Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flight Attendants and Covid-19

confessionsfromaflightattendant.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 148 posts

Re: Flight Attendants and Covid-19

#131

Post by eyelidlessness »

caseysoftware wrote: post #125
rootusrootus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are over 100 vaccines in development, several have completed phase 1 trials, and one is actually in production already so it will be available when it completes phase 3. We didn't need vaccines for SARS or MERS because they were both gone pretty quickly and the number of affected individuals was never high enough to warrant completing the expensive testing required to get approval for a vaccine.

Yes, exactly. I hope a) those vaccines yield useful results b) quickly enough before people lose interest and funding.

They don't lose interest like it's some unstoppable force of nature on a timer. They lose interest if the harm caused by the disease is either low or contained. As long as the world continues to experience significant death, impact on the health care system, and economic damage... there will be interest in a vaccine.

Re: Flight Attendants and Covid-19

#132

Post by GordonS »

brenden2 wrote: post #101
ISL wrote: post #7

The days of carefree travel will return. It'll be a while, but it will be back. In early March, looking for a park to sit quietly with my thoughts in the sunshine but away from others, I found myself in a local cemetery. Alone, but not far from a great many people. Seattle's a pretty young place on the scale of things. I was surprised to find that our local graveyard had a substantial contingent that had lived throug…

This is just fear mongering. Life will return to normal. Lots of people swore they'd never fly after 9/11 and yet things did recover.

Things in air travel did not go back to normal though.

Cockpit doors were reinforced, with nobody allowed in during flights.

Things on the ground were even more changed, with security still heightened to this day (even if much of it is theatre). AFAIK, it was also around then that tickets became non-transferable. People's luggage can no longer travel with out them. We have 3D body scanners and can only carry small quantities of liquids in a tiny bag (I realise this came a bit later, but the point stands). Being brown results in even more unpleasantness.

Things absolutely did not return to normal after 9/11.

Re: Flight Attendants and Covid-19

#133

Post by eyelidlessness »

Trasmatta wrote: post #46
walterbell wrote: post #10

Humans continuously invent their "normals". There was no "old normal" and there won't be a "new normal". Already, different countries and regions have different cultures, histories, responses and outcomes. If anything, their future societies are diverging as a result of conscious choices and actions by humans exercising creative will.

Out of all the buzzwords to come out of COVID, "new normal" is maybe my least favorite. What the hell does it even mean?

I've heard "new normal" in common usage for [at least] most of my adult life (I'm 37). I don't think I've ever been confused about its meaning either. "New normal" implies some prior normal, and represents a substantial and permanent delta between the two.

Re: Flight Attendants and Covid-19

#134

Post by eyelidlessness »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #22
pkage wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still risky for healthy young individuals, while most barely present symptoms some people have a very real risk of dying. "Voluntarily allowing people to get infected" creates a perverse incentive for poor essential workers to put their lives on the line in order to put food on the table.

What's the perverse incentive? I don't think the proposal is that essential workers should have to get infected before they work.

It's not an incentive if it's mandatory. It's an incentive if there's some perceived benefit to do it. It's perverse if that perceived benefit is avoiding unnecessary consequences of economic distress.

If voluntary infection is allowed, employers may favor employees who test positive for antibodies—for example, by offering a pay increase, or some additional amount of paid sick leave prior to recovery—because they would be less likely to fall ill en masse at some unpredictable later date. States with continued (or resumed in a second wave) shutdown restrictions may exempt businesses whose employees are deemed immune.

The people most likely to be incentivized to take this risk are the people who are most economically vulnerable already. I would never consider that risk, but I'm a well paid software engineer working from home.

Re: Flight Attendants and Covid-19

#135

Post by ken »

downerending wrote: post #114
brenden2 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just fear mongering. Life will return to normal. Lots of people swore they'd never fly after 9/11 and yet things did recover.

Maybe. Two very reassuring things happened right after 9/11, though: (1) cockpit doors were seriously reinforced, and (2) everyone realized that if there was a on-board threat, the only rational response would be "Let's roll". Some might also include TSA changes on that list. COVID-19 is different. We're having an extended period of time to realize that we simply don't need to fly anywhere. And that airplanes always…

Teaching passengers to wear masks when sick, wash their hands, etc., is the "let's roll" of COVID-19. A vaccine will be the reinforced cockpit doors of COVID-19. For most people, in 3 years, we'll be right back to where we were.

I don't see how airplanes are any more "petri dishes" than buses, trains, theatres, stadiums, conventions, churches, restaurants, or the DMV. (We're not going to start building everything 4x bigger in every dimension just so people can safely sneeze at an IMAX screening.) Instead of seeing that they don't need to fly, they'll see that flying is no worse than 20 other things they do.

We just have to hope that the government doesn't take advantage of the situation to create a TSA of COVID-19, with mandatory worse-than-useless "health theater".

Re: Flight Attendants and Covid-19

#136

Post by downerending »

ken wrote: post #135
downerending wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Two very reassuring things happened right after 9/11, though: (1) cockpit doors were seriously reinforced, and (2) everyone realized that if there was a on-board threat, the only rational response would be "Let's roll". Some might also include TSA changes on that list. COVID-19 is different. We're having an extended period of time to realize that we simply don't need to fly anywhere. And that airplanes always…

Teaching passengers to wear masks when sick, wash their hands, etc., is the "let's roll" of COVID-19. A vaccine will be the reinforced cockpit doors of COVID-19. For most people, in 3 years, we'll be right back to where we were. I don't see how airplanes are any more "petri dishes" than buses, trains, theatres, stadiums, conventions, churches, restaurants, or the DMV. (We're not going to start building everything 4x…

Cockpit doors were pretty straightforward and appeared almost immediately. There's a pretty good chance we will never have an effective COVID-19 vaccine. No knowledgeable scientist thinks it's a sure thing, nor that it will be widely available anytime soon.

Airplanes are uniquely awful in that people are packed closely together and the air is almost entirely recirculated. Nothing else even comes close.

Re: Flight Attendants and Covid-19

#137

Post by nradov »

walterbell wrote: post #108
kazagistar wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have that luxury based on class. Otherwise they are hosed.

One of the most effective defenses is Vitamin D, which is free if you go outside on a sunny day. Bonus fresh air. Dark-skinned people may benefit from (cheap) supplements, depending on location. A disproportionate number of US/UK severe cases are dark-skinned people. Have you seen research into the cause? Sadly, Vitamin D does not have a pharma marketing budget to convince people that they would be hosed without expe…

There does appear to be a correlation between vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19 risk.

https://ssrn.com/abstract=3585561

Re: Flight Attendants and Covid-19

#138

Post by JadeNB »

ken wrote: post #135
downerending wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Two very reassuring things happened right after 9/11, though: (1) cockpit doors were seriously reinforced, and (2) everyone realized that if there was a on-board threat, the only rational response would be "Let's roll". Some might also include TSA changes on that list. COVID-19 is different. We're having an extended period of time to realize that we simply don't need to fly anywhere. And that airplanes always…

Teaching passengers to wear masks when sick, wash their hands, etc., is the "let's roll" of COVID-19. A vaccine will be the reinforced cockpit doors of COVID-19. For most people, in 3 years, we'll be right back to where we were. I don't see how airplanes are any more "petri dishes" than buses, trains, theatres, stadiums, conventions, churches, restaurants, or the DMV. (We're not going to start building everything 4x…

Every little dribble of terrorism made flying a lot worse. (An infinitesimally small one of the reasons to curse Richard Reid.) Just imagine every way flying will get worse when future diseases flare up, and diseases aren't limited by human resourcefulness as terrorism is.

Re: Flight Attendants and Covid-19

#139

Post by dannyw »

H8crilA wrote: post #31
drewcon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chance of death is one thing, but your chance of ending up with a prolonged extremely unpleasant hospital stay and possible long term (we don't know yet, but I don't want to be the one to find out) morbidities is far higher. Under 50 year olds make up 20-25% of hospitalizations. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1259131903170371591

50% of ICU patients have clotting problems, including strokes, but mostly damage to lower limbs. 30% of ICU patients experience kidney problems and require a consultation with a nephrologist or dialysis. It's not as simple as "all good" vs "death". PS: source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-hijacks-the-body-fr...

These numbers don’t account for the age distribution. It’s not reasonable to say “25% of those going to ICUs are under 50” (chances are this is probably 23% 40-45; btw), and “50% of those in ICU have clotting problems”, so “25% x 50% = 12.5%”.

Re: Flight Attendants and Covid-19

#140

Post by ekianjo »

rootusrootus wrote: post #124
walterbell wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero vaccines in the entire history of coronaviruses. For the well-known reason that the viruses mutate, so a vaccine against seasonal variant A does not work against new variant B.

This is a common misconception. Viruses mutate, sure, but most do not mutate very quickly or very much. This includes coronaviruses. Influenza, on the other hand, mutates at a prodigious rate in meaningful ways. The reason we don't have vaccines against any coronaviruses is because there aren't very many that infect humans and all of them other than SC2 are so mild it isn't worth spending the effort to eradicate them…

> The reason we don't have vaccines against any coronaviruses

Coronaviruses affect animals too, and yet we haven't been able to develop vaccines against them. And yes, there are vaccines for many other infections for animals.

Post reply on HN