If we assume that this virus is as infectious as the common cold, we can expect the infection rate within a household to be approximately 25% of contacts. That means that of the people you LIVE with, 25% will catch it from you.
50% infection rate in a large, distributed population like China would be very extreme.
Over any time frame, it's still quite extreme. To use influenza as a proxy, which has virulence comparable to the cold, the yearly incidence rate in China is <35 per 100,000. Even if this is a full 100x worse, we aren't even getting close to 50% infection rate over the season or a 6 month time frame.
This is all well understood, and studied in considerable depth.
The media overreaction is typical, but here at HN we are better than that and we should strive to rely on established science (where available). No need to throw out extreme or unreasonable numbers!
Of course in many ways they are different, but not in the important ones for this discussion.
I used influenza because it was convenient in terms of available research, I could grab in a minute or two, but I'm sure if you care to look you can find similar data for rhinovirus.
Rhinovirus and influenza have very comparable R0's. R0 is the epidemiological measure of the "contagion" factor of a pathogen.
We could try to make the comparison you are suggesting instead. But to make a valid comparison we need to consider:
Is influenza infectious for 10 days before any symptoms show?
How many people get the influenza vaccine each year? I.e. is there some herd immunity built up?
The symptoms of influenza are universally nasty for everyone infected. No one with the flu is walking around and going to work (if you think do then you don't have the influenza virus you have a cold). It seems that at least some people with this new corona virus just have cold like symptoms and therefore will not by default be self-isolating like people with influenza naturally do.
I'm not making anecdotal conclusions or assumptions about whether people walk around or go into work, I'm simply stating the facts here based on considerable research.
Influenza is a useful proxy for the cold, because we have plenty of data on influenza strains with R0 very close to the cold.
Perhaps the most contagious disease we've ever encountered, the measles, has an R0 around 18. Before the 1960's, when the vaccine was licensed, we saw incidence rates as high as the .8% range yearly for measles. That is 20x more than influenza, but still orders of magnitude short of the 50% number you threw out there.
The cold and influenza both range from R0=1.3, to perhaps 6 on the very high end of estimates. 50% just isn't reasonable by any measure.
As for comparisons to this nCoV, it's still very early days and there are many unknowns. Still, there is no evidence to support an R0 even remotely close to the measles. 50% simply isn't plausible or reasonable, based on everything we know about viruses and epidemics.
Those colds that you’re seeing represent common symptoms of many viruses (metapneumovirus, paraflu, influenza, rhinovirus, RSV, etc, etc ... and many of these have multiple subtypes which can be concurrently circulating). In other words, you’re noticing common symptoms not necessarily the same virus.
> Those colds that you’re seeing represent common symptoms of many viruses
And not just that. I have a septum deviation, so I basically have a runny nose all winter long, even though, most of the time, no viruses are involved.
It's worth fixing that, surgery has come a long way. I had it surgically corrected last year and the energy boost from better breathing while physically active, better sleeping, and the lack of annoying people with my snoring are well worth it.
Peak cold symptoms last about 3 days. I never said 50% of the population have the same cold at once. 50% catching it over a 6 month period is very reasonable.
> Also about telemetry if all power users turn it off then you can have situations where developers will drop a feature because they don't use it and there is no data to show that more then 12 people are using it.
Yet another reason not to put telemetry in your software.
Why? So some developers and jerks can claim that you are a snowflake if you used the feature they removed? If there was data at least you can resign that you are really special and you were in a select club but without the data the vocal developer with big ego will claim whatever he wants.
When something important gets removed (which is happening at an alarmingly increasing pace across the board), it doesn't matter at all to me why the feature was removed. What matters to me is that the software has become less suitable for my use.
>Yet another reason not to put telemetry in your software.
Can you explain a bit more your way of though? How should you decide what to support if not having the information from your user?
The only other alternative is to ask, and then only the one that answer will get supported, which sure is great for the one that answer, but that may means a much bigger audience that you won't support even though they need to be supported.
> How should you decide what to support if not having the information from your user?
There are many well-known and largely perfected methods of getting that information without the use of telemetry. The thing that general telemetry really brings is cost savings and convenience. But it also brings a peculiar kind of blindness as well, since companies largely stopped doing product research that isn't telemetry.
>There are many well-known and largely perfected methods of getting that information without the use of telemetry.
Can you link to a few of this many known methods? I am interested in ones that would fit open source projects that have no budgets for research. Thanks
Just look at how product development worked before telemetry was a thing that was possible, and how its done in other industries. This isn't hidden information.
Telemetry is 100% not a viable fit for an open source project. A very significant proportion of your potential users will either keep it disabled or if that is not possible (which would be illegal in the EU anyway) not use your software.
> A very significant proportion of your potential users will either keep it disabled
Then they made the conscious choice that their usage won't get known and thus be aware that another way of communication will have to be used.
> Just ask your users.
"A very significant proportion of your potential users" won't tell what they want, or won't even know what they want. The one that will be the most vocal won't necessarily be the voice of reasons either.
... nothing wrong with what followed? Why did you just quote the beginning when I cite a pretty good argument afterward and you don't even argue with it? We are on Hacker News please, be more thorough and defends your point.
So? Just because we happen to be on Y Combinator's corporate propaganda machine doesn't mean I'm any more compelled to respond to things about which I care not.
Yeah, those idiots! They buy something from Apple, and then find it doesn't work. What did they expect.
This, of course, is passive-aggressive snark. Suffice to say that I disagree with you; why shouldn't people expect software they buy from Apple to work? People buy from Apple because they don't want to have to deal with all this sort of crap; they just want it to work.
Steve Jobs originally wanted to strip out the shell entirely and only support POSIX at the level of the C API. To this day, Apple acts like they've been strong-armed into providing support for the Unix utilities.
I can understand the attitude that 99% of their userbase will never touch the command line, but that last 1% represents the developers that keep the whole ecosystem going.
In the US, they're for sale everywhere. And I must acknowledge their ingenuity when it comes to toilet plunger design: American plungers have an additional "lip" at the bottom of the rubber thingy that fits into their toilets quite nicely and seals them up better than the usual plungers in Europe would do, which don't have that extra rubber lip.
Apparently the extraordinary demand for plungers resulted in better plungers, not in someone asking "why the heck are we so reliant on plungers?" and possibly making better toilets ;-)
I think the ship has sailed on better toilets in America, unfortunately. A big part of the problem is just that the standard waste pipe is too small AIUI.
The dirt does not go up with the number of bathrooms but rather the number of uses. With more bathrooms you either have to clean less often or less as much.
They don’t get dirty as quickly when they aren’t used as frequently.
Usually in high-bathroom-count houses, there are the “main” bathroom(s) and some bathrooms are mainly just used in the instance that the primary choice is occupied. Like when you really gotta take a leak but people are getting ready in the morning and bathrooms are in high demand.
When visitors are over, the "main" bathroom becomes #1 only, and #2s have to be taken in the less convenient bathrooms.
Like forcing longer-running processes onto a different CPU when congestion occurs.
#1s are usually quicker and more time-sensitive. Nobody wants to piss in the backyard because someone else is pooping. And that has only happened while visiting a 2 bed/1 bath place. Fine for one, but five people overloads the resource, and the scheduler can't pre-empt the running process.
Really, the problem is that the bath or shower and the toilet are in the same room. Occupying the bath or shower should not exclude others from using the toilet. It's bad design that has propagated via real estate marketing.
> Do middle class Americans clean their own homes?
Middle class Americans (petit bourgeois) might, but probably contract out for at least some of it; middle income Americans probably can't afford to contract out and probably do their own cleaning. But Americans often say the former when they mean the latter, so it's not usually clear what is being discussed.
That number won't change. The main cause of miscarriage is that the embryo/foetus has a massive problem and can't ever develop. There is nothing medical science can do. In fact many more miscarriages are known about today - 50 years ago most women wouldn't even have known they were pregnant they would have thought they had a late heavy period.
Yes, which is why I’d recommend using DDG primarily and only using !s when you need better results. Using Startpage is probably better than using Google directly.
The GDPR pop up is NOT just a pop up (not if you are following the law). If you are a data controller and you believe that the GDPR is just a pointless pop up you should consult your lawyer and see what they say.
Very recently UK medics noticed some highly deleterious effects of Tetra Fluenz flu vaccine and pushed back the earliest age for its use to 24 months. They not only entertained not vaccinating, they advise it.
It's irrational to not consider the question of whether taking a vaccine is right (for yourself [or dependents], and for the population).
Not as big as you are thinking the MMR is normally given after one year. This is because there are some know potential negative side effects when babies get it earlier.
The point is that society already evaluates these hazards/risks very effectively so that individual parents don't need to. Indeed any individual parent's risk analysis about vaccines is likely to put their children at greater risk.
