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

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#521

Post by sershe » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

throwanem wrote: post #471

sershe wrote: post #463

This may get downvoted, but I think the following judgement-free statement is true: this is starting to look scary/serious /solely/ because of the measures the governments are taking, and the media circus around it. Otherwise (while it would have almost certainly "started to look serious" eventually, probably for a short time), at this point, you would not have even noticed given the actual numbers.

Your suggestion here and elsewhere has been that it would be ultimately less harmful overall to let the disease run unchecked, even if it kills millions in a few weeks that way, than to attempt to control it in the ways our various levels of government are doing. I have yet to see you substantiate that claim in any way.

First of all, I made this suggestion in the other comment and I absolutely did substantiate it with numbers.

On the contrary, the responses I've received were 1) Point #2 below. That is fair. 2) Failing to read my post, e.g. saying healthcare will collapse while I already include that assumption. 3) Appeal to emotion like (literally) "[you are] not human" or "shit HN says"

If you have something better, I welcome you to comment on my other post.

Two new pieces of information I got since then:

1) Medical supplies are in danger because of the local disruption (e.g. local blood drives are cancelled in King County so they say the supply is collapsing), factory closures, and shipping disruption - again, the cure is worse than the disease and it just reinforces my point.

2) People noted that sudden death spike would cause economic disruption due to panic too, however I argue that (a) without the media and govt attention at the early stage, the panic would be brief, (b) even after healthcare collapses, the panic and impact would be much less significant than now, as evidenced by Italian doctors on FB/Twitter being unhappy with the common reaction of reading the horror stories and then going out with friends.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#522

Post by fortran77 » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

amiga_500 wrote: post #515

fortran77 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have property tax. It's not just mortgages. And there's all sorts of compliance issues even in a closed building.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#523

Post by sershe » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

lm28469 wrote: post #473

sershe wrote: post #463

This may get downvoted, but I think the following judgement-free statement is true: this is starting to look scary/serious /solely/ because of the measures the governments are taking, and the media circus around it. Otherwise (while it would have almost certainly "started to look serious" eventually, probably for a short time), at this point, you would not have even noticed given the actual numbers.

Either you don't do anything and it eventually _gets_ serious, or you do something and it _looks_ serious. > you would not have even noticed given the actual numbers. Surely you'd notice if 15%+ of your family's elders died in one year. People don't seem to get that it's not so bad (health wise) as long as you take serious decisions to slow the spread, so yes, you're right, it _looks_ serious, because it is, and it w…

That remains to be seen. The consequences of current actions, while the current impact of the virus itself is basically nil, will be severe, including extra deaths (and lack of births, for that matter - didn't occur to me to count that but looking at demographic articles I realized it's also lives lost in the net), and massive waste of life-years due to economic disruption that will disproportionately affect the developing world, the poor and the young. Which one is worse, I don't know, but over the last few days my opinion is starting to change towards the latter being worse.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#524

Post by sershe » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

Buttons840 wrote: post #507

sershe wrote: post #463

This may get downvoted, but I think the following judgement-free statement is true: this is starting to look scary/serious /solely/ because of the measures the governments are taking, and the media circus around it. Otherwise (while it would have almost certainly "started to look serious" eventually, probably for a short time), at this point, you would not have even noticed given the actual numbers.

You should not call the media a "circus" if you are trying to be judgement-free. So, removing judgement: this is starting to appear serious because of government actions and media reporting. I find this to be personally true, because if the government and media had not informed me of this illness, I would be unaware and unconcerned. I think you probably want some discussion of this point, but it is so plain and obvio…

That is fair, "circus" was a judgement. Regardless, the main point stands. I tried to start a discussion in another thread; this post was mostly to bring more attention to the fact that the virus is not disrupting things at all at this point, the reaction to it is.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#525

Post by widowlark » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

listenallyall wrote: post #363

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be a misunderstanding here. The shutdowns we're seeing in the US aren't full lockdowns - under current plans, most businesses will remain open and most people will continue to go to work. I'd agree with what you're saying if there were a full lockdown happening that arbitrarily excluded to-go restaurants, but we're just doing targeted shutdowns of the biggest transmission vectors.

> most people will continue to go to work Virtually all white collar workers, tech, administrative, managerial - work from home. Teachers, school admins & university workers - home. Entertainment (shows, sports, movies, concerts) - home. Apple - home. Shitty jobs that nobody cares about except during a crisis: janitorial/sanitation - work despite the risks. Cooks/food prep - work despite the risks. Grocery store/Walm…

How do you work from home as a janitor?

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#526

Post by sershe » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 6:11 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…

My point (in the other thread, but this is going the same way) was that yes, if someone says let's have 100 people of all ages play Russian roulette (only the gun has 30-50 capacity, and also loaded guns mostly go to much older people), that is very bad.

But if the alternative is, we will instead take those 100 people and make them really miserable, make a few homeless and/or drug addicted, maybe have one commit suicide, starve a few of them, get a few divorced, and ruin a few lives completely - disproportionately affecting the young and children - let them play Russian roulette. I am not convinced, but at this point to me it's looking more and more like that's the case.

Politicians (in NZ) are already saying it's going to be worse than 2008. - The cost of the Soviet union collapsing (a purely economic disaster I can really relate to, even though I do think Soviet union disappearing was a great thing as such) in Russia was 3-5 years of life expectancy, over a decade, for EVERYONE. How many lives is that? Not counting the missing births and the knock-on effects of both, as well as the total waste of life that the 90ies in Russia were for many people.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#527

Post by widowlark » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #442

Merad wrote: post #8

IMO the only question now is how long it takes the rest of the country to follow suite. Here in NC our governor announced the closing of all public schools on Friday, but I've heard from several friends that in my city (Raleigh) the downtown bars and restaurants were pretty much at normal capacity this weekend. I don't think the general public is going to truly take this seriously until they're told that they have to…

NYC bars/lounges were packed Friday and Saturday. The bar staff that I follow on IG was giggly at the amount of money they were making telling people to keep coming in. The sad thing is it were places popular with the crowds that live paycheck to paycheck most of whom cannot afford any sort of medical emergency or being under a forced quarantine.

I bet having to pay for COVID-19 treatment will cost them more than a paycheck though

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#528

Post by pombrand » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

topkai22 wrote: post #144

When talking about economic damage it is also worth thinking about what we are trying to avoid in the US- if SARS-Cov2 gets to 60% of the population, then at a 2% case fatality rate we are looking at 4 million excess deaths. Most importantly, that is a humanitarian tragedy that we must avoid. However, having numbers also let’s us put an economic value out there for what we are trying to save. A 1% reduction in the ca…

Who cares about Case Fatality Rate (the % diagnosed that die), it depends on how many cases are measured. What you need to base yourself on is estimated Infected Fatality Rate (the % infected that die) which is what the CDC states is about 0.1% for the seasonal flu in the US. In Korea the CFR is closing on the IFR as they're testing thousands of asymptomatic people, currently at 0.6% AFAIK.

Infected Fatality Rate will likely end up at 0.3% taking the diamond princess cruise ship as a model (this assumes access to quality care and a PCR false negative rate of 29% adjusted for the higher average age on the cruise).

Worst case: 327 million people * 0.6 (a worst case nr) * 0.005 = 981 000 dead.

More likely 30% gets infected, we figure out what treatment options are optimal and we end up with something like 30% infected and a 0.2% IFR = 196 000 dead.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#529

Post by marvin » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 6:32 PM UTC

easytiger wrote: post #421

marvin wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8000-ish cases. 70-ish deaths => ~0.9% fatality rate. Very thorough testing, so 0.9% is likely to be a reasonable estimate of the real fatality rate. Granted, 250k-ish of 50 million is a small sample, but you've got to assume that they haven't tested randomly but tested people who have been in touch with known cases.

You are almost there. > but you've got to assume that they haven't tested randomly but tested people who have been in touch with known cases Yes. Well with symptoms etc. So of the people who got tested they are much more likely to test +ve. I agree. Which means real cases are massively more widespread than those tested. It is believed here in the UK that this has been fairly rife for a while now, but those who got it…

I don't follow your reasoning. South Korea has tested 35 times the number of positive cases. That's a lot. Presumably, it's not a random sample, but people who have been in touch with people who have had obvious symptoms. Maybe some random sampling in outbreak areas, I don't know their methodology.

Certainly there's a number of people that are not picked up throughout that process. This means that the real death rate is not ~70/8000. The real denominator is bigger.

But it wouldn't be on the order of 10 times bigger. In most of the groups of sick people, there's likely to be some that show enough symptoms to prompt a test, with a positive test leading most of that group to be tracked down. The exception would be tiny groups that somehow did not spread the disease further, or untracably spread it to similar tiny groups.

I don't buy that there's a massive amount of such lonely cases out there. Twice as many as detected? Sure. But not a dramatically bigger number than that.

Maybe there's a way to show mathematically that this reasoning is wrong, if so, please feel free.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#530

Post by asenna » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 6:55 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.

We already have the best case (South Korea) and worst case scenarios (Italy) in front of us. Each country affected is shutting down so not to become another Italy.

If you're not aware of the situation there, I really urge you to look it up - doctors are saying they're having to choose who has the best survival chance to give attention to.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/13/opinion/coronavirus-c...

it's all about "flattening the curve" right now, to slow it down.