Comment by salmon30salmon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by salmon30salmon | Hacker News Reader

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See the reply I just posted. You are comparing a Italy to a massive nation. We only had uncontrolled community spread in a few areas in the Mid-Atlantic and New England, MI and LA. Other than that, we had very few cases and locked down burning through all potential goodwill while there was nothing to lock down over.

Compare the states of New York and New Jersey to the country of Italy. That is a more fair comparison. Not USA -> Italy.

One more thing. Italy didn't beat it. As soon as free movement is restored to the EU, it will spread again. The only thing that would prevent that is the ballyhooed theory that there is latent immunity in 40-60% of the population. If that is the case, than yes Lombardy is in the clear.

But if that is the case, then we also ruined the economy over a disease that was only going to infect a quarter of the people feared, and kill even less. Changes the math, doesn't it?

Edit: Fixed my stupidity about regions of my own country.

> We only had uncontrolled community spread in a few areas in New England, MI and LA.

NY/NJ are not part of New England. And what's your definition of "uncontrolled community spread"? [Other places like Louisiana surely qualified. Edit: never mind, I didn't parse LA as Louisiana.] Would you say it's now "uncontrolled" in say Arizona or South Carolina?

Yes, NY and NJ are in New England. MI is Michigan, LA is Louisiana. Sorry if I assumed state abbreviations were known. I forget that I am speaking to an international crowd at times.

I lied! NY and NJ are not in New England. The USA is annoying.

They're not though. New England starts at Massachusetts.

New York and New Jersey are mid Atlantic states.

Well fuck. I am an idiot. Thanks!

Connecticut and Rhode Island are also part of New England. Really the tristate area is what people mean when they say New England or the North East in regards to covid. I definitely wouldn't classify NY or NJ as mid-atlantic though, it's really Maryland to the Carolines imo.

> Really the tristate area is what people mean when they say New England

Maybe they should be more careful with their choice of name, New England has been used for over 400 years to refer to something that definitely doesn’t include Manhattan or New Jersey.

The name even has a precise administrative meaning today, as does Middle Atlantic: https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/maps/reference/us...

Yeah, I agree it's technically not correct, but in the context of coronavirus specifically, much like COVID-19 is the disease and SARS-CoV-2 is the virus, but everyone calls it COVID, that's what people are referring to in my experience.

In other contexts New England is usually used correctly, though I have seen people include NY and/or the original 13 colonies as "New England"

That said I didn't know about the mid-atlantic administrative region, thanks for that info. It seems really weird to call NY, which borders Canada, mid-atlantic and have it stop at the south of NJ, especially when east north central goes further south. South atlantic looks about 2-3x bigger than mid and definitely goes way past the north-south halfway point of the east coast.

Yes, exactly plotting Lombardy and New York show very similar trends.

To be fair, in my opinion neither region "defeated" the virus - they just ran out of people that could be easily infected.

The seropositivity in NYC is probably pushing 30-40 percent now.

Ha! I just added the "Italy didn't defeat it" caveat. Great minds or something :)

So 70% that could be infected rather than 100% is "running out of people"?

No infection, in the history of infections has EVER infected 100% of people. So already I can ignore you as an alarmist. But I won't.

I will say that being susceptible is not evenly distributed across a population. This is why prisons, meat packing and old people homes are more likely to have outbreaks. The corollary to that is that R0 is not consistent in a population. The R0 for people who live in old folks home is far higher than a bachelor who works from home.

So when the person said that they ran out of easy people to infect, that is absolutely true.

So there will be no more cases in NYC going forward? Good for them!

Nope, that has never been and never will be a goal. Hell, there are still cases of Bubonic plague that occur.

The goal should be to minimize spread among the most vulnerable.

123K and counting.

Yep. It sucks. Death sucks. The lie we tell ourselves is that these are preventable deaths. The only thing that would have prevented this would have been for China to detect it ASAP and eliminate the spread. Once it hit uncontrolled community spread we were fucked.

We can minimize it somewhat, but lots of people are going to die. If we locked down completely, lots of people would die of a litany of other things that would have normally been prevented in an open society. Fucked either way.

See my point?

It didn’t hit “uncontrolled community spread” in the US until at least 3 months after the first US case and until at least a month after it devastated Italy.

For the US to still cry about China is embarrassing.

I think you meant to reply to me.

I am not crying about China. It is the truth. The only way to prevent uncontrolled spread would have been to stop it before it became uncontrolled. The fact that the first cases were in Cali. in December shows how impossible that really is for a non-island nation (caveat only because NZ)

The main point I was making is that it isn't possible! By the time China had enough data to detect a novel virus, it was too late. It would have always been too late. China isn't to blame. This could just have easily of jumped species in Canada or the US. The point is that we can't be gods no matter how much we tell ourselves we are just that.

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