321–330 of 535 posts
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Someone would be infected and contagious for awhile before developing antibodies though.
True, but that's unavoidable with every test. Even PCR doesn't work until you're body has produced enough viruses to be detected.
> It appears that the virus travels through the air, so whenever possible, it’s important to avoid crowds of people or indoor spaces with shared air. The virus is about the same size as the particles in cigarette smoke (though it would usually be part of a larger droplet), so I find it helpful to imagine a smoker exhaling smoke, and what it would take to avoid inhaling too much of that second-hand smoke. I just got b…
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> Death is sad and terrible, but we don't shut down society because people die. Yea, but COVID has the potential to kill a lot of people, quickly -- are you suggesting it's a bad idea to "shut down society" to keep our hospitals functioning? I get the point that the economic cost is severe and also comes with its own share of human cost, but we're talking about saving ~1-2 million people in the US alone by doing this…
> Several trillion dollars is still worth it $2 trillion is 10% of GDP or the losses in ~6 months of a lockdown resulting in 80% productivity (with the assumption that everything goes back to normal immediately after the shutdown, which it won't) So it seems like a ~6 month lockdown is warranted if you crassly value saving a life from COVID at $1 million. That's not long enough for a vaccine. Alternatively, working b…
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How is chip fabrication is more scalable than plastic 384-well plates and cotton swabs? Nothing shy of a home pregnancy test is more scalable than qPCR.
Great question. This is one of the implementations we're actually developing. One of the challenges with the implementation of testing on this scale is not necessarily on the technology/assay but on implementation. How do you reasonably test millions of folks each and every day, or said another way actually get millions of nasal swabs, saliva, etc on 384 well plate? I think our ultimate approach is much more akin, al…
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Curious to know how you are getting power of 2 exactly. Are you just saying it's some sort of power law growth and approximately 2, or is there an actual way of deriving it?
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] *…
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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 ~…
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you’re missing the second half of the random chance argument. you could also have driven right past a collision that would have happened at a slower speed.
I'm sympathetic to raising speed limits like any good Californian. But there's an asymmetry in the positions, in that more reaction time is universally better than less reaction time.
active driving and avoiding distractions (including drugs) are the difference makers, not speed limits. the reason people oppose this is because they want to treat driving like lounging by the pool, rather than operating machines that collectively kill a million people a year.
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Fair enough. But I hope that line of reasoning has limits. After all, it would be safer to send everyone by truck to a quarantine camp instead of back to their apartment where they might infect their neighbors in the lobby, wouldn’t it?
That's actually how China handled it. If you test positive, you don't go home - you go to a facility to be quarantined and treated if necessary.
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Curious to know how you are getting power of 2 exactly. Are you just saying it's some sort of power law growth and approximately 2, or is there an actual way of deriving it?
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] *…
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The flu comes every year, and it’s not even a order of magnitude less fatal. Maybe COVID will come back every year too. What “solution” are you looking for to solve this relatively small share of “death from natural causes” that we call COVID? How much damage should we inflict upon ourselves in this moral quandary? How many people should die because we’re willing to spend trillions of dollars due to our innate fear o…
Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? This sort of rhetoric and polemic destroys curious conversation, which is what the site exists for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If I could still edit the comment, I would replace the first “you” with “we”, as none of the comment is meant to be directed personally at OP.
The dystopia we have is purely one of our own creation. One which TFA seems to not only welcome with open arms, but seeks to capitalize upon. It’s really quite sad.