
Ask HN: Possible benefits of Covid-19 pandemic? - DoofusOfDeath
The COVID-19 pandemic is a terrible thing. In both the short- and long-terms, it will cause immense suffering throughout the world. But it&#x27;s conceivable that some good things will also result. Any ideas for what those might be?
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cjbprime
There have apparently been good effects related to pollution and therefore
climate change.

Like you say, these effects don't counter the immense human suffering
happening.

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Jemm
The lack of aerosols from pollution and jets might actually let more sun light
through and increase temperatures.

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bob90
Are you saying that less greenhouse effect gases emissions will lead to more
global warming ?

~~~
unlikelymordant
no, the loss of particulate, which contributes to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming)
\- not greenhouse gasses.

~~~
bob90
I had no idea of this concept. This is awesome. Thank you sir.

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peterburkimsher
Face to face time will be appreciated.

People will wash their hands more thoroughly and more often.

Wearing masks when sick won't be stigmatized.

Governments might increase funding for healthcare, even as a military "health
force".

National healthcare might be possible politically in some countries that don't
yet have it.

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kokowawa393
A lot more workplaces realizing that remote work is super viable.

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thatguy0900
I don't get why this is good for the average worker in developed countries, to
be honest. Doesn't this just open every job up to insane amounts of
competition with the lowest price of living areas in the country, not to
mention other countries? I feel like I must be missing something

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theworld572
> Doesn't this just open every job up to insane amounts of competition with
> the lowest price of living areas in the country

Remote jobs will have a much bigger pool of applicants to choose from, but
likewise applicants will have a much bigger jobs to choose from too. So the
two should cancel each other out.

~~~
cgb223
I think the main downside of this is it dramatically increases the amount of
crap that recruiters will have to sift through to find viable candidates

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japhyr
If this pushes the US to finally separate health care from employment, that
would be a very good thing.

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op03
Newton did his best work on calculus, gravity etc during the Bubonic Plague
shutdown - [https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/woolsthorpe-
manor/features/...](https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/woolsthorpe-
manor/features/year-of-wonders)

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toomuchtodo
The realization that local manufacturing capacity is a national security
imperative.

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elamje
Stress testing the system. Imagine if this viral of a disease had a 25%
mortality rate on all age brackets. It would be pandemonium.

Businesses get more robust, start having a larger margin of safety. It reminds
me of how banks got deleveraged after 2008 because Dodd Frank forced them to
keep more cash on hand.

People eat all those random items in their pantry that would sit there uneaten
for 10 years without a virus.

People realize that it’s possible to survive and thrive under the constraints
of not going out much at all.

Parents are forced to cope and learn how to parent their kids instead of
putting responsibility on teachers and schools.

Online education because more normal.

Work from home will be desirable if people successfully adjust.

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thecupisblue
People are going to spend more time with themselves - learning more about
themselves and their families, improve closest relationships, find new
hobbies, learn new things. A lot of people will come out of this with their
habits changed in a positive way.

Many countries will have their economies halt - causing them to bring forward
new laws and cut on taxes and different costs associated with owning a
business, a lot of extraneous work and spending will be cut away and
bureaucracy will be slashed, healthcare will be taken more seriously.

Startups that were gonna die in 1-2-3 years because they dont have any real
market fit will die out and the overblown ones will have to reform the way
they approach business.

But mostly, this will be a push for Universal basic income and into a "more
socialist" direction for many countries.

A fun new world awaits us.

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djsumdog
I mean ... none? This thing has been a disaster of information. The John
Hopkins map was made by engineers and it's arcgis in a damn iframe. It has
terrible visualizations. No one seems to remotely be displaying any of the
data in ways that are helpful. No one knows the actual infected to confirmed
rate or even has a decent guess.

We're told ~70% of people won't need to be hospitalized .. we're also seeing
hospitals overrun in Italy with perfectly healthy people in their 40s dying.

We're in a wash of really bad information and panic and we have people
criticizing those who are trying not to panic. And none of us are really
talking to each other, because we can't.

It's a 1984 style cluster fuck.

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jonahlibrach
sciugo.com is a site which gives biomedical researchers sharable repositories
for their research.

If the site gains traction amongst COVID-19 researchers, it will be the first
time researchers document their results in a format that can be easily be
reused by other researchers across the world forever.

Any data shared on sciugo.com can be exported with a few mouse clicks to a
clean spreadsheet for reuse by other researchers.

If this platform for data sharing gains tractions, it will significantly
accelerate the rate of scientific discovery!

We're always looking for feedback from biomedical researchers. Also, we're
hoping to recruit software engineers to help build the product.

If you have any questions, I'd love to chat more!

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unlikelymordant
is sciugo your site? there is almost no information on the page about why i'd
want to use this. Show me other papers or organisations that are using it,
allow me to browse datasets. Have a paragraph about what it's for. Also, there
needs to be some sort of guarantee that the data will survive for a long time,
even if your company/organisation dies/you lose interest. Maybe partner with
archive.org, or automatically generate dois for dataset versions.

~~~
jonahlibrach
Yea, you're right, thanks. We're working on this dataset browsing.

What don't you like about the lefthand side?

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epicureanideal
Many people are becoming familiar with technologies for remote work.

People are spending more time with their kids. Maybe eating healthier, cooking
at home. Maybe breaking fast food habits.

Workers are getting a chance to not commute. To get a few weeks break from the
commute.

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borplk
Hopefully good hand washing habits will stay with us

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rayhendricks
There are many more people walking outside with their families. I’ve never
seen so many people in the parks. If this helps stop the obesity epidemic that
would be great, because realistically overweight & obesity related disease is
much more of a problem than coronavirus. This is assuming we didn’t do
anything to stop coronavirus at all it would still be less deadly than heart
disease/diabetes/cancer.

We’re also seeing a rise in remote work. If we can go to the office 1-2days a
week for 6hrs and work from home for the rest I think that will be a much
better for us.

Universal basic income is being more seriously considered. When we realize
that all these service industry jobs were non-essential. I don’t think they’re
coming back to the extent that we would all imagine.

We also are in the middle of an unprecedented tax upon the healthcare system.
Right now is absolutely the time to switch to a Medicare for all system.
Coronavirus does not know rich vs poor and it will infect and kill both.

Lastly I think we’re going to take a long hard look as as a nation about what
kind of education we need and how to pay for it. We will have a lot of young
workers not working right now. What if we started to make CS/IT degrees free
for all the people who were laid off? Something like
[https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/online-
degrees/undergraduate...](https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/online-
degrees/undergraduate/computer-science/) but actually free and taught by laid
off developers.

TL;DR M4A, UBI, and Yang was right..

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tomwilson
No April fools day on the internet.... hopefully.

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galesky
Cheaper real estate.

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reactor
Bit cleaner air.

