Hey HN, in light of the current situation and the potential ordeal in the coming weeks, may I ask you instead of blaming whoever, let's find some solutions to help people?
As a Chinese, I read first hand materials from Chinese social media and friends on what life is like in a lockdown area. People there depends on deliveries for groceries and medicine, and occasionally restaurants take-outs. All those services, and a bunch of other services for small businesses are possible because of Wechat. Wechat is obviously not a popular option here in N.A. Is there something we can do to help both the people buy whatever they need via delivery and help local businesses?
In Wuhan when the entire family had to be isolated, no one was left to take care of family pets. I heard there's volunteer groups to take them but their capacities were very limited due to the short notice for them to take on such responsibilities. Can we be more prepared and maybe find a technology(-assisted) solution to this before it becomes a huge issue? I feel this will be an issue sooner rather than later because in N.A. it appears the current policy for mild cases is self-isolating, which will very likely infect the entire family.
Also in Wuhan during the lockdown many people felt so lonely, especially the older generation who can't use the internet effectively to stay connected to their families/rest of the world. Can we find ways to help people prepare for it psychologically? A lot of people will break medical suggested self-isolation because of the eagerness to stay connected to certain people/group. Instead of blaming them, can we help them find ways to stay connected yet in isolation?
I'm sure there are more things the mighty HN crowd can do to help others overcome this difficult time. Let's give it a try?
What China did is a complete shutdown and isolation of whole cities, cancellation of public gatherings, prohibition of attendance at school and work, massive mobilization of health and public health personnel as well as military medical units, and rapid construction of entire hospitals.
Wuhan, Iran, Italy have shown us that the health care system simply collapses under the huge number of patients needing hospitalization (20% of infected.) So mobilizing healthcare workers, springing up new "hospitals", and limiting spread with extreme responses is the way to go.
Unfortunately I predict that western governments are going to be less likely to suggest, deploy, and enforce such massive quarantines. Quarantines impede on civil liberties, and people in the West are very protective of freedom and liberties. I think the average American will NOT be okay with his government telling him he is only authorized to exit his house to go shopping once a week...
Singapore offers a compelling counter example entailing enlisting voluntary cooperation, rigorous testing and contact tracing, price controls on masks. I don't think China's fundamentally totalitarian / martial law approach is the place to start. I think Singapore offers a much much better model for dealing with Wuhan Flu.
I agree and disagree at the same time. Let me tell you why.
Extreme measures without a plan and a data basis will certainly make matters worse. We need a plan, which Western countries have. What is somewhat lacking is the basis to implement it. Aggressive testing of everybody would provide this basis, like South Korea does.
Which increases my critique points of the response to a total of two, a viable social media campaign to inform people and prevent panic reactions, which could totally provided and carried by tech companies. So, Google, Twitter, Facebook, if you are listening do something good with your social power! And the aggressive testing of people, everyone, starting with contact persons, people having traveled to risk areas and ultimately everyone.
Other than that I am quite satisfied, in Europe at least. The US seem to be a different story.
I think you need to be really careful creating statistics out of thin air, like: "20% of infected people require hospitalization". We don't know how many people in a given region are infected... we only know the positive test cases and all percentages are based upon the positive test cases.
There is evidence that a lot of people contract the virus and have no symptoms or very mild symptoms.
Reported stats out of various countries/egions also do not account for things like the severity of regional air pollution (Wuhan, Tehran, and Milan have BAD air pollution) or the other key statistics, like "do they smoke?" (lot of smokers in China, Italy, and Iran... just saying). Bad air pollution and smoking tears the crap out of the lungs and makes it much easier to contract respiratory infections.
Caution and concern are completely warranted.... significant action needs to be taken to protect all of us, especially our elderly and immune suppressed.
But we need to be careful about pushing information that causes a descent into panic.
Large-scale extreme response measures are a disaster waiting to happen.
1. 38% of nurses have children at school. Shutdown the country and 1/4 of the US healthcare industry will choose their children over work in a blink. We don't want to put any more pressure on the people working in healthcare.
2. 75% of US companies have now a disrupted supply chain. Yes the cons of outsourcing core economic functions like manufacturing drugs, hospital supplies etc... Mass mania followed by ongoing shopping sprees will set in further draining a crippled supply chain.
What we need more of is hygiene education (with strict fines) and detailed data about who, where and how they are affected by the virus. Being politically correct in a time where the world is at the brink of chaos is not going to save anyone. Sometimes hard debates need to be had and tight restrictions enforced. It's sort of like the Trolley problem.
Why do people point to the China response as being a model response, as though that is easily seen. China has had an order of magnitude more deaths and instances than any other country. While you can point to many factors showing why it is disingenuous to look at those raw numbers without context, it seems to me that the burden of proof is on the other side, to show that the China model is actually effective, because naively it looks like it didn't work out too well.
I think I’m retrospect the severity of the lockdown in China will be seen as a mistake. Many of the steps they took were unnecessarily damaging, and realistically It’s only a matter of time before there’s another outbreak over there, in fact it’s probably already happening. There’s just no way to stop this virus, we can only slow it down.
Extreme measures are likely doing more harm than good -- as soon as China loosens them, there will be a flood of cases. You can't eradicate a disease that spreads via the air we breath (and can spread to animals). You can slow it, but much like Influenza you're stuck with it forever now.
With that in mind, the larger impact is going to be the lack of medicine, food, etc. that comes from a large-scale heavy response. We are just at the beginning. Push for social distancing, but over the next two years we're just going to have to learn to deal with this. It'll mutate, we'll find ways to mitigate damage and we'll have a large loss of life.
Push out higher production of medical equipment and push out the best possible safety gear for healthcare workers. On a personal level, try to stay fit, get lots of rest, and try to quickly take care of any other conditions. Stay home if you are sick (to avoid spreading any illness).
That's about the extent we can do.
Closing schools, closing offices, shutting down the economy is going to be far more damaging than this disease will be.
There’s never going to be a lockdown in this country. If people need stuff, they’ll go out. It simply won’t work.
I’ve seen the videos coming out of Hubei. If you tried to weld someone’s door shut in the US you stand a good chance of being shot by the resident and both their neighbors. Maybe not in the big cities, but virtually everywhere else.
No. We knew the R0 of this thing in late January, and we knew, at least approximately, the fatality rate and ICU/ventilation requirement rate, in very early February.
Every single "just the flu bro" type has indirectly killed people since that time, including the WHO Chief and US President. These things should not be forgotten, and consequences should be meted out, lest we doom ourselves to repeat the mistakes of complacency in the future.
It would be great if we had some kind of global institution with distributed local branches whose aim was to feed the hungry, tend to the sick, and commune with the destitute.
Taking the same action as China technically is impossible for most countries because of differences on attitude to human rights.
In China, a lot of people can be left at home to die and they cannot do any protest against their government. In the most serious period in Wuhan, citizens were limited to stay home and there were not enough means of transport to do necessary transportation, such as critical patients and food. At the expense of this, another large proportion of people can keep alive.
But in the US, people have weapons and they are very tough. In addition, the information is transparency, so it is impossible to hide such tragedies.
There are structural problems that China needs to address that would help in the future. For example, the lack of indoor heating in southern China exacerbates flus and sicknesses like this because your immunity system is constantly beat down when it is constantly cold everywhere. China is rich enough now that they can afford to heat southern homes, if not for comfort, then for stuff like this (see https://facilityexecutive.com/2020/02/indoor-humidification-...)! And when the quarantine comes, you have to keep warm at home somehow.
Something that we westerners take for granted and why I would guess the virus won’t propagate as quickly. Long term, these kind of things are more important than shiny sky scrapers and HSRs.
I don’t quite get this. Having spent significant time in southern China, while there’s no exceptional water heating that’s (from what I heard and from some brief stays) universal in the north, I can’t think of an urban residence that doesn’t have indoor air conditioning, and rural homes tend to have installed them in the last twenty years, too. It can’t be constantly cold unless people refuse to turn on air conditioning. (I’ve heard that some older college dorms may not have air conditioning, though.)
Meanwhile, I’ve spent significant time in NorCal and NJ residences with extremely crappy heating, too.
HN likes to downrank anything regarding the current outbreak. This was posted 53 minutes ago and received around 100 votes in 20 minutes, but was downranked shortly after:
Now this post has inevitably been downranked as well. I'm setting up a HN downranking-watch site right now ;-)
If you know some crowd-funding site where one can donate money to health care workers, please let me know (berthold dot alexander at googlemail dot com)
HN will down rank anything getting a lot of comments, I think votes might be factored in as well. It kills a lot of good topics and often allows astro turfing accounts to kill them.
For the pets there are already various pet care platforms that probably tout themselves as "The Uber/AirBnb for pets!". People can take your pet to their home or visit yours for feeding/walking/yard time.
So if this may be an issue for you it might be good to start looking around to get connections. I assume the issue is that the entire family was moved out of the home? I'd be a little leery of visiting such a home without training if there's a chance the fixtures (doorknobs, fridge handles) can be carrying the virus. In particular if there's any reason to be opening the fridge for pet food because lower temperatures of 4c apparently drastically increase virus survival time to a few weeks, so handling items in the fridge may be a major risk.
Before helping people already in locked regions if you are not I beg you to do whatever you can to talk some sense into your representatives. The level of actions you want from your point of view would probably be seen as "drastic" or "exaggerated". It is not.
> All those services, and a bunch of other services for small businesses are possible because of Wechat.
Ughh, no thanks buddy. I'd rather not have any of this propaganda garbage. WeChat basically contributed to a global pandemic because it's prime instrument of Chinese censorship[1].
If the root cause of the problem is not resolved, even we overcome this virus, then now what? What's next? If the next virus hit us again, would Chinese government still try to cover up the problem and stop people from speaking up? Would WHO stop down playing the problem and advice not taking actions? It's a wake up call, while it's nice to have some heartwarming help from internet, I am more concern about COVID-19 is not the worst case, it's just a test, next thing could be way worse if we only try to look away from the root problem, like all the time we did.
The root cause of this Outbreak in North America is we have a president call it a HOAX, a flu. The incompetency of the government resulted this disaster in here. Even now when we have thousands in isolation. They are still trying to down play it. They have no idea how many people are infected, they have no idea how many possible contact s are out there spreading the virus. No matter how much they blame others, the root cause is right here in North America!
I'm failing to see how the "root cause", as you suggested, China, of the problem can somewhat solve the problem. It always us against the virus. Last I recall, they don't take orders from any one. Not even Trump.
I'm saying I'm serious twice in this year already do it had to be the end..
Send everyone over 55 s as my working phone capable of doing Skype or whatever and provide the device a data connection to a Chatroulette app setup and instructions to disable the it and use normally in big big print and grayscale not color screens please color is confusing or color only what you want clicked (NeXT could have been a revolution for just doing that) by us old people anyway...
I don't see any tech solutions mentioned out here. At least i would like to take a shot.
Not relying on government is the way to go.
I think we should build a social network for community welfare which can prepare us for something like this in future. Where people build communities among themselves. Key point being internal resource availability to be exposed to the close knit network and an external pool exposed to an radius. Keeping everything to the close knit shouldn't be encouraged and there should be a proportion. Ideally the network should be split when its crossing a proportion.
How do we keep up with something like covid-19 in future?. I don’t think relying on government is the way to go.
Why not build a social network which helps to build close knit communities and it can have a cascade effect on the whole populace as a side effect("good"). Some of the key points for it to work being:
# Pool resources before hand so that the whole system is not suffocated.
# Internal resources exposed to close knit.
# External resources exposed to a radius.
# Cap on internal vs external resources.
# Split the community into smaller ones when it reaches a proportion.
# Point system to motivate communities.
# Ability to mobilize resource across communities.
This need not be the case with just a pandemic but can help us tide over other eventualities as well.
Here in Austria the government forbade any indoor gatherings of >100 people (outdoor >500), all universities and colleges are closed (except administration and research), including libraries and also museums. All schools and kindergartens will gradually close coming monday. That's more than 1.5m students/pupils against a total population of 8.8m. Nurses and doctors are being honed in from retirement. We completely locked down our borders to Italy. This is all very unprecedented.
Here in Austin, SXSW was cancelled but I've seen numerous "unofficial party" lists of people organizing events.
I understand people want to support the Austin economy since losing SXSW is a big hit, however it was cancelled to limit mass gatherings yet people still want to gather.
People will of course want to gather still... I've always wanted to hit SXSW so I'd be pretty heartbroken, myself.
Even still, my partner and I are keeping an eye open on flights to Europe (we've always wanted to go) and seriously considering taking the risk of buying a flight for in a couple of months time because they are quite literally at half price right now. And I'm not even talking about Italy.
edit: Haha—to clarify, the risk being flight cancellation or border closures not catching or spreading disease.
2nd edit: Wow. I'm drawing a little ire here. I'll reiterate: the risk is in not being able to go because the problem continues. Please take the charitable view (and of my whole comment, not snippets)—not the one that I'm some kind of monster :)
If my facebook feed is indicative of the general US population, there are still a lot of people who think the media is just trying to scare us. Some of them are your typical nutjobs for Trump, but even my 60-something year old hippie liberal jazz musician friend is on that train. There were women replying to her that the media focuses on Covid-19 because "it's killing old men" who run the world, and the media should instead be focusing on women's issues... I think I'm finally ready to give up facebook after seeing my the thoughts of most of my 'friends'.
If they wanna support the economy just send money to the entities that they can't go to. That restaurant you were going to dine out at, instead you're not microwaving a Lean Cuisine? Send them $10. Otherwise they are doing it for the shills.
You need to approach senior management, and press them on what their plan is.
Why aren't they already transitioning to remote work? Is there a timeline in place? What are their criteria about what would trigger WFH? What about employees with elderly family members at home? Do they have the necessary systems in place to support a fully remote staff?
It's very likely that management has simply avoided thinking about the topic entirely. If the employees press them for a concrete action plan, then that at least prompts them to start engaging in objective analysis.
For all their faults my smaller company is very forward thinking on this. They have banned all non-essential visits to sites by clients or contractors, and travel between offices by staff - even within the same metro area. So you can't just pop into the other office on Friday if you feel like it.
You're also asked to work from home for a while if any travelling family member from overseas visits, and if you have no reason to be in the office they won't say no if you just want to work at home and avoid public transport.
Hoping it doesn't cause a big hit to productivity because it's the right thing to do.
It makes a tremendous difference, so don't downplay it. Infection due to smear (secondary droplet) is really high IIRC and washing hands is a huge countermeasure.
It likely will. If all people washed their hands properly and avoid touching their face that would probably slow infection rates down enough. Measures are needed because realistically, no one follows these orders enough.
It has really been a lackadaisical response from the Austrian government - shades of Semmelweis all over again? This is a country that has monuments to Plague victims in its most valued districts ..
Going to be an interesting few weeks as we see how things proceed. To think, somewhere out there, the virus lurks and is headed our way ..
Plague monuments are hardly an Austria specific thing, you can find them almost everywhere in a large part of Europe, including here in Czech Republic:
Austria isn't as badly hit as Italy, despite the short distance to the most affected regions in Italy. They took quite drastic measures early which hopefully slows down the spread. It also helps that much of the traffic from Italy continues on northwards towards Germany and therefore bypasses the main population centers in Austria.
But as in all countries by now, older folks should stay home and self quarantine whenever possible.
Isn't this happening in many places? In Greece, schools are closing for two weeks, all gatherings are prohibited, and celebrations for various holidays have been canceled.
Notably, the Church of Greece has announced that "the virus cannot be spread through Communion" (where everyone drinks wine from the same cup). You can imagine how angry this self-serving move made most people.
Overreacting? Did you miss the headline of the thread you’re commenting on? This is officially a pandemic. And instead of reading that and thinking “wow, this needs to be addressed with serious action” you instead thought that hundreds of governments across the world are working in tandem to make it easier to raise false flags in the future. Yikes.
It's not clear that it's an overreaction; the paradox is, assuming this truly is a pandemic (seems likely), and every nation on earth had taken drastic action early enough, it could have actually been contained; in which case we wouldn't have seen the pandemic manifest, and the public would be left scratching their heads, going "why did we do all that again?", and provoking inquiries into false-flag/etc.
I lean a little tinfoil-hatty; but I get the impression that for all the bullshit self-serving narratives proffered by elites (both economic and political), this is one that they actually seem to believe themselves, privately as well as publicly. If anything, they're more spooked than they're signaling openly.
Playing Devil's advocate, but if the situation does fizzle out in the US due to active measures, people will likely look back and say how it "ended up not being a big deal".
I don’t say that lightly. That was 20 years ago, so maybe you youngsters just read about it in books. But in summary, a bunch of us busted ass to make sure the predictions of ATM and power failures did not come to pass on 1/1/2000. Our reward was, “See? We got all up in arms about nothing.”
Plenty of those same short-sighted dipshits are still alive, and of those now deceased, I’m sure replacements are just reaching voting age.
That’s assuming the U. S. puts forth anything close to the effort of fixing Y2K. Which is not even remotely guaranteed.
Deus ex machina is unlikely. But we aren't even at the stage of admitting this is going to be anything other than a bad flu season, for sure not like the 1918 flu.
Fauci said today that if we don't get aggressive, the death toll will be many millions.
None of these occurred on anywhere near the current spread or scale. SARS and MERS were almost entirely confined to Asia, Ebola to West Africa, and Zika to South America. The last was most widespread but was still limited to about 10,000 cases outside of South America and Cape Verde. Even then the greatest danger was to the children of pregnant women and, rarely, lasting complications. The number of “deaths from Zika” was <100 in total.
Coronavirus’ combination of “widespread prevalence and awareness” and “killing people” is quite different from previous diseases, I think. It might effect more social change.
There were changes after SARS that led to better containment and reporting measures in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.
Sure, the initial cases were clearly messed up, but it has mostly been contained in Hong Kong and Singapore. And with the way this disease has progressed, I would bet many countries are going to overtake China in case counts.
There have been some quite impressive Covid-19 containment campaigns in the Middle East and Africa thanks to improvements brought on by exactly those outbreaks, so maybe.
I think the scale of global impact is different. I’m now turn into a person who religiously wash my hand, and care about hygiene and stuff much, much more often than before, all thanks to this COVID-19.
Humans don’t seem to be very good about internalizing lessons across more than 2, maybe 3, generations. Especially if there’s any sort of indirect effects or abstract concepts involved.
Besides #2, most of these would disappear after a couple generations. We've obviously forgotten a lot since the Spanish Flu, polio, and other highly infectious diseases.
Most people have little interest in operating their motor vehicles safely, even though doing so would be trivially easy, and not doing so kills a staggering number each year.
The This Week in Virology podcast was discussing some anecdotal stats from doctors HK who reported lower incidents in many common seasonal disease due to better hygiene. I don't believe they have population wide compulsory quarantine, so it might just be a case of mask usage + hand washing. Would be interesting if on the whole, less people died this year due to elevated vigilance as side affect of corona response.
It's actually not a bad thing that it's between 1% and 3% mortality. Can you imagine if this had been Ebola or MERS? This pandemic will leave us much better prepared for one that could be much much worse.
More dangerous infection often kill their hosts before they can infect many others, so might result in horrendous dead toll locally but might find it hard to spread very far.
I actually think its' success is largely due to the low mortality rate.
At the extreme if it killed 100% of the people it infected then everyone would've locked down borders immediately and taken it very seriously.
But instead it's only 10x as deadly as a common virus (the flu) that most people have personally had. Which made people not very wary of it until they saw the exponential spread problem illustrated in Italy. (China also illustrated that but Westerners really only feel something can personally affect them if it happens to other Westerners)
One data point might be Toronto. SARS had a pretty large social impact here, and people are far more cautious and measured in the face of COVID-19, but not panicking. Not yet anyway.
But small changes have been impactful—like some businesses immediately getting on wider WFH policies and self-quarantine for returning business travelers as well as general hygiene—people aren't always great at that but it's a conscious act on everyone's part lately. Businesses and buildings even started placing more sanitizer stations, etc.
I keep reading that because of how insanely transmissible covid is, this doesn't end until enough people have already had it that there just aren't that many people around you to infect anymore. It's been described as "trying to stop the wind". We can maybe slow it down but not stop it, and in the US since our response has been so weak, we especially shouldn't hope to stop it unless we're willing to totally isolate our entire families.
At the same time we're hearing that Italian hospitals are completely overwhelmed to where they are having to "choose who to let die" vs providing acute treatment.
So... (1) is it fair to say that focusing on prevention is pointless and we should just focus on survival which is largely about staying healthy and receiving care and therefore (2) (this is the crazy part) does it actually make sense to get it now before hospitals are overwhelmed and you might be unlucky enough to be sick with something else. Basically choose the most opportune survivable situation to get it versus letting the virus and bad luck pick when you have to fight this battle?
My gut tells me a bunch of people are going to crap all over this question but I'm not coming up with good counter-arguments off the top of my head.
(one other point, I live in SF, a large dense city, and I have two little kids that get everything so I'm maybe more fatalistic about the idea that I and my family will eventually get it either way)
> (2) (this is the crazy part) does it actually make sense to get it now before hospitals are overwhelmed and you might be unlucky enough to be sick with something else. Basically choose the most opportune survivable situation to get it versus letting the virus and bad luck pick when you have to fight this battle?
No.
(1) If you get it, you may spread it, even if you're careful. That chain of spread may lead to additional burdens on the system, or deaths
(2) No matter your age, you may become seriously ill, and may draw resources from the system because of irresponsible behavior
(3) It's highly possible that after some time has passed, the mortality rate will drop significantly because doctors will develop a good protocol. If you get it now, you risk being treated in a system that is still figuring this thing out
(4) If you get it, you will not be available to help anyone else if needed due to the required isolation period
The only ethical thing to do is to try as best you can not to become sick and also to support your community through this difficult time with money or volunteer labor. So, if you are a highly-paid techie who can work from home and limit your interaction with others in the community, do so.
Only number 3 is a potential benefit to the individual. The rest are for the community’s benefit. Remember we are on a site full of people with a rather “every man is an island” attitude...
What you're saying is close to the standard line -- "flatten the curve". By trying to prevent infection, you slow the process down, so that hospitals are not overwhelmed. An overwhelmed medical system means that every aspect is made worse; people are not contained so the spread accelerates, we don't do backtracing with the same effect, medical personnel get infected, people with easily treatable conditions are not treated, etc.
The end state is that almost everyone will be exposed to it, most likely to mutated less deadly variants (because those have higher survivability in viral terms), but if the rate of exposure is slow enough then we can mitigate a disaster.
Looking at Italy as a case study we need to limit the spread of this virus only for the reason of reducing stress on the medical industry at any given single moment while accepting everyone is likely to encounter this thing eventually. Aside from slowing the rate of transmission the guidance, from the medical experts, says to treat this no differently than the flu.
The reality is that this virus will be everywhere because it is at least as transmissible as the flu but with more benign symptoms and a longer incubation period. The incubation period for the flu is generally 5-7 days but the early data from China was suggesting an incubation period of 10-14 days for corvid19. Both of those numbers are variable upon a given snapshot and environmental factors.
On the other hand the earlier people encounter this thing means the earlier a population can build the necessary mass immunity resistance.
This. What is urgently needed is to flatten the curve. Maybe we can't reduce the total number of people who get it, but if we can spread out the infection over a longer time period, we may be able to avoid overwhelming the health care system, to the benefit of all.
That's a good point and highlights a possible misalignment of interests between individuals and the community: me intentionally getting it now, before there are many cases might help me and my family but speeding up spread by doing so might increase the size of the peak for everyone else.
Related question: when I imagine the spread I feel like fast moving spread will burn itself out more quickly and completely. But if it slows down too much, might it become like the flu where if only 1/3 of the people get it in a given year we never hit that critical point where everyone is immune and it peters out within a season, giving it time to mutate and keep reinfecting populations year after year much like the flu does?
It could take two weeks before you develop severe symptoms sending you to the hospital. After that you may need intensive care for a couple of weeks. How sure are you that your local hospitals won't be overwhelmed in 2-4 weeks?
There are different strains of the virus and it's not clear if getting one of them gives you immunity to other strains.
Yes if you're vulnerable it would be better to get it today than in a month when hospitals are full. However it would be even better not to get it at all or get in 6 months time when doctors know more about how to treat the disease and could have drugs that are known to work.
It sounds like your family is young enough to not really be badly hurt, its more about how many people you'd pass it on to.
> (2) (this is the crazy part) does it actually make sense to get it now before hospitals are overwhelmed and you might be unlucky enough to be sick with something else.
I don't think that's crazy, it would be quite helpful to be able to plan to catch it, and you can quarantine yourself at home so you don't spread it to anyone. The big trick is to be able to avoid spreading it around during the symptomless incubation period. Catching the virus on purpose could help you do that.
> (1) is it fair to say that focusing on prevention is pointless and we should just focus on survival
I don't think so. The point is to lower the exponent. Buying time has a lot of value.
I've read that you need about 40% of the population to be immune to it, for this to die down. Suppose you will inevitably get there no matter what we do (barring a deus ex machina like a vaccine) - you want to do it at a pace that does not overwhelm the health system.
Another thing to consider is, that this is like a friction coefficient. So maybe if people spend 80% less time outside, we can maybe equate that to having 25% of the people already immune or something like that, and then 10-15% actual immunity is enough to make it die down.
So I was on Youtube when WHO was holding the conference giving the promotion and I caught about 10 minutes off it. In there, the spokesperson said exactly concerning 1) that we SHOULD still enact containment measures, and that those containment measures could help nip it in the bud.
No to number one as prevention is very important, as you wont receive care if hospitals are overwhelmed. Also, containing the virus is useless if in the end a vaccine is able to be developed.
Number two makes more sense as not having access to care and equipment later on can be a problem.
I've heard the "you can't escape it" argument too, but I'm not too sure if I believe it. Shouldn't we have to avoid it only until the vaccines are ready?
The only way to ensure escape from a disease is to eradicate or contain it. A vaccine helps tremendously in that regards, but alone doesn't guarantee eradication; as we have flu vaccines since the 1930s, yet the flu still remains amongst us. However, this is arguably just a result of vaccination rates; if more people took the flu seriously and were regularly vaccinated, we may have eradicated the flu by now.
Same for COVID-19. If people don't ever take this seriously enough, then I doubt we'll eradicate it. The virus is on every continent in ~120/195 of the world's countries, all of which happened in a few months, despite travel bans and quarantines setup to initial outbreak areas. To me that sounds like people need to take it more seriously and put more effort into containing this. Otherwise it looks like it'll end up being endemic just like the flu, and we may never eradicate it despite having a vaccine - as what evidence do we have that enough people will vaccinate themselves when we do have a vaccine, if people keep equating it to the flu...
The problem with pandemics is that they tend to grow exponentially. What people often forget about exponential growth is that it's actually very slow around t = 0.
obviously its not going to be exponential forever, no one believes that. The more people get infected, the less people there are to infect. This is obvious. The problem is no one knows where the inflection point is yet, and it depends entirely on how countries react to the illness.
I think t is too far from 0 at this point, at least in the U.S. Our ability to test for SARS-CoV 2 has been completely kneecapped since the beginning, and there still aren't enough tests to screen people for the virus. There are documented cases in my area going back to 3 feb. But those cases were diagnosed outside of the country. As in, they had it while they were here, but they were not diagnosed until they flew back home and visited a doctor.
Anyone following the social media and the news would’ve called the pandemic weeks ago.
I hope this will make people realize that we need to abolish centralized institutions in our highly complex world. They are single points of failure which introduce significant systemic risks.
CDC also dropped the ball on this one. In Washington state local authorities discovered the outbreak only because they defied federal regulators.
We need better organization at the local level, and we need it now.
Why is this evidence that “we need to abolish centralized institutions”? It’s not like every local organization can marshal expertise on every issue. Perhaps the WHO misjudged the coronavirus, but I’m confused about how this is suddenly a referendum on large institutions and the superiority of local ones.
Running the WHO seems hard. Alarm people too often and they will tune you out. Miss an alarm once and they will call you incompetent (“you had one job!”).
There's nothing wrong with having large-scale institutions. The problem is when local organizations can't act without a single centralized institution giving the OK. National health departments listen to the WHO but can take action as needed without WHO signoff; local health departments in the US often literally could not test for the coronavirus, even though they had the tools and the capacity and the desire to make tests, because they didn't have federal approval.
> It’s not like every local organization can marshal expertise on every issue.
In order to be efficient decision makers, local organizations should be concerned with acquiring expertise related to local issues, and then, through cooperation, global expertise becomes an emergent property. It's not like every central institution can marshal expertise on every local issue.
One reason you want to avoid centralization is due to the fact that decision making occurs under imperfect and incomplete knowledge, or bounded-rationality as Herbert Simon called it.
By decentralizing the process of decision making, you mitigate the risks, since you are allowing entities to tackle a problem in parallel, and if one of them turns out to be wrong, the fallout is localized. Whereas in a centralized system, one bad decision can spell trouble for everyone.
The WHO knew (and told people) that this disease had the potential for a pandemic and/or widespread harm a long time ago. Here’s a two-months old article with the title “Narrowing window to contain outbreak, WHO says”: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51591091
There is a difference between a potential, or even a certain, pandemic and an actual one. You and the WHO knew what it meant when you looked at that egg. But only now has it become an actual chicken.
> Anyone following the social media and the news would’ve called the pandemic weeks ago.
I would not trust the unstoppable gushing torrent of dubious information that is Twitter over whoever may be giving the World Health Organization its information.
If anything, this is evidence that we need to empower centralized institutions. China started late and fucked up early, but they dealt with it (at least for now). And we'd all be in a much different place now if WHO had actual power and could start bossing countries around a month or two ago.
Similar to how the number 1 problem with the UN is that it has absolutely zero power to do anything.
sorry but 3 months ago WHO was complaining that China is taking too strong measures that are hurting the local population and are not proven to work. WHO never recommended shutting down cities or regions, which as we can see is the only thing that works.
WHO fucked up big time IMO. thousands of employees there, most probably appointed politically by country of origin and who have nothing to do with science.
You're not wrong, but to be fair, the CDC has to fight for funding all the time. If Trump gets his way with his budget proposals, it'll only get worse.
>I hope this will make people realize that we need to abolish centralized institutions in our highly complex world.
While I too favor decentralization, what we really need to do is return merit to our institutions. We need a social climate that encourages Pattons and Churchills and the like. Unfortunately to return to such a time of competent leadership (not just in government, but society at large) would require undoing decades of propaganda that convinced some two generations of children that we all have equal ability and any of us can do anything. The dangerous downside of giving everyone a trophy across society is that now people have grown up less able to judge competence and merit in others.
It's funny how in those political discussions, comments often say more about the commenter.
For example, I would argue that the "propaganda" that anybody can do anything isn't that old yet. On the other hand, certain political groups have been sabotaging government leadership for so long - by claiming that government is always incapable - that there's just no good leadership left in many places and it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm fairly sure the quality of institutions in this day and age has almost nothing to do with participation trophies/equal ability propaganda, as this kind of thing rapidly gets torn to shreds as soon as one enters the job market.
I suspect it has a great deal to do with decades of people blaming government for their problems and increasingly less faith in government institutions, to the point of some politicians running on the idea that government doesn't work. It strikes me as difficult to get competent people for your organizations when the term "unelected bureaucrats" is used as an epithet, the pay is below equivalent work in the private sector, and the people at the top are selected for idealogical reasons instead of anything related to effectiveness, expertise or capability.
Parents from every school districts in the Bay Area have collected thousands of signatures to close, but the politicians are not doing their job.
I was on call with Santa Clara county hotline and the school district and the standard answer I got was: Oh, the kids are at low risk and the numbers are low so we're not closing yet.
What they don't realize is that the kids can still be carriers and many teachers and parents are in the danger zone (age or underlying conditions)
I listened to Joe Rogan's podcast with Michael Osterholm and he gave an interesting perspective. He said that most nurses who have children will suffer if kids have to be sent home. They most likely don't have people that can help take care of their children while they are supporting the influx of patients. Moreover, many children rely on school provided meals so sending them home will be very tough on the families.
Don't remember where I read, but some district or something has proposed (or implemented) an option where kids are able to get lunch/breakfast and take it with them without needing to attend school.
It does not solve the nurse issue, which perhaps as a community we need to solve. Perhaps limited opening of school monitored by younger healthier teachers/PTA reps.
Only vaguely relevant, but the school district I grew up in had a policy of never closing for weather. The rationale was that if the school were closed and some children showed up anyway (didn't get the message or whatever), they would literally freeze to death. So, no matter how bad things were, there would be someone there to unlock the doors.
Those are actually the least solvable problems. A disproportionate amount of poor people are going to lose their jobs during the next 3-6 months because of a recession. A lot of people especially in the US are going to suffer because of the vast income inequality that has arisen. So there is no good solution, just like quarantine isn't a good solution but at some point we have to do it.
I understand that. In which case at least they should make school optional.
Several Universities are closed, several schools are closed and we need to worry more about the spread because if we don't we'll have the problems you mentioned in addition to a massive spread.
There are a lot of folks on here asserting facts that are not supported by evidence.
The actual facts are this: we don't know what the CFR (case fatality rate) is. CFR is very difficult to accurately calculate, and varies widely with age, location, health conditions and even biological sex (so far, this seems to affect men a bit worse than women). The "2-3%" mortality rate that's being tossed around as fact, is most likely wildly inaccurate.
We don't know what the mutation rate is. Viruses tend to become less lethal over time, because the fatal strains kill the host and don't spread as well, which puts evolutionary pressure on the virus to become milder. Will that happen in this case? We don't know.
We don't know what the appropriate government response is. It's somewhere between welding people into their houses and doing nothing. Which is to say, who knows? Go overboard and everyone criticizes the government for crying wolf and wasting funds. Too little, and everyone criticizes the government for standing by and letting people die. It's a very difficult balance to strike, and I have a lot of sympathy for the folks who are in the position of making these decisions. They'll invariably get some wrong. Hopefully not too many.
IMHO, the best resource to learn about what we do know is the comprehensive Ars Technica article[1], which is frequently updated.
I would like to suggest
a) that folks stop claiming mortality rates in a panicky tone - because we don't know. and
b) that everyone who is reading folks claiming mortality rates and the upcoming apocalypse - reserve judgement until we have more information.
Readit News
As a Chinese, I read first hand materials from Chinese social media and friends on what life is like in a lockdown area. People there depends on deliveries for groceries and medicine, and occasionally restaurants take-outs. All those services, and a bunch of other services for small businesses are possible because of Wechat. Wechat is obviously not a popular option here in N.A. Is there something we can do to help both the people buy whatever they need via delivery and help local businesses?
In Wuhan when the entire family had to be isolated, no one was left to take care of family pets. I heard there's volunteer groups to take them but their capacities were very limited due to the short notice for them to take on such responsibilities. Can we be more prepared and maybe find a technology(-assisted) solution to this before it becomes a huge issue? I feel this will be an issue sooner rather than later because in N.A. it appears the current policy for mild cases is self-isolating, which will very likely infect the entire family.
Also in Wuhan during the lockdown many people felt so lonely, especially the older generation who can't use the internet effectively to stay connected to their families/rest of the world. Can we find ways to help people prepare for it psychologically? A lot of people will break medical suggested self-isolation because of the eagerness to stay connected to certain people/group. Instead of blaming them, can we help them find ways to stay connected yet in isolation?
I'm sure there are more things the mighty HN crowd can do to help others overcome this difficult time. Let's give it a try?
Here is evidence why it works: new cases/day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=...
What China did is a complete shutdown and isolation of whole cities, cancellation of public gatherings, prohibition of attendance at school and work, massive mobilization of health and public health personnel as well as military medical units, and rapid construction of entire hospitals.
Wuhan, Iran, Italy have shown us that the health care system simply collapses under the huge number of patients needing hospitalization (20% of infected.) So mobilizing healthcare workers, springing up new "hospitals", and limiting spread with extreme responses is the way to go.
Unfortunately I predict that western governments are going to be less likely to suggest, deploy, and enforce such massive quarantines. Quarantines impede on civil liberties, and people in the West are very protective of freedom and liberties. I think the average American will NOT be okay with his government telling him he is only authorized to exit his house to go shopping once a week...
Extreme measures without a plan and a data basis will certainly make matters worse. We need a plan, which Western countries have. What is somewhat lacking is the basis to implement it. Aggressive testing of everybody would provide this basis, like South Korea does.
Which increases my critique points of the response to a total of two, a viable social media campaign to inform people and prevent panic reactions, which could totally provided and carried by tech companies. So, Google, Twitter, Facebook, if you are listening do something good with your social power! And the aggressive testing of people, everyone, starting with contact persons, people having traveled to risk areas and ultimately everyone.
Other than that I am quite satisfied, in Europe at least. The US seem to be a different story.
There is evidence that a lot of people contract the virus and have no symptoms or very mild symptoms.
Reported stats out of various countries/egions also do not account for things like the severity of regional air pollution (Wuhan, Tehran, and Milan have BAD air pollution) or the other key statistics, like "do they smoke?" (lot of smokers in China, Italy, and Iran... just saying). Bad air pollution and smoking tears the crap out of the lungs and makes it much easier to contract respiratory infections.
Caution and concern are completely warranted.... significant action needs to be taken to protect all of us, especially our elderly and immune suppressed.
But we need to be careful about pushing information that causes a descent into panic.
1. 38% of nurses have children at school. Shutdown the country and 1/4 of the US healthcare industry will choose their children over work in a blink. We don't want to put any more pressure on the people working in healthcare.
2. 75% of US companies have now a disrupted supply chain. Yes the cons of outsourcing core economic functions like manufacturing drugs, hospital supplies etc... Mass mania followed by ongoing shopping sprees will set in further draining a crippled supply chain.
What we need more of is hygiene education (with strict fines) and detailed data about who, where and how they are affected by the virus. Being politically correct in a time where the world is at the brink of chaos is not going to save anyone. Sometimes hard debates need to be had and tight restrictions enforced. It's sort of like the Trolley problem.
Once countries get to about 150 cases their trajectories are very similar. So far the USA has not been too different to Italy.
Such an impressive single day drop, it's almost like they stopped testing people..
Meanwhile, I recommend relying on vastly more credible and less easily falsified sources to judge how China is recovering.
If you trust your eyes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-4zQADLS8
If you trust TomTom, https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/wuhan-traffic
With that in mind, the larger impact is going to be the lack of medicine, food, etc. that comes from a large-scale heavy response. We are just at the beginning. Push for social distancing, but over the next two years we're just going to have to learn to deal with this. It'll mutate, we'll find ways to mitigate damage and we'll have a large loss of life.
Push out higher production of medical equipment and push out the best possible safety gear for healthcare workers. On a personal level, try to stay fit, get lots of rest, and try to quickly take care of any other conditions. Stay home if you are sick (to avoid spreading any illness).
That's about the extent we can do.
Closing schools, closing offices, shutting down the economy is going to be far more damaging than this disease will be.
I’ve seen the videos coming out of Hubei. If you tried to weld someone’s door shut in the US you stand a good chance of being shot by the resident and both their neighbors. Maybe not in the big cities, but virtually everywhere else.
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No. We knew the R0 of this thing in late January, and we knew, at least approximately, the fatality rate and ICU/ventilation requirement rate, in very early February.
Every single "just the flu bro" type has indirectly killed people since that time, including the WHO Chief and US President. These things should not be forgotten, and consequences should be meted out, lest we doom ourselves to repeat the mistakes of complacency in the future.
In China, a lot of people can be left at home to die and they cannot do any protest against their government. In the most serious period in Wuhan, citizens were limited to stay home and there were not enough means of transport to do necessary transportation, such as critical patients and food. At the expense of this, another large proportion of people can keep alive.
But in the US, people have weapons and they are very tough. In addition, the information is transparency, so it is impossible to hide such tragedies.
Something that we westerners take for granted and why I would guess the virus won’t propagate as quickly. Long term, these kind of things are more important than shiny sky scrapers and HSRs.
Meanwhile, I’ve spent significant time in NorCal and NJ residences with extremely crappy heating, too.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22550623
Now this post has inevitably been downranked as well. I'm setting up a HN downranking-watch site right now ;-)
If you know some crowd-funding site where one can donate money to health care workers, please let me know (berthold dot alexander at googlemail dot com)
So if this may be an issue for you it might be good to start looking around to get connections. I assume the issue is that the entire family was moved out of the home? I'd be a little leery of visiting such a home without training if there's a chance the fixtures (doorknobs, fridge handles) can be carrying the virus. In particular if there's any reason to be opening the fridge for pet food because lower temperatures of 4c apparently drastically increase virus survival time to a few weeks, so handling items in the fridge may be a major risk.
Ughh, no thanks buddy. I'd rather not have any of this propaganda garbage. WeChat basically contributed to a global pandemic because it's prime instrument of Chinese censorship[1].
[1] https://medium.com/pcmag-access/china-has-been-censoring-cor...
This post right here
This is peak HN
We're facing potentially the worst global pandemic in a century and you're talking about takeout and pet sitting
And this is the top post
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Send everyone over 55 s as my working phone capable of doing Skype or whatever and provide the device a data connection to a Chatroulette app setup and instructions to disable the it and use normally in big big print and grayscale not color screens please color is confusing or color only what you want clicked (NeXT could have been a revolution for just doing that) by us old people anyway...
Not relying on government is the way to go.
I think we should build a social network for community welfare which can prepare us for something like this in future. Where people build communities among themselves. Key point being internal resource availability to be exposed to the close knit network and an external pool exposed to an radius. Keeping everything to the close knit shouldn't be encouraged and there should be a proportion. Ideally the network should be split when its crossing a proportion.
Why not build a social network which helps to build close knit communities and it can have a cascade effect on the whole populace as a side effect("good"). Some of the key points for it to work being:
This need not be the case with just a pandemic but can help us tide over other eventualities as well.I understand people want to support the Austin economy since losing SXSW is a big hit, however it was cancelled to limit mass gatherings yet people still want to gather.
Even still, my partner and I are keeping an eye open on flights to Europe (we've always wanted to go) and seriously considering taking the risk of buying a flight for in a couple of months time because they are quite literally at half price right now. And I'm not even talking about Italy.
edit: Haha—to clarify, the risk being flight cancellation or border closures not catching or spreading disease.
2nd edit: Wow. I'm drawing a little ire here. I'll reiterate: the risk is in not being able to go because the problem continues. Please take the charitable view (and of my whole comment, not snippets)—not the one that I'm some kind of monster :)
Why aren't they already transitioning to remote work? Is there a timeline in place? What are their criteria about what would trigger WFH? What about employees with elderly family members at home? Do they have the necessary systems in place to support a fully remote staff?
It's very likely that management has simply avoided thinking about the topic entirely. If the employees press them for a concrete action plan, then that at least prompts them to start engaging in objective analysis.
You're also asked to work from home for a while if any travelling family member from overseas visits, and if you have no reason to be in the office they won't say no if you just want to work at home and avoid public transport.
Hoping it doesn't cause a big hit to productivity because it's the right thing to do.
Going to be an interesting few weeks as we see how things proceed. To think, somewhere out there, the virus lurks and is headed our way ..
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pests%C3%A4ule
(in German)
But as in all countries by now, older folks should stay home and self quarantine whenever possible.
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Notably, the Church of Greece has announced that "the virus cannot be spread through Communion" (where everyone drinks wine from the same cup). You can imagine how angry this self-serving move made most people.
I lean a little tinfoil-hatty; but I get the impression that for all the bullshit self-serving narratives proffered by elites (both economic and political), this is one that they actually seem to believe themselves, privately as well as publicly. If anything, they're more spooked than they're signaling openly.
1. Will take infectious disease more seriously
2. Will build out health care infrastructure to guard against future occurrences
3. Personal sanitation will be improved
4. People less likely to take risky behaviors like getting together in huge groups
edit: formatting
I don’t say that lightly. That was 20 years ago, so maybe you youngsters just read about it in books. But in summary, a bunch of us busted ass to make sure the predictions of ATM and power failures did not come to pass on 1/1/2000. Our reward was, “See? We got all up in arms about nothing.”
Plenty of those same short-sighted dipshits are still alive, and of those now deceased, I’m sure replacements are just reaching voting age.
That’s assuming the U. S. puts forth anything close to the effort of fixing Y2K. Which is not even remotely guaranteed.
Fauci said today that if we don't get aggressive, the death toll will be many millions.
Did this happen after Ebola outbreak?
Did this happen after Zika outbreak?
Don't get your hopes up.
Coronavirus’ combination of “widespread prevalence and awareness” and “killing people” is quite different from previous diseases, I think. It might effect more social change.
Sure, the initial cases were clearly messed up, but it has mostly been contained in Hong Kong and Singapore. And with the way this disease has progressed, I would bet many countries are going to overtake China in case counts.
None of those became major issues in the US or Europe. The media did it's typical the sky is falling thing and then nothing happened.
So, now we have a virus that is hard for us to contain but people haven't taken it seriously until Italy started having crazy day over day numbers.
So no, not optimistic on this.
At the extreme if it killed 100% of the people it infected then everyone would've locked down borders immediately and taken it very seriously.
But instead it's only 10x as deadly as a common virus (the flu) that most people have personally had. Which made people not very wary of it until they saw the exponential spread problem illustrated in Italy. (China also illustrated that but Westerners really only feel something can personally affect them if it happens to other Westerners)
But small changes have been impactful—like some businesses immediately getting on wider WFH policies and self-quarantine for returning business travelers as well as general hygiene—people aren't always great at that but it's a conscious act on everyone's part lately. Businesses and buildings even started placing more sanitizer stations, etc.
Both those 4... 3 of them are against human nature, the other one is expensive, just forget about it.
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I keep reading that because of how insanely transmissible covid is, this doesn't end until enough people have already had it that there just aren't that many people around you to infect anymore. It's been described as "trying to stop the wind". We can maybe slow it down but not stop it, and in the US since our response has been so weak, we especially shouldn't hope to stop it unless we're willing to totally isolate our entire families.
At the same time we're hearing that Italian hospitals are completely overwhelmed to where they are having to "choose who to let die" vs providing acute treatment.
So... (1) is it fair to say that focusing on prevention is pointless and we should just focus on survival which is largely about staying healthy and receiving care and therefore (2) (this is the crazy part) does it actually make sense to get it now before hospitals are overwhelmed and you might be unlucky enough to be sick with something else. Basically choose the most opportune survivable situation to get it versus letting the virus and bad luck pick when you have to fight this battle?
My gut tells me a bunch of people are going to crap all over this question but I'm not coming up with good counter-arguments off the top of my head.
(one other point, I live in SF, a large dense city, and I have two little kids that get everything so I'm maybe more fatalistic about the idea that I and my family will eventually get it either way)
No.
(1) If you get it, you may spread it, even if you're careful. That chain of spread may lead to additional burdens on the system, or deaths
(2) No matter your age, you may become seriously ill, and may draw resources from the system because of irresponsible behavior
(3) It's highly possible that after some time has passed, the mortality rate will drop significantly because doctors will develop a good protocol. If you get it now, you risk being treated in a system that is still figuring this thing out
(4) If you get it, you will not be available to help anyone else if needed due to the required isolation period
The only ethical thing to do is to try as best you can not to become sick and also to support your community through this difficult time with money or volunteer labor. So, if you are a highly-paid techie who can work from home and limit your interaction with others in the community, do so.
The end state is that almost everyone will be exposed to it, most likely to mutated less deadly variants (because those have higher survivability in viral terms), but if the rate of exposure is slow enough then we can mitigate a disaster.
Looking at Italy as a case study we need to limit the spread of this virus only for the reason of reducing stress on the medical industry at any given single moment while accepting everyone is likely to encounter this thing eventually. Aside from slowing the rate of transmission the guidance, from the medical experts, says to treat this no differently than the flu. The reality is that this virus will be everywhere because it is at least as transmissible as the flu but with more benign symptoms and a longer incubation period. The incubation period for the flu is generally 5-7 days but the early data from China was suggesting an incubation period of 10-14 days for corvid19. Both of those numbers are variable upon a given snapshot and environmental factors.
On the other hand the earlier people encounter this thing means the earlier a population can build the necessary mass immunity resistance.
Related question: when I imagine the spread I feel like fast moving spread will burn itself out more quickly and completely. But if it slows down too much, might it become like the flu where if only 1/3 of the people get it in a given year we never hit that critical point where everyone is immune and it peters out within a season, giving it time to mutate and keep reinfecting populations year after year much like the flu does?
Somehow that term to me is more dystopian than “pandemic”.
There are different strains of the virus and it's not clear if getting one of them gives you immunity to other strains.
I would guess it takes at least a couple weeks from exposure to get into critical condition and treated.
It sounds like your family is young enough to not really be badly hurt, its more about how many people you'd pass it on to.
I don't think that's crazy, it would be quite helpful to be able to plan to catch it, and you can quarantine yourself at home so you don't spread it to anyone. The big trick is to be able to avoid spreading it around during the symptomless incubation period. Catching the virus on purpose could help you do that.
> (1) is it fair to say that focusing on prevention is pointless and we should just focus on survival
I don't think so. The point is to lower the exponent. Buying time has a lot of value.
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Another thing to consider is, that this is like a friction coefficient. So maybe if people spend 80% less time outside, we can maybe equate that to having 25% of the people already immune or something like that, and then 10-15% actual immunity is enough to make it die down.
Number two makes more sense as not having access to care and equipment later on can be a problem.
Same for COVID-19. If people don't ever take this seriously enough, then I doubt we'll eradicate it. The virus is on every continent in ~120/195 of the world's countries, all of which happened in a few months, despite travel bans and quarantines setup to initial outbreak areas. To me that sounds like people need to take it more seriously and put more effort into containing this. Otherwise it looks like it'll end up being endemic just like the flu, and we may never eradicate it despite having a vaccine - as what evidence do we have that enough people will vaccinate themselves when we do have a vaccine, if people keep equating it to the flu...
it's nearly always a sigmoid in disguise.
What we are trying our damndest to control is the carrying capacity.
I hope this will make people realize that we need to abolish centralized institutions in our highly complex world. They are single points of failure which introduce significant systemic risks.
CDC also dropped the ball on this one. In Washington state local authorities discovered the outbreak only because they defied federal regulators.
We need better organization at the local level, and we need it now.
Running the WHO seems hard. Alarm people too often and they will tune you out. Miss an alarm once and they will call you incompetent (“you had one job!”).
In order to be efficient decision makers, local organizations should be concerned with acquiring expertise related to local issues, and then, through cooperation, global expertise becomes an emergent property. It's not like every central institution can marshal expertise on every local issue.
One reason you want to avoid centralization is due to the fact that decision making occurs under imperfect and incomplete knowledge, or bounded-rationality as Herbert Simon called it.
By decentralizing the process of decision making, you mitigate the risks, since you are allowing entities to tackle a problem in parallel, and if one of them turns out to be wrong, the fallout is localized. Whereas in a centralized system, one bad decision can spell trouble for everyone.
There is a difference between a potential, or even a certain, pandemic and an actual one. You and the WHO knew what it meant when you looked at that egg. But only now has it become an actual chicken.
I would not trust the unstoppable gushing torrent of dubious information that is Twitter over whoever may be giving the World Health Organization its information.
Similar to how the number 1 problem with the UN is that it has absolutely zero power to do anything.
> He urged the public to remain calm, saying WHO wasn’t recommending “measures that unnecessarily interfere with international trade or travel. (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/who-declares-china-coronavir...)
WHO fucked up big time IMO. thousands of employees there, most probably appointed politically by country of origin and who have nothing to do with science.
Oh, I thought you were going to say this teaches us why international trade and travel is bad, and relationships between countries should be minimal.
While I too favor decentralization, what we really need to do is return merit to our institutions. We need a social climate that encourages Pattons and Churchills and the like. Unfortunately to return to such a time of competent leadership (not just in government, but society at large) would require undoing decades of propaganda that convinced some two generations of children that we all have equal ability and any of us can do anything. The dangerous downside of giving everyone a trophy across society is that now people have grown up less able to judge competence and merit in others.
For example, I would argue that the "propaganda" that anybody can do anything isn't that old yet. On the other hand, certain political groups have been sabotaging government leadership for so long - by claiming that government is always incapable - that there's just no good leadership left in many places and it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I suspect it has a great deal to do with decades of people blaming government for their problems and increasingly less faith in government institutions, to the point of some politicians running on the idea that government doesn't work. It strikes me as difficult to get competent people for your organizations when the term "unelected bureaucrats" is used as an epithet, the pay is below equivalent work in the private sector, and the people at the top are selected for idealogical reasons instead of anything related to effectiveness, expertise or capability.
Dead Comment
Parents from every school districts in the Bay Area have collected thousands of signatures to close, but the politicians are not doing their job.
I was on call with Santa Clara county hotline and the school district and the standard answer I got was: Oh, the kids are at low risk and the numbers are low so we're not closing yet.
What they don't realize is that the kids can still be carriers and many teachers and parents are in the danger zone (age or underlying conditions)
It does not solve the nurse issue, which perhaps as a community we need to solve. Perhaps limited opening of school monitored by younger healthier teachers/PTA reps.
Who is supposed to watch these kids if the parents can't stay home with them?
What about the thousands of low income kids that rely on school for most of their meals?
I'm sure these are solvable problems, but I think there are good reasons that it's taking longer than most people want.
Several Universities are closed, several schools are closed and we need to worry more about the spread because if we don't we'll have the problems you mentioned in addition to a massive spread.
The actual facts are this: we don't know what the CFR (case fatality rate) is. CFR is very difficult to accurately calculate, and varies widely with age, location, health conditions and even biological sex (so far, this seems to affect men a bit worse than women). The "2-3%" mortality rate that's being tossed around as fact, is most likely wildly inaccurate.
We don't know what the mutation rate is. Viruses tend to become less lethal over time, because the fatal strains kill the host and don't spread as well, which puts evolutionary pressure on the virus to become milder. Will that happen in this case? We don't know.
We don't know what the appropriate government response is. It's somewhere between welding people into their houses and doing nothing. Which is to say, who knows? Go overboard and everyone criticizes the government for crying wolf and wasting funds. Too little, and everyone criticizes the government for standing by and letting people die. It's a very difficult balance to strike, and I have a lot of sympathy for the folks who are in the position of making these decisions. They'll invariably get some wrong. Hopefully not too many.
IMHO, the best resource to learn about what we do know is the comprehensive Ars Technica article[1], which is frequently updated.
I would like to suggest a) that folks stop claiming mortality rates in a panicky tone - because we don't know. and b) that everyone who is reading folks claiming mortality rates and the upcoming apocalypse - reserve judgement until we have more information.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/dont-panic-the-compr...