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Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

But not even China has 100,000 people infected, and their rate of new infections is slowing down. Italy still has <30,000 cases. And in both cases, the number of people requiring ventilators is obviously much lower.

Where are you getting this "hundreds of thousands more people infected than you have ventilators" idea? We've already had a couple months of the virus spreading at this point, maybe it's time to start making more realistic estimates?

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When China started the lockdown of Wuhan in Jan 23, they had 830 cases, and almost all concentrated in one location. Even with the hard lockdown they were at over 70k infected people in Feb 16, before the infection rate slowed.

The US already is at over 5k, every state has infected people, and there is no proper lockdown to speak of in any state, only "strong recommendations". Assuming the same growth rate, the US will be at 440k infected in 24 days, but sadly without the reduced infection rate after April 12.

> every state has infected people

West Virginia does not have any confirmed cases.

cementing their status as the #1 flyover state

The chances they don't actually have any cases is so close to nil that it's negligible.

When China started the lockdown of Wuhan on Jan 23, they may only have had 830 confirmed cases - but the number of confirmed cases was basically limited by the rate at which they could test people turning up at hospitals with severe symptoms and continued to be so for quite a while, from what I can tell. There's a more interesting figure buried in the WHO's final report from their joint mission to China: at some point, someone went and retested old samples taken from people in Wuhan with flu-like symptoms, 20 per week. They found no positives before January, 1 in the first week of January, and 3 in the second week. Those are not pretty numbers.

But was this different to the US? I don't follow the US news that closely, but my impression was that testing capacity is only significantly growing since yesterday.

Best estimates are that the US has roughly 90,000-150,000 cases right now. You multiply number of deaths by 1500. That assumes doubling every five days and 1% fatality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-fatality-r...

> 2.2 million people in the United States could die.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/14/8156756...

> The latest study available estimates there are about 62,000 ventilators in hospitals nationwide.

It's also important to keep in mind that some of those ventilators are already in use for non-COVID-19 cases. Our healthcare system has to deal with COVID-19 on top of what it's already dealing with.

I understand that people are making extreme estimates, and I'm making good money off of their panic, but it's about time for a sober and level-headed look at how the past couple of weeks have stood up to what those people were predicting a couple of weeks ago.

China had about the same number of infections 3 weeks ago as it does today, for example. And their most extreme lockdown measures are waning.

We'll see what happens in a few months, but it looks like a lack of information causing people to assume the worst.

> I'm making good money off of their panic

Stop profiteering off a misery, if you've been hawking over priced toilet paper you're exploiting people in their time of need.

> We'll see what happens in a few months, but it looks like a lack of information causing people to assume the worst.

Assume and prepare for the worst - the US government has had a critical shortage of test kits and it's nigh on impossible that the case numbers we've seen are accurate. Trump has previously specifically and openly acted to keep the numbers artificially low[1] along with generally showing a large amount of concern over the appearance of things to the detriment of dealing with the actual crisis.

The actual numbers are worse than they look right now - everyone outside of the US trusts the US's numbers as much as we trusted China's numbers, the government (though this time almost certainly through incompetence rather than maliciousness) is not a trusted reporter of real data.

Also, stop profiting off of misery.

1. Specifically "[...] would like to have the people come off. I’d rather have the people stay, but I’d go with them. I told them to make the final decision. I would rather—because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault." https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/03/trump-keep-em...

I'm slowly buying into stocks as the market plummets due to people's irrational panic, which is a vote of confidence in the mid-term future.

What are you talking about, "profiting off misery"? I'm profiting off of predictable herd behavior, and putting my money where my mouth is.

Are you? Better start selling stocks if you really believe what you're saying, right?

Ah sorry - given your comment above I assumed you were one of the folks reselling supplies.

One analysis showing how we’re likely to far, far exceed ventilator capacity in the US

https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-dea...

We have at least a 10 day backlog on an asymptomatic disease that is exponentially growing. If 4-5k are infected now, and the 10 day backlog is largely with the virus spreading unchecked, were probably in the 100k actual carriers already.

People are having a really hard time with this - every argument I see about 'oh it's not that bad' seems to be missing that we already have the next 1-2 weeks of infected walking around, totally oblivious to their nature as ticking time bombs. Few seem to realize anything we do now will be at best apparent in 2-3 weeks of exponential growth.

But the measures are decreasing the base of exponentiation. If it can be pushed below one, the spread can be stopped - until a second wave or until there is medication or enough testing capacity to test eryone with a cold. With an estimated 2.5 people infected by every person absent any measures, it seems possible to reduce it to < 1.

Yes, it absolutely can, and hopefully our changes ARE helping - but everyone needs to realize the lag time between stimulus and response. My thoughts are really more about those people who don't see it as a big deal now - if we do the right things we can stop this, but if we don't do those right things right now it's going to grow, and by the time it hits those people's "oh no, this is a problem" mark, we're going to have another 2 weeks of growth before THEIR changes come into effect. We can't let the "oh, it's not a problem right now" people dictate the course of this pandemic.

So people say, but China's infection numbers have not grown over the past 3 weeks.

Nature doesn't do exponential curves; they're inherently unsustainable. It does logarithmic ones, which look exponential when you extrapolate from the right point on the graph.

Logistic, not logarithmic. Exponential and logarithmic are the same thing seen from different angles.

Thanks, but the point is that there is a horizontal asymptote and people are acting like there isn't.

Two weeks ago I was constantly being told to just wait a couple of weeks, and I would see overflowing ICUs in the United States.

But here we are, and the only places that are overflowing in the States (and most other nations) are the newsrooms.

Every analysis I've seen puts that peak sometime in June.

I think it would be clearer if you'd stop trying to use math terms entirely. Your point isn't that there's a horizontal asymptote, because a virus that kills everyone on Earth could still have one or two of those. Your point is that you think the growth rate is going to slow quickly and you are basing that on intuition rather than math,right?

All of the data says we're still no where near the inflection point, and describing the short term as a exponential seems to be the best way to get the point across.

China is locked down hard. Every place you go, someone takes your temperature, and if you're feverish at all you're taken directly to a testing facility. If it turns out you have corona then you're in isolation until you're better.

If we do the same in the U.S. then it'll be valid to expect similar results.

It's certainly true that the virus will peak and decline naturally, but it does that because most of the population has been infected so it can't find fresh hosts. With 0.7% mortality that translates to over a million dead in the U.S.

Don't use China numbers as the kind of quarantine they implemented no other country did. Italy is the more realistic marker. And it is too soon to tell if the Italy lockdown was effective maybe 2 weeks after the lockdown comes down.

We have already seen the efficacy of "social distancing" in Codogno, Lodi, Italy; which was locked down earlier than the rest of the country. Cases are still increasing, but slower than they are in the surrounding areas.

https://twitter.com/drjenndowd/status/1239150231498956806

https://apnews.com/d7fe9900bc1a5ed201f2e49b74df78a4

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lockdown-of-recovering-italian-...

China took aggressive and far earlier steps to contain spread.

We're far behind on mitigation, and we should expect a much larger spike in cases.

Things might be slowed down while quarantines are in force. The big question at the moment is what happens when those quarantines become unsustainable if, as seems very likely, we don't yet have mass vaccinations available.

>Where are you getting this "hundreds of thousands more people infected than you have ventilators" idea?

Where are you getting the idea that we should trust any data coming out of China?

South Korea, Italy? Sure.

Unbelievable that people are still not only buying the numbers but downvoting too.

Decades of easy living in the US has made the average native dangerously naive.

China is most likely going through a second wave of the infection either now or soon, as people return to work out of necessity to prevent supply shortages and food insecurity. Notice how they've totally locked everything down online - the internet was awash with leaked videos and tweets from people inside of china - but the government has clamped down on these dissenters hard enough to discourage the rest, apparently.

The CCP lies to save face. Its existence is predicated upon the fear and/or respect of the people it controls. It is not a free society.

>Unbelievable that people are still not only buying the numbers but downvoting too.

Much of Silicon Valley (and the coastal elite, in general) is in the pocket of the CCP. Is normal.

People will literally refer to Trump as a tyrant or "Hitler", but refuse to speak ill of Chinese leadership. It's crazy.

I don't know that I'd go that far but there is definitely a lot of influence, indirect mostly, and direct for those operating within China of course.

I can't find the % value but the stake that tencent owns in Reddit is a little concerning. That's a lot of propaganda potential.

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