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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

My feeling is that we should be focusing on training up medical people on a massive scale, as that's something that the USA is notoriously bad at

Or just lock down nationally now, including full lockdown in major cities, and none of this will be necessary. The only reason this is going to get out of control in the US is the lack of testing and the lack of controls being imposed.

By the time they are imposed, it will be too late and more people are going to die because of that.

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Nationally lock down now, and once we unlock down the virus will come back from foreign countries and be just as much of an issue.

Slightly more of an issue in fact, because we will have just shot ourselves in the foot in terms of capability to deal with it via manufacturing.

Exactly. The goal of the lockdowns is to reduce the number of concurrent cases, thereby allowing time for medical infrastructure to scale up.

I wish this was true, but from all appearances the medical infrastructure is not scaling up at a reasonable pace... i.e.

> The Trump administration has not yet formally asked GM to use its network of plants and suppliers to make any medical equipment, the person said. (From the Article)

> Tesla makes cars with sophisticated hvac systems. SpaceX makes spacecraft with life support systems. Ventilators are not difficult, but cannot be produced instantly. Which hospitals have these shortages you speak of right now? (From twitter 9 hours ago https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240492347835604992)

It's a very difficult problem. Here is a paper outlining the cost in lives of your proposal.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

This is a messaging failure.

We cannot just lockdown and “none of this is necessary.” There is no scenario short of locking down for 10 years that would be able to manage with the number of critical beds we actually have. We need to dramatically upscale capacity (which means training new doctors) and quarantine.

It cannot be an either/or.

You're forgetting the development of a vaccine. With enough time (10 years is way more than enough), a vaccine will be developed and deployed, and that capacity won't be needed because far fewer people will contract the disease and develop symptoms requiring hospitalization.

The problem is, developing and testing a vaccine takes some time. How much time do we have before the global economy totally collapses?

> With enough time (10 years is way more than enough), a vaccine will be developed and deployed

Based on what? It’s been more than 10 since SARS and we still don’t have a vaccine. I think you’re making a lot of assumptions about immunization when it is far, far too early to know. Also, the point is that we don’t want to be quarantined for 10 years, we want to build the capacity now.

They probably never developed a SARS vaccine because it didn't turn into a major worldwide pandemic. There's lots of diseases that don't have vaccines mainly because it's seen as not worth the effort or cost. SARS and MERS looked scary at first but never got this big.

As an addition here, look at Ebola. It was perfectly feasible to create a vaccine, but no one bothered as long as it was confined to Africa. As soon as white people in western nations started getting it, then suddenly there was a huge effort to create a vaccine.

I agree with you... last week.

I mean, sure, we should lock down now, but my feeling is that it's mostly too late for the urban areas.

The rural areas might have a chance... they need to lock down hard right now. But... from talking to rural family... I'm not sure that's culturally possible.

Yes you're probably right.

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