The article is basically saying "we're going to be fine if we continue implementing extreme social distancing measures".
In other words, if we stop panicking, and big hotspots don't implement extreme social distancing measures, we won't be fine.
A certain level of panic is required to enforce efficacy of these social distance programs, so it seems dangerous to spread this message less people begin to act out of self interest.
A certain level of taking life and death situations seriously and doing the next right thing towards controlling the situation is required, from everybody.
Looks like he got lucky predicting 80000 cases and that is reported cases. He predicted the actual people that got tested and positive. He also is another one of those that the flu is worse and not understanding the high severity of many of the Covid cases is the thing that is what is worrying a lot of the professionals. The last thing is that the economics involved that may not make things fine in 1-2 year period, you cannot restart an economy like a light switch.
I feel like the headline is somewhat irresponsible. The framing encourages a "don't worry, be happy" attitude. Reading the article, the message is more like "If we keep doing the right things, we will be fine."
The problem with such a headline is it can be misinterpreted to mean you don't need to make any effort whatsoever for things to "be fine." I think this is not a great signal to send.
Exactly: I've actually been somewhat alarmist early on about this virus, but I actually agree with the article. We've had to make some crazy sacrifices in the last 2 weeks, but now that we've done those, things are actually looking moderately optimistic:
Most of the US hopefully isn't going to become a "big Italy", besides a few unfortunate hotspots. Other areas will still see heavy infections, but likely without overwhelming the hospital systems, if we maintain at least some far more moderate social distancing measures for another year.
...I do worry about the Deep South, due to poverty and lack of leadership by governors in that area.
I am doing what I can to make resources available online. I've done this a long time. I'm encouraged to see a lot of online resources popping up in response to this.
My hope is that the most vulnerable areas will get some relief from local issues because of the availability of online resources.
I run a Citizen Planners subforum. I write a bit about making money online. Etc.
There's a lot of free information available online and the internet proved to be a hugely helpful thing for me when I was homeless. It's proving to be a big deal for helping people cope in the face of quarantines, etc.
I'm cautiously optimistic -- assuming we continue to take it seriously and don't decide it's time to dance in the streets and party like it's 1999.
As a general response to this thread: it's a big problem over here in The Netherlands that apparently tons of people are not properly practicing 'social distancing'. There have been quite a few frustrating images shared that showed a sign imploring people to keep 1.5m distance with a huge crowd right next to it waiting to be let into some particular section of a park. Also pictures of health care workers expressing their frustration at dealing with things while the rest of the country acts like it's just a big vacation.
I expect that possibly tonight the government will impose a stronger quarantine as a result, which is a shame. I had hoped we'd collectively better at following advice.
More specifically in response to you: is there a way to discuss with you one of these days what you're working on and perhaps in particular how perhaps advice on how we might help the homeless here? I'd very much like to chat about that, whether via email or some other channel.
I think the bigger issue that we'll need to address after we handle the case influx is how we'll go about achieving herd immunity.
I'm starting to think it might be wise to consider letting small, not-at-risk populations out with the intention of allowing the virus to spread in a fashion that wouldn't overwhelm the health systems. A controlled burn, if you will. I'd definitely join in to something like this.
Question to the virologists on HN: human cells have some limits on how many generations they can be copied, have there even been similar mechanisms observed in viruses?
Not a virologist but a (former) molecular biologist. Hayflick limit is largely controlled by telomeres; viruses do not have telomeres due to a different mechanism of replication.
I’m not a virologist, but I did pay attention in biology class fwiw.
Evolutionary, a virus that can only replicate a few times is a dead end. That’d be like mule, a viable life form, but one that cannot reproduce successfully.
Think about the mechanisms of cells with generation limits, I’d intuit that they preform functions related to morphogenisis (we only want this bone to be this long), and forcing evolutionary iteration by limiting the maximum age of a individual. I’d posit that extreme longevity is an affront to evolution.
I could be totally off my rocker with the second part, but I’d like to think that a basic knowledge of biology and an obsession with cellular automata might have given me a useful intuition.
I was thinking more along the lines of a virus that is able to reproduce indefinitely in one species, but after a species jump ends up being able to reproduce only a limited number of generations due to the copying mechanism being subtly different in the host cell of the new species. But you're right that from an evolutionary standpoint such a virus would be a dead end if it happened in any species.
It would very much depend on how - and if - the different ribosomes and other cell mechanisms responsible for copying the viruses RNA (or DNA in some cases) would deal with the virus.
The effect you'd see would be a species jump, followed by a very virulent episode fizzling out when the copy errors accumulated to the point that the copies would no longer be viable.
Note that human stem cells and cancer cells do not have a limit on how many times they can divide. This is because they possess the enzyme telomerase.
Also, note that in human reproduction, there is an unbroken lineage of cell divisions through generations (egg and sperm are produced by specialized cell divisions called meiosis, and combine in sexual reproduction to develop a new human who can eventually produce more egg or sperm).
However, it is true that differentiated somatic cells (most of the cells in your body) cannot divide indefinitely.
A virus, unlike a differentiated somatic cell, does not have an intrinsic limit to how many times it can replicate. It hijacks cellular machinery to make an exact replica of itself (+/- any replication errors a.k.a. mutations that occur).
However, a virus that becomes evolutionarily unfit could go extinct. If you look at phylogenetic trees of viruses, there are many branches that go extinct (become a dead end). But there are other branches that continue succeeding. All of this is driven by evolutionary dynamics rather than by a lack of telomerase leading to a hard limit on the number of times the virus can replicate.
Now, just to blow your mind, oncogenic viruses like certain strains of HPV can induce human cells to produce telomerase and become able to divide indefinitely! Wowww this is so confusing!
Key points missing from the headline: social distancing is necessary, PPE supplies must be sufficient, and healthcare system must not have broken down for us ‘to be fine’.
He predicted the Chinese cessation of outbreak correctly because China consistently implemented the lockdown plan across regions and had strict measures to make sure of compliance.
From what we see, few western countries have bended the infection trajectory sufficiently to see the outbreak ending soon. Some people’s behaviors and general lack of mask wearing don’t help. (I think Germany may eventually accomplish that. The 2-person-max meeting rule and relatively extensive testing should help.)
We must read professional epidemiologists, like Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, whose expertise is more relevant and who don’t have nearly as rosy a view on the epidemic. (Marc is also on Twitter.)
>few western countries have bended the infection trajectory sufficiently to see the outbreak ending soon.
There's an expected lag, we saw that in the Wuhan lockdown. Beyond a certain density of infection though, maybe it just won't be effective enough.
Wuhan lockdown was Jan 23rd and cases continued to rise for some time after because there is an incubation period, and additional family (and maybe within apartment building?) infection.
Italy lockdown is just where they were Wuhan was on Feb 2nd or so, it didn't look like it was slowing down enough for them at that point, but then did.
The lagging effect is true. What we see is a snapshot to the past. However, most accounts suggest that the European 'lockdown', esp early days in Italy, is too lax.
The trajectory will bend down. Whether it's sufficient we'll see in a couple of weeks, but that might be too late.
If preventative measures aren't employed correctly, then eventually, most people are going to watch someone they know die. I reckon that experience will cause them to employ preventative measures immediately.
Let's imagine how this will play out for a minute....
Assuming 1 person knows 100 people, it would take 1 million deaths to seriously warn 100 million. And since it takes 3-4 weeks from infection to death, during which the warning still wouldn't be personally grave, and infections continue to spread. Thus, the population will be infected until herd immunity is sufficiently high (~60% of population if R0 is ~2.5). [1]
If hospitalization rate is 15% & Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is 1%, then 9%/0.6% of the population will be severely ill/die within 1-2 years, respectively, just from this one disease. One can do further arithmetic for a given country.
The 'solution' above is clearly unacceptable to the vast majority of people.
At the moment it's looking like France is doing better than Germany. Many Eastern European countries acted early too, and it looks to be working. Lots of graphs here: http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/
The number of deaths and those in critical/severe conditions are better measures than the number of infections. The latter greatly depends on testing policy and availability.
Germany is doing better than most in Europe by the former measures.
South Korea also had a higher infection growth rate since they tested extensively. Because of that they can identify cases and contain the spread.
Agreed, but in the end what will make most difference is getting off of exponential growth soonest. If you don't do that, no country can care for the surge of patients. South Korea is the only country to shut down exponential growth once it got properly started without a complete shutdown of the country.
If what I've seen in the grocery stores of the bay area is representative of overall behavior in the US, we're screwed. People still have very little awareness of personal space and very few people were wearing masks. Unless people commit to actual social distancing, there's no way we're going to stop the spread.
It would help, I think, if such claims were supported in ways that didn't make them sound like conspiracy theories and fearmongering.
Perhaps you'd like to do so. If not, consider that this is a singularly bad time to be spreading misinformation, no matter how plausible you may find it. People are already frightened enough.
They have also kicked out american media so there are no independent fact checkers on the ground.
Their official death rate is also lower than every other country's.
Thus, the null hypothesis is that china is lying, like they always do. A claim that they are not lying would need to be supported by evidence. Otherwise this is just the fallacy of an appeal to authority.
We have tons of non-China sources, and their death rate is low because of their overwhelmingly aggressive response and tactics, which were lauded by the WHO.
Translated: On March 20th, A local community management issued a notice, stating that one of the unit has 2 patient found, the unit will be sealed and no one is allowed to enter or exit.
It essentaily means that they are starving to death in the room.
So, I'm not to trust a government - which is fair; I don't - but a totally unsourced and unverifiable Reddit post is 100% okay? When its claim is that the CCP is competent enough to enforce the murder by starvation of two innocent people, while the existence of the post that makes the claim implies that the CCP is too incompetent to prevent word of such a crime getting out, even to the point of issuing an official document to prove they're doing it?
Do you see what I mean about seeming like a conspiracy theory? Heinlein's Red-baiting about Soviet cosmonauts unpersoned when their early space capsules failed and stranded them, despite being nonsense, had at least the virtue of originality. But that was over half a century ago. I'd like to hope our standards have risen in the interim.
You are being a bit naive about journalism in an authoritarian country that has control over digital media coming out of the country. The fact that this picture made it out (suggesting that image recognition/AI censor rules are still naive in China) is proof enough that there are voices desperately trying to tell the outside world - don’t trust their government!!
Have you considered it takes a while for cases to filter up or down? Incompetence is usually a better candidate than malice. It could be they'll report it a few days from now, or that these cases were found and reported a few days prior to the 20th and were folded into earlier reportings. For instance, if the cases were identified and reported on the 18th, and the notice was posted on the 20th, that would remain consistent.
Stop with the unfounded speculation and fearmongering.
> Except China is clearly lying about having their outbreak contained. I'm not sure why this is so difficult for everyone to realize.
You have no data to back up your totally spurious allegations. Are you just outright speculating? If you're going to say something so bold, citations are necessary.
What we do know is this:
- Apple has re-opened their factories and all 42 Apple stores in all of China [1], and closed their Apple stores in the entire rest of the world [2]. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Apple would do this except in the face of evidence. What kind of PR nightmare do you think they'd be inviting if it was discovered they put lives at risk to placate the PRC?
- Tourist attractions and factories are re-opening. [3]
- The WHO said: "China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic. A particularly compelling statistic is that on the first day of the advance team’s work there were 2478 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported in China. Two weeks later, on the final day of this Mission, China reported 409 newly confirmed cases. This decline in COVID-19 cases across China is real." [4]
- I've no doubt this will be confirmed via observation of atmospheric release of nitrous oxides in short order.
Fine, if you don't want to believe China, Apple or the WHO (and soon NASA), you better have some data, otherwise it's just breathless unsubstantiated fear-mongering and conspiracy theories.
I’ve heard that rather than eliminate all new cases, the best we can hope to achieve would be to slow down the spread so our health system isn’t overwhelmed all at once (most of us would get the virus, just not all at once). Somehow China is claiming to achieve the complete elimination goal rather than the more pragmatic slow the spread goal. Which begs the question, what are we getting wrong in the rest of the world?
> Which begs the question, what are we getting wrong in the rest of the world?
They literally locked people in their homes in the entirety of Wuhan (population 19 million) for a month and sent drones after them if they walked out. It's really not possible for a disease to spread if people are physically isolated. That much is settled science haha.
The difference is China kept people apart by force, and much of the west doesn't have the necessary respect for authority to do so voluntarily. One comment I replied to here someone literally quoted me the national anthem as their justification for going outside and ignoring the shelter-in-place orders.
If there's one thing a totalitarian government can do effectively, it's lock people indoors.
WHO claimed the virus was not contagious up until Jan 20. They are not a trustworthy source but a propaganda arm of the Chinese communist party. The claim that their figures are true is simply an appeal to authority not even backed up by any argument that the supposed authority is even trustworthy.
The United Nations World Health Organization, contributed to by the entire world, is a propaganda arm of the Chinese. [citation needed]. Weird, as of 2012, the largest annual assessed contributions from member states came from the United States ($110 million), Japan ($58 million), Germany ($37 million), United Kingdom ($31 million) and France ($31 million). [1]
They may well have been wrong, or made mistakes early on. You can't exactly claim that the US' response was bang on the money the whole time either. Remember two weeks ago when Donald Trump told us this was nothing to worry about then the next day declared a national emergency then the day after invoked the defense procurement act then did nothing with it? Remember a few days ago when he called it the "deep state department" in front of Fauci who couldn't contain his laughter? Is Donald Trump a propaganda arm of the Chinese? Uh actually wait don't answer that, but you get my point.
It's usually incompetence not malice. Provide sources, not speculation.
While I don’t believe the line that their new cases are at zero, I have a lot of contact with the Asian and Chinese supply chain and I can assure you that things are mostly back to normal with Chinese factories. So the situation in China is much improved at the very least.
Question from the cheap seats here : what causes a virus to "burn itself out" or fail to keep replicating? A lack of new hosts it can infect? Environmental details (heat, humidity)?
I am not a credible source on this, but I believe if we achieve heard immunity the virus burns itself out because it will eventually not find new hosts to infect. The virus has to keep finding new hosts, because otherwise the people infected will either get well and gain immunity or die. If enough people gain immunity then the virus can't spread anymore. Not everyone has to be become immune, just enough.
The problem is that for this virus, "just enough" immune people is about 60% of the population. If 1% of that 60% die, as will happen with COVID19, that's a lot of deaths.
The other alternative is social distancing, so you can reduce R0 (the number of people each infected person passes the virus on to) from something like 2.5-3 down to less than 1. Then it dies back by itself. This is what China and South Korea succeeded in doing.
Yes, and I think we wouldn't need to wait until the coronavirus is completely dead to end complete social distancing, just until it becomes manageable to track and isolate just those still infected.
Since this is hacker news, where is the Girardian analysis? This situation seems to call for it with the fear of outsiders and scapegoating. Hard to worry about mimetic contagion when there is a real contagion?
We're going to be fine... whew, that's a relief...
> Levitt said the social-distancing mandates are critical
...as long as we practice fastidious social distancing, which, at least in the U.S., big parts of the country are utterly failing at...
> The goal needs to be better early detection — not just through testing but perhaps with body temperature surveillance...and immediate social isolation.
...and if we have widely deployed testing, which the U.S. government has failed at spectacularly.
So: We're going to be fine if we take this seriously and have a coordinated, competent government response. I'll be in my doomsday bunker if anyone needs me.
1. The fact that the author is a Nobel laureate adds no weight to his conclusions. The Nobel laureate who invented PCR was otherwise what I would describe as "crazy" - he was a notorious HIV denialist for years. Not saying this Nobel laureate is, but Nobels go for novel discoveries, not for being the best scientist.
2. Look at the amount of extreme lockdowns that have been deployed in China for months to get this reduction in transmission (assuming they aren't lying). There was a Twitter thread posted here recently describing the current situation in Wuhan, and their "lightened" levels of current restrictions are way more intense then any of the shelter-in-place restrictions in the US.
Uh, why the hell would we listen to a chemist’s opinion about a pandemic? There is literally a whole field of science that studies this, and it’s not remotely similar to chemistry.
If you don't do what China or South Korea did, we're not "going to be fine". The US handling of this is extremely poor. One shouldn't give the people false hope.
This was my initial reaction, but it seems that he came to this conclusion after analyzing the numbers in other countries as well.
> He analyzed 78 countries with more than 50 reported cases of COVID-19 every day and sees “signs of recovery.” He’s not looking at cumulative cases, but the number of new cases every day — and the percentage growth in that number from one day to the next.
> Levitt acknowledges that his figures are messy, and that the official case counts in many areas are too low because testing is spotty. But even with incomplete data, “a consistent decline means there’s some factor at work that is not just noise in the numbers,” he said.
I also don't think you (and others) should be gleefully clutching pearls for too long just yet. Yes, western governments have been woefully unprepared and very slapshot in their response to this. Yes, valuable time was wasted. But please avoid the trap the media wants to drown us all in, that of despair and permanent anxiety.
We will solve this, one way or another. It won't be easy, and there will be a ton of pain (a lot of which is already being felt). But a solution will be found (my best guess: probably a vaccine in the medium to long run, and in the short to medium term stronger testing and isolation regimes to let us get back to some semblance of normal life again)
Beating this thing requires sacrifice and it seems very few people are willing to voluntarily do it. There is no reason to despair or panic or be anxious if you are following the proper precautions to prevent its spread.
I think there is just cause for spreading fear until people get it into their heads that this is serious and behave accordingly, at which point the focus needs to switch towards keeping people optimistic and healthy in isolation without social interaction.
The alternative is millions of deaths and a collapse of our medical system.
China and S. Korea did very different things. It appears likely that only China needed to do what China did, and that the rest of the world can kill off this pandemic with less draconian measures.
In the U.S., our nearly complete lack of leadership at the federal level set us back by at least a month, but state and local governments are catching up fast.
15,000 people are dead. Forget being fine for a moment. This is a substantial loss of life compared to recent wars. That number is guaranteed to, at the absolute minimum, double, but has a more probable lower bound at 100,000.
This will be a death toll that hasn’t been seen in a lifetime. Yeah, maybe the economy won’t collapse. Maybe it will. Regardless, it’s unkind to downplay the severity of the situation.
H1N1 in 2009-10 is best estimated to have killed somewhere from 200k to over half a million people - without the widespread global mitigation measures we are witnessing today. So, hard to say now if it will be a death toll that hasn't been seen in a lifetime.
At a macro level, we need perspective. This year around 3 million people will die for various reasons in the US. 15K deaths would be a rounding error, and even 100K wouldn't move the needle much.
COVID19 is scary and we should respond, but we are panicking well out of proportion to the threat. We should continue to make our best effort to prevent it from spreading while getting society back to some kind of normal footing, and then use the lesson as an opportunity to improve our preparations and planning for the next time.
I think a good lower bound for the number of COVID19-related deaths in the USA without proper measures is somewhere in the millions, not hundreds of thousands. And that includes a very large blow to our medical system.
This is one of those cases where the disease is far worse than the cure.
What you are reporting is disingenuous and uninformed. CDC estimations of flu deaths in 2019 suggest that the number you provide match a regular flu season. Note that this source provides US only stats: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
Do CDC do the same as UK, who apparently report all additional Winter deaths as "flu" (which rather helpfully for the government shifts focus away from poor elderly care during "austerity", still being cut further AFAICT). Only the ONS (Office for National Statistics) also report the actual verified data on flu and instead of numbers O(10k) it's O(100).
For 2017, the most recent year, it's ~450 deaths total for the UK [1], vs an anticipated infection rate of 20% of the adult population and 50% of the rest. That's 450/15M, 0.003%.
Reported death rates are O(1%) for Covid19.
Could you explain that discrepancy?
The BMJ (British Medical Journal) has some discussion of the controversy of over-reporting of flu deaths here [2].
Re those CDC figures, do you really have ~200,000 people hospitalised with flu each month in USA?
But how many "Covid" deaths would have been attributed to something else if we hypothetically had never become aware of it? Hopefully we are able to answer this someday, with more reliable data, and a thorough analysis of the events that are occurring at the moment. I could see the answer ranging from "all of them" to "much less than the majority currently think". I just hope we can answer it with confidence, so we are better prepared in the future.
This shouldn't be compared to a war, in terms of death count. We never want to take death lightly, but a large percentage of the deaths happening now are in people that are already very sick or old and likely to be severely affected by a number of health ailments and infections.
In other words, if we stop panicking, and big hotspots don't implement extreme social distancing measures, we won't be fine.
A certain level of panic is required to enforce efficacy of these social distance programs, so it seems dangerous to spread this message less people begin to act out of self interest.