The usefulness instantly clicked when I saw this - awesome work, and I wish it were government promoted.
I'm no good at writing copy, but I'd work on the homepage's phrasing. Link to https://healthweather.us/ as well as the NYT article on them, rather than making a reference to Maddow elsewhere (it'd be dumb for someone to be turned away by that, but someone will be.) Explain that CDC data lags three weeks behind historically, and point out all the counties without data. Say all this on the front page, and run A/B tests once you have enough visitors.
It's not a personal attack if it's a factual truth. Nobody will ban me for that.
Someone who suggests that the government promotes a website that is wanting to make unverified healthcare related data available to healthcare professionals during a global pandemic is stupid.
Showing poor judgment or little intelligence.
In this case stupid = very poor judgement as a decision made on this data by healthcare officials could cost actual lifes.
I'm the last to disagree with your assessment of myself, but I'll defend the idea. Aggregating data during a global pandemic isn't a stupid thing to do. Rather - and stay with me here - it's a smart thing.
Edit: Oh you were calling me stupid because you thought researchers wouldn't understand the concept of self-reported medical data. Give them some credit.
I am sorry if you took this as a personal attack and will apologize if i hurt your feelings, i forget that words sometimes mean something different for people than what they were intended for.
I should have made clear that I think you have poor judgement if you think this is a good idea to use unverified healthcare data to base any decisions on that could cause people severe harm or the restriction of their rights.
If you look at how the US handled the Covid-19 crisis until now, especially at the CDC and the Expert level that the president assigned to guide him, that is really troubling evidence that not every researcher or healthcare official understood the concept of self-reported data or properly verified data at all.
There is a good reason why no other country in the world during this crisis suggested citizens to self test or go on a website to enter data there and based on that get tested.
That's what we have doctors and lab work for. You call the doctor tell him you might have an infectious disease, he looks at you and your symptoms. He makes the decision that you need to get tested. This is also good advise for the regular flu. And especially with Covid-19 it's important that people get tested early and hospitalized with risk factors before they turn into severe ICU cases. Many people end up in the ICU right now because they go to the hospital while already dying. A lot of the reports you read from Hospitals in the US and in other countries where people don't have universal healthcare is they already arrive with blue lips and fingers in the emergency room and do not any longer have a fighting chance to beat the virus.
I have also seen this before, I have been one of the PMCs training a lot of the military repsonse teams to the Ebola Outbreak in 2014 in west africa and it was very frightening to see on who's advise and what data the governments were basing decisions on. So excuse me when I get a bit temperamental about this topic.
Stupid people or let's say people with poor judgement are at all levels of society, sometimes in positions that they shouldn't be in a crisis.
And I understand that the guy who made the website probably has good intentions. But if you do something, do it right or not at all.
I've had my moments during all this too, no worries.
> I should have made clear that I think you have poor judgement if you think this is a good idea to use unverified healthcare data to base any decisions on that could cause people severe harm or the restriction of their rights.
> Just last Saturday, Kinsa’s data indicated an unusual rise in fevers in South Florida, even though it was not known to be a Covid-19 epicenter. Within days, testing showed that South Florida had indeed become an epicenter.
You buried the lede a bit on your prior experience (that's significant context!) but I'm not advocating anything more than data collection in the interest of identifying mass trends and hotspots.
I also disagree that the US' current inept response means software engineers have a moral duty not to hand them any complicated information (if I understood you correctly) but am having a harder time phrasing that.
I'll check out the article. Thanks for providing that additional information.
>But I'm not advocating anything more than data collection in the interest of identifying mass trends and hotspots
If you word it like that that is a legit goal yes. We just need to be aware that when something is on the Internet people are going to abuse it. There are also state actors who could be interested in manipulating data like that in the worst case. Imagine you got a country to shut down or divert ressources to certain places by feeding them false data. This is not something too far fetched these days.
>I also disagree that the US' current inept response means software engineers have a moral duty not to hand them any complicated information (if I understood you correctly) but am having a harder time phrasing that.
I understand what you want to say and yes it's the governments obligation to verify the accuracy of the data they want to act on and not the software engineers, but it does help if they already get data that they can work with.
From years of working for governments, if you work with/for the Government always pretend they have no clue what they are doing and prepare for the worst.
I'm one of the guys who made the website, and I thought a lot about these things too. You have good concerns. My group talked to doctors and epidemiologists before starting this project and we proceeded with these thoughts in mind.
If it were actually possible to go to your doctor or get tested for COVID-19, I would agree that this is not the best way to collect medical information. The reality is we don't have that fortune right now, and this is the best fallback we can propose.
If you have specific criticism that we can take to improve the form, I'd be happy to implement it.
We're biased towards action, not sitting on our hands.
Thank you for your effort, and apologies for being a bit hot headed about this.
Like I said I am sure you just have the best intentions. If you could add some kind of geo restriction/verification so that people are not able to enter at least ZIP codes outside the country they live that would probably be helpful already
I can also give you a real life example on how unverified data actually hurt people.
There is no scientific evidence and proper data yet that Plaquenil ( hydroxychloroquine ) is actually helping most covid patients to beat the illness or get better.
The President mentioned the drug in his press conference without getting interrupted immediately by Dr.Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US.
After the Press conference people in Africa started raiding the pharmacies for Plaquenil which is widely available in Africa because some people have complications with the newer Malaria meds and it's dirt cheap.
It was even worse after the President tweeted about this new wonder drug. Again neither Dr. Fauci or Dr. Birx immediately published a statement that the president is false and not a physician.
Multiple people ended up in the Hospital with Plaquenil poisoning because of that.
People got hurt because experts did not shut down the presidents false claims that were only based on anecdotal data immediately.This is how easy unverified data can hurt or potentially kill people.
Personal attacks and "factual truth" are orthogonal, and we certainly will ban you for the former (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) so please don't do it again. In practice, people underestimate how much of the former they're doing and overestimate how much of the latter they possess, so the distinction isn't generally useful.
It's easy to make your substantive points without declaring others to be stupid, so please do that instead.
If you say you ban people for telling the truth I'll consider to not post on this platform and contribute in the future. Because we are getting close to censorship if you despite someone explaining himself threatening with banning them for a personal attack which it wasn't in this case and even the OP agrees to that if you follow the course of this discussion.
>It's easy to make your substantive points without declaring others to be stupid, so please do that instead.
I agree with you on that point, instead of calling someone else stupid for poor judgement I'll instead call their argument stupid or to not cause any friction "poor judgement" instead and explain why I think that to keep room for a discussion on the argument and not the author.
We don't ban people for telling the truth, we ban them for breaking the site guidelines. Fortunately, it's possible to tell the truth without breaking the site guidelines, so there need be no conflict.
I really want to call upon any engineers/managers at Apple/Google/Garmin/Fitbit: please start working on body temperature monitoring. It doesn't have to be a realtime readout like a heart monitor, but something that could work overnight to find an average. This could stop entire pandemics.
Really good question. One hypothesis is that they're massively under-testing, but there's not a lot of data to support that. If you look at https://covidtracking.com/data/ for example, you see a positivity ratio of about 9% for FL, compared with 86% (!!!) for NJ, where it is really clear that the situation is dire but we're not seeing it because of lack of testing.
The other one to watch is Michigan. There the "data quality grade" from covidtracking is a D.
I think Iceland pop 300,000 tested everyone. The result is 50% of the cases are asymptomatic. That's terrible in two ways, one is potentially it's spreading undetected. And two natural herd immunity comes at an enormous cost.
I had an idea, that one way to eliminate this COVID-19 coronavirus, as well as the H1N1 influenza virus from civilization, is to shut down all human movement for 30 to 60 days.
You have to go 2 or 3 weeks, without any new reported infections to be sure.
This would require that all the countries and governments of the world, act in unison, to ensure that all 7 billion people are tracked, and monitored.
But the reality is, good luck, as this will never happen. The economic cost is too high, but the alternative, is that the COVID-19 virus will hunt down the human race.
I'm curious about something: Is fever is a symptom that would appear without someone noticing it? Wouldn't other symptoms like chills/coughing manifest first?
People often don’t know they have a fever. Not necessarily because they feel well, but because they fail to identify their ill feeling as “fever”. I’ve had tons of patients deny fever, endorse fever symptoms, and then have a fever on thermometer.
We might. There's some worry that e.g. showing a heat map of the data might be alarming, so we're trying to figure out where the balance is between transparency and cautiousness.
Will this track individual's symptom progression over time? e.g. if I submit everyday as suggested, are these uncorrelated datapoints, or do you get trend info?
Yes, we get trend info. We're storing a cookie in your browser with a UUID that is associated to your temperature reading. If you submit temperatures for multiple people in your household, they all get that UUID, which we assume to be a household identifier.
Carson here, site developer. Thank you for the positive response so far, but also feel free to leave us constructive criticism. If you want to contribute to this effort, the GitHub is https://github.com/carsonbaker/takeyourtemp. We're working on it with frenetic energy.
Celsius would be good. It'd save me a manual conversion. And 98.6 is just a conversion from 37C anyway that ignored the rules of significant figures...
May I ask how is any of the data you collect of any use if there is zero verification that said data is from actual people with symptoms?
I was just able to enter a US Zip code and normal temperature 98.6 without any verification. The site doesn't even check for location. I was able to enter data for a "US citizen" from Europe. Then clear cookies and do it again.
Verification of data is a huge thing if you want to make any kind of decision based on that data.
This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.
The second one has a sample size of less than thousand people and concludes "Self-diagnosis does not accurately predict influenza seropositivity"
The third one is the only one that has a good set of data in terms of sample size ( 50+ Million ) but concludes "Symptom checkers had deficits in both triage and diagnosis" and that said I have no idea if those websites need some kind of verification as well, so if not someone who's bored could have just added bogus data to that as well.
45 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 81.4 ms ] threadI'm no good at writing copy, but I'd work on the homepage's phrasing. Link to https://healthweather.us/ as well as the NYT article on them, rather than making a reference to Maddow elsewhere (it'd be dumb for someone to be turned away by that, but someone will be.) Explain that CDC data lags three weeks behind historically, and point out all the counties without data. Say all this on the front page, and run A/B tests once you have enough visitors.
Again, great work!
What? Mind = Blown
You can't be this stupid.
Someone who suggests that the government promotes a website that is wanting to make unverified healthcare related data available to healthcare professionals during a global pandemic is stupid.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stupid
Showing poor judgment or little intelligence. In this case stupid = very poor judgement as a decision made on this data by healthcare officials could cost actual lifes.
Edit: Oh you were calling me stupid because you thought researchers wouldn't understand the concept of self-reported medical data. Give them some credit.
I should have made clear that I think you have poor judgement if you think this is a good idea to use unverified healthcare data to base any decisions on that could cause people severe harm or the restriction of their rights.
If you look at how the US handled the Covid-19 crisis until now, especially at the CDC and the Expert level that the president assigned to guide him, that is really troubling evidence that not every researcher or healthcare official understood the concept of self-reported data or properly verified data at all.
There is a good reason why no other country in the world during this crisis suggested citizens to self test or go on a website to enter data there and based on that get tested.
That's what we have doctors and lab work for. You call the doctor tell him you might have an infectious disease, he looks at you and your symptoms. He makes the decision that you need to get tested. This is also good advise for the regular flu. And especially with Covid-19 it's important that people get tested early and hospitalized with risk factors before they turn into severe ICU cases. Many people end up in the ICU right now because they go to the hospital while already dying. A lot of the reports you read from Hospitals in the US and in other countries where people don't have universal healthcare is they already arrive with blue lips and fingers in the emergency room and do not any longer have a fighting chance to beat the virus.
I have also seen this before, I have been one of the PMCs training a lot of the military repsonse teams to the Ebola Outbreak in 2014 in west africa and it was very frightening to see on who's advise and what data the governments were basing decisions on. So excuse me when I get a bit temperamental about this topic.
Stupid people or let's say people with poor judgement are at all levels of society, sometimes in positions that they shouldn't be in a crisis.
And I understand that the guy who made the website probably has good intentions. But if you do something, do it right or not at all.
> I should have made clear that I think you have poor judgement if you think this is a good idea to use unverified healthcare data to base any decisions on that could cause people severe harm or the restriction of their rights.
Check out this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/health/coronavirus-fever-...
> Just last Saturday, Kinsa’s data indicated an unusual rise in fevers in South Florida, even though it was not known to be a Covid-19 epicenter. Within days, testing showed that South Florida had indeed become an epicenter.
You buried the lede a bit on your prior experience (that's significant context!) but I'm not advocating anything more than data collection in the interest of identifying mass trends and hotspots.
I also disagree that the US' current inept response means software engineers have a moral duty not to hand them any complicated information (if I understood you correctly) but am having a harder time phrasing that.
>But I'm not advocating anything more than data collection in the interest of identifying mass trends and hotspots
If you word it like that that is a legit goal yes. We just need to be aware that when something is on the Internet people are going to abuse it. There are also state actors who could be interested in manipulating data like that in the worst case. Imagine you got a country to shut down or divert ressources to certain places by feeding them false data. This is not something too far fetched these days.
>I also disagree that the US' current inept response means software engineers have a moral duty not to hand them any complicated information (if I understood you correctly) but am having a harder time phrasing that.
I understand what you want to say and yes it's the governments obligation to verify the accuracy of the data they want to act on and not the software engineers, but it does help if they already get data that they can work with.
From years of working for governments, if you work with/for the Government always pretend they have no clue what they are doing and prepare for the worst.
If it were actually possible to go to your doctor or get tested for COVID-19, I would agree that this is not the best way to collect medical information. The reality is we don't have that fortune right now, and this is the best fallback we can propose.
If you have specific criticism that we can take to improve the form, I'd be happy to implement it.
We're biased towards action, not sitting on our hands.
Thank you, James.
Like I said I am sure you just have the best intentions. If you could add some kind of geo restriction/verification so that people are not able to enter at least ZIP codes outside the country they live that would probably be helpful already
There is no scientific evidence and proper data yet that Plaquenil ( hydroxychloroquine ) is actually helping most covid patients to beat the illness or get better.
The President mentioned the drug in his press conference without getting interrupted immediately by Dr.Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US.
After the Press conference people in Africa started raiding the pharmacies for Plaquenil which is widely available in Africa because some people have complications with the newer Malaria meds and it's dirt cheap.
It was even worse after the President tweeted about this new wonder drug. Again neither Dr. Fauci or Dr. Birx immediately published a statement that the president is false and not a physician.
Multiple people ended up in the Hospital with Plaquenil poisoning because of that.
People got hurt because experts did not shut down the presidents false claims that were only based on anecdotal data immediately.This is how easy unverified data can hurt or potentially kill people.
It's easy to make your substantive points without declaring others to be stupid, so please do that instead.
>It's easy to make your substantive points without declaring others to be stupid, so please do that instead.
I agree with you on that point, instead of calling someone else stupid for poor judgement I'll instead call their argument stupid or to not cause any friction "poor judgement" instead and explain why I think that to keep room for a discussion on the argument and not the author.
Thank you for your input.
Calling arguments stupid still breaks the site guidelines though. Would you mind reviewing them? I think it might help: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The other one to watch is Michigan. There the "data quality grade" from covidtracking is a D.
You have to go 2 or 3 weeks, without any new reported infections to be sure.
This would require that all the countries and governments of the world, act in unison, to ensure that all 7 billion people are tracked, and monitored.
But the reality is, good luck, as this will never happen. The economic cost is too high, but the alternative, is that the COVID-19 virus will hunt down the human race.
Why is this US centric?
I was just able to enter a US Zip code and normal temperature 98.6 without any verification. The site doesn't even check for location. I was able to enter data for a "US citizen" from Europe. Then clear cookies and do it again.
Verification of data is a huge thing if you want to make any kind of decision based on that data.
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/1/2/e000234
https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h3480.full
The first one says
This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.
The second one has a sample size of less than thousand people and concludes "Self-diagnosis does not accurately predict influenza seropositivity"
The third one is the only one that has a good set of data in terms of sample size ( 50+ Million ) but concludes "Symptom checkers had deficits in both triage and diagnosis" and that said I have no idea if those websites need some kind of verification as well, so if not someone who's bored could have just added bogus data to that as well.
I am not sure what's your point.