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Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

While I'm not questioning the truth of these accounts, what annoys me about all these reports is that they seem to be anecdotes rather than hard data. It's really difficult to understand what's actually going on because the data sucks. It's hard to assess just how full hospitals are, which hospitals are at capacity, how many patients are actually testing positive vs. showing up at the hospital because they feel a bit off that day, how many require hospitalization, how these cases are affecting other patients, and a whole lot of other things.

I'm still kind of on the fence about this whole situation. The panic is undoubtedly real and serious, but the seriousness of the virus itself seems questionable. I don't think we'll really know what's actually going on for a few more weeks or months.

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It's kinda hard to get "hard data" in the middle of a shitshow. This comment sounds like someone watching a school shooting live and asking "yeah but what's the % of kids that got shot".

Show some humanity dude.

I think that's a bit of an overreaction. The way I read that comment was very similar to your response to it: it's hard to get hard data in the middle of a crisis. The difference is that the commenter was also expressing the very natural, human response of frustration at this fact. A lot of people are feeling that way.

The serious problem with the comment is that it's saying these reports are annoying, however it is not the job of the providers of these reports to provide hard statistics, it's not as if any of them have the option to do that themselves instead. So it's basically just saying, shut up. I don't want to hear your annoying report of actual effects on human beings.

A more charitable reading of the comment would be an annoyance of anecdotes without underlying prevalence data to contextualize the info.

It would be all too easy for the media to pick a healthy senior with a mild case and tout “it sucks but it’s not so bad” or find cases of healthy 18yo dying in horrific conditions to fit their overall narrative.

Data by itself doesn't cut it. That nurse in London didn't commit suicide because of data. She did is because she couldn't face the reality of treating so many patients dying in agony.

I’m not arguing for just data, I’m arguing for both. I would be equally “annoyed” if it were just data.

Just data wouldn’t give me sympathy/empathy and not being a medical professional I’m not familiar with diagnostic or clinical language. Data won’t properly convey the suffering unless you’ve seen it.

I’m weary of just anecdotes because it is impossible for me to be able to allocate my limit resources efficiently. I’m not saying this isn’t important or can only be validated when enough people are devastated.

Thanks, that was well put.

There's no reason that state health departments shouldn't be reporting hospitalization to the best of their ability. Hospitals already send information to them on a daily basis.

I'm sure we all recognize the tragedy. That deserves to stand in a paragraph alone; it's tragic and my heart goes out to the medical professionals and patients who have to deal with it.

But it's not an isolated tragedy like a school shooting. If the proposed response to school shootings were indefinite social isolation, I would definitely want to know the percentage of kids that got shot and I would be intensely suspicious of a narrative that it's rude or dangerous to ask the question.

This.

The hard data we have may be incomplete.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhiprakash/coronaviru...

> And two of the hardest-hit areas in the nation — New York City and Los Angeles County — released guidance earlier this week encouraging doctors not to test patients unless they think the test will significantly change their course of treatment. That means that potentially more people in both places could be admitted to hospitals with severe respiratory symptoms and recover — or die — and not be registered as a coronavirus case.

“If you need to be right before you move, you never win. Perfect is the enemy of what is right when it comes to emergency management. Speed trumps perfection.” - WHO Executive Director Dr. Michael Ryan

https://twitter.com/JIMrichards1010/status/12391407105589698...

The only hard data we have are death numbers. They're awful enough: https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

Other hard data takes time to collect and will only be reliable once the disaster has swept through.

Even the death numbers are going to be off. Lot of deaths either were attributed to the ultimate cause (i.e. heart attack) or happened at home and haven't been attributed to covid as of yet.

No, it's the other way around. Normally deaths would be specifically linked to e.g. the flu, but in this case, all deaths are being tested for COVID-19 and mostly assigned with that as the 'cause' even if there were other causes like heart failure.

There was an article in the Spectator today where a doctor made that point: that this disease has been made a 'notifiable disease' whereas a normal flu wouldn't be, meaning each death gets tested and reported up to the government if positive, whereas for other types of coronavirus the death would just be marked as pneumonia, for example. The data isn't being treated consistently.

They're bad, but if you put it into the context of normal daily life it's not that crazy. Check out the CDC stats[1] yourself. On average there are about ~1700 deaths per day from heart disease alone in the US, according to the CDC data.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

If heart disease deaths were contagious and increasing by 33% daily, that'd be a great point.

If the number of heart disease deaths doubled every 3 days I would take heart disease much more seriously than I do now.

None of those other numbers are doubling every three days.

And now that number is going to go up because medical care is less available.

Those numbers are going to go up if your hospitals are overwhelmed.

Additionally, a very large percentage of health care workers will catch the virus, this will further reduce the amount of capacity.

Loss of health care workers could be a long term issue as well given the CFR in a place like Italy.

https://xkcd.com/2278/

I agree with your main point. That said, if we're okay with subjecting ourselves to propaganda that reduces the spread of covid19, these anecdotes might serve a useful role.

They are useful to know, but they have one fundamental problem: they erode trust. Though it is up for debate on how much trust in the political system and mass media there is left in the US.

Can you elaborate on how they (the anecdotes, I assume) erode trust?

I think part of the problem is that these sorts of anecdotes have been reported in previous bad flu years. That's perhaps a part of why people think it's just a bad flu. You can easily find reports (see above) where doctors describe their hospitals as "like the third world", needing tent wards, like war time, overloaded, people on beds in corridors etc from prior years. They sounded like a disaster had struck at the time too, because the media highlights the most dramatic anecdotes.

A bit like audio compression - if everything is compressed to the same volume then it gets really hard to tell how loud things are relative to each other.

Another problem is people encounter stories where there are anecdotes in the other direction e.g. today I read stories about Ticino, Japan, Germany where hospitals are waiting for an influx, but it doesn't seem to be growing in the expected way. Why? Unclear. These stories of course get less attention.

Simply: by telling lies. If we tell people 3 in 100 will die, and after the fact it turns out that 3 in 1000 died, next time, when it will be more serious nobody will believe.

So you are proposing the solution to not do anything so the projections become true, so next time you will take it serious?

The problem with your way of arguing is that one can not win. If they say "if we don't do anything there will be 3 in 100 people dying" and they do something, you say they lied. If they don't do anything, you will ask "why have they not done anything! They are incompetent or malicious"

> They are useful to know, but they have one fundamental problem: they erode trust. Though it is up for debate on how much trust in the political system and mass media there is left in the US.

Clickbait-style "everyone in New York is dead!" bad-faith hysteria would erode my trust.

"We saw a terrible situation, and communicated the situation as clearly as we could at the time, even though our information was incomplete. Since then we have more facts, and are striving to communicate them to you" enhances my trust, not erodes it.

In Bergamo and surrounding areas the death rate is 5-10x higher than it was at this time last year.

Even if you are on the fence I hope you're taking measures now and having older relatives isolate. If you're not, a couple of weeks from now you will look back and regret being on the fence. Look after yourself.

Well in the hypernetworked hive mind that is society these days, American News Media plays the role of brain cancer.

Randomly infecting cells to over broadcast, attack each other, focus on noise, unfocus signal etc etc.

Basic prediction about them, whether on the left or right or podcasting from a garage is that they don't contribute to good outcomes and the bad outcomes are not their fault.

Then one year down the road they hand each other Pulitzers for "unravelling" what actually happened.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Exponential growth of cases and deaths translate into many horrible anecdotes.

It would be interesting to see geographic case density vs. geographic ventilator capacity.

One of the huge failures of the government is that we still don't have any push for ubiquitous testing. South Korea's aggressive testing for the virus is a key factor in their success in suppressing the epidemic.

Assuming you're talking about the US, I think this situation exposes a not well known fact that the federal government doesn't really control the inside of the country. The response has to come at the state and local level, which it is, slowly. e.g. : https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/03/coronavi...

Here in our county in rural Montana (based on info from the local medical establishment, who I know fairly well), we have been conducting much more testing than you'd expect based on reports from around the country, and we have never had a shortage of tests, and our small hospital lab will shortly have in-house testing deployed.

> The response has to come at the state and local level, which it is, slowly

I don't think this makes sense. If this is actually true then the US is just completely broken. Coronavirus is a global pandemic - are you arguing that each individual local jurisdiction should develop and manage it's own tests? That's horribly inefficient and slow.

The initially hit states were depending on the CDC and FDA to provide tests (or at least approve tests):

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-went-wrong-wit...

Unfortunately under the current administration the CDC and FDA are understaffed and being run extremely poorly, which greatly hampered initial testing. If your argument is that local jurisdictions should be responsible for pandemic testing, that makes very little sense to me. It is far more efficient for a single organization to coordinate pandemic response at the national level.

My comment was responding to parent's "push for testing", not the development of a test. Having a test exist is one thing. Deciding how many people to test is a different thing, and is decided at the local level in the USA.

Actually that's not true in this case. I believe it was the CDC who said only use our test. I'm not from the States but I believe the CDC is a federal agency isn't it?

FDA actually, but I'm not addressing the existence of the test but rather decisions on whether to perform widespread testing like SK.

Individually the danger is not so big but the fact that a lot of people are ill simultaneously is unmanageable for hospitals. The number off people who have the virus simultaneously is enough to see there is a big problem.

You can look at pictures on twitter

> the seriousness of the virus itself seems questionable.

Half of the world’s population are or have been under some kind if restriction due to this virus. I don’t governments do that if they are uncertain.

> I don't think we'll really know what's actually going on for a few more weeks or months

I don’t think it is going to happen, but if the US does what Trump wants and ”lets it rip”, that will answer the question about the seriousness.

Even scientists are uncertain, how can governments be?

Unfounded certainty is a byproduct of abject stupidity

81 people died of the virus in NYC yesterday. I think the large number approach of pandemics can almost sanitize the numbers of their humanity.

Imagine 81 people died in a bus accident, or a fire, or a mass shooting. This is very serious and we're still at the beginning of it.

Looking at yesterday misses the point. Look at tomorrow!

Don't look at the lit fuse. Look at the bomb it leads to.

NYC death numbers double in under 2 days now.

You can use the same argument for flu deaths, heart disease deaths, diabetes deaths, etc. The numbers that you pay attention to are dependent on what is popular right now.

The difference is the rate of those aren't doubling every three days.

Hmm. This comment got me curious.

Using CDC's FluView app I looked at the 2017/2018 flu season to see what the doubling time was. It's not 3 days indeed. It varied quite significantly during the outbreak, but there were periods where it was doubling approximately every week. Potentially faster I suppose depending on how closely people were looking for it (not that close if I understand correctly for most flus).

Viruses can grow pretty fast.

This is true and conceded, but that wasn't my argument.

It isn't the virus that is sanitizing people of their humanity. They lost their humanity a long time ago, and the virus is simply revealing their nature.

I wrote a comment elsewhere about death rates in the US. 81 people per day is not an astronomical number for the most densely populated part of the country, in fact it's well within the normal number of deaths according to CDC data. In fact, just compared to heart disease alone, it might be slightly on the lower end.

But of course heart disease isn't contagious and rapidly increasing. I think if it were, it would be far more concerning, wouldn't you agree?

The problem is, as bad as the current numbers are, without significant changes, they are inevitably going to get considerably worse quickly, as you can see from the graphs.

Imagine what'll happen if 60% of the US population gets this quickly (over the next 3 months say) and then 2% of those people die with another 8% in hospital...

A stable 80 deaths per day isn't that many, it's only 29,200 people per year.

But with covid-19 the numbers of people dying is doubling every 3 days.

80, 160, 320, 640, 1280, 2560, 5120, 10,240, 20,480

Potentially Covid-19 would hit that 29200 figure in about 25 days from today.

Keep extrapolating and you'll find 2.5 trillion people will be dead just a week after that.

Look at Italy; look at Spain. These are not unreasonable extrapolations.

Neither of them have exponential growth. The rate of growth has steadily decreased after the first initial spike of cases.

The growth seems to be tapering off after extreme lockdown measures have been taken.

Of deaths? Here's Spain. They implemented lockdown on about the 7th of March.

https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/

   8th   17 deaths
  11th   55 
  14th  196 
  17th  533
  20th 1093
  23rd 2311
  26th 4365

With the current rate it’s going to be 2500 death per day in 10 days.

This is absurd.

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