HN user
First part is mostly correct.
Second part, you're dead wrong in two areas. Manufacturing of essential goods continues in haste. And, stimulus is essential for people have lost their jobs and need to buy food. So take your theoretical keyboard economics degree and leave it at the door. Let's take away your source of income, ability to work and see how you feed your family.
Don't mess around in the US for peanuts if you can speak/read/write Mandarin and English. Head to Shenzhen without delay. If you happen to be white, then you're worth your weight in gold. If you can do technical things, then you're a magician too. Furthermore, you could even sell yourself as a manual proofreader/editor/translator as well.
Relocate your abilities where they can be best utilized and compensated where things are designed, engineered and/or manufactured.
Don't the reagents for similar commercial lab rtPCR tests typically have to be kept hard frozen too?
CMIIAW: this doesn't seem like a readily DIY biohacking-possible project without some significant infrastructure, procedural knowledge, and expenses.
Also is there a low-volume, open source rtPCR procedure with cheaper equipment and consumables?
$23.6 trillion plus whatever else this situation will cost. I would guess $5-7 trillion more, at a minimum, because it will cost $1.2 trillion a month for shelter-in-place UBI.. and then however much of many trillions in loans go into default or are forgiven.
The debates over whether playing Russian roulette or having clickbait titles are good ideas.
People > profits
I stopped eating meat about 8 years ago and think about this almost every day. It's far worse than just pandemic evolution by keeping too many animals too close to wild animals, to each other and to humans.
- Climate change
- Antibiotic resistance
- Peak phosphorus
- Nutrition availability
- Water usage
- Pollution of air, water and soil (lakes of pig shit sprayed into the air)
somewhere down the list is animal cruelty, but most people are selfish, unconvinced and don't care if it happens elsewhere as long as they don't have to watch it.
If humans are to survive, meat (and resource-intensive substitutes) and fossil fuels have to go bye-bye because they're too risky in the long-term.
Chocked full of misleading, regurgitated government propaganda:
- Facemasks work if worn, fitted, tested and removed properly. Plus, it's not just about the person protecting themselves, but protecting others. The problem is for-profit hospitals and ineffective government (HHS' SNS) failed to prepare, and just-in-time inventory doesn't work during a crisis. It's like telling people to plant trees or recycle to "fight" climate change. There should've been billions of masks and respirators ready and given to anyone and everyone. I happen to have a dozen or so 3M NIOSH N95 respirators because of one of the worst forest fires in decades, but there aren't any hospitals for miles.
- Eye protection, with indirect or no venting, is also essential. Droplets in the eyes is a no-go.
- Hand washing doesn't have much to do with this current outbreak because it's not the primary mode of transmission. This is habits-manipulation health theater. Maybe some people need it, but this comes across as hygiene theater bikeshedding.
- Manipulating people into grossly under-preparing (two weeks? what a joke.) and making unnecessary trips, putting themselves, their families and others in danger is irresponsible. 3-6 months of shelf-stable food that would be eaten anyways is a more sensible number, and reduces risky trips by 90%.
From "the paper of record" that decides what people "should" believe.
There's already a 45-minute rtPCR test from Cepheid and a simple 10 minute ELISA test from SureScreen (which serves a different need, antibody detection rather than infection detection).
It doesn't appear to have an FDA EUA so it may not be immediately usable in the US.
The user-friendly UX and compact size seem good.
The cycle time seems to be on the slow side when minutes count in an ER / ICU situation. ~9 tests per day per machine seems slow, costly and likely to occupy a lot of space for the machines and the cartridges (which contain reagents that have to be kept chilled).
This seems overall like a timely product to solve immediate needs. It could've been better but it was designed quickly.
An ounce of prevention...
PPE isn't perfect or a magical panacea. Ask Craig Spencer, the NY ER doc who worked with Ebola in Africa, how he got it despite being careful.
Watch thunderf00t's videos and Paul Beckwith's.
Without a vaccine and pervasive testing, isolation resets the clock on the pandemic curve and it starts like Groundhog Day all over again, but at a potentially lower level. It will keep happening over and over again, especially spreading N <--> S hemispheres with the seasons. It will keep happening until either everyone is infected, resulting in hundreds of millions of cumulative deaths, indefinite isolation, or a vaccine is widely-deployed.
That is reality.
I want to go agro on US govt liars who damage trust, try to manipulate people and don't promote honest information.
This wouldn't happen in the US because the prevailing attitude is "everyone for themselves; working together is communism." Oddly enough, parts of the Bay Area experienced "panic buying" of masks in early January: I was at a Walgreens on El Camino in Palo Alto when people were buzzing like bees around masks like they were toilet paper at Costco nowadays. IIRC, it was mostly persons of Asian ancestry because they follow the news and have friends and family overseas; a few globally-aware Caucasians did as well.
Only people without symptoms and with proof of antibodies should be allowed to move freely. Everyone else who isn't an essential worker should be isolated until there is a vaccine. It's the only way to make H0 stay below 1.0 and stop this crisis fastest. There are too many people flaunting the isolation orders and risking the health of everyone for their arrogant, selfish recklessness.
This is meaningless. rtPCR is the gold standard, which this obviously isn't. Testing for antibodies is clinically-worthless except for who is now immune or had it in the past and doesn't need a vaccine.
That's the rtPCR expensive test for early detection. Self-swab of the front of the nose is now possible without a nasopharyngeal swab.
A 15 minute test cannot possibly do rtPCR which takes 45 minutes minimum, so this could only be an antibody test for who has recovered or is recovering. It's totally worthless in a clinical setting.
There's been a cheap, 10 minute antibody (ELISA?) test kit from SureScreen for sometime. It only works after someone develops antibodies.
For initial infection, rtPCR is the gold standard and takes at least 45 minutes as of writing.
https://www.surescreen.com/products/covid-19-coronavirus-rap...
True, but that itself is a symptom of bigger problems. The problem isn't which people should or shouldn't have masks. The problem is a lack of supply chain capacity and inventory, and the SNS should have 6 billion masks and 100k ventilators.
Lying to people doesn't help public health or fix the problems of the federal government failing to act. The AARC told HHS to get their act together about the SNS on ventilators, but the govt didn't.
When manufacturing consent is broken because the lies are so obvious.
No. Some people survive and doctors have a moral and ethical obligation to not throw their hands up in the air. Furthermore, without informed consent or advance directives, it's unfair and unethical to play god.
The circumstances of this situation is that ventilated COVID patients often drown in their own plasma, get bacterial pneumonia or their lungs are irreparably destroyed. Like ECMO, this sort of ventilation is a hail mary procedure to try to salvage patients.
Even COVID survivors with mild symptoms, they may have reduced lung capacity due to lung damage.. and that may well be permanent. I suspect lung transplant lists will be backlogged the world over due to this pandemic.
Don't be cute. Professional Engineer / Chartered Engineer is a "real" engineer. A random coder calling themselves an "engineer" doesn't make them qualified to design and implement life-critical safety systems.
That's true of all ICU beds. That's why some hospitals were completely converted to COVID only. The point is to separate them from regular ICU cases because COVID requires BSL3, which is significantly more work than regular patients. In China, this separation was often done well. Italian hospitals may not have had the preparation or resources to properly protect medical staff and other patients.
Apparently, the new term is "physical distancing," because it's not like people are mass unfriending people or calling them Mr./Mrs. SoAndSo.
Sadly, true.
The flip-side of globalization is there are unlikely to be any more large-scale conventional or NBC wars (only proxy, cyber and economic wars) because of extreme economic interdependency.
This is absolutely and patently false for 99% of Chinese manufacturing. I suggest you watch Strange Parts videos to see what manufacturing in China is actually like before making a fool of yourself.
It's best not to assume who-owns-what, but to know in each specific case.
Does that not appear correctly on your device? Which would that be?
I would bet this is only for final assembly. I seriously doubt there is any "Made in USA" product that isn't completely dependent on some tooling or components made overseas.
That's a problem. If a country doesn't have manufacturing capacity, other countries can use that as leverage in the geopolitical sphere. This is one example of where the interests of corporations and countries conflict.
Even AvE got into the fabricobbled ventilator prototype business.
It might buy a couple of rolls of toilet paper too. When rent is $1500, food costs $450 a month for a family now that staple items in particular are scarce and more expensive, car payments aren't going away, and rent will become due after the 90 day pause because there will be no forgiveness. I predict bread lines in 6 months and far more massive homelessness without a proper bailout of small businesses and the people, rather than trillions of corporate welfare. Trickledown Reaganomics corporate welfare will never work, only trickle-up works.
When people don't have money to meet their non-discretionary needs and unemployment reaches 20-30%, which is worse than the Great Depression, what follows is deflation and depression on an unprecedented macro scale. At the street scale, starvation and homelessness would be the impact; Venezuela, Cuba and the UN would be flying in doctors, refugee camp materials and food to the US.
Massive UBI directly to individuals and small businesses enough to meet basic needs is essential, and will be spent into the economy because MPC will be nearly 1.0. Otherwise, the US economy will contract more and for longer than at any point in recorded history.