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I’m really surprised at the public reaction in the UK. Many of my friends are still going to pubs and concerts like nothing is going on. Life is just continuing

• Aqua 7y ago
  On the other hand, if it works the payoff will be quite significant in terms of impact to the economy compared to the rest of the world.
  • mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    If condemning 2-5% of your elderly population to death with a shrug is seen as shrewd economic policy, I’m moving to Mars. Fuck this place.
    • glofish 7y ago
      It has always been like that, only usually it is not this obvious. All advanced societies are built on the exploitation of someone else, you just did not get to see who those people were. Note: I am not endorsing the choice - just observing.
    • CPLX 7y ago
      You’re going to be really upset then when you find out what happens to the elderly if you just wait a few years. This stuff always involves complicated choices. For example, would you advocate a policy of taxing all restaurant owners at a 90% marginal rate forcing most into bankruptcy to pay for a very expensive new medical treatment that only works on the elderly and extends their life just a few years? If you proposed that do you think it would be unanimous or controversial?
      • mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        Describing sheer abandonment of elder care as “a complicated trade-off” is utterly disgusting.
        • CPLX 7y ago
          Did anyone propose that? Do you believe that, in normal circumstances, we should repurpose all money typically spent on primary education and firefighting to go to elder care instead? If you weren’t arguing for that last year then you believe in complicated trade-offs too. The concept of trade-offs is the absolute core basis of all major public policy decisions. It’s also the basic of many personal decisions. If you’re familiar with hospice care or a DNR order then you know that end of life questions have trade-off calculations as well, even within families or between life partners. Pretending this is a binary decision is just nonsensical.
          • mlthoughts2018 7y ago
            > “ Did anyone propose that?” In rereading your post carefully, the answer is yes. You did describe it that way and offer a reason to think it’s not so bad. Doing so is shameful.
          • rsecora 7y ago
            One day youngers will be elders too, and the future youngers will apply the same rules. Marines say "no one left behind", for a reason, because it creates a group... A society. The UK decision smells like eugenics.
    • amscanne 7y ago
      I imagine that 2-5% of people over 70 die each year from other natural causes, if not much more. I’m not justifying anything, but I feel the death rates need to be understood in this context.
      • bcrosby95 7y ago
        What's with the focus of people over 70? If you catch this and are in your 50s or 60s, you have a decently high chance of dying. Hell, the young and healthy can go skydiving 100 times and have less chance of dying vs coronavirus. Nevermind the not dying part. Over 50% of ICU spots in France and the Netherlands for coronavirus are taken up by people under 60. Pneumonia this severe can cause permanent lung damage.
    • zozbot234 7y ago
      It's not 2%-5% of the elderly, it's 10% or more. Particularly with no supportive treatment. The UK government say they will try to preferentially isolate the elderly population, but this makes very little sense. People will spread the infection regardless, and some social contacts across generations will have to occur.
    • jotm 7y ago
      "Some of you may die, but that's a risk I'm willing to take"
      • zepto 7y ago
        “Some of you will die but that’s a risk I’m willing to take”
        • sgt101 7y ago
          "Some of you will die* this year, and there is nothing that anyone can do about that" *some of you will die even without the virus, more of you will die than normal because of it, this is awful, but true.
          • zepto 7y ago
            Many more of you will die than would have if I had chosen a better policy.
            • sgt101 7y ago
              That may or may not be true - there's no given that there is a better policy or that any of the policies that we have seen are a better policy. We won't know until next year at least - the final counting will take a while.
    • avip 7y ago
      Wake up people. The fatality in Italy borders 8% average! For that age group it's > 10% UK seems to be playing a very dangerous game.
      • CraigJPerry 7y ago
        I don’t think wake up is the right sentiment. In South Korea, Germany, the diamond princess, in fact anywhere that’s not Italy or Wuhan the death rate is lower. The higher death rates have occurred in places where the health system was overrun. Of course with the current trajectory the UK health system will be over run.
    • Gupie 7y ago
      Deaths in the elderly is precisely what the UK strategy is aiming to avoid. Isolate elderly and other at risk groups until there is herd immunity in the rest of the population.
      • mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        The UK strategy is not aiming to reduce deaths in the elderly. Claiming that it is would be a grievous lie to distract attention from the real and only reason: propping up the economy as long as possible. Claiming you can isolate at risk groups well enough while the whole country is going about its business is just putting your fingers in your ears and going lalalalala.
    • JamesBarney 7y ago
      It's 2-5% of the general population. It's much higher among the elderly. And once the hospitals gets overrun it could easily be even higher than that.
  • glofish 7y ago
    If the strategy works the UK will benefit massively. It is like seeing an experiment playing out at a societal scale. We are all looking at it from a personal level, but successful societies have always been built on sacrifices of various kinds - their costs or others (colonization)
  • yulaow 7y ago
    And if it doesn't work it would be catastrophic in terms of impact because the NHS will collapse fast and won't be even able to process all the other medical needs of the population for an extremely long time.
    • CraigJPerry 7y ago
      Taking a step back from the impact on patients, if you subscribe to conservative economic thinking, this would be a good thing in the long run. Of course the impact would be blunt but relatively short and in conservative thinking a quick swallow of a bitter pill for future benefits is a perfect idea. The future benefit being get the state out of medicine. I don’t subscribe to this view at all but having read Rees-Mogg’s daddy’s book, the Soverign Individual i will happily stake my house on the above being very close to the victorian geezer’s view on this.
    • baby 7y ago
      On the other hand free healthcare!
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • overcast 7y ago
    So you saying I should have call options on EWU? Probably a bit premature, but could be a good gamble.
    • cycrutchfield 7y ago
      TBH this looks more like you should buy a straddle.
  • Twisell 7y ago
    There is however another underlying gamble. If they let the virus freely evolve and spread this might also give it more opportunities to mutate and maybe become more lethal whereas country that try to mitigate contagion won't offer as many hosts to try random forks...
    • gruez 7y ago
      >this might also give it more opportunities to mutate and maybe become more lethal AFAIK viruses tend to mutate to be less lethal because killing the host is bad for reproduction. random source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu >This is a common occurrence with influenza viruses: there is a tendency for pathogenic viruses to become less lethal with time, as the hosts of more dangerous strains tend to die out
      • klipt 7y ago
        The first wave of the Spanish Flu mostly killed the elderly. The second wave mutated and killed young, normally healthy people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Deadly_second_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Deadly_second_wave
        • CraigJPerry 7y ago
          I see that same line being peddled out of context like this frequently these days. When you point out the young people factor you really also need to point out why that was the case and it wasn’t because of the mutation of the virus...
          • klipt 7y ago
            Wikipedia says it was a mutation, although the selective pressure on that mutation (war) is something we hopefully won't have in today's circumstances.
    • empath75 7y ago
      There is very little evolutionary pressure to mutate to a more lethal variant and a lot of pressure to mutate to less dangerous variant. The ideal evolutionary strategy is to produce excess bodily fluids from sweating, coughing and sneezing, while not making people so sick that they lay down and stay home, let alone die. Viruses don’t get bonus points for being lethal, unlike certain video games.
  • jotm 7y ago
    People are still working everywhere. It will be interesting to see GBP/EURO this week, on Friday it tumbled doooown. I predict it will go down another 5p.
• overcast 7y ago
  Same here, I'm continuously amazed people are actively "standing up" to a virus. Like it's some terrorist threat that they won't back down in fear from. A dude last week told me he's flying out for a cruise this week. How many spring breakers hopped on planes to Mexico? Can you really not live without going out for a few weeks? Stay inside, read a book, watch some movies, work on that video game backlog, get some work done. The quicker we stop the spread, the quicker we can all go back to our normal lives. All you're doing is just making it longer and more devastating. wtf people. Use your brains. It's totally irresponsible for you to be spreading this to everyone else.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Like it's some terrorist threat that they won't back down in fear from. Ironically, even the actual terrorists decided to back down in fear from it, suspend their terrorist activities, and teach themselves how to wash hands properly. https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-isis-terrorists-europe/ https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-isis-terrorists-...
  • ivanbakel 7y ago
    >The quicker we stop the spread, the quicker we can all go back to our normal lives. All you're doing is just making it longer and more devastating. From my understanding, this isn't really true. "Stopping the spread" is an unreasonable and incredibly difficult undertaking. Isolation is about reducing the rate of cases. It's likely that similar infection numbers will be reached over the course of the whole pandemic no matter what. Nobody is going back to "normal life" any time soon - the only question is how drastic the counter-measures will be.
    • swader999 7y ago
      The idea to social distancing is to slow the inevitable spread so health infrastructure isn't overwhelmed and death is minimized.
      • bob33212 7y ago
• rolltiide 7y ago
  When you look at the incentives: less vulnerable people (because the vulnerable ones will be wiped out) will make it more economical for the trade deal with the US to go through, the part about healthcare. So yeah they probably are making them cannon fodder, whether its intentional or not, the incentives would let higher ups look at the proposal and say "by golly that makes so much sense", whereas the rest of the world wouldn't consider this proposal as killing two birds with one stone and just reject the proposal.
  • Gupie 7y ago
    Vulnerable people are being told to isolate themselves until herd there is herd immunity. The policy protects that elderly.
• CPLX 7y ago
  It’s the same in New York. At this point we can talk all day about it on message boards but we are going to find out who’s right soon enough regardless.
• wintorez 7y ago
  They have taken "Keep Calm and Carry On" to the heart.
• chrisseaton 7y ago
  "Keep Calm and Carry On" is a big part of British national identity. It may or may not be appropriate in this crisis, sounds like genuine experts are arguing both ways, but that's part of the reason behind why the British respond like this.
  • tiles 7y ago
    That's what confuses me. How particularly is the UK so different from the rest of Europe or the globe even? I get that how the UK views itself may give support for this strategy, and it agrees with how I view UK society, but why only in this location is national identity the defining factor in pandemic response?
    • chrisseaton 7y ago
      The UK is a funny combination of collectivism and individualism. The NHS, BBC, the Blitz spirit, but also small-c-conservatism, almost always slightly-right-of-centre governments, the Monarchy. It's culturally mid-Atlantic - somewhere between the European way and the way in the United States. And that's pretty much how they're responding to this crisis, isn't it?
    • dmix 7y ago
      The UK already has more aggressive policies than Canada and our PM is in isolation. The UK is easily par for the course. It really only got very serious yesterday when numbers doubled (which we saw with the US reacting to that news). The UK government has also completely denied the “herd immunity” thing is part of any active policy. But that hasn’t slowed down social media... or HN for that matter.
    • xorcist 7y ago
      Is it really that different? The actions and motivations seems very much like Finland and Sweden, for example, in as much as they stage their response and focus on keeping the society running until data suggests otherwise.
• zozbot234 7y ago
  > Personally I’m staying as isolated as I can until the worst of this is over, regardless of the official advice. Good choice. Look at what Italy and Spain are doing now. Stay at home as much as possible, don't hang out with others. Wear personal protective equipment if you must go out for some reason.
  • mattmanser 7y ago
    It's worth pointing out that Italy is about 2 weeks further along in infection spread than the UK and Spain a week. Italy's had 1800 death, Spain 300, UK 30. They're all roughly the same size population (60, 50, 70 million) As I've said in other threads on this, I would assume that the earlier you lock down, the longer you have to stay locked down. Or you risk a second peak. There's a balancing act, given that it's not possible now to stop the spread, only slow it. Lock down too early and you do a lot of damage to the economy and by extension the country. Lock down too late and people die from lack of care.
    • sgt101 7y ago
      Additionally it is not clear yet that the interventions in Italy and Spain have worked. It will not be clear for some months in fact.
    • zozbot234 7y ago
      > I would assume that the earlier you lock down, the longer you have to stay locked down. I would not assume that at all. Containment is still possible in a looser sense; many places in both Italy and Spain may end up being disease-free in a shorter period of time by locking down things early, and then they can contribute healthcare resources to places where the disease is more widespread, or even be put under some sort of protective "reverse" quarantine with less strict measures.
      • mattmanser 7y ago
        And then you've got to lock down the next region, which re-infects the first region or you've got to keep the lock-down there happening, and so on, and so on. Did you not think this through? Essentially the whole things a massive balancing act, allow a certain amount of infections, but not too many the health service gets overwhelmed. Even China's now getting more infections from outside than in, which is only going to grow. The consensus is that you can't stop it now. So your plan might be an even worse idea, a cascading lock down, that lasts even longer. The only hope being summer stops it like flu, but then you're left with a potential resurgence in autumn and even more lock downs.
• jotm 7y ago
  It's the British way, they're a tough cynical bunch heh. Plus it's human nature to not believe something until it happens to you or your family. I'm not gonna panic, and keep going as usual, with the recommended precautions. Ideally I don't want to get infected, but if I do, oh well, such is life.
• zulgan 7y ago
  do not judge people's relationship with death. some are rational, some petrify and can not move, some try to face it, some turn inside, some turn outside. some old people are going out on purpose, if they petrify they will not be able to live anyway. anyway, it is not easy for anyone when the mass is moving in such volatile way, not to mention individual responsibility towards the group is stressed to extremes (as you can see people fighting over toilet paper for example) i am also staying as isolated as i can, but from time to time i force myself and my family to go out in the forest, to see that the world is not burning yet.
  • senordevnyc 7y ago
    This has little to do with your risk of death as an individual unless you’re in a vulnerable population. Rather, it’s about people’s selfish indifference to how their actions risk infecting and killing other people. And I’ll judge that all I want, thanks.
    • sgt101 7y ago
      How do you feel about people who drive cars? Driving a car risks killing people - tens of thousands die in car accidents. Do you judge drivers?
• muse900 7y ago
  I would like to see if Gov officials apply the same 'herd immunity' tactic to themselves and their relatives as well. Would be great to see if Boris Johnson and his cabinet and their close ones are staying home or not.
  • Hokusai 7y ago
    > I would like to see if Gov officials apply the same 'herd immunity' tactic to themselves and their relatives as well. The problem is not getting the virus. But, if everybody gets it at the same time. That will make hospitals collapse as queues of people wait for treatment. If Goverment officials have access to health care, it does not matter for them what happens to the rest of the population. Herd immunity works. And one hundred years from now what the government did is irrelevant. The problem is the suffering that may be caused to the current UK citizens. It may work, but the price to pay if it doesn't is very high. It not only includes lives but the long term trust in the government and its institutions, that is quite eroded already.
• grawprog 7y ago
  So why didn't people do this back in 2009? https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemic.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi... Or back in 2014? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/12/30/this-seasons-flu-activity-has-reached-the-epidemic-threshold-the-cdc-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/1... Why is the world taking such an extreme reaction towards a disease that's less deadly and infectious than ones from 5 and 11 years ago where there wasn't an air of extreme hostility directed towards people for not worrying? Is it because the name is scarier? Is it because it's not a flu but a coronavirus? Because I still remember those, those were genuinely scary, mortality rates were high for healthy people, there were millions of cases around the world, and it was highly infectious. Yet, there was no massive global quarantine, the world didn't end, and life went on. Why should a disease that is less bad in every conceivable way be so much more panic inducing?
  • noja 7y ago
    > Why should a disease that is less bad in every conceivable way be so much more panic inducing? Because it's worse in every way: the initial containment has failed, the base immunity does not exist, the transmission rate is much higher, and the virus is more deadly.
    • grawprog 7y ago
      >and the virus is more deadly. Explain this, because this is the part I just can't wrap my head around. How is a disease that's deadly towards a much smaller percentage of the population 'more deadly'. Children aren't affected, anyone under the age of 60 is mildly affected barring pre-existing health problems. How is that more deadly than, a 30% mortality rate for young otherwise healthy individuals in the case of 2009's pandemic?
      • noja 7y ago
        Don't forget containment failed.
• mike-cardwell 7y ago
  "like nothing is going on" - Most people assume they'll be fine. And they're right. Even those that get it, the vast majority will survive it, like they survive most illnesses. It's just not that scary unless you're in an at-risk category. I say this as a British male in my 30's. I'm not changing anything unless I get ill. And then, it will only be to stay away from at-risk people and large gatherings. If I worked in an office, I'd work from home, but I work from home already. I'm certainly not going to barracade myself in my house for weeks/months. That's just my perspective, and one which may explain why you're seeing this behaviour from other Brits. [edit] Yeah, I thought this comment might be controversial. General response seems to be that I should be more scared than I am, and that I should do more than I am to stop the spread of the disease. I'm still not scared, and I still feel my response is proprotionate at this time.
  • yread 7y ago
    Even young people end up in ICU like this 16 year old: https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/5056536/sehraz-breda-coronavirus-16-intensive-care-besmet-covid19 https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/5056536/se... As the classic asks: Do you feel lucky, punk?
    • baby 7y ago
      They probably would have ended up there after catching the flu.
      • allannienhuis 7y ago
        but they're no where nearly as likely to catch the flu as they are this virus, which no one is immune to.
      • wila 7y ago
        The boy was never sick.
    • mike-cardwell 7y ago
      Every time I eat something or go somewhere, or don't eat something or don't go somewhere, I'm taking a risk with my life. What matters is what the level of risk is, and what the cost of reducing that risk is. I feel lucky.
• onetimemanytime 7y ago
  The bravest of the brave, hide from this. These guys don't know what's gonna hit them. But the fault lies with the government, they know and should know better