Comment by shalmanese | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shalmanese | Hacker News Reader

> The only way to defeat this pandemic is to approach it with the seriousness it deserves. It is time for a radical acceptance of reality.

This is all so surreal to me. Shouldn't we have taken this with the seriousness it deserves when China was locking down 700 million people?

Like, even if you didn't believe what China was doing was correct, you should at least have been trying to formulate your best arguments over why China's reaction was wrong and looking for confirmatory and dis-confirmatory evidence over your arguments.

Instead, we spent six weeks in a state of such basic blissful ignorance of China (& other early countries/cruise ships) that we're scrambling now because we don't even have the data to make the right decisions.

For example, there was a case in Hong Kong where one person got it through the sewerage pipe of an infected person 10 floors above because they improperly modified their vent pipes: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic... . (This is a famous example of how SARS spread through Amoy Gardens in HK so HK people are hyper paranoid about this infection route).

This piece of news didn't even make a ripple in the West (I know because I have friends who work at SCMP and I asked them to look at the analytics, the only western media that picked up their story was... drudgereport.com)

Friends I know in HK are like, "Yeah, the canto news covered this story quite widely so we're all pretty aware" but you can't find any English awareness of this. Even the C D FUCKING C is not aware of this, their page on fecal borne transmissions (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/water.html) STILL says:

"CDC is reviewing all data on COVID-19 transmission as information becomes available. At this time, the risk of transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19 through sewerage systems is thought to be low. Although transmission of COVID-19 through sewage may be possible, there is no evidence to date that this has occurred. This guidance will be updated as necessary as new evidence is assessed.

SARS, a similar coronavirus, has been detected in untreated sewage for up to 2 to 14 days. In the 2003 SARS outbreak, there was documented transmission associated with sewage aerosols."

The case in Hong Kong happened ONE MONTH ago and the CDC didn't even pick this up!!! WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD?

That’s assuming there’s more than anecdotal data to support sewage transmission, that other transmission vectors were ruled out and that there is other cases where it’s been shown to happen. Plus their quote says it’s low risk, not “no risk”.

It’s always easy to look from the outside and yell “what are these idiots doing?!”

I know a conservative/right-wing kind of guy who thinks all the people trying to prep for disaster right now are dumb media sheep for falling for the coronavirus craze or whatever that means. I'm paraphrasing. I know he's not the only one who thinks this way, because there have been a bunch of instances even on HN where common people genuinely worried about their and their family's safety and wellbeing are mocked like this. This attitude is not uncommon here in the U.S. I said this earlier today too, these same asshole people are the same ones who will ask "Oh, well why didn't you prepare?" when disaster does happen. I think it's because these people have money or something that gives them such a huge sense of security, they believe that even if something bad could happen, they would still come out okay.

With one exception, all “prepper” types I know are not wealthy, or even comfortably middle class. They just prioritize their sense of independence and being prepared in an emergency. Whether other disagree with the drivers for that is irrelevant to them. They’re currently patting themselves on the back.

In any event I hope this does encourage more of a prepared mindset in people. I know it has for me. Events like this will only continue to happen and have increasingly far-reaching impacts. I equate it to using a try/catch instead of assuming your program will work flawlessly forever.

Agree. It seems to me like a clear case of Western arrogance and exceptionalism, built around some strange (unconscious) assumption that what happens in China (or elsewhere in Asia) just cannot happen in the West. Hopefully, this will end up in history books as an important lesson how not to look at the world.

Edge cases don't make epidemics?

you can't lockdown too quickly, because you need a plan for removing the lockdown, otherwise you have to stay on lockdown forever.

In this epidemic the lockdown is meant to avoid overwhelming the medical system while we get herd immunity (by contamination and eventually vaccines) in the general population for when we remove it.

You don't have to lockdown but you should be gathering evidence and preparing contingency plans for different scenarios. The saddest shit ever is I assumed this was all going on behind the scenes and serious people in serious suits were sitting in serious meetings looking at all the China data and drawing up plans that would all get revealed to the public at the right time.

The last few weeks have been a sad disconfirmation that this is not the case. If even world leaders are getting this, it's strong evidence that nobody in their government has any fucking clue what they're doing (or at least the people with the fucking clue were not empowered to act).

Trump holds a press conference announcing this is a national emergency and even during the press conference, people were standing less than 1m apart, people were constantly touching their face, each speaker adjusted the microphone at the exact same spot and touched the podium at the exact same spot without sterilizing in between, nobody was wearing a mask and everyone was shaking hands except ONE person who did the elbow bump. Sure, some of this can be attributed to optics but they should also be demonstrating best practices if they want others to be taking those best practices seriously.

Lockdown would not have been needed if aggressive testing was done from the start. And infected people and those they had interacted with been isolated. Lockdown comes a lot later.

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