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Comment by brandon272 | Hacker News Reader

There are negative effects of shutdowns, yes. I would argue that the case hasn't been made that allowing the virus to run rampant among society is the lesser of two evils.

Given the risk level, on an average basis, the question seems to be, "Are you willing to kill off either yourself, or more likely someone you know, so that we can all enjoy the ability to go stand in stores?"

A large percentage of the population (doesn't even have to be anywhere near a majority) is going to answer "No" to that question. Regardless of lockdowns, regardless of what the government says they are allowed to do. People will maintain their own personal "shutdowns" regardless of how the government (or those who assess the risk differently) tell them to feel.

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Few people are brave enough to explicitly say "yup it's worth N deaths to do suchandsuch", no matter how important the suchandsuch is.

If you gave people a complete understanding of the scenario, that "stay inside until the risk is gone" means "stay inside until at least 2021, maybe longer, while the rest of the world gets to stand in stores and eat at restaurants again", I doubt any significant number of people would sign up for it.

> Given the risk level, on an average basis, the question seems to be, "Are you willing to kill off either yourself, or more likely someone you know, so that we can all enjoy the ability to go stand in stores?"

This is an absurd appeal to emotion — it implies that you should treat COVID-19 as something you will deterministically die from.

The correct framing is “what _probability_ of increased death for yourself or someone you know would you accept in order for the lockdown to be over?”

Well, “someone you know” is extremely vague, but just speaking for myself, I’d probably accept a 10% risk of my own death to end the lockdown (which is many orders of magnitude higher than the actual risk).

No I don’t think my grandma dying is worth all this being over. I do think some small risk of people dying is worth it, though. Everyone thinks that way about everything, even if it’s hard to admit. If they didn’t, they would never have gone outside even before COVID-19 was discovered.

> This is an absurd appeal to emotion — it implies that you should treat COVID-19 as something you will deterministically die from.

It's not an appeal to emotion at all. If we allow the virus to run unabated through the population, it's a statistical likelihood that someone you know will die from it. I think "someone you know" is generally understood to mean friends, acquaintances, near and extended family members.

Of course, we're only talking about probabilities and at the end of the day there would be people who would end up having no one they know die, and others who would see half their families wiped out.

> I’d probably accept a 10% risk of my own death to end the lockdown

Accepting a 10% risk of death to "end a lockdown", of all things, so that people can go stand in stores, is completely incomprehensible to me, which just goes to show that not everyone's risk tolerance is the same.

You can't dictate to others how they feel on this topic.

> Accepting a 10% risk of death to "end a lockdown", of all things, so that people can go stand in stores, is completely incomprehensible to me, which just goes to show that not everyone's risk tolerance is the same.

It is not about wanting to stand in stores. It is about avoiding long-term damage to the material conditions of millions, maybe billions, of people.

Do you not think the lockdown will cause a huge increase in poverty, homelessness, and starvation?

> Do you not think the lockdown will cause a huge increase in poverty, homelessness, and starvation?

Perhaps. But that's something that should be quantified and included as part of the risk assessment so that rational decisions can be made. It's also something that can be planned for and mitigated.

It also plays into the idea that the economy is "shutdown" or that there is a universal "lockdown" happening or that the economy needs to be "reopened" because it is no longer producing anything at all. Large parts of the economy didn't have to (and did not) shut down and they have continued full-steam ahead.

Yes. What you said.

How can you reduce all of the freedoms we've lost in the lockdown to "go stand in stores." That's life to you? Standing in stores? It will not be possible to have a rational argument about the cost/benefits of lockdown if people aren't going to acknowledge how many features of our lives have been sacrificed.

Can you provide a list of the freedoms we've lost? Honestly, perhaps my thinking on what I or others have lost in this is too narrow.

People are being asked to make the temporary sacrifice of practicing physical distancing. That's what it boils down to in terms of "freedoms lost".

And because, frankly, we have been utterly unprepared to deal with this completely predictable viral outbreak, much of our society is unprepared to conduct business in a way that allows or supports physical distancing. So people are scrambling.

Yes, there will be severe economic hardship for many people. No one denies that. But as I said, for many people they are making an extremely difficult choice between economic hardship or what they perceive to be the health and wellbeing of family and loved ones.

Where I am in the USA, people are seriously proposing not to resume in-person elementary school in fall. Public education is one of very few equalizers in society here, and the children who fall behind because their parents can't/won't/don't supplement the videoconference lectures may never catch up. That cost is hard to quantify for me, but it seems tremendous, unquestionably worth a significant chance of my (but mostly others', since coronavirus mostly kills the elderly) death.

Do you agree? How many quality-adjusted life years do you think it's worth paying to keep the kids in school? The answer can't be zero, since just driving them there costs something. This isn't a pleasant question, but it's one that society has to answer.

I really don't like the binary argument about "lockdowns". It creates the impression that the pro side wants no one leaving the house except for food, and the anti side wants to resume status quo ante corona. The real answer is of course in between--that some measures, like masks and not standing too close are clearly worth it, while others, like banning all outdoor exercise, are not. Perhaps some people arguing for or against "lockdowns" really are at those extremes, but I doubt most are.

Keeping kids out of school and not receiving a proper education is a serious issue, and keeping schools shut down is certainly not sustainable at all.

But, and this speaks to your point about binary arguments, why are our only options presented to us "open schools as we normally would" or "keep them closed"?

It seems to me that there are many ways that education systems could be re-tooled by the time school opens in the fall to enable education while substantially reducing risk of infection. To me the question is if there is a will to make those changes and compromises. It really seems to me like there isn't, and I think that is the part that distresses me the most among all of this.

I certainly agree that elementary schools (a) should reopen on site, and (b) should reopen with measures to slow the spread of coronavirus. I've already seen discussion of (b) in the press, and that gives me some optimism. I hope a month from now, we're arguing e.g. about whether kids should be held entirely in a single class (to minimize the total number of kids that one infected could expose) vs. allowed to take electives. That seems a lot more productive to me than just pro/anti "lockdown".

And while I'm here, I think the proposals to move university education entirely or mostly remote are insane. College students are themselves at very low risk from this, and they live mostly with college students. We should take measures to protect those at risk (help students living with their parents to instead live with classmates, let older professors lecture remotely while TAs run the class, etc.), but the cost of moving that online-only again seems huge to me.

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