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Comment by TheCowboy | Hacker News Reader

Except that being wrong about how bad a virus is can be catastrophic, especially when nearly every nation was woefully underprepared. You can easily do math to demonstrate how small changes in the variables of a virus can lead to more dire outcomes.

What if China had taken the most conservative policy in response to the appearance of covid-19? Maybe we would have been spared the turmoil and disruption of this pandemic. You're way too confident declaring this as "provably false".

Hopefully our knowledge is greater and our preparedness will be better such that we don't have to always take such an aggressive policy position when faced with a novel virus.

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The job of Governing is not solely to minimise loss of life, or to utterly avoid tail risks irrespective of cost. (imo)

Focussing so myopically on the above has had unmeasurable consequences on a huge variety of fronts. My prime fury is reserved for closing schools. Extraordinary damage done, gulfs in opportunity and experience widened. Nobody cares much. Death stats are, after all, the only thing that matters to the media at large

This isn't what my comment is arguing. This is about the outbreak phase when we don't know much. I appreciate some of the points you're making but it's also not a binary choice.

As we acquire more information, policy should evolve with it. Limits on individual freedoms are blunt policy tools that should be used only when necessary, because they aren't zero cost.

I don't think we should have forever lockdowns at all. I'm in the camp of "get vaccinated and move on with your life" and that we should be more upfront about how covid-19 isn't going to be eradicated anytime soon.

You're pro having 30 people breathing in a small room with bad airflow for multiple hours when there's a pandemic?

If you don't know how it's transmitted, then try various things and see if they help. We tried lockdown, and it worked. So we kept doing it, if it didn't change the situation we would have tried other things instead.

Yup. I think that fucking up the education of children, especially those from low socio-economic status backgrounds, is worse than the deaths not doing it causes.

It is not that lockdown is bad or wrong. It is that I do not agree with all the things which were hit. I acknowledge there is a price to keeping education open but I believe it would have been worthwhile.

Perhaps you missed my point? Governing is about more than keeping the most people alive.

> Perhaps you missed my point? Governing is about more than keeping the most people alive.

Actually I believe that’s table stakes for good governance. Trading known deaths for possible impact to development of children isn’t even in the realm of equal, which is why most places didn’t do it.

But we’ll trade thousands of lives to secure some nice minerals in Afghanistan. Cmon.

And, early on it was not sure how Covid would affect children. Their lives and health are still more important than their education. Better be conservative in hazardous circumstances. Better safe than sorry

How has their development been impacted? I mean apart from the ones who died.

Why is their education fucked up?

What about the children who infected their parents and now they're orphans?

We tried lockdown, and it worked. So we kept doing it

No, we tried lockdowns, they did not work well, then extended them, then again. In my country some school children did not go to school for a whole year because people with anxiety disorder thought opening schools would kill children, parents and grand parents.

There is very little proof that lockdowns worked. We had no clue if they worked going in and we still can’t prove they worked, let alone well enough to justify their immense societal costs.

Do we have proof that the "societal costs" were immense, compared to what they could have been if more people died?

I mean, I made a chart, seems pretty obvious https://imgur.com/a/mI8OdpW

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