6 ms·

Show HN: Stop Covid-19 by taking your temperature

50 points by carsonbaker 7y ago

samizdis 7y ago
Is anosmia worth including in the symptoms options?
- carsonbaker 7y ago
  Very good observation. I'll defer to our network of doctors and take their feedback on this. Thank you!
- samizdis 7y ago
  In case anyone's interested - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/health/coronavirus-symptoms-smell-taste.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/health/coronavirus-sympto...
ExtremePopcorn 7y ago
The usefulness instantly clicked when I saw this - awesome work, and I wish it were government promoted. I'm no good at writing copy, but I'd work on the homepage's phrasing. Link to https://healthweather.us/ https://healthweather.us/ as well as the NYT article on them, rather than making a reference to Maddow elsewhere (it'd be dumb for someone to be turned away by that, but someone will be.) Explain that CDC data lags three weeks behind historically, and point out all the counties without data. Say all this on the front page, and run A/B tests once you have enough visitors. Again, great work!
- Jamesbeam 7y ago
  "The usefulness instantly clicked when I saw this - awesome work, and I wish it were government promoted." What? Mind = Blown You can't be this stupid.
  - dang 7y ago
    Personal attacks will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful.
    - Jamesbeam 7y ago
      It's not a personal attack if it's a factual truth. Nobody will ban me for that. Someone who suggests that the government promotes a website that is wanting to make unverified healthcare related data available to healthcare professionals during a global pandemic is stupid. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stupid https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stupid Showing poor judgment or little intelligence. In this case stupid = very poor judgement as a decision made on this data by healthcare officials could cost actual lifes.
      - ExtremePopcorn 7y ago
        I'm the last to disagree with your assessment of myself, but I'll defend the idea. Aggregating data during a global pandemic isn't a stupid thing to do. Rather - and stay with me here - it's a smart thing. Edit: Oh you were calling me stupid because you thought researchers wouldn't understand the concept of self-reported medical data. Give them some credit.
        Jamesbeam 7y ago
        I am sorry if you took this as a personal attack and will apologize if i hurt your feelings, i forget that words sometimes mean something different for people than what they were intended for. I should have made clear that I think you have poor judgement if you think this is a good idea to use unverified healthcare data to base any decisions on that could cause people severe harm or the restriction of their rights. If you look at how the US handled the Covid-19 crisis until now, especially at the CDC and the Expert level that the president assigned to guide him, that is really troubling evidence that not every researcher or healthcare official understood the concept of self-reported data or properly verified data at all. There is a good reason why no other country in the world during this crisis suggested citizens to self test or go on a website to enter data there and based on that get tested. That's what we have doctors and lab work for. You call the doctor tell him you might have an infectious disease, he looks at you and your symptoms. He makes the decision that you need to get tested. This is also good advise for the regular flu. And especially with Covid-19 it's important that people get tested early and hospitalized with risk factors before they turn into severe ICU cases. Many people end up in the ICU right now because they go to the hospital while already dying. A lot of the reports you read from Hospitals in the US and in other countries where people don't have universal healthcare is they already arrive with blue lips and fingers in the emergency room and do not any longer have a fighting chance to beat the virus. I have also seen this before, I have been one of the PMCs training a lot of the military repsonse teams to the Ebola Outbreak in 2014 in west africa and it was very frightening to see on who's advise and what data the governments were basing decisions on. So excuse me when I get a bit temperamental about this topic. Stupid people or let's say people with poor judgement are at all levels of society, sometimes in positions that they shouldn't be in a crisis. And I understand that the guy who made the website probably has good intentions. But if you do something, do it right or not at all.
exabrial 7y ago
I really want to call upon any engineers/managers at Apple/Google/Garmin/Fitbit: please start working on body temperature monitoring. It doesn't have to be a realtime readout like a heart monitor, but something that could work overnight to find an average. This could stop entire pandemics.
- raphlinus 7y ago
  Kinsa is doing a lot of this already. Check https://healthweather.us/ https://healthweather.us/ for their published maps.
  - exabrial 7y ago
    I have one of their thermometers! It's cool. I just wish it was automatic
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    So what's going on with Florida?
    - raphlinus 7y ago
      Really good question. One hypothesis is that they're massively under-testing, but there's not a lot of data to support that. If you look at https://covidtracking.com/data/ https://covidtracking.com/data/ for example, you see a positivity ratio of about 9% for FL, compared with 86% (!!!) for NJ, where it is really clear that the situation is dire but we're not seeing it because of lack of testing. The other one to watch is Michigan. There the "data quality grade" from covidtracking is a D.
      - Gibbon1 7y ago
        I think Iceland pop 300,000 tested everyone. The result is 50% of the cases are asymptomatic. That's terrible in two ways, one is potentially it's spreading undetected. And two natural herd immunity comes at an enormous cost.
blackrock 7y ago
I had an idea, that one way to eliminate this COVID-19 coronavirus, as well as the H1N1 influenza virus from civilization, is to shut down all human movement for 30 to 60 days. You have to go 2 or 3 weeks, without any new reported infections to be sure. This would require that all the countries and governments of the world, act in unison, to ensure that all 7 billion people are tracked, and monitored. But the reality is, good luck, as this will never happen. The economic cost is too high, but the alternative, is that the COVID-19 virus will hunt down the human race.
ipunchghosts 7y ago
wont let me enter my temp
- carsonbaker 7y ago
  You might be on Firefox. I just fixed this!
  - strict9 7y ago
    Still broken on FF :(
    - carsonbaker 7y ago
      Sorry! Try again.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
      Are you blocking reCaptcha?
psychometry 7y ago
I'm curious about something: Is fever is a symptom that would appear without someone noticing it? Wouldn't other symptoms like chills/coughing manifest first?
- prostheticvamp 7y ago
  People often don’t know they have a fever. Not necessarily because they feel well, but because they fail to identify their ill feeling as “fever”. I’ve had tons of patients deny fever, endorse fever symptoms, and then have a fever on thermometer.
x0xMaximus 7y ago
Make the data public like https://covidstudy.com https://covidstudy.com
- carsonbaker 7y ago
  We might. There's some worry that e.g. showing a heat map of the data might be alarming, so we're trying to figure out where the balance is between transparency and cautiousness.
mNovak 7y ago
Will this track individual's symptom progression over time? e.g. if I submit everyday as suggested, are these uncorrelated datapoints, or do you get trend info?
- carsonbaker 7y ago
  Yes, we get trend info. We're storing a cookie in your browser with a UUID that is associated to your temperature reading. If you submit temperatures for multiple people in your household, they all get that UUID, which we assume to be a household identifier.
carsonbaker 7y ago
Carson here, site developer. Thank you for the positive response so far, but also feel free to leave us constructive criticism. If you want to contribute to this effort, the GitHub is https://github.com/carsonbaker/takeyourtemp https://github.com/carsonbaker/takeyourtemp. We're working on it with frenetic energy.
- SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
  Celsius would be good. It'd save me a manual conversion. And 98.6 is just a conversion from 37C anyway that ignored the rules of significant figures...
Daviey 7y ago
> contributing to the most important crowdsourcing operation in US history. Why is this US centric?
- tylerhou 7y ago
  Because presumably they are working with US health officials.
Jamesbeam 7y ago
May I ask how is any of the data you collect of any use if there is zero verification that said data is from actual people with symptoms? I was just able to enter a US Zip code and normal temperature 98.6 without any verification. The site doesn't even check for location. I was able to enter data for a "US citizen" from Europe. Then clear cookies and do it again. Verification of data is a huge thing if you want to make any kind of decision based on that data.
- x0xMaximus 7y ago
  https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.19.20038844v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.19.20038844v... https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/1/2/e000234 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/1/2/e000234 https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h3480.full https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h3480.full
  - Jamesbeam 7y ago
    Ok cool, you give me three links. The first one says This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice. The second one has a sample size of less than thousand people and concludes "Self-diagnosis does not accurately predict influenza seropositivity" The third one is the only one that has a good set of data in terms of sample size ( 50+ Million ) but concludes "Symptom checkers had deficits in both triage and diagnosis" and that said I have no idea if those websites need some kind of verification as well, so if not someone who's bored could have just added bogus data to that as well. I am not sure what's your point.
mofojed 7y ago
I would love to, but I don't have a thermometer and the stores are all sold out :(
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  My GF and I have a single thermometer that is over 20 years old. It seems to still work but still.
sesuximo 7y ago
Just keep in mind that fever plus flu like symptoms is probably the flu!

50 points by carsonbaker 7y ago

samizdis 7y ago

Is anosmia worth including in the symptoms options?

carsonbaker 7y ago
Very good observation. I'll defer to our network of doctors and take their feedback on this. Thank you!
samizdis 7y ago
In case anyone's interested - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/health/coronavirus-symptoms-smell-taste.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/health/coronavirus-sympto...

ExtremePopcorn 7y ago

The usefulness instantly clicked when I saw this - awesome work, and I wish it were government promoted. I'm no good at writing copy, but I'd work on the homepage's phrasing. Link to https://healthweather.us/ https://healthweather.us/ as well as the NYT article on them, rather than making a reference to Maddow elsewhere (it'd be dumb for someone to be turned away by that, but someone will be.) Explain that CDC data lags three weeks behind historically, and point out all the counties without data. Say all this on the front page, and run A/B tests once you have enough visitors. Again, great work!

Jamesbeam 7y ago
"The usefulness instantly clicked when I saw this - awesome work, and I wish it were government promoted." What? Mind = Blown You can't be this stupid.
- dang 7y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - Jamesbeam 7y ago
    It's not a personal attack if it's a factual truth. Nobody will ban me for that. Someone who suggests that the government promotes a website that is wanting to make unverified healthcare related data available to healthcare professionals during a global pandemic is stupid. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stupid https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stupid Showing poor judgment or little intelligence. In this case stupid = very poor judgement as a decision made on this data by healthcare officials could cost actual lifes.
    - ExtremePopcorn 7y ago
      I'm the last to disagree with your assessment of myself, but I'll defend the idea. Aggregating data during a global pandemic isn't a stupid thing to do. Rather - and stay with me here - it's a smart thing. Edit: Oh you were calling me stupid because you thought researchers wouldn't understand the concept of self-reported medical data. Give them some credit.
      - Jamesbeam 7y ago
        I am sorry if you took this as a personal attack and will apologize if i hurt your feelings, i forget that words sometimes mean something different for people than what they were intended for. I should have made clear that I think you have poor judgement if you think this is a good idea to use unverified healthcare data to base any decisions on that could cause people severe harm or the restriction of their rights. If you look at how the US handled the Covid-19 crisis until now, especially at the CDC and the Expert level that the president assigned to guide him, that is really troubling evidence that not every researcher or healthcare official understood the concept of self-reported data or properly verified data at all. There is a good reason why no other country in the world during this crisis suggested citizens to self test or go on a website to enter data there and based on that get tested. That's what we have doctors and lab work for. You call the doctor tell him you might have an infectious disease, he looks at you and your symptoms. He makes the decision that you need to get tested. This is also good advise for the regular flu. And especially with Covid-19 it's important that people get tested early and hospitalized with risk factors before they turn into severe ICU cases. Many people end up in the ICU right now because they go to the hospital while already dying. A lot of the reports you read from Hospitals in the US and in other countries where people don't have universal healthcare is they already arrive with blue lips and fingers in the emergency room and do not any longer have a fighting chance to beat the virus. I have also seen this before, I have been one of the PMCs training a lot of the military repsonse teams to the Ebola Outbreak in 2014 in west africa and it was very frightening to see on who's advise and what data the governments were basing decisions on. So excuse me when I get a bit temperamental about this topic. Stupid people or let's say people with poor judgement are at all levels of society, sometimes in positions that they shouldn't be in a crisis. And I understand that the guy who made the website probably has good intentions. But if you do something, do it right or not at all.

exabrial 7y ago

I really want to call upon any engineers/managers at Apple/Google/Garmin/Fitbit: please start working on body temperature monitoring. It doesn't have to be a realtime readout like a heart monitor, but something that could work overnight to find an average. This could stop entire pandemics.

raphlinus 7y ago
Kinsa is doing a lot of this already. Check https://healthweather.us/ https://healthweather.us/ for their published maps.
- exabrial 7y ago
  I have one of their thermometers! It's cool. I just wish it was automatic
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  So what's going on with Florida?
  - raphlinus 7y ago
    Really good question. One hypothesis is that they're massively under-testing, but there's not a lot of data to support that. If you look at https://covidtracking.com/data/ https://covidtracking.com/data/ for example, you see a positivity ratio of about 9% for FL, compared with 86% (!!!) for NJ, where it is really clear that the situation is dire but we're not seeing it because of lack of testing. The other one to watch is Michigan. There the "data quality grade" from covidtracking is a D.
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      I think Iceland pop 300,000 tested everyone. The result is 50% of the cases are asymptomatic. That's terrible in two ways, one is potentially it's spreading undetected. And two natural herd immunity comes at an enormous cost.

blackrock 7y ago

I had an idea, that one way to eliminate this COVID-19 coronavirus, as well as the H1N1 influenza virus from civilization, is to shut down all human movement for 30 to 60 days. You have to go 2 or 3 weeks, without any new reported infections to be sure. This would require that all the countries and governments of the world, act in unison, to ensure that all 7 billion people are tracked, and monitored. But the reality is, good luck, as this will never happen. The economic cost is too high, but the alternative, is that the COVID-19 virus will hunt down the human race.

ipunchghosts 7y ago

wont let me enter my temp

carsonbaker 7y ago
You might be on Firefox. I just fixed this!
- strict9 7y ago
  Still broken on FF :(
  - carsonbaker 7y ago
    Sorry! Try again.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
    Are you blocking reCaptcha?

psychometry 7y ago

I'm curious about something: Is fever is a symptom that would appear without someone noticing it? Wouldn't other symptoms like chills/coughing manifest first?

prostheticvamp 7y ago
People often don’t know they have a fever. Not necessarily because they feel well, but because they fail to identify their ill feeling as “fever”. I’ve had tons of patients deny fever, endorse fever symptoms, and then have a fever on thermometer.

x0xMaximus 7y ago

Make the data public like https://covidstudy.com https://covidstudy.com

carsonbaker 7y ago
We might. There's some worry that e.g. showing a heat map of the data might be alarming, so we're trying to figure out where the balance is between transparency and cautiousness.

mNovak 7y ago

Will this track individual's symptom progression over time? e.g. if I submit everyday as suggested, are these uncorrelated datapoints, or do you get trend info?

carsonbaker 7y ago
Yes, we get trend info. We're storing a cookie in your browser with a UUID that is associated to your temperature reading. If you submit temperatures for multiple people in your household, they all get that UUID, which we assume to be a household identifier.

carsonbaker 7y ago

Carson here, site developer. Thank you for the positive response so far, but also feel free to leave us constructive criticism. If you want to contribute to this effort, the GitHub is https://github.com/carsonbaker/takeyourtemp https://github.com/carsonbaker/takeyourtemp. We're working on it with frenetic energy.

SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
Celsius would be good. It'd save me a manual conversion. And 98.6 is just a conversion from 37C anyway that ignored the rules of significant figures...

Daviey 7y ago

> contributing to the most important crowdsourcing operation in US history. Why is this US centric?

tylerhou 7y ago
Because presumably they are working with US health officials.

Jamesbeam 7y ago

May I ask how is any of the data you collect of any use if there is zero verification that said data is from actual people with symptoms? I was just able to enter a US Zip code and normal temperature 98.6 without any verification. The site doesn't even check for location. I was able to enter data for a "US citizen" from Europe. Then clear cookies and do it again. Verification of data is a huge thing if you want to make any kind of decision based on that data.

x0xMaximus 7y ago
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.19.20038844v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.19.20038844v... https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/1/2/e000234 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/1/2/e000234 https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h3480.full https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h3480.full
- Jamesbeam 7y ago
  Ok cool, you give me three links. The first one says This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice. The second one has a sample size of less than thousand people and concludes "Self-diagnosis does not accurately predict influenza seropositivity" The third one is the only one that has a good set of data in terms of sample size ( 50+ Million ) but concludes "Symptom checkers had deficits in both triage and diagnosis" and that said I have no idea if those websites need some kind of verification as well, so if not someone who's bored could have just added bogus data to that as well. I am not sure what's your point.

mofojed 7y ago

I would love to, but I don't have a thermometer and the stores are all sold out :(

Gibbon1 7y ago
My GF and I have a single thermometer that is over 20 years old. It seems to still work but still.

sesuximo 7y ago

Just keep in mind that fever plus flu like symptoms is probably the flu!