How to make sense of the coronavirus chaos

Resist the temptation to conquer this chaos with slashing, drastic mental oversimplifications.A good way to make sense of the noise is to distinguish between three categories of information: A) what we know is true, B) what we think is true, inferences drawn from reasonably strong supporting evidence, and C) opinions and speculation.There’s a lot of C) with extremely limited evidence masquerading as B). Now that ~13,000 New Yorkers are already categorized as confirmed or probable COVID-19 deaths, in a city with a population of 8.5 million — a fatality rate of 0.15% for the entire city, not just those infected — it’s past time to recategorize that and similar speculation as category D), “proved completely wrong.”It’s important to be ready to move your own beliefs to category D as well.