
Doctors turn to social media to develop Covid-19 treatments in real time - JumpCrisscross
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-24/covid-19-mysteries-yield-to-doctors-new-weapon-crowd-sourcing
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adelHBN
This is awesome. MDs in American and Europe should turn their social media
attention to MDs in S. Korea and China... get frontline tips from them. As for
PMG, I love it. My wife is an MD and she is on it all the time. Real valuable
information there.

~~~
nixpulvis
As long as you listen to the right people, as in the physical world.

~~~
charlesism
This would be easier if the internet were optimized around enlightenment
values (for lack of a better phrase) instead of the values of a tabloid
newspaper.

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mmhsieh
Perhaps we should coin the term "epidemiological debt" for the compounding
costs of ignoring an emergent pandemic early on. The essential definition of
such debt is: paying down the debt requires qualitatively greater expense and
creativity (as in this case) to solve this problem later than sooner.

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abakker
Fascinating. First I’ve seen about the low blood pressure and gastric symptoms
in old people...makes me wonder. An older friend of mine in the bay area was
hospitalized in the last week of January, first week of February. His symptoms
were extreme physical weakness, fever, low blood pressure. Enough so that he
went to the ICU twice. A few weeks later he was better. Doctors ran all types
of tests then, but didn’t know what it was, they told him it was likely a
random viral infection. No lung issues that I know of, but that sure sounds
like what this article mentions.

~~~
o-__-o
SARS-COV-2 binds to ACE2 receptors which are prevalent in your lungs and your
gut. Its possible the virus attacked the gut rather than the lung. Staring at
data last night there's about 1/4-1/3 of a chance for "mild symptoms" but the
data did not capture gastrointestinal issues. This also goes along with the
theory that there are two strains, one more vicious than the other.

~~~
feanaro
FWIW, the Lcov/Scov two-strain theory turned out to be somewhat of a nonsense
paper.

~~~
rorykoehler
Source?

~~~
jkh1
Post criticizing the paper and discussion: [http://virological.org/t/response-
to-on-the-origin-and-conti...](http://virological.org/t/response-to-on-the-
origin-and-continuing-evolution-of-sars-cov-2/418)

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cycomanic
What I really find worrying is that all this knowledge gets locked up behind
the facebook walled garden. Essentially giving them a monopoly on processing
this information. I understand why the doctors do it (use something that's
available). But as another poster mentioned, we really need something better.

~~~
mlrtime
Do you really find it all that worrying, more so than the virus itself? I'm
not a FB apologist but the fact that they have this network affect and that
doctors can use it for free is outstanding. This would not have happened 20
years ago.

~~~
read_if_gay_
That’s not so much due to Facebook as it is to the internet.

~~~
edouard-harris
Facebook has, in fairness, made this sort of collaboration far easier than it
would have been in the days of the pre-Facebook Internet.

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tejtm
Is there a publicly available feed/mirror of this?

I have never been there (thefaceship), and would not be just another voyeur of
this data set.

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winddude
Looking at the covid-19 hackathon and wondering if there would be an advantage
of a dedicated social network for doctors and labs. Perhaps with possibility
of making data publicly readable but not submittable. Thoughts?

~~~
Reelin
This exists and is called ResearchGate. I'm not fond of it personally, but
many seem to make good use of it.

> making data publicly readable but not submittable

I'm unclear what you mean by this.

~~~
tejtm
Not the person who wrote that but I think read only feed of the conservation
where random folks like myself could hear the conservation but not speak
directly == "not submit comments". which would work fine for me. Any
hypothesizes I generated should go through a vetting process where the idea
generates own momentum so as not to waste their time if it ever showed up. a
... peer review process writ smaller and more distributed.

~~~
winddude
Yup, I couldn't have said it more eloquently.

My biggest issue with pursuing this is I have next to no breadth of knowledge
in the medical or medical research fields. It would be hard for me to
understand what would help doctors and research labs to share and distribute
information, other than being more filterable and searchable than a facebook
group.

~~~
Reelin
tl;dr Kicking out the non-experts won't solve the current problems and is
likely to introduce new ones. It's a tooling issue, not a platform one.

This is a difficult problem. In trying to reduce the noise by choosing who
gets to speak, you immediately encounter a number of issues related to
gatekeeping. Moreover, filtering by source doesn't directly address what I see
as the underlying problem of presenting relevant information to the user.

Competent and aggressive moderation seems to work fairly well for setting a
standard of discourse without excluding anyone (HN is a good example here) but
it's time consuming. And it doesn't do much of anything to address the problem
of filtering for relevant information.

I think conversations themselves (ie actual back-and-forth with meaningful
input from all sides) ultimately just don't scale well beyond a small group.
Topic specific mailing lists seem to be the least-worst solution to date, and
a Facebook group or subreddit is essentially the same thing implemented using
a proprietary platform.

It seems like we still lack the models and tooling to address these problems
on a fundamental level. Plenty of academic research exists surrounding
knowledge graphs, ontologies, and relationships, but in practice all the
mainstream tooling that "just works" is restricted to hierarchical folders
(and tags if you're lucky). Zotero is very much a least-worst reference
management solution in my opinion (I detailed my thoughts in an HN comment
sometime within the past year if you're curious). On the literature front we
have things like Arxiv Sanity Preserver and Semantic Scholar, but we're still
proverbially drowning in new publications. Tools like Memex
([https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex](https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex))
and Contextualise
([https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise](https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise))
look promising, but aren't (yet?) a complete solution.

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jungletime
George Hotz is also making a valiant attempt. Starting from scratch, he's made
a surprising amount of progress in the last 3 days. Armed with just a web
browser and python.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vWaawiUteM&t=43s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vWaawiUteM&t=43s)

~~~
michelb
Love how this went nowhere and the people in the comments are lapping it up.
Nice to see a live coding session from him, but man..

~~~
agumonkey
I don't want to watch it, what is he trying to achieve ? where did it end ?

~~~
jansan
It ended with him playing Plague Inc.. Reminds me a bit of my early childhood,
when I wanted to build a galley with a friend. We already had one piece of
wood...

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tomglynch
That facebook group they talk about is currently getting over 900 posts per
day. Difficult to keep up - definitely a firehose of information. Could ML be
used to distill this info?

~~~
beenBoutIT
It's on Facebook so we know for a fact that ML's already being used to refine
the posts now - keeping them relatively free of spam, hateful comments, known
malware links, etc.

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ggm
Watch one, Do one, Teach one. Isn't that the MD way?

Send some to China, get some Chinese surgeons and EMT over in the US.

Oh right: we shouted at them because reasons. Hard to be nice, when they have
knowledge we need and the posture is shouty.

~~~
DeonPenny
China has been kicking journalists and other westerns out of the country. I
doubt they want to share what they did nor want to disclose what real
infection rates are.

~~~
fragmede
If only the world were so simplistic. 300 Chinese doctors and equipment
arrived in Italy last week. They are anxious to share what they know, to help,
and heal, as doctors do. That the CCP gets good press out of it is the sort of
“soft power” that the US has forgotten.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-doctors-and-supplies-
ar...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-doctors-and-supplies-arrive-in-
italy-11584564673)

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Paperweight
I lieu of adequate testing, I wonder if we could use mild proinflammatory
immune response as a way for carriers to self-detect - i.e. so that they feel
more sick, quicker, rather that just carrying it around for days unknowingly.
Perhaps garlic?

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4417560/#sec4ti...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4417560/#sec4title)

~~~
mattmanser
Please don't speculate or spread information like this. When they know what we
should do, they'll tell us.

People have already been admitted to hospital for eating too much garlic.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51735367](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51735367)

~~~
Paperweight
I'm not suggesting trying to _cure_ or _prevent_ the disease, but to _promote_
its symptoms to emerge in asymptomatic carriers so that they can self-isolate.

