Hacker News Reader

Comment by eezurr | Hacker News Reader

Please consider reaching out to your elderly neighbors and offering your time to gather groceries/supplies for them. Or posting a note near the entrance of your apartment complex with your number. This alone will have a huge impact. They have a very real chance of dying if they contract covid-19. Take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you could not safely leave your home.

<rant> A lot of us have the amazing comfort of working from our own homes, isolated from the rest of the world. In roughly 2-3 weeks, the epicenter locations of this disease in the US are going to run out of hospital beds. If you are younger and healthy, please consider asking your boss if you need to be working full time right now. Watch your state governor's and mayor's press conferences. They will communicate to you where you can go to help volunteer.

We are going to transition to "war time leadership". A time that will test everyone's true character. </rant>

View on HN

Buying recently for 3 groups. My cart is always full and that causes extreme anger of other shoppers. And supermarket personnel complains about my volumes. Getting tired of explaining why I am buying this way. I am afraid, that grocery shopping will be limited anyway soon.

Edit: printing missing equipment parts with 3D printer would be easier for me.

Print out a sign and stick it on your cart.

I agree with this 100%. People in South Africa are panic buying. So these people think you are taking the groceries to your cave. Get a sign and people can read for themselves.

Double benefit in that it might encourage others to help too.

Sadly, as soon as this becomes common, the hoarders will do the same to avoid the shame/consequences. Fear makes people very very irrational. :(

One up them and include pictures on your sign of the people you are shopping for!

(Yeah, it's a cat / mouse game...)

Well it is a temporary solution at least.

Look around for programs in your area that already coordinate efforts like grocery delivery for the elderly on a daily basis. Volunteering through these programs may be an easier way to find who needs help and do it in a coordinated way.

Example in Colorado: https://cultivate.ngo/programs/carry-out-caravan

I joined a community group that is doing just this, and as an hour ago have a list of older neighbors to check in on, and possibly help with obtaining food and medications.

I do wonder if at 39 i am in fact young enough to be in the most-likely-to-survive-if-exposed group.

As long as you don’t have any other diseases, you’re statistically sort of “safe”. 0.2% risk of dying for your age group regardless of physical health according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

Wash your hands, stay safe.

For comparison, the death rate across all age groups of flu is 0.1%. Extrapolating out, a failure to contain the virus will still mean tens of thousands of young healthy people dying in every country. That's why governments are finally admitting "Herd Immunity/Flatten the Curve" without total containment is not an option.

Flat statements about what strategies are or aren't options don't seem helpful. It's not a good option, ideally we'll have total containment, but it's important that we not see it as a betrayal if it's decided in a couple weeks that total containment isn't feasible.

It absolutely would be a betrayal of the people you'd be giving up on to not do everything we can to help them while we still can. You can advocate for or against taking strong action but you can't tell people you're allowing to die to not be upset about it.

You certainly can't tell people not to be upset! Every death is tragedy; people have a right to be upset even about rarer causes of death that are harder to mitigate. (From personal experience, I can tell you that anyone who's seen an alcoholic family member die learns to sympathize with the Prohibitionists.)

But it's not a betrayal to acknowledge their pain while recognizing nothing feasible can be done.

> For comparison, the death rate across all age groups of flu is 0.1%. Extrapolating out, a failure to contain the virus will still mean tens of thousands of young healthy people dying in every country.

I’m not sure why you’re comparing the all-age mortality of flu to the age-specific mortality of COVID-19.

The relevant metric would be about 0.02% [1]

1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

Why not? It's just giving some context to people who may think .2% is a "low" mortality rate.

Thanks for the age specific number. That shows my point even more.

Ah, I wasn't sure what point you were trying to make, but I thought the all-age figure understates how much more deadly COVID-19 is compared to influenza.

> Death Rate = (number of deaths / number of cases) = probability of dying if infected by the virus (%).

Nonsense! Unless we can count every death caused by the virus, and correctly diagnose every infection, then this is a ridiculous (and irresponsible) guess. The number for "all cases" comes from the CCDC paper:

> A total of 72,314 patient records—44,672 (61.8%) confirmed cases, 16,186 (22.4%) suspected cases, 10,567 (14.6%) clinically diagnosed cases (Hubei Province only), and 889 asymptomatic cases (1.2%)—contributed data for the analysis.

Another more recent study guesses that 86% of cases are asymptomatic and/or otherwise undocumented:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/scie...

Yeah, it's almost certainly way overblown. People are freaking out over a bad flu season. I could see a case made in a future retrospective that the exponential increase we're seeing in cases is actually an exponential increase in the number of available tests disseminated.

Until we have antibody tests, the PCR-based tests we're using will only tell us if you actively have the disease not if you had it ages ago and already recovered. This disease could have easily spread unnoticed (due to the overwhelmingly mild flulike symptoms most people get) for months. Due to its highly-contageous nature, it probably did.

Until we calm down and analyze what all actually happened my guess is just as good as anyone else.

Right now tests are being allocated to critically ill or dead people suspected of Covid-19. Ideally most cause of deaths are caught so the absolute number of deaths are a decent indicator of spread, but they are lagged by probably 7-14 days or the time until critical + testing and reporting time.

Also I am 32yo male on day 5 of Covid-19 symptoms and have hopefully been through the worst part (immune response in lungs). AMA.

AMA: Was it any different than a bad flu for you?

After a week long light dry cough, it was rapid onset and more resperatory/lung focused kind of immune response, almost like a lung infection. The acronyms SARS is a pretty good description.

Basically I think it slowly invades your lungs but finally your immune system figures it out and goes all-in. What triggered it was some vigorous excersize which wiped me out. I call that day 1 but it was after over a week of the cough. Day 1-2 occasionnaly had a 99.0F fever but often lower/normal. Had two nights where I felt congestion developing in lungs and then third day got to 100.8F at 5pm... that night-BAM-woke up at 4am with cold sweats and a strong even burning in both lungs (probably immune system working on it). Lungs felt raw breathing in air. Turned on the shower to get some humidity and the burning subsided but then lungs started swelling up and breathing difficulties began. Luckily I took a bunch of benedryl and was able to breathe more after an hour of calm, but was close to calling ambulance. After that I've now had one OK night with a lot of localizing immune activity but at a lower level. On a scale from feeling lousy (1) to dead (10) the progression each night was 1,2,5,2.. (and hopefully continuing down..).

Get well soon, and thank you for sharing!

Do you have any underlying health conditions?

No I'm super healthy, 32 yr old, competitive runner.

I have a suspicion that I may have had it even longer than a week in advance and it spread more in the lungs than normal.

today is a 2.5

it kind of sucks, do your best to avoid it.

I had the worst cold around christmas and it really does make me wonder.

Fever, body aches for a couple days. Felt like I was going to cough up a lung.

but no real sneezing or congestion.

With modern genomic science, we can pinpoint almost the exact time and place Covid-19 jumped from an animal host (likely pangolins intermediate host from bat reservoir) to humans.

It almost certainly jumped hosts to humans in November of 2019[1]. It has not been circulating in humans for long.

Indeed, several scientific publications have come out in the past decade that more or less predicted that a similar strain of SARS would jump hosts and become a pandemic disease[2].

Also, technically the Spanish Flu was just a bad flu season, right? Now, few believe now that Covid-19 will be nearly as bad as the 1918 pandemic (at least in its current mutation), but it will almost certainly worse than the 1957 flu pandemic, which was bad enough and which resulted in many governmental edicts similar to today, with many school and library closings.

I agree we need to keep cool and not overreact or panic, but we also need to take this thing very seriously. Even the experts are trying to figure this thing out. Disease modeling has come a long way since 1918, but modelers are not seers.

1. https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/24/dna-sleuths-read-coronav...

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

3. https://www.encyclopedia.com/media/educational-magazines/inf...

This is one of the few cases where the raw data is so systematically flawed - many younger people are completely asymptomatic or not being tested because they don't need hospitalization - the anecdata might give you a better picture of the relative risk.

The youngest of the UK's >100 confirmed COVID-19 fatalities was in his forties and already terminally ill. Young people aren't totally safe and should certainly avoid contracting it if possible with a view to protecting the people they come into contact with and not taking up a hospital bed if they're at the unlucky end of the spectrum, but relatively speaking they're a tiny fraction of the overall casualties, and probably have more exposure to the virus than the elderly due to more active social/work lives.

Not to disagree with anything you said here, but there was recently a story comparing the fates of two young Chinese medical workers who both contracted the disease and who required medical care. The punchline is that a 29-year old physician with no co-morbidities died a terrible death. Be careful out there no matter your age or health status.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/world/asia/co...

This guy is pretty clearly an outlier (or there is some missing information).

In Italy only 5 people under 40 have died, out of approx. 2500 deaths so far, and every one of the 5 had an existing serious illness.

"Didn't die" is not the same as "was not harmed".

This relentless focus only on the people who died misses the point: covid-19 puts people in hospital, sometimes into intensive care, and many of those people end up with damaged lungs.

Yeah, I've been reading this all over HN, and saw a few articles out of China at the peak there, but have struggled to find good sources on the prevalence of it elsewhere. In particular, there's a lot of data coming out of Italy but very little that I've found mentions long-term lung damage. Could you share your sources?

Survive yes. But half the patients in intensive care in Holland and France are in the 30 to 60 age bracket. And we don’t know yet what the longterm damage is after you survive.

Not to mention that survival rates start to go down as the medical establishment succumbs to the strain. I'm isolating myself as much as possible and engaging in rather stringent protocols (N95 mask and gloves while out/ disrobe, wash clothes, and bathe on return), with the goal of staving off contraction until Fall if at all possible. Maybe the Chloroquine research will prove effective by then.

I'm in Kirkland/Redmond, so the risk is higher here than elsewhere at the moment.

Every group is "most-likely-to-survive-if-exposed". The numbers they seem to be working with is around 15% for ages 80+. That's not odds you want to take but it's by no means an automatic death sentence.

If I'm interpreting the news correctly it seems that even a lot of not-so-old people (30 and up) seem to be ending up in intensive care with some frequencey, but that aspect of it (bad pneumonia) just isn't deadly in healthy people under 50 if you are given quality care. Elderly people seem to suffer myocarditis or failure of other organs.

What's worrying about that though, is that the high survival of healthy people under 50 seems to be conditional on the availability of ventilators and ecmo. Few countries can guarantee that in all scenarios.

Along with being young and healthy, the people going out in public to do things should wear gloves and a mask if possible. You might be relatively safe, but you still might take up a hospital bed, and you still might transmit it.

We're being told by the medical establishment, quite angrily, that masks are useless - unless you work in the medical establishment, then they're essential.

Who is right?

A mask doesn't "work" in the sense of preventing you from catching the virus, because airborne is not its transmission method.

A mask does work in the sense of reducing your transmission to others if you are infected (and may not know it), by keeping your moisture-laden exhalations confined.

A mask can reduce your risk by reminding you not to touch your face after having contacted potentially infectious surfaces.

And there are different types of masks. Simple cotton patches aren't what the medical establishment needs, they don't filter micron-size virus particles. There are surgical-grade masks that do, and that's what medical workers need.

We really need to start distinguishing between masks and respirators.

Surgical masks are useless for protecting the wearer from infected people, however they help protect others from an infected wearer.

If used properly, a respirator will help protect the wearer from infected people, as it will block them from inhaling virus-containing droplets.

I don’t see how they’re completely useless for protecting the wearer. If someone infected sneezes in my face, would I not be better off with a physical barrier over a point of entry into my system?

Not completely, but it's pretty unlikely it helps. First of all, no one will probably sneeze (or actually cough, because that's the frequent symptom) in your face directly.

If it's not 'in your face', just pretty close, then a lot of the droplets will be too small for the simple surgical mask to filter out. Especially as it leaves a lot of gaps around your nose and mouth. Not to talk about your eyes, where you can get infected just as easily. (Yes, you could wear protective glasses too.)

But... if almost everyone wears these in public places, which actually just became compulsory in Czech that should give pretty good protection to everyone (by filtering the emission of the asymptomatic infected).

And if we think about this use case, then actually it makes no point telling people that it won't protect them because if they think it will they are more likely to wear it.

Droplets on the mask and you breathe them in right through it.

Surgical masks contain a wax barrier that prevents the healthcare worker from spreading their own germs.

If a surgical mask can stop germs from going out of the mouth, then I better hear a more rigorous reason why that same mask doesn't work in the opposite direction.

> If a surgical mask can stop germs from going out of the mouth, then I better hear a more rigorous reason why that same mask doesn't work in the opposite direction.

One word: leakage.

Watch this:

Healthcare - Mask vs. Respirator Video - 3M Worker Health and Safety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR2uLfEVD2w

> Surgical masks are useless for protecting the wearer from infected people

They are not useless for protecting the wearer, and this anti-vaxer level dangerous misinformation needs to stop. It's like saying condoms are useless for protecting the wearer from HIV because they sometimes break.

The lie that masks don't work was spread because there weren't enough masks. Sad that people are still falling for it/spreading it.

Paper I saw on homemade masks compared to N95 masks. Said ones made out of tee shirt material were not as good but not useless. The authors also pointed out they also work by preventing the wearer from touching their mouth and nose.

Frankly I see no downside to people wearing homemade masks.

Edit: More friendly article that references the paper I'm talking about.

https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/best-materials-make-diy-...

> airborne is not its transmission method

If the virus can stay "alive" in the air for 3 hours [1], why wouldn't airborne be a transmission method?

[1]: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20200318_23/

It my understanding that the difference between this and other airborne things is that the particles that get expelled from covid patients contains liquid droplets that are pretty heavy and so they fall out of the air quickly and onto surfaces, they dont float around and linger.

Smaller lighter particles can just float around in the air for hours and linger, then you just have to breath them in. With covid you'd have to touch a surface that droplets fell onto, and then touch your face or something.

Verify this info before counting on it for anything serious, I am a lay person with possible misunderstandings.

"The scientists found that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was detectable in aerosols for up to three hours..."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317150116.h...

That indicates airborne transmission is a vector.

https://nyti.ms/2x2naQu

Masks work. Telling the public they didn't need them in order to conserve them for doctors and nurses was a mistake.

Here's a good opinion piece in the Times about that very subject.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-c...

Some numbers from Italy:

- 48.5% of people who died had three or more other illnesses

- 25.6% of people who died had two other illnesses

- 25.1% of people who died had one other illness

- Overall, 99.2% of people who died had at least one other illness

- Average age of those that died was 79.5

Of the 2500 or so people that have died:

- only 17 people were under 50

- only 5 people were under 40 and all 5 had an existing serious illness

https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...

> please consider reaching out to your elderly neighbors

I live in a densely packed city. I have no idea who lives in my neighborhood.

I would be glad to help anyone at anytime though. I am just not clear how to go about it.

Have you tried Nextdoor?

My Nextdoor is also a great source of information about which local stores still have things in stock, which businesses are changing their hours, etc.

yeah i was on there in the past but it was too noisy with some people dominating every topic. there were lots of negative vibes and was ruining my mood.

> I live in a densely packed city. I have no idea who lives in my neighborhood.

This is ironic, but I hear it a lot from people living in big cities. I live in a sparsely packed city, but mostly know who lives in my neighborhood. We were unhappy with the last city government, so we replaced them, and it took a lot less people to do so, in absolute terms (which matters because the relative size of your movement only comes into play if you can manage to have a movement at all, and that depends on the absolute size of the movement (1000 people are easier to convince and coordinate than 10K)). My metropolis-dwelling friends keep sharing how lonely they are all the time.

I never got the logic behind living in the perpetual cocktail party/high school that is a big city.

Access to high-paying jobs within walking distance. Increased cultural events (concert tours stop in your city, your city makes new concerts...). Better public transit. "cocktail party/high school" sounds like an odd descriptor, especially since those two situations are defined by social interactions, the one thing city living has significantly less of.

>I never got the logic behind living in the perpetual cocktail party/high school that is a big city.

I'm really struggling to interpret that charitably but I'll try -

Some reasons to live in a big city: (1) It's where your friends and (perhaps elderly) parents live. (2) It's where your job is. (3) You can't afford, (or don't want to own) a car. (4) You're single (especially true if you are LGBTQ). (5) You like the cultural opportunities it affords. (6) You have access to specialized medical treatment. (7) You run a business. (8) You're getting an education. (9) You're too poor to move. (10) You don't like narrow minded, holier-than-though attitudes that tend to be more common (IMHO) in smaller towns.

You don't like narrow minded, holier-than-though attitudes that tend to be more common (IMHO) in smaller towns.

Have you ever been to San Francisco?

well, yeah, but in a big city you can choose which group of narrow minded, holier-than-though folks you want to associate with. In smaller towns or cities you just don't have that option...

not sure about others but i live in the city because i can't drive due to some personal health reasons.

I've tried to live out in the burbs but it was really hard for me without a car.

I'm metropolis-dwelling primarily because of the cultural offering and diversity. I don't have to adjust my life to what are the popular views of just 1000 people.

For me it is the small places that are the perpetual cocktail party/high school where I "have" to get along with everyone instead of picking my preferences.

Unless we intend to depend on unsustainable transportation technologies forever, dense cities are a requirement. I live in a sparsely populated city, and I have to drive 15 minutes to get anywhere. Without a car, this city would be unlivable.

Matching elderly residents with helpers is one of the projects: https://helpwithcovid.com/projects/15

i will sign up for sure. Seems like new signups are timing out, will try again later tonight.

Try looking for local organizations that coordinate help with elderly on a normal day to day basis. There are likely to be non-profits, NGOs and maybe some local government programs that already exist. Therefore, they will probably have a good idea of who needs help and how to coordinate it.

People have been setting up mutual aid and volunteer groups to do just this.

If you’d like to find one in your local area we’ve built a directory for them:

https://coronavolunteer.org

Helping in your local community (safely) will be one of the most important things you can do in the coming months.

Have you seen https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/volunteering?

Both of those links are blank pages with JS disabled. It's a minor thing, but still a thing.

I'm not a practiced germ-o-phobe. There is certainly a risk that I will mess up and touch my face without disinfecting my hands.

Given this, would shopping for my neighbors even be helpful? I'd hate to be the one doing them in..

You should assume everything you get at the grocery store has been touched by someone with it, including the bag they hand you. Whoever you give it to should be sanitizing it, or you could help them with that with fresh gloves and distance.

> In roughly 2-3 weeks, the epicenter locations of this disease in the US are going to run out of hospital beds.

This sounds right, but do you have a source on the 2-3 weeks number? I found a source regarding hospital bed shortages, but it does not specify a number that concrete.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/17/upshot/hospit...

You just need to follow the curves in Italy and France - the US follows closely

Are there good tips for doing this safely? Should I wipe down all the items? Ideally they could do so themselves.

to wipe down and disinfect (if the bleach is 2.75% strength, otherwise adjust accordingly) use 1 gallon water with 1 tablespoon unscented laundry bleach for eating utensils or 1 gallon water with 6 tablespoons bleach for surfaces like tables.

a gallon is 213 tablespoons so your ratio is about 200 to 1 for eating utensils vs 30 to one for surfaces, so that's metric-ish.

This is "child safe" (like for nursery schools), I got it from here https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/8340/970-216-Disi...

I just looked at a generic bottle of bleach I bought at a chain pharmacy to see if they listed the concentration, and even better, they listed various measures as above for different uses as above, so if you look there it might be the most convenient system.

source:

in normal times, the board of health requires restaurants in new york city (but probably everywhere) to keep a bucket of chlorinated water (essentially diluted laundry bleach) around with rags in it to wipe off tables with bare hands in between customers. I infer from this factoid that it must be a good, safe way to disinfect things, so I mention it if you were looking for a way to wipe things down simply and reliably.

obviously, you want to get the concentration right so the chlorine doesn't become a health risk itself (or bleach your jeans) so I'll try to look that up now, and I found the above link from the State of Washington.

Well I do have some isopropyl alcohol. I've been using it sparingly but it's lasting me longer than I expected.

nothing wrong with the disinfectant property of strong concentrations of alcohol, but I assume institutional food service type places are told to use diluted bleach because it is not flammable and is safe and stable (not evaporatey) to sit for periods of time in an open bucket.

I found this earlier:

- https://queercare.network/our-work/resources/covid-19/disinf...

- https://queercare.network/our-work/resources/covid-19/delive...

The parent directory has more.

Everybody seems to be announcing special hours at grocery stores for seniors today. It seems like people are acting rapidly.

Well said, @eezurr!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com