Hacker News Reader

Comment by j8hn | Hacker News Reader

I have been wondering about this. If health experts are saying it's inevitable that a large portion of the population is going to be infected with the virus then why not limit isolation to those most at risk.

View on HN

In my mind you want to isolate until we better know how to treat it. I have seen some "evidence" on twitter that anabolic steroids seem to help and that the cs. Koreans are more successful with a treatment of zinc plus mineral salts. I thin eventually we will be able to limit the mortality rate significantly, but it will take time to determine what is effective.

I think I'm with you. I don't think it can be contained anymore.

Even if it seems gone, it can pop up and we go on lockdown again?

I wonder if the lockdown people are anti-math.

It’s the anti-lockdown people that are anti-math. Any reasonable person can see that the lethality of the virus is much worse when the healthcare system is saturated. If you accept this, then the only solution is to reduce the transmission rate to reduce saturation of the healthcare system, i.e. “flatten the curve”.

I think the point of the UK strategy is doing such a thing early doesn't help much: if you bring in such measures while the number of cases is small, you'll delay the peak but it won't reduce it much unless you can sustain it all the way through, and by increasing the time you're trying to sustain it you run the risk it won't be sustainable.

That's dubious, and why many people have been calling on the UK to expose their analysis to peer review.

Since early contagion is an exponential process the rate of growth (and all higher derivatives) also grows exponentially along with the number of infected. As a result, "as early as possible" also ends up being the correct time to maximally spread out the peak with the least intrusive countermeasures.

In order to conclude that delaying mitigations will do a better job of reducing the peak they must be making some highly novel assumptions. ... or just not actually reasoning about it formally at all and instead depending on intuition which is often not particularly accurate for exponential processes.

> If you accept this, then the only solution is to reduce the transmission rate to reduce saturation of the healthcare system, i.e. “flatten the curve”.

But for how long can you keep people holed up in their homes? This is a tradeoff that the government (whatever it is, in whatever country), must be prepared to face (even if it just means extending lockdowns).

Also, once the curve is flattened, will you allow people to leave their homes, and if so, what if another outbreak occurs? Will you lock people periodically every year until treatments are available?

(meant with no rhetoric: a question that I keep asking myself) Will this be sustainable in the long run?

But how long do you, can you, lock down for, 3 months, six months, 1 year, until there is a vaccine?

This graph explains what it is they're going for. Basically, they're trying to keep the health system below saturation, but busy, in the hope of chugging through the "inevitable" number of cases at a sustainable rate.

Of course, that requires them to be able to "apply the brake" appropriately to keep things from becoming saturated. Which is why I thing the best word to describe the attitude of the UK government is "ballsy".

EDIT: Link to the original Lancet article the figure is from

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

The risk of overly-strict measures is the blue line; the aim of the UK government is to go for the green line.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com