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Comment by repsilat | Hacker News Reader

Funny, I think it's exactly the other way around -- people wring their hands about things that don't matter ("plastic in our bloodstreams") but tend to act appropriately. Don't panic. Carry on.

Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one. Being a week or a month late to the current pandemic is less costly than locking down for SARS, mad cow, bird flu, swine flu, ...

Not to mention the times when we did overreact. The latest TSA budget is $8.24 billion dollars, or 824 lives per year (at a cost of $10 million per life), or 2.17 One World Trade Centers per year, or (verging into polemic) one 9/11 every four years.

Isn't the lesson that we tend to overreact? Sure, maybe it'll be a pandemic, and let's not completely discount the idea, but why not just lock the plane's cabin doors and see if it gets worse?

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>Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one.

For the general public, ignoring and carrying on is a great response. We live in a world that capitalizes on specialists. The problem with COVID-19 was multiple failures by the people whose jobs were to care about pandemics. And we don't need massive budgets to prevent pandemics. Just epidemiologists and doctors on the lookout. Small teams working with hotspot countries.

It's not the average citizen's fault we got here. It's the fault of the institutions tasked with protecting us, who only had to hire a small team of experts every two decades to write up short proposals of what to do in unusual but eventually guaranteed emergencies. From what I've seen, the majority of Western countries were making up their pandemic response on the fly. And it's a virus that spreads like the annual flu, so not even a "black swan" method of infection.

Huh?

As far as I know most countries already do that more often than you ask for. Everyone had a strong response to the 2009 pandemic, with plans, PPE stockpiles and such. The virus turned out very mild, which lead to heeding to the advice of epidemiologists to be politically costly. But in the USA pandemic preparedness was only effectively disassembled with the 2017 update.

As an employee of a state department of health, I can honestly say we were blindsided and had no plan. At most, our plan was "Do what the CDC says." Even if the CDC had been on top of things, much more could've been done and planned.

Well sure, but all this is a somewhat-conscious decision by politicians: "basing on experience, doing the pandemic preparations as advised by epidemiologists is more expensive than absorbing a pandemic not prepared (even if that somehow happens during our term)".

I think the tendency is slightly more complicated than that. I People tend to under react to a certain point and then tend to overreact past that point. The problem is that this inflection point is rarely informed by any sort of rational thought.

Why is plastic in our bloodstream something that doesn't matter?

That's stupid. Over the long shot, "being a week or a month late to the current pandemic" will be completely disastrous. We're lucky that the current pandemic kills mainly old people (more or less, let's gloss over permanently disabled people), but are you denying that it's just a matter of time until some virus comes along that lies in the sweet spot of infectiousness, mortality and/or permanent damage to the body?

Enforcing lockdown a week earlier could have halved death toll in the UK

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/10/uk-coronavirus...

This is the only thing I fault my own government for. They reacted, and reasonably well but two weeks too late thinking it might blow over. Respect the exponential function or you'll end up paying for it.

That's entirely presumptive. You can't conclude that a model works because the predictions the model makes don't come true.

Models are the best we have. And if we compare the UK with countries that reacted faster then it seems likely that a lot of deaths could have been prevented.

If you compare the UK to places that didn't lock down and have had very few deaths you can conclude the opposite. That's why you shouldn't cherry pick your data points.

Many people created models of the spread of Covid. Some of these models worked very well and others were terribly inaccurate. We should use the models that work and not those that have lost all credibility.

Isn't this an extreme case though?

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