skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mortality rate in Italy was high only for people 65 and up.

But lot more have been brought to hospitals for no real reason, once they were there they couldn't be sent home anymore

In fact home confinement has increased a lot once they understood not everyone was in need of medical attention

Hell, we even tested people with no symptoms at the beginning because they said they weren't feeling fine or one of their acquittance had flu in the previous week's

That of course became immediately problematic for the healthcare system
> And of course the quarantine leaked enough that the infection spread to the entire world.

It spread prior to the quarantine being put in place.

> at this point it's run its course, so it's successful mitigation

Only ~80,000 people out of 11,000,000 in Wuhan were infected. For a disease this contageous, that we don't have herd immunity for, that's hardly 'run its course'.
Most complete lockdown would seem to coincide with health care system stress beyond a certain level.

Universal testing and full identification, isolation, and clearance of all patients across multiple checkpoints would result in the fewest number subject to confinement, confined in the least broad of areas for the shortest periods of time.

OTOH if insignificant testing has been achieved, lockdown itself will need to be inversely universal and long-lasting.

There is an exponential component involved, so the effect will be felt sooner than you think.

Theoretically either way, it's possible no one will be able to be unconfined across multiple checkpoints without a real-time valid negative test or credential.

That decision could be the same either way.

But the fewer and less reliable the tests, the fewer the number of citizens that can be expected to be allowed to move about with some freedom.

After pandemic stress exceeds the magnitude where there can be no treatment resources for additional patients anyway, movement will certainly not be relaxed, and those who might have had a chance with earlier & more thorough action & testing will be left to expire undertested in confinement.

Not every scenario is that uplifting.

Due to the excess rate of confinement resulting from inadequate testing, the greater stress on the marginal economic needs of a large contingent of the populace may result in a need for lockdowns to become oppressive enough to theoretically halt the spread of all possible crime in addition to disease.

Depends on how serious it gets, if it's bad enough you could get unrulyness or looting like there is during some disasters regardless.
That 10,000 number looks like it was a combined u.s. plus europe.
If we let covid-19 run rampant through the u.s. and Europe we're talking about one to several million deaths.

And 100k seems high for 2 some odd million people losing health insurance for a couple of years.
If you read the whole thread he himself says in the end that the situation is not portrayed accurately. So take this with a grain of salt to say the least.
There is a very cheap and effective way to keep surfaces free from coronavirus (without having to continually spray them) that few people seem to have picked up on: copper

https://youtu.be/Qb2oWYMrFn8

It kills a wide variety of bacteria & viruses, including coronavirus: https://www.copperclothing.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Co...

Covering surfaces with copper sheeting could be a bit costly, but copper foil tape is really cheap, and easy to apply.
Hey everyone, here’s our new service, but sorry, you can’t actually sign up and use it. We aren’t actually even sure we have a product yet, just a landing page for it. Subscribe for updates though...

/s
What If We Could Fight Coronavirus with Artificial Intelligence? [pdf]
Agreed. Kay &co’s lack of followthrough pains me something awful. Great ideas, promising experiments; but without taking it all the way to finished proven product, that’s all they’ll ever be. And definitely, if they don’t do it themselves, no-one’s going to do it for them.

For the other truth is that most people just plain don’t like change, least of all radical change. And programmers are no exception. I mean, they may fancy themselves as brave pioneering visionary techno-utopians building this wonderful new world for everyone, but truth is most are so reactionary ultra-conservative they’d make your crazy John Bircher great uncle blush, and the only future they’re building for everyone else is the one that looks exactly like their own past. Because that’s where their comfort zone is, and that’s where they intend to keep it.

Me, I don’t have a comfort zone to preserve: I’m completely uncomfortable everywhere in life. But it is, at least, liberating. :)

--

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw
All Public Schools in NYC Suspended
I don’t know. The tube in London at peak hour looks like to me as an even better spreading zone than a school. Not much we can do about that.
I feel like this page really nails down the key feature that makes great STEM notes: lots and lots of examples. And they're fully worked out too, showing all steps from formula to result.

So much technical documentation and tutorials and what-have-you seems to want to stay on an entirely conceptual level, when just throwing in a single example can make things so much easier to digest.
Warehouse employees tend to be quite far apart at almost all points in time except breaks, at all warehouses I've worked at.

On top of this, I believe current science says that covid-19 survives extremely poorly on most surfaces for the periods of time that are involved with storage + shipping.
I don't think it's harsh -- I think it's a good attitude to question this stuff.

I put myself in the shoes of the gym, coffee shop, or restaurant owner... The businesses that contribute to our communities but likely won't be consolidated into bigger companies. They add value to our communities without necessarily being hugely profitable. I think it's good to support those businesses.

I wish I had a stronger economic argument but I don't, right now.
sorry for spamming my own reply, but here's what 21 days after in China looks like:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587840
Some more hypothetical explanations:

- Italy has a large fraction of the population over 70.

- The proportion of smokers is larger in Italy.

- The amount of close contact between the “mobile” part of the population (in schools and offices) and elderly people may be higher.

Not sure what the statistics are in Germany vs Italy on that final point but if I were to guess I’d say elderly taking care of grandchildren or even living together with the younger generation is a phenomenon that still exists in Italy.
The SEC didn't exist in 1914: it was created in 1934. It's complicating to compare events of then to the modern era.
South Korea had no mandatory shutdown, but according to Suki Kim nearly the entire city of Daegu voluntarily self-quarantined shortly after Patient 31 was confirmed positive. (Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-south-korea-los... plus personal communication)
The general response to this would be that the amount of testing can shift the prognosis by couple of days. Is New York 14 days behind Italy, or 10 days, or 20 days? Doesn't matter if no action is taken, and the best results will be achieved by taking action immediately.
Silicon Valley Ramps Up Efforts to Tackle Virus
From the "Appendix / methodology" section at the bottom of the page:

> "Day 1" is when a country reaches 100 cases. A country is "X days behind Italy" if they reached 100 cases that many days after Italy did.
I had to lookup one such claim yesterday. Maybe a domain name like 'corona fake news' is still available?
This won't be any regular lay off. Bars and restaurants are all shutting. Retail stores can't stay open. 60% of the workforce may be out of work in 3 months time. This might be an economic collapse.
How do you measure "less dangerous than influenza"? Honestly I think it is likely in some jurisdictions to be in the final analysis less dangerous (raw population wide deaths over the season) than influenza. But I think it's worth being cautious (and am contributing and setting an example by self-isolating), because there's a small but worrisome chance it's way worse than influenza.

Why is this important? Because if knowledge authorities go around talking about severity with scary talking points, and in the end, it doesn't turn out to be so, then we wind up in a "boy who cried wolf" situation next time.
I know I'm not the target audience but I'm at the point where if the most salient element on a startup's website is a button that says "Get Started" or "Request Access" I hit the back button.

This fluffy nonsense is really starting to feel lame.
Attempted Stripe Atlas user here. While the product looks great, it doesn’t cover all corner cases of business creation, so we ended up not being able to use it. It turns out that following this revelation, we had to scrap the associated Stripe account just to be able to rid ourselves of the “complete your Atlas application” (or similar) at the top of the dashboard too. Just one anecdote.
What are you going to do when its time to teach your kid an "anatomy" lesson?
Yep, sorry, you’re right. I got them backwards. Eh, too many edits, not enough checks.:)
function loginAction(evt) {
evt.preventDefault();
const password = inputPasswordEl.current.value;
props.db.getAllUsers()
.then(querySnapshot => {
const users = [];
querySnapshot.forEach(function (doc) {
const userObject = Object.assign({}, doc.data(), { id: doc.id });
users.push(userObject);
});
const userFound = findUserMatch(password, users);

+

export function findUserMatch(password, users) {
return users.find(user => {
return bcrypt.compareSync(password, user.userKey)
});
}

With modern React, I can’t tell whether this is server-side, client-side, or potentially both. If it’s server-side, that’s ideal, because the way the server stops responding to all requests for several minutes will make you fix this before that Firebase query really starts costing (but still, why does this exist). If it’s client-side, are you really exposing every user’s hash to offline attack?

export function saveMasterPassword(masterPassword) {
const simpleCrypto = new SimpleCrypto(MASTER_PASS_SECRET);
const cookies = new Cookies();
const masterPass = simpleCrypto.encrypt(masterPassword);
cookies.set(COOKIE_MASTER_PASSWORD, masterPass, { path: '/' });
}

(uppercase values are server-side constants)

If you’re serving the same cookie encryption secret to everyone, is it really a secret?

function cypherObject(object) {
const cookies = new Cookies();
const masterPass = getMasterPassword();
var simpleCrypto = new SimpleCrypto(masterPass);
if (typeof object === 'object') {
const object = JSON.stringify(object);
}
return simpleCrypto.encrypt(object);
}

simple-crypto-js uses 100 rounds of PBKDF2 to derive an AES key from `masterPass` here, so your brute-force resistance to an attacker with access to the encrypted secrets comes from 100-round PBKDF2, not 2^10-round bcrypt.

I would recommend Bitwarden instead.
I love docker swarm. It just doesn’t have the mindshare that k8s has. I wish it had caught on
I agree with the content. I wonder whether the title “Don’t be Italy” still holds. US might be past the point already where Italy was locked down.
This is PRETTY but I really wish we had more interfaces with growth curves. The only one I see updating regularly is the WHO data set[1], which lets you see the day-to-day growth and whether there is a levelling off.

If you have recommendations for reviewing growth curves based on actual data, I'd love to see that!

[1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5b...
It's too late for contact tracing NOW. Contact tracing is the "relaxed" solution after we bazooka the virus with a quarantine such that the virus dies in 99% of current hosts. That brings the numbers down to a manageable level so that contact tracing will be effective.
>> never seen so many statisticians and virologists pop up

The same people were prominent internet economists and political scientists just a month ago. They have many talents.
If anyone knows: How were RFCs distributed before the modern Internet as we know it existed?
The Italian government wasn't even that bad in this occasion. Italy's been the first western country to be badly hit, and given the exponential spread of the virus it had very little time to take absolutely unprecedented measures. Other countries have it a little bit easier as they can see what happened in Italy and follow the same road, earlier.

Also, take in account that the Lombardy region and the Milan area are one of the most densely populated in Europe, with a huge traffic of people for business and tourism, as well as the economic center of the country. Preventing and containing the epidemic wasn't easy at all, and the decision to quarantine it extremely difficult given its importance.
This is more to help people avoid losing their jobs and paychecks as demand craters and business look to cut costs.
> Do you have a source for 80-90% collapse in China? That sounds way high

I live in Shanghai. It normally takes about two weeks for things to go back to normal after Lunar New Year ends, which was two months ago. Things are not yet back to normal. Maybe 30% of office workers are back at work, 50% maximum. Gyms, bars, restaurants are almost all still closed. The dental hospital is still closed. You can basically write off February and at least half of March for economic production.
> Sometimes the perfect measure on paper doesn't work the way people imagine

This is true. Here in Belgium all restaurants and non-essential shops closed. The day before this took effect, restaurants were packed with people going out while they still could. The day after, people went shopping and dining en masse just over the border in France and the Netherlands, where the same measures had not been taken.
It doesn’t indeed until you consider the differences in how people live together, the fact this was building well before Italy became a crisis, and the age of their population.

I’m not trying to sugarcoat anything and we need to take drastic evasive action. But Italy is different when you consider the proximity to each other, population demographics, and onset parameters.
Speaking 100% from a point of ignorance, how far do you need to "zoom out" to be in compliance with HIPPA? Can the name of the hospitals treating cases be disclosed? The city where the hospital is located? I noticed that many county websites are showing the origin of the case, whether it was travel-related/community spread/etc.. If you could have that level of granularity, maybe you can have some geographic detail (hospital location, for instance) so that people could at least get a better feel for how close to home this is, encouraging them to socially distance.
Two non-government-related issues that I heard complicated the situation in Italy: just before the shutdown of the north, a lot of people fled the north and moved to other parts of the country, bringing the virus with them. And Italians are very family-oriented, and therefore less willing to socially isolate their elderly. Normally an admirable quality, but in this case it can endanger the most vulnerable group.
> "Day 1" is when a country reaches 100 cases. A country is "X days behind Italy" if they reached 100 cases that many days after Italy did.

Before 100 cases, the evolution of the epidemic is noisy, but it becomes pretty regular afterwards with 20-30% daily growth (in the absence of strong control measures).
Donate your unused CPU cycles to fight the Coronavirus
It is still gamesmanship and internal politics (do not add to panic) in France and Germany, their numbers for Western Europe zone that is heavily interconnected with Northern Italy (the unfortunate guinea pig of the entire West, also for a number of local and central government inefficiencies and incompetence) just do not add up... it was the same in Spain until yesterday too, but they went tits up and opted for full transparence. The United States seem further behind in that respect, but the Fed just went full bazooka with printing money and Trump can now deploy any given artillery in full.
Sunday afternoon the long distance trains in Germany had many Army and Navy personnel in uniform (which gets them free travel; may have been more in civvies paying their own way), including old reservists. We asked: they're preparing to institute mass isolation/quarantine, patrolling streets to "remind" people to stay at home.

It isn't a question of "if" such measures will become necessary, it's just when will a country accept this, and how many extra deaths will be caused in that interval.
Computers solve the legible problems. But scheduling is one where the problems lack in hard specification, and plans involve several "layers" of prioritization, so what's called for is approximate results that avoid failure modes, which is something a skilled human does pretty well.

I do think that software speeds up some parts of the process, but like so many automated processes, it's computer assistance, not computer intelligence.
Are there segments of the HN community which have been to such extremes as to feel the need to pay $5000 USD for a bottle of hand sanitizer?

Asking because I'm noticing that some others online are missing the fact that this is a comic, and not a 1:1 representation of how things are for the average person now. Which is normal maybe but not cool to watch.

This kind of emotional response seems (maybe irresponsibly, maybe not) brought to the forefront by details which have been over-magnified, and kept there, and that's how people start to make rash decisions and suffer from legitimate anxiety issues.

Last time we had an emergency where I live (last year), it wasn't cool at all because the joking of this kind had a bitter edge to it, and good people ended up in quite a panic, even going to the hospital seeking care because they are not used to even a little destabilization. In the end, most affected by the disaster were OK.

I'm not a fan of propaganda but I wish we could factor in the normal boring reality a bit more. People around me are going on hikes with their families today, and otherwise taking this a day at a time.

(With that said--props for a clever reference to the Bitcoin phenomenon. I get the joke, downvote if you feel the need to, but I do wonder if the joke is helping or hurting)
That too is my understanding. Italy really screwed up by turning hospitals into disaster zones. Other countries are not letting people with symptoms near hospitals, even for testing, unless they have severe breathing difficulties
Let's not overreact either. A sensible thing to do is to issue an executive order that protects employment during this time, freezes all kinds of credit payments, freezes rent payments. Perhaps the Treasury should guarantee payrolls, too.
Doh. Yes, you’re right: John Shutt. Homepage here:

https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/work.html
Right now we don’t know if immunity lasts long enough for herd immunity to work.
I seem to recall in the Marxist-Leninist schema that the contradictions of capitalism lead the workers to seize power through violent revolution and create a "dictatorship of the proletariat" that brings about socialism. Socialism itself is supposed to also collapse under its own contradictions and being about communism, a sort of anarcho-syndicalist utopia.

So, in a sense, you're right that "communist" is a misnomer (at least under the Marxist-Leninist scheme, which is clearly what the CCP is trying to emulate). However, it's hard to imagine a more apt description for the CCP and other far-left Marxist parties worldwide than "dictatorship of the proletariat."
Yes you are right, i meant GOSUB/RETURN. Though instead of "RESUME" (which should have been RETURN) most programs would use GOTO 20 (in an opposite expression of what Dijkstra wrote about, i accidentally used a 'function call' idiom instead of a spaghetti 'jump wherever' one :-P).
Maybe, in a smarter society, door handles are made of copper? (Or alloys if that's effective)
U.S. Government official: Coronavirus vaccine trial starts Monday
> ... I can go on and on... Just let me know. :-)

Please do! :). And please let me know when you have that blog post up, I'd love to read it. My mail is in the profile.
See also: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06300
It's amazing how reckless some people can be. Shut down restaurants to stop the spread of the virus, so people go to restaurants further away, to spread the virus even more. You'd think shutting everything down would be a pretty clear signal, but apparently a lot of people just don't care.
I think touting the benefits of widespread deaths is off topic here.
This is cool! Tickets to live shows are usually pretty pricey, and these are some of the best performances in the world.
Quote a few current nations were founded by serial or parallel killer revolutionary warriors -- er, terrorists.
Not back to square zero - you have the core of a new outbreak amidst wide-spread monitoring for it and a population that is generally practicing better infection control. So perhaps a few dozen are infected before the flames are doused again.
Ibuprofen already is known to lead to GI perforation and mental decline in the elderly, so there's rarely a compelling reason to administer it. Paracetamol is much safer over short durations for analgesic and antipyretic properties generally unless acute or chronic liver injury is suspected.
But at the same time, what percent of the population was in food distress prior to the crash of 1929, what percent had no access to medical facilities whatsoever, or could wind up in a situation where nobody was checking in on them and they couldn't put out an ask for help?

So a lot of things have changed, at least in the US, that make the infrastructure of resilience possible in a way that was specifically impossible in 1930.
> Not much we can do about that.

You can avoid packing people in the trains to that extent, for starters. Take temperature readings at all stations, so that the people with the worst symptoms (who are at the highest risk of spreading the virus) can be kept out. And spread out "peak hour" by having people enter and leave workplaces with flexible hours, while others just stay home altogether.
"you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" was made famous by Wayne Gretzky, who said he heard it from an old coach.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/381542/what-was-...
But I bet nobody will, because you know nobody wants a lynch mob looking for them

UK is still having giant music shows with thousands of people, Germany is not counting people with previous conditions, France had even a smurf convention (sigh!)

We all have a family member living in one of the EU countries and are all calling home sick worried because nobody is doing anything because “The Italians, any old excuse to, you know, shut down everything and stop work for a bit and have a long siesta.” (it's not a joke, a British TV personality really said that)

So maybe be like Italy and not like everybody else this time.

Seriously, I've been confined 3 weeks and am fine, but my friends calling me from abroad are crying for help, because they want to come back, but can't.
> No, the world is much more interconnected than in the 30s.

More, yes, but not much more. Agriculture, commodities, finished manufactured goods and finance were all global markets before WWI. The re-integration of markets only overtook that period in the 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union and before that the demise of Bretton Woods and managed trade.
HIPPA is about public safety.