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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

To illustrate why this lockdown really needs to stay as short as possible and why Trump and Boris are aggressively pushing for a test and anti-viral alternative, economists are forecasting jobless claims in the US to be in the 2-3m region next week vs 150-200k a normal month.

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Do we even live in the same time line ? All he did was say "nothing is happening", "we have the best people" and aggressively push to call it "the Chinese virus". None of it being useful. [0]

The US will get absolutely destroyed by this virus. It's way too little way too late and it'll really show how far behind the US is in term of social/job security and healthcare.

[0] https://twitter.com/LeeHolly81/status/1240223327811239936

To put things into perspective, in tiny Norway companies have issued warnings to 170k, in one week. In six days they received 105k applications for unemployment benefits.

The government is paying full salary (capped at ~600k) for the first 20 days. After that you receive either 62,4% of your salary up to 600k, and if you make less than 300k you receive 80%.

But it's not just Trump and Boris pushing for it. Trials of anti-virals are pushed heavily by the WHO in all countries.

Not in all countries. In France the gvt and newspapers have been downplaying the benefits of these anti-viral drugs. They are launching trials but it feels like it is doing under the pressure of the opinion. They are adament that lockdowns are the only efficient long term solution.

We're not going to whitewash Trump; he wasted too much time trying to downplay and deflect the virus and only took it seriously when it became apparent that wouldn't work.

I also think everyone is working to end the quarantine as quickly as possible, as they are aware of the social and economic implications. The problem with rushing however is that if we develop a vaccine that is ineffective or harmful, it will make the situation worse.

Here's a transcript from yesterday's press conference. Of the 42 hits of a search for "test", not one of them is Trump referring to the availability of tests. It's either other people mentioning tests, reporters asking about tests, Trump using "test" as an imbecile's synonym for "clinical trial", or referring to various peoples' test result. No "tests are being made available", or "we're working with industry to increase production of testing kits" or anything similar.

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-coronaviru...

Goes in hand with anti-virals. You don't give anti-virals to the whole population, only to people who have been tested positive.

It's not unheard of and some work has been done to study if this would be beneficial (with promising results)[1]:

But I offer as evidence two papers[2] in 2005, one in Nature and one in Science. They both did mathematical modeling with influenza, to see whether saturation with just Tamiflu of an area around a case of influenza could stop the outbreak. And in both cases, it worked.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-interview-larry-bril...

[2] Journal references: Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature04017) and Science (DOI:10.1126/science1115717)

Perhaps. But in this case we are just trying to get around the saturation of medical facilities.

Which is really all that most countries are doing. In doing so also they're buying time by decreasing the number of people that get infected per unit of time, thus increasing the likelihood that more people will be infected later when possibly better treatment options exist and/or a vaccine.

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