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

My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 215 posts

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#141

Post by endorphone »

obituary_latte wrote: post #135
endorphone wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first comment specifically indicated N95 masks. Remarkably two people have criticized me for not being specific when replying to a blanket (and incorrect) post, when I was actually specific. Amazing. Then again, the one guy claims that health-care workers only wear masks to protect patients, which is just cartoonishly incorrect (beyond in the abstract "protect patients by the healthcare workers not getting infecte…

It’s not cartoonishly incorrect, in fact it’s mostly correct. Healthcare workers wear masks mostly to protect their patients. They themselves may get some protection from splashing/spurting bodily or other fluids, but not from any airborne contaminants or infections. > A. Masks were introduced into clinical practice at the beginning of the 20th century to protect patients from microorganisms being expelled from healt…

Surgical masks. We all know that. Everyone knows that.

N95 masks are distinctly and absolutely worn to protect the wearer. N95 masks are recommended for front-line staff when dealing with viral outbreaks. H1N1, SARS, MERS, and now COVID-19 -- staff wear self-protection masks. During flu outbreaks front-line staff wear N95 for clinics.

This discussion -- what we are talking about -- is COVID-19. Every front-line staff dealing with this, worldwide, is equipped with an N95 mask, or there is a problem. Because when your front-line staff get sick things really break down.

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#142

Post by bootlooped »

ghostpepper wrote: post #75
partiallypro wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Surgeon General dismissed medical masks, which are useless against this virus, they were not talking about masks that are sealed to your face and actually filter germs. Your post itself is misinformation.

I don't think most people know how to properly fit test an N95 respirator though.

Learning how is as easy as watching a 5 minute YouTube video. I have read this argument in other places and it is never mentioned that, while laypeople may not know how to properly wear a mask right now, it is not hard at all for them to learn.

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#143

Post by baq »

partiallypro wrote: post #76
rkagerer wrote: post #51

On the face of it, seems stupid you didn't get tested. But I don't know the other side of the story. If there really is a limited supply of these tests, it makes sense for CDC to assign them accordingly. Frankly, if you don't end up with COVID-19, this is a bit of a non-story. Regardless, it sounds like a bigger budget should be set aside for for testing. If I was in charge and had the resources, EVERYONE coming back…

The CDC has undoubtedly pushed massive amounts of funds into test kits...but that has to be manufactured. It doesn't just appear instantly and out of thin air. Then you have to distribute it to clinics/ERs. Testing will gradually expand, and the requirements for testing will be loosened once supply can finally meet demand.

In the mean time, why not import test kits from Italy or South Korea? Those countries test hundreds daily, if not thousands.

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#144

Post by [deleted] »

obituary_latte wrote: post #139
endorphone wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, yes they do. I can find a million pictures of N95 masks that look just like a cheap little paper mask (not like surgical masks -- not rectangular. Just cheap and like it's made of paper similar to a paper filter). https://cdn10.bigcommerce.com/s-rxcy1k/products/11668/images...

Now you seem to be just arguing for arguments sake or you’re the kind of person who can’t ever admit to making a mistake or being wrong. Your linked image in no way objectively looks “just like” cheap square pleated surgical masks. https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/LyoAAOSwMTFeMbmh/s-l300.png

[deleted]

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#145

Post by voidmain »

garmaine wrote: post #82
seraphsf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core problem is that the CDC (and country) has had the capacity to test only a few hundred samples per day. Meaning, they don’t have the ability to test everyone with flu-like symptoms. Nobody thinks it’s right to NOT test every potential case. It just wasn’t possible. Good news: Just today, they released new rules that should increase testing capacity by 400x.

The CDC doesn't run the tests. The hospitals and independent labs do. There has been some issues with the test kits distributed by the CDC, but since the virus genome has been sequenced you don't actually need a test kit (it's just a faster process if you have one). However the CDC has enacted emergency powers to make it illegal for hospitals to use their own testing equipment, which they have in-house, to test their…

Some clarification based on what I've been able to put together (caveat: I'm not an expert in this area)

The CDC developed a testing protocol (crudely, a set of 3 conserved RNA sequences of the virus to chemically "grep" for). The protocol is here [1] and I think anyone with suitable equipment (an RT-PCR machine and an oligonucleotide synthesizer to make the primers and probes?) could run tests using just the information on that web page, though they would probably also want known positive samples of the virus to validate against. And there are lots of labs with suitable equipment. But as that page says, it is not legal to do this clinically.

The CDC also sent out test kits [2]. These are just vials of primer/probe pairs synthesized from the short sequences on the above page, and a fake positive control to validate with. These were authorized by the FDA, and so are legal to use. But apparently somehow they screwed up the production of primer #3 (or maybe the sequence itself is wrong), and so almost all the labs were not able to validate the test. After several weeks the CDC has still not fixed this problem, but labs are now allowed to run tests using just primer 1 and 2, so testing capacity is rapidly increasing (though of course who knows how sensitive or specific the tests are).

The federal organization preventing labs from running tests is the FDA [3], not the CDC. It is also the FDA who would have to approve the commercially produced test kits.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/rt-pcr-panel-p... [2] https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download [3] https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-...

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#146

Post by fspeech »

themagician wrote: post #107

This helps highlight just how much of this is nothing more than FUD. The CDC counts real flu deaths and estimates infections. It doesn’t test for them. As a result you get a relatively low fatality rate. But for COVID-19 we are using only confirmed deaths and confirmed tested infections to come up with a fatality rate that seems much higher than it actually is because most infections go unreported. This is just a rea…

Read the WHO comment: Guangdong, China, tested 320000 samples with postive rate of 0.15%. So no they did not miss a lot of light cases. The death rate is real, esp for the vunerable population. Medical system will be overwhelmed if this goes unchecked.

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#147

Post by bobcostas55 »

mlyle wrote: post #114
themagician wrote: post #107

This helps highlight just how much of this is nothing more than FUD. The CDC counts real flu deaths and estimates infections. It doesn’t test for them. As a result you get a relatively low fatality rate. But for COVID-19 we are using only confirmed deaths and confirmed tested infections to come up with a fatality rate that seems much higher than it actually is because most infections go unreported. This is just a rea…

Medical statisticians are not tards, and the math used to estimate CFRs is reasonable. Yes, there's uncertainty, because when something is massively growing, it's not meaningful to test the population at large and ordinary surveillance mechanisms are not effective yet. We also don't really have serological testing (allegedly Singapore has a good serological assay?) which doesn't help. It's worth noting that the real…

>Medical statisticians are not tards

This paper has 4000 citations: https://journals.lww.com/epidem/Abstract/1990/01000/No_Adjus...

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#148

Post by jonas21 »

anonsivalley652 wrote: post #122
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CT has a pretty high radiation dose. As far as I understand, for every 2000 people given a chest CT we expect 1 person to get a fatal form of cancer due to the CT. Compared to the natural incidence of getting a fatal cancer in your lifetime (about 400 in 2000), this is a very low. And for serious conditions, a CT can literally be a life saver. But if you apply chest CTs to screen for a disease with (let's say) a 0.…

It's ~29000 deaths / 70M CT scans per year. That's 414 micromorts, which is almost exactly as risky as skydiving once on average. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort Source: US NCI 2007

The wikipedia article says skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump. So more like skydiving 50 times?

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#149

Post by rsync »

endorphone wrote: post #16
sschueller wrote: post #8

The Swiss government issued the following guidelines [1] to prevent further spread of the virus. Masks are considered useless unless you are infected. - Wash your hands thoroughly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvcvvRp3lsY - Cough and sneeze into a paper tissue/handerchief or the crook of your arm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3_rFPtQgKE - If you experience shortness of breath, have a cough or fever: • Stay at…

Masks are considered useless unless you are infected. This is a bizarre claim that can be countered against the reality that every front-line worker is equipped with a mask. EDIT: Almost immediately I dropped to -2. Bizarre. Again, every health agency the world over equips health workers who deal with potential COVID-19 with N95+ masks. For some reason people desperately want to clutch onto the notion that it's usele…

"EDIT: Almost immediately I dropped to -2. Bizarre."

I downvoted you because you talked about your downvotes.

If you're keeping track of scoring, HN is perhaps not the right community for you.

Re: My Covid-19 Story in Brooklyn

#150

Post by obituary_latte »

endorphone wrote: post #141
obituary_latte wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not cartoonishly incorrect, in fact it’s mostly correct. Healthcare workers wear masks mostly to protect their patients. They themselves may get some protection from splashing/spurting bodily or other fluids, but not from any airborne contaminants or infections. > A. Masks were introduced into clinical practice at the beginning of the 20th century to protect patients from microorganisms being expelled from healt…

Surgical masks. We all know that. Everyone knows that. N95 masks are distinctly and absolutely worn to protect the wearer. N95 masks are recommended for front-line staff when dealing with viral outbreaks. H1N1, SARS, MERS, and now COVID-19 -- staff wear self-protection masks. During flu outbreaks front-line staff wear N95 for clinics. This discussion -- what we are talking about -- is COVID-19. Every front-line staff…

Ok, yeah it sounds like there’s a terminology and context breakdown going on. Typical healthcare setting vs. current COVID-19 setting etc. When you said

> Then again, the one guy claims that health-care workers only wear masks to protect patients, which is just cartoonishly incorrect (beyond in the abstract "protect patients by the healthcare workers not getting infected" way). To the point that is has to be malicious.

it’s not clear which (COVID-19/typical healthcare) setting is being referred to (maybe same for comment you’re responding to as well).

Apologies for any confusion on my part.

Post reply on HN