Where should LessWrong go on COVID?

I think it is still very unclear what the situation a medium (~a few months) to long (~a year) amount of time from now will be like. I would love to see more discussion on this. On a related note, I think mental health and self-help are going to very important very soon, and while I am in a fine place personally I would still like to know a lot more about this, including how to help others. This strays a little bit from the other COVID discussion topics, but I do think LessWrong might have a comparative advantage here (especially compared to the crapshoot baseline that is the internet).

This has been great, and it is both impressive and refreshing to see this question asked explicitly. Thank you for all of it!

The main thing I'd like to see is a short-term (say, on May 1 looking back on 2/15-4/15) and then medium-term (maybe in September or November) retrospective on what LW did well and what we could have done differently. Things like:

• Was there any advice or thinking that was mistaken or misleading?
• what meta-models were helpful to figure out what was important to analyze more closely?
• what level of detail of advice was useful to what groups?
• did we have the right balance between noisy detail and hard-to-use very-abstract thinking?

My current sense is that we're still in a pretty advantageous position in the online sphere (relative to twitter and facebook etc) to understand what's happening and do analysis on the ongoing effects and secondary effects (what the recession will look like, what actions can be taken to mitigate the effects), and that on-site we want to continue discussing important and under-explored covid ideas for some time (e.g. on my new justified key insights thread [LW · GW]), even while we've now passed peak covid discussion. (As I look at the frontpage, 4/13 posts are covid, and I expect that it will maybe level out at 15%-20% for a while, perhaps with several valleys of no covid when nothing much happens.)

It's less clear to me that there is infrastructure for the team to be working on (like the links database, adding a coronavirus tag, adding a section for covid posts to the top of the frontpage, etc), and it seems that we should primarily try to take advantage of all the increased demand for online events and other online things and other than that get back to work as normal on things like tagging, wiki, making a book of the LW review, and other work.

Am interested in ideas for other things for us to build or counter views.

(Remember, if you don't like the covid discussion on LessWrong, you can use the new filter tool on the frontpage to make sure you never see it.)

I'd like a better model of possible infection and death trajectories than the models driving discussion at present. I think we might be capable of that.

Metaculus only represents the outputs of people's models. There's been a lot of talk in the rationalsphere criticizing overly simplistic/rigid/overconfident models, but little explicit discussion of what a better one might look like. It would be great if such models could be done through Guesstimate, but still valuable in other formats as long as they're easily readable.

I just wanna encourage you to not create COVID threads for the sake of creating COVID threads. I contributed to some of those threads, but in retrospect I think my contributions were kind of a waste of time, because there's just been so much COVID discussion on LW and it's not organized very well. (One example: this overview [LW · GW] suggested high-dose vitamin D and exercise could be good, I had posted links from sources I think are reasonably credible saying both of those could be harmful. I'm not certain they're harmful but given that the LW userbase skews young, think it's better to avoid high variance treatments since the default outcome for us is good.)

This is one of my big complaints about LW in general but for whatever reason it's been seeming especially acute lately.

I'm worried about supply chains where I live (in NYC and the U.S. broadly), especially food. I don't think there's much I can do practically, besides deal with whatever happens the best I can, or possibly consider leaving NYC at some future point.

I am curious tho about the relevant 'gears-level' explanations for why we should or should not expect specific medium-term or longer-term disruptions.

Here's a post about the recent closure of a meat processing facility:

• siderea | US/CA Supply-Chain Issue: Meat plant closures [COVID-19, US, CA, domesticity]

Should I be worried? Should we all be worried? Is anyone thinking about how to adapt and adjust workplaces for 'essential' industries to limit the risk of COVID-19? Are the relevant politics likely to prevent or greatly slow the necessary economic disruptions?

I haven't been able to order groceries for delivery like I wish I could. I'm also generally reluctant to leave my apartment, especially to go my neighborhood grocery store. How often should I leave to go shopping? What can I or others do, both individually but also in small private groups, to mitigate the likely impending disruptions? I'm resigned to likely running out of toilet paper soon; that's easily worked around, if unpleasant. But I'm less sure how to work around not being able to buy groceries where I live in the medium-term.

Relegate covid work to personal posts since it’s not timeless?

The Alarm Bell [LW · GW] posts seem like a possible exception.

This is the time for starting the post-mortem on public responses, assessing long term economic and political fallout, and emphasizing strategies for diminishing the effects of future pandemics. That last point, in particular, as this coronavirus isn't that lethal - imagine an equally infectious but more fatal virus.

I think the primary benefit of having C19 discussion segregated is that people who want to not be bombarded with it can find a safe refuge, and that the primary benefit of having that content integrated is that people who have a revealed preference to be bombarded with it are bombarded less than if they had a pure source.

Any benefit that arises from useful new information being rapidly integrated is roughly countered by the harm that arises from useless or counterproductive new information being rapidly integrated.

I propose that a much higher standard for quality of information and analysis be applied than is currently, but that it not be retroactive. All of the good low-hanging fruit has likely already been posted.

• How should we be thinking about second waves from May - Dec? In particular, what evidence should we look for that countries / states are well-prepared to handle potential outbreaks (e.g. even countries like Singapore are having problems with second waves right now)?
• +1 “What is my risk from delivery food, given a certain prevalence?" And the same question for packages and delivered produce, given cleaning them or not. I thought about this for ~1hr but didn't generate a great answer, I think it'd save a bunch of people time to have a good one.
• What are the chances that various vaccine efforts will work in x months (in particular, chances of working in <12 months)?

I keep meaning to ask but keep not...

I think everyone accepts that some elements of what we've been through will be something of the new norm going forward. Particularly around the issue of preventive actions, including gear.

How much value does wearing gloves really pose for the general public over just good, frequent and particularly timely hand washing?

I've heard some suggest that mask and gloves are a good plan. However we already have a pretty big problem with plastic and rubber compounds. If everyone is wearing and throwing out 2 or 3 pairs of gloves a day...

Does it make more sense to ditch the gloves?