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Comment by salmon30salmon | Hacker News Reader

Deaths will continue the slow roll until herd immunity is reached, either artificially via a vaccine or naturally. Masks, distancing, lockdowns do not _prevent_ infections, deaths or otherwise. They _delay_ and _slow_ infections, deaths etc. There is no perfect compliance to masks, lockdowns etc. and masks, lockdowns etc. are not 100% effective.

The greatest lie we were told back in March was that lockdowns were temporary to beat COVID. There is no beating COVID, we are not gods. The disease will continue until it doesn't.

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> There is no perfect compliance to masks, lockdowns etc. and masks, lockdowns etc. are not 100% effective.

They don't need to be 100% effective, only reasonably effective. Take New Zealand for example. They have a population of about 4.8 million, yet have only had 25 deaths. Louisiana, a state in the US with a similarly sized population has had 5,375 deaths as of writing.

Just because the lockdowns in the US didn't work isn't a flaw of lockdowns in general; it's a flaw in the response of the US government. We needed swift, strong, decisive action, and we needed it when cases first started appearing. We didn't get that, and now hundreds of people are dying each day.

I think it's too early to assess New Zealand vs. Louisiana. New Zealand likely has very little immunity to this virus. And it will have paid a heavy price in second-order effects from lockdowns.

I picked Louisiana because they reported their first COVID case a few days after New Zealand reported theirs. I think it's an apt comparison in their current outcomes, just to indicate that strong action could have prevented virtually all of the deaths that have occurred.

That being said, I do agree that the long-term implications of their actions aren't something we can really discuss at the moment. My biggest concern, however, is the increasing number of cases of heart damage following COVID infection. We may find ourselves in a situation where deaths _after_ COVID are significant. A vaccine won't help the almost 7 million people who have likely already suffered that damage. I sincerely hope that in a few years time the most significant damage COVID has is on a country's economy, since that's something that can recover.

I don't think it's a great comparison, one is an island and the other is a contiguous US state in a country with freedom of travel

> The greatest lie we were told back in March was that lockdowns were temporary to beat COVID.

I thought the stated purpose of those early lockdowns was to "flatten the curve"? I don't recall anyone ever promising that they would beat COVID. They simply wanted to distribute the need for hospital beds.

That was the purpose, and then the media moved the goalposts to minimizing total deaths regardless of the cost, and freaked out over any reopening hiccups.

Not every country pledged to "eradicate COVID", but at least one did: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/20/asia/new-zealand-coronavi...

And, like expected, they continue to have, and will continue to have essentially forever, a slow trickle of detected cases, until they reach whatever herd immunity looks like, at their own pace. Or, if they're not completely bonkers, they'll just cover their ears and sing "la-la-la", pronounce victory over the disease, win the election, and join the rest of the world in having a bit heavier trickle.

>The greatest lie we were told back in March

Characterizing something as a lie when the facts were not at all clear at the time is not a good idea. Especially regarding the situation in China, Vietnam etc. where the results of the lockdown have actually been very different.

This is demonstrably false. Basic interventions have proven effective across the globe. Reducing the growth rate can cause the case count to decay to zero. Interventions do not need to be 100% effective to succeed in controlling a problem. This is like saying that it is possible to get pregnant or an STI with a condom so we should just have unprotected sex.

Sadly the lockdowns were never billed as something that would put a stop to Covid and the government has really never made an honest effort at that. But let it never be said we took the easy way out.

The greatest lie that we keep telling ourselves is that there is no way we could have done better. And I don't mean marginally better, I mean orders of magnitude better.

Look at how South Korea dealt with Covid. Look at how Taiwan dealt with Covid. Look at how China dealt with Covid. Look at how Canada dealt with Covid.

If we took the problem seriously back in March, we wouldn't be where we are today. If we got aggressive about testing, contact tracing and quarantine, like all of those countries did, we wouldn't be dealing with this slow roll of a disaster today.

> If we took the problem seriously back in March

Whom do you mean by "we" here?

The president?

The governors?

The hidden powers who rule the world?

I think it's rather self-evident that the lion's share of the blame lies with the administration that was proclaiming that Covid will go away in April, the CDC (whose failings are in large part, but not solely on the shoulders of this administration), and their regional equivalents. You're also free to blame some structural problems, if you're looking to assign blame. [1]

The civil unrest that followed made it clear that the administration is more then willing to use federal forces to interfere in state business - but only when it comes to putting down civil unrest, not to prevent the spread of an epidemic.

[1] I honestly don't think assigning blame matters at this point, everyone's already made up their mind on whether or not the man who claimed that sunlight and bleach cures Covid has done a good job.

That simply is not true. You are comparing apples to oranges. First, SK and Taiwan has potential latent immunity with SARS v1, and China literally imprisoned an entire city. Canada is the only fair comparison.

Now that we are on month six of this disaster, I would have taken a full lockdown of my city[1], if it meant that that the virus would have been brought under control in two months, and lockdown were lifted after three... And 200,000[2] lives had been saved.

And neither Korea nor Taiwan had latent immunity. What those countries had is a CDC equivalent that actually did it's job, because of its experience with SARS.

[1] My city did actually get a full lockdown, when the civil unrest started a few months ago. Apparently, people protesting deserves a curtailment of basic freedoms, but stopping a deadly pandemic does not. Puzzle me that...

[2] That number will keep growing, not to mention unprecedented economic damage.

Canada had more cases of SARS than SK(who had 3). Taiwan had a grand total of 346.

>Deaths will continue the slow roll until herd immunity is reached, either artificially via a vaccine or naturally. Masks, distancing, lockdowns do not _prevent_ infections, deaths or otherwise. They _delay_ and _slow_ infections, deaths etc. There is no perfect compliance to masks, lockdowns etc. and masks, lockdowns etc. are not 100% effective.

Then why does almost every other nation have a much lower per capita infection rate and per capita death rate?

1) I don't know how you define "every other", but there are several other states (notably, with dramatically different political responses) that have similar mortality rates.

2) It's plausible (perhaps even likely) that the US has experienced a more acute course of the virus, and thus has experienced more of its deaths already, while others like New Zealand are still in a much earlier stage.

3) The US has done a miserably shitty job of stratifying risk. There was no reason to send SARS-CoV-2+ patients to nursing homes, for example. It was possible, with the trillions of dollars spent, to completely isolate nursing homes and nearly completely isolate vulnerable populations, as most of the world's best experts advised. Instead, we chose to horizontally stratify - that is to say, constrain activity and contact regardless of risk profile. This was a huge blunder, but one that nearly every state in the world made.

>2) It's plausible (perhaps even likely) that the US has experienced a more acute course of the virus, and thus has experienced more of its deaths already, while others like New Zealand are still in a much earlier stage.

New Zealand will never get to where the US is because they have an administration that actually takes it seriously. It's also resulted in them being able to have no restrictions aside from travel for quite a long time.

Are we subject to survivorship bias here?

What if in absence of good information about covid all countries acted more or less randomly. Then we pick the ones with the lowest death rate and call their administration wise?

I didn't say they were wise. I said they took it seriously. There's the possibility of taking it seriously and doing the wrong thing. There's not really any possibility of saying it's a hoax and doing the right thing.

Really? https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

For we are doing great, but we are not the worst either. That is basically the story of the USA in general I think

There is also a huge variance between US states. Some states have larger populations than most whole countries, and under the dual sovereignty principle of our federal system the state governments bear the primary responsibility for pandemic responses. Several US states, mainly in New England, have worse death rates than any other countries. Others are doing much better: for example Utah has a lower death rate than 51 other countries.

My point of reference is always the UK, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, the largest five EU countries comprising 70% of the EU population. Germany is outperforming everyone, but otherwise we are right in the middle of the pack. (Ahead of the UK and Spain, about tied with Italy, a bit behind France.)

Yeah, it’s really comforting to be the 9th worst out of 191 countries, not the worst.

France, with one of the best socialized healthcare systems in the world, isn’t much better at 15th out of 191. So I’m not sure what that’s supposed to prove.

It means “best socialized healthcare systems in the world” have failed miserably this time for the most part. You don’t get to pat yourself on the back just because supposed peers did just as terribly.

I tend to look at it from "who are the neighbors" perspective. Being rated somewhere between Italy and the UK is not that bad.

I would be far more worried if the US had the same death rate as Turkmenistan or North Korea.

The USA is #9 out of 150 on this list, I think it's reasonable to say "almost every other nation".

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