Or in US case, “public hospital is socialism”. US will be the worst case scenario. At least California and New York has the infrastructure.
1 Like
I don’t think we do here in California.
This will be a huge disaster for the whole Western (democratic) world.
1 Like
thanks 
edit: the photo was taken with a 25-Euro lens, a OM Zuiko 50/1.8
I’ve thought quite a lot about hacking our way out of this mess as well. The only measures capable of attacking the root of the problem with my skill set I could think of are various variations on mass surveillance. That turns out to be a demon that I’m fairly reluctant to summon for both moral and legal reasons.
So I agree with what others are saying here, for most of us it’s probably best to focus on how to keep our societies and our economies afloat while buying the people that can attack the problem more effectively more time.
In the end I’m much more worried about us losing our humanity and values than the virus itself. That might seem to be a bit far fetch but if there is anything to learn from history it its how thin the line between barbarism and a civilized society really is.
I’d give away my software for free if I wouldn’t be already. 
4 Likes
As I wanted to contribute to WirVsVirus, I would like to share my experience from today
The Orga was totally overcharged by the amount of contributors. If I undstood correctly, they expected max. 2000 contributors, but in fact there are more then 40000.
That led to a chaos at the beginning of the hackathon, because they couldn’t hold the planned eta and also the response time of the servers were really bad.
Of course it is great to have ~40000 people spending their time to improve the corona-situation, well, at least, the 40000 will mostly stay at home for the weekend, not being able to spread the virus ;-), I’m still a bit disappointed about current state. Let’s see, if it will be better tomorrow…
That’s exactly the same conclusion I have made. The key for dealing with emergencies is preparation: identify needs, know your resources, split work.
First of all, among the many people with maths/coding skills, almost nobody has background in medicine or epidemiology. So everyone is asking for contact with health agencies or doctors, but guess what… They are busy. Then, whatever solution you come up with, who will test it before deploying it ?
Then, developing new soft means users will need to learn it. People are not in learning mode right now, they are in “patch whatever you can with what little you know” mode.
So, yeah. Back to remote-work or Netflix and chill. Sure, it’s great to see people trying to help. But I have seen this kind of guys being a burden to the actual pros, more than real assets
3 Likes
Maybe I should concentrate on another issue: My wife is pharmacist (so working on the front)…
5 Likes
I see that wirvsvirus is on DE only so I can’t read it.
But, like 6-7 years ago a capital city of my region had a plan of becoming a “Smart City” by basically tracking and collecting search results data and analyzing it to catch potential outbreaks of common flu and other diseases in the city. Big data was all the rage back then.
I remember there was a company present with a plan to do just that. They did some studies and as it turns out everyone that had a Internet connection searched their symptoms.
I don’t really know how accurate this would be today when every site is using https tho. And also the whole idea was thrown aside quickly since many ppl, including myself, were concerned about the impact that this would have on the privacy of the citizens.
As much as this might be a good idea on paper, I’m actually afraid that Covid-19 might really hurt our privacy as I’m sure companies will begin to lobby for the mass data collection and now in this climate it might be hard to fight against that politically.
What are your thoughts? Am I making sense or am I just paranoid and we should seek the solutions in the big data no matter the privacy implications?
Thinking about how can a person with technical skills help in this situation, I think the best one can do is make a few DIY ventilators and possibly save his grandparent or neighbor’s life. You might think a medical professional wouldn’t be inclined to use your DIY solution but my country for one has only 800 ventilators. With our population being 4 million it’s not hard to predict many will meet their end b/c the lack of ventilator aparatuses.
Medical personel in my country is saying that around 15% of infected need respirators so when we hit 5500 infected in one moment, that’s it. 25 ppl dies b/c the lack of equipment.
So whip out your arduinos, raspberry pis etc and start I guess start making. I may be able to provide some measurements for the connection tubes etc. since my mother is on one ventilator from philips. I think it’s Trilogy 202 model.
Sorry to hear about your mother. Praying for her recovery and comfort.
There is a lot of “I can make a machine” going around. I know that certain companies are printing parts. I read on the news that some medical professionals in my country have been looking into hooking more than one patient to a machine.
PS The main problem is that there aren’t enough respirologists to go around even under normal conditions in my city. It takes a team to take care of a single patient on a machine and there are simply too many sick in some parts of the world.
1 Like
A more positive note on this catastrophe, I managed to fully integrate my old Ubuntu notebook to my office Windows standards, so now I’m working from home smoothly.
I’m specially amazed by Thunderbird’s ability to integrate with my org Office365 server, so now I can manage emails, events, tasks and contacts, all from one place.
Besides, I managed to put in place an openvpn server in a way that some of us are able to virtually access our network.
A big hail to foss!
6 Likes
Not enough, but certainly more so in general than rural-dominated states. Globally, there isn’t enough infrastructure, but ones with infrastructure will likely do better in the long run. It takes time to affect areas with less density, but by no mean they are immune. They have to do grocery shopping, and some of them do go into places of religious worship, and both of these will guarantee that places with less infrastructure do worse in the long run.
@davidyanceyjr I don’t want to start a fight, but there isn’t any stereotyping here. Places with more access to education or resources that contributes to education do evidently lean to being less religious. That is correlation that has been corroborated with several researches. Also, republicans in general are quite known for being anti-abortion while most of them does nothing about supporting sex education, and that is a observation that supports the claim that they’re less likely for equality. While it’s possible to be a pro-abortion and pro-education republican as well as a ignorant democrat, the reverse is just far more likely and polls from pew forum and other reputable sources supports this claim.
2 Likes
Let’s focus pur energy towards being kind to one another and helping our fellow human beings.
5 Likes
While infrastructure is important, its maintenance and improvement is more so. And whether they can weather changing policies and management.
One point of mismanagement in my country is that after SARS, they didn’t see the point of maintaining the stockpile of medical goods and services. Many were tossed and discontinued because of the opinion they weren’t needed and a waste of resources to store and maintain.
As they say hindsight is…
3 Likes
If any projects require access to a super computer, a US consortium is taking proposals
1 Like
In addition to these high tech efforts, I feel it is important to do our part in our local communities to fight disinformation and promote healthy hygiene habits. There’s no need to get confrontational but you can gently suggest to your coworkers that maybe that facebook post isn’t very trustworthy. You can also set an example to the people around you by washing your hands regularly and using disinfectant wipes.
Hmmm, from my son’s personal experience, I thought it was only 1st yr students.
Given the number of cases in NY, I don’t think there’s sufficient infra for that state.