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Ask HN: When do you expect life will get back to “normal”?

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Re: Ask HN: When do you expect life will get back to “normal”?

#61

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #58
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I hope its true. The curves have shown 'levelling off' before, only to return to geometric growth when testing increases. E.g. click on a country on the left, select 'logarithmic' on the lower right and see what you think: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

Sure, more time/data is needed to know for sure. If you factor in 1 week until symptoms, another 1-2 weeks until the worst part of the illness, then yes, the effect of lock down on death rates won't be seen until 2-3 weeks have passed. This is the UK 2.5 weeks ago: https://twitter.com/stereophonics/status/1238944498006274048

* Average time between infection and death from COVID-19 is 23 days. https://twitter.com/michaeljswalker/status/12454153391497052...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

So lockdown won't be reflected in death rates until _over_ 3 weeks have passed.

This is the UK, 3 weeks ago: https://twitter.com/stevethewall/status/1244249363427328003

Re: Ask HN: When do you expect life will get back to “normal”?

#63

Post by Brown11 »

rckoepke wrote: post #46

https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data This shows an "unexpected" inflection point starting March 28 which slowed the USA death growth from 2.7 day doubling to 3.4 days doubling. Even at that slower rate 900 million Americans would be dead by the end of May, so obviously there will be a major slowdown in deaths over the next 8 weeks. https://neherlab.org/covid19/ indicates maybe sometime between July and October th…

> 900 million Americans That's a lot of Americans!

Re: Ask HN: When do you expect life will get back to “normal”?

#64

Post by steve_adams_86 »

sali0 wrote: post #55
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #30

My fear is that economic impacts will end up so severe that we won't really see normal again as a result for a long, long time. I hope I'm being alarmist, but my gut tells me (and my brain) that my city is hemorrhaging cash and even with economic stimulus, jobs aren't going to come back as quickly as people think. A lot of local business owners who were doing alright (making money and paying several employees) are no…

I have this same fear. Small businesses suffer immensely while large corporations thrive. I think also based on the hiring thread last week on HN, tech companies are disproportionately unaffected.

It seems like it so far, but the impacts might just be delayed. I hope that's not the case, I don't want anyone to lose their livelihood.

Re: Ask HN: When do you expect life will get back to “normal”?

#66

Post by credit_guy »

dont__panic wrote: post #44
credit_guy wrote: post #25

I think as soon as serology tests become widely available and cheap, lots of people will get a "certificate of immunity" and be allowed/encouraged to return to work. My thinking is that in 3 months (i.e. around end of June), lots of people will be back to work. In the US in particular, public schools get money from the federal government conditional on administering state tests. It doesn't look like the stimulus bill…

This does largely depend on state. See that NYS has cancelled state exams, and is weighing the options on the graduation-requirement Regents exams: https://chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2020/03/20/its-official-new-y... Meanwhile, NYC's mayor has suggested that it's unlikely for schools to resume this school year at all: https://www.silive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/mayor-nyc-schools... Definitely depends on your region, though…

You are correct. I didn't know that, and now I found the actual statement from the NY DOE

http://www.nysed.gov/news/2020/statement-board-regents-chanc...

As for serology tests, I may be jumping the gun, but only a bit. My employer started paying for coronavirus home test kits in the UK, with the aim of having people come back to work if they show the antibodies. They don't have anything similar in the US simply because there's no FDA approved similar kit. But this will probably change soon.

Re: Ask HN: When do you expect life will get back to “normal”?

#67

Post by JoeAltmaier »

dont__panic wrote: post #47
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #29

Folks are estimating many weeks, even months. But consider: the doubling time is around 4-5 days. We'll hit 1M worldwide maybe Friday. 40 days after that, we'll hit 1B people. That's about the estimated total that typically get infected by a pandemic. Peak infection. Two or three weeks after that, everybody will be through it. No problem; scars and health issues; death; whatever, it'll be over. So 60 days to do anyth…

Without mitigation, sure. But of course the deaths, overwhelmed hospitals, etc. would be horrific. Instead, we're trying to "flatten the curve" in most countries. This means we're directly trying to lower the doubling time, which means that we won't develop herd immunity the same way. Lots of pockets of never-infecteds will exist where COVID can crop up again. I'd also caution estimating based on current "confirmed c…

Flattening surely is not going to work if everybody eventually get sick from this. We'd need 3M beds for a month each patient. Divide that by the number we have, it'd take 20 years of 'flattening' to make that work.

No, the reason to try and delay is only to give time for vaccines, better processes and treatments. That's the only path forward.

And it isn't happening fast enough. So there will be some suffering.

Re: Ask HN: When do you expect life will get back to “normal”?

#68

Post by seattle_spring »

hither2 wrote: post #23
maest wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the neo-liberal/neo-marxist agenda? Also, the state of quarantine is happening at a global level, not just the US.

I'm not in the U.S. And I'm not interested in starting a flame-war. By all means, research these ideologies yourself. I was answering the poster's question with my opinion. You do not have to like it.

Ah, the tried and true method of bringing up an extremely controversial opinion and then gaslighting people who respond into thinking they're the ones starting a flame war.

Re: Ask HN: When do you expect life will get back to “normal”?

#69

Post by Tepix »

thu2111 wrote: post #59
Tepix wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly an over-reaction with 100.000 expected deaths. Of course earlier actions might have prevented this tragedy.

No, that's still an open question. We won't really know until much more analysis is done, but there's a ton of reasons to suspect an over-reaction now. See some of the daily update links here: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ The basic problem is confused data e.g. 100,000 deaths expected from what? Given how often COVID-19 seems to give people a little push over an edge they were very close to anyway, i…

If you disregard people dying from COVID-19 because they would have died anyway within a few years, then you may come to that conclusion.

I don't consider it ethical to do that. Quite the contrary.

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