HN user
Weird to single out HFT's. Isn't everyone working from home right now?
“That” in parent comment is being sequestered at work, so the opposite of working from home.
Slightly older (I don't think it mentions the exterior sugars) but more detailed and comprehensive Economist article about the coronavirus structure and how it motivates research into different solutions (e.g., why do we hope remdesivir will help?): https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/03/12/understanding-...
Was also previously discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22572311
How does this “save big”? Isn’t supermarket ground beef about $5/lb?
Shouldn’t the title be “hoarding”?
Per the article, “increased 283-fold” means a specific variety of worm is now more common in the fish. It doesn’t mean parasites have become more common in people. It’s consistent with these results for sushi freezing to still kill the worms.
their 3 biggest increases in new cases were the last 3 days
As raw numbers but not percentages. 13% each of the past 3 days is better than the 15-25% (mostly nearer 25%) of the past few weeks.
If it turns out that there’s a cheap, widely available, already-studied treatment that achieves something even close to the 100% cure rate observed in the paper, the timeline for total shutdown looks much shorter, no?
I really want this study to be legit, but there are a few more weird things:
1. the evidence-free claim of “full peer review”, 2. the fact that patients who refused or met “exclusion criteria” for the drug served as a portion of the control group, and were the only members of the control group from the same region as the experimental group, 3. the removal of people from the experiment group because they went to the ICU or died (only three of first and one of second, but a rather bizarre thing to happen before claiming 100% cure), 4. the lack of coverage from any major news source, despite this being reported about a day ago.
This reminds me of a pretty niche article I found a couple months ago. It was about the bones of a bunch of cave bears that a father and his young son found in Drachenloch Cave in Switzerland in the early 1900s. They called in naturalist Emil Bachler and he got to work finding more bones in the cave, organized in tantalizingly structured ways.
In Drachenloch, however, not only were there [crude stone] walls, but behind these walls were found accumulations of bear bones — the long bones of the legs and more or less complete skulls. The pattern was very consistent. Where such walls were present, bones were present. Where they were absent, bones were rare along the cave walls.
These and other deliberate-looking accumulations of bones (including apparent crude “chests” of limestone slabs enclosing more bones) led Bachler to suggest the idea of a prehistoric cave bear worshipping cult. But a counterargument suggests this explanation is unnecessary. It might just be bears being bears, no cult required.
When cave bears entered a cave to hibernate, they began by scratching nests into the cave fill. In the process, bones and small rocks were pushed aside, often falling into crevices among the fallen blocks. This had two effects. First, it helped to build up accumulations of bones in natural cavities among rocks or among piles of rocks. Second, it protected the bones that did enter such interstices from further trampling and, if they were buried there, from weathering and decay. It is perfectly natural, therefore, that modern excavators should find concentrations of bones in cavities surrounded by rock. Moreover, because further weathering of the cave roof naturally produced subsequent roof fall, it is perfectly normal that such cavities would be covered by slabs of greater or lesser size.
I wonder if something similar happened here. Obviously, the lack of a cave is an issue. But it’s a funny connection to something I read randomly a few months ago.
Cave bear stuff from https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-cult-of-the-cav... which is also a fun read if you like archaeologists sniping at each other.
The estimates in that first article seem oddly cavalier:
“Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak," said Prof [of mathematical biology at ICL] Ferguson. "There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably."
As of 2014 the number of deaths is <500, although the Wikipedia article [1] is written as if bird flu is something that may yet turn much worse.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5...
The best source I know of for statistics like this is the Federal Reserve's most recent "Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households" [1]. It's a survey of about 10,000 people and, as far as I can tell, is the source for many claims like "40% of American adults cannot meet an unexpected $400 expense", which has been consistently true for several years, although it used to be more like 50% in 2013. Note that “cannot meet” here means anything other than “would pay the expense in full before next month”.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2018-repor...
Not any kind of doctor, but the list of adverse effects on Wikipedia [1] is...not trivial. Seizures, deafness, retinopathy, and the bald assertion that “there is not enough evidence to determine whether chloroquine is safe to be given to people aged 65 and older.”
Granted, all these risks may be outweighed by those of covid, but it’s not a slam dunk choice yet.
There are trials for chloroquine starting at University of Minnesota [2] too.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloroquine
[2] http://www.startribune.com/university-of-minnesota-to-test-t...
The “from orbit” part is a little misleading I think. You can also see individual cars, down to their passenger windows, from orbit in the referenced photos. The photos are pretty detailed.
For verifying the slides’ source? Not that I can think of, unfortunately. The slides themselves are at the featured link.
This is NOT an estimate based on mathematical model, this is the estimate based on clinical data so far and virus's exponential growth rate.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but an exponential growth rate is a mathematical model. We’re extrapolating the current curve into the future, that’s a model.
Just to check the source, these are the same slides (same Drive doc) tweeted by the listed author on the slides [1], who is a neurobiology and bioengineering professor at Stanford.
If you want an understandable, relatively short but info-dense writeup from a sober expert (there hasn’t been much of this on HN) this is nice.
Confused — the article starts off with the reasonable point that we don’t know the true number of covid infections (likely only the most severe ones) so calculations of death rates are flawed. But then they address this by instead computing # deaths that day/# infected 14 days prior? How does this solve the initial problem?
Dumb question: does this mean normal citizens can take out loans at near-0% interest, or something close to that? I know credit card interest rates are typically tied to “the fed rate” but a but higher?
From the figures, it looks like 10% of young are still severe pneumonia’s [0].
Sorry, where do you see that in [0]? Table 3 has a pneumonia diagnosis but isn’t broken down by age, Table 1 is broken down (somewhat) by age but only differentiates between nonsevere and severe “disease”?
I think you agree with the parent comment. “put selective pressure on the strain types that are more infective and severe” does select for milder strains (the pressure is on severe strains to change).
That figure may be “% of population >= 85 years old”, where Italy does lead the EU. See p21 in this report [1] from Eurostat for a breakdown by country. About 3.45% of Italy is at least 85, compared to about 2.75 for Germany. That’s about 40% higher.
So Italy is older in the sense of “more people who are very old”. But you are right that the mortality difference so far is not explained entirely by this gap.
It may be informative to watch how this evolves in Greece, and to a greater extent (due to more infection before a lockdown) France and Spain. Those are the next oldest countries in the EU by this measure, and all are well above 3%.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/10166544/KS-...
A decline in cases to treat would be informative, no?
That makes sense. It’s challenging to think of a “problem to work on”. If it was programming or math, I’d find a project to try out whatever technique I’d picked up. There doesn’t seem to be a ready analogue for that here.
Whatever domain you're in, whatever interests you have- having something of a model of the financial machinery that basically underlies all human activity, both in the small and in the large, I would argue is super valuable.
What’s strange is I’m generally in favor of “staying informed”. But I typically skip most financial news. For example, looking at last week’s issue of The Economist, there are several articles in the finance section. I summarized these below, but my reaction to most is “yup, sounds like the logic I saw in my first-year econ class”.
Maybe my issue is that I rarely feel like I learn anything from these articles; they mostly read as applications of basic theory that might work. In this case, my read on finance is there’s a set of basic principles that explain most of the decisions made and then just beyond that lies an enormous set of more complex but also controversial material.
In contrast, I think of other areas as having a lot of “basic information” that I don’t know, with the controversial bits much further out. So if I’m trying to accumulate useful and relatively uncontroversial info, finance is not the best place.
(Those summaries:
1. interest rate cuts may not suffice to avert recession, governments may add in spending, tax cuts, and credit to banks to increase liquidity
2. fear has led to price increases for safe haven assets like gold, bonds, and stable currencies and drops for economic activity trackers like oil and copper; share price changes have varied depending on debt levels and how different companies are expected to react to societal slowdowns
3. might be a good idea to pivot between stocks and bonds as market rises or falls; downturns can be opportunities if your horizon is long enough
4. if the economy slows, how should banks deal with reduced payment abilities, especially when they may be legally required to not have too many bad-looking liabilities?
5. something about corporate bond trading [this one was most confusing]
6. some special bonds offer yields to investors with the catch that if some defined disaster strikes the investors will not get money back; these bonds have not yet been useful to covid because of stringent conditions on duration and impact of the disaster before payout, and complications of prevention (countries who respond well may get paid less)
7. covid has particularly hurt commodities markets, and by extension economies that rely on commodities (like Saudi Arabia))
The relics business is way more organized than I thought. There are technically three classes of relics, first (actual remnant of a saint), second (remnant of object belonging to saint) or third (touched a first class relic or a saint’s tomb) [1]. So technically it’s always possible to manufacture more relics.
[1] https://m.ncregister.com/blog/smcafee/i-made-a-third-class-r...
Did they win?
It’s not our first pandemic. It won’t be the last.
As far as I can tell, for almost all Americans, this is our first pandemic. The closest analogue might be polio in the 1950s, but maybe 10% of the population remembers that.
Going down the list, none of the remaining pandemics within living memory seem to have made a large impact on life in the US [1].
It’s not crazy to imagine changes from this event. There doesn’t seem to be much precedent here for it.
But Tsang said the long-term effect on recovered patients, such as whether they would develop pulmonary fibrosis, a condition where lung tissue hardened and the organ could not function properly, had yet to be ascertained.
It sounds like there hasn’t been enough time yet to see if the effects last?
Re: students, a nontrivial fraction of students get meals from the schools they attend, so if schools close this would help cover that demographic.
Other coverage of this bill suggests McConnell is OK with passing something he sees as imperfect, given cover from Trump.
Should the White House and House Democrats come to terms, Mr. McConnell has indicated privately that he would quickly bring up the measure and pass it to allow Mr. Trump to sign it into law.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/us/politics/trump-house-c...
It’s hard to imagine he would incentivize Pelosi to pass an aid bill just so he can block it, what is the political upside for him if he does that?
Similarly, the fact that Pelosi is even trying to work with Trump, Mnuchin, etc suggests she believes passage is possible. If she’s just doing this to make the senate republicans look bad when they reject it, then it’d be much easier to pass something with little to no input from Republicans.