alexandercrohde

For context, it's estimated that BEST case scenario (flatten the curve entirely, everybody gets medical attention) that 1.1 million Americans still die[1]. This is assuming a quarantine for > 6 months [1]. Vaccines are a year off [1].

Some may see this as risky, but given that containment is out of the question, the only risk with variolation experiments would be that one catches it earlier, currently 80% of people are expected to catch Covid [1].

Given that, but surely something akin to mixing the phlegm of the infected with hot water, or exposed to ultraviolet radiation for a certain interval, would be worth a shot and potentially mass-producible.

Unfortunately I imagine our slow and process-oriented healthcare system isn't going to be innovative or fast enough for this, and more like 2 million will die in US alone.

Maybe another country will give it a try.

[1] https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/77482/5/Impe...

This is a topic that seems to be in a perverse conflict of interests.

A. Politicians have interests representing themselves as well as their country, and thus have given dishonest advice (masks don't help) with an ulterior motive (save them for hospital), downplayed the problem, and covered up the number of cases.

B. I think a lot of actually qualified experts (doctors, scientists) to think the public can't handle the truth perhaps? I still have yet to see anybody in any position of respect or authority simply say the bald truth: "A few million Americans will die, at least, unless some radical cure happens. Social distancing is a drop in the bucket, ventilators make a tiny difference. The vast majority of young people will be totally fine"

I'm disappointed in our society for failing to bubble up and synthesize good information quickly.

Wow... I had no idea it was so low.

Since you seem to be knowledgeable, if ventilating isn't a big-impact intervention, what's the point of flattening the curve? Is there some other intervention that hospital is doing that actually makes a more meaningful difference that can't be done at home?

Or is it maybe just psychological?

That's fine, so long as the article lets you know that up-front. Title it "Why we don't know yet whether you can get Corona a second time."

If you don't know then title the article "Why we don't know when Corona will end," so I can save my time. This article deliberately link-baits by purporting to answer a question and then giving a non-answer.

This is what happened with Spanish flu, but people lived with it, and each year it got less deadly, and it still persists to this day as Influenza A [1].

Personally I assume if it's more than a 6-month ordeal people would accept the losses rather than fundamentally changing the economy as we know it.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2749954/

Worthless article. Basically says 1-month to years. Well thanks Sherlock.

I'm downvoting this because it's a huge claim without adequate evidence. Feel free to cite some sources showing what % of harvests have been missed, etc, and I'll change my downvote.

Your emotions are out of whack. Quotation marks are used for exact quotes, and nobody is saying anything remotely like that. I'm not going to continue to dive into the reasons I disagree with your argument. But that level of emotionality is incredibly tribal and counterproductive to the pursuit of truth.

That's a dumb bet. If the system crashes odds are pretty high they aren't getting paid.

It's amazing how many people copy-paste knowledge without doing the most basic logical checks on it.

For example, nobody yet explained to me how flattening the curve is gonna make much difference when say NYC has 3,000 ventilators, and the average time on a ventilator is 20 days. If 1/100 of NYC's 8 million population need a ventilator that'd still be 80,000 ventilators needed.

So flattening would reduce the deaths to 74,000 instead of 77,000?

[To be clear I'm not saying this math is exact. But I am saying I am owed the actual math by people who want me to change my life over it]

Right, if there's a resurgence I'm not participating. The cure would be worse than the disease.

I encourage susceptible populations to quarantine themselves, rather than everybody quarantining. We must work, date, and life must go on.

I refuse to upvote on principle a one-liner quip on this site. But you're right, the insincere pretense of a question gives the air of a phony attempt at objectivity.

Of course, that's entirely independent of whether the points are valid or not.

Every time I see an HN analysis of the stock market, I hesitate to click it. It's only one-degree better than bitcoin spam memes on reddit.

For example, the above paragraph is completely hollow until it gives some numbers. What % of the stock is held by boomers retirement funds? (is it 1% of the market volume? 10%?)

A half-analysis is no better than no analysis.

Men's average sperm-count levels go down about 3% a year, and have been consistently for over 30 years. No cause is known, but pollutants are the best hypothesis.

I'd love to know if we see any sort of "rebound" in the quarantine period.

Great question, and I'm glad I'm not the only one wondering this. It seems hard to believe that in a situation where almost every single country has it that somehow China kept it confined to one province... Obviously they censor their news and social media, so any information coming from them is questionable to begin with.

Other than incorrect numbers, the second most likely possibility is that they found some effective treatment.

Unfortunate that a bad investigator made a professor's life difficult. I liken it to a bad boss who can make one ultimately lose one's job for entirely unclear reasons.

Without any evidence that this is a systemic problem, I wonder why it would justify my attention.

I guess the operative detail is whether shelter-in-place will get us to a "23%" total infection rate vs 70%.

I wonder if that's accurate. I also wonder if this is recurring in the fall, and every year, and whether physical distancing will be mandatory every year?

How does this differ from a pigeonhole sort?

Meh, it's a hundred times better to let something be made in the next weeks out there that has 90% effectiveness than to disallow anything from being made because the testing process is too slow.

Maybe you're a bit oblivious to the problem, but the US has 160,000 ventilators and 372 million people. Even if only 1% need a ventilator we're over 3 million short.

Do the math buddy, before you get snarky.

I'm sorry but what does this title even mean?

Define "beat Covid-19."

Not to be a hardass, but I'd prefer real information not babyfood. Something akin to "Currently predicted US deaths without social distancing: X. With social distancing: Y. Potentially recurring each year"

Maybe a proposal is to loosen FDA requirements during emergencies, and allow these ventilators to be sold on the free market after minimal testing (and sold with the understanding that they are as-is).

Seeing how inefficient and slow our health-care system is, I think the free-market approach may actually be better here.

Is this just an ad for triplebyte?

I feel like this is implying this is a bad thing, which it absolutely is not. Am I the only one who hasn't stumbled onto any conspiracy theories whatsoever?

I've found the internet to be an invaluable source of outstanding information on this virus (dashboards of diagnoses, research on variants, journal articles on origin, updates about potential treatments) and have found most people to relatively reasonable (e.g. frustrated about lack of testing, but nothing resembling conspiracy theories). That said I focus on HN/reddit.

Well, if the government was matching a curve to it, on a public website that had updates daily, supported by professionals, then I think there would be less demand for random people to do it.

Maybe people won't like this question. Is there a point at which does "social distancing" do more economic damage than it does health good?

(Not saying we're there yet, just asking if such a point exists, and when.)

I wonder how this choice compares to using a hosted solution like Splunk (both in capabilities and cost).

The point is that even in the worst-case-scenario, if you bought stock the hour before the great depression, you'd still be way up when you retire in 30 years later.

The burden isn't on me to list every company that won't be affected by this. The burden is on the person making claim to provide evidence for their claim.

Linkbait.

Offers no evidence. I see no reason why the vast majority of software companies would be affected at all by this (Github, google, amazon, etc).

I especially foresee this being a huge benefit to biotech.