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Comment by ericol | Hacker News Reader

> Treating you in emergency now might involve kicking someone else off respiratory support.

This has been my standard reply to the "It's just a flu" concept for some time now.

Aside from all this, it's incredible how difficult it is for people to think about this using all the info available (long onset of symptoms, asymptomatic spread, high % of hospitalizations / intensive care, etc) plus thinking in the long term.

I know the generalized idea is no face masks if you don't have symptoms, but if we all used them it might have a good effect on curving the spread.

Unfortunately, western cultures associate face mask with sickness, and are frowned upon.

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> I know the generalized idea is no face masks if you don't have symptoms, but if we all used them it might have a good effect on curving the spread.

There was never enough for everybody. So second best option is, known infected + healthcare. Health professionals work under heavy viral load, which is positively correlated with your chance of getting sick and having a bad outcome. Which means in an overloaded healthcare system without adequate amounts of PPE (like Italy now), doctors will be dying, even if they were young and otherwise healthy. And dying doctors drops the system capacity too.

(Capacity of most healthcare systems seems to be limited by the amount of beds and ventilators available, but these you can always make - and China is indeed making them full-steam, to help the rest of the world. You can't make new doctors that quickly, and there isn't much of them either.)

Wash your hands frequently, sneeze in your armpit, use disposable tissues, don't touch your face, don't shake hands, don't go to large meetings. This is the standing advice in the Netherlands.

Those are basic precautions that depend only on the availability of soap. Face masks need to be worn properly to work, and in cultures where people don't wear them normally this is an issue. Only medical staff really has a valid use for face masks now, also because of limited availability.

>Face masks need to be worn properly to work, and in cultures where people don't wear them normally this is an issue.

But clearly this is not insurmountable.

> but if we all used them it might have a good effect on curving the spread.

They aren't very effective and people who use them tend to touch their face a lot more. Not a good idea - unless you are infected.

It's people didn't think it was as serious then they wouldn't be overloading the hospitals. Most people can probably stay home.

I think we're out of N95 masks in the U.S. and we have to wait a month or so to get them from China.

3M is retooling their US factories. They should be producing by now.

There also is a factory in Georgia that makes them. They probably are working three shifts.

Good luck getting them off China.

Sorry! It's the opposite for me. What is incredible is having access to Google and 4 days worth of reading material, people(non-experts) want to weigh in on everything from geopolitics, to how to run healthcare institutions, or what the federal bank should do.

If you are an expert in anything watching this play out everyday has become a gigantic nuisance and a distraction. Not because it matters what the herd is debating but because of the effect it has on leaders, decision makers etc. It piles pressure on them to waste time/resources/energy reacting to the herd.

Even with the info explosion the educated herd is as dumb as it has ever been, probably dumber, for the simple fact there is always more info than whatever you hear on the news or can read up in 2 weeks.

As if the educated herd made a diff to the election of Trump or Brexit. Some people argue the response is evolving with each crisis. I haven't seen any evidence of that.

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