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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

It looks like the national response to the conronavirus here in the US is going to be, "Let's hope it's not much worse than a seasonal flu."

It's really not looking good.

I'm still hopeful, though that's because it's the only thing I've got.

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Thankfully, health departments at state and local levels generally know what they're doing.

They know they've been following CDC orders not to test for it?

Seattle officials purposefully disobeyed that order.

And they're the only ones.

The same ones that advocated making needles and syringes non-prescription and get rid of needle exchange programs?

I see people who diligently get flu shots ignoring the severity of corona :(

I think most people still don't grasp it here. Which is probably because the govt doesn't seem to be taking it seriously too.

I think people here (USA) see the news out of China/Italy and think it's not that bad here, without realizing we're 1-4 weeks away from starting to see how bad it will actually get.

I think it's because they read that the majority of cases are "mild" symptoms not understanding that mild symptoms includes being bed ridden for 10 days and contracting pneumonia.

People have a really hard time grasping exponential growth.

There's the famous "would you take a million dollars, or a penny doubled every day for a month" question. People reliably make the wrong choice.

This comment didn't age well.

Hey, I am really happy we're starting to take this seriously.

Cancelling everything and drastically reducing travel should slow down the spread significantly. We still desperately need wide-spread testing here. It seems crazy that this many weeks into it we still can't do that.

Restricting travel from Europe & China isn't a typical response to a seasonal flu.

I think they’re referring to everything up until now.

Right. Up until last night the president just kept comparing it to the flu. I'm glad we're getting serious, though since the coronavirus is already wide-spread in the US I'm not sure how much a travel restriction will do now. Hopefully it will slow it down, which would help.

We really need massively expanded testing now, though we've known that for a while and somehow it hasn't happened yet.

A friend just said "This Contravirus thing is an attempt to make the President look bad for the election. It's nonsense."

Yikes.

That's crazy. March is much too early to try to ruin a November election.

And, ironically, a strong response by the only candidate with the bully pulpit, would have been the best way to ensure re-election.

That would require strategic thinking and execution. Those people had their budgets cut two years ago and left. Only the sycophants remain.

Yeah, for those in the West who are virulently anti-CCP, last month was the best time in decades to topple their power. There was real indications that the simmering discontent would exceed the Chinese censor's ability to control and widespread public anger could have been harnessed into real regime change.

All the West had to do was fuck up less than China and the CCP could have been gone for good. Now, the exact opposite has happened, any anti-CCP voices inside of China have completely lost their legitimacy as the West manifestly has handled the virus worse than China. At the end of this, Xi has basically cemented his status as dictator for life with unchecked power because he was the leader that saved China from the worst of the virus (even if it eventually spreads to China, everyone is much more prepared now and the death toll will be much lower).

Never mind that the best predictive factor of how well you handle COVID 19 was whether your country was traumatized by SARS. Never mind that democracies like Taiwan were arguably more effective. Nobody in China is going to want a "Western" style government for the next 100 years because of COVID 19.

Italy shut down their entire country to make Trump look bad. Wow, that's some dedication to the cause.

Nah, it's to distract from the Impeachment.

There's this weird conspiracy theory that it's only as bad as the flu, being passed around by a lot of strange groups. It's disconcerting

I keep joking "Yes it's just like the flu... We're all going to get it!". Nobody laughs.

Unfortunately, you're right:

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

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370245512943820...

I'm amazed not only at these affirmations, but at the number of likes they get. Incredible.

To be fair, many of them are just bots.

Yup. Twitter is not reality.

To be fair, that is the 'official' communication channel from the president of the US to its citizens.

And yet anyone I know who actually approves of Trump behaves nearly identically to these bots. He has an absurdly high approval rating in his own party

https://gist.github.com/62726164/a501e13ae9bec8ac8a3b5a440d9...

This is the predictive infection rate vs the actual CDC daily report.

Yes, let's trust anonymous user 62726164 on github.

just use the official numbers from WHO or JHU and double the value every 4 days. very similar result

Thats what this does - it ysed that, but pulls the daily cdc for comparison. So far, its pretty accurate.

these numbers look really scary when you have them in front of you. it's easy to miss in scales and charts. the date here goes only to May which is even more alarming.

Stops in May because the planetary population is less than the next doubling.

This model indicates a few percent drop in the worlds population by summer.

Yes but by then the whole population of THE WORLD is projected as infected.

It's a tiny bit silly, this is not what happened in China, it's not what will happen in many places. It may be what happens in the US thou...

yeah china (after they quit pretending it didn't exist) actually started to quarantine people an mean it, not just pretend its the flu an refuse to test people because it might make the official numbers go up.

That exponential growth. It is amazing to think that the numbers have grown so much that even the most pessimistic number of 10k hidden cases in the US (since we don't test) -- using that number only pushes us out a day globally and not even much locally.

For all intents and purposes then, globally we're on a very aggressive path that's going to be almost impossible to stop.

But if you've been following Wuhan, Italy, Iran -- you already know this.

Please remember that epidemics must, by rules of reality, logistic curves, not exponential.

Yes at some point the new infections has to go down if for no other reason than there is no one left to infect. As you said it must be logistic, because after a while infected people simply bump into fewer and fewer uninfected people.

Thanks, I was wondering what the name of the curve was, because logically there is no way it ends up being totally exponential.

And to be more specific, you can roughly model it with a Gompertz function: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz_function

This won't age well.

Agreed, this is a picture that exemplifies what you said pretty well.

https://twitter.com/Journo_Christal/status/12378061673484369...

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