IS THE CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) A GIGANTIC HOAX?

“immer das gleiche Lied” (same old song).
I’m always amazed that people still use the same bunk argument that you use.
The argument that those extreme, hysteric and overblown predictions didn’t come true because of mitigation measures is bunk because there is no scientific proof for that.
I’m not worshipping science or scientists but I love the scientific method.
I’m shure you know that a hypothesis/theory is scientific if and only if it is falsifiable. This means that there must be a test which shows that the hypothesis/theory is false. Unless you state the criteria which must be satisfied in order to falsify your hypothesis/theory it has the same weight as the legends of big foot, dragons and unicorns.
I’m waiting for you to tell us which test would falsify your hypothesis/theory.
As a reminder here is your hypothesis/theory: The most extreme predictions didn’t come true because of mitigation measures.
Feel free to correct me, if I misrepresented you.

“– The Y2K Bug (Melting nuclear reactors and civilisational collapse)
Read up, There was a massive campaign patching the software.”

I’ve been a software developer and programmer since before the year 2000 and I’ve been programming and using computers excessively since the earliy 1980s.
So, I feel I’m more than qualified to speak about the Y2K craze.
I lived it close up and personal.

I knew immediately that the claims of melting nuclear reactors due to Y2K were bullcrap for very simple reasons.

1. No programmer with more than two braincells makes critical functions dependent on the value of the current date.
To do so, you’ve got to be completely insane and you deserve to be shot, hung, quartered and burned and your name be remembered in eternal shame.
The only possible exceptions are things like orbital mechanics where the date is critical.
But then you wouldn’t want your space ship tumbling out of control on 1/1/2000, would you?

2. It’s inconceivable that embedded systems which regulate things like steam pressure would depend on the current date. Due to the scarcity of CPU-power and memory such systems didn’t waste precious resources handling dates but they used simple integer counters instead. This means that even if such systems depended for some strange reason on the elapsed time they would not be affected by the change from year 1999 to 2000.

3. Nuclear power plants are designed to run for many decades and it would be exceedingly stupid to use software/hardware that is not designed to run many decades as well.

4. The most critical systems in a power plant are the many embedded system and microcontrollers running practically autonomously.
These systems are controlled by just a few or even one single system.
In the worst case you just would need to set the clock of the main system(s) back to 1990. That’s it. That’s all.

Solid and knowledgeable people always knew that the scare about melting nuclear reactors was baloney.
But the media did not go to the solid and knowledgeable people.
Without fail they went to the nutjobs, wackadoodles and looney tunes.
The scarier and crazier a story is, the more clicks and views it generates, the higher TV ratings it genarates and the more newspapers it sells.
Of course, only completely clueless people are still trying do defend the wackos of Y2K today.

As for mitigation, you will never be able to proof your claim that mitigation averted the prophecied Y2K apocalypse.
I’ll explain later why.
The Y2K problem was real but it affected only a tiny percentage of hardware and software and therefore it was clear that it could never cause the much feared societal collapse.
Software bugs are not viruses. That’s why there would never be a “cascading effect” crashing more and more computers.
In the mid 1990s most of the software was already “Y2K compliant” and most programming languages already reserved enough memory for date values to handle years greater than 1999 without problem.
Same goes for the PCs. By the late 1990s there were hardly any PCs from the 1980s in use.
Nevertheless, due to media-induced fear countless people needlessly dumped their PCs and bought new PCs.
The software that needed to be reviewed was primarily software written in archaic and exotic languages like COBOL from the 1960s, 1970s and the early 1980s running on mainframes.
Lots of COBOL programmers already in retirement were recalled (for good money, of course).
To understand why you will never be able to proof that mitigation averted a catastrophy you need to understand how programmers work.
When a programmer tasked with identifying and replacing program code that uses 2 digit years finds such code he does NOT try to determine whether the code would cause catastrophic problems or minor, negligible irritation.
To determine the severity of the effects caused by the code the programmer would need to set up and run elobarate, complicated tests which would consume much more time than simply changing the code and testing its correct function.
That’s why there is no way in hell, you can ever tell whether the code would have caused major problems or whether it would have almost no effect.
Furthermore, the amount of money spent for software patches is no metric for the scale of the mitigation.
In fact, it’s completely irrelevant, since the programmer could spend most of the time sifting through the code only to find that few or no changes are necessary.

So, I say to you: If you want to proof that mitigation prevented the prophecied Y2K apocalypse, go ahead, make my day!