Hacker News Reader

Comment by celticninja | Hacker News Reader

stores in the UK are limiting the number of people allowed in at any one time, and people queuing outside have the sense to to leave gaps to allow for some social distancing in the queue

View on HN

Micro Center here in the states has you give them your phone number and they text you when you can come in. The one by me doesn’t even let people queue up and wait there - you have to go somewhere else while waiting.

that's a great idea even if it just means people can sit in their vehicles outside the store.

And the store owner gets the phone numbers of their customers and ca at least roughly map it to a set of sales from that time frame. If they survive this allows nice marketing in future.

But yeah, pragmatic solution.

Microcenter is already terrible about sucking up all consumer information they can. When I check out with a credit card it shows an address from three apartments before in another state .. not updating it.

It is the same here in many states, though I don't think a occupation limit has been imposed federally

I think many people will misunderstand the U.S. effort, since it's something like looking at the whole EU (but with less population density).

They look at the central government and they're like "this is not enough!", when often the things they're asking for are deployed to some reasonable degree in every state.

neither has one been imposed in the UK, it's just using common sense and also protecting their staff

And yet the UK is testing at a rate 1/2 that of the US per capita (with a max capacity of only 12,750 per day) [1]. Two weeks ago they were barely testing at all.

This is in fact going on across all of Europe, very few nations are doing anything right including on the testing front. That includes supposedly good outcome nations such as Sweden, which has made a terrible mistake of not properly quarantining, and even bragging about this fact [2]; meanwhile their case numbers are surging by the day, tripling in roughly 10-12 days.

It's just that people ignorantly like to target the US with abuse because it feels good, while pretending everything is going swimmingly elsewhere (it's not). They count on Americans not following the news of the disaster that's still unfolding across Europe.

There are a handful of nations doing kinda-sorta well in Europe and that's it.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britai...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-27/corona...

> “I’m deeply concerned,” virology professor Fredrik Elgh told state broadcaster SVT. Epidemiologist Joacim Rocklov told the FT it was “a huge experiment” that could go “crazily” wrong. Mathematician Marcus Carlsson, less politely, said it amounted to “Russian roulette.”

Regarding the rate of testing, since the whole country is in lock down the rate of testing isn't actually that helpful. It's more about damage limitation. The UK, and most countries, are no longer in a containment phase that ship has sailed. Now it's more a case of reducing burden on the NHS. So the rate of testing only has a limited use at this point. I gives a guestimate about the total infection rate, and it is probably essential for hospitals to ensure containment of patients, but in terms of testing the general public, not that helpful.

The US might get more use out of it at the moment in the remotely located populations such as towns that currently have limited infection rates Then testing is extremely helpful postponing infection. By doing so, it bides time for stock of medical supplies to increase after the significant burden that infected cities will have in the coming months.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com