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No leader wants to take drastic action for their nation when the number of deaths they can point to for justification is smaller than the number of deaths for t

by Taek 7y ago

No leader wants to take drastic action for their nation when the number of deaths they can point to for justification is smaller than the number of deaths for the seasonal flu. If they save lives and prevent the disease from spreading, it looks like they over-reacted and unnecessarily tanked the economy.

res0nat0r 7y ago
The USA is going to be in terrible shape very soon, just look at this as of tonight: https://twitter.com/davidenrich/status/1239004689338970113 https://twitter.com/davidenrich/status/1239004689338970113
- jtaft 7y ago
  wow
- beamatronic 7y ago
  I cannot understand why unnecessary flying was not shut down weeks or months ago.
  - nullc 7y ago
    Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids. :) Now scale this up to the whole country and account for the fact that HN is probably a little better on average about reasoning about these things. But now, on HN now we're mostly preaching to the choir... I've been contacting the officials of my state and surrounding communities since February 28th urging action. If your community isn't taking action you should join in. Even if your politicians don't respond to math, they'll still respond to public outcry. The best time to respond was a while ago, but today is still vastly better than tomorrow.
    - nodamage 7y ago
      > Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids. Exactly. Two weeks ago every coronavirus thread on Hacker News was full of deniers claiming this was no worse than the flu and this was all just media hysteria. Some probably still hold that opinion. I don't think they will be convinced until the hospitals start overflowing.
      - dmitriy_ko 7y ago
        Elon Musk was one of the deniers. You would think someone who "always starts with physics" would know better.
        _jal 7y ago
        Wealthy people have a habit of doing this. Being good at something doesn't necessarily make you good at something else, and the hero-worship the wealthy get in the US (not to mention his fan club) can't help but go to one's head. (Engineers to, too. I try hard to watch it and I still arrogantly show my ignorance sometimes.)
        friendlybus 7y ago
        He has a responsibility to not feed panic.
      - joe_the_user 7y ago
        Yeah, When Coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, I tended to the opinion that it would self-limiting in one fashion or another or that is would not be worse than the flu. Only people arguing with me and me investigating the facts changed that. And, yeah, changing your opinion is hard and imagining a force that will upend the world is hard so it's easy to imagine how people stay in their positions. That said, we have a representative government with the aim of electing people who will think ahead and protect from purely reflex based views. And clearly that control has failed.
        nullc 7y ago
        As disappointed as I am with much of the response in the US, it could still be a lot worse. The potential for this kind of pandemic is something that the government was aware of and at least somewhat prepared for. It can be hard to imagine, but if all we had were the concerns of joe-everyman this would have caught us significantly more off-guard than it has. Where I think we've faltered is in rapidly the hard decisions to trade-off short term economic impact vs long term health and economic impact. But there is still time to do a lot of good, and the level of our response seems to now-- finally-- be increasing exponentially along with the infection.
  - ajmurmann 7y ago
    That apparently makes very little difference. I listened to an interview with a Yale professor who cited stories that showed minimal impact. The supposed reason is that by the time you know a country has an outbreak, it's already to late and people from there will have travelled to your country. What apparently had been shown to be very effective is preemptive school closures. Unfortunately that's a tough call because we can't have a well functioning social system liked other developed countries. Interview: https://samharris.org/podcasts/190-respond-coronavirus https://samharris.org/podcasts/190-respond-coronavirus
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Why are people still flying now? Most public transportation is rated as dangerous for several weeks already.
  - thedance 7y ago
    Why do people ever fly? Something like a quarter of people who travel by air contract a respiratory infection from doing so. It's an extremely effective way to spread disease.
- newtoday 7y ago
  I'm in the US, no one cared about this until a few days ago. Now, some stores are getting low on food supplies, and people are posting about it. But, I was at a store today where they were completely stocked, and the only empty shelf was the toilet paper supply! It's insane.
  - dboreham 7y ago
    Surely the hand sanitizer shelf was empty too?
    - erikerikson 7y ago
      Tofu was surprisingly empty here.
    - newtoday 7y ago
      Not empty at all, maybe a shipment came in, though.
  - pettycashstash2 7y ago
    What? I’m in New England tri state and started preparing 28 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22339369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22339369
    - dboreham 7y ago
      Parent presumably means no regular people. I had a similar experience: a month ago I suddenly realized we may need to be isolated at home for up to 2 months. I live in a place where that's actually fairly practical. Except our generator was broken. So I left work, drove to town immediately with the idea that I might be able to get the last generator as they sold out given that everyone else surely would be also buying a generator. Then over the next month I watched as Costco stacked a huge pile of generators near the entrance, eventually hand sanitizer sold out, flu medication, Isopropyl alcohol, and finally TP. I think you can still get a generator though.
      - 7y ago
- vl 7y ago
  Well, all these people consciously have chosen to fly at the time like this. It was clear that drastic travel disruption is imminent and chance of exposure is high on the plane, and yet they took the risk.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    Wow, you're not even considering that each infection in that airport will come back and infect a bunch of people who didn't make the choice to fly? IE we should not allow people to take risks that are going impact all of society. The virus has exploded the American myth that we can isolate individual behavior to individual rewards but also this myth means the country is going to seriously suffer.
tormeh 7y ago
This. No self-preserving politician wold have reacted early to this. And you don't get to that level without being self-preserving.
- hatenberg 7y ago
  Clearly self preservation stops at simple math. We need to confront the fact that democracy in the West by now elects people who sell the most comfortable lies instead of people who help adaptation to reality.
  - cercatrova 7y ago
    Political leadership being self serving while convincing people that they are not has been true throughout history, and will continue to do so in the future. There is no way to stop this without modifying human nature itself. I cannot blame the voting populace, yet at the same time, I cannot blame the politicians either. They are part of a larger system of incentives.
    - arvinsim 7y ago
      Then perhaps we need a better version of democracy. Or a better system of government altogether. I am hopeful that human civilization and ingenuity can invent or discover that. I am just not confident that it would be anytime soon.
      - ModernMech 7y ago
        The solution I think would be to somehow get people to lead who have no desire to do so. Politics attracts sociopaths and psychopaths due to the power involved. Competent and compassionate people have no time and patience for the power jockeying while sociopaths live for it. Thus you end up with a government by sociopaths for themselves. But how to make politics unappealing to sociopaths? Beats me.
        dmitriy_ko 7y ago
hatenberg 7y ago
The science that this was not the flu was clear 6-8 weeks ago. Even if you thought china was under-reporting, it was clear what would happen. Then korea happened. There was no excuse because there was never a chance for another outcome. The WHO was screaming into the void.
nullc 7y ago
That argument might work at a national level. It works less well at a community level, and I think stops working for any community once there is observed community spread there. After that point it is mathematically clear that you're going to have deaths, and that similarly situated communities who react days later will have a lot more deaths. At that point the political calculus you're arguing for flips the other way around and encourages an over-reaction. ... except innumeracy is so common, we're not seeing too much evidence of that happening.

by Taek 7y ago

res0nat0r 7y ago

The USA is going to be in terrible shape very soon, just look at this as of tonight: https://twitter.com/davidenrich/status/1239004689338970113 https://twitter.com/davidenrich/status/1239004689338970113

jtaft 7y ago
wow
beamatronic 7y ago
I cannot understand why unnecessary flying was not shut down weeks or months ago.
- nullc 7y ago
  Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids. :) Now scale this up to the whole country and account for the fact that HN is probably a little better on average about reasoning about these things. But now, on HN now we're mostly preaching to the choir... I've been contacting the officials of my state and surrounding communities since February 28th urging action. If your community isn't taking action you should join in. Even if your politicians don't respond to math, they'll still respond to public outcry. The best time to respond was a while ago, but today is still vastly better than tomorrow.
  - nodamage 7y ago
    > Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids. Exactly. Two weeks ago every coronavirus thread on Hacker News was full of deniers claiming this was no worse than the flu and this was all just media hysteria. Some probably still hold that opinion. I don't think they will be convinced until the hospitals start overflowing.
    - dmitriy_ko 7y ago
      Elon Musk was one of the deniers. You would think someone who "always starts with physics" would know better.
      - _jal 7y ago
        Wealthy people have a habit of doing this. Being good at something doesn't necessarily make you good at something else, and the hero-worship the wealthy get in the US (not to mention his fan club) can't help but go to one's head. (Engineers to, too. I try hard to watch it and I still arrogantly show my ignorance sometimes.)
      - friendlybus 7y ago
        He has a responsibility to not feed panic.
    - joe_the_user 7y ago
      Yeah, When Coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, I tended to the opinion that it would self-limiting in one fashion or another or that is would not be worse than the flu. Only people arguing with me and me investigating the facts changed that. And, yeah, changing your opinion is hard and imagining a force that will upend the world is hard so it's easy to imagine how people stay in their positions. That said, we have a representative government with the aim of electing people who will think ahead and protect from purely reflex based views. And clearly that control has failed.
      - nullc 7y ago
        As disappointed as I am with much of the response in the US, it could still be a lot worse. The potential for this kind of pandemic is something that the government was aware of and at least somewhat prepared for. It can be hard to imagine, but if all we had were the concerns of joe-everyman this would have caught us significantly more off-guard than it has. Where I think we've faltered is in rapidly the hard decisions to trade-off short term economic impact vs long term health and economic impact. But there is still time to do a lot of good, and the level of our response seems to now-- finally-- be increasing exponentially along with the infection.
- ajmurmann 7y ago
  That apparently makes very little difference. I listened to an interview with a Yale professor who cited stories that showed minimal impact. The supposed reason is that by the time you know a country has an outbreak, it's already to late and people from there will have travelled to your country. What apparently had been shown to be very effective is preemptive school closures. Unfortunately that's a tough call because we can't have a well functioning social system liked other developed countries. Interview: https://samharris.org/podcasts/190-respond-coronavirus https://samharris.org/podcasts/190-respond-coronavirus
ekianjo 7y ago
Why are people still flying now? Most public transportation is rated as dangerous for several weeks already.
- thedance 7y ago
  Why do people ever fly? Something like a quarter of people who travel by air contract a respiratory infection from doing so. It's an extremely effective way to spread disease.
newtoday 7y ago
I'm in the US, no one cared about this until a few days ago. Now, some stores are getting low on food supplies, and people are posting about it. But, I was at a store today where they were completely stocked, and the only empty shelf was the toilet paper supply! It's insane.
- dboreham 7y ago
  Surely the hand sanitizer shelf was empty too?
  - erikerikson 7y ago
    Tofu was surprisingly empty here.
  - newtoday 7y ago
    Not empty at all, maybe a shipment came in, though.
- pettycashstash2 7y ago
  What? I’m in New England tri state and started preparing 28 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22339369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22339369
  - dboreham 7y ago
    Parent presumably means no regular people. I had a similar experience: a month ago I suddenly realized we may need to be isolated at home for up to 2 months. I live in a place where that's actually fairly practical. Except our generator was broken. So I left work, drove to town immediately with the idea that I might be able to get the last generator as they sold out given that everyone else surely would be also buying a generator. Then over the next month I watched as Costco stacked a huge pile of generators near the entrance, eventually hand sanitizer sold out, flu medication, Isopropyl alcohol, and finally TP. I think you can still get a generator though.
    - 7y ago
vl 7y ago
Well, all these people consciously have chosen to fly at the time like this. It was clear that drastic travel disruption is imminent and chance of exposure is high on the plane, and yet they took the risk.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  Wow, you're not even considering that each infection in that airport will come back and infect a bunch of people who didn't make the choice to fly? IE we should not allow people to take risks that are going impact all of society. The virus has exploded the American myth that we can isolate individual behavior to individual rewards but also this myth means the country is going to seriously suffer.

tormeh 7y ago

This. No self-preserving politician wold have reacted early to this. And you don't get to that level without being self-preserving.

hatenberg 7y ago
Clearly self preservation stops at simple math. We need to confront the fact that democracy in the West by now elects people who sell the most comfortable lies instead of people who help adaptation to reality.
- cercatrova 7y ago
  Political leadership being self serving while convincing people that they are not has been true throughout history, and will continue to do so in the future. There is no way to stop this without modifying human nature itself. I cannot blame the voting populace, yet at the same time, I cannot blame the politicians either. They are part of a larger system of incentives.
  - arvinsim 7y ago
    Then perhaps we need a better version of democracy. Or a better system of government altogether. I am hopeful that human civilization and ingenuity can invent or discover that. I am just not confident that it would be anytime soon.
    - ModernMech 7y ago
      The solution I think would be to somehow get people to lead who have no desire to do so. Politics attracts sociopaths and psychopaths due to the power involved. Competent and compassionate people have no time and patience for the power jockeying while sociopaths live for it. Thus you end up with a government by sociopaths for themselves. But how to make politics unappealing to sociopaths? Beats me.
      - dmitriy_ko 7y ago

hatenberg 7y ago

The science that this was not the flu was clear 6-8 weeks ago. Even if you thought china was under-reporting, it was clear what would happen. Then korea happened. There was no excuse because there was never a chance for another outcome. The WHO was screaming into the void.

nullc 7y ago

That argument might work at a national level. It works less well at a community level, and I think stops working for any community once there is observed community spread there. After that point it is mathematically clear that you're going to have deaths, and that similarly situated communities who react days later will have a lot more deaths. At that point the political calculus you're arguing for flips the other way around and encourages an over-reaction. ... except innumeracy is so common, we're not seeing too much evidence of that happening.