Hacker News Reader

Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com