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Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

People saw, but how many really saw? Not many, I think. My post is now sitting at -3 (as expected), which is what usually happens on HN COVID threads whenever a new chunk of the narrative falls off and someone points out it was known from the start.

Whilst some people might have seen and registered the mismatch in private, very few were willing to point it out in public. Instead people acted as if everyone was guaranteed to be infected immediately. This incorrect belief about susceptibility rates was the basis of the models that predicted one giant wave in April 2020, it's what justified all the lockdowns, mandates, travel shutdowns etc. To point out that some people weren't getting sick was to attack the entire COVID narrative, because if you use a correct IFR and multiply by the real immunity rate, you get a number too low to pose problems to the health system.

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> if you use a correct IFR and multiply by the real immunity rate, you get a number too low to pose problems to the health system

Both the "correct number" and the "real immunity rate" were not known at the beginning of the pandemic, and, had they been different, many more people could have died before we would have realized and taken corrective action. In the face of these unknowns, wouldn't you agree that being cautious was the more responsible course of action?

They were both known early on thanks to the outbreak on the Diamond Princess, which was a perfectly sealed environment yielding data on the worst case scenario (cruise ships are full of the elderly). Officials just ignored it.

But it was also known that IFRs measured early on in an epidemic are always too high, because the less serious cases don't get reported or detected. There's discussion of that problem in the literature pre-dating COVID. So you'd expect some attempt to compensate for that, which there wasn't.

And finally once more accurate data did become available, epidemiologists typically ignored it. They were still happily publishing models assuming a 1% IFR in 2021.

W.R.T. acting in the face of unknowns, no, would not agree. The precautionary principle can be used to justify literally any action no matter how crazy. It's informally called the politician's fallacy (something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done). You do have to make decisions based on data. Not having data or understanding doesn't give permission to make everyone do literally anything you want. It means you can't take morally legitimate action until you do have that understanding.

> because if you use a correct IFR and multiply by the real immunity rate, you get a number too low to pose problems to the health system

You don't have to estimate, because the actual outcome in terms of number of infections frequently overwhelmed local health capacity in many countries. Certainly UK policy ended up in a loop of hospital overload -> lockdown -> rate goes down but still prevalent -> unlock -> infection rises.

Lockdowns had no effect on case numbers, as has been proven in several different ways by now. The Swedish healthcare system for example did not collapse.

People's understanding of the hospital situation have been badly distorted by the problem of officials lying about it, which happened distressingly frequently. Officials often just made things up when it came to hospital overload. They knew people wouldn't suspect they were lying and it would make people obey, which seemed to be their only priority :( Consider this case from November 2021 where the head of NHS England said “The NHS is running hot...We have had fourteen times the number of people in hospital with Covid than we saw this time last year”. That was not only a 100% false statement, it was absurd on its face. In reality hospital load was lower, not higher. FullFact wrote about it here:

https://fullfact.org/health/amanda-pritchard-nhs-hospitalisa...

Then when asked why she said that, the NHS lied again! They claimed the comparison was actually between August of each year because there was no more recent data, even as daily updated data could be downloaded from their own dashboard:

https://capx.co/why-is-the-head-of-nhs-england-peddling-dodg...

Nobody in the media challenged any of this. They were happy to repeat her lies uncritically. Now think about how often they did this without getting caught.

This wasn't a UK specific problem. Similar things happened in Switzerland: the government held a press release where they said hospitals were overloaded even as their own dashboards directly contradicted them, showing no unusual level of bed demand. It was remarkable that health officials so frequently said things directly contradicted by their own data, and how no "journalists" ever called them on it. Did these people even realize these dashboards existed at all? Often it seemed not.

Were you on the front lines of the pandemic? Respectfully it sounds like you weren't. When nurses and doctors are using trash bags against a novel disease because supplies have run out—that's posing a problem to the health system. When they have to move ventilators from upstate NY to NYC—that's posing a problem to the health system. You're not going to find a source from an epidemiologist saying 100% of exposures lead to an infection. Otherwise you would have already posted it as part of your conspiracy theory.

They even deployed the national guard in areas to set up tent hospitals because the local hospitals couldn't keep up. The reason saying "not everyone gets sick!!!1!!" attacks the narrative is not because it's correct (although it is). It attacks the narrative because people can be asymptomatic carriers. Can't believe the same shit is being rehashed now, several years into a new endemic illness that could have been overcome with a global version of the lockdowns that Vietnam and China did (until realizing literally no other country cared enough).

Lastly—how the fuck is a government supposed to get the IFR absolutely 100% correct for a novel virus without rolling out mandatory testing and reporting? I don't know what people expect from the government. Magic I guess. Didn't lock down but you should have? Right to jail. Locked down but things weren't as bad as we thought? Right to jail.

The real criticism of the US government should be for the economic policy it chose to pursue over the real lives and health of its citizens. Don't expect that conversation on here.

Also note that in Washington State we had originally received a field hospital, but the quarantine was so effective at preventing our health system from collapsing that the army redeployed it to California by April.

There’s this constant misconception that the quarantine was about keeping people safe from COVID. It wasn’t. What it was about was preventing our hospitals from being so overwhelmed they could no longer treat emergencies or acute medical problems. The trigger for a lockdown here was pretty straightforward: over N% bed occupancy in the state hospital system was the trigger.

Yes, your post is down-voted by a logic and rational thought denialists. You are not attacking the view but you are attacking them because they have become believers of the Covidian Church

I downvote comments that are uninteresting. The last thing I want to do is rehash politics that don’t matter anymore. Literally don’t care, stop talking.

This kind of attack on people for disagreeing is what most of us come to HN to avoid. Conspiracy theories are fun entertainment but anathema to discussion.

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