As an Italian, I really hoped the horror stories that are coming out of Italy right now could help raise awareness of how things could look like when a government reacts too late to this threat.<p>However, it seems every major country is sadly going down the same path: <a href="https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1237119688578138112" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1237119688578138112</a> .<p>I hope you won't have to be as scared as I currently am for my parents. My dad is in one of the categories that has low priority for an ICU bed. Older than 65 and diabetic. If he gets sick and require an ICU chances are he'll die because medics, rightly so, will choose someone with better survival chances.
This is so sad, I really hope he pulls through.<p>My office is a couple of blocks away from Moscone and I was pretty surprised by the fact that RSA didn't cancel. It seemed clear at the time that the spread wasn't going to be contained and getting a bunch of people to fly in from all over the world to sit in cramped auditoriums and shake hands with one another was a really bad idea.<p>All of the restaurants, streets, and coffee shops around the conference center were packed that week, and I fear that it will have made a material contribution to the speed with which this virus will have spread.
Meanwhile, CONEXPOAGG is on with 130,000 attendees:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/LasVegasLocally/status/1237148919898836994" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/LasVegasLocally/status/12371489198988369...</a>
It is breathtaking that conferences organized and attended by affluent tech employees are not being canceled when conferences like SXSW and ComicCon <i></i>are being canceled<i></i>.<p>It hurts the people behind SXSW and Comiccon much more to cancel their events but they did it anyways. Is our industry really so much more unethical than average?
If anyone is interested in donating, here's the GoFundMe page setup to help the family of the engineer from Connecticut mentioned in the story:<p><a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/xpcwgy-conquering-covid19" rel="nofollow">https://www.gofundme.com/f/xpcwgy-conquering-covid19</a>
I'm not sure I need a tinfoil hat at this point to imply that the people who are supposed to mitigate the effects of this pandemic have no objective quantification of how pervasive the spread of this disease is already.<p>I'd be willing to wager that if there was a good enough historic and near enough to realtime dataset of individuals entering the ER with pneumonia, and this disease is actually atypical for the season: that the ramp actually started more than a month ago in some regions.<p>Although I do wonder if the necessity of some pre-existing condition to perpetuate the development of the disease might present some type of choke in the significance of the anomalous nature of the thing..<p>Anyone know of any dataset like this? It would be really interesting to consider.