Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

While the US debates whether we should continue our ill-conceived pandemic policies or just give up and take the hit, multiple other countries have managed to fight the virus effectively and are now opening their economies safely.

Based on their experience, what we should have been doing is:

- Lock down enough to really get the numbers down, with the understanding that it's temporary, because:

- While locked down, really beef up the test and trace infrastructure. After the numbers are reasonable, this lets you open up but find and isolate individual cases.

- Encourage/require mask wearing by anyone in public. Studies have shown that 80% mask wearing reduces the virus by over 90%.[1]

- Instead of putting money into unemployment, pay businesses to keep people on salary while they're not working. That way the jobs are still there when we open back up. European countries have done this, kept unemployment low, and in some cases spent less per GDP than the US.[2]

The earlier you start, the easier and more effective all this is. If you start early enough and already have good systems in place, you can even skip the lockdown step, aside from localized outbreaks.

[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/masks-covid-19-infec...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/opinion/sunday/coronaviru...

It is indeed quite silly that people are thinking about policies as "quarantine for everyone" vs "let people roam the streets while coughing".

Wearing masks has zero cost in terms of GDP and unemployment. Why the heck aren't we mandating those?? Even in 1918 people were not allowed to step on a tram/metro without a mask.

Judging from people's reaction to the "end of the lockdown" here, I think Costco's leading the charge and making it OK for other businesses to require masks and enforce distancing has been, effectively, better public health policy than what we're getting out of our state government. Outside those places there's a clear "well guess the danger's over, let's all get really close and spit on each other and all touch the same stuff" attitude and pattern of behavior. It's insane—now's the time to be more cautious when out and about, than during the lockdown! Especially seeing how people are acting, it's gonna get worse before it gets better. I reckon my odds of catching it in a given store outing now are significantly higher than during the lockdown, but people aren't acting that way.

Part of what was so effective about changing american minds about smoking were the public ads that decried it.

If we want to change peoples minds about wearing a mask we need to campaign to change minds which goes all over. It's not about losing your freedom it's about being safe. I don't think legal requirements will do it. It'll just stir up the anti-government people. Whereas if we make it about looking dumb if you don't wear a mask then we'll be better off.

Also as a side benefit, making masks more acceptable in public may help us thwart facial recognition software in stores which I'm game for.

It has definitely crossed my mind more than once since this started that now is exactly the time to bust out some old-school WWII-propaganda-style slogans. Posters and everything. Shit, get WB to make some new cartoons about masks and social distancing, mimicking that style. That'd go viral like crazy.

From Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, describing Britain during WWII (all emphasis mine):

"The British gas masks have a squat round fitting on the front to allow exhalation, which looks exactly like the snout of a pig, and no woman would be caught dead in such a thing if the models in the gas mask posters were not such paragons of high-caste beauty."

But maybe he invented this -- I've never seen a copy of such a poster. (Edit: I've found at last something related, just a photo, not a poster, and a "South African": (1) ) What's certain is that there were mask "issues" around 1918 in the US, at the time of another pandemics:

https://www.history.com/news/1918-spanish-flu-mask-wearing-r...

1) https://www.alamy.com/a-female-of-the-south-african-air-forc...

I don't buy the freedom argument. I can't wander around outside naked nor can I wander around with an open container of alcohol (some communities allow this - most don't and mine is in the most category) - yet few people are seriously complaining about that yet those behaviors have far less of an impact on my health than people wandering around without face masks. No, there's a belligerence at play here and there's a certain high-ranking federal officer encouraging that belligerence in part by famously refusing to wear a face mask. Face mask wearing has now become a gang sign: if you're wearing a face mask then you're one of them. That's how insane things have become in the United States and we're suffering badly as a result.

I'm not making the freedom argument. I'm suggest we sidestep the freedom argument by working to convince people it's a good idea to wear masks rather than telling them they have to wear masks.

Also, all legal requirements are backed up by some sort of punishment. A regulation put in place to wear a mask might affect different groups more than others. If you can't afford to get a mask because the supply is low, then you get fined or go to jail. I don't like regulation where I think a campaign would be much more effective.

Really people are frankly being delusional narcissistic morons who think their motivated reasoning and wanting something changes reality.

The sad thing aside from the literal thousands of needless deaths is that they could do more reengineeeing to arrange things to be safe and productive at a lower capacity (say hair dressers by appointment with masks and a clean up sequence between customers) but they largely prefer an illusion of normality even though it will just prolong the disease, measures and boost expenses.

I’ll never understand why news media thinks it makes sense to compare the entire United States to individual European countries? We are 350 million people, among 50 states, all with their own autonomous governments making their own decisions. From the European perspective, states might as well be their own countries. I think if you want to compare policies, you should drill down to that level. Not lump the whole country as one. If not that, I think we should group all the numbers from the EU collectively for a more reasonable comparison.

You have a federal government, Europe's union isn't that.

Absolutely, you are correct.

But that's not the point I want to make. What I was trying to get at is, why does it make sense to say "Well, why doesn't the United States just implement the policies of insert name of European country here?

Well, because the federal government, for the most part, isn't calling the shots on what individual states decide to do about the pandemic. It's up to the governors and individual state governments to decide their own course of action, for their area. In many states, the outbreak is very manageable and under control. In others, usually in states with the largest cities, the situation is much more serious. We are not all like New York City.

It it much more complicated than just lumping all the US numbers into one. I'm saying, it doesn't make sense just to look at the total US numbers, and say we are fucking up. Take the 3 most populous states in the US for example. California, Texas and Florida combined have nearly 90.5 million people. Together they account for nearly 203,000 cases total according to the CDC.

Comparatively, the United Kingdom has something like 65 million people, and a rough total of 261,000 cases according to the ECDC. Spain and Italy both individually have more than our top 3 states by population. Russia's rate per capita is higher.

Don't let Donald Trump and the huge numbers out of New York City/ New Jersey fool you. Most areas of the country have the pandemic under control, and very importantly, hospitals are not at risk of being overrun. Weather that remains to be the case as we loosen restrictions going forward will be interesting to monitor though.

First three things are on point, but we tried the last one. The "Paycheck Protection Program" that immediately ran out of money was our attempt to do something similar.

In a perfect world, a much larger PPP would have been more efficient and easier to manage than expanded unemployment benefits; in world we live in, that would have meant trusting an administration that prides itself on incompetence and corruption to handle what would have been the bulk of our economic response.

Yes, we implemented that poorly. But other countries have done it better, as my link points out, so it's not like it's the policy which is flawed. The shortcomings of our executive branch are basically the reason we haven't done any of these things well.

But one simple thing we could have done better is to pay the banks a fixed fee, instead of a percentage of the loan, which incentivized banks to ignore the smaller businesses.

What is the end game for that strategy?

Last time I ran the numbers, they said we’d be in the current holding pattern for 27 years.

Here is how you can run the math:

1) Divide deaths per day by 0.005, or use an epidemiologist’s estimate of new cases per day.

2) Look up the world’s population.

3) Divide the two, and multiply by 0.8 (which is a good estimate of the necessary herd immunity fraction). Convert from days to years.

While you’re at it, look how long flu vaccines last until the virus evolves immunity, then look at how often coronavirus changes relative to the flu.

Edit: I agree with the bits about having the government pay salaries directly, and that early action can effectively stop pandemics before they start.

The end game is masks, tests, and contact tracing until you have an effective vaccine. We can run an economy under those conditions, just as other countries are starting to do already.

After a couple years if a vaccine looks nowhere close, maybe that's a time to reevaluate, but right now we have several that look promising in the relatively short term.

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