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

Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

helpwithcovid.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–218 of 218 posts

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#211

Post by DanBC »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #209
mikeyouse wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to disagree with anything you said here, but there was recently a story comparing the fates of two young Chinese medical workers who both contracted the disease and who required medical care. The punchline is that a 29-year old physician with no co-morbidities died a terrible death. Be careful out there no matter your age or health status. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/world/asia/co...

This guy is pretty clearly an outlier (or there is some missing information). In Italy only 5 people under 40 have died, out of approx. 2500 deaths so far, and every one of the 5 had an existing serious illness.

"Didn't die" is not the same as "was not harmed".

This relentless focus only on the people who died misses the point: covid-19 puts people in hospital, sometimes into intensive care, and many of those people end up with damaged lungs.

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#212

Post by _-___________-_ »

DanBC wrote: post #211
_-___________-_ wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy is pretty clearly an outlier (or there is some missing information). In Italy only 5 people under 40 have died, out of approx. 2500 deaths so far, and every one of the 5 had an existing serious illness.

"Didn't die" is not the same as "was not harmed". This relentless focus only on the people who died misses the point: covid-19 puts people in hospital, sometimes into intensive care, and many of those people end up with damaged lungs.

Yeah, I've been reading this all over HN, and saw a few articles out of China at the peak there, but have struggled to find good sources on the prevalence of it elsewhere. In particular, there's a lot of data coming out of Italy but very little that I've found mentions long-term lung damage. Could you share your sources?

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#213

Post by hdkrgr »

orbifold wrote: post #93
hdkrgr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the German federal government (of all people), is organizing a distributed hackathon this upcoming weekend: https://wirvsvirushackathon.org/ Seems like it's supposed to be (mostly) in German language as well. If they do and market this right this might actually be an opportunity to get non-tech people to contribute important PROBLEMS that can be solved by tech right now, so we don't just get another few dozen n…

Just to clarify because it is not obvious from the homepage: This is not actually organized by the government, but by a private non-profit startup funded by the federal government. That makes some difference and now I've given my email address to a random Berlin startup.

Good to know, I missed that. Luckily I've given them AN email :)

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#214

Post by KibbutzDalia »

jdminhbg wrote: post #196
fortran77 wrote: post #10

> Help With COVID is a marketplace for people (especially software engineers) to find projects to contribute to, and for projects to find help. Do you know how "software engineers" can "help with COVID?" By getting into their cars and bringing supplies to elderly people in their neighborhood.

> Do you know how "software engineers" can "help with COVID?" By getting into their cars and bringing supplies to elderly people in their neighborhood. Even if you think the best thing to do is deliver supplies to the elderly, it makes no sense for a software engineer to stop what he or she is doing and do that. The entire restaurant and hospitality industry just got laid off; you should keep working and pay someone…

Blockchain consultant here. Only a select few professions are able to meaningfully help during this health crisis.

Generally speaking, these tend to be software engineers (esp those working in fields like blockchain or machine learning) and arguably some medical professions like nurses and doctors. When we're in times of crisis, we need our best minds doing what they excel at, not doing things that your average Joe could do just as easily.

For non technical people who are struggling to understand this concept, I've prepared an analogy. It would be like hiring a CEO of a powerful corporation such as Jeff Bezos to clean your toilet. It just isn't a good use of his time or your money.

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#215

Post by taborj »

umbelisco wrote: post #178
taborj wrote: post #159

Hopefully some of these aren't re-inventing the wheel. For instance, currently the first one is helping build APIs for getting healthcare data. This is potentially a solved problem; indeed, interoperability is rather a large market in the healthcare world (I speak as someone who does this for a living).

curious where you would start tackling it? what are the right building blocks that can be accessed for devs building solutions? from an outside perspective there is little access to data across the silos. im helping coordinate the project, not a healthcare expert myself (rather coming from the api / data side from other verticals), so happy about your thoughts.

FHIR APIs are allowing a standards-based approach to accessing healthcare data from external sources, such as an app. In addition, there are national networks for sharing data between clinics and hospitals, like CareQuality and Commonwell. I'm most familiar with CareQuality, as that's the system my company's EHR software integrates with. It uses SOAP calls to exchange CDA documents.

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#216

Post by fock »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #61
fock wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I missunderstand something or isn't it necessary for the real bad cases to intubate the person needing the ventilator? I think the bottleneck here is a lot more complicated than "moaaar" ventilators. Also if you have 1 Mio. people on ventilation, these probably are not able to move on theirselves, so you need a care person to turn them every hour. Additionally hooking them up to a ventilator and pressing "play" se…

A care person is a very low skill job, it's not a critical bottleneck. (In many cases family could make do, especially if you have some cooperation. One person can't do it but two could trade off doing two people.)

...

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#217

Post by aaron_m04 »

allannienhuis wrote: post #150
aaron_m04 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Print out a sign and stick it on your cart.

Sadly, as soon as this becomes common, the hoarders will do the same to avoid the shame/consequences. Fear makes people very very irrational. :(

Well it is a temporary solution at least.
Post reply on HN