Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says
npr.org
npr.org
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?
Even in a time like this you choose to make snide comments towards religion? Really?
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...
Or look at cumulative deaths (outside China): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESyyxfiUMAEwMVa?format=png&name=... The growth follows a perfect exponential curve, which suggests other countries have so far been completely unable to even bend the epidemic curve a little bit. It is obvious given this data that we will see 10k deaths outside China by March 20. I have a perfect track record at making such predictions in the past: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Azorinaq%20%23PredictionW... (short-term predictions are easy to make, long-term not so much)
Regulation sucks until it saves your life.
Consider the incubation time of 5 days avg, 14 days max during which you're already infectious. Even if China had reacted quickly, not trying to cover it up, we still wouldn't have known about that for a while. Even without the Chinese new year, I'm pretty sure given how dense and large Chinese cities are, this would have spread eventually either way. And I doubt the rest of the world would have reacted any different in that alternate reality than now. We still have travel with China and Italy today. Why would that have been any different had China handled that differently? It would have been slower, but it would have spread to other countries, I have no doubt about that.
I have seen several comments like this on this thread suggesting people are contagious during the incubation phase. Do you have a source for this? AFAIK this has not yet been confirmed, other than perhaps a few anecdotal cases.
I check out John Campbell on YouTube every couple days. He has this unique style of presenting current developments and research papers in a no-bs manner and commenting on them, currently urging for more proactive measures mostly.
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2001468?url_ver=Z...
It seems likely that if we fully controlled most of the cases that had visible symptoms, the spread would stop, even if we failed to control the cases which did not show symptoms.
The same is true for spread via surfaces: while I'm sure it's possible and happens, it seems like the primary mechanism of infection is breathing infected respiratory droplets from someone else.
Sources: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/transmission...
If true, social distancing, hand hygiene, and not touching ones face would bring asymptomatic transmission down to almost zero.
some good news
You don't think that's a testing kit production curve?
The initial cover up didn't help either. Once they instated the lockdown, they could test the backlog of people. That took quitea while. But now the spread has pretty much stopped, while everywhere else on this planet it increases day by day.
After the initial cover-up got public, the West couldn't get enough of reporting about it, and how this is the reason it could spread so fast, how irresponsible it was, and how it's typical for evil China. Now we have that virus here, plus two month of knowledge about it, and we're still mostly being reactive instead of proactive. In China's defense, when they tried to cover it up, much less was known about the disease, like it's asymptomatic spread. Now the cards are on the table and we're being ignorant, as if ignoring a problem makes it go away. But hey, when things are getting really really ugly for us, we can still go back to blaming China for their initial cover-up.
Watch Italy closely the next days, and compare it to China when they were at a similar stage. It will tell you what's to come in your country too. Another thing that's suspicious about Italy is the high CFR of around 6%. It most likely means they're not doing enough testing, only the severe cases, so the rest wanders around the country happily spreading it further.
It's worth noting that South Korea also was able to engage in such mass mobilization. Moreover, if the trends continue for a few weeks, China's not going to have an order of magnitude more death anymore.
Italy's high CFR sounds like a health care that's broken far more than the Chinese health care system, a system which essentially isn't taking any specific extreme measures (which would be building more hospitals, importing more health care workers, etc).
However once things get even more overwhelmed, you have bad cases become critical leading to more fatalities.
The going figure seems to 20% are badly impacted, with 5% of that critical. Some of that 15% will become critical without treatment that might not be available. Thus impacting people <70.
Korea CDC has raw numbers it looks like. https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=a30402000000&bid=00...
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/f2jiyz/uclo_jun...
The issue has to do with preparedness and healthcare capacity. South Korea has 3x the number of hospital beds per capita than Italy.
It’s Simpson’s paradox
I think you're combining two largely-unrelated factors. The news in any country is only going to be interested in the most salacious stories in countries 12 time zones away. This is just how the market operates. A tiny percentage of china dying from a new kind of flu is not as headline-grabbing as people dying due to govt misbehavior.
Meanwhile our govt isn't blind, they have people and plans in place for everything and they think they are ready and in control. Then, it turns out it's a clusterfuck anyway that takes way longer than expected to implement. They need to have dealt with the exact same disaster in recent years to get it right. It's a problem with implementing a large-scale system you can't test until it's needed.
But in fact I doubt there really is a plan in place at all. It seems most countries ignored this, hoping they'll be spared of this, then stumbled along with adhoc measures, and only now slowly start to listen to experts.
Saying there is nothing we could have done better from just looking at what unfolds in China is very questionable.
> The news in any country is only going to be interested in the most salacious stories in countries 12 time zones away. This is just how the market operates.
... for about a month, and still bringing it up to this date.
Compare [1] to [2]. Notice anything? Western, especially US media is becoming more and more of an echo chamber trying to strengthen that simplistic world view that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. But it's not overly surprising really, considering the financial struggles of traditional media over the last decade. As you said, the focus shifts more and more towards stories and headlines that sell, even for once renowned outlets like the NYTimes.
Do you recall the international coverage of Hurricane Katrina? It was dominated by the stories about rape gangs and anarchy which all ultimately turned out to be false rumors. Media everywhere sucks like that to some degree. As an american, I probably notice the bias towards stories that make the US look bad a lot more than you might.
Though I get what you're saying. US media may be one of the worst in the developed world. I don't even look at it anymore. Lucky I learned about coronavirus from here and adjusted my plans for it. And the NYT in particular seems to be really anti-China since they got blocked in China a long time ago.
I believe the argument to be made here is that most parts in China, excluding Hubei, has a lot less cases than Korea or Italy, when Korea's population is about 3-4% that of China. In most provinces in China there were 0 deaths.
Ideally, European countires like Italty are far further away and should have fewer cases than those regions closer to the epicenter, but reality suggest otherwise.
When talking about China's coronavirus response, the numbers really have to be split up into Hubei and non-Hubei.
I don't know if you were being colloquial, but this isn't true. China has 80k, Italy 12k cases and the latter is seeing rapid increases.
The US should be looking at China as a case study on how not to handle the early stages of a pandemic. Instead it seems like we're making the same mistakes (though thankfully at least some areas are being proactive about e.g. shutting down schools).
The earliest case was found at the start of December but it wasn't correctly identified till the end (they went back and tested existing patients).
It wasn't confirmed as being able to spread person to person until the 17th although there was some evidence that it should have been identified on the 11th. (So a delay of either 5 or 10 days rather than 2 months)
The doctor didn't raise public concern. He told a few friends and told them not to tell people. The official announcement was made the following day.
If you look at the timetable it is significantly better than the SARs response or the N1H1 response so we seem to be learning and making progress which is good.
----- BEGIN WIKIPEDIA QUOTE -----
(30 December)
On 30 December 2019, genetic sequencing report of the pathogen of a patient indicated inaccurately the discovery of Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS coronavirus) in the test result.[15] After receiving the test result, multiple doctors in Wuhan shared the information via internet, including Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, who posted a warning to alumni from his medical school class via a WeChat online forum that a cluster of seven patients treating within the ophthalmology department had been unsuccessfully treated for symptoms of viral pneumonia and diagnosed with SARS.[20][21][15] Because these patients did not respond to traditional treatments, they were quarantined in an ER department of the Wuhan Central Hospital.[22] In the WeChat forum, Li posted that this cluster of patients appeared to be infected by SARS. Dr. Li posted a snippet of an RNA analysis finding "SARS coronavirus" and extensive bacteria colonies in a patient's airways according to a chat transcript that he and other chat members later shared online. [...] Dr. Li is widely known for the statement he gave before his death exemplifying how the Chinese government botched the containment of the Wuhan coronavirus, stating "There should be more than one voice in a healthy society."[20]
The Chinese National Health Commission announced later that evening that 8 doctors engaging in this WeChat forum had been arrested by Wuhan Police and charged with "llegal acts of fabricating, spreading rumors and disrupting social order."[25]
Wuhan medical authorities forbade doctors from making public announcements and ordered them to report cases internally.[26]
[...]
(31 December)
Qu Shiqian, a vendor at the Huanan Seafood Market, said government officials had disinfected the premises on 31 December 2019 and told stallholders to wear masks. Qu said he had only learnt of the pneumonia outbreak from media reports. "Previously I thought they had flu," he said. "It should be not serious. We are fish traders. How can we get infected?"[29]
"Chinese state television reported that a team of experts from the National Health Commission had arrived in Wuhan on 31 December 2019 to lead the investigation, while the People's Daily said the exact cause remained unclear and it would be premature to speculate."[28][29][38] Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported that a team of senior health experts had been dispatched to the city of Wuhan and were reported to be "conducting relevant inspection and verification work."[30]
Tao Lina, a public health expert and former official with Shanghai's Centre for disease control and prevention, said, "I think we are [now] quite capable of killing it in the beginning phase, given China's disease control system, emergency handling capacity and clinical medicine support."[29]
[...]
(1 January)
According to the Chinese state-sponsored Xinhua News, the Huanan Seafood Market was closed on 1 January 2020 for "regulation."[22] However, in the Consortium's report of 24 January 2020, it was stated that the Huanan Seafood Market had been closed on 1 January 2020 for "cleaning and disinfection."[36]
[...]
(2 January)
On 2 January, 41 admitted hospital patients in Wuhan, China, were confirmed to have contracted (laboratory-confirmed) the 2019-nCoV (Wuhan coronavirus); 27 (66%) patients had direct exposure to Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.[8] All 41 patients were subsequently relocated from the hospital they had originally been diagnosed in to the Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, China.[8]
[...]
(3 January)
On 3 January 2020, Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan ophthalmologist who had been arrested for spreading false "rumors" on WeChat, was summoned to the Wuhan Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign an official confession and admonition letter promising to cease spreading false "rumors" regarding the coronavirus. In the letter, he was accused of "making false comments" that had "severely disturbed the social order". The letter stated, "We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice—is that understood?" Dr. Li signed the confession writing: "Yes, I understand."[21]
[...]
(4 January)
The head of the University of Hong Kong's Centre for Infection, Ho Pak-leung, warned that the city should implement the strictest possible monitoring system for a mystery new viral pneumonia that infected dozens of people on the mainland, as it was highly possible that the illness was spreading from human to human. The microbiologist also warned that there could be a surge in cases during the upcoming Chinese New Year. Ho said he hoped the mainland would release more details as soon as possible about the patients infected with the disease, such as their medical history, to help experts analyse the illness and to allow for more effective preventive measures to be put in place.[43]
[...]
(7 January)
Since the outburst of social media discussion of the mysterious pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China, Chinese authorities censored the hashtag #WuhanSARS and were now investigating anyone who was allegedly spreading misleading information about the outbreak on social media.[51]
[...]
(18 January)
On the same day, the Wuhan City government held an annual banquet in the Baibuting community celebrating the Chinese New Year with forty thousand families in attendance despite the officials' knowledge of the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. They shared meals, plates and ate together.[83] On 21 January 2020 when Wuhan mayor Zhou Xianwang was asked on state television why this banquet was held even after the number of cases had risen to 312 he responded, "The reason why the Baibuting community continued to host the banquet this year was based on the previous judgment that the spread of the epidemic was limited between humans, so there was not enough warning."[26]
[...]
(21 January)
After 300 confirmed diagnoses and 6 deaths, Chinese state media warned lower-level officials not to cover up the spread of a new coronavirus.[40] Officials declared that anyone who concealed new cases would "be nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity", the political body responsible for law and order said. Local Chinese officials initially withheld information about the epidemic from the public. It later vastly under-reported the number of people that had been infected, downplayed the risks and failed to provide timely information that experts say could have saved lives. In its commentary published online on Tuesday January 20, 2020, the Communist Party's Central Political and Legal Commission talked of China having learned a "painful lesson" from the SARS epidemic and called for the public to be kept informed. Deception, it warned, could "turn a controllable natural disaster into a man-made disaster".[40]
[...]
(28 January)
China's Supreme People's Court ruled that whistleblower, Li Wenliang, had not committed the crime of spreading "rumors" when on 30 December 2019 he posted to a WeChat forum for medical school alumni that seven patients under his care appeared to have contracted SARS. In their ruling, the Supreme People's Court stated, "If society had at the time believed those 'rumours', and wore masks, used disinfectant and avoided going to the wildlife market as if there were a SARS outbreak, perhaps it would've meant we could better control the coronavirus today," the court said. "Rumours end when there is openness."[221][222]
----- END WIKIPEDIA QUOTE -----
So:
> The earliest case was found at the start of December but it wasn't correctly identified till the end (they went back and tested existing patients).
By that timeline, it wasn't even correctly identified by the end of December (though the "rumor" Dr. Li et. al. disseminated about it looking like SARS ended up being pretty close).
> It wasn't confirmed as being able to spread person to person until the 17th although there was some evidence that it should have been identified on the 11th. (So a delay of either 5 or 10 days rather than 2 months)
There's evidence that it should've been recognized as at least potentially spreading person to person by the 3rd, at the very latest (given that not all cases were connected to the Huanan Seafood Market).
> The doctor didn't raise public concern. He told a few friends and told them not to tell people.
He told an online forum of his fellow alumni, and he (among others) posted transcripts online, drawing the ire of authorities.
> The official announcement was made the following day.
Yes, after those "rumors" about SARS forced their hand.
> If you look at the timetable it is significantly better than the SARs response or the N1H1 response so we seem to be learning and making progress which is good.
True, and that's commendable, but even China admits it done goofed. It's great that (as far as we can tell) they've course-corrected and are getting a handle on things, but let's not gloss over how their kneejerk tendency toward censorship and their casual "well we don't know for sure if it spreads human to human so let's pretend we're all safe" attitude around the outbreak directly contributed to what's now officially a global pandemic.
I don't know why Wikipedia is missing a lot of the public information that happened before the 31st. The local government was notified on the 28th. The National government was notified on the 30th. Other hospitals in the region were notified around this time as well.
His "leak" came while a lot of people were being notified about this problem. It "looks" like they would have notified the public and WHO a few days later once they had more information.
We still don't know if the original source is the seafood market. The fact that not all the cases came from there doesn't mean much. The SARS expert (Guan Yi) from Hong Kong said that there was no proof of human to human transmission on the 3rd.
You've counted time before anyone knew it existed in your 2-month delay. The first death was on the 10th. Less than 50 people have the virus. The probably should have done something then or on the 15th (second death).
There was a delay but more like 2 weeks compared to 2 months. If you are saying that they should have done something before they knew it existed then ... what should they have done?
As it is people are constantly bashing them for doing something.
What do you think they should have done and when?
Not kneejerk-censor anyone "spreading rumors" about it, for one.
So far.
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.
Not in Italy. Our government changed emergency plans at least three times since Sunday and as far as I can tell is not aggressive enough in finding contacts and isolating them. The current trend is just to lock most of the people up and hoping the curve flattens.
There is a lot that could've done better than the current approach.
There were a few errors done in my view:
1. First, no preparation at all was done at any level. Other countries are now prepping their ICUs to prepare for the incoming tsunami.
2. Horrible communication and execution. The PM can't be both the head of the government and the one enacting the emergency measures (as in putting them into practice short of giving orders), at least not in bureaucracy-land like my country, and this PM in particular is weak and not particularly capable (and made key communication errors like blaming the hospital where the first case was recorded).
3. Laws given without clarity of "appropriate" or "not appropriate" behavior, which required constant clarification from the government
4. The leak of the "executive order" (inappropriate wording, hard to translate it to the actual Italian way of doing it) draft before it was completed, which caused mass panic and exodus (and instead of blaming the "idiots", people should investigate why that happened).
5. Total lack of clarity of how long the lockdown measures will last (if they don't change yet again).
It's not like changing measures every day will change the curve immediately (first lockdown on Sunday, then another on Monday, then more restrictive measures within a few days).
Lastly, all of this flurry of activity from the PM, aside pressure from other involved parties (like local governments), is, according to rumors, done because the current PM is likely to be asked to step down sooner or later (the country was at a political paralysis before the outbreak, and his handling of the crisis made matters worse).
How is Italy testing so?
Coming 10-14 days will display how the most of the rest of the Europe will actually handle the critical situation.
Only country that appears to be doing something right is Germany. They should tell others what is their trick to keep most of the people alive. Of course they have highest number of intensive care places in EU https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00134-012-2627-8#... so perhaps just brute force is how they do it but I have heard (but was not able to confirm) that they are also isolating their elderly such that they will just receive food and other goods behind their doors. I do not know how right this is but this would make sense.
Given the mortality rates by age bracket, this makes a huge amount of sense. Subject to their mental and emotional needs being given every consideration, of course.
Assuming (1) a large amount of the public will eventually be infected, (2) infections are (generally speaking) only fatal in older people... why not best protect the most vulnerable among us?
At this point, nursing homes and assisted living facilities should be staff-only, guaranteed paid sick leave, with teleconferencing equipment set up for families.
Wait until new case rate peaks, then start looking at relaxing the restrictions.
At least, that's the hope as I understand it. That's what I'm trying to help do by staying home and seeing only close friends and only in 1:1 settings.
You want to give the old folks, among who I am myself in this respect, something to live for. Attention is the catnip.
Want to kill the olds in droves? Isolate them.
I'm bloody serious about this and believe it's tort that needs a Court hearing for the human sake alone. You don't know anything until you friend all died. Mine did except for who then exited into a new world of economic paranoia and now hides in a regular job after increasingly failing to deal with isolation in the context of a young loving family around him at home at least. I'm so intensely proud of my buddy but he's a truly impractical link back to life for me
People are calling 116117 but getting hang up on, and the weaker central government (due to obvious historical reasons) means that the response differs state to state. Much like in the US.
Regarding school closings and such things, at last Bavaria is prepared for that (my sons school is over 1,000 students and might be clsed in the next one or two weeks regardless of cases due to that number of people there, but that is just a snapshot, so).
I could not find demographic breakdown of infected in Germany. This could suggest if these assumptions could be true.
Events over 1,000 people are cancelled, how that applies to larger schools is currently being discussed (source: my sons school is over 1,000 students).
Communication is a little bit of an issue so, we found out about the high risk zone declaration by chance, more or less. On the other hand, case numbers are really low, so I think it's kind of trade-of thing. In denmark the increase in cases triggered the response.
In France on the hand, everybody with any symptoms resembling Corona are sent on sick leave for at least a week, over the phone. People not needed in the office work from home.
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 are approximately 20 full-service ventilators per 100k population in the united states. Let's say 1% of cases require hospitalization and ventilation. That means we can sustain a sick population of 200 per 100k, or 0.2% at any given time.
You underestimate just how unprepared we are for this situation. It is not possible to "bend the curve" enough to keep everyone safe (infected below 2% of the population). Full stop, that little chart from bendthecurve.com with the nice flat blue curve that goes under "medical system capacity" will not happen. That's fantasy.
By all means we should do everything we can, the more we can slow the disease the fewer people will die, but the happy fantasy scenarios about everybody washes their hands and doesn't go to the sportsball game and we bend the curve enough that our medical system's capacity will be sufficient is just a fantasy.
Further, the lower we reduce the reproduction rate, the longer this crisis will last. This is a crass observation, but if you let it burn through the population it'll be done in a few months. If you really "bend that curve" and substantially decrease reproduction rate, then it'll take correspondingly longer to exhaust its susceptible population. That means sustaining quarantine measures for a longer period of time.
Researchers point to Coronavirus peaking around June or July. That means it will remain a serious problem through at least August or September ("peak" doesn't mean it's done, it just means it's slowing down). Interventions will extend that further. We need to consider the possibility that quarantine will be required for an extended period. How will this work if we need to turn our economy off for 6 months? Nine months? A year?
Grandparent is probably correct that if China loosens its quarantine measures that it's going to bounce back. And in fact that is a problem that everyone has to consider.
https://www.ketv.com/article/unmc-models-suggest-covid-19-ca...
https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-03/coronavirus-government-w...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022566v...
You lost me here.
I hope we never do them in the USA, but the extreme measures taken by China absolutely halted the spread of the disease.
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
If anything that makes the number more believable.
I can see why people are extremely resistant to believing anything the Chinese government says, but there seem to be indicators that don't rely on their statements.
Because I certainly don't know it, and there isn't anybody around here talking about this for some reason (and ok, even if there were, it would be hard to know if they are reliable - and yes, the entire world knows the reason, China prohibited talking about it).
I don't get how people can simultaneously think "China instituted unthinkable totalitarian measures to isolate and quarantine people" and "all the numbers out of China are false, it has to be undergoing exponential growth like other countries."
You can choose one or the other, but not both: they're not self-consistent.
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.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/100-a-day-for-...
Apparently -- and this is unconfirmed scuttlebutt -- somebody already landed in hot water for neglecting to tell the authorities about their visits to a red light district. (Which, this being Singapore, are both legal and closely regulated.)
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2004...
Or you can see that in the past week alone we got 27 cases, starting from 2 planes. And the number is low because we vigorously chased people down to test them all and quarantine them. Had we let them go loose those 2 cases alone could spread to hundreds.
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.
Not saying I have a strong opinion on this; I really have no clue. But at least from what I understand even just slowdown might be worth quite a high cost.
Your personal relationship to this is entirely understandable, but not a sufficient reason to not focus on root causes where they first occurred.
Then it happens again...
Wrong. You are just repeating misinformation. He labeled some of the criticism a hoax, not the outbreak.
You are right though, he did not directly call it a hoax.
Only later when he was called out on how stupid the comment was he back-pedalled and said their criticism was a hoax. That doesn’t make sense.
They weren’t really criticising him? Or they were trying to make him think they were criticising him?
The sentence doesn’t make any sense, so it’s clearly not what he meant.
No he didn't. He characterized the criticism as a hoax. That is an entirely different thing. By perpetuating the lie that he considered the outbreak as a hoax you are adding to the problem. If you disagree, please link to some sort of news account that backs up your statement.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-coronavirus-rally-re...
It isn't really hard to understand what he meant either. The President's critics say all sorts of things that aren't true. He is constantly calling them out on it. He has used the term 'hoax' for a long time to refer to the misleading stories his critics tell.
Doesn't mean that there aren't valid criticisms. Just means that much of the back and forth is just hot air. There is no reason to add to the madness though by spreading more misleading information.
“Now, the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus," and, "One of my people came up to me and said, 'Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.' That didn't work out too well. They couldn't do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. And this is their new hoax.”
It's hard to parse that, but a reasonable interpretation is to say "this" refers to coronavirus. Notably he didn't say "criticism" at all, and referring to "politicizing" as a hoax doesn't make grammatical or logical sense (which of course doesn't mean it isn't what he meant. He said "the impeachment hoax", and he was impeached so clearly his interpretation of "hoax" is different to the normal interpretation).
Either way, I wouldn't say it's misinformation.
My initial reading was that he meant the severity of the virus is a hoax (which goes along with his "the flu kills more people" narrative).
Your reading sort of makes sense if "hoax" was a synonym for "attack". It's not, but Trump seems to use it as one, so yes I could see that could be what he meant.
It's interesting, because we end up in situations like this where you can try to read into it what he meant but that really requires guessing!
Trump surrogates said after the rally that he wasn’t calling coronavirus a hoax. “He was referring to the way he had been treated by the opposite party … in terms of taking every opportunity to bring him down,” said Surgeon General Jerome Adams on SiriusXM’s The Black Eagle with Joe Madison. And you can argue that Trump is limiting his claim to Democrats arguing he’s not prepared for the coronavirus. But the speech simply compares coronavirus to the “impeachment hoax” (which Trump describes as a “perfect conversation” that Democrats twisted into something negative), so it’s also easy to argue that Trump is saying the coronavirus itself is similarly overblown.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/3/21163388/facebook-fact-che...
There is also the fact that his actions don't make any sense at all if it were true that the President thinks the outbreak is a hoax.
Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.... Hopefully, we’re not going to have to spend so much because we really think we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum. And again, we’ve had tremendous success — tremendous success — beyond what people would have thought.
and
So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...
I really think he is using "hoax" as a synonym for "bad" and is referring to coronavirus, criticisms of his response and the Democrats all at the same time.
Yes we should strive for clear communication but that doesn't happen by declaring particular words as off limits.
And what exactly am I defending other than accurate reporting?
The problem is that the public at large will internalise the first interpretation they are presented with, whether this be their own understanding or their favourite news outlet's. Past presidents were smart enough to realise this and therefore appointed professionals (whom they listened to!) to help them craft their messaging to be as precise as possible. Trump, for some reason, has failed to learn this lesson in his first three years on the job. It is because he continues to use inprecise language that his messaging gets corrupted like this.
The most generous interpretation of his words is that he meant it's a political attack from his political opponents.
The fact that his first instinct is his own political fortunes and has to preemptly whine like a baby about it is evidence of shit leadership.
The President and all leadership should be focused on the right response that minimizes loss of life, political fortunes be damned. I mean, seriously. If a sheriff's first instincts in every crisis were his reelection chances, he'd be out on his ass. But sadly, yes, here we are, arguing stupid shit, in the middle of a completely unnecessary distraction because he felt threatened and needed to lash out. So he pitted us against each other at the least opportune time. It is the one of the worst possible things to do in a crisis. Find a way to divide us!
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.
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)
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.
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.
It stems from a decision Mao made more than 50 years ago. First, people expect the state to be responsible for heating, which is weird to us but follows the soviet model. So the state decided to provide central heating to people in the north but not in the south.
Now you could provide your own heat, but the majority of Chinese live in apartment blocks that are poorly insulated between units. So to heat your home you have to heat all of your neighbors also, which isn’t going to happen. It works fine in northern China because they just pump hit water through the whole building. So people are left with local heating options, eg the kokatsu.
So my wife and her family own a couple of apartments in hunan that we’ve thought about renovating for heat. No one local really knows how to do it because it isn’t done. Coupled with the fact that walls in China are concrete slabs, not wooden posts with room for insulation in the middle, so you have to add something on top of the walls and maybe do heating from the floors. Anyways, it is expensive.
And it’s not just your home, but where you work. The last time I went to the HSR station in my wife’s hometown, the girls selling snacks at the station were really bundled up and if you weren’t wearing gloves your hands with hurt...inside the brand new train station.
Indoor heating is a requirement in much of the states, even in LA (you can skimp on AC, but you can’t rent or sell a unit without heat), and building codes have improved a lot over the years so it’s unlikely you’ll freeze your butt off in something built within the last 30 years.
Central heating is lacking in southern China in all but single family homes and high end apartment buildings for sure, but the air conditioner is considered one of the essential household appliances, alongside the refrigerator, television (this one might be on the decline?), etc.
> Now you could provide your own heat, but the majority of Chinese live in apartment blocks that are poorly insulated between units. So to heat your home you have to heat all of your neighbors also, which isn’t going to happen.
Apartments I lived in and visited all have AC (usually more than one unit for moderately sized ones) and I’m pretty sure I never benefited from neighbors’ AC at all, nor did mine benefit them. Insulation may be bad but not that bad. If you were planning in-floor hearting then yeah, you’re probably gonna provide for the household living downstairs too.
> Workplace & HSR station
Ones I’ve been to (Beijing, Shanghai, numerous ones between Shanghai and Nanjing including ones at small towns, etc.) all have indoor AC. Haven’t been to Changsha but kind of hard to imagine it lagging behind too much. Every single office building I’ve been in, too, but I suppose I’ve hardly ever been in a really crappy one.
> Indoor heating is a requirement in much of the states, even in LA (you can skimp on AC, but you can’t rent or sell a unit without heat), and building codes have improved a lot over the years so it’s unlikely you’ll freeze your butt off in something built within the last 30 years.
Not talking about freezing my butt off apparently, just uncomfortably cool to the point of having to wrap myself up even at home. Many houses aren’t built within the last 30 years so there’s that.
A concrete slab built without insulation is going to be difficult to insulate after the fact, you just can’t foam it up because there is nowhere for the foam to go. You have to maybe build a false wall and lose some floor space, or use paneling. Anyways, it is complicated.
Zhejiang and jiangsu are China’s richest provinces, and often lack the problems of the rest of south China. Jiangsu is actually north of the Yangtze so they they get heat in the cities anyways, like much poorer Anhui next door. Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, and I guess fujian is where the no heat in the south starts to hurt. Guangxi and guangdong also, though winter weather isn’t as bad, but touring Guilin I the winter was also a bit uncomfortable, only the five star hotels provided real heating.
Yes, I was using the phrase air conditioner (don’t think I’ve seen a unit in China without heat function) for lack of a better one, but the meaning was hopefully clear given the context.
The AC units mostly cost between 1-3k yuan (just looked up the current prices) so they’re affordable to pretty much all (urban) households, even in the poorer regions...
AFAICR commonly seen AC units can usually heat up to something like 25-28 degrees Celsius (except ones that have been sucking up a lot of dust and haven’t got a proper cleaning in a while, in which case they’d be less effective) so they’re okay.
Another thing: Yangtze actually runs through Jiangsu, with the wealth concentrated mostly in the south. I’m not sure where they start to have central heating — the cities bordering Shandong probably do, but Nanjing (sitting on top of Yangtze) and southern cities don’t have it, that I’m sure about.
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.
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.
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:
# 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.
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...
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
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...
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.
> "the virus cannot be spread through Communion"
I assume Greece is Catholic, right? Because pope himself told people to take the "spiritual communion" instead of the actual one, and yet the Church in Poland doesn't seem to care.
EDIT: sorry. Somehow I thought Orthodox is mainly in Russia. But my rant against Polish Catholic Church still stands. Pope himself shows people what to do, but in Poland, we're going to do the opposite.
It's kind of like the systemd rageforks, only for sillier (unless you're religious, I guess) reasons:
Catholics in Greece are overwhelmingly Orthodox. The Orthodox Catholic church distributes holy communion differently, with a spoon (there is a particular term for it, but I don't know it) that doesn't touch the communicant's mouth. So, they're not drinking from a communal cup.
It's entirely possible for the communicant to exhale / cough / sneeze on the spoon. I don't know what the priest would do if this were to happen.
As an aside, it's widespread right now (but maybe not universal) in Catholic dioceses to not even provide the cup to the congregation during Communion (which is perfectly fine according to Catholic theology btw). edit: additionally, I recently heard about a dispensation in at least one diocese for people who are in any of the COVID-19 risk categories that they don't need to receive Communion for now. I don't know whether this also dispenses them from attending Mass on Sundays (which is otherwise an obligation for all Catholics).
The spoon very much touches the communicant's mouth, and the priest dips it back in the cup afterwards. You're getting spoon-fed wine, essentially, with a whole lot of contact.
Do Orthodox folks not use the term "Catholic" for themselves? I just don't know very many.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_(term)
Greek Orthodox are "Catholic" but they are not "Roman Catholic".
> don't need to receive Communion for now
Regardless of the virus you only need to receive Communion once per year, not at every Mass[2].
[1] https://www.dsj.org/decree-of-special-dispensation-coronavir...
[2] https://forums.catholic.com/t/receive-holy-communion-at-leas...
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 :)
Save your heartache. SXSW lost its "soul" many years ago.
Too many pints in Dublin and then wine in her ancestral village in Portugal and then we're talking.
Even if you're not in the groups with high mortality rates, you can still be a carrier.
I cannot know your intentions, so if they truly are with other people in mind, I apologize.
Do also keep in mind, though, that by purchasing them now you are inevitably biasing yourself towards going.
If you do this in the midst of a pandemic, it's an unethical and selfish act.
I'm certain that just purchasing some discounted airline tickets for sometime later in the year will not in itself cause any negative global health effects. The decision to actually travel can be made entirely separately from that gamble.
If we're still in the height of epidemics during your travel, you will be basically locked in someplace and very hard to see anything.
To sum it up, tremendously stupid idea with utterly selfish tones.
To travel after the trouble with the virus has subsided on tickets purchased during a period of discounted rates?
Or do you mean not traveling because the virus hasn't subsided and tossing the hundreds of dollars down the drain in a gamble?
If neither of these were your conclusions, then respectfully—I think you misunderstood my comments.
Buying flight tickets might be cheap right now but the point is if when your trip starts X weeks from now and the situation is still bad and you don't cancel it, then you are indeed selfish and deserving of the negative comments and down votes.
Further, since nobody knows when this will end (it could continue into 2021 for all we know) and you didn't say you'd cancel your plans if it did (instead you expressed concerns you'd lose money if travel was banned), I feel like you're drastically misunderstanding the 2nd order dangers your actions would have and likely deserve the ire and down votes you're getting.
That is the risk I referred to, as I clarified—not being able to take the trip because the situation didn't improve. I've explained this many times over by now.
I think it's pretty normal. Surreal would be adapting more easily and unconsciously to the new constraints.
Thankfully, continuing to dream doesn't cost us anything, and it doesn't hurt anyone.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/pneumonia.htm
[2] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
"it's plausible that more than half of the population could get it, and leaders of many western countries have acknowledged that."
Will there ever be apologies for spreading mass hysteria?
E.g. in a recent turnabout Vice President Mike Pence said today that there has been “irresponsible rhetoric” from people who have downplayed the seriousness of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak.
Edit: also pneumonia is caused by a large number of causes. If covid-19 killed as much as all respiratory diseases it would already be scary.
The numbers don't need any mitigating factors but those do exist as well. I don't see South Korea doing anything more extreme than what could be done in the US so that doesn't show the US would be worse. The population density of South Korea is 15x that of the US so that would probably mean the infection rate would be lower in the US. The median age is also higher in South Korea and since this disease affects older people more that would also make the outlook for America better.
"Scientists working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Institute for Disease Modeling have used these approaches to estimate the infection fatality rate. Currently, these estimates range from 0.5% to 0.94% indicating that COVID-19 is about 10 to 20 times as deadly as seasonal influenza. Evidence coming in from genomics and large-scale testing of fevers is consistent with these conclusions. The only potentially good news is that the epidemic in Korea may ultimately show a lower CFR than the epidemic in China.
...
"On balance, it is reasonable to guess that COVID-19 will infect as many Americans over the next year as influenza does in a typical winter -- somewhere between 25 million and 115 million. Maybe a bit more if the virus turns out to be more contagious than we thought. Maybe a bit less if we put restrictions in place that minimize our travel and our social and professional contacts.
"The bad news is, of course, that these infection numbers translate to 350,000 to 660,000 people dying in the U.S., with an uncertainty range that goes from 50,000 deaths to 5 million deaths. The good news is that this is not a weather forecast. The size of the epidemic, i.e., the total number of infections, is something we can reduce if we decrease our contact patterns and improve our hygiene. If the total number of infections decreases, the total number of deaths will also decrease."
[1] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-this-epidemiologist-is...
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.
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)
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.
It's a massive multinational company, so I'm sure they're thinking about it. Technically no barriers to working from home (I do it every Friday), tempted to just start doing it every day, but would rather they made a formal decision on it first.
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.
But as in all countries by now, older folks should stay home and self quarantine whenever possible.
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
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 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.
Meanwhile, the industry still doesn't know how to deal with dates and times correctly: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
This is also why y2k problems happening on Jan 1st was a bit misleading for many use cases. Things like insurance renewals and investment projections look ahead to future dates and so problems will start showing up earlier and get fixed well before.
In short, it was massively overblown and misunderstood - people expected their own computers to blow up and even made shelters - and some scammers even took advantage of those fears. It made perfect sense for someone who didn't knew what was going on and was fed on doom and destruction to see things continuing without any hitch and wonder what was the fuss all about.
Absolutely, the hype was way above the risk. But if the hype wasn't there I'm not sure it would have been prevented, so it served a useful purpose.
As a society we need the right amount of panic at the right time, but for this pandemic it feels like too much and too late.
18 years away now and an absolute ton of affected systems are still out there and mission critical.
These type pf issues, from Corona to 2038 to climate change, always remind me of that Homer Simpson quote.
"Pfft, that's a problem for future Homer. Man I don't envy that guy."
Already halfway, and we haven't done shit.
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.
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.
Coronavirus’ combination of “widespread prevalence and awareness” and “killing people” is quite different from previous diseases, I think. It might effect more social change.
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.
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)
Depends on how fast it kills too. Something like airborne aids that somehow didn't have respiratory symptoms would be the most terrifying scenario because it would spread world wide before anyone noticed.
Well, don't be afraid to share it with the world, if such evidence does exist.
I highly doubt it though.
was on mobile yesterday, sorry for not providing sources
So no, not optimistic on this.
Both those 4... 3 of them are against human nature, the other one is expensive, just forget about it.
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)
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?
It's also possible that we'll identify antiviral treatments, etc that will reduce the impact on our health system / death rate (in which case getting it later would be better).
Somehow that term to me is more dystopian than “pandemic”.
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.
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...
There are different strains of the virus and it's not clear if getting one of them gives you immunity to other strains.
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.
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.
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.
Number two makes more sense as not having access to care and equipment later on can be a problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”).
But that’s a judgement against the United States’ federal government, not the WHO. The WHO does not actively constrain governments, they just offer guidance (as far as I know!).
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.
True, but maybe we disagree on how easy it is for every locality to acquire expertise. Plenty of local governments in the United States are already stretched thin fulfilling the simpler functions of policing, schooling, and basic infrastructure. Adding a staff epidemiologist seems very hard for such places. The same proviso applies to many poorer states and nations. That is why I think it makes most sense to direct effort toward having a competent central authority.
> 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.
On the flip side, decentralizing makes coordination harder. In coarse terms, there are game-theoretic considerations in an epidemic. For example, if localities are purely self-interested, an unaffected region may attempt to quarantine and keep all of its medical infrastructure ready for itself rather than lend it to nearby affected regions. In such cases a coordinating mechanism can be extremely helpful.
I'm not arguing that one kind of organization is always better or worse. To me it just seems complicated.
Perhaps technology could help in this regard, at least to some degree. Bitcoin has proven coordination in a low trust environment is possible. Imagine if we could make coordination easier in other industries too.
> I'm not arguing that one kind of organization is always better or worse. To me it just seems complicated.
I agree, it is indeed complicated. But we need to start seriously considering concepts such as scale, systems thinking with its centralization/decentralization paradigms, and incomplete knowledge/risks if we want to design better institutions. Then we can thinker with turning the knobs one way or the other.
Reality is already ahead of you. [1] Switzerland is currently having trouble receiving masks and other medical supplies that were commissioned out of state:
Being landlocked, goods bound for Switzerland necessarily have to pass through a different country first, in this case Germany. Germany has a decree by which Corona-related medical supplies must not leave the country - and right now, this even applies to goods destined to Switzerland that are just arriving at a german port.
A fully "decentralised" world full of self-interested microstates would see a lot more of this stuff.
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.
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.
Even if you 100% trust everyone you follow, and also believe them to be entirely impartial, the nature of Twitter makes it so easy to spread misinformation (mixed in with real stuff.) Twitter is optimized for viral content, not true content.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
Personal opinion, not a lawyer, not your lawyer, is that the further into the global pandemic we were when executing an agreement, the less wiggle room you might have. Again, talk to your lawyer; that's what they get paid for.
Matt Levine does some analysis here: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-19/the-fi...
The first area where I'm seeing widespread uses of force majeure clauses is the cancellation of large events, conferences etc with limited or compensation for the cancellations. And again, while this hurts some people a lot, this is mostly a good thing, because we do want to give the organizers the ability to break their commitments and cancel the conference with much smaller consequences (to them) than an ordinary cancellation would have; we don't want the organizers to be pressured to hold the event at all costs.
How can we help?
i.e. I'm hearing about things like the ways for hospitals to report numbers to the CDC having just been set up.
This seems likely something any local technical person could help tackle.
Is there a place to go to find out how to help in any way possible?
don't know anything about it though or whether it's that effective
For really big tech companies (FAANG), improve data analytics for automated reporting of health data to government agencies (CDC, FDA, etc). Google Flu Trends [1] is a great example of this. Basically google combines common symptom queries with geolocation data to track diseases in near-real time across a region. I first read about this in Datacalysm (Christian Rudder) and it's a fascinating thing.
For individuals: maybe make some cool graphs or ways of analyzing the publicly available COVID-19 data? There's a lot of misinformation going around and helping to curb that with real data will help the whole fear thing. For example [2]: people are saying to donate blood to get tested for COVID-19 "for free" but the test itself is a swab, not a blood pull.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Flu_Trends
[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/fguxil/...
- Advice not to ban flight to China after China locked down hubei lockdown (yes, many country trust WHO, like Japan and Korea)
- Met and praised Xi many times, admire how wonderful they did
- Keep down playing how serious the problem can be, and didn't advice any action
And recently, China suddenly donate $20M to WHO
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/coronavirus-outbreak-china-t...
For more details, please watch this video
Yeah a lot of it was rumor and hard to verify but...nothing? You'd almost start to wonder whether our journalists were cooperating with the Chinese government or something in censoring everything. I struggle to come up with a legitimate excuse other than total incompetence. It was all over the internet and a lot of it (first hand accounts from Chinese citizens within China) would have been reasonably easy to verify for a journalist who knew a Chinese speaker.
Given the display across the world right now I don't know if the experts are that much more informed than the collective wisdom of online society at this point, at least for this matter.
No thanks.
They have to stay on the good side of the Chinese, or they will get kicked out.
Today in the US, the US is reporting only lab-confirmed cases. They are also upfront that this is limited by the amount of tests they can perform. Unlike China, the US is __not__ reporting how many people are tested or how many tests are being processed. They are also not upfront about the fact that testing is severely limited by a very strict policy on who to test.
At this point, all flights from the US should be terminated. Your government is a danger to your own country and to the world.
Suppose the WHO did recommend a zero travel ban from/to China, what do you think would happen?
Nothing would have changed. It's still in the hands of the politicians in those countries to enact it. And let's be fair, in each country there's at least one politician in the parliament, congress,... that mocked the current, mild, response to the outbreak. Some said they would, or did in fact, defy quarantine rules to stop spreading the disease.
Countries are also running out of reagents to test for this virus so analysis of the situation is already going to be complex. If China is being dishonest, they'll see it in the data. If country X or Y are dishonest in reporting figures about infection, mortality rates and what not, they will also see it.
To summarize and put it bluntly:
1) I doubt China was the only superpower on the planet that used political force on the WHO to change their messaging.
2) The virus is new and currently raw data in any form is more important than issuing a medical recommendation that will be ignored because of country specific politics.
China is the only superpower who prioritizes "saving face" over world health. Nobody else would be stupid enough to falsify health data in the face of a pandemic to make themselves look better.
Otherwise, yeah, you have a point about having data about a new disease. But if we can't trust China to provide accurate data anyway, what did we gain? Arguably, the entire reason we saw such a delayed international response to the outbreak outside of China was their "only 300 infected! whoops it's actually 5k lol" campaign.
The US has criminally undertested and is actively hiding information (classifying meetings) by order of the current administration.
The clickbait that these two Youtubers spread on their channels creates a very, very biased picture of China, and Chinese society (to the negative). Things are blown out of proportion or presented with misleading or no context. Even when they pretend to make a positive video about China, they can't help but add a few dismissive comments here and there.
All of the aforementioned people I know dislike their content, because they feel it misrepresents China as a whole.
I could go on about how and why I think these two guys are toxic, but the gist of it is that I actually used to watch their channel regularly before they became full-time youtubers, which was a turning point. Over the following 6-12 months their content slowly became more clickbaity and generally negative towards China. But I guess once you depend on youtube financially, you simply make videos that get the most clicks. Their comment section slowly turned from "sometimes filled with Chinese trolls and otherwise cool people" to a cesspool of people living in their echo chamber of "murica is awesome, teh commies are evil", and obviously still a lot of Chinese trolls.
Their content doesn't help to get insight into China. It helps you to strengthen the bubble you live in.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/what-taiwan-can-t...
See it yourself, not China. They hide data from the world, beat people up on street. How come that now becomes a model for the world? Taiwan is a free country, and yet they did a great job there.
Taiwan have done a stellar job. Pre-prepared, acted quickly (starting on 31st of Dec), and have got the results to show they were doing it right. For more information, see: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689
Edit: This also shows up the lie that China’s suppression of information was the critical factor in delaying everyone’s actions: Taiwan had the information and acted, it is just that other countries chose not to act on the information they had. Li Wenliang (one of the whistleblower doctors) on 30 December he “sent a message to fellow doctors in a chat group warning them to wear protective clothing to avoid infection. Four days later he was summoned to the Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign a letter.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: turns out you've been using HN pretty much exclusively for that. That is a bannable offense as the site guidelines make clear. I'm not going to ban you now, but if you don't stop then we will.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/22/china-health-coronaviru...
Yeah, right? why would they, hmmmmm, I am wondering
* [Assessed Contribution - WHO]: https://www.who.int/about/finances-accountability/funding/as...
* [US Impact - WHO]: https://www.who.int/about/planning-finance-and-accountabilit...
It's hard to assess the global consequences of hundreds of thousands of flats getting vacant (increasing real estate supply in an overvalued market), labor shortages (which is high even today) and economic output reduction and the all the societal costs.
The only positive thing I see is an event, that unites the whole world - you will be able to relate to strangers - and this is actually a very good thing.
Even if ever single German were infected (unlikely, with any disease), I still doubt there would be that many deaths.
Quote: "all the insurance companies here, either today, or before today, have agreed to waive all copays on coronavirus testing, and extend coverage for coronavirus treatment in all of their benefit plans"
As far as I can tell, there was a lot of room for caveats in that statement. In particular, it was scoped to companies they met with.
It will create so much value for our shareholders!
How should we be preparing for that? How are other people doing it who have to keep their children home and away from educational resources and teachers?
Edit: I’m getting mixed reactions to this. I’m not at all saying academics are more important than slowing the spread of the virus. But I see many comments calling for a complete shutdown of schools and very few saying that for many parents this is a legitimate source of hardship and anxiety, even if it’s the right thing to do.
I think if we went through that time again and I was in her shoes, I would take advantage of Khan Academy. Especially for Math, it's incredibly well structured and forces you to convince it that you've truly learned the content with built-in quizzes. It doesn't hold you back if you've got a handle on the lessons and makes sure that if you're having issues that you practice until you've really got it down.
I think the most work for you will be setting her up properly, making sure she's comfortable with the system, and being available if she's got questions that it's not quickly answering.
I love Khan Academy, and the cool thing about youtube is there are so many content creators that there will be someone your daughter thinks has a nice voice or is easy to understand or funny.
I think that’s a fair question, and I’d love to be optimistic about her ability to hunker down and build those skills. But, she has some behavioral challenges and just getting her to do homework is a nightly struggle consisting of meltdowns and arguments, so I’m not as hopeful that she’ll be able to do it. She’s a bright kid, but definitely one who -needs- the structure of a classroom to be successful.
Fun thing to think about: there are videos that measurably improve students' performance on a task, but students rate those videos as "confusing" and "not helpful". The videos that students do like? They have zero effect.
https://teachingcommons.stanford.edu/teaching-talk/when-conf...
I don't know how to turn non-self-learners into self-learners though. And admittedly if I was a kid during this, I'd be playing as much video games as possible.
Hopefully most teachers have a clue and will realize this was some pretty serious circumstances and not be as harsh and do more review.
* Boast how easy school is these days.
* Wait to get told you're wrong.
* Propose a competition. Your child can pick any subject that neither of you have studied yet, and then have a race over 24 hours, 1 week, etc. to learn the material and do a multi-choice test you both agree on first.
Your child will obviously pick a subject they're good at, and you'll probably loose. But you still made them choose to study really hard.
There are tons of resources and communities for homeschooling on the internet. Happy to help point you to stuff if needed, but please prioritise health over potential educational slowdown.
Citation needed.
Citation may be needed in general, but here… that's sounds like a reasonable guess.
How important is any particular six months of your education to your ability to do your current job?
Missing 6 months of school isn't ideal, but I think we tend to overestimate the importance of hitting every nail on the head when it comes to education.
Not to mention the fact that if most children in the US miss 6 months of school, they will have that as an excuse when they start sending out resumes in however many years.
Due to a mistake in the records, I skipped an entire year of math (pre-algebra, which I was supposed to take in 8th grade). My algebra teacher decided the first month was going to be review, because she didn't expect most of the students to need a refresher after summer break.
Turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me, at least for that subject - not only did I have no issues catching up, turned out that was close to my natural pace. The topic was no longer boring and became one of my favorites after that.
Since that assertion is important to a larger argument, it's reasonable to ask why we should believe it.
Miss 6 months of school while changing schools. Come in, I don't understand the math underlying what they're learning. I fall behind because I'm playing catchup while still trying to stay on top of new material. I have no discipline or direction from home so I don't put it any extra time or anything, I just get home and ride my bike around. This makes me hate math in general, and next year I'm still not entirely caught up or even sure of what I learned the previous year, so I'm failing harder. I don't know if there were any extra resources available or not, I was like, 13, but I was also a holy terror so I bet even if the resources existed they wouldn't have been provided to me because my poor performance was chalked up to me being a problem child in general - never mind my stellar performance in literature classes.
And so on. Throughout my entire public school career. By college I "get it" and am trying to catch up but it's already so ingrained in my personality that I'm "not a math person" that I instead pursue a useless humanities degree, then fuck around in Asia for a couple years. Then finally, at 26 years old, I genuinely get my shit together, learn what I missed 13 years prior, find out that I actually am capable of all that, and now I'm an engineer.
So, sure, do what you can to not get your kids killed, obviously, but I don't agree that it's fair to shit on this parent for worrying about what missing 6 months of school might do to their kid. I mean it sounds like they at least know more about discipline and enforcing learning on their kids than my parents did, so maybe the kid will be Just Fine, but homeschooling is no joke either, and the kid might still end up having to play catch up.
My apologies - I didn’t at all mean to make it seem like I was downplaying the public health aspect. I fully understand this is likely what’s necessary and that public health comes first. That being said, it is a source of anxiety for me as someone who values academics because, for me, it was a path to a better life.
Think of some ways you can help kids who won't have a steady source of meals if they're missing school.
I would truly love an opportunity to not work for 6 months and have my child not go to school so I could spend that time with them. I'm sure you'll be able to find ways to spend that time enriching their life. Caring is the most important step.
My plan is to let them enjoy the time off, for the most part, and then spend the next n months on reduced entertainment in favor of extra studying.
Seems a small price to pay given how many lives will be saved by closing schools.
Edit: one concern I heard is that health care workers need schools to take care of their children. Why not start by letting anyone that can take their child home, take their child home. This would reduce the risk for the children that stay in school by a lot, which will help health care workers not get sick.
Because currently I'd risk punishment for taking my child out of school "unexcused". Which seems like some seriously backwards bs.
Your daughter should be given long youtube playlists of online lessons, homework assignments, scheduled interactive video lessons, etc.
As a parent, all you really need to do is check your daughter is actually doing what the school is providing. The threat of detention doesn't work so well at home when you can just claim the internet broke and that's why you haven't showed up to an online lesson or submitted an assignment...
With internet and access to online courses find something that helps her self study and improve upon the existing knowledge/skills. Follow the instructions from school.
I wouldn't worry too much. The evidence from prior natural experiments show that unexpected interrupted school years[1] has no persistent effects into adulthood.
"This paper investigates how changing the length of the school year, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged, affects learning and subsequent earnings"
In-person curriculum != online curriculum (social interactions, lab classes, PE...)
Short school year != Interrupted school year
If she is in high school the only answer is probably a bunch of "homework", good books on the subject, and there are also hundreds of video courses online.
So it only took you about 80 years to catch up? ;)
Step 1: Chill.
We home-schooled from preschool through high-school. Today I am trying to figure out how to help (from the opposite coast) my MIT senior deal with getting kicked out of their dorm in a few days. Home-schooling can work just fine. Chill.
1. Remember that of things that can be measured, the thing most highly correlated with academic success is parental involvement. So no matter how wonky your pedagogy, you will be involved. Hopefully that factoid helps you chill.
2. My first piece of advice to all new home-schooling parents is: Don't try to do everything at once. Get one subject working well, when you have established momentum and routine on that, add another. Cook until done.
3. There are many great online resources now. But I suspect your school is going to be providing curriculum information so you may have a usable starter kit.
4. As to the "self-learner" issues, all that does is help you find your happy place on the home schooling spectrum. At one end you have "school at home" -- trying to replicate the school environment in your dining room. There is also "unschooling" -- completely self-directed learning. This may not work for you. This may be a good chance to help your child develop some self-learning instincts.
(unschooling in my definition is: "You can work on what you want, but you MUST work on something." Which is NOT what I call "raised by wolves" -- a home schooling philosophy that I have seen occasionally, but doesn't often yield a good result.)
Most school districts may start doing things like video instruction or give parents a curriculum to work on, I'm not worried about that aspect. It may become an entirely remote education for the rest of this school year across the world.
I'm considering taking leave of absence and teaching him the curriculum. The problem is I'm not a good teacher, I know this about myself.
It's impossible to WFH and take care of a child. So your productivity will suffer, hopefully your company understands this, but then again everyone will be in the same boat once the school districts start closing things down.
however, it's important not to spread irrational fear, which words like "terrified" tend to do, particularly when overblown. the state of being "terrified" leads to immobilization, panic, and irrationality, so it should literally be avoided like the plague.
on the other hand, being concerned and worried, and acknowledging (unhelpful) anxiety, is reasonable. asking for help and information, like you did, is reasonable. discerning and acknowledging the appropriate level of risk (probably worse than a regular flu but not nearly as bad as the 1918 flu) is reasonable.
with that said, children are constantly learning whether you teach them or not. it's ok if learning is not entirely linear. the world is not linear, and our brains are not either. what's needed will get in there eventually, and we're resilient enough to compensate for nearly any kind of deficiency anyways.
(the same case can be made for overly worrying about "getting into good school districts", something worth considering a little bit, but not a lot, and a commonly-cited driver of localized real estate bubbles)
Very good point. Thank you for calling it out. I am not at all intending to spread irrational fear and realize I should have chosen my word there a bit more carefully. I am definitely anxious about it, but that anxiety is driving a desire to figure out a plan and not causing paralysis on my part, which I agree is what the word "terrified" implies.
There is some worry if your kid is hospitalized for a month while the rest of the school goes on (presumably this means containment worked well except for your kid), but even here schools have to deal with kids who are out for months for medical reasons and they provide extra tutoring to catch those kids up. (I'm familiar with this because my cousin missed a month of school his senior year - he still graduated with his class even though he had to go back the next year to finish some classes)
https://www.khanacademy.org <- requires a bit more self-direction but quite good.
Homeschooling is not rocket science. I've done it for years and I barely know what I'm doing. Just make resources available, sign up for a couple out school classes, and be willing to help them pursue stuff when they're interested in it. You can do it!
Read your textbook, do homework exercises, and (above all) feel free to contact your professors and ask them for help. That is what they are paid to do!
The hardest part is instructors who feel like unlocking everything to let people work at their own pace is somehow egregious...I think it's so stupid that a teacher cant somehow manage grading the same stuff for everybody at the same time but just ignores the other students who are ahead until they get to that point.
The best online teachers I've ever had were the ones that unlocked it all from the start and helped you with the few questions you had along the way.
That seems like a lot until you realize there's still Boston College, Simmons, Berklee College of Music, Emmanuel, Brandeis, Babson, Bentley, Wellesley, a pharmacology college, two art colleges, and a bunch of community colleges -- and plenty of others I'm forgetting -- I could reach via public transit are still to announce anything, presumably because it's all still being discussed.
For Boston this is really weird and impactful. There is a massive population (somewhere between 350,000 - 400,000 students I think) in the area that is just a transient student population. Though outside of NYC and VERY specific parts of the SFBA, the Boston area is one of the most population dense parts in the US, so there's no more fooling around.
> d4mi3n
> What happens when the WHO classifies a pandemic? I imagine a number of processes and procedures come into effect--anybody know what they are?
> Hongwei
> My limited understanding understanding is that it automatically releases funding (from the WHO and other bodies) to help with the crisis. It should also trigger some catastrophe and pandemic bond clauses, meaning investors who bought these bonds will lose their money as it now goes towards relief funding.
Full thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22547349
I was listening it live and they said its just a classification, they are already doing what they should be doing, the classification changes nothing.
"The reason the WHO is not declaring the coronavirus a "pandemic" is likely to avoid causing a panic at this point. They will only use the P-word once it is clear to everyone that it is one." https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1232094407584710656 I was criticized for being "alarmist." But I was right. It was obvious to those of us who did the research (100+ hours reading peer-reviewed articles) that it was going to turn into a very big deal.
For all the things that Reddit gets wrong, early-January r/cornavirus was pretty much spot on the money.
Might be useful in case you or loved ones get infected.
I should note that Sam Harris is rather on the worried side of the spectrum (and felt compelled to add a disclaimer at the begining).
[1] https://samharris.org/podcasts/191-early-thoughts-pandemic/
So I don't buy all the hype, can somebody tell me why i'm wrong? I keep hearing claims from brilliant people that 50-80% of the population could easily be infected.
Exponential growth is obviously the answer, and is occurring because the median person is infecting more than one other person, which right now is coming from people not knowing they have the virus and not worrying about getting the virus. This will change as more people become infected. Assuming even the most BASIC of measures are taken, (people washing their hands, not going to crowded areas often, not travelling etc.) this will probably stop exponential growth.
In China, 5 people have been infected for every 100,000 citizens, and the virus isn't exponentially growing anymore. But fine, maybe they took good measures.
In Italy, it's closer to 20 people per 100,000. Fine, four times as high, but still a TINY portion of the population. If you assume that their graph will ever look anything like China's, there is no way in hell more than 1% of the population will be infected. It probably won't come within two orders of magnitude.
In what god forsaken situation could even 1% of the US get the Coronavirus?
Even without government intervention, as cases increase people will start taking this more seriously and the exponential growth will stop. Even if you don't have symptoms but have the virus, you aren't going to that concert or that vacation because you don't want to catch the virus from someone else. As long as you at most infect 1 other person, the exponential growth stops. This will happen way before 1% of the population is infected.
EDIT: I'm incorrect in the idea that people shouldn't worry about it, you should, but I believe that worrying about it will be enough to stop the exponential growth.
If people think it's serious, they'll take actions to prevent that serious outcome.
If people think it's not serious, then it may become serious.
Most cases so far have been traced back to people coming back from a vacation trip to Northern Italy and Austria (ski resorts also popular among Italians), but now cases are popping up where health authorities are unable to trace the source of infection, and this, rather than raw numbers, is what has prompted the heightened alert level.
Exponential growth is occurring because the median person is infecting more than one other person, which right now is coming from people not knowing they have the virus and not worrying about getting the virus.
Even without government intervention, as cases increase people will start taking this more seriously and the exponential growth will stop. Even if you don't have symptoms but have the virus, you aren't going to that concert or that vacation because you don't want to catch the virus from someone else.
Hell, I heard someone say that if we stay home and change how we live then the "virus has won.". I don't even know what I'm supposed to say to that.
Another point to consider is that this virus is apparently "novel", meaning that humans in general have not had time to build up significant immunity. Even if measures are taken, they will likely just push the date of infection for each individual out into the future some--most people will eventually be exposed no matter what.
It's pretty obvious if you separated people and kept them in their homes the virus would stop spreading. So what? The world cannot just stop forever. Life will go on, and so will this virus. It is with us now.
Unfortunately this is going to change your life and people you know are going to get very sick and die. Please tell the older people in your life to be very careful and DO NOT downplay the risks to them.
Please don't exaggerate. In another thread here on HN someone from Italy posted exactly what it's like. They go for walks, they go to bars or restaurants and maintain 1 meter distance between people, and if they need to care for a relative or someone else they're permitted to travel to other towns/cities.
Sure, people's lives are a bit different, but say they're on "lockdown" is simply not true.
Those examples (China, Italy) have taken drastic measures to keep people from socializing, in order to slow the spread of the disease in order to not overwhelm the health system.
That's the killer - once you reach maximal hospital capacity, people die because of not only the severe virus infections, but because they can't get the required treatment for their other unrelated ailments as well (e.g. a stroke, or a car accident etc...). Italian doctors already have to make really hard decisions with regards to who they will admit into ICU since there are not enough beds for everyone.
So if only 1% of the country gets severe symptoms requiring hospitalization in the US, that's 3 million people needing intensive care unit beds, on top of the normal load.
Measures in Italy and China won't prevent 80% of the country to be infected (mostly, people will not need hospitalization - only a small fraction will), it only tries to reduce the number of people needing intensive care at the same time, in order to not overload the health system and save as many of them as possible (since they can't make enough ICU beds and equipment appear out of thin air)
EDIT: and of course, buy time until a vaccine or other treatment method is available...
> maybe the took good measures.
How do you "take good measures" without "hype"? Will people mass-self-quarantine if you tell them "it's just the flu, nothing to worry about"?
Even if you look at Italy, though, and if you assumed that their numbers were accurate (highly unlikely), 20/100k is only 5-6 doublings away from 1% of the population, or as little as 3-4 weeks if not properly contained.
Hopefully you're correct and it won't grow out of control and infect most of the world, but for now the idea is to keep the burden on the medical systems low to prevent knock-on effects of over-running our caring capacity.
But from what I could dig up, the last widely accepted pandemic declaration was the H1N1 2009.
The two current pandemics include HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.
There is a list of epidemics, but that list also includes localized or regional matters rather than just global-scale pandemics, and not all of them may amount to PHEICs.
Therefore, just wait for it to happen?
Story from a couple years back about that last point: https://epmonthly.com/article/not-heroes-wear-capes-one-las-...
Would this help increase the number of covid-19 patients that could be treated? Or do they not require ventilators? I wonder if the study they mentioned about it was ever completed?
In this scenario, I think it's fantastic that Canadians are so quick to go to the doctor, and that everyone can do it on-demand. It means we're more likely here to catch more cases early & hopefully slow the spread. In the US, who is going to go to the doctor just because they have flu-like symptoms? And pay the 20, 50, 75, ?? dollar copay, wait in the line, then spend hours fighting with insurance later when they refuse to cover it? Yeah right. "May as well stay home," and this is going to cause tons more cases to go undetected & spread.
Canada is not perfectly prepared & is definitely making missteps (parade is still on in Toronto this weekend) but I predict the universal healthcare system will make the impact night & day different from USA.
I see the benefits here, don't get me wrong, but I can't imagine the waiting rooms when people go to the doctor with actual emergencies.
The messaging from the media (who are laypersons) and the politicians (who are economically motivated laypersons) has been that this is "just the flu". Weak messaging from both the WHO and the CDC has only reinforced this in the public's perception.
The WHO should have taken the decisive move to encourage greater caution by employing the "pandemic" label. That label comes with real power. While there is danger in crying wolf, it was evident months ago from the growth rate of the virus and the lack of quarantine procedures being put in place that this virus would reach the pandemic stage.
If the role of the WHO is to stave off pandemics and not just to monitor them, then elevating the risk profile of the virus should have been a top priority. Since people look to the WHO for guidance, their actions have direct impact to sequestration and bringing the outbreak under control.
Both the WHO and the CDC were too afraid to take early action. Their wait and see approach will ultimately result in more human deaths and suffering.
The president has been visibly out-of-step with the rest of the federal government messaging on this. One voice, no matter the position, doesn't evaporate what the hundreds of others have been saying.
What, and let someone else “hog” the attention and the spotlight? I’ve been reading about 45 since the 80s (most of the time, not by choice). “All eyes on me” seems to be far more important to the sitting president than “do the right thing”. I’m not saying “do <what he thinks is> the right thing” isn’t on the list, it’s just way down that list.
Because he judges how well he does his job on the performance of the stock market. He speaks to sooth the jitters of Wall Street.
It's not unique to the current administration. Most presidents have done this. It was even a recurring theme in the TV series West Wing.
I couldn’t imagine any of the presidents of the last decades to stand up and openly contradict his experts on something like this. Maybe behind the scenes but not in the open. He doesn’t seem to understand that he can only lose doing this.
Read my comment again. I didn't say that being contradictory was common. I said judging performance by the stock market is common.
The President has been accusing the "Bureaucrats" of not caring about average Americans, fear-mongering the virus, and claims the Deep State is after him.
The President's followers do NOT believe the government experts. As per the sitting President's plan. The sitting President has cultivated an "Us lay people vs Them bureaucrats" atmosphere.
Case in point: My own Mother believes that the Coronavirus is a Chinese conspiracy to attack the President. And nothing I say could sway her opinion. Unfortunately, the voters of the President support, and believe in him more than even family.
Because this "skill" has been honed from a lifetime of obsession with media, he's exceptionally good at bypassing anything resembling rational thought, and hitting emotional triggers, resulting in otherwise intelligent people engaging with Frankfurtian Bullshit even when they should know better (opponents and supporters alike).
Many people in this country still absolutely listen to him, and trust him more than the media when the messaging conflicts.
Sadly, in this case it puts the people who put the most faith in him at even more risk.
We truly must be living in different universes.
> So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370273563148697...
The top performing story on Facebook right now is a Fox News piece highlighting the President downplaying it:
https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1237092136958545923
Basically the entire GOP leadership structure has decided that people are only worrying as much as they are to damage Trump politically. Essentially the only top level official giving the straight story is Dr. Fauci and he's immediately contradicted by others in the cabinet who seemed to be completely preoccupied with the stock market and the election.
I've heard "just the flu bro" a bunch and people still operating business as usual in spite of large events being cancelled.
Other obstacles to perceiving it as a big deal:
- Not grasping that a fraction of a percent mortality can be a big deal. Numbers under one percent make it sound indistinguishable from flu, even if it's 10x as deadly as flu.
- Having AIDS and Ebola as your mental prototypes for dangerous infectious diseases and feeling relieved when you hear COVID-19 is nothing like either one.
The president tweeted this 2 days ago [1]:
> So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
This is what the Surgeon General said on Sunday [2]:
> "If we had massive numbers of cases we would be seeing more deaths. And so we actually feel pretty good that some parts of the country have contained it just like when you look at the flu," Adams said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday. "When we look at the flu tracker, some parts of the country are having much more severe flu seasons. Some are having very mild flu seasons. The same thing for coronavirus."
[0] https://www.c-span.org/video/?469747-1/president-trump-annou...
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/stocks-dive-coronavirus-spre...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/stocks-dive-coronavirus-spre...
I'm in WA state, where until last week testing wasn't being conducted on anyone that wasn't traveling from a level 3 country or in contact with a known infected person, EVEN IF THE WOULD-BE TESTEE WAS SHOWING SYMPTOMS. We keep talking about the count of infected (and relying on it to decide who to test) but it's unarguably low if we've not been testing, particularly as we apparently have introductions via Europe as well as China, plus community transmission.
Trump just a few days ago said that everyone who wants to be tested can get tested. According to the doctor's offices, that's still false.
Trump himself has a NUMBER of downplaying statements. So many I won't bother to list them. But lots of statements along the lines of "just the flu", among others.
> there's been an overabundance of information and caution
Hard to judge "overabundance" (see other article about how everything with a pandemic is premature until it is too late)
Today's headlines: "The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials."
Note this prevents any expert who doesn't have clearance from attending.
A few days ago: "US health officials wanted to recommend that elderly Americans avoid flying amid the coronavirus crisis. The White House overruled them"
But even with the research on pandemic readiness showing that neither capacity nor governance has been up to the task people are still pretending it's just a political choice and the results will be fine. If I remember correctly it as CSIS thing: https://healthsecurity.csis.org/final-report/
If you are otherwise healthy, this is like getting a cold with a fever for a week, then feeling better.
Sure, call it a pandemic, because it is worldwide. But honestly it's just not that remarkable. This isn't some godly virus with 25% death rates!
It is remarkable in that it is novel, but that's mostly it.
[1] https://www.ecodibergamo.it/stories/bergamo-citta/evitiamo-i... (Italian)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag...
> "It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care." [Emphasis mine]
Please educate yourself: https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
The trouble is that (1) the people who need hospital to be fine need hospital. They won't be fine if it isn't there, and (2) by being a selfish ass and treating it like just the flu, when it's a disease that grows exponentially in a no-immunity population, people are amplifying the speed and height of the peak, which means not enough hospital places.
If you get a situation where effectively nobody who needs hospital can get it - then those 20-ish percent just drop dead. And then there's your godly death rate.
This is a new thing and you should treat it as a new thing. There has not in living memory been one this bad, against which we had no defense except to avoid catching it and spreading it.
That's part of the problem; even if it was "just like the flu" (it is not; in particular the percentage of cases requiring advanced medical treatment is much higher, which will lead to a rise in mortality as that treatment is oversubscribed), the flu would be pretty scary if the annual vaccine didn't exist.
The flu is actually quite scary - they are the frog in hot water.
2% of those infected with influenza (estimated, 4% of those who sought medical intervention) in 2017-2018 required hospitalization.
Unless there's information that's not making it out of Italy, the death statistics reported today don't seem to align with the picture painted by those tweets.
“Earlier in the epidemic, there was hope that 3.5 percent was grossly overestimated, however as evidence continues to emerge, there is dwindling support for that hope.”
Please also note that many people who require intensive care but survive are left with huge chronic damage to their lungs that will affect their quality of life for the rest of their lives.
Which is that entire communities can be infected in a very short amount of time, overwhelming local medical infrastructure and resulting in deaths and harm because the doctors simply can't keep up. What was originally something that could be treated then becomes life threatening.
In particular, one of those factors was sustained duration of the outbreak. My understanding is we finally crossed the time threshold for declaring this a Pandemic.
Much, much better than the alternative.
H1N1 was serious and compared to this, well handled.
An extreme and early response, can turn a disease into a trivial event. Which raises questions about whether such an aggressive response is necessary.
It can be, in many ways, like using an umbrella in a rainstorm. You get to the destination, and you're totally dry, so what was the point of the umbrella?
With these disease outbreaks, there's no counterfactual we can run to see what would have happened if we didn't respond early.
The current COVID-19 epidemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 is many times more fatal than the 2009 H1N1 epidemic. The current epidemic has similar a fatality rate to the 1918 Spanish Flu.
The table in the "comparisons to other pandemics and epidemics" section gives a point estimate for the case fatality rate of 0.03%. If we assume that the final rate for covid-19 is somewhere in the 1-2% range that's what I last heard, that would mean that "10X as fatal" is an understatement - more like 30-70x as fatal.
The mortality rate is presently 6.01% and fluctuating, making this virus about twice as deadly as the Spanish Flu.
Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this):
125,108 confirmed cases 4594 deaths 66,682 recoveries 71,276 outcomes 4,594 / 71,276 = 6.45% have died (deaths / outcomes)
COVID-19 currently has a 3.4% case fatality ratio according to the WHO last week -
https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...
But this is in the middle of the pandemic and is likely to be revised downward as many cases are undiagnosed.
The 2009 H1N1 outbreak had a inital case fatality ratio of 0.4%, but revised downwards to 0.026% afterwards due to new evidence of more spread than thought -
This is the most dangerous misinformation I’ve heard spread about this disease, and it’s getting repeated everywhere.
There is no mountain of undiagnosed asymptomatic cases. It doesn’t exist.
WHO has looked. China has looked. South Korea has looked.
It’s not there. The mortality rate is presently 6.01% and fluctuating, making this virus about twice as deadly as the Spanish Flu
People in Italy are only admitted in hospitals if they have difficulty breathing by themselves. People that only have a fever or other mild symptoms are sent home, with no test administered. When the outbreak started they were testing asymptomatic cases, trying to be proactive in identifying infected people, but they stopped doing that once things have gotten out of control. And we will see this pattern repeating.
What's dangerous is spreading nonsense like a 6% death rate, which is factually not true.
South Korea have a lot of early stage cases in those numbers (haven’t died, haven’t recovered), and a very young population on the whole. An undetermined number of those cases will die rather than recover.
Multiple sources have looked for these large majorities of asymptomatic cases and did not find them. There is no evidence other than our collective hunches that these cases exist in significant numbers.
Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this):
125,108 confirmed cases 4594 deaths 66,682 recoveries 71,276 outcomes
4,594 / 71,276 = 6.45% have died (deaths / outcomes)
At least 80%-85% of all Covid-2019 cases have mild symptoms. We are not talking about completely asymptomatic cases, we are talking about a majority of cases that could pass for a mere cold or flu.
Many of those will not go to a hospital or be tested, especially if the system is overwhelmed.
Italy could easily have more than 10 times the number of reported cases because they stopped testing proactively. Only people with difficulty breathing are now tested and these represent a small minority of cases.
I gave S.Korea as an example because AFAIK they are the only ones doing large scale testing of the population and they aren't China (whom we may or may not trust to be transparent).
The data we have points to a mortality rate that's less than 1%.
When you see a mortally greater than that it is because people aren't tested unless they reach the ICU.
The 80-85% mild cases comes from confirmed cases that we know about. They’re included in the current 6.45% death rate from the JH data.
China may or may not be transparent, but if they have an incentive to hide anything, it would be a higher death rate rather than a lower one.
The data is the data. In any case it’s now global and the 6.45% is actually higher than it was before the virus started growing exponentially outside of China (it was 5.7% from this dataset then).
This number will likely go down to below 1% because:
- S. Korea have implemented large scale tests on asymptomatic cases and their death rate is 0.77%
- the "Princess Diamond" cruise, which can be considered a closed experiment, has had a 1% death rate for people that were not ventilated
- in China if you exclude the Hubei province, the mortality rate is 0.88%
In Italy the mortality rate is 6% but the explanation is quite simple — they stopped testing asymptomatic cases, even people with fever are sent home without a test and instructed to return in case the fever doesn't go away in a few days and they are overwhelmed. At this point they are only admitting people that have trouble breathing.
And northern Italy has really good hospitals, so the only reasonable explanation for the huge disparity is that they have more than 10 times the reported total cases.
In other words, the virus has infected many more people than official numbers.
Remember that those "total cases" are cases that have been discovered via tests, it does not include people that stayed at home and weren't tested, either because the symptoms were too mild or because they were sent home.
Edit: A Hong Kong national from the ship died on 6 March which is being included as the 7th death. So, this may simply be fragmented rather than explicit exclusions.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
They are saying 7 deaths and 32 critical.
As far as I can tell Australia has 3 deaths including 1 from the cruse ship. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-08/coronavirus-related-d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Epide...
Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this): 125,108 confirmed cases 4594 deaths 66,682 recoveries 71,276 outcomes 4,594 / 71,276 = 6.45% have died (deaths / outcomes)
Basically we are counting every case severe enough to cause death, but only some of the cases that aren't very severe, and that latter group is already a much bigger piece of the pie even among confirmed cases.
Data from the China CDC suggests 20x as fatal: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-to-flu-...
I for one lean towards nipping things in the bud and have been experiencing ever-increasing anxiety since I started watching Covid-19 in late January.
Look at the situation with vaccines. Your grandparents getting vaccines was a no-brainer. They heard stories of people getting polio or the measles and it was serious shit. Three generations later we have conspiracy theories about vaccines, I think because so few iminently deadly diseases have gotten a vaccine lately. We are down to the tricky ones, and cultural memory of the others is starting to crack.
AFAIK, scientists are still trying to develop a covid-19 vaccine candidate. And after they have one, there will be many months before millions of doses can be produced and distributed.
Modeling the causal impact of their criteria in light of data from the COVID-19 pandemic could reveal how different messaging strategies applied at different thresholds impact the spread of the virus.
The leadership could have done this months ago and estimated how proactive versus inactive quarantine efforts would impact morbidity. They have to know their role in persuading the public and government officials.
You don't have to stick to a rigid and inflexible criteria when thousands of human lives are at stake. When you define the criteria, you can also change them.
Labeling this a pandemic would have given cover to organizations that wanted to be more cautious but were afraid of "looking stupid".
Declaration of official pandemic means world bank pandemic relief fund program gets activated as long as many other clauses in different contracts and agreements. There is an influence on WHO and the people behind it didn't want pandemic to be declared too soon. If it was declared 3-4 weeks earlier there could be many lives saved in countries like Iran, what is happening in Africa is not known at all due to no testing but situation is probably bad.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/11/21156325/coronavirus-pand...
I suspect The WHO declared this a pandemic, based upon the article, out of concern for what they perceive to be insufficient government activity.
EDIT: I was wrong, here is the chart: https://www.who.int/influenza/resources/documents/pandemic_p...
that is, sustained community outbreaks in multiple WHO regions.
For someone like the WHO, you'll either be criticized for sounding the alarm for no reason or not sounding it fast enough.
My reaction to this push alert today was "wait, they hadn't called it a pandemic yet??"
https://canoe.com/news/world/who-no-longer-uses-pandemic-cat...
Here is a neat video that helps put things in perspective for most any viewer. https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg
It already looked pretty bad mid/late January when China started construction of hospitals. Were there any reasons to think it would no go global?
So: no, there was no objective reason to think it would not go global, but it was faaaar away...
Wouldn't it be better if the WHO actually helped prevent the pandemic in the first place?
WHO is merely declaring matter of fact about the virus's spreading. Which is kind of it's primary function, to declare things and publish reports so the governments can act on them. They can't really do much beyond that.
Thanks for clarifying, I thought the WHO was more like a global CDC.
There's no particular reason to assume it would take the same path in other countries took some sort of action, even if the actions weren't nearly as forceful as a complete lockdown. Especially since that lockdown was basically a blind and desperate shot in the dark based on incomplete and dubious information.
The only mass media where I've seen that was in a BBC television report from a soccer stadium, and that was only last night.
Other than their censorship in China (they give different advice on their website served to China, even on English-language pages, involving the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine against the virus), I think they're doing a mostly okay job so far, from what I can see in the current reporting.
I believe the pandemic label is when containment has failed and governments need to go into mitigation mode. Seeing as it had been relatively contained in China, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., it seemed reasonable that taking measures would be sufficient to prevent further escalation.
It's akin to people not caring about a major hurricane barreling towards them because they've heard the doomsday scenarios before and nothing has happened.
They have to be careful, and that they were.
Perhaps the 'doomsday clock' was right all along but didn't see this one coming.
And leaving aside the immediate difficulties...let's save this kind of retrospective criticism for after, when we're closer to being out of the woods.
If you have prospective criticism -- what should be done now and going forwards -- that would be worthwhile.
Whether the WHO uses the term "pandemic" is honestly just semantics. You should direct the majority of your criticism at short-sighted governments who have prioritized the economy (or, even worse, markets) over health.
It was incumbent on local authorities to take the WHO's message seriously, especially after their expedition to China released its report.
... why?
I mean, it's not like the word of the WHO is a binding thing, where anyone is mandated to take action on any level because of a binary designation in a taxonomy. This whole this is just bureaucratic wheels turning; everyone who needs to take action has all the information they need to do so.
This is just the WHO doing what it does best -- having committees meeting endlessly to decide whether to apply a certain meaningless designation and then announcing the conclusion of that exercise.
Their actual job, of collating and disseminating information and trying to coordinate any large-scale responses, is actually hard, so nobody wants to do it, but having a meeting to decide IS IT A PANDEMIC is an easy bikeshedding meeting that all the MBAs and ex-McKinsey people can attend and offer their stupid opinion on what the definition of a word is.
EDIT: I said "everyone who needs to take action has all the information they need to do so", and that could be interpreted as saying that we know enough to determine what actions to take. But what I mean is that we have enough data to start to make a range of predictions and bound the uncertainty to some degree; having a more precise metric for any aspect of COVID-19 should not affect the response since those metrics are essentially made up and not comparable even on a per-hospital level, much less a per-country level or even a per-test-kit-type level. Uncertainty is part of the game here, and understanding the risk profiles is how people and organizations and governments have to tune their response.
1) There are no objective criteria for calling something a pandemic.
2) They did not feel they knew enough about the propagation pattern to make the subjective call.
3) They were deeply worried that calling it a pandemic would switch government strategies from containment to mitigation, resulting in higher contagion and loss of life.
They especially emphasized the last point. The only question in my mind is whether (1) they decided containment was no longer viable or (2) they decided not calling it pandemic would be seen as unserious, even if containment could still potentially have benefits.
Source: https://youtu.be/OJQTM4QbTsg
[1]https://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/frequently_asked_qu...
I'm not familiar with how the US system works but that seems... strange. Why would the WHO declaring it a pandemic affect your coverage?
For example, your home insurance would cover your house burning down but might have a clause along the lines of "if the whole town burns down, we will not cover you."
I'm guessing some health insurance plans have a similar clause of "if there is a WHO declared pandemic, we won't cover you".
The fire example from a real historical event: a German city burned to the ground and put multiple insurance firms out of business. This led to the development of "re-insurance" aka insurance firms that insure other insurance firms.
For an interesting take on the above plus catastrophe bonds in general (mentioned in another comment) I highly recommend this article by Michael Lewis: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/magazine/26neworleans-t.h...
EDIT: changed "would have" to "might have a clause"
This isn't true. Insurance companies can and do regularly cover people in areas where massive destruction occurs within a particular area (e.g. hurricanes). This is why some companies no longer write policies in certain areas: their risk managers usually require them to "spread out risk" and so they write some stuff in some areas and then they may stop and lower rates elsewhere which are deemed "lower risk".
EDITED: Actually, some companies will even cover you in some pretty extreme circumstances, but this is stuff you have to pay for extra and isn't usually included on most policies.
At any rate, what _is_ true is that most insurance companies won't cover you based upon the cause of something: e.g. if your house is burned down due to a riot "civil unrest" or because of something like war, it will not cover you. If your house floods because a pipe bursts, then it is OK. If water comes up from the ground (i.e. a _real_ flood) then it will not cover you because it looks not only at what happened but how it happened.
1. Structure their agreements so that some things are covered and others are not e.g. suicide is sometimes NOT covered for life insurance
2. Choose not to cover certain areas e.g. there were insurance firms choosing not to cover Staten Island even pre-Sandy
3. Set their rates at high levels to discourage people e.g. this happened in my old town house where there were too many claims based around water heaters leaking
Funny side story: I remember reading a book about the British Special Forces (S.A.S.) and there was a note that said only Lloyd's of London was willing to insure them due to the high risk of injuries from their line of work.
Funny side story #2:
One of my family members had a friend who was apparently a crazy driver. He drove a delivery truck so a bunch of the driver's friend (including my family member) took out a life insurance policy on him (driver). I didn't even realize you could do this but apparently you can.
In the end, turned out that the driver outlived all of the people who were on the policy!
It's generally restricted, since it can incentivize killing them to collect the money. To life-insure anybody you have to convince the insurer that you have an "insurable interest" in their life. That's easy if they're a breadwinner/caretaker in your family, and you could also show it if they were e.g. critical to your business (edit: or had lent them money). I'd be interested to know what the justification was in that case.
Insurers really try to make sure that the payout isn't so high that you want the insured event to happen ("moral hazard").
I should have pointed out that this was back in the mid-1950s when regulations were probably a lot more lax than they are today.
TLDR: If the event affecting you gets big enough/outrageous enough the insurance companies consider it an act of god and you aren't covered.
Edit: I do not remember posting this. I certainly did not intend to. Sorry folks for the spammy, uselss comment.
Welcome to the free market. Please take a survival fitness brochure on your way out.
No brochures for them.
This is not a long standing policy as far as I know.
Insurance companies are all about numbers and are very good at running them. they are not always right, but they are right often enough for their purposes.
Quote: "all the insurance companies here, either today, or before today, have agreed to waive all copays on coronavirus testing, and extend coverage for coronavirus treatment in all of their benefit plans"
Assuming that one is insured to begin with, and your insurance company was one of those at the White House, yeah, you could be covered. So “probably still have coverage” is a pretty wishful statement.
Mortality and impacts seem to hit people over 50 the hardest, and that is where a majority of the Republican supporters come from.
It would be a curious footnote to have COVID-19 swing an election.
Something like a stroke requires immediate action (say, within 2 hours) to be able to use the best treatments available. Living very far away from a good hospital makes your survival chances quite lower.
For Covid-19, as far as I read, some people have gone to the hospital (already having trouble to breath) and died after a few hours. But those seem extreme cases. Normally you would have a couple days to go to the hospital from the moment you realize something is odd.
Then there is the issue of cost for that flight and the poor state of healthcare.
I live (urban/suburban) in spitting distance of 3-4+ hospitals (I don't even know for sure) with at least 2 of those being ones I would trust my life to in a heartbeat (the others I just don't know enough about). I was really unaware of the disconnect before that trip and it didn't really occur to me that hospital != hospital. So not only do some rural location have limited or no hospitals but they don't trust the ones they do have.
The current White House is essentially the worst case scenario in dealing with this outbreak and is going to get people killed. There is still current exponential growth in the USA, and there is near zero testing going on due to incompetence and coverup. Things are going to get much worse.
Downvote all you want, but these are facts.
The main issue right now is the lack of testing and covering up just to try and bump the stock market, and it obviously is having the opposite effect since the problem is just getting worse the longer the problem is ignored.
Everyone will come in contact with the virus. People under 50 years old (as recent reports have stated) have a high chance of survival. The deaths from it will mostly be from those 50 years and old. Voters who are 50 years and older largely vote for the Republican party.
My mom drives 90 minutes a day to be with my dad in nursing home rehabilitation, the closest facility. The normal response time for an ambulance is 20 minutes, plus 30-45m to an ER. Their doctors are a similar distance. Note that the ambulance is volunteer, and the average member is 55. They live in NY, in a county with a decent sized city. It’s worse in the real boonies.
I live in a city, a paramedic will be at your door in 7-10m. Hospital 5-10m, etc.
If this gets bad, everyone will be familiar with tragedy. The urban stories will be about neglected patients in overcrowded wards and people who die of untreated strokes, etc. The rural tragedies will be finding grandma, drowned in her own phlegm because sick relatives and travel restrictions isolated her from support.
I'm pretty sure I'd rather be homesteading off-grid in a remote wilderness or on a sailboat than in an average American suburb through all this.
I myself am not worried, but I AM worried about my Fox News watching elderly parents. They are in danger the most. Also, mis-informed.
This is how years of denial, spin, propaganda, lying, and gaslighting end up being. In fact - deadly.
This is really not the time for petty partisan politics. Both parties are propaganda machines. It is the nature of the two party system.
>https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/chuck_schumer_q...
I think the fact that it's an election year, more people are susceptible to thinking the pandemic is overblown and thus a conspiracy to defeat Trump.
Perhaps it's just that they can change course without any pushback from their demographic -- they're happy believing that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Still, it must cost them something to be quite so demonstrably wrong on something that's so much in people's faces. (As opposed to, say, climate change, where the effects are much slower and more easily shuffled under "the heat wave and fires are just weather".)
Personally I'm not sure if it will outweigh how democrats are more likely to live in denser urban areas where spread is faster.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-po...
Irony.
"Initially the left was saying flu was a bigger threat. Now they are taking it seriously, shutting down events.
Initially the right was taking it seriously, banning travel. Now they are calling it the flu."
That's not really what GP's poll indicates:
> About four of every 10 Democrats said they thought the new coronavirus poses an imminent threat, compared to about two of every 10 Republicans.
Both less than half.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-checking-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/us/politics/coronavirus-t...
Source: https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/economic-demogra...
- old people vote in far larger proportion compared to young folks
- they tend to vote conservative
- this virus is likely to kill old people disproportionately
- red states tend to do less well in terms of all kinds of infrastructure, including medical
...then would you expect to see a change in the results of future elections?
The first thing that I would draw your attention to is that social shifts have moved the "silent generation" from being evenly split Democrat/Republican in 2004 to going for Trump by a 13 point margin in 2016. This is the group that will suffer the vast majority of fatalities. See https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-... for verification.
Secondly, women lean Democratic, men Republican. (The same link verifies that.) Most casualties will be men. See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... for verification.
Third, the upcoming generations through that 12 years are overwhelmingly Democratic and will have almost no deaths from this disease. Both previous links verify that.
The result is that, a well researched article from a dozen years ago notwithstanding, the impact of COVID-19 are likely to disproportionately hit Republicans over Democrats.
(Not necessarily. The one trend that Republicans can hope for is that diseases spread through urban areas and urban areas are overwhelmingly Democratic. I don't think that this offsets the other phenomena though.)
Parliament has sat today, without her, so it's still quite possible that others will catch it.
ruth bader ginsburg is 86 years old, and still seems sharp as a tack.
That's highly subjective and no doubt any assessment is likely to strongly align with partisanship.
Which is why we need age limits. You can't expect people to objectively evaluate whether those inside or outside their party are still legislating or judging effectively in their 80s. Obviously most Republicans would lean towards arguing that she's senile and most Democrats would lean toward the opposite.
And then I imagine cognitive decline does not affect all faculties equally - so someone may still, say, have no trouble writing essays, but their judgement may be compromised.
Beyond direct consequences, it seems reasonable that covid19 would affect the election by tanking the economy and giving Trump nothing to point at as his big accomplishments
Had they raised alarm early on, more countries would have enforced proper procedures (look at South Korea). Instead, the thing spread around and starts impacting economy.
To me, WHO lost all credibility.
Too soon?
Are you saying Covid-19 isn't a pandemic anymore?
> This should have been done way earlier
Not what you're sayin.
So I read OP's comment as self-contradictory and am still not quite sure what to make of it.
So the only (provided) statement we should disbelieve is that Covid-19 is a pandemic. Which is precisely what OP wanted them to say. Hence the contradiction.
Obviously, this line of reasoning is tenuous, but the initial claim isn't much better, as nothing is said of what it really means for the WHO to have credibility.
I read that comment as an additional armchair semanticist making the strong claim that (exaggeration mine) the WHO should have declared the pandemic before the virus reached their own country.
You're going to need to cite a source because there's no chance anyone remotely educated would make that statement.
The WHO and CDC botched this. Because of their messaging a lot of people (the majority of people!) didn't take this virus seriously, and that is going to result in real human lives lost.
Not even 1 second of TV in the 12 months they are alive.
I was curious why, and after researching they had 0 Data. This decision was made by a panel.
Ahhh good old tradition and mysticism.
As in, who do people like you, who claim that WHO's maybe flawed handling of this has erased all of the work they've done in the past, consider the best source of truth in these matters?
Yes, outbreak of zootonic diseases is still possible through widely consumed firm animals (chickens, pigs, or cows). But we can dramatically reduce the risk of next pandemic if we stop eating exotic wild animals like bats, which is not hard to give up. We may have been able to stop outbreak of COVID-19 on the first place if we had learned our lessons from SARS outbreak and stopping eating exotics animals.
EDIT: bat was used as an example. You can replace any exotic animals in place of bats, the point still stands. This video touches on the topic of outbreak of coronavirus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54
Maybe that's why MERS never spread widely outside of areas where camels don't exist widely.
Yes, the press has reported that a market in Wuhan sold exotic animals, but it seems this is uncorroborated, and after asking an acquaintance in Wuhan about it, I was told it's fake news, and that said market sells farmed animals as far as she's ever seen.
Even with conventional animal agriculture, things like bird flu and swine flu are a serious threat.
Fake news, seriously? There's an entire wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanan_Seafood_Wholesale_Marke.... Please verify your own news source before spreading more fake news/
Bat soup was used as an example. It would help the discussion if we stop taking everything in the most literal way possible.
It would also be helpful to the discussion if "we" stopped casting broad nets and making sweeping generalizations without specifics and context.
"Eating exotic animals" has no real meaning. Bats may not be exotic in that region. Additionally, you specifically said "eating" and, so, my comment was specifically directed at the consumption of animals. In that case, cattle (not "exotic" in my region) can carry bovine spongiform encephalopathy which _can_ survive ingestion (most likely CNS tissues). So, when dealing with science-y sort of things, making generalizations in order to support an opinion, you're basically opening yourself up to people (like myself) who desire specificity and factual support.
As was mentioned in an erudite child comment, the most likely form of transmission was in the preparation of the foodstuff, so if you believe that more caution should be exercised, then you'd get no complaints from me.
That seems a very first world-centric point of view.
Isn't the eating of such animals partially driven by cultural culinary preferences, and partially driven by the availability of such foods (eg. unable to afford beef or chicken, but can afford the next best thing).
I have no doubt that there are cases of wealthy people consuming exotic meat as a delicacy, but I would bet pound for pound it is largely people in poorer regions without much alternative.
Unfortunately I'm looking for real stats but am having trouble as most of the trade does not keep records, is illegal, etc
2. A very small minority of people in China consume exotic food not because they are cheap, but because they are more expensive and were considered prestigious.
3. There is now a very strong pushbacks against this culture from both the Chinese government and the vast majority of the Chinese people.
> Yes, outbreak of zootonic diseases is still possible through widely consumed firm animals (chickens, pigs, or cows). But we can dramatically reduce the risk of next pandemic if we stop eating exotic wild animals like bats, which is not hard to give up.
Washing your hands is not going to stop every single disease on the earth, but it'll reduce the risk. What exactly is the unsound part here?
It's not a harmful proposal or anything, I just don't think it would have much impact, and it fixates excessively on the particulars of two specific outbreaks.
You're probably referring to the youtube disinformation that has been trotted around by right-wing media outlets as "the cause".
It may very well have come from bats. But bats can infect other animals, in various ways, including ones that are traded in live-animal markets.
This is not about cuisine.
How can you even remotely suggest this when the proximity between humans and lifestock animals in horrible conditions is a primary driver of a) transmission of disease, as well as b) increasing resistance to antibiotics due to how much of them we pump into the animals, and then consume ourselves?
It absolutely _is_ about cuisine choices and the sooner we stop eating animals and animal products, the better.
WHO 10 March report: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
Today, but the thing about time is that before long next month will be today.
That's impossible to know. We have no idea how many cases there are in the US, because we're not doing a significant amount of testing here, because our government is incompetent and unprepared for this.
It seems to me that the U.S. government would prefer for cases to not be tested. Whatever medical competence there is appears to be sidelined by other interests.
That will depend quite a bit on how overwhelmed the hospitals become.
In the instantaneous moment, yes.
But there's a reason one measures derivatives, and that's why people are concerned.
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
Now wait a minute. If you have a source on that, please do provide it. Because I am from Italy and I have never heard of such things. (There were cases of people who died from a stroke and tested positive to COVID-19, but that's all I know)
Perhaps it's an issue with translation, but then I'm entirely unsure what he means by "Arrest".
Just to be clear, I do not want to downplay what is happening in any way. But I feel it is better if we stick to verifiable info.
[1] https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/03/10/coronavirus-il-c...
Once it's fully spread through our community because the've decided they're entitled to be carriers (because, hey, you're more likely to die of the flu), they'll blame that same government for failing to provide the requisite care in the community.
"It's mostly in China" = I don't understand exponential growth.
"the flu" = I don't understand that there's a 10-30x higher mortality rate and hospital bed availability is vital to lowering it.
This. Plus, any disease that has very good chances of putting a young, healthy person in some ICU is not "the flu".
If left to expand, this is going to turn into another unavoidable seasonal flu, except more contagious, more severe, and more deadly. And for now, with no vaccine.
A couple of important reasons to try to slow this thing down are:
* Hospitals don't have the capacity to deal with the number of severe COVID-19 patients they're likely to get. There's a good reason China built a new hospital in a week. Severe cases end up on the ICU, and we could end up with hundreds of thousands severe cases.
* Slowing it down gives scientists more time to find a vaccine.
If you wait for it to get worse than the flu, it will be too late.
Just because something hasn't happened yet does not mean it's completely unpredictable. COVID-19 is coming, and if we don't put significant preventative measures in place, many more people will die from it in 2020 than the yearly flu.