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Comment by rumanator | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what the hell are you talking about. The nations who were hit the hardest by the epidemic were also the ones which took the longest to react after the first infection. For example, compare Spain's experience with Portugal's.

More importantly, even the nations that were hit the hardest were only able to recover from the initial impact after imposing adequate quarantine measures. Another good example is Spain, which managed to drive down their 1k/day death count down to next do double digits after decisively acting on declaring state of emergency.

If you feel that ramping up a death wave with a collapsing healthcare system is a good approach then you should reconsider your priorities in life.

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The threat of collapsing healthcare system is really hard to estimate. Most of our treatment options are not especially effective against the disease. In the event that triaging needs to occur, you don't cause that many extra deaths by triaging those with the highest risk of dying, given treatment.

Spain may have reduced deaths in the short term, but there's no particular reason it hasn't just spread them over a longer period of time. You can't eradicate this disease permanently without closing your borders permanently.

> The threat of collapsing healthcare system is really hard to estimate.

You don't need to estimate, you only need to look at the facts. In Spain the covid outbreak forced them to comandeer hotels to serve as intensive care units and even then they were compelled to open an emergency hospital in Madrid with capacity for 5000 patients just to be able to admit covid19 patients requiring immediate medical care.

And that alone was just to alleviate their healthcare system.

That's not the point I'm making. You're saying Spain ran out of hospital capacity. I'm asking, did it actually increase mortality rates?

Everyone agrees that a collapsing healthcare system would be very bad, but Sweden's healthcare system is not collapsing.

The countries that were hit hard were countries that had a collapsed healthcare system to begin with, collapsed through austerity, politicians of these countries only try to safe their ass and re-elect-ability...

The nations who fared the best were those that tested heavily from the out-set.

Testing does nothing to address infection rates. Either you have the infrastructure in place to isolate spreaders or you have no alternative to nip the epidemic in the bud by quaranting everyone.

The first option is not on the table with covid19 because asymptomatic and presymptomaric carriers can walk freely among us weeks at a time without anyone having a clue.

many countries have succeeded by testing and quarantining contacts of known infections. why do you say an empirically effective response is off the table due to some supposition?

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