Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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And honestly even the notion that the world during coronavirus should be that different is open to question. I agreed with taking action to delay the virus by a few months to buy time to both work out what was going on and figure out the most effective treatment strategies, but in Western countries people are seriously considering 12 month style lockdowns to protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life.

In hindsight it may well be that the actuarial math didn't make sense - this isn't the first disease humanity has faced by a long stretch and we're potentially looking at severe self inflicted wounds for something that doesn't look like it is going to be the next Black Death or Ebola. The obvious historical precedent I remember is 9/11. Making any changes after 9/11 was a mistake the US never really recovered from. This would be a great moment to be a little hard-hearted and remember that everyone has to die of something.

We don't know what is going to happen from this economically. The economic forecasts are as flimsy and there is a lot of room for unpleasant surprises.

>to protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life Bold statement. Should it be my mother who deserves to be left to die or yours? Assuming for a minute that most of those affected would be the oldest, there are plenty of people with immunocompromised systems who deserve to live just as anyone else.

The other difficult issue is that an order of magnitude more people end-up in hospital, many in intensive care, for at least 2 weeks.

That's an enormous amount, even if you were to spread out that effect, assuming we lift all restrictions and let the virus loose, we would be talking -at the very least- about more than a million people requiring beds at any given time, in the US alone, just for COVID-19...

Imagine the economic effect of that on medical costs and the economy at large...

A year-long confinement is not workable and no nation can afford it, western or otherwise. However, strong social distancing and hygiene measures, as well as travel restrictions, could/should be implemented until we have a universal solution for this.

> protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life.

That's not what lockdowns are for. The point is to avoid overloading the hospitals. If we didn't slow the pace at which COVID19 spreads, hospitals would become full of COVID19 infected people, leaving no room for people with other kind of afflictions. So we'd still have 1-2% death from COVID, but also a bunch of unrelated death due to reduced hospital capacity.

Arguably the death rate from covid would increase as well, wouldn't it? You'd have a lot more potential survivors not getting proper care.

>...people are seriously considering 12 month style lockdowns to protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life.

"Good years" for who? The accumulation of experience, knowledge, historic context, etc., tend to make a person's life more meaningful with time not less. To insinuate that the good years come and go with youth is either a statement about your own life or a failure of your imagination. Not even getting into the fact that you feel you can measure the worth of millions of stranger's lives and determine they're not worth saving.

Could you elaborate on the mistakes made after 9/11? The ones that come to mind are the Patriot Act, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Also erosion of various civil liberties. Terrorism is like a pathogen causing an auto-immune disorder; pretty much all of its damage comes from reaction to it.

However, I don't think it's in any way like COVID-19 situation. In this pandemic, the economy was going to go down anyway, due to simple self-preservation of individuals. Without social distancing and lockdown measures, once you'd seen people around you getting sick and dying left and right, you'd too be reluctant to go to your work, or to run your plant.

That we still have the amped-up TSA infrastructure in place is arguably a mistake. If it were allowed to post selfies of sneaking dangerous objects through security, the whole thing would collapse as an expensive farce.

> in Western countries people are seriously considering 12 month style lockdowns to protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life.

Other than being completely calloused, this argument also isn't true. We don't know the exact mortality rates because we haven't seen proper data for it yet. Depending on when you get your numbers, Italy has had up to 34% of their infected die.

Furthermore, this isn't just a Boomer and Silent Generation killer. Asthmatics, immuno-comprimised, and otherwise healthy people without access to decent health care for socioeconomic reasons are at risk.

I'm not arguing for or against such a long quarantine time. I'm only stating that we aren't just trying to save the last holdouts from the 40s.

I have no icdea where you got that 34% from but it absolutely does not at all match any mortality rates for this virus anywhere in any normal setting.

As for the elderly dying more than all others by far (including younger immunocompromoised people), the numbers are plainly available for a variety of regions and countries. They speak for themselves clearly enough.By far and away, the absolute majority of all dead are those over the age of 70. Most of them over the age of 80, and even those with what would normally be comorbidities among younger populations ide so rarely of Covid that they're outliers. Healthy young people are extreme outliers to the mortality count. Even in northern Italy at the worst of its saturation of the healthcare system, the same thing was observable: deaths among younger people are outliers across the board.

At the time of this comment Italy has 181,228 confirmed cases and 24,114 deaths which comes out to about 13%.

Even ignoring the mortality rate, this thing is causing lasting and perhaps permanent damage to the body.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

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