Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

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> Polio had historic mortality rates around 5% in children, would you want your children to catch polio?

No, nor would I want my children (or anyone) to get covid. This is a separate question from whether the current lockdown measures increase life expectancy and if so, whether they’re worth it.

> There are other health risks besides death to consider.

Yes, there are. Again, a reasonable person might think the probability of those occurring is either (1) low enough to begin with or (2) not much decreased by the lockdown, that the negative effects of the lockdown outweigh it. Do you have any non-anecdotal discussion of (1) how common permanent disability from Covid is, and (2) how many severe covid cases are prevented by lockdowns?

> Half of the US seems to think this is just a GLOBAL conspiracy to hurt Donald Trump

Nobody in this thread said that covid is not serious or that it is a conspiracy, or anything about Trump, so this is a complete non sequitur. Certainly, there are people in the US who believe that covid is a global conspiracy to hurt Trump, which is absurd, but it’s an obvious fallacy to argue like “some people make absurd arguments for proposition P, therefore P is wrong”.

>Again, a reasonable person might think the probability of those occurring is either (1) low enough to begin with or (2) not much decreased by the lockdown, that the negative effects of the lockdown outweigh it.

If you think your average anti-mask anti-lockdown American is making that kind of analysis then frankly I think you are disconnected from reality...

>Do you have any non-anecdotal discussion of (1) how common permanent disability from Covid is

Permanent disability is obviously impossible to prove at this point.

Perhaps the best microcosm we've had to learn from so far is the Diamond Princess cruise ship. The Japan Self-Defense Forces Central Hospital did an in depth study: "Of 104 cases, 76 (73%) were asymptomatic, 41 (54%) of which had lung opacities on CT. Other 28 (27%) cases were symptomatic, 22 (79%) of which had abnormal CT findings."

54% of asymptomatic cases had lung opacities, and 83% of those were ground glass opacity. That usually indicates pretty nasty lung damage. Symptomatic cases as expected showed more and worse damage.

Here's an analysis, what is the expected economic cost of achieving herd immunity? If you expect 60% infection rate to provide herd immunity thats 196 million cases in the US. Play with the numbers, 1-5% mortality rates, 50% of asymptomatic and 80% of symptomatic cases had some degree of lung damage. We're talking 500K - 1M+ deaths and tens of millions of people with lung damage. Have you actually factored that into your "The stonks must go up so lets sacrifice grandma" argument?

This is also a pointless exercise because virtually every major developed country on the planet has basically beaten this thing with... wait for it... LOCKDOWNS and MASKS. Crazy right?

https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/ryct.2020200110

> If you think your average anti-mask anti-lockdown American is making that kind of analysis then frankly I think you are disconnected from reality...

I never said anything about what the average anti-lockdown American believes. Frankly, I have no idea. Again, what does this have to do with whether lockdowns are good policy or not? If 99.9% of people believed the earth was round based on some flawed argument, would you conclude that it must be flat?

> virtually every major developed country on the planet has ... beaten this thing with lockdowns and masks

Nobody has beaten it, since the pandemic isn’t over. Once places that had very few cases start opening up, it stands to reason that the outbreaks will start again, as happened in Arizona for example. It seems clear that the only way to truly beat covid without it naturally burning out due to herd immunity is to impose a strict lockdown until a vaccine is widely deployed, which I believe to be impossible.

(Unlike probably anyone who thinks this is a scam to hurt Trump, I hope I’m wrong and a vaccine comes out quickly, because things going back to relatively normal in the near future is a much better outcome than various jurisdictions stubbornly locking down until their unemployment systems collapse, causing mass unrest...)

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