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Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

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Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#501

Post by [deleted] »

tomp wrote: post #252
ISL wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WFH. Do it now. Individual actions have outsized impact in the face of exponential growth. The problem is twice as hard every time the number of cases doubles. If you don't want to work from home for many months, start working from home now. Working from home isn't as bad as it seems. Modern collaboration tools are great. Our research group and wider laboratory have gotten into the swing of things within a week.

> Individual actions have outsized impact in the face of exponential growth. Are you sure? I think it's the other way around. Nothing I can do (apart from staying completely indoors, which I can't because I don't have enough supplies (food, etc.) to last for months) can prevent me from being infected (eventually). Luckily I'm in the low-risk group (young); I advised my parents the latter (hopefully they're following…

[deleted]

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#502

Post by bcrosby95 »

nodamage wrote: post #437
nullc wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids. :) Now scale this up to the whole country and account for the fact that HN is probably a little better on average about reasoning about these things. But now, on HN now we're mostly preaching to the choir... I've been contacting the officials of my state and surrounding communities since February 2…

> 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.

Yes, I've had some neighbors ask me why I didn't tell them that we had been preparing for this to potentially happen when we started about 3 weeks. I told them "because you would have thought we were crazy if I told you to do it 3 weeks ago".

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#503

Post by StephanTLavavej »

mirimir wrote: post #485
nine_k wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and see it as merely linear. That's the problem. Exponential growth is like dynamite. It's absurdly fast, compared to anything people see in daily lives.

Dropping stuff and falling are good examples. If you're paying attention, anyway. I can still grab stuff that's fallen maybe 10-20 cm, but by 50-100 cm it's moving way too fast.

And that's only quadratic growth, not exponential.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#504

Post by sjy »

iagovar wrote: post #488
hatenberg wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may explain but certainly not excuse. We submit our individual freedoms to governments we vote for to be able to act better than our ingrained short term reflexes. Best and brightest and all. It's also not necessarily an indictment of democracy- Taiwan clearly has been on the ball here. But it is absolutely an indictment of our current state of affairs in many western countries.

Spanish lead epidemiologist was telling us a few weeks ago that nothing was going to happen here. I did my numbers back in December. In January was already pretty worried, but I'm not an expert I thought. Maybe there's something I'm not taking in account. So I kept reading about models and stats. Not that difficult. Ran my numbers again and again, yep it seemed pretty bad no matter what I cheated myself with paramete…

What “numbers” were you doing back in December? The virus had not spread outside of Wuhan, or been named or sequenced, by that point.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#505

Post by jdnenej »

tuna-piano wrote: post #44
lbeltrame wrote: post #36

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, which means you can get almost everyone to obey, in one way or another. Also, the Chinese Party is what caused this mess to begin with, by allowing this virus to spread all around the w…

Just like China, there was a time when Italy had 1 case, then 2 cases, then 4, etc. Italy was unable to stop the spread before reaching a huge level and spreading to other countries. Why blame China for "allowing this virus to spread all around the world" when Italy allowed the same? (Italy even had a warning that it was coming!)

The difference is china could have contained it with minimal disruption. The only option italy had was to shut down all borders for the next 6 months.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#506

Post by adrianN »

riquito wrote: post #268
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…

There's no "luckily". It's the exact behaviour that spread the virus all over Italy. If you love your family and you have some sense of responsibility your duty is to stay where you are for a while. You can embrace your family in the near future.

"For a while" is likely until we have a vaccine and produced enough of it to build up herd immunity. That probably takes a year or more.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#507

Post by sjy »

nine_k wrote: post #444
submaroon wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Human beings do not intuitively understand exponential growth. This layman has read that we intuitively think of numbers logarithmically, which makes him wonder if we human beings do, in fact, intuitively understand exponential growth. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-natural-log/

...and see it as merely linear. That's the problem. Exponential growth is like dynamite. It's absurdly fast, compared to anything people see in daily lives.

Population and GDP also grow exponentially, but we’ve been watching those numbers go up for decades. Most things that grow do so exponentially. Growth always comes to an end, but that often happens well before the rate of change becomes “absurdly fast.“

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#508

Post by [deleted] »

tomp wrote: post #249
bsaul wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wish more countries did randomized testing over its whole population, or extensive testing, like SK.

Why even test? The decision procedure is the same: treat the ill, lock down everyone else at home, avoiding social contact at the max; enforce social isolation and/or masks in "critical" spaces (power plants, grocery stores, ...). What does a positive or negative test change?

[deleted]

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#509

Post by adrianN »

lbeltrame wrote: post #124
jennyyang wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drugs are not a solution in the next 2-3 months. There's no way a drug can be tested and ensure safe and scaled up to the tens/hundreds of millions of doses you would need. It's impossible so don't even bother considering it. Quarantining is the only thing that will help in this situation. There's no other solution we have as a society to slow down the pace of infections. People who normally wouldn't die will die bec…

> Quarantining is the only thing that will help in this situation. The question is, for how long? Until the infection curve goes down? Until there is not a single infected cases in the whole country? While you can't know when this will happen (especially the former, most models are inaccurate because too little is still known about this virus), I don't believe it is sustainable to keep an extended lockdown on a whole…

Until we have a vaccine or enough people have been infected to build up natural herd immunity. At least a year is my guess.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#510

Post by sjy »

chongli wrote: post #480
thedance wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jo…

Show someone an animation of the lily pads doubling every day and ask the same question and you’ll realise that they understand exponential growth intuitively, they’re just not good at word problems.
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