4 ms·

If we could just convince the hoaxers that wearing masks in public is not emasculating, and convince the doomers that we need to flatten the curve rather than a

If we could just convince the hoaxers that wearing masks in public is not emasculating, and convince the doomers that we need to flatten the curve rather than attempt to completely contain the virus, we could go back to something bordering on normal life pretty quickly while we waited for vaccines to come along and kill off the virus altogether. And then we would be prepared to react to the next pandemic, too.

salmon30salmon 6y ago
Exactly. We need some humility in people. It is okay to admit that this is (thankfully!) not as bad as we thought, but it is still bad. It will still kill a lot of people. We need to take it seriously, but not as seriously as we feared. The doomers need to have the humility to admit that, and the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu. Again, I fear people don't realize that this isn't a game. This is disastrously bad and getting worse every. single. day.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu. I don't believe any significant number actually thinks that, it's their counter to "everybody will die, the science is settled". They will aim for something on the opposite extreme, that is a pretty common reaction. Imho: if you don't try to convince them that an asteroid is about to crash into earth, but instead tell them that lots of people are scared to death of an asteroid crashing into earth, they'll have a much easier time saying "okay, sure, I don't want them to be scared, I can wear a mask when I go shopping, I guess". > Again, I fear people don't realize that this isn't a game. This is disastrously bad and getting worse every. single. day. Where you live, maybe. Where I live, we haven't had a case in 10 days in the county of 330k people, we've had laughably low deaths to begin with, the curve was pretty much flattened the moment we went into constraints ... and we still have mandatory masks with no end in sight, and our local government still does not go back to normal mode, the trash is still getting picked up on irregular schedules etc. It's neither disastrous here, and it's not getting worse. But a lot of people are still scared out of their mind. And we need to help them to breathe and calm down, and tell them that it was scary, but that it's okay to go back outside. And at some point we'll have to tell them that they need to go back outside because we can't keep society running around them without them.
  - salmon30salmon 6y ago
    I mean the response is a disaster, not the epidemic itself. The fact that 40m are unemployed, that income tax receipts have nosedived, that business are shuttering leading to blight etc. Those are the long term disasters in the making.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      Oh, my mistake, I misunderstood. Thanks for clearing that up!
- umvi 6y ago
  > and the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu. Seasonal flu happens every year. Novel virus pandemics happen once per century. Seasonal flu is much more deadly, just spread out over longer timeline. And estimated covid mortality rate for my age group falls every week. I'm still not convinced it's measurably worse than the flu (for my age group).
ColanR 6y ago
I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth. The recent hydroxychloroquine is an obvious example [1]; The Lancet should never have published something with data so obviously questionable, and the media should not have picked it up so immediately as political ammunition. But the result is that the media appears to be "once again" lying to the public. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421797
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  > I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth. Fully agree here. I'm aware of Heterodox Academy trying to tackle this problem in the academic world--is there an analog solving for media bias?
  - jerf 6y ago
    At this point, the only thing I'm hoping for is basically total media collapse. It's actually proceeding apace. By its very nature, being slick TV shows and edited textual content, it'll superficially look like everything's fine until the very end, but the layoffs continue to roll through, marginal outlets are closing, the viewership drops, the respect keeps finding new lows... it's still looking good and may even come sooner than you think. This does not, on its own, solve the problem, but it makes the problem possible to solve.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      Yes for TV news. Not for every kind of news. Some outlets are having a good crisis. In the UK the Daily Telegraph is giving back the government furlough/support money as it doesn't need it. So is The Spectator. Interestingly these are the right wing newspapers. Why give up free money? Because the government really needs it but the newspapers don't, given that they are profitable and subscriptions have been rising, not falling. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-statement-from-the-chairman-of-the-spectator https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-statement-from-the-cha... The Daily Telegraph has doubled subscriptions in March alone.
chrisco255 6y ago
In my state the virus has killed less than 2,000 people with a population of 27 million and hospitalization rates continue to plummet in spite of lifted restrictions weeks ago. The problem I have with all arbitrary Covid rules is that they're not based on any objective criteria. For example, if we were rational, we would base policy entirely on local hospital capacity and hospitalization count (the original impetus for draconian shut downs was the belief that hospitals would get overrun, which never happened in 99% of the country). We cannot live in bubbles forever, and the disease may well persist forever with no vaccine. There's no threshold being set for arbitrary rules (i.e. if Covid hospitalizations less than X, restrictions lifted). So we just get this random enforcement of arbitrary policies, where you have leaders in CA fining people for being on the beach, in the sun, in open air, where there's extremely small chance of transmission. For my own part, I choose my own risks, and if you want to a wear a mask, go for it. But the curve was flattened even in places that never had restrictions. So we know by now this isn't the plague. We gotta move on. We only get so many trips around the sun. Can't live it in fear.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  That's exactly the strategy that Washington state is following. We even have a dashboard where can see the indicators, and they are things like infection rates per day per capita over 7 days, hospitilization rates.

salmon30salmon 6y ago

Exactly. We need some humility in people. It is okay to admit that this is (thankfully!) not as bad as we thought, but it is still bad. It will still kill a lot of people. We need to take it seriously, but not as seriously as we feared. The doomers need to have the humility to admit that, and the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu. Again, I fear people don't realize that this isn't a game. This is disastrously bad and getting worse every. single. day.

luckylion 6y ago
> the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu. I don't believe any significant number actually thinks that, it's their counter to "everybody will die, the science is settled". They will aim for something on the opposite extreme, that is a pretty common reaction. Imho: if you don't try to convince them that an asteroid is about to crash into earth, but instead tell them that lots of people are scared to death of an asteroid crashing into earth, they'll have a much easier time saying "okay, sure, I don't want them to be scared, I can wear a mask when I go shopping, I guess". > Again, I fear people don't realize that this isn't a game. This is disastrously bad and getting worse every. single. day. Where you live, maybe. Where I live, we haven't had a case in 10 days in the county of 330k people, we've had laughably low deaths to begin with, the curve was pretty much flattened the moment we went into constraints ... and we still have mandatory masks with no end in sight, and our local government still does not go back to normal mode, the trash is still getting picked up on irregular schedules etc. It's neither disastrous here, and it's not getting worse. But a lot of people are still scared out of their mind. And we need to help them to breathe and calm down, and tell them that it was scary, but that it's okay to go back outside. And at some point we'll have to tell them that they need to go back outside because we can't keep society running around them without them.
- salmon30salmon 6y ago
  I mean the response is a disaster, not the epidemic itself. The fact that 40m are unemployed, that income tax receipts have nosedived, that business are shuttering leading to blight etc. Those are the long term disasters in the making.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Oh, my mistake, I misunderstood. Thanks for clearing that up!
umvi 6y ago
> and the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu. Seasonal flu happens every year. Novel virus pandemics happen once per century. Seasonal flu is much more deadly, just spread out over longer timeline. And estimated covid mortality rate for my age group falls every week. I'm still not convinced it's measurably worse than the flu (for my age group).

ColanR 6y ago

I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth. The recent hydroxychloroquine is an obvious example [1]; The Lancet should never have published something with data so obviously questionable, and the media should not have picked it up so immediately as political ammunition. But the result is that the media appears to be "once again" lying to the public. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421797

throwaway894345 6y ago
> I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth. Fully agree here. I'm aware of Heterodox Academy trying to tackle this problem in the academic world--is there an analog solving for media bias?
- jerf 6y ago
  At this point, the only thing I'm hoping for is basically total media collapse. It's actually proceeding apace. By its very nature, being slick TV shows and edited textual content, it'll superficially look like everything's fine until the very end, but the layoffs continue to roll through, marginal outlets are closing, the viewership drops, the respect keeps finding new lows... it's still looking good and may even come sooner than you think. This does not, on its own, solve the problem, but it makes the problem possible to solve.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Yes for TV news. Not for every kind of news. Some outlets are having a good crisis. In the UK the Daily Telegraph is giving back the government furlough/support money as it doesn't need it. So is The Spectator. Interestingly these are the right wing newspapers. Why give up free money? Because the government really needs it but the newspapers don't, given that they are profitable and subscriptions have been rising, not falling. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-statement-from-the-chairman-of-the-spectator https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-statement-from-the-cha... The Daily Telegraph has doubled subscriptions in March alone.

chrisco255 6y ago

In my state the virus has killed less than 2,000 people with a population of 27 million and hospitalization rates continue to plummet in spite of lifted restrictions weeks ago. The problem I have with all arbitrary Covid rules is that they're not based on any objective criteria. For example, if we were rational, we would base policy entirely on local hospital capacity and hospitalization count (the original impetus for draconian shut downs was the belief that hospitals would get overrun, which never happened in 99% of the country). We cannot live in bubbles forever, and the disease may well persist forever with no vaccine. There's no threshold being set for arbitrary rules (i.e. if Covid hospitalizations less than X, restrictions lifted). So we just get this random enforcement of arbitrary policies, where you have leaders in CA fining people for being on the beach, in the sun, in open air, where there's extremely small chance of transmission. For my own part, I choose my own risks, and if you want to a wear a mask, go for it. But the curve was flattened even in places that never had restrictions. So we know by now this isn't the plague. We gotta move on. We only get so many trips around the sun. Can't live it in fear.

NotSammyHagar 6y ago
That's exactly the strategy that Washington state is following. We even have a dashboard where can see the indicators, and they are things like infection rates per day per capita over 7 days, hospitilization rates.