9 ms·

Questioning the Clampdown

46 points by sbuttgereit 7y ago

leggomylibro 7y ago
I believe that at this point, any quarantine or 'shelter in place' order must be voluntary. We stand to lose too much by giving up fundamental rights, and it is questionable what we would gain from...what, arresting the vanishingly small number of people who are still blasé about the measures? Like the article notes, our goal is now to slow the virus, not stop it. Normalizing heavy-handed authoritarian measures will only breed future despotism.
- seemslegit 7y ago
  Future despotism agrees.
- Supermancho 7y ago
  > must be voluntary Must not be voluntary. Humans are erratic and generally selfish. > now to slow the virus, not stop it Stopping it is ideal and when the plague is leathal enough, the only option. It is not draconian to institute measures that are effective. They will be instituted eventually (eg if a plagie was ebola with a 60% mortality and 2wk incubation), regardless of what philosophy you subscribe to.
  - Veen 7y ago
    If you have a complete mandatory lockdown that works to stop the spread, it's highly likely that there will be a resurgence of infections as soon as the lockdown is lifted.
- thrill 7y ago
  There's nothing voluntary when your boss is saying, "Well, I'll be at work - look forward to seeing you there".
- greedo 7y ago
  Have you seen photos of large groups still hitting the bars? Lots of people think they're invulnerable.
  - guenthert 7y ago
    Not invulnerable, just not eager to give up their way of live and sanity for a stupid flu like sickness which they might or might not get. They are much more likely to die in a traffic accident when leaving the bar intoxicated, than from CORVID-19.
    - deweller 7y ago
      Please don't dismiss this illness. Your stated facts are not correct. One is 50 times more likely to die from CORVID-19 than a car crash. The latest CORVID-19 fatality rates for those aged 15 to 44 is 0.5% [1]. The odds of dying in a car crash in one year are 0.01% [2] [1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-rate-estimates/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-... [2] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o... - assumed 78 year lifespan
      - p2detar 7y ago
        Not to be picky, but those stats may be different for people that get intoxicated on a regular basis. Much like OP suggests.
      - chrismcb 7y ago
        I believe your first statistic is based on where you get the disease or not. The second is just based on the number of car accidents per year. I don't think we really know what the odds are you will be infected
    - greedo 7y ago
      It's COVID-19, not CORVID-19. And like your accuracy in spelling the disease, your facts are also poor and unsubstantiated.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Italy has said that if you knowingly break quarantine without a good reason you could be charged later with murder. That seems like a much more effective approach than making arrests, from the standpoint of both deterrence and practicality.
iamaelephant 7y ago
This is a dangerously stupid article. Whether boomers like this author accept it or not we are finally living in a generation that ranks human suffering of higher importance than worshipping the S&P 500. Thank god for that.
- seemslegit 7y ago
  Given that boomers like this author are more vulnerable both to the disease and the S&P their risk calculus is more position-balanced then yours.
- underbluewaters 7y ago
  I think it's healthy to question the efforts taken to deal with the virus. I'm not arguing for or against the quarantines, but I do think people need to be aware of the tradeoffs being made. To save the maximum number of lives will require shutting down a substantial portion of the economy for 18 months until a vaccine is ready for distribution. This could save more than 2 million additional lives by recent estimates. There will also be substantial damage, and not just in terms of returns for shareholders. Livelihoods, retirement savings, and marriages will be destroyed. Lives will be taken by depression and unhealthy habits developed. This is going to be a very tough burden to bear.
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  This has received downvotes but is actually insightful. Without ethics and a focus on human value, we'd probably be forced to admit that a virus that removes the "unproductive" elderly for whom SS and Medicare expenses that are very expensive in normal times, and whose occupation of homes, often singly, inflate housing prices, etc etc, is actually a boon for the economy. Thank goodness that we realize that the economy is meant to support human value, not the other way around, else we'd let the "Boomer Remover" take its course.
- saurik 7y ago
  Most of my friends--who aren't in tech, but are still better off than many--are now without jobs; soon they will not be able to afford food; if you are living paycheck to paycheck, you are already pretty screwed right now... like, I am seeing people begging for jobs on Facebook right now, so they can eat. If you are incapable of even having the discussion about whether 2% of people dying is better or worse than 25% of people going hungry for months, how can you make any claims about suffering? Our economy is unjust and unfair, but likening the existence of all of these jobs with some abstract number is "dangerously stupid" and kind of indicates you don't actually care at all about "human suffering". :/
tunesmith 7y ago
The last 24 hours have seen some dueling arguments, from respected sources, regarding how to model this. This one (pdf) has been highly influential to US and UK governments and is pretty sobering and alarming: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s... This one is way on the other end: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a... I'm just hoping that we discover effective treatments soon, because with those we might be able to start treating this like a normal cold before any of the worst case scenarios would come to pass.
- jtbayly 7y ago
  That first link isn't loading for me. Looks overwhelmed. I checked the Wayback archive, and it says it has been archived a lot of times, but it isn't working. Anybody have a working link?
  - allisonburtch 7y ago
    the first link is a pdf. try checking your downloads folder?
    - jtbayly 7y ago
      I know it’s a PDF. I got it eventually. Did you check archive.org for the url? As of yesterday it was simply broken.
- kasperni 7y ago
  There is a summary of the imperial paper on Twitter https://twitter.com/jeremycyoung/status/1239976309456916482 https://twitter.com/jeremycyoung/status/1239976309456916482 Not a very pleasant reading if people are hoping on a quick fix.
ranprieur 7y ago
The number we need to know is the death rate in the absence of hospitalization. Because if we let it ride, and the hospitals fill up, that's the number we're looking at. If it turns out to be only 1%, then shutting down the economy is probably a mistake. But if it's more like 10%, then without quarantine we would get an economic collapse anyway, plus a much higher death toll.
- greedo 7y ago
  A 1% CFR will be catastrophic if we let it ride. Over 7 billion people worldwide. Assuming a simple 1% infection rate (extremely unlikely consider the R0 of SARS-CoV-2), that would result in over 700K dying worldwide. And that ignores the hospitalization required for non-fatal cases. Currently it looks like 18% of all infections require multi-week hospitalization. So again, with 1% infection rate, that means over 12 million hospitalizations. And that's just a 1%/1%/18% assumption.
  - Gys 7y ago
    A completely collapsed economy could trigger a society breakdown and will have deadly consequences as well, like violence (fighting over food, possesions) and bad healthcare
    - greedo 7y ago
      True. But imagine a more realistic scenario based on the CFR we've seen worldwide. Start with 7B people. Assume 50% get infected because we don't want to do a lockdown. 3.5B infections means 630M multi-week hospitalizations and 70M fatalities worldwide. And the follow-on effects will kill even more since these hospitalization rates will consume all our medical resources, so other illnesses will have higher CFRs as well. I don't know about you, but avoiding 70m fatalities and over 600M hospitalizations is the optimal choice. Pursuing this choice would be the greatest human calamity, surpassing the destruction of WW2 in terms of lives.
      - tunesmith 7y ago
egypturnash 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holman_W._Jenkins_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holman_W._Jenkins_Jr. Born 1959. 61 years old. A quick search for covid mortality by age brings me to https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-age-older-people-higher-risk-2020-2?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-age-older-... which puts him in the 3.6% mortality bracket. If we assume his parents were in their twenties when they had him, they are in the 80+ bracket, with 14% mortality. As to what we are getting from this shutdown? Does “a major boost to Medicare For All and maybe even basic income to substitute for the fact that the minimum wage has not budged since 2009” count as a thing we get? Probably not, he got his already. Or in summation, ok boomer.
- dang 7y ago
  You can't post personal attacks to HN, nor generational slurs, nor flamebait in general. We ban accounts that do these things. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in its intended spirit, including right now when stress, fear, and anger are at higher than usual levels, we'd be grateful.
  - jqgatsby 7y ago
    There isn't consensus on whether "ok, boomer" is a slur vs a protest or criticism. It seems inappropriate to me to ban accounts for using that phrase.
    - dang 7y ago
      We don't ban accounts only for using that phrase. If someone just said "ok boomer", I'd either not reply or do a "please don't do this here" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22do%20this%20here%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) In practice, though, accounts that do that kind of thing tend also to do other things. Combining it with personal attack is already an escalation. In any case, it is generational flamebait, which is off topic on HN regardless of generation.
cryoshon 7y ago
i've flagged this article for spreading dangerous misinformation regarding the ongoing public health efforts to curb the spread of the coronavirus. casually talking about discarding our only effective means of saving lives is unacceptable.
jbob2000 7y ago
Here's what it comes down to then; Which option is cheaper: 1. Spend money to temporarily increase hospital beds and ventilator capacity, but keep everything else running normally, or; 2. Shutdown everything to slow the spread so that we don't need to increase bed and ventilator capacity. I'm tempted to say that adding bed and ventilator capacity is cheaper. I don't think that option costs trillions of dollars, like option 2 does.
- greedo 7y ago
  The first assumes that increasing vents, ECMOs, and hospital beds is all that's needed. You'd still need trained staff to man them. Staff that is extremely vulnerable to this disease. Also, if you don't shut things down, you'll overwhelm the system, even if you were able to double the number of beds...
  - jbob2000 7y ago
    Do those things cost trillions of dollars? I don't think so. Each country could probably commit a couple hundred million to this and be better off than a complete shutdown.
    - greedo 7y ago
      In a world with perfect planning, yes it would have made more sense for us to expand our healthcare so that we could withstand something like this. But we didn't. We made our bed, and we have to use what we have in hand. We can't create enough bed space, vents, ECMOs, in the next 6 months. We can't train enough doctors, nurses, etc in 6 months. So we play the hand we're dealt, and choose a mitigation strategy that doesn't result in 70M worldwide fatalities (6M in the US).
      - jbob2000 7y ago
        Why 6 months? How much money does it take to do it in 1 month? Is that amount of money less than trillions of dollars?
vearwhershuh 7y ago
Anyone concerned with individual rights should be concerned at the government responses. H1N1 caused 10K+ deaths and infected tens of millions in the US, and we had nothing even remotely approximating this response. This is not to say that we shouldn't be concerned and diligent in our efforts at containment, but that we should also be concerned and diligent about our liberty. Right now I see a lot of emphasis on the former and almost none on the latter, and anyone who voices concerns is labeled a crackpot or worse.
- rovolo 7y ago
  The 10K+ deaths is over the entire course of H1N1/09. The US had ~4K deaths from 2009-04 to 2009-10 [1]. Italy has had 3K deaths in just 2020-03 [2]. You can't directly compare the early state of COVID-19 to the end state of H1N1/09. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/H1N1flu/estimates/April_February_13.htm https://www.cdc.gov/H1N1flu/estimates/April_February_13.htm [2] http://www.protezionecivile.gov.it/media-communication/press-release/detail/-/asset_publisher/default/content/coronavirus-sono-28-710-i-positivi http://www.protezionecivile.gov.it/media-communication/press...
- tunesmith 7y ago
  I just googled that H1N1 had a fatality rate of 0.02% . Current estimates are that covid is 50x more deadly.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  I think emphasis on the former is appropriate because the current measures are reasonably limited to the traditional scope of government disaster relief. Anti-gouging provisions, retooling factories to more socially useful goods, weeks-long shelter in place orders: all of these things regularly happen in response to disasters, although typically not simultaneously everywhere. I see some people talking about "oh, you know, we'll just have to ban social gatherings until 2021". If that happens - if the official conversation in a few weeks is about extending emergency measures rather than safe strategies for reopening bars - I expect people will get a lot more concerned and diligent.
- akvadrako 7y ago
neonate 7y ago
https://archive.md/KMBQc https://archive.md/KMBQc
gdubs 7y ago
About every two weeks since January, it seems there are people who say that it's too expensive to take bold action. And roughly every two weeks later it gets much more expensive, and the options become narrower. This, despite having China, and then Italy, to give us a sense of the severity, and urgency. These are hard choices. There are no easy answers at this stage. I think there's also a large degree of cognitive dissonance at play, where people aren't really able to grasp that this is all actually happening. Personally, I think we should have done this weeks ago. I think it's good we're doing it now, but we lost time and it's gonna cost a fortune. Rolling the dice on this virus feels reckless. That seems to be the opinion of people like Bill Gates, Taleb, Fauci, etc.
RickJWagner 7y ago
In the final analysis, it will be said that Trump sacrificed his crown jewel, the American economy, to save lives. I think better of him for it.

46 points by sbuttgereit 7y ago

I believe that at this point, any quarantine or 'shelter in place' order must be voluntary. We stand to lose too much by giving up fundamental rights, and it is questionable what we would gain from...what, arresting the vanishingly small number of people who are still blasé about the measures? Like the article notes, our goal is now to slow the virus, not stop it. Normalizing heavy-handed authoritarian measures will only breed future despotism.

seemslegit 7y ago
Future despotism agrees.
Supermancho 7y ago
> must be voluntary Must not be voluntary. Humans are erratic and generally selfish. > now to slow the virus, not stop it Stopping it is ideal and when the plague is leathal enough, the only option. It is not draconian to institute measures that are effective. They will be instituted eventually (eg if a plagie was ebola with a 60% mortality and 2wk incubation), regardless of what philosophy you subscribe to.
- Veen 7y ago
  If you have a complete mandatory lockdown that works to stop the spread, it's highly likely that there will be a resurgence of infections as soon as the lockdown is lifted.
thrill 7y ago
There's nothing voluntary when your boss is saying, "Well, I'll be at work - look forward to seeing you there".
greedo 7y ago
Have you seen photos of large groups still hitting the bars? Lots of people think they're invulnerable.
- guenthert 7y ago
  Not invulnerable, just not eager to give up their way of live and sanity for a stupid flu like sickness which they might or might not get. They are much more likely to die in a traffic accident when leaving the bar intoxicated, than from CORVID-19.
  - deweller 7y ago
    Please don't dismiss this illness. Your stated facts are not correct. One is 50 times more likely to die from CORVID-19 than a car crash. The latest CORVID-19 fatality rates for those aged 15 to 44 is 0.5% [1]. The odds of dying in a car crash in one year are 0.01% [2] [1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-rate-estimates/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-... [2] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o... - assumed 78 year lifespan
    - p2detar 7y ago
      Not to be picky, but those stats may be different for people that get intoxicated on a regular basis. Much like OP suggests.
    - chrismcb 7y ago
      I believe your first statistic is based on where you get the disease or not. The second is just based on the number of car accidents per year. I don't think we really know what the odds are you will be infected
  - greedo 7y ago
    It's COVID-19, not CORVID-19. And like your accuracy in spelling the disease, your facts are also poor and unsubstantiated.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
_bxg1 7y ago
Italy has said that if you knowingly break quarantine without a good reason you could be charged later with murder. That seems like a much more effective approach than making arrests, from the standpoint of both deterrence and practicality.

iamaelephant 7y ago

This is a dangerously stupid article. Whether boomers like this author accept it or not we are finally living in a generation that ranks human suffering of higher importance than worshipping the S&P 500. Thank god for that.

seemslegit 7y ago
Given that boomers like this author are more vulnerable both to the disease and the S&P their risk calculus is more position-balanced then yours.
underbluewaters 7y ago
I think it's healthy to question the efforts taken to deal with the virus. I'm not arguing for or against the quarantines, but I do think people need to be aware of the tradeoffs being made. To save the maximum number of lives will require shutting down a substantial portion of the economy for 18 months until a vaccine is ready for distribution. This could save more than 2 million additional lives by recent estimates. There will also be substantial damage, and not just in terms of returns for shareholders. Livelihoods, retirement savings, and marriages will be destroyed. Lives will be taken by depression and unhealthy habits developed. This is going to be a very tough burden to bear.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
This has received downvotes but is actually insightful. Without ethics and a focus on human value, we'd probably be forced to admit that a virus that removes the "unproductive" elderly for whom SS and Medicare expenses that are very expensive in normal times, and whose occupation of homes, often singly, inflate housing prices, etc etc, is actually a boon for the economy. Thank goodness that we realize that the economy is meant to support human value, not the other way around, else we'd let the "Boomer Remover" take its course.
saurik 7y ago
Most of my friends--who aren't in tech, but are still better off than many--are now without jobs; soon they will not be able to afford food; if you are living paycheck to paycheck, you are already pretty screwed right now... like, I am seeing people begging for jobs on Facebook right now, so they can eat. If you are incapable of even having the discussion about whether 2% of people dying is better or worse than 25% of people going hungry for months, how can you make any claims about suffering? Our economy is unjust and unfair, but likening the existence of all of these jobs with some abstract number is "dangerously stupid" and kind of indicates you don't actually care at all about "human suffering". :/

tunesmith 7y ago

The last 24 hours have seen some dueling arguments, from respected sources, regarding how to model this. This one (pdf) has been highly influential to US and UK governments and is pretty sobering and alarming: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s... This one is way on the other end: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a... I'm just hoping that we discover effective treatments soon, because with those we might be able to start treating this like a normal cold before any of the worst case scenarios would come to pass.

jtbayly 7y ago
That first link isn't loading for me. Looks overwhelmed. I checked the Wayback archive, and it says it has been archived a lot of times, but it isn't working. Anybody have a working link?
- allisonburtch 7y ago
  the first link is a pdf. try checking your downloads folder?
  - jtbayly 7y ago
    I know it’s a PDF. I got it eventually. Did you check archive.org for the url? As of yesterday it was simply broken.
kasperni 7y ago
There is a summary of the imperial paper on Twitter https://twitter.com/jeremycyoung/status/1239976309456916482 https://twitter.com/jeremycyoung/status/1239976309456916482 Not a very pleasant reading if people are hoping on a quick fix.

ranprieur 7y ago

The number we need to know is the death rate in the absence of hospitalization. Because if we let it ride, and the hospitals fill up, that's the number we're looking at. If it turns out to be only 1%, then shutting down the economy is probably a mistake. But if it's more like 10%, then without quarantine we would get an economic collapse anyway, plus a much higher death toll.

greedo 7y ago
A 1% CFR will be catastrophic if we let it ride. Over 7 billion people worldwide. Assuming a simple 1% infection rate (extremely unlikely consider the R0 of SARS-CoV-2), that would result in over 700K dying worldwide. And that ignores the hospitalization required for non-fatal cases. Currently it looks like 18% of all infections require multi-week hospitalization. So again, with 1% infection rate, that means over 12 million hospitalizations. And that's just a 1%/1%/18% assumption.
- Gys 7y ago
  A completely collapsed economy could trigger a society breakdown and will have deadly consequences as well, like violence (fighting over food, possesions) and bad healthcare
  - greedo 7y ago
    True. But imagine a more realistic scenario based on the CFR we've seen worldwide. Start with 7B people. Assume 50% get infected because we don't want to do a lockdown. 3.5B infections means 630M multi-week hospitalizations and 70M fatalities worldwide. And the follow-on effects will kill even more since these hospitalization rates will consume all our medical resources, so other illnesses will have higher CFRs as well. I don't know about you, but avoiding 70m fatalities and over 600M hospitalizations is the optimal choice. Pursuing this choice would be the greatest human calamity, surpassing the destruction of WW2 in terms of lives.
    - tunesmith 7y ago

egypturnash 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holman_W._Jenkins_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holman_W._Jenkins_Jr. Born 1959. 61 years old. A quick search for covid mortality by age brings me to https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-age-older-people-higher-risk-2020-2?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-age-older-... which puts him in the 3.6% mortality bracket. If we assume his parents were in their twenties when they had him, they are in the 80+ bracket, with 14% mortality. As to what we are getting from this shutdown? Does “a major boost to Medicare For All and maybe even basic income to substitute for the fact that the minimum wage has not budged since 2009” count as a thing we get? Probably not, he got his already. Or in summation, ok boomer.

dang 7y ago
You can't post personal attacks to HN, nor generational slurs, nor flamebait in general. We ban accounts that do these things. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in its intended spirit, including right now when stress, fear, and anger are at higher than usual levels, we'd be grateful.
- jqgatsby 7y ago
  There isn't consensus on whether "ok, boomer" is a slur vs a protest or criticism. It seems inappropriate to me to ban accounts for using that phrase.
  - dang 7y ago
    We don't ban accounts only for using that phrase. If someone just said "ok boomer", I'd either not reply or do a "please don't do this here" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22do%20this%20here%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) In practice, though, accounts that do that kind of thing tend also to do other things. Combining it with personal attack is already an escalation. In any case, it is generational flamebait, which is off topic on HN regardless of generation.

cryoshon 7y ago

i've flagged this article for spreading dangerous misinformation regarding the ongoing public health efforts to curb the spread of the coronavirus. casually talking about discarding our only effective means of saving lives is unacceptable.

jbob2000 7y ago

Here's what it comes down to then; Which option is cheaper: 1. Spend money to temporarily increase hospital beds and ventilator capacity, but keep everything else running normally, or; 2. Shutdown everything to slow the spread so that we don't need to increase bed and ventilator capacity. I'm tempted to say that adding bed and ventilator capacity is cheaper. I don't think that option costs trillions of dollars, like option 2 does.

greedo 7y ago
The first assumes that increasing vents, ECMOs, and hospital beds is all that's needed. You'd still need trained staff to man them. Staff that is extremely vulnerable to this disease. Also, if you don't shut things down, you'll overwhelm the system, even if you were able to double the number of beds...
- jbob2000 7y ago
  Do those things cost trillions of dollars? I don't think so. Each country could probably commit a couple hundred million to this and be better off than a complete shutdown.
  - greedo 7y ago
    In a world with perfect planning, yes it would have made more sense for us to expand our healthcare so that we could withstand something like this. But we didn't. We made our bed, and we have to use what we have in hand. We can't create enough bed space, vents, ECMOs, in the next 6 months. We can't train enough doctors, nurses, etc in 6 months. So we play the hand we're dealt, and choose a mitigation strategy that doesn't result in 70M worldwide fatalities (6M in the US).
    - jbob2000 7y ago
      Why 6 months? How much money does it take to do it in 1 month? Is that amount of money less than trillions of dollars?

vearwhershuh 7y ago

Anyone concerned with individual rights should be concerned at the government responses. H1N1 caused 10K+ deaths and infected tens of millions in the US, and we had nothing even remotely approximating this response. This is not to say that we shouldn't be concerned and diligent in our efforts at containment, but that we should also be concerned and diligent about our liberty. Right now I see a lot of emphasis on the former and almost none on the latter, and anyone who voices concerns is labeled a crackpot or worse.

rovolo 7y ago
The 10K+ deaths is over the entire course of H1N1/09. The US had ~4K deaths from 2009-04 to 2009-10 [1]. Italy has had 3K deaths in just 2020-03 [2]. You can't directly compare the early state of COVID-19 to the end state of H1N1/09. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/H1N1flu/estimates/April_February_13.htm https://www.cdc.gov/H1N1flu/estimates/April_February_13.htm [2] http://www.protezionecivile.gov.it/media-communication/press-release/detail/-/asset_publisher/default/content/coronavirus-sono-28-710-i-positivi http://www.protezionecivile.gov.it/media-communication/press...
tunesmith 7y ago
I just googled that H1N1 had a fatality rate of 0.02% . Current estimates are that covid is 50x more deadly.
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I think emphasis on the former is appropriate because the current measures are reasonably limited to the traditional scope of government disaster relief. Anti-gouging provisions, retooling factories to more socially useful goods, weeks-long shelter in place orders: all of these things regularly happen in response to disasters, although typically not simultaneously everywhere. I see some people talking about "oh, you know, we'll just have to ban social gatherings until 2021". If that happens - if the official conversation in a few weeks is about extending emergency measures rather than safe strategies for reopening bars - I expect people will get a lot more concerned and diligent.
akvadrako 7y ago

neonate 7y ago

https://archive.md/KMBQc https://archive.md/KMBQc

gdubs 7y ago

About every two weeks since January, it seems there are people who say that it's too expensive to take bold action. And roughly every two weeks later it gets much more expensive, and the options become narrower. This, despite having China, and then Italy, to give us a sense of the severity, and urgency. These are hard choices. There are no easy answers at this stage. I think there's also a large degree of cognitive dissonance at play, where people aren't really able to grasp that this is all actually happening. Personally, I think we should have done this weeks ago. I think it's good we're doing it now, but we lost time and it's gonna cost a fortune. Rolling the dice on this virus feels reckless. That seems to be the opinion of people like Bill Gates, Taleb, Fauci, etc.

RickJWagner 7y ago

In the final analysis, it will be said that Trump sacrificed his crown jewel, the American economy, to save lives. I think better of him for it.