Live data from Hacker News

Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

joshuaweissburg.com

101–110 of 232 posts

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#101

I'm also in CO and had COVID-19 like symptoms about a month ago (fever and GI issues without any other major symptoms for a week progressing into a dry cough/heavy breathing -- completely unlike any other flu I've had). I never got tested due to lack of test kits here in CO at the time and because my symptoms stayed manageable I never saw a health care provider beyond a virtual meeting to get a rescue inhaler. At the…

Have you seen any theories floating around that it had already spread in some places like the following? https://www.ksbw.com/article/new-study-investigates-californ... I’m in SF but having a hard deciphering the plausibility vs the timing and effectiveness of sheltering-in-place vs it just being a rationalization. Anything similar stories out there for CO?

I read the article.

Professor Victor Davis Hanson is one of America's smartest and most lateral thinkers. If he proposes a theory, it's a good idea to at least think about.

Because of how highly contagious corona virus is, I agree with him. It also matches the Daily Mail article.

I lean towards lockdown as being a rationalization now that we know ventilators don't work with 66% to 90% mortality, and that we (the US) don't have the testing and tracing capabilities to stop a highly contagious disease.

Most people can't separate their personal fear of death with public policy. This seems to go all the way up our political structure.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#102

So he claims that he got it despite practicing all the social distancing protocols, hand-washing, etc. Has anyone calculated what are the probabilities of infection in an area with an active infection cluster while practicing social-distancing and other hygiene measures?

That isn't something you can quantify. By all means take reasonable steps to avoid infection, but the most likely outcome is that no matter what we do the majority of us will be infected before a vaccine is available. There are already four other endemic coronaviruses which circulate in humans and SARS-CoV-2 is going to be the fifth.

https://patch.com/california/losgatos/bay-area-s-dr-fauci-ex...

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#103

I'm also in CO and had COVID-19 like symptoms about a month ago (fever and GI issues without any other major symptoms for a week progressing into a dry cough/heavy breathing -- completely unlike any other flu I've had). I never got tested due to lack of test kits here in CO at the time and because my symptoms stayed manageable I never saw a health care provider beyond a virtual meeting to get a rescue inhaler. At the…

Have you seen any theories floating around that it had already spread in some places like the following? https://www.ksbw.com/article/new-study-investigates-californ... I’m in SF but having a hard deciphering the plausibility vs the timing and effectiveness of sheltering-in-place vs it just being a rationalization. Anything similar stories out there for CO?

That's pretty interesting... anecdotally, I was in SF a few weeks before I had symptoms. I could have caught the end of the wave.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#104

I'm also in CO and had COVID-19 like symptoms about a month ago (fever and GI issues without any other major symptoms for a week progressing into a dry cough/heavy breathing -- completely unlike any other flu I've had). I never got tested due to lack of test kits here in CO at the time and because my symptoms stayed manageable I never saw a health care provider beyond a virtual meeting to get a rescue inhaler. At the…

The U.S. has about 600k cases. One order of magnitude more is 6M cases. That's still very far from broadly spreading. It's worrying about the viability of the herd immunity theory (too few people had it), and opening the country soon (a few weeks of exponential case increases would overload hospital capacity, even after stemming the case growth through sheltering-- putting us back to square one). It feels, 1-2 months…

You know if we start to open/close in cycles in theory it's possible that a manageable equilibrium of cases can be achieved while we work out a prophylactic or cure. Capacity everywhere for supplies is ramping up and I imagine once that happens masks will be commonplace and perhaps the stigma around masks will die once a couple hundred thousand Americans do.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#105

I'm also in CO and had COVID-19 like symptoms about a month ago (fever and GI issues without any other major symptoms for a week progressing into a dry cough/heavy breathing -- completely unlike any other flu I've had). I never got tested due to lack of test kits here in CO at the time and because my symptoms stayed manageable I never saw a health care provider beyond a virtual meeting to get a rescue inhaler. At the…

The U.S. has about 600k cases. One order of magnitude more is 6M cases. That's still very far from broadly spreading. It's worrying about the viability of the herd immunity theory (too few people had it), and opening the country soon (a few weeks of exponential case increases would overload hospital capacity, even after stemming the case growth through sheltering-- putting us back to square one). It feels, 1-2 months…

6M cases are still far from broadly spreading, am I reading this right?

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#106
post #92
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this interpretation is that whatever the combination of deadly/contagious the virus is, we already have direct evidence that when it spreads without any containment it causes unacceptably extreme amounts of sickness and death. So exactly where the virus ends up on the grid of mortality/contagiousness doesn't seem to be all that important because it is well beyond the frontier of being problematic. Ho…

>we already have direct evidence that when it spreads without any containment it causes unacceptably extreme amounts of sickness and death That hasn't happened in Sweden.

Yet.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#107
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would in fact be good news in a certain way, because either it's as deadly as reported and nowhere near as contagious as your last paragraph suggests, or its far more contagious and widespread but thus nowhere near as deadly as is being seen from case fatality rates derived from known cases. I'm not stating anything new with this really, but your case is likely one of many, many others in which a person felt my…

The problem with this interpretation is that whatever the combination of deadly/contagious the virus is, we already have direct evidence that when it spreads without any containment it causes unacceptably extreme amounts of sickness and death. So exactly where the virus ends up on the grid of mortality/contagiousness doesn't seem to be all that important because it is well beyond the frontier of being problematic. Ho…

There is one problem with what you say about its spread at levels that saturate healthcare systems and cause extreme amounts of sickness and death: They may not be the case so much because the virus is particularly deadly or even much deadlier than the flu -which may indeed be the case: that it's only part of an order of magnitude deadlier than H1N1, we don't know yet until we get more concrete infection rate surveys- but there are reasoned arguments supporting this idea.

Instead it saturates in such ugly ways because it's so contagious (as the comment below this mentions). Thus, highly contagious + entirely virgin population of susceptible people (of all types: asymptomatic, lightly symptomatic, moderately, severely, mortally) will inevitably result in very high infection rates and thus an initial saturation that's also high even if hospital-worthy cases are a small percentage of total known and unknown cases.

This saturation may or may not be capable of getting worse than what we've seen so far in NYC, Northern Italy, Spain and Iran to a lesser extent, but though we don't yet know this for sure, if it is the case, the virus being allowed to spread far and fast will likely cause these bad but possibly tolerable saturations to happen quickly only once, and then simply cease as enough people become immune or at least resistant, and healthcare systems steadily adapt.. So far, it seems that Italy and Spain might actually be close to as bad as it gets even with widespread infection of the population, since credible estimates are presupposing at least 2 million cases in total in Italy at this point, for example. Even in New York there are signs of slowdown already. Again, if that is in fact the worst case scenario in any given region, its cost, as tragic as it is, might be worth weighing against the possibly more catastrophic cost of prolonged quarantine and its resulting economic and social consequences.

We could possibly be delaying an inevitable event with only briefly heavy localized consequences and moderate general clinical consequences by artificially creating a much worse long term problem that kills too, albeit more indirectly and among a wider demographic through missed clinical care appointments of other kinds, depressive suicides, economic ruin, substance abuse and other general population harm factors we can only start guessing at so far.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#108
post #28

I hate to say it, but I’m actually jealous of people who have gone through and recovered from COVID-19. You can enter normal life again, you don’t need to have the fear, the rest of us are simply waiting because the chances of us getting it at some point is very high. I actually wonder if some controlled exposure might be a good thing, I can get it and (statistically) recover from it at a place away from my family, a…

> I hate to say it, but I’m actually jealous of people who have gone through and recovered from COVID-19. You can enter normal life again, you don’t need to have the fear, the rest of us are simply waiting because the chances of us getting it at some point is very high. Even if you have antibodies it's not going to be normal a life. There will still be social distancing expected and enforced, capacity limits at store…

Being able to visit friends and family is a hell of a step up over having zero face-to-face interactions with any other humans though.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#109
post #92
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this interpretation is that whatever the combination of deadly/contagious the virus is, we already have direct evidence that when it spreads without any containment it causes unacceptably extreme amounts of sickness and death. So exactly where the virus ends up on the grid of mortality/contagiousness doesn't seem to be all that important because it is well beyond the frontier of being problematic. Ho…

>we already have direct evidence that when it spreads without any containment it causes unacceptably extreme amounts of sickness and death That hasn't happened in Sweden.

Sweden didn't take no measures. Sweden took flexible measures[1]. Social distancing, allowing anyone who felt sick to stay home, encouraging people to work from home (and 50% Swedes apparently can do that[2]).

The problem is that when American employers grant to no sick leave to employees and are brutally against ever doing so, applying the flexible Swedish model to the US would be extremely hard. The model involves mutual trust and responsibility between the state, employers and employees and there's very little trust there in most other countries.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-sweden-no-lockdo...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/545241/sweden-enterprise...

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then , if you arent a medicine, but german as I see,,, LINKERPRPAGANDIST ??!!, nur ein Verdacht,, so if , then read about retoviral medicaments,, NO science ,all they say is we assume that it avoided xz amount of people dying. Ther are no empiric studies.. its charlataneria concerning those meds and they are very toxic... understand now tiny bit the only one? Verdammt schnell bei der Stange, Hallo mit wem habe ich da…

I'm not German but I'm pretty sure that you're from the 50 cent army given that this account was created super recently and has only posted in this one thread with utter nonsense straight out of Google translate. Especially since your post is about how drugs don't work on a predominantly American used forum...

You can't attack another user like that regardless of how bad their comments are or you feel they are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.

(By the way: I'm sorry I didn't respond to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22837826. I mean to, but there just wasn't time to write a longer explanation. This unfortunately has been happening increasingly.)

Post reply on HN