Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdog | Hacker News Reader

Did this pervasive level of criticism, animosity, and negativity exist a hundred years ago during the last serious pandemic? Every week there's some new crisis.

It feels like the entire media is always trying to highlight the next systemic failure. "This is wrong." "This failed." "We don't have enough ventilators." "New York cases are surging." "California cases are surging." "We don't have enough PPE." "We don't have hand sanitizer." "We don't have masks." "We don't have enough tests."

Are things actually this consistently bad, or does the media magnify the negative and ignore the positive developments (of which there are plenty)?

It's like the difference between acute inflammation (which is good for the body when it's fighting an infection) and chronic inflammation (which causes a lot of problems).

View on HN

I mean, in the United States, 149,324 deaths is a systemic failure. Another 834 today, and the day isn't over. Do you not think that constitutes a massive crisis?

That's my point. The Spanish flu killed 750,000 in the United States at a time when the population was around 100 million. It was certainly a massive crisis.

What was the reporting like and how has it changed?

People had lower expectations of healthcare back in the 20’s. Many of the vaccines we have today didn’t exist, and there were no antibiotics.

I think it was actually relatively the same. Different styles etc, but there were people back then that didn't feel like distancing or wearing a mask and there were laws put in place that would land you in jail if you went out without a mask. And there were protestors against that, just like now. And they too got infected, spread it around and some died.

It's an excellent (sad) example of history repeating itself.

On the other hand, things aren't all that comparable. Consider the distances people travel, the amount of people that use the same space, but also the amount of single-use things we have now that we didn't have (at scale) back then (even simple things like spoons, napkins, cups).

People love to make comparisons, but it's not always as useful or helpful as one might think (even if we went all the way down the rabbit hole and tried to find all the variables between now and then).

Back then there was hardy any reporting at all. They tried to keep it under wraps as much as possible. It’s the whole reason it was called the “Spanish” flu, as Spain was the only country accurately reporting on the crisis, which made it seem like a problem unique to them.

When talking about mortality rates I don't think it is easy to make a comparison of these two virus.

Firstly, the medical technologies of 1918 were nothing like what we have today.

For example, even though it would have been no help fighting Spanish Flu, wide spread use of penicillin was still some 20 years, showing just how far behind the medical system of that time really was.

That difference also shows up in things like life expectancy which back then was in the low 50s where as today it is in the 70s.

Finally the two virus are very different.

One factor that made the Spanish Flu virus so deadly was it killed both young and old.

If COVID-19 had the same death profile I suspect we would be seeing those same 750,000 totals.

All of that, plus a context of wartime

And this deathcount was for an event that extended for 16 months between 2918 and 1920. We are in the eight month of covid-19 still

2918... (LOL)

1918

Per capita it is still less than France, Italy, UK, Sweden and plenty others - did they all have systemic failure too?

I think it’s pretty obvious that yes, they also did have systemic failures.

“Per capita it is still less than France”

Give it a couple days.

We also know more about how the virus spreads and treating people who are severely ill with it than we did 3-4 months ago. Part of why Germany’s death rates were a lot lower than its neighbors is likely due to having far more ICU beds per capita before the crisis, but also, hitting our infection rate peak a bit later. Those two things combined meant that our doctors had more time to figure out what does and doesn’t work, and never came close to the horrible decisions doctors in Italy had to make - Germany was even able to take in several hundred patients from Italy and France.

Also of interest: Germany has almost as many ECMO-equipped hospitals as the US does, despite having 1/4 the population and a tiny fraction of the land area.

Italy you can maybe excuse that they were caught by surprise, but yes, the other countries in Europe handled it badly initially. The surprising thing about the US is that somehow it's handling it worse.

From what I can tell, Italy being caught by surprise was a largely self-inflicted problem - they seem to have not tested any patients who were hospitalized with potential symptoms unless they'd travelled to China or had contact with someone who had. Other countries like the US had testing policies that, on paper, excluded those patients but in reality they did get tested anyway often enough that community spread was detected relatively early on. Italy only spotted theirs when someone happened to be hospitalized who'd had contact with a person that'd travelled to China but hadn't caught it from them.

This is very different from the narrative the American and British press have been pushing, probably for political reasons - in that narrative Italy was just unlucky, and it was the other countries that didn't learn from them and stop themselves following in Italy's footsteps that failed. That doesn't seem to match reality. As best I can tell, Italy screwed up so badly that they doomed not only themselves, but any hope of containing Covid-19 in Europe and America. Everywhere else seems to have done a reasonably good job of stopping it coming from China, and it was the unexpected, undetected cases from Italy when they claimed to be completely clean that caused the outbreaks.

But the rest of Europe stood around, slack-jawed, while things spiraled out of control in Italy. I live in a different European country, and the lead-up to the COVID crisis was like watching a someone being chased down by a snail -- the only reason the snail caught them was because they didn't bother to move out of the way. For example, people were regularly traipsing off to the Italy for vacation up until the point when things started to spin out of control and they shut the country down.

80,000 died of the flu in the US in 2018. Yes, I know Covid will be worse, but 80,000 died and nobody seemed to notice.

Was that a crisis? Based on numbers alone, I’d say yes. But it sure didn’t seem like it.

But in the country of 330000000 this is relatively minor. Yes, this happened quickly, but other, and more importantly, preventable deceases are killing way more people over time. Yet we don’t test for flu, don’t close McDonald’ses or allow driving only with special permit once a week. Basically current hysteria is disproportionate.

Flu could never kill 2 million (or more) Americans in a single year like COVID can unchecked.

The current hysteria is not disproportionate.

Not only it could, it did. Adjusted for today’s population Spanish flu would kill 2 million. Yet lockdowns were way less severe and schools, for example, reopened. Moreover, looking at current numbers, covid is not on track to reach 2 million by any degree of imagination.

> Moreover, looking at current numbers, covid is not on track to reach 2 million by any degree of imagination.

That is only the case because we shut down so much of the economy & society.

America is objectively doing terribly with covid-19. Massive business disruption combined with massive cases. The view from outside america is of widespread mismanagement and systemic failure. It is a death blow to America’s perception as a competent world power to be relied upon.

In this context, negative headlines are hardly surprising.

> America is objectively doing terribly with covid-19

They’ve had fewer deaths per capita than Italy, UK, France, Sweden and plenty others... not doing great but also in plenty good company.

The US also has much lower population density and Europe had a month+ head start. Give us time.

We're days away from catching up to France.

It also happens to be the case that Houston is the major processing center for all of the major lab groups for the south/southwest. They literally pointed at the single most congested part of the network, during a period of global supply shortages, and went "well, that's not working well."

Well, yeah, it's not fucking working well. We're cranking out tests and running analyses at an unprecedented level. And we're doing a decent job of ramping up, actually, but not perfectly evenly across the board.

My healthcare center is not particularly large or particularly well-connected. We've been getting our tests back in 3 days. At one point our partner started getting too heavily inundated, things were lagging to 5 days, so we switched to another that didn't require shipping to Houston for processing. We're back to 3 days.

But we're lucky - we're small enough that we don't have to partner with a Houston-based center. Others aren't.

I suppose ever since newspapers were invented they've done whatever they can to attract readership

fact is the news needs their audience to feel that news is essential to their daily life, and if it was just good news I could make the choice to watch something a little more interesting, but by choosing stories that feel urgent and dramatic, they create the urgency to stay tuned to 'stay informed'

No one needs to stay informed of the good news, although I do miss when the late night shows would make fun of light hearted news that was a once daily reminder that there's a lot going on in the world that's not american politics

No, a hundred years ago people accepted that death from infectious disease is common and got on with their lives. Certainly they had no months-long lockdowns at the time.

Actually many municipalities did lock down in response to the Spanish Flu epidemic here in the US. The epidemiological studies of these cities are in part why we chose to lock down this time too.

Yes, but they locked down for much shorter than we did. San Francisco had restrictions in 1918 for just over 1 month, for example. Nowhere you’d have found things like 5 months+ lockdowns like we have now in many places, with no end in sight.

Because everyone actually stayed inside, unlike this time around. Lockdowns don't work if people ignore them.

Do you have evidence that this is true? It's pretty hard to believe that people were more willing to stay inside in an era when nobody had the Internet or even TV.

It was a ghost town around here.

And now, a few months later, we're seeing the affects of the lockdown. Businesses are closing everywhere.

It's incredibly sad.

The vulnerable should have stayed isolated - cleansed everything from the outside. That ensures their safety. The healthy should have been able to go forward.

Responsibility without control is cruel. Financial debt accumulates, but hey, stay inside, don't go to work.

Yup, human nature completely changed over the past 100 years.

Reminds me of the “wear a mask or go to jail” from 1918

https://www.history.com/news/1918-pandemic-public-health-cam...

Did they have newspapers that depend on 24/7 crises and ‘breaking’ disasters to survive, and had the reach of today’s online outlets?

> does the media magnify the negative and ignore the positive developments (of which there are plenty)?

The media crafts its daily narrative with an eye on objectivity and plays right down the middle. Just the facts, always. To suggest otherwise is quite dangerous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com