Hacker News Reader

Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

I'm at a small ~500 attendee conference today and I'd say only about 2/3 of everyone bothered to show up. We're here in NYC where we just had our first covid19 cases.

People are scared.

View on HN

No - they are responsible. It is irresponsible to show up to these events when the mortality rate for 70+ year olds is so high for the virus.

These events just exponentially multiply community transmission so while everyone there might be 30ish and just gets a bad flu, the bigger point is that they are spreading it to their communities at home and disproportionately at-risk populations.

It's possible to be both scared and responsible.

Also - and this is critical - the more it can be slowed down, the less likely it is that the health system gets overloaded, which would lead to more deaths than if the exact same quantity of people become sick over a more drawn out period of time.

It is fear or common sense that actually make people avoid big gatherings during the pandemic of an unknown virus?

It might actually just be public-spiritedness.

I think it's both.

I was at PAX East over the weekend with a 100,000 strong cohort of people who aren't exactly well known for personal hygiene and I wasn't scared, but it probably wasn't the ideal place to go. As long as you take strong precautions (cleaning shared surfaces aggressively, using hand sanitizer or washing hands after touching shared surfaces or people, avoiding sick people, avoiding confined spaces, etc) then I don't think there is really that much risk short of being coughed on by someone, but not much risk != basically no risk if you don't go. I actually went with a friend who was sick with the common cold and I was more concerned about him getting me sick than me getting COVID-19, and it seems I managed to avoid both.

(I was also there, had a great time as usual).

PAX East basically only happened IMO because it was already in motion by the time the COVID-19 concerns really blew up. Ironically, the early date that no one was happy with probably saved the convention.

If it was being held even this week, much less in a few weeks like GDC was supposed to be, I'd expect widespread exhibitor cancellations and likely event cancellation.

You'll only know for sure in two weeks. It leaves yoi plenty of time to infect other people in your community

> ... it seems I managed to avoid both.

Unfortunately I don't think you'll know for sure if you got sick for at least a few more days. For COVID-19, I think there is a 5-7 day period where you can show no symptoms (but still pass it on to other people.) And even for the regular cold/flu, it can take a couple days for symptoms to show up.

I agree with everything else you said though; wash your hands often, use hand sanitizer, bring lysol/clorox wipes with you and wipe down any shared surfaces if possible.

It can actually be upto three weeks before symptoms show all the while being infectious.

If it's true that there is a three week latency period while you can still be infectious then we are screwed. There's basically nothing you can do because quarantine becomes impossible short of forcibly quarantining everyone.

If even Xi Jinping doesn't have the political cover to pull it off, the US political leadership surely won't.

The absolute highest outlier (like, only one case so far) seems to be 27 days, with the vast majority being under 5 days.

I've never seen more PAX attendees actually wash their dang hands, though. Normally if the sinks are full people just run back out (ew). Not this year. Almost everybody was waiting to clean their hands.

It's a shame it takes a viral outbreak to make convention-goers wash their hands...

(speaking as someone who's been on both the attendee and organiser side of the convention 'fence')

Seems a simple fix would be to add hand sanitizer stations either in the bathrooms or right outside of it.

People would then have to use them. The hand sanitizers you see all over PAX do not get a lot of traffic.

Nerds be gross, my dude.

For bathrooms that use toilet paper, I've wondered if the hand-washing station should be located within easy reach of the toilet.

Then people could wash their hands immediately after wiping, instead of first having to touch other objects like pants, belts, and in public restrooms, jackets, backpacks, and stall latches.

And now you've discovered why I always try and use the handicapped stall.

On average a person gets the common cold 3 times each year. You probably got the cold, but had zero symptoms.

The statistics are also totally different (right now), which affects their risk profile. You probably wouldn't have gone to it if it were hosted in China. Or maybe in a year or two from now if double-digit percentages of US residents become infected. But right now, it's not a hugely dangerous gamble.

Even if you do catch it now in the US, if you're not very old or have other health issues, the healthcare system has enough slack space to treat you (potentially crippling debt afterwards notwithstanding), and you'll almost certainly be fine. This may not be the case in the coming months and years, but it's difficult to predict how things will progress (considering there could possibly be vaccines and anti-virals that arrive in time to prevent a full US epidemic).

You seem like you're missing the point. It's not about you. Contagion is a lottery you play on behalf of other people. You will probably not die of the covad virus even if you contract it, but you can kill other people if you get it and don't stay home.

If one of those 100,000 people had the thing then by now many many more of them have it and are now vectors.

Paraphrasing Lord Humungus, "Just stay home. Stay home for a few months and there will be and end to the horror. Just stay home." (The bad guys are the virus, the good guys and their gas is your health, and Mad Max is the guy cancelling your event. It's an imperfect metaphor.)

"Just Walk Away" Mad Max 2 - The Lord Humungus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfL4xKQeSfo

Going to Channel Partners in Vegas next week. Usually about 7000 attendees. Will be interesting

Given we now have a media/news system that perpetuates such social drama and literally spread fear, then we often see fear itself do way more damage than the crux of the story itself.

Imagine if we had a news/media blackout for a month - life would be so much better overall that you appreciate why so many just avoid social media, a label that is so far removed from the social aspect that it is literally fear/hate media platforms for the extremes in life, whatever side of the fence they sit.

Nice as it would be to have such a blackout the media companies would complain to no end about lost profits. The incentives are totally misaligned. In my opinion, Fox and the AP are not really comparable in terms of quality. The former is for-profit, the latter is non-profit. "If it bleeds, it leads" is less viable when people rely on you writing the more undistilled version of a story to sell to others who put their own spin on it later. That's not to say there's no bias at all in such journalism, but I feel like the incentives greatly affect the content of the story.

If people panicking leads to people watching more news, the news companies will let it happen.

Besides, these people have to put food in the table somehow. Asking them to just stop working because their work is ethically compromised would raise various issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com