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Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

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Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#131

Post by _mitch »

hnarn wrote: post #127
unionpivo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, for people who are older or have health problems, who might also read HN you mean ? I have chronic Bronchitis and Asthma and am on biological drugs witch lower my immune system. Had pneumonia last year, wasn't fun. Somehow my portfolio is not high on my list of concerns.

I sympathize with your health concerns, but all things considered it's not much more of a threat than (unfortunately) seasonal flue is every year. And your point is exactly what I'm saying, in terms of health profile you are an outlier, but the hysteria visible online makes a reader think that this pandemic is somehow going to wipe out a majority of humanity.

According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), 15-20% of people infected require hospitalization. If this becomes widespread, it will overwhelm the US healthcare system. If that happens, anyone who needs urgent care for any reason, has fewer resources available to help them.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#132

Post by pmoriarty »

craftyguy wrote: post #62
erentz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concern is people have not been taking this seriously for the past two months. This has resulted in the US being on the back foot and only acting in a reactive manner. The CDC has fallen flat on its face and now state public health departments need to try to pick up the slack. I hope they do. Other countries are already trying to slow down spread via cancellation of events and closures of schools. The same needs…

> The concern is people have not been taking this seriously for the past two months. This has resulted in the US being on the back foot and only acting in a reactive manner. The CDC has fallen flat on its face and now state public health departments need to try to pick up the slack. I hope they do. Oh please. There's likely absolutely nothing the CDC could have done to prevent it from entering and spreading within th…

"There's likely absolutely nothing the CDC could have done to prevent it from entering and spreading within the US"

The point isn't to prevent it from entering and spreading within the US, but to slow down its spread to give the medical community more time to study it and develop treatments and vaccines, and for the US health care system to prepare by increasing capacity, equipment, training, and staffing.

Sadly, little preparation has been happening because people haven't been taking it seriously, and have been squandering the advanced warnings we've gotten from China.

Something else to consider is that a slowly spreading disease is much easier to manage than a fast-spreading, uncontrolled outbreak. The latter leads to an overwhelmed health care system and many more unnecessary deaths.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#133

Post by feanaro »

hnarn wrote: post #129
nyolfen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

many people have beloved family members who are older than 60. even if you are young, the symptomatic infection can be very severe and disabling for a week or two. it's also extremely contagious. > especially not since lethality goes down with spread there is no guarantee of this

How is any of this different from seasonal flu? It's also potentially lethal for the older population and can also knock you out for a week or two. I'm not disputing that flu viruses are bad, I'm just pointing out that the mass hysteria that seems to be brewing is not based in facts.

Because the flu is simply much less lethal than this.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#134

Post by feanaro »

hnarn wrote: post #110
walterlb wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree about avoiding hysteria, but IF "most" people got the virus... Let's take "most" people to be 50% of the population. The Seattle Metro area had ~3.9 million people in 2017. The virus death rate is currently estimated at 2%. So just accepting that 3.9m * 0.5 * 0.02 = 39,000 people will die in the the Seattle area alone seems a bit extreme

Saying that the death rate is 2% is extremely dishonest since it ignores one of the most important factors: age. For most people reading this you're off by an entire decimal.

That's only "dishonest" if your only concern is to estimate your own probability of dying and you are a young person. However, if you're trying to estimate the proportion of (confirmed) infected people that will die, it's a pretty good guess.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#135

Post by pmoriarty »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #85
daenz wrote: post #70

Personally, I believe most people should just accept that they are going to get COVID-19. It's going to get spread around, and it's not containable. You're likely going to get it. That's the bad news, but the good news is that we have immune systems and we know how to take care of each other and ourselves. Yes it's going to kill some people, no it is highly probably not going to kill you. People will be sick and goin…

This misses all the secondary effects an uncontained global pandemic would have, which would be wide-ranging. A sudden and prolonged 10% drop in global productivity could be a nightmare scenario. Having said that, I'm not panicking either, and I think it's still too early to assume it's going to be fully uncontained -- hell, once the weather starts warming it could all change dramatically. (But then again, I have the…

The secondary effects could go far beyond productivity losses.

If the health care system gets overwhelmed as we've seen in China (and as it already nearly does in the US every year due to seasonal flu), then even those 15%-20% (according to current estimates) with severe symptoms that could have been saved had the health care system not been overwhelmed are likely to die.

Also, people with other life threatening illnesses that could have been kept alive may die when the health care system gets overwhelmed.

Here[1] is a recent post from a doctor expressing his concerns:

"The hospital beds are most of the time at full capacity. Usually I had to send on Friday 30% of my patients home to make place for the new ones that were coming over the weekend, and this without any major epidemic. The reserves of protective gear are low. A lot of doctors and nurses don’t want to work in these conditions and most probably won’t show up at work anymore after they see how many people are going to die ( especially if young ones are also gonna start dying left and right ). We don’t have enough personnel. We don’t have enough beds. We don’t have enough machines. I expect that the CFR will be around 10%."

[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fbbr3b/r0_betw...

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#136

Post by runarberg »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #124
runarberg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to ask—since you admit to causing environmental harm with your admittedly unessisary travels—how do you morally accept the damage your selfish actions are causing? I’m genially asking, and not trying to be judgmental.

The company I work for uses high quality carbon offsets to reach carbon neutrality for all business activities, including business travel by employees. Of course, this isn't scalable, so it doesn't really absolve me. But the travel I do is also not really optional. I just personally don't think it's necessary or helpful. Doesn't mean I don't have to do it when I'm called upon to do so. The other thing I do is live a…

Thank you for an honest and good answer

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#137

Post by nexuist »

secondraft wrote: post #111
nexuist wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully it encourages innovation in the space. 17 years after Skype came out we'd still all rather prefer to be in the same physical room than a laggy, compressed, low quality virtual call.

To be fair, video quality is usually great in developed regions where ISP's do not intentionally slow down internet speed via bandwidth throttling.

Maybe I just haven't been exposed to it, but in my opinion I have pretty good speeds (100 down / 50 up) and still experience stuttering on both ends. I've tried enterprise solutions (like WebEx) at a Fortune 50 with a >1Tbps fiber connection and still encountered problems. I think the problem is just that...video conferencing is a hard problem, and there is more innovation that needs to be done until we can feel comfortable replacing physical interactions with it.

One exciting prospect is the advent of AR/VR, where instead of streaming 30 1080x720 frames a second, we can stream 60 virtual character positions a second (a la multiplayer FPSs like CS:GO) that operate as stand ins for real bodies / faces. I think games such as VRChat will have a real impact on the enterprise teleconferencing space once the proper market is targeted: replace the childish characters with more "indifferent" avatars, add in some "business casual" background environments, etc.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#138

Post by edanm »

hnarn wrote: post #129
nyolfen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

many people have beloved family members who are older than 60. even if you are young, the symptomatic infection can be very severe and disabling for a week or two. it's also extremely contagious. > especially not since lethality goes down with spread there is no guarantee of this

How is any of this different from seasonal flu? It's also potentially lethal for the older population and can also knock you out for a week or two. I'm not disputing that flu viruses are bad, I'm just pointing out that the mass hysteria that seems to be brewing is not based in facts.

Well, even if it's only as bad as the flu, what we're talking about is "remember that thing that kills hundreds of thousands every year? We're now going to double that number for the foreseeable future". Unless of course we manage to stop it from spreading further (which seems unlikely at this point but possibly worth trying anyway.)

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#139

Post by dkarl »

conradev wrote: post #84
dkarl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering how contagious it seems to be, I think if it had been circulating in the U.S. for months under the guise of flu, there would have been a mysterious number of deaths of young, healthy people from flu that would have been recognized in hindsight as Covid-19.

Mortality in people under 40 for Covid-19 is only 0.2% according to the CCDC study: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... We’d be seeing a number of deaths in older people who would have otherwise been fine

In either demographic the mortality is so much higher than the flu that it would be noticed. Otherwise we wouldn’t be worried; it would be like just another strain of the flu.

Re: Seattle-Area Patient With Coronavirus Dies

#140

Post by nemonemo »

triangleman wrote: post #123
jp57 wrote: post #36

Is it possible that the virus has been circulating in the states since Christmas or earlier? I live in the states, though not in Seattle. My wife's best friend teaches ESL at a major university. She has several Chinese students in her class who went home over the semester break in December and January. In mid-to-late January, the teacher, her husband, my wife, and I all came down with the "flu" in swift succession, w…

For point of reference, the clinic where my wife works has been testing for coronavirus since January 25. There are many private institutions with the ability to test patients as they saw fit. I know the protocol was more focused on travel but it seems like there would have been more reports since then. With that said, my family has indeed suffered from the same kind of persistent cough you describe, so I don't know…

Do you know how many the clinic has tested since then? The ratio between the confirmed cases vs the test count seems about 3% in US, and the total tested number in US is 472 according to CDC.
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