COVID Truthers List – Lyman Stone?

COVID_Actuary - June 25, 2020

Was reading Jon Stokes’ latest article and was surprised to see Lyman Stone on the truthers list. He’s been advocating masks and mandatory centralized quarantine upon testing positive or, I believe, being a known contact of someone who has tested positive until you test negative, for months now.

Whether or not you agree with that viewpoint (I can certainly see the arguments in favor of that instead of just locking down everyone) it seems odd to have him on the same list as someone advocating that we are testing too much and that the virus is no big deal.

EDIT: Realizing this may be delete-worthy for discussing people not prepping. Not on twitter but might ping you on patreon instead.

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I think this is correct, and it has been bothering me since I made that list public that he’s on it. He was one of these folks who was saying this would all be over by August, which is originally why I added him to it.

Also, the list name “Virus Truthers” was really mostly ironic, because the list was private only to me. I wanted a list of skeptical/contrarian voices, so I made that list and just sort of gave it that name. I actually changed it to “Virus Skeptics” after making it public.

Anyway, I’m going to remove him from it, because I agree he doesn’t belong.

 

It looks like I can still reply even though this is closed – apologies if that is frowned upon.

I think (based on following his twitter for a few months) that what he meant by “over by August” is that either:
1. We would be following in the footsteps of other countries that have handled it (New Zealand, Vietnam, Hong Kong) and hit upon the steps needed to resume mostly normal life (with him advocating for masks and quarantine).

OR

2. We would have given up entirely and moved on to worrying about other things (which seems a lot less implausible to me than it did a few months ago…) and settled in for a big burn

I think he is going to end up being wrong – schools around these parts are already talking about alternating days and other mitigation measures, but the thought behind it seemed somewhat legitimate.

As a sidenote, @Polimath has been a really interesting twitter follow as someone who is diving into the data and trying to understand what is going on in different places. I can see where you are coming from here: https://mobile.twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1276927181533388800
But I also think his point is somewhat legitimate – we know a LOT more now than we did in March, and are baseline testing capacity is much higher. To your point, if we just squander all those advantages it doesn’t matter anyway, and a high rate of baseline spread is going to be worse regardless.

Anyway, that’s enough of me trying to police how you do twitter for a day. Love what you guys are doing here 🙂

 

Oh hey didn’t even think about just responding to the article itself…long year 🙂