Hacker News Reader

Comment by baggy_trough | Hacker News Reader

The faster your community does the same, the more people will live.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. We're all on approximately the same exponential trend as Italy, just a few days behind. The US, for example, is looking to be 11 days behind. Do nothing and we'll end up where they are now.

https://twitter.com/EcolEpig/status/1237430984678703104

Here's an updated thread from the same author with more plots, more countries, and a few more thoughts. Well worth reading.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1237781162153717760.html

In absolute numbers yes. More 30d-ish of you account for difference in population size. Not sure which parameter is more useful since the spread doesn't occur with equal density

Exactly. It is already clear that it will not go away by itself. The more drastic measures, the sooner, the faster it can be managed.

I live in Poland. It seems most cases are connected with somebody who recently came from abroad. Closing borders may seem like a drastic measure but much less drastic that waiting couple of days and doing it anyway + much more.

My point of view is it is a bit foolish to slowly, gradually escalate measures. It would be probably wise cause of action with a completely new disease which we don't know yet, but it is not a new disease now. We saw what happened to China. We know it is difficult to control and if people are allowed to move it is neigh impossible to prevent from spreading.

I don't understand it. Your refrigerator breaks, something goes wrong with your sink, how forcing shops to close is helping? I could understand maybe shops that are selling clothes, but so many things depend on each other. You need working appliances to be able to cook for yourself and keep proper hygiene.

If you can decrease the spread factor (R0) by 0.1, you're going to help a lot of people. t^(r0-0.1) is a lot less over time than t^(r0).

That's averaged, of course. If your refrigerator breaks, your individual value will increase. But as a whole, it will still decrease.

In the SIR model, a factor 1-1/R0 of the total population end up being infected over time. That means with a reduction of 0.1, you will prevent about 0.1/R0^2 from ever being infected, so something like 2%. Of course there are other effects like less load on the hospitals.

Yes, but if you look closely at italy, that's what matters: spread the amount of people requiring intensive care until it is below the threshold your region is able to provide.

That's right. Even if it is impossible to prevent from spreading, which I believe we will no longer be able to do, it is still much better to be sick at some other time than when everybody else is sick, too.

It also gives more time to develop protocol to treat it.

Exactly, as https://www.flattenthecurve.com/ puts it, it's all about reducing the load on the healthcare infrastructure:

"Far and away, the most important thing to do is flatten the curve of the epidemic so that our health systems can cope and to give time for the scientists to research vaccines and treatments."

This seems to me to be mainly aimed at restaurants and department stores. For working applications, isn't that usually dealt with via in-home repair anyways? I don't know many people who would go to a store to buy a new appliance if it breaks, nor many people who would know how to buy parts and fix it themselves.

Contractors often buy some of their supplies in stores...

And depending on how badly something broke you do replace it. How many people do you know with 50 year old fridges?

One person being inconvenienced out of thousands is better than thousands being infected out of millions, and tens or hundreds of dead or permanently damaged.

These actions will kill 10x or more as many people as covid would even if no action was taken.

And you can substantiate your claim with what data?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com