skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are more cases, they are on average much more mild, the real mortality rate is much lower, it is actually not doubling every two days (it is the tests that are doubling every few days). Lots of possible and very consequential conclusions.
Thanks for bringing this up, I wouldn't have considered it.
This actually sounds like a replay attack.

Thanks for the link to he blog article.
We don't know yet how sustainable Chinese actions are. People are still in lockdown. Covid19 could come back when the lockdown is relaxed.
Italian cave makes sense of the change in Earth’s ice age rhythm
Nice simulations. But I believe that using a population of only 200 individuals might be giving misleading results because it enters too fast the logistic limit part of the curve before you can experience the early exponential part.
https://www.dummies.com/education/science/environmental-scie...
> People are hearing "flatten the curve" and thinking that a few small personal hygiene changes will save the day.

That's your personal assertion, not the definition or what "people" think or say. You are insisting on a notion that you've made up as if it was a strawman. It's wrong and unsupported. Just let or go.
It is a good model because it works. The end justifies the means. You can't argue with the results.
> have no contact with folks over 65, have no co-morbid conditions and so I have no reason to keep away from folks. I'm at zero risk.

Until you spread it to someone _with_ contact with the over-65/those at risk.
It has built in javascript simulators.
> but there are big privacy concerns of tracking citizens by intelligence agencies.

Huh? An ankle bracelet ("tag") is quite transparent, it's not covert "intelligence". The deal is, you get to wear it for a couple weeks while you recover from your potential illness, and you know you're being monitored so you're not going to just leave your assigned place and hang out anywhere else.
Don’t forget USA navy vessels shooting down passenger plane.
Yes, we need more panic. Maximum panic please! For a disease that has a 0.5% fatality rate, and the medium death age is over the average life expectancy of one's country. And most scientists believe we can't stop it anyway. Yes, let's burn down the modern world and suspend all civil rights for this.
Sure. We've got a house with multiple buildings, including sheds, halls etc.

Around 100 people need separate profiles, each should be able to set alarms, timers, reminders, etc. if they want a routine to create any of those or tell them time or date or temperature they should be able to do that from any of the voice assistants in any room. They might only want such a routine in a particular room. They should be able to define a home device and a current device. Home device would usually be a bedroom for those of us that need them etc.

I definitely don't want to have to create any of those routines etc for any of them. Nothing about these should be fixed in stone. They have to be able to self-serve. We can assume they can navigate the ios amazon app as a baseline level of knowledge.

Room settings include temperature, lighting, curtains, tv on/off, channel, volume to name a few. The voice assistant in some rooms should be able to show web pages on-screen, or even youtube etc. including the laptop someone plugged in on HDMI1.

...the coffee machine automation is also a requirement. Its controlled by a flask app. The voice control should be able to let you order a coffee, strong, black. Or a Dave#5.

We'd also like device detection to trigger when people's phones appear in certain locations.

What kinds of options exist for this?
And Google is pretty much how I fix any technical problems given to me in my household.
These people made the UK national news (channel four) with their claimed simple test kit. After three days it detects antibodies supposedly. https://www.biopanda.co.uk/php/products/rapid/infectious_dis...
Huh, I appreciate the corrections.
Is there some parable about getting too excited about exponential growth and taking the extrapolation game way too far?
Universe may have been filled with supermassive black holes at the dawn of time
>Just like China, there was a time when Italy had 1 case, then 2 cases, then 4, etc.

Just like the spread of fire, the window of opportunity to put it out is right at the beginning.

Yes, Italy could put it out when it first came to Italy but they would have to do it many many more times to successfully contain it. China just had to do it once and they failed.
>Why on Earth is this a good model?

While a state like China would be a bad idea, here in America we could perhaps learn the benefits of not heading too far in the opposite direction.
Doctors and civilians tried to sound the alarm that something was going on, and were silenced until it was too late. To their credit, the CCP fired the Wuhan officials who presumably silenced those people, but it is still their responsibility for fostering a culture where towing the line and hiding problems until they cannot be hidden is acceptable for leadership positions.
While this may help alert fatigue, hackers will kick the can down the road and adopt adversarial AI to work around the “AI” solutions.
Alphabet, Walmart join U.S. effort to speed up coronavirus testing
They can work from home. But I'm learning from this thread, that being in a rather northern location where no one in the entire city has started working from home is not the norm. Again, it was only yesterday that the government gave any official guidance on travel or gatherings of people.
To quote that article:

In civilian life, natural selection favors a mild strain. Those who get very ill stay home, and those mildly ill continue with their lives, preferentially spreading the mild strain. In the trenches, natural selection was reversed. Soldiers with a mild strain stayed where they were, while the severely ill were sent on crowded trains to crowded field hospitals, spreading the deadlier virus.
Awesome, I guess this is a common topic for Sci-Fi stories that there's so many similar ones.
That's a very important point if we're discussing the upsides and downsides of censorship, or whether China is a bad country and should feel bad about itself.

But if we're looking for an example of how to solve the pandemic, when people point to China as an example, they aren't saying "we should spend a few weeks pretending the virus doesn't exist, threaten doctors who talk about it, order our labs not to study it, and THEN take decisive action". They're saying we should do the stuff that China did, starting from the decisive action part.
Trying to raise capital right now?
Also someone from Italy here: never, ever praise China as it is the same authoritarian state that caused all these deaths by silencing the truth when it mattered the most. Had they not violently censored doctors (like their own people or the current holocaust being carried on against Muslims), we would not be suffering through this devastation. This is also absolutely not an open letter "from Italy": it's a message from a minor—poorly written— publication.
Can anyone vouch for the legitimacy of the names on this list? Is this authentic? I've been running my own numbers, and it does not seem far fetched at all. Governments need to be taking this extremely seriously.
After the crisis, his death should be investigated by an international group.

And those responsible for rebuffing assistance, including those at the CDC or other US agencies that rejected test kits, should be investigated.

Everyone just throws their hands up and says “incompetence” but in the real-world, a huge majority seem to believe in sinister motives. This is based on anecdotal experiences from mostly wealthy/successful people I’ve talked to. I’m a skeptic but way more people are conspiratorial than the media acknowledges.

How the US didn’t have tests in January when people were sounding the alarm, or how we don’t have general Coronavirus tests from decades or years ago is quite confounding.
What they were speaking about here is using people’s phones.
That is the most useful graph on this subject so far. Go look at it now.
Most countries have exactly the same growth trajectory measured from 100 cases. That's solid data about how this behaves.

Singapore and Hong Kong have been able to slow things down by strong measures, but it's still a straight line on a log graph, just with 1/3 of the growth rate. Italy is on the same line, just 8 days ahead of Europe and 13 days ahead of the US.

Only South Korea shows flattening so far.
Drugs are not a solution in the next 2-3 months. There's no way a drug can be tested and ensure safe and scaled up to the tens/hundreds of millions of doses you would need. It's impossible so don't even bother considering it.

Quarantining is the only thing that will help in this situation. There's no other solution we have as a society to slow down the pace of infections. People who normally wouldn't die will die because of the lack of medical care.

The problem we face in the US is lack of testing, which makes it impossible to do anything except a quarantine.
If you’re wondering why, just think how hands-on Apple stores are. Their entire purpose is touching things others have touched.
Impressive video and soundtrack, indeed. One thing that I don't fully understand, though, is how relevant lab results might be accurate, when, during part of the processing workflow, containers appear to be open to the processing chamber and its atmosphere, thereby presumably being exposed to potential cross-contamination. I'm likely missing something trivial, so I'm curious about what it might be.
>What works for people without that discipline ?

Amphetamines. Seriously. Prescription, of course. Coffee is a distant second. Thiobromine can be better for some people - you can get supplements it you can buy brewing cacao if you want to experiment with a potentially tasty drink.

Yeah, sure, there are behavioral interventions but for a guy like me, if I can just do it with a reasonably pill I'm willing to take the risk. Your risk tolerance may vary. Meditation is a good alternative but it takes time and, ironically, discipline.

Incidentally it may be the reverse, that people who are good at meditating are those predisposed to having good discipline!
do you mind sharing some sources regarding the long term effect of covid-19? i am worried about it, especially since i haven't heard much about it so far (might be too early to tell). thanks.
> It's only 'working' while the country is on lockdown, and FYI the country spirals towards economic meltdown.

Nope.

> In Taiwan, most residents carry on as normal, with offices and schools open. Many restaurants, gyms, and cafes in the capital, Taipei, are still bustling, although most premises will take temperatures and spray hands with sanitiser before allowing customers in.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/how-taiwan-is-...
> the prime minister ordered the government to accelerate plans [...and] is expected to impose the new rules this week

It's not the current advice.
Elon Musk underplays coronavirus threat, says car crashes are more dangerous
Mirroring your comment, I have found both through personal experience and through anecdotes of others that forcing yourself into routines has benefits in all kinds of situations. Make your bed every morning, do your full hygiene routine, change out of your sleeping clothes, and so on. Helps with depression and monotony among others. I'm not surprised to see it valid here, it's universal.
thats when you buy a spotlight.

joking but its very frustrating dealing with neighbours like that, but at the same time they do sort of have the right to their own hobbies.

Maybe take up a loud hobby yourself. Cathartic leisure jackhammering. Good for grip strength.
Why did the Plague spare Poland?
If you take every potential apocalyptic scenario and stockpile supplies. It’d add up to much more than 400$/resident.

The real shame is globalization. If manufacturing occurred in Europe. In North America...etc. we’d all just quickly ramp up our respirator production.

Instead the west outsourced this to China
There's nothing to credit. Everyone was in on the silencing, the CCP only used those officials as scapegoats. Everyone on all levels of politics was keeping this a secret and hoping it would go away.
We've stockpiled some number of ventilators in the USA (though still likely insufficient for the task at hand). The bigger issue is the labor needed to staff them, which has very limited scalability.

I wonder how hard it is, and how quickly a moderately intelligent person could be brought up to speed (at least enough to get better outcomes than just leaving the patient to die).
Why didn't more people die in China?
I care. These doom and gloom shrieks and exhortations for President Madagascar to Shut. Down. Everything are distracting from the real work governments have to do to tackle this severe and protracted crisis in a competent manner, i.e. following the advice of real, not collective-letter experts.
Something they don't tell you when you start learning lisp is the sense of calm it brings

It's such a elegant thing, it ruins me for doing "professional" programming
By staying out you are contributing to the spread of a virus that society at large is ill-prepared for. You have no excuse either. This shouldn't be hard for a grown adult to understand.

If your behaviour is only responsible on the assumption that everyone else you meet is behaving responsibly, then your behaviour is irresponsible.
If the availability of testing kits is low and the ratio of infected to non infected people is extremely low, it makes absolutely no sense to sample randomly from the population.
I'll assume you're a programmer. Have you ever been in a situation where your IDE, text editor, or other tools were extremely slow and unresponsive? You're trying to perform some task and there's this external bottleneck slowing down everything you are doing. Instead of completing the subtask quickly so that your train of thought flows smoothly into the next unit, the flow is interrupted by having to wait. And once you're out of the flow, there's mental effort required to get back into it. But if your tools present a constant bottleneck, then you are permanently stuck in this less efficient mental state. Essentially the bottlenecking tool becomes a part of your mental model, and that useless chunk of mental real-estate reduces what can be accomplished by the same mind unburdened by this useless detail.

But all of this goes just as much when a lack of typing skills is the constant bottleneck. If you can't type at the speed of thought, the quality and complexity of your thoughts suffer since a part of your working memory is consumed by the process of typing. This has real implications for what you're able to accomplish.
Agreed, though you can find letters from individual Italian medical professionals saying about the same thing. Most authoritative would be a letter from the government of Italy or the equivalent of the AMA.
Abuse. I see so many bad interactions from their network that I have blocked them entirely.

Bots attempting credit card fraud are common.
The story behind ‘flatten the curve,’ the defining chart of the coronavirus
>you're missing that China initially suppressed info abt this virus

Not only that, refuse to acknowledge, or share any information to international communities. The amount of things they do just to saves faces.
Lasers were banned. Where does your certainty come from?
Working from home for 6 years now.

What worked for me:

Sleep till noon

Checking mail/chats

2-4h creative work (design, coding, writing) interleaved with mail/chats if the flow won't hit

Checking Mail/chat

<30h work weeks

only <4 meetings a month

See that you have to find time for work and not for life.
As someone who worked in health R&D in the US, I can assure you it’s all metric and has been for decades.
This shouldn’t be done even in the office. Can’t tell you how many times I get interrupted by any member of my team in the office for trivialities or even useful things that can also wait. We have some fires but that’s only about 10% of my interruptions.
I know/have worked with the team behind it at UCSD. They've mostly moved on to LiquidHaskell [0].

[0] https://ucsd-progsys.github.io/liquidhaskell-blog/
>6 days later, we're at over 6000 infections, the country is in total lock down.

Similar anecdote here.

My SO texted me earlier this week saying how she will be taking the train from Madrid to Barcelona to go back to her family. She figured it will be empty on Sunday at 6 am.

I have been following the situation evolve in Italy and told her to get on the train right away and leave immediately before it gets worse.

Luckily, the next day she was on the train. The lockdowns started happening shortly afterwards.
True.

But still, maybe Italy is a worst case.

Trying to be optimistic here, being >70 and all ;)
WSJ: Apple’s remote working faces glitches due to secrecy, unclear guidelines
Ooo ???
What's likeliest to kill more than 10M human beings in the next 20 years? (2015)
> I haven't heard any reputable source suggest there was any practical way of containing it perfectly.

Of course there was. If they somehow magically divined the true danger of the virus the day they identified it.

But they didn't, it took time and observation, and they shut down the affected areas as soon as the extent of danger was realized and processed by their bureaucracy. There's plenty of things here that could've been done better, but it's asinine to blame them for the virus taking hold everywhere else. Doubly so given that most of the world had a month+ warning before they registered their first cases.
First thing first, this is science, not politics.

Everyone wants a drug and vaccine, but good science takes time to happen. Make no mistake, no one wants a lock down, but so far, it's the only option in the lack of a functional medical solution. If tons of scientists tell us lock down is the only option for now, we should'd listen rather than discredit them.

Now, if someone really wants to move on to talk about politics. It's about a nation as a whole can do the right thing, not about authoritarian vs. democracy.

A ideal democracy society works because we trust reasonable individuals can collectively make the right decision. In this COVID-19 case, lock the hell down and do the best practice to stop it from spreading. I don't see why a functional democracy nation can't do that. But it has to be a functional one.

Unfortunately, authoritarian was necessary when the general population (including local governments at various level) cannot function as well. China for example, has to reply on THE ONE in the center to make the right call and execute order top down to be functional. At least according to the CCP, the general population cannot be trusted. Thus the authoritarian regime. It's easy to see it's effectiveness when there is the right order in place. But it's also equally easy to neglect the fact that such an order takes really long (from Dec 2019 to end of Jan) to materialize.

IMHO, I think both Italy and China failed here, while we are all ignoring the one did really well, at least so far, Japan. (Or maybe Taiwan and Singapore, but they are small states which is easier to govern).
Interesting! Got any reading material on this?

Thanks
Pretty decent list, as someone who's full-time remote let me add one more:

At the end of the day send your manager a quick email of what you did and things that happened. You shouldn't spend more than 5 minutes and there's never an expectation of a reply but it's a great way to fill them in and augment the in-person conversations that happen in the office.
I’m sure there’s still a ton of bureaucracy. We need to go back to first principles and really look at what makes a drug safe and how quickly we can find out.

And also take a look at what safeguards we are willing to cut when every day of delay is thousands of deaths.
> Quarantining is the only thing that will help in this situation.

The question is, for how long? Until the infection curve goes down? Until there is not a single infected cases in the whole country?

While you can't know when this will happen (especially the former, most models are inaccurate because too little is still known about this virus), I don't believe it is sustainable to keep an extended lockdown on a whole country (as opposed to "just" Hubei, which however has almost the entire population of Italy) more than a few months.
> But the thing you fail to understand

No no, I understand that. But the thinking is, and it seems to be backed by data, that the health system will be able to cope with a full-population maximal pandemic, as long as it is limited to the much less vulnerable segments of the population. The ICUs in Italy and Hubei were filled, for the most part, with elderly patients. The math, such as it is, checks out.

The risk management analysis, again, is IMHO batshit crazy. But the theory seems about as sound as it could be given the data we have.
For what it means, I know some of the people on that list and I can say that they are real scientists.
Understanding Consumer Panic (1989)
Just drop it. If you actually had any experience in academia you'd be aware that citation counts matter zero beyond vanity. What matters is if you are able to get published on reference journals, and in some cases in a pre-approved list of publications. That's it. Just give it a rest.
Birth defects and infertility aren’t issues for most of these patients.
A friend and I are working on an mvp for something like this - hoping to have a prototype out by the end of the day tomorrow (pacific time). Will share it here. How has the response to your ads been?
Death.

Kaletra, a protease inhibitor, is a combination of two drugs, one of which is a CYP3A4 inhibitor. It is used with some success on coronavirus patients.

Co-administering this with chloroquine 500mg/BID could easily result in chloroquine concentrations well above LD50.
No it's insane. Because you know viruses do one thing: they mutate.

Also heard immunity takes to long at which point all old people will get potentially infected too.

Also cases to death ratio (and infection to death ratio) are still on a magnitude larger then with the flu. Especially given that somewhat between 10-20% of infected need intensive medical care, all roughly at the same time if you don't slow the spread which likely can't be provided if that should happen increasing death ratio.

With such a strategy we at looking a mostly likely at >350000 deaths. Not unlikely even over 1800000...[]

Through well there is always very, very small chance that it will work. Less because it's a good strategy but because even if you do nothing there is a very very very small change for a virus to "self destruct" (not correct way to describe they effect but it basically similar to a self destruction to a outside observer knowing nothing about virology).

But gambling hundred of thousand lives one it would be insane.

Well except if you have no morals and want to destabilize the country. Through I don't think that's the case, incompetence is more likely.

EDIT:
spelling

EDIT:
Numbers based on not unlikely infection rate of 60% of population and IDR of 1% (health system not overloaded) and 5% (health system overloaded to some degree).

EDIT:
argument based on heard immunity idea not explicitly the UK strategy
Don't know about "corporate shilling" - you weren't covert at all.

I did ask for options after all.

The only gotcha is the requirements will overwhelm most basic setups fairly quickly. Not talking 20 lights here or a tv or desk or two.

I've replied to your original comment, thanks.

PS I forgot to mention, all this exists right now as a mixture of amazon echo and a set of text inputs via phone over wifi for evaluation. As we implement more it turns into more voice control and less of a giant hack. So some bits are half-baked but functional.