skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the above comments that China is not a model to follow at all but the true sole responder for today's situation.

From the number of people and the wide range of field and institutions signing this letter, I suspect a very strong CCP secret united action behind it to paint a good picture for CCP reputation. The most probably org that manipulated this letter is the so called "Chinese Students and Scholar Organization" that exists in every country and directed by CCP embassy. Only such an org can enlist by its members's connections so many different field people to sign this letter.

On the other hand, I think most of the signers are sincere in their actions and belief and did not realize they are being manipulated by CCP.

Cut away the part that praise CCP, the other part of the letter is mostly correct I think, countries should take actions before it is too late.
More insane than genius.

The government expert on TV was basically saying most people are going to get it eventually so why bother making huge efforts to delay but that kind of ignores that if we delay we may get better treatments or a vaccine. Just fine tuning some of the existing treatments could make a big difference.
Think again. Do we really want this to happen?
But with several weeks worth of lag. The number of deaths today should be divided by the number of cases N>10 days ago. The number of cases was much more severely underestimated N days ago than today. The death rate in Italy is basically unknown because the denominator is just noise with a time lag.
> The economy is a tool to get people goods and services. It is less important than life & death on a mass scale.

This just isn’t true. The definition of an economy is a system to determine the production and allocation of scarce resources.

To the extent that those resources include food, shelter, and other elements required to stay alive then the economy literally is the determinant of life and death.

Furthermore, significant contractions of economic activity cause death in measurable predictable ways.

All of this closing down of the economy is — literally — killing people as we speak.
Sounds specific to windows? Definitely doesn't happen in MacOS or Linux
Please also read this, I believe it's the right approach:

https://medium.com/@jb_89278/the-11-day-plan-to-contain-covi...

The guy is tech enterpreneur and VC investor who has been advising our (Czech) PM.
You'd be surprised how many people in third world countries have internet and cell phones but no running water or electricity.
If you have google location history turned on you can see it in maps. Its pretty accurate. It couldn’t tell you for sure you were in with 5 feet of a known case, but it certainly would give a useful signal.
So, as a physicist, you should know how exponential growth works. Let's say you have a pile of Uranium that's juuuust sub-critical. You would likely to be confident to stand next to it without significant fear.

But if someone throws on just enough additional Uranium for the pile to go supercritical, you would run for your life because none of the following will matter[1] all that much to the final outcome:

1) How much neutron radiation there was to start with.

2) The specific exponential growth coefficient.

3) How much total Uranium there is, as long as it's a nontrivial amount

4) Whether your Geiger counter is off by some constant factor or not.

None of those matter. It's going boom. It might go boom a bit sooner or a bit later, but it is going to go boom. That's just how exponential growth works. There's no maybe. There's no "let us wait and see". There's no "we'll hope for the best". No: It. Will. Go. Boom.

All of the factors that are irrelevant are just shifting a figurative vertical wall on your graph paper a bit to the left, or a bit to the right. It's adding or subtracting "a couple of doubling times". If the doubling time is short, then you're not really achieving anything by fiddling with constant factors.

With the Coronavirus just about every country has a doubling time of 4-5 days.

I live in Australia, where we're about a "month behind" everyone else. So of course, the dumbass government is saying things like "the heat here will slow it down". But it hasn't, our doubling time is 4.75 days at the moment. They're saying that it's "premature to lock down the country". No it isn't, it's already weeks too late and getting literally exponentially worse daily! They're saying that the hospitals are being prepared, but no amount of extra beds or ventilators will help. If they double the number, it just delays the catastrophe by 4.75 days. Not even a whole week! Quadrupling beds and ventilators buys just under 10 days before people are being turned away to go home and die.

So, again. I ask you: If you were the nuclear physicist in charge of a nuclear pile and someone told you it's gone critical and the radiation is rising exponentially, is your first reaction to: just "stand around and wait and see what happens", or to: take drastic action right this second? Do you SCRAM, or do you call the communist party leadership for permission? Are you the hero of the Chernobyl story, or the villain?

[1] Ignoring thermal effects slowing down the reaction. This actually has an analogy with disease spread, where there are fewer susceptible people remaining because everyone is already sick or dead. If we reach this point, we'll be seeing millions infected and hundreds of thousands dead.
How does the UK have an extra month, exactly ?

It did not take Italy 1 month to to go from 1,143 (today's UK number) positives to 21,157 (today's Italy number, per https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...), did it ?
The 11 Day Plan to contain Covid-19
Shit...

I have a thing scheduled for early next month. Not a full on surgery but it is pretty invasive and urgent and they require me to be in the hospital for a few days.

I'm not in New York but I am in hotbed for the current problem.

Interventional Radiology is somewhat specialized so hopefully there aren't any interruptions. But they do have about 20 beds in their unit of the hospital.
You say it like that instability is a bad thing.

As Musk might say, if you want to build a robust and efficient factory for complex machines, iterate, iterate, iterate.
I watched a presentation/session by Norwegian directorate of health that included some comments from Italy [1]. I think they shed some light on the mortality rate - in effect 50% of those intubated died. And they were some percentage of those needing icu care. Assuming the icus are overrun, and all ventilators taken - all of those patients would be dead.

So (given the size of population, and relative lack of ventilators) - in an actual uncontrolled spread, I think we will/would see much higher mortality rates than we've seen so far.

I hope the UK won't be the first to prove that (I suspect the US might be the first to do so). Or indeed, maybe Iran already has.

I heard there was mentioned that in areas hard hit in China, where low(ish) mortality rates were reported, they were also desperately seeking more people for

[1] in English, starts at 4h mark:
https://youtu.be/LtWti5prxzg?t=4h
Nonsense. Nothing in the real world can impede the progress of endlessly extrapolating exponential growth and impressing your friends with Really Big Numbers.
I wonder how many people need to start popping vitamin D when switching to the shut-in lifestyle—especially if living father north. And how many of them will know that they do.
I suggest you show my definition to a few people, ask them whether it includes security guards, and see what they say.

On the negligible chance that you made this comment in earnest, the results may surprise you.
Can you point out to me the statement where Google denies working on the web tool?
>Make sure you have a fixed schedule. Get up. Get ready. Do your job. Sign off.

This is the most important one. I sign on at 8:30, I sign off at 5:30, and I turn off my laptop and phone until 8:15 the next morning to give time to hook everything back up. No exceptions.I take a 1 hour lunch where I might continue a slack conversation but also do some yoga / Ring Fit.
On Windows, I had no issue screenshotting (on Chrome) and no issue using OBS to record the screen that is displaying the Netflix content.
Tracking Phones, Google is a Dragnet for the Police: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google-loc...

Mirror: http://archive.md/UV9px
The author is a tech enterpreneur and investor, he has been advising the Czech PM with handling the coronavirus crisis.
I’m currently assembling an offline home assistant setup using Node-RED and voice2json, all running on Raspberry Pi’s:

http://voice2json.org/

https://nodered.org/

Requires a little customization and/or coding, but it’s quite elegant, and all voice recognition happens on-device. Part of what makes the recognition much more accurate (subjectively, 99%ish) is the constrained vocabulary; the grammars are compiled from a simple user-defined markup language, and then parsed into JSON intents, containing both the full text string and appropriate keywords/variables split out into slots.

Just finished a similar rig in my car, acting as a voice-controlled MP3 player, with thousands of artists and albums compiled into intents from iTunes XML database. Works great, and feels awesome to have a little 3-watt baby computer doing a job normally delegated to massive corporate server farms. ;)
The President said it would be up on Sunday.
Alexis Ohanian Bought a Billboard in Times Square to Inform People About COVID19
At least he closed the borders. Russia as well. EU can't even do that.
Taiwan population is smaller, but not really "tiny" compared to UK's.
Can you link me one?
The Spanish Flu (H1N1) killed between 3-6% of the entire world's population. Unlike most other flu pandemics, a large portion of the victims were young and healthy adults. You really think Covid-19 is going to be that bad?

The Black Death (Bubonic Plague) lasted for decades, killed more than 1/4 of the world's population and set human civilisation back by a century or more. It took more than 200 years for Europe's population to recover to where it was before the pandemic. Many regions never recovered economically, or only recovered centuries later. You really think Covid-19 is going to be that bad?
Also possible the ads were paid for with stolen credit cards or counterfeit checks.

Since the website and marketing are totally anonymous/fake people, the ad buys and Kickstarter likely were fake IDs also.
But like didn’t you go to high school or college? Did you never have to study at home? How does one get into the modern office workforce without ever learning how to be productive when left to their own devices? I don’t get it

For me working from an office or working from home is literally the same thing. I’m on computer with headphones on and talking through slack.
The purpose now of social distancing and quarantine is to spread out the infections so that the hospitals are not overrun by everyone being sick at once.
The left drove us to the same situation here in Spain. I cannot be more concerned with their politics, sadly, we should be prepared to a massive spread.
It's unlikely that other countries can do what China has done. As an example, China is able to do 200 CT scans a day at each fever station throughout the affected regions. In the US we can maybe do what 10 CT scans a day with a single machine? In China they were able to figure out within a short duration if someone needed to be quarantined. They built hospitals in days. It's not just about locking down. China has people taking temperatures of people entering their apartments or when they show up at work. There are drones patrolling the streets that detect people with a high temperature. I have a hard time seeing us in the US build out what China did in just a few days.
A quick read of the article confirms that a google subsidiary IS MAKING A WEBSITE. Trump got all the details wrong as usual, but the main idea is true.

That article just seems like its fishing for "trump bad" material.
Not to sound skeptical, but I've seen some stuff Ratheon was putting out at least 10-15 years ago and I think it had some pretty impressive optical sensors. Are we including the various infrared frequencies?
Counter to this, I would suggest scheduling in focus time in your calendar and block incoming calendar requests/IMs etc.

That way you can be responsive in scheduled times, and unresponsive in focus time.
The local police imprisoned a doctor for speaking out about a fast-growing pneumonia disease. They didn't just ignore it, they actively quashed discussion of it
> President Donald Trump claimed during a Rose Garden news conference Friday that Google would soon publish a national-scale website related to the coronavirus, but company representatives said its plans relate to a small-scale site that will initially be focused on California cases and the timing was unlikely to be soon.
Google Communications says here that Verily (a sister company to Google) is working on a small scale tool for the Bay area: https://twitter.com/Google_Comms/status/1238574670686928906
Now Fox News is blaming it on the liberals for being focused on impeachment. Its incredibly frustrating how irresponsible they're being.

Clearly their viewers are quite gullible and are going to fall for their bullshit. That could literally cost lives, especially given the demographics of their audience.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-coronavirus-s...

For readers wondering why that piece is problematic: 1) Coronavirus was receiving widespread coverage during the impeachment trial. 2) Trump was still ignoring this during impeachment. 3) Trump & the Republicans were calling coronavirus a democratic hoax up until February 28.
I manage a remote team and the first training session I give is on the importance of asynchronous communication. Synchronous communication should be scheduled in advance or for dire emergencies (at least for projects/roles that required extended periods of focus).
I was looking at the numbers for today (because I was curious about the U of A which has gone fully remote for course and exam delivery). There's a model in here https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop... that you can plug numbers into. I would say work from home though, you'll feel absolutely devastated if one of your employees falls ill and you were the cause. Trust them to do their work remotely and they will reward that trust.
I guess not always.

“The speech recognition process involves capturing audio of the user’s voice and sending that data to Apple’s servers for processing. The audio you capture constitutes sensitive user data, and you must make every effort to protect it. You must also obtain the user’s permission before sending that data across the network to Apple’s servers. You request authorization using the APIs of the Speech framework.“

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech/asking_perm...

Which languages are processed on device and not send to Apple’s servers?
No. It is to flatten the curve, i.e. to get infected slowly and manageably, in order to minimize peak ICU admissions. This will minimize deaths. If you fuck up initially, like China and Italy, by severely underestimating the problem, you're forced to shut down everything for a bit, but in the end everyone will be doing the same thing - shutting down some things to control the infection, not try in vain to "stop" it.
If health care workers start falling ill and going into 14 day quarantines, this will need to happen.

And it would only be a start.

Can also do: if you're currently in a program of studies XYZ and > 75% complete, you can also practice until xx/yy/zzzz and indemnified by government.
Large scale strikes also, but after air defenses have been taken down, or suppressed by SEAD escorts. Keep in mind we only have 21 B-2s and they are very expensive to maintain, so it makes sense to use the B-52 whenever possible.
> We're putting the cart before the horse.

If you want to accurately act on 'inherent intelligence' you need to correct for external factors first, or else you'll just get a slice of the bell curve based on how rich/poor people are.
> It’s certainly not easy, but it seems possible

If your population already has lived through similar outbreaks, sure.

But look at the US. There is a sizable portion of the population who thinks this thing is a hoax, who simply don't believe in this pandemic. How do you lock down those people? They're going to completely ignore government recommendations, and they'll scream bloody murder when government cancels events and restricts travel and assembly.

But let's say you manage to lock down the US to contain the current wave, and that you manage to ramp up testing so that you can be more sure about actual infection rates. Once it dies down in the US, then what? Ease the lock down? What about other countries where it's still rampant? What if it flares up again in the US? Go into a second lock down? You've already spent an enormous amount of political capital getting the first one through, good luck getting a second one.

> Plus it saves half a million lives

You pulled this number right out of your ass by multiplying a guesstimated death rate as measured in China, where the virus spread unchecked through an entire province, and where the medical system wasn't prepared, and you're assuming that the demographics of the people catching the virus in the UK is going to be the same.

But if your medical system is prepared, if you're quarantining vulnerable people, if you have good testing, then letting the virus roll thorough the remaining un-quarantined population won't lead to the same death rates, or the same hospitalization rates, because all the underlying factors are different.
Ask HN: Where is the correct data on coronavirus?
Imagine the scenario (which is likely in some countries) that most of the population contracts COVID-19 in a very short timeframe.

The most important question for most of people in the Western world is then:
For a healthy person of my age, what is the chance I will require hospitalization if I contract coronavirus?

This question does not depend on R0, measures taken to prevent the spread of the disease, population distribution, ..., nothing. Therefore, it should not differ much across different circumstances.

Except, the relevant data from different countries are contradictory by orders of magnitude.

Is there a single country in the world that has a nontrivial amount of cases, and has actual data and not absolute garbage?
It's not often practical to get a loaded plane on a scale.

Also it is useful to balance the weight across the sides of a plane, not just get total weight.
There are many more of these: http://websdr.org/

Be sure to check several. Receive capability is not the same across stations or between frequency bands on the same SDR.
Taiwan only has 53 corona cases and one death
I live in Austin where people are still lamenting SXSW being canceled and the Democrat Mayor was still encouraging people to go out to concerts after he canceled SXSW.

And the tech press mocked "no handshakes" until less than a month ago.

Stupid knows no political party.
The key quote in the Verge article is:

"Carolyn Wang, communications lead for Verily, told The Verge that the “triage website” was initially only going to be made available to health care workers instead of the general public. Now that it has been announced the way it was, however, anybody will be able to visit it, she said. But the tool will only be able to direct people to “pilot sites” for testing in the Bay Area, though Wang says Verily hopes to expand it beyond California “over time.”"

From https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/13/21179118/google-coronavir...

From this quote and the behavior of Google's communications team (whether Google or Verily), you can assume that Google/Verily were caught off guard by the announcement of Google's involvement. Whether it was Google's original intent or not, it seems Google is trying to make the best of the situation now.
It would be impossible to do this in the U.S. I'm not sure he appreciates the size of the U.S., the resistance among many Americans who don't like being told what to do, the denial by Fox et al, the distributed nature of our government and on and on. I can't even imagine it working in my county.
Working remotely benefits greatly from creating the right environment to reduce distractions. That can be the difference between enough discipline and failure.
My neighbor is a doctor, when he gets called to the quarantine unit, his family doesn't know how long it'll be (weeks? months?) until they see him again.

Last night he was headed to work. I saw him saying goodbye to his family with a bag packed. It was horrible. Kids crying, chasing after him...
Do CT scans even help?
On the scale of "not worried at all" to "feeling complete helplessness" you should be somewhere in the middle. Maybe 2/3rds of the way up.

Respect the situation for what it is, listen to scientists, and you won't have to feel pessimistic.
They can fast track drugs if that drug has been tested for other things. It happens all the time. I mean like all the time doctors do it for other cases, there's not reason it couldn't happen for cov19
The doctors were not jailed, because luckily CCP need them to work to fight the virus. Some of them died for it already, mostly due to the hard work, insufficient protection CCP provided to the doctors, and in one case at least, intentionally punish the doc by delay his treatment.

Talking about the origin of this virus, this paper of 2015 is quite interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
. In this paper, the wuhan P4 institute people basically described how they produced a prototype of the 2019 wuhan virus.
I wonder how many of those experts got on a stage to give 'we, the people' that warning. The media will hide that stuff on page nnn because it's not popular.

Whatever I may think of Gates' past actions, I applaud his educational and other-directed actions ... they're not about consolidating power or fortune. Carping and suspicion about anyone's generosity is bottom-feeding.
You are missing the point of my comment. A bat infecting a pig or some other two step is a pre-cursor to many Zoonotic events. Those wet markets are indeed a huge accelerator. But the pre-conditions exist in many places and all it takes is one butcher that isn't paying attention and you've got the ball rolling.

Africa and Asia have a lot of this and so are a recurring theme in these very unfortunate stories. But it could happen here, and viruses really don't care about location.

Wet markets and bushmeat is how we got SARS and HIV. We're not sure if COVID-19 was really transferred that way, maybe we'll never know. The Swine flu also jumped species in a regular farm. So there are lots of opportunities all over the world, some more dangerous than others.
Are you sure that Germany does not perform extensive testing? I admit that reddit comments should not be used as sources but I would love to know more about German approach to testing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fguheu/why_have...

Earl_of_Northesk:
The RKI is conducting random sample testing to keep track of Influenza in Germany. These tests now also test on COVID-19. So far, not a single prior undetected case of COVID-19 has shown up in these samples. It is thus highly likely that the extensive early tracking and testing means that Germany has, in comparison to other countries, a very low rate of undetected cases, which would obviously lead to a lower mortality rate. That's what the President of the RKI also said in todays press conference together with Angela Merkel.

Painy_:
How big is the RKIs sample size tho?

patientzero_:
All cases that had the flu and went to the hospital. So the more severe once. But they also re-ran the tests from the beginning of the year to test for Covid-19. If you can't detect it in there it wasn't in the country most likely

Sounds like a massive amount of testing that no other country can match.