How can I help the Coronavirus situation?

I was just at a pharmacy where I asked the cashier to use hand sanitizer because she kept touching her damn nose every minute or two and she blew me off and told me "I've been using hand sanitizer all day."

If you could smack a few million people upside the back of the head and get them to actually, in fact, practice the hygiene stuff that gets repeated all the time and utterly ignored, you could save thousands of lives.

Stop touching your face.

Stop touching your face.

Train cashiers to practice actual germ control.

Don't let them lick their fingers to open bags. Fire them if they do stuff like touch their nose and then immediately handle money or lick their fingers to open bags.

The single biggest obstacle to germ control is the fact that most humans don't want to actually practice it. Making it a widespread habit would nearly put a stop to most epidemics all on its own, but we are too busy sticking our heads up our butts to do that.

Accept that there's a significant chance you're going to get coronavirus.

Educate yourself and be realistic.

Realize that 80% of patients have mild symptoms, only 20% have serious symptoms, and of that 20% only 2% fatalities occur.

Also, accept that nothing in life is guaranteed, appreciate the time with the people you love and care about, and be grateful this pandemic isn't some more virulent version of something more lethal like yersinia pestis.

That's about all you can do.

By keeping an eye on vulnerable people around you and ensuring they have access to life's necessities without risk penalty.

The only thing I'm personally vaguely concerned about is making sure my grandparents have access to basic necessities without having to expose themselves in places like supermarkets.

If you're under 40 and healthy it seems that you don't have much to worry about besides not spreading the virus yourself (self quarantine as soon as you think you might have it).

I encourage you to write your local politicians to encourage policy changes that would encourage people to self-quarantine or to seek treatment for infectious diseases. I wrote the following to my state senators:

Many people currently are concerned about the corona virus outbreak. I believe that Washington state can take the lead in medical policy decisions that would help to mitigate the effect of the disease on the most vulnerable members of our state.

There are two key legislative gaps that prevent people from seeking proper care for infectious diseases:

1. A lack of legislation protecting peoples’ jobs when taking leave for treatment or diagnosis for an infectious disease.

2. The high potential cost of medical care when seeking treatment or diagnosis for an infectious disease. Although many people have health care in Washington state, many have high deductibles that are so high that they may choose paying their rent over treatment.

I am not a medical professional nor a medical policy expert, but an ordinary citizen of your district and these gaps are frightening. Please help Washington be a national leader in infectious disease policy.

I had this question of software engineers with maybe access to social data. But I think I posted it at a poor time - no replies.

Ask HN: Usefulness of social network data for epidemic management?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22440114

But really it seems like a natural reaction to want to help, but I suspect if you aren't already tied in to a network of people/resources with a jump on the issues already, that coming up to speed is more of a idle thought than practical.

You could build insurace infrastructure for people at a high risk of the disease.

https://asindu.drileba.capital/2020/02/fighting-of-disease-p...

I've just purchased the domain name coronavirus.rehab Planning to compile useful content and share it with public

Wash your hands.

Question, should I go to office tomorrow? First case just reported a few hours ago.

You can donate your computational resources to Stanford.

Wash your hands.

Wash your hands.

Write an app!

On the first screen it poses the question, "Should I buy a bunch of N95 masks?"

On the second screen, it says, "Fuck, no."