17 ms·

I think large decisive moves like this may seem to some to be an overreaction, but it will prove to be the correct decision in hindsight (like the early travel

I think large decisive moves like this may seem to some to be an overreaction, but it will prove to be the correct decision in hindsight (like the early travel bans). Exponential growth is real, and anything we can do to slow the rate of infection will save lives. As a current undergrad at UC Berkeley, they've moved all classes here online [1], and exams are either being postponed or converted to take-home assignments. I'm currently accessing lectures through Zoom. [1] https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/03/09/as-coronavirus-spreads-uc-berkeley-suspends-in-person-instruction/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/03/09/as-coronavirus-spreads-...

smallgovt 7y ago
Actually, I think it's likely going to be seen as an overreaction in hindsight by the general public (even though it may not be). If these actions are successful in curbing the virus' spread, most people won't appreciate how bad things could have really gotten.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  So what do we do if this virus festers for another couple of years? We can't shut down society forever.
  - Trasmatta 7y ago
    The goal at this point should be to flatten the curve as much as possible to prevent overwhelming healthcare until a vaccine is developed and tested. Nobody thinks this is going to be a permanent measure.
    - xur17 7y ago
      I don't disagree with the flattening the curve bit, but I do wonder - my understanding is that a vaccine is at minimum a year out. Would we need to keep doing this for that entire time period, or are there other factors at play here?
      - Gibbon1 7y ago
        I think that there is a rough relation between the infection rate and the percent of the population that gets infected. Consider raw r0 of 3.0. Each case infects three other people. But as more and more of the population gets infected and acquires immunity the infection rate drops. Say half the population is immune due to prior infection. The rate is now half r0 = 3.0 * 0.5 Left unchecked 66% of the population will get infected and then the disease dies out. Social distancing, hand washing, quarantine reduces r0. And reduces the total number that the virus can infect before is dies out. Cut r0 from 3.0 to 1.5 and the number of infected goes from 66% to 33%. In the US that would be 100 million people. And maybe a million fewer deaths. Scuttlebutt is China and Taiwan due to high early compliance have r0 down to about 0.3, which means the epidemic is in a state of exponential crash.
      - pfranz 7y ago
        There are shortages in the supply chain; hand sanitizer, masks, and tests for coronavirus in addition to overwhelming hospitals by sick people. If there aren't open beds or staff (ideally who aren't overworked), people who otherwise would get medical attention will die. If a vaccine wasn't even in the picture flattening the curve would help with these things.
        xur17 7y ago
        That's a good point. Also, my understanding is that antiviral medications might be an option in a "few" months.
        bluGill 7y ago
        There are a lot of things in the future. Antivirals show promise of working in a few months - but we don't actually know they will work (or for that matter that the virus won't evolve a new unique resistance to them). It will take time to figure out what works best for treatment.
    - fspeech 7y ago
      Or even just more personal protective gears for medical personnel, more isolation wards, and more ventilators could be readied. The medical system can be built up and reconfigured to take care of this disease but it needs time.
    - andrejk 7y ago
      A good analysis on this point from a public health perspective: https://www.flattenthecurve.com/ https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
  - empath75 7y ago
    They can just slow it down and prevent hospital systems from becoming overwhelmed. A lot of people will get immunity to it, which should confer some herd immunity that will protect older people. They’re eventually going to lift quarantines after it burns out in different areas.
  - tim333 7y ago
    Maybe there will be vaccines, better treatment.
- pbourke 7y ago
  Yeah, I've been thinking something similar. In the American context, a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction. The administration responsible (federal or state) would be blamed for the economic damage and voted out. It would take a very strong leader who was willing to act without thought to reelection to really meet the crisis head on. That would be ... rare.
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    >a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction. Seems likely. Since solving the problem would make it look like there was no problem in which case what was the point of all the work. This is also one of those cases where you have to overreact to begin with because once you have an actual problem its too late.
  - zanderwohl 7y ago
    I think you're right, and that economic damage is something I think too many people are worried about. I've seen a lot of business magazines more worried about the dow-jones than the number of people who could die.
  - fudged71 7y ago
    >a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction This is what worries me the most. Is there a name for this bias? Seems similar to survivorship bias, I'm sure it's seen across all kinds of contexts.
    - easytiger 7y ago
      Have you thought about inverting your thinking? Every pandemic this century ended up being a damp squib despite WHO et al promising doomsday.
      - admax88q 7y ago
        Was it the WHO promising doomsday? Or the media reporting on it?
- Trasmatta 7y ago
  So a Y2K style hindsight? I wonder if there is a phrase for that type of thing.
  - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
    "Closing the barn door after the horses have left" ?
    - Ensorceled 7y ago
      Closing the barn door before the horses leave and being blamed for the barn being too warm is actually what is happening.
- rellui 7y ago
  In this case though we've examples of how bad it can get. Iran comes to mind. As this progresses we'll see what happens to countries who didn't attempt any quarantine or drastic measures at all.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    That won't be the US though which is already quietly quarantining things. Conferences are being postponed. Companies are stopping all non-emergency travel. Nursing homes are not allowing visitors.
- throwaway237654 7y ago
  Yup, it's the same reason why most people now see the Japanese internment as unjust. They just know we won the war and fail to connect the dots that the internment was potentially critical to winning the war.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - sethaurus 7y ago
    Is this an accepted view among historians? I'd like to know more about that.
    - AlexCoventry 7y ago
      There was a widespread, mostly inaccurate perception in the West that Japan's incredible territory gains early in the war must have been due to fifth-column agents preparing the battleground. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30036444 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30036444
- pfranz 7y ago
  Hopefully, we'll see articles like the recent articles talking about how closing schools during the 1918 flu saved lives. Specifically, closing schools before there were any identified cases were much more effective than waiting until one was detected.
- rockmeamedee 7y ago
  It's a common thread in Incident Response & "Resilience Engineering" that preventative measures that reduce the blast of incidents are always blamed, especially if they work. Whatever ends up working to fix the incident, you should have done it sooner or it was too drastic a response. (No matter the fact that it _did_ fix the incident, outsiders will blame you that way). One example is the Knight Capital trading disaster, where they eventually noticed (I don't remember the exact number) X minutes after the runway trading bot had been put into place, and shut it down, but got blamed for not shutting down the trading soon enough. Can't find any links about this right now though :(
  - hateful 7y ago
    I see this in Programming/IT a lot. Also a very similar case whereby the person fixing the issue gets pressure to complete the fix and even blame after the fact. It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick.
    - afiori 7y ago
      > It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick. To be fair, I am sure doctors experience that a lot.
      - dr_zoidberg 7y ago
        It depends. I blame the dentist that fixed my tooth in a substandard way and then I had to have it removed, because the bad fix had it broken a couple of years down the line. I also blame him because, over the years, other patients of him had trouble for his sloppy work. I absolutely praise the dentist I went after that one, who made his best to fix everything, explained me the pros and cons of every decision he made, and ultimately got me top notch (as best as could be done). Sorry for he weird "counterpoint", but the example could be open to ambiguity. I still get the point: don't blame the guy fixing things when it's someone elses responsibility. In my case: I'd be wrong to blame the 2nd dentist for the mistakes of the 1st.
- cm2187 7y ago
  Hum. On the other side it is the story of the madman holding an umbrella in the middle of the summer. Someone asks him why he is holding an umbrella, it's not raining. He answers that it is to keep pink elephants from flying around. But there aren't any pink elephant flying. The madman responds: you see, it works.
- fuckknows 7y ago
  It depends on how bad it gets, if people are dying by the thousand I think the conventional wisdom will be we should have done more. Even with these measures I fear it wont be nearly enough to avert catastrophe.
whyenot 7y ago
It should be noted that they have not moved lab classes online. For someone in the sciences, much of your classroom time is spent in lab classes. Unfortunately, there isn’t a good way to teach students how to run a gel, or do a titration, or identify minerals, etc. without in-person instruction. There are students who are graduating this spring and the skills they learn in upper division or capstone lab classes are some of the most important skills they will learn at school. You can’t just cancel the classes (or those students won’t graduate), you can’t do a very good job at all teaching them online... What can you do? We haven’t figured it out here at my institution, and it looks like nobody else has figured it out.
- blendo 7y ago
  Nor will in-person, small group seminars be moved on-line. It might be fairer to just extend spring break for 2-3 months, and pick up the semester again in May or June. Or, refund this semesters’s tuition, room, and board, and give everyone a do-over until next fall. (I am assuming the virus will burn out in 2-3 months.) Maybe the best outcome would be radically improve remote learning, this time with full institutional support.
  - eropple 7y ago
    > I am assuming the virus will burn out in 2-3 months. This is a really optimistic assumption. I hope you're right, but I would hope no political unit is making plans based on it.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      Actually, that's extremely pessimistic. Unchecked exponential growth until it slams in to the population ceiling is both the worst-case scenario for fatalities, and also the scenario that would finish in three months.
      - fuckknows 7y ago
        Assuming that immunity lasts for an extended period or indefinitely, which we have no way of knowing yet.
fwipsy 7y ago
So far, I've heard that UCSD, UCSC, UC Davis, and Stanford have taken similar precautions to Berkeley.
- kart23 7y ago
  UC Irvine as well! Not excited to install a rootkit on my computer to take finals, but oh well.
  - pfranz 7y ago
    Any option to install it onto a VM or a separate drive for dual boot? Windows 10 VMs are active for a few weeks (or edu discounts are often pretty steep). If it was in a VM you otherwise use you can snapshot and revert back after taking the test (I guess you could do this with a normal backup, too). That's usually my go-to for stuff like this (but for me it's often Linux/macOS).
    - kart23 7y ago
      VMs and Linux aren't allowed, and apparently the software can detect if you're using either. I'm probably gonna use my macbook for it, but I just hate willingly installing such garbage. https://www.proctoru.com/proctoru-live-resource-center https://www.proctoru.com/proctoru-live-resource-center
      - en-us 7y ago
        Perhaps partition your hard drive then and dual boot? Then reclaim the Windows partition after the program is no longer needed.
      - dTal 7y ago
        Requires Adobe Flash? What is this garbage?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Can you pretend to exclusively use a Chromebook as your computing device?
asiachick 7y ago
Apparently during the Spanish flu cities that closed their schools early had 1/2 as many deaths as cities that waited until the first confirmed cars showed up in their city.
chadash 7y ago
This might normally be true, but in this case, there will be some countries that overreact and some that don't. The ones that do will see what happened in the ones that don't and it will be harder for the former to be upset since they can observe the difference. Israel is the best example right now. They have the strongest reaction of any country, essentially closing their borders, but their people don't seem to be outraged, at least not yet.
classified 7y ago
Security measures are always an "overreaction", until they aren't.

smallgovt 7y ago

Actually, I think it's likely going to be seen as an overreaction in hindsight by the general public (even though it may not be). If these actions are successful in curbing the virus' spread, most people won't appreciate how bad things could have really gotten.

chrisco255 7y ago
So what do we do if this virus festers for another couple of years? We can't shut down society forever.
- Trasmatta 7y ago
  The goal at this point should be to flatten the curve as much as possible to prevent overwhelming healthcare until a vaccine is developed and tested. Nobody thinks this is going to be a permanent measure.
  - xur17 7y ago
    I don't disagree with the flattening the curve bit, but I do wonder - my understanding is that a vaccine is at minimum a year out. Would we need to keep doing this for that entire time period, or are there other factors at play here?
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      I think that there is a rough relation between the infection rate and the percent of the population that gets infected. Consider raw r0 of 3.0. Each case infects three other people. But as more and more of the population gets infected and acquires immunity the infection rate drops. Say half the population is immune due to prior infection. The rate is now half r0 = 3.0 * 0.5 Left unchecked 66% of the population will get infected and then the disease dies out. Social distancing, hand washing, quarantine reduces r0. And reduces the total number that the virus can infect before is dies out. Cut r0 from 3.0 to 1.5 and the number of infected goes from 66% to 33%. In the US that would be 100 million people. And maybe a million fewer deaths. Scuttlebutt is China and Taiwan due to high early compliance have r0 down to about 0.3, which means the epidemic is in a state of exponential crash.
    - pfranz 7y ago
      There are shortages in the supply chain; hand sanitizer, masks, and tests for coronavirus in addition to overwhelming hospitals by sick people. If there aren't open beds or staff (ideally who aren't overworked), people who otherwise would get medical attention will die. If a vaccine wasn't even in the picture flattening the curve would help with these things.
      - xur17 7y ago
        That's a good point. Also, my understanding is that antiviral medications might be an option in a "few" months.
        bluGill 7y ago
        There are a lot of things in the future. Antivirals show promise of working in a few months - but we don't actually know they will work (or for that matter that the virus won't evolve a new unique resistance to them). It will take time to figure out what works best for treatment.
  - fspeech 7y ago
    Or even just more personal protective gears for medical personnel, more isolation wards, and more ventilators could be readied. The medical system can be built up and reconfigured to take care of this disease but it needs time.
  - andrejk 7y ago
    A good analysis on this point from a public health perspective: https://www.flattenthecurve.com/ https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
- empath75 7y ago
  They can just slow it down and prevent hospital systems from becoming overwhelmed. A lot of people will get immunity to it, which should confer some herd immunity that will protect older people. They’re eventually going to lift quarantines after it burns out in different areas.
- tim333 7y ago
  Maybe there will be vaccines, better treatment.
pbourke 7y ago
Yeah, I've been thinking something similar. In the American context, a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction. The administration responsible (federal or state) would be blamed for the economic damage and voted out. It would take a very strong leader who was willing to act without thought to reelection to really meet the crisis head on. That would be ... rare.
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  >a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction. Seems likely. Since solving the problem would make it look like there was no problem in which case what was the point of all the work. This is also one of those cases where you have to overreact to begin with because once you have an actual problem its too late.
- zanderwohl 7y ago
  I think you're right, and that economic damage is something I think too many people are worried about. I've seen a lot of business magazines more worried about the dow-jones than the number of people who could die.
- fudged71 7y ago
  >a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction This is what worries me the most. Is there a name for this bias? Seems similar to survivorship bias, I'm sure it's seen across all kinds of contexts.
  - easytiger 7y ago
    Have you thought about inverting your thinking? Every pandemic this century ended up being a damp squib despite WHO et al promising doomsday.
    - admax88q 7y ago
      Was it the WHO promising doomsday? Or the media reporting on it?
Trasmatta 7y ago
So a Y2K style hindsight? I wonder if there is a phrase for that type of thing.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  "Closing the barn door after the horses have left" ?
  - Ensorceled 7y ago
    Closing the barn door before the horses leave and being blamed for the barn being too warm is actually what is happening.
rellui 7y ago
In this case though we've examples of how bad it can get. Iran comes to mind. As this progresses we'll see what happens to countries who didn't attempt any quarantine or drastic measures at all.
- bluGill 7y ago
  That won't be the US though which is already quietly quarantining things. Conferences are being postponed. Companies are stopping all non-emergency travel. Nursing homes are not allowing visitors.
throwaway237654 7y ago
Yup, it's the same reason why most people now see the Japanese internment as unjust. They just know we won the war and fail to connect the dots that the internment was potentially critical to winning the war.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sethaurus 7y ago
  Is this an accepted view among historians? I'd like to know more about that.
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    There was a widespread, mostly inaccurate perception in the West that Japan's incredible territory gains early in the war must have been due to fifth-column agents preparing the battleground. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30036444 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30036444
pfranz 7y ago
Hopefully, we'll see articles like the recent articles talking about how closing schools during the 1918 flu saved lives. Specifically, closing schools before there were any identified cases were much more effective than waiting until one was detected.
rockmeamedee 7y ago
It's a common thread in Incident Response & "Resilience Engineering" that preventative measures that reduce the blast of incidents are always blamed, especially if they work. Whatever ends up working to fix the incident, you should have done it sooner or it was too drastic a response. (No matter the fact that it _did_ fix the incident, outsiders will blame you that way). One example is the Knight Capital trading disaster, where they eventually noticed (I don't remember the exact number) X minutes after the runway trading bot had been put into place, and shut it down, but got blamed for not shutting down the trading soon enough. Can't find any links about this right now though :(
- hateful 7y ago
  I see this in Programming/IT a lot. Also a very similar case whereby the person fixing the issue gets pressure to complete the fix and even blame after the fact. It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick.
  - afiori 7y ago
    > It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick. To be fair, I am sure doctors experience that a lot.
    - dr_zoidberg 7y ago
      It depends. I blame the dentist that fixed my tooth in a substandard way and then I had to have it removed, because the bad fix had it broken a couple of years down the line. I also blame him because, over the years, other patients of him had trouble for his sloppy work. I absolutely praise the dentist I went after that one, who made his best to fix everything, explained me the pros and cons of every decision he made, and ultimately got me top notch (as best as could be done). Sorry for he weird "counterpoint", but the example could be open to ambiguity. I still get the point: don't blame the guy fixing things when it's someone elses responsibility. In my case: I'd be wrong to blame the 2nd dentist for the mistakes of the 1st.
cm2187 7y ago
Hum. On the other side it is the story of the madman holding an umbrella in the middle of the summer. Someone asks him why he is holding an umbrella, it's not raining. He answers that it is to keep pink elephants from flying around. But there aren't any pink elephant flying. The madman responds: you see, it works.
fuckknows 7y ago
It depends on how bad it gets, if people are dying by the thousand I think the conventional wisdom will be we should have done more. Even with these measures I fear it wont be nearly enough to avert catastrophe.

whyenot 7y ago

It should be noted that they have not moved lab classes online. For someone in the sciences, much of your classroom time is spent in lab classes. Unfortunately, there isn’t a good way to teach students how to run a gel, or do a titration, or identify minerals, etc. without in-person instruction. There are students who are graduating this spring and the skills they learn in upper division or capstone lab classes are some of the most important skills they will learn at school. You can’t just cancel the classes (or those students won’t graduate), you can’t do a very good job at all teaching them online... What can you do? We haven’t figured it out here at my institution, and it looks like nobody else has figured it out.

blendo 7y ago
Nor will in-person, small group seminars be moved on-line. It might be fairer to just extend spring break for 2-3 months, and pick up the semester again in May or June. Or, refund this semesters’s tuition, room, and board, and give everyone a do-over until next fall. (I am assuming the virus will burn out in 2-3 months.) Maybe the best outcome would be radically improve remote learning, this time with full institutional support.
- eropple 7y ago
  > I am assuming the virus will burn out in 2-3 months. This is a really optimistic assumption. I hope you're right, but I would hope no political unit is making plans based on it.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    Actually, that's extremely pessimistic. Unchecked exponential growth until it slams in to the population ceiling is both the worst-case scenario for fatalities, and also the scenario that would finish in three months.
    - fuckknows 7y ago
      Assuming that immunity lasts for an extended period or indefinitely, which we have no way of knowing yet.

fwipsy 7y ago

So far, I've heard that UCSD, UCSC, UC Davis, and Stanford have taken similar precautions to Berkeley.

kart23 7y ago
UC Irvine as well! Not excited to install a rootkit on my computer to take finals, but oh well.
- pfranz 7y ago
  Any option to install it onto a VM or a separate drive for dual boot? Windows 10 VMs are active for a few weeks (or edu discounts are often pretty steep). If it was in a VM you otherwise use you can snapshot and revert back after taking the test (I guess you could do this with a normal backup, too). That's usually my go-to for stuff like this (but for me it's often Linux/macOS).
  - kart23 7y ago
    VMs and Linux aren't allowed, and apparently the software can detect if you're using either. I'm probably gonna use my macbook for it, but I just hate willingly installing such garbage. https://www.proctoru.com/proctoru-live-resource-center https://www.proctoru.com/proctoru-live-resource-center
    - en-us 7y ago
      Perhaps partition your hard drive then and dual boot? Then reclaim the Windows partition after the program is no longer needed.
    - dTal 7y ago
      Requires Adobe Flash? What is this garbage?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Can you pretend to exclusively use a Chromebook as your computing device?

asiachick 7y ago

Apparently during the Spanish flu cities that closed their schools early had 1/2 as many deaths as cities that waited until the first confirmed cars showed up in their city.

chadash 7y ago

This might normally be true, but in this case, there will be some countries that overreact and some that don't. The ones that do will see what happened in the ones that don't and it will be harder for the former to be upset since they can observe the difference. Israel is the best example right now. They have the strongest reaction of any country, essentially closing their borders, but their people don't seem to be outraged, at least not yet.

classified 7y ago

Security measures are always an "overreaction", until they aren't.