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Comment by itcrowd | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why this is on the number 1 spot currently.

This is a letter signed by non-experts (albeit sometimes scientists/engineers). To me, it comes off as the climate-change denier letters or 9/11 "truthers" letters.

Please let the experts do their job. Don't spread uninformed opinions backed up by Facebook posts and panicked researchers with expertise "relevant to virus spreading" such as electronics, architecture and art history.

Be safe out there but don't let the fear and resulting panic of this virus be worse than the virus itself.

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You don't need expertise beyond elementary school math to understand cases doubling every 2 to 3 days is very, very bad. Look at the charts for any of the countries. They all follow the same pattern.

The US is going to look like France and Italy in a week, 10 days at the most. This is a certainty.

> This is a certainty.

Are you an epidemiologist?

I don't need to be. Just look at the graphs across various countries. Then ask yourself, has the US response been better or worse, to date?

Why do you believe this is misinformation? All it's trying to do is mobilize people who understand what an exponential is to act.

I hope you haven't read the reports from the medical frontline in Lombardie - They are making life or death choices now due to influx of ICU patient without enough equipment and medical staff exhausted and starting to get sick themselves

One frontline story among many here https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/123714289107769753...

Triage, i.e. if you show up and have any condition that reduces your chances of survival you are not treated at all. Palliative care only.

Also the government, despite sounding enlightened and getting most of the praise of the press, is locking everyone up with exceptional measures, but still goes the bureaucratic way to procure respirators (which are essential in the current emergency, and they are needed now, not in the two weeks required for the lockdown to show any effect) and masks (either useless because not certified for medical use, or stuck in a warehouse due to "missing authorizations").

At this point my region (Lombardia) appointed someone with the sole task of getting an emergency hospital up in Milano to house more patients, doing whatever it takes. Hopefully this will help.

Nothing in this letter is inaccurate or goes against what the scientific experts have been saying. When you say "experts," you're really talking about the bureaucrats and politicians who get to make these decisions and have been too hesitant to ramp up testing and quarantine measures.

This letter doesn't make any contraversial scientific claims. Please, highlight anything you think is in doubt?

By "experts" you mean the WHO who delayed declaring it an pandemic for more than a month? I think we're beyond experts already... it's time for leadership, decisive action after experts have failed across the board.

They declared it a global emergency because it would turn into a pandemic (which has an actual definition and criteria that weren’t met) in January. People ignored them and they were right and were forced to declare it a pandemic a month later.

What changed when they declared it a pandemic (i.e. when it meet some necessarily arbitrary bureaucratic definition)? Nothing much. Any government that was holding its breath waiting for this declaration is not listening to its experts anyway.

Stop doing the internet equivalent of running around like a chicken with your head cut off. This is absolutely the Yinge to listen to experts, also known as people who know what they're talking about at a level much deeper than a few weeks' worth of regurgitated Reddit posts.

We are not anywhere near the point where the panic of this virus is worse than the potential outcome of the virus. If anything there is not ENOUGH strong movement being made.

Yes, we need more panic. Maximum panic please! For a disease that has a 0.5% fatality rate, and the medium death age is over the average life expectancy of one's country. And most scientists believe we can't stop it anyway. Yes, let's burn down the modern world and suspend all civil rights for this.

Yes we should be so flippant about hundreds of thousands of people dead. How dare you ask me to sacrifice going to a restaurant for that?

Something something 20% hospitalization rate * number of infected people >> healthcare capacity of any country -> a lot more than 0.5% of fatalities, + all the other deaths for all other kinds of medical emergencies, which only happen because doctors have to aggressively triage patients.

Obviously we should try and slow it down. But there's a fine line between slowing it down and overreacting.

Overreacting would be nuking the affected cities. Locking down a country to give healthcare a chance to cope will have some unpleasant economic consequences, but it won't "burn down the modern world and suspend all civil rights".

0.5% is a textbook number, not the sorry-the-hospital-is-full number, which has in some places been closer to 5%.

Well, it's the real number in places that took this virus seriously and have enough case history to develop accurate numbers: China outside of Hubei; South Korea. Likely other east Asian countries that are showing slow growth rates will have similarly low death rates due to not overflowing their hospitals: Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore.

You're completely correct that the rate is more like 3-5% in Iran, Italy, and probably the US at this rate.

The fatality rate is only as low as 0.5-0.9% in countries that aggressively locked down, quarantined, and built temporary medical facilities in order to flatten the curve so health care facilities could keep up with urgent cases.

In places where no aggressive action is taken, fatality rates are much, much higher (3-5%) — because otherwise treatable cases can not be treated, and the marginally more ill die for lack of treatment.

The difference between 0.9% and 3% of the US population (per Census.gov ~329 million estimate) is 6.9 million people.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

The “experts” are not doing their jobs! In the US you would have expected the CDC under the President’s leadership to act decisively and promptly. Obviously this did not happen.

The randos are providing much more value than the experts in the US. Other countries like South Korea and Singapore have experts who are doing quite well.

The CDC can’t dictate state policies. These are executive decisions that the CDC can only strongly advise on.

The CDC effectively dictated who could be tested and what test would be used. But those tests were faulty and now there are supply chain issues with the new tests. That was the point when they gave up and admitted failure. "Mitigation" and "flattening the curve" are admissions of failure. The only hope now is that summer blunts the spread, which is possible but by no means guaranteed.

they did the same thing with slaughterbots when deep learning was making the news.

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