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I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the ec

by tempsy 7y ago

I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.

nightstaywalki 7y ago
> I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. It seems to be forbidden to debate this unfortunately.
- jwilber 7y ago
  There are responses above now. Looking forward to your debates.
- eropple 7y ago
  It’s not “forbidden” for y’all freethinkers or autodidacts or whatever the term today is to debate such things and to make the claim is dishonest. You’d have to find somebody to debate with, however, and most people are not particularly interested in “hang your Grandma for my stocks”. That is not a restriction of debate, it’s the social dumpstering of people beyond either statistics or empathy and that’s a feature and not a bug.
  - volak 7y ago
    Framing the debate as "your grandma or your 401k" is precisely the gas lighting that prevents rational discussion on this topic
    - eropple 7y ago
      I submit that you don't know what gaslighting is. Further, I submit that you're attempting to coopt the language of marginalized groups to buttress a weak and selfish viewpoint. I shall not buy what you are selling.
      - nate_meurer 7y ago
        Right, it's not exactly gaslighting. Rather, it's a fucking strawman made in bad faith. The stakes are not "my stocks". The stakes are civil society, which as you may or may not know, can't exist for long without a functioning economy.
        eropple 7y ago
        You're right, the stakes are civil society. Which you no longer get to claim you have when you sacrifice the weak and the sick to Moloch for pseudofictional accounts in a computer somewhere. We must take care of each other, it is our basic obligation as citizens of a civil society, and this is the only way we can do that right now.
        nate_meurer 7y ago
        If that's what you mean then fucking say it. Tarring folks who express concern over the economy with a bullshit strawman just makes you the asshole.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
    You seem to believe that 'stocks' are some abstract entity and are relevant only to the lives of people without grandmas to hang. We don't live in a vacuum. Economic activity is not some cute thing people do in their free time. Recession also costs lives, including those of some grandmas.
    - majormajor 7y ago
      Yes, and one of the interesting questions would be *why is our government so much more effective at propping up "the stocks" while everyone loses their job? There's miles of room for argument over the economic policy response. But instead what we get is "the economic effects aren't worth it" where none of the assumptions are quantified.
      - nate_meurer 7y ago
        Our economy has fallen off a cliff, and we have no view of bottom yet. What exactly do you expect anyone to be able to quantify at this early stage?
  - nightstaywalki 7y ago
    > “hang your Grandma for my stocks” But people feed their children using the value of their stocks. Do you think it's possible that a seriously damaged economy will lead to more suffering and deaths than are being prevented by the lockdown?
    - eropple 7y ago
      In no realistic permutation. Thanks for asking!
      - nightstaywalki 7y ago
        Hmm I'm not as sure, and I'm not sure why other people are so sure. People seem to generally respond 'of course not' and get offended that I've suggested it. I'm not really sure why.
        eropple 7y ago
        On the off chance that you're saying this in good faith? Generally speaking it's because Just Asking Questions comes with motives that suck. Maybe you're the one whose don't and you are tragically caught up amidst the sewage flow of "screw 'em" types, but playing the percentages on bad-faith argumentation is pretty safe. Trolls and other turds make a point of wasting people's reserves of good faith as a tactic to dominate discourse--there's no reason to let them do so. Flat dismissal is the milder form of "block and move on".
        nightstaywalki 7y ago
        I'm just as confused. It's prompted another strong reaction in you but I genuinely don't get why. I don't know what motives you think I have, or why I might be arguing in bad faith, or why you're talking about trolls and turds (?). Why is it so wrong to ask 'are we sure we're going the right way - this way seems to have a lot of problems - are we sure the other way has more?' Some people literally kill themselves when they become unemployed. We have millions of new unemployed people. You say it's not forbidden but you're comparing me to a turd for doing it. Why does it cause people to abuse me?
- majormajor 7y ago
  I see it brought up quite a bit on HN, and yet... very rarely with much rigor. It is often of this sort of "I feel that the economic costs will be worse than the human life costs" without any hard backing to explain that. Challenging the opinions of the people getting airtime is fine, but only if you've got the material to back you up. Otherwise it sounds just like wishful thinking.
  - volak 7y ago
    Some quick research https://www.nber.org/papers/w23192?fbclid=IwAR15UAkVuakNeQrlQIfiwj9mPhH1MdseNsXpKENR2tu8LYX-dA1KBlppnPg https://www.nber.org/papers/w23192?fbclid=IwAR15UAkVuakNeQrl... 100,000 more drug overdoeses per 1% unemployment Also https://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20110414/suicides-go-up-when-economy-goes-down#1 https://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20110414/suicides-go-u...
  - randallsquared 7y ago
    > Otherwise it sounds just like wishful thinking. ...what? Who would wish for this? Maybe you're pattern-matching to something for which you have a political response, without actually listening to the worry that is being expressed.
draw_down 7y ago
Easy to say this. But no one has put forth a credible plan for reopening the economy and ending stay-at-home.
simonw 7y ago
It seems pretty clear to me that California has so few cases precisely because of the measures it has taken.
- option 7y ago
  what you said is probably true. And it does not contradict “the cure should not be worse than the disease” statement
  - abootstrapper 7y ago
    It does, because the statement “the cure should not be worse than the disease” insinuates we’re overreacting.
- tempsy 7y ago
  The economic toll of shelter in place vs enforced social distancing + mask wearing while keeping most businesses open is huge though. I’m not convinced quarantine is/was necessary for most of the country, including California.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
    So when should have China, Italy and Iran had invoked quarantine?
  - woofie11 7y ago
    I'm not sure the economic toll is necessary. We just haven't bothered to try to mitigate it. It's like the lockdown itself; do nothing for a long time, then we'll use a nuke.
  - afiori 7y ago
    The question will be what will happen in 4-5 months. If California manages a total lockdown and by July-August is back to being normally operative then the lockdown was a good choice. On the other extreme case there might be so few cases that there will be zero herd immunity in September and a second even worse lockdown might be needed again.
CydeWeys 7y ago
The "disease" would be a lot, lot worse without the "cure" though. There'd still be really bad economic effects; there's no scenario in which everyone would just be going about doing business as usual pretending nothing is wrong while the news is reporting on catastrophically overwhelmed hospitals and how if you get to the point where you have serious trouble breathing, you're on your own and might easily die without a chance of being treated. People would be socially distancing of their own accord anyway, the main difference being this scenario has a much higher death toll since the distancing started way too late.
- goalieca 7y ago
  Well, the statistics are starting to show that if you're young and healthy, this is not much worse than the flu in terms of outcome. The hospitalization rate is also much lower than was reported earlier. Even just counting positive and confirmed test cases, this data is painting a pretty clear picture. Here's the data out of new york city. You can see the chart showing hospitalizations and deaths per age. The trend is pretty biased towards old people. This makes me wonder if a more targeted response by the government would be better. The 2 trillion dollars might have been better spent. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Well, spoiler alert, not everyone is young and healthy. In fact, the majority of Americans have at least one comorbidity for coronavirus. > Covid for new york city has a death rate of about 75 per 100k. So far. We're still experiencing hundreds of deaths per day in the city, significantly more than all other causes combined. Your analysis is vastly premature.
    - laichzeit0 7y ago
      > So far. We're still experiencing hundreds of deaths per day in the city, significantly more than all other causes combined. Your analysis is vastly premature Even if it's 150 per 100k, or even if it's 500 or 1000 per 100,000, is that too much? We need to establish an upper bound for the number of deaths we're willing to tolerate. It cannot be "zero". There is a balance between acceptable mortality and economic consequence that I fear few people are willing to discuss. The medical establishment's goal is to save as many lives as possible, and due to that strategy, they will go to any length to make that happen. I do not once see a medical professional saying "well we can't save all these lives because it would be too expensive". The concession seems to only go one direction: The economy must suffer at any and all cost to minimise mortality as far as possible. So again, what is an acceptable mortality rate? 2%, 5%? A realistic upper bound that's a fair trade off between economic collapse and mortality rate needs to be decided.
thaumaturgy 7y ago
It's been very hard for me to understand this line of thinking. As I see it, there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken. Do you think California would not have many more cases if the measures were relaxed? Or do you think that the cases would not be all that bad? Or do you think that they would only affect people that you aren't personally concerned about? I'm asking honestly for an explanation here, because you're certainly not alone in this view, but I haven't heard a rational justification for it yet, and I haven't been able to come up with one myself.
- istorical 7y ago
  I think there are open questions about how much our current actions are preventing deaths vs delaying them, what the difference is in terms of number of deaths caused by stay-at-home order vs more mild social distancing, and what downstream effects and deaths will result from a new global depression (especially in the developing world).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - yibg 7y ago
    Are there any examples of milder social distancing without extensive testing and contact tracing that has been effective? There are certainly a lot of examples of delayed or poorly enforced / adhered social distancing that has proved to be ineffective.
    - option 7y ago
      Sweden. Also look how different states/counties are affected in US
      - therealdrag0 7y ago
        Sweden has one of the highest deaths/million.
majormajor 7y ago
Restaurant bookings and travel were falling sharply in CA even before the official stay-at-home policies[0], so your alternative is a world where huge chunks of the economy are still fucked. Unless you want to force people to eat at restaurants, travel to conferences, host events, etc... [0] there's this from March 13, for instance https://blog.opentable.com/2020/covid-19-coronavirus-restaurant-industry-data/ https://blog.opentable.com/2020/covid-19-coronavirus-restaur... , googling conference cancellations and such is left as an exercise for the reader...
- paulgb 7y ago
  NYC too, to the point that the mayor tweeted encouraging "New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus", which did not age well even by 2020 standards.
torpfactory 7y ago
If you act early, it will always appear you overreacted. If you act too late, well... https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007076660/coronavirus-hot-zone.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007076660/corona...
- christophilus 7y ago
  This goes both ways, though. If you act early-- and way over-react-- and it works, you get to claim to be the savior of the country, even though the reaction was disproportionate. There's no way to disprove it.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    You can't "disprove" overreacting, but you can disprove saving the country. Case in point, Italy was not saved. What would overreaction look like? Shutting an entire country down back in December? If your definition of "overreacting" is "shutting down a country before there's a single case", you can definitely prove or disprove that.
  - abakker 7y ago
    This is true, but also unhelpful. We all make significant choices all the time that cannot be proved effective, these are heuristics and not scientific theorems. The gist is that this is more like avoiding rock climbing because you don't want to fall to your death. It's not likely that you fall to your death rock climbing, but it is MUCH less likely if you never climb. But, you can't know the future, so you can only take actions that are either right or wrong in hindsight.
  - torpfactory 7y ago
    Point of clarification: Are you saying that there's no way to disprove your claim of being a savior? Or no way to disprove the reaction was disproportionate.?
  - x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
    But we have other countries that didn't react at all and their crematoriums have been running non-stop, like Iran, China and Italy. We also have NYC, which has brought in mobile morgues for their dead since the standard system can't handle the overflow. Why are we acting like we don't know what outcome we are trying to defend against?
omgJustTest 7y ago
Unfortunately you have to put a number on human life to make this tradeoff effectively. In undergrad we were taught 2-10M$/life. 60k people in the US puts that cost at a cool upper limit of 600B$. Of course this assumes (1) that you know all the risks/added them in and (2) know the number of people that will die if risk tolerance is exceeded in any specific case. Right now we unfortunately don't know #1 or #2, if the virus mutates like in 1918 we will have a second wave. If there are a % of the population who do not get immunity or spread the disease after they recover, we will have a very different situation on our hands. In comparison the planning or preparation methods would have been very cheap! I think Bill Gates is correct in side-stepping cost of measures we are taking now and instead saying "Just fund the research, it will save you money in the future". If you don't like the medicine, get better medicine cause this isn't going away.
pacificmint 7y ago
Presumably the cases are so low precisely because we have enacted these measures. If we had not done that we'd probably look more like New York right now. The more effective your measures are, the more it is going to look like they were unnecessary. Or to reuse your metaphor: A campfire can turn into a wildfire really quickly. If we hadn't thrown the tsunami onto it when it was the size of a campfire, we might have gotten a wildfire burning down the whole state.
- randallsquared 7y ago
  New York was only a few days behind California. Density matters so much that it's going to take a long time to arrive at good answers for how much lockdowns affected this, and there will be very strong pressure for a long time not to arrive at any conclusion other than "it worked", regardless of whether that's the truth. Which, obviously, it might well be!
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    A few days is a very long time when you're talking about an exponential curve. Shutting down a few days earlier relative to the start of the outbreak can easily halve the total number of deaths. And CA shut down 4 days before NY on an absolute basis and even earlier than that on a basis relative to the progression of the spread of the outbreak. Acting early enough trumps everything else.
empath75 7y ago
It’s preventing one to three million Americans from dying this year. How much is that worth to you.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  It was probably the right thing because it was conceivable to end up with 30 million pneumonia victims and no way to treat them all. But we shouldn't forget we had to waste 0.1% of all 328 million lives (one month/78.54 years under house arrest) and counting.
  - empath75 7y ago
    I’m not under house arrest. I’m working from home with my family around me. I’m actually enjoying it for the most part. We’ve picked up baking, started going on walks together as a family. It’s not anything like dying for a month or whatever weird equivalence you’re trying to draw.
    - Ensorceled 7y ago
      They have made a calculation based completely on productivity and effect on GDP. The USA lost 1 month of "critical" productivity and we only have time with children, a resurgence of baking and netflix watched lists to show for it. That you and your family weren't part of the "dead" statistics didn't even factor into their equations.
  - bestnameever 7y ago
    > But we shouldn't forget we had to waste 0.1% of all 328 million lives (one month/78.54 years under house arrest) and counting. It's only a waste if you need to waste it. I'm sure plenty of people are using this time to be productive doing things they would otherwise not have the time to do.
  - viewer5 7y ago
    not going to work != wasting life
dehrmann 7y ago
My fear is that 2-3 months of lockdown isn't a cure, it turns into on-and-off lockdown, herd immunity is never established because immunity wears off in 2 years, and a vaccine is 2-5 years out. Ignoring the economics, preserving life takes on new meaning if you count a every locked down day as taking away an hour of life from someone. Take the Bay Area. At 7.7M people, every day, there are 11.7 lifespans wasted by lockdown. There have been 3.2 covid-19 deaths per day.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  There's no basis for your fear that immunity would wear off in two years. Unlike the cold and the flu, these coronavirus strains do not mutate quickly enough to cause quick loss of immunity. It seems more akin to chickenpox, which you can only catch once (and shingles doesn't count). So, take heart in this at least?
  - kmtrowbr 7y ago
    common cold = caused by coronaviruses, COVID-19 = an uncommonly deadly coronavirus RNA viruses have a faster mutation rate than DNA viruses. Chickenpox = DNA virus, Coronavirus = RNA virus. That Chickenpox is a DNA virus is why, like HIV, it can survive in the body for the long term and re-emerge decades later as shingles. DNA has a double helix which has error-correction and is more stable. However that makes it also physically larger and more complicated. RNA is small, sloppy, and cheap. Source of all this: Spillover, David Quammen: https://www.amazon.com/Spillover-Animal-Infections-Human-Pandemic/dp/0393066800 https://www.amazon.com/Spillover-Animal-Infections-Human-Pan..., it's a good & topical book, a little bleak but good. There's a discussion of exactly this about halfway through the book. So I do not believe your comment is factually correct. Sadly, the COVID-19 causing virus should have a high potential mutation rate similarly to all RNA viruses.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Nope. The common cold is a catch-all term for over 200 different mild upper respiratory viruses, the clear majority of which are not coronaviruses. The most common strain of virus causing the common cold is a rhinovirus, which does have the property of mutating well and thus being hard to develop a resistance to. It is true that some of the common cold strains are coronavirus, but not most of them, and regardless, they aren't COVID-19 (which is of recent zoonotic origin). Preliminary analysis of COVID-19 indicates that catching it once is likely to confer life-long immunity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus
addicted 7y ago
Ummmm.... The reason California has such few cases was because it acted sooner. Next you will be telling us about Y2K.
jarfil 7y ago
The fun part about this virus is that it works on a 10 day delay, so you can either prevent infections long before it has a chance to start killing people, or you can start dealing with the epidemic once it's too late to stop it. Also, California ICUs are at 80% capacity, so there isn't that much room left to relax unless you want them to get verwhelmed and start sending people back home to die.
- therealdrag0 7y ago
  Where'd you get 80%? The site I have bookmarked shows 25% (https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/california https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/cali...)
  - thaumaturgy 7y ago
    The numbers there are funky. Best guess is that their "total available" beds are the estimated number of statewide beds that would normally be empty, and the "ICU beds needed" number is just for Covid patients. From https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/article241790336.html https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/articl... : > About 1,178 confirmed and 374 suspected COVID-19 patients were under treatment in California’s ICUs on Tuesday, according to the latest figures from the California Department of Public Health. > On a typical day, about 58 percent of the state’s ICU beds are occupied by patients needing treatment. Although the exact number of ICU beds currently in use was not released, the increase in COVID-19 cases suggests that about 80 percent of the ICU beds in California may now be filled. And from https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/24/map-where-are-the-intensive-care-beds-in-california-the-u-s/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/24/map-where-are-the-int... : > In California, where the confirmed number of coronavirus cases was 2,181 on March 23, there are 7,345 ICU beds. Eleven counties have no ICU beds or no hospitals at all.
deleted 7y ago
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wholien 7y ago
We'll see how Sweden fares since they aren doing very minimal shutdowns (public events over 500 people are canceled).
- magicalhippo 7y ago
  Currently an order of magnitude more deaths than their otherwise very comparable neighbor Norway, or 5x as many per 1M pop. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/norway/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/norway/ Will be very interesting to follow during May, as Norway is now opening up again. Schools and kindergartens will start again next week.
taneq 7y ago
Kind of like the Y2K bug? We spent billions on that and then nothing happened... what a waste of money, right?
deleted 7y ago
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spyder 7y ago
You can start worrying about that when the economic impact caused by the restrictions kills more people than the virus would without the restrictions. Sure, unemployment can worsen mental health and cause suicide indirectly, but those numbers must be nothing compared to the deaths would be caused by the virus without the restrictions.
- afiori 7y ago
  This is relatively true, but it is also completely missing the point. Iperrationalism is not a substitute for ethics. In particular I see no reason why a headcount should be an obviously correct solution to the trolley problem.
new2628 7y ago
You are right, but at a larger level the economy itself may be a cure that kills the patient. Pursue economic growth even if it doesn't make us happier and destroys the natural environment. In that sense, the current events can be seen as the antidote to the cure that was harming the otherwise healthy patient.
- casefields 7y ago
  We aren't worried about economic growth. We are worried about livelihoods. The type of economic devastation that leaves people unable to put food on the table. The civil unrest won't be pretty.
kitotik 7y ago
We’ve had more documented covid-19 deaths in ~6 weeks than we usually have murders in an entire year and it hasn’t even peaked yet. We have no clue how many cases there even are because we’ve utterly failed to do mass testing. Serious question: do you have any family, friends, or even acquaintances that you would prefer not to have 3-6 weeks of terror and complete misery with a non-trivial chance of permanent disability or death?
- ceilingcorner 7y ago
  Do you understand that millions of people are now out of work and won't be able to support their families, businesses are collapsing, calls to suicide lines are up massively, and society is general is not functioning? This is a complex issue. Using hyperbolic emotional appeals to drown out discussion is not the right move.
  - dx034 7y ago
    In the end no one will know if it was worth it since no country went in the other direction and just lived with it. The UK tried for a bit but then reacted harshly as the situation worsened. Maybe not doing anything would've resulted in a few months of medical chaos and not much more, maybe it would've destroyed whole societies. But the polls I'm aware of show that the majority of people is supportive of measures nearly everywhere (I'm not aware of a poll that shows the opposite). In democracies, you'd expect politicians to act if the majority and experts support it.
    - praveenperera 7y ago
      Isn’t that exactly what Sweden is currently doing?
      - techer 7y ago
        And currently backtracking on.
        7y ago
Ensorceled 7y ago
Calculations for operating "business as usual" in the USA gave ranges from 1.7 to 5 million dead with extremes of 4-8% death rate (13+ million). This is based on a collapsed health care system causing the vast majority of cases requiring ventilators to result in death. Roll two die, if you roll snake eyes you would die. But, in my experience, most people saying things like "cure cannot be worse than the disease" are young, healthy and have access to good health care. Would that describe you? My father is in the 18+% fatality zone.
- frockington1 7y ago
  I remember people screaming that it would be worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor two weeks ago. Still waiting on anything that level of sheer panic and pandemonium. Sadly I don't think anyone is going to be willing to admit they were wrong anytime soon.
  - lovehashbrowns 7y ago
    25,832 deaths in the US from COVID-19 isn't really all that bad, huh?
    - frockington1 7y ago
      In a population of 325 million, not really. I remember back in March when the media was saying at least 6 million people would die and that bodies would be piling up in the streets. Currently seems like the biggest threat will be unemployment and continued economic downturn
      - Lewton 7y ago
        You do realize there are countries who didn't act in time where the bodies literally are piling up in the streets right?
      - lovehashbrowns 7y ago
        Ah, you're one of those people that looks at 25,000 dead in ~41 days AFTER shelter-in-place provisions and thinks it's not a big deal. Gotcha.
afpx 7y ago
The economic impact was going to happen one way or the other.
deleted 7y ago
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gruturo 7y ago
> I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire. You do realize that there are so few cases because of the lockdown, and otherwise those cases would not only be an order of magnitude higher, but also much much MUCH more likely to result in death because the medical system would be entirely saturated and unable to admit 80% of the people who show up ?
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > those cases would not only be an order of magnitude higher An order of magnitude is a week of the natural virus spread. How long has been the lockdown there? Two weeks would mean imply in a two orders of magnitude difference.
TheCondor 7y ago
Don’t we need to see the end results to know? If we can somehow bootstrap the economy quickly and there is pent up demand, maybe this is just a short temporal blip with relatively limited impact. If it’s the next big depression and takes 30 years to come out of then there certainly be plenty that will say we should have done nothing and just taken it on the chin. I’m predicting that we will panic at the financial numbers, open things up in June and then this fall there will be a bigger second wave, hopefully we stock the pantry with PPE and everything the medical professionals need in the mean time. It will be a Hail Mary, hoping we can get a vaccine in to play by September
IAmEveryone 7y ago
Why did I eat? I’m not even hungry anymore!

by tempsy 7y ago

nightstaywalki 7y ago

> I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. It seems to be forbidden to debate this unfortunately.

jwilber 7y ago
There are responses above now. Looking forward to your debates.
eropple 7y ago
It’s not “forbidden” for y’all freethinkers or autodidacts or whatever the term today is to debate such things and to make the claim is dishonest. You’d have to find somebody to debate with, however, and most people are not particularly interested in “hang your Grandma for my stocks”. That is not a restriction of debate, it’s the social dumpstering of people beyond either statistics or empathy and that’s a feature and not a bug.
- volak 7y ago
  Framing the debate as "your grandma or your 401k" is precisely the gas lighting that prevents rational discussion on this topic
  - eropple 7y ago
    I submit that you don't know what gaslighting is. Further, I submit that you're attempting to coopt the language of marginalized groups to buttress a weak and selfish viewpoint. I shall not buy what you are selling.
    - nate_meurer 7y ago
      Right, it's not exactly gaslighting. Rather, it's a fucking strawman made in bad faith. The stakes are not "my stocks". The stakes are civil society, which as you may or may not know, can't exist for long without a functioning economy.
      - eropple 7y ago
        You're right, the stakes are civil society. Which you no longer get to claim you have when you sacrifice the weak and the sick to Moloch for pseudofictional accounts in a computer somewhere. We must take care of each other, it is our basic obligation as citizens of a civil society, and this is the only way we can do that right now.
        nate_meurer 7y ago
        If that's what you mean then fucking say it. Tarring folks who express concern over the economy with a bullshit strawman just makes you the asshole.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
  You seem to believe that 'stocks' are some abstract entity and are relevant only to the lives of people without grandmas to hang. We don't live in a vacuum. Economic activity is not some cute thing people do in their free time. Recession also costs lives, including those of some grandmas.
  - majormajor 7y ago
    Yes, and one of the interesting questions would be *why is our government so much more effective at propping up "the stocks" while everyone loses their job? There's miles of room for argument over the economic policy response. But instead what we get is "the economic effects aren't worth it" where none of the assumptions are quantified.
    - nate_meurer 7y ago
      Our economy has fallen off a cliff, and we have no view of bottom yet. What exactly do you expect anyone to be able to quantify at this early stage?
- nightstaywalki 7y ago
  > “hang your Grandma for my stocks” But people feed their children using the value of their stocks. Do you think it's possible that a seriously damaged economy will lead to more suffering and deaths than are being prevented by the lockdown?
  - eropple 7y ago
    In no realistic permutation. Thanks for asking!
    - nightstaywalki 7y ago
      Hmm I'm not as sure, and I'm not sure why other people are so sure. People seem to generally respond 'of course not' and get offended that I've suggested it. I'm not really sure why.
      - eropple 7y ago
        On the off chance that you're saying this in good faith? Generally speaking it's because Just Asking Questions comes with motives that suck. Maybe you're the one whose don't and you are tragically caught up amidst the sewage flow of "screw 'em" types, but playing the percentages on bad-faith argumentation is pretty safe. Trolls and other turds make a point of wasting people's reserves of good faith as a tactic to dominate discourse--there's no reason to let them do so. Flat dismissal is the milder form of "block and move on".
        nightstaywalki 7y ago
        I'm just as confused. It's prompted another strong reaction in you but I genuinely don't get why. I don't know what motives you think I have, or why I might be arguing in bad faith, or why you're talking about trolls and turds (?). Why is it so wrong to ask 'are we sure we're going the right way - this way seems to have a lot of problems - are we sure the other way has more?' Some people literally kill themselves when they become unemployed. We have millions of new unemployed people. You say it's not forbidden but you're comparing me to a turd for doing it. Why does it cause people to abuse me?
majormajor 7y ago
I see it brought up quite a bit on HN, and yet... very rarely with much rigor. It is often of this sort of "I feel that the economic costs will be worse than the human life costs" without any hard backing to explain that. Challenging the opinions of the people getting airtime is fine, but only if you've got the material to back you up. Otherwise it sounds just like wishful thinking.
- volak 7y ago
  Some quick research https://www.nber.org/papers/w23192?fbclid=IwAR15UAkVuakNeQrlQIfiwj9mPhH1MdseNsXpKENR2tu8LYX-dA1KBlppnPg https://www.nber.org/papers/w23192?fbclid=IwAR15UAkVuakNeQrl... 100,000 more drug overdoeses per 1% unemployment Also https://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20110414/suicides-go-up-when-economy-goes-down#1 https://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20110414/suicides-go-u...
- randallsquared 7y ago
  > Otherwise it sounds just like wishful thinking. ...what? Who would wish for this? Maybe you're pattern-matching to something for which you have a political response, without actually listening to the worry that is being expressed.

draw_down 7y ago

Easy to say this. But no one has put forth a credible plan for reopening the economy and ending stay-at-home.

simonw 7y ago

It seems pretty clear to me that California has so few cases precisely because of the measures it has taken.

option 7y ago
what you said is probably true. And it does not contradict “the cure should not be worse than the disease” statement
- abootstrapper 7y ago
  It does, because the statement “the cure should not be worse than the disease” insinuates we’re overreacting.
tempsy 7y ago
The economic toll of shelter in place vs enforced social distancing + mask wearing while keeping most businesses open is huge though. I’m not convinced quarantine is/was necessary for most of the country, including California.
- x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
  So when should have China, Italy and Iran had invoked quarantine?
- woofie11 7y ago
  I'm not sure the economic toll is necessary. We just haven't bothered to try to mitigate it. It's like the lockdown itself; do nothing for a long time, then we'll use a nuke.
- afiori 7y ago
  The question will be what will happen in 4-5 months. If California manages a total lockdown and by July-August is back to being normally operative then the lockdown was a good choice. On the other extreme case there might be so few cases that there will be zero herd immunity in September and a second even worse lockdown might be needed again.

CydeWeys 7y ago

The "disease" would be a lot, lot worse without the "cure" though. There'd still be really bad economic effects; there's no scenario in which everyone would just be going about doing business as usual pretending nothing is wrong while the news is reporting on catastrophically overwhelmed hospitals and how if you get to the point where you have serious trouble breathing, you're on your own and might easily die without a chance of being treated. People would be socially distancing of their own accord anyway, the main difference being this scenario has a much higher death toll since the distancing started way too late.

goalieca 7y ago
Well, the statistics are starting to show that if you're young and healthy, this is not much worse than the flu in terms of outcome. The hospitalization rate is also much lower than was reported earlier. Even just counting positive and confirmed test cases, this data is painting a pretty clear picture. Here's the data out of new york city. You can see the chart showing hospitalizations and deaths per age. The trend is pretty biased towards old people. This makes me wonder if a more targeted response by the government would be better. The 2 trillion dollars might have been better spent. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Well, spoiler alert, not everyone is young and healthy. In fact, the majority of Americans have at least one comorbidity for coronavirus. > Covid for new york city has a death rate of about 75 per 100k. So far. We're still experiencing hundreds of deaths per day in the city, significantly more than all other causes combined. Your analysis is vastly premature.
  - laichzeit0 7y ago
    > So far. We're still experiencing hundreds of deaths per day in the city, significantly more than all other causes combined. Your analysis is vastly premature Even if it's 150 per 100k, or even if it's 500 or 1000 per 100,000, is that too much? We need to establish an upper bound for the number of deaths we're willing to tolerate. It cannot be "zero". There is a balance between acceptable mortality and economic consequence that I fear few people are willing to discuss. The medical establishment's goal is to save as many lives as possible, and due to that strategy, they will go to any length to make that happen. I do not once see a medical professional saying "well we can't save all these lives because it would be too expensive". The concession seems to only go one direction: The economy must suffer at any and all cost to minimise mortality as far as possible. So again, what is an acceptable mortality rate? 2%, 5%? A realistic upper bound that's a fair trade off between economic collapse and mortality rate needs to be decided.

thaumaturgy 7y ago

It's been very hard for me to understand this line of thinking. As I see it, there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken. Do you think California would not have many more cases if the measures were relaxed? Or do you think that the cases would not be all that bad? Or do you think that they would only affect people that you aren't personally concerned about? I'm asking honestly for an explanation here, because you're certainly not alone in this view, but I haven't heard a rational justification for it yet, and I haven't been able to come up with one myself.

istorical 7y ago
I think there are open questions about how much our current actions are preventing deaths vs delaying them, what the difference is in terms of number of deaths caused by stay-at-home order vs more mild social distancing, and what downstream effects and deaths will result from a new global depression (especially in the developing world).
- deleted 7y ago
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- yibg 7y ago
  Are there any examples of milder social distancing without extensive testing and contact tracing that has been effective? There are certainly a lot of examples of delayed or poorly enforced / adhered social distancing that has proved to be ineffective.
  - option 7y ago
    Sweden. Also look how different states/counties are affected in US
    - therealdrag0 7y ago
      Sweden has one of the highest deaths/million.

majormajor 7y ago

Restaurant bookings and travel were falling sharply in CA even before the official stay-at-home policies[0], so your alternative is a world where huge chunks of the economy are still fucked. Unless you want to force people to eat at restaurants, travel to conferences, host events, etc... [0] there's this from March 13, for instance https://blog.opentable.com/2020/covid-19-coronavirus-restaurant-industry-data/ https://blog.opentable.com/2020/covid-19-coronavirus-restaur... , googling conference cancellations and such is left as an exercise for the reader...

paulgb 7y ago
NYC too, to the point that the mayor tweeted encouraging "New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus", which did not age well even by 2020 standards.

torpfactory 7y ago

If you act early, it will always appear you overreacted. If you act too late, well... https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007076660/coronavirus-hot-zone.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007076660/corona...

christophilus 7y ago
This goes both ways, though. If you act early-- and way over-react-- and it works, you get to claim to be the savior of the country, even though the reaction was disproportionate. There's no way to disprove it.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  You can't "disprove" overreacting, but you can disprove saving the country. Case in point, Italy was not saved. What would overreaction look like? Shutting an entire country down back in December? If your definition of "overreacting" is "shutting down a country before there's a single case", you can definitely prove or disprove that.
- abakker 7y ago
  This is true, but also unhelpful. We all make significant choices all the time that cannot be proved effective, these are heuristics and not scientific theorems. The gist is that this is more like avoiding rock climbing because you don't want to fall to your death. It's not likely that you fall to your death rock climbing, but it is MUCH less likely if you never climb. But, you can't know the future, so you can only take actions that are either right or wrong in hindsight.
- torpfactory 7y ago
  Point of clarification: Are you saying that there's no way to disprove your claim of being a savior? Or no way to disprove the reaction was disproportionate.?
- x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
  But we have other countries that didn't react at all and their crematoriums have been running non-stop, like Iran, China and Italy. We also have NYC, which has brought in mobile morgues for their dead since the standard system can't handle the overflow. Why are we acting like we don't know what outcome we are trying to defend against?

omgJustTest 7y ago

Unfortunately you have to put a number on human life to make this tradeoff effectively. In undergrad we were taught 2-10M$/life. 60k people in the US puts that cost at a cool upper limit of 600B$. Of course this assumes (1) that you know all the risks/added them in and (2) know the number of people that will die if risk tolerance is exceeded in any specific case. Right now we unfortunately don't know #1 or #2, if the virus mutates like in 1918 we will have a second wave. If there are a % of the population who do not get immunity or spread the disease after they recover, we will have a very different situation on our hands. In comparison the planning or preparation methods would have been very cheap! I think Bill Gates is correct in side-stepping cost of measures we are taking now and instead saying "Just fund the research, it will save you money in the future". If you don't like the medicine, get better medicine cause this isn't going away.

pacificmint 7y ago

Presumably the cases are so low precisely because we have enacted these measures. If we had not done that we'd probably look more like New York right now. The more effective your measures are, the more it is going to look like they were unnecessary. Or to reuse your metaphor: A campfire can turn into a wildfire really quickly. If we hadn't thrown the tsunami onto it when it was the size of a campfire, we might have gotten a wildfire burning down the whole state.

randallsquared 7y ago
New York was only a few days behind California. Density matters so much that it's going to take a long time to arrive at good answers for how much lockdowns affected this, and there will be very strong pressure for a long time not to arrive at any conclusion other than "it worked", regardless of whether that's the truth. Which, obviously, it might well be!
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  A few days is a very long time when you're talking about an exponential curve. Shutting down a few days earlier relative to the start of the outbreak can easily halve the total number of deaths. And CA shut down 4 days before NY on an absolute basis and even earlier than that on a basis relative to the progression of the spread of the outbreak. Acting early enough trumps everything else.

empath75 7y ago

It’s preventing one to three million Americans from dying this year. How much is that worth to you.

erik_seaberg 7y ago
It was probably the right thing because it was conceivable to end up with 30 million pneumonia victims and no way to treat them all. But we shouldn't forget we had to waste 0.1% of all 328 million lives (one month/78.54 years under house arrest) and counting.
- empath75 7y ago
  I’m not under house arrest. I’m working from home with my family around me. I’m actually enjoying it for the most part. We’ve picked up baking, started going on walks together as a family. It’s not anything like dying for a month or whatever weird equivalence you’re trying to draw.
  - Ensorceled 7y ago
    They have made a calculation based completely on productivity and effect on GDP. The USA lost 1 month of "critical" productivity and we only have time with children, a resurgence of baking and netflix watched lists to show for it. That you and your family weren't part of the "dead" statistics didn't even factor into their equations.
- bestnameever 7y ago
  > But we shouldn't forget we had to waste 0.1% of all 328 million lives (one month/78.54 years under house arrest) and counting. It's only a waste if you need to waste it. I'm sure plenty of people are using this time to be productive doing things they would otherwise not have the time to do.
- viewer5 7y ago
  not going to work != wasting life

dehrmann 7y ago

My fear is that 2-3 months of lockdown isn't a cure, it turns into on-and-off lockdown, herd immunity is never established because immunity wears off in 2 years, and a vaccine is 2-5 years out. Ignoring the economics, preserving life takes on new meaning if you count a every locked down day as taking away an hour of life from someone. Take the Bay Area. At 7.7M people, every day, there are 11.7 lifespans wasted by lockdown. There have been 3.2 covid-19 deaths per day.

CydeWeys 7y ago
There's no basis for your fear that immunity would wear off in two years. Unlike the cold and the flu, these coronavirus strains do not mutate quickly enough to cause quick loss of immunity. It seems more akin to chickenpox, which you can only catch once (and shingles doesn't count). So, take heart in this at least?
- kmtrowbr 7y ago
  common cold = caused by coronaviruses, COVID-19 = an uncommonly deadly coronavirus RNA viruses have a faster mutation rate than DNA viruses. Chickenpox = DNA virus, Coronavirus = RNA virus. That Chickenpox is a DNA virus is why, like HIV, it can survive in the body for the long term and re-emerge decades later as shingles. DNA has a double helix which has error-correction and is more stable. However that makes it also physically larger and more complicated. RNA is small, sloppy, and cheap. Source of all this: Spillover, David Quammen: https://www.amazon.com/Spillover-Animal-Infections-Human-Pandemic/dp/0393066800 https://www.amazon.com/Spillover-Animal-Infections-Human-Pan..., it's a good & topical book, a little bleak but good. There's a discussion of exactly this about halfway through the book. So I do not believe your comment is factually correct. Sadly, the COVID-19 causing virus should have a high potential mutation rate similarly to all RNA viruses.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Nope. The common cold is a catch-all term for over 200 different mild upper respiratory viruses, the clear majority of which are not coronaviruses. The most common strain of virus causing the common cold is a rhinovirus, which does have the property of mutating well and thus being hard to develop a resistance to. It is true that some of the common cold strains are coronavirus, but not most of them, and regardless, they aren't COVID-19 (which is of recent zoonotic origin). Preliminary analysis of COVID-19 indicates that catching it once is likely to confer life-long immunity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus

addicted 7y ago

Ummmm.... The reason California has such few cases was because it acted sooner. Next you will be telling us about Y2K.

jarfil 7y ago

The fun part about this virus is that it works on a 10 day delay, so you can either prevent infections long before it has a chance to start killing people, or you can start dealing with the epidemic once it's too late to stop it. Also, California ICUs are at 80% capacity, so there isn't that much room left to relax unless you want them to get verwhelmed and start sending people back home to die.

therealdrag0 7y ago
Where'd you get 80%? The site I have bookmarked shows 25% (https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/california https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/cali...)
- thaumaturgy 7y ago
  The numbers there are funky. Best guess is that their "total available" beds are the estimated number of statewide beds that would normally be empty, and the "ICU beds needed" number is just for Covid patients. From https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/article241790336.html https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/articl... : > About 1,178 confirmed and 374 suspected COVID-19 patients were under treatment in California’s ICUs on Tuesday, according to the latest figures from the California Department of Public Health. > On a typical day, about 58 percent of the state’s ICU beds are occupied by patients needing treatment. Although the exact number of ICU beds currently in use was not released, the increase in COVID-19 cases suggests that about 80 percent of the ICU beds in California may now be filled. And from https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/24/map-where-are-the-intensive-care-beds-in-california-the-u-s/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/24/map-where-are-the-int... : > In California, where the confirmed number of coronavirus cases was 2,181 on March 23, there are 7,345 ICU beds. Eleven counties have no ICU beds or no hospitals at all.

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wholien 7y ago

We'll see how Sweden fares since they aren doing very minimal shutdowns (public events over 500 people are canceled).

magicalhippo 7y ago
Currently an order of magnitude more deaths than their otherwise very comparable neighbor Norway, or 5x as many per 1M pop. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/norway/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/norway/ Will be very interesting to follow during May, as Norway is now opening up again. Schools and kindergartens will start again next week.

taneq 7y ago

Kind of like the Y2K bug? We spent billions on that and then nothing happened... what a waste of money, right?

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spyder 7y ago

You can start worrying about that when the economic impact caused by the restrictions kills more people than the virus would without the restrictions. Sure, unemployment can worsen mental health and cause suicide indirectly, but those numbers must be nothing compared to the deaths would be caused by the virus without the restrictions.

afiori 7y ago
This is relatively true, but it is also completely missing the point. Iperrationalism is not a substitute for ethics. In particular I see no reason why a headcount should be an obviously correct solution to the trolley problem.

new2628 7y ago

You are right, but at a larger level the economy itself may be a cure that kills the patient. Pursue economic growth even if it doesn't make us happier and destroys the natural environment. In that sense, the current events can be seen as the antidote to the cure that was harming the otherwise healthy patient.

casefields 7y ago
We aren't worried about economic growth. We are worried about livelihoods. The type of economic devastation that leaves people unable to put food on the table. The civil unrest won't be pretty.

kitotik 7y ago

We’ve had more documented covid-19 deaths in ~6 weeks than we usually have murders in an entire year and it hasn’t even peaked yet. We have no clue how many cases there even are because we’ve utterly failed to do mass testing. Serious question: do you have any family, friends, or even acquaintances that you would prefer not to have 3-6 weeks of terror and complete misery with a non-trivial chance of permanent disability or death?

ceilingcorner 7y ago
Do you understand that millions of people are now out of work and won't be able to support their families, businesses are collapsing, calls to suicide lines are up massively, and society is general is not functioning? This is a complex issue. Using hyperbolic emotional appeals to drown out discussion is not the right move.
- dx034 7y ago
  In the end no one will know if it was worth it since no country went in the other direction and just lived with it. The UK tried for a bit but then reacted harshly as the situation worsened. Maybe not doing anything would've resulted in a few months of medical chaos and not much more, maybe it would've destroyed whole societies. But the polls I'm aware of show that the majority of people is supportive of measures nearly everywhere (I'm not aware of a poll that shows the opposite). In democracies, you'd expect politicians to act if the majority and experts support it.
  - praveenperera 7y ago
    Isn’t that exactly what Sweden is currently doing?
    - techer 7y ago
      And currently backtracking on.
      - 7y ago

Ensorceled 7y ago

Calculations for operating "business as usual" in the USA gave ranges from 1.7 to 5 million dead with extremes of 4-8% death rate (13+ million). This is based on a collapsed health care system causing the vast majority of cases requiring ventilators to result in death. Roll two die, if you roll snake eyes you would die. But, in my experience, most people saying things like "cure cannot be worse than the disease" are young, healthy and have access to good health care. Would that describe you? My father is in the 18+% fatality zone.

frockington1 7y ago
I remember people screaming that it would be worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor two weeks ago. Still waiting on anything that level of sheer panic and pandemonium. Sadly I don't think anyone is going to be willing to admit they were wrong anytime soon.
- lovehashbrowns 7y ago
  25,832 deaths in the US from COVID-19 isn't really all that bad, huh?
  - frockington1 7y ago
    In a population of 325 million, not really. I remember back in March when the media was saying at least 6 million people would die and that bodies would be piling up in the streets. Currently seems like the biggest threat will be unemployment and continued economic downturn
    - Lewton 7y ago
      You do realize there are countries who didn't act in time where the bodies literally are piling up in the streets right?
    - lovehashbrowns 7y ago
      Ah, you're one of those people that looks at 25,000 dead in ~41 days AFTER shelter-in-place provisions and thinks it's not a big deal. Gotcha.

afpx 7y ago

The economic impact was going to happen one way or the other.

deleted 7y ago

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gruturo 7y ago

> I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire. You do realize that there are so few cases because of the lockdown, and otherwise those cases would not only be an order of magnitude higher, but also much much MUCH more likely to result in death because the medical system would be entirely saturated and unable to admit 80% of the people who show up ?

marcosdumay 7y ago
> those cases would not only be an order of magnitude higher An order of magnitude is a week of the natural virus spread. How long has been the lockdown there? Two weeks would mean imply in a two orders of magnitude difference.

TheCondor 7y ago

Don’t we need to see the end results to know? If we can somehow bootstrap the economy quickly and there is pent up demand, maybe this is just a short temporal blip with relatively limited impact. If it’s the next big depression and takes 30 years to come out of then there certainly be plenty that will say we should have done nothing and just taken it on the chin. I’m predicting that we will panic at the financial numbers, open things up in June and then this fall there will be a bigger second wave, hopefully we stock the pantry with PPE and everything the medical professionals need in the mean time. It will be a Hail Mary, hoping we can get a vaccine in to play by September

IAmEveryone 7y ago

Why did I eat? I’m not even hungry anymore!