This is all fine and good. And I should state that I am on board with the actions (in San Francisco/California) taken so far. However, I'm not unconditionally so.<p>I get that right now we're buying time. My current understanding is that we're trying to slow the spread of the disease because the existing health care system was going to quickly collapse under the weight; whether or not that should have been the case or not is a discussion for another day. I also understand that we are -not- trying to contain the disease, just "serialize" its progression (so to speak) through the population.<p>Assuming that understanding is sufficiently correct, what I'm not hearing enough of is what is being done with the time we're buying. Many in the Hacker News audience likes to talk about "externalities" and how the wise appreciates those externalities in their actions. Shutting down the economy has externalities; those externatlities can be life or death as well. If the strategy of those implementing the "shelter in place" is one of just waiting it out: then I'm going to be off the wagon fairly quickly. I want to start hearing strategies that start to address the issues of how we minimize impacts of this problem. I want to know what we're buying for the pain that we're being sold on. I want to know when people estimate that the societal damages of the illness start to be outweighed by the damages of our response.<p>I see the admin of the site suggesting we're buying time for these things. I want to start hearing this from the officials making policy.
This site openly admits the obvious flaws in their model:<p>- R0s for interventions are guesses, in some cases informed by data. There is no historical precedent for what is going on right now to draw from.<p>- The default R0 used in this model is an average. The model does not adjust for the population density, culturally-determined interaction frequency and closeness, humidity, temperature, etc in calculating R0.<p>- This is not a node-based analysis, and thus assumes everyone spreads the disease at the same rate. In practice, there are some folks who are “super-spreaders,” and others who are almost isolated. Interventions should be targeted primarily at those most likely to spread the disease.<p>Are there any epidemiologists using less naive statistical models who are producing easily readable results like this? The "average R0" logistic function model seems better suited for examining historical epidemics than estimating risk to inform decision-making for ongoing epidemics.
I still feel there is compelling evidence that lung damage from things such as exposure to local pollution is a big driver in serious cases.<p>I say this as someone that thinks they had it a month ago. I was on steroids for a week, then a respirator, then steroids for another week. Worst asthma attack of my adult life. I live in Seattle... (And yes, i had fevers)<p>I did not get tested, but having a hard time shaking that I had it. And if I did, so has my family. With my kids all having fevers, but no shortness of breath.<p>Edit: I hasten to add that I am socializing this as a call for what am I missing? I am <i>not</i> encouraging inaction.
I don't get it, because these measures can't last forever. Let's pretend USA completely extreme isolates...step foot outside and you get arrested. Fine, the virus disappears in a month or two. Then what? Unless every single person on the globe does the same thing, you have to effectively keep your borders closed forever. This isn't a solvable problem at the state or national level, it's a completely global thing. We can attempt to slow it, but it's just gonna rear its ugly head again when we let our guard down.
The projections are ignoring a very important datapoint - there is significant evidence that COVID-19 does not have a positive R0 in warm climates. This means that in many areas, there is no need to flatten the curve - it will flatten naturally in the next month or two. On the contrary, by aggressively shutting down the spread now, we are leaving ourselves more vulnerable to winter outbreak which will be hard to stop.<p>Now the really terrible part is that the economic effect of the mass closure is going to grow exponentially. So layoffs start small and grow more massive week by week. And unlike COVID-19, that economic effect will not subside with the warming weather...<p>Here is some evidence:<p>Compare the slow growth in cases per day (green line) in CA and FL (warm) vs NY and WA (cold):<p><a href="https://covid-19.direct/state/CA" rel="nofollow">https://covid-19.direct/state/CA</a><p><a href="https://covid-19.direct/state/FL" rel="nofollow">https://covid-19.direct/state/FL</a><p><a href="https://covid-19.direct/state/NY" rel="nofollow">https://covid-19.direct/state/NY</a><p><a href="https://covid-19.direct/state/WA" rel="nofollow">https://covid-19.direct/state/WA</a><p>See for example how in Malaysia there was an outbreak due to a very large Muslim gathering with foreign travelers, that seems to diminish every day (indicated an R factor < 1) - <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/malaysia/" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/malaysia/</a> The same is true for Qatar.<p>Same examples all over the world for warm countries:
<a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/</a>
Sheltering in place would be less necessary if everyone would stay at least 2 meters apart, wear masks, wear gloves, not talk unnecessarily or cough/sneeze at anyone, and wash up with soap when they get home. Some people seem unable to stay away and feel compelled to get in your face and talk.
<a href="https://covidactnow.org/state/CA" rel="nofollow">https://covidactnow.org/state/CA</a><p>This is missing a HUGE point. At the very end of the California "shelter-in-place" plan, the numbers will go up. What it doesn't show is that this will merely delay the epidemic to 3 months in the future. The chart useless with only a 3 month time horizon.
I guess the operative detail is whether shelter-in-place will get us to a "23%" total infection rate vs 70%.<p>I wonder if that's accurate. I also wonder if this is recurring in the fall, and every year, and whether physical distancing will be mandatory every year?
Here let's do some numbers since this group likes numbers:
Population of China: 1.4B
Population of USA: 330M
China Population/USA Population ~= 4.5
Case Count China: 81250
Case Count USA: 19285
China Case Count/USA Case Count = 4.2
Given the current rate of increase and the lack of action, the USA is on track to be in a worse situation than china and is still trying to figure out what to do.
Best to look to countries like Taiwan, Japan, S. Korea, Singapore and maybe learn from their actions because the current approach is clearly not working.
Stupid question: why do all the curves go down way before reaching a large percentage of the population? For example, California's curve peaks at ~900,000, only 2% of its population (and only a bit more if you consider cumulative hospitalizations). I guess 2% is not enough for herd immunity to kick in so what is it?<p>Edit: Oops, brain fart. Those numbers don't include all cases, just hospitalized ones.
Site is broken for me. The url <a href="https://covidactnow.org/data/wa.7.json" rel="nofollow">https://covidactnow.org/data/wa.7.json</a> is returning an HTML document with the text "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app." and there's a JSON.parse error in the console.
So, this projects 3-months out. But what about after that? The graph for my state (MN) showed 3 months of sheltering in place would keep infections down, but then start to rise immediately afterwards. Then the graph ends. I think super-extended voluntary isolation is going to be a tough sell.
Naive question: in the states I looked at, the "California-style shelter-in-place" line consistently goes <i>up</i> again toward the right side of the graph (end of June to July), whereas none of the other approaches have that second lift. Why is that?
This was just used to trigger a shelter in place in Dallas. Thanks to whoever built this!<p><a href="https://www.dallasnews.com/news/public-health/2020/03/22/hospitals-will-run-out-of-beds-by-late-april-if-gov-abbott-doesnt-order-texans-to-stay-at-home-hospital-group-warns/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dallasnews.com/news/public-health/2020/03/22/hos...</a>
This is what worries me:<p>> Our models show that it would take at least 2 months of Wuhan-style Lockdown to achieve full containment. However, it is unclear at this time how you could manage newly introduced infections.<p>When will Wuhan accept travelers from Spain or Italy ? Or are we going to live with border controls & quarantines forever?
It appears this assumes a doubling rate of 3-4 days? That's pretty pessimistic compared to what the science-heads are saying, right? I've heard 5-6 days, 6.2 from another source.<p>EDIT: I'm talking about the doubling rate of the actual cases, not the confirmed cases.
In my opinion this page isn't terribly informative unless you happen to live in Texas or California.<p>Basically every state has measures in place already. None of that is reflected here, and there is no way to tell where it fits relative to the scenarios shown.
Where is this data coming from?<p>I have not seen any numbers to indicate Utah was at 96 hospitalizations as of yesterday. Are other state's number correct? Was California at 952 hospitalizations as of yesterday?<p>Is this just using number of cases as hospitalizations?
Having read some of the comments here, I want to say that I think I fall in the "cynical" portion of the population. Then again, my family is Russian, and we all typically think we're all gonna be screwed somehow.<p>The most optimistic outcome, for me, is that remote work becomes a bigger possibility when companies realize they're wasting tons of money on too much office space.<p>People already know that we can live with less. _Businesses_, however, do not realize this. I hope businesses ( especially big ones ) realize this.<p>Shortcomings in our economy and health care ( not just America, but world-wide ) will be realized and fixed.<p>However, I do not think any of the above will become true. Humans have short memories. I think once the crisis is over, business as usual will resume and we will have made no progress. Other than another vaccine.
I see a lot of rumbling in this thread about how we need to ask ourselves if the costs of a shutdown is worth it, or what happens after a shutdown?<p>My question is this: what would <i>you</i> propose we do? If we don’t lock everything down, we’ll overwhelm the hospitals and the death rate will skyrocket. And then the deaths will be less skewed towards the elderly, because virtually all causes of mortality will shoot up when we no longer have a functioning medical system to treat anyone for anything except this.<p>Are you really proposing we just let hundreds of millions of people all over the world die over the next 6-12 months? So we’ll all just go back to work and to restaurants and on vacation while 5% of the population is gasping their last breaths in a hospital somewhere? We’ll just say goodbye to a huge chunk of our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and coworkers? Because the economic cost is just too high?<p>It’s easy to complain about this course of action. It sucks. But unless you can lay out a plausible alternative, this still seems like the best one to me.