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Plan for 5 Years of Lockdown
- jdlyga 7y agoWhy should anyone trust an article like this written by someone who knows nothing about infectious diseases?
- dahfizz 7y agoI think humanity is going to learn to accept coronavirus, just like we have accepted pneumonia or the flu. There will always be some cases and some deaths every year. The uncomfortable question is when those numbers are low enough that its not worth it to quarantine anymore. Lockdown has very real costs. We are seeing crazy unemployment, a huge spike in calls to suicide hotlines, and very likely an increase in all-cause mortality as people are unable to get regular preventative care. Someone who would have had that weird lump checked out last year isn't going to right now. We are already seeing protests pop up all over the place. And as most places have seen daily new cases start to fall, lockdown will become unenforceable as people get too restless.
- PizozhokKovidlo 7y agoSorry to be saying this but the post seems so smug and smarter-than-thou. > I know. I know. No one wants to hear this. > But, but… vaccine? Would this kind of antagonism really convince anyone?
- biznickman 7y agoGreat job with a sensationalist unrealistic title. This isn't a scenario grounded in fact and it's written by a speculative software engineer. Not a medical professional or epidemiologist.
- Trasmatta 7y agoIt seems that everyone has become an epidemiologist in the past two months, despite never having even heard of concepts like R0 or herd immunity before 2020.
- mattbee 7y agoSooo this post is flagged, but patio11's conspiratorial epic gets a long day of front page discussion. I'd prefer hn flagged any amateur covid19 policy discussion, it's just a bit embarrassing.
- amigiac 7y agoCountries that end their lockdowns early will be seen as a problem and we will see travel bans.
- rabboRubble 7y agoIn the 80s, the USA was an exporter of HIV because Reagan refused to address the "gay plague". I'm laying odds that the USA will be an exporter of COVID cases around the world. Assuming the rest of the world will accept travelers from the USA without mandatory quarantine.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoIt will be an interesting experiment to observe, from a distance.
- RubenSandwich 7y agoThis author is asserting 5 years of lockdown but gives no reasons why specifically 5 years. They talk about the possibility of no vaccine working and herd immunity not working if the immune window is too small, etc. But how does that equate to 5 years of lockdown? Why 5 years and not just say indefinitely then? Am I missing something?
- nathanyukai 7y agoAlso I don't think the global economy can afford 5 year lockdown, it will cause starvation among with other cause of death, which might end up 'killing' more than covid-19
- hef19898 7y agoNo idea why it would be 5 years. But a lockdown would not result in starvation. Why would it? We "only" lock down social life (bad enough with all kinds of negative impacts on people, society and economy), but the food supply won't brake down. Why would it? All necessary things will be kept open.
- de_watcher 7y agoShut down the pubs and focus on the important stuff. It's already surprising how much of the activity turned out to be "non-essential". And we can have oil at half-price to do the essential. :D
- glaberficken 7y agoI think the point was not that food distribution would fail, but that the more disadvantaged slice of the population would not have money to buy food anymore.
- PizozhokKovidlo 7y ago> All necessary things will be kept open. Worldwide, that's not to be taken for granted. Here in Russia, the police is sometimes stopping agricultural workers from planting their crops because of the lockdowns. (Source in Russian: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4311038 https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4311038)
- IshKebab 7y agoDon't be ridiculous. There's no way the country could afford that, nor would people agree to it. There's no way a lockdown like this will go on for more than a year even if it means more people die.
- nogabebop23 7y agoYou've been down voted but I agree with your position. Humans will prioritize their well-being over others survival; this is an unpleasant truth. I think everyone has a different threshold of what they will accept & rationalize, but at some point they will no longer shoulder personal hardship for the greater good. They will collapse their support to a sub-tribe, like country, community or family and choose "us" over "them", even though the differentiation is very recent.
- SethBraud 7y agoI think this is not true and lot of people are living out of moral superiority, fake altruism, based on the ego. They want to be a cultural hero by saying stuff that imply moral superiority and people with other opinions are evil! There are good reasons to be sceptical about locking down a complete economy, but everybody is afraid to speak out, because they know they will be destroyed by the moralists! The communists believed in altruism... they thought they were right and people around them evil. The human mind is corrupt. Some people simply live in a fantasy world. The christians, communists and fascists had 1 thing in common... they thought they were right and used the truths as a weapon against other people. Speaking about other people as "evil", is sometimes projection or an egoic illusion.
- Robotbeat 7y agoSign me up for early vaccine trials then.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoI don't think I'll be rushing to volunteer. Things done in a hurry have a tendency to go wrong.
- Robotbeat 7y agoThose developing vaccines are professionals and are going through all the necessary steps. Phase I human clinical trials are already 6-7 weeks in for the Moderna vaccine. By the time there’s enough vaccine for Phase III trials, I’ll be comfortable enough with the risk. Besides, by volunteering early, I’m doing a service to others. Any additional risk I’d be taking would be buying-down risks for others later, so I’d be happy.
- fennecfoxen 7y agoI don’t think so. The world at large will much rather take the death count than five years of mass unemployment, no one getting basic medical services and cancer screenings … and there is the whole part where economic output is sorta needed to pay for things (like rent and food for the 20%+ unemployed). My own mother still needs urgent dental surgery. It’s going on two months now. You hear the trite content free version of this tradeoff in people whining “you just want to protect your 401(k)”. Imagine after five years, all 401(k)s are wiped out, most hospitals are bankrupt for lack of running any profitable procedures, and the US is throwing together some emergency single-payer system ... but it is struggling with recruitment because there’s not enough tax revenue to get the budget to pay enough doctors. (You want to sell bonds? Who has money to buy bonds?) How many die in this scenario?
- chinathrow 7y agoThat's the authors A5) in the post. > "In the end, I suspect the only way out of lockdown in anything like the short or medium term is if we can assert something new: A5) The social and economic damage caused by lockdown is going to cause more unnecessary deaths than those caused by ending it."
- kennydude 7y ago> most hospitals are bankrupt for lack of running any profitable procedures That's a very American problem due to having private hospitals...
- fennecfoxen 7y agoThe UK equivalent would be more orderly, but they still need to pay for the NHS with finite supplies of tax dollars and borrowing. They had staffing and recruitment and budget issues before the crisis, and some lockdown approaches might deprive them of seeking any more talent from major sources like India.
- dahfizz 7y agoYou ignored the rest of that point. What happens to the European hospitals when tax income falls way below what the government needs to operate?
- Paianni 7y agoFive years is not realistic. More likely is one to two years of lockdowns broken up with periods of 'relief' to allow a degree of economic recovery. The supply chain will just disintegrate otherwise.
- lettergram 7y agoI actually think the supply chain largely has been upended. That’s the real story here... I tried to buy a part for my dryer two weeks ago and it was going to take >2 months. I ended up then trying to buy a dryer and the only one I could purchase was already in store. If I tried to order one again it was >2 months (on an unknown timeline). China is having massive production issues, there are import fees/inspections and now a 2 week quarantine on incoming goods. It’s all kinds of messed up and now there’s a good reason to change production location.
- mumblemumble 7y agoRumor has it that power plants are having a hard time getting replacement parts, too. I expect, though, that these sorts of things will get sorted out. For one, no government is going to be keen on letting people who are confined to home and dependent on computers and the Internet to keep their little corner of the economy going go without power for long just because it's suddenly next-to-impossible to get some special precision bracket from the overseas factory that got the contract to make it back in 2005, while at the same time the domestic economy has hordes of ex-machinists who aren't quite ready to retire yet yet, and would be more than happy to quit their jobs as greeters at the local big box store in order to return to a job that pays more and reduces their risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2. Worst case scenario, perhaps we won't return to the "easily availability of basically everything so everything's basically disposable because the global supply chain is so fluid that it's easier to buy new broken crap than replace old broken crap" that we enjoyed so far this millennium. But I doubt it'll get much worse than the level of availability that developed economies enjoyed when I was a kid. Which is still pretty good. It would take a bit longer to rejigger the design of consumer products so that they return to using more standardized parts that can easily be stocked locally instead of all this fragile, disposable, special snowflake industrial design. But I could see that shifting fairly quickly, too, if things are still looking bad in 5 years.
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- piokoch 7y agoA 2020 A.D. blog post. Title has nothing to do with the content and the content itself is a bunch of speculations and pessimistic predictions that are so far not based on any scientific evidence.
- majewsky 7y agoWithout commenting on the merits of the article content... > Title has nothing to do with the content You might be misparsing the title in the same way that I originally did. It's not "[this is the] plan for 5 years of lockdown", but "[you should] plan for 5 years of lockdown" which is a correct summary of the position argued by the article.
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- febeling 7y agoAt some point you have to assume people get sort of religious satisfaction out of being pessimistic. God ("nature"?) is punishing us, because we have sinned. There are so many variables in play right now, which we don't know about. Things that could help us are: * unrecognised infections make the mortality compute to flu levels * we find a vaccine timely * we find treatment timely * we find specifics about transmission and can avoid it with low-impact responses instead of lockdown * there are explanations for why it's so regionally different (NYC/Italy vs. Singapore/Germany) * some sort of seasonality * we find more specific risk factors which can be remidiated (air pollution?) Probably more. Why point out it could all go bad? That seriously can't count for an intelligent assessment of the situation. It's an expression of fear. Why don't you read the optimistic reading more often? It's almost like people think fear was virtuous.
- tom_mellior 7y ago> * we find specifics about transmission and can avoid it with low-impact responses instead of lockdown I think this is a very important point, and I have some hopes that we will. Austria reopened smaller shops (below a certain number of square meters; supermarkets and other "essential" stores were open all the time) eight days ago, with a limit on how many customers may be admitted at a time, and a requirement to wear masks. If this were dangerous, we should have started to see a rise in new cases per day, but they have mostly been sinking over this period. Further businesses will follow in the coming weeks, with the numbers being monitored. I think that over the next few months we should get pretty good data on what seems to work and what doesn't. The solution will not be limited to "wash your hands, don't touch your face" like we thought in early March, but neither is this virus impossible to keep in check using some hygienic and distancing measures.
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- watwut 7y ago> Why don't you read the optimistic reading more often? It's almost like people think fear was virtuous. Being pessimistic is not the same thing as being afraid. Being cautious is not the same thing as being afraid. Acting on negative prediction does not mean one is acting out of fear.
- imvetri 7y agoThanks for sharing and thinking through the worst case which will possibly help to think what other measures we can take in order to keep ourself survive through this pandemic
- Jemm 7y agoThe thing about viruses, especially Corona viruses is that they mutate. The chance of mutation grows with infection rates. So letting the virus run its course is not as simple as people would like to believe. If we do let the virus infect 60 to 70% of the population, we vastly increase the risk of a much worse pandemic. Personally I think that the people who want to re-open the most are rich people who realize that they stand to lose a lot of money both by not getting the income from an active economy and secondly by higher taxes and asset nationalization from governments who are going to have to support lost income and social services. My final thought is that many people now perceive the virus as mainly targeting elderly, poor, frail, drug addicted and ethnic communities; which sadly many people consider to be acceptable losses.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoIt could mutate to become less deadly although I'm not sure what pressures would cause that. The Spanish flu got worse in the second wave, it killed many more otherwise healthy 25-35 year olds.
- majkinetor 7y agoThe evolution dictates that it should become less deadly because dead host mostly means dead virus and live host may mean more live viruses.
- gremlinsinc 7y agoExcept it's showing to mutate pretty damn fast and some of the mutations are way deadlier, don't know which 'came first' or how that proves one way or the other that it'll get worse or better. The are currently > 30 known mutations: https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/coronavirus-has-mutated-into-at-least-30-different-strains-study/ https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/coronavirus-has-mutated-into-a... But a lot of deadliest viruses kill fast and are less viral, so only way to spread is become less lethal. This virus has the luxury of being both deadly AND extremely viral (because it takes it's time killing people). Even if you don't die, nobody knows the long term effects of the virus on lungs, kidneys, heart, etc... So, while a lot of diseases do mutate to be less severe, that doesn't need to be the case with Sars-cov-2.
- lazylizard 7y agoSo how about 2months of lockdown every 6mths? How sustainable is that? How about 2mths every year? How long before we realise its not going away? At the 3 year mark when no successful vaccine is found???