Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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Life is not a movie, some stuff is just hard ...

I think this sort of language is why a lot of non-professionals are sort-of balking. Life currently is like a movie. A zombie or some similar disaster movie, a situation where things are changing fast, where the normal plans are expected to fail.

...and requires a long time of training before we'll let you go 'solo'. One mistake and someone ends up dead, there are no do-overs, there is no undo button.

We are talking about a situation, coming up in X many days, when it won't be a matter of the authorities "letting" people try but a matter of the entire health system being overwhelmed. What are the other, workable plans you have for people dying in the parking lots of the emergency room? And yeah, this is a different world, one where we expect people to end up dead and we're asking how to decrease that are much as possible.

This horrible movie is the consensus of most projections. The question is not "could we deal with this? Can we play doctor, please!" but rather "how should we best deal with an ongoing disaster where we're assured, the doctors will be gone. Surely there's something one could beside 'die in place'?".

The last thing ICU's need right now is on top of all the stress already going on there to be overrun by eager rookies that are trying to help.

If the ICUs have a different, workable plan for when they are overrun with a massive number of patients, I'll be tremendously happy. The only thing I hear is "this won't work" "but what can we do?" "don't you understand that this won't work"....

> Life currently is like a movie. A zombie or some similar disaster movie, a situation where things are changing fast, where the normal plans are expected to fail.

No, because after a movie you get to go home, no matter how terrible it was. And in real life you don't get to go home. So you will have to trust in the people that have spent their lives preparing for stuff like this while we, the software smartasses were 'changing the world' with our SaaS toys.

Right now the best programmer is worth less than a mediocre ICU nurse, and that will remain so for a while. Afterwards we can all go back to pretending they don't matter but right now this is how it is.

> We are talking about a situation, coming up in X many days, when it won't be a matter of the authorities "letting" people try but a matter of the entire health system being overwhelmed.

That's a past station in some places.

> What are the other, workable plans you have for people dying in the parking lots of the emergency room?

I don't have any plans. They will die. Because we were too stupid to listen to those sounding the alarm when it mattered.

> And yeah, this is a different world, one where we expect people to end up dead and we're asking how to decrease that are much as possible.

We can decrease it as much as possible by stopping to move around so much. And yet, that seems to be too much to ask. Just now in another thread some religious guy claiming an exception just because the risk was low. I sincerely hope they'll all be fine, I also hope that if they are not that they'll trust their god rather than to hog precious ICU capacity needed by people who were careful and who did not seek this out on purpose.

> If the ICUs have a different, workable plan for when they are overrun with a massive number of patients, I'll be tremendously happy. The only thing I hear is "this won't work" "but what can we do?" "don't you understand that this won't work"....

The ICU staff is working double shifts and around the clock in plenty of places. They too get ill, plenty of them have already died. It's a bit late to stick your oar in now and make it your mission, I totally sympathize with the intentions but this isn't your fight other than to stay put, tell other people to stay put and accept that this story will not have a Hollywood ending for many people.

The ICU staff is working double shifts and around the clock in plenty of places. They too get ill, plenty of them have already died. It's a bit late to stick your oar in now and make it your mission, I totally sympathize with the intentions but this isn't your fight other than to stay put, tell other people to stay put and accept that this story will not have a Hollywood ending for many people.

This language of addressing each posters as if they personally had this intention is pretty bizarre. It's very much the language of "proper authorities are taking care of that." I don't personally have any intention of jumping but I'm part of a community and part of a situation where the proper authorities aren't taking care things.

> This language of addressing each posters as if they personally had this intention is pretty bizarre.

Oh, so it's just posturing. Forgive me then for taking you serious.

From what I have read the Italians have repurposed all kinds of doctors to be able to treat Covid patients as best they can with all available equipment. So I don't think it's too far out to say that in New York and other places you will see doctors stepping up and learning on the job in order to treat this disease. You will also see doctors coming into New York from other places to help.

Yes, and for doctors that may make more or less sense. But that's very far from the ideal situation: that we had managed to keep things under control when we could and that right now we stay home as much as possible to reduce the load on the system. But since people aren't even doing that (see this gem of a thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22724268 ) I fail to see why we should at the same time break things even further.

Let's first all stay the fuck home, then ensure good personal hygiene and if and when infected self isolate as much as possible and leave the rest to the HCWs who are risking their lives in the most literal way possible.

All this well intentioned backseat driving isn't going to move the needle, not even a little bit.

> Let's first all stay the fuck home

This is a good point. Preventative medicine is the best medicine. That's true in general, but is especially true during this type of crisis.

We should also be more strict about isolation measures and lockdown, both individually and as a matter of policy and enforcement. That would keep our hospitals from flooding, to a much greater degree than an army of respiration therapists and ventilators would.

> All this well intentioned backseat driving isn't going to move the needle, not even a little bit.

But how else shall we spend our weekends locked indoors without pointless arguments on the internet? ;)

> The only thing I hear is "this won't work" "but what can we do?" "don't you understand that this won't work"....

I find it doubly frustrating because the majority of these are asserted as fact, typically based on flawed reasoning, when what they really are, are estimations/predictions.

If this lack of concern (if not outright disdain) for correctness becomes too prevalent within a society, I worry that it may affect the quality of our decision making.

The flawed decision making was right at the start, when this thing could have been bottled up, and then after that at just about every junction where decisions were postponed. Now it's too late and everybody and their brother will start telling the ICU personnel how to clean up our messes?

It could be, I'm not overly familiar with those details, and therefore hold no opinion. Only when I sense I have a fairly decent understanding of a situation do I form any opinions on it (or more accurately, this is how I try to approach things!). And often even not then, as I have awareness of and profound respect for the ~multidimensional complexity of reality, where many of the variables and associations involved are completely invisible from an individual human perspective.

Regardless, is this somehow related to my comment above?

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