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Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

Are you suggesting that the Indian numbers are in any way accurate?

It doesn't matter, panic is gone, they are not scared anymore as they got used to fact that >99% of them are surviving. >99% survival is very acceptable for countries where preventive health check ups does not exist.

In those countries people die all the time due to reasons which could have been prevented with regular health check ups and care, COVID restrictions were only making it worse for people who have to work everyday to pay for that days food.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/31/health/us-coronavirus-tuesday...

5 states have fewer than 10% of their ICU beds remaining. The public death rate of victims who receive treatment when necessary has virtually no relation with the reality of "number of people requiring medical care > medical care available". If those 5 states weren't doing even the minimum of vaccines/distancing/masking that they're doing today, they would be at 0% capacity, without question.

Definitely what Australia is doing is too much, but opening everything and leaving it to individual choices is an incomprehensibly bad position.

> If those 5 states weren't doing even the minimum of vaccines/distancing/masking that they're doing today, they would be at 0% capacity, without question.

Is there evidence of that? From my limited and non-expert perspective, it seems that states that had substantial restrictions (California) experienced the same types of waves that states with barely any restrictions (Florida) experienced at different times. It seems like we have a lot less control of these waves than we think we do.

The restrictions were uniformly unenforced throughout the USA. Enough people ignored them without consequence, so the pandemic effects were similar to states without restrictions. I live in CA, notorious for their "strict" stay-at-home orders and mask mandates. If I wanted to, I could have easily gotten in my car, violated those orders by driving around, found a restaurant violating those orders, sat down and eaten there, totally unmasked. If this was the situation in one of the "more locked down" states, then it's no surprise that the virus spread similarly to states where there were few restrictions.

I'm not confident in western numbers either. There's a definite conflict of interest when governments are tasked with collecting data which rationalizes their use of emergency powers.

Right new York under Cuomo, widely hailed as a star governor with regards to covid, misreported up to 12000 deaths, which only came to light officially when the lieutenant governor took over.

There are government-independent studies that roughly reflect similar numbers. CMU's Delphi team has an interesting survey - no media involvement needed, they offer an API.

Studies are worthless if the data reporting by the source (hospitals) was inaccurate. We have strong reason to believe bias since emergency funds were allocated to places with the highest covid count

> emergency funds were allocated to places with the highest covid count

Wouldn't this be how we would expect things to work? Places with more infections need more resources. It seems to me like the "strong reason to believe bias" is the exact same evidence as "this is how I would expect it to work in absence of bias".

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