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

America is giving up on the pandemic?

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

901–910 of 1001 posts

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#901

Post by roenxi »

orange8 wrote: post #897
roenxi wrote: post #896

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? It is impossible. The stats are too unreliable. And that is why an oranges to oranges comparison can't actually be done.

> Almost. We'd need to compare actual homicides to an imaginary world where... What do you mean how? Aren't you the one who came up with the suggestion in the first place? You go ahead and almost do it. > And that is why an oranges to oranges comparison can't actually be done. Classic straw-man argument. You just set up your own imaginary cooperative world of full of alternative stats, then shot it down immediately.

Well, I suppose I wasn't being entirely clear. Let me try to put it all in one post with vague apologies for letting the thread build up:

Your "oranges-to-oranges" comparison isn't. It compares homicides - which are overwhelmingly going to be negligent accidents or intentional crimes - with police caused deaths. The police are people we purposefully send into situations where violence is likely or respect for the law has broken down. It is expected that they will cause some deaths in the execution of their duty.

I can certainly see an argument that getting the deaths caused by police to 0 or close to is a worthy goal. But it isn't comparable to homicides because it is normal for the police to be sent in to uncontrolled situations. It'd be nothing short of a minor miracle if police-caused deaths were comparable to background rates given how seedy the US gets. We certainly can't get a feel for the justified/unjustified/negligent breakup of the figures which is germane to the debate.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#902

Post by blub »

hef19898 wrote: post #888
blub wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for anyone but myself, however I now no faith in anything that the WHO, US surgeon general and to some limited extend the CDC and RKI say, because of the way they lied or hid the truth in the past. I have much more faith in the KCDC for example and otherwise I want to see studies. And anyway, people are unfairly accused of hoarding masks. It turns out that in the US, Australia, Germany (and probably oth…

Who do you trust instead? Seriously asking, because dismissing somethig is always the easy part. Regarding the masks, I went deepy down that rabbit hole in February and March. Most production happens in China. China didn't produce anything, needed what was there for themselves and had closed down a lot cities and ports and such. At the same time, demand increased by orders of magnitude around the world. hence the sho…

I did say I trust the KCDC, didn't I? And also the CDC and RKI can obviously do some good work, but they completely failed to set the story straight on masks and aerosol transmission while over-emphasizing the fomite transmission and hand washing. So at least on those topics they've lost credibility.

I don't know if China needed the masks, or if they needed to weld people in their apartments, but apparently they did that anyway. See for example the article "Billions of face masks sent to China during Australian bushfire crisis". This was happening around February.

Spiegel published an article in which a distributor of protection equipment got orders for months of inventory within a day from various Chinese customers. They also claimed that all the other distributors which they knew had a similar situation on their hands. In fact they got so many orders that they alerted the ministry of health about an upcoming bottleneck in procuring PPE.

Then there's the US: "U.S. exported millions in masks and ventilators ahead of the coronavirus crisis". $17.5 millions worth of masks exported during January and February.

And this is in addition to the hundreds of thousands in PPE they received as donations from all over the world.

The average Joe buying a 10 or 20 pack for himself & family is first of all not hoarding, as this is a very small quantity and secondly didn't cause the shortage.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#903

Post by koheripbal »

stevoski wrote: post #290
dang wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a stub comment to collect replies in one place, so that it can be collapsed and prevent too much offtopicness at the top of the thread.

@dang, Maybe the text in italics ("Be kind. Don't be snarky...") should be always shown above the HN comment box? It'd be nice to get the reminder every time we are starting to write something unkind or snarky...

Do the mods here ban users who have a track record of non-substantive + snarky/combative comments?

I feel like sites experience a downward spiral of intellectual entropy as time goes on if effort isn't put into maintaining a constructive culture.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#904

Post by mns »

hef19898 wrote: post #879
mns wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not just the US, I just realised that in Germany, Munich, there were some "rednecks" and weird people protesting the Corona measures. So they closed down a 100 acres area where Oktoberfest takes place for a 1000 person protest (that's how much they were allowed). Now I live in that area and on that weekend we were stopped by the police while going shopping, and they were stopping everyone to make sure you're…

At least in Munich, the latest protests are around a time everything is opening up again anyways. The anti-lockdown protest happened, more or less, during the hight of the lockdown. So totally different circumstances.

The one where police stopped us from going grocery shopping was exactly one week before, so it's not that far back. It's still not allowed to have mass protests, no matter the cause.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#905

Post by blub »

ethanbond wrote: post #889
blub wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't complicated at all, it's only been made to look so by governments and organizations caught with their pants down. Not wearing a mask offers zero protection from an illness which is mainly transmitted through droplets and aerosols. Wearing a mask offers some protection, ranging from little to very good depending on the type of mask. In the mean time we know that surgical masks offer pretty good protection i…

You are assuming that people’s behaviors are identical when wearing and not wearing masks. This is what we do not know (still). There are plenty of results in life science far more counterintuitive than the hypothesis, “people are less strict about social distancing when wearing masks.”

There are countries - including in the EU - which made masks mandatory or highly recommended them. If "we" do not know how people behave when wearing masks, we could simply ask them.

Although we don't strictly need to ask them, since the head of the Chinese CDC said more than a month ago that using masks is essential and that he doesn't understand why Europe doesn't do it. KCDC specialists said much of the same thing, although I don't know if they expressed concern at Europe's lax attitude toward masks.

And finally here's a couple of anecdotes:

* people in supermarkets seem a bit more careful now, since the masks have been introduced. But keeping 1.5-2m distance at all times is hard and this is certainly not always respected. That's the whole point of why one needs masks instead of relying on distancing - distancing doesn't always work, but having a mask on is pretty simple. And even if the wearer screws up, at least they don't easily infect the others.

* before the mandatory mask thing people generally got out of my way when they saw me with my mask on.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#906

Post by thazework »

dang wrote: post #405
dang wrote: post #220

All: if commenting, please be up to date on the site guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ) and be sure follow them. Start here: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Don't use a thread like this to fulminate or flame. It helps no one. It adds toxic fumes. Regardle…

This is a stub comment to collect replies in one place, so that it can be collapsed and prevent too much offtopicness at the top of the thread.

When you make a call for civility the people most likely to exercise increased self-restraint are those who would in any case tend to be more judicious in how they express themselves. Meanwhile those who spew racist hatred will not be deterred and moreover they will now face lesser pushback calling out their barbarism. Source: this thread.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#907

Post by blub »

hef19898 wrote: post #844
blub wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your source that airborne transmission is rare is the WHO, then all you have is a worthless source. Recently I've read an interview with Drosten (the German virologist which came up with one of the Coronavirus tests) say that they're starting to see airborne transmission as an important transmission factor, maybe not a strong as droplets but comparable. This is especially the case in poorly ventilated spaces.

Key words: starting to see. Using that now is 20/20 hindsight.

Well, at least in the west we're starting to see it now, but we're late to the party compared to Asian countries.

We already knew for instance that SARS is transmitted through aerosols. Then a new thing comes up which is related to the above and is basically named SARS-2 and we forget about the aerosols and instead think we should wash our hands a lot. Words can't express how stupid this is.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#908

Post by blub »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #856
blub wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your source that airborne transmission is rare is the WHO, then all you have is a worthless source. Recently I've read an interview with Drosten (the German virologist which came up with one of the Coronavirus tests) say that they're starting to see airborne transmission as an important transmission factor, maybe not a strong as droplets but comparable. This is especially the case in poorly ventilated spaces.

I don't suppose you have links to any pre-prints or papers (hell even blog posts I guess) around this?

This is a pretty nice and very recent summary: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/06/02/scie...

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#909

Post by blub »

hef19898 wrote: post #845
blub wrote: post #827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really unfortunate with that young girl. So far it looks like these are the absolute exception, but it does sadly happen that young healthy people and kids too get seriously sick and sometimes even die. The German pediatric association publishes some (incomplete) stats about the disease in children ( https://dgpi.de/covid-19-survey-update-kw22/ ) and there were so far 159 hospitalizations, with 21 of those in…

Key word: Incomplete. As was Drostens study about the virus concentration in children. The German Fox News wannabe BILD tried to kill him for it. Incomplete studies and data is the norm right now. I am happy to not have to make decissions about life and death based on this. Someone has, so. And erring on the side of caution isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The DGPI data is not a study, but rather they collect data from children's clinics and it is incomplete in the sense that not all clinics deliver information to them. If anything there could be more hospitalizations and deaths, but that seems rather unlikely.

In any case I agree that the topic COVID and children is particularly sensitive and still blurry right now.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#910

Post by blub »

hef19898 wrote: post #855
blub wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all contagious people never stay at home. Based on my experience, people with colds come to work and go about their business.

That is anecdata. Maybe valid for, say, January. Starting Febuary, that changed. Again anecdata, but In Germany you got up to 2 weeks of sick eave for potential COVID-19 symptoms without seeing a doctor.

I must be unlucky because my colleagues almost always come to work sneezing for a few days until (if!) they take sick days. This was right before the pandemic, when the situation was getting hot in China but not yet in Europe.
Post reply on HN