
“I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing” - michaelt
https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1238837158007447558
======
mcsb4
I don't understand why we are not trying to interrupt the transmission vectors
with masks and hand sanitizer like the Chinese do. They ramped the daily
production from 10M to 100M and even advised the use of make-shift masks.

The reaction in the west: masks are not protecting 100% and also we don't have
any and we are too lazy to produce them, although they are much cheaper than
the economic impact covid-19 has.

1\. you go out, you wear a mask

2\. you are not allowed into a super market without hand sanitizing

3\. you clean your hands when coming home or going into your office

4\. wear any kind of glasses

We _know_ the transmission vectors but the whole response in the west is
solely based on quarantaine - like we would still not know what viruses are
and how they are transmitted.

Reducing social contact is one thing, reducing virus dispersion is the other
and it is cheap.

You have a sewing machine? Go start making masks.

~~~
marcus_holmes
In Asia, where mask-wearing is common (part of the culture, nothing to do with
COVID), sick people wear masks. It's very practical, and also a social signal
that "I am ill". As a manager of a business in SE Asia, people coming in sick
but wearing masks was awesome. The mask-wearing reduced their infectiousness
(because the mask stops saliva-borne virus communication) and made it OK to
come in to work if you're feeling well enough to work. It's socially
acceptable to not shake a mask-wearer's hand or otherwise touch them. It's as
much social signal as anything ("I might be infectious, I'm not going to be
offended if you treat me as a walking virus bomb").

Part of the problem for the West is that we wear masks when _we_ don't want to
get sick. Masks don't really work for this (the rest of the mask-wearer still
gets covered in virus). And if we're diagnosed sick, then we stop wearing
masks. Again, that's not how the mask thing works, because this is when masks
are most useful. Both as a social signal and practical way of reducing
infectiousness.

To use masks effectively, we need to stop wearing them when we're scared, and
start wearing them when we're infected. But I think the social change to do
this will be difficult.

~~~
pas
> To use masks effectively, we need to stop wearing them when we're scared,
> and start wearing them when we're infected. But I think the social change to
> do this will be difficult.

Not exactly. Just make it mask season and make everybody wear it. You don't
know when you are contagious/infectious, and it might not be at the same time
when you are feeling sick. So just make sure everyone wears it.

~~~
marcus_holmes
I don't think it's practical to insist that everyone wears a mask all the
time.

~~~
gji
Practical from a cultural standpoint or in terms of quantity? IIRC, people are
required to wear masks when entering businesses in China now.

------
ohazi
> How long immunity lasts for following covid-19 infection is the biggest
> unknown. Comparison with other Coronaviridae suggests it may be relatively
> short-lived (i.e. months).

Anyone have sources for this?

I've been skeptical of the rumors about reinfection, because they seem to be
based on tests coming back positive after recovery, but the tests are rt-PCR
based, and your body will be shedding leftover bits of RNA as it flushes out
viral remnants long after recovery, so this seems expected.

As far as I'm aware, immunity to most viruses is long-lasting or permanent,
with the obvious exception being if the virus mutates enough to look different
to your immune system. Is this assumption wildly off?

~~~
Arkhaine_kupo
I remember reading they expect immunity to last as little as 6 months for
Covid-19, found this paper about the SARS outbreak of 2002 which was also a
type of corona virus, saying patients had an average immunity of 2 years.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/)

~~~
ohazi
Wikipedia-grade non-biologist here, so again, feel free to correct me if I'm
wrong.

As far as I'm aware, antibodies don't stick around after they're no longer
needed... They're produced by B cells when an infection is detected, and after
an initial infection, some B cells that learned how to make effective
antibodies stick around in your body as "memory B cells" \- these will produce
the same antibodies again upon reinfection.

Counting antibodies a few years after a SARS infection doesn't seem like it
would tell you much about immunity.

~~~
Pepe1vo
It's correct that the memory cells in your body will last a long time.
However, (I think) what the parent is getting at is that within a relatively
short amount of time the virus will have mutated just enough to evade
detection by those memory cells.

~~~
PaulKeeble
The other four coronavirus' that form part of what we call the common cold all
mutate readily and come back and reinfect us year after year. This one could
be different but there is plenty of good historical reason to believe it will
be like the others.

------
jonrimmer
In this event, the solution will be the creation of a permanent, South Korea
and China inspired infrastructure for testing, tracking and constraining
infectious citizens by all developed countries. Regardless of the privacy and
civil liberty concerns, I think that's where we'll eventually end up, and to
your children it will one day seem crazy that a person with an infectious
illness was once able to freely walk the streets.

~~~
londons_explore
Imagine a future where you do a swab test every morning while brushing your
teeth. If you had any of thousands of infectious diseases, you're required to
stay home. The test would take only 5 minutes, and you get fined if you don't
do it, and receive sick pay if you test positive.

I imagine that within a few years of rolling this out, common colds might be a
thing of the past, and overall worker productivity higher rather than lower.

~~~
keiferski
Imagine a future where you do a swab every morning while brushing your teeth
and your testosterone and adrenaline levels are evaluated for likelihood of
engaging in Anti-Social or Anti-Authority Activity. Individuals with high
levels are locked into their apartments and subject to online training
courses. Repeated violations result in a visit from the authorities.

Yeah, no thanks. Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some
surveillance state dystopian nightmare.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
But it needs to be based on good science. As someone in thread said, the false
positive rate needs to be staggeringly low. And the false positive for
Testosterone -> AntiSocial behaviour is huge - marathon runners to
entrepreneurs and weight lifters.

So the _idea_ is good - test people for something bad they _will_ do - but the
ability to test reliably for all the bad things is real low. I think we shall
just stick to past crime not FutureCrime for now.

And honestly, using "bad authoritarian governments do bad things with good
tools so we should not use those tools" does not make a good argument. it just
means we need to double down on democracy.

~~~
keiferski
I don't think it is a good idea or good tool _at all._ I don't need or want
some external authority to tell me if I'm allowed to leave my house. I used
the example of "Anti Social" behavior as a joke and I thought that was
obvious...but apparently not. The idea is entirely antithetical to a free
society.

As someone indicated in another comment, the proper way to do this is through
personalized incentives and social encouragement, not through authoritarian
state action.

~~~
scotty79
> I don't need or want some external authority to tell me if I'm allowed to
> leave my house.

In a world full of Covid19 mutations, some even more lethal than the current
one you actually might need external authority to tell you if you can leave
the house because you yourself will lack technology to asses the risks
involved and your decision making even if you have the information might be
very dangerous to other peoples freedoms.

You still might not want that because people's wants are not necessarily
reasonable.

~~~
keiferski
As I said in the original comment:

> Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state
> dystopian nightmare.

The authoritarian response of shutting everything down, locking people in
their homes and instituting all-but-in-name-martial law seems like a massive
lack of creativity to me. Plagues are not a new phenomenon. We can come up
with better solutions - as Taiwan and Singapore seem to be doing. Throwing
away the rights and benefits of a free society should be the _last_ solution.

~~~
scotty79
Authority is not authoritarian if it tries to make you do the most
scientifically reasonable thing.

~~~
Mirioron
Yes it is. Science advances one funeral at a time. The most scientifically
reasonable thing can still be wrong. If an authority forces everyone to do the
same, then everyone would be wrong. And this is all assuming that there is
zero corruption at play, which is unlikely.

Everyone should do the scientifically proven swab test every morning. The test
has very strict requirements that were created by politicians and industry
professionals working together! As it happens, only one company creates a
rigorous enough test to fit the criteria. Thus every test is bought from said
company. Is the test actually any good? Of course! Who has _ever_ heard about
bs being published as science before?

~~~
scotty79
> The most scientifically reasonable thing can still be wrong.

Yes, it can be. But you still should do what science says because relying on
science is the only way you could make knowledge base decision, because
science is the only way we actually know things.

If you decide to act other way to what science dictates and it leads to better
outcome, then you were right by sheer luck and can't really claim that you
made the right call. You made the wrong one which by sheer luck turned out
well.

~~~
Mirioron
Do you brush your teeth? Have you ever looked into why brushing your teeth is
good scientifically? How many people do you think have done that? Yet we all
brush our teeth or at least believe it's good for us. We're not basing our
decision to brush teeth on science. We're basing it on the word of other
people.

Other people can also say the craziest things and pass it off as science.
Should we believe them too, because they claim it's science? You can't verify
every single thing whether it's "based on science" or not. You need to use
heuristics and sometimes those heuristics lead people to do something
different that ends up being the better way to do things than what science at
the time entails. Taking away people's choice means that this happens a lot
less.

As an aside, I would like to contest the idea that science is the only way we
know things. Most science that ends up in practical use has a lot of
handwaving of details in it. We describe some parts of it, but everything else
is filled in by our instincts and knowledge. Few sciences are as pure as
mathematics, where you can reason over things on paper without needing an
extra assumed context. In most cases when science says we "know" something it
is meant in a narrow context. We extrapolate based on that into other contexts
and most of the time it works fine, but we often don't _know_.

~~~
scotty79
I don't brush my teeth because other people word.

I'm doing it for the feeling of freshness and believe it's good for me because
of what I believe to know from science and personal expeirience about
existence and influence of microorganisms.

I try to avoid putting qtips in my ears even though people are doing it
because science says that it has higher probability of doing harm than good.

> Other people can also say the craziest things and pass it off as science.

That doesn't make it science and you should base your decisions on science not
things passed as science. You should use your critical faculties and knowledge
of scientific process to tell what science is and what is not.

You definitely should verify every single thing that informs your decision
proces if the decision you are about to make is an important one.

> ... Sometimes those heuristics lead people to do something different that
> ends up being the better way to do things than what science at the time
> entails.

Science offers heuristics to guide your decision process. If scientific
heuristic exists and you are using your own instead, you are doing wrong (even
if by chance it ends up well).

If there's no scientific heuristic for given problem ( you need to check! )
then by all means make up your own. You won't be wrong unless you make "let's
ignore what science established" a part of your heuristic.

You'd be amazed how much of the things you consider instincts filling gaps in
science was actually researched for very practical fields. A lot. When money
is on the line people suddenly get very interested in actual reality and they
do the research. Some of those instincts get confirmed, some get thoroughly
debunked. There was no knowledge untill science properly investigated it. Just
self propagating ideas, right or wrong.

------
Taek
Heavy testing and aggressive isolation of infected persons and areas seems to
be effective.

In the absence of heavy testing, broad quarantine seems to be effective.

The answer at this point seems to be heavy, widespread quarantine until
testing infrastructure is sufficient to closely track every active case. Once
that testing is in place, most quarantines can be lifted, and any second wave
can be managed.

There are numerous promising treatments as well in development. HIV drugs,
Ebola drugs, and Malaria drugs are all showing promise in pre-print research.
If any of those pan out, it's likely that the mortality rate will go
substantially down so long as we can suppress the spread until treatment
infrastructure has scaled up.

~~~
Udik
Let me dream: how hard would it be to create a test that can be distributed by
the billions on paper strips like a ph test? You take one every evening and by
the morning it tells you if you can go out or not.

Is it conceivable or (borderline) impossible?

~~~
neuronic
Bioinformatician here (well, former): I would never say something is
impossible but the way these things are tested right now, it pretty much is
impossible.

We need to amplify some molecules and run a process called PCR on them for
which you need a full lab setup. It would take nothing short of a revolution
in detection to achieve this.

~~~
pas
What would the cost be to set up testing machines every few blocks? People
just get a swab, drop it into the machine, and get a code (just take a picture
of a QR code) that they can later check for results.

~~~
neuronic
> What would the cost be to set up testing machines every few blocks?

Where are you getting near infinite qualified and trained lab personnel from?
Machines that can mostly automate the process cost $500k - $1m easily.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P-jaC3_d3o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P-jaC3_d3o)
(Roche commercial!)

------
blueblimp
There absolutely is an acceptable way out of this. China, South Korea, Taiwan
and Singapore, at least, are going to be just fine. They are focused on
suppressing and controlling the virus. Once they get few enough imports from
travel (presumably by restricting travel from countries where the virus is
uncontrolled) and eliminate local transmission, they can resume life-as-usual,
apart from being on high alert for imported cases.

There is no other acceptable solution. Countries hoping to avoid the short-
term economic cost of suppressing the virus will find themselves paying a
greater economic cost over the long-term along with a massive cost in lives.

The question is now: which countries will adopt the correct approach before
it's too late?

~~~
hackandtrip
In 5-10 days we'll see if the first EU country to adopt police-state measures
will be added to that list. Spain and France are on the right track too, other
than Italy.

~~~
blueblimp
I'm not sure exactly what Italy is doing at the moment, but an important
result out of China is that they found quarantine-at-home was not good enough
for R<1\. They needed centralized quarantine to achieve R<1\.
[https://twitter.com/XihongLin/status/1236076749491929094](https://twitter.com/XihongLin/status/1236076749491929094)

So the first attempt does not necessarily work. But I hope it does, and if
not, I hope they quickly iterate to find one that does.

------
roenxi
> The correlation between per-capita GDP and health (life expectancy) is
> essentially perfect.

I've seen this said before; this is not considering correlation vs. causation.
High per capita GDP correlates exceedingly well with technological and
scientific mastery.

A global economic collapse would lead to some lives lost and be very painful,
obviously. But if the economic damage is in the tourism industry or
entertainment that will be far less damaging than if the food supply lines
collapse or the oil stops flowing. One of those is inconvenient, the other
would lead to militaries being deployed.

~~~
grandinj
Exactly. Also, that scatter has very high variance. I feel a lot less
confident about the authors conclusions if they call that a "perfect"
correlation

------
growlist
The acceptable solution is for society to adapt. That includes everyone
accepting their lives will change, and rich people in particular accepting
they'll be poorer for a while. And if we have to move to a war footing to stop
people dying, then that's what we have to do. To say 'it's either continue as
close to normal or people will die' is a false dichotomy.

Also: there's this 'oh well' attitude afoot here in the UK that we can't
enforce curfews etc. because the people won't have it. To this I say: we lock
people up here for _hurty words on the Internet_. The only reason it can't
happen is because some people in power don't want it to happen.

------
DoreenMichele
Some solutions that already exist, are already in use and could be firmed up:

1\. Working from home.

2\. Ordering online and getting takeout.

3\. Using self checkout.

4\. Collaboration and socialization via phone and internet.

You can't get sick if you aren't exposed. People don't get sick due to some
random number generator. You have to have a vector.

We already know a great many ways to disrupt the spread. The antidote to a
global crisis is not a global solution. It's a local solution.

When Ebola was initially a problem, the epidemic was stopped by African tribal
elders, not advanced Western medicine. They told their people "Don't go to the
white man's hospital" because you would go for something fixable, like a
broken leg, and die of Ebola.

They blockaded the roads and stopped letting outsiders in. They quarantined
those who were infected and left food on the doorstep to take care of them.

If the food stopped disappearing, they burned the hut down.

We know a lot about how to stop this. What we currently lack is some means to
get people to do all the basic stuff we already know works, like wash your
hands, stop touching your face and don't lick your fingers to separate bags.

I'm disappointed in seeing this handwringing, angsting piece at number one.
It's not really factual. It's someone being emotional.

It isn't 1918. We have vastly better technology and information these days.

We just have to deploy it and leverage it. This is mostly about shaping
culture. The primary question is "How do you get people to voluntarily comply
instead of blowing it off as usual?"

~~~
gwd
> You can't get sick if you aren't exposed.

The problem isn't the short-term; the problem is the long term. Are you
suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet
for the rest of our lives?

One of the biggest questions in this thread is specifically what kind of
immunity we can have from the virus. If catching it gives you 10-year
immunity, then slowing things down might work. But what if catching it only
gives you a 6-month immunity? The only way to stop it would be for _the entire
world_ to manage be SARS-CoV-2 free at the same time. Otherwise, we're looking
at a situation where the thing might just keep going around the world
indefinitely.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the
internet for the rest of our lives?_

No, of course not.

But some people who are especially vulnerable can work from home permanently.

We can permanently crack down on things like cashiers licking their fingers to
help them open bags.

I have a compromised immune system. The gross behavior of cashiers is one of
my single biggest headaches in life. If we recognized how critical a link they
are in transmitting disease and took that threat seriously, I imagine people
would generally be healthier.

We also can design public bathrooms without doors so you don't have to touch
the handle. Walmart has that mastered.

We also can make it more the standard for public bathrooms to have no-touch
technology, such as hand dryers and faucets that are motion activated.

We can permanently move to bowing instead of shaking hands. Several older
cultures have such practices.

We can more widely adopt the practice of removing our shoes at the front door
when we get home rather than tracking dirt all over the house. There are
plenty of cultures that do that.

We can move away from wall-to-wall carpeting in most homes in the US. It is
not the norm in other countries.

We can move to passive solar design and away from forced air HVAC systems.

I'm suggesting that this isn't a situation where we need to throw our hands up
and just be resigned to it being utterly futile. There are many things we can
do to reduce the transmission of disease without simply calling a halt to
life. And for a professional scientist to suggest otherwise is basically being
alarmist because they are stressed out or because the solutions don't fit
their mental models of "just pop a pill" or whatever.

They are boring and a lot of them are basically the purview of what housewives
historically did. And no one wants to admit housewives did anything of real
value.

American culture acts like homemakers and full-time moms are losers and
leeches and not actually contributing anything of real value to the economy. A
charitable reading of that is that it's a blind spot and people just don't get
it.

A less charitable reading is that it's misogynistic BS rooted in intentionally
being disrespectful of women and of the value and importance of "women's work"
and that people would literally rather die than admit that women's work has
real value on par with what important men do, like doctors and scientists. And
to whatever degree that is true, the world can now either get over its crap or
die due to clinging to it.

A lot of people may die over that. Change tends to occur one funeral at a time
because most people stubbornly cling to their ideas and refuse to change.

This can either be an age of enlightenment or a new dark age.

Ain't no big thing. We're all dust in the wind anyway. But the dark path is
not the only option.

~~~
gwd
> We can... [big list of good ideas]

Those all sound like good ideas[1]. But exactly how will those affect the R0
of the virus if we all keep going to the pub, and the club, and church, and
the office, and schools, and concerts, and sporting events? Particularly if we
ride the bus and the tube and trains and airplanes to get there?

Fundamentally, not enough to keep it from saturating the population at least
once. And if immunity doesn't last long enough for it to die out after that,
not enough to keep it from saturating the population over and over.

Which isn't to say we shouldn't do all the things you suggest. But simply
slowing things down isn't our ultimate goal. Going back to some semblance or
normalcy is our ultimate goal: Perhaps with tiles instead of carpet and bowing
instead of shaking hands, sure, but not everyone holed up in their homes
permanently. And towards _that_ goal, there's not a clear path.

[1] Except for "move to passive solar design", which I didn't really
understand.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Passive solar design relies on things like absorbing heat from the sun and
storing the heat in structures with thermal mass instead of burning fuel and
forcing air flow to try to heat the home.

It actually results in a more comfortable home and higher quality of life.
It's more environmentally friendly. It's more sustainable. And it doesn't
actively promote sick building syndrome.

Please note that Legionnaire's Disease was originally transmitted by the air
conditioning system where it was growing. I hate forced air heat with a
passion.

I currently live in a hundred year old building with a radiator in my unit and
it's a huge improvement over most living arrangements I've ever had.

Normalcy:

For someone in the 1800s, there's absolutely nothing normal about airplane
flights, much less for ordinary individuals. There's nothing normal about
computers. There's nothing normal about the internet.

These things are all basically magic for someone from 150 years ago and we
take it all for granted and feel like our lives are being utterly ruined if
someone suggests we should maybe curtail our use.

I have a form of cystic fibrosis. I've made a lot of the changes I'm talking
about.

I'm a social creature. I would love to have a "normal" life. The way I live
didn't come naturally at all. It was a shotgun wedding.

But it was better than the way I had and I am no longer in constant,
excruciating pain and I'm no longer on boat loads of drugs and I generally
sleep better, I'm more productive and I'm happier.

I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the world's worship of some arbitrary
concept of normal. Life routinely adapts or dies.

The people telling me that making permanent changes to our current lifestyle
in order to not die is some unthinkable and harsh burden may well be among the
dead in the near future. And the ones who remain can choose to adapt or die in
the next round.

It doesn't much matter to me. I already live the life of a germaphobe thanks
to my genetic disorder. And I long ago gave up on ever being taken seriously,
cared about, etc. So I have enough anger, bitterness and baggage over the past
decade of being treated terribly by the world at large that I will be
perfectly happy to see some folks go and I've got a mental list of "Hey,
universe, maybe you can make sure Coronavirus gets these people soon. Thanks."

But go ahead and cling desperately to your ideas about some "normal" life and
how amazingly important that is. Maybe someone will mourn the loss of people
doing that. But it won't be me.

You have a good day. This is probably not a conversation worth pursuing.

------
ekianjo
> If the covid-19 pandemic leads to a global economy collapse

Very unlikely it happens. At some point people/countries will decide to take
the risk rather than letting their own economies collapse (which is in the
interest of absolutely no one, even the patients at risk).

~~~
trevyn
The collapse coin has a flipside: New growth.

------
bsder
On what basis is anybody predicting a second wave which gets _worse_? This
seems completely backwards from everything we know.

The Spanish Flu accidentally had an inverted forcing function--we sent the
worst cases back to their home countries which helped spread the most severe
cases rather than the mildest.

For Covid-19, the cases most likely to spread are going to be the mildest. The
worse you feel, the more likely you will pull yourself out of circulation.
And, if you are obviously unwell, people are going to _force_ you home.

~~~
dvdcxn
Yes this is my predection too. We are enforcing evolutionary pressure that
favours a less dangerous strain of the virus.

~~~
scotty79
Given that this virus can spread well before there are any symptoms and well
after symptoms are gone I think there are very little evolutionary pressures
on it right now and it can evolve into milder strains with pretty much same
probability as more lethal strains.

If we are vigilant then the only thing that the virus might be pressure toward
is having even longer asymptomatic spread and even higher survivability in the
air and on the surfaces.

------
seapunk
Original source:
[https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12388371580074475...](https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1238837158007447558)

Threader's version (if you want to read it without ads and fake news
recommendations):
[https://threader.app/thread/1238837158007447558](https://threader.app/thread/1238837158007447558)

------
saneshark
It's a beautiful thing if it can bring humanity together towards a common aim.

But if it leads to the collapse of monetary systems, the collapse of civil
society, looting, rioting, the rise of nationalism, and WWIII that's most
certainly going to lead more death and destruction than the virus itself.

~~~
neuronic
Way to escalate the situation. Let's see how well quarantine measures work and
how the next 4 weeks pan out with the economy in hibernation.

It will cost us dearly but I wouldn't say it's going to lead to rioting and
WW3. If anything, this is a global problem for which we need global solutions
and not fucking nationalism merely 100 years after it already screwed our
societies.

Let's hope that China will enforce prohibition of wild animal trade/use as
much as possible. It's not in the CCPs interest to let that kind of
instability rain down on it.

------
0-_-0
> How long immunity lasts for following covid-19 infection is the biggest
> unknown. Comparison with other Coronaviridae suggests it may be relatively
> short-lived (i.e. months).

Could this mean that covid-19 is here to stay? Is it the new common cold, but
more serious?

~~~
notacoward
That's the outcome that worries me. Continual reinfection plus
disproportionate effect on certain groups means we're going to have a lot
fewer people in those groups unless we develop and deploy a vaccine in less
time than seems likely. We're also going to have a lot more people with
permanent lung scarring from "moderate" cases. Will that cause society to
collapse? Of course not. We'll adapt, but it's still pretty horrible to
contemplate.

------
rapsey
Is covid-19 the biggest world event since WW2?

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Depends how you measure and what you call a "world event".

* Mao Zedong killed 40 to 80 million people during his rule after WW2, but "only" in China.

* 2-5 million died in the Second Congo Civil War between 1998-2003, but to a first approximation only Congo and its immediate neighbors even noticed.

* The US response to 9/11 killed around 500,000 people directly (war violence) and a lot more indirectly (health, economy, etc).

The direct death toll of COVID-19 is unlikely to get anywhere close to this,
but the indirect economic impact will clearly be global and massive.

~~~
mcv
Those were certainly big events, but they were mostly local. COVID-19 is more
global than anything I can think of. Social life is getting shut down in east
Asia, India, Europe and the US. I'm not sure what South America, Africa and
the Middle East are doing, but COVID-19 will hit them too.

Even if the death toll is going to me more limited than other big events (we
don't know that, though), it is absolutely massive and truly global.

As for the potential death toll, if half the world gets it and 2% of them die,
we're looking at a 80 million death count.

------
timwaagh
I'm sure if china can shut people inside their houses to prevent spread, so
can we. We just have to adopt a different attitude towards fundamental rights.
Besides, medicine development seems to go rather quickly. I am sure it will be
mostly dealt with in a years time.

~~~
raxxorrax
> We just have to adopt a different attitude towards fundamental rights.

This is talk that really drives up any resistance against sensible health
support. And the worst part, the resistance is more or less justified.

You don't even know yet if the quarantine worked. We currently have data from
countries without it that don't fare any worse. 2 weeks incubation period
probably makes the tool worthless, but we don't have any conclusions yet.

~~~
timwaagh
I don't think the chinese government is intentionally lying about the data. If
we can assume their numbers are trustworthy enough, we can infer their
measures were effective. Of course, if it happens it will be a bitter pill to
swallow for everyone.

~~~
raxxorrax
I don't think they are lying, but you simply don't have anything to compare it
to yet, which makes current inference a conjecture at best. You can only
evaluate the data in comparison to other countries. Maybe they will get hit
much harder, but currently the evidence doesn't support that.

------
wiz21c
Interestingly, when we face a problem where deaths can be attributed to a very
specific, identifiable killer, politicians don't fail to act in strong ways...

Let's talk about action against climate change now...

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
> Let's talk about action against climate change now...

What do you mean exactly by "talk"? People have been "talking" about it for
decades, what are you proposing or predicting will change now?

~~~
wiz21c
I was just telling that a little sense of urgency would not be bad to
accelerate things about climate (ie move from a decade rythm to something like
a yearly one would be so much better)

------
lazylizard
I'm sure many will point this out. A few east asian countries beg to differ.
Namely China, s.korea, taiwan, singapore. Solutions even come in different
sizes!

------
black_puppydog
I don't agree with the conclusion. We can scale down our economies and still
maintain production of essentials by ` _`drumroll`_ ` scaling back shit that
nobody needs.

Starting with an overblown healthcare admin system in the US, IMHO, but also
including less inflammatory non-essential things like yet another range of
plastic toys and luxury perfumes and and and.

Essentially in this scenario, we should take this as an opportunity to prune
all Bullshit Jobs [1] and focus on things securing social, mental, and
healthcare subsistence.

Oh and maybe just don't move troops all around the planet to fuck up other
people's place. It wasn't a good idea before, (both during the 1918 influenza
wave and after that) and it's certainly not a good idea now. Save that money
and manpower, put it to use for something constructive for a change.

There you go, I guess I just pissed on every holy cow this crowd has. You know
where the downvote button is.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs)

~~~
TuringTest
_> ``drumroll`` scaling back shit that nobody needs._

Maybe, but what do you do with people whose livelihood depend on those
superfluous bullshit jobs?

Until we have a system that guarantees a right to life even if you do nothing
_productive_ , those busyworks are used to justify giving food, shelter and
healthcare to those people.

~~~
netsharc
The sane/benovelent governments will probably switch to universal basic
income, i.e. go deep into debt and just pay everyone money to live. And no,
actually going into debt is not a huge problem, ask Keynes, or what happened
in WW2; it was an emergency and governments borrowed and borrowed with no
fear.

~~~
tomp
I never understood this logic, and I understand it even less now. _If_ we have
the industrial / economic capacity to provide everyone with necessities of
life (food, water, heat, shelter, ...), _why not just provide that_ directly?!
No need to go via the "money -> essentials" route... that way you're only
indirectly making landlords and grocery store owners rich.

For this crisis, people are saying, give $1000 to everyone... that money is
mostly going to find its way into the pockets of already rich people, and/or
those companies that should have collapsed because of bad planning, but now
won't. Instead, you could legislate things like food stamps for everyone (with
the government paying grocers directly, while at the same time ensuring the
money isn't spent on shit like alcohol and cigarettes), and a few months of
rent amnesty for everyone (including businesses) (it's not like houses will
disappear if somebody doesn't pay the rent).

~~~
jnwatson
There’s a lot of research on this in the effective charity set. See [1].

First, it is highly paternalistic to tell people what to spend money on.

Second, it takes a huge bureaucracy to manage and enforce controls. Folks
still sell their food stamps.

1:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/07/5416096...](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/07/541609649/how-
to-fix-poverty-why-not-just-give-people-money)

~~~
tomp
> First, it is highly paternalistic to tell people what to spend money on.

Indeed, and that's kind-of the point: (1) you eliminate bullshit spending (on
things like alcohol, tobacco, lottery) that many people are prone to do, but
that they arguably _shouldn 't_ (to some extent, those products are
"predatory"); (2) it provides a minimal standard (survival) yet incentivizes
people to work (be productive) to increase their standard of living (e.g. to
be able to buy alcohol); (3) avoids inflation, as only a very limited set of
products would be affected by increased demand (in particular, _not_ real
estate, as "free" housing would only be available in government-owned real
estate) that the government can plan in advance.

My prior is that "bureaucracy" can be reduced significantly with modern IT
technologies.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
> eliminate bullshit spending (on things like alcohol, tobacco, lottery)

How do you propose to prevent people acquiring drugs, and gambling?

~~~
tomp
I don't! I fully support people's freedom to spend _their own_ money for
anything they want! Just not the tax-payer's money, that's why I'm in favor of
things like food-stamps (that could only be exchanged for some "basic"
staples), government-provided housing, ...

------
QuesnayJr
David Graeber is a stupid person, and the thesis of that book is stupid. There
are boring jobs, and there are jobs that wouldn't exist in utopia, but he has
no idea why jobs exist or what function they serve. His book is paradoxically
feel-good, in that just because we can imagine a world in which nobody has to
shovel shit that we can eliminate all shit-shoveling jobs today.

Shit, I actually worked at the kinds of jobs he calls "flunkies" as a temp,
and it wasn't a big mystery to me what the jobs were for. When I had a temp
job as a receptionist, my job was literally answering the phone. People would
call, and I would answer. It did not require a Ph.D. in anthropology to figure
out the function of the job, or why someone would pay me to do it.

~~~
dang
Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN regardless of how stupid someone is or
you feel they are. Even if you don't owe David Graeber better (though you do),
you definitely owe this community better if you're posting to it. Comments
like this add rotational momentum to the downward spiral.

It's a pity, because your comment also makes some good points. But adding
poison to the commons is more significant.

If you'd please review
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and stick to the rules when commenting, we'd be grateful.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590987).

~~~
QuesnayJr
So calling jobs of many people here "bullshit", like the original comment did,
is okay? Apparently so.

~~~
knolax
This is HackerNews, you can literally advocate for genocide on here and be
upvoted but don't you dare be slightly rude to some humanities charlatan.

~~~
dang
That's untrue, of course. There's a reason why such shocking and grandiose
claims never come with links.

------
allovernow
This is basically a summary of most of the worst case rumors turning out to be
true. This is very bad. We should be preparing to isolate ourselves from
society as much as possible for a few months. Times are going to get rough.

The good news is that this may be a cleansing fire that the US is long overdue
for. By now some of you have undoubtedly realized that 2019ncov is not just a
virus - it is a chaotic geopolitical force. It is changing the way we live in
front of our eyes.

These are exciting times. There's your silver lining.

>Health and the economy are closely linked. The correlation between per-capita
GDP and health (life expectancy) is essentially perfect. If the covid-19
pandemic leads to a global economy collapse, many more lives will be lost than
covid-19 would ever be able to claim

I don't agree with his derivation, I think he's mixing correlation and
causation a little, but his conclusion is undoubtedly correct.

------
kortilla
Flagged because there is nothing in the article but a tweet author admitting
he/she doesn’t know much and is guessing without sources.

> and have spent five years in a world class 'pandemic response modelling'
> unit

A pretty damming thing for the field of “pandemic response modeling”, but not
really worth worrying about on its own.

------
numair
I am 100% in agreement with the author. It’s refreshing to see someone admit
how much they don’t know — one of the most annoying things about our social
media era, when combined with this current situation, is that everyone thinks
they’re an expert and that their course of action is the One True Way to
defeat the virus. Fact of the matter is, we’re flying blind, and governmental
action is more about crowd control than a real fix.

My advice to the young people for whom this virus is not a major threat is ...
Enjoy yourself, enjoy your time with your friends. There’s a chance that this
virus could mutate to pose as much of a threat to young, healthy people as
old, unhealthy ones (and ironically there’s a chance this whole quarantine
thing might be of assistance, as OP carefully alludes to). That’s not a sci-fi
disaster scenario, that’s just 1918, baby.

Governments really need to increase the penalties — meaning, jail time, huge
fines, etc — on spreading misinformation on social media. That is as big of a
problem as any during this time. And so-called “medical experts” on Twitter or
Facebook or whatever, trying to validate themselves, are a large component of
that. If we don’t get people to stop playing games online about this now, we
are going to have a full-scale meltdown if this virus mutates later in the
year.

~~~
tsimionescu
You are wrong on almost every count.

Crowd control is a real fix for an epidemic. And while we don't know the
details of the infection, we know enough to understand that we can't let it
roam free.

Your advice to young people is horrible, and based on nothing. One of the
things we don't know is whether there is any lasting damage in recovered
patients. We don't know if the virus might mutate. The only safe thing to do
is to avoid catching it, whether you are 80 or 20. Note that SARS left
permanent damage in some recovered patients. Even without that, the death rate
among less than 40 is similar to the flu in the entire population. This is all
not to mention that young people have old relatives that may need their help,
especially if they are to stay in isolation for extended periods of time.

And while fake news in the media is a problem, it is one of the last things
that governments should be spending resources on at this time,especially as
there have been no cases of breaking quarantine or isolation based on fake
news.

~~~
ojilles
Upvoted. But, I would change this:

>> The only safe thing to do is to avoid catching it

to

>> The only safe thing to do is to avoid spreading it

(And this is why young people need to take as much note as older people)

