“It is my belief that the best cure for any disease is to avoid the disease.”
A Third Solution
221–230 of 535 posts
Re: A Third Solution
#222I don't particularly disagree with any of this, but as a society, we have a bad habit of assuming that people with an impressive record of innovation and expertise in one field should be treated as authoritative in others. At the very least, they should take their idea to people with sufficient expertise to evaluate it before using their notoriety to take it to the public. I think Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Linus Pauling and any number of failed unicorn startups should have taught us some caution. I don't want to know what a famed early architect of social media thinks about this topic, at least not before a famed virologist, immunologist or public health practitioner comments on it first.
Re: A Third Solution
#223Why are there so many armchair quarterbacks in this thread spouting dismissive criticism? Paul already acknowledges that "success is far from guaranteed." If this works, great! If it doesn't, I don't think any of us are worse off...
This seems like a heavy application of The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
Re: A Third Solution
#224This isn't a unique idea. This is the mainstream view. Everyone knows we need more testing and that testing is the only way to effectively ease distancing rules. That was a pretty extensive writeup to say what we've been hearing from all rational information outlets for a month.
I have not found any mainstream sources that advocate screening everyone every day (which is very different from simply doing "more testing"). Would love some pointers if I'm wrong.
I have advocated it. Allegedly everyone who comes close to Trump gets swabbed and rapid tested on the Abbott machine.
How does your device detect viruses? Is it based on a protein or the RNA or what?
Re: A Third Solution
#225Not only is it completely unrealistic at scale, the specific approach in the blog post is wildly impossible at all. It requires screeners to directly manipulate saliva samples; this is dangerous in a pandemic. The assays referred to (lazily) in a Google Scholar search are almost overwhelmingly antibody assays; this does not allow the screener to differentiate between "has COVID-19" and "had COVID-19". Also, there is…
What they’re describing is an antigen test, not an antibody test. It tests directly for part of the virus, not an immune response, so it’s more a replacement for the existing PCR testing.
That said, I have some serious doubts about the particular mechanism being used here being ready for $1/test within say the next year or two. It’s been studied for a few decades and while there has been some promising progress, this would be the first saliva viral antigen test using this technology. It seems a bit like trying to solve global warming by bringing fusion generators to market. I have doubts it will be deployable before a vaccine, let alone more conventional and boring antigen rapid diagnostic tests that we have developed for a wide array of viruses.
Re: A Third Solution
#226Can we stop hyping blog posts by tech people writing about epidemiology and medicine? I'm shocked how much baseless speculation and misinformation is being shared on HN.
No, because they were right and the epidemiologists and medical people were wrong. Everyone kept telling us not to use masks except the tech people. There were all these lies:
* Doesn't work
* Too hard to train
* Shortages will happen
Literally all were wrong and they either knew it and misinformed everyone or didn't know it. So you can either drop the assumption of benevolence or competence.
The only guys who didn't listen to them, Taiwan, are doing fine despite every other risk factor being huge for them. It turns out some skills translate across domains. I'm not going to get a software engineer to perform a total knee replacement on me, but I think I'll listen to them on the crisis management: turns out they're better at it than the crisis managers.
Re: A Third Solution
#227The latest on the COVID-19 R0 is a median of 5.7, up from the previously thought range of 2.2 - 2.7. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article This means herd immunity kicks in at 82% of the population. Antibody testing appears to be showing infection rates are a lot higher than previously thought as well. Both of those things together mean that 1) "there's no way to stop it" 2) "it might not be as dange…
> infection rates are a lot higher
in certain urban cores. herd immunity requires well mixed populations
Re: A Third Solution
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we assume (key) that the probability of becoming infected is directly proportional to the number of people you interact with, and consider that the probability of spreading infection given that you are infected is obviously directly proportional to the number of people you interact with, the product gives a quadratic function: [probability of becoming infected and spreading] = [probability of becoming infected] *…
Okay so something like: probability of spreading = a * n probability of infected = b * n where: a,b = some blackbox function for spreading/infection ratio? n = number of people you meet Assuming both are independent events we get: p = a * b * n^2 I can see how we get n^2 with that. The way I'm using a, and b seems clumsy though, is there a better way?
In math and (especially) physics it is common to express "proportionality" laws usually with a symbol that looks like LaTeX \propto. So for instance the activity A of a radioactive sample is written A \propto e^(-t/T) where t is time and T is the mean lifetime of a single particle. For convenience \propto is often transliterated as ~ when typing. So that becomes
p_catch ~ n
p_spread ~ n
p_relay = p_spread * p_catch ~ n^2.
Re: A Third Solution
#229The post refers to an alternative method of testing for COVID-19 based on surface plasmon resonance that would have significant advantages, but unfortunately it provides absolutely no real substantiation that the test exists or works. The link about surface plasmon resonance goes to a generic Wikipedia page, the link about saliva is a small scale study that was conducted on RT-PCR not surface plasmon resonance, and t…
According to my biochem-undergrad kid, surface plasmon resonance is a thing; it had come up in classes. "It's like doing an ELISA with no secondary antibody". Someone here will know what that means. I don't!
Re: A Third Solution
#230> First of all, it’s not “just the flu”. It is something much more dangerous. Catching this virus is a bit like playing a round of Russian roulette. You’ll probably be fine, but you could end up dead I think this is mischaracterizing it. People have to die eventually. One year of existence has a mortality rate of 1%. For a 75-84 year old individual it is nearly 5%. Above 85 it's 14%. [1] The coronavirus infection fat…
So would you be willing to roll the dice then for the sake of opening up society? In fact, are you willing to die for it? If given the choice between dying of COVID-19 or shutting down society, you're saying that you personally would choose to die? I'm bringing this up because the difference between this and other causes of death is that not only is this transmissible, but it also has knock-on effects that we current…
> If given the choice between dying of COVID-19 or shutting down society
Obviously shut down society, but that's not the choice that exists.
The choice in reality is an acceptable risk of death, or shut down society. Between those I pick the acceptable risk of death. We all make the same choice for many, many other situations.