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Comment by axaxs | Hacker News Reader

Not to sound grim, but I now wonder if it would have been best to let things be. Of course inform the public, but enforce no action. Would/could it have led to a huge overwhelming initial spike that has died down months ago? It feels now that we've been in various states of lock down for a year and reached the same result, unfortunately.

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Wait you're wondering if not taking any action would have had the same result? Or masks on but no social distance? Or both social distance and masks on? Because social distance will preclude many activities.

But in any case, in my opinion more should have been done, not less. Specifically, cut people a check so that they can afford to stay safely inside.

I mean, the govt can make recommendations and let people decide what to do. I'm -not- an antimasker...and haven't left the house much since March. But it feels like our people will inevitably decide it's boring and give up, as I've seen not only in news but in my friend group. So it feels like we just delayed mass infection rather than preventing it.

The.. whole point was delaying it by “flattening the curve”. We were not remotely prepared at all and knew nothing about the virus. Mass infection now is incredibly more safe because we know how to treat it, and most cities have extra buildings retrofitted as hospitals.

Infection is more safe. Mass infection is not. I was recently hospitalized with covid and got the experimental cocktail (remdesivir, convalescent plasma, dexamethasone, azithromycin, anti-clotting drugs, zinc, D, C, probiotics) that only became available a few months ago. It cost over $62000. How many people can afford that? And it requires hospital beds because it is strictly inpatient treatment. It's not without its risks either. It's really only viable if 1) the patient has insurance and money and 2) the hospitals can avoid being overrun.

Regeneron could change things. That's an outpatient treatment that could be administered at clinics to patients who have tested positive. The problem is it's simply not available and it's still expensive.

If you catch covid, have good healthcare and can be admitted to a hospital then your prognosis is very good. What we can't do is treat large numbers of people simultaneously. Mass infection is a disaster.

> It cost over $62000. How many people can afford that?

Anyone who isn't insured can, because it's free:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/10/22/9259424...

> incredibly more safe

This was your takeaway from the article?

But we have the vaccine rolling out now. So mass infection is not inevitable. If there was some leadership on the top and a working political system, we could’ve done a lot better

Why let people do anything if they will make the wrong decisions?

They do not want to stay inside, and that is the problem. In the small town I live now not far from LA, most restaurants are closed for indoor, as well as outdoor dining, but several places just refuse to obey this order . What do you think is happening ? They are packed to the brim, with lines waiting to get in and have their beer and fried wings their usual way. No need to say local community is split between outraged "conscious" citizens demanding managers' heads on a plate, and "freedom lovers" demanding first group mind their own business and stay the fsck out of others' way to have their regular fun. I'm watching this hitshow with both amusement and fright .

I don't get how these restaurants can get away with this. It's not like the police suddenly can't enforce the rules anymore. If I refused to obey the speed limit or refused to pay my CA income taxes, they'd come down on me like a ton of bricks, but for some reason, when a restaurant refuses to obey the closures loudly, visibly, in full view of the public, where are the police? Suddenly it's "oh, we just can't seem to enforce things, golly what do we do?!"

Not can't enforce. But aren't. By choice.

https://www.foxla.com/news/orange-county-sheriff-says-deputi...

> If I refused to obey the speed limit

There's your answer. The unwritten rule is everyone in California drives 10 mph over the speed limit and no one gets a ticket. More than 15 over and you're pushing your luck.

I think they were doing a thought experiment where you'd let it run wild in the beginning, and let people see the horrors of that, and let that fear be the motivating factor. Arguably fewer deaths could have come out of that strategy, because the anti-maskers and political covid minimizer have successfully spread the misinformation of "it's just a flu, very few deaths" etc. discounting the fact that the fewer deaths were happening coz of masks and lockdowns.

Half of what we're seeing right now is lockdown fatigue and a lot more people making the decision that the risk is worth it. It's not because they haven't seen how bad it could be, it's because they're numb to what they've seen, and 9 months is a long time.

> it's because they're numb to what they've seen

I observe the COVID-19 narrative is probably false, starting with the timeline for the initial spread of SARS-CoV-2 across the globe in November/December 2019. Like the good doctor said, "#containment was never possible" [0].

Many people, including myself, probably had COVID-19 before tests were available. I think people did much better surviving the dreaded virus before the medicalists were treating COVID-19 as a diagnosis.

[0] https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1334531533013536768

edit: Wuhan vastly under-counted their COVID-19 cases: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/29/asia/china-coronavirus-se...

There’s been plenty of deaths to motivate us.

People still are spreading, and believing, disinformation. Even here, when the numbers came out of the 400k extra deaths this year in the U.S., 300k from COVID, no shortage of commenters were disputing the numbers and the causes.

One political party has worked so hard over the last generation to convince people that science and experts are the enemy, and now we're paying the price.

I think he is suggesting there would be a strong information campaign about masks, social distancing, hand washing etc then leave people be while moving on with the vaccines and so forth.

On the other hand, if all the people would followed the restrictions to the letter it would been under control many times over, as demonstrated by NZ, TW, AU, CN.

This -> if all the people would followed the restrictions to the letter it would been under control many times over, as demonstrated by NZ, TW, AU, CN.

Yeah this is what I thought the US would do, as its a country where individual decision making feels like its prided above all else. I was absolutely surprised about this joke-authoritarian style regulations that CA and the counties tried to push over and over. Absolutely absurd.

With a different president, yes. Not with this one though.

When hospitals hit capacity, the death rate dramatically spikes. Take a look at early NYC data to see how hospital overload affects this. Letting things be would have been true disaster.

Because we took steps, this is not going to reach anywhere close to the same result in terms of deaths, even if it comes to equal cases. The solution to the time problem was more strict action earlier, ironically for most on the "economy" side of pandemic action. Give people a big stimulus, stop all jobs beyond food and true essentials, and enforce strict contract tracing. We might have been out of this in two months if we did that.

The early NYC numbers came from a variety of situations:

1) Gov Cuomo sending elderly to nursing homes and packing them in for treatment. This killed thousands (same with Gov Whitmer in Michigan) and yet Cuomo wrote a fucking book about how great he is instead of facing any consequences.

2) Overuse of ventilators. People were putting vents right as they came in, mostly based off bad advice from doctors in Europe. Turned out this was a death sentence. Most of the young people who died, most likely died from high pressure ventilators over anything else.

3) Overflow hospitals in NYC were entirely empty because they were intended for non-covid patients and were incredibly difficult to get into. Many people who didn't have COVID, who were kept for monitoring, were kept on COVID floors of regular hospitals and got COVID.

NYC was mismanagement at every possible level.

Not this again. Where do you put elderly folks who are recovering but not sick enough to keep in the hospitals which need to freed up for more seriously sick people?

They live in the nursing home FFS, that is their home.

They could have been put in the massive empty emergency facilities they put up but never used.

They were cramming sick elderly people into nursing homes with perfectly healthy people; nursing homes without individual rooms! They were packing sick people next to unsick people. It literally killed thousands.

Janice Dean covers all the details very well in her podcast with Megyn Kelly, including reasonable countermeasures they could have taken instead of cramming sick elderly people together:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-megyn-kelly-show/i...

> Not this again

Why do you not consider this as valid? Nursing homes were the primary spread for COVID cases back in March/April and there is more than enough damning evidence against both Como and Whitmer.

As in Sweden?

You can simply compare them to Denmark, Norway and Finland on infection rates, death toll and economic impact. If those countries manage to immunise their populations quickly then Sweden's approach was a huge failure in comparison.

But more to the point Sweden has now started trying to mandate restrictions and lockdowns as their health system is struggling and relying on public goodwill to do the right thing just isn't enough.

I don't know, the other side of that argument is imagine how much worse it could have been if we'd done nothing.

Brutal that this idea keeps surfacing on Hacker News contrary to the advice of almost all epidemiologists out there. It seems like utter hubris to assume you know something they don't.

There's also been hubris from epidemiologists because they're not politicians, economists, or experts in human behavior, and this very much isn't just a problem of a virus spreading.

Nothing new here. Hacker News (and more generally a lot of people in tech) are pretty sure they have the solution to: debt, famine, equality, global warming, etc.

Sure, maybe, and we could spin out dozens of scenarios and approaches that could have been better or worse.

I think one phrase from your comment highlights the entire problem though: “enforce no action.”

You can’t enforce a society wide shutdown. You can only get that from citizens who voluntarily participate in a social order that they trust. We (Americans) are faced with enormous problems as a society as a result of our inability to trust one another.

We may be able to engineer a zero trust replacement for our monetary system. We seem to desire the same thing for our society. Everyone demands infinite verification of everything. Fact check the fact checkers and audit the auditors that audit the election results! At some point though, it’s turtles all the way down. Political debate is starting to sound like epistemology.

It appears that societies that have greater levels of trust are faring better in this pandemic. That cannot become an excuse for our failure. It should instruct us on how to proceed.

EDIT: re-reading this I realize I’m singling out “society wide shutdown” as the sort of imagined best response, maybe it is, but what I was really thinking of was “highly coordinated society wide response where everyone does what they are supposed to based on their role.”

Already people are dying of non-COVID disease due to lack of capacity. Is that a fair trade off? We can directly connect the dots from "I wanna do what I want!" who then get sick or make other people sick who then end up at a hospital who take up a bed and someone else who isn't sick but has a plumonary or cardiac episode dies.

If we had perfect information, we could trace the liability back to people's behavior and fine them properly for non-compliance. But that would run up against privacy concerns wouldn't it?

What about a general strike by health care workers and grocery stockers and food delivery service workers? Right now. In the middle of a pandemic. Can you imagine the outrage? And why would people be outraged? Because they think these workers are slaves. They shouldn't have a choice. It's everyone who isn't on the front line who should get to choose whether to comply with public health orders.

It is certainly more civilized for health care workers to just quit en masse right now, than to propose people should just get to flaunt public health orders without any kind of penalty. But I'm getting the strong indication this is not a civil society.

It's debatable whether we'd be dealing with multiple significantly more transmissible strains of the virus if we hadn't amplified the evolutionary pressures (and time scales) necessary for it to happen.

We've only eradicated smallpox and rinderpest, so we have almost no experience doing something like this. It was also crazy to think that short-term containment measures (masks and social distancing) wouldn't start selecting strains that are more virulent.

The good news is that vaccine distribution is moving very quickly--hopefully faster than the virus can mutate. The bad news is only developed countries, India, and China will likely vaccinate that quickly.

> It was also crazy to think that short-term containment measures (masks and social distancing) wouldn't start selecting strains that are more virulent.

Why? It can't evolve against "no way to reach the human" like it could chemical/biological countermeasures.

But there's not "no way" when people work essential jobs, leave their homes for groceries, touch packages getting delivered, live with other people, etc.

I'm not sure what you're trying to argue for here, but if we had allowed a huge initial spike, many hundreds of thousands would have died needlessly. We are still doing much better than that.

This is an incorrect take, and deeply frustrating that it is so pervasive, given that there is literal evidence of it being wrong. China, especially Wuhan, was the center of the virus outbreak early in 2020. China successfully locked down and stopped the spread of the virus. Today, Wuhan and China in general has no community spread of Covid. So there is clearly a solution, even with out a vaccine.

Our political leadership was too weak to make the decisions necessary to implement these solutions. Some readers may retort that lockdowns are a violation of democratic or constitutional freedoms, but there have been times in the past when these rights were suspended. During the civil war, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and jailed people without a trial. In extreme situations, extreme actions may be warranted. (The US will soon have more Covid deaths than US soldiers died in all of WW2, if you think my war comparison is unfair). China took extreme actions to enforce lockdowns and successfully ended the spread of Covid. America's leadership decided that peoples lives did not matter, and did not.

Ultimately, I will be significantly more suspicious of any western politician who demands we go to war to protect lives, or give up liberties for personal safety. 2020 has shown that politicians would not take even the weakest measures to protect personal safety (e.g mask mandates) - exposing their lies in other domains as well. The war on terror was fiction. The war on drugs is a jobs program. And a 9/11 amount of deaths can happen every day and politicians will literally do nothing and people will demand nothing. I am deeply pessimistic about our future.

The "stay at home orders" in the USA were so unenforced, they were jokes. Politicians wanted to seem like they were doing something so they rolled their eyes and enacted these half-assed "orders", making sure to forget to have the police enforce them. In CA, our brilliant governor told everyone to wear masks and avoid restaurants, then went out and had a fun maskless restaurant outing himself.

Most people I know took stay-at-home seriously, but enough people didn't that it was totally ineffectual.

It’s not just that the political leadership was lacking; our media and the people of the US also collaborated in this failure. There is no sense of community or duty amongst our people, only selfishness.

I mentioned in another thread [1] that COVID-19 was a gigantic game of Prisoner's Dilemma, where cooperation meant staying at home and wearing a mask when you go out, and where defection meant going out and horsing around, and we utterly failed the game.

Since, I don't know... WW2, we seem to no longer have the ability as a country to act in coordinated cooperation for some greater good. It's all individualism, now. It's all about me, me, me! My rights! My need to go shopping! My desire to eat at Olive Garden! Other people are dying? Fuck em... I'm going to enjoy my life and not let "the man" tell me what to do! Wait, I got the disease?? Well, crap! Who could have predicted it? God certainly works in mysterious ways.

2020 has pretty much robbed me of what empathy I had left. It's insane how selfish we have become.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25577270

> 2020 has pretty much robbed me of what empathy I had left. It's insane how selfish we have become.

When I start thinking along these lines, I consider the doctors and nurses, firefighters/EMS, vaccine researchers, food bank volunteers, grocery store workers, open-source data volunteers, ... “Look for the helpers,” as Mr. Rogers said.

I think that many people have been conscientious during the pandemic. They aren’t visible - they only show up in year-over-year measures of reduced traffic, etc.

None of this obviates my frustration at the political and cultural response to the pandemic. Covidiots and maskholes still piss me off, but I don’t think they’re the whole story.

You forgot the part where the selfish and decadent, upon becoming sick, demand not only the right to health care services, but the right to cutting in front of the line merely because they paid extra for the VIP health care plan.

This is not a civil society. It is a caste system.

You are seeing a fraction of what would have happened if you just "let things be."

Fatalism ain’t the correct response.

The problem is in the US hospitals get overloaded quite easily. Our healthcare is not as robust as Sweden's, so that option hasn't been able to be on the table.

Keep in mind the surge we are seeing right now is from Thanksgiving. It is most likely going to get worse.

While Sweden did adopt the 'do nothing' approach, their results so far have hardly been a success story.

Currently Swedish deaths sit at 837 deaths per million: https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/sweden

By comparison consider Sweden's neighbors.

Norway currently sits at 80 deaths per million: https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/norway

Finland currently sits at 99 deaths per million: https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/finland

What is more troubling for Sweden is their current daily death rate is also very much higher than both Norway and Finland.

So if the aim was to try an reduce the number of citizens dying from Covid 19 then based on those figures Sweden's 'do nothing' approach has failed.

My point was, if the US adopted that policy it would be far worse.

> Would/could it have led to a huge overwhelming initial spike that has died down months ago?

Highly doubtful. And you would have crushed your healthcare workers.

Even if everything we did just delayed the big spike until now, it's a HUGE win that healthcare workers are now getting vaccinated.

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