on hope vs. expectation...

i first started worrying about coronavirus 3rd week of jan. my wife was following lots of china watchers and chinese insta accounts. i was in a chan with someone born in china who still followed.

i remembered h1n1. i'm 95% sure i caught it actually

i really wanted to hope tho i was worried. i thought to myself we'd had so many scares over the past few decades that never panned out. ebola, SARS, h1n1, ebola again. well, they didn't pan out in the USA at least...

but i was worried. i wanted more evidence to be hopeful

~feb 1 i asked around other ppl outside of those in the chan and family conversations. mixed responses. most ppl who i knew in silicon valley and in austin were not worried. but, individuals who knew the most about past pandemics were the most uncertain in any optimism

though i was still hopeful that the pandemic was blow over and not spread in 1st week of feb, that is when we decided to make a costco run and stock up majorly. we still have plenty of TP in the shed from that :-)

this is also when i began to be open to a lot of friends

this triggered others our circle of friends and family to

1) start worrying & stock up

2) express skepticism of doom-mongering

as the weeks of feb wore on "wuhan happened". but the spread was minimal outside. but 'exponential growth'!

slowly altered behavior. we still attended to a few decisions made earlier. e.g., we went to chuckee cheese in early feb. science fare in mid-feb, etc.

but i started ranting a bit to friends and acquaintances too. some of them i had forgotten about until we got texts and emails months later thanking us for alerting them.

by mid-feb i started noticing bulk buys on amazon referrals. others were noticing/worrying

yet the world seemed to b going on its way. e.g., science twitter was having a huge melee about richard dawkins and eugenics ... and i have specific memories of the form "OK, if these phd biologists can expend so much energy about this but not talk abut covid perhaps i'm wrong?"

the reality is that culture-war stuff kept going on and on for weeks in feb when i thought people would get worried. so again, i doubted myself. BUT I WAS ALSO HOPEFUL.

this is a situation where you don't want to be right. you exhale with happiness when you are wrong

ultimately shit hit the fan. on feb 24th i sent out a very alarmed tweet because i had gotten tired of getting DMs of the form "razib do you think i should worry about this wuhan flu/coronavirus?" they kept increasing in freq.

the rest is 'history'...i feel like we know a lot less about the dynamics of the virus than we should. why is thailand the way it is? why does it hit walloons more than flemish-speakers? the racial and ethnic differences in the USA re mortality

so here is the upshot: i hope the winter wave will be a bust. i hope the vaccines will roll out fast. i hope that my worries are unfounded. i'm not 'excited' if my worries are proven to be true. i tried hard to be optimistic last winter/spring...and was disappointed

also, i think facts are important. i understand why every 30 year old attractive white women who dies of covid-19 is profiled in the media. but this is not the typical sufferer, and definitely not the typical person who dies.

covid-19 has changed my view of eldercare in america

i don't know how much i'll tweet about covid-19 really. like everyone else i'm a passenger on this crazy ship. trying to survive and make it through unscathed. my risks are super low, but my goal is to not catch this thing, but from friends i hear it's way worse than h1n1

but i want to be clear: i am preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. if the winter wave turns out to be a bust, you don't need to tweet "told you so!" at me..i'll be happy, and it's not ABOUT US WINNING AND ARGUMENT.

also, on note of pessimism: i'm way more bearish on USA after this. i'm bearish on our gov. i'm bearish on our culture. also, tbh, i'm bearish on public health officials.

take care of yourself. take care of your family. take care of your loved ones. not sure anyone else will

end thread & have a good day! :-)