Hacker News Reader

> Part of what went wrong at the start of COVID around March 2020 was the reactive approach waiting for hard proof that the disease would slip through the borders before cancelling flights. This approach runs a risk that any action will be taken too late.

Humanity has been underestimating and downplaying the disease from the very start. We closed too late, re-opened (multiple times) too early, timidly agonized over every little decision, failed to enforce decisions once made, and then collectively acted shocked, SHOCKED! that it went out of control.

We've had a year to learn what's effective, and have learned a lot. The problem isn't knowledge about the virus, it's lack of political will to actually do anything about it. We know stopping flights and closing borders helps. Why are we so slow to do it?

> To be honest, I'm confused by the amount of air travel that is still going on. If locking down large swathes of most countries is on the cards, why is there any air travel happening? Why was there a high profile diplomatic visit to India being planned? Are the benefits from all these plane trips really outweighing the costs? We may as well be trying to evolve COVID to sneak past quarantines. How is it acceptable to scuttle the economy in response to COVID, why are there still plane flights 12 months in to the pandemic?

I think the main reason is because air travel is heavily used by rich people and the professional managerial class.

If you look at the response, the people who bore the brunt of the pain were working class people and small business owners. The professional managerial class was mostly fine, just slightly inconvenienced.

When a politician is making decisions, they can’t really emphathiz me with your small business or restaurant getting shut down, but they do know from first hand experience, how much of a pain it would be if they were not able to fly, and all their corporate, NGO, and lobbyist buddies also know the pain that they would feel from not being able to fly around to where they wanted.

> most of them don't speak English

I thought this must have been wrong with how distinct of a thing Indian English is but apparently it's true, albeit India still contains the second largest English speaking population at ~10% of 1.37B.

I'm constantly reminded that I clearly live in something of a bubble. I think I know a few people who took a plane to ride out the pandemic somewhere they saw as safer and one person who took an international trip to do some business. But that's about it. And a lot of people I know, including myself, practically live in planes normally.

Yet, while air travel is down significantly, it's not that far down. Certainly not the 95% decrease it is in my circle.

What makes you say that? While it may be rebounding now, there was a long stretch where it was down 95%, if not more, as evident from, say, https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput. I don't think other countries fared better.

There was a very dramatic slowdown last spring/early summer but those numbers show it's been slowly picking up since then. And, to a first approximation, no one I know is traveling yet. (Though that will probably change this summer as they're all vaccinated.)

ADDED: And there are still basically no in-person tech events. Maybe in the fall though I'm skeptical that will happen. And where I work, you basically need high-level exemptions to meet with anyone physically for work purposes.

My guess is: Many people just can't get a grip on themselves and their urges.

Among friends I know, that I am the most strictly adhering to lockdown rules, even going beyond what the rules are. I don't visit people, I avoid being visited (even whatever number of people is allowed visiting each other. Just because one can, does not mean it is a great idea.) I try to tell close ones to avoid visits. Many days I don't leave the house or premises, which of course I can only do, because of being able to work from home. Many people at least need to go to work, that much I understand. This goes on for a year or so by now, in which I have once met one friend outside for hiking.

Yet I know people, who I thought were smarter or had more self-control, who travelled. To me this is bafflingly selfish. Is their vacation travelling really more important than people around them, family members included? What if they catch a new variant, perhaps even one which goes undetected? (I don't know if that is biologically possible with the tests we have.) What if they have no symptoms but spread it to others? Are they ready to carry the responsibility for someone suffocating? Why do they need to go on vacation every year, no matter what is happening? What is the reasoning behind their actions?

I guess these thought and questions are not on the menu for many. Too uncomfortable to think about that. I guess I am quite extreme in my isolation. Probably easier for me to do than for others, because of pre-existing social isolation and being used to little social contact. However, what I also think is, that if more people avoided unnecessary contacts, travelling and such, we would be in less trouble than we are now.

The whole thing changed my view of some people I know. Not much to the better, I am afraid. Perhaps I am a person with especially low requirements of my world, as long as I have a computer with Internet access, food and running water. I guess it is hardest for the people, who have a huge contrast to the before pandemic time.

It's the awesome combined power of denial and selfishness. I've also had to do a tough re-evaluation of several friendships and relationships with family members. This pandemic brought out a lot of harsh truths about people's real selves. Here are some direct quotes from people I know. "We always have Thanksgiving dinner. It simply has to happen." "You can't just stop living life!" "I'm not going to let other people tell me what to do." "I am sure I won't get sick." "Play dates are OK because children can't spread it." "It's not that deadly." "You're in your 40s you have nothing to worry about, go out and live your life." "Stop being so scared." And these are all people who don't think it's all a hoax/conspiracy.

> My guess is: Many people just can't get a grip on themselves and their urges.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées:

> All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

> To be honest, I'm confused by the amount of air travel that is still going on. If locking down large swathes of most countries is on the cards, why is there any air travel happening?

I think essentially all the data we have indicates that there is a surprisingly low rate covid transmission on airplanes and airports. (You can be worried that the data is being provided by airline companies who are biased, but at this point I think you have to postulate a pretty big conspiracy in order to explain the consistent signal.) Assuming that's true, it means:

1. Your concern should be with any method of travel, not air travel per se.

2. Your concern should be with travel between areas with very different rates of covid (or of different variants), not travel in general. If an infected person in country A swaps places (through flight) with an infected person in country B, nothing has changed regarding covid transmission.

> Your concern should be with any method of travel, not air travel per se.

The U.S. was extremely slow to restrict travel from India. Are many people traveling to the U.S. from India via car, bus, train, or boat? Flights are the concern because that's how people travel between continents.

Absolutely. But the article (via footnote 12) is talking about how there are variants of Indian origin being detected in the UK. There is the paragraph:

> Two more cases of the Variant of Concern VOC-21JAN-02 (P.1) have been identified in England – one in the West Midlands and one in Haringey, London.

When the varient crosses a border, it is highly likely it will cross by plane or boat. The worst case outcome is mass lockdowns. I have some faith that it is easier to detect COVID on sea voyages because it is slower and I assume less volume of people, but air travel is a different story. What are the risk-rewards of this air travel?

In 2020 I faced things like being forbidden from leaving my home & my parents potentially dying (they didn't). These were issues faced on a mass scale. I'd like to know how important all this globetrotting is relative to those pain points.

I suppose I'm open to shutting down passenger travel by boat if the numbers are there.

“Most of them don’t speak English?”

That is so not true. English is compulsory in Indian schools and has been since partition. There are 125 million English speakers in India, second only to America. You will never find a shortage of people who speak English there, even in remote villages.

India has 125 million English speakers out of over a billion people total, so yes, most Indians don't speak English. That said, I disagree with the overall assertion that a language barrier between India and global English media is the reason for unsatisfying reporting. I suspect current events are just still too murky.

125 million english speakers is still around ~10% of the population right? So if ~90% don't speak English then saying "most" seems accurate.

True…I should in most communities you can find people who speak English.

> why are there still plane flights 12 months in to the pandemic? Someone fill me in on what I've missed; this seems to be not taking the situation seriously. Are these variants not going to be travelling between countries by plane and ship?

Because the virus is more than an order of magnitude less dangerous than initial estimates, but we are stuck with the legacy decisions made back then in a political environment where admitting you were wrong is seen as suicide. This is why each successive "lockdown" has basically been "do like last time, but more half assed." The reality of the situation is that the virus has a mortality rate of around 0.3% of which half are over 80. This is just not worth shutting down large swathes of the economy indefinitely for, but, politically, you can't say that. So here we are.

You are commenting on a thread that is literally about an entire country's healthcare system collapsing because of this virus. People in their 30s and 40s who would otherwise have survived with appropriate medical care, are dying because they can't get hospital beds.

The raw facts are that lockdowns and other COVID restrictions saved millions of lives. I'm open to arguments about other balancing factors but they must come from an underlying view that some restrictions on personal liberty are completely legitimate in emergencies. Skeptics like the signatories of the "Great Barrington Declaration" should learn from India, take the L and have some more humility next time.

> The reality of the situation is that the virus has a mortality rate of around 0.3% of which half are over 80.

...when everyone can receive medical treatment in a roughly modern-ish hospital.

the concern from the start of the "flatten the curve" discussions has been to ensure that the number of simultaneous severe infections does not exceed the number of hospital beds, so that we stay at merely 0.3%.

(and also to keep the rate of transmission low enough that we're not providing ideal conditions for the virus to evolve.)