<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>notahacker</author><text>Yep. Ventilator usage [if available] and deaths are more reliable indicators, but they&amp;#x27;re also lagging ones [and even deaths aren&amp;#x27;t entirely consistently measured since many of the most severely affected patients exhibit comorbities, and many nations don&amp;#x27;t test the dead]</text><parent_chain><item><author>cowsandmilk</author><text>&amp;gt; the USA curve is fearsomely steep&lt;p&gt;This analysis is difficult because it is related to testing capacity. We all know testing capacity was limited early on. It remains limited, but is growing. The faster capacity grows, the steeper the curve will be. Want to have a less steep curve? Lower the amount of testing.&lt;p&gt;In another comment, you claim looking at the curves leaves out politics completely, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t. Any politician can make the situation look worse on the curve, but better serve their people, by increasing testing. They can also make their curve look better, but do worse for their people, by claiming their state is unable to purchase tests. This can be a very political game.</text></item><item><author>throwaway_pdp09</author><text>This is bad. I&amp;#x27;ve been graphing the exp curve for Italy, UK and USA and the USA curve is fearsomely steep. Italy has more cases now but the USA is growing fastest and &lt;i&gt;looks like&lt;/i&gt; it will match Italy&amp;#x27;s on ~March 28th (looking at the most recent 10 points, see below)&lt;p&gt;The rate of growth in the USA, extrapolated, is just huge. Looking at the whole curve it does not match an exponential well, I think the early part is skewing it. If we take the last 10 data points, they fall very well onto the curves for all 3 countries, and that curve for the USA is horrific. I&amp;#x27;m not an epidemiologist nor statistican so it would be irresponsible to put my predicted figures here, but christ, if I&amp;#x27;m right the US is going to be reeling in just a few day.&lt;p&gt;Edit: @mnl below has pointed out that infection is not an exponential but on the whole a logistics curve (s-shaped curve &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Logistic_function&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Logistic_function&lt;/a&gt;). He is correct. However in early stages I believe an exponential MAY be a decent approximation (and I&amp;#x27;m reading up on it now). However, the inflection in the &amp;#x27;S&amp;#x27; (where new infections would start to slow down) would be expected to be at far higher figures than those I&amp;#x27;m looking at - a few tens of thousands of reported infections per country currently - and it&amp;#x27;s not even close to that (populations of multiple millions in each country).</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What&apos;s Coming</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-interview-larry-brilliant-smallpox-epidemiologist/#intcid=recommendations_wired-homepage-right-rail-popular_d00a3648-f912-49b3-9b8a-f82ade2ecbd5_popular4-1</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>DyslexicAtheist</author><text>once people&amp;#x27;s minds are made up, it&amp;#x27;s incredibly difficult to walk them back to a different reasoning. Apart from the lack of early tests the problem is therefore exacerbated by the downplaying of the problem during the critical early stages. It wasn&amp;#x27;t just lost-time that needs to be made up for but also that mitigations will now become harder to swallow!</text><parent_chain><item><author>cowsandmilk</author><text>&amp;gt; the USA curve is fearsomely steep&lt;p&gt;This analysis is difficult because it is related to testing capacity. We all know testing capacity was limited early on. It remains limited, but is growing. The faster capacity grows, the steeper the curve will be. Want to have a less steep curve? Lower the amount of testing.&lt;p&gt;In another comment, you claim looking at the curves leaves out politics completely, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t. Any politician can make the situation look worse on the curve, but better serve their people, by increasing testing. They can also make their curve look better, but do worse for their people, by claiming their state is unable to purchase tests. This can be a very political game.</text></item><item><author>throwaway_pdp09</author><text>This is bad. I&amp;#x27;ve been graphing the exp curve for Italy, UK and USA and the USA curve is fearsomely steep. Italy has more cases now but the USA is growing fastest and &lt;i&gt;looks like&lt;/i&gt; it will match Italy&amp;#x27;s on ~March 28th (looking at the most recent 10 points, see below)&lt;p&gt;The rate of growth in the USA, extrapolated, is just huge. Looking at the whole curve it does not match an exponential well, I think the early part is skewing it. If we take the last 10 data points, they fall very well onto the curves for all 3 countries, and that curve for the USA is horrific. I&amp;#x27;m not an epidemiologist nor statistican so it would be irresponsible to put my predicted figures here, but christ, if I&amp;#x27;m right the US is going to be reeling in just a few day.&lt;p&gt;Edit: @mnl below has pointed out that infection is not an exponential but on the whole a logistics curve (s-shaped curve &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Logistic_function&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Logistic_function&lt;/a&gt;). He is correct. However in early stages I believe an exponential MAY be a decent approximation (and I&amp;#x27;m reading up on it now). However, the inflection in the &amp;#x27;S&amp;#x27; (where new infections would start to slow down) would be expected to be at far higher figures than those I&amp;#x27;m looking at - a few tens of thousands of reported infections per country currently - and it&amp;#x27;s not even close to that (populations of multiple millions in each country).</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What&apos;s Coming</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-interview-larry-brilliant-smallpox-epidemiologist/#intcid=recommendations_wired-homepage-right-rail-popular_d00a3648-f912-49b3-9b8a-f82ade2ecbd5_popular4-1</url></story>