I cannot understand why unnecessary flying was not shut down weeks or months ago.

Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids. :) Now scale this up to the whole country and account for the fact that HN is probably a little better on average about reasoning about these things.

But now, on HN now we're mostly preaching to the choir...

I've been contacting the officials of my state and surrounding communities since February 28th urging action. If your community isn't taking action you should join in. Even if your politicians don't respond to math, they'll still respond to public outcry.

The best time to respond was a while ago, but today is still vastly better than tomorrow.

> Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids.

Exactly. Two weeks ago every coronavirus thread on Hacker News was full of deniers claiming this was no worse than the flu and this was all just media hysteria. Some probably still hold that opinion. I don't think they will be convinced until the hospitals start overflowing.

Elon Musk was one of the deniers. You would think someone who "always starts with physics" would know better.

Wealthy people have a habit of doing this. Being good at something doesn't necessarily make you good at something else, and the hero-worship the wealthy get in the US (not to mention his fan club) can't help but go to one's head.

(Engineers to, too. I try hard to watch it and I still arrogantly show my ignorance sometimes.)

He has a responsibility to not feed panic.

Yeah,

When Coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, I tended to the opinion that it would self-limiting in one fashion or another or that is would not be worse than the flu. Only people arguing with me and me investigating the facts changed that. And, yeah, changing your opinion is hard and imagining a force that will upend the world is hard so it's easy to imagine how people stay in their positions.

That said, we have a representative government with the aim of electing people who will think ahead and protect from purely reflex based views. And clearly that control has failed.

As disappointed as I am with much of the response in the US, it could still be a lot worse.

The potential for this kind of pandemic is something that the government was aware of and at least somewhat prepared for. It can be hard to imagine, but if all we had were the concerns of joe-everyman this would have caught us significantly more off-guard than it has.

Where I think we've faltered is in rapidly the hard decisions to trade-off short term economic impact vs long term health and economic impact. But there is still time to do a lot of good, and the level of our response seems to now-- finally-- be increasing exponentially along with the infection.

Yes, I've had some neighbors ask me why I didn't tell them that we had been preparing for this to potentially happen when we started about 3 weeks. I told them "because you would have thought we were crazy if I told you to do it 3 weeks ago".

And you thought I was crazy when I started 30 years ago.

That apparently makes very little difference. I listened to an interview with a Yale professor who cited stories that showed minimal impact. The supposed reason is that by the time you know a country has an outbreak, it's already to late and people from there will have travelled to your country. What apparently had been shown to be very effective is preemptive school closures. Unfortunately that's a tough call because we can't have a well functioning social system liked other developed countries.

Interview: https://samharris.org/podcasts/190-respond-coronavirus

I'm in the US, no one cared about this until a few days ago. Now, some stores are getting low on food supplies, and people are posting about it. But, I was at a store today where they were completely stocked, and the only empty shelf was the toilet paper supply! It's insane.

What? I’m in New England tri state and started preparing 28 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22339369

Parent presumably means no regular people. I had a similar experience: a month ago I suddenly realized we may need to be isolated at home for up to 2 months. I live in a place where that's actually fairly practical. Except our generator was broken. So I left work, drove to town immediately with the idea that I might be able to get the last generator as they sold out given that everyone else surely would be also buying a generator. Then over the next month I watched as Costco stacked a huge pile of generators near the entrance, eventually hand sanitizer sold out, flu medication, Isopropyl alcohol, and finally TP. I think you can still get a generator though.

What city, if I may ask?

That's cause you're smart, and read hN!

I’d argue the smart part :) Well read is a better scarlet letter. Fairfield county, CT

Surely the hand sanitizer shelf was empty too?

Not empty at all, maybe a shipment came in, though.

Tofu was surprisingly empty here.

I've commented elsewhere on this, but in the Bay Area I saw evidence of people panic buying as far back as March 2nd.

Why are people still flying now? Most public transportation is rated as dangerous for several weeks already.

Why do people ever fly? Something like a quarter of people who travel by air contract a respiratory infection from doing so. It's an extremely effective way to spread disease.

Well, all these people consciously have chosen to fly at the time like this. It was clear that drastic travel disruption is imminent and chance of exposure is high on the plane, and yet they took the risk.

Wow, you're not even considering that each infection in that airport will come back and infect a bunch of people who didn't make the choice to fly?

IE we should not allow people to take risks that are going impact all of society.

The virus has exploded the American myth that we can isolate individual behavior to individual rewards but also this myth means the country is going to seriously suffer.

wow