LA Mayor closes movie theaters, bars, nightclubs, entertainment venues, gyms | Hacker News Reader

LA Mayor closes movie theaters, bars, nightclubs, entertainment venues, gyms

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58 pointsceohockey6027 comments

> "However, the good news is that 75% of the tests coming back from county labs are negative."

How on earth is this good news? 25% of people coming back positive sounds absolutely insane.

This is pure speculation based on incomplete and casually arranged data, feel free to dismiss me as a crackpot.

The U.S. really didn't have any capacity to test for months. Only recently, a small amount of testing has become possible. Oklahoma burned up nearly its entire daily ration to test the Utah Jazz, for example.

I'd guess the biases in place would indicate whoever is able to authorize tests had a fairly broad view of "who has ncovid" so they're burning their tests on a broad array of very sick patients.

It's good news, because whoever can authorize testing will gain experience about what severe cases really look like. Fewer critical but non infected patients will be tested, so more tests can be used for less severe or possibly even asymptomatic cases.

As far as I know, not everybody is getting tested. I'm assuming it's mostly those showing symptoms and seeking tests, or those who believe themselves to have been exposed seeking tests.

It's still a high number, but not the apocalypse.

Because the projected figures are often times between 50-70% positive.

I wonder whether this will be enough to sufficiently reduce infection rates or if stricter measures will be required. It’s really like driving in the dark with so few test being performed. By the time we realize that it’s not enough, it might be too late. There is a 2 week delay in the feedback loop.

Not a doctor, but it seems pretty obvious from the state of our testing and what's happened in Italy that everyone who is able needs to be self-quarantining, now. Not like avoiding nightclubs, but more like avoiding leaving their houses. We need to do something as closely resembling what China did as we can bear. Since that seems unlikely to come from the top for a bit, we need to start heavy social pressure on each other.

I agree with you but nothing I see around me in SoCal makes me think voluntary self isolation is going to cut it.

I agree, the gym next door is still hosting dance classes. Just a way of trying to slow it a bit. But it's going to take a formal lockdown.

Stop wondering and speculating.

Everyone mass broadcasting at the same time whatever they are wondering about is probably creating more issues than the actual virus.

Once upon a time, many to many mass broadcast used to be banned on the network. Why? Cause it would overwhelm hardware.

But everyone just blindly assumes that human minds under conditions of many to many mass broadcasts will keep functioning as if there is no upper limit.

The reactions of people on the net these days to one crisis after another, resemble the same symptoms of broadcast overload.

The info flows and streams needs to change.

What's weird is, these days it's not hard to find the right person/authority figure locally and directly contact them and have a one to one chat about issues or ideas but everyone is instead broadcasting.

That dynamic needs to change.

Interesting analogy. Do you know where I can read up on the history of many to many mass broadcasting and the issues of broadcast overload?

Not sure. Probably networking/distributed systems textbooks or network/telco hardware docs prior to 2000-2003. That was the conventional wisdom back then. Dig around in IEEE and ACM articles of the period and you will find lot of commentary about the broadcast/scaling issues.

Back then Data Centers didn't exist as they do today. Most large system architects didn't believe emerging new startups like Twitter/Facebook/YouTube etc would survive because the scaling problem, that many to many broadcast required, hadn't been cracked yet. There was only email and IM back then and no one was broadcasting to millions of people every 2 mins. Because it would just crash everything.

That's why large companies at the time like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft etc totally missed the social media boat. They didn't believe it would work and were already running into scaling issues with their own systems.

It mostly all luck that it worked out. Telcos worldwide upgraded pipes and Moore's law drastically dropped cost of processing exactly around that period making data centers/cloud possible. And all of a sudden we are in a new world were many to many mass broadcasting is a reality.

Beyond the CS side to this recommended reading would be Howard Simon's concept of Bounded Rationality, it's implications, work arounds etc. It's based on studying large orgs and how they fail when human cognitive limitations get hit.

That kind of approach probably needs to be scaled up/developed to handle the broadcast issue.

With everyone broadcasting it's easy to hit mental bandwidth limits. And then mistakes start happening. People react to each others mistakes, hide them etc. Fixing thing get more and more complicated and then you have a runaway cascade. It becomes a trap.

As a ham radio operator, I can tell you that it’s completely ok to allow everyone to broadcast if there is a small system of common sense rules in place that determines when to send and when to wait.

Want to play devil's advocate

Closing all schools, closing gyms, closing restaurants

It's obvious we can't contain the virus

A ton of otherwise healthy adults and children, not at risk from virus, are going to damage their health both mental and physical to "flatten the curve" for the sake of the elderly

How about a different protocol: Society resumes per normal and if you're elderly or high risk, stay indoors and avoid contact until there's herd immunity, which given transmissibility could happen quickly

Problem is until we reach "herd immunity" it will overwhelm the healthcare system and many people die unneccessarily due to degrading quality of treatment.

If won't overwhelm if the elderly or high risk are isolated and protocols are strict with that segment

There is still risk for people outside the high-risk segment.

Let's say that it's only 0.2% risk of death without a ventilator for the general population (based on https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-11/covid-19...). Let's say in the USA that we're talking 150M infected people who aren't high risk (65% or ~200M of the population is between 15-65). That's 300,000 people who will need ventilators (potentially for multiple weeks -- https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/prevention-and-sc...).

"The latest study available estimates there are about 62,000 ventilators in hospitals nationwide. That figure is seven years old — so the actual number could be higher." -- https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/14/8156756...

So yeah, you don't want all of those infections happening the same month or else hundreds of thousands of people will die.

That's not how herd immunity works... there is zero immunity. Caregivers cannot risk infection because their risk to their cared is too great and getting everyone infected isn't a strategy for anything other than mass death.

I don't follow, herd immunity greatly reduces the virus because when a critical mass gains immunity it can't easily reproduce

At that point it will be much safer for the vulnerable

There isn't mass death because the elderly will be isolated, a lot of elderly at risk here don't need caregivers and for the ones that do basic protocols can be adopted

Except we do not know that immunity from Covid is long-lasting. Based on similarity with other corona viruses one cannot expect that. It could be just few months.

The best hope that virus mutates to a milder form. But that requires the longest chain of transmission so the evolutionally pressure has chance to work. Increasing social distance is precisely what pushes the virus in that direction.

You're talking out of your ass in hyperbolic absolutes that you know nothing about. Many elderly, like my mother, depend on caregivers. Caregivers get infected because it's so contagious, don't know they have it, and pass it along to their cared. That's the end of that so-called "isolation." One small foul-up and an elderly person is infected. That's all it takes.

You've been repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. I get that you have reasons to feel strongly about this situation. But even if others are wrong, you (like everyone) still have to follow the rules here. The comment would have been fine without the first sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sigh!

Herd immunity applies to the fact that a certain percentage (usually > 90%) is vaccinated against a specific virus.

You can't herd immunize a population by letting them get sick. What the Brits are attempting, in my opinion, is sheer madness and totally irresponsible. Even when they try to backtrack from the term "herd immunity" now.

Or, how do you think herd immunity ever worked on smallpox, or polio?

Hint: It started to work, when people got vaccinated against smallpox and polio. Before that they got sick in a very misearble way and died. It's not that they ever developed "herd immunity" on a natural way.

I also think that your suggestion to just bunker away old people in your original comment is outright offensive.

Offensive? Gimme a break. Necessary? Absolutely. It's a whole lot easier to reduce risks of catching a pandemic to zero than listen to obnoxious bullshit FUD suggesting not wearing masks and continue being blissfully reckless as the authorities have no plans and continue to display their complete unpreparedness.

I'm buying several months of dry goods tomorrow that won't be touched for several weeks, quarantining myself outside of my mom's home for two weeks, and will stick it out 3-6 months or however long it takes.

That's extremely kind of you (I mean that genuinely).

But how many elderly people do you think have such support?

This is the UK’s theory.

Skin in the game. Those tickets to London have never been cheaper.

You're only assuming that immunity is possible.

As the experts don't know this yet, it would be irresponsible of the general public to make this assumption.

(especially when the rate of mutation is taken into consideration)

People are recovering because their immune system learns and remembers how to fight it. I'd at least assume our immune system would behave as its programmed to with this virus, before jumping to opposite conclusion

Also, if immunity isn't possible we'd see mass reports of people who recovered months ago getting it again, since this has been around mid November

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