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Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

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Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#111

Post by secondraft »

nexuist wrote: post #16
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.

Hopefully it encourages innovation in the space. 17 years after Skype came out we'd still all rather prefer to be in the same physical room than a laggy, compressed, low quality virtual call.

To be fair, video quality is usually great in developed regions where ISP's do not intentionally slow down internet speed via bandwidth throttling.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#112

Post by dang »

Medicalidiot wrote: post #87
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…

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 precaut…

HN has plenty of readers over 50. Age diversity, from high school students to people who post about their programming jobs in the 1960s, is one of the best things about HN.

I get that you feel strongly about coronavirus and are trying to be helpful, but these comments are starting to become repetitive, so if you'd pull back a bit, we'd be grateful. Repetition is the enemy of curiosity, which this site exists for.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#113

Post by rolph »

tshaddox wrote: post #60
throwaway3157 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, I've been told by medical professionals that there are hundred(s) of strains but the flu shot only covers the handful of strains they expect to be prevalent for that flu season. I have been wondering how they come up with that prediction though...

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/vaccine-selection.htm Seems pretty straightforward. They look at which strains people have been testing positive for and how successful the previous vaccines were.

the challenge with influenza vaccines is that the virus can shift character faster than a vaccine can be produced so its a crap shoot of sorts for a good match.

This is why we need to perfect much more expedient vaccine production technology other than the attenuated virus method

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#114

Post by dang »

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…

> given you are younger than 50 there is a less than 0.4% mortality rate

Please let's stop making assumptions about who is over/under 50 and implications about how un/important their lives are. This has come up too often already, and it's leading to flamewars.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#115

Post by pmoriarty »

conradev wrote: post #84
dkarl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The mortality estimates we have now are mostly based on numbers coming out of China, which are just not reliable.

We should have better estimates in a couple of months, once more numbers come out of countries outside of China.

Also, mortality rates are impacted not just by the disease itself but things such as how overwhelmed the health care system is, what measures are used to treat the disease, how many people actually get treated, population-specific or location-specific factors, etc.

All of these factors could vary widely from place to place and cause different mortality rates, even if the virus infecting everyone is the same.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#116

Post by pbourke »

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 steps that can be taken now at the community and country level that will drastically lessen the impact of the virus. That is to heavily promote social distancing.

Social distancing will flatten the epidemic curve, which means that hospitals will be less likely to be overwhelmed. It will cause economic pain so it will be anything but easy. Mitigating that economic pain would be an absolutely good use of government stimulus.

So let’s say there is no political will to be proactive with social distancing. Then we enter reactive mode - schools And offices close when a cluster is detected. Perhaps a larger scale quarantine must be enacted by the government (aka martial law). The economic pain is worse, and the end result is more deaths and an overwhelmed hospital system. Plus Wuhan style images of hospitals in major Anerican cities flooding the media.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#117

Post by MiroF »

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…

[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 SARS outbreak in the early 2000s.

That's 2-3 times higher than most estimates that I've seen.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#118

Post by nyolfen »

hnarn wrote: post #108

If you are under 60 years old, the lethality of Covid19 is only 2-3x that of the regular flu. Why are people spreading these types of news and commenting on them like it's the end of days? We may yet see a severe pandemic in our time but I don't see anything indicating this would be it, especially not since lethality goes down with spread. The biggest concern so far people should have regarding this virus is what it'…

many people have beloved family members who are older than 60. even if you are young, the symptomatic infection can be very severe and disabling for a week or two. it's also extremely contagious.

> especially not since lethality goes down with spread

there is no guarantee of this

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#119

Post by pbourke »

akvadrako wrote: post #83
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?

“The train appears to be over a mile away from where I’m standing. Why would you think it would hit me?”

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#120

Post by pmoriarty »

runarberg wrote: post #37
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have to ask—since you admit to causing environmental harm with your admittedly unessisary travels—how do you morally accept the damage your selfish actions are causing? I’m genially asking, and not trying to be judgmental.

Generally speaking, people almost always find some way to justify their actions to themselves, if they even think about what they do in ethical terms at all.

They justify it by convincing themselves their actions are necessary to feed their families, or they think what they do isn't as bad as what someone else does, or everyone else is doing it, or they'll compromise for now but do better later, or they just don't care about most others and are looking out for themselves, their friends and family.

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