London may have gone into a Covid-accelerated decline | Hacker News Reader

London may have gone into a Covid-accelerated decline

economist.com

155 pointsjxub533 comments

The article takes a long time to essentially get around to saying this:

> But covid-19 and the extreme social-distancing measures used to combat it pose a new and more profound danger to the capital

I feel that during lockdown a fair few people have turned mildly insane - they seem to honestly believe that we're going to stand very far apart from other humans for the rest of time.

It's just not the case. I'll be in the pub by the end of the year.

Considering that the virus is here to stay for a few years at least, how can we blame them for thinking this way? Lifting the lockdown is not gonna make the virus disappear.

Out of sight out of mind.

I returned a bike yesterday in North Beach (SF) and people were crowded together. Maybe half of the people were wearing masks. There was a 4 piece street band walking around playing brass instruments like it was a carnival.

I play in a jazz band, and one of the first things that came to mind when the lockdown started was standing next to the all of the horn players blowing their spit all over the place. Fortunately, both our rehearsal and performance spaces shut down before we had to decide as a group whether to continue operating.

>> standing next to the all of the horn players blowing their spit all over the place.

That's an aspect of the universal 6-foot rule that everyone seems to forget. It originally appeared as advice for business (restaurants). You don't want to sit too close to someone else in still air. But if we are spitting, singing, shouting, coughing, panting, playing in a Jazz band, or are simply downwind of someone, that 6-foot distance is probably not enough. Airlines have basically said as much about their cabins. If the air is being circulated artificially in a closed environment, specific measured distances are probably irrelevant.

The "universal 6-foot rule" is anything but universal. Other countries have recommended 1m, 1.5m, 2m, etc. The distance rules are almost entirely arbitrary and not based on sound science.

Distances can be both arbitrary and based on sound science. You can scientifically determine that your chances of infecting someone at 1.5m and 2m are e.g. 40% and 50%, but you still have to pick one to recommend.

No one has scientifically determined the infection risk at various distances. Such an experiment with human subjects would never pass ethical review due to the serious risk. Some scientists have created mathematical models of virion distribution, but those models are basically a joke and don't appear to align with observed reality.

I do appreciate that public health authorities have to make clear and simple recommendations to avoid confusing people. But let's not pretend there is anything scientific about it.

IMO it’s scientific as soon as someone uses data to get an edge in prediction over random chance. It’s technologically relevant when it can outperform an average person’s guess.

People have looked at well documented super spreader events as real world evidence even if it’s not a formal experiment. Aka infected person A sitting at X with local airflow Y infected N people at these locations without infecting people at K other locations.

Such data is much harder to collect after an infection has become endemic, but early contact tracing can provide great data.

It is scientific, but only partly. It has to include practicality, adherence, and every other human factor. They can’t say 2 miles because nobody could comply. They can’t say “2 meters minus the (square root of the outside temperature in Kelvin) in centimeters” because everyone would be flummoxed by the math. When getting a large group of people to coordinate an action, communication clarity/effectiveness is more important than the specific recommendation itself.

My understanding is that the six foot distance is based on the expected air speed of a cough/sneeze and distribution of droplet sizes in a cough/sneeze. Given these two factors you can calculate how far droplets are expected to travel from a cough before hitting the ground.

When a person stands in a checkout line and breathes into the air and all over the plexiglass that stands between you and the cashier...and you carefully stand 6 feet back and then walk into the same exact airspace the person occupied just seconds prior...believe me, you're breathing in droplets from that other person. Our bodies contract diseases all day every day. There are millions of viruses and bacteria that but for our immune system, would bring us to our knees in a matter of days or weeks. We cannot carry on like this. Social distancing will tear society apart and destroy the economy, resulting in far more deaths and misery.

Well, it seems to have worked out well for some of the Asian countries (and countries like Australia/NZ) which have gotten COVID-19 under control. The US still ha a major problem with deaths in the tens of thousands, as do many of the European countries.

I take your point that there will be economic paint - but I think you're being a bit hyperbolic about "tearing society apart" and "resulting in far more deaths and misery". This is the sort of rhetoric that Trump has been using - whilst I agree in principle there is economic pain - please don't treat people's lives as meaningless, or that the almighty dollar is all that matters. It's the job of governments to guide the country through these crises - this is where government stimulus and spending should be used - not just letting people die needlessly.

COVID-19 is a new and novel disease that's highly spreadable, has no known vaccine, and is killing an unprecedented number of people.

And we're not just talking about yourself - perhaps you're young/healthy and are prepared to contract COVID-19 and roll the dice.

However, those around you - family, or friends - may not be so lucky, or it could be a potentially life-threatening condition. Please think about people around you.

The US death toll is nearly 100,000....

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-24/coronavirus-update-co...

That is absolutely heartbreaking.

That is over 30x the death toll from the 9/11 plane attacks - and look what lengths the government went to combat that?

I just got my second COVID-19 test (fortunately came back negative) - my parents (who are older and vulnerable) are paranoid I'll give it to them. So when I got a sore throat, I went to get the test. And a few weeks back, my son had a cough, so I got myself tested.

Our government (Australia) is encouraging people with any symptoms to get tested - and I think that's a good thing, towards eradicating this illness.

>> and is killing an unprecedented number of people.

Black death.

Bubonic plague.

Smallpox.

Malaria.

Measles.

Polio.

There have been many more virulent and many more destructive diseases than this one. Malaria in particular has been so destructive over thousands of years that it has modified human populations, forcing observable natural selection for traits such as sickle-cell anemia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_malaria

Those aren't killing people in rich countries with good healthcare and sanitation though

You're correct that historically, there have been other illnesses hundreds of years ago that killed more people.

And in many developing countries, there are tragically many deaths caused by poor sanitation or healthcare.

However, this is a disease that has - even with incredibly draconian lockdowns and a global effort from every country to combat it - tragically killed nearly 350,000 people in a matter of months. And this is often in countries with state of the art healthcare systems, and every effort made to keep those people alive.

And as another commenter pointed out, this is often in countries not used to such scale of health disasters, as they have healthcare and good sanitation. Ironically, I read that things like air travel and holidays actually worsened illnesses like this.

Imagine if we'd simply let the diseases run its course.

The thing that baffles me is the US - advanced Western nation - with a death toll of nearly 100,000 people. How is that even possible?

I am hoping we've seen the worst of it.

Nursing home outbreaks are a huge chunk of those deaths.

> historically, there have been other illnesses hundreds of years ago that killed more people.

AIDS has killed around 34 million people since 1981.

That’s .. staggering.

> AIDS has killed around 34 million people since 1981.

That's on average 100k deaths per year since 1981.

Right now we are in our first quarter of covid19 and the official death count is at 340k.

And the response to AIDS was malicious neglect for years in many countries. A large portion of those deaths were due to bigotry.

So I suppose somewhat like the situation in the US with COVID-19 today.

>> And as another commenter pointed out, this is often in countries not used to such scale of health disasters, as they have healthcare and good sanitation.

Polio.

"On Saturday, June 17, 1916, an official announcement of the existence of an epidemic polio infection was made in Brooklyn, New York. That year, there were over 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, with over 2,000 deaths in New York City alone.[15] The names and addresses of individuals with confirmed polio cases were published daily in the press, their houses were identified with placards, and their families were quarantined."

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

Measles too. These are diseases that hit the western world, the rich countries, killed thousands, in living memory. They causes panic. They caused quarantines. They caused social change. Polio lead directly to the disability rights movement. Wheelchair ramps as mandatory in all buildings: that's from polio.

I think if smallpox was spreading in America today it might also be a good idea close restaurants and offices to slow that down.

It's not just about the dollar. We are social creatures, we thrive off of social interaction and contact and we benefit from community. Businesses, schools, churches, concerts, dancing, sporting events, all these things that give people joy and fun are shut down. We only get a few dozen trips around the sun. I do not want to spend my life cowering in fear and in a society that cowers in fear. I want kids playing in neighborhoods and playing ball, I want concerts on the regular, dancing in public squares and I want to live.

But to your point about the economy, we are seeing unprecedented damage to the worldwide economy from the shutdowns. It's not the virus that's doing this. It's the shutdowns. 40 million people are unemployed in the U.S. alone and rising, rapidly. This is unsustainable. The economy has to function or everything falls apart. And a big part of that functioning is travel and tourism and restaurants and it creates value and moves trade along. It's very important to re-establish those things.

Much of those deaths are in nursing homes with extremely vulnerable populations. I think its a tragic shame that many of these outbreaks occurred especially in nursing homes all over the northeast (NY, NJ, PA, CT, etc). However, once a patient gets moved to a nursing home, the average length they live is about 1 year. We can make nursing homes cleaner and safer and we should probably get those patients outside a bit more, but there's also only so much that can be done for people in the last months of their life.

Lockdowns vs no lockdown is an false dichotomy. The lockdown didn’t impact many people like myself, and many people can still be financially impacted even without a lockdown. Some people and businesses have actually been thriving. So your model is too black and white and doesn’t really match reality.

Or the one that makes me laugh is the sterilization of the credit card keypad versus the handling of cash without sterilization.

I don't see what's funny about that. If you have some measures that are feasible and at least somewhat helpful (wiping the keypad, encouraging people to use contactless payment instead of cash) and some measures that are infeasible (sanitizing cash), obviously you do the feasible stuff and not the infeasible stuff.

It's hypocritical. Much like the medical advice pandered by the media.

That argument only works if everyone caught the disease if they were exposed to even a single infected droplet. In fact, infection is highly non linear: below a certain concentration, the probability of infection is practically zero. That's because if you're exposed to a very small amount of the virus then most people's immune systems can fight it off immediately without "catching" the disease.

If you walk into the space previously breathed in by an infected person (or even if you just stand a couple of metres away from them) you will still indeed be breathing some infected droplets, but far less than if you stood closer to them. The result is not just that you chance of being infected is less, but that it is disproportionately less. This is born out in the observed consequences of social distancing in many countries. It's pointless to dispute it.

Forgive me for being presumptuous, but I suspect that this isn't really the point of your comment or the main reason for your view. I suspect that you think social distancing is a bad policy even if it does prevent infection. So I suggest against tacking on "oh and by the way it doesn't really prevent infection anyway", which is obviously not true; you're only weakening your credibility which undermines your main point.

There are a handful of unscientific experiments circulating around, like this Mythbusters one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f4sUNWkq60 . Tl;dr: 6 feet is optimistic. But, compared to 2 feet it's probably worlds better. It's a numbers game.

the experiments done were on how far these sorts of particles can travel, not on how infectious they are. so if we know a potentially infectious particle can travel 2m then we know the best chance to avoid infection is to not get in that radius.

it doesn't mean you won't get it outside that radius or that you will get it inside that radius, just that the opportunity to catch it is increased or decreased based on distance.

The fact that it's an arbitrary cutoff point still matters, though. If there's a cliff of infectiousness at the 2 meter line, you'd better send out people with rulers; if it's an arbitrary cutoff, you can give some wiggle room to restaurants where some tables are only 1.8 meters on a diagonal.

They are based on science, the further you are apart the longer that interaction is (probabilistically) safe for. Different governments are a) using different models; b) choosing different (and yes, arbitrary) times over which they want interactions to be safe ('enough').

Imagine someone smoking a cigar. If you could smell it, then you are in contagious range.

The virus survives in water droplets or aerosol which fall down faster than smoke.

You can easily smell cigar smoke at 10 meters but you are ver unlikely to get infected at the same distance, current estimates put it to 4 meters in hospital settings.

Also,the amount of virus you receive matters, and distance decreases it.

You are right about viral load being a factor. You are not right about only macro droplets being a problem. Micro dropplets, that are suspended in air and do not "fall to the ground" soon carry enough of the virus to be infectious in accumulation. This is why indoor areas are problematic regardless of the 6 foot spacing, as the air just gets saturated over time unless you have a continual strong crossdraft.

The smoke analogy is not perfect, as it's composition is less moist, but it is closer to the truth than the '6 foot' model that was itself already a compromise between the now accepted as disproved macro fluid projectile model and economic concerns.

And that strong cross draft can be blowing it directly into someone else’s airspace anyway.

Is smoke water droplets?

Vape is, isn't it?

In case of tobacco smoke, Wikipedia says yes:

"The particles in tobacco smoke are liquid aerosol droplets (~ 20% water), ..."

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

There is not much difference between smelling cigars and smelling my neighbours smoking weed, is there? It never occurred to me, that being able to smell this might indicate danger.

A disturbing claim, for sure. Any pointers to evidence for it?

Not OP, but I had the same theory but with cigarettes. According to Google results, cigarette smoke particles are 0.25 micron at the largest, Sars-CoV-2 virus is 0.12 micron, so about half. They're both so light that gravity probably has little effect.

So, sharing a room with someone sick probably gives you a high chance of encountering the virus, but outdoors one hopes the concentrations would be so low that our bodies can fight it off.

And if you're wearing a mask and can still smell cigarette smoke, then surely it means that mask would let the virus particles through as well.

And in fact, this is how you test the respirator fit in professional setting. You don your respirator, and then somebody sprays a funny-smelling substance. If you can smell it, it means it doesn't have a proper seal on your face.

It also depends on motion and speed. In France at some point there were talks about a rule of 10 meters when people are in motion, for skateparks or jogging for example. Because the droplet of the person in front of you takes sometime to fall to the ground, depending on your speed you can end up breathing it.

Instrumental orchestras and choirs are some of the causes of the worst clusters. It's good they stopped your practice.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/13/how-coronavirus-sprea...

Indeed, there was no chance that we were going to continue. I live in a town that was ahead of the curve about shutting down. When the band's performances were canceled, most of the musicians were already in the process of clearing their schedules.

Wearing masks outside when you are not close to someone from outside your bubble isn't necessary. The virus needs close human contacts for several minutes to spread successfully. On the outside you have wind and other positive factors.

There have been plenty of reports of infection with far less than a few minutes of close contact. Proximity to a single cough can do it.

Eventually we will have herd immunity, a weakened virus, a vaccine, reduced pressure on health care facilities, or all four. At some point we'll be back in the airport bar. There may be a few waves before we get there, but get there we will. This social isolation will not go on, it is not the new normal.

FWIW, in most of the US and Europe there is no pressure on healthcare facilities. Most hospitals are seeing lower than normal utilization, primarily from non-Covid cases.

Edit: as an example, my county (Santa Clara) is using under 10% of hospital beds for Covid. This is typical, check your county dashboard if they have one and you are likely to see a similar number. Source: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#ho...

See reverse Tinkerbell effect

My take is that what happened in Northern Italy freaked out the world, but it was actually rather unique. Very high density coupled with lots of intergenerational living.

One reason Sweden's approach may work out in the end is they have the highest proportion of single person households of any country on Earth.

Northern Italy was repeated across various big counties. I'm also wondering where you're getting your information from Sweden from. It's not easy to get a good insight into any country. E.g. Sweden's approach is quite different than what you might read if you read/follow US based news sources.

> what happened in Northern Italy freaked out the world, but it was actually rather unique

Was it? NYC has reported more deaths than Lombardy (with less population) and NY/NJ as many deaths as Italy with half the population.

The high death count in NY/NJ is probably related to the fact that in both states, the governors ordered that nursing homes not be permitted to refuse coronavirus patients.

Massachusetts and Connecticut are not far behind, for what it’s worth. I don’t know if the same factor applies.

This site lists NY, NJ, Massachusetts and California as the four states to issue such orders: https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/health/info-2020/coronavirus...

Interesting, thanks. But apparently MA didn’t really do it, according to that article.

I made a comment in another thread, but NYC is also quite unique in the US: extreme density and extremely high usage of public transportation.

So far all the places that have had hospital systems overwhelmed (or on the verge) have had extremely high density, lots of intergenerational mixing, or both.

Sweden approach gave them a spot in the countries with the highest mortality rate per capita (so far ~376 deaths per million, versus 55 and 44 in the neighbour Finland and Norway [1][2]).

It may work out for them because it's a lowly populated country but I wouldn't try that model anywhere with an higher density.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/21/just-7-per-cen...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-coronavirus-per-capit...

- Japan effectively had no lockdown and basically no testing[1].

- Japan is populated extremely densely[2].

- Japan is number 2 by the population's median age (for comparison, Italy is 5th)[3].

- Japan had 808(!) COVID-19 fatalities[4].

- Despite the lockdown, in New York "most new coronavirus hospitalizations are people who had been staying home"[5].

- New York had 29112(!) deaths[6].

One just has to ask, do lockdowns even have that big of an impact on the spread of the virus? Or did it just ran its natural course in each country -- in lockdown or not -- and differences in the numbers of deaths are just down to dumb chance?

"... there’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities..."[7]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-22/did-japan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag...

[4] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/japan/

[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/ny-gov-cuomo-says-its-shocki...

[6] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/new-york/

[7] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-opinion-coronavirus-...

The problem with this kind of "constructivism" (since the beginning of time) is that it is easy to neglect other factors that play a crucial role in the development of a crisis that may or may not be exclusive to each geographical region. For example, I've lived in Sweden and I've lived in London. The amount of differences (social, economic, political) that could be contributing to Covid-19 in one way or another is immense, and so obviously are their strategies. I would imagine the same applies for a country like Japan. Want another extreme example? Cyprus initiated a lockdown far earlier than London, and they have had 17 (0.0014% of the population) deaths so far. One can not and should not simply cherrypick situations and arguments to support one's case.

I wasn't asking rhetorically and am quite open to be proven wrong.

What kind of differences do you have in mind for Japan given their population of ~126 millions, density and median age?

"One can not and should not simply cherrypick situations and arguments to support one's case."

I don't think the fallacy of cherrypicking applies here. One counter example is enough to challenge a hypothesis and ask very serious questions about it. I gave two -- Japan and people staying at home and still getting infected in NY.

Do these counterexamples immediately disporve lockdowns effectiveness? I don't think so.

Do they mean some very strong evidence is necessary to confirm the effectiveness? In my opinion, absolutely.

"Cyprus initiated a lockdown far earlier than London, and they have had 17 (0.0014% of the population) deaths so far."

I'm going to give an absurd example but consistent with this line of reasoning.

So, I claim the Sun still rises thanks to lockdown, and as a result of initiating their lockdown earlier the Sun is brighter over Cyprus. So does the Sun still rise everyday? Yes. Is it brighter over Cyprus? Yes. Hence, my claim is proven!

> It may work out for them because it's a lowly populated country but I wouldn't try that model anywhere with an higher density.

Sweden has a very low population density on average, but they also have some densely packed metro areas. Just the Stockholm and Gothenburg metro areas make up over a third of the total population.

Unsure how its going to "work out in the end", unless they intend to resurrect their dead.

Who would choose to die now without a "lockdown" when the other option is die later with a lockdown, including the added bonus of there being more work done to understand the virus and how to treat it, which might mean not dying at all.

Nobody is choosing to die now to avoid a lockdown. They're choosing a ~0.1% chance of dying now to avoid a lockdown (I'm assuming the old and sick are in favor of the lockdown).

0.1% of the rest of my life is less than three weeks, it's not a bad gamble to avoid an 18-month lockdown if that were the choice.

> Who would choose to die now without a "lockdown" when the other option is die later with a lockdown

Umm, lots of people? If we prohibited all vehicle traffic we would prevent 1.3 million deaths worldwide, yet lots of people appear willing to drive.

Look, I don't mean to minimize the deaths, and the lockdowns were a very rational response given what was known initially. At the same time, humans make risky choices all the time, and it's not unreasonable to ask if the cost of the lockdowns is worth the lowered risk, especially in lower-density locales.

Covid-19 killed twice the annual car deaths in 1 month and half in US. And this with a lockdown in place.

> If we prohibited all vehicle traffic we would prevent 1.3 million deaths worldwide.

Sure, seems a bit extreme though. I suggest we remove all the safety features on cars, it costs the car companies loads in R&D to comply with all those regulations. You take a risk when you drive, and to be honest people should just be better drivers and there will be less accidents.

Far less accidents in lower-density locales as well.

Europe is way too varied to day that. I noticed various countries whereby the healthcare is overwhelmed. Various things were done to ensure they could cooe. E.g. by delaying some of the medical care. But also by taking various actions to slow down the spread.

I'm not sure what's the basis of your idea.

Is there any data on that?

Like major hospitals furloughing employees:

https://www.foxnews.com/science/mayo-clinic-furlough-or-cut-...

All the field hospitals in the UK and US have been now closed.

Yes, lots. My county (Santa Clara) has less than 10% of beds used for Covid: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#ho...

This is direct, primary source data, not a media report.

You're entirely incorrect though about 'Europe'. Though seems kind of logical if you follow US based news sources. They leave out a lot of detail and get things wrong. Various countries in Europe were heavily affected healthcare wise.

That you say it's not the case while linking to only your own county.. feels bad.

I’m living in America so I mainly follow the cases here. Do you have any data showing European hospitals going over capacity?

Much of this is because any non urgent care is suspended.

There is a lot of pent up health care need building up. Some of it lethal.

There is a lot of pent up health care need building up. Some of it lethal.

The impact of the lockdown is going to be 10-100x that of coronavirus itself. No healthcare system is prepared for it.

How would the hospital load look like in the US today without lockdowns?

In New York? They’d be fucked. In most of the rest of the country? Simply canceling sporting events, concerts, conventions, and other mass gatherings would probably have been enough. Even the CDC is now saying surface transmission is highly unlikely and that the aforementioned superspreading events were disproportionately responsible for the early exponential growth,

You don’t need a giant gathering to have a potential superspreading event.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/23/missouri-hai...

So a disease that’s easily on its way to being the number 3 or 4 killer in the U.S. this year is going to be outweighed by...what, exactly?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/california-doctors-s...

It’s already happening

75,000 potential suicides is terrible, but that’s about two orders of magnitude fewer than a reasonable worst case for the virus.

Addendum: and we have financial tools to deal with the economic stress. We don’t have much in the way of treatment for the virus yet.

The fact that we’re not throwing money at the unemployed is a crime.

I agree the lockdown(s) have a real, destructive impact that has to be acknowledged and weighed.

But you blew it with those crazy numbers..

> we will have herd immunity

Eventually-eventually, but if it turns out immunity lasts a year and 10% of the population has had it next February, you'll never get herd immunity until people say "fuck it."

The virus is not gonna disappear but it doesn't mean you are going to be infected as well. If you do infected, doesn't mean you are going to have the symptom. If you do have the symptom, doesn't mean you are going to have severe symptom. If you do have severe symptom, doesn't mean you are going to require hospitalization.

Then why are we doing any lockdowns at all? If most of the young are near-safe, we should have just isolated the 60+ and kept society running as usual for the rest.

Clearly a lot of people are not willing to take the risk of contracting the virus.

That is an excellent question, and essentially exactly the argument Sweden is making.

TBH, I have yet to hear a decent argument against this, given the following thoughts:

1. Development of a vaccine will take a minimum of 12 months, more like 18.

2. It is not feasible, either for democracy or our economy, to stay locked in/sheltered at home for this long.

3. Thus, the main concern should be to "flatten the curve": keep the infection rate low enough so that, even though people still get infected, hospital systems don't get overwhelmed. I think it's important to note that the only places yet that have had overwhelmed (or close to it) hospital systems had extreme density (Wuhan, NYC), often coupled with lots of mixing of young and old (Northern Italy).

4. A corollary to number 3 is that as long as hospital systems aren't overwhelmed, or close to it, that you shouldn't lock down further. The belief is that the majority of society becoming infected within 12/18 months is inevitable, so extreme lockdowns will do little beyond push deaths out a bit.

5. Do everything you can to protect the highly vulnerable (old, immuno-compromised) as they appear to be at exponential greater risk.

I mean, as the US starts to open up, it is quite clear the virus has not been contained, so for better or for worse the above is the approach we are taking as well.

Sweden is 6th worst in deaths per capita in the world among non-microstates, and still isn't very close to herd immunity.

Natural herd immunity is an utter fantasy. There has never been herd immunity for polio, measles, or even for chicken pox.

Herd immunity only happens when a critical mass of the population - >70% at a minimum - is given immunity by a vaccine.

This creates a population with a low enough R to guarantee that outbreaks die out, even if some people aren't vaccinated.

Even then it still doesn't guarantee personal immunity, because people in small clusters can still become infected. But instead of a national health emergency which threatens to overwhelm primary care, you get small localised individual/cluster outbreaks which are very much easier to handle.

Absolutely right. People need to understand this.

> There has never been herd immunity for polio, measles, or even for chicken pox.

I think you've got a selection bias there. Those illnesses are household names because they are/were so prevalent. But what of the illnesses that never became prevalent enough to become household names because populations developed immunity fast enough to suppress the spread?

What's the last illness that never became prevalent enough to become a household name because populations developed immunity fast enough to suppress the spread?

I can't think of any.

That diseases come in waves seems like evidence of herd immunity to me. Like starting with a naive population you get a wave of infection. People become immune, spreading (mostly) stops. Over the years immunity is weakened because of old people dying and new people being born. Eventually the fraction of the population that is immune is low enough that a new wave gets going.

The alternative, which much of Europe is following, is lock down until cases are at sufficiently low level that test, trace and isolate can work effectively. Community wide measures such as mandatory mask wearing help with this.

We are deeply embarrassed about Sweden.

The trouble is, there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that test, trace and isolate can work effectively. The characteristics of Covid-19 - infection just from being in the same room as someone with no symptoms, low mortality, lots of asymptomatic cases and non-specific symptoms in most other cases - do not seem even remotely amenable to contact tracing-based approaches.

Supposedly, Singapore and South Korea were proof that this could work anyway, but it seems to have failed in both places - Singapore had to give up and lock down after cases exploded, whilst South Korea also had a whole bunch of spread that completely escaped contact tracing and nowhere near enough testing to pick it back up again, but somehow managed to reverse it through stricter social distancing measures well short of a full lockdown for reasons no-one has explained. I'd be very interested to see what serology studies have to say about South Korea's actual infection rate.

Apparently (I can't back this up with sources right now) infections usually happen with someone you spend a significant amount of time with - e.g. together in a restaurant vs crossing their path at the supermarket. With mandatory masks on public transport and elsewhere, this distinction is reinforced and contact tracing becomes easier.

It is hard to imagine SK's infection rate is anything other than very small, given their extremely low death rate (264 for a pop of ~50MM) - to insinuate otherwise is, well, questionable.

Sadly a different dimension has crept into what should be a reasoned public health emergency response. I'm not sure from where, or why, or indeed who - but we should be vigilant, the cost is terrible.

Because we didn't know just how many people were asymptomatic when the lockdowns first began. The virus is still far worse than the flu but not nearly as bad as initially feared. At this point I think reasonable people can disagree on the right approach moving forward.

Unfortunately once you scare everyone into locking down you can't reverse course on a dime.

I hear this sentiment often lately. But it always looked like 0.6-1 percent deathrate. Already in february this was suggested by one of the researchers at Hopkins, based on the nrs of South Korea at the time. And it's still around that percentage with the latest studies in Europe. Even though it sounds low, that's still a lot of deaths if left uncontrolled.

The latest data indicates an infection fatality rate of about 0.3%.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/Los-Angeles...

Latest study in Spain around 1-1.3. 70,000 participants.

https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-05-14/antibody-study...

Most studies in Europe show this: 0,5 - 1.

NYC and Stockholm antibody tests would indicate an IFR more like 1% or a little over.

Though I'd be cautious about being too confident in antibody study results, for now. A lot can depend on test accuracy (especially where covid is rare anyway).

That study (and the related Santa Clara study by a subset of the same authors) were torn apart by statisticians for the shoddy methodology and irresponsible selling of its results to the media.

UK's model used .9%>. WHO never said >3% IFR, they only said that was the amount of deaths out of current known cases.

This was their criticized quote:

> Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died

It was true.

That was the initial strategy of herd immunity, and everything we learned about this virus vindicated this strategy. But it didn't go well because the vulnerable population wasn't isolated. My opinion is that it is because instead of passing on the message of what to do to isolate the sick and the elderly, the media were busy trashing "evil Boris" and his herd immunity strategy.

And no the lockdown isn't about "lot of people are not willing to take the risk of contracting the virus", it is about keeping the pace of the tiny fraction of infections that go bad to under the capacity of the NHS / ICUs. At least that was the stated goal. It seems now that we have switched to a goal of zero infection (and not sure that it makes sense, given that I hear the WHO now refering to this virus as an "endemic disease").

> That was the initial strategy of herd immunity, and everything we learned about this virus vindicated this strategy.

This is just completely wrong. It's a useful exercise to work out how many people would need to die before herd immunity could be achieved. Use mortality numbers based on what we've learned about the virus and estimates of what percentage of the population would need to be infected to achieve herd immunity based on the behavior of any number of other viruses.

And that's assuming infection confers immunity with this virus, which we don't know yet.

If you are still questioning whether infection confers immunity, then what other strategy than herd immunity do you suggest? If we don’t develop immunity naturally, there won’t be a vaccine either. Permanent lockdown?

As for the death rate, the rate to the non vulnerable population is immaterial. With appropriate isolation we could absolutely achieve herd immunity with minimal losses. Instead we have sent covid infected patients back in nursing homes in both the US and the UK with catastrophic results.

> As for the death rate, the rate to the non vulnerable population is immaterial.

The numbers don't look very immaterial to me. [1] Granted there's a weird amount of variance between regions and there's a lot that isn't certain.

> If you are still questioning whether infection confers immunity, then what other strategy than herd immunity do you suggest? If we don’t develop immunity naturally, there won’t be a vaccine either. Permanent lockdown?

(Let's hope some reasonable amount of immunity is conferred! It seems likely, but I think it's useful to consider the worst case.)

I'd be happy with people doing what they ought to be doing anyway: exercising some caution and doing the obvious things to limit the spreading of the bug. I'm in a constant state of amazement at how bad we are at all of this.

In the crazy worst case where there isn't much immunity conferred by the infection, we could hopefully rely on Darwin to eventually provide us with a less dangerous version of the virus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mort...

Do you like good news? Then I have good news!

You're looking at the numbers for the case fatality rates (CFR). The CFR is not the same as the infection fatality rates (IFR) which represent "the fatality rate in all those with infection: the detected disease (cases) and those with an undetected disease (asymptomatic and not tested group)... The IFR will always be lower than the CFR..."[1]

Spanish government ran a seroprevalence study and got the following estimates of COVID-19's IFR[2]:

For the age group under 50, the estimated IFR is about 0.003%

For the age group 50 - 69 yo, it's 0.04%

And for those over 70, it's 4.1%

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate#Terminology

[2] https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/a... Look for the table on page 15

I don't know, an overall IFR of 0.8% is not great news, but thank you for sharing the estimate! (and for reminding me that reading Spanish is not the kind of skill you retain without practicing it every now and then... sigh)

Does the document break out IFR-S? Some news came out in recent days indicating IFR-S in the United States was around 1.3%.

"I don't know, an overall IFR of 0.8% is not great news"

I agree, 4% IFR of people over 70 is a scary number. In my opinion, governments around the world should really focus on protecting these people.

The good news is for people under 70 personal danger from the virus is close to zero.

"Does the document break out IFR-S?"

Don't know, sorry. Deciphering that table is really easy as the column names are almost the same as the English terms. And Google Translate does a really good job on the footnotes.

But reading the whole paper I'll have to leave to someone who actually reads Spanish.

> The good news is for people under 70 personal danger of the virus is close to zero.

I feel like I'm missing some key context that would lead a person to declare that with any sense of certainty. It's on a chart and everything! But it's not in agreement with everybody else's charts, and it's early days when it comes to the epidemiology.

(and at least in the US, our treatment capabilities are vast, but our testing regime is cartoonishly bad)

"But it's not in agreement with everybody else's charts, and it's early days when it comes to the epidemiology."

I haven't seen any other IFR estimate that included a breakdown by age group from a government or another authoritative source. Do you have anything particular in mind?

Is it a certain thing the risk for people under 70 is close to zero? Strictly speaking, no, it isn't.

It's unlikely we're going to see precise IFR numbers any time soon. But countries around the world are lifting lockdowns. Where I am, they're lifting it too. So I'll have to evaluate my personal risks without full information.

Why do I tend to rely on Spanish numbers?

- They are one of the hardest hit countries. If they had relatively few fatalities in the age group under 70, it must be reasonable to assume other countries aren't going to have significantly more.

- Don't have a link handy, but numbers published by Italian government had similar numbers of fatalities per each age group. (They didn't try to estimate IFR, though.)

- I don't think Spanish govt manipulates their numbers. But -- if anything -- they have an incentive to overestimate the IFR to justify one of the strictest lockdowns and a high number of dead.

I'm privileged enough, to be working from home. And staying as safe possible. I just think bad economy can ultimately take lives (not only livelihoods) of more people than COVID-19.

Here is breakdown for UK https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52403772, France https://www.liberation.fr/direct/element/la-repartition-par-... and Belgium https://5minutes.rtl.lu/actu/frontieres/a/1496940.html after quick googling.

Thank you for the links. I find them useful.

But one difference with the Spanish documents is they don't estimate their IFRs.

And if I'm not missing anything, doing it yourself is not trivial if possible at all. It's not enough to know that 5% (an arbitrary number, just to give an example) of a country's population developed antibodies. You'd also need to know the age structure of those 5%, which may or may not match the country's age structure.

And I thank you for the link to the Spanish study.

Yes, modeling prevalence is complex but once you have the total estimated infected then finding IFR becomes trivial. Calculating SMR would be much more difficult.

Many (most?) countries do not produce reports in English but only in their native language.

When you search in the native language then it is easier to find relevant data. Especially when you catch the right keywords they use.

There is something funny going on here.

Here is 14th May report https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/a... that is referenced below the table.

For some reason they chose to use total from the page 3, 19.155 total by age not 27.321, total by region from page 2. I presume that they do not know the details of about 8000 diseased, but it does not matter when it is the total number.

Again while number of >= 70 year old matches the table on the page 3 - 16559, so do age groups <10 and 10-19 but other numbers do not.

The table on the page 15 contains only 263 from the age group 50-69 but the table on the 14th May report contains 2303. The IFR for this age group would be then 0.32%. Not very big but not negligible either.

Group 20-49 contains only 23 people from the 20-29 but omits 62 people from the group 30-39 and 201 people from the group 40-49. The IFR for this age group would be then 0.03%.

Thanks for catching that.

I don't really understand why they are using numbers from one table and not the other.

I guess, it may be related to the dates they conducted the seroprevalence study, but it's only a wild guess.

I'll try to look through the documents more carefully later, maybe there's an explanation.

Becuase age and pre-existing conditions have such a huge effect, the overall IFR is going to vary depending on things such how effective measures are at protecting younger people vs. older people. Spain is likely to be particularly bad in this regard - their lockdown was one of the strictest in Europe and their care homes an absolute horror show: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52188820

That's a weird dichotomy. What a shame.

This is an interesting report that intrigues me.

Here is 14th May report https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/a... that is referenced below the table.

Again while number of >= 70 year old matches the table on the page 3 - 16559, so do age groups <10 and 10-19 but other numbers do not.

Group 20-49 contains only 23 people from the 20-29 but omits 62 people from the group 30-39 and 201 people from the group 40-49. The IFR for this age group would be then 0.03%.

My mum works in a care home, and the stories are harrowing. Anecdata leads me to believe they are the worst hit.

I don’t think it is just anecdata. I think in NY care homes represent something like 40% of covid deaths.

Well - "evil Boris" is responsible for one of the highest death rates in the developed world. And media trashing is the correct response when a senior adviser says that it doesn't particularly matter if some pensioners die, and the "herd immunity" strategy makes absolutely no scientific sense, and never did.

There is no practical way to "isolate the sick and the elderly" when there are no supplies of PPE or testing kits for care workers. The whole point is that the sick and elderly need care, and when there's a pandemic that care requires extra measures to prevent the spread of infection.

In reality the government did the exact opposite - knowingly sending elderly people with Covid infections back to care homes, and then saying "Oh that's nothing to do with us - every move was signed off by a clinician."

And that in turn makes even less sense when you realise that tens of millions were spent on Covid-ready Nightingale Hospitals, which were opened to great fanfare - and then literally left empty, while old people were being sent to nursing homes to infect others.

Evil, or "simply" stupid and incompetent? It doesn't even matter any more A lot of people are dead for no good reason, and far more are going to die in the UK before this is over.

4% of mortalities are <65, with ~1% mortality rate overall.

2017 flu had 60k deaths, despite likely undercounting.

As Nietzsche once put it: “insanity is rare in individuals, but common in the herd”

Statistics on flu deaths are effectively fabricated through statistical voodoo. Health authorities count up how many people died from pneumonia, subtract the number of people they think ought to have died, and label the difference "flu deaths". I'll grudgingly admit that there are valid use cases for this kind of thing, but it's meaningless to directly compare it to a count of people where a doctor wrote "COVID-19" on the death certificate.

doesn't this cut both ways though?

you could be severely sick with some other disease then get COVID19 in addition, what killed you?

I think 10 years from now we will look back at this time as the time where everything was counted as COVID19

It does - there are surely some number of deaths that would be recorded as flu deaths if doctors considered that a reasonable thing to do. I don't think any conclusions in any direction can be drawn from the comparison.

Despite the your downvoters, there is good evidence to suggest we are already doing that in the US. According to the CDC, for the week ending in 5/9, there were more COVID19 deaths than there were "excess" deaths.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm

These data are subject to being modified after the fact.

> there were more COVID19 deaths than there were "excess" deaths

This still makes sense if the lockdown has lowered other causes of death like car crashes.

Fair point. Though the excess seems to already eclipse car crash deaths in their entirety, and I'm not sure if other major causes of accidental deaths (e.g. drug overdoses) would really be expected to go down during a lockdown.

https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...

If we can have 60k deaths labeled "due to random fluctuations", as you seem to be claiming, why should there be mass panic and shutdown of all human activity from 90k deaths due to covid?

I don't mean to say that Covid is not a problem -- of course it is. But the response is not correct given the magnitude and nature of the problem.

To me it seems like massive government investment in protecting at risk populations is the answer.

Around a quarter of cases are working age.

A non-trivial proportion of those become seriously ill for months. It's possible they're going be left with permanent health problems.

I know of one music app developer in his forties with no health issues who spent more than a month on a ventilator. He recovered - barely - but it's going to be a while before he's back to working full-time.

Nonsense about flu statistics is just ignorable whataboutery. Covid is a very nasty illness, and until a vaccine is developed it has potential to do huge direct damage.

Without lockdowns it would have spread like wildfire and a lot of people would have been off work at the same time. Some food supply chains in the US are already struggling.

Imagine what would have happened with only ten times more casualties.

The point of lockdowns in the US was to delay the peak of cases until hospitals had time to prepare and could more likely have enough capacity.

This seems a very difficult point for most people.

Early on, we had an exponential rise in cases and it appeared we would overwhelm hospitals. Therefore quarantine orders were issued (rather delayed imo) to offset the growth and allow hospitals to not have more cases than beds/equipment.

We had a lot less data initially and had to be proactive. The initial call was correct, and slowly easing it with monitoring is correct now.

There were different points to lockdown for different people. Depending on who you talked to, the point of lockdown was to flatten the curve, or to eradicate corona, or to wait until corona was eradicated. There was never broad consensus about what the point of lockdowns was.

the entirety of US popular culture, excluding fox news, was dominated by the meme "flatten the curve" in March and into April.

it is totally disingenous to suggest that anyone actually proposing the "lockdown" claimed that it was about eradicating it or waiting for it to pass (both of which are widely understood to be absurd goals at this time).

I don't watch cable news. I'm talking about the attitudes of people I've seen expressed online (including this website) or in public.

Clearly a lot of people are not in a position to make these decisions.

One they are being scared into thinking that if they get infected they will die a horrible death and so will everyone around them. This is obviously an exaggeration because for people under 40 the vast majority will not even notice the infection. And please if you reply grasping at the straw of ‘some people are ill for long’ specify how many people and if they are seriously ill or just tired for a long time.

Second they are not in a position to set policy. The people who make the rules are even more scared and make the rules much tighter than is useful.

You're totally missing the point of current public policy.

We know that sars-cov-2 is highly contagious - R0 values up above 2 without any action. This means that with no action, the entire population will be infected rapidly. Out of the entire population a certain percentage will have no symptoms. Another group will have mild symptoms. Another group will have severe symptoms. Another group will require hospitalization. Members of the last two groups will die.

The point of current public policy (at least from the POV of the people smart enough to understand and propose it) has been to decrease R0 so that it takes much longer for the entire population to become infected (which will almost certainly happen anyway unless an effective vaccine appears quickly). Why would we want to do that? Because if the entire population is rapidly infected, the numbers requiring hospitalization would vastly exceed the resources of our medical system. That means that:

1. Some of those who might have survived COVID-19 had they received effective hospital care will die. 2. People with other treatements requiring hospital care will find it difficult or impossible to receive it, leading to more deaths from non-COVID-19 causes.

None of this has anything to do with "if they get infected they will die a horrible death and so will everyone around them" - that's nothing but a silly strawman painted by people who, for some reason, want to downplay the risk of allowing a virus with R0 > 2 to plough through a population.

No, I’m not buying this story.

Everywhere you see governments building up these huge emergency hospitals and then tearing them down again without them being used.

If your story were true they’d keep the hospitals and loosen restrictions to maximize use, saving the economy while keeping a safe margin.

> allowing a virus with R0 > 2 to plough through a population

Sounds so scary but

> the entire population to become infected (which will almost certainly happen anyway)

Is the same thing, but put in a not scary manner.

These people making the rules are not as smart as you think they are. When the rules were made there was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of pressure to take action. Logically some of the rules work and some don’t. Truly smart people would just say ‘oh well we will remove the rules that don’t work’. Instead what you see is clinging to ineffective rules, defending them with poor excuses as doing otherwise means admitting you were wrong.

In the US, look at mr. Cuomo and his indefensible failure of sending infected old people to nursing homes. It’s clearly the worst thing to do and look at his reaction now that the results are in! He just says he didn’t know even though his signature is on the page ordering it. How smart is that.

It's not the same thing.

> allowing a virus with R0 > 2 to plough through a population

puts a very concrete time estimate on it. We know that the SARS-CoV-2 replicates every 4 days on average, so this scenario has a doubling of cases every 4 days. Starting from a single infected person, the US would become completely infected in roughly 120 days, i.e. they would roughly be done by this point or early next month, with all the consequences that entails. In contrast,

> the entire population to become infected (which will almost certainly happen anyway)

does not imply any specific timeline. It could happen in 30 days, it could happen in 30 weeks, it could happen in 30 years.

> "Everywhere you see ..."

Handwaving nonsense. You said that, not people advocating for serious and sensible public policy re: COVID-19.

> "Sounds so scary ..."

Have you actually listened to the people who had COVID-19 and recovered from more than mild symptoms? If there was an army or a terrorist group about to invade the US and kill 100k people, mostly at random, I suspect you'd consider that fairly "scary", as would most other people.

> "Is the same thing..."

As noted by another sibling comment, no it's not the same thing at all.

> "... there was a lot of uncertainty ..."

There is still a lot of uncertainty. We don't really know what works and what doesn't work. What you characterize as "clinging to ineffective rules" I would characterize as "trying to be cautious in the face of massive uncertainty".

I would never defend all of Cuomo's actions as NY Governor. He made a number of extremely serious errors, even though his demeanour in his later press briefings was exemplary.

> There is still a lot of uncertainty. We don't really know what works and what doesn't work.

Yet there are the unnamed but great

> people advocating for serious and sensible public policy re: COVID-19.

According to you these people have no idea what they are doing. Indeed if you believe that, the only way to go is to keep doing nothing out of caution.

_Permanently totally isolating everyone over 60_ is clearly not feasible. In a scenario where it was allowed spread willy-nilly through the younger population, that isolation would have to be absolute.

And it is not like under 60s are all that safe. In the US 25% of deaths are under 65.

_Permanently totally isolating everyone over 60_ is clearly not feasible.

More or less infeasible than throwing millions of people out of work and forbidding everyone from seeing their friends and families?

And it is not like under 60s are all that safe. In the US 25% of deaths are under 65.

85% of the US population is under 65. So 15% of the population has 75% of the deaths, meaning a randomly selected person over 65 is 17 times more likely to have died than a random person under 65.

Yes that was my thinking when Italy locked down the first little towns and I'm still with that opinion. Not many viruses target specific groups of the population, but this one does and it was clear by end of February.

For politicians it was just easier to lock us all in because such measures are more accepted by the public if everyone has to give up and not just a few. On the other hand, the lockdown for all created so much noise that we didn't focus enough on those at risk and easing their lockdown in some way. Even Sweden got it wrong by banning visits to elderly homes only by late March.

Besides the lockdown for elderly (and a growing list of others at risk) I wish they'd broken up elderly and care homes where-ever possible. If just half the residents moved to a younger relative for a year (and pay the relative for their work, obviously) the homes might not be those death traps they are.

Here in Austria the government worked a lot with Angst. It went so far that the younger were more afraid of the virus than the elderly. I had to spend days to persuade a 35-yr-old that she doesn't have to be afraid and from her initial "I don't want this virus" position she moved to "I already had it" six weeks after...

Banning visits to the elderly in care homes in late March is better than Singapore, which amazingly didn't ban them until the start of April: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/no-visitors-allowed-a... (This was back when the press elsewhere were still pointing to Singapore as the coronavirus success story everyone else should follow. The first foreign news story noticing the warning signs was literally that day, and the existing narrative carried on for a while elsewhere.)

If most of the young are near-safe, we should have just isolated the 60+ and kept society running as usual for the rest.

Young people in their 20's and 30's are dying too, just at a lower percentage.

Many young people who survive COVID-19 end up with permanent lung damage and other on-going issues.

A New York Times staffer who's 33-years old ran 3 miles and walked 10 more the day before she came down with COVID-19 on April 17.

And now this: "I am one of the lucky ones. I never needed a ventilator. I survived. But 27 days later, I still have lingering pneumonia. I use two inhalers, twice a day. I can’t walk more than a few blocks without stopping."—https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/coronavirus-young...

> Young people in their 20's and 30's are dying too, just at a lower percentage.

Far lower. It may be still undesirable, but if we want to talk about risk, there is no absence of risk for anyone, yet the risk changes a lot depending on age and comorbidities. This matters if one wants to take the risk or not, given that it will never be zero.

> Many young people who survive COVID-19 end up with permanent lung damage and other on-going issues.

Some of these issues apply to any type of pneumonia. It takes a year or so to fully recover if you had a bad one. And to evaluate "permanent" damage, we need more time. It would be better to say "we don't know yet if the damage is permanent or not".

> If you do have severe symptom, doesn't mean you are going to require hospitalization.

You had me up to that one. It does mean you're likely to require hospitalization if you have severe Covid symptoms. You may not require a weeks long stay in the ICU and you may not require a ventilator. If you have severe symptoms, you're at a very elevated risk of death. This is why so many young people have been hospitalized by it as a percentage of all cases ending up in the ICU, even though they're still far more likely to live through the severe symptoms.

But there aren't, percentage-wise, that many young people that _have_ been hospitalized. And those aren't healthy young people - they're obese, they're drug users, they're diabetic, immune-compromised, asthmatic, have heart disease, lung disorders, or all the above, etc.

If you're in those categories by all means, update your will and self-isolate. But otherwise you'll do fine. Even the healthy elderly, and there are plenty of them, do fine.

Except the young and healthy who have an overreaction in their immune system. NPR had a recent story of teen who nearly died and could have some lastly heart or lung damage

Why would you classify a person as "young and healthy" if he appears to manifest a cytokine storm response (supposedly) to Covid-19?

Such a case is very unusual and I would question severely the use of "young and healthy" to describe such a person. Sorry if that seems harsh but naming is meaningful here.

So while there are relatively few Covid-19 patients and even fewer Covid-19 deaths, there are indeed a minuscule percentage of such cases. It's not worth worrying about for the average person.

Indeed that is the point: Covid-19 odds are so low that there is no reason for a normal intelligent person to be unduly concerned about catching Covid-19. Take precautions and go about your business. Truth is you're more likely to get killed in a car accident than by Covid-19.

The real problem may be characterised by the fact that half of the population has an IQ below 100. However as a society we've given up on eugenics, so that is a path not chosen!

> Truth is you're more likely to get killed in a car accident than by Covid-19

In the US during 2018 there were ~36,000 auto fatalities. For the first half of 2020 Covid-19 is nearing 100,000 deaths with all the precautions. And there may be a surprising number of people with health complications of one kind or another (over 30% of US population is obese) that could be exacerbated by this virus.

> The real problem may be characterised by the fact that half of the population has an IQ below 100. However as a society we've given up on eugenics, so that is a path not chosen!

We are stronger when we work together. Suggesting that the government regulate procreation to increase society's IQ is ... not going to help toward that end.

If you do require hospitalization it doesn't mean you need intensive care. If you do require intensive care it doesn't mean you are going to die.

If you are discharged from a hospital and require rehabilitation you will probably be placed in some form of nursing facility with other patients who may or may not have been infected.

The last part is the hidden disaster of the COVID-19 crisis.

> If you do have severe symptom, doesn't mean you are going to require hospitalization.

Isn't "requiring hospitalization" pretty much the definition of "severe symptoms"? As far as I can tell, when doctors talk about "mild symptoms", that can include anything from a mild cough to weeks of heavy fever, muscle pains, ... .

But more importantly: even if you're complete asymptomatic, you're still very likely to infect other people and contribute to the spread of the virus and the disease. That's bad for other people's health, causes extra deaths, is bad for the economy, and generally makes everything worse for everybody including yourself.

>you're still very likely to infect other people and contribute to the spread

True, if you are scared then by all mean isolate yourself, do not meet other people.

>causes extra deaths

Assume, in the worse case everyone infected, the estimated death rate is only 1%, that's not going to make difference to most people life or the economy.

1% is 70+ million, which is more people than die every year from every other cause.

And most other causes are not simultaneously sending several multiples of that number to the hospital, or spreading like wildfire in same hospital.

Sure, but most people not going to notice.

It is a very large number . That’s about the number of people who died during the Second World War (albeit a higher % of population). The human population only grows by that number every year . The world population will shrink if this levels are reached

Not everything is about "you". By definition, a virus propagates to others.

I guess we've lost sight of how important early containment is and the reality that once the virus is in the wild it's essentially a force of nature.

> Lifting the lockdown is not gonna make the virus disappear.

Lifting prohibition wasn't going to make alcoholism disappear.

Lifting the war on drugs won't make overdoses disappear.

There are many things we could do in society to make negative externalities that cause hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths disappear. Yet we don't do those.

Do you think that the lockdown actually makes the virus more prevalent? Seems like a strange analogy

The virus may be around for a few years but surely it is likely we will have an effective vaccine in the next 18 months if not the next 6 at which point the risks will become similar to the flu?

A vaccine has never been developed that quickly so I’m not sure you can say “surely”.

A vaccine has never had the resources put behind its development as much as this one before either. Human trials have already started in the US, UK and China which has never happened so quickly either.

9 women can't make a baby in one month. I for one don't want to inject myself with something rushed through trials and whose testing was hand-waived away.

If anything it only gives the anti-vaxxers more ammunition and brings down the overall credibility of vaccination as a concept, and heaven knows we don't want to deal with that right now.

We develop flu vaccines every year, and we do have knowledge of other coronavirus.

I tend to agree that there is some potential for fuckups, but 12-18 months seem reasonable to have most (if not all) of the vaccines as reliable.

One thing that's funny is everyone keeps saying 12-18 months. But it's already been 3 months so shouldn't that estimate at the very least be (12 to 18 minus 3) if the confidence was going up.

At least in my intention the "12-18 months" are related to when research started not the time I made the comment.

For example, the Oxford University team said it may be ready by next fall[0] some weeks ago, and they seem on track for now (i.e. human trials already started and being expanded). Moderna also started human trials and had preliminary positive results.

Other entities said they aim for this winter.

Considering early 2020 as the start of the research I would say that fits the 12-18 months figure.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-11/coronavir...

I‘m in a city of 3.5 Million that saw 15 to 20 new infections per day over the last week (Berlin, Germany). At that level, it’s perfectly possible to mostly open up again and still reduce infections further by extensively tracking every single case and their contacts.

Not years, but decades. However, I think the virus will hit an equilibrium state sooner than we expect because there will be less of an appetite for lockdowns when the fall/winter wave hits. Covid deaths will be seasonal but not headline news.

Virus also evolve to be less deadly I understand. Thus Covid19 becomes more like the common cold over time. How much time required? I don't know that.

Interesting, I hadn't heard about this. Do you mind sharing the reasoning around this?

This article from The Scientist provides an overview of why it happened in a rabbit population: https://www.the-scientist.com/features/do-pathogens-gain-vir...

> The question Fenner asked was: What happens when such a virulent virus spreads through a very susceptible host species on a continental scale? He focused on two possibilities. First, the highly lethal virus might evolve to become less lethal. Second, the highly susceptible rabbits might evolve resistance. Thanks to Fenner, we now know both happened.

> The work showed that the almost invariably lethal progenitor virus strain was replaced within a few years by strains with case fatality rates of 70 percent to 95 percent. Some field isolates killed fewer than half the lab rabbits. Over the next few decades, things settled down, and strains at both ends of the lethality spectrum become increasingly difficult to find. Fenner showed why. The highly lethal progenitor virus killed rabbits so fast that its infectious period was shorter than that of the less lethal viral mutants. That meant that the less lethal strains were able to infect more new victims and spread throughout the population.

I'm not sure if the same thing would apply to a virus that's 0.1-0.5% lethal. Since this is through natural selection, what we're selecting the virus for right now is strains that spread at long distances and through face masks, strains that spread well in a household, and strains that spread will for certain occupations.

Which virus are you speaking about? From the study in Spain with 70000 people covid has a mortality of 1.15%, looking at New York antibody test the mortality is at around 1.5% counting the excess deaths, looking at South Korea that detected pretty much every case the mortality is 2.3%. So in no plausible scenario covid-19 has a 0.1%/0.5% mortality.

Here is a link to some meta-analysis that suggests differently. Note that this is a twitter discussion with an epidemiologist, David Fisman. https://twitter.com/BenHouston3D/status/1260194923816550400?...

And for not showing symptoms for as long as possible, which if it never shows symptoms is the perfect spreader ...

Not always. Common flu has been evolving to become more & more deadly over the past few years.

FYI: common cold != common flu

That's why I specified flu.

The 1918 flu never mutated enough to become endemic and it dissapeared. Endemic mutation is not an inevitability.

If we can get the virus contained then there is no need to stay in lockdown.

Compare with Ebola. They don't have Ebola in Europe. But if it pops up somewhere, we will contain it as soon as possible.

It doesn't mean that they need to live in isolation for the rest of time.

People who are spreading ebola tend to be bleeding from their eyeballs. Covid can be spread widely by someone with no symptoms. The transmission of the two viruses are so different that comparing them is extremely misleading.

As of https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/ebola/frequently-as... ebola is not very infectious until you show symptoms. And when you show symtoms (feever, headache, vomitting) you probably won't run into the cinema or restaurant the next day to spread the virus.

Ebola couldn't be more different from Corona.

Millions of people with Corona are asymptomatic or have mild flu-like symptoms and are therefore easy carriers.

OTOH once you have Ebola symptoms (and that's when you are infectious), you have only a coin's flip chance of surviving it. You can be pretty sure no random guy on the street is giving you Ebola. You can't say the same for Corona.

To be honest, the debate is still open on whether the asymptomatic people spread it as much as the people who show symptoms. I haven't been able to find a paper that does not offer more than just circumstantial evidence.

Does anyone have a good idea on what the probability is if you get COVID-19 this year that you will be immune to it next year?

Would you like next week's lottery numbers too?

Based on recent animal experiments and past experience with other coronaviruses, the probability of immunity lasting at least 12 months is high. However no one can give you a precise number.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/05/19/scie...

> Considering that the virus is here to stay for a few years at least, how can we blame them for thinking this way?

It has been widely reported since the very beginning of the pandemic that the likely time to develop and deploy a vaccine is on the order of 18 months. Yes, it might be more, it might also be less (quite a few are already in testing!). But the idea that this is permanent has never been a feature of any expert advice nor mainstream reporting.

The idea that the people who support lockdowns (which is, let's be clear, almost everyone) want to be shut down forever is, itself, a fever swamp hallucination.

Stay home until it's beaten, and then open up slowly so we don't lose control again. Much of the world outside the US and the UK, in fact, is already opening up.

Who tells you that? Of course it does disappear, at least until the next winter. Without lockdown much earlier.

The problem with London are the aristocratic measures of social distancing. The danger of being caughed at at low distance is exponential. The recommendation is 1-2 meter. The UK did 2m, likely because the ones who came with that idea never use public transport, and want to be safe from the plebs. Face masks don't help at all against direct caughing. only against droplets.

2m distancing doesn't work in public places at all. 1 - 1.5m do work, if in the subway, bus, restaurant, pub somehow. I don't know who else did 2m. And the death mortality is directly proportional to the severity of the measures. Maybe not causal, but those are the numbers. 2m don't help at all. When you are being caughed at, it goes far over 5m, even up to 20m. So social distancing in public places does not help much. indirect caughing via droplets is not that dangerous, transmission via surfaces at very low percentages. there's no known case so far. but hard to prove.

Germany did (and is still doing) 2m. I'm actually unaware of anywhere doing 1-1.5m - perhaps the US?

Here in Belgium it's 1.5m

Ah, cool. Good luck to you all. :)

I'm in Germany. Most signs/posters say 1.5 meters.

Weird! Where I am in Germany they all say 2 metres.

Cambridge recently released a study estimating that 9% or so of the UK population already have antibodies. You only need to get to ~60% and (assuming it doesn't become endemic) you have herd immunity, it doesn't matter that the virus is here to stay.

There is a paper (not peer reviewed) that suggests that herd immunity starts occurring around 20% as long as mass gatherings remain are banned. If true life could go back to normal a lot quicker.

We don't even know still if immunity would last for more than a couple of months, it seems that would be a short duration issue in any case, so the herd immunity plan has some loopholes on it.

> I'll be in the pub by the end of the year.

Does this mean that you think the risk of serious morbidity or mortality is overestimated, or because you think at some point the reduction in social interaction is worse than the pandemic itself?

both

Not to mention that everyone can see that as in many countries measures are being loosened with little effect.

This is sort of inevitable though: if the disease were not serious and measures were an overreaction, you would see little change as they were lifted. If the disease were serious, measures were effective and they were lifted sufficiently late, you would also hope to not see much difference after they were lifted. The only cases one would expect to see a large increase in cases would be if the measures were ineffective (but then you’d also have seen an increase while the measures were in place) or if the measures were lifted too early.

Personally I’m mostly indifferent to whether or not the current restrictions are an overreaction, though I’m in the fortunate position of not being particularly severely affected by them. I would rather an overreaction than an underreaction.

Why would you see a large increase in cases when ineffective measures are lifted? Ineffective measures have no effect.

Well cases would continue to increase after as before. That case was included for the sake of completion

> I'll be in the pub by the end of the year.

"The war will be over by Christmas."

See, it's this kind of thing that makes me worry social distancing proponents aren't confronting reality. Many countries are already opening their pubs; do you really think the UK population or any other population will submit to have them closed until 2021?

You don't know what things will be like by the end of the year.

As long as 1) the virus is still around, 2) we do not have a vaccine, 3) we have not reached a certain level of herd immunity, policy making should be based on the day to day data that we have, and about the immediate term.

Perhaps the evolution of the situation means that it will be safe to be back in the pub celebrating with your buddies for Christmas. But then again, perhaps not. We don't know.

Claiming broad things like "I will be back in the pub by the end of the year" is not about sensible decision making, it's pure emotion and is not what we need right now.

I don't agree. It would be a complete abdication of responsibility to not have a concrete plan after months of lockdown.

Have people always been this petulantly childish, or is this a new thing?

(Watch the people thinking "You're not taking our need to socialize seriously!" burn this comment to the ground...)

You're not taking their need to socialize seriously! I hesitate to even respond, because the idea that it's childish to have concerns about extreme social distancing for 9+ months is so absurdly disrespectful that you frankly don't deserve my time. Hopefully you'll be able to look back in a bit and reevaluate why you felt the need to be so rude.

I thought as the parent comment at first. A bit more than 3 months in, I now think like you.

This. I live alone and after 5 weeks my mental health has deteriorated significantly. This is not a situation that can last as is till 2021. We'll have a suicide and mental health crisis.

Ironically, something we already had.

People are horrendously social creatures. Even I as a self labeled introvert am really feeling the cabin fever.

A lot more people have lost jobs. Restaurants continue to go bankrupt. Retail and airlines continue to let people go.

To sell the other side as petulant children is bordering on slanderous.

I'm a nerd so I don't mind being in front of the computer all day (I do resent the loss of civil liberties though).

But I have a friend already going through depression who is going through hell with this stupid lock down. It affects people differently.

I use the phrase 'mild insanity' because I honestly feel that it's some element of cabin fever that's caused a minority of individuals to become paralyzed in this way.

At this point we've gone way beyond any semblance of 'flattening the curve' and gotten stuck because there was no plan to unwind the lockdown.

I've seen so many people comparing COVID to war, which I find to be bizarre and misleading. It's such a fundamentally different thing.

Not sure about 'by the end of the year' but agree with the basic sentiment. The key of course is whether or not the virus can mutate to avoid the immunity provided by antibodies to the current strain.

What I've been reading so far, the genetic analysis of its mutations[1] has not suggested that it will.

That isn't to say that it won't evolve into something more like the common cold, just that the features that make it SARS appear to me to be locked into specific genetic elements of the current virus (and MERS and SARS-Covid-1).

If this trend continues, then the vaccines developed will provide immunity for people and prevent further widespread outbreaks. Covid-19 will become "just like the flu" in that you get a shot for it (possibly only 1 or 2), and your chances of catching it become low enough that even if you are exposed to someone with it, your immune system will kill it.

At which point the world goes back pretty much to exactly the way it was before, except that we have experienced a worldwide pandemic in "living memory" and there will be a crap ton of sovereign debt which is going to drag on the various economies of the world for a decade at least.

Things to watch for are the results of vaccine trials, and follow the genetic tracking with respect to the virus' use of its 'spike' to infect cells. Good results in vaccines and no change in the virus without also making it just a regular cold virus, and the world goes on.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241

It doesn’t even have to mutate if the antibody reaction fades over time, as there is evidence for with other coronaviruses.

True, if it were an annual vaccine like influenza it wouldn't be a much of a change from our previous lives either though right?

> "I'll be in the pub by the end of the year."

Some London pubs have already figured out that they can legally sell take away beers in plastic cups. So while you can't sit down inside the pub, everyone stands around in the street outside the pub drinking their "take away" beer.

Presumably they have to be off licenses to do that?

It's an open container. Entrances to half the pubs in London are, British weather permitting, perpetually encircled with punters, fag and pint in hand.

I've noticed this start to happen in SF. They sell you a drink in a coffee cup with a lid and people stand around on the sidewalk outside. I think it's probably completely illegal, but the opaque cup raises legal barriers to search.

I guess it's likely ok as long as it's an open container - that's how it works in the UK.

> I'll be in the pub by the end of the year.

I mean, you might be, but it may not be the pub as you know it. The current Irish plan calls for reopening of pubs in phase 5 (last phase) in late August (I don't think the UK has a concrete plan on this, but it'll likely be similar enough). But it will be pubs with social distancing.

EDIT: Looks like UK pubs may be allowed reopen in July, but with social distancing and table service. So, not very pub-like, then.

In the real world, people across the country will be piling in to pubs to socialise (actually socialise, not just 'chat at 2 metres away from a person they already know') and a blind eye will be turned.

People will go out, get smashed, snog, dance, hug, etc. If you force them out onto the street they'll do that. Maybe we'll even have a resurgence of good old pub violence.

Most pubs can't even support this nonsense - a business with 10% of its' normal capacity is a dead business, there's no point in even opening the doors.

I'll accept that the Government _might_ attempt a re-closure after the above happens, but I find that unlikely.

"In the real world"

This is denial masquerading as cynical realism. Covid-19 cases in the UK continue to increase at 1% or 2% a day. This is much better than the double digit growth of March and early April, but it is still bad.

At 2% a day cases double every 5 weeks. Would anyone apply this reasoning to any other disease? Can you imagine anyone saying "We have AIDS under control, cases are only doubling once every 5 weeks."

You might say that on the best days, the increase has only been 1%. That's fantastic. As soon as people start going back to the pubs, the rate of spread will again accelerate to something more than 1% a day.

Classic psychological denial is clearly operating in force. A textbook case might be the man with pain in his chest and numbness in his left arm but instead of thinking it's a heart attack he keeps thinking "It's nothing, just stress." Denial is in force when things are so grim that people do not feel comfortable facing how grim they are. Some people don't see reality until they are forced to. Some people only have a lucid moment when they are in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Some people never have a lucid moment, they simply die.

In reality, the struggle against Covid-19 will take at least another year and might take two or more years. Things are going to be very bad for a long time. But no doubt, some people won't see that clearly till they've personally known some people who've died.

The biggest worldwide increase for this illness was 2 days ago:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52748894

I think the point he's trying to make is, so what?

The people will stop caring, they've already stopped caring.

They're not the ones who are going to die. The realization is dawning that it's only the old that die.

Much like the starving kids in Africa, it's rapidly becoming a "Well, it's tragic, but I can't see it" problem.

Note I don't know how I personally feel about this, I think this is just the reality of what's about to happen in Western democracies.

I think the old will ultimately be chucked under a bus. We'll get lots of tragic stories about care homes and a whole load of hand wringing, but no-one will actually care all that much to bring in another lock-down.

Or, as you say, the other option is that we all throw 5-10 years of our lives away in a massive global recession for some old people who've already had the best years of their lives to live a couple of years more.

I think we've got to start hoping beyond hope for a magic cure, or that basic social distancing kinda keeps r below 1, so we don't have to look ourselves in the mirror in 5 years time and have to face the reality of what we just did.

FWIW, I don't feel that way at all (re throwing old people under the bus).

I think that what's happened is the opposite - the young have been thrown under the bus (even disregarding social activity we have things like school closures, university admissions, exams cancelled), and that economic activity is being hindered unnecessarily, which is having enormous knock-on effects already which will persist for a generation.

I think that the appropriate response is for the vulnerable (old, immunocompromised, or really just anyone with low risk tolerance) to isolate and be given the resources to do so.

Care homes, for example, should be dealt with via paying the staff much higher salaries and having them stay on-site, effectively 'sealing off' the care home and creating an isolated unit.

If you're poor and have to go to work, you should be given enough money such that it's your free choice and you can stay at home if you want.

My vulnerable friends and family are forced into doing this, lockdown or no lockdown, they're disinfecting packages, haven't been outside for months, and probably will be forced into a "new way of life" for the foreseeable future.

This is the sort of thing that we should be using the severe lockdown time for - determining an appropriate way of protecting the individuals which we know to have very high fatality/complication rates - the people for whom we're bothering to do this at all.

What I strongly disagree with is the idea that the lives of the healthy should be deleted in some asinine attempt to drag out the (in my view, inevitable) death toll over a multi-year period.

But those things aren't in place and they won't be. Because our government sucks and are incompetent.

So now you're in a place where you're intelligent enough, and aware enough, that you follow the rules or you play Russian Roulette with people's lives.

Rage all you want about what could be and reality, the two rarely meet.

Yeah, I'm doing everything I can personally at the moment, this is more a discussion around how in N months I feel hands will be forced.

The current situation is some sort of distributed trade of mental health for physical health; the brains of the youth for the bodies of the old. It's not a stable state and will break at some point.

Regarding "russian roulette":

Everyone I know who feels at significant risk is doing the whole "don't leave the house" thing.

Care homes are almost certainly fucked regardless.

I tend to think the major impact is going to be amongst 50+ year olds who are in good health and decide that they can't be arsed with staying inside. We basically don't have a way to deal with this issue collectively.

>> The current situation is some sort of distributed trade of mental health for physical health; the brains of the youth for the bodies of the old.

The young are the old, in due time. I'm guessing that the majority of young people today would prefer to grow old in a society that will care for them, that has demonstrated that it will care for them, rather than one that is prepared to "throw them under the bus" to "protect the young".

All of us are young at some point and many of us will grow old. We must be treated fairly in both states. The sensible way to do that in the current situation is to establish some sort of protocol for interaction with each other that will allow economic life to go on, because obviously everyone wants that, but without exposing the vulnerable to the virus. And that doesn't mean locking them up until it's gone, because that is still throwing them under the bus. After all, there is a substantial minority of people with chronic diseases etc that are still young, and have many productive years of life ahead of them. But for the rest, also, there is what I say above: if we throw the old under the bus now, we'll throw the young under the bus also, when it's their turn to be old.

And this protocol must necessarily be a strict form of social distancing and some measure to reduce transmission, like wearing masks. We know that works. Until there is a better solution, that's the best solution.

So there's no point in saying "this can't be done, you'll find me at the pub". It has to be done. And it has to be done for the good of everyone, young and old, vulnerable and strong. There's no point in thinking that "I'm young, this doesn't affect me" and carrying on as before because "it only kills the old and sick". One day, you yourself will be old and sick. And whatever kills the old and sick at that point will get you, unless the young and strong around you take care of you, like we are asked to take care of the old and sick right now.

And if young people don't care for the old and sick right now, they're digging their own graves.

Why can't the old be "locked up"? They already are, along with the rest of the population!

> they're digging their own graves

Digging our graves for when we're old? Yes, we are all going to die, and probably when we are old. I find your framing interesting though, as if it would be the young treating old people like crap by ultimately choosing to get on with their lives as the mental health costs creep up and up. No, it's the virus, a force of nature, that is doing that. Denying our humanity by enforcing social distancing, well I fail to see how this is a objectively moral position, either.

Lockdown and social distancing is fine and good, but it cannot extend towards a year or more, people will not stand for it.

Risk of coronavirus is a gradient due to age. But more importantly IMO is the number of other people who are also at risk- the obese, the diabetic, the immunocompromised... and of course all the family and friends and roommates who also may go into isolation so that they don’t accidentally expose their loved ones.

That looks very close to a lockdown to me... (especially in my country with a very high proportion of obese people. There’s probably an order of magnitude more of people living with an obese person.)

>> Digging our graves for when we're old?

Yes. If we don't treat the old now as we want to be treated when we are old ourselves, why would anyone do us the favour? We work towards the world we'll live in the future, right now, in the present. What we do now, how we behave towards those whose place we will be in one day will determine how we are treated when we are in their place.

>> Denying our humanity by enforcing social distancing, well I fail to see how this is a objectively moral position, either.

This is a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think? "Denying our humanity..."? By not going to the pub?

I note also that the narrative seems to have shifted a bit lately. A few weeks ago it was along the lines of "we can't keep the lockdown for ever, or the economy will go bust". Now, judging from this thread, it's changed to "we can't keep social distancing for ever because our lives will be destroyed".

Or just because the weather is good and people must go to the pub.

>Yes. If we don't treat the old now as we want to be treated when we are old ourselves, why would anyone do us the favour? We work towards the world we'll live in the future, right now, in the present. What we do now, how we behave towards those whose place we will be in one day will determine how we are treated when we are in their place.

We wouldn't be treating old people badly by not completely shutting down the entire country.

>This is a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think? "Denying our humanity..."? By not going to the pub?

Humans are social animals. Being unable to socialise is dehumanising, yes. It's not just an inconvenience, it's very real and very harmful.

>I note also that the narrative seems to have shifted a bit lately. A few weeks ago it was along the lines of "we can't keep the lockdown for ever, or the economy will go bust". Now, judging from this thread, it's changed to "we can't keep social distancing for ever because our lives will be destroyed".

It's not a coincidence, it's because the human cost is creeping up. You're literally just observing the negative impact of lockdown on people's health, but instead you seem to be choosing to interpret it as a negative and selfish character trait. Lockdown is obviously and trivially unsustainable, but so too is social distancing in the not too long run.

>> We wouldn't be treating old people badly by not completely shutting down the entire country.

Can you show me in one of my comments where I advocated for "shutting down the entire country"? Or stopping people from socialising?

I'm sorry but I don't have much patience for that kind of conversation. It tends to waste too much time with clarifications and refutations of wrong assumptions.

Here are the HN guidelines:

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

Please read them again, or for the first time if you haven't done so already. Especially the one about responding to the strongest interpretation of what someone says.

I might suggest that the issue is that you're attacking this from an angle of giving people minor manipulations on a state of full lockdown - "oh, you know, there will be changes for years, but not full lockdown", "X might re-open but with the 2 metre rule, maybe, not sure", etc.

From our perspective, that's you seizing control of the narrative and handing out minor concessions. The entire country is currently shut down, unless you change a _lot_, it'll still be mostly like that.

Stuff like 'ok, we'll do 2 meter rule in the pub, that's basically the same, right' feels like a complete joke. It's dreamed up by someone who like, doesn't go there anyway, so what do they care? It pretty much defeats the entire point of even going, and beyond that it's obviously not economically viable anyway.

But that's not all - not only are the suggested steps seemingly absurd (e.g. "soon", we can open restaurants, but can't meet family in their homes) - there's not even a real timetable, it's all conditional on Boris' mood! Months in, and we're still talking about "ooh err, maybe well, maybe this, I guess perhaps, but that, but this other thing".

Basically, it feels like not being taken seriously. It gets people's backs up. I apologise if in conversation I've seemed aggressive, but I hope the above explains why.

The virus exists regardless, but how we choose to respond to it is something that I'm not sure democracy is even capable of handling. I guess you could call it a power struggle?

At the moment the only possible method of contesting is to just ignore the rules, but you're not even taking that seriously, you're pretending it away as if people are irresponsible and just want to see death and destruction.

Re the whole old/young split: I think that the pensioner form of esotericn would be on board with my current views. I know that when I'm older I'm going to be more frail; I imagine spending time inside reading, studying, etc (depending on my eyesight), possibly spending time with my partner, perhaps we have pets, etc.

Sure - the theatre, galleries etc are things I'd like to do, but realistically, I wouldn't take the elevated risks of death in order to do them. If no-one does them though, they collapse, and I'm left with shit like Netflix in my old age regardless.

I haven't broken the site guidelines, we just have radically different perceptions of what is tolerable. My idea of shutting down the country is quite different to yours, presumably. Even mandatory 2m social distancing is utterly ridiculous and unsustainable in the short term, never mind lockdown.

> Care homes, for example, should be dealt with via paying the staff much higher salaries and having them stay on-site, effectively 'sealing off' the care home and creating an isolated unit.

That's not feasible. Those people have families, too.

They can't even realistically do this with the NBA and associated support staff, and that's a hell of a lot fewer people than vulnerable/old people and their support staff.

I, too, wish it were that easy, but it's simply not.

"That's not feasible. Those people have families, too."

Why not? I don't think the parent meant staff should stay on-site forever.

There can be shifts. Staff on shift get tested or even stay isolated for two weeks, then enter the unit, spend a month on-site and leave for home.

Does this sound like a dream job? Not really, I guess.

Does it sound that different from sailors, long-haul drivers, deployed military personnel and many other professionals who stay away from their families for prolonged period of times?

Strawmen everywhere as of late.

It has to happen, because people cannot stay inside forever, with all the will in the world.

This is definitional unless you're planning to create a police state and forcibly prevent the young from interacting with each other for years at a time.

Protecting the vulnerable is the only practical solution.

>> Protecting the vulnerable is the only practical solution.

It is not a practical solution because there is no political will to do it and there is not the competency to do it even if the political will was present.

> Staff on shift get tested or even stay isolated for two weeks, then enter the unit, spend a month on-site and leave for home.

So we have four weeks of quarantine for every month worked. That means we would need double the staff, and also we would have to pay them way more to even find someone willing/able [1] to accept this shift arrangement. This means that a huge part of the inhabitants will be priced out of the nursing home market and forced to stay at home with inadequate care.

[1] Re "able to accept this", for instance, single mothers would not be able to work under these conditions at all.

"The people will stop caring, they've already stopped caring."

Who are you talking about? You and your circle of friends? Large majorities of the public continue to support lockdown measures, in both the USA and the UK.

You should consider that those who are not in denial are looking at the situation with a risk assessment very different than your own, and such people as those currently constitute the majority.

The article here is describing a time-frame of years.

Yes, most people are on board with a lockdown of a few months. Flattening the curve is a sane aim.

If you persist with this idea of deleting social interaction for multiple years, people are going to rightly conclude that you're insane and just want to force your antisocial vision on them.

That's what's causing the antsiness - there's no exit plan, it's all "oh, well, you might be able to have a normal life.. or perhaps post-2020 we deleted society".

If you can't understand that, you're probably in a special situation (either very introverted, or living with family so you already have some social contact).

Who introduced the term "deleting social interaction" to the conversation? Right now, the talk is of "social distancing" and "self isolation". But "deleting social interaction"? That sounds like a contrived exaggeration.

At the moment we _still_ have no date in the UK for when people will be able to visit their wives, husbands, partners or children if they're not cohabiting.

If you're living alone, then you still have no idea when it will legally be permitted for you to embrace, play games with, spend the night with, kiss, hold hands with - experience humanity with - literally anyone else.

If you're single, all of that _plus_ you now need to fight through a 2 metre social bubble in order to perform basic human functions like, for example, attracting a mate in order to perform sexual intercourse.

All of the above is very silly to me. I honestly think the whole "let's wait for the science" approach misses the point. At an absolute minimum we need a hard deadline of something like "look, in N weeks/months you can go and be a husband again".

People _will_ take a risk of death in order to do the above. If you think this is all about young individuals believing that they're invincible you've completely missed the point - the issue is that a life without those things is _not life_ - 1 year of being a hermit for many may as well just be a deletion of 1 year of the prime of their life, i.e. a >1% mortality rate imposed upon them anyway.

The longer term view on this is people actually starting to worry that perhaps that's just it - their parents had a good life when you used to be able to go out, party, meet a girl, and so on and so forth - and now, oops, that's illegal, sorry, we're doing social distancing for the next 10 years. It's utter madness.

If the Government refuses to address this, and they very much are refusing to do so, then the inevitable consequence will be that people just begin to wholesale ignore the guidelines.

If I had children on the other side of the country I'm not watching them grow from age 5 to age 6 over a video link regardless of what the R number is. There's no political process to address these concerns, other than just doing it anyway, so people will do it anyway.

As before, you're exaggerating the extent of social distancing that anyone is discussing will have to be adhered to in the long term. It makes sense that some aspects of social life, as well as economic life, that are currently restricted will have to be supported with looser regulations if we are to keep to social distancing in the long term.

But you seem to be advocating for abandoning social distancing altogether and just letting everyone do whatever they please, without any rules at all. Or am I misrepresenting your comments in this thread?

You have repeated a few times that there is no exit plan (do you mean an exit from the lockdown or from social distancing rules?). Indeed, there is no such thing currently in the UK where I understand we both live because the current government is a travelling circus run by a band of incompetent clowns (and don't let me get started on the opposition). However, again, that is no reason to advocate for just letting everyone run wild and do whatever they please, regardless of whether it puts others in danger or not.

Other EU countries, many of which had severe outbreaks of the disease, like Spain, France and Italy, have managed to enter and exit their lockdowns and to establish new social distancing guidelines, all in an orderly fashion. Yet other EU countries, like Greece and Germany have managed to impose a lockdown early enough to avoid the worst of the disease and are also now exiting their lockdowns and imposing social distancing measures again in an orderly fashion. It is my undestanding that in every such case, social distancing measures and even the lifting of the lockdown are provisional and can be expected to either loosen up or tighten down in the future, depending on how the pandemic progresses in those countries (and outside) and always with a mind to allow social and economic life to go on as freely as possible which is of course everyone's aim.

I don't understand why it is not possible to do the same thing in the UK or why, like you say it's madness or antisocial etc etc.

It's possible for a short period. It's not possible for years. We won't do it. Really, we just won't. I can't be clearer on this, I consider it pointless, frustrating even, to discuss - it feels like arguing against a strawman - if you think that humans will simply stop mixing for years on end, viewing each other through a screen or far away enough that we can't even smell each other, there are really only two explanations in my mind:

a) you have some atypical neurochemistry which means you don't/can't understand human socialisation properly

and/or

b) you're locked inside with your family and so you can't "feel" the dread that millions of people are feeling right now, wondering whether they'll ever touch another human again

For me, it's an urge almost as strong as the urge to drink water. If you refuse to take that on board and just pretend that people are being irrational because your brain doesn't work that way, you're going to remain confused by this.

If you don't want to go to a language class, a theatre, a gallery, a pub, a cafe, sit on a bus, a train, a restaurant, go on a date, have children play in a playground, work in an office, and so on and so forth, for years, or you want to replace them with some wanky dystopian "social distancing" version in which you sit behind screens, wear masks, and have 10 people in a hall built for hundreds, that's cool, you do you. I'll do it for a few months, I won't do it for years, because that represents the imposition of a >2% mortality rate on me anyway by removing all of the good parts of life. My response to this is pretty much "OK introvert", you know?

That over with;

Of course, I do think that we should, for a few months, attempt to reduce the spread of the virus, via whatever measures are reasonable!

I strongly disagree that the status quo of "you can get on the tube to go and work in a supermarket, but can't cuddle your partner" is sustainable.

There's no guidance. As I've repeatedly said, we need a plan to deal with mental health _right now_. Not next week, not "if the R number goes down", not "if Boris has a good day", we need a date at which it will be legal for people to have autonomy and decide whether they want to take the risk to visit their friends and family, and to make new friends.

Notice, by the way, that you're not giving any concrete plans for this in your post - it's all wishy washy "oh, well, we might do this, or I suppose that, well maybe" nonsense. There's no sense of urgency at all. You're really not understanding that many, many people would rather die than live in a dystopian world in which people treat each other as virons. A few months, sure we'll take it. A few years - completely intractable.

We were urgently locked indoors, the world was turned off, and now our needs are being ignored with this child-like "we're not there yet, darling" fluff.

So again - I ask you - what's the plan for long term partners meeting each other? Family members? For dating? For meeting new friends? Do you have one? You do realise that the Government has literally broken up families so that they can prioritise the flower shop opening?

Or are you going to twiddle your thumbs and moan about people breaking the lockdown whilst giving them zero indication that it's ever ending (and seemingly actually _enjoying_ it?)

When people bottle up mental health issues the inevitable result is a release like a pressure valve.

I see you've moved on to assumptions about how my brain works and other personal characterisations.

What an awful communication style. My mistake for trying to hold a civilised conversation, then.

If you refuse to engage on my points, which you still are (as is the Government, literally completely ignoring the main issue people are having) then you need to justify that with reasoning other than "well I don't care about it, so you shouldn't either".

I don't mean to insult you, it's simply baffling to me that you can just ignore this as if it's a nonentity. My brain is different to yours, yours to mine, however we slice it we need to bridge that gap in order to understand each other.

Again: this shut down is trading some lives for other lives. I don't think it's a net gain, I've explained why, and all you can offer is "just wait" on a loop forever. Waiting 1 month locked in a box as a single person is a 0.1%-1% fatality rate depending on demographic.

And yes, '2 meter land' is the same thing if pretty much all of the joy in your life revolves around being close to other people.

You can engage with that on an honest basis, or you can just pretend it away and watch people slowly stream outside, you know? I apologise if I'm getting combative, but it feels like I'm left with no choice...

> Much like the starving kids in Africa, it's rapidly becoming a "Well, it's tragic, but I can't see it" problem.

That's exactly how this is different. Most people in the UK or US don't have a starving African kid in their direct family. They do have people at high risk for COVID-19 in their direct family.

> Or, as you say, the other option is that we all throw 5-10 years of our lives away in a massive global recession for some old people who've already had the best years of their lives to live a couple of years more.

I must live in a weird bubble because none of my friends are willing to sacrifice their parents'/friends'/coworkers' lives for economic indicators. Besides, that is a false dichotomy: adapting to new circumstances is not "throwing 5-10 years of our lives away".

> adapting to new circumstances is not "throwing 5-10 years of our lives away".

This really resonates with me. yet I've seen highly educated good friends go from "shit we need to do something about this" to "I don't care if people die, I want my summer vacation" within two months now. It's really depressing to see.

It seems that for many people, changing anything about their previous lifestyle is already pain enough that they stop considering the impact on others. And this was a person who prides themselves in adapting and who constantly rants about how people resist change...

But this isn't just "changing anything" about our lifestyles is it? It's a complete pause on life itself. I'm lucky to have a job that I can do from home but the depression is seeping in and some days I am just floundering. That's what I take issue with, that's why I hate lockdown.

I'm talking about the time after the "real" lockdown. When we're supposed to "go back to normal."

I don't think going back to normal is practical, nor desirable. Ref work-from-home, air travel, etc. But for many people, apparently the bar for acceptable is "everything is exactly as before or it's too much change."

I don't know where you're located. I'm in Germany, where R0 is currently hovering at a sustainable 0.8-0.9 and the country is slowly opening back up. Shops, restaurants, cinemas and barbers are open, albeit with distance rules and obligatory face mask usage. Big gatherings are still forbidden, so sports events are being played in empty stadiums and there are no concerts. The only really huge issue ("huge" as in "impacts life daily") is education. Daycares and schools are slowly opening back up, but in a frustratingly slow pace since SARS-CoV-2 transmission through children is still not understood as much as we would like.

So yeah, there are definitely restrictions, but "a complete pause on life itself" would be a wild overstatement. If it's different where you are, it's either because the government failed to take effective steps early on and thus contributed to the spread of the virus, or if your society's culture facilitates the spread better than ours in Germany.

EDIT: For completeness' sake, I am worried that many businesses (restaurants, cinemas, etc.) will not be sustainable if they have to operate under social distancing guidelines indefinitely, since their price calculations are based on a certain occupancy rate. But I'm not an expert in this regard, so I'm honestly not sure how this will play out. Maybe rents will drop when landlords realize that this calculation looks similar for every prospective tenant.

From what I understand, the risk of dying starts rising at the age of 65. You don't have to be 80 to be thrown under a bus.

Also, that's the risk of dying. Serious illness that can do long-term damage is another issue. I'm not sure how common that is supposed to be.

It’s certainly true that we’ll be fighting the coronavirus for the next year or two, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be doing it the way you might prefer.

> At 2% a day cases double every 5 weeks. Would anyone apply this reasoning to any other disease?

I don't know but maybe the flu [1]? I don't think focusing just on the infection rate is useful.

> Classic psychological denial is clearly operating in force.

I think the denial is in thinking that we can beat the virus by extending the lock down for years (you say "might take two or more years"). It is likely that all we are doing is slowing down the spread, and that it will eventually infect most of the population, stopping only when we reach herd immunity. I say this is likely because this is where we are headed unless we come up with a vaccine or treatment at an unprecedented speed -- not something I would bet on.

If this is indeed where we are headed, it may be better to open up as much as possible short of overwhelming the healthcare system. Note that in many places, the healthcare systems are significantly below capacity (e.g. [2]).

[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

[2] https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx

> Classic psychological denial is clearly operating in force

Yes, that's the point that people in this thread is making.

It doesn't matter how serious covid-19 is, nor what the R rate is: young people perceive themselves to be at low risk, and they don't care about the risk to other people, so they're going to go out as much as they used to.

You only need to look at crowded parks and beaches or queue outside fast food places to see this.

Cummings' shenanigans haven't helped (which is I suspect the point of them).

One of my local pubs was open today with the caveat that people has to drink outside.

There were enough people outside to make it impossible to have everyone at 2m distance, but for a second I considered breaking social distancing for drinking a beer in a warm sunny day.

Where I live they closed the beach, and they "closed" the benches across the promenade around the beach, but you're still allowed to exercise. You're not allowed to sit down anywhere.

So everyone is going back and forth in that narrow band, some jogging, others walking their dog, others pretending, etc.

The whole thing makes absolutely no sense.

I think many politicians don't know how humans actually behave and write policy based on the assumption we're robots or slaves. Or maybe they did not realize that reducing the size of the public space we're allowed to use implies a higher density of people in the remaining space we're allowed to use.

> I'll be in the pub by the end of the year.

You maybe, but how many others will? 10-20% less people in pubs, fewer tourists visiting west end shows, banks and other companies using work from home, could have a huge knock on effect on other businesses, property and taxes.

Counterexample: pubs reopened this past weekend in NZ and every venue was at capacity. No tourists, but increased domestic consumption.

This will obviously be more pronounced in countries with a greater historic discrepancy between tourism expenditure and receipts.

e.g. Spain will no doubt be more effected than NZ, whereas the UK could actually benefit:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ST.INT.XPND.CD?end=2018...

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ST.INT.RCPT.CD?end=2018...

Yeah but unlike the US it's possible the the virus is no longer present in NZ.

That's thinking too macro. The virus will plausibly be eliminated in the US gradually, e.g. French red/green zones.

Red/green zones or just about any partial/segregated lockdown seems likely to not work. Being in a red zone is worse than being in a green zone so people are incentivised to move from red zones to green zones (if they can). This is not what you want. It seems hard to restrict movement or enforce a strict quarantine in countries that are generally not planned to support restricting movement across internal boundaries.

The longer it's allowed to persist the more social and economic damage.

I doubt this. It was spreading the Bay Area in late December. The first reported case with local transmission was in late February. That said, we weren't really looking for it, but without incredibly widespread testing, they best we can do is keep it lurking in the background.

> and every venue was at capacity. No tourists, but increased domestic consumption.

I can't help but wonder if we're gonna have another century repeat: After the Spanish Flu came the Roaring Twenties.

And then right around the corner is World War III.

Don’t forget an enormous economic depression in between...

For every pint they don't drink, I'll drink two? :)

I feel like I’m already doing that now.

You're in good company there ;)

>You maybe, but how many others will?

I'm willing to bet you in the next ~12-24 months virtually everyone. This isn't the first pandemic in human history. It's frankly ridiculous how people seem to have no awareness of how strongly we tend to overestimate events simply because we're living through them.

Yes but prior large pandemics have had triggered losing lasting social and economic changes. Things won’t necessarily go back to how they were before. Only time will tell

> I'll be in the pub by the end of the year.

You may be in a pub by the end of the year, but you won't be in a pub at the end of the year, because at that point we'll locked down in the midst of a second wave of coronavirus, with some pent up seasonal flu thrown in for good measure.

Yeah, I reckon that's fairly probable (the lockdown - not the second wave, I think that's inevitable, where the case numbers sit after that is yet to be seen though).

I figure we have N waves, with herd immunity building during the process, and an eventual vaccine which may or may not need to be applied across the whole population by that point.

Perhaps seasonal lockdowns will be the new solution to reducing nhs funding while not becoming overrun by flu cases in the winter.

And if immunity isn’t long lasting?

And how many people have to die to reach it?

Im in a pub right now.

I just don’t think that people are going to quarantine any longer. Almost no matter how bad it gets, I think people care about social interaction above almost all else even their own safety.

Now that said: I’m in a bar that is only outdoors, it’s sunny, there is a breeze, and the closest person is 15 feet away. Everybody is wearing a mask who isn’t eating, everything is getting washed and sanitized.

People will find a way to keep doing this, and it isn’t going to be VR or zoom calls. It’s going to be real in person experiences where you can see other people’s faces.

Preface: I'm glad you're in a pub. I wish I could be! Sounds nice, masks and all.

> Almost no matter how bad it gets, I think people care about social interaction above almost all else even their own safety.

Ultimately, my struggle is that I don't understand this. I don't value social interaction this way, and most of my close family and friends don't either (though it's far closer to 50/50 than I am comfortable with).

Ultimately people are irrational. People want to be masters of their own destiny. Is it illegal to go outside? Am I going to get in trouble? So long as people can act without consequence, they will.

With a deadly virus that spreads so silently, I really fear for humanity here. The fools will be the end of us all.

The only hope of real consequence is contract tracing and frankly, I don't think the majority of people want contract tracing to even work, especially Americans, who value their liberties to such extremes. People would rather kill anonymously without consequence.

This all makes me so sad.

If it helps, think of social interaction like sunshine. If you could only be safe by never ever going out into the sun, at all, for a year or more, could you do it? Social interaction is like this, it warms people up, makes them healthier, and people feel the loss when they can't, yes, even introverts.

I could probably avoid the sun forever. I don't have some innate requirement to be exposed to the sun to survive, or to enjoy life.

Being charitable - you're inadvertently being dishonest here.

Your "close friends", unless you met them all on IRC or whatever, literally _exist_ because you met them. Your family exist because you spent time close to each other.

I don't think you really understand what this whole brave new "social distancing" world means. It means never forming social bonds. It means young people never finding a partner, having children. It means children growing up thinking that their friends are virons.

We can do it in lockdown, for a while, that's what we're doing, and sensible people have no issue with that.

If you think we are going to do it for years, you're being daft. It's like imposing a chronic disease on 100% of the population.

I think your broad point is accurate. It's going to be a spectrum. Many people will want that social interaction in some form that is not just virtual, but the form it takes will vary a lot.

Sure, some people will go right back to indoor dining, bars, nightclubs, whatever is allowed to open back up. But, a lot of people aren't going to go back to pre-Covid behaviors just because things are open. Many will seek to resume social interaction, but in safer ways, and your example of the pub is a good one. Time for more beer gardens!

Just thinking about myself, I probably won't dine inside a restaurant for a long while. But outdoor dining set up in a reasonably safe way? That's possible.

For better or worse, we're moving into reopening, so there should be a big focus on harm reduction: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/quarantine...

> What does harm reduction look like for the coronavirus? First, policy makers and health experts can help the public differentiate between lower-risk and higher-risk activities; these authorities can also offer support for the lower-risk ones when sustained abstinence isn’t an option. Scientists still have a lot to learn about this new virus, but early epidemiological studies suggest that not all activities or settings confer an equal risk for coronavirus transmission. Enclosed and crowded settings, especially with prolonged and close contact, have the highest risk of transmission, while casual interaction in outdoor settings seems to be much lower risk. A sustainable anti-coronavirus strategy would still advise against house parties. But it could also involve redesigning outdoor and indoor spaces to reduce crowding, increase ventilation, and promote physical distancing, thereby allowing people to live their lives while mitigating—but not eliminating—risk.

I’d like to believe you’re right about the end of the year, personally I don’t think things will be “normal” for a bit longer. But yeah, the “rest of time” is a very long time, and these theories forget how quickly we adapted to this in the first place. It’s reversible.

My leading theory at the moment is that we're going to see some sort of huge societal fissure.

It already seems to be happening - there's a massive ideological split between the group that wants to minimise risk at all cost, and the group that is willing to die to live a normal life.

You need to check with an app before you can get within 6 feet of a stranger. You want to make physical contact, that's going to be $20/months for 3 checks a month. Each person you get close to will increase your chance of getting hauled off to contact tracing quarantine. You'll also need a properly isolated location for 9 months if you want to get your wife pregnant. Population control advocates will be ecstatic.

I can tell you how it is in Copenhagen (which has lifted many restrictions within the last two weeks); there are people at the pubs, at the high street, and in the metro. It is not crowded as it used to be and it is a noticeable younger crowd. But people do come back.

It’s just normal to go insane when isolated from the world. Only the newer generation that lives digital lives. This lockdown forced me to open social media accounts and that only made thing worse. I am glad that I have so many hobbies to dive or else I would have gone insane.

it's amazing how Very Smart People(TM) can't seem to think past 1-2 months ahead.

That said, I was always a germophobe and always practiced social distancing on the train whenever I could so I support this.

> I'll be in the pub by the end of the year.

Until there is either a vaccine that I have taken, or a complete eradication of the COVID-19 in London; then "the pub" or any other voluntary gathering of strangers in close quarters is an unnecessary risk that I will not be taking.

That is the reality of our situation. You have to face up to it, disbelieving it does not help anyone.

I think everyone is facing up to it. It's likely to be a risk, and you're free to not take it, but the rest of us can't be expected to follow your extreme risk aversion for years.

It's an extreme situation, so an "extreme risk aversion" response is actually proportionate.

The problem with the thinking of "you do that, I'll do otherwise" is that with an infectious disease, what our neighbours do impacts us. To germs, there really is such a thing as human society.

It bears repeating again - as responsible individuals, we can handle lock down for a few months. It's a reasonable thing to do given the uncertainty of the situation.

We won't do it for years - that's a delusion, a fantasy that ignores how the human mind works.

It sounds like you don't want to take the risk of either contracting, or further spreading, the disease.

No-one _wants_ to take that risk.

But if the only alternative that you can suggest is deleting 1, 2, ... years of the prime of my life, staring at screens or meeting friends behind plexiglass, you've lost me completely, because you're describing the actions of a paperclip maximizer, not a human being. You're impacting others by expecting them to give up their lives.

In that world view, either I'm autistic or you are; we don't have the same brain chemistry; your experience of the world is _so far_ from my own and most people I know that a blanket policy for both of us makes no sense.

> we can handle lock down for a few months. ... We won't do it for years

This is binary, black-or-white, false dicotomy thinking: either lockdown, or we all go to the pub, movies, gigs, football etc, like before.

I accept that it can't and won't be the full lockdown for years. But it won't be the other extreme until it's safe. It will be somewhere in-between.

> But if the only alternative that you can suggest is deleting 1, 2, ... years of the prime of my life, staring at screens or meeting friends behind plexiglass, you've lost me completely, because you're describing the actions of a paperclip maximizer, not a human being

You'd be surprised what people put up with in order to stay alive. Then again, I should say "some people" as there will be literal survivorship bias in that. People do need to realize that this is a period of relative hardship not seen in a few decades, and like WW1 it won't be "over by Christmas" and deal with it in ways that get us through.

I fully accept that you are willing to put up with this and that you'd like to see something 'in between'.

I'm not and most people I know aren't. The 2 metre rule will kill off all of the cultural institutions I hold dear. The recent video of a Wetherspoons pub with 2m distancing has people guffawing up and down the country.

It doesn't make sense to me anyway - as I've said, a person in a vulnerable group will not wish to perform outdoor leisure activities, or work, etc, even with the 2-metre-rule in place.

We'll just have to agree to disagree.

> The 2 metre rule will kill off all of the cultural institutions I hold dear.

So will people dying, far more effectively. What's your point?

> The recent video of a Wetherspoons pub with 2m distancing has people guffawing up and down the country.

And it's also insufficient. Not safe for hours in an enclosed space with strangers and recirculating air, not at 2 meters, or at 5 meters.

https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-t...

I don't think that "it raised a chuckle" is the devastating criticism of a deadly disease countermeasure that you seem to think it is. The virus won't care what you think.

Yes, it's madness. The whole thing is pointless even if it did work, which it won't, because as I posted above people will ignore the rules almost instantaneously, especially once they're a few pints in.

I'll just end this by saying that some people are like you, some people are like me.

We're not going to stay in fear forever. You might. I hope whatever happens that you manage to find peace with it. Godspeed.

And you're still in denial. I hope you get through it. But remember: You don't have to adapt, survival is optional.

You're invited to my funeral.. wait, no you're not, sorry, you can watch it on Zoom.

http://archive.is/ZydIr

>>> poor parts of the Midlands and north of England would get lots of infrastructure investment, helping them to close the productivity gap with London. The country would be “levelled up”.

By "infrastructure" I guess they mean improvements to intercity rail connections, namely the high speed rail. I don't see those as localized improvements. Moreover they seem geared to decreasing commute times in/out of london (and a couple other of the largest cities). The net result is to allow rich londoners to live and commute from further afield. That isn't a move away from "peak capital", it's doubling down on that capital by further extending its influence, expanding the hinterlands on which it relies.

Money could be spent on electrifying more of the commuter rail network around the Northern cities.

Sorry, no. High speed rail's main benefit is to increase capacity on existing lines by removing fast trains from the mix. Currently big gaps have to be left in front of the fast trains to allow them to run. The reduction in travel time is a secondary benefit.

I was unaware of this until I recently discovered Gareth Dennis on twitter, who is doing a fantastic job of making up for HS2 ltd's appallingly lacking public engagement "strategy".

Surely you mean removing slow trains from the mix?

Maybe "slow" is a misnomer or misleading. By slow we're talking about local services which stop at every station. When you relocate fast trains onto another line, those local services benefit considerably. Ultimately you get more local services running, which alleviates the sardine-style travel we currently endure.

HSR was never about commuting, capacity is too low, the journey time improvements are modest and tickets will always be priced to discourage commuting. It's a bone to throw to those people who currently travel longer distances to London, who are currently using slower rail, driving or flying. This group includes all the MPs from north of Birmingham, as well lots of rich Tory voters, and it was thought that it would carry the same appeal as the channel tunnel does for Londoners - reduced journey time and hassle for very occasional trips. They missed several real opportunities with it though - proper connection with the existing HSR to Europe would have played into the eco / flight shaming crowd, but it didn't fit the Brexit message. Linking it to a program of speed improvements on connecting commuter rail would have been a cheaper vote winner that would have boosted the value of HSR2 too. The whole project was a giant misguided waste of our money even before covid19 made public transit irrelevant, and with the rise of self-driving and environmentally friendlier cars only a crazy stubborn government would place a multi-billion pound on continuing HSR2.

> HSR was never about commuting, capacity is too low

It initially doubles capacity and ultimately triples it https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... (figure 4.2, p76)

What would "proper connection to Europe" have looked like to you? HS2 ends in London where eurostar begins. If HS2 terminated in say, Milton Keynes, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you.

> Linking it to a program of speed improvements on connecting commuter rail would have been a cheaper vote winner

Do you have any evidence for this? Any publicly available report showing even outline calculations? HS2 has always had cross party support.

> before covid19 made public transit irrelevant

In one way or another, the threat of covid will eventually pass. We'll still need public transport when it does.

London will be fine...

Source: The traffic jams outside my front door are back and the lockdown isn’t even lifted yet.

Nothing about that sounds "fine".

I have no intention to go to the pub or travel abroad, especially with a potential two week quarantine. I have seriously ill early March and it wasn't fun at all. I am sure the pubs or the restaurants will not miss me

“Why pay london rent when you can’t enjoy what the city has to offer?” said my friend that lives there just the other day.

Yeah of course, but the same could he said for almost any major city in the world right now save a few exceptions in East Asia.

https://archive.md/ZydIr

http://archive.is/ZydIr

Non-paywall link: https://outline.com/4e95fm

The article is behind a paywall and I can't read it, anyone got an alternative url?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com