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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

The three major groups of saw it coming are the "saw it coming from China" which only the most rational and steady-minded people were able to achieve, the "saw it coming once it spread to Italy" people (I fell in to this group because I fell prey to the "China is a different planet" fallacy), and the group you have a chance of joining today, the "realized American hospitals were going to get overwhelmed after seeing it happen in two other countries" group.

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I think lots of people predicted it as a risk, especially after the original sars, which didn't turn into a massive thing but was still a wake up call. I mean, canada created an entire new agency for being prepared for a pandemic after the sars thing.

Here's a WHO page from 2016 that specificly mentions coronavirus type diseases as a risk: https://web.archive.org/web/20161220180509/http://www.who.in...

Plenty of us saw this coming as soon as news came out of China - even me [0]. The problem was none of us were able to do anything about it, either on a social or individual level beyond stocking up on food and other essentials in January before the masses panicked.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156140

It's been a very difficult, helpless feeling watching this all happen. A lot of people were watching from afar what occurred in Wuhan, then saw it spread to SK, Japan, and eventually Italy. When Disney and Starbucks shut down in China it was extremely concerning, and when FoxConn shut down it was terrifying.

I've been telling my friends and family that they should be gathering extra food, medications, etc. if for no reason other than the coming supply chain disruptions. At first they laughed, but at this point they seem like they're actually mad at me, and in some senses blame me for the currently bare shelves in supermarkets. It sucks.

Same here. Tried to alert people in Italy. Laughed at me. Now mad at me.

The human mind is indeed fascinating.

Still if only one person was saved because of this, it was worth it.

The feeling I have is like being tied to the railway line and watching the train coming around the bend.

Nobody has started to blame me for the situation, but plenty laughed at me at the time when I tried to warn them what is coming. They have stopped laughing.

Yes. I sometimes feel like the Sarah Conner character in Terminator 2, telling friends and family about judgement day and being derided.

The problem is probably that they lumped you up with all the doomsday predictors.

I have a certain friend who, for years, have been trying to tell everyone that normal food is bad and imported "superfoods" are the way to go.

Same goes for scaremongering of every other kind. I feel for everyone who warned about the corona virus in January there are 5 or 10 who warned about everything else which turns out to be a significantly smaller problem.

It's the same from me. I've been trying to talk people into worrying & caring about this for the past 3 weeks in my social group. From the standard "This is just a flu" to the brainless "I don't share your opinion" to now people not caring because they are not in the age bracket that gets affected the most.

We're at "just" 2 deaths and slightly over 30 confirmed cases, but we had the gates open for way too long and just this week people coming from Europe is "asked" to quarantine themselves, but the government doesn't want to suspend classes.

I’ve been told I’m inciting panic just for dispassionately commenting on friends and acquaintances Facebook posts.

Because of the distrust in our government and institutions, people won’t believe anything until it’s way too late.

I’m also frustrated with the “happy talk” people, who think if we just stay positive, everything will be fine in the end.

I’ve must have explained a dozen times the difference between what happens when a virus has a mortality rate of 0.1% like the flu vs. Covid19 (on average) at 1–3%, which means it’s 10–30 times more deadly.

I was typing it so often that my iPhone was autocompleting chunks of my sentences!

I’ve already been invited to a less public discussion group on Facebook for people who get it and are sharing tips, strategies and information on getting through this.

I’m thinking about getting my cousins on a conference call to check where their heads are at.

I don't believe the gov't when officials say don't panic and it's just a cold. Then they or somebody close to them got it along with the wakeup call.

Same.There are people quite furious at me for having warned them in January when this was just a Chinese blip on their screens. I have fallen out with colleagues over nothing more than taking banal, sensible precautions which don't harm anyone. Eyes are rolled, I am a hysteric. That's going on even now, after my country has gone on unprecedented lockdown. (I am in Denmark, public sector shut down, borders closing today at noon).

Well, the related question though is not whether it was possible, but would happen (one metric being can you consistently estimate probabilities better).

Would most of the people who predicted COVID-19 escaping also have been able to predict SARS would have minimal effect outside of Asia?

(Don't forget that China had pretty aggressive lockdowns going on during SARS -- schools closed, gatherings limited, etc. -- though not to the level Wuhan got to).

Yes. I initially thought it was another SARS until I saw the R0 numbers. As soon as I saw that I knew that only the most aggressive containment policies would prevent this getting out of control.

At this point the only issue is how much we can delay the peak and minimise the time we are above the capacity of the medical system.

I thought r0 numbers were pretty similar? The problem seems to be that containment is harder this time around.

No SARS was around 1.2 while COVID-19 is between 2.5 and 4.

I'm honestly a bit surprised about the amount of people that are stocking up on food.

What is your motivation for doing so? Is it because you assume essentials will be unavailable because of other people stocking up, or because of eventual pandemic related supply chain issues?

Maybe I'm naive, but I just can't imagine that because of the pandemic society will be collapsing to a point that it becomes hard to obtain the food I need for me and my family.

If you are quarantined, your food selection may be severely restricted. I'm sure you'll be able to get food, but it may not be the food you normally like to eat.

Additionally, if the virus is rampant in your area, you may not wish to go to grocery stores and risk exposing yourself.

I can't speak for others, but I stocked up simply so I could isolate my family if the virus becomes common in our city. It's about 2 weeks of food for 4 people (me and 3 kids).

I don't anticipate the need to isolate but I figured I'd play it safe. I thought this was what others were doing, but now that I think of it I'm just assuming people think as I do. I personally didn't buy 40 rolls of toilet paper.

Social distancing. Last week I had a Trader Joe's cashier blow his nose and immediately start scanning my items. Today I had an old woman behind me in line who couldn't stop touching her face and scratching all over.

There are already enough "it's just a flu" people out here I don't really want to wade into that any more than I have to.

1. To avoid the grocery store and other busy social places. Social distancing.

2. To avoid buying food from the grocery store that may have been coughed/sneezed on and still have live virus on it. Stock up on non-perishables while they’re still more likely to be clean.

3. Anticipate shortages due to other people stocking up.

4. This virus came from an animal and can also infect animals. So maybe the outbreak infects animal feedstock and reduces our food supply. Or the outbreak infects Ag workers and reduces our food supply. Or the outbreak disrupts supply chain between farms and table. That kind of thing.

Expectation of supply disruptions due to both panic and supply chain breakdowns. I don’t see things getting totally out of control, but what is available might be limited. Everything I have bought I will use up over the next 6 months anyway so no loss.

You might read up on the Bullwhip Effect. these demand fluctuations can have very disruptive effects on supply chains and availability of things, even if nothing else happens. So I highly disagree with the "no loos" statement. Not you personally, but as group behavior these stock ups caused probably more mid term supply issues on everyday stuff than the Corona virus so far.

Sure, I've spent months being the funny doomsayer guy at work and everyone hah, it's like a flu. no problems. But the difference between me and this guy is he's an expert who saw it coming.

You don't think precautions in North America are sufficient? I'm not totally clear on how much we're mirroring Italy right now. I'm hoping we're doing better to isolate and prevent, and we're less dense in population, but... I'm still worried.

Other countries (mine included) are in almost complete shutdown, with only super markets and pharmacies open. Any other place where people congregate (schools, night clubs, cinemas, cafeterias, restaurants) are closed. This is with fewer than 200 cases country-wide, and it's still probably not going to be enough.

I think there's more the US should be doing.

if you look at graphs of net new cases per day, US is about 2 weeks behind Italy. The current measures are insufficient to prevent it getting as bad.

That's if those stats are even relatively accurate. The testing kits are lacking to say the least and the qualifications to use them seem very unrealistic in preventing it from spreading.

A big part of the problem here in the US has been a complete lack of national leadership from Washington, which has left all the various states to come up with policies on what should and shouldn’t be closed on their own. The results are (predictably) all over the place.

All sporting events in the US have been suspended (read: effectively cancelled) or outright cancelled, multiple states are enacting bans on congregations larger than 100/200/etc. people, many colleges and public schools are going on 2-3 week breaks, tech employers are starting to roll out mandatory work from home policies, etc. This is about as extreme as its ever been in recent memory.

> I think there’s more the US should be doing.

If you want more to be done, then politicians need to be honest about what we’re dealing with. Everyone, and I’m not talking about just Trump here, has been giving a lot of wishy-washy “well it’s not really bad, but it kinda is, but not really, we just want to prevent the spread of disease is all” answers but the actions we’re seeing seem to imply that this is some super-virus that’s gonna wipe out 20% of the population. And maybe that’s the case, but if you want people to treat it that way, we need to hear that.

All I’ve been hearing from foreign and domestic leaders is “this is basically a really nasty flu.” Well guess what, the flu is background noise to everyone. Yeah it kills people but it’s just not perceived as some massive ongoing threat. Meanwhile you’ve got entire countries locking themselves down like it’s 28 Days Later over this particular virus. But again, nothing but “eh nothing to worry about, just like, quarantine yourself for the next couple weeks” talk from our leaders, how is anyone supposed to take this seriously if no one will admit that this virus is “something different this time”?

I have had a couple of physician friends describe it as “just a really nasty flu” as well. However, I couldn’t square it with the seriousness with which I was seeing th authorities address it. That’s when I realized, that the comparison is misleading. For example, you could describe a lion as “just a really nasty cat”, but that wouldn’t be doing it justice.

If the 2% fatality rate is accurate, compared to the flu’s 0.1%. That is 20x worse. The other scary part is that we don’t yet know if this virus is going to be seasonal like the flu.

The dissonance comes from three aspects:

1) people selfishly reason from their point of view: "there is a 2% chance I'll die". But it is more than 10% for those aged 70+.

2) people don't think systemic and forget second-order effect s. If the health system can't handle everyone being sick at the same time, it's not 2% but much more. Moreover, anyone requiring intensive care will be subject to triage, not just Corona cases.

3) people forget the health impact after healing (diminished lung functions due to fibrosis, etc)

The precautions that would be needed to prevent hospital overloads would be things like nearly shutting down cities. We are seeing some time-buying measures enacted by local governments (event cancellations for example) along with some from the Federal government (border closing). However these measures buy us at most a few days of replication time. Factors like average age and population density slow it down, but that only delays the wall-hitting.

We don't have nearly enough isolated ICU beds or ventilators on hand if we take what happened in China and Italy as a warning.

The sad thing to me is that there is at least one American company that still makes ventilators here in the states, but they reported that they haven't been asked to ramp up production.

They even make a simplified and hardened version of a ventilator specifically aimed at meeting surge demand during a pandemic, so the engineering effort has already been done.

http://www.alliedhpi.com/mcv.htm

Why haven’t management of this company not gone into mass ramp up on their own? If anyone can see the need it would have to be them.

If I'd hazard a guess, it might be because someone still has to operate the ventilator, and hospitals are expecting a drop in healthcare workers (since you don't want a sick person treating patients).

A couple things being done to help reduce pressure on medical personel here in Czech Republic:

- elective surgeries being canceled, hospitals cleared as much as possible

- medical students were ordered to stay in their residence area and are taking disaster medicine courses

- teaching students are volunteering to take care of children of medical personel (as all schools are closed, someone needs to take care of childrens & students are free to do so)

Once you're infected, would it matter if a sick healthcare worker treated you?

(Presumably uninfected patients with unrelated issues wouldn't want a sick healthcare worker, but that's not everyone.)

NPR did an interview with the owner of one of the last companies to make surgical masks in the US. He said that during the last panic they ramped up production and just as the new machines started coming online demand evaporated. It very nearly destroyed his company. Ramping up production is not an instantaneous thing and doing it without a clear customer for the increased product is an incredible business risk.

The US is about 11 days behind Italy, with approximately the same growth rate (keeping in mind this is only counting confirmed cases).

Compare the "Total Coronavirus Cases" charts: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

But the question is whether the social distancing being implemented across the US will reduce the rate of growth. There’s been drastic action taken this past week.

I mean it's very state by state right now and in disarray. In NYC they've tried to ban public events and large gatherings; no public schools are being shut down and it's pretty much whatever each entity decides. It's a hard choice to make in a city like this, but I feel we are on the "not doing enough" side of things. I think for the US they are definitely trying to weigh the economic cost so that's just competing with the heath cost. I guess time will tell.

Different major cities are likely to experience different outcomes, by chance and by actions taken. Maybe we’ll hear of overwhelmed hospitals in some areas of the country. But I’m hopeful that the US has enacted social distancing measures at an earlier stage of the spread than did Italy.

Boston just canceled public school until the week of April 27.

Based on what’s about to happen, the schools won’t be able to reopen, because it’ll be too dangerous.

I am not seeing much social distancing. People are talking about it, but I don't think people are really doing it. I see pictures of other countries where people are visibly standing 3-6 feet apart, everywhere. Here people are standing in groups in the supermarket telling jokes as they're stocking up, as if they're involved in a light-hearted roleplay of a pandemic.

Expected the US to have 100k tests per day in February and a coordinated response but watched in horror as we bungled the early days in every imaginable way.

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