Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community • Hacker News Board

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#271

Post by beatgammit » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

js2 wrote: post #243

RivieraKid wrote: post #229

Please also read this, I believe it's the right approach: https://medium.com/@jb_89278/the-11-day-plan-to-contain-covi... The guy is tech enterpreneur and VC investor who has been advising our (Czech) PM.

It would be impossible to do this in the U.S. I'm not sure he appreciates the size of the U.S., the resistance among many Americans who don't like being told what to do, the denial by Fox et al, the distributed nature of our government and on and on. I can't even imagine it working in my county.

Yeah, there would be rioting pretty much immediately if anyone tried that here, and I'm sure the same would happen elsewhere.

I'm personally a fan of controlled, opt-in infections to help speed up research for a vaccine along with moderate quarantine (cancel many public events, encourage self quarantine). It may not be as effective, but it's much less likely to end in riots.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#272

Post by caseysoftware » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

fma wrote: post #265

caseysoftware wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The China travel ban went into effect 6 weeks ago. Italy, South Korea, and Japan followed not too long after. He was even called a dictator for that. Correction: South Korea & Japan were "do not travel" not specific travel bans.

Wait, I hope you are joking because you are spreading misinformation. Japan and Korea were NEVER banned. China was and Italy was just a few days ago. Japan: level 2 (exercise caution) https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/... Korea:level 3 (reconsider) https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...

My mistake. You are correct. They weren't travel bans but "don't go there" recommendations.

Regardless, they're still a response which refutes your original point.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#273

Post by terramex » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #259

troughway wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>6 days later, we're at over 6000 infections, the country is in total lock down. Similar anecdote here. My SO texted me earlier this week saying how she will be taking the train from Madrid to Barcelona to go back to her family. She figured it will be empty on Sunday at 6 am. I have been following the situation evolve in Italy and told her to get on the train right away and leave immediately before it gets worse. Luc…

Shame on her People should stay where they are. Lockdown is not a disaster. People fleeing lockdown are literally the carriers of this disaster. Stay where you are, wait. Don't travel. Don't fight the locdown. Lockdown is the current, appropriate course of action. A very effective lockdown can eliminate the infection in, well, however long it took to eliminate it in Wuhan. Fleeing the lockdown now is just going to an…

People should stay where they are. Lockdown is not a disaster. People fleeing lockdown are literally the carriers of this disaster.

There will be test of this thesis in Poland soon. As government closed down universities, some of them told students that they have to vacate their dormitories and go back home (dormitories are usually occupied by students from countryside and smaller cities), and it caused massive migration. It is already confirmed that students in my city were infected for two weeks, but is not known yet how widespread it was. To make situation worse, some dormitories are now being turned into quarantine hotels, so students are told to come back and take their belongings with them (initially they were told they can leave their stuff behind).

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#274

Post by malandrew » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

fma wrote: post #221

nullc wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an Italian, I raise my eyebrows every time China is mentioned as an example for the successful containment of this virus. It could do that because it could afford to take the economical hit and because it is an authoritarian state, You know what is MUCH more effective than an authoritarian response? An _earlier response_. An earlier response, even if it weaker, is much more potent than a stronger later response.…

Agreed. And where is Trump's response? We don't even have enough testing kits. We had 2 months to ramp things up.

Relying solely on the federal government for a response is a single point of failure. Regardless of who is in control of the FDA and CDC, neither agency should have had the ability to block testing. Not having a breakglass feature is downright stupid.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#275

Post by makomk » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

adinobro wrote: post #187

ksec wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you're missing that China initially suppressed info abt this virus Not only that, refuse to acknowledge, or share any information to international communities. The amount of things they do just to saves faces.

You mean like making the DNA public, posting statistics daily, sending doctors and resources to other countries to help train ... That kind of not sharing information?

Like pretending it was an unknown disease that showed no sign of person-to-person spread when they'd already sequenced its entire RNA and found cases of it spreading within the community. Like having to be pressured into revealing what little details they did. Like, as I recall, only admitting that it was spreading person-to-person when another country spotted this. That kind of not sharing information.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#276

Post by fattire » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

on_and_off wrote: post #151

delegate wrote: post #46

I've seen comments here trying to play down the message or discredit the signatories of this letter. Don't. Please take it seriously. This is not sensationalism. What the letter means is that if your country is not there yet, you might be DAYS away from widespread panic and total lock down. I'm writing this from Barcelona, Spain. This last Sunday, 6 days ago, I went on a walk with my girlfriend, had a nice lunch, too…

I fear that the situation is already at that state in the USA. There are 1600 confirmed cases but the lack of tests hides how many real infections there are.

Leaving aside the fact that here in the US tests are literally not happening on an epic scale that will be the subject of numerous investigations, hearings (, and prosecutions?) in the years to come. And forget that even if we had legit numbers, those numbers we can see are a tip of the iceberg, representing at most 20% of the actual more-serious cases.

Put that all aside.

Remember-- the numbers we see now are a look at the PAST. The infection incubates silently for a median 5 days. Then symptoms present. Then a week goes by with relatively mild illness. THEN shit gets real. THEN comes the hospital visit, the fight for a test, the time it takes for the test results to come back (if it happens). THEN the number gets added. Then you see it on wikipedia or the news.

These numbers we're seeing today are a time machine view backwards to recognize infections from 14 days ago. So infections spreading TODAY will show up AFTER the current Italy-like situation has already taken hold in the United States.

If it is possible, STAY HOME.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#277

Post by stan_rogers » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 2:18 AM UTC

warent wrote: post #270

joe_the_user wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame on her People should stay where they are. Lockdown is not a disaster. People fleeing lockdown are literally the carriers of this disaster. Stay where you are, wait. Don't travel. Don't fight the locdown. Lockdown is the current, appropriate course of action. A very effective lockdown can eliminate the infection in, well, however long it took to eliminate it in Wuhan. Fleeing the lockdown now is just going to an…

I didn't see them say anything about "fleeing a lockdown." She was fleeing a potentially life-threatening virus in a scary situation in order to be with her family. That isn't so hard to grok, and obviously she felt she was making the right decision. Shaming someone for looking for security and safety in a scary situation (i.e. for being human) is just absurd.

Shaming somebody for potentially spreading a disease, on the other hand, is precisely the sort of thing that needs to happen in a situation like this. Epidemics don't give a tinker's damn for anyone's feelings.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#278

Post by bluGill » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 2:18 AM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #41

cknoxrun wrote: post #10

My co-founder and I are really struggling with the decisions ahead of us. We feel we should act quickly, and enforce our team to work from home, but the spread in our city is quite low for now. We also wonder how long this can go on, are we going to be isolated for months? We are at a critical point where we have just closed our seed round this past week. We have both put so much energy and time into this moment and…

> the spread in our city is quite low for now If you’re in the United States, where testing has been infuriatingly limited, the fact of the matter is you have no idea what the spread in your community is. The numbers aren’t low because nobody has the virus, they’re low because nobody has been tested. If we did actual testing, they might come in low or they might come in high, who knows. As it stands, nobody has any r…

Actually we do know one number :the total number of people in ICU is normal for this time of year. There are a handful of confirmed cases (I'm not sure if they are in ICU), but the total number of cases is still low.

It is hindsight, but expontial grow means that despite not testing we didn't have a problem two months ago. Maybe we should have been in lock down a week ago, but anything sooner would be overreacting and not necessary. Most of the US is on lock down now which seems like about the right time to start. No more than a week sooner can be seriously argued.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#279

Post by terramex » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 2:18 AM UTC

gpderetta wrote: post #264

FiberBundle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the availability of testing kits is low and the ratio of infected to non infected people is extremely low, it makes absolutely no sense to sample randomly from the population.

Aldo if you expect the true positves to be a small percentage (which should still be the case in most countries), false positives will dominate in a ranom sampling. Apparently false positives are high for unsymptomatic cases. Of course if you can estimate the false positive rate well enough, the random sampling might still give useful statistics.

As far as I know lab performed PCR tests are assumed to have 0% false positives and about 29% false negatives. Antibodies tests have about 10% false-positive rate but to the best of my knowledge countries in Europe widely use PCR tests.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#280

Post by nojvek » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

caseysoftware wrote: post #242

fma wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can give China the benefit of the doubt that not everything was known. Or even blame them for suppressing info. But we (the world, US) knew the severity 2 months ago and Trump was still trying to downplay it. Fox News is still downplaying it. They called a "Democratic Hoax". I live in a conservative area and residents are cursing out local leaders for canceling events, canceling school...

I live in Austin where people are still lamenting SXSW being canceled and the Democrat Mayor was still encouraging people to go out to concerts after he canceled SXSW. And the tech press mocked "no handshakes" until less than a month ago. Stupid knows no political party.

The only way I see the mocking change is when they see their close ones being infected. We haven't seen anything like this (at-least in our lifetime) where the entire world was in semi-lockdown.

Sure our president is really downplaying it, but how do you even fight something that makes some people sick, and not others. There could be 1000s of carriers of COVID-19 who don't even know it.