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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I believe most people should just accept that they are going to get COVID-19. It's going to get spread around, and it's not containable. You're likely going to get it. That's the bad news, but the good news is that we have immune systems and we know how to take care of each other and ourselves. Yes it's going to kill some people, no it is highly probably not going to kill you. People will be sick and going on with their lives and doing their jobs.

It feels like we're teetering on the verge of hysteria, but a little acceptance about the situation would go a long way.

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There are steps that can be taken now at the community and country level that will drastically lessen the impact of the virus. That is to heavily promote social distancing.

Social distancing will flatten the epidemic curve, which means that hospitals will be less likely to be overwhelmed. It will cause economic pain so it will be anything but easy. Mitigating that economic pain would be an absolutely good use of government stimulus.

So let’s say there is no political will to be proactive with social distancing. Then we enter reactive mode - schools And offices close when a cluster is detected. Perhaps a larger scale quarantine must be enacted by the government (aka martial law). The economic pain is worse, and the end result is more deaths and an overwhelmed hospital system. Plus Wuhan style images of hospitals in major Anerican cities flooding the media.

This misses all the secondary effects an uncontained global pandemic would have, which would be wide-ranging. A sudden and prolonged 10% drop in global productivity could be a nightmare scenario.

Having said that, I'm not panicking either, and I think it's still too early to assume it's going to be fully uncontained -- hell, once the weather starts warming it could all change dramatically. (But then again, I have the advantage of living in a first-world developed nation with strong health care; the massive numbers of people living in 2nd- and 3rd-world countries have a lot more reason to be concerned I think.) But the concerns here go well beyond the simple individual experience of contracting the illness.

The secondary effects could go far beyond productivity losses.

If the health care system gets overwhelmed as we've seen in China (and as it already nearly does in the US every year due to seasonal flu), then even those 15%-20% (according to current estimates) with severe symptoms that could have been saved had the health care system not been overwhelmed are likely to die.

Also, people with other life threatening illnesses that could have been kept alive may die when the health care system gets overwhelmed.

Here[1] is a recent post from a doctor expressing his concerns:

"The hospital beds are most of the time at full capacity. Usually I had to send on Friday 30% of my patients home to make place for the new ones that were coming over the weekend, and this without any major epidemic. The reserves of protective gear are low. A lot of doctors and nurses don’t want to work in these conditions and most probably won’t show up at work anymore after they see how many people are going to die ( especially if young ones are also gonna start dying left and right ). We don’t have enough personnel. We don’t have enough beds. We don’t have enough machines. I expect that the CFR will be around 10%."

[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fbbr3b/r0_betw...

I think the experiences of places like Singapore and Vietnam indicate containment is possible and we shouldn't give up yet. I wish the US would do more testing and quarantine those who have it. (Singapore has gone down from 56 active cases to 32, Vietnam from 16 to zero in spite of being a major travel hub for China and next to China respectively).

I agree about avoiding hysteria, but IF "most" people got the virus...

Let's take "most" people to be 50% of the population. The Seattle Metro area had ~3.9 million people in 2017. The virus death rate is currently estimated at 2%.

So just accepting that 3.9m * 0.5 * 0.02 = 39,000 people will die in the the Seattle area alone seems a bit extreme

Saying that the death rate is 2% is extremely dishonest since it ignores one of the most important factors: age. For most people reading this you're off by an entire decimal.

That's only "dishonest" if your only concern is to estimate your own probability of dying and you are a young person. However, if you're trying to estimate the proportion of (confirmed) infected people that will die, it's a pretty good guess.

There are 86k confirmed cases globally. That’s 0.001%

Why would you think most people will get it?

The number of cases per day outside of China is still growing exponentially:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/...

Until that changes it’s a fair assumption that a lot more people will get it

If you look at the log graph on that link it’s clear it won’t get 50000x more severe unless the course drastically changes.

Looks like doubling every 5-6 days. So a million cases in 35-40 days if trend continues?

“The train appears to be over a mile away from where I’m standing. Why would you think it would hit me?”

Because it's spreading exponentially and its incubation period is up to 1 month. You should watch the CDC press conference given a few days ago[0]. Officials are not talking in terms of "if", they're talking in terms of "when."

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNV8HYI126U

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