UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tests positive for Covid-19 | Hacker News Reader

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tests positive for Covid-19

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66 pointsrvz23 comments

Why is this flagged?

I can't vouch it either, not sure why flagged, possibly there are multiple articles appearing in /new and someone is trying to make one of them the canonical one.

This one was the first one.

I don’t understand that as well. It seems many articles from well established places are getting flagged.

I still don't understand why HN isn't limited how many times a day a single person can flag something... Seems obvious to become abused.

dang has commented on this. The gist is that you can have your flag powers taken away if you abuse them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173836

Its been really interesting to me how various health minsters and government officials seem to be getting it in surprising numbers when only around 0.006% of the world's population is infected. The amount of famous figures with the disease seems to be vanishingly unlikely to happen if it were distributed entirely by chance.

What mechanism is it that made these political/buisness/celebrity figures more likely to catch it? More international travel?

More access to testing;

Many people consider that COVID-19 has spread far beyond what the official numbers suggest.

This is more evidence of that.

For context; an NYC nurse spoke to NYT about many people coming into the hospital for other things such as car accidents and the CT scan showed signs of COVID-19 on the lungs: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-...

> What mechanism is it that made these political/buisness/celebrity figures more likely to catch it?

Outside of meeting a lot of people, shaking hands, lots of contact etc it's worth remembering that they probably have much easier access to testing...

   only around 0.006% of the world's population is infected

Maybe that's the hypothesis you need to invalidate ?

It's likely orders of magnitude more people are infected than are tested. But, in the UK, people like the PM and the Prince of Wales are a priority for testing. When they are infected, it's noticed.

I'm guessing they travel a lot and meet/shake hands with people all around the world?

Perhaps - I wonder if this kind of thing might inevitably lead to less physical contact in buisness/politics, or at least more caution around that kind of behaviour

That's a good question. Travel and meeting lots of different people are major factors, of course. Most people in politics meet lots of different people and then meet each other, so it might well be that politics is a major vector for spreading this disease.

And with politics being dominated by older men, and older men being the most vulnerable group, this sounds like it could easily turn into a major political disaster.

In the past two weeks I've met three people, I imagine Boris might have interacted with 300

Not following their own advice. MPs tested positive and yet the House of Commons remained open as normal.

The government shutting down during a crisis would be a disaster. If politicians want to risk their lives, for the betterment of all, then for once I say let them.

This isn’t to say they couldn’t do more to isolate themselves. Having the House self quarantine from all non members would at least stop the spread.

Presumably persistently meeting lots of people, and having to necessarily do so in order to do their job

they tend to do a lot of hand shaking and celebs will have people asking for selfies and stuff like this, so essentially they are in close contact with a lot more people than the average person.

He will be most likely fine but this shows the extent of this pandemic for sure and should encourage people in UK and anywhere else to take it seriously.

> should encourage people in UK and anywhere else to take it seriously

I'd love for you to be proven right but given what we've seen so far, not least from the government, I'm very much on the fence on this. Maybe in a few days we might have cause for cautious optimism

It's one of the "what-if" scenarios if Trump were to test positive. Would it convince his supporters to stop calling this "fake news", "hoax" etc?

Betteridge, please chime in.

It's only time until he tests positive.

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