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Politically in support of quarantine? It's established medical science. That we're at a point where epidemiology is political is truly worrying. Donald Trump l

Politically in support of quarantine? It's established medical science. That we're at a point where epidemiology is political is truly worrying. Donald Trump learned that ignoring science doesn't make it go away to his detriment; I really hope others will take note and follow prevailing medical advice to keep themselves and their loved ones safe, rather than pretending it's political.

nsxwolf 6y ago
You can accept the science that a quarantine prevents disease from spreading. You can also take the stance that the quarantine isn't worth it. Not mutually exclusive ideas.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  The problem with that stance is that you're taking it on faith that the economy will do better without a quarantine than with one. A large number of sick and dead people and the fear of such will destroy an economy, quarantine or not. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-sweden-gdp-falls-8pc-in-q2-worse-nordic-neighbors-2020-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-sweden-gdp-falls...
  - frockington1 6y ago
    I think its pretty clear that places where the economy shut down longer are affected more, at least in the US. In the midwest where I live everything is almost back to normal, Main difference is you have to put a piece of cotton over your face when you walk into a bar. Housing market is still strong and jobs are to be had. Meanwhile NYC and other shut down areas are seeing an exodus of the wealthy
    - kazagistar 6y ago
      Its not over yet. I live in a rural area and we are seeing the worst spike yet.
    - addicted 6y ago
      In the US places that were shut down longer were also places that were affected by the virus more. A more relevant comparison is Sweden with its neighbors. If you simply compare Sweden to Denmark (which was the worst performing Swedish neighbor), Sweden which never had an official lockdown, still saw its economy contract more than all its neighbors, had a death rate 5x that of Denmark (and 10x other neighbors) and a case rate 2x that of Denmark. Of course, it's hard to compare different economies, but the initial evidence indicates that not locking down does not help the economy either. Another interesting bit of evidence is that mobility data showed that in cities that were affected by the virus, reduction in economic activity preceded lockdowns. Which indicates that the economy would be affected negatively irrespective of the lockdown. It's also not all that surprising. The reality is that the majority of people are not gonna want to be active while a deadly disease for which we have no cure/vaccine is running rampant. So a lockdown effectively only affects the behavior of those at the margin. Their activity affects the economy linearly, but will affect the spread of the disease exponentially. The marginal linear economic benefit of not having a lockdown could very easily be dwarfed by the economic impact of the greater spread of the virus. That being said, now that we have a much better understanding of the virus and how it spreads (we had absolutely no idea in the beginning when the blanket lockdowns were issued), targeted and limited lockdowns should be more than sufficient in societies where people generally tend to follow rules.
      - jariel 6y ago
        "eduction in economic activity preceded lockdowns." In Montreal, the coffee shops were almost empty when the PM's wife was diagnosed, some time before the official shut downs. It may very well be that social interaction is only partly controlled by 'shut downs'. I suggest that there is probably a 'form of staying open' that would actually limit COVID spread, and that if the communications used by government were more effective (i.e. 'instead of going to the coffee shop, make sure to buy coffee takeout) - we may have been able to 'have our cake and eat it' which is to say keep the economy running while limiting infections. The economic shock is real, I don't think people realize how upside down our system is right now. We've been basically avoiding total social meltdown by printing money out of thin air in historical proportions. If we don't play our cards right, and we screw this up, it will be 'Weimar Republic' all over again and things could melt down very badly. Someone much worse than Trump will come along and take advantage of that. Have a look here [1] In 10 years the US Fed has gone from 800B in assets to 7 Trillion. It's very scary. [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      The evidence is strongly suggestive that consumer behavior has more of an impact on business success than lockdown, which is why business in Sweden suffered. You can't separate consumer sentiment and lockdown just by looking at the midwest. The question is more - in places where the population voted for people who did lockdown, would lifting the lockdown lead to a resumption of economic activity? The answer to that question appears to be a tentative no. The best way to resume normal activity is to control the pandemic.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      High cost areas are seeing an exodus of the wealthy because they now have the ability to work from places where they don't have to pay $4000/mo for a tiny apartment.
    - nobody9999 6y ago
      >Meanwhile NYC and other shut down areas are seeing an exodus of the wealthy I think you're not as informed as you think you are. I live in NYC and we started opening back up in late June. In fact, pretty much everything but indoor dining, gyms and large indoor gatherings have been open since August. We've had some hot spots recently which have necessitated geographically isolated restrictions, but the majority of the city is open, as is indoor dining and gyms. Sure, there has been a goodly bit of economic impact, as many continue to work from home (before the pandemic, the population of Manhattan would roughly double on a working day) which has impacted much of the hospitality industry. Broadway theaters, the Opera and the Philharmonic are all closed until at least next summer, but those require being in large groups indoors to be profitable. But museums are open. NYC is certainly not "back to normal," but in a place where the population density is 27,000/sq mi (what's the population density where you live?) that's not surprising. What is surprising is how low we've kept the infection rate since the end of May[0]. In fact, given the circumstances, once we got things under control (mid March- late May were horrific and deeply disturbing here), we've been doing really well. [0] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
  - craftinator 6y ago
    It seems like it's a good time to own a cemetery or funeral service.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Destroy? How? > Sweden's GDP fell 8.6% during the second quarter of the year, according to its statistics body. > The fall is sharper than its neighbors — Denmark registered a 7.4% fall, and Finland a 3.2% fall. US GDP fell 30% during lockdown. If not locking down is approximately as bad as locking down, plus the lifestyle benefits of not locking down, that's a win overall.
    - bryanlarsen 6y ago
      > US GDP fell 30% during lockdown. which was split over the second & third quarters, so not as massively different from the Scandanavian numbers as it first appears > If not locking down is approximately as bad as locking down, plus the lifestyle benefits of not locking down, minus the drawback of Grandpa dying
  - kevstev 6y ago
    These aren't the only options though. At least not in a "all in or all out" kind of way over a large area and length of time. You can aggressively test and trace and separate just those that test positive. You can quarantine those most prone to be affected/infected. You can quarantine specific localized areas where there is infection. These all require that you actually implement these things effectively and comprehensively of course. And just for the record, I think in early March we absolutely made the right decisions, and the "lockdowns" that are still in place are still the right way to go considering how terribly the US has managed all this. In general though, this doesn't seem to be the only or even the best tool we have in our toolbox to fight a pandemic like this. Had the NYC area started an extensive test and trace program when we were in our lulls in August (NJ was down to under 300 cases a day across the state), and enacted forced quarantines with criminal consequences, I think we would be in a much better place now. As an aside on a personal level, I am livid that I am being forced to go back in the office on Monday 5 days a week despite being able to be able to do my job 100% effectively. Its completely irresponsible and has permanently damaged my view of my employer.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  That's true. I find that most of the "not worth it" crowd seems to be making post-fact justifications for why it's not worth it after they've already decided they don't like quarantine. There's no reasonable evidence suggesting, for instance, that a shutdown is causing more deaths than it is preventing, and yet we continuously hear that take.
  - zepto 6y ago
    The WHO disagrees with you: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/who-official-urges-world-leaders-to-stop-using-lockdowns-as-primary-virus-control-method/ar-BB19TBUo https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/who-official-urges-...
    - addicted 6y ago
      “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.” I'm pretty sure these conditions applied when the lockdowns were imposed in most countries. So the WHO does not disagree with the poster at all. And yeah, no one thinks lockdowns should be the primary or only way of addressing the pandemic.
      - zepto 6y ago
        Your quote actually entirely supports my assertion. Look at the poster’s comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24776722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24776722 The poster is talking about a ‘not worth it crowd’ dismissively, and as if they are inherently wrong. The WHO supports the idea that it is almost always not worth it and that the conditions in which it is worth it are narrowly defined. Whether or not the conditions obtain for it to be worth it is therefore a very valid discussion. Dismissing (with bulverism) the concerns of those who question the value is not valid. It is also certainly not true that we know that all of the lockdowns were justified based on the WHO’s advice.
ketamine__ 6y ago
Science gives us options but doesn't tell us what we _should_ do. That is up to voters in countries with democratically elected officials.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Not even close. In the US we have a full year from when the epidemic hit until the next set of elected officials are seated.
InitialLastName 6y ago
If you wanted to, you could use that logic to justify quarantines for as long as influenza and HIV are present in society (they kill people too, and a heavily enforced quarantine would prevent them from spreading). One has to balance the benefits of slowing the spread of a virus against the costs of policy decisions.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  So the typical person who thinks that shutdown is unjustified think that HIV, influenza, and covid are all comparable diseases? Explains a lot.
  - frockington1 6y ago
    As a member of the healthy and under 30 demographic, influenza is a more serious threat to my health. I see no reason I shouldn't treat influenza as a more serious risk
    - kazagistar 6y ago
      Because there is more to moral choices then self interest.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      That's not even true, although you're right that the risk of both are extremely low for our age group. Do you think the lives and health of others have no impact on your decision making? If so, you might be interested to learn that drunk drivers actually have a higher rate of survival than people who walk home drunk from the bar. Never mind those pesky pedestrians you might hit, drunk driving is the safest option for the driver!
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      Will you feel the same when you are unable to receive life saving care because health care resources are tied up dealing with the flood of COVID victims?
    - 6y ago
dang 6y ago
Please do not take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. Those are like black holes, and the idea here is to resist their gravitational pull. Otherwise everything ends up getting sucked into the same few places, which is repetitive, which is tedious. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=black%20hole%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... (We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24775774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24775774.)

nsxwolf 6y ago

You can accept the science that a quarantine prevents disease from spreading. You can also take the stance that the quarantine isn't worth it. Not mutually exclusive ideas.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
The problem with that stance is that you're taking it on faith that the economy will do better without a quarantine than with one. A large number of sick and dead people and the fear of such will destroy an economy, quarantine or not. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-sweden-gdp-falls-8pc-in-q2-worse-nordic-neighbors-2020-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-sweden-gdp-falls...
- frockington1 6y ago
  I think its pretty clear that places where the economy shut down longer are affected more, at least in the US. In the midwest where I live everything is almost back to normal, Main difference is you have to put a piece of cotton over your face when you walk into a bar. Housing market is still strong and jobs are to be had. Meanwhile NYC and other shut down areas are seeing an exodus of the wealthy
  - kazagistar 6y ago
    Its not over yet. I live in a rural area and we are seeing the worst spike yet.
  - addicted 6y ago
    In the US places that were shut down longer were also places that were affected by the virus more. A more relevant comparison is Sweden with its neighbors. If you simply compare Sweden to Denmark (which was the worst performing Swedish neighbor), Sweden which never had an official lockdown, still saw its economy contract more than all its neighbors, had a death rate 5x that of Denmark (and 10x other neighbors) and a case rate 2x that of Denmark. Of course, it's hard to compare different economies, but the initial evidence indicates that not locking down does not help the economy either. Another interesting bit of evidence is that mobility data showed that in cities that were affected by the virus, reduction in economic activity preceded lockdowns. Which indicates that the economy would be affected negatively irrespective of the lockdown. It's also not all that surprising. The reality is that the majority of people are not gonna want to be active while a deadly disease for which we have no cure/vaccine is running rampant. So a lockdown effectively only affects the behavior of those at the margin. Their activity affects the economy linearly, but will affect the spread of the disease exponentially. The marginal linear economic benefit of not having a lockdown could very easily be dwarfed by the economic impact of the greater spread of the virus. That being said, now that we have a much better understanding of the virus and how it spreads (we had absolutely no idea in the beginning when the blanket lockdowns were issued), targeted and limited lockdowns should be more than sufficient in societies where people generally tend to follow rules.
    - jariel 6y ago
      "eduction in economic activity preceded lockdowns." In Montreal, the coffee shops were almost empty when the PM's wife was diagnosed, some time before the official shut downs. It may very well be that social interaction is only partly controlled by 'shut downs'. I suggest that there is probably a 'form of staying open' that would actually limit COVID spread, and that if the communications used by government were more effective (i.e. 'instead of going to the coffee shop, make sure to buy coffee takeout) - we may have been able to 'have our cake and eat it' which is to say keep the economy running while limiting infections. The economic shock is real, I don't think people realize how upside down our system is right now. We've been basically avoiding total social meltdown by printing money out of thin air in historical proportions. If we don't play our cards right, and we screw this up, it will be 'Weimar Republic' all over again and things could melt down very badly. Someone much worse than Trump will come along and take advantage of that. Have a look here [1] In 10 years the US Fed has gone from 800B in assets to 7 Trillion. It's very scary. [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    The evidence is strongly suggestive that consumer behavior has more of an impact on business success than lockdown, which is why business in Sweden suffered. You can't separate consumer sentiment and lockdown just by looking at the midwest. The question is more - in places where the population voted for people who did lockdown, would lifting the lockdown lead to a resumption of economic activity? The answer to that question appears to be a tentative no. The best way to resume normal activity is to control the pandemic.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    High cost areas are seeing an exodus of the wealthy because they now have the ability to work from places where they don't have to pay $4000/mo for a tiny apartment.
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >Meanwhile NYC and other shut down areas are seeing an exodus of the wealthy I think you're not as informed as you think you are. I live in NYC and we started opening back up in late June. In fact, pretty much everything but indoor dining, gyms and large indoor gatherings have been open since August. We've had some hot spots recently which have necessitated geographically isolated restrictions, but the majority of the city is open, as is indoor dining and gyms. Sure, there has been a goodly bit of economic impact, as many continue to work from home (before the pandemic, the population of Manhattan would roughly double on a working day) which has impacted much of the hospitality industry. Broadway theaters, the Opera and the Philharmonic are all closed until at least next summer, but those require being in large groups indoors to be profitable. But museums are open. NYC is certainly not "back to normal," but in a place where the population density is 27,000/sq mi (what's the population density where you live?) that's not surprising. What is surprising is how low we've kept the infection rate since the end of May[0]. In fact, given the circumstances, once we got things under control (mid March- late May were horrific and deeply disturbing here), we've been doing really well. [0] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
- craftinator 6y ago
  It seems like it's a good time to own a cemetery or funeral service.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Destroy? How? > Sweden's GDP fell 8.6% during the second quarter of the year, according to its statistics body. > The fall is sharper than its neighbors — Denmark registered a 7.4% fall, and Finland a 3.2% fall. US GDP fell 30% during lockdown. If not locking down is approximately as bad as locking down, plus the lifestyle benefits of not locking down, that's a win overall.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    > US GDP fell 30% during lockdown. which was split over the second & third quarters, so not as massively different from the Scandanavian numbers as it first appears > If not locking down is approximately as bad as locking down, plus the lifestyle benefits of not locking down, minus the drawback of Grandpa dying
- kevstev 6y ago
  These aren't the only options though. At least not in a "all in or all out" kind of way over a large area and length of time. You can aggressively test and trace and separate just those that test positive. You can quarantine those most prone to be affected/infected. You can quarantine specific localized areas where there is infection. These all require that you actually implement these things effectively and comprehensively of course. And just for the record, I think in early March we absolutely made the right decisions, and the "lockdowns" that are still in place are still the right way to go considering how terribly the US has managed all this. In general though, this doesn't seem to be the only or even the best tool we have in our toolbox to fight a pandemic like this. Had the NYC area started an extensive test and trace program when we were in our lulls in August (NJ was down to under 300 cases a day across the state), and enacted forced quarantines with criminal consequences, I think we would be in a much better place now. As an aside on a personal level, I am livid that I am being forced to go back in the office on Monday 5 days a week despite being able to be able to do my job 100% effectively. Its completely irresponsible and has permanently damaged my view of my employer.
whimsicalism 6y ago
That's true. I find that most of the "not worth it" crowd seems to be making post-fact justifications for why it's not worth it after they've already decided they don't like quarantine. There's no reasonable evidence suggesting, for instance, that a shutdown is causing more deaths than it is preventing, and yet we continuously hear that take.
- zepto 6y ago
  The WHO disagrees with you: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/who-official-urges-world-leaders-to-stop-using-lockdowns-as-primary-virus-control-method/ar-BB19TBUo https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/who-official-urges-...
  - addicted 6y ago
    “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.” I'm pretty sure these conditions applied when the lockdowns were imposed in most countries. So the WHO does not disagree with the poster at all. And yeah, no one thinks lockdowns should be the primary or only way of addressing the pandemic.
    - zepto 6y ago
      Your quote actually entirely supports my assertion. Look at the poster’s comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24776722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24776722 The poster is talking about a ‘not worth it crowd’ dismissively, and as if they are inherently wrong. The WHO supports the idea that it is almost always not worth it and that the conditions in which it is worth it are narrowly defined. Whether or not the conditions obtain for it to be worth it is therefore a very valid discussion. Dismissing (with bulverism) the concerns of those who question the value is not valid. It is also certainly not true that we know that all of the lockdowns were justified based on the WHO’s advice.

ketamine__ 6y ago

Science gives us options but doesn't tell us what we _should_ do. That is up to voters in countries with democratically elected officials.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Not even close. In the US we have a full year from when the epidemic hit until the next set of elected officials are seated.

InitialLastName 6y ago

If you wanted to, you could use that logic to justify quarantines for as long as influenza and HIV are present in society (they kill people too, and a heavily enforced quarantine would prevent them from spreading). One has to balance the benefits of slowing the spread of a virus against the costs of policy decisions.

whimsicalism 6y ago
So the typical person who thinks that shutdown is unjustified think that HIV, influenza, and covid are all comparable diseases? Explains a lot.
- frockington1 6y ago
  As a member of the healthy and under 30 demographic, influenza is a more serious threat to my health. I see no reason I shouldn't treat influenza as a more serious risk
  - kazagistar 6y ago
    Because there is more to moral choices then self interest.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    That's not even true, although you're right that the risk of both are extremely low for our age group. Do you think the lives and health of others have no impact on your decision making? If so, you might be interested to learn that drunk drivers actually have a higher rate of survival than people who walk home drunk from the bar. Never mind those pesky pedestrians you might hit, drunk driving is the safest option for the driver!
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Will you feel the same when you are unable to receive life saving care because health care resources are tied up dealing with the flood of COVID victims?
  - 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Please do not take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. Those are like black holes, and the idea here is to resist their gravitational pull. Otherwise everything ends up getting sucked into the same few places, which is repetitive, which is tedious. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=black%20hole%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... (We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24775774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24775774.)