Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars • Hacker News Board

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#511

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

reedx8 wrote: post #111

Taek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid19 is closer to SARS than the flu, and is known to cause permanent lung, kidney, and testicle damage, even in young and healthy patients. Even among young patients, the ICU rate is as high as 10%. A low mortality rate for young people assumes access to an ICU. All of New York State only has about 600 unoccupied ICU beds. If the number of infections in New York breaches 6,000, the fatality rate among young people…

Those are some important facts, thanks for sharing. I’d like to see the probability of healthy people getting permanent damage however. That would change my mind. Until then the extremely low fatality and infection rate for average people, as well as the incubation period being so long that it’s unrealistic to contain it, is enough for me not to worry about it.

> low fatality and infection rate for average people

Could you say how're defining "average" because right now it just sounds like "me". There's a lot of people who are non-average and have the very same right to live as the average.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#512

Post by djsumdog » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #444

acangiano wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, 2% is very dubious. Italy is at 7%. The Philippines at 8%. I mean, sure these figures are out of people who were tested, but 2% is looking awfully optimistic at this point. So the potential for death reduction is even greater than the intentionally unassailable 1% figure you picked.

In terms of fatality, the Diamond Princess cruise ship [1] has the helpful property that everyone on board was tested. Nobody recovering/asymptomatic not getting tested, nobody being refused a test. The wikipedia page lists 700 infections and 7 deaths. Of course there are still certain biases: on one hand it happened early, when hospitals weren't overloaded; on the other, cruise ships tend to have more older people.…

..and they were trapped on that ship for days. Amesh Adalja (infectious disease MD at John Hopkins) has been in a few interviews where he commented, SARS-Cov2 is similar to other viruses where the initial dosage does impact the severity of the infection.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#513

Post by djsumdog » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

easytiger wrote: post #380

marvin wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But South Korea is still at 0.6%, and they've tested everyone and their dog, and provided top care to everyone.

This is incorrect. As of the weekend gone past South Korea had tested 248,000 people out of a population of 50,000,000, with 8,086 +ve cases and 72 deaths. There is a lot of memetic nonsense flying around about this online and this is part of it

248k out of 50M is still a very impressive sample size; especially compared to most scientific papers coming out these days.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#514

Post by MaybiusStrip » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #490

ChrisClark wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are ignorant of the virus, why talk about it like this? 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50, and it causes permanent damage to your lungs and organs. If you don't take paranoid drastic measures, many millions will die. If you do take paranoid drastic measures, lives will be saved, and then everyone will call you crazy for taking those measures because it ended up not that bad. Just like people think Y2K wa…

> 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50 And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days? When the mortality rate is 0.2% for people I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.

>And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days?

This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance.

> I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.

Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why?

1. You have a hypothesis that taking less drastic measures would result in a manageable death rates and less impact on the economy. However, Wuhan and Italy tried to deal with the virus through these less drastic measures (telling the elderly to self-quarantine, asking the population to social-distance), and the results were disastrous. Does that not invalidate your hypothesis?

2. Even if you're right, and there was a good chance we could avoid the worst of the epidemic, we know for a fact that the worst case scenario is that in the US, 21 million people will require hospitalization, and 1.7 million people will die. Saying that it's worth taking a risk on less drastic measures is the equivalent of saying it's OK to play Russian roulette because the odds are actually really good: it totally ignores the tremendously high cost of the worst case scenario.

I have found that risk-analysts like Taleb have the most convincing arguments for why all these extreme measures are called for. Check out his twitter: https://twitter.com/nntaleb

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#515

Post by amiga_500 » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #201

amiga_500 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suspend rent payments

Landlords don't have expenses?

Let them go bankrupt or have the banks suspend mortgages.

Not having a homeless crisis is far more important than protecting rentiers. Just throw them under the bus.

They are not actually doing anything anyhow.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#516

Post by mardifoufs » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

graeme wrote: post #212

mardifoufs wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but it could normalize doing all of that in the future. Giving up rights once usually make these rights less untouchable in the future which doesn't have to mean that the current measures will be permanent.

Counterpoint: the west has had quarantine measures in its traditions for centuries, while developing the individual rights approach. We haven’t had to use them much in living memory, but they were not permanent in the past. Quarantine has been a necessary fact of human life for centuries. We just lived in a blessed time.

You're right and I don't necessarily agree with the original comment but governments have a much bigger place our lives today than in the past. They also have a much better ability to actually permenantly enforce those new restrictions.

The patriot act and all the measures taken because of 9/11 are still here simply since it is now so easy to keep them active which wasn't true in the past at all. Not because they are needed. The same could happen in the future!

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#517

Post by lsllc » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #164

lsllc wrote: post #25

Gov. Baker has done the same today in Massachusetts. A one month ban on on-site service starting Tuesday. Any food establishment will be allowed to do delivery or take out even if they didn't previously have a license for it. https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2020/03/15/charlie-ba... EDIT: It's until April 5th, so 3 weeks not a month: https://whdh.com/news/all-mass-restaurants-and-bars-ordered-...

A license needed for delivery/takeout? How is that justified?

In Massachusetts, everything is either illegal, or requires a license.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#518

Post by umvi » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

MaybiusStrip wrote: post #514

umvi wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50 And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days? When the mortality rate is 0.2% for people I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.

>And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days? This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance. > I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction. Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why? 1. You have a hy…

> This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance.

No, it's not "easily available". There's data flying around everywhere from different countries as this situation rapidly evolves and you can torture it to tell any story you want. If the data is so easily available, couldn't you have at least linked your source?

> Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why?

The "experts" in this case have never dealt with a global pandemic of this scale before. So they are inexperienced experts giving it their best guess based on what they know about disease transmission and math. But they clearly did not factor in the effects of shutting down the global economy for 3-6 months in their quest to optimize for a single variable. I'm sure we'll have a lot of "lessons learned" after this is all over and the experts will be much more experienced the next time around...

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#519

Post by umvi » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #500

ChrisClark wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are ignorant of the virus, why talk about it like this? 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50, and it causes permanent damage to your lungs and organs. If you don't take paranoid drastic measures, many millions will die. If you do take paranoid drastic measures, lives will be saved, and then everyone will call you crazy for taking those measures because it ended up not that bad. Just like people think Y2K wa…

> and it causes permanent damage to your lungs and organs. It's too early to know this for sure. I know personally, it took over two months for my lungs to recovery from pneumonia when I was younger. People are claiming this, but we won't know for a full year of this damage is non-recoverable. But to your other point, yes a number of experts have said the really scary thing is the number of people in their 40s, who w…

> Also, since when was "just a flu" okay? The flu is really fucking bad.

Bad enough to merit shutting down nations, bankrupting companies, and causing a global recession?

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#520

Post by irq-1 » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

altoidaltoid wrote: post #508

michaelt wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of fatality, the Diamond Princess cruise ship [1] has the helpful property that everyone on board was tested. Nobody recovering/asymptomatic not getting tested, nobody being refused a test. The wikipedia page lists 700 infections and 7 deaths. Of course there are still certain biases: on one hand it happened early, when hospitals weren't overloaded; on the other, cruise ships tend to have more older people.…

WHO Sitreps have the aggregated data. https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

From: Situation report - 55, 15 March 2020

3.5% mortality worldwide (there are totals at the end of country listings)