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Not to sound grim, but I now wonder if it would have been best to let things be. Of course inform the public, but enforce no action. Would/could it have led t

• nharada 6y ago
  I don't know, the other side of that argument is imagine how much worse it could have been if we'd done nothing.
• proverbialbunny 6y ago
  The problem is in the US hospitals get overloaded quite easily. Our healthcare is not as robust as Sweden's, so that option hasn't been able to be on the table. Keep in mind the surge we are seeing right now is from Thanksgiving. It is most likely going to get worse.
  • jussij 6y ago
    While Sweden did adopt the 'do nothing' approach, their results so far have hardly been a success story. Currently Swedish deaths sit at 837 deaths per million: https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/sweden https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/sweden By comparison consider Sweden's neighbors. Norway currently sits at 80 deaths per million: https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/norway https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/norway Finland currently sits at 99 deaths per million: https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/finland https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/finland What is more troubling for Sweden is their current daily death rate is also very much higher than both Norway and Finland. So if the aim was to try an reduce the number of citizens dying from Covid 19 then based on those figures Sweden's 'do nothing' approach has failed.
    • proverbialbunny 6y ago
      My point was, if the US adopted that policy it would be far worse.
• raziel2701 6y ago
  Wait you're wondering if not taking any action would have had the same result? Or masks on but no social distance? Or both social distance and masks on? Because social distance will preclude many activities. But in any case, in my opinion more should have been done, not less. Specifically, cut people a check so that they can afford to stay safely inside.
  • AlexDragusin 6y ago
    I think he is suggesting there would be a strong information campaign about masks, social distancing, hand washing etc then leave people be while moving on with the vaccines and so forth. On the other hand, if all the people would followed the restrictions to the letter it would been under control many times over, as demonstrated by NZ, TW, AU, CN.
    • mdale 6y ago
      This -> if all the people would followed the restrictions to the letter it would been under control many times over, as demonstrated by NZ, TW, AU, CN.
    • Jommi 6y ago
      Yeah this is what I thought the US would do, as its a country where individual decision making feels like its prided above all else. I was absolutely surprised about this joke-authoritarian style regulations that CA and the counties tried to push over and over. Absolutely absurd.
    • CydeWeys 6y ago
      With a different president, yes. Not with this one though.
  • axaxs 6y ago
    I mean, the govt can make recommendations and let people decide what to do. I'm -not- an antimasker...and haven't left the house much since March. But it feels like our people will inevitably decide it's boring and give up, as I've seen not only in news but in my friend group. So it feels like we just delayed mass infection rather than preventing it.
• krona 6y ago
  It's debatable whether we'd be dealing with multiple significantly more transmissible strains of the virus if we hadn't amplified the evolutionary pressures (and time scales) necessary for it to happen.
  • dehrmann 6y ago
    We've only eradicated smallpox and rinderpest, so we have almost no experience doing something like this. It was also crazy to think that short-term containment measures (masks and social distancing) wouldn't start selecting strains that are more virulent. The good news is that vaccine distribution is moving very quickly--hopefully faster than the virus can mutate. The bad news is only developed countries, India, and China will likely vaccinate that quickly.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      > It was also crazy to think that short-term containment measures (masks and social distancing) wouldn't start selecting strains that are more virulent. Why? It can't evolve against "no way to reach the human" like it could chemical/biological countermeasures.
      • dehrmann 6y ago
        But there's not "no way" when people work essential jobs, leave their homes for groceries, touch packages getting delivered, live with other people, etc.
  • sjg007 6y ago
    Nonsense.
• sjg007 6y ago
  Fatalism ain’t the correct response.
• bsder 6y ago
  > Would/could it have led to a huge overwhelming initial spike that has died down months ago? Highly doubtful. And you would have crushed your healthcare workers. Even if everything we did just delayed the big spike until now, it's a HUGE win that healthcare workers are now getting vaccinated.
• noobermin 6y ago
  You are seeing a fraction of what would have happened if you just "let things be."
• adjkant 6y ago
  When hospitals hit capacity, the death rate dramatically spikes. Take a look at early NYC data to see how hospital overload affects this. Letting things be would have been true disaster. Because we took steps, this is not going to reach anywhere close to the same result in terms of deaths, even if it comes to equal cases. The solution to the time problem was more strict action earlier, ironically for most on the "economy" side of pandemic action. Give people a big stimulus, stop all jobs beyond food and true essentials, and enforce strict contract tracing. We might have been out of this in two months if we did that.
  • djsumdog 6y ago
    The early NYC numbers came from a variety of situations: 1) Gov Cuomo sending elderly to nursing homes and packing them in for treatment. This killed thousands (same with Gov Whitmer in Michigan) and yet Cuomo wrote a fucking book about how great he is instead of facing any consequences. 2) Overuse of ventilators. People were putting vents right as they came in, mostly based off bad advice from doctors in Europe. Turned out this was a death sentence. Most of the young people who died, most likely died from high pressure ventilators over anything else. 3) Overflow hospitals in NYC were entirely empty because they were intended for non-covid patients and were incredibly difficult to get into. Many people who didn't have COVID, who were kept for monitoring, were kept on COVID floors of regular hospitals and got COVID. NYC was mismanagement at every possible level.
    • belltaco 6y ago
      Not this again. Where do you put elderly folks who are recovering but not sick enough to keep in the hospitals which need to freed up for more seriously sick people? They live in the nursing home FFS, that is their home.
      • djsumdog 6y ago
        They could have been put in the massive empty emergency facilities they put up but never used. They were cramming sick elderly people into nursing homes with perfectly healthy people; nursing homes without individual rooms! They were packing sick people next to unsick people. It literally killed thousands. Janice Dean covers all the details very well in her podcast with Megyn Kelly, including reasonable countermeasures they could have taken instead of cramming sick elderly people together: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-megyn-kelly-show/id1532976305?i=1000498452028 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-megyn-kelly-show/i... > Not this again Why do you not consider this as valid? Nursing homes were the primary spread for COVID cases back in March/April and there is more than enough damning evidence against both Como and Whitmer.
• Afforess 6y ago
  This is an incorrect take, and deeply frustrating that it is so pervasive, given that there is literal evidence of it being wrong. China, especially Wuhan, was the center of the virus outbreak early in 2020. China successfully locked down and stopped the spread of the virus. Today, Wuhan and China in general has no community spread of Covid. So there is clearly a solution, even with out a vaccine. Our political leadership was too weak to make the decisions necessary to implement these solutions. Some readers may retort that lockdowns are a violation of democratic or constitutional freedoms, but there have been times in the past when these rights were suspended. During the civil war, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and jailed people without a trial. In extreme situations, extreme actions may be warranted. (The US will soon have more Covid deaths than US soldiers died in all of WW2, if you think my war comparison is unfair). China took extreme actions to enforce lockdowns and successfully ended the spread of Covid. America's leadership decided that peoples lives did not matter, and did not. Ultimately, I will be significantly more suspicious of any western politician who demands we go to war to protect lives, or give up liberties for personal safety. 2020 has shown that politicians would not take even the weakest measures to protect personal safety (e.g mask mandates) - exposing their lies in other domains as well. The war on terror was fiction. The war on drugs is a jobs program. And a 9/11 amount of deaths can happen every day and politicians will literally do nothing and people will demand nothing. I am deeply pessimistic about our future.
  • grumple 6y ago
    It’s not just that the political leadership was lacking; our media and the people of the US also collaborated in this failure. There is no sense of community or duty amongst our people, only selfishness.
    • ryandrake 6y ago
      I mentioned in another thread [1] that COVID-19 was a gigantic game of Prisoner's Dilemma, where cooperation meant staying at home and wearing a mask when you go out, and where defection meant going out and horsing around, and we utterly failed the game. Since, I don't know... WW2, we seem to no longer have the ability as a country to act in coordinated cooperation for some greater good. It's all individualism, now. It's all about me, me, me! My rights! My need to go shopping! My desire to eat at Olive Garden! Other people are dying? Fuck em... I'm going to enjoy my life and not let "the man" tell me what to do! Wait, I got the disease?? Well, crap! Who could have predicted it? God certainly works in mysterious ways. 2020 has pretty much robbed me of what empathy I had left. It's insane how selfish we have become. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25577270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25577270
• AlexandrB 6y ago
  Brutal that this idea keeps surfacing on Hacker News contrary to the advice of almost all epidemiologists out there. It seems like utter hubris to assume you know something they don't.
  • latch 6y ago
    Nothing new here. Hacker News (and more generally a lot of people in tech) are pretty sure they have the solution to: debt, famine, equality, global warming, etc.
  • dehrmann 6y ago
    There's also been hubris from epidemiologists because they're not politicians, economists, or experts in human behavior, and this very much isn't just a problem of a virus spreading.
• cmurf 6y ago
  Already people are dying of non-COVID disease due to lack of capacity. Is that a fair trade off? We can directly connect the dots from "I wanna do what I want!" who then get sick or make other people sick who then end up at a hospital who take up a bed and someone else who isn't sick but has a plumonary or cardiac episode dies. If we had perfect information, we could trace the liability back to people's behavior and fine them properly for non-compliance. But that would run up against privacy concerns wouldn't it? What about a general strike by health care workers and grocery stockers and food delivery service workers? Right now. In the middle of a pandemic. Can you imagine the outrage? And why would people be outraged? Because they think these workers are slaves. They shouldn't have a choice. It's everyone who isn't on the front line who should get to choose whether to comply with public health orders. It is certainly more civilized for health care workers to just quit en masse right now, than to propose people should just get to flaunt public health orders without any kind of penalty. But I'm getting the strong indication this is not a civil society.
• blaisio 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you're trying to argue for here, but if we had allowed a huge initial spike, many hundreds of thousands would have died needlessly. We are still doing much better than that.
• throwaway9980 6y ago
  Sure, maybe, and we could spin out dozens of scenarios and approaches that could have been better or worse. I think one phrase from your comment highlights the entire problem though: “enforce no action.” You can’t enforce a society wide shutdown. You can only get that from citizens who voluntarily participate in a social order that they trust. We (Americans) are faced with enormous problems as a society as a result of our inability to trust one another. We may be able to engineer a zero trust replacement for our monetary system. We seem to desire the same thing for our society. Everyone demands infinite verification of everything. Fact check the fact checkers and audit the auditors that audit the election results! At some point though, it’s turtles all the way down. Political debate is starting to sound like epistemology. It appears that societies that have greater levels of trust are faring better in this pandemic. That cannot become an excuse for our failure. It should instruct us on how to proceed. EDIT: re-reading this I realize I’m singling out “society wide shutdown” as the sort of imagined best response, maybe it is, but what I was really thinking of was “highly coordinated society wide response where everyone does what they are supposed to based on their role.”
• dwd 6y ago
  As in Sweden? You can simply compare them to Denmark, Norway and Finland on infection rates, death toll and economic impact. If those countries manage to immunise their populations quickly then Sweden's approach was a huge failure in comparison. But more to the point Sweden has now started trying to mandate restrictions and lockdowns as their health system is struggling and relying on public goodwill to do the right thing just isn't enough.
• messick 6y ago
  We’d be looking at seven figure death counts instead of “just” the six figure ones we have now.