211–220 of 772 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stop it because it is incorrect or stop it because it is insensitive?
"Stop it because it's unimaginable that the UK government is intentionally trying to kill off it's old folks no matter how much money that may save the NHS, in no small part because that would be akin to a genocide for profit"
There are 10's of thousands of scientific research papers [1], by scientists, on COVID-19 already, and this guy is just some tech exec who knows how to play with a jupyter notebook. I see no reason to pay much attention to him.
[1] https://twitter.com/freereadorg/status/1236104420217286658
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average age of a fatal case is still north on 80 years. The UK plan is effectively to get as many people as possible that are young, and thus at a super low risk of needing hospitalization to get infected, so that they can recover and then be immune, thus making it hard for the virus to sweep through again. If 30% or more of the population were immune, it would be much harder to get a new outbreak started. With a…
What exactly is the risk of needing hospitalisation if you are young? Does anybody know?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
I like tomp's comment from a few days ago, feels like the UK playing a game theory https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22555643 1) no pandemic, no action -> government was "right", avoided wasting money -> reelected 2) no pandemic, action -> government was "wrong", wasted a lot of money, damaged the economy, inconvenienced the lives of the population -> voted out 3) pandemic, no action -> government was "wrong", cau…
Now, I think the following consequences need to be taken into account:
(1) politicians have very little skin in the game (given they have priority access to hospitals, security, flights, ...)
(2) the only skin in the game is next election, which in the UK won't happen for another 5 years, so literally who cares (a.k.a. this won't affect Johnson's decision-making)
(3) capacity - NHS in the case of the UK - of which we (the public) have very little information, and the government (Johnson) has a lot - he might think that if there's even less capacity than in Italy, it makes no sense to even try their strategy
(4) what other countries do - a disaster isn't really a disaster if it's no worse than other countries... and Italy is pretty bad already, so it makes some sense to do something else (can hardly be worse than Italy)... this is also why I think Trump won't fare that bad, as long as the US outcome is better than EU (which is might still be, it's a bigger country with literally more space for people to self-isolate, and banned flights with China a while ago - not sure if that'll have an effect at all but it might) he should be fine
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have some links with reliable reports of young people getting sick and other cases you told?
Singapore has had a handful of cases of children getting it. A six-month old caught it and took nearly three weeks to recover: https://co.vid19.sg/cases/singapore-case-28-6-month-old-male... A 5 year-old was in hospital for six days, but has been discharged today: https://co.vid19.sg/cases/singapore-case-160-5-year-old-male... A 17-year old evacuated from Wuhan tested positive, but never showed any symptoms during th…
To be honest, I don’t think this kind of conversation is worthwhile on HN. There are very few facts here, just opinions. I’m all for posting authoritative information, and interesting side-effects. But just shooting around opinions is best left for Twitter, Facebook, Reddit.
The dividing line for what's on topic on HN not fact vs. opinion, it's intellectual curiosity ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). That doesn't limit itself to authoritative information, by definition. Speculation is inevitable. The question is whether it's curious (thoughtful and fresh) or uncurious (reflexive and predictable).
The incubation period is something like 5-6 days on average, it'll probably take at least another day, likely more to get test results. So you're always at least a week behind when you're trying to examine the results of your actions, and the pandemic spreads at an exponential rate if no containment or mitigation measures are preventing it. If you get this kind of strategy wrong, at the point where you're noticing it you will have doomed your healthcare system and your population.
It is the nature of exponential spread that you will have to act before it is obvious, and that if you don't do that it'll be far too late once you notice that.
Their reasoning is that if the only things you can do are China-style lockdown or nothing, then the disease will just resume exponentially growing the second lockdown ends, so it's pointless to do it at all. While that may be technically right (under some optimistic, unverified assumptions, e.g. no reinfection), it's a false dichotomy. Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea aren't under lockdown, they're stopping the…
I like tomp's comment from a few days ago, feels like the UK playing a game theory https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22555643 1) no pandemic, no action -> government was "right", avoided wasting money -> reelected 2) no pandemic, action -> government was "wrong", wasted a lot of money, damaged the economy, inconvenienced the lives of the population -> voted out 3) pandemic, no action -> government was "wrong", cau…
Since there's already a pandemic, I'll assume when you're saying "pandemic" you mean more specifically "epidemic in the UK". Even then, there's some fallacy in your list. In the best case -- if action is taken and it contains the spread -- then there is no epidemic and it looks like overreaction. Even if it slows the spread allowing the health care system to keep up and keeps the fatality rate fairly low you'll get p…
One region of Italy is close to their ICU beds limit, despite a full lockdown. And they have more beds per person than the UK. Without a full lockdown, won't they run out of beds very quickly, thus increasing the death rate a lot?
The average age of a fatal case is still north on 80 years. The UK plan is effectively to get as many people as possible that are young, and thus at a super low risk of needing hospitalization to get infected, so that they can recover and then be immune, thus making it hard for the virus to sweep through again. If 30% or more of the population were immune, it would be much harder to get a new outbreak started. With a…