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

Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

left.it

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 740 posts

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#471

Post by dboreham »

pettycashstash2 wrote: post #448
newtoday wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the US, no one cared about this until a few days ago. Now, some stores are getting low on food supplies, and people are posting about it. But, I was at a store today where they were completely stocked, and the only empty shelf was the toilet paper supply! It's insane.

What? I’m in New England tri state and started preparing 28 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22339369

Parent presumably means no regular people. I had a similar experience: a month ago I suddenly realized we may need to be isolated at home for up to 2 months. I live in a place where that's actually fairly practical. Except our generator was broken. So I left work, drove to town immediately with the idea that I might be able to get the last generator as they sold out given that everyone else surely would be also buying a generator. Then over the next month I watched as Costco stacked a huge pile of generators near the entrance, eventually hand sanitizer sold out, flu medication, Isopropyl alcohol, and finally TP. I think you can still get a generator though.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#472

Post by solidasparagus »

fattire wrote: post #408
solidasparagus wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you'd be so absolute if this meant your job ceasing to exist.

Yes, it's a risk vs. benefit calculation where the risk is very very high. And not only risk to yourself but risk to others...

The risks of large portions of the economy shutting down and millions of people losing their jobs is also very significant, particularly in a country where so many live so close to the edge of disaster. It's a difficult balance, but it feels like the economic fallout is sometimes lost on the readers of HN, most of who would quite comfortably live through a period of complete lockdown.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#473

Post by spectramax »

coliveira wrote: post #198
zozbot234 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The very end of December" was 20+ days prior to the Wuhan lockdown, which was was essentially the only instance where China officially acknowledged the disease - before then, the local government was having police caution their doctors and scientists not to talk or "spread untrue rumors" about it. In the meantime, people in Wuhan and elsewhere were just hanging out as usual with no social distancing behaviors whatso…

People are very quick to blame Chinese officials, but I think they were correct in avoiding panic before knowing for sure the true dimensions of the problem they had at hand. The government has its credibility at stake: if you start using harsh measures without evidence, you lose credibility for the next time it is really needed.

"You lose credibility for the next time it is really needed" when I hear the government harrass NBA officials, gamers, non-citizens of the world when they criticize the CCP, going around banning movies and books left and right, never mind the extraordinary surveillance state it has built for its own citizens. I feel like the CCP has already lost its credibility when it can't have a spine and a composure, constantly feeling insecure against anyone who criticizes them.

Fuck the CCP.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#474

Post by nullc »

joe_the_user wrote: post #454
nodamage wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids. Exactly. Two weeks ago every coronavirus thread on Hacker News was full of deniers claiming this was no worse than the flu and this was all just media hysteria. Some probably still hold that opinion. I don't think they will be convinced until the hospitals start overflowing.

Yeah, When Coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, I tended to the opinion that it would self-limiting in one fashion or another or that is would not be worse than the flu. Only people arguing with me and me investigating the facts changed that. And, yeah, changing your opinion is hard and imagining a force that will upend the world is hard so it's easy to imagine how people stay in their positions. That said, we have a repre…

As disappointed as I am with much of the response in the US, it could still be a lot worse.

The potential for this kind of pandemic is something that the government was aware of and at least somewhat prepared for. It can be hard to imagine, but if all we had were the concerns of joe-everyman this would have caught us significantly more off-guard than it has.

Where I think we've faltered is in rapidly the hard decisions to trade-off short term economic impact vs long term health and economic impact. But there is still time to do a lot of good, and the level of our response seems to now-- finally-- be increasing exponentially along with the infection.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#475

Post by loeg »

nostromo wrote: post #99
VectorLock wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not anywhere near the point where the panic of this virus is worse than the potential outcome of the virus. If anything there is not ENOUGH strong movement being made.

Yes, we need more panic. Maximum panic please! For a disease that has a 0.5% fatality rate, and the medium death age is over the average life expectancy of one's country. And most scientists believe we can't stop it anyway. Yes, let's burn down the modern world and suspend all civil rights for this.

The fatality rate is only as low as 0.5-0.9% in countries that aggressively locked down, quarantined, and built temporary medical facilities in order to flatten the curve so health care facilities could keep up with urgent cases.

In places where no aggressive action is taken, fatality rates are much, much higher (3-5%) — because otherwise treatable cases can not be treated, and the marginally more ill die for lack of treatment.

The difference between 0.9% and 3% of the US population (per Census.gov ~329 million estimate) is 6.9 million people.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#476

Post by toss1 »

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…

In discussing similar issues around this crisis, I noticed that "Things that seem extreme today will, in just a few days, seem obvious, under-done, and late."

Thinking of the cancelation of the NBA season an how Mark Cuban's response was thar it seemed "crazy" and "surreal". Now, it seems obvious and late.

Don't wait - tell everyone now to work from home, prep like mad, and isolate hard.

The damage will be far less than anyone getting it. You'll also get down that critical learning curve far faster.

Congratulations, Good luck, stay well.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#477

Post by Animats »

dfox wrote: post #251
Animats wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the most useful graph on this subject so far. Go look at it now. Most countries have exactly the same growth trajectory measured from 100 cases. That's solid data about how this behaves. Singapore and Hong Kong have been able to slow things down by strong measures, but it's still a straight line on a log graph, just with 1/3 of the growth rate. Italy is on the same line, just 8 days ahead of Europe and 13 day…

I have one issue with or maybe just question about this graph. Why it starts with 100 detected cases? It seems like arbitrary round number, but it also seems to be the smallest arbitrary-looking number that makes SK overlap other countries. Why is that? Why is the initial slow spread in SK irrelevant? What caused it to be initially slower than in other countries?

It's somewhat arbitrary, but you can't start from "patient zero" because that's not usually known. And the detailed circumstances of the first few patients matter. By 100 or so, the disease is in the population and starts to behave statistically. That's what's called "community spread".

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#478

Post by [deleted] »

makomk wrote: post #275
adinobro wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#479

Post by Animats »

contravariant wrote: post #345
dfox wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one issue with or maybe just question about this graph. Why it starts with 100 detected cases? It seems like arbitrary round number, but it also seems to be the smallest arbitrary-looking number that makes SK overlap other countries. Why is that? Why is the initial slow spread in SK irrelevant? What caused it to be initially slower than in other countries?

This doesn't really matter, you're just doing that to make it easier to compare. Shifting South Korea so it doesn't overlap the other countries is possible but not terribly useful. They do seem to be missing Denmark though, which should stick out somewhere top-left of Norway.

They do seem to be missing Denmark though, which should stick out somewhere top-left of Norway.

I was just talking, via text, to a friend in Norway. They're going for major restrictions on contact and the people there are not worried enough yet. I sent her that graph.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#480

Post by chongli »

thedance wrote: post #417
chongli wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to test this is to ask random people the question: "The number of lily pads on a pond double every day. If it takes 20 days for the lily pads to completely cover the pond, how long does it take to cover half the pond?" I think you will be surprised by how many people say "10 days."

This is because most people are unable to suppress their reflexive response to being asked what's half of 20, not because people don't understand exponentiation.

My point was not about whether people are incapable of understanding exponentials, it was about whether they understand them intuitively. You used the term “reflexive response” but what we’re both describing is intuitive or automatic thinking.

Why is it relevant that people don’t correctly apply exponential reasoning automatically? Because when people encounter information in everyday life (outside of the specific job they’ve been trained to do) they tend to use intuitive thinking predominantly. This matters a hell of a lot when it comes to making political decisions of a technical nature, such as infectious disease planning and response. Lo and behold, this is the exact problem the Italians are trying to warn everyone about!

Post reply on HN