skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> From our data, about 10% of patients require ICU (Intensive Care Unit) or sub ICU assistance and about 5% of patients die.

I think that we really need to understand precisely what conclusions these represent when we see statements like this.

Exactly what does "10% of patients" mean? 10% of those who test positive? 10% of those who test positive and also show symptoms?

It seems that a majority of people who contract the virus and test positive (let alone those who are exposed) do not show any symptoms at all.[0]

Of those who do show symptoms, estimates regarding how many any seek out, receive, or require care vary widely, so much so that it's very difficult to draw any conclusions using any dataset that I've seen.

So I ask: When the authors here say "From our data", exactly what dataset are they using and what operations are they performing on this dataset to arrive at this number?

This is crucially important, because if this 10% is actually 10% of those who already seek treatment for respiratory illness, and also subsequently test positive for COVID-19, then the death rate is actually much, much lower than most of the published reports.

It seems to me that we need to know the answer to this before proceeding with any other restrictive public policy solutions.

I'm particularly concerned with the decision to close schools, which in many cases (at least here in the USA) is inevitably going to lead to kids being placed with grandparents for care, which is a terrible outcome if our goal is to reduce exposure to vulnerable populations.

It is OK to question the panic. It is OK to believe, as I do given the available data so far, that the panic is more harmful than the virus itself. I have started a subreddit to gather data and opinions inclined toward using this as an opportunity to appropriately prepare rather than race to drastic solutions likely to hurt vulnerable populations.[1]

0: https://eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.20...

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrepareInsteadOfPanic/
Taiwan's leadership, ahem. Only 50 or so cases and their approval rating has soared.
> authoritarian system that allowed them to build a hospital fast or close a city or whatever they did well on.

Look, this is a dangerous meme in more ways than one. Italy and Spain managed to lock down entire cities, and those are countries with a strong tradition of democracy. Emergency powers, martial law etc. are a thing, and there's even quite a bit of precedent for using them to deal w/ disease outbreaks. Even in the US.
There are far more than that today, the number you're quoting is the last cdc report (published mid day Friday). Current number is likely around 3000. NYT last published ~2700 from aggregating state reports, and their per state numbers were a bit lower than every state website I checked.

And this is with extremely limited testing.
Your claim is BS. If someone is buying the whole stock of multiple store, of course they're having an impact now matter how strenuously you insist otherwise.
This doesn't really matter, you're just doing that to make it easier to compare. Shifting South Korea so it doesn't overlap the other countries is possible but not terribly useful.

They do seem to be missing Denmark though, which should stick out somewhere top-left of Norway.
wow, -2. What a surprise. Anything that paints Trump in a good light is downvoted. And this is why there's a silent majority that smile when libs talk and vote Trump anyway.
The most popular satellite transmission receivable with that box is probably the ISS when it passes over. When it comes to using satellites as relays i can tell you that it's a popular practice to pirate unused US navy transponders.
What you're saying doesn't make any sense. You said, "A bat infecting a pig could easily happen in Italy". How is a careless Italian butcher in any way comparable to a seething, filthy wet market where live pigs and bats are crammed into stacked cages? How much bat do you think they eat in Italy? Do Dutch butchers serve bat or pangolin or dog meat, or keep wild birds in cages on top of ferrets, which are good animal models for human influenza infections?

As a vegetarian, I'll happily acknowledge the barbarity and health hazards of factory meat production in the Western world. But this really is a tortured apples-to-oranges thing you're doing here. There is simply no valid comparison between a European meat grocer and a Chinese wet market, and I think you know it.
I work from home full time now. Have been for about a year. Before I started working from home, jeans, chinos, etc. for 10+ hours a day wasn’t bothersome. But now? They bug me. I do have different kind of sweatpants to wear during work hours. That does help demarcate the work day.
It's never "nothing". For all we know (or don't), the virus might (or not) slow down spread during the warmer months in Europe and the US.

Perhaps it could be effective enough to have multiple 2-week lockdown periods (eg. separated by 2 or 4 weeks non-locked-down periods), just to slow down the spread so health care systems can keep up?

There is so many variables at play, and no simple model could come up with "the best" solution, if there ever is one.
so you otherwise accept the Serbians/passive radar got the entire F117 fleet mothballed?
I think having an ad-blocker on breaks this and send you back to the paywall with a new warning.
I haven't tried it directly myself but there is this project, Dragonfire, which looks quite reasonable using DeepSpeech:

https://github.com/DragonComputer/Dragonfire

There's a minimal demo app I put together here too: https://github.com/nmstoker/SimpleSpeechLoop
Please read the whole comment instead of just the first couple of words.
Definitely a Boomer word... my Mom would say it when I was growing up.
Even if it's not contained world-wide, there's still the chance that a vaccine can be developed to provide the immunity later.
Have you ever worked in a bureaucracy? It's not hard to believe that this is all an admixture of hubris, incompetence, and political small-ball.
Well we don't really know other than the obvious.

Don't smoke, eat healthy, take some supplements because they can't hurt (C,D,Zinc) have been shown to strengthen the immune system and most folks are deficient anyway. Get your affairs in order so if you become ill you don't have to pay bills or run errands (getting medication, etc), have some extra things that might come in handy like disinfectants (lysol, etc), food, etc, make sure all your chores are done so you don't have to deal with an illness and a mess at the same time. If you live with someone have a plan like a spare bedroom or something to quarantine in. Most importantly have someone you can speak with everyday so they can monitor your condition. If you become very ill and can't help yourself, you would want someone to be able to call the authorities to alert them to your emergency.
>letting the virus spread uncontrolled through the not at risk population

Sounds excellent. Did we remember to tell the virus?
> The only way to defeat this pandemic is to approach it with the seriousness it deserves. It is time for a radical acceptance of reality.

This is all so surreal to me. Shouldn't we have taken this with the seriousness it deserves when China was locking down 700 million people?

Like, even if you didn't believe what China was doing was correct, you should at least have been trying to formulate your best arguments over why China's reaction was wrong and looking for confirmatory and dis-confirmatory evidence over your arguments.

Instead, we spent six weeks in a state of such basic blissful ignorance of China (& other early countries/cruise ships) that we're scrambling now because we don't even have the data to make the right decisions.

For example, there was a case in Hong Kong where one person got it through the sewerage pipe of an infected person 10 floors above because they improperly modified their vent pipes: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic... . (This is a famous example of how SARS spread through Amoy Gardens in HK so HK people are hyper paranoid about this infection route).

This piece of news didn't even make a ripple in the West (I know because I have friends who work at SCMP and I asked them to look at the analytics, the only western media that picked up their story was... drudgereport.com)

Friends I know in HK are like, "Yeah, the canto news covered this story quite widely so we're all pretty aware" but you can't find any English awareness of this. Even the C D FUCKING C is not aware of this, their page on fecal borne transmissions (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/water.html) STILL says:

"CDC is reviewing all data on COVID-19 transmission as information becomes available. At this time, the risk of transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19 through sewerage systems is thought to be low. Although transmission of COVID-19 through sewage may be possible, there is no evidence to date that this has occurred. This guidance will be updated as necessary as new evidence is assessed.

SARS, a similar coronavirus, has been detected in untreated sewage for up to 2 to 14 days. In the 2003 SARS outbreak, there was documented transmission associated with sewage aerosols."

The case in Hong Kong happened ONE MONTH ago and the CDC didn't even pick this up!!! WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD?
Is there something odd going on with Netflix?
It seems like there are quite a few problems being reported. Someone I know had their account's e-mail changed so is there a possible breach?
America has been "souring" on dairy milk, but it took us three tries to find some at the store last week.

I think what is also happening is that milk substitutes are being consumed more often by people who otherwise would not have drank milk, or not as much. People don't have to switch to drink oat milk. They just have to buy it and pour it in a glass. The dairy industry may be targeting these people.

Another thing that is happening is that the United States is becoming less white. Europeans have the highest incidence of lactase persistence; Africans and South Asians have somewhat less (with high regional variance); and people originating from other regions have almost none. The culture surrounding products like e.g. ice cream is not the same for lactose-intolerant people, who are limited to a few flavors.
Probably there's a big concern about civil unrest.
In their lifetime, it’s not something they’ve seen before . That may sound overly simple but that is the answer.
Keeps people from panicking more than they already are.
This article might be a "submarine" article for it, but I'm actually glad A2 milk is getting more popular, and now even Costco carries it.

I grew up in France and drank milk without problem my whole life, but when moving to the US, I started noticing dry-patches on my arms, and digestive discomforts after breakfast.

It took me a while to pinpoint the root-cause, but after some experimentation, I figured out it was either the whole-wheat bread, or the milk. Today I'm pretty confident this is the milk.

For a while I thought this had to do with some difference in UHT/pasteurization process (all milk in France is shelf-stable until opened, whereas here it has to be refrigerated at all times).
But then I realized then that this A2 milk is popular in Australia, and I had never heard of this A1/A2 distinction, but apparently France's cow is 100% A2 only, so I tried their milk, and I don't have any digestion nor dry-patch on my arms anymore. Maybe it's placebo effect, but it works for me, so now I'm back at drinking milk.

A1/A2 apparently isn't as big of a deal for processed dairy (Cheese, yogurts), but I buy the one imported from France/Switzerland, so those are probably A2 anyways.
About 15-20% require hospital care of some kind. Then depending on how prepared/overrun the health care system is, 0.6-5% cases are fatal. These numbers are ballpark and the lack of data makes it hard to know with confidence. The CFR gets more severe with age and comorbidities.
So, I'm gonna have to go to Walmart to get tested? Wtf? I should be able to go to my local hospital right now, but there's no tests, and no one will be wearing PPE when I walk in there.

Fuck this website. Exactly where, in each US state does one go for testing, right now? Any sources on this?

Edit: I may sound rash, but what I read is Google: it's only in SF Bay, Trump: there will be a website, and drive through testing, which sounds like in Walmart parking lots or something. Yes, I'm freaking out.

Can anyone out there answer my question above? Cause the local govt or healthcare facilities are unable to. Nor Trump, Walmart, or Google (even Google search)
I hope for your own sake that you haven't put any skin in the game over that assumption.
They're an effective diagnostic, faster than testing for the virus directly. At least they seem to be effective at these fever clinics. NYTimes Daily podcast had a good explanation of how these fever clinics work.
Huh

There’s a project called TiddlyWiki[0] Would work great for this.

[0] - https://tiddlywiki.com/
It’s easier from a public reassurance standpoint to give a specific date that can be moved after everyone has adjusted to the situation rather than saying that everything is closed indefinitely.
There are now clear environmental and animal rights reasons to avoid red meat and dairy. Unfortunately, animal rights motivations don't seem to cut it for most of my colleagues and friends, who are by and large highly educated. Arguments about whether cows are "alive" or "feel pain" the same way humans do inevitably conclude with an acknowledgement that they probably do in all likelihood, but too bad, they taste good/produce animal products we like, and thus it sucks to be them. Or "too bad our ancestors have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years".

Thankfully, most are swayed by environmental arguments and have eliminated their red meat consumption. Far fewer have given up milk, probably out of long-standing habits of milk consumption with cereal/coffee.

Just like the choice of whether we hurt or inflict pain and enslavement on a fellow human (a choice which has taken centuries to reverse), there's a choice of whether we enslave another sentient species for the sake of our tastebuds and convenience. I hope the decline of the milk industry continues, and that more of these farmers can successfully switch into more ethical and planet-friendly sources of revenue.
2969 right now at https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/. That site aggregates from news media reports and is the most real-time of the various sites I've seen. Plus it gives county-level breakdowns and links to reports with further details.
Honestly work has been a good distraction for me. Might not be healthy but it helps.
He had a lot of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 in a brief period of time however, and there's some circumstantial evidence that things like this do contribute to a higher case-fatality rate.
How many weeks have we had to spin up mask factories? They're not exactly high tech items.
Inventory is a lot easier to manage when you don't have to send it to 500 different sites and predict demand. If you're coming up short on inventory, the reasonable choice is to put it into one central repository and ship from there. There are several different configurations for each type of device, varying based on color, memory, and carrier.

If they were only concerned about the virus, they would take the display models out of the showroom and continue to process pick-up orders. And they wouldn't shut down stores worldwide (ex-China).

No health body has recommended worldwide retail shutdowns, and no competing device vendor has closed all of its stores worldwide (ex-China). This is a ramification of the factory shutdowns we saw in China several weeks ago.
Did you see the Louis CK skit about flying in a tin can and complaining about not having wifi on your cell phone?

Existence is a very fragile thing. Nature is unforgiving. We as a species have made incredible strides to be where we are today. People all over the world wake up every morning, do their routine, and go about their daily lives.

Around them, they are surrounded by people, care free and oblivious to the absurd amount of work it has taken to come to a point where people can relax their minds and go for a walk, get fresh water to drink, go watch a movie with their friends, or get in a fancy car and go for a drive.

We will make it through this. We are surrounded by all kinds of deadly shit waiting to kill us, and we are still here, thriving. There are many competent teams working on this to the best of their abilities.

Modern medicine is a technological marvel. Two days ago, a team of researchers managed to reproduce the virus which will pave the path to figuring out how to create antibodies.

It will take some time, and it has already impacted a lot of people. The death count will not stop going up, but we won't give up either.

We have given a middle finger to just about anything that could have killed us. We've erected hamlets, villages, towns, cities, metropolises. We have a station floating in space. Built monuments to things we like and things we despise. We've composed beautiful music to inspire ourselves to wage wars against each other. We are relentless and unstoppable.

Hang in there, and don't let helplessness take over you.
You can control whether or not you get infected by limiting interaction.
A decline in cases to treat would be informative, no?
What are you talking about? Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude but what do you mean that there is no need to speculate? That is literally what humans do all the time for all of human existence.

Our medical situation, that is say that of the United States, is much worse than that of italy and it is so by design. That is an objective fact even though it’s not pleasant to think about. What makes you think we will be better off than Italy, even though we are in a weaker medical position? My argument is that panic is warrented.
I understand the point you and GP are trying to make.

I'm saying that the two miseries feel like apples vs oranges, given the context.

You'd have to go pretty far to convince me that (even mass) economic depression is more harmful than widespread, near-term fatalities.
> There's certainly no danger of accidentally containing it too much.

Actually, there is. The UK strategy explicitly aims to avoid a peak come autumn/winter, you want it to go through enough of the population before summer ends. Too fast and it overwhelms the NHS right now, too slow and it will overwhelm the NHS in November.

I completely agree that it is a risky strategy, but unlike the general sentiment in this thread, I don't think it's an obviously bad strategy, and I absolutely think that everyone arguing against it are also engaging in a lot of wishful thinking regarding people's willingness to self-quarantine and obey government recommendations aimed at containing it.

Try harsh containment measures in the US, and 20% of the population is going to go "fuck you it's a Democratic hoax/Chinese conspiracy/Deep State population control scheme, nothing's gonna stop me!"

At least the UK strategy takes the unwillingness of the population into accord, locking down all retirement homes is much more doable than locking down everything.
> We had a uncomfortable conversation last month when I broke the news to her.

That both are owned by the same company?
I buy your analogy and it resonates with me. But I was referring to our "personal data".

The car transports us from one place to another without taking/owning a piece of us.

Smartphones take a piece of us, our memories and what shapes our identities...all that make us who we think we are.

"Personal Identity depends on consciousness not on substance”
― John Locke
Excellent work! Expect apps across platforms.
The lead time for many items is questionable due to demand. Think about the volume of Amazon Pantry orders right now.
The first time I remember hearing the phrase was in 2009 when Roberts flubbed the swearing in oath at Obama's inauguration. They later announced that the oath was administered again privately "out of an abundance of caution."

Was that the origin, or was it in use before that?
I was downvoted here recently for sounding the alarm bells on how bad this is going to be and accused of trying to incite panic. Folks, COVID-19 is something that should be taken seriously. President Obama had great advice: "stay calm and listen to the experts". All the experts are saying this is going to be bad and we should be getting ready now for what will happen in the future.
There is only one medical mask factory still in business in the US.

Edit: you can read more about the mask supply issue here. There maybe more than one but very few remain and 95% of masks are imported.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/15/coronavir...
Good camera suggestions there. Nothing else there should be a surprise.
Although honestly, a webcam on a laptop should be fine too, or tablet. But headphones are a really good idea for conferences.
The USA is roughly 16 days behind Italy at the moment.
Flattening the curve is the only scenario a lot of countries can realistically do outside of a Wuhan style quarantine.
Hopefully the US has learned something in the past 32 years since that incident. It seems that even our allegedly sophisticated adversaries haven’t in the present time.

At least the Russian team was merely operating a Buk in a clandestine op in the middle of a field in Ukraine (and the US ship was technically in Iranian territorial waters in 1988 during an actual war), I’m curious what Iran’s excuse was shooting it down in their own property?... maybe we’ll learn more about it eventually. Bellingcat was able to provide the actual team member names and wiretaps of the Russian soldiers.
I was wondering the same... Maybe thinking of a different racing game?
They don't have 200B in cash. Their cash stockpile has been cut down immensely since they started doing Accelerated Share Repurchases.
The UK can raise as much cash as Germany so it is a choice they are making.
I've done IT for labs. The PCs these insanely expensive machines are hoked to make me absolutely sick with how they have to be set up. You have a testing machine, be it a mass spec, PCR, whatever, costing 6 and 7 figures with a $500 PC that has every imaginable security hole and updates turned off. Drives me bonkers.
I think the kind of embedded development you are doing is not the same as I am doing.

Where I work we were looking at CMake and were "forced" to start learning it when we embarked on a pilot project that needed to compile WebKit for several embedded platforms (the kind that can usefully use WebKit to display something). There were at least 3 ways to build WebKit but someone before me chose CMake.

Fast-forward to today, and our main build system is actually a wrapper around buildroot, which can use CMake projects for the packages if desired. We use CMake for one of our Linux kernel modules and for our middleware. We don't use generators, or to be precise we only use the Unix Makefile generator. For the CMake projects we adapt the compilers of our various platforms by using toolchain files, which we write ourselves. Toolchain files are chosen by an option to the initial CMake command and primarily describe the location and preferred settings of the toolchain's tools.

There is a temptation, a very practical temptation, to merge toolchain considerations with the ways targets vary, and handle both subjects with the toolchain file. We have resisted that temptation across over a dozen target platforms. We create platform files separately and we have devised a convention for specifying which one to use.

Our developers all have their own IDE/non-IDE ways of working with the source code and the build system has not asked to integrate in any way with that.

A lot of our developers work primarily within the middleware, and we have a documented way to make that work easy. Others have to cope with buildroot as much as with the build system of the buildroot package they are working on, and that is not refined yet.