12 ms·

This is what I thin many forget when they speak against lockdown and for "heard immunity" - that this would not only result in a huge ammount of unnecessary dea

This is what I thin many forget when they speak against lockdown and for "heard immunity" - that this would not only result in a huge ammount of unnecessary deaths, but also pretty much wear out if not outright kill a signifficant part of medical personel. It's basically condemning them to working nonstop for months if not years, watching people die all day long & being in infection danger at all times while at work. And you can't replace all the people that burn out, get ill or die quickly - training medical professionals takes many years.

musha68k 6y ago
Completely agree, we have to think of others not ourselves when we diligently put on our masks.
- briandear 6y ago
  We diligently put on our masks out of a sense of theater and emotion rather than actual effectiveness. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/new-study-questions-the-effectiveness-of-masks-against-sars-cov-2#More-virus-on-outer-mask-surfaces https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/new-study-question... And the WHO continues to maintain that healthy people do not need to wear masks. And asymptomatic spread of the virus is “very rare” according to the WHO: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asymptomatic-coronavirus-patients-arent-spreading-new-infections-who-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asymptomatic-coronavirus-pat... Masks in the general public is just a placebo. A way to make people feel like they are “doing their part.”
  - majormajor 6y ago
    > This study did not aim to verify whether surgical or cloth masks are able to shorten the trajectory of droplets emitted through coughing. This seems like a very limited study, since so much of the discussion about masks as a way of preventing spread has resolved around the known cases of one person spreading the virus to a big crowd of others in a confined indoor space.
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
    The WHO recently changed its guidance to recommend masks for all, albeit only in "specific situations" where distancing is not possible. WHO has updated its guidance to advise that to prevent COVID-19 transmission effectively in areas of community transmission, governments should encourage the general public to wear masks in specific situations and settings as part of a comprehensive approach to suppress SARS-CoV-2 transmission. https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/when-and-how-to-use-masks https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
    - mkagenius 6y ago
      Lets just say every one is just as clueless about this virus as WHO or CDC or Fauci or whoever. Its just a failure of our not so advanced research in this field that we are in this situation. I can't believe everyone is just so clueless.
      - adrianN 6y ago
        You are blatantly wrong. There are of course many things we don't understand about the new virus yet, but of course the experts on infectious diseases know a lot more than the average person. Why is is such a common trope to discredit whole fields of research just because they can't provide all the answers, or gasp revise their answers as more data comes in?
        gizmo 6y ago
        Your suggestion that there is any kind of scientific consensus at this point is wrong; the experts are still very much divided. And right now the most prominent and most frequently cited experts are those that made one wrong prediction after another. Sometimes the media cites the wrong experts. Like with "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction" and "Hillary has a 99% chance of winning the general". In those cases, too, the experts that disagreed with the mainstream view got basically ignored until it was too late.
        6y ago
  - watwut 6y ago
    These attempts to frame masks as emotional or fear are very manipulative. Please argue by facts instead of emotional appeals to peoples insecurity.
trhway 6y ago
>It's basically condemning them to working nonstop for months if not years how come? wouldn't without lockdown the herd immunity with that R0 would come in like 2-3 months (and during that period the vulnerable people would have to be locked down), while with lockdown we're already 3 months into it without reasonable lockdown based endgame in sight?
- tomrod 6y ago
  The US did not lock down. A portion opted to stay at home if they could afford it, several industries were deemed essential (often with ridiculous inclusions), and the brunt is being borne by folks in poverty. We had between 40% and 60% reduction in urban mobility, much less in rural areas, and an increase in stay at home rates on par with a census block groups median household income. Then we re-opened too early. This is why there is no endgame in site.
  - hcknwscommenter 6y ago
    There is totally an endgame. Lockdown worked in NYC. That is huge. NYC is crushing the curve. 1 in 600 people in NYC have died of COVID (NOT GOOD). However, it is estimated that 1 in 5 is already immune. That's great news! A huge step towards herd immunity.
    - kmonsen 6y ago
      It means NYC must do this three times more to get to herd immunity, and strike the right balance each time. Still it is far from safe since people can come from the rest of the country so it’s not a real herd immunity.
      - hcknwscommenter 6y ago
        Your comment implies that "do[ing] this three times more" would be very difficult. That's totally incorrect. As the level of immunity rises, R0 goes down naturally. The effect is huge at even 20%. Giant at 50%, etc., especially with moderate social distancing. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that some people are just naturally resistant/immune to the virus. I believe Bergamo never got above 57% sero-positivity and even the USS Rosevelt was around 60% sero-positivity. It seems impossible to believe the other 40% weren't exposed. If (okay a big BIG if) 40% just don't ever get COVID, and 50% get it but have mild moderate symptoms (the data strongly supports this), NYC is basically done with this emergency.
redis_mlc 6y ago
> This is what I think many forget when they speak against lockdown and for "herd immunity" - that this would not only result in a huge ammount of unnecessary deaths, but also pretty much wear out if not outright kill a signifficant part of medical personel. Actually, no. You're parroting nonsense. The US cannot do testing and tracing because they waited too late, with 100,000 airline arrivals per week from China before (and during) the travel ban. So lockdown and masks accomplish nothing in the long run - we will all get corona until there's herd immunity, whether that's sooner or later. And half of hospital staff have been laid off. Many could be retrained in weeks or months to work in a corona ICU - watching a monitoring machine for a drugged, intubated patient isn't harder than anything else in an ICU. You know how annoying fake humility and humblebragging are? I find the fake empathy on HN just as annoying, and counter-productive.
- majormajor 6y ago
  > The US cannot do testing and tracing because they waited too late. "Cannot"? Why wouldn't it just require a much bigger effort? I've been flabbergasted by the lack of wartime thinking this whole time in the US. We know how to mobilize things and build logistical supply chains, why can't we apply that to a in-country medical battle? Not only did the US governments (at all levels) demonstrate incompetence early, we've now given up on even trying to be competent. That bodes poorly for future events. If you're a person who can work from home and isolate, or just someone who's not scared because you think your personal odds are good, then it burning through the rest of population faster is better than it burning through more slowly, which is the best most of the country had gotten through their restrictions. But wow... what a low standard for our country.
  - tomrod 6y ago
    The folks holding the power in the US don't appear to want there to be a pandemic, therefore it's just a bad flu. Out of sync with reality. This is going to get rougher, I think.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > "Cannot"? Why wouldn't it just require a much bigger effort? Corona is basically endemic in the US. You can test nursing homes and airport arrivals, and do followup testing on a small population. You cannot test 320 million people, and do followup weekly testing on them. Perhaps you're inspired by the success in NZ or Taiwan. The US has a totally different situation. You seem to think that "doing something" is better than nothing. Again, that's false hope in this case. Herd immunity is the only logical result in this case. But hope is not a strategy. I would compare the US response to corona in 2020 to the English and French appeasement of Germany in the 1930's. Denial of reality resulted in the total destruction of Europe in WW2, not much different to the health and financial results of corona.
nradov 6y ago
Through US government incompetence we missed our chance to contain and suppress the virus back in February. Now the pandemic is so widespread that it's impractical to do enough contract tracing and isolation to eradicate the virus. In many areas the authorities aren't even bothering to try. So we're on a path to herd immunity whether we like it or not. Obviously this is a bad state of affairs. But it's important to understand the reality we're in rather than indulging in fantasies.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  "But it's important to understand the reality we're in rather than indulging in fantasies." This seems an important point to remember in most US public discussions. If people can't even agree on basic facts, how can you make decisions?
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    Indeed, the reality for the average person is you're confronted by different authorities that don't agree on facts or goals. The situation seems to promise a series of rolling disasters with Covid just being one.
- laichzeit0 6y ago
  Say the US gets to herd immunity and the rest of the world has done a really good job at containing the virus, e.g. New Zealand. What are they realistically going to do long term? Shut up their country until a vaccine arrives? Quarantine everyone coming in or going out for two weeks? Who is realistically going to want to travel into or out of there with those kind of restrictions. I seriously wonder if the short term pain isn’t just worth it. It’s cold and calloused but it’s either vaccine or a long drawn out constant state of fear and social distancing. The other option is short burst of mass deaths followed by a return to complete normalcy. So my question is more like, how are countries that, in say six months, that’s population only have 10% exposed to COVID-19 going to coexist in a global world with countries that are past herd immunity and operating freely again.
  - 6y ago
40four 6y ago
I think it is more complicated than that. Almost all states very early on had some level of 'lock-down', stay at home order, or what have you. This has limited movement of people, and as a side effect, or maybe even direct order from governors, closed down/ limited many business. Including hospitals. Hospitals in America, believe it nor not, are for profit businesses. It is un-intuitive, but many of them are in serious financial trouble, despite the influx of Covid-19 patients. At a cursory level, I think most people would assume the hospital business is booming, but this assumption couldn't be more wrong. At this point, nobody wants to go in for routine examinations or non-emergency procedures. For-profit hospitals (almost all of them are) as a business, depend on providing these non-emergency services/ surgeries/ procedures. Hospitals across the country are laying off health-care workers en-masse. So it is not correct to imagine all hospitals are running at full capacity, and burning out their workers. In fact, many health care professionals are drawing unemployment at this point. I know this is doesn't make sense at the surface level, but it is something we all need to consider when continuing to advocate for lock-down or stay at home strategies. Our economy depends on movement of people/ goods/ services. That includes hospitals. I wish there was more serious discussion about this, and how we keep things moving as much as possible, while also protecting one another from spreading the virus. Lock-down alone is not an solution. If your areas hospitals are at risk of reaching capacity, for sure close it down. But almost nowhere in America outside of NY/NJ is there a risk of that right now. We've tried it for a while, but now we have more understanding. Now I want us to re-imagine how we can continue a life of movement, and also reduce risk of infection.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
  Everything you wrote is weird and simply shows that you need a proper health care system over there.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    America isn’t going to transform their healthcare market in the next several months. We can be ideological and let hospitals fail and doctors and nurses get laid off, or we can be pragmatic and focus on what creates the best outcome as we navigate the reality we are in.
thdrdt 6y ago
More and more researchers start to believe that the virus (also) spreads as aerosols. They also believe the amount of virus that enters your body affects how sick you get. This might also be the reason that healthy health workers can get sick when they are exposed a lot. So I have no doubt that working as health worker without enough protective gear is scary when you see healthy collegues getting sick. But that does not mean that going for herd immunity is a bad thing. We know now that most people even don't know they have the virus when they were just exposed a little bit to it. And if the virus travels like an aerosol it might even be true that the world wide protests that are going on in the open air won't lead to much more sick people. But this also means that people inside a bad ventilated building are at risk. Edit: an example of an article that explains this more in depth: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200527/aerosol-scientist-covid19-is-likely-airborne https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200527/aerosol-scientist-c...
- hcknwscommenter 6y ago
  I think you are missing the point. We are long past the point of containment. We will get to herd immunity no matter what. The question becomes, how to do it safely. The answer is to have in place sufficient capacity. One can have sufficient capacity easily if R is kept low. There are other ways of getting there (i.e., actually increasing capacity), or a combination thereof.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    We will hopefully not get hers immunity. Spain, Italy and Sweden are not close yet and they were pretty close to capacity, same with NYC. There is no safe way to get to herd immunity, it’s vaccine or nothing.
    - dillonmckay 6y ago
      I agree with you. I have yet to see evidence that once somebody is infected, they cannot get re-infected. Not to mention, the vaccine needs to work on the correct strain AND be administered to what, 70% of the population?

musha68k 6y ago

Completely agree, we have to think of others not ourselves when we diligently put on our masks.

briandear 6y ago
We diligently put on our masks out of a sense of theater and emotion rather than actual effectiveness. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/new-study-questions-the-effectiveness-of-masks-against-sars-cov-2#More-virus-on-outer-mask-surfaces https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/new-study-question... And the WHO continues to maintain that healthy people do not need to wear masks. And asymptomatic spread of the virus is “very rare” according to the WHO: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asymptomatic-coronavirus-patients-arent-spreading-new-infections-who-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asymptomatic-coronavirus-pat... Masks in the general public is just a placebo. A way to make people feel like they are “doing their part.”
- majormajor 6y ago
  > This study did not aim to verify whether surgical or cloth masks are able to shorten the trajectory of droplets emitted through coughing. This seems like a very limited study, since so much of the discussion about masks as a way of preventing spread has resolved around the known cases of one person spreading the virus to a big crowd of others in a confined indoor space.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  The WHO recently changed its guidance to recommend masks for all, albeit only in "specific situations" where distancing is not possible. WHO has updated its guidance to advise that to prevent COVID-19 transmission effectively in areas of community transmission, governments should encourage the general public to wear masks in specific situations and settings as part of a comprehensive approach to suppress SARS-CoV-2 transmission. https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/when-and-how-to-use-masks https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
  - mkagenius 6y ago
    Lets just say every one is just as clueless about this virus as WHO or CDC or Fauci or whoever. Its just a failure of our not so advanced research in this field that we are in this situation. I can't believe everyone is just so clueless.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      You are blatantly wrong. There are of course many things we don't understand about the new virus yet, but of course the experts on infectious diseases know a lot more than the average person. Why is is such a common trope to discredit whole fields of research just because they can't provide all the answers, or gasp revise their answers as more data comes in?
      - gizmo 6y ago
        Your suggestion that there is any kind of scientific consensus at this point is wrong; the experts are still very much divided. And right now the most prominent and most frequently cited experts are those that made one wrong prediction after another. Sometimes the media cites the wrong experts. Like with "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction" and "Hillary has a 99% chance of winning the general". In those cases, too, the experts that disagreed with the mainstream view got basically ignored until it was too late.
        6y ago
- watwut 6y ago
  These attempts to frame masks as emotional or fear are very manipulative. Please argue by facts instead of emotional appeals to peoples insecurity.

trhway 6y ago

>It's basically condemning them to working nonstop for months if not years how come? wouldn't without lockdown the herd immunity with that R0 would come in like 2-3 months (and during that period the vulnerable people would have to be locked down), while with lockdown we're already 3 months into it without reasonable lockdown based endgame in sight?

tomrod 6y ago
The US did not lock down. A portion opted to stay at home if they could afford it, several industries were deemed essential (often with ridiculous inclusions), and the brunt is being borne by folks in poverty. We had between 40% and 60% reduction in urban mobility, much less in rural areas, and an increase in stay at home rates on par with a census block groups median household income. Then we re-opened too early. This is why there is no endgame in site.
- hcknwscommenter 6y ago
  There is totally an endgame. Lockdown worked in NYC. That is huge. NYC is crushing the curve. 1 in 600 people in NYC have died of COVID (NOT GOOD). However, it is estimated that 1 in 5 is already immune. That's great news! A huge step towards herd immunity.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    It means NYC must do this three times more to get to herd immunity, and strike the right balance each time. Still it is far from safe since people can come from the rest of the country so it’s not a real herd immunity.
    - hcknwscommenter 6y ago
      Your comment implies that "do[ing] this three times more" would be very difficult. That's totally incorrect. As the level of immunity rises, R0 goes down naturally. The effect is huge at even 20%. Giant at 50%, etc., especially with moderate social distancing. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that some people are just naturally resistant/immune to the virus. I believe Bergamo never got above 57% sero-positivity and even the USS Rosevelt was around 60% sero-positivity. It seems impossible to believe the other 40% weren't exposed. If (okay a big BIG if) 40% just don't ever get COVID, and 50% get it but have mild moderate symptoms (the data strongly supports this), NYC is basically done with this emergency.

redis_mlc 6y ago

> This is what I think many forget when they speak against lockdown and for "herd immunity" - that this would not only result in a huge ammount of unnecessary deaths, but also pretty much wear out if not outright kill a signifficant part of medical personel. Actually, no. You're parroting nonsense. The US cannot do testing and tracing because they waited too late, with 100,000 airline arrivals per week from China before (and during) the travel ban. So lockdown and masks accomplish nothing in the long run - we will all get corona until there's herd immunity, whether that's sooner or later. And half of hospital staff have been laid off. Many could be retrained in weeks or months to work in a corona ICU - watching a monitoring machine for a drugged, intubated patient isn't harder than anything else in an ICU. You know how annoying fake humility and humblebragging are? I find the fake empathy on HN just as annoying, and counter-productive.

majormajor 6y ago
> The US cannot do testing and tracing because they waited too late. "Cannot"? Why wouldn't it just require a much bigger effort? I've been flabbergasted by the lack of wartime thinking this whole time in the US. We know how to mobilize things and build logistical supply chains, why can't we apply that to a in-country medical battle? Not only did the US governments (at all levels) demonstrate incompetence early, we've now given up on even trying to be competent. That bodes poorly for future events. If you're a person who can work from home and isolate, or just someone who's not scared because you think your personal odds are good, then it burning through the rest of population faster is better than it burning through more slowly, which is the best most of the country had gotten through their restrictions. But wow... what a low standard for our country.
- tomrod 6y ago
  The folks holding the power in the US don't appear to want there to be a pandemic, therefore it's just a bad flu. Out of sync with reality. This is going to get rougher, I think.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > "Cannot"? Why wouldn't it just require a much bigger effort? Corona is basically endemic in the US. You can test nursing homes and airport arrivals, and do followup testing on a small population. You cannot test 320 million people, and do followup weekly testing on them. Perhaps you're inspired by the success in NZ or Taiwan. The US has a totally different situation. You seem to think that "doing something" is better than nothing. Again, that's false hope in this case. Herd immunity is the only logical result in this case. But hope is not a strategy. I would compare the US response to corona in 2020 to the English and French appeasement of Germany in the 1930's. Denial of reality resulted in the total destruction of Europe in WW2, not much different to the health and financial results of corona.

nradov 6y ago

Through US government incompetence we missed our chance to contain and suppress the virus back in February. Now the pandemic is so widespread that it's impractical to do enough contract tracing and isolation to eradicate the virus. In many areas the authorities aren't even bothering to try. So we're on a path to herd immunity whether we like it or not. Obviously this is a bad state of affairs. But it's important to understand the reality we're in rather than indulging in fantasies.

spaetzleesser 6y ago
"But it's important to understand the reality we're in rather than indulging in fantasies." This seems an important point to remember in most US public discussions. If people can't even agree on basic facts, how can you make decisions?
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  Indeed, the reality for the average person is you're confronted by different authorities that don't agree on facts or goals. The situation seems to promise a series of rolling disasters with Covid just being one.
laichzeit0 6y ago
Say the US gets to herd immunity and the rest of the world has done a really good job at containing the virus, e.g. New Zealand. What are they realistically going to do long term? Shut up their country until a vaccine arrives? Quarantine everyone coming in or going out for two weeks? Who is realistically going to want to travel into or out of there with those kind of restrictions. I seriously wonder if the short term pain isn’t just worth it. It’s cold and calloused but it’s either vaccine or a long drawn out constant state of fear and social distancing. The other option is short burst of mass deaths followed by a return to complete normalcy. So my question is more like, how are countries that, in say six months, that’s population only have 10% exposed to COVID-19 going to coexist in a global world with countries that are past herd immunity and operating freely again.
- 6y ago

40four 6y ago

I think it is more complicated than that. Almost all states very early on had some level of 'lock-down', stay at home order, or what have you. This has limited movement of people, and as a side effect, or maybe even direct order from governors, closed down/ limited many business. Including hospitals. Hospitals in America, believe it nor not, are for profit businesses. It is un-intuitive, but many of them are in serious financial trouble, despite the influx of Covid-19 patients. At a cursory level, I think most people would assume the hospital business is booming, but this assumption couldn't be more wrong. At this point, nobody wants to go in for routine examinations or non-emergency procedures. For-profit hospitals (almost all of them are) as a business, depend on providing these non-emergency services/ surgeries/ procedures. Hospitals across the country are laying off health-care workers en-masse. So it is not correct to imagine all hospitals are running at full capacity, and burning out their workers. In fact, many health care professionals are drawing unemployment at this point. I know this is doesn't make sense at the surface level, but it is something we all need to consider when continuing to advocate for lock-down or stay at home strategies. Our economy depends on movement of people/ goods/ services. That includes hospitals. I wish there was more serious discussion about this, and how we keep things moving as much as possible, while also protecting one another from spreading the virus. Lock-down alone is not an solution. If your areas hospitals are at risk of reaching capacity, for sure close it down. But almost nowhere in America outside of NY/NJ is there a risk of that right now. We've tried it for a while, but now we have more understanding. Now I want us to re-imagine how we can continue a life of movement, and also reduce risk of infection.

gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
Everything you wrote is weird and simply shows that you need a proper health care system over there.
- dannyw 6y ago
  America isn’t going to transform their healthcare market in the next several months. We can be ideological and let hospitals fail and doctors and nurses get laid off, or we can be pragmatic and focus on what creates the best outcome as we navigate the reality we are in.

thdrdt 6y ago

More and more researchers start to believe that the virus (also) spreads as aerosols. They also believe the amount of virus that enters your body affects how sick you get. This might also be the reason that healthy health workers can get sick when they are exposed a lot. So I have no doubt that working as health worker without enough protective gear is scary when you see healthy collegues getting sick. But that does not mean that going for herd immunity is a bad thing. We know now that most people even don't know they have the virus when they were just exposed a little bit to it. And if the virus travels like an aerosol it might even be true that the world wide protests that are going on in the open air won't lead to much more sick people. But this also means that people inside a bad ventilated building are at risk. Edit: an example of an article that explains this more in depth: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200527/aerosol-scientist-covid19-is-likely-airborne https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200527/aerosol-scientist-c...

hcknwscommenter 6y ago
I think you are missing the point. We are long past the point of containment. We will get to herd immunity no matter what. The question becomes, how to do it safely. The answer is to have in place sufficient capacity. One can have sufficient capacity easily if R is kept low. There are other ways of getting there (i.e., actually increasing capacity), or a combination thereof.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  We will hopefully not get hers immunity. Spain, Italy and Sweden are not close yet and they were pretty close to capacity, same with NYC. There is no safe way to get to herd immunity, it’s vaccine or nothing.
  - dillonmckay 6y ago
    I agree with you. I have yet to see evidence that once somebody is infected, they cannot get re-infected. Not to mention, the vaccine needs to work on the correct strain AND be administered to what, 70% of the population?