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Comment by cryoshon | Hacker News Reader

>This is going to cost you money, time, and opportunity

herein lies the problem. everyone knows the virus is costing time and money. but how much do you want to bet that unscrupulous people are going to want to try to keep their employees working in-office or on their retail sites so that their bottom line doesn't get hammered as hard?

without a public health response mandating certain measures -- a response which the US public health bodies have been woefully slow to initiate -- many people will be left at risk.

then there's the other issue: what do we do about people who can't afford to stop working or work remotely? at present, we have no plan. these people are a ticking time bomb because our political apparatus refuses to mobilize in response to this threat.

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To add to this, this sentence FTA rubbed me the wrong way:

>In the U.S., especially the nonstop work culture in startups, we tend to think we’re immune to such things and carry on business as usual.

Do we really think we're immune? I mean, there's probably a large set of the population ignorant of how viruses and disease spreads but aside from them, I don't think we believe we're immune. Most people are a little more educated than that.

The vast majority hope they won't be affected because the way our ridiculous business and work culture continues entrenching into our personal lives, in many cases, due to providing financials for necessities. I'm sitting in my office today with a mixed group who frequently travel abroad, especially working with epidemiologists and healthcare, and hoping none of them managed to catch and share it. I would much rather be working remote at home today with a much lower risk of transmission. It's still fairly low but the question is, when it does spread largely across communities (it's pretty certain at this point), will my (and others') office accommodate or be ridiculous about the scenario because their investors concerns and turn around are higher than their concerns of their workforce's health.

And I like to think I work in a fairly progressive environment. Many don't have the option to work remote, I at least do. My SO is a doctor who has to work with others/patients to continue paying our regular bills. Sure, we have a safety net but it'll set us back towards major financial goals (e.g., mortgage/home ownership, etc. -- nothing extravagant).

Many have no safety net and are at the mercy of the humility of their employers. We'll see how this plays out.

The people who make the decision about weather or not you should work from home probably think you're immune.

Or rather: they're hoping for the best, and calculating that they can survive the costs of you getting sick.

I'm curious what would lead to more death and disease overall: shutting down retails sales, or trying to keep it running?

For really basic goods and services: production and sales of food, fuel, electricity, healthcare, etc., it's easy to imagine the health impact of a prolonged interruption.

But what about less urgent categories, such as building construction, automobile manufacturing, restaurants, and tourism? Is it possible that a prolonged reduction in economic activity from those sectors would have a major impact on public health?

It's certainly an incredibly complex multifaceted issue. It would be interesting with the correct data to model the infection rate and mortality rate.

As a back of the envelop calculation from someone who doesn't do epidemiological modeling, the US has ~330M people. The flu itself infects 5-20% of the population from what I read so let's say this virus infects a conservative 3%, we're at 9.9M.

Based on the data I'm seeing, mortality rate is higher than 3% but there's a lot of factors that go into that (so who knows), so were at just shy of 300k deaths. I think those are conservative figures, personally. My guess is the transmission rate and mortality rates are both higher but there are again so many unknowns.

https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/01/23/coronavirus-outbreak-mapping-...

Mortality rate is almost certainly lower, actually. 3% is already on the high end of the high estimates I've been hearing, which were 2%. This article says 1%: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/02/worse-than-the...

"If borne out by further testing, this could mean that current estimates of a roughly 1% fatality rate are accurate."

With treatment. 10-20% of patients end up requiring intensive medical support, including mechanical ventilation. Will they recieve it? It's more contagious than the Spanish Flu. There simply aren't enough ICU beds - let alone ones equipped to isolate highly contagious disease.

The mortality rate, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, may be far lower than 1% as we’ve been discovering lots of mild cases.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

I think it’s more and more looking like the mortality rate is lower than initially predicted due to massive underreporting of asympomatic/mild cases. Looking at the Diamond Princess there are (so far) 6 deaths out of 700+ cases in a population skewed towards risk groups.

So assuming 40% of the world gets it, and 1% mortality that's about 30,120,000 dead.

If it's 70% of the world gets it approximately 52,710,000 dead

however, I think once we're at 40% of the population having it I would expect things to go worse because that is a lot of people overloading the health system.

Ehh, nature, she always drags some series into the mix - the mortality rate is a function of distribution across age and other health factors - it doesn't seem to drive the immune system bonkers, so WHO is calling out higher risks to older people, esp those with additional factors such as cardiac or pulmonary impairment. Probably due to the fact this is fundamentally a respiratory issue. Abstractly, more data always helps in spite of the cost to get it, but for us in the USA, the last official action has been to delete the tests_administered count from daily CDC reporting. So that makes any projection more guesswork than not.

Exactly. Panic and overreaction also has a real cost:

People lose their jobs, their homes, and their healthcare.

True. But we seem so fixated on avoiding any economic downturn that we prioritize the short term over the long term. Wouldn’t it make sense to take a hit in the short term and try more aggressively to slow the spread of coronavirus, for instance, than to react as it becomes a pandemic? Unless we think that containment was always destined to fail with this particular virus.

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