17 ms·

Hey HN, in light of the current situation and the potential ordeal in the coming weeks, may I ask you instead of blaming whoever, let's find some solutions to h

Hey HN, in light of the current situation and the potential ordeal in the coming weeks, may I ask you instead of blaming whoever, let's find some solutions to help people? As a Chinese, I read first hand materials from Chinese social media and friends on what life is like in a lockdown area. People there depends on deliveries for groceries and medicine, and occasionally restaurants take-outs. All those services, and a bunch of other services for small businesses are possible because of Wechat. Wechat is obviously not a popular option here in N.A. Is there something we can do to help both the people buy whatever they need via delivery and help local businesses? In Wuhan when the entire family had to be isolated, no one was left to take care of family pets. I heard there's volunteer groups to take them but their capacities were very limited due to the short notice for them to take on such responsibilities. Can we be more prepared and maybe find a technology(-assisted) solution to this before it becomes a huge issue? I feel this will be an issue sooner rather than later because in N.A. it appears the current policy for mild cases is self-isolating, which will very likely infect the entire family. Also in Wuhan during the lockdown many people felt so lonely, especially the older generation who can't use the internet effectively to stay connected to their families/rest of the world. Can we find ways to help people prepare for it psychologically? A lot of people will break medical suggested self-isolation because of the eagerness to stay connected to certain people/group. Instead of blaming them, can we help them find ways to stay connected yet in isolation? I'm sure there are more things the mighty HN crowd can do to help others overcome this difficult time. Let's give it a try?

austincheney 7y ago
I cannot up vote this enough. I wish there were a government or social agency in place to better consider these issues.
- rabidrat 7y ago
  It would be great if we had some kind of global institution with distributed local branches whose aim was to feed the hungry, tend to the sick, and commune with the destitute.
  - ohithereyou 7y ago
    Isn't it the aspirational goal for several churches/religious orders to do just this?
    - smegger001 7y ago
      that is what he was referring to.
  - code_duck 7y ago
    It would be even more awesome if they were actually focused on that and not primarily on hoarding wealth.
  - s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
    Yes, and they do. Local churches in my area are always helping the community. Even in a time like this you choose to make snide comments towards religion? Really?
mrb 7y ago
I hate to suggest that but the only short-term solution that seems to work is large-scale extreme response measures, just like China. Here is evidence why it works: new cases/day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=... What China did is a complete shutdown and isolation of whole cities, cancellation of public gatherings, prohibition of attendance at school and work, massive mobilization of health and public health personnel as well as military medical units, and rapid construction of entire hospitals. Wuhan, Iran, Italy have shown us that the health care system simply collapses under the huge number of patients needing hospitalization (20% of infected.) So mobilizing healthcare workers, springing up new "hospitals", and limiting spread with extreme responses is the way to go. Unfortunately I predict that western governments are going to be less likely to suggest, deploy, and enforce such massive quarantines. Quarantines impede on civil liberties, and people in the West are very protective of freedom and liberties. I think the average American will NOT be okay with his government telling him he is only authorized to exit his house to go shopping once a week...
- andrewla 7y ago
  Why do people point to the China response as being a model response, as though that is easily seen. China has had an order of magnitude more deaths and instances than any other country. While you can point to many factors showing why it is disingenuous to look at those raw numbers without context, it seems to me that the burden of proof is on the other side, to show that the China model is actually effective, because naively it looks like it didn't work out too well.
  - mrb 7y ago
    Well, look at this chart which speaks volume about how successful China is in containing the outbreak, with new cases per day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=... And look in particular how cases in other countries are starting to explode since the last week or so. Or look at cumulative deaths (outside China): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESyyxfiUMAEwMVa?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESyyxfiUMAEwMVa?format=png&name=... The growth follows a perfect exponential curve, which suggests other countries have so far been completely unable to even bend the epidemic curve a little bit. It is obvious given this data that we will see 10k deaths outside China by March 20. I have a perfect track record at making such predictions in the past: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Azorinaq%20%23PredictionWasCorrect&src=typed_query&f=live https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Azorinaq%20%23PredictionW... (short-term predictions are easy to make, long-term not so much)
esistgut 7y ago
Before helping people already in locked regions if you are not I beg you to do whatever you can to talk some sense into your representatives. The level of actions you want from your point of view would probably be seen as "drastic" or "exaggerated". It is not.
victorlin 7y ago
If the root cause of the problem is not resolved, even we overcome this virus, then now what? What's next? If the next virus hit us again, would Chinese government still try to cover up the problem and stop people from speaking up? Would WHO stop down playing the problem and advice not taking actions? It's a wake up call, while it's nice to have some heartwarming help from internet, I am more concern about COVID-19 is not the worst case, it's just a test, next thing could be way worse if we only try to look away from the root problem, like all the time we did.
- theseadroid 7y ago
  Let's overcome this virus first? We normally don't do root cause analysis during an outage in IT do we?
  - handedness 7y ago
    If the root cause of an IT outage in one place can be used to help prevent the outage from occurring elsewhere, yes. Your personal relationship to this is entirely understandable, but not a sufficient reason to not focus on root causes where they first occurred.
    - victorlin 7y ago
      Yeah, right. So now you have an outage, the cause could be, say like database is having corrupted data in it. Now, you're saying, we should not fix the corrupted data, instead, we should keep changing the front page, make many happy faces and harts there and hope the database corruption goes away automatically? It's very obvious what you are playing here, we all know Chinese propaganda very well. Now instead of looking into the root cause, we have to send out "heartwarming" (暖心) messages to the world, like all those video people forced to dance to show the world they are happy there in the big quarantine area. By doing that, make it a distraction to what people saw, the corruption of WHO and CCP. That's pretty much over, now many people in the world who pay enough attention would notice the same out-facing Chinese propaganda (大外宣) pattern appears again and again. And your post suddenly got up-voted to the first place is also very strange. We all know how many bots Chinese government is using. So in short, it's an on-going problem, they are still covering up, even for now. The western world have been looking away from this for too long time, they think that's not my problem, well, now it's our problem right now, everyone's problem, unfortunately.
hummel 7y ago
Despite knowing that I will be voted down massively by the Chinese bots, I suggest the following. 1) I would like an international independent investigation to look into the evolution of Covid-19, especially the months before the general alarm was given. It has been shown that the delay from November to December in alerting about the virus has caused unprecedented devastation. 2) I want China as a nation and its leaders to be trialed for ineptitude and crimes against humanity in the court of The Hague. As China is a strong country it will refuse to provide any information or will simply provide scapegoats among the doctors and health personnel who warned of the event. Chinese politician's incompetence can't get away from this. 3) China is not co-operating with external institutions and researchers, a large part of the information flow is non-existent. The research flow is from outside institutions to China. And we need to collaborate to find a solution. I am especially pessimistic and I don't think China will collaborate with anyone. 4) How is China going to restore the economic damage that it is going to cause to billions of people around the planet and hundreds of thousands of businesses that are going to have to close because of this pandemic? For much lesser reasons we have imposed embargoes on Cuba or Iran. 5) Many Chinese citizens fill their mouths with words like solidarity and joint effort, cooperation and world happiness. When the great majority is looking to do business and profit from the situation, whether it be with the sale of masks or necessities, multiplying their price by 1000x. There is no such solidarity among Chinese citizens with the rest of the world. 6) Propaganda and censorship are the order of the day. We cannot know what is happening, nor its impact, nor its origin. I hope that the Chinese citizens will be aware of this and impose themselves on their government by demanding 改革 and 革命 .
- lostlogin 7y ago
  Re 4), this sounds way too much like what was done to Germany post World War 1, and it had massive consequences.
- Jommi 7y ago
  What's up with these constant purtorting of November as the starting point of the disease? AFAIK. We have no reliable information that this is the case. Could you give sources to that and some of the other statements in your comment?
- 7y ago
nickysielicki 7y ago
There’s never going to be a lockdown in this country. If people need stuff, they’ll go out. It simply won’t work. I’ve seen the videos coming out of Hubei. If you tried to weld someone’s door shut in the US you stand a good chance of being shot by the resident and both their neighbors. Maybe not in the big cities, but virtually everywhere else.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
daxorid 7y ago
> may I ask you instead of blaming whoever No. We knew the R0 of this thing in late January, and we knew, at least approximately, the fatality rate and ICU/ventilation requirement rate, in very early February. Every single "just the flu bro" type has indirectly killed people since that time, including the WHO Chief and US President. These things should not be forgotten, and consequences should be meted out, lest we doom ourselves to repeat the mistakes of complacency in the future.
chupa-chups 7y ago
HN likes to downrank anything regarding the current outbreak. This was posted 53 minutes ago and received around 100 votes in 20 minutes, but was downranked shortly after: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22550623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22550623 Now this post has inevitably been downranked as well. I'm setting up a HN downranking-watch site right now ;-) If you know some crowd-funding site where one can donate money to health care workers, please let me know (berthold dot alexander at googlemail dot com)
- flukus 7y ago
  HN will down rank anything getting a lot of comments, I think votes might be factored in as well. It kills a lot of good topics and often allows astro turfing accounts to kill them.
  - code_duck 7y ago
    Every time I make a comment that garners a large number of replies, moderators 'detach' it from the article, which I suppose leaves it in some Netherworld where it can only be accessed from members' profiles. I'm not sure what the point of that is.
    - incompatible 7y ago
      Maybe they are just falling off the first page of the article's comments. Try the "more" link at the bottom.
      - code_duck 7y ago
        No. I'm referring to a moderator making a statement 'this has been detached', not some misunderstanding or confusion I'm having. You can find it on my profile recently.
        incompatible 7y ago
        I see what you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22512003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22512003. Considered off-topic maybe?
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
There are structural problems that China needs to address that would help in the future. For example, the lack of indoor heating in southern China exacerbates flus and sicknesses like this because your immunity system is constantly beat down when it is constantly cold everywhere. China is rich enough now that they can afford to heat southern homes, if not for comfort, then for stuff like this (see https://facilityexecutive.com/2020/02/indoor-humidification-can-reduce-coronavirus-transmission/ https://facilityexecutive.com/2020/02/indoor-humidification-...)! And when the quarantine comes, you have to keep warm at home somehow. Something that we westerners take for granted and why I would guess the virus won’t propagate as quickly. Long term, these kind of things are more important than shiny sky scrapers and HSRs.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- oefrha 7y ago
  I don’t quite get this. Having spent significant time in southern China, while there’s no exceptional water heating that’s (from what I heard and from some brief stays) universal in the north, I can’t think of an urban residence that doesn’t have indoor air conditioning, and rural homes tend to have installed them in the last twenty years, too. It can’t be constantly cold unless people refuse to turn on air conditioning. (I’ve heard that some older college dorms may not have air conditioning, though.) Meanwhile, I’ve spent significant time in NorCal and NJ residences with extremely crappy heating, too.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    What cities in southern China? There is very little indoor heating in Changsha, and I assume nearby Wuhan as well but I’ve never been there. Guangzhou and HK have less indoor heating as well, but they have more mild climates than Changsha so it isn’t much of a problem. Shanghai and Hangzhou do much better with heat, but they are also the richest cities in China. It stems from a decision Mao made more than 50 years ago. First, people expect the state to be responsible for heating, which is weird to us but follows the soviet model. So the state decided to provide central heating to people in the north but not in the south. Now you could provide your own heat, but the majority of Chinese live in apartment blocks that are poorly insulated between units. So to heat your home you have to heat all of your neighbors also, which isn’t going to happen. It works fine in northern China because they just pump hit water through the whole building. So people are left with local heating options, eg the kokatsu. So my wife and her family own a couple of apartments in hunan that we’ve thought about renovating for heat. No one local really knows how to do it because it isn’t done. Coupled with the fact that walls in China are concrete slabs, not wooden posts with room for insulation in the middle, so you have to add something on top of the walls and maybe do heating from the floors. Anyways, it is expensive. And it’s not just your home, but where you work. The last time I went to the HSR station in my wife’s hometown, the girls selling snacks at the station were really bundled up and if you weren’t wearing gloves your hands with hurt...inside the brand new train station. Indoor heating is a requirement in much of the states, even in LA (you can skimp on AC, but you can’t rent or sell a unit without heat), and building codes have improved a lot over the years so it’s unlikely you’ll freeze your butt off in something built within the last 30 years.
derekhsu 7y ago
Taking the same action as China technically is impossible for most countries because of differences on attitude to human rights. In China, a lot of people can be left at home to die and they cannot do any protest against their government. In the most serious period in Wuhan, citizens were limited to stay home and there were not enough means of transport to do necessary transportation, such as critical patients and food. At the expense of this, another large proportion of people can keep alive. But in the US, people have weapons and they are very tough. In addition, the information is transparency, so it is impossible to hide such tragedies.
- richard78459 7y ago
  This is why US is an accepted leader of the world. I am not a national of china or US.
hnick 7y ago
For the pets there are already various pet care platforms that probably tout themselves as "The Uber/AirBnb for pets!". People can take your pet to their home or visit yours for feeding/walking/yard time. So if this may be an issue for you it might be good to start looking around to get connections. I assume the issue is that the entire family was moved out of the home? I'd be a little leery of visiting such a home without training if there's a chance the fixtures (doorknobs, fridge handles) can be carrying the virus. In particular if there's any reason to be opening the fridge for pet food because lower temperatures of 4c apparently drastically increase virus survival time to a few weeks, so handling items in the fridge may be a major risk.
navinsylvester 7y ago
I don't see any tech solutions mentioned out here. At least i would like to take a shot. Not relying on government is the way to go. I think we should build a social network for community welfare which can prepare us for something like this in future. Where people build communities among themselves. Key point being internal resource availability to be exposed to the close knit network and an external pool exposed to an radius. Keeping everything to the close knit shouldn't be encouraged and there should be a proportion. Ideally the network should be split when its crossing a proportion.
- navinsylvester 7y ago
  How do we keep up with something like covid-19 in future?. I don’t think relying on government is the way to go. Why not build a social network which helps to build close knit communities and it can have a cascade effect on the whole populace as a side effect("good"). Some of the key points for it to work being: # Pool resources before hand so that the whole system is not suffocated. # Internal resources exposed to close knit. # External resources exposed to a radius. # Cap on internal vs external resources. # Split the community into smaller ones when it reaches a proportion. # Point system to motivate communities. # Ability to mobilize resource across communities. This need not be the case with just a pandemic but can help us tide over other eventualities as well.
2J0 7y ago
I'm saying I'm serious twice in this year already do it had to be the end.. Send everyone over 55 s as my working phone capable of doing Skype or whatever and provide the device a data connection to a Chatroulette app setup and instructions to disable the it and use normally in big big print and grayscale not color screens please color is confusing or color only what you want clicked (NeXT could have been a revolution for just doing that) by us old people anyway...
jakequade 7y ago
What's happening is an appropriate response. Sure, anyone blaming individuals / residents is being out-of-line, but this _needs_ to happen.
JVIDEL 7y ago
This post This post right here This is peak HN We're facing potentially the worst global pandemic in a century and you're talking about takeout and pet sitting And this is the top post
anthonybsd 7y ago
> All those services, and a bunch of other services for small businesses are possible because of Wechat. Ughh, no thanks buddy. I'd rather not have any of this propaganda garbage. WeChat basically contributed to a global pandemic because it's prime instrument of Chinese censorship[1]. [1] https://medium.com/pcmag-access/china-has-been-censoring-coronavirus-information-for-months-933205db1b0f https://medium.com/pcmag-access/china-has-been-censoring-cor...

austincheney 7y ago

I cannot up vote this enough. I wish there were a government or social agency in place to better consider these issues.

rabidrat 7y ago
It would be great if we had some kind of global institution with distributed local branches whose aim was to feed the hungry, tend to the sick, and commune with the destitute.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  Isn't it the aspirational goal for several churches/religious orders to do just this?
  - smegger001 7y ago
    that is what he was referring to.
- code_duck 7y ago
  It would be even more awesome if they were actually focused on that and not primarily on hoarding wealth.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
  Yes, and they do. Local churches in my area are always helping the community. Even in a time like this you choose to make snide comments towards religion? Really?

mrb 7y ago

I hate to suggest that but the only short-term solution that seems to work is large-scale extreme response measures, just like China. Here is evidence why it works: new cases/day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=... What China did is a complete shutdown and isolation of whole cities, cancellation of public gatherings, prohibition of attendance at school and work, massive mobilization of health and public health personnel as well as military medical units, and rapid construction of entire hospitals. Wuhan, Iran, Italy have shown us that the health care system simply collapses under the huge number of patients needing hospitalization (20% of infected.) So mobilizing healthcare workers, springing up new "hospitals", and limiting spread with extreme responses is the way to go. Unfortunately I predict that western governments are going to be less likely to suggest, deploy, and enforce such massive quarantines. Quarantines impede on civil liberties, and people in the West are very protective of freedom and liberties. I think the average American will NOT be okay with his government telling him he is only authorized to exit his house to go shopping once a week...

andrewla 7y ago
Why do people point to the China response as being a model response, as though that is easily seen. China has had an order of magnitude more deaths and instances than any other country. While you can point to many factors showing why it is disingenuous to look at those raw numbers without context, it seems to me that the burden of proof is on the other side, to show that the China model is actually effective, because naively it looks like it didn't work out too well.
- mrb 7y ago
  Well, look at this chart which speaks volume about how successful China is in containing the outbreak, with new cases per day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=... And look in particular how cases in other countries are starting to explode since the last week or so. Or look at cumulative deaths (outside China): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESyyxfiUMAEwMVa?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESyyxfiUMAEwMVa?format=png&name=... The growth follows a perfect exponential curve, which suggests other countries have so far been completely unable to even bend the epidemic curve a little bit. It is obvious given this data that we will see 10k deaths outside China by March 20. I have a perfect track record at making such predictions in the past: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Azorinaq%20%23PredictionWasCorrect&src=typed_query&f=live https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Azorinaq%20%23PredictionW... (short-term predictions are easy to make, long-term not so much)

esistgut 7y ago

Before helping people already in locked regions if you are not I beg you to do whatever you can to talk some sense into your representatives. The level of actions you want from your point of view would probably be seen as "drastic" or "exaggerated". It is not.

victorlin 7y ago

If the root cause of the problem is not resolved, even we overcome this virus, then now what? What's next? If the next virus hit us again, would Chinese government still try to cover up the problem and stop people from speaking up? Would WHO stop down playing the problem and advice not taking actions? It's a wake up call, while it's nice to have some heartwarming help from internet, I am more concern about COVID-19 is not the worst case, it's just a test, next thing could be way worse if we only try to look away from the root problem, like all the time we did.

theseadroid 7y ago
Let's overcome this virus first? We normally don't do root cause analysis during an outage in IT do we?
- handedness 7y ago
  If the root cause of an IT outage in one place can be used to help prevent the outage from occurring elsewhere, yes. Your personal relationship to this is entirely understandable, but not a sufficient reason to not focus on root causes where they first occurred.
  - victorlin 7y ago
    Yeah, right. So now you have an outage, the cause could be, say like database is having corrupted data in it. Now, you're saying, we should not fix the corrupted data, instead, we should keep changing the front page, make many happy faces and harts there and hope the database corruption goes away automatically? It's very obvious what you are playing here, we all know Chinese propaganda very well. Now instead of looking into the root cause, we have to send out "heartwarming" (暖心) messages to the world, like all those video people forced to dance to show the world they are happy there in the big quarantine area. By doing that, make it a distraction to what people saw, the corruption of WHO and CCP. That's pretty much over, now many people in the world who pay enough attention would notice the same out-facing Chinese propaganda (大外宣) pattern appears again and again. And your post suddenly got up-voted to the first place is also very strange. We all know how many bots Chinese government is using. So in short, it's an on-going problem, they are still covering up, even for now. The western world have been looking away from this for too long time, they think that's not my problem, well, now it's our problem right now, everyone's problem, unfortunately.

hummel 7y ago

Despite knowing that I will be voted down massively by the Chinese bots, I suggest the following. 1) I would like an international independent investigation to look into the evolution of Covid-19, especially the months before the general alarm was given. It has been shown that the delay from November to December in alerting about the virus has caused unprecedented devastation. 2) I want China as a nation and its leaders to be trialed for ineptitude and crimes against humanity in the court of The Hague. As China is a strong country it will refuse to provide any information or will simply provide scapegoats among the doctors and health personnel who warned of the event. Chinese politician's incompetence can't get away from this. 3) China is not co-operating with external institutions and researchers, a large part of the information flow is non-existent. The research flow is from outside institutions to China. And we need to collaborate to find a solution. I am especially pessimistic and I don't think China will collaborate with anyone. 4) How is China going to restore the economic damage that it is going to cause to billions of people around the planet and hundreds of thousands of businesses that are going to have to close because of this pandemic? For much lesser reasons we have imposed embargoes on Cuba or Iran. 5) Many Chinese citizens fill their mouths with words like solidarity and joint effort, cooperation and world happiness. When the great majority is looking to do business and profit from the situation, whether it be with the sale of masks or necessities, multiplying their price by 1000x. There is no such solidarity among Chinese citizens with the rest of the world. 6) Propaganda and censorship are the order of the day. We cannot know what is happening, nor its impact, nor its origin. I hope that the Chinese citizens will be aware of this and impose themselves on their government by demanding 改革 and 革命 .

lostlogin 7y ago
Re 4), this sounds way too much like what was done to Germany post World War 1, and it had massive consequences.
Jommi 7y ago
What's up with these constant purtorting of November as the starting point of the disease? AFAIK. We have no reliable information that this is the case. Could you give sources to that and some of the other statements in your comment?
7y ago

nickysielicki 7y ago

There’s never going to be a lockdown in this country. If people need stuff, they’ll go out. It simply won’t work. I’ve seen the videos coming out of Hubei. If you tried to weld someone’s door shut in the US you stand a good chance of being shot by the resident and both their neighbors. Maybe not in the big cities, but virtually everywhere else.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

daxorid 7y ago

> may I ask you instead of blaming whoever No. We knew the R0 of this thing in late January, and we knew, at least approximately, the fatality rate and ICU/ventilation requirement rate, in very early February. Every single "just the flu bro" type has indirectly killed people since that time, including the WHO Chief and US President. These things should not be forgotten, and consequences should be meted out, lest we doom ourselves to repeat the mistakes of complacency in the future.

chupa-chups 7y ago

HN likes to downrank anything regarding the current outbreak. This was posted 53 minutes ago and received around 100 votes in 20 minutes, but was downranked shortly after: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22550623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22550623 Now this post has inevitably been downranked as well. I'm setting up a HN downranking-watch site right now ;-) If you know some crowd-funding site where one can donate money to health care workers, please let me know (berthold dot alexander at googlemail dot com)

flukus 7y ago
HN will down rank anything getting a lot of comments, I think votes might be factored in as well. It kills a lot of good topics and often allows astro turfing accounts to kill them.
- code_duck 7y ago
  Every time I make a comment that garners a large number of replies, moderators 'detach' it from the article, which I suppose leaves it in some Netherworld where it can only be accessed from members' profiles. I'm not sure what the point of that is.
  - incompatible 7y ago
    Maybe they are just falling off the first page of the article's comments. Try the "more" link at the bottom.
    - code_duck 7y ago
      No. I'm referring to a moderator making a statement 'this has been detached', not some misunderstanding or confusion I'm having. You can find it on my profile recently.
      - incompatible 7y ago
        I see what you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22512003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22512003. Considered off-topic maybe?

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

There are structural problems that China needs to address that would help in the future. For example, the lack of indoor heating in southern China exacerbates flus and sicknesses like this because your immunity system is constantly beat down when it is constantly cold everywhere. China is rich enough now that they can afford to heat southern homes, if not for comfort, then for stuff like this (see https://facilityexecutive.com/2020/02/indoor-humidification-can-reduce-coronavirus-transmission/ https://facilityexecutive.com/2020/02/indoor-humidification-...)! And when the quarantine comes, you have to keep warm at home somehow. Something that we westerners take for granted and why I would guess the virus won’t propagate as quickly. Long term, these kind of things are more important than shiny sky scrapers and HSRs.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
oefrha 7y ago
I don’t quite get this. Having spent significant time in southern China, while there’s no exceptional water heating that’s (from what I heard and from some brief stays) universal in the north, I can’t think of an urban residence that doesn’t have indoor air conditioning, and rural homes tend to have installed them in the last twenty years, too. It can’t be constantly cold unless people refuse to turn on air conditioning. (I’ve heard that some older college dorms may not have air conditioning, though.) Meanwhile, I’ve spent significant time in NorCal and NJ residences with extremely crappy heating, too.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  What cities in southern China? There is very little indoor heating in Changsha, and I assume nearby Wuhan as well but I’ve never been there. Guangzhou and HK have less indoor heating as well, but they have more mild climates than Changsha so it isn’t much of a problem. Shanghai and Hangzhou do much better with heat, but they are also the richest cities in China. It stems from a decision Mao made more than 50 years ago. First, people expect the state to be responsible for heating, which is weird to us but follows the soviet model. So the state decided to provide central heating to people in the north but not in the south. Now you could provide your own heat, but the majority of Chinese live in apartment blocks that are poorly insulated between units. So to heat your home you have to heat all of your neighbors also, which isn’t going to happen. It works fine in northern China because they just pump hit water through the whole building. So people are left with local heating options, eg the kokatsu. So my wife and her family own a couple of apartments in hunan that we’ve thought about renovating for heat. No one local really knows how to do it because it isn’t done. Coupled with the fact that walls in China are concrete slabs, not wooden posts with room for insulation in the middle, so you have to add something on top of the walls and maybe do heating from the floors. Anyways, it is expensive. And it’s not just your home, but where you work. The last time I went to the HSR station in my wife’s hometown, the girls selling snacks at the station were really bundled up and if you weren’t wearing gloves your hands with hurt...inside the brand new train station. Indoor heating is a requirement in much of the states, even in LA (you can skimp on AC, but you can’t rent or sell a unit without heat), and building codes have improved a lot over the years so it’s unlikely you’ll freeze your butt off in something built within the last 30 years.

derekhsu 7y ago

Taking the same action as China technically is impossible for most countries because of differences on attitude to human rights. In China, a lot of people can be left at home to die and they cannot do any protest against their government. In the most serious period in Wuhan, citizens were limited to stay home and there were not enough means of transport to do necessary transportation, such as critical patients and food. At the expense of this, another large proportion of people can keep alive. But in the US, people have weapons and they are very tough. In addition, the information is transparency, so it is impossible to hide such tragedies.

richard78459 7y ago
This is why US is an accepted leader of the world. I am not a national of china or US.

hnick 7y ago

For the pets there are already various pet care platforms that probably tout themselves as "The Uber/AirBnb for pets!". People can take your pet to their home or visit yours for feeding/walking/yard time. So if this may be an issue for you it might be good to start looking around to get connections. I assume the issue is that the entire family was moved out of the home? I'd be a little leery of visiting such a home without training if there's a chance the fixtures (doorknobs, fridge handles) can be carrying the virus. In particular if there's any reason to be opening the fridge for pet food because lower temperatures of 4c apparently drastically increase virus survival time to a few weeks, so handling items in the fridge may be a major risk.

navinsylvester 7y ago

I don't see any tech solutions mentioned out here. At least i would like to take a shot. Not relying on government is the way to go. I think we should build a social network for community welfare which can prepare us for something like this in future. Where people build communities among themselves. Key point being internal resource availability to be exposed to the close knit network and an external pool exposed to an radius. Keeping everything to the close knit shouldn't be encouraged and there should be a proportion. Ideally the network should be split when its crossing a proportion.

navinsylvester 7y ago
How do we keep up with something like covid-19 in future?. I don’t think relying on government is the way to go. Why not build a social network which helps to build close knit communities and it can have a cascade effect on the whole populace as a side effect("good"). Some of the key points for it to work being: # Pool resources before hand so that the whole system is not suffocated. # Internal resources exposed to close knit. # External resources exposed to a radius. # Cap on internal vs external resources. # Split the community into smaller ones when it reaches a proportion. # Point system to motivate communities. # Ability to mobilize resource across communities. This need not be the case with just a pandemic but can help us tide over other eventualities as well.

2J0 7y ago

I'm saying I'm serious twice in this year already do it had to be the end.. Send everyone over 55 s as my working phone capable of doing Skype or whatever and provide the device a data connection to a Chatroulette app setup and instructions to disable the it and use normally in big big print and grayscale not color screens please color is confusing or color only what you want clicked (NeXT could have been a revolution for just doing that) by us old people anyway...

jakequade 7y ago

What's happening is an appropriate response. Sure, anyone blaming individuals / residents is being out-of-line, but this _needs_ to happen.

JVIDEL 7y ago

This post This post right here This is peak HN We're facing potentially the worst global pandemic in a century and you're talking about takeout and pet sitting And this is the top post

anthonybsd 7y ago

> All those services, and a bunch of other services for small businesses are possible because of Wechat. Ughh, no thanks buddy. I'd rather not have any of this propaganda garbage. WeChat basically contributed to a global pandemic because it's prime instrument of Chinese censorship[1]. [1] https://medium.com/pcmag-access/china-has-been-censoring-coronavirus-information-for-months-933205db1b0f https://medium.com/pcmag-access/china-has-been-censoring-cor...