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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

There are only two countries (China, South Korea) and two city-states (Hong Kong, Singapore) that have managed to stop the spread, I wouldn't call that "many". For comparison all of Europe plus the US and Canada in North America are navigating in the dark, with no visible end in sight.

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Now you're being sensationalist - Those places that stopped their local epidemics were A) the first ones to have the epidemics, and B) took effective action to stop it.

Saying there's "no visible end in sight" is meaningless in this context. If you model the epidemic, as many researchers have, you will see when the end of the epidemic is.

> If you model the epidemic, as many researchers have, you will see when the end of the epidemic is.

Do you have a link to a study of said researchers saying when the epidemic will end? I'm asking because I've been following this whole epidemic thing since just before Wuhan was put into lockdown, I currently live in Europe and I don't see us getting out of the dark with the current measures being taken.

It is generally accepted that the pandemic will end once just about everybody has caught it, because even those cases where people are thought to have re-caught it, if you assume they really happened, are a small fraction of the population.

> It is generally accepted that the pandemic will end once just about everybody has caught it

Yeah, that's probably how the Black Death ended in the mid-1300s, everything "ends" at some point, I was inquiring of the possibility of this "ending" without the obituary pages in local newspapers growing ten-fold in a matter of 7 or 8 days.

You didn't link to these many models, so I'll ask directly: when they model to the end, do 500M people die? Because that would be worthy of sensationalism. If instead, it's 1M people globally, I guess I agree with you.

Social distancing actually stops the spread but the Western countries will see their confirmed cases rate number drop only after 10-15 days, because they only account for symptomatic cases that underwent a test, not for real-time scans of the full population. That’s why the ‘true cases’ in the OP document are estimated at 10x-30x the confirmed cases, and governments’ lockdowns now actually aim to quarantine all of them.

I know all of that, but the first numbers that will either confirm of contradict the lockdown measures will come this Tuesday-Wednesday (for Italy), but you've still got Spain where countless madrilenos ran for the seaside this weekend (no matter the state of emergency already being instituted the day before), France actually holding elections (?!) and countless bars and restaurants still being full over the weekend, Switzerland ignoring the situation almost completely and Germany most probably fudging the numbers. The UK is a special case which I'll not get into because it's too complicated.

Which is to say that yes, nobody knows where and when the light at the end of the tunnel will show up. This positivist "attitude" of first "it's just a flu" and now of "we'll get over it in no time" has really started getting onto my nerves.

What is the UK situation?

The government saying a couple of days ago that they're going to do almost nothing and rely on what they called "herd immunity". They've since slightly changed course and today they've announced (through unofficial channels) that they're thinking of isolating the over-70 year old people (either at home or at other designated places, it's not sure for now).

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