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Comment by archi42 | Hacker News Reader

For those who speak no dutch (neither do I), from what I understand the title gives the most important point. The google translation also seems pretty good:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

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Am Dutch, can confirm the article is reasonably summed up with the title. From the article:

Some scientists still had these antibodies from previous research, and so far it looks promising. It has not been tried on humans yet, which can take months.

There’s a reasonable chance this might eventually become the medicine.

suppose X is dying and everyone in his family circle consents, why not try it? Being an emergency and all. Nothing to lose

It isn't a choice of aye or nay to one drug; there are a suite of drugs that either should or probably do help with COVID-19. If they are going to pick something randomly, chloroquine is probably a better choice based on Chinese trials.

The speed with which things that help against this coronavirus are being found really is impressive. It is good to be facing this in the modern era instead of 50 years ago.

If going experimental, Camostat and E-64d are better choices to blockade ACE2 and TMPRSS2. Chloroquine has much more serious potential side-effects including irreversible, rapid macular degeneration where someone might reasonably prefer not to continue living because of them.

Well, they faced something comparable 102 years ago ... The world didn't end, though it did suffer greatly.

America has "a right to try," so patients with no chance could ask for this.

> why not try it?

I imagine not everyone feels comfortable potentially killing someone with a creation of theirs that they're not confident in, even if others are willing to risk it.

It's the other way around though: it's not them or their creation that is killing the patient, it's the virus. There's a big difference between their creation being unable to save the patient and actively killing them.

That's the thing with giving people stuff that hasn't been tested on anyone before: It might actively kill them, not just not prevent them from being killed by the virus.

That's a very optimistic viewpoint. In reality, it is certainly possible that their creation could kill the patient before the virus does.

If everyone always demanded the "best" treatment according to our current knowledge, we might never find out there was anything better than leeches...

Informed consent of X or X's health POA determines what happens, not random doctors.

Not a doctor but if X is dying, wouldn't it be too late for antibodies to do their work?

e.g. if dying from the immune response or a co-infection.

Side note: this translation by Google Translate is amazing. I am a native Dutch speaker and the translation is 100% correct. I had no idea Google Translate was this good.

I wouldn't be surprised if high-volume translations weren't hand-tweaked by a human to iron out mistranslations. In fact, I would be very surprised if Google didn't had a human in the loop to handle these usecases. They already rely on end-users to fix translation issues on their own.

Nope, I doubt that this translation is somehow more tweaked than other translations: Last year around this time I was shopping to import a dutch car. As a German native speaker I find dutch to be pretty well readable with some practice, but I sometimes double checked on Google Translate - and the translation were always excellent. (But reading Durch as a German is actually quite funny, so I prefered that).

However, the user-supplied fixes have probably been a huge contributing factor to getting the translations where they're today. And Googlers reviewing some translations for their training data sets ;)

Being an English speaker living in The Netherlands, I rely heavily on Google Translate. Works near perfect for formal/semi-formal writing. Short form sentences & phrases (as you might find in casual emails), not so much.

I recently had a similar experience when I came across DeepL [1].

I believe it was French to Dutch. The result was basically perfect.

[1] https://www.deepl.com/translator

The structure of English and Dutch sentences is often very similar. There is a glaring error right in the title though: “ Scientists Rotterdam and Utrecht claim discovery...”

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