Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/11/814474930/coronavirus-covid-19-is-now-officially-a-pandemic-who-says

by tmlee • 6 years ago

1243 906 6 years ago

npr.org

jennyyang5• 6 years ago

What sort of effect will this have on contracts that have Force Majeure clauses? That's a big unknown to me that could have a big recessionary effect.

toomuchtodo• 6 years ago

I think there's going to be so much nuance around this (what does your contract say? when did you sign it? do you have insurers backstopping you? if so, what does their policy say?) that the answer is going to be, "Talk to your lawyer".

Personal opinion, not a lawyer, not your lawyer, is that the further into the global pandemic we were when executing an agreement, the less wiggle room you might have. Again, talk to your lawyer; that's what they get paid for.

Hongwei• 6 years ago

Somewhat related - pandemic bonds will now pay out towards relief efforts and investors will lose their money.

Matt Levine does some analysis here: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-19/the-fi...

alexpotato4• 6 years ago

Interesting history on catastrophe bonds in general: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/magazine/26neworleans-t.h...

ac29• 6 years ago

I share an office with a travel agent, and I can tell you a lot of people with "cancel for any reason" travel insurance are getting screwed by force majeure clauses. Unsurprisingly, insurance companies have no interest in paying out policies that threaten the existence of their company.

jennyyang5• 6 years ago

That sounds like a great way to kill the travel insurance industry. Not paying out means that the same people won't buy it again next time.

PeterisP3• 6 years ago

It's exactly what force majeure clauses are for. If something gets cancelled or becomes unreasonable because of Covid-19, this gives a reasonable way to exit contracts without penalties, and that is a good thing because given very unusual circumstances, we want people and organizations to be able to adapt instead of being pressured financially to execute things that seemed reasonable last year but are not now.

The first area where I'm seeing widespread uses of force majeure clauses is the cancellation of large events, conferences etc with limited or compensation for the cancellations. And again, while this hurts some people a lot, this is mostly a good thing, because we do want to give the organizers the ability to break their commitments and cancel the conference with much smaller consequences (to them) than an ordinary cancellation would have; we don't want the organizers to be pressured to hold the event at all costs.

finaliteration4• 6 years ago

Even though I rationally know it’s the right thing to do, I’m terrified about my daughter’s school closing and her and other students severely falling behind academically. I can work from home and watch her, but my spouse and I are not AT ALL equipped to home school her for a lengthy period of time. She is not a good self-learner and already struggles in some areas.

How should we be preparing for that? How are other people doing it who have to keep their children home and away from educational resources and teachers?

Edit: I’m getting mixed reactions to this. I’m not at all saying academics are more important than slowing the spread of the virus. But I see many comments calling for a complete shutdown of schools and very few saying that for many parents this is a legitimate source of hardship and anxiety, even if it’s the right thing to do.

ZeroCool2u• 6 years ago

I'm not a parent, but I had a period of time, about a month, when my Mom had to teach me, because I couldn't attend school. What worked well for us was structuring and scheduling time. What didn't work well was her winging it with the curriculum.

I think if we went through that time again and I was in her shoes, I would take advantage of Khan Academy. Especially for Math, it's incredibly well structured and forces you to convince it that you've truly learned the content with built-in quizzes. It doesn't hold you back if you've got a handle on the lessons and makes sure that if you're having issues that you practice until you've really got it down.

I think the most work for you will be setting her up properly, making sure she's comfortable with the system, and being available if she's got questions that it's not quickly answering.

jethro_tell• 6 years ago

This is what I'm working on now, I'm trying to set up 'classes' for my second grader with math, reading, writing, typing, and programing. She has music and art at school and I can't really teach that but I may look into a little more. I'm not too worried about her falling behind, but I do want to make sure it's not just idle time, I assume I'll have to do some WFH though I don't really expect to hit full time with it.

dickjocke• 6 years ago

I don't mean to be glib, but isn't this a good opportunity for her to learn those skills? I wasn't a good self-learner until I was in AP Bio and the teacher was very incompetent and I had to just face down the book. That groundwork helped me so much as a freshman in college where there were lots of kids who had always had awesome, attentive teachers. Especially if you are there with her!

I love Khan Academy, and the cool thing about youtube is there are so many content creators that there will be someone your daughter thinks has a nice voice or is easy to understand or funny.

finaliteration4• 6 years ago

but isn't this a good opportunity for her to learn those skills?

I think that’s a fair question, and I’d love to be optimistic about her ability to hunker down and build those skills. But, she has some behavioral challenges and just getting her to do homework is a nightly struggle consisting of meltdowns and arguments, so I’m not as hopeful that she’ll be able to do it. She’s a bright kid, but definitely one who -needs- the structure of a classroom to be successful.

MengerSponge• 6 years ago

YouTube videos are great for some resources, but they aren't a substitute for a competent teacher.

Fun thing to think about: there are videos that measurably improve students' performance on a task, but students rate those videos as "confusing" and "not helpful". The videos that students do like? They have zero effect.

https://teachingcommons.stanford.edu/teaching-talk/when-conf...

vsareto• 6 years ago

I don't have kids but there's lots of Khan academy and legit youtube stuff (3blue1brown) that can be used to learn things, even if they don't get credit for the classes.

I don't know how to turn non-self-learners into self-learners though. And admittedly if I was a kid during this, I'd be playing as much video games as possible.

Hopefully most teachers have a clue and will realize this was some pretty serious circumstances and not be as harsh and do more review.

londons_explore2• 6 years ago

As a parent, if you have the energy & time, a good approach can be to:

* Boast how easy school is these days.

* Wait to get told you're wrong.

* Propose a competition. Your child can pick any subject that neither of you have studied yet, and then have a race over 24 hours, 1 week, etc. to learn the material and do a multi-choice test you both agree on first.

Your child will obviously pick a subject they're good at, and you'll probably loose. But you still made them choose to study really hard.

Blahah2• 6 years ago

Honestly this is the last thing I'd be worrying about. A child can skip 6 months to a year of school and have almost no negative effects on their life outcomes. If they get sick and die, or their close family members do, they will definitely have negative effects on their outcomes.

There are tons of resources and communities for homeschooling on the internet. Happy to help point you to stuff if needed, but please prioritise health over potential educational slowdown.

mochomocha2• 6 years ago

A child can skip 6 months to a year of school and have almost no negative effects on their life outcomes.

Citation needed.

finaliteration4• 6 years ago

please prioritise health over potential educational slowdown

My apologies - I didn’t at all mean to make it seem like I was downplaying the public health aspect. I fully understand this is likely what’s necessary and that public health comes first. That being said, it is a source of anxiety for me as someone who values academics because, for me, it was a path to a better life.

cptskippy• 6 years ago

As a parent to a child who missed significant amounts of school and is graduating with her class this summer, I 100% agree with you.

earthtourist2• 6 years ago

I hope my kids school closes, and I'm happy to make a commitment to spending a lot of extra time helping them make up the lost progress.

My plan is to let them enjoy the time off, for the most part, and then spend the next n months on reduced entertainment in favor of extra studying.

Seems a small price to pay given how many lives will be saved by closing schools.

Edit: one concern I heard is that health care workers need schools to take care of their children. Why not start by letting anyone that can take their child home, take their child home. This would reduce the risk for the children that stay in school by a lot, which will help health care workers not get sick.

Because currently I'd risk punishment for taking my child out of school "unexcused". Which seems like some seriously backwards bs.

rogerkirkness• 6 years ago

School is daycare, you barely learn things. Your kid will be fine. I was unschooled, did no formal education, am fine...

citiguy• 6 years ago

Agreed. My son missed 2 months of 4th grade a couple years ago and when he went back it was like he hadn't missed a day.

londons_explore2• 6 years ago

I expect your school will have prepared materials for such an eventuality.

Your daughter should be given long youtube playlists of online lessons, homework assignments, scheduled interactive video lessons, etc.

As a parent, all you really need to do is check your daughter is actually doing what the school is providing. The threat of detention doesn't work so well at home when you can just claim the internet broke and that's why you haven't showed up to an online lesson or submitted an assignment...

blackoil2• 6 years ago

"falling behind academically" makes sense only if she alone is taking a leave. If whole school is closed then she is keeping with the school. In a 70 year lifetime, taking at worse 3 months of holidays won't affect anyone in life. She'll have a more severe scar if she infects anyone who struggles for life.

With internet and access to online courses find something that helps her self study and improve upon the existing knowledge/skills. Follow the instructions from school.

dcolkitt2• 6 years ago

I’m terrified about my daughter’s school closing and her and other students severely falling behind academically

I wouldn't worry too much. The evidence from prior natural experiments show that unexpected interrupted school years[1] has no persistent effects into adulthood.

[1]http://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/spischke/ksj_EJ_final.pdf

mochomocha2• 6 years ago

I don't think that's what this paper is about though:

"This paper investigates how changing the length of the school year, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged, affects learning and subsequent earnings"

In-person curriculum != online curriculum (social interactions, lab classes, PE...)

Short school year != Interrupted school year

SubiculumCode4• 6 years ago

Just have them read books and limit TV watching while home.

pingyong2• 6 years ago

If she's not in high school I wouldn't worry too much. I essentially missed half of third grade, all of 4th and 5th grade and half of 6th grade, and by 8th-90th grade I was pretty much caught up completely without even a real catch up program. A lot of the stuff your learn at that age simply becomes trivial or at least much much easier just from getting older. In that case, I'd just give her some puzzles to solve or something.

If she is in high school the only answer is probably a bunch of "homework", good books on the subject, and there are also hundreds of video courses online.

alistairSH• 6 years ago

and by 8th-90th grade I was pretty much caught up

So it only took you about 80 years to catch up? ;)

detaro• 6 years ago

"Falling behind" what? Even if she and her peers have to repeat a school year because classes don't happen for a long time, which would be quite extreme, what would be the issue with that?

swasheck7• 6 years ago

Exactly. Summer break? Spring Break? Winter Break? I'm somewhat perplexed by OP sentiment.

matlin• 6 years ago

It actually might not be the right thing to do for the reason you mentioned but also, for the families that can't work from home, it becomes a huge economic burden to have their kids not in school. It's obviously a necessary step to contain a deadly pandemic but I think, in this particular case, children are actually in the lowest risk pool. Kids seem to survive the virus at near the highest rate but also contract the virus near the lowest rate so closing schools might be an unnecessary burden on working parents with marginal effect on containment.

papito3• 6 years ago

She will probably benefit more from a few weeks of being a child, and being worry-free. School was the most stressful time of my life. Tests and exams always hang over your head. Pop quizzes, mid-terms, finals. There is literally NEVER a peace of mind.

recursive• 6 years ago

Different people experience differently. Tests were always less stressful for me than non-test days. On a non-test day, there would be a non-zero chance I forgot/didn't know to do homework that was due. But homework was never due when there was a test.

TheFiend7• 6 years ago

This is so culturally unhealthy IMO and it's why America and similar academic oriented countries work work work until they die. It's like 1 year of being off course people act like their lives are going to end.

dbcurtis• 6 years ago

How should we be preparing for that?

Step 1: Chill.

We home-schooled from preschool through high-school. Today I am trying to figure out how to help (from the opposite coast) my MIT senior deal with getting kicked out of their dorm in a few days. Home-schooling can work just fine. Chill.

1. Remember that of things that can be measured, the thing most highly correlated with academic success is parental involvement. So no matter how wonky your pedagogy, you will be involved. Hopefully that factoid helps you chill.

2. My first piece of advice to all new home-schooling parents is: Don't try to do everything at once. Get one subject working well, when you have established momentum and routine on that, add another. Cook until done.

3. There are many great online resources now. But I suspect your school is going to be providing curriculum information so you may have a usable starter kit.

4. As to the "self-learner" issues, all that does is help you find your happy place on the home schooling spectrum. At one end you have "school at home" -- trying to replicate the school environment in your dining room. There is also "unschooling" -- completely self-directed learning. This may not work for you. This may be a good chance to help your child develop some self-learning instincts.

(unschooling in my definition is: "You can work on what you want, but you MUST work on something." Which is NOT what I call "raised by wolves" -- a home schooling philosophy that I have seen occasionally, but doesn't often yield a good result.)

jennyyang5• 6 years ago

I'm in a similar boat as you.

Most school districts may start doing things like video instruction or give parents a curriculum to work on, I'm not worried about that aspect. It may become an entirely remote education for the rest of this school year across the world.

I'm considering taking leave of absence and teaching him the curriculum. The problem is I'm not a good teacher, I know this about myself.

It's impossible to WFH and take care of a child. So your productivity will suffer, hopefully your company understands this, but then again everyone will be in the same boat once the school districts start closing things down.

clairity• 6 years ago

rather than becoming immobilized, panicked, and/or irrational, fear should be a trigger for a learn-plan-do cycle, which you've apparently started (learning what's possible to do about the situation).

however, it's important not to spread irrational fear, which words like "terrified" tend to do, particularly when overblown. the state of being "terrified" leads to immobilization, panic, and irrationality, so it should literally be avoided like the plague.

on the other hand, being concerned and worried, and acknowledging (unhelpful) anxiety, is reasonable. asking for help and information, like you did, is reasonable. discerning and acknowledging the appropriate level of risk (probably worse than a regular flu but not nearly as bad as the 1918 flu) is reasonable.

with that said, children are constantly learning whether you teach them or not. it's ok if learning is not entirely linear. the world is not linear, and our brains are not either. what's needed will get in there eventually, and we're resilient enough to compensate for nearly any kind of deficiency anyways.

(the same case can be made for overly worrying about "getting into good school districts", something worth considering a little bit, but not a lot, and a commonly-cited driver of localized real estate bubbles)

finaliteration4• 6 years ago

however, it's important not to spread irrational fear, which words like "terrified" tend to do, particularly when overblown. the state of being "terrified" leads to immobilization, panic, and irrationality, so it should literally be avoided like the plague.

Very good point. Thank you for calling it out. I am not at all intending to spread irrational fear and realize I should have chosen my word there a bit more carefully. I am definitely anxious about it, but that anxiety is driving a desire to figure out a plan and not causing paralysis on my part, which I agree is what the word "terrified" implies.

anonAndOn• 6 years ago

I expect many schools may close for a few weeks. How do kids that get stuck at home during blizzards and hurricanes manage? Do what they do.

bluGill3• 6 years ago

This isn't unusual for schools. Last year my kid had so many days off school for bad weather that he had to go an extra week at the end of the year. Maybe your July plans will be messed up because your kid is still in school, but otherwise the school will give your kid enough school.

There is some worry if your kid is hospitalized for a month while the rest of the school goes on (presumably this means containment worked well except for your kid), but even here schools have to deal with kids who are out for months for medical reasons and they provide extra tutoring to catch those kids up. (I'm familiar with this because my cousin missed a month of school his senior year - he still graduated with his class even though he had to go back the next year to finish some classes)

sequoia3• 6 years ago

https://outschool.com <- Fantastic, paid

https://www.khanacademy.org <- requires a bit more self-direction but quite good.

Homeschooling is not rocket science. I've done it for years and I barely know what I'm doing. Just make resources available, sign up for a couple out school classes, and be willing to help them pursue stuff when they're interested in it. You can do it!

atombender2• 6 years ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22547223

swasheck7• 6 years ago

I prefer the non-paywall npr site so I hope that this one stays up

atombender2• 6 years ago

Sure. When the admins merge dupes, they consider what the best link is and reparent the comments, which has now happened. Now thread had more upvotes and comments.

bagol• 6 years ago

That one requires you to sign up for whatever reason.

fear91• 6 years ago

This should have been done way earlier. WHO's excuse of not declaring it before was that it didn't reach Antarctica yet... which is ridiculous.

Had they raised alarm early on, more countries would have enforced proper procedures (look at South Korea). Instead, the thing spread around and starts impacting economy.

To me, WHO lost all credibility.

LeoTinnitus4• 6 years ago

Well it's gotta hit Madagascar before it can win

mizzao• 6 years ago

Reminds me of the difficulty of getting Madagascar in this game: https://www.addictinggames.com/strategy/pandemic-2

Too soon?

tripa4• 6 years ago

To me, WHO lost all credibility.

Are you saying Covid-19 isn't a pandemic anymore?

mc32• 6 years ago

They vacillated many weeks and they even claimed they had done away with the term/classification of “pandemic” in favor of some word soup.

rhacker• 6 years ago

I got this from OP:

This should have been done way earlier

Not what you're sayin.

meritt• 6 years ago

WHO's excuse of not declaring it before was that it didn't reach Antarctica yet

You're going to need to cite a source because there's no chance anyone remotely educated would make that statement.

warent• 6 years ago

Following organized, rational procedure is exactly what is needed in times of widespread panic. If the WHO based their decisions such as this one on emotions like fear or intuition then they really would be damaging their credibility. Let's be honest, if countries hadn't been enforcing proper procedures to this point, how likely is it that a label by the WHO would make that much of an impact to governments?

echelon4• 6 years ago

They didn't base their decision on the observed growth curve. Anyone looking at the data could have called this a pandemic the moment it left Asia.

The WHO and CDC botched this. Because of their messaging a lot of people (the majority of people!) didn't take this virus seriously, and that is going to result in real human lives lost.

lou13064• 6 years ago

Now, inactive governments may be held accountable of not listening to the WHO. Also, calling it a pandemic 2 weeks ago (or more) would have been perfectly rational.

76543210• 6 years ago

WHO also claimed children under 1 year old should see 0 TV.

Not even 1 second of TV in the 12 months they are alive.

I was curious why, and after researching they had 0 Data. This decision was made by a panel.

Ahhh good old tradition and mysticism.

pilsetnieks• 6 years ago

Who is your goto authority that has supplanted WHO in healthcare matters?

As in, who do people like you, who claim that WHO's maybe flawed handling of this has erased all of the work they've done in the past, consider the best source of truth in these matters?

aazaa2• 6 years ago

Does anyone have a list of previous pandemic declarations and year?

JohnFen2• 6 years ago

I always hate linking to wikipedia, but it's the best such list I could find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

bairrd• 6 years ago

May I ask why you hate linking to wikipedia?

aazaa2• 6 years ago

I'm looking specifically for WHO pandemic declarations.

eganist• 6 years ago

Doesn't look like anyone is tracking "pandemics" formally. WHO.int is tracking public health emergencies of international concern, which appear to include epidemics with pandemic potential as well as outbreaks with pandemic potential and extremely egregious likelihood of permanent harm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Health_Emergency_of_Int...

But from what I could dig up, the last widely accepted pandemic declaration was the H1N1 2009.

The two current pandemics include HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.

There is a list of epidemics, but that list also includes localized or regional matters rather than just global-scale pandemics, and not all of them may amount to PHEICs.

LeoTinnitus4• 6 years ago

My college just basically closed and hour ago saying everything is online now after spring break. Kinda nice for my easy classes. Sucks for my harder ones though.

munk-a• 6 years ago

Good luck - I think I would've had a lot of issues had I ever been forced to remote into classes. When I was in college I definitely didn't have the discipline for that.

impendia• 6 years ago

Speaking as a college professor:

Read your textbook, do homework exercises, and (above all) feel free to contact your professors and ask them for help. That is what they are paid to do!

TeMPOraL6• 6 years ago

Underrated advice. I'd get 10x as much benefit from my undergraduate studies than I did if anyone got it through my head that the academic staff will help you with the stuff that was in the class - and more importantly, they're very happy to tell you everything about their field of research.

LeoTinnitus4• 6 years ago

I mean I'm a returning student and have always been good with online classes so it's honestly an actual perk for me.

The hardest part is instructors who feel like unlocking everything to let people work at their own pace is somehow egregious...I think it's so stupid that a teacher cant somehow manage grading the same stuff for everybody at the same time but just ignores the other students who are ahead until they get to that point.

The best online teachers I've ever had were the ones that unlocked it all from the start and helped you with the few questions you had along the way.

MrFoof• 6 years ago

In the Boston area, Harvard, MIT, Boston University, all five UMASS campuses (including Boston and Lowell), Tufts University, Suffolk University, Emerson College, Northeastern and Olin have all moved to online classes. Plus Amherst College out in western Mass.

That seems like a lot until you realize there's still Boston College, Simmons, Berklee College of Music, Emmanuel, Brandeis, Babson, Bentley, Wellesley, a pharmacology college, two art colleges, and a bunch of community colleges -- and plenty of others I'm forgetting -- I could reach via public transit are still to announce anything, presumably because it's all still being discussed.

For Boston this is really weird and impactful. There is a massive population (somewhere between 350,000 - 400,000 students I think) in the area that is just a transient student population. Though outside of NYC and VERY specific parts of the SFBA, the Boston area is one of the most population dense parts in the US, so there's no more fooling around.

stakkur• 6 years ago

[EDIT] I greatly misjudged this audience. Fear is everywhere, but (at least) so is data.

WHO 10 March report: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

whatshisface2• 6 years ago

In the US, you have a significantly higher chance of dying from the flu than from covid-19.

Today, but the thing about time is that before long next month will be today.

magduf• 6 years ago

80% of all cases are still in China.

That's impossible to know. We have no idea how many cases there are in the US, because we're not doing a significant amount of testing here, because our government is incompetent and unprepared for this.

chungus_khan3• 6 years ago

And it should be very obvious from the fact that the rate of positives relative to the number of tests is enormously higher in the US than elsewhere that the number of infected are much higher than believed. Alongside this, cost prevents many from seeking care for things like respiratory illnesses, and in the case of one that actually requires care would probably do so until it is severely progressed.

lolc• 6 years ago

True. And we don't care about the number of cases anyway. We care about the growth. Assuming China has been ramping up its testing efforts, that gives us a clear picture of the spread in China. Especially compared to countries with slow-to-start, spotty testing.

It seems to me that the U.S. government would prefer for cases to not be tested. Whatever medical competence there is appears to be sidelined by other interests.

metalliqaz• 6 years ago

It is too early in the course of the disease in the US to make that assertion.

That will depend quite a bit on how overwhelmed the hospitals become.

whatshisface2• 6 years ago

SARS-CoV-2 has significantly higher mortality than the flu even with top treatment.

eropple• 6 years ago

In the US, you have a significantly higher chance of dying from the flu than from covid-19.

In the instantaneous moment, yes.

But there's a reason one measures derivatives, and that's why people are concerned.

vtail• 6 years ago

According to this dashboard, there are 40k infected outside of China vs 80k inside, and the 40k number is still growing exponentially. It’s just a matter of days until we have more cases outside of China.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

dontreact• 6 years ago

Given what I know about the nature of this disease, and the american response thus far, I don’t think this is true. It is looking very likely that the health system is going to be overloaded in the US. This is what people working in hospitals are telling me and it makes sense to me given the information that’s out there.

anthonybsd5• 6 years ago

That's what skeptics in Italy were originally saying. Now people in Lombardy are dying from strokes because hospitals can't admit them because ICU is overrun by Covid-19 patients. Sure, if you break your leg and die from bleeding out because all local hospitals are busy treating bilateral pneumonia patients you technically didn't die from Covid-19, but ....

lou13064• 6 years ago

Now people in Lombardy are dying from strokes because hospitals can't admit them

Now wait a minute. If you have a source on that, please do provide it. Because I am from Italy and I have never heard of such things. (There were cases of people who died from a stroke and tested positive to COVID-19, but that's all I know)

swasheck7• 6 years ago

This is where I'm currently battling my south-Denver community. They're all up in arms reciting the GP's facts-in-a-vaccuum. They honestly don't give a rip about the extreme pressure it's put on healthcare systems in Italy (let alone Seattle). They're mad at the local government for "bordering on hysteria" because they're following the South Korean model for management.

Once it's fully spread through our community because the've decided they're entitled to be carriers (because, hey, you're more likely to die of the flu), they'll blame that same government for failing to provide the requisite care in the community.

earthtourist2• 6 years ago

This comment is a great example of the ignorance we face.

"It's mostly in China" = I don't understand exponential growth.

"the flu" = I don't understand that there's a 10-30x higher mortality rate and hospital bed availability is vital to lowering it.

https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth

lou13064• 6 years ago

and hospital bed availability is vital to lowering it.

This. Plus, any disease that has very good chances of putting a young, healthy person in some ICU is not "the flu".

mcv• 6 years ago

For now. It's still expanding rapidly. A lot of countries, including the US, don't exactly give the impression they've got a good handle on this.

If left to expand, this is going to turn into another unavoidable seasonal flu, except more contagious, more severe, and more deadly. And for now, with no vaccine.

A couple of important reasons to try to slow this thing down are:

* Hospitals don't have the capacity to deal with the number of severe COVID-19 patients they're likely to get. There's a good reason China built a new hospital in a week. Severe cases end up on the ICU, and we could end up with hundreds of thousands severe cases.

* Slowing it down gives scientists more time to find a vaccine.

If you wait for it to get worse than the flu, it will be too late.

harpastum• 6 years ago

Today's XKCD is a direct response to this line of thinking: https://xkcd.com/2278/

Just because something hasn't happened yet does not mean it's completely unpredictable. COVID-19 is coming, and if we don't put significant preventative measures in place, many more people will die from it in 2020 than the yearly flu.

JdeBP• 6 years ago

Duplicates via different news services:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22547223

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22547345

deadalus2• 6 years ago

Since Covid-19 is now a Pandemic, my Health Insurance provider will no longer provide treatment to me for free :-(

tribaal3• 6 years ago

Wait, what?

I'm not familiar with how the US system works but that seems... strange. Why would the WHO declaring it a pandemic affect your coverage?

alexpotato4• 6 years ago

I would imagine it's similar to all insurance: there are events outside the scope of your agreement with the insurance company for coverage.

For example, your home insurance would cover your house burning down but might have a clause along the lines of "if the whole town burns down, we will not cover you."

I'm guessing some health insurance plans have a similar clause of "if there is a WHO declared pandemic, we won't cover you".

The fire example from a real historical event: a German city burned to the ground and put multiple insurance firms out of business. This led to the development of "re-insurance" aka insurance firms that insure other insurance firms.

For an interesting take on the above plus catastrophe bonds in general (mentioned in another comment) I highly recommend this article by Michael Lewis: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/magazine/26neworleans-t.h...

EDIT: changed "would have" to "might have a clause"

sp3324• 6 years ago

Some policies just explicitly won't cover them. And it's not only the US, I found examples in at least Australia https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-06/coronavirus-covid-19-... and India https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/insure/health-in...

wmeredith• 6 years ago

I would assume there are many insurance plans that include force majeure clauses. "Force majeure – or vis major – meaning "superior force", also known as cas fortuit or casus fortuitus "chance occurrence, unavoidable accident", is a common clause in contracts that essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties, such as a war, strike, riot, crime, or an event described by the legal term act of God, prevents one or both parties from fulfilling their obligations under the contract"

TLDR: If the event affecting you gets big enough/outrageous enough the insurance companies consider it an act of god and you aren't covered.

dang3• 6 years ago

The commenter is in India. Half of the HN community is outside the US, or was the last time I ran the numbers.

SubiculumCode4• 6 years ago

Are you serious?

Edit: I do not remember posting this. I certainly did not intend to. Sorry folks for the spammy, uselss comment.

aqme28• 6 years ago

How do you find out if your insurance has a pandemic clause?

pantulis• 6 years ago

Read your insurance policy. There is a good chance that pandemics are excluded in the small letter.

Florin_Andrei4• 6 years ago

Since Covid-19 is now a Pandemic, my Health Insurance provider will no longer provide treatment to me for free :-(

Welcome to the free market. Please take a survival fitness brochure on your way out.

sgt1012• 6 years ago

No brochures for the dead my friend.

No brochures for them.

chrxr3• 6 years ago

That sucks if that's true for your insurance provider. Here in the US it is not always true. For example, Blue Cross Blue Shield in MA are covering expenses for testing and waiving co-payments for medically necessary treatments. https://home.bluecrossma.com/coronavirus

SkyPuncher5• 6 years ago

This is only in response to the gov't pressuring over the past few days.

This is not a long standing policy as far as I know.

m0zg4• 6 years ago

You probably still have coverage. Trump stepped on their balls the other day so they extended it: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/486816-pence-major-hea...

Quote: "all the insurance companies here, either today, or before today, have agreed to waive all copays on coronavirus testing, and extend coverage for coronavirus treatment in all of their benefit plans"

post_break2• 6 years ago

I have an HSA plan, there were no copays to begin with, just my $4,000 deductible. So I'm still on the hook for $4,000 before insurance kicks in.

mikestew4• 6 years ago

”Vice President Pence said Tuesday that a group of major health insurance companies”

Assuming that one is insured to begin with, and your insurance company was one of those at the White House, yeah, you could be covered. So “probably still have coverage” is a pretty wishful statement.

Twixes2• 6 years ago

That's outrageous. Every living person deserves full healthcare coverage. Leaving people behind by private insurers is inhumane, and in difficult times like these it's in fact a hazard for the public at large.

Aachen• 6 years ago

Name and shame... Also, country please. I don't know if this would also be a thing in Europe or if it's a result of the USA system (for all I know you're from China).

deadalus2• 6 years ago

Can't name the Provider but the country is India.

StavrosK10• 6 years ago

Allianz in the EU also has clauses where they won't cover pandemics, wars, and other large-scale disasters.

tuna-piano• 6 years ago

Can I ask what country and health insurance? It's not my understanding that would be legal in the US.

ThomW• 6 years ago

Name your insurer.

throwaway29303• 6 years ago

https://twitter.com/Mike_Pence/status/1237503086731632640

thsowers• 6 years ago

OP is not from USA so this doesn't apply to them

anticensor3• 6 years ago

They mean that SARS type 2 is a pandemic. COVID-19 looks like a JIRA ticket to me.

xenonite2• 6 years ago

The virus is called "SARS-Cov2", the disease is called "COVID-19".

anticensor3• 6 years ago

The disease should be called SARS type 2, because the virus is called SARS-CoV-2.

Aaronstotle• 6 years ago

WHO is a complete joke, from praising China's lack of a response as ground-breaking and refusing to label this thing as a Pandemic until now. Trust in institutions is at an all time low because these institutions perform so poorly that most people dismiss them entirely (even if the advice is sound). I hope the world will learn it's lessons from this outbreak, so at least we can react faster next time.

linsomniac• 6 years ago

Yesterday I had the sudden realization that the US Republican Party is likely to be disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, but also seems to be avoiding taking precautions to prevent the spread.

Mortality and impacts seem to hit people over 50 the hardest, and that is where a majority of the Republican supporters come from.

It would be a curious footnote to have COVID-19 swing an election.

throwaway7877• 6 years ago

I ran the numbers for Florida. Unless Imm way off it was only a 1-2 year difference of the existing aging out.

Uhhrrr• 6 years ago

The vote tally there in 2016 was 4,605,515 (49.1%) to 4,485,745 (47.8%), though. And other swing states were even closer.

echelon4• 6 years ago

Do you think this won't hurt urban areas worse than rural ones, where the liberal voting blocs are concentrated?

lsc2• 6 years ago

It's an interesting question. Urban areas, it would seem, are likely to get the spread a lot faster, but they also have way better medical infrastructure. It will spread slower in rural areas, but you have way fewer hospital beds, and less medical infrastructure in general.

bobbytherobot2• 6 years ago

No. You misunderstood the OPs premise.

Everyone will come in contact with the virus. People under 50 years old (as recent reports have stated) have a high chance of survival. The deaths from it will mostly be from those 50 years and old. Voters who are 50 years and older largely vote for the Republican party.

Spooky23• 6 years ago

Suburbs are the best place to be.

My mom drives 90 minutes a day to be with my dad in nursing home rehabilitation, the closest facility. The normal response time for an ambulance is 20 minutes, plus 30-45m to an ER. Their doctors are a similar distance. Note that the ambulance is volunteer, and the average member is 55. They live in NY, in a county with a decent sized city. It’s worse in the real boonies.

I live in a city, a paramedic will be at your door in 7-10m. Hospital 5-10m, etc.

If this gets bad, everyone will be familiar with tragedy. The urban stories will be about neglected patients in overcrowded wards and people who die of untreated strokes, etc. The rural tragedies will be finding grandma, drowned in her own phlegm because sick relatives and travel restrictions isolated her from support.

rstupek2• 6 years ago

What is your reasoning?

papito3• 6 years ago

They are watching Fox News and listening to the chief executive, who keep telling them "this is fine, as you were".

I myself am not worried, but I AM worried about my Fox News watching elderly parents. They are in danger the most. Also, mis-informed.

This is how years of denial, spin, propaganda, lying, and gaslighting end up being. In fact - deadly.

rtkwe• 6 years ago

It's right there in their post... older voting population combined with taking fewer precautions against the virus. Both mean it might have a larger affect on the republican block.

Personally I'm not sure if it will outweigh how democrats are more likely to live in denser urban areas where spread is faster.

smt14• 6 years ago

There is a poll that said that Democrats are taking it much more seriously than Republicans:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-po...

Irony.

Reedx• 6 years ago

They are incapable of occupying the same position at the same time. It's ridiculous. Pure tribalism at work.

"Initially the left was saying flu was a bigger threat. Now they are taking it seriously, shutting down events.

Initially the right was taking it seriously, banning travel. Now they are calling it the flu."

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1237241527035928576

squarefoot• 6 years ago

Most republicans were successfully programmed to believe what Trump tells them, which as of today is a mix of underestimation of the risks and then dodging responsibilities.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-checking-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/us/politics/coronavirus-t...

dnissley• 6 years ago

On the other hand, "Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism" [1]. Which wouldn't necessarily swing the election obviously one way or the other (left or right, Democrat or Republican -- although my gut tells me it would swing things to the right to some degree), but could definitely be a confounding factor to the above theory.

1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3641067/

allovernow11• 6 years ago

That's a bit of a stretch...there are probably dozens of other obvious correlations in places where authoritarianism pops up, because authoritarianism is much more likely to spring up where people are poor and uneducated...

StreamBright• 6 years ago

In fact, most virus infections hit harder over 50.

lacker• 6 years ago

The average Republican is 50 and the average Democrat is 47. I don’t think there will be a huge difference in coronavirus impact.

Source: https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/economic-demogra...

aza050012• 6 years ago

That was in 2012. The data is way outdated. The vast majority of young voters nowadays are swaying democrat.

silvestrov• 6 years ago

It's not the average that's important, it is the percentage above 70 and 80 years that is the important factor.

Florin_Andrei4• 6 years ago

Now, assuming:

- old people vote in far larger proportion compared to young folks

- they tend to vote conservative

- this virus is likely to kill old people disproportionately

- red states tend to do less well in terms of all kinds of infrastructure, including medical

...then would you expect to see a change in the results of future elections?

btilly• 6 years ago

That article is from 2008. A lot has changed since.

The first thing that I would draw your attention to is that social shifts have moved the "silent generation" from being evenly split Democrat/Republican in 2004 to going for Trump by a 13 point margin in 2016. This is the group that will suffer the vast majority of fatalities. See https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-... for verification.

Secondly, women lean Democratic, men Republican. (The same link verifies that.) Most casualties will be men. See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... for verification.

Third, the upcoming generations through that 12 years are overwhelmingly Democratic and will have almost no deaths from this disease. Both previous links verify that.

The result is that, a well researched article from a dozen years ago notwithstanding, the impact of COVID-19 are likely to disproportionately hit Republicans over Democrats.

(Not necessarily. The one trend that Republicans can hope for is that diseases spread through urban areas and urban areas are overwhelmingly Democratic. I don't think that this offsets the other phenomena though.)

pjc50• 6 years ago

Similarly the UK health minister has just tested positive for it. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51827356

Parliament has sat today, without her, so it's still quite possible that others will catch it.

jennyyang5• 6 years ago

Junior health minister. I think she is in charge of a subsection of areas, but she is not THE health minister from what I've read.

Iwan-Zotow• 6 years ago

Uncle Joe is 77 years old vs Trump 74

allovernow11• 6 years ago

And Bernie is 78. There should really be age limits for government, especially given how much we now know about cognitive decline.

oh_sigh• 6 years ago

Republicans may be marginally older, but they are also more rural. Presumably cities would be harder hit with a pandemic, but then again city folk might have easier access to care. It's really hard to say.

Beyond direct consequences, it seems reasonable that covid19 would affect the election by tanking the economy and giving Trump nothing to point at as his big accomplishments

jfengel2• 6 years ago

Republicans are older on average, but they also live in less densely-populated places. The most dangerous thing I can think of is commuting on public transportation. That's a feature of cities, predominately Democratic strongholds.

jxub2• 6 years ago

Funnily enough, the second in charge of the Spanish far-rightwing party Vox who accused immigrants of bringing diseases like HIV (sic), has just been diagnosed positive after the party gathering on 8th March (intentionally on Women's day). Honestly, everything looks like a fun/scary/dystopic meme these days.

anikan_vader• 6 years ago

The problem with pandemics is that they tend to grow exponentially. What people often forget about exponential growth is that it's actually very slow around t = 0.

wrs• 6 years ago

Much worse is that it’s always slow at t compared to what it’ll be at t+1. No matter how crazy it seems at t.

gmfawcett2• 6 years ago

Not true. There are growth limiting factors in infectious disease models, e.g., herd immunity.

hprotagonist• 6 years ago

that is true. what is also true is that nature abhors a naked exponential nearly as much as she abhors a naked singularity.

it's nearly always a sigmoid in disguise.

What we are trying our damndest to control is the carrying capacity.

WilliamEdward2• 6 years ago

obviously its not going to be exponential forever, no one believes that. The more people get infected, the less people there are to infect. This is obvious. The problem is no one knows where the inflection point is yet, and it depends entirely on how countries react to the illness.

chadlavi• 6 years ago

t=0 was three months ago

jacobwilliamroy2• 6 years ago

I think t is too far from 0 at this point, at least in the U.S. Our ability to test for SARS-CoV 2 has been completely kneecapped since the beginning, and there still aren't enough tests to screen people for the virus. There are documented cases in my area going back to 3 feb. But those cases were diagnosed outside of the country. As in, they had it while they were here, but they were not diagnosed until they flew back home and visited a doctor.

xchip2• 6 years ago

Most insurances don't cover pandemics, so guess who is benefited by this ;)

xenonite2• 6 years ago

in the USA?

m0zg4• 6 years ago

As of a few days ago they cover coronavirus specifically: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/486816-pence-major-hea...

SkyPuncher5• 6 years ago

I think this comes with a big asterisk.

As far as I can tell, there was a lot of room for caveats in that statement. In particular, it was scoped to companies they met with.

Florin_Andrei4• 6 years ago

guess who is benefited by this ;)

It will create so much value for our shareholders!

riyadparvez5• 6 years ago

In preparation of stopping next pandemic, maybe we should have an international agreement like Paris climate change agreement. Like climate change and nuclear weapons this is an existential risk.

Yes, outbreak of zootonic diseases is still possible through widely consumed firm animals (chickens, pigs, or cows). But we can dramatically reduce the risk of next pandemic if we stop eating exotic wild animals like bats, which is not hard to give up. We may have been able to stop outbreak of COVID-19 on the first place if we had learned our lessons from SARS outbreak and stopping eating exotics animals.

EDIT: bat was used as an example. You can replace any exotic animals in place of bats, the point still stands. This video touches on the topic of outbreak of coronavirus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54

jiofih2• 6 years ago

MERS has camels as hosts, is the deadliest by far and 1) camels are not exotic in the Middle East 2) you don’t need to eat it to be infected.

smt14• 6 years ago

Although MERS is more deadly than SARS-CoV-2, it looks it's less transmissible between people than SARS-CoV-2. I heard an epidemiologist theorize that it might be because people infected with SARS-CoV-2 shed the virus before they show any signs of COVID.

Maybe that's why MERS never spread widely outside of areas where camels don't exist widely.

oppositelock• 6 years ago

Is there any evidence whatsoever that the current coronavirus outbreak was due to eating exotic animals.

Yes, the press has reported that a market in Wuhan sold exotic animals, but it seems this is uncorroborated, and after asking an acquaintance in Wuhan about it, I was told it's fake news, and that said market sells farmed animals as far as she's ever seen.

gbrown• 6 years ago

Well, it's linked to bats (like many such illnesses). One of the biggest exposures to these animals is at such markets, so whether or not this particular outbreak is traced to a particular market is less important than generally lowering exposure.

himinlomax• 6 years ago

The Chinese government appears to be trying very hard to not be blamed for it and is spreading fake news of their own, which is what your acquaintance may be telling you.

gdubs• 6 years ago

Animals are absolutely a primary vector for infectious disease. No, there's no definitive evidence as of yet of patient 0, though the cluster of early cases in China had strong connections to the wet market in Wuhan. It's not necessarily the eating of the animals directly, but indirectly – because wild animals are kept stressed, in cages, next to other domesticated animals and people.

Even with conventional animal agriculture, things like bird flu and swine flu are a serious threat.

riyadparvez5• 6 years ago

Yes, the press has reported that a market in Wuhan sold exotic animals, but it seems this is uncorroborated, and after asking an acquaintance in Wuhan about it, I was told it's fake news, and that said market sells farmed animals as far as she's ever seen.

Fake news, seriously? There's an entire wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanan_Seafood_Wholesale_Marke.... Please verify your own news source before spreading more fake news/

swasheck7• 6 years ago

I thought that the bat soup origin was debunked. I'd suspect it's pretty rare that you come across a novel virus that's hardy enough to survive cooking at temperature and then the rigors of the human GI tract.

missedthecue• 6 years ago

It was from a wet market, and was probably contracted during the butchering process, not during consumption.

terramex• 6 years ago

SARS-CoV-2 virus is zoonotic for sure, question is only what kind of animal was immediate host and what was mode of transition. It didn't have to be eating, might as well have been transmission of body fluid like mucus while hunting or cutting meat.

mordechai9000• 6 years ago

I don't know anything about the likelihood of the bat origin theory, but it wouldn't have to pass through the gut. It could pass from mucous, saliva, or other secretion, or internal fluids/tissues. If it got on a surface at any point during processing, either the people handling the animal or someone else could transfer it to their own noise/eyes/mouth just by accident.

riyadparvez5• 6 years ago

I thought that the bat soup origin was debunked

Bat soup was used as an example. It would help the discussion if we stop taking everything in the most literal way possible.

makerofspoons• 6 years ago

The Paris Climate Agreement should definitely not be the template. It has zero teeth and is hardly aggressive enough to hit its own targets.

jfim• 6 years ago

if we stop eating exotic wild animals like bats, which is not hard to give up

That seems a very first world-centric point of view.

Isn't the eating of such animals partially driven by cultural culinary preferences, and partially driven by the availability of such foods (eg. unable to afford beef or chicken, but can afford the next best thing).

Litmus23362• 6 years ago

Yeah, people don't eat bushmeat and from the garbage can because they choose to - they have (or feel they have) no other choice.

Leary2• 6 years ago

1. It's unlikely that this coronavirus was caused by the consumption of bats. It is more likely that it was transmitted through an intermediate host such as pangolin.

2. A very small minority of people in China consume exotic food not because they are cheap, but because they are more expensive and were considered prestigious.

3. There is now a very strong pushbacks against this culture from both the Chinese government and the vast majority of the Chinese people.

chungus_khan3• 6 years ago

It's also not actually sound to begin with. MERS was transmitted to humans from camels, which are not exotic at all in the middle east. Livestock frequently interacts with wild animals, and this isn't really preventable, especially against bats. Worse yet, livestock is generally kept in large groups in close proximity to each other, and once slaughtered is distributed quickly and widely. While it doesn't get the same media coverage, it is not that uncommon for diseased meat to make it into the food supply. While meat inspection practices go a long way to help, they for obvious reasons have a hard time dealing with new diseases.

crispyambulance• 6 years ago

stop eating exotic wild animals

You're probably referring to the youtube disinformation that has been trotted around by right-wing media outlets as "the cause".

It may very well have come from bats. But bats can infect other animals, in various ways, including ones that are traded in live-animal markets.

This is not about cuisine.

geddy2• 6 years ago

This is not about cuisine.

How can you even remotely suggest this when the proximity between humans and lifestock animals in horrible conditions is a primary driver of a) transmission of disease, as well as b) increasing resistance to antibiotics due to how much of them we pump into the animals, and then consume ourselves?

It absolutely _is_ about cuisine choices and the sooner we stop eating animals and animal products, the better.

SubiculumCode4• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22538779

Might be useful in case you or loved ones get infected.

d4mi3n• 6 years ago

Cross posting this from the other Pandemic thread since I thought it was interesting:

d4mi3n
What happens when the WHO classifies a pandemic? I imagine a number of processes and procedures come into effect--anybody know what they are?
Hongwei
My limited understanding understanding is that it automatically releases funding (from the WHO and other bodies) to help with the crisis. It should also trigger some catastrophe and pandemic bond clauses, meaning investors who bought these bonds will lose their money as it now goes towards relief funding.

Full thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22547349

mkagenius• 6 years ago

is that it automatically releases funding

I was listening it live and they said its just a classification, they are already doing what they should be doing, the classification changes nothing.

mrleiter2• 6 years ago

Here in Austria the government forbade any indoor gatherings of >100 people (outdoor >500), all universities and colleges are closed (except administration and research), including libraries and also museums. All schools and kindergartens will gradually close coming monday. That's more than 1.5m students/pupils against a total population of 8.8m. Nurses and doctors are being honed in from retirement. We completely locked down our borders to Italy. This is all very unprecedented.

Florin_Andrei4• 6 years ago

Finally - vigorous, coordinated action. That's exactly what's needed right now and I'm glad to see countries stepping up to the challenge.

mrleiter2• 6 years ago

Yes, I'm glad. Currently we have 246 confirmed cases and with those measures they may rise slower than otherwise.

StavrosK10• 6 years ago

Isn't this happening in many places? In Greece, schools are closing for two weeks, all gatherings are prohibited, and celebrations for various holidays have been canceled.

Notably, the Church of Greece has announced that "the virus cannot be spread through Communion" (where everyone drinks wine from the same cup). You can imagine how angry this self-serving move made most people.

fokinsean3• 6 years ago

Here in Austin, SXSW was cancelled but I've seen numerous "unofficial party" lists of people organizing events.

I understand people want to support the Austin economy since losing SXSW is a big hit, however it was cancelled to limit mass gatherings yet people still want to gather.

52-6F-6211• 6 years ago

People will of course want to gather still... I've always wanted to hit SXSW so I'd be pretty heartbroken, myself.

Even still, my partner and I are keeping an eye open on flights to Europe (we've always wanted to go) and seriously considering taking the risk of buying a flight for in a couple of months time because they are quite literally at half price right now. And I'm not even talking about Italy.

edit: Haha—to clarify, the risk being flight cancellation or border closures not catching or spreading disease.

2nd edit: Wow. I'm drawing a little ire here. I'll reiterate: the risk is in not being able to go because the problem continues. Please take the charitable view (and of my whole comment, not snippets)—not the one that I'm some kind of monster :)

fma3• 6 years ago

If they wanna support the economy just send money to the entities that they can't go to. That restaurant you were going to dine out at, instead you're not microwaving a Lean Cuisine? Send them $10. Otherwise they are doing it for the shills.

01100011• 6 years ago

If my facebook feed is indicative of the general US population, there are still a lot of people who think the media is just trying to scare us. Some of them are your typical nutjobs for Trump, but even my 60-something year old hippie liberal jazz musician friend is on that train. There were women replying to her that the media focuses on Covid-19 because "it's killing old men" who run the world, and the media should instead be focusing on women's issues... I think I'm finally ready to give up facebook after seeing my the thoughts of most of my 'friends'.

danlugo92• 6 years ago

Makes the conspiracy theorist inside me think why are the governments are overreacting... Are they testing their reach for a future false flag?

fit2rule2• 6 years ago

Western governments do seem to be reacting to this major threat to our lives with a degree of callous disregard ..

enumjorge• 6 years ago

Overreacting? Did you miss the headline of the thread you’re commenting on? This is officially a pandemic. And instead of reading that and thinking “wow, this needs to be addressed with serious action” you instead thought that hundreds of governments across the world are working in tandem to make it easier to raise false flags in the future. Yikes.

lukifer3• 6 years ago

It's not clear that it's an overreaction; the paradox is, assuming this truly is a pandemic (seems likely), and every nation on earth had taken drastic action early enough, it could have actually been contained; in which case we wouldn't have seen the pandemic manifest, and the public would be left scratching their heads, going "why did we do all that again?", and provoking inquiries into false-flag/etc.

I lean a little tinfoil-hatty; but I get the impression that for all the bullshit self-serving narratives proffered by elites (both economic and political), this is one that they actually seem to believe themselves, privately as well as publicly. If anything, they're more spooked than they're signaling openly.

streb-lo• 6 years ago

And yet if they did nothing you would predictably be in this thread wondering if it was a planned release.

fit2rule2• 6 years ago

It has really been a lackadaisical response from the Austrian government - shades of Semmelweis all over again? This is a country that has monuments to Plague victims in its most valued districts ..

Going to be an interesting few weeks as we see how things proceed. To think, somewhere out there, the virus lurks and is headed our way ..

m4rtink2• 6 years ago

Plague monuments are hardly an Austria specific thing, you can find them almost everywhere in a large part of Europe, including here in Czech Republic:

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pests%C3%A4ule

(in German)

jmkni3• 6 years ago

There's probably about 500 people in the massive open plan office I work in. We're just sitting ducks.

krick• 6 years ago

Same here. And it's not like I can just head home freely.

dcolkitt2• 6 years ago

You need to approach senior management, and press them on what their plan is.

Why aren't they already transitioning to remote work? Is there a timeline in place? What are their criteria about what would trigger WFH? What about employees with elderly family members at home? Do they have the necessary systems in place to support a fully remote staff?

It's very likely that management has simply avoided thinking about the topic entirely. If the employees press them for a concrete action plan, then that at least prompts them to start engaging in objective analysis.

hnick3• 6 years ago

For all their faults my smaller company is very forward thinking on this. They have banned all non-essential visits to sites by clients or contractors, and travel between offices by staff - even within the same metro area. So you can't just pop into the other office on Friday if you feel like it.

You're also asked to work from home for a while if any travelling family member from overseas visits, and if you have no reason to be in the office they won't say no if you just want to work at home and avoid public transport.

Hoping it doesn't cause a big hit to productivity because it's the right thing to do.

mNovak• 6 years ago

Was wondering about the response in Austria, thanks. Haven't seen much over at ORF.at. I have older extended family there I worry about.

dx0343• 6 years ago

Austria isn't as badly hit as Italy, despite the short distance to the most affected regions in Italy. They took quite drastic measures early which hopefully slows down the spread. It also helps that much of the traffic from Italy continues on northwards towards Germany and therefore bypasses the main population centers in Austria.

But as in all countries by now, older folks should stay home and self quarantine whenever possible.

00deadbeef• 6 years ago

Here in the UK our government thinks washing our hands will save us.

neuronic2• 6 years ago

It makes a tremendous difference, so don't downplay it. Infection due to smear (secondary droplet) is really high IIRC and washing hands is a huge countermeasure.

dx0343• 6 years ago

It likely will. If all people washed their hands properly and avoid touching their face that would probably slow infection rates down enough. Measures are needed because realistically, no one follows these orders enough.

echelon4• 6 years ago

By delaying the "pandemic" designation, the WHO has inadvertently cost more lives. They will strongly need to reevaluate their role and policies going forward, because this was a monumental process and leadership failure.

The messaging from the media (who are laypersons) and the politicians (who are economically motivated laypersons) has been that this is "just the flu". Weak messaging from both the WHO and the CDC has only reinforced this in the public's perception.

The WHO should have taken the decisive move to encourage greater caution by employing the "pandemic" label. That label comes with real power. While there is danger in crying wolf, it was evident months ago from the growth rate of the virus and the lack of quarantine procedures being put in place that this virus would reach the pandemic stage.

If the role of the WHO is to stave off pandemics and not just to monitor them, then elevating the risk profile of the virus should have been a top priority. Since people look to the WHO for guidance, their actions have direct impact to sequestration and bringing the outbreak under control.

Both the WHO and the CDC were too afraid to take early action. Their wait and see approach will ultimately result in more human deaths and suffering.

stronglikedan• 6 years ago

What country are you in? Both the media and government in my country (US) have been sending the exact opposite message of "just the flu". As with anywhere, there are a few local outlets and politicians trying to downplay it, likely for economic reasons, but I haven't seen it downplayed on the Federal level at all. In fact, there's been an overabundance of information and caution.

ddoolin2• 6 years ago

The president himself severely downplayed it and gave the opposite advice as his own health officials (including [paraphrasing] "it's just the flu" and "go to work.")

james-mcelwain3• 6 years ago

but I haven't seen it downplayed on the Federal level at all

We truly must be living in different universes.

mikeyouse• 6 years ago

What? The Federal Government has been saying exactly that -- that the flu is far worse, it kills more, and that Covid19 is no big deal. They've said it repeatedly from Day 1 - Up through two days ago when Trump tweeted:

So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370273563148697...

The top performing story on Facebook right now is a Fox News piece highlighting the President downplaying it:

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1237092136958545923

Basically the entire GOP leadership structure has decided that people are only worrying as much as they are to damage Trump politically. Essentially the only top level official giving the straight story is Dr. Fauci and he's immediately contradicted by others in the cabinet who seemed to be completely preoccupied with the stock market and the election.

fokinsean3• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what part of the US you're in but around in Texas people are very much downplaying the severity of the situation.

I've heard "just the flu bro" a bunch and people still operating business as usual in spite of large events being cancelled.

danso2• 6 years ago

Are you serious? At the Feb. 26 press conference [0], President Trump literally said: "This is a flu. This is like a flu."

The president tweeted this 2 days ago [1]:

So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!

This is what the Surgeon General said on Sunday [2]:

"If we had massive numbers of cases we would be seeing more deaths. And so we actually feel pretty good that some parts of the country have contained it just like when you look at the flu," Adams said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday. "When we look at the flu tracker, some parts of the country are having much more severe flu seasons. Some are having very mild flu seasons. The same thing for coronavirus."

[0] https://www.c-span.org/video/?469747-1/president-trump-annou...

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/stocks-dive-coronavirus-spre...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/stocks-dive-coronavirus-spre...

ergothus• 6 years ago

What US are you in?

I'm in WA state, where until last week testing wasn't being conducted on anyone that wasn't traveling from a level 3 country or in contact with a known infected person, EVEN IF THE WOULD-BE TESTEE WAS SHOWING SYMPTOMS. We keep talking about the count of infected (and relying on it to decide who to test) but it's unarguably low if we've not been testing, particularly as we apparently have introductions via Europe as well as China, plus community transmission.

Trump just a few days ago said that everyone who wants to be tested can get tested. According to the doctor's offices, that's still false.

Trump himself has a NUMBER of downplaying statements. So many I won't bother to list them. But lots of statements along the lines of "just the flu", among others.

there's been an overabundance of information and caution

Hard to judge "overabundance" (see other article about how everything with a pandemic is premature until it is too late)

Today's headlines: "The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials."

Note this prevents any expert who doesn't have clearance from attending.

A few days ago: "US health officials wanted to recommend that elderly Americans avoid flying amid the coronavirus crisis. The White House overruled them"

oneplane• 6 years ago

I suppose that depends on your local feeds; if you are in NA you probably have a hard time getting correct information/governance/leadership at this time. (hence your question) It used to be 'good enough' or even 'fine' over there, i.e. with HIV or malaria issues or even H1N1.

But even with the research on pandemic readiness showing that neither capacity nor governance has been up to the task people are still pretending it's just a political choice and the results will be fine. If I remember correctly it as CSIS thing: https://healthsecurity.csis.org/final-report/

abstractbarista13• 6 years ago

From the death %, symptoms, and recovery stats, it really is mostly "just the flu".

If you are otherwise healthy, this is like getting a cold with a fever for a week, then feeling better.

Sure, call it a pandemic, because it is worldwide. But honestly it's just not that remarkable. This isn't some godly virus with 25% death rates!

Waterluvian• 6 years ago

Where do you live that CV is 20-30x less deadly than elsewhere? From the numbers I'm seeing, it's not just the flu.

abnry• 6 years ago

It is remarkable, it's just not civilization destroying. Lots of old and vulnerable people will die. The healthcare system will be taxed for many months to come.

empath753• 6 years ago

It's collapsing health care systems every where it breaks out. It doesn't take a high hospitalization rate before the CFR jumps way up. Italy's is 4% because they're just letting older people die because they don't have the resources to treat them.

odorousrex• 6 years ago

This is misinformation, and spreading misinformation like this is not helping anyone, and can actively hurt people.

Please educate yourself: https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

JulianMorrison2• 6 years ago

80-something percent of the time yes. The remainder is divided between "you need hospital, but will be fine" and "serious intensive care needed".

The trouble is that (1) the people who need hospital to be fine need hospital. They won't be fine if it isn't there, and (2) by being a selfish ass and treating it like just the flu, when it's a disease that grows exponentially in a no-immunity population, people are amplifying the speed and height of the peak, which means not enough hospital places.

If you get a situation where effectively nobody who needs hospital can get it - then those 20-ish percent just drop dead. And then there's your godly death rate.

BlargMcLarg• 6 years ago

Except the statistics have been so wildly different across sources it'd be very unwise to follow any of them, and instead check the stories where possible. Only yesterday someone posted the accounts of people in Italy being overwhelmed. Last time I checked, a regular flu doesn't smash through a hospital's capacity so hard they have to ask doctors to change focus.

tigershark8• 6 years ago

It’s around 4% of mortality, the flu in US kills about 2 orders of magnitude less.

brazzledazzle3• 6 years ago

Are we allowed to flag a comment because it contains advice that could result in harm or death?

fzeroracer• 6 years ago

Something doesn't have to have 25% death rates to be dangerous. Your way of thinking is quite frankly not only flawed but also incredibly harmful to the actual dangers of the coronavirus.

Which is that entire communities can be infected in a very short amount of time, overwhelming local medical infrastructure and resulting in deaths and harm because the doctors simply can't keep up. What was originally something that could be treated then becomes life threatening.

SkyPuncher5• 6 years ago

I was under the impression that the Pandemic label was a response to objective criteria, not subjective decision of leadership.

In particular, one of those factors was sustained duration of the outbreak. My understanding is we finally crossed the time threshold for declaring this a Pandemic.

reaperducer5• 6 years ago

I believe I read somewhere that it had to be declared an epidemic on two continents for it to be called a pandemic.

tigershark8• 6 years ago

For H1N1 as far as I remember the pandemic designation happened far earlier and that was a joke of virus compared to covid-19 comparing the mortality rates.

echelon4• 6 years ago

Pandemic label was a response to objective criteria

Modeling the causal impact of their criteria in light of data from the COVID-19 pandemic could reveal how different messaging strategies applied at different thresholds impact the spread of the virus.

The leadership could have done this months ago and estimated how proactive versus inactive quarantine efforts would impact morbidity. They have to know their role in persuading the public and government officials.

You don't have to stick to a rigid and inflexible criteria when thousands of human lives are at stake. When you define the criteria, you can also change them.

concerned_user7• 6 years ago

From the definition: A pandemic is an epidemic of disease that has spread across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or worldwide. We knew and saw that weeks ago.

Declaration of official pandemic means world bank pandemic relief fund program gets activated as long as many other clauses in different contracts and agreements. There is an influence on WHO and the people behind it didn't want pandemic to be declared too soon. If it was declared 3-4 weeks earlier there could be many lives saved in countries like Iran, what is happening in Africa is not known at all due to no testing but situation is probably bad.

forkexec• 6 years ago

That's ironic because the WHO supposedly doesn't use the category "pandemic" or 6-phases of pandemic anymore.

https://canoe.com/news/world/who-no-longer-uses-pandemic-cat...

laufj• 6 years ago

The WHO themselves said that there is no longer an official criteria for something being a pandemic.

willis936• 6 years ago

But months ago they really couldn’t have known. We still don’t know how many will be infected. All we can do is take precautionary measures. The WHO messaging should have been stronger and earlier, but it isn’t their fault for not labeling a pandemic months ago. Granted, there was enough data and research done to squarely label this as a pandemic, and that’s really where I assign blame on them.

Here is a neat video that helps put things in perspective for most any viewer. https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg

pier253• 6 years ago

But months ago they really couldn’t have known

It already looked pretty bad mid/late January when China started construction of hospitals. Were there any reasons to think it would no go global?

reaperducer5• 6 years ago

For the most part, the only place I've seen people saying "this is just the flu" is on the internet, and especially in tech-heavy circles.

The only mass media where I've seen that was in a BBC television report from a soccer stadium, and that was only last night.

sneak2• 6 years ago

They also have to be careful about credibility. It wasn't clear how well the global containment efforts were going to work until very recently. Let's say a week or two ago there's a 33% probability of global pandemic: that means if they call it such then, 2 times out of 3 they're crying wolf and causing people to listen less carefully to the WHO. You already see people claiming all manner of conspiracy theory nonsense and not taking it as seriously as they should; they have to be careful not to amplify that, and balance that against acting too late when it's clear there is a high probability of global community spread.

Other than their censorship in China (they give different advice on their website served to China, even on English-language pages, involving the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine against the virus), I think they're doing a mostly okay job so far, from what I can see in the current reporting.

cm21872• 6 years ago

What are you are dismissing as "conspiracy theory nonsense" includes calls to calm from infectious diseases experts and health authorities. When we will look back with hindsight, the conspirary theory nonsense may end up being the unecessary panicking, armchair epidemiologists, "the numbers are worse than we are told", etc.

MiroF• 6 years ago

I feel like containment had clearly failed by at least two weeks ago, we're just only now seeing policy catch up.

raugustinus• 6 years ago

"If the role of the WHO is to stave off pandemics and not just to monitor them". Not really no.

yitianjian2• 6 years ago

I believe it was declared a PHEIC - Public Health Emergency of International Concern - and this should be the signal that governments need to take measures for containment to prevent it from spreading.

I believe the pandemic label is when containment has failed and governments need to go into mitigation mode. Seeing as it had been relatively contained in China, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., it seemed reasonable that taking measures would be sufficient to prevent further escalation.

hacym• 6 years ago

I think it's easy to criticize their leadership from the outside, but I would assume that they make their decisions with great care, and aren't going to throw around "pandemic" or other words easily. If they do that, people stop listening.

It's akin to people not caring about a major hurricane barreling towards them because they've heard the doomsday scenarios before and nothing has happened.

They have to be careful, and that they were.

rvz• 6 years ago

The delayed message of the WHO was really more like a very slow reaction at the cost of potentially millions infected with several thousands dead. By the time it spread to Europe and the US, it was essentially game over.

Perhaps the 'doomsday clock' was right all along but didn't see this one coming.

olalonde• 6 years ago

As a layperson, I'm not sure I agree with your layperson perception analysis. To me, calling it an epidemic meant that efforts should be focused on containment in order to slow it down or stop its progression. That signaled just how dangerous it was. Calling it a pandemic essentially means that we've given up on that and just like the common flu, most people will catch it. Basically, it's time to just "deal with" it instead of attempting to contain. I'd rather they had kept the epidemic label a bit longer.

beaunative8• 6 years ago

Declaring pandemic requires data which the WHO simply can't have if its member states do not submit or further, do not test for it. People like to think that international organizations like the UN, WTO, WHO is somewhat superior, or above the states, but they are not.

wool_gather2• 6 years ago

If it is a political and subjective decision as you say, then they have to balance the benefits of the declaration against the risk of the counter-narrative overwhelming it. Too early and even more people would dismiss the problem than are doing so now. And there's no "we said 'pandemic' before, well, it's 'really a pandemic' now" label that can be used.

And leaving aside the immediate difficulties...let's save this kind of retrospective criticism for after, when we're closer to being out of the woods.

If you have prospective criticism -- what should be done now and going forwards -- that would be worthwhile.

tanilama• 6 years ago

But would political leaders actual take actions regardless of the pandemic categorization? I hope they do, but the reality starts to frighten me.

pbourke3• 6 years ago

The WHO's entire purpose is to act as health diplomats and coordinators. They have been ringing the alarm bell for weeks now, saying that countries need to take things seriously.

Whether the WHO uses the term "pandemic" is honestly just semantics. You should direct the majority of your criticism at short-sighted governments who have prioritized the economy (or, even worse, markets) over health.

It was incumbent on local authorities to take the WHO's message seriously, especially after their expedition to China released its report.

andrewla3• 6 years ago

By delaying the "pandemic" designation, the WHO has inadvertently cost more lives.

... why?

I mean, it's not like the word of the WHO is a binding thing, where anyone is mandated to take action on any level because of a binary designation in a taxonomy. This whole this is just bureaucratic wheels turning; everyone who needs to take action has all the information they need to do so.

This is just the WHO doing what it does best -- having committees meeting endlessly to decide whether to apply a certain meaningless designation and then announcing the conclusion of that exercise.

Their actual job, of collating and disseminating information and trying to coordinate any large-scale responses, is actually hard, so nobody wants to do it, but having a meeting to decide IS IT A PANDEMIC is an easy bikeshedding meeting that all the MBAs and ex-McKinsey people can attend and offer their stupid opinion on what the definition of a word is.

EDIT: I said "everyone who needs to take action has all the information they need to do so", and that could be interpreted as saying that we know enough to determine what actions to take. But what I mean is that we have enough data to start to make a range of predictions and bound the uncertainty to some degree; having a more precise metric for any aspect of COVID-19 should not affect the response since those metrics are essentially made up and not comparable even on a per-hospital level, much less a per-country level or even a per-test-kit-type level. Uncertainty is part of the game here, and understanding the risk profiles is how people and organizations and governments have to tune their response.

afthonos• 6 years ago

They were asked about this in their briefing a few days ago and made a multi-point response:

1) There are no objective criteria for calling something a pandemic.

2) They did not feel they knew enough about the propagation pattern to make the subjective call.

3) They were deeply worried that calling it a pandemic would switch government strategies from containment to mitigation, resulting in higher contagion and loss of life.

They especially emphasized the last point. The only question in my mind is whether (1) they decided containment was no longer viable or (2) they decided not calling it pandemic would be seen as unserious, even if containment could still potentially have benefits.

Source: https://youtu.be/OJQTM4QbTsg

wcoenen• 6 years ago

The WHO defines a pandemic as the worldwide spread of a disease[1]. So the disease only becomes a pandemic after it has spread everywhere; it wouldn't make sense to call a disease a pandemic before it becomes one.

[1]https://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/frequently_asked_qu...

yumraj3• 6 years ago

Hopefully the school districts will now close.

Parents from every school districts in the Bay Area have collected thousands of signatures to close, but the politicians are not doing their job.

I was on call with Santa Clara county hotline and the school district and the standard answer I got was: Oh, the kids are at low risk and the numbers are low so we're not closing yet.

What they don't realize is that the kids can still be carriers and many teachers and parents are in the danger zone (age or underlying conditions)

RandallBrown• 6 years ago

It's not that simple to just close schools, especially for long periods of time.

Who is supposed to watch these kids if the parents can't stay home with them?

What about the thousands of low income kids that rely on school for most of their meals?

I'm sure these are solvable problems, but I think there are good reasons that it's taking longer than most people want.

yumraj3• 6 years ago

I understand that. In which case at least they should make school optional.

Several Universities are closed, several schools are closed and we need to worry more about the spread because if we don't we'll have the problems you mentioned in addition to a massive spread.

jennyyang5• 6 years ago

Those are actually the least solvable problems. A disproportionate amount of poor people are going to lose their jobs during the next 3-6 months because of a recession. A lot of people especially in the US are going to suffer because of the vast income inequality that has arisen. So there is no good solution, just like quarantine isn't a good solution but at some point we have to do it.

jlisam13• 6 years ago

I listened to Joe Rogan's podcast with Michael Osterholm and he gave an interesting perspective. He said that most nurses who have children will suffer if kids have to be sent home. They most likely don't have people that can help take care of their children while they are supporting the influx of patients. Moreover, many children rely on school provided meals so sending them home will be very tough on the families.

yumraj3• 6 years ago

Don't remember where I read, but some district or something has proposed (or implemented) an option where kids are able to get lunch/breakfast and take it with them without needing to attend school.

It does not solve the nurse issue, which perhaps as a community we need to solve. Perhaps limited opening of school monitored by younger healthier teachers/PTA reps.

goodcanadian• 6 years ago

Only vaguely relevant, but the school district I grew up in had a policy of never closing for weather. The rationale was that if the school were closed and some children showed up anyway (didn't get the message or whatever), they would literally freeze to death. So, no matter how bad things were, there would be someone there to unlock the doors.

downerending3• 6 years ago

Mine just announced that they will pack everyone into a meeting auditorium to discuss steps that might be taken in the future. (No, I'm not kidding.)

jdkee• 6 years ago

The US is likely about 11 to 14 days behind Italy in terms of medical infrastructure collapse.

sp3324• 6 years ago

We're that many days behind in raw case numbers. We have a lot more capacity than Italy overall, and our larger hospitals are prepped for mass shootings which means they have procedures in place for a sudden influx of patients who need ventilators.

Story from a couple years back about that last point: https://epmonthly.com/article/not-heroes-wear-capes-one-las-...

onionjake• 6 years ago

What he came up with was that if you have two people who are roughly the same size and tidal volume, you can just double the tidal volume and stick them on Y tubing on one ventilator.

Would this help increase the number of covid-19 patients that could be treated? Or do they not require ventilators? I wonder if the study they mentioned about it was ever completed?

plainOldText4• 6 years ago

Anyone following the social media and the news would’ve called the pandemic weeks ago.

I hope this will make people realize that we need to abolish centralized institutions in our highly complex world. They are single points of failure which introduce significant systemic risks.

CDC also dropped the ball on this one. In Washington state local authorities discovered the outbreak only because they defied federal regulators.

We need better organization at the local level, and we need it now.

IAmEveryone• 6 years ago

The WHO knew (and told people) that this disease had the potential for a pandemic and/or widespread harm a long time ago. Here’s a two-months old article with the title “Narrowing window to contain outbreak, WHO says”: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51591091

There is a difference between a potential, or even a certain, pandemic and an actual one. You and the WHO knew what it meant when you looked at that egg. But only now has it become an actual chicken.

allovernow11• 6 years ago

I hope this will make people realize that we need to abolish centralized institutions in our highly complex world.

While I too favor decentralization, what we really need to do is return merit to our institutions. We need a social climate that encourages Pattons and Churchills and the like. Unfortunately to return to such a time of competent leadership (not just in government, but society at large) would require undoing decades of propaganda that convinced some two generations of children that we all have equal ability and any of us can do anything. The dangerous downside of giving everyone a trophy across society is that now people have grown up less able to judge competence and merit in others.

rndmize• 6 years ago

I'm fairly sure the quality of institutions in this day and age has almost nothing to do with participation trophies/equal ability propaganda, as this kind of thing rapidly gets torn to shreds as soon as one enters the job market.

I suspect it has a great deal to do with decades of people blaming government for their problems and increasingly less faith in government institutions, to the point of some politicians running on the idea that government doesn't work. It strikes me as difficult to get competent people for your organizations when the term "unelected bureaucrats" is used as an epithet, the pay is below equivalent work in the private sector, and the people at the top are selected for idealogical reasons instead of anything related to effectiveness, expertise or capability.

atq2119• 6 years ago

It's funny how in those political discussions, comments often say more about the commenter.

For example, I would argue that the "propaganda" that anybody can do anything isn't that old yet. On the other hand, certain political groups have been sabotaging government leadership for so long - by claiming that government is always incapable - that there's just no good leadership left in many places and it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

majos4• 6 years ago

Why is this evidence that “we need to abolish centralized institutions”? It’s not like every local organization can marshal expertise on every issue. Perhaps the WHO misjudged the coronavirus, but I’m confused about how this is suddenly a referendum on large institutions and the superiority of local ones.

Running the WHO seems hard. Alarm people too often and they will tune you out. Miss an alarm once and they will call you incompetent (“you had one job!”).

SpicyLemonZest4• 6 years ago

There's nothing wrong with having large-scale institutions. The problem is when local organizations can't act without a single centralized institution giving the OK. National health departments listen to the WHO but can take action as needed without WHO signoff; local health departments in the US often literally could not test for the coronavirus, even though they had the tools and the capacity and the desire to make tests, because they didn't have federal approval.

plainOldText4• 6 years ago

It’s not like every local organization can marshal expertise on every issue.

In order to be efficient decision makers, local organizations should be concerned with acquiring expertise related to local issues, and then, through cooperation, global expertise becomes an emergent property. It's not like every central institution can marshal expertise on every local issue.

One reason you want to avoid centralization is due to the fact that decision making occurs under imperfect and incomplete knowledge, or bounded-rationality as Herbert Simon called it.

By decentralizing the process of decision making, you mitigate the risks, since you are allowing entities to tackle a problem in parallel, and if one of them turns out to be wrong, the fallout is localized. Whereas in a centralized system, one bad decision can spell trouble for everyone.

TeMPOraL6• 6 years ago

If anything, this is evidence that we need to empower centralized institutions. China started late and fucked up early, but they dealt with it (at least for now). And we'd all be in a much different place now if WHO had actual power and could start bossing countries around a month or two ago.

Similar to how the number 1 problem with the UN is that it has absolutely zero power to do anything.

PunchTornado• 6 years ago

sorry but 3 months ago WHO was complaining that China is taking too strong measures that are hurting the local population and are not proven to work. WHO never recommended shutting down cities or regions, which as we can see is the only thing that works.

He urged the public to remain calm, saying WHO wasn’t recommending “measures that unnecessarily interfere with international trade or travel. (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/who-declares-china-coronavir...)

WHO fucked up big time IMO. thousands of employees there, most probably appointed politically by country of origin and who have nothing to do with science.

Andrex2• 6 years ago

Anyone following the social media and the news would’ve called the pandemic weeks ago.

I would not trust the unstoppable gushing torrent of dubious information that is Twitter over whoever may be giving the World Health Organization its information.

plainOldText4• 6 years ago

I guess it depends on who you follow on Twitter.

ulkesh• 6 years ago

You're not wrong, but to be fair, the CDC has to fight for funding all the time. If Trump gets his way with his budget proposals, it'll only get worse.

paulddraper2• 6 years ago

I hope this will make people realize that we need to abolish centralized institutions in our highly complex world.

Oh, I thought you were going to say this teaches us why international trade and travel is bad, and relationships between countries should be minimal.

victorlin5• 6 years ago

I've been watching COVID-19 very closely since 2019 Dec it, I also witnessed how WHO responses to this Pandemic. If you were me, you will notice that WHO tried very hard to please China, rather than taking people's health into consideration. Many things they did:

- Advice not to ban flight to China after China locked down hubei lockdown (yes, many country trust WHO, like Japan and Korea)

- Met and praised Xi many times, admire how wonderful they did

- Keep down playing how serious the problem can be, and didn't advice any action

And recently, China suddenly donate $20M to WHO

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/coronavirus-outbreak-china-t...

For more details, please watch this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5VGPYtbTk8

allovernow11• 6 years ago

Yes, I've been saying this from the start as well. Also note that they used China's severely misleading statistics from day 1 with no disclaimer. The WHO is incompetent and/or corrupt.

lsd5you• 6 years ago

This is a lot of media. Bizarrely no skepticism, just writing articles matter of factly using dubious (or at the very least opaque/unverifiable) figures from foreign governments.

TheKarateKid2• 6 years ago

Many feel the same way. There's a petition with almost 500k signers calling for the WHO Director General's resignation: https://www.change.org/p/united-nations-call-for-the-resigna...

heartbeats2• 6 years ago

Wer zahlt, schafft an. It's not as if they can just tell the Chinese to fuck off, is it?

They have to stay on the good side of the Chinese, or they will get kicked out.

cjhopman• 6 years ago

In what way were China's statistics severely misleading. For a long time, they reported lab-confirmed cases and were upfront that this was limited by the amount of tests they could perform. In addition, they reported how many people were tested and how many tests were still being processed.

Today in the US, the US is reporting only lab-confirmed cases. They are also upfront that this is limited by the amount of tests they can perform. Unlike China, the US is __not__ reporting how many people are tested or how many tests are being processed. They are also not upfront about the fact that testing is severely limited by a very strict policy on who to test.

tensor• 6 years ago

I'll take China's statistics (which I've not seen to be misleading) over the US's complete censoring of any information about the outbreak, and the CDC preventing people from getting testing.

At this point, all flights from the US should be terminated. Your government is a danger to your own country and to the world.

Invictus02• 6 years ago

WHO is an organization with no real power; it was necessary to kiss China's ass so that they could gain access to the country and get early data on the virus. The alternative was that the rest of the world would have had to rely solely on the manipulated Chinese stats.

parliament323• 6 years ago

Why is gaining access a good idea? If China's being dishonest WHO should just recommend zero travel from/to China and let them stew in it -- they can manipulate their stats internally all they want.

james-mcelwain3• 6 years ago

This kind of Sinophobia is so unwarranted -- China has done the best to control this disease outside of maybe S. Korea.

marmaduke• 6 years ago

Suggesting the Who is partial to China is not sinophobia.

ameen• 6 years ago

Vietnam has done similarly well too. China deserves some blame for not having investigated complaints seriously and allowing it to have spread at least for a month before the alarm bells were rung.

bschwindHN• 6 years ago

What's Sinophobic about this?

brrrrr1• 6 years ago

China has also silenced those who detected it in early stages. China should pay a dear price for doing so as that is the main reason it got out of control. Stay safe folks!

victorlin5• 6 years ago

Sorry to say that, but Taiwan did the best to control it

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/what-taiwan-can-t...

See it yourself, not China. They hide data from the world, beat people up on street. How come that now becomes a model for the world? Taiwan is a free country, and yet they did a great job there.

president• 6 years ago

I think most people can agree that no one country has done a stellar job (including the US) to contain and mitigate the virus but given that China was the first to be hit, it gets a larger share of the blame for letting it spread to the rest of the world. If you look at the timeline of the events that transpired in China since December [1], it shows a clear pattern of ignorance and favoring politics over public health. You know things have gone completely wrong when you decide to arrest doctors that have called out the disease. Anybody that says "China has done the best to control this disease" is either a CCP shill or massively uninformed or misled by propaganda. Remember, the only news we get out of China comes from state-sanctioned media.

[1] https://wuhanmemo.com/?page_id=230929

odiroot• 6 years ago

Republic of China (Taiwan) is ironically very lucky to be excluded from WHO. They acted on their own accord on made all the right decisions.

vonmoltke• 6 years ago

What does being excluded from the WHO have to do with that?

austincheney6• 6 years ago

You are diving into conspiracy theories of the world's second largest economy and a massive multi-billion dollar pandemic over just $20 million?

devmunchies• 6 years ago

its a very believable "conspiracy theory", given the circumstances.

beaunative8• 6 years ago

Why would the WHO try to please China? It's an international organization. It's not a charity. It doesn't rely on donation. Its membership were to countries, it's operations were maintained based on membership dues. I find it revolting as the OP seems to be insinuating there were financial interest for WHO to please China, which is bizarre and outrageous based on how it's organized.

heartbeats2• 6 years ago

Because China threaten them. If they don't bend over backwards for them, China will accuse them of "Sinophobia" and being agents of the CIA all the rest.

victorlin5• 6 years ago

If WHO doesn't want to please China, could you explain they follow China's will and block Taiwan all the time?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/22/china-health-coronaviru...

Yeah, right? why would they, hmmmmm, I am wondering

shock-value• 6 years ago

WHO does rely in large part on donations. See http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA72/A72_35-en.pdf page 82. It could certainly be argued that they have an interest in convincing China to boost the voluntary portion of its contribution to match that of some of the other nations on that list.

jacobwilliamroy2• 6 years ago

You want visas to go into china and research a pandemic? This is how it is done. Not by throwing people under the bus, but by maintaining a very narrow bandwidth of comment and showing appreciation to the powers that be, for allowing you to enter the country and go about your business. I appreciate Xi Jinping and other chinese official's efforts to contain the disease and assist the WHO on their research mission. That's all I have to say about that.

xchip2• 6 years ago

This are great news for many insurance companies because if you get sick the won't need to cover your expenses. Stay safe!

chrxr3• 6 years ago

Not true at least for many Blue Cross Blue Shield areas: https://home.bluecrossma.com/coronavirus

anigbrowl• 6 years ago

It's worth noting that the US test situation is still going to be held up for a while due to a shortage of lab chemicals: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/coronavirus-testing...

beamatronic4• 6 years ago

Curious if anyone has tried to look on the bright side, and see where humanity will be in the long run.

1. Will take infectious disease more seriously

2. Will build out health care infrastructure to guard against future occurrences

3. Personal sanitation will be improved

4. People less likely to take risky behaviors like getting together in huge groups

edit: formatting

ratsimihah2• 6 years ago

Will we though? I'd like to agree but weren't the past pandemic/epidemic diseases within the last 20 years, yet this all feels like a new problem?

52-6F-6211• 6 years ago

One data point might be Toronto. SARS had a pretty large social impact here, and people are far more cautious and measured in the face of COVID-19, but not panicking. Not yet anyway.

But small changes have been impactful—like some businesses immediately getting on wider WFH policies and self-quarantine for returning business travelers as well as general hygiene—people aren't always great at that but it's a conscious act on everyone's part lately. Businesses and buildings even started placing more sanitizer stations, etc.

beamatronic4• 6 years ago

The scale is different, certainly. But the prep work is the same. Imagine if we did all this for the flu. We'd make pretty short work of that.

fokinsean3• 6 years ago

Playing Devil's advocate, but if the situation does fizzle out in the US due to active measures, people will likely look back and say how it "ended up not being a big deal".

venantius• 6 years ago

Given that current measures in the US don't come close to Italy/SK/China, that seems highly unlikely.

mikestew4• 6 years ago

See also: Y2K.

I don’t say that lightly. That was 20 years ago, so maybe you youngsters just read about it in books. But in summary, a bunch of us busted ass to make sure the predictions of ATM and power failures did not come to pass on 1/1/2000. Our reward was, “See? We got all up in arms about nothing.”

Plenty of those same short-sighted dipshits are still alive, and of those now deceased, I’m sure replacements are just reaching voting age.

That’s assuming the U. S. puts forth anything close to the effort of fixing Y2K. Which is not even remotely guaranteed.

jupp0r2• 6 years ago

I think that would also be a positive outcome (given other options from the set of possible outcomes).

cmurf2• 6 years ago

Deus ex machina is unlikely. But we aren't even at the stage of admitting this is going to be anything other than a bad flu season, for sure not like the 1918 flu.

Fauci said today that if we don't get aggressive, the death toll will be many millions.

LeoNatan25• 6 years ago

Did this happen after SARS and MERS outbreaks?

Did this happen after Ebola outbreak?

Did this happen after Zika outbreak?

Don't get your hopes up.

yitianjian2• 6 years ago

There were changes after SARS that led to better containment and reporting measures in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.

Sure, the initial cases were clearly messed up, but it has mostly been contained in Hong Kong and Singapore. And with the way this disease has progressed, I would bet many countries are going to overtake China in case counts.

majos4• 6 years ago

None of these occurred on anywhere near the current spread or scale. SARS and MERS were almost entirely confined to Asia, Ebola to West Africa, and Zika to South America. The last was most widespread but was still limited to about 10,000 cases outside of South America and Cape Verde. Even then the greatest danger was to the children of pregnant women and, rarely, lasting complications. The number of “deaths from Zika” was <100 in total.

Coronavirus’ combination of “widespread prevalence and awareness” and “killing people” is quite different from previous diseases, I think. It might effect more social change.

beamatronic4• 6 years ago

Yes, I would say that the government response in certain Asian countries was informed by their past experience with these outbreaks.

makomk3• 6 years ago

There have been some quite impressive Covid-19 containment campaigns in the Middle East and Africa thanks to improvements brought on by exactly those outbreaks, so maybe.

the-pigeon2• 6 years ago

I credit those for the US and European response being so slow coming.

None of those became major issues in the US or Europe. The media did it's typical the sky is falling thing and then nothing happened.

So, now we have a virus that is hard for us to contain but people haven't taken it seriously until Italy started having crazy day over day numbers.

raindropm• 6 years ago

I think the scale of global impact is different. I’m now turn into a person who religiously wash my hand, and care about hygiene and stuff much, much more often than before, all thanks to this COVID-19.

vharuck• 6 years ago

Besides #2, most of these would disappear after a couple generations. We've obviously forgotten a lot since the Spanish Flu, polio, and other highly infectious diseases.

malandrew3• 6 years ago

It's actually not a bad thing that it's between 1% and 3% mortality. Can you imagine if this had been Ebola or MERS? This pandemic will leave us much better prepared for one that could be much much worse.

m4rtink2• 6 years ago

More dangerous infection often kill their hosts before they can infect many others, so might result in horrendous dead toll locally but might find it hard to spread very far.

the-pigeon2• 6 years ago

I actually think its' success is largely due to the low mortality rate.

At the extreme if it killed 100% of the people it infected then everyone would've locked down borders immediately and taken it very seriously.

But instead it's only 10x as deadly as a common virus (the flu) that most people have personally had. Which made people not very wary of it until they saw the exponential spread problem illustrated in Italy. (China also illustrated that but Westerners really only feel something can personally affect them if it happens to other Westerners)

brazzledazzle3• 6 years ago

Humans don’t seem to be very good about internalizing lessons across more than 2, maybe 3, generations. Especially if there’s any sort of indirect effects or abstract concepts involved.

thorwasdfasdf• 6 years ago

with everyone washing their hands like crazy now, I wonder what the percentage of normal/everyday colds/flus will be like this year, vs other years.

pixl972• 6 years ago

It has already been a bad flu season and it naturally starts to taper off this time of year.

dirtyid• 6 years ago

The This Week in Virology podcast was discussing some anecdotal stats from doctors HK who reported lower incidents in many common seasonal disease due to better hygiene. I don't believe they have population wide compulsory quarantine, so it might just be a case of mask usage + hand washing. Would be interesting if on the whole, less people died this year due to elevated vigilance as side affect of corona response.

downerending3• 6 years ago

Most people have little interest in operating their motor vehicles safely, even though doing so would be trivially easy, and not doing so kills a staggering number each year.

So no, not optimistic on this.

buboard• 6 years ago

5. Will invest in counterbioterrorism defense

marcosdumay2• 6 years ago

People will probably invest on research on how to contain and react to new types of diseases.

Both those 4... 3 of them are against human nature, the other one is expensive, just forget about it.

JPKab• 6 years ago

The CCP has finally closed the wildlife markets that have spawned several dangerous diseases like this one. Finally.

nomel• 6 years ago

How many times have they shut down the wildlife markets now?

soberhoff• 6 years ago

How is it a "bright side" that when something bad happens people try to avoid it happening again in the future? That's just circular.

aty2689• 6 years ago

Please keep in mind I might be wrong, I just want to understand things outside of the hype.

So I don't buy all the hype, can somebody tell me why i'm wrong? I keep hearing claims from brilliant people that 50-80% of the population could easily be infected.

Exponential growth is obviously the answer, and is occurring because the median person is infecting more than one other person, which right now is coming from people not knowing they have the virus and not worrying about getting the virus. This will change as more people become infected. Assuming even the most BASIC of measures are taken, (people washing their hands, not going to crowded areas often, not travelling etc.) this will probably stop exponential growth.

In China, 5 people have been infected for every 100,000 citizens, and the virus isn't exponentially growing anymore. But fine, maybe they took good measures.

In Italy, it's closer to 20 people per 100,000. Fine, four times as high, but still a TINY portion of the population. If you assume that their graph will ever look anything like China's, there is no way in hell more than 1% of the population will be infected. It probably won't come within two orders of magnitude.

In what god forsaken situation could even 1% of the US get the Coronavirus?

Even without government intervention, as cases increase people will start taking this more seriously and the exponential growth will stop. Even if you don't have symptoms but have the virus, you aren't going to that concert or that vacation because you don't want to catch the virus from someone else. As long as you at most infect 1 other person, the exponential growth stops. This will happen way before 1% of the population is infected.

EDIT: I'm incorrect in the idea that people shouldn't worry about it, you should, but I believe that worrying about it will be enough to stop the exponential growth.

Leary2• 6 years ago

All depends on the mitigations people take.

If people think it's serious, they'll take actions to prevent that serious outcome.

If people think it's not serious, then it may become serious.

Fragoel22• 6 years ago

Most countries (and leaders) and not taking this seriously until they are it HARD by it. They should learn from the nations that were first affected and not just minimize it with "They handled it badly, we're gonna be fine".

aza050012• 6 years ago

It's wrong to believe China's numbers are accurate at all. and in Italy, its mostly been in one area, not the entirety of Italy.

aty2689• 6 years ago

That's a good point, I suppose my argument hinges on the fact we can prevent exponential growth and if that isn't the case because the data is wrong...

michaelmcmillan2• 6 years ago

Exponential growth.

aty2689• 6 years ago

You assume exponential growth will just continue, which I am claiming is false with China as an example. If simple proper measures are taken, (which they will be once more people are infected) like shutting the majority of businesses down, restricted travel, people washing their hands and not going out of their way to concerts and big meetings, you don't have the exponential growth.

greedo4• 6 years ago

Because the virus can propagate asymptomatically. And even in the best performing countries, only symptomatic people are being tested.

aty2689• 6 years ago

Of course, that is the explanation for the exponential growth in the early stages. US citizens don't care right now. Once the virus grows, people will start being more careful, whether they have symptoms or not, because they don't want to get the virus. This along with some government intervention and businesses closing shop will destroy the exponential growth, as we see with China and will soon see with Italy.

learc83• 6 years ago

Even if it is possible, there's no evidence that shows that asymptomatic transmission is common enough to be a significant factor.

tribaal3• 6 years ago

From my non-specialist understanding:

Those examples (China, Italy) have taken drastic measures to keep people from socializing, in order to slow the spread of the disease in order to not overwhelm the health system.

That's the killer - once you reach maximal hospital capacity, people die because of not only the severe virus infections, but because they can't get the required treatment for their other unrelated ailments as well (e.g. a stroke, or a car accident etc...). Italian doctors already have to make really hard decisions with regards to who they will admit into ICU since there are not enough beds for everyone.

So if only 1% of the country gets severe symptoms requiring hospitalization in the US, that's 3 million people needing intensive care unit beds, on top of the normal load.

Measures in Italy and China won't prevent 80% of the country to be infected (mostly, people will not need hospitalization - only a small fraction will), it only tries to reduce the number of people needing intensive care at the same time, in order to not overload the health system and save as many of them as possible (since they can't make enough ICU beds and equipment appear out of thin air)

EDIT: and of course, buy time until a vaccine or other treatment method is available...

aquadrop• 6 years ago

It's just harsh restrictive measures are also not free. Sending economy into hard recession, disrupting supply chains etc will cause people to lose jobs, get under poverty line or not get above it etc. I think it would be a good idea to get more research on how to approach it, finding right balance. South Korea seems have curbed exponential spread and without much panic/hard disruption of everyday life, at least according to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZqgMIrjKOQ

triceratops2• 6 years ago

So I don't buy all the hype,
maybe the took good measures.

How do you "take good measures" without "hype"? Will people mass-self-quarantine if you tell them "it's just the flu, nothing to worry about"?

JamesBarney2• 6 years ago

I don't know if the most significant pandemic of the last century, that could be slowed if we implement unprecedented draconian measures in time can be over-hyped.

peripitea• 6 years ago

Among others, the numbers are way under-reported. For example, in Iran there's good reason to believe that 1-5% of the population already have it: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/irans-coro...

Even if you look at Italy, though, and if you assumed that their numbers were accurate (highly unlikely), 20/100k is only 5-6 doublings away from 1% of the population, or as little as 3-4 weeks if not properly contained.

carapace• 6 years ago

This went by here from 3Blue1Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg "Exponential growth and epidemics"

Hopefully you're correct and it won't grow out of control and infect most of the world, but for now the idea is to keep the burden on the medical systems low to prevent knock-on effects of over-running our caring capacity.

aty2689• 6 years ago

Thank you for sharing! I'll check this out after work.

aresant• 6 years ago

What are HNers doing with elementary age school kids in CA / Bay Area? Seems inevitable that we are heading towards school closures en mass - reasonable to get an early start?

3fe9a03ccd14ca5• 6 years ago

I hope our over-pressured Bay Area children get a month respite from their usual schedule to just be children, and not anything else.

hodder• 6 years ago

Reminds me of Moody's after Lehman. Very timely warning!

wh-uws• 6 years ago

Here's my question. As a technical community here.

How can we help?

i.e. I'm hearing about things like the ways for hospitals to report numbers to the CDC having just been set up.

This seems likely something any local technical person could help tackle.

Is there a place to go to find out how to help in any way possible?

mackrevinack• 6 years ago

saw this a few days back: https://foldingathome.org/

don't know anything about it though or whether it's that effective

sixstringtheory• 6 years ago

Got into it only recently after having known about it for a long time. Just checked the leaderboards and discovered to some amusement that there's crypto based on it: https://curecoin.net

SamuelAdams• 6 years ago

For people embedded in companies: make sure your company can work remotely. Buy more VPN licences, update firewalls to handle the traffic, find meeting / conferencing software, whatever else you need to do to keep people working outside of the office.

For really big tech companies (FAANG), improve data analytics for automated reporting of health data to government agencies (CDC, FDA, etc). Google Flu Trends [1] is a great example of this. Basically google combines common symptom queries with geolocation data to track diseases in near-real time across a region. I first read about this in Datacalysm (Christian Rudder) and it's a fascinating thing.

For individuals: maybe make some cool graphs or ways of analyzing the publicly available COVID-19 data? There's a lot of misinformation going around and helping to curb that with real data will help the whole fear thing. For example [2]: people are saying to donate blood to get tested for COVID-19 "for free" but the test itself is a swab, not a blood pull.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Flu_Trends

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/fguxil/...

Jommi3• 6 years ago

Not sure if you read this: https://www.wired.com/2015/10/can-learn-epic-failure-google-...

antaviana• 6 years ago

Possibly a big relief for insurance companies as life insurances typically have exclusions for a pandemic.

rronalddas• 6 years ago

So no summer Olympics I guess

sequoia3• 6 years ago

As a US citizen very familiar with the US healthcare system, I'm very glad to be living in Canada during this epidemic where everyone has a Go To The Doctor Free card, literally. At times I am a bit surprised how readily Canadians will go to the doctor because they "woke up with a headache/back is hurting/eyes are red and itchy." Coming from the US it would never occur to me to go to the doctor for such "minor" complaints (to be honest, in the US I didn't go to the doc unless I was worried about immediate mortal peril or had an extremely long-running complaint, it's just too much trouble & they rarely help).

In this scenario, I think it's fantastic that Canadians are so quick to go to the doctor, and that everyone can do it on-demand. It means we're more likely here to catch more cases early & hopefully slow the spread. In the US, who is going to go to the doctor just because they have flu-like symptoms? And pay the 20, 50, 75, ?? dollar copay, wait in the line, then spend hours fighting with insurance later when they refuse to cover it? Yeah right. "May as well stay home," and this is going to cause tons more cases to go undetected & spread.

Canada is not perfectly prepared & is definitely making missteps (parade is still on in Toronto this weekend) but I predict the universal healthcare system will make the impact night & day different from USA.

geddy2• 6 years ago

Honest question - what kind of capacity can possibly be supported during a pandemic when people already go to the doctor for (seemingly) trivial reasons?

I see the benefits here, don't get me wrong, but I can't imagine the waiting rooms when people go to the doctor with actual emergencies.

sequoia3• 6 years ago

I'm not sure, but I can say anecdotally that I spend less time waiting for a same-day appointment or drop-in here in Canada than I did in the US when making an appointment in advance with my PCP at my regular doctor's office. So the deterrent effects of private pay & shitty insurance bureaucracy didn't seem to reduce wait times in my area of the USA.

claytongulick• 6 years ago

There are a lot of folks on here asserting facts that are not supported by evidence.

The actual facts are this: we don't know what the CFR (case fatality rate) is. CFR is very difficult to accurately calculate, and varies widely with age, location, health conditions and even biological sex (so far, this seems to affect men a bit worse than women). The "2-3%" mortality rate that's being tossed around as fact, is most likely wildly inaccurate.

We don't know what the mutation rate is. Viruses tend to become less lethal over time, because the fatal strains kill the host and don't spread as well, which puts evolutionary pressure on the virus to become milder. Will that happen in this case? We don't know.

We don't know what the appropriate government response is. It's somewhere between welding people into their houses and doing nothing. Which is to say, who knows? Go overboard and everyone criticizes the government for crying wolf and wasting funds. Too little, and everyone criticizes the government for standing by and letting people die. It's a very difficult balance to strike, and I have a lot of sympathy for the folks who are in the position of making these decisions. They'll invariably get some wrong. Hopefully not too many.

IMHO, the best resource to learn about what we do know is the comprehensive Ars Technica article[1], which is frequently updated.

I would like to suggest a) that folks stop claiming mortality rates in a panicky tone - because we don't know. and b) that everyone who is reading folks claiming mortality rates and the upcoming apocalypse - reserve judgement until we have more information.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/dont-panic-the-compr...

jmkni3• 6 years ago

+1 for that Ars Technica article, been following the updates as well.

eagsalazar22• 6 years ago

Crazy line of thinking:

I keep reading that because of how insanely transmissible covid is, this doesn't end until enough people have already had it that there just aren't that many people around you to infect anymore. It's been described as "trying to stop the wind". We can maybe slow it down but not stop it, and in the US since our response has been so weak, we especially shouldn't hope to stop it unless we're willing to totally isolate our entire families.

At the same time we're hearing that Italian hospitals are completely overwhelmed to where they are having to "choose who to let die" vs providing acute treatment.

So... (1) is it fair to say that focusing on prevention is pointless and we should just focus on survival which is largely about staying healthy and receiving care and therefore (2) (this is the crazy part) does it actually make sense to get it now before hospitals are overwhelmed and you might be unlucky enough to be sick with something else. Basically choose the most opportune survivable situation to get it versus letting the virus and bad luck pick when you have to fight this battle?

My gut tells me a bunch of people are going to crap all over this question but I'm not coming up with good counter-arguments off the top of my head.

(one other point, I live in SF, a large dense city, and I have two little kids that get everything so I'm maybe more fatalistic about the idea that I and my family will eventually get it either way)

austincheney6• 6 years ago

Not exactly.

Looking at Italy as a case study we need to limit the spread of this virus only for the reason of reducing stress on the medical industry at any given single moment while accepting everyone is likely to encounter this thing eventually. Aside from slowing the rate of transmission the guidance, from the medical experts, says to treat this no differently than the flu. The reality is that this virus will be everywhere because it is at least as transmissible as the flu but with more benign symptoms and a longer incubation period. The incubation period for the flu is generally 5-7 days but the early data from China was suggesting an incubation period of 10-14 days for corvid19. Both of those numbers are variable upon a given snapshot and environmental factors.

On the other hand the earlier people encounter this thing means the earlier a population can build the necessary mass immunity resistance.

hanche2• 6 years ago

This. What is urgently needed is to flatten the curve. Maybe we can't reduce the total number of people who get it, but if we can spread out the infection over a longer time period, we may be able to avoid overwhelming the health care system, to the benefit of all.

eagsalazar22• 6 years ago

That's a good point and highlights a possible misalignment of interests between individuals and the community: me intentionally getting it now, before there are many cases might help me and my family but speeding up spread by doing so might increase the size of the peak for everyone else.

Related question: when I imagine the spread I feel like fast moving spread will burn itself out more quickly and completely. But if it slows down too much, might it become like the flu where if only 1/3 of the people get it in a given year we never hit that critical point where everyone is immune and it peters out within a season, giving it time to mutate and keep reinfecting populations year after year much like the flu does?

alkonaut2• 6 years ago

the medical industry

Somehow that term to me is more dystopian than “pandemic”.

andrewla3• 6 years ago

What you're saying is close to the standard line -- "flatten the curve". By trying to prevent infection, you slow the process down, so that hospitals are not overwhelmed. An overwhelmed medical system means that every aspect is made worse; people are not contained so the spread accelerates, we don't do backtracing with the same effect, medical personnel get infected, people with easily treatable conditions are not treated, etc.

The end state is that almost everyone will be exposed to it, most likely to mutated less deadly variants (because those have higher survivability in viral terms), but if the rate of exposure is slow enough then we can mitigate a disaster.

seankimdesign• 6 years ago

I've heard the "you can't escape it" argument too, but I'm not too sure if I believe it. Shouldn't we have to avoid it only until the vaccines are ready?

Rury• 6 years ago

The only way to ensure escape from a disease is to eradicate or contain it. A vaccine helps tremendously in that regards, but alone doesn't guarantee eradication; as we have flu vaccines since the 1930s, yet the flu still remains amongst us. However, this is arguably just a result of vaccination rates; if more people took the flu seriously and were regularly vaccinated, we may have eradicated the flu by now.

Same for COVID-19. If people don't ever take this seriously enough, then I doubt we'll eradicate it. The virus is on every continent in ~120/195 of the world's countries, all of which happened in a few months, despite travel bans and quarantines setup to initial outbreak areas. To me that sounds like people need to take it more seriously and put more effort into containing this. Otherwise it looks like it'll end up being endemic just like the flu, and we may never eradicate it despite having a vaccine - as what evidence do we have that enough people will vaccinate themselves when we do have a vaccine, if people keep equating it to the flu...

greenshackle2• 6 years ago

It could take two weeks before you develop severe symptoms sending you to the hospital. After that you may need intensive care for a couple of weeks. How sure are you that your local hospitals won't be overwhelmed in 2-4 weeks?

There are different strains of the virus and it's not clear if getting one of them gives you immunity to other strains.

dvirsky• 6 years ago

I've read that you need about 40% of the population to be immune to it, for this to die down. Suppose you will inevitably get there no matter what we do (barring a deus ex machina like a vaccine) - you want to do it at a pace that does not overwhelm the health system.

Another thing to consider is, that this is like a friction coefficient. So maybe if people spend 80% less time outside, we can maybe equate that to having 25% of the people already immune or something like that, and then 10-15% actual immunity is enough to make it die down.

pbourke3• 6 years ago

(2) (this is the crazy part) does it actually make sense to get it now before hospitals are overwhelmed and you might be unlucky enough to be sick with something else. Basically choose the most opportune survivable situation to get it versus letting the virus and bad luck pick when you have to fight this battle?

No.

(1) If you get it, you may spread it, even if you're careful. That chain of spread may lead to additional burdens on the system, or deaths

(2) No matter your age, you may become seriously ill, and may draw resources from the system because of irresponsible behavior

(3) It's highly possible that after some time has passed, the mortality rate will drop significantly because doctors will develop a good protocol. If you get it now, you risk being treated in a system that is still figuring this thing out

(4) If you get it, you will not be available to help anyone else if needed due to the required isolation period

The only ethical thing to do is to try as best you can not to become sick and also to support your community through this difficult time with money or volunteer labor. So, if you are a highly-paid techie who can work from home and limit your interaction with others in the community, do so.

etaioinshrdlu• 6 years ago

Only number 3 is a potential benefit to the individual. The rest are for the community’s benefit. Remember we are on a site full of people with a rather “every man is an island” attitude...

MikeHolman• 6 years ago

Probably too late for that. Italy outbreak was only like 19 days ago, so I imagine US will be there in about 2 weeks.

I would guess it takes at least a couple weeks from exposure to get into critical condition and treated.

rb808• 6 years ago

Yes if you're vulnerable it would be better to get it today than in a month when hospitals are full. However it would be even better not to get it at all or get in 6 months time when doctors know more about how to treat the disease and could have drugs that are known to work.

It sounds like your family is young enough to not really be badly hurt, its more about how many people you'd pass it on to.

RealityVoid• 6 years ago

So I was on Youtube when WHO was holding the conference giving the promotion and I caught about 10 minutes off it. In there, the spokesperson said exactly concerning 1) that we SHOULD still enact containment measures, and that those containment measures could help nip it in the bud.

dahart• 6 years ago

(2) (this is the crazy part) does it actually make sense to get it now before hospitals are overwhelmed and you might be unlucky enough to be sick with something else.

I don't think that's crazy, it would be quite helpful to be able to plan to catch it, and you can quarantine yourself at home so you don't spread it to anyone. The big trick is to be able to avoid spreading it around during the symptomless incubation period. Catching the virus on purpose could help you do that.

(1) is it fair to say that focusing on prevention is pointless and we should just focus on survival

I don't think so. The point is to lower the exponent. Buying time has a lot of value.

LZ_Khan• 6 years ago

No to number one as prevention is very important, as you wont receive care if hospitals are overwhelmed. Also, containing the virus is useless if in the end a vaccine is able to be developed.

Number two makes more sense as not having access to care and equipment later on can be a problem.

theseadroid2• 6 years ago

Hey HN, in light of the current situation and the potential ordeal in the coming weeks, may I ask you instead of blaming whoever, let's find some solutions to help people?

As a Chinese, I read first hand materials from Chinese social media and friends on what life is like in a lockdown area. People there depends on deliveries for groceries and medicine, and occasionally restaurants take-outs. All those services, and a bunch of other services for small businesses are possible because of Wechat. Wechat is obviously not a popular option here in N.A. Is there something we can do to help both the people buy whatever they need via delivery and help local businesses?

In Wuhan when the entire family had to be isolated, no one was left to take care of family pets. I heard there's volunteer groups to take them but their capacities were very limited due to the short notice for them to take on such responsibilities. Can we be more prepared and maybe find a technology(-assisted) solution to this before it becomes a huge issue? I feel this will be an issue sooner rather than later because in N.A. it appears the current policy for mild cases is self-isolating, which will very likely infect the entire family.

Also in Wuhan during the lockdown many people felt so lonely, especially the older generation who can't use the internet effectively to stay connected to their families/rest of the world. Can we find ways to help people prepare for it psychologically? A lot of people will break medical suggested self-isolation because of the eagerness to stay connected to certain people/group. Instead of blaming them, can we help them find ways to stay connected yet in isolation?

I'm sure there are more things the mighty HN crowd can do to help others overcome this difficult time. Let's give it a try?

austincheney6• 6 years ago

I cannot up vote this enough. I wish there were a government or social agency in place to better consider these issues.

rabidrat• 6 years ago

It would be great if we had some kind of global institution with distributed local branches whose aim was to feed the hungry, tend to the sick, and commune with the destitute.

mrb3• 6 years ago

I hate to suggest that but the only short-term solution that seems to work is large-scale extreme response measures, just like China.

Here is evidence why it works: new cases/day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=...

What China did is a complete shutdown and isolation of whole cities, cancellation of public gatherings, prohibition of attendance at school and work, massive mobilization of health and public health personnel as well as military medical units, and rapid construction of entire hospitals.

Wuhan, Iran, Italy have shown us that the health care system simply collapses under the huge number of patients needing hospitalization (20% of infected.) So mobilizing healthcare workers, springing up new "hospitals", and limiting spread with extreme responses is the way to go.

Unfortunately I predict that western governments are going to be less likely to suggest, deploy, and enforce such massive quarantines. Quarantines impede on civil liberties, and people in the West are very protective of freedom and liberties. I think the average American will NOT be okay with his government telling him he is only authorized to exit his house to go shopping once a week...

andrewla3• 6 years ago

Why do people point to the China response as being a model response, as though that is easily seen. China has had an order of magnitude more deaths and instances than any other country. While you can point to many factors showing why it is disingenuous to look at those raw numbers without context, it seems to me that the burden of proof is on the other side, to show that the China model is actually effective, because naively it looks like it didn't work out too well.

hef198985• 6 years ago

I agree and disagree at the same time. Let me tell you why.

Extreme measures without a plan and a data basis will certainly make matters worse. We need a plan, which Western countries have. What is somewhat lacking is the basis to implement it. Aggressive testing of everybody would provide this basis, like South Korea does.

Which increases my critique points of the response to a total of two, a viable social media campaign to inform people and prevent panic reactions, which could totally provided and carried by tech companies. So, Google, Twitter, Facebook, if you are listening do something good with your social power! And the aggressive testing of people, everyone, starting with contact persons, people having traveled to risk areas and ultimately everyone.

Other than that I am quite satisfied, in Europe at least. The US seem to be a different story.

citilife• 6 years ago

Extreme measures are likely doing more harm than good -- as soon as China loosens them, there will be a flood of cases. You can't eradicate a disease that spreads via the air we breath (and can spread to animals). You can slow it, but much like Influenza you're stuck with it forever now.

With that in mind, the larger impact is going to be the lack of medicine, food, etc. that comes from a large-scale heavy response. We are just at the beginning. Push for social distancing, but over the next two years we're just going to have to learn to deal with this. It'll mutate, we'll find ways to mitigate damage and we'll have a large loss of life.

Push out higher production of medical equipment and push out the best possible safety gear for healthcare workers. On a personal level, try to stay fit, get lots of rest, and try to quickly take care of any other conditions. Stay home if you are sick (to avoid spreading any illness).

That's about the extent we can do.

Closing schools, closing offices, shutting down the economy is going to be far more damaging than this disease will be.

slovenlyrobot• 6 years ago

Here is evidence why it works: new cases/day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=....

Such an impressive single day drop, it's almost like they stopped testing people..

Meanwhile, I recommend relying on vastly more credible and less easily falsified sources to judge how China is recovering.

If you trust your eyes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-4zQADLS8

If you trust TomTom, https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/wuhan-traffic

semerda• 6 years ago

Large-scale extreme response measures are a disaster waiting to happen.

1. 38% of nurses have children at school. Shutdown the country and 1/4 of the US healthcare industry will choose their children over work in a blink. We don't want to put any more pressure on the people working in healthcare.

2. 75% of US companies have now a disrupted supply chain. Yes the cons of outsourcing core economic functions like manufacturing drugs, hospital supplies etc... Mass mania followed by ongoing shopping sprees will set in further draining a crippled supply chain.

What we need more of is hygiene education (with strict fines) and detailed data about who, where and how they are affected by the virus. Being politically correct in a time where the world is at the brink of chaos is not going to save anyone. Sometimes hard debates need to be had and tight restrictions enforced. It's sort of like the Trolley problem.

dmagee• 6 years ago

https://www.databrew.cc/posts/covid Is a really good blog post on the data behind COVID-19.

Once countries get to about 150 cases their trajectories are very similar. So far the USA has not been too different to Italy.

skmurphy6• 6 years ago

Singapore offers a compelling counter example entailing enlisting voluntary cooperation, rigorous testing and contact tracing, price controls on masks. I don't think China's fundamentally totalitarian / martial law approach is the place to start. I think Singapore offers a much much better model for dealing with Wuhan Flu.

cashsterling• 6 years ago

I think you need to be really careful creating statistics out of thin air, like: "20% of infected people require hospitalization". We don't know how many people in a given region are infected... we only know the positive test cases and all percentages are based upon the positive test cases.

There is evidence that a lot of people contract the virus and have no symptoms or very mild symptoms.

Reported stats out of various countries/egions also do not account for things like the severity of regional air pollution (Wuhan, Tehran, and Milan have BAD air pollution) or the other key statistics, like "do they smoke?" (lot of smokers in China, Italy, and Iran... just saying). Bad air pollution and smoking tears the crap out of the lungs and makes it much easier to contract respiratory infections.

Caution and concern are completely warranted.... significant action needs to be taken to protect all of us, especially our elderly and immune suppressed.

But we need to be careful about pushing information that causes a descent into panic.

simonh2• 6 years ago

I think I’m retrospect the severity of the lockdown in China will be seen as a mistake. Many of the steps they took were unnecessarily damaging, and realistically It’s only a matter of time before there’s another outbreak over there, in fact it’s probably already happening. There’s just no way to stop this virus, we can only slow it down.

classified• 6 years ago

The rest of the world is definitely not fascist enough in handling this. We should pass worldwide control to the Chinese government.

esistgut• 6 years ago

Before helping people already in locked regions if you are not I beg you to do whatever you can to talk some sense into your representatives. The level of actions you want from your point of view would probably be seen as "drastic" or "exaggerated". It is not.

victorlin5• 6 years ago

If the root cause of the problem is not resolved, even we overcome this virus, then now what? What's next? If the next virus hit us again, would Chinese government still try to cover up the problem and stop people from speaking up? Would WHO stop down playing the problem and advice not taking actions? It's a wake up call, while it's nice to have some heartwarming help from internet, I am more concern about COVID-19 is not the worst case, it's just a test, next thing could be way worse if we only try to look away from the root problem, like all the time we did.

theseadroid2• 6 years ago

Let's overcome this virus first? We normally don't do root cause analysis during an outage in IT do we?

acoderhasnoname2• 6 years ago

The root cause of this Outbreak in North America is we have a president call it a HOAX, a flu. The incompetency of the government resulted this disaster in here. Even now when we have thousands in isolation. They are still trying to down play it. They have no idea how many people are infected, they have no idea how many possible contact s are out there spreading the virus. No matter how much they blame others, the root cause is right here in North America!

beaunative8• 6 years ago

I'm failing to see how the "root cause", as you suggested, China, of the problem can somewhat solve the problem. It always us against the virus. Last I recall, they don't take orders from any one. Not even Trump.

nickysielicki• 6 years ago

There’s never going to be a lockdown in this country. If people need stuff, they’ll go out. It simply won’t work.

I’ve seen the videos coming out of Hubei. If you tried to weld someone’s door shut in the US you stand a good chance of being shot by the resident and both their neighbors. Maybe not in the big cities, but virtually everywhere else.

chupa-chups• 6 years ago

HN likes to downrank anything regarding the current outbreak. This was posted 53 minutes ago and received around 100 votes in 20 minutes, but was downranked shortly after:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22550623

Now this post has inevitably been downranked as well. I'm setting up a HN downranking-watch site right now ;-)

If you know some crowd-funding site where one can donate money to health care workers, please let me know (berthold dot alexander at googlemail dot com)

flukus5• 6 years ago

HN will down rank anything getting a lot of comments, I think votes might be factored in as well. It kills a lot of good topics and often allows astro turfing accounts to kill them.

daxorid• 6 years ago

may I ask you instead of blaming whoever

No. We knew the R0 of this thing in late January, and we knew, at least approximately, the fatality rate and ICU/ventilation requirement rate, in very early February.

Every single "just the flu bro" type has indirectly killed people since that time, including the WHO Chief and US President. These things should not be forgotten, and consequences should be meted out, lest we doom ourselves to repeat the mistakes of complacency in the future.

seanmcdirmid3• 6 years ago

There are structural problems that China needs to address that would help in the future. For example, the lack of indoor heating in southern China exacerbates flus and sicknesses like this because your immunity system is constantly beat down when it is constantly cold everywhere. China is rich enough now that they can afford to heat southern homes, if not for comfort, then for stuff like this (see https://facilityexecutive.com/2020/02/indoor-humidification-...)! And when the quarantine comes, you have to keep warm at home somehow.

Something that we westerners take for granted and why I would guess the virus won’t propagate as quickly. Long term, these kind of things are more important than shiny sky scrapers and HSRs.

oefrha3• 6 years ago

I don’t quite get this. Having spent significant time in southern China, while there’s no exceptional water heating that’s (from what I heard and from some brief stays) universal in the north, I can’t think of an urban residence that doesn’t have indoor air conditioning, and rural homes tend to have installed them in the last twenty years, too. It can’t be constantly cold unless people refuse to turn on air conditioning. (I’ve heard that some older college dorms may not have air conditioning, though.)

Meanwhile, I’ve spent significant time in NorCal and NJ residences with extremely crappy heating, too.

derekhsu• 6 years ago

Taking the same action as China technically is impossible for most countries because of differences on attitude to human rights.

In China, a lot of people can be left at home to die and they cannot do any protest against their government. In the most serious period in Wuhan, citizens were limited to stay home and there were not enough means of transport to do necessary transportation, such as critical patients and food. At the expense of this, another large proportion of people can keep alive.

But in the US, people have weapons and they are very tough. In addition, the information is transparency, so it is impossible to hide such tragedies.

richard78459• 6 years ago

This is why US is an accepted leader of the world. I am not a national of china or US.

hnick3• 6 years ago

For the pets there are already various pet care platforms that probably tout themselves as "The Uber/AirBnb for pets!". People can take your pet to their home or visit yours for feeding/walking/yard time.

So if this may be an issue for you it might be good to start looking around to get connections. I assume the issue is that the entire family was moved out of the home? I'd be a little leery of visiting such a home without training if there's a chance the fixtures (doorknobs, fridge handles) can be carrying the virus. In particular if there's any reason to be opening the fridge for pet food because lower temperatures of 4c apparently drastically increase virus survival time to a few weeks, so handling items in the fridge may be a major risk.

navinsylvester2• 6 years ago

I don't see any tech solutions mentioned out here. At least i would like to take a shot.

Not relying on government is the way to go.

I think we should build a social network for community welfare which can prepare us for something like this in future. Where people build communities among themselves. Key point being internal resource availability to be exposed to the close knit network and an external pool exposed to an radius. Keeping everything to the close knit shouldn't be encouraged and there should be a proportion. Ideally the network should be split when its crossing a proportion.

navinsylvester2• 6 years ago

How do we keep up with something like covid-19 in future?. I don’t think relying on government is the way to go.

Why not build a social network which helps to build close knit communities and it can have a cascade effect on the whole populace as a side effect("good"). Some of the key points for it to work being:

    # Pool resources before hand so that the whole system is not suffocated.
    # Internal resources exposed to close knit.
    # External resources exposed to a radius.
    # Cap on internal vs external resources.
    # Split the community into smaller ones when it reaches a proportion.
    # Point system to motivate communities.
    # Ability to mobilize resource across communities.

This need not be the case with just a pandemic but can help us tide over other eventualities as well.

2J02• 6 years ago

I'm saying I'm serious twice in this year already do it had to be the end..

Send everyone over 55 s as my working phone capable of doing Skype or whatever and provide the device a data connection to a Chatroulette app setup and instructions to disable the it and use normally in big big print and grayscale not color screens please color is confusing or color only what you want clicked (NeXT could have been a revolution for just doing that) by us old people anyway...

jakequade• 6 years ago

What's happening is an appropriate response. Sure, anyone blaming individuals / residents is being out-of-line, but this _needs_ to happen.

JVIDEL2• 6 years ago

This post

This post right here

This is peak HN

We're facing potentially the worst global pandemic in a century and you're talking about takeout and pet sitting

And this is the top post

anthonybsd5• 6 years ago

All those services, and a bunch of other services for small businesses are possible because of Wechat.

Ughh, no thanks buddy. I'd rather not have any of this propaganda garbage. WeChat basically contributed to a global pandemic because it's prime instrument of Chinese censorship[1].

[1] https://medium.com/pcmag-access/china-has-been-censoring-cor...

mrb3• 6 years ago

16 days ago I wrote:

"The reason the WHO is not declaring the coronavirus a "pandemic" is likely to avoid causing a panic at this point. They will only use the P-word once it is clear to everyone that it is one." https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1232094407584710656 I was criticized for being "alarmist." But I was right. It was obvious to those of us who did the research (100+ hours reading peer-reviewed articles) that it was going to turn into a very big deal.

amalter• 6 years ago

I browsed Reddit for 30 minutes a day and concluded the same thing. Don't congratulate yourself too much, it was blindingly obvious.

For all the things that Reddit gets wrong, early-January r/cornavirus was pretty much spot on the money.

makomk3• 6 years ago

The obvious corollary, given the tone of the announcement, is that they want people to be more panicked now.

marcinjachymiak• 6 years ago

FYI for anyone else who was wondering, the WHO declaration has no impact on whether or not pandemic bonds default.

vkaku• 6 years ago

The WHO did not call it early enough, due to political pressure. I don't trust them.

app4soft• 6 years ago

WHO is who says that.

dznodes• 6 years ago

Where is the site for noob preppers to adopt best-prep practices in anticipation for covid-19?

bronzeage• 6 years ago

What people don't understand is that this can be stoppped so much faster if we just learn from china and do everything we can from the first moment. Gradual escalation of measures is useless.

cm21872• 6 years ago

Pointing to the last Sam Harris podcast [1]. He interviewed an infectious disease specialist, who like several other infectious disease specialists I heard before, isn't particularly concerned by this event. It is serious, but not alarming.

I should note that Sam Harris is rather on the worried side of the spectrum (and felt compelled to add a disclaimer at the begining).

[1] https://samharris.org/podcasts/191-early-thoughts-pandemic/

throwaway8291• 6 years ago

I leave this here for future reference: if we paint a worst case scenario, by the end of summer 2020, we may have 1M+ casualties in Germany alone.

It's hard to assess the global consequences of hundreds of thousands of flats getting vacant (increasing real estate supply in an overvalued market), labor shortages (which is high even today) and economic output reduction and the all the societal costs.

The only positive thing I see is an event, that unites the whole world - you will be able to relate to strangers - and this is actually a very good thing.

usuallymatt• 6 years ago

Why would hundreds of thousands of flats be vacant? 1M+ infections won't translate to hundreds and thousands of deaths.

jxub2• 6 years ago

A small increase in supply available, even if it's not a large absulute number will probably lead to a proportionally bigger dip in prices as tenants or prospective buyers might have other options, especially in very bubbly markets with high competition (correct me if this line of reasoning is wrong).

guerrilla2• 6 years ago

That's an interesting point. It reminds me of that TV series "The Leftovers."

paulddraper2• 6 years ago

The mortality rate is almost certainly overstated due to spotty reporting.

Even if ever single German were infected (unlikely, with any disease), I still doubt there would be that many deaths.

pauljurczak• 6 years ago

It seems to me that WHO waited for the stock market to tumble down first, before declaring this pandemic. This way, WHO may avoid getting blamed for the end of the bull market.

mensetmanusman• 6 years ago

I just learned that testing kits are wrong almost 30% of the time, that means they are more likely to contribute to misinformation than not.

Therefore, just wait for it to happen?

nodamage• 6 years ago

I wonder if the internet "experts" here (and on other forums) who declared two weeks ago that "this is just overblown media hysteria and no more dangerous than the flu" will retract their claims now that the WHO has declared a pandemic? Or will they continue to bury their heads in the sand because denial is easier than acknowledging the seriousness of the situation?

Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says

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