I am actively trying to promote work from home options and mostly being ignored.
I am actively trying to talk about home health care options. It's been extremely controversial, so I am reluctant to push too hard.
There's a lot of disinterest or active blow back against any attempt at a grass roots movement in the absence of sufficient leadership from the top.
Given how powerful America is, it's not unreasonable for the world at large to be concerned.
Please refrain from providing advice to people if you're not in the position to do so unless you're a medical doctor. It sounds good hearted but this is exactly the kind of things we shouldn't be perpetuating. You can cause inadvertent loss of life in worst case.
My parents are forwarding all kinds of shit from social media from fake vaccine news to completely insane home remedies such as going to a sauna when you have fever to "kill the virus". I am not suggesting you're doing this, but just to illustrate extreme case of misinformation.
I have a form of cystic fibrosis, as does my 32 year old son who still lives with me. I left all the CF lists years ago because people with CF live in terror and mostly don't want to take chances on trying anything not prescribed by a doctor, even though they are facing certain death.
Doctors don't know how to fix them. When I was diagnosed in 2001, life expectancy in the US was age 36.
Like anyone who has CF or who has a loved one with CF, I know quite a lot about germ control and daily home management of potentially deadly lung problems. Unlike most people with CF, I'm currently drug free. My condition is managed with diet and lifestyle.
I think it's outright irresponsible to say nothing at all in cases where I know a thing and no one else is speaking up, even though I surely an not the only person who knows X. I've mostly spoken up to say, essentially, "If there aren't enough ventilators to go around, airway clearance techniques have been around forever and some of them are non invasive and don't require mechanical intervention. You may still have options, even if the worst comes to pass, the medical system is overloaded and you are trying to survive a deadline epidemic while locked down at home."
If you want to see my past remarks, I've added the link to that discussion to my profile. I'm disinclined to do too much cage rattling on HN in discussion.
I'm currently working on developing a blog in hopes of putting together useful information about best practices for simply avoiding germs in day-to-day life.
I think I know a lot of useful information. I don't think I'm behaving irresponsibly.
I'm still trying to sort out for myself what I think works going forward. I don't think there's anyone on the planet who can tell me what that is.
If you want to help, volunteer in a hospital.
- Spread information about hygiene, CDC recommendations on how to prevent spread of Coronavirus and reiterate/ephasize the importance of washing hands/cleaning public spaces.
- Donate money to medical research, who knows, some of these home remedies may be useful. But not without getting the research done first.
You don't see the danger of providing medical advise to others? I've been wrong many times of something that I thought was intuitive to me but ultimately there was a "oh..." moment when I saw experimental results or some concrete evidence.
There is also a network effect - you say X to person Y. Person Y tells X to 10 other friends who then tell 1000 other people. The misinformation that started from you could potentially affect a lot of people and then you start having deep thoughts such as - I tested X on myself and it worked. But now 100,000 people are doing it - is it safe?
This is why you should stop from providing medical advice to others. I am saying this with respect to you and your earnest intentions from heart.
I often have insufficient money for food. Yet, we are still alive.
I respect your genuine and valid concerns about giving advice in situations where you don't know what you are talking about. Trying to give me advice to do things like volunteer in a hospital or donate money I don't have falls in that category.
Maybe take a few minutes to at least look up cystic fibrosis before commenting further about what you think I should be doing.
You cannot cough your way to health here. Eating onions will not protect you from SARS-CoV-2.
Why is Hacker News okay with spreading falsehoods as medical advice? That's reckless at the best of times.
The whole point of a fever is that the higher temperature harms the disease organism more than the host organism. It is in fact to "kill the virus".
The sauna supports that. The same goes for anything else that would enable the fever of course. You could instead eat hot soup, wear a jacket, or adjust your thermostat.
Going the other way, cooling yourself to suppress a fever, blocks a natural response to infectious disease. Don't do that unless your body has overshot the proper fever temperature by a long ways, to the point that you are at risk of brain damage.
I told several friends about your advice to prop up your head and back in bed when feeling shortness of breath.
Cautiously I also recommend tonic water for a cough - not because of a medical benefit, but because the bitterness makes sputum in my mouth and that soothed my sore throat. Also wasabi for a blocked nose. Normally I think cough medicine would be better, but I know that pharmacies are overloaded right now. I also think the placebo effect is very real - doing something positive might help, instead of just sitting and worrying.
Tonic water absolutely has a medical history. It's not hard at all to find that out by reading the label and doing a little online research.
It makes me extremely uncomfortable for you to talk about tonic water for a very long list of reasons.
Because it contains an actual for serious drug -- quinine -- you can get serious side effects from overusing it. These include vision problems, headache and nausea similar to migraines. IIRC, you can cause yourself permanent vision problems.
Because it's a powerful alkaloid, overuse can cause your stomach to become too alkaline. This can cause you to be unable to digest food and can result in vomiting.
The name "tonic water" is medical in origin. The bitter flavor you speak of was common to a class of medicinal herbs typically referred to as "bitters."
Quinine is a drug related to the drug currently being tested as a possible treatment for covid19: Chloroquine. So casual and uniformed use of it could create resistance in the virus, making actual medical treatment less effective in the future.
I highly recommend you keep a journal and actually read up on anything you are finding personally helpful.
I'm not here trying to tell people what to do with home remedies for casual use. My consistent framing has been "If the shit really hits the fan and doctors have nothing for you, there are other options that may make sense to gamble on if your options are take a chance or die."
I know a helluva lot about medical stuff. My mother wanted to be a doctor and she personally changed the practices of two cancer clinics when she kept my dad alive after they wrote him off for dead. I have another relative who works at the CDC and has for years.
I've been surrounded by medically knowledgeable people my entire life. I also absolutely don't hawk home remedies.
I've spent a lot of years trying to figure out if there is any way to effectively share what I know about CF and other health issues to either be helpful or to somehow get actual medical professionals and scientists to do studies.
I would love to finally have credibility and be taken seriously in the world and have actual respect.
And it matters vastly less to me than avoiding potential harm to potentially millions of people because I'm cute and charismatic and people want to be my fwend and it goes amazingly bizarre places and always has.
I know you mean well. I know you think I'm pathetic and sad and a social outcast and a poor person and you think you are doing something nice by publicly patting me on the head.
I absolutely don't see it that way. I'm extremely uncomfortable with you and other people here clearly desiring some kind of feel good emotional attachment to me personally as your primary goal of engaging me, very much at the expense of best practices for disseminating medically useful information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_water
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_and_tonic
https://flaviar.com/blog/gin-tonic-history
http://activehistory.ca/2012/08/gin-and-tonic-a-short-histor...
I've done the math. I know how much tonic water you need to drink to be roughly equivalent to being prescribed quinine as a drug for medical use.
It's a lot, but not so much that you can't consume that much in a single day. I'm not posting the figures I remember here because I'm not interested in encouraging people to do something like that.
We need to make "Support our Healthcare Workers" a bigger part of the messaging strategy. They are on the front lines of this battle, and when we fail to implement control measures, we are putting their lives at risk.
I'd say that even overt corruption is not necessarily a white or black determinator on the overall health of the institute of government.
South Korea is not only known for "Samsung bribing *," but also countless successful cases of corruption prosecution, including 2 Samsung CEOs in a row going to real jail.
In overall, a health on the very top of society stems from strength at the bottom.
Netherlands: TOTAL CORONAVIRUS CASES QUADRUPLE IN A WEEK TO 4,204; DEATH TOLL REACHES 179
https://nltimes.nl/2020/03/22/total-coronavirus-cases-quadru...
All this seems like a much bigger problem than the virus itself. Our system is incapable of being efficient, effective or proactive.
That isn't really true. Some viruses are more susceptible to vaccination than others but all have one thing in common: about 12-18 months between the first confirmed sighting of a virus and the time to make a vaccine if one is possible. And for plenty of Viruses we have not been able to make a vaccine and some of those are coronaviruses.
Why we had to wait until a crisis like this for this to be rendered bare for the wider population?
As I've said countless times before, the West has been on the downward trajectory for a very long time, both as a society, and as state entities.
What I call an "ultrapopulism" has been an ever growing trend in the West since around mid-nineties.
The Western nations are not just weak as societies, and nations, they are diseased (sorry for having to use this word now.)
The reasons for me moving from comfy life in the West to China is not because I so much enjoyed it, but for me having a realisation that this accelerating downward trend will have very real consequences in my lifetime, and that even money alone no longer favours the West.
Yes, China is a patently dysfunctional society. This is what I can say as person whose life and career depends on it, and who actually lived there.
I'd say the "good" performance of Chinese state looks like that only in comparison to catastrophically bad showing from Western nations.
20 year ago, I would've said that what China did after the monumental screw up at the start, would've been an expected level of response from an upstanding Western nation. Now, the West can not do the same what it could've done 20 years ago easily. That's the only message for that particular point.
Is Chinese society a healthy, functioning society? No, but at least critical parts are still coasting on inertia from the time China had half sane political leadership.
Is the West a healthy, functioning society? Some things there work, but the most important, critical parts are failing in broad daylight, and people don't damn care.
I heard even most hardcore communists starting to question Xi's mandate to rule now, and how much such a weak leader is costing them.
What I heard myself was pretty much a question "What if it was a war?"
Were Xi to hide in a bunker when the military can't do anything without his explicit approval, they would've been screwed.
* demonstrate failure by business and political leadership in the US to be science-based, humanitarian * counter the emerging anti-Asian sentiment
Agree that my last statement could have been more productive.
We can all wish for the culture, test availability, and competent government that South Korea and Singapore and Taiwan apparently have, but we don’t have those. So their “plan” is effectively a plan to just let millions of people 60+ or with pre-existing conditions die without much effort to save them. It’s not only unconscionable, it’s incredibly stupid. Do they think we’re just going to go back to work and restaurants and on vacation while millions of our loved ones take their last gasps in a converted convention center somewhere? The economy grinds to a halt either way, and there’s no moral or political path forward for what they want to do. Which is why they don’t have the courage to even spell it out, it’s just some magic handwaving about how we must do something different.
And all this against the backdrop of them and people like them downplaying this from the start and putting us in this position.