The Frightening Future

[writerkit]

At some point I really need to figure out whether Umair Haque is reliable or paranoid.

I mean, he's not communicating things in an effective way whether or not he's reliable-- "Omicron merging with MERS is inevitable and that will cause complete societal breakdowns" with great detail about how there will be mass graves in every town and borders will close forever and the fascists will take control is going to terrify people inclined to believe that and make anyone not inclined to believe that dismiss him as crazy out of hand-- but he hasn't yet talked about any subject where I've sifted through enough data on my own to have a decent perspective on the likelihood of his doomsday scenarios.

On thinking about this specific thing, I tend to think "take number of fatalities attached to COVID so far and assume a mortality rate of SARS or MERS" is lacking nuance-- as ineffective as our governments have been, something with that many fatalities among young healthy people would produce stronger containment responses, because you wouldn't have the "oh, it's only hitting old people and the immunocompromised; it's not killing anyone who matters" effect. And we've established that if you actually put effort in you can flatten the curve for even the things with a high R0-- and vaccinations have proven somewhat effective against death even with new variants, so I think even in a recombinant scenario while you'd have more deaths, you wouldn't have the same fatality rates as MERS, at least among the vaccinated.

But I keep stumbling across these doomsday essays that are much more doomy than anything anyone else is saying and then going "Oh, it's Umair Haque" and I still haven't worked out if he's visionary or alarmist.

Comments

[jducoeur]

Anyone who uses the word "inevitable" I take with a huge grain of salt. Assuming a mortality rate of SARS seems silly, although I'm concerned that we might get back to the "raw" rate of 5% in places with already-stressed health systems and low vaccination rates.

I'm feeling slightly doomy about the next three months, but AFAICT Omicron is going to be a tidal wave, not a slow build, which is, weirdly, easier for me to deal with. I believe it's going to slam through pretty much everywhere and overwhelm health systems for a little while, but I expect it to burn through the most-susceptible population relatively quickly, given the preposterously high Rt.

As far as Haque is concerned, I don't think "visionary" and "alarmist" are mutually exclusive. The thing about being mildly visionary is that you can be sometimes right and sometimes wildly off-base. Folks will still take you seriously, and fail to internalize that you aren't reliably right.

[siderea]

I don't think the "visionary or alarmist" paradigm is a useful one.

Umair Haque is much more clear-sighted than the average person. You should take what he says seriously, which is not the same thing as uncritically.

Unfortunately, I think he may be caught in a common psychological process for more-clear-sighted-than-usual people, where he's unwittingly upregulating the intensity of his signal because of a sense of it not being received.

[elusiveat]

On thinking about this specific thing, I tend to think "take number of fatalities attached to COVID so far and assume a mortality rate of SARS or MERS" is lacking nuance-- as ineffective as our governments have been, something with that many fatalities among young healthy people would produce stronger containment responses, because you wouldn't have the "oh, it's only hitting old people and the immunocompromised; it's not killing anyone who matters" effect.

There's also the thing where lethality in itself constrains spread. Viruses that quickly kill everyone who comes into contact with them don't get very far. I don't think it's an accident that the coronavirus that finally had really global reach is considerably less lethal than SARS.