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Comment by phenkdo | Hacker News Reader

There are some credible voices skeptical of the current doomsday predictions from Dr. Fauci et al, vis-a-vis the national quarantine.

Unfortunately, this too has become a partisan political issue with dems for shutdown/quarantine, and republicans for opening up.

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The closest thing to a credible voice with a somewhat contrarian view I've seen is John Ioannidis [1]. His comment was a bit provocative, but ultimately the main thing he was asking for was proper studies to have better numbers for the real mortality rate. Which would be a study with a random sample of the population where you test everyone and then follow up for a while to see how they do.

But asking for such a study is far away from the people asking to just let a few % of the population die because "it's for the economy".

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

Name some of these "credible" voices. Thus far, most of the skeptical analyses seem to come from non-specialists and/or make some ridiculous assumptions that do not hold water.

The authors of the above article for example. Are you more qualified than them to dismiss them as "ridiculous"?

It’s funny that the Republican plan involves the manslaughter of their voter base prior to the next election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

Please don't take HN threads further into political or ideological flamewar. It leads to predictable, bad places.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I genuinely disagree that this is a flamewar topic. I posted about a political party’s actions the same way I would post about any other organizations actions.

I believe you, but what makes it a flamewar topic is how other people are going to react. The results will be predictably dismal. Actually you combined two flamewar topics there: a partisan one and an ideological one.

This is a moderation issue because such flamewars aren't only off topic, but destroy the intellectual curiosity that HN exists for.

The worst hit states are Democrat. Many of the Republican states have lower population density, therefore lower spread.

Age is a larger predictor of political party affiliation than location[1], and the CFR of covid-19 against age[2] means the deaths will disproportionately be republicans. Every elderly persons life is also worth more, on average, in terms of number of votes because the elderly vote more than the young[3].

An early end of self-isolation would be an unmitigated political disaster for the Republican party. These are statistics so simple that even politicians should be able to understand them.

Edit: I would also like to add that it is very early days for covid-19. A significant percentage of the population will be infected at some point before November. How high of a percentage is inversely related to how long people self-isolate. The states that are barely hit at all today will the "worst hit states" tomorrow.

1. https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-af...

2. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/07/coronaviru...

3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_...

Unintended consequences strikes again.

Maybe not ha-ha funny but I agree it is really bizarre. I don't know if they believe they're immortal or if just hugely skeptical but it does seem to be flying in the face of reason to just assume it's not a big deal.

If it does turn out to be devastating then those responsible won't face any consequences. When confronted with their weak response to the virus in any elections in the future the likes of Boris and Trump will counter that you're politicising the deaths of [thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions?] of citizens blah blah.

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