Hacker News Reader

Comment by WilliamEdward | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that will shake up the US elections and put the entire country at risk is the fact that healthcare is so expensive. If you cannot get treated for coronavirus, you can expect the number of cases to spread and skyrocket.

View on HN

I don't want to downplay the financial concerns but in the US we expect every hospital bed to be full by mid May. Many of those beds lack proper isolation for infectious disease, and we'll have run out of proper PPE supplies for healthcare workers, meaning many of those workers will cycle out of commission. Unfortunately every country is in a similar situation. People are going to go without appropriate care regardless of copays. Helping people cover out of pocket expenses is the easy problem to solve.

https://twitter.com/LizSpecht/status/1236095180459003909?s=2...

This is beyond simply getting a hospital bed, really. If people can't even stay at home because they're forced to make money, or they cant afford proper medication, well you get the idea.

That's an engineer extrapolating from an assumed doubling time.

It's not an absurd scenario, the doubling time is from studies of other countries, but there's also no accounting for public health measures and individual behavior. Things like reducing time spent in groups (school, church, events) have a considerable impact on infection rates. The small number of cases in Hong Kong provides good evidence that such measure work.

> Undeserved panic does no one any good. But neither does ill-informed complacency. It’s wrong to assuage the public by saying “only 2% will die.” People aren’t adequately grasping the national and global systemic burden wrought by this swift-moving of a disease. 23/n

Isn't the best approach then to do nothing? To be blunt here: if what she's saying is true, most of the vulnerable groups are going to die anyway. So why not just ignore it completely, and spend the healthcare resources on other stuff?

I mean, if the choices are:

1. 2% of the population dies and the healthcare system and economy collapses completely

2. 2 + ε% of the population dies

Then the second option is arguably preferable.

I believe the unspoken plan is to let it happen but try to let it slow roll through the population at a rate I would describe as a controlled disaster. That's why planes are still flying except to the worst spots.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com