badfrog

> some portion of exposed people may never develop detectable antibodies.

Interesting. Would those people still develop some form of immunity/resistance?

I don't think that fully explains it. There are plenty of European cities of similar density to NYC that haven't been hit nearly as hard. Naples Italy, for example.

> I still can't get my head around why NY has suffered so disproportionately.

Compared to California, NY locked down much later and did it in slow, incremental steps.

> New York City had the highest positive rate at 21.2%. The potential good news to come to light is that the death rate may be far lower than some estimates, at 0.5%.

How do they get to 0.5%? According to NYC data if you include "probable" cases, 15,400 people, or 0.18% of the population, are already dead. Wouldn't that imply 0.9% fatalities if the whole city was infected?

> The closer we get, the better it is. Having 21% "immune" leads to far different outcomes than .1%.

It depends on how long the immunity lasts. If it's permanent, this is indeed great. If it lasts only a few months, this 21% won't make any difference for another wave of infections this fall.

> a huge source of unnecessary risk through nonsense like this

What is the risk illustrated here? A trading firm losing a few million dollars isn't a big deal in terms of the overall global economy.

> Do you think things will get three times as bad in Louisiana than they are now

If people there stopped all preventative measures, yes it would get much worse than 3x.

If we're going to talk about the total number of people who have been infected, wouldn't it make more sense to use the overall test rate?

> year-to-date, about 1300 people died each day of the flu.

That seems impossible. CDC estimates 61k flu deaths in 2017-2018 and 34k in 2019-2020: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

That is nowhere near 1.3k per day.

What exactly do you mean by worst-case here? The actual worst case would be if nobody took any precautions, which almost certainly would result in more than 0.18% of the total US population dying.

> Underlying illnesses include Diabetes, Lung Disease, Cancer, Immunodeficiency, Heart Disease, Hypertension, Asthma, Kidney Disease, and GI/Liver Disease

That's a whole lot of people left out of your number. A quick google suggests that 1/3 of Americans have hypertension and 9% have diabetes. It seems like probably the majority of the US has at least one of these underlying illnesses.

> less than 40% of the people tested give a positive.

FWIW, Queens and Brooklyn (Kings county) are at 50.7% and 48.3% positive tests respectively.

https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Track...

> Would you rather fly in business class comfort for 8 hours or with less comfort for 4 hours?

I'd take the 4 hours any day. At that point, it's reasonable to take a trip to Europe for a long weekend.

> We don't know how many people were tested.

> We don't know how many people tested positive.

Both of those are in the article.

> What I've looked at so far are IC admissions.

Where do you find that data?

Here's some info on that from US FDA: https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/investigational...

I think it's just unnecessary. Kneading helps gluten develop, but the same thing can be accomplished by letting the wet dough sit out for longer.

> It reported that 0.04% of 10-19 year olds would probably require hospital care—as would 1.0% of people in their 20s, 3.4% of people aged 30-39, 4.3% aged 40-49, 8.2% aged 50-59, 11.8% in their 60s, 16.6% in their 70s, and 18.4% of those over 80.

This is quite a bit lower than the 20% number that people have been using for while.

Also, the risk of getting COVID from food is very low. You're more likely to get it from people near you standing in line.

> According to multiple health and safety organizations worldwide, including the CDC, the USDA, and the European Food safety Authority, there is currently no evidence that COVID-19 has spread through food or food packaging. Previous coronavirus epidemics likewise showed no evidence of having been spread through food or packaging

https://www.seriouseats.com/2020/03/food-safety-and-coronavi...

A bag of uncooked rice doesn't help somebody who's homeless or has had their gas/electric shut off.

> Going to some store and lining up is very demoralising thing.

Perhaps, but also it might be just annoying enough so that everybody who really needs the food is able to get it, and people who can afford food don't take it. If that works effectively, we're saving a lot of administrative costs and reducing barriers to entry compared to food stamps where you have to convince the government that you need it.

Is this just a smaller, sketchier Lending Club?

I've also been surprised at how much of an improvement headsets with microphones are over built-in laptop mics.

Where did they go? Are there 80k hospital beds in Wuhan?

I actually can't tell whether evaporation is good or bad. If a droplet evaporates, does the virus die or does it float freely through the air?

This is kind of interesting. Check figure C.2. The behavior of droplets depends on size, but they all either evaporate or fall to the ground within 4.5 seconds. Knowing this has made me feel better about better about walking a dozen feet behind somebody outside.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK143281/

> This is interesting, i had always thought it was binary, either you get infected or you don't

IIRC, some vaccines work by exposing the person to a tiny amount of virus so that their immune system can "learn" how to fight that particular type of virus.

Do we have any idea how this changes outdoors? I could see it being worse because the wind spreads virus farther or better because it gets diluted quicker.

Isn't this virus transmitted via droplets, not aerosols?

> How do you do physical distancing within your home? Eat meals alone? Don't share cups/plates? Wear gloves for doorknobs? I feel like there's currently no solution for this.

I don't think you really need to. Say the average household size is 3. If everybody locks down just within their household, the maximum spread of infection is 3x the current level. If that's done early enough, things will be pretty much fine in terms of hospital capacity, etc. Though if somebody in your household is especially at risk, they may want to stay in a separate room for a few days until it's clear that everybody else is safe.