15 ms·

Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

402 points by prostoalex 7y ago

ggm 7y ago
I expect norovirus and rotovirus D&V will decline but salmonella will rise. Maybe even accidental mushroom poisoning, ptomaine? (Foraging, tinned meat) and bad salami caused an outbreak of life threatening kidney and other problems in South Australia some years back, so people going into cured meats be warned. Alcohol poisoning from home stills is a constant.
- belenos46 7y ago
  I'm not too worried about alcohol poisoning RE: home stills. It's people who don't toss the heads and tails that have a bad time: methanol poisoning sucks, and is the cause of most home distilling dangers (blindness, kidney failure, etc).
  - ggm 7y ago
    This is what I suspect most people will miss. Worldwide I think alcohol poisoning is adulteration of spirits with industrial alcohol but the heads and tails are not just methanol, it can have metal and chemical residues as well.
lalos 7y ago
"Historically, Kinsa’s methods have been able to account for a sharp rise in the number of people taking tests, said Benjamin Dalziel, a professor at Oregon State University who studies infectious diseases. For his research, Dalziel has ensured that a spike in testing didn’t lead to inaccurate predictions, and so he believes the current decline in illness is a result of social distancing, and not a statistical anomaly. (Dalziel has had research funded by Kinsa in the past)." Huh, I was expecting the opposite of this. The previous data could be slightly off because of smaller sample size and now that it has exploded they have a better estimate to reality.
- lolc 7y ago
  Well their error bars may be smaller this year but they're comparing to past years.
- feanaro 7y ago
  The problem is the sample isn't random.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sudoaza 7y ago
I was hoping for this, lets do social distancing a tradition for every winter
- recursive 7y ago
  Just you and me? That's not going to do much. Organizing action in the scale of the billions is a lot harder than having the idea. I'm not sure if there's any precedent for what's happening now.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  Do you really think we're going to come out of this period causing people to lose their jobs, lose their savings, lose their loved ones, not see their friends, stop going to sports and social events… and everyone's going to be like "Hey, that was fun, let's do it again next year"?
  - kaitai 7y ago
    Maybe a brief version, like a Passover commemorating COVID-19 instead. Passover isn't exactly a fun party kind of holiday.
  - fiblye 7y ago
    Some countries have week-long holidays where most people go home/travel/don't work. Their economies aren't dead. Make it a tradition where everyone with non-essential work stays home at least one week a year, all at the same time. More time is better, but even a little bit would likely cut back on disease. Governments already define Christmas/New Years/etc as a holidays and huge numbers of people aren't working on those days and economies don't die. It wouldn't be hard for companies to promote "Pre-Stay Home Week Extravaganza" sales and make people actually look forward to staying home, eating and watching movies/playing games/whatever.
    - Terretta 7y ago
      In Europe this is called "August".
a_t48 7y ago
I was just wondering about this yesterday. Neat, thanks for sharing.
bluedevil2k 7y ago
I was thinking if we go all in on this stay-in-place and we get it working around the world, could we eliminate measles? Chicken pox? Any other human-virus disease that relies on human-to-human contact to spread?
- sdafsdf 7y ago
  Unfortunate, stuff like the flue is believed to live in some/few/enough humans which do not show symptoms but are able to spread it. It would be interesting to see a list or to survive it to see a documentary about its effects.
- nxc18 7y ago
  Unfortunately, I think a more significant cause of the continued existence of these diseases is failure to vaccinate, either by choice (anti-vax) or due to circumstance (cost of vaccination, access to health care, etc). There are several diseases that society could eradicate that we simply choose not to. Even wealthy tech people are affected by this; I was just told my very good insurance doesn't cover a vaccine that my doctor prescribed. It would cost $400, so I need to weigh my actual risk of getting the disease against cost of vaccination. I'd think the long-term return on investment for society would justify making just about every vaccine free to all. edit: consider how much easier it is to just get a few shots, compared to never going to a bar, restaurant, sporting event, public transit or shared workspace ever again. Going all-in on social isolation is a nonstarter, even discounting the people who won't comply (there are many) or the toxic political environment that has pitted half the US against science and expertise.
  - dathinab 7y ago
    Not sure why you got down voted, I can only agree. Social distancing only slows distribution it doesn't prevent it reliably also some disease are spread by animals which are not at all affected by social distancing. And then vaccines are also not enough as it had shown for some disease where we did try to eliminate them by handing out free vaccines in affected countries. Lastly social distancing has a super high cost if continued. Not only economically but a super high health cost. Humans are not meant to live permanently social distanced they are inherently social animals and the internet can't really replace it. E.g. for people fighting depression social distancing can be like poison. It prevents them or at least restrict them from doing many the thinks which can help fighting depression and causes "physical" isolation (Internet is helping but has limits, it's not helping enough to counter it). Another group most likely majorly negatively affected are people with "home" problems, like violent partners or parents (or just to controlling partners or parents). To just name some example.
jakewins 7y ago
Does anyone know if they account for their user base presumably being mismatched with actual demographics? ie. I assume their users are going to correlate with tech-savvy people, in turn correlating with people able to work from home, giving a severely skewed sample
ivanhoe 7y ago
the title should really be "other INFECTIOUS diseases"
- mrob 7y ago
  Reduced air pollution reduces non-infectious disease too.
  - ivanhoe 7y ago
    Can you please explain me how is air pollution affected by social distancing? And also article is not discussing air pollution at all, they talk about less fevers detected on smart thermometers. Those are caused by seasonal flu and other viral seasonal colds, obviously because people now take more care, so those other infectious diseases are blocked from spreading too.
    - mrob 7y ago
      Physical distancing prohibits all non-essential travel, much of which would have happened by motor vehicle.
phantom784 7y ago
What about selection bias? I'd think that people are more likely to use a thermometer even if they don't feel like they have a fever now than they would have previously. That could account for numbers going down.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  They think they have been able to correct for that. > Due to the emergence of the coronavirus, Kinsa is receiving two to three times more thermometer readings per day than in previous flu seasons. Historically, Kinsa’s methods have been able to account for a sharp rise in the number of people taking tests, said Benjamin Dalziel, a professor at Oregon State University who studies infectious diseases. For his research, Dalziel has ensured that a spike in testing didn’t lead to inaccurate predictions, and so he believes the current decline in illness is a result of social distancing, and not a statistical anomaly. (Dalziel has had research funded by Kinsa in the past).
ShorsHammer 7y ago
The lockdown of non-essential businesses has essentially reduced traffic accidents here to zero when usually there'd be a over a hundred deaths and few thousand injuries per week. By comparison there's only been 20 deaths from covid-19 over the space of 3 months, nearly all of them elderly people with pre-existing conditions. Yet people are emotional creatures and not all deaths are equal.
- __s 7y ago
  Traffic accidents also aren't contagious
  - tejtm 7y ago
    Allot of people do get them from someone else, but your point still holds as they tend to fall off not grow beyond first contacts.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  As of right now, covid-19 is killing about 2,200 people/day, compared to about 3,300 people/day for car accidents. So it hasn't caught up yet, but it's still on an exponential climb and will probably get there in another week or so, and then keep right on climbing. This whole "the flu/cars/heart disease is way worse" shtick people are leaning on has got to stop. It's true until exponential growth suddenly means it's not. EDIT: And those are the worldwide numbers. In the US specifically, covid-19 is killing about 200 people/day, compared to 100 people/day for car accidents, and is of course going to go way up from here.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Wouldn’t the number of people the virus will kill will reach a maximum and then decline rapidly as the remaining population will be immune to it?
MobileVet 7y ago
Just imagine how many fewer people would fall ill each year with the flu if we didn’t shake hands as our default greeting?
- fiblye 7y ago
  I really hope this helps kill the concept of handshaking entirely. Unfortunately, there's still a large segment of dirty-handed people who think you can judge a person based on their handshake.
  - SomeGuy789 7y ago
    There's a lot of hidden value in physical contact. I don't think it should be disregarded so easily considering society as a whole became much more distant in recent years.
    - fiblye 7y ago
      Potentially. But I find there to be zero value in touching the hands of someone I only just learned the name of. Especially considering I don't even know whether they're the type to cough in their hands, or the type to not wash after using the toilet. Bro hug with a friend I haven't seen in a while? Okay. Sweaty hand contact with a stranger? Never.
      - hackeraccount 7y ago
        The danger is higher - that's exactly why we do it. It's an easy way to create intimacy with a stranger quickly. There's a reason politicians shake hands and kiss babies.
        fiblye 7y ago
        Handshakes far predate modern germ theory of disease. The "danger" doesn't really help with intimacy in any way. It's completely unnecessary danger. We'd find sharing tissues with strangers to be disgusting if it were introduced as a greeting today, but touching the hands of someone right after they've sneezed and coughed into them--after which we often unknowingly touch our own face--is regarded as a sign of intimacy or respect.
justlexi93 7y ago
This is just temporary but effective way to lessen the spread of contagious disease. No other country wants to be the next Italy.
ineedasername 7y ago
There could be some selection bias here. It's based on thermometer readings from Kinsa. And the articles states: Kinsa is receiving two to three times more thermometer readings per day than in previous flu seasons Many more people may be taking thermometer reading that don't really need to, but are being cautious. That would cause the appearance of a proportional drop in high temp readings compared to prior years when really it's just that lots of not-so-sick people are taking their temp lots more.
- mrfusion 7y ago
  (Removed)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - logicallee 7y ago
    This line: >Recent data clearly show the spread of Covid-19. On March 19, the share of Americans with temperatures indicating they had flu-like symptoms was about 4.9% when it typically would be expected to be about 4.0%. This was likely a result of the spread of Covid-19, according to Kinsa’s researchers. ... means that 1 week ago 2,964,898 Americans (0.9%) had Covid-19. Today there are 65,950 recorded cases in the United States: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
    - mrfusion 7y ago
      Wow that’s pretty amazing. Really makes you wonder. And that would just be the people with symptoms right now. It wouldn’t include recovered, asymptomatic, nor people in the incubation period.
      - logicallee 7y ago
        Or the data is invalid. We'll find out soon enough, there are millions of test kits being made available soon.
mrfusion 7y ago
I’ve heard there are 200 different cold viruses. It’s conceivable at least a few of them become eradicated after this. Anything with a low r0 is going to have a lot of trouble surviving right now.
Robotbeat 7y ago
I've noticed this anecdotally. My son usually goes to preschool (and Sunday school and playdates and museums and parks). He has had an almost constant runny nose for a while... as soon as one virus is fought off, another takes its place. Nothing major, but clearly annoying to him (cheek red due to him wiping his nose, in spite of our efforts to keep his face clean). A few days to a week after soft-quarantine (school and church cancelled), his runny nose is gone and hasn't come back.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  This also means your little one is not getting that community immunity. You want your little one to get sick at a young age to ward of invaders as they get older. Anecdote: my niece gets sick badly and passes it on to everyone in her house at least every other month. She does not got to daycare. My LO does go to daycare and comes home with a new mild sickness once every third week and is fine a few days later. I’m interested to see how he fairs when school opens up again
  - op00to 7y ago
    Childrens immune systems are challenged quite effectively with normal everyday exposure. You don’t need to feel symptoms to build immunity.
  - op00to 7y ago
    I could say the opposite. My son was sick 3 times prior to entering school, we took care of him at home until age 5. Each resolved in a day or so. Upon attending school, he’s got his share of colds and a fever or two, and clears them out quickly.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  Have you verified that it's a virus and not actually allergies? Runny nose can be confused for allergies, school might e.g. have mold or dust which your son is reacting badly to.
mrfusion 7y ago
Influenza only has an R0 of 1.3. I really wonder if we’ve managed to push it below 1.0 world wide. Pretty wild to think about. 1.3 really isn’t that much. What if all the new people who’ve started washing their hands keeps it below 1.0?
- zzleeper 7y ago
  Sadly, as long as there's a large enough region where it has R0 > 1, then when we lift restrictions we'll be back to normal.
  - closeparen 7y ago
    Or a species. Viruses aren’t just for humans.
    - _ph_ 7y ago
      You have to distinguish between viruses in abstract and a concrete disease. Many viral diseases we are fighting with are human only. So if we erradicate it in humanity, it is gone. This is how smallpox went away. We vaccinated enough people to make it go away once and for ever. Measels have no animal host either, as far as I am aware, so we could have a good chance to erradicate it too. The corona virus sars-cov-2, as well as the first sars virus jumped from animals to humans. There are several animal species which carry variations of the sars virus, but fortunately, they don't make the transition to humans regularly. If we managed to prevent further transmissions of sars-cov-2 between people, there is a good chance, this virus could go away entirely, unless it manages to jump to some common animal.
- ummonk 7y ago
  It should be noted that R0 won't be constant - the more people have it the lower the R0 since more people will have immunity and more of the extroverts / travelers (who are high R0) will have spread it around to each other already. Also, of course, the R0 always goes below 1 in summer...
- noway421 7y ago
stagas 7y ago
I am betting also driving and particularly drunk driving related accidents and deaths will also drop during this quarantine.
- Exmoor 7y ago
  ..And suicides will likely go way up. Probably a lot of other issues as well that may be more difficult to track. Mental health crisis, domestic violence, etc.
  - dlivingston 7y ago
    As you hint at, unemployment numbers are directly proportional to suicide rates. The effects of shutting down the world are much higher than just missed paychecks and business bankruptcies. You list a few of them. There must be a cost-benefit analysis done where we find the breakeven point between lives saved by quarantine vs. lives damaged by quarantine side effects.
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      The entire world is going on with it this time because the cost-benefit analysis is quite trivial. The entire world also doesn't go with it every few years to stop the flu because the cost-benefit analysis is quite trivial. There has got to be something in between, but on the land of exponential growth and slow-down, that line is very thin. This one pandemic will cross the line at some point, but I bet we will resume business as usual even before that.
aaron695 7y ago
> they may not have realized that they were also combatting other infectious diseases, such as the seasonal flu. No, they fully realise. We have to also reduce the flu. It also takes up many ICU beds. This is vital. Any plan knows this. Whether they are implementing measure like free Flu shots and are ramping up supply of Flu shots using the military if they have to, I doubt, because no one wants to think ahead more than a day.
jb775 7y ago
TLDR: Social distancing is also slowing the normal flu
beamatronic 7y ago
“What if we made a better world...and it was all for nothing”
hyperdunc 7y ago
"Social distancing" is such a weird and ambiguous phrase. Are we not socializing right now over the Internet while maintaining physical distance? Arguably, we're socially closer than before because of this crisis.
- mrob 7y ago
  Which is why the WHO changed their recommended terminology to "physical distancing". Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665506
  - hyperdunc 7y ago
    Difficult to replace a phrase that's already caught on. Good to know, though.
rossdavidh 7y ago
It's fascinating data, and I'm glad it's being taken, but...I am a bit skeptical that we can draw any reasonable conclusions from it without limiting the data to long-term users. It seems implausible that there has not been a significant change in the health-consciousness of the typical purchaser in the last month or two, vs. prior to that. I can't tell you what the change would be, but I find it highly implausible that it would be not at all different, given the biggest spike in public awareness of a health issue in several decades. It's nice to see that Dalziel has thought of the issue, but the article doesn't tell us much about _how_ he accounted for that. I could think of ways, but I could also think of ways to screw it up, and it doesn't say in this article how he "ensured" that the effect is real.
- dcftoapv 7y ago
  Agreed, but this study can certainly be used as part of a larger triangulation. A guy I worked with pointed out that this was happening in Japan about a month ago: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/21/national/influenza-wave-drastically-wanes-japan-amid-spread-coronavirus/#.XnxLlYhKiM8 https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/21/national/influe...
  - nonbel 7y ago
    But who is going to go to a doctor/hospital for the flu when they are scared of catching sars2 there?
- peter_retief 7y ago
  There has also been a decrease in traffic accidents and violent crime. This is data from hospital casualty units in South Africa
  - nroets 7y ago
    Maybe it's not due social distancing, but the economic uncertainty.
  - Swenrekcah 7y ago
agumonkey 7y ago
A worldwide fast through slow
rossdavidh 7y ago
Hypothesis: people who are stuck at home have more time and inclination to check their temperatures, even when they don't feel sick.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  That wouldn't generate an unusual number of 'fever' readings, and then a pretty simple model would do some accounting for repeated use of each thermometer (so 'extra' normal readings shouldn't be reducing the expected number of 'fever' readings).
  - rossdavidh 7y ago
    Agreed, but it could easily generate an unusual number of "not a fever" readings, which would make it look as if there were a smaller than normal number of people getting sick with the flu. Or, maybe it doesn't do that. I don't see how you can say for certain which way it would shift, but I find it implausible that it would stay the same.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      That's what I mean by a simple model. Like a dead stupid one would be to compare to historical data for fevers/week per thermometer. That is barely a model at all and it manages to ignore how many readings are done and accounts for multiple readings during a period of illness and readings for multiple sick members of a household and so on.
anonsubmit2671 7y ago
Apparently, the new term is "physical distancing," because it's not like people are mass unfriending people or calling them Mr./Mrs. SoAndSo.
- noway421 7y ago
  Funny thing is, term "physical distancing" doesn't make sense without mentioning "social distancing", because without that context and by itself it might mean different things.
andreygrehov 7y ago
Randall Munroe did a small section on eradicating the common cold in his What-if book, the basic idea is if that all of humanity stayed away from each other for a week or two then the common cold would die out as it can't survive outside of the human body for more than a week and normally survives by continuously hopping from host to host.
- nullc 7y ago
  Do we know for sure that it* doesn't have an animal reservoir? [*] The common cold is a half dozen distinct viruses.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    > The common cold is a half dozen distinct viruses. Some of them coronaviruses. It makes sense, but it's funny that we classify the common cold by symptoms, ignoring that the viruses are in different families.
  - nickthemagicman 7y ago
    True. Maybe something like chickens or pigs could be an animal vector. Then a very minor mutation could make it infectious to humans.
    - nullc 7y ago
      Doesn't even need the mutation. It may be that it is infectious with R0>1 to some other animals as is, but with few health effects so we don't notice it. If so, it'll just immediately get reintroduced to humans even if we distance it out of our population successfully. No mutations required.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  This current situation had me wondering how hard it would be to coordinate a regular -- maybe not yearly -- global self-isolation for say 2-3 weeks at a time. Aside from the difficulties of getting everyone in the world to agree that the first three weeks of February during a leap year are observed through social distance, it doesn't seem like it would be as bad on a recurring basis as it is during an emergency like this. You could plan for your self-isolation in advance, so there wouldn't be a rush for supplies the way there is now; you would already know not to schedule anything for February; you'd probably still have to solve some money problems for a large number of people, since being able to WFH probably anti-correlates with living paycheck to paycheck. If you could actually eliminate -- or at least, dramatically reduce the incidence of -- common colds and seasonal flu through such a scheme, it would probably be worth both from a QoL standpoint for the everyone in the world (would you trade 3 weeks of cabin fever every four years for never having another actual fever?) and from an economic standpoint (three weeks of predictable low productivity is almost certainly better than the unpredictable constant costs associated with illness and death).
bregma 7y ago
I image new cases of the clap are going to tumble precipitously.
kanox 7y ago
Social distancing is pretty great. My company temporarily banned meetings with more than 6 people; this should be permanent.
deevolution 7y ago
I wonder if viruses will adapt to this hostile social distancing climate.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
FpUser 7y ago
Well, the ultimate example of "social distancing" were tiny island nations. They got visited by Europeans, caught whatever bugs they brought and now they're all dead. If you do not train your immune system it'll fail you. When we have some major epidemic with an ugly consequences coming then sure social distancing can help. However taking social distancing as a generic strategy for out future lives I think will lead to a major f.. up.
known 7y ago
India is practicing Untouchability for 2700 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda Social Distancing is not different/difficult for them; http://archive.vn/bEMTt http://archive.vn/bEMTt
tomerico 7y ago
Here is a reason to believe that the data is biased. If you look at any county in California - you’d see a large drop on the exact date that the statewide shelter in place was ordered. This is obviously before any of the effects of isolation would manifest themselves. The reason is likely due to larger amount of testing done due to the panic, that is not properly accounted for in their algorithm.
- madsmith 7y ago
  I whole heartedly agree. Kinsa’s data immediately shouts out that there’s a non-intuitive behavior being demonstrated. I would also make an argument that individuals who invest in smart thermometers would be more concerned about illness than the typical population and thus highly responsive to governmental declarations of states emergency. I think it’s really hard and misleading to look at this data and make any larger conclusions.
- 01100011 7y ago
  For what it's worth, some populations began isolating before the shelter in place order. I went to Ranch 99 on 2/28 and panic buying was already in full swing. Lots of masks. I think the Chinese community was very proactive and took action early. It left an impression on me and I started WFH full time. I think that was the day they announced the second community infection in Santa Clara county.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- empath75 7y ago
  People started staying at home well before that.
- darkarmani 7y ago
  It's certainly biased. The question is if it is still useful after accounting for bias. People that use these thermometers probably skew towards being more worried about the virus. They probably isolated and were more careful days before the shelter in place was ordered.
geuis 7y ago
Wish I had seen this hours ago. Their data is visualized at https://healthweather.us/ https://healthweather.us/ I’ve been checking this daily for the last week or so.
101404 7y ago
Sounds more like more people are taking their temperature despite not feeling sick. Hence the sudden increase in readings they receive. So a pronounced decline in the percentage of high temperature readings should be expected.
lez 7y ago
I prefer to call it physical distancing. Social distancing is when the Internet goes off.

402 points by prostoalex 7y ago

ggm 7y ago

I expect norovirus and rotovirus D&V will decline but salmonella will rise. Maybe even accidental mushroom poisoning, ptomaine? (Foraging, tinned meat) and bad salami caused an outbreak of life threatening kidney and other problems in South Australia some years back, so people going into cured meats be warned. Alcohol poisoning from home stills is a constant.

belenos46 7y ago
I'm not too worried about alcohol poisoning RE: home stills. It's people who don't toss the heads and tails that have a bad time: methanol poisoning sucks, and is the cause of most home distilling dangers (blindness, kidney failure, etc).
- ggm 7y ago
  This is what I suspect most people will miss. Worldwide I think alcohol poisoning is adulteration of spirits with industrial alcohol but the heads and tails are not just methanol, it can have metal and chemical residues as well.

lalos 7y ago

"Historically, Kinsa’s methods have been able to account for a sharp rise in the number of people taking tests, said Benjamin Dalziel, a professor at Oregon State University who studies infectious diseases. For his research, Dalziel has ensured that a spike in testing didn’t lead to inaccurate predictions, and so he believes the current decline in illness is a result of social distancing, and not a statistical anomaly. (Dalziel has had research funded by Kinsa in the past)." Huh, I was expecting the opposite of this. The previous data could be slightly off because of smaller sample size and now that it has exploded they have a better estimate to reality.

lolc 7y ago
Well their error bars may be smaller this year but they're comparing to past years.
feanaro 7y ago
The problem is the sample isn't random.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sudoaza 7y ago

I was hoping for this, lets do social distancing a tradition for every winter

recursive 7y ago
Just you and me? That's not going to do much. Organizing action in the scale of the billions is a lot harder than having the idea. I'm not sure if there's any precedent for what's happening now.
scrollaway 7y ago
Do you really think we're going to come out of this period causing people to lose their jobs, lose their savings, lose their loved ones, not see their friends, stop going to sports and social events… and everyone's going to be like "Hey, that was fun, let's do it again next year"?
- kaitai 7y ago
  Maybe a brief version, like a Passover commemorating COVID-19 instead. Passover isn't exactly a fun party kind of holiday.
- fiblye 7y ago
  Some countries have week-long holidays where most people go home/travel/don't work. Their economies aren't dead. Make it a tradition where everyone with non-essential work stays home at least one week a year, all at the same time. More time is better, but even a little bit would likely cut back on disease. Governments already define Christmas/New Years/etc as a holidays and huge numbers of people aren't working on those days and economies don't die. It wouldn't be hard for companies to promote "Pre-Stay Home Week Extravaganza" sales and make people actually look forward to staying home, eating and watching movies/playing games/whatever.
  - Terretta 7y ago
    In Europe this is called "August".

a_t48 7y ago

I was just wondering about this yesterday. Neat, thanks for sharing.

bluedevil2k 7y ago

I was thinking if we go all in on this stay-in-place and we get it working around the world, could we eliminate measles? Chicken pox? Any other human-virus disease that relies on human-to-human contact to spread?

sdafsdf 7y ago
Unfortunate, stuff like the flue is believed to live in some/few/enough humans which do not show symptoms but are able to spread it. It would be interesting to see a list or to survive it to see a documentary about its effects.
nxc18 7y ago
Unfortunately, I think a more significant cause of the continued existence of these diseases is failure to vaccinate, either by choice (anti-vax) or due to circumstance (cost of vaccination, access to health care, etc). There are several diseases that society could eradicate that we simply choose not to. Even wealthy tech people are affected by this; I was just told my very good insurance doesn't cover a vaccine that my doctor prescribed. It would cost $400, so I need to weigh my actual risk of getting the disease against cost of vaccination. I'd think the long-term return on investment for society would justify making just about every vaccine free to all. edit: consider how much easier it is to just get a few shots, compared to never going to a bar, restaurant, sporting event, public transit or shared workspace ever again. Going all-in on social isolation is a nonstarter, even discounting the people who won't comply (there are many) or the toxic political environment that has pitted half the US against science and expertise.
- dathinab 7y ago
  Not sure why you got down voted, I can only agree. Social distancing only slows distribution it doesn't prevent it reliably also some disease are spread by animals which are not at all affected by social distancing. And then vaccines are also not enough as it had shown for some disease where we did try to eliminate them by handing out free vaccines in affected countries. Lastly social distancing has a super high cost if continued. Not only economically but a super high health cost. Humans are not meant to live permanently social distanced they are inherently social animals and the internet can't really replace it. E.g. for people fighting depression social distancing can be like poison. It prevents them or at least restrict them from doing many the thinks which can help fighting depression and causes "physical" isolation (Internet is helping but has limits, it's not helping enough to counter it). Another group most likely majorly negatively affected are people with "home" problems, like violent partners or parents (or just to controlling partners or parents). To just name some example.

jakewins 7y ago

Does anyone know if they account for their user base presumably being mismatched with actual demographics? ie. I assume their users are going to correlate with tech-savvy people, in turn correlating with people able to work from home, giving a severely skewed sample

ivanhoe 7y ago

the title should really be "other INFECTIOUS diseases"

mrob 7y ago
Reduced air pollution reduces non-infectious disease too.
- ivanhoe 7y ago
  Can you please explain me how is air pollution affected by social distancing? And also article is not discussing air pollution at all, they talk about less fevers detected on smart thermometers. Those are caused by seasonal flu and other viral seasonal colds, obviously because people now take more care, so those other infectious diseases are blocked from spreading too.
  - mrob 7y ago
    Physical distancing prohibits all non-essential travel, much of which would have happened by motor vehicle.

phantom784 7y ago

What about selection bias? I'd think that people are more likely to use a thermometer even if they don't feel like they have a fever now than they would have previously. That could account for numbers going down.

roywiggins 7y ago
They think they have been able to correct for that. > Due to the emergence of the coronavirus, Kinsa is receiving two to three times more thermometer readings per day than in previous flu seasons. Historically, Kinsa’s methods have been able to account for a sharp rise in the number of people taking tests, said Benjamin Dalziel, a professor at Oregon State University who studies infectious diseases. For his research, Dalziel has ensured that a spike in testing didn’t lead to inaccurate predictions, and so he believes the current decline in illness is a result of social distancing, and not a statistical anomaly. (Dalziel has had research funded by Kinsa in the past).

ShorsHammer 7y ago

The lockdown of non-essential businesses has essentially reduced traffic accidents here to zero when usually there'd be a over a hundred deaths and few thousand injuries per week. By comparison there's only been 20 deaths from covid-19 over the space of 3 months, nearly all of them elderly people with pre-existing conditions. Yet people are emotional creatures and not all deaths are equal.

__s 7y ago
Traffic accidents also aren't contagious
- tejtm 7y ago
  Allot of people do get them from someone else, but your point still holds as they tend to fall off not grow beyond first contacts.
Analemma_ 7y ago
As of right now, covid-19 is killing about 2,200 people/day, compared to about 3,300 people/day for car accidents. So it hasn't caught up yet, but it's still on an exponential climb and will probably get there in another week or so, and then keep right on climbing. This whole "the flu/cars/heart disease is way worse" shtick people are leaning on has got to stop. It's true until exponential growth suddenly means it's not. EDIT: And those are the worldwide numbers. In the US specifically, covid-19 is killing about 200 people/day, compared to 100 people/day for car accidents, and is of course going to go way up from here.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Wouldn’t the number of people the virus will kill will reach a maximum and then decline rapidly as the remaining population will be immune to it?

MobileVet 7y ago

Just imagine how many fewer people would fall ill each year with the flu if we didn’t shake hands as our default greeting?

fiblye 7y ago
I really hope this helps kill the concept of handshaking entirely. Unfortunately, there's still a large segment of dirty-handed people who think you can judge a person based on their handshake.
- SomeGuy789 7y ago
  There's a lot of hidden value in physical contact. I don't think it should be disregarded so easily considering society as a whole became much more distant in recent years.
  - fiblye 7y ago
    Potentially. But I find there to be zero value in touching the hands of someone I only just learned the name of. Especially considering I don't even know whether they're the type to cough in their hands, or the type to not wash after using the toilet. Bro hug with a friend I haven't seen in a while? Okay. Sweaty hand contact with a stranger? Never.
    - hackeraccount 7y ago
      The danger is higher - that's exactly why we do it. It's an easy way to create intimacy with a stranger quickly. There's a reason politicians shake hands and kiss babies.
      - fiblye 7y ago
        Handshakes far predate modern germ theory of disease. The "danger" doesn't really help with intimacy in any way. It's completely unnecessary danger. We'd find sharing tissues with strangers to be disgusting if it were introduced as a greeting today, but touching the hands of someone right after they've sneezed and coughed into them--after which we often unknowingly touch our own face--is regarded as a sign of intimacy or respect.

justlexi93 7y ago

This is just temporary but effective way to lessen the spread of contagious disease. No other country wants to be the next Italy.

ineedasername 7y ago

There could be some selection bias here. It's based on thermometer readings from Kinsa. And the articles states: Kinsa is receiving two to three times more thermometer readings per day than in previous flu seasons Many more people may be taking thermometer reading that don't really need to, but are being cautious. That would cause the appearance of a proportional drop in high temp readings compared to prior years when really it's just that lots of not-so-sick people are taking their temp lots more.

mrfusion 7y ago
(Removed)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- logicallee 7y ago
  This line: >Recent data clearly show the spread of Covid-19. On March 19, the share of Americans with temperatures indicating they had flu-like symptoms was about 4.9% when it typically would be expected to be about 4.0%. This was likely a result of the spread of Covid-19, according to Kinsa’s researchers. ... means that 1 week ago 2,964,898 Americans (0.9%) had Covid-19. Today there are 65,950 recorded cases in the United States: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
  - mrfusion 7y ago
    Wow that’s pretty amazing. Really makes you wonder. And that would just be the people with symptoms right now. It wouldn’t include recovered, asymptomatic, nor people in the incubation period.
    - logicallee 7y ago
      Or the data is invalid. We'll find out soon enough, there are millions of test kits being made available soon.

mrfusion 7y ago

I’ve heard there are 200 different cold viruses. It’s conceivable at least a few of them become eradicated after this. Anything with a low r0 is going to have a lot of trouble surviving right now.

Robotbeat 7y ago

I've noticed this anecdotally. My son usually goes to preschool (and Sunday school and playdates and museums and parks). He has had an almost constant runny nose for a while... as soon as one virus is fought off, another takes its place. Nothing major, but clearly annoying to him (cheek red due to him wiping his nose, in spite of our efforts to keep his face clean). A few days to a week after soft-quarantine (school and church cancelled), his runny nose is gone and hasn't come back.

o-__-o 7y ago
This also means your little one is not getting that community immunity. You want your little one to get sick at a young age to ward of invaders as they get older. Anecdote: my niece gets sick badly and passes it on to everyone in her house at least every other month. She does not got to daycare. My LO does go to daycare and comes home with a new mild sickness once every third week and is fine a few days later. I’m interested to see how he fairs when school opens up again
- op00to 7y ago
  Childrens immune systems are challenged quite effectively with normal everyday exposure. You don’t need to feel symptoms to build immunity.
- op00to 7y ago
  I could say the opposite. My son was sick 3 times prior to entering school, we took care of him at home until age 5. Each resolved in a day or so. Upon attending school, he’s got his share of colds and a fever or two, and clears them out quickly.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
skocznymroczny 7y ago
Have you verified that it's a virus and not actually allergies? Runny nose can be confused for allergies, school might e.g. have mold or dust which your son is reacting badly to.

mrfusion 7y ago

Influenza only has an R0 of 1.3. I really wonder if we’ve managed to push it below 1.0 world wide. Pretty wild to think about. 1.3 really isn’t that much. What if all the new people who’ve started washing their hands keeps it below 1.0?

zzleeper 7y ago
Sadly, as long as there's a large enough region where it has R0 > 1, then when we lift restrictions we'll be back to normal.
- closeparen 7y ago
  Or a species. Viruses aren’t just for humans.
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    You have to distinguish between viruses in abstract and a concrete disease. Many viral diseases we are fighting with are human only. So if we erradicate it in humanity, it is gone. This is how smallpox went away. We vaccinated enough people to make it go away once and for ever. Measels have no animal host either, as far as I am aware, so we could have a good chance to erradicate it too. The corona virus sars-cov-2, as well as the first sars virus jumped from animals to humans. There are several animal species which carry variations of the sars virus, but fortunately, they don't make the transition to humans regularly. If we managed to prevent further transmissions of sars-cov-2 between people, there is a good chance, this virus could go away entirely, unless it manages to jump to some common animal.
ummonk 7y ago
It should be noted that R0 won't be constant - the more people have it the lower the R0 since more people will have immunity and more of the extroverts / travelers (who are high R0) will have spread it around to each other already. Also, of course, the R0 always goes below 1 in summer...
noway421 7y ago

stagas 7y ago

I am betting also driving and particularly drunk driving related accidents and deaths will also drop during this quarantine.

Exmoor 7y ago
..And suicides will likely go way up. Probably a lot of other issues as well that may be more difficult to track. Mental health crisis, domestic violence, etc.
- dlivingston 7y ago
  As you hint at, unemployment numbers are directly proportional to suicide rates. The effects of shutting down the world are much higher than just missed paychecks and business bankruptcies. You list a few of them. There must be a cost-benefit analysis done where we find the breakeven point between lives saved by quarantine vs. lives damaged by quarantine side effects.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    The entire world is going on with it this time because the cost-benefit analysis is quite trivial. The entire world also doesn't go with it every few years to stop the flu because the cost-benefit analysis is quite trivial. There has got to be something in between, but on the land of exponential growth and slow-down, that line is very thin. This one pandemic will cross the line at some point, but I bet we will resume business as usual even before that.

aaron695 7y ago

> they may not have realized that they were also combatting other infectious diseases, such as the seasonal flu. No, they fully realise. We have to also reduce the flu. It also takes up many ICU beds. This is vital. Any plan knows this. Whether they are implementing measure like free Flu shots and are ramping up supply of Flu shots using the military if they have to, I doubt, because no one wants to think ahead more than a day.

jb775 7y ago

TLDR: Social distancing is also slowing the normal flu

beamatronic 7y ago

“What if we made a better world...and it was all for nothing”

hyperdunc 7y ago

"Social distancing" is such a weird and ambiguous phrase. Are we not socializing right now over the Internet while maintaining physical distance? Arguably, we're socially closer than before because of this crisis.

mrob 7y ago
Which is why the WHO changed their recommended terminology to "physical distancing". Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665506
- hyperdunc 7y ago
  Difficult to replace a phrase that's already caught on. Good to know, though.

rossdavidh 7y ago

It's fascinating data, and I'm glad it's being taken, but...I am a bit skeptical that we can draw any reasonable conclusions from it without limiting the data to long-term users. It seems implausible that there has not been a significant change in the health-consciousness of the typical purchaser in the last month or two, vs. prior to that. I can't tell you what the change would be, but I find it highly implausible that it would be not at all different, given the biggest spike in public awareness of a health issue in several decades. It's nice to see that Dalziel has thought of the issue, but the article doesn't tell us much about _how_ he accounted for that. I could think of ways, but I could also think of ways to screw it up, and it doesn't say in this article how he "ensured" that the effect is real.

dcftoapv 7y ago
Agreed, but this study can certainly be used as part of a larger triangulation. A guy I worked with pointed out that this was happening in Japan about a month ago: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/21/national/influenza-wave-drastically-wanes-japan-amid-spread-coronavirus/#.XnxLlYhKiM8 https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/21/national/influe...
- nonbel 7y ago
  But who is going to go to a doctor/hospital for the flu when they are scared of catching sars2 there?
peter_retief 7y ago
There has also been a decrease in traffic accidents and violent crime. This is data from hospital casualty units in South Africa
- nroets 7y ago
  Maybe it's not due social distancing, but the economic uncertainty.
- Swenrekcah 7y ago

agumonkey 7y ago

A worldwide fast through slow

rossdavidh 7y ago

Hypothesis: people who are stuck at home have more time and inclination to check their temperatures, even when they don't feel sick.

maxerickson 7y ago
That wouldn't generate an unusual number of 'fever' readings, and then a pretty simple model would do some accounting for repeated use of each thermometer (so 'extra' normal readings shouldn't be reducing the expected number of 'fever' readings).
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  Agreed, but it could easily generate an unusual number of "not a fever" readings, which would make it look as if there were a smaller than normal number of people getting sick with the flu. Or, maybe it doesn't do that. I don't see how you can say for certain which way it would shift, but I find it implausible that it would stay the same.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    That's what I mean by a simple model. Like a dead stupid one would be to compare to historical data for fevers/week per thermometer. That is barely a model at all and it manages to ignore how many readings are done and accounts for multiple readings during a period of illness and readings for multiple sick members of a household and so on.

anonsubmit2671 7y ago

Apparently, the new term is "physical distancing," because it's not like people are mass unfriending people or calling them Mr./Mrs. SoAndSo.

noway421 7y ago
Funny thing is, term "physical distancing" doesn't make sense without mentioning "social distancing", because without that context and by itself it might mean different things.

andreygrehov 7y ago

Randall Munroe did a small section on eradicating the common cold in his What-if book, the basic idea is if that all of humanity stayed away from each other for a week or two then the common cold would die out as it can't survive outside of the human body for more than a week and normally survives by continuously hopping from host to host.

nullc 7y ago
Do we know for sure that it* doesn't have an animal reservoir? [*] The common cold is a half dozen distinct viruses.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > The common cold is a half dozen distinct viruses. Some of them coronaviruses. It makes sense, but it's funny that we classify the common cold by symptoms, ignoring that the viruses are in different families.
- nickthemagicman 7y ago
  True. Maybe something like chickens or pigs could be an animal vector. Then a very minor mutation could make it infectious to humans.
  - nullc 7y ago
    Doesn't even need the mutation. It may be that it is infectious with R0>1 to some other animals as is, but with few health effects so we don't notice it. If so, it'll just immediately get reintroduced to humans even if we distance it out of our population successfully. No mutations required.
saalweachter 7y ago
This current situation had me wondering how hard it would be to coordinate a regular -- maybe not yearly -- global self-isolation for say 2-3 weeks at a time. Aside from the difficulties of getting everyone in the world to agree that the first three weeks of February during a leap year are observed through social distance, it doesn't seem like it would be as bad on a recurring basis as it is during an emergency like this. You could plan for your self-isolation in advance, so there wouldn't be a rush for supplies the way there is now; you would already know not to schedule anything for February; you'd probably still have to solve some money problems for a large number of people, since being able to WFH probably anti-correlates with living paycheck to paycheck. If you could actually eliminate -- or at least, dramatically reduce the incidence of -- common colds and seasonal flu through such a scheme, it would probably be worth both from a QoL standpoint for the everyone in the world (would you trade 3 weeks of cabin fever every four years for never having another actual fever?) and from an economic standpoint (three weeks of predictable low productivity is almost certainly better than the unpredictable constant costs associated with illness and death).

bregma 7y ago

I image new cases of the clap are going to tumble precipitously.

kanox 7y ago

Social distancing is pretty great. My company temporarily banned meetings with more than 6 people; this should be permanent.

deevolution 7y ago

I wonder if viruses will adapt to this hostile social distancing climate.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

FpUser 7y ago

Well, the ultimate example of "social distancing" were tiny island nations. They got visited by Europeans, caught whatever bugs they brought and now they're all dead. If you do not train your immune system it'll fail you. When we have some major epidemic with an ugly consequences coming then sure social distancing can help. However taking social distancing as a generic strategy for out future lives I think will lead to a major f.. up.

known 7y ago

India is practicing Untouchability for 2700 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda Social Distancing is not different/difficult for them; http://archive.vn/bEMTt http://archive.vn/bEMTt

tomerico 7y ago

Here is a reason to believe that the data is biased. If you look at any county in California - you’d see a large drop on the exact date that the statewide shelter in place was ordered. This is obviously before any of the effects of isolation would manifest themselves. The reason is likely due to larger amount of testing done due to the panic, that is not properly accounted for in their algorithm.

madsmith 7y ago
I whole heartedly agree. Kinsa’s data immediately shouts out that there’s a non-intuitive behavior being demonstrated. I would also make an argument that individuals who invest in smart thermometers would be more concerned about illness than the typical population and thus highly responsive to governmental declarations of states emergency. I think it’s really hard and misleading to look at this data and make any larger conclusions.
01100011 7y ago
For what it's worth, some populations began isolating before the shelter in place order. I went to Ranch 99 on 2/28 and panic buying was already in full swing. Lots of masks. I think the Chinese community was very proactive and took action early. It left an impression on me and I started WFH full time. I think that was the day they announced the second community infection in Santa Clara county.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
empath75 7y ago
People started staying at home well before that.
darkarmani 7y ago
It's certainly biased. The question is if it is still useful after accounting for bias. People that use these thermometers probably skew towards being more worried about the virus. They probably isolated and were more careful days before the shelter in place was ordered.

geuis 7y ago

Wish I had seen this hours ago. Their data is visualized at https://healthweather.us/ https://healthweather.us/ I’ve been checking this daily for the last week or so.

101404 7y ago

Sounds more like more people are taking their temperature despite not feeling sick. Hence the sudden increase in readings they receive. So a pronounced decline in the percentage of high temperature readings should be expected.

lez 7y ago

I prefer to call it physical distancing. Social distancing is when the Internet goes off.