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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

My neighbor is a doctor, when he gets called to the quarantine unit, his family doesn't know how long it'll be (weeks? months?) until they see him again.

Last night he was headed to work. I saw him saying goodbye to his family with a bag packed. It was horrible. Kids crying, chasing after him...

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I've been hearing over the past week a lot of optimism about how things will return to normal in two weeks (ie. schools are "closed until April <so and so>")

Where did these people get the idea that this will be under control in such a short amount of time?

Edit: Just to clarify I am not saying this to sow seeds of negativity, just wondering myself how can anyone announce reopening without any basis in reality.

Probably there's a big concern about civil unrest.

Ya don't say... https://twitter.com/cjjohnsonjr/status/1238868541689880576

That's exactly what you want to do in a pandemic. Stand in line close to a dozen other people so you can buy a gun and shoot the virus. People's stupidity never ceases to amaze.

That's what someone in the Twitter thread said.

But basically, people want guns to deal with all the other people who have guns. Most of them are dreaming, though, because they're not well enough trained to use them effectively.

When I was in Jersey City during Sandy, a gun would have been very handy: there were roving gangs of thugs roaming the blacked out streets breaking into homes and looting. Police response was vastly overloaded and the flood waters made mobility a problem. It’s prudent to be able to defend oneself in times of unrest. Just hoping for the “authorities” to do it is naïve. The US military has roughly a million troops, 250,000 cops and 380,000,000 million people spread out over a massive land area.

A bunch of people who misunderstand desperate people are down voting you. Downvoting because people are putting their head in the sand. We live in a society of "just in time" production and shipping. How much food do people have stored up?

Ok, let's think this through.

You buy a weapon and try to intimidate the armed aggressors with your weapon.

They actually know how to handle weapons and shoot you as soon as they see your weapon because they know how dangerous these things are.

You're now shot and are either dead or currently bleeding out.

How did this improve your situation exactly?

Escalating conflict is not necessary in your favor. It can be, but its way more likely to backfire than help you

> They actually know how to handle weapons and shoot you as soon as they see your weapon because they know how dangerous these things are.

Yes, that's exactly it. It's actually quite hard to train people to freely kill others. Most naive people think about using guns for intimidation. The first lesson in my weapons class (as I recall) was to never point a gun at anything you don't intend to shoot. Maybe the second lesson was to point and shoot as an uninterrupted process. Not any faster than you can do smoothly, but not any slower either.

Burroughs, who was quite the gun nut, also recommended that. He also advised to first take out assailants with shotguns.

There's a great anecdote in Hunter Thompson's book about hanging with Hell's Angels. Involving a guy who pointed a handgun at one of them, and got shot with it. Also a great sequence in some Seagal film with an Aikido reverse move with an assailant's shotgun. It's a riff on a sword move.

Presumably a large portion of "armed looters" you'd expect in a public unrest situation are also untrained.

Trained > untrained

Untrained gun > no gun

No gun == no gun

> No gun == no gun

Re guns, sure. Generally, no.

Realistically though, looting during a quarantine is pretty much the dumbest time to do so. The best scenario for looting is that one gets something valuable with minimal risk (eg. taking from an abandoned store or house).

Looting houses during a quarantine means that the looters would go into houses that are actively occupied, at a time where the occupants are nervous and potentially armed. Pretty much the worst case scenario.

Doesn't mean there aren't dumb criminals, but between looting houses for food or shoplifting food from stores, one is clearly less risky.

Looting a Twitter office who's sent all their employees home on the other hand.. pretty risk-free.

The problem is that to really be risk-free, you need everyone converging on the idea simultaneously, so that the police are overwhelmed -- this has happened with toilet paper.. whether it'll happen with looting corporate offices is to be seen. For now though, it's still pretty risky.

Civil unrest should not occur. Society and order will not disintegrate, and people will keep working (one of the better ways of dealing with the anxiety of this situation for many people, I imagine).

There isn't a food shortage; there will be a slow down of cargo movement because of extra safety precautions and less people working, but there is no reason to expect people to go hungry and riot over this. Food shelters will not be closing down. Water, electricity will continue working.

Things will get quieter for a little while, shopping malls will be empty and then running in a reduced capacity as things return to normal.

> people will keep working

> less people working

Something here doesn't make sense to me.

He meant to say “fewer”.

> There isn't a food shortage; there will be a slow down of cargo movement because of extra safety precautions and less people working, but there is no reason to expect people to go hungry and riot over this. Food shelters will not be closing down. Water, electricity will continue working.

Based on the panic buying I saw yesterday and the reports of the same from elsewhere, a significant number of people do not believe this.

You need public demonstrations for civil war. Who is going to be out protesting and rioting?

This is not Katrina. We have time to react. State of emergency can be issued, food stocks requisitioned and rationalised until this is over. I have lived during communism, the Chernobyl accident, the 1989 revolutions. We will get over it, eventually. The question is at what cost.

Keep safe, limit non essential travel, preferably cook your own food that you eat at work, avoid crowded places and wash your hands. I alsi don't use taxis and publuc transport. Walk or bike if you can.

In their lifetime, it’s not something they’ve seen before . That may sound overly simple but that is the answer.

Keeps people from panicking more than they already are.

It’s easier from a public reassurance standpoint to give a specific date that can be moved after everyone has adjusted to the situation rather than saying that everything is closed indefinitely.

Because many places have only announced school closings of 2 weeks. If I were betting I’d say realistically it will end up being more like 8-10 weeks when it is all said and done. Also probable that there is a second wave of outbreak later in the year. Historically these things come in waves from what I’ve read.

This was exactly what happened with Spanish flu. Erupted in early Spring of 1918, spread widely until summer, and then a mutated form caused a bigger and deadlier second wave in the Fall. A third wave occurred the following Spring with an equally high mortality rate, but the death toll was lower, likely due to the decrease in troop movements after the war.

Luckily for us, a coronavirus is generally less likely to mutate into more a lethal form than is an influenza virus.

According to a report out of China, we are already experiencing the mutated version which is less lethal (0.6%) than the original (5%). I am hopeful that as we identify and remove the strains causing more terrible effects via prevention and hospitalization, the remaining strains will mutate themselves away in a year or two.

https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3064908/coro...

https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074938/chin...

https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3048772/stri...

Oh yeah? Have a look at Italian numbers. And then go to wiki and look at what was the deaths/cases at a similar moment in China it was like 1%! Symptoms occur on average 5 days after infection, hospitalization 6 days after that and death 7 days after that. To get true CFR you have to have at least 2 weeks without a new case

This is likely because Italy has underreporting for younger cases:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103023/coronavirus-case...

There’s two reasons that I could guess at: the age of the population itself, and the mild or asymptotic presentation of young folks with the way testing is ordered.

Unless you’re got widespread testing for even mild illness, you’re unlikely to see real numbers. South Korea has wide spread testing, so if you look at their numbers it also explains their low death rate:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102730/south-korea-coro...

Viruses become less lethal once they have killed off the most vulnerable.

There was a paper that discussed a L and an S strain the former of which is thought to be more deadly and was more dominate in Wuhan. In other areas the two are more equally distributed but the more deadly strain is still a large percentage of cases.

https://youtu.be/7YI2tOoVVpk?t=141 https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwaa036

That paper was retracted due to lack of evidence.

A lot of folks seem to be confusing the confinement period of two weeks for something else.

My mother asked me today, okay, so I’m stuck in the house for two weeks, and then I go out to the mall and get infected then, don’t I?

I had to explain two weeks was just to make sure she didn’t have it yet. she had no clue that two weeks wasn’t the return to normalcy.

She can get the mail. She should place it indoors, let it sit for a few days before opening, and wash her hands before touching any surfaces in the house.

She said “go out to the mall.”

Oops

The reason is because the school districts that have closed have specifically almost all said that they'll be closing for a period of two weeks.

They do this because they don't want to panic people, despite knowing almost certainly that this will last far more than two weeks.

I am not a school-age person, and my mother is not a teacher. Additionally, our region’s schools haven’t closed, causing furor.

I’m going out on a limb and saying that’s not where it’s coming from, at least in our context.

This is a pure logistics thing.

It is much much more prudent to close for two weeks, monitor the situation, and adapt accordingly. It is pretty painless to extend a closure if you need, but it is basically impossible to un-cancel the semester once you have cancelled it.

Also in two weeks it’s spring break for many schools. So it’s effectively a three week period to monitor how things go.

I don't know about a few weeks, but if it spreads quickly the peak could be here sooner than we might think.

I don't think anyone can predict the future, in any direction.

> Where did these people get the idea that this will be under control in such a short amount of time?

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

I almost said this to a friend who is, hopefully, visiting in May. I changed "back to normal" to "the new normal". I think there is going to be a fundamental shift in how societies operate.

Those people are actual heroes.

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