
Show HN: Covid-19 Treatment Dashboard - greatwave1
https://www.quiverquant.com/covidtreatments
======
groby_b
Making this information accessible is amazing work, thank you!

But, alas, it loses a lot in the UX department:

1) It's low-contrast. This makes it hard to read for a lot of people,
unnecessarily so.

2) It uses a font that is hard to read. Not sure if it's font rendering, or if
the font is just bad, but... just a plain Sans Serif would be fine?

3) The gradient for the map is pretty much not fulfilling any function,
because you can't read it with any kind of precision. You'd be better off with
4 distinct gradients. Or better, separate colors.

4) If I can nitpick: The title has 3 different font faces, with misaligned
baselines. Please don't do that :)

~~~
vikramkr
I wonder if the thinking was to make it deliberately uninviting and difficult
like the Bloomberg terminal to make people feel cooler while using it (which
is a legitimate thing - i'm not saying that glibly at all. People that master
the bloomberg terminal feel like wizards which certainly contributes to
lockin, and that sort of needlessly difficult UX is somehow associated with
being "cool" or being like a "real command center" somehow)

~~~
fermienrico
While I agree with the GP, I don't agree with the jab at Bloomberg terminal.
There is nothing needless in Bloomberg terminal - it comes with a special
keyboard and everything is keyboard driven. There are no animations such as
the ones you see in macOS and Windows that take up 300ms. There are no
distracting popups and notifications. It is probably the most incredible feat
of UI/UX design...ever, perhaps airplane cockpits and nuclear power plant
control rooms would rival.

Just because UI is dense does not mean it is not easy to learn. Dense UI
provides more information than something with 5 levels of hierarchical
layouts, each screen animating with 300ms of bullshit animations. Furthermore,
learning curve should be acceptable for people that truly want to use a tool
on a daily basis (for e.g. emacs or vim).

There is a reason why people who use Bloomberg terminal will _never_ want
anything else. Here is a video of the thought process that goes into designing
just the keyboard:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_juj1MIRJVE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_juj1MIRJVE)

Have you used Bloomberg terminal or talked to a user? Regarding lock-in: I
think its the opposite - when the users don't want to switch to anything else,
that's the best a company can do. That's the kind of "lock-in" every company
should aspire to.

~~~
vikramkr
I've used a Bloomberg terminal and most of my social circle has as well. I
guess maybe difficult isn't the right word to describe it, but definitely
uninviting on purpose. And a lot of my friends get a kick out of how
uninviting it looks and how much they feel like a wizard using it. Theres
definitely an aspect to the way it looks unrefined that make people love it,
and I guess a better way of saying it might be that trying to emulate that by
making something actually inaccessible and unrefined is not going to be
successful

~~~
fermienrico
I think you're attributing ugliness "on purpose" incorrectly. No one at
Bloomberg exclaims "Oh gee, let's make this more ugly, people will get a kick
out of it."

It's just that they haven't bloated this app with CSS styles and other
unnecessary aesthetics. It works. That's all.

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chimichangga
FDA: emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine

[https://www.fda.gov/media/136534/download](https://www.fda.gov/media/136534/download)

~~~
sbuttgereit
Yep, and this possibility has become a right cluster-fuck for many people that
have other needs for the drug.

Many Lupus sufferers can no longer get this because of possible use
([https://www.kqed.org/science/1960404/at-kaiser-trumps-
pharma...](https://www.kqed.org/science/1960404/at-kaiser-trumps-
pharmaceutical-advice-creates-chaos-for-lupus-patients))

I know people that have this condition and have been told there's none
available at pharmacies when in fact it's in stock (based on how they resolved
their problem).

~~~
wrycoder
And how did they resolve their problem?

~~~
jsight
They asked until they reached the right person? Its not that uncommon of a
pattern, sadly.

~~~
sbuttgereit
Basically this.

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erinaceousjones
Minor bugbear: the thin font used does not lend itself to rendering nicely in
Firefox 74 running on a GNOME 3.36 linux install with subpixel font
antialiasing:
[https://i.imgur.com/LauxkrQ.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/LauxkrQ.jpg)

I made it more readable it for myself by switching to grayscale antialiasing,
but it's still not a very readable font as it's quite small and thin and is
light-ish blue against dark-ish blue background - standard sans serif,
slightly larger and with more contrast in colours probably better for
accessibility

~~~
dcre
Even when it renders properly it's still not very easy to read.

------
deweller
I noticed that this study is not on the list:

[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04264533](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04264533)

What is the criteria for choosing studies that show on this list?

~~~
notaharvardmba
Also the University of Minnesota Losartan trial:
[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04312009](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04312009)

Probably don't have to look far to find another dozen or so.

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aaossa
Hey, this looks really good! Didn't even know that the information about those
studies was accesible. I don't understand the phases meaning, can you explain
them? Maybe a table or tooltip somewhere could help.

~~~
greatwave1
Thank you very much! That’s a good idea... I will think about the best way to
incorporate that information on this dashboard, but for now you can find it at
[https://www.nccn.org/patients/resources/clinical_trials/phas...](https://www.nccn.org/patients/resources/clinical_trials/phases.aspx)

~~~
aquadrop
Thanks for the site.

Bug report: Looks like sort by expected finish works on strings instead of
dates.

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svetlins
Sorting by expected finish date seems be broken - it sorts by strings

~~~
rodcoelho
came here to say this

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projektfu
Looks cool. There's a lot of double entries. Is that in the data or is it a
glitch?

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airstrike
The table "News articles on COVID-19 Treatments" shows a duplicate "FDA
authorizes chloroquine for use in treating coronavirus"

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StavrosK
This is great, is there any information somewhere about the efficacy of each
treatment? I'm on mobile and may have missed it.

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superasn
All I see is a login page?

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foobaw
Minor feedback - I wish I could click on a trial on a map to go to that trial
page.

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brian_herman__
Great job you should make the lists scrollable but it looks great !

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dchichkov
As per www.worldometers.info, Russia seem to have relatively low death rate
(0.06 per million of population), despite having a border with China, no early
distancing measures, public transportation in the cities, etc. Could be just
accident, but they did one interesting thing - recommended a nation-wide
treatment strategy early on.

~~~
AdamN
The confirmed cases number is effectively useless without models for
extrapolating into an estimated infection count. Presumptive cases aren't
bothering to be tested, asymptomatic cases rarely tested, lack or abundance of
supplies differ by country and region, etc... We have very little idea of the
prevalence in any given country - confirmed case count is just a floor.

~~~
dchichkov
If you notice, I'm talking about number of deaths, not the number of cases. I
do understand the limitations of confirmed cases stats.

