@cwebber Oh, yes, this level of mortality is, I expect, borderline *terrifying* for epidemiologists. As long as the spread is both only animal->human *and* very hard then it's a concern but not a worry. If we get human->human transmission or animal->human gets easier... yeah, that'll be a very bad day.

Hopefully this is a MERS situation, with low transmission and some care kept it from being bad. It is, though, influenza and the flu is an absolute bastard virus

@cwebber I thought it was important to make 'em but I couldn't think of a way to phrase it as a reply that didn't either co-opt the thread or "well, actually"''d it, neither of which is cool. That thread is useful and derailing wouldn't help!

I stats for a (partial) living, though, and I know how folks tend to misunderstand them. (Which is fine, stats are weird, and frankly if you think about them and your head *doesn't* hurt you're probably missing something. Maybe that's just me, though...:)

The main reason the real rates for these rare-infection diseases is lower is because we're only analyzing the stats on the people we actually know got the disease, and for these rare diseases that means people who either died (so the local authorities checked), or got sick enough to go see a doctor *and* got their infection analyzed. If you just felt meh, or didn't present symptoms, or your doctor waved you off, then you won't be in the stats.

2/N

@cwebber has a thread on the current H5N1 situation, which is an interesting (and useful) read. There are mortality stats in it and I wanted to add some statistics color to that, since it's common for people to see these and panic. Don't panic! (actually never panic, it doesn't help)

Disease fatality/injury rates are, especially for very rare occurrence diseases, extremely biased because the sample the draw from is biased. The real rates are almost always lower.

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113680455871797535

1/N

@cwebber @bnewbold It's cool to see this kind of reasoned back-and-forth on design, with the various intentions, requirements, non-requirements, and engineering compromises run through. I really appreciate reading it, and hopefully this helps at least some folks come to the realization that there are many ways to come at complex systems and how changes in requirements (or sometimes seemingly random small choices) can make large differences in the design you ultimately end up with.

@jalefkowit Counterpoint: Awful people should not, in fact, listen to their lawyers.

@evan Only if it stayed internal-only. If it was actually federated then absolutely not. (Though given my employer that's not a worry, there's no way they'd allow that)

@jalefkowit Buying a car and involving *both* a dealership and Amazon? Its like someone looked at the process and thought "how can we make it even more skeevy than it already is?"

@grimalkina While the US healthcare system is a nightmarish dystopian hellscape, it's surprising how much flexibility there is when there are employee requests and employer pushback. This is doubly true for employers large enough to be self-insured, where the insurance companies are "just" administrators.

You're 100% right, it's always worth asking because a surprising number of times things will get less bad when you do.

@wdlindsy I've always been curious -- does that long a wait improve the fruitcake flavor/texture more than a shorter one? I can see a few days making a difference but a full month seems less likely to matter. (Though these things are sometimes surprising and it may well make a big difference)

@mcc @cwebber I'm gonna guess that Bluesky doesn't have p2p really and truly built into their core node, and it's basically a monolith. Their scaling issues reek of that, honestly -- p2p with 99% of your work on one central node has a nasty tendency to fall over when the external nodes start getting bigger.

@cwebber @mcc Scaling is hard and if you don't aggressively use a core feature when developing a system it's really easy to find it falls over hard, so I have some technical sympathy for BlueSky here.

I'm not in any way surprised, mind. I also fully expect to find that the end result is Bridgy Fed gets shut off basically forever "while BlueSky works out some scaling issues" that never actually get fixed.