Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 159 posts

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#81

Post by gdubs »

hinkley wrote: post #45

When is it time to start freaking out? I have a friend who may be starting to unhinge a little bit. Whereas I have some sort of stoic “this is completely out of my control and will happen or it won’t” response that is probably not that much more rational.

It’s never time to freak out. That leads to poor decisions. It is time to take this seriously. Beyond personal hygiene, plan on how you’ll deal with school closures if you’re a parent (and ensure your school has a remote study curriculum in place.) Consider if you get it, it could be fairly benign — so you want to think about your role in reducing the spread to more vulnerable populations. WFH if possible.

Preparedness begins in the household, to the community, to the state. We should all do what we can to spread the impact of this and prevent a strain on resources.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#82

Post by hbosch »

cheeze wrote: post #2

Amazon recently announced that all non essential work travel is cancelled. Friend who works there said they are taking it very seriously - any "essential" travel must be approved from the highest levels. They also announced that interviews will be conducted via VC going forward during the outbreak. I wonder if they 'shut down' campus and encourage everybody to work from home after this, self quarantine kind of thing.…

I heard this, too, and I wonder if any companies will extend this travel ban to local transit. I work in Seattle, and I ride a ferry and a bus to get to the office. The Seattle ferry, especially at rush hour is a crowded and not-incredibly-santiary experience, as are the city busses. How long before MSFT/GOOG/AMZN/etc. are asking people not to ride the ferries? Or busses?

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#83

Post by akvadrako »

daenz wrote: post #70

Personally, I believe most people should just accept that they are going to get COVID-19. It's going to get spread around, and it's not containable. You're likely going to get it. That's the bad news, but the good news is that we have immune systems and we know how to take care of each other and ourselves. Yes it's going to kill some people, no it is highly probably not going to kill you. People will be sick and goin…

There are 86k confirmed cases globally. That’s 0.001%

Why would you think most people will get it?

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#84

Post by conradev »

dkarl wrote: post #66
jp57 wrote: post #36

Is it possible that the virus has been circulating in the states since Christmas or earlier? I live in the states, though not in Seattle. My wife's best friend teaches ESL at a major university. She has several Chinese students in her class who went home over the semester break in December and January. In mid-to-late January, the teacher, her husband, my wife, and I all came down with the "flu" in swift succession, w…

Considering how contagious it seems to be, I think if it had been circulating in the U.S. for months under the guise of flu, there would have been a mysterious number of deaths of young, healthy people from flu that would have been recognized in hindsight as Covid-19.

Mortality in people under 40 for Covid-19 is only 0.2% according to the CCDC study:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

We’d be seeing a number of deaths in older people who would have otherwise been fine

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#85

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

daenz wrote: post #70

Personally, I believe most people should just accept that they are going to get COVID-19. It's going to get spread around, and it's not containable. You're likely going to get it. That's the bad news, but the good news is that we have immune systems and we know how to take care of each other and ourselves. Yes it's going to kill some people, no it is highly probably not going to kill you. People will be sick and goin…

This misses all the secondary effects an uncontained global pandemic would have, which would be wide-ranging. A sudden and prolonged 10% drop in global productivity could be a nightmare scenario.

Having said that, I'm not panicking either, and I think it's still too early to assume it's going to be fully uncontained -- hell, once the weather starts warming it could all change dramatically. (But then again, I have the advantage of living in a first-world developed nation with strong health care; the massive numbers of people living in 2nd- and 3rd-world countries have a lot more reason to be concerned I think.) But the concerns here go well beyond the simple individual experience of contracting the illness.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#86

Post by [deleted] »

erentz wrote: post #42
jcoffland wrote: post #34

One person has died in the US. It's not time to panic. I expected more logical comments here.

The concern is people have not been taking this seriously for the past two months. This has resulted in the US being on the back foot and only acting in a reactive manner. The CDC has fallen flat on its face and now state public health departments need to try to pick up the slack. I hope they do. Other countries are already trying to slow down spread via cancellation of events and closures of schools. The same needs…

[deleted]

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#87

Post by Medicalidiot »

ramblerman wrote: post #28
Medicalidiot wrote: post #12

I'm not going to stop saying this. This looks very dangerous and we should take very precaution possible to slow transmission. All nonessential travel should be avoided, don't touch your face, wash your hands. Slowing this virus down makes everything so much better. [1] Estimate that the case to fatality ratio is between 5-8%. The transmission rate is between 2 and 3. Both of these numbers are similar to the earlier…

> This looks very dangerous, fatality ratio is between 5-8%. We're better than this at HN. There are stats on the mortality rates, and given you are younger than 50 there is a less than 0.4% mortality rate. Furthermore, recent autopsies have shown this is a virus that hits the lungs more than anything else. China with it's incredible pollution, might have skewed mortality rates that are higher than we may expect in E…

Oh so we don't care about anyone over the age of 50 now? Almost no one reading this thread is going to be in the patient populations that are going to die. I'm here to say this is going to kill the people you love, who are elderly. Also, smoking looks like it exacerbates the problems but the worst factor is age and immunosuppression; 1-2% of the US is immunosuppressed at any time.

I'm advocating that you take precautions by not touching your face, washing your hands, and avoiding public places. Stocking up on food so you can avoid the grocery store later is a great idea. Avoiding people when you don't feel well and self quarantining are also great ideas.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#88

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

kjlhiou534 wrote: post #17
burlesona wrote: post #3

First posted this on another article before seeing this one. Not much information in this article, but given they only just reported new cases that makes me wonder if this person didn’t come to a hospital until they were in severe condition - probably because they had no idea it was coronavirus and were thinking “it’s the flu, it’ll pass.” If so it likely means many more cases in the community than we currently know…

Surely there are a number of people with severe pneumonia all over the US right now. Maybe they just started testing them for coronavirus.

That's correct - until very recently, severe pneumonia with no known link to coronavirus cases didn't meet the testing criteria.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#89

Post by vidanay »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #15
BooneJS wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this “temporary alteration” will impact the way business is conducted long-term. Instead of choosing between conference calls or flights, choose VC.

As someone who doesn't have to do business travel very often, I enjoy the trips to go meet with long-lost colleagues. But at the same time, it's pretty clear at least to me that most of these things are a waste of company money and don't really move the ball forward much compared to typical electronic collaboration. Selfishly, I'd be sad if business travel suffered a large permanent reduction. But it would be better…

I just got done planning a 20 person meeting in Germany for July. It will cost almost $5k USD per participant for travel, lodging, and food.

We were only half joking when we said the company could FedEx us each a top of the line video conference setup, and then throw it in the trash afterwards, and it would still be cheaper.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#90

Post by CamperBob2 »

vincnetas wrote: post #52
ramblerman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This looks very dangerous, fatality ratio is between 5-8%. We're better than this at HN. There are stats on the mortality rates, and given you are younger than 50 there is a less than 0.4% mortality rate. Furthermore, recent autopsies have shown this is a virus that hits the lungs more than anything else. China with it's incredible pollution, might have skewed mortality rates that are higher than we may expect in E…

0.4% is number of deaths / number of cases. Problem is that not all cases have recovered and there will be more deaths among them. But yes, main takeaways, don't panic, slow down spread as much as possible (aka wash your hands)

The fact that only a few deaths occurred on the cruise ship is pretty reassuring. Practically everyone on board would have been older and thus more at risk, yet there were only four deaths out of 600+ cases, IIRC.
Post reply on HN