Live data from Hacker News

Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

bloomberg.com

81–90 of 298 posts

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article and discussions about Korea seem to mainly revolve around testing and contact tracing. These are complex and expensive, and substantially more difficult to manage in a country like the US which is 7x the population, and is somewhat decentralized (50 states). Meanwhile, the on the street observations in the article are: masks, masks, masks. Masks are cheap and easy. So let's start with masks, masks, masks…

Also, they are very meticulous about taking their shoes off before going into a home and about keeping their floors clean. Which may be more important, especially in dense locations, than we might be realizing. A Chinese study found that the virus was probably being moved around by people's shoes https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0885_article

That says they detected it on floors in hospitals. Does it talk about it being on shoes, entering homes and ultimately infecting people?

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For businesses that will probably never return.

They'll be replaced, but the owners, employees, and loved ones who die won't.

Eventually, but an immense amount of capital (not just in a cash sense) that allows those businesses to operate has been irreparably destroyed. Rebuilding and bootstrapping that again from almost nothing will take years in many cases. Businesses don't exist in isolation, some sectors are seeing destruction not just of the businesses but the entire institutional structure of their ecosystems, which is much harder to replace.

There will be second-order effects that people aren't considering. In Seattle, for example, all of the builders I know are saying multi-family residential construction projects have become indefinitely non-viable due to the systemic collapse of the business ecosystem they rely on. Even if things opened up tomorrow, most of their projects will stay dead for the foreseeable future. This will have a large impact for housing costs, construction worker employment, etc many years beyond the term of the lockdown.

I think many people are oblivious to the long-term second-order damage that is being inflicted in some industries that cannot be fixed on any kind of timeframe that matters to ordinary people.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#84
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This video has a good explanation of why the Spanish policy is ineffective. https://unherd.com/thepost/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-joh...

Can you summarize or link to the time in the video where it is addressed?

I recommend watching the whole video, as it is by far the clearest argument in favor of the "herd immunity" approach I've seen.

The problem with the approach is that it assumes several things that, shall we say, there is not yet evidence for.

1. The disease is relatively mild, certainly less than an order of magnitude more fatal than influenza.

2. It is possible to protect older people and other vulnerable populations while the disease spreads through most of the rest of society.

3. After people recover from the infection, there is lasting immunity.

If these three things are true (and some other things that I'm not going to argue with, including that it will take a long time to get a vaccine), then herd immunity is a reasonable strategy. But let's look at each in turn.

1. The death rate in New York City is already 0.1% of the entire population. Even under very strict assumptions, that we're exactly at the peak of a totally symmetrical curve, and that herd immunity results in 50% of the population being infected, that results in a lower bound of the IFR at 0.4%. Lombardy gives similar results (0.12% of the population directly attributed to Covid-19)

2. Prof. Giesecke admitted that they failed to do so in Sweden. It is not clear how this could be done, as elderly people do not live in a bubble, but rather have lots of workers coming in and out of the facility to help take care of them.

3. SARS-CoV-2 is a new virus, and we just don't have the data yet. You can extrapolate from existing coronaviruses, which suggest that immunity will last at least a year for most people, but there are worrying signs (low antibody production, reports of reinfection that might or might not be testing artifacts). We just don't know.

To me, it was a gamble, and we'll know before long whether it pays off. There were some things that bothered me about Prof. Giesecke, such as his dismissal of the experience of China ("it's a different world"), and other things that made a lot of sense. People who want to believe will be citing this video as authoritative support for their beliefs. If these assumptions turn out not to be consistent with evidence, then people will be citing this video as a case study in how smart people can get stuff horribly wrong.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#85
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bill Gates has literally been preparing the last 20 years to make enormous amounts of money on a forced vaccination program Is this one of those conspiracy theories I’ve been hearing about? Bill Gates’ foundation has been giving away money for decades. If you think he’s planning to make a bunch of money off “forced vaccination”, you’re stuck in the past — Gates doesn’t care about making more money, he cares about g…

Your comment only appeals to people who already agree with you, therefore it’s useless. If you want people to take you seriously then you can begin by addressing any of his points rather than fixating on the word “money” as if that was his entire argument. I can’t see his comment because he edited it but I’m assuming he provided plenty of evidence such as the timing of Event 201 and its focus on coronaviruses. Maybe…

Event 201 as in the pandemic preparedness exercise? And its focus on coronaviruses because of SARS and MERS? Is that really all it takes to start an entire conspiracy lol

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#86
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bill Gates has literally been preparing the last 20 years to make enormous amounts of money on a forced vaccination program Is this one of those conspiracy theories I’ve been hearing about? Bill Gates’ foundation has been giving away money for decades. If you think he’s planning to make a bunch of money off “forced vaccination”, you’re stuck in the past — Gates doesn’t care about making more money, he cares about g…

Your comment only appeals to people who already agree with you, therefore it’s useless. If you want people to take you seriously then you can begin by addressing any of his points rather than fixating on the word “money” as if that was his entire argument. I can’t see his comment because he edited it but I’m assuming he provided plenty of evidence such as the timing of Event 201 and its focus on coronaviruses. Maybe…

The original comment didn’t mention event 201, it was literally just about money and how Gates was doing all this to get more of it, but really — all event 201 shows is that a coronavirus-based pandemic disaster was extremely predictable, not that it was planned. War games in secret rooms help predict outcomes, they don’t cause those outcomes.

Smart people have been concerned about a viral pandemic of this sort for centuries, and yet we were caught unprepared. That’s the real tragedy.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#87
post #24
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bill Gates has literally been preparing the last 20 years to make enormous amounts of money on a forced vaccination program Is this one of those conspiracy theories I’ve been hearing about? Bill Gates’ foundation has been giving away money for decades. If you think he’s planning to make a bunch of money off “forced vaccination”, you’re stuck in the past — Gates doesn’t care about making more money, he cares about g…

Perhaps it would indulge the conspiracy theories too much - but I'd kinda love to see an actual breakdown of how something like this could ever make him money. Think of the huge amount of money he has lost from this in the other businesses he owns and think of all the money he invested in this for decades he could have invested in other lucrative industries. How much would he need from this supposed plan to even brea…

These things usually break down with one or two questions that the person can't answer. Just like the 5G connection nonsense, if you ask how electromagnetic radiation in the spectrum that 5G uses has a connection to a virus (the most basic question possible) you will just get someone angry with you. It's almost fascinating how people can develop emotional attachment to something that fails a droplet of investigation.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#88

Meanwhile, the US still has very little testing capacity, with no signs of if and when that will change. One problem with the death of journalism is that no one is even reporting on this.

Lots of people are reporting on this - I'm not sure where you're looking that you're missing it.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#89
post #20

Yup

> Bill Gates has literally been preparing the last 20 years to make enormous amounts of money on a forced vaccination program Is this one of those conspiracy theories I’ve been hearing about? Bill Gates’ foundation has been giving away money for decades. If you think he’s planning to make a bunch of money off “forced vaccination”, you’re stuck in the past — Gates doesn’t care about making more money, he cares about g…

> he cares about getting the respect of his peer group & broader society. He’s not going to earn money off this, he’s going to earn respect.

Whatever the case, you have to admit that you are taking for granted that his intentions are benign. There's no rule that billionaires have to be benevolent. There's a lot of soft power associated with a mandatory vaccination program but aside from that, the chipping that he is behind has an enormous (and dangerous) surveillance potential.

The man has the clout and resources to potentially install a physical, nonremovable beacon into people's bodies, and has spoken openly and repeatedly about doing so. How do you know he won't get drunk with that kind of power? A single man could, say, sway elections if he had access to just the location data for 300MM Americans. And there's really no way we'd know if the biometric/location data were being siphoned for "non government" use...

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you summarize or link to the time in the video where it is addressed?

I recommend watching the whole video, as it is by far the clearest argument in favor of the "herd immunity" approach I've seen. The problem with the approach is that it assumes several things that, shall we say, there is not yet evidence for. 1. The disease is relatively mild, certainly less than an order of magnitude more fatal than influenza. 2. It is possible to protect older people and other vulnerable population…

Yes, that is the main issue with our strategy in Sweden. We failed to keep it away from seniors' homes. The strategy seems to have worked just fine otherwise. It stopped our hospitals from getting overwhelmed, espcially since we managed to contain it in Stockholm for the most part. But we did not have resources to test people working with the elderly.
Post reply on HN