7 ms·

For some people the goalposts are moving faster than the speed of light. The goal was to flatten the curve. Remember that? Flatten. The. Curve. Is the curve n

• nexuist 5y ago
  There is a worryingly large constituency, mostly on Twitter, who believe that any unjust death at all is damning evidence that all of our institutions and economic systems must be destroyed and rebuilt. Of course unjust death is tragic, but it's not an excuse to throw out all of society and start over again. I think many of these people saw mask mandates as that "rebuilding society" step, and to get rid of it so quickly (despite it being like a year) is evidence that the state "learned nothing", so to say. I even saw someone say something like "I can't believe the anti-maskers won" which so succinctly ties up the stupid reality of our political atmosphere: you can't do anything, anything at all without it being seen as a goal attempt into the other side's net. I really do believe that a large amount of people do want 0.000% risk, and they'd be happy to wear masks until 2030 to guarantee it. As for myself, I'm fully vaccinated but will continue to wear masks to make other people feel comfortable. But even before being vaccinated I didn't care too much if people wore masks around me and I certainly won't care now.
  • bb123 5y ago
    I’d be pretty careful drawing any conclusions about the mood of the nation from Twitter. The Twitter crowd are very loud and quite extremist but I believe they are small in number. To be honest I’d just avoid Twitter all together. Nothing good comes out of it.
    • jbjohns 5y ago
      I wish companies and politicians would follow your recommendation.
    • kbelder 5y ago
      You could post this in nearly every hackernews thread and I'd upvote you each time for being the most relevant comment on the page.
    • kodah 5y ago
      Debating how small or big they are is fruitless when their power and impact via their network effect is palpable. "Avoiding Twitter" and it's collection of extremists (and their followers that signal boost) is not possible. These people have their tweets and reactions in the news, they are constantly quoted on blogs and websites. I'd argue the opposite that you are. Twitter extremists influence the rest of the nation and it's easy to see how the network effect has some decay on their ideas, but the thorny points remain. At some point you have to stop treating Twitter and Twitter users like an isolation zone.
      • Gene_Parmesan 5y ago
        If you are someone who is active on Twitter, your thoughts about how important Twitter is are biased by your engagement with it. None of the actual people I know and talk to in real life harbor any sort of extremist views one way or another. Literally none of them ever mention Twitter in daily conversation. (And many of them are software devs.) IMO their statements are amplified by things like national media because of their extremism; the extremism generates strong feelings (whether positive or negative), and strong feelings leads to more eyes on the media for longer. That doesn't mean the people consuming the media also have those extremist beliefs.
        • kodah 5y ago
          > If you are someone who is active on Twitter, your thoughts about how important Twitter is are biased by your engagement with it. I don't have Twitter. > Literally none of them ever mention Twitter in daily conversation. (And many of them are software devs.) Network effects do not cause or force you to acknowledge a source. They merely require you to trust the mental gymnastics of the person who communicated the idea to you. > That doesn't mean the people consuming the media also have those extremist belief Generally the people adopting will adopt bits an pieces, this is what I described as "decay". The rest I agree with.
  • swiley 5y ago
    I wish these people would go after cars, they're much worse and they seem to be effective at changing policy.
  • ixacto 5y ago
    The individuals on Twitter are an extremist “mob” on both sides of the political spectrum that really has little relevance to larger society, except for politicians and the like who use it for communication. Follow the science and draw your conclusions for your own life and don’t let the mob bully you, they are living in a world where dogma/politics trumps science [full disclosure that is word choice, I’m independent btw & not a Trump supporter]. I double masked up until 2 weeks after the second mRNA shot (early April), at which time COVID was effectively over for me. If others want to wear masks for years of that makes them feel better that’s totally ok, but the reality is that the pandemic is over for the vaccinated, although I’d get a booster if needed. Also if we do have to wear masks for another pandemic I absolutely will, but not any longer than needed they really mess with my ability to read facial expressions and communicate. The political landscape has also changed now so that the government is forced to admit that and now the fully vaccinated can go shopping without masks. It is about damn time. This pandemic has damaged the mental health of the nation but finally rolling back restrictions is the best way to give everyone an end to the pandemic that is in sight.
• garmaine 5y ago
  Yes, I want the virus eliminated.
  • josephcsible 5y ago
    This is completely unreasonable. We've never been able to eradicate any disease that affects humans other than smallpox, and not for lack of trying.
    • flukus 5y ago
      The case numbers coming out of Israel show their (still ongoing) vaccination effort is on the precipice of eliminating it locally. So it seems incredibly reasonable it will be eliminated, at least from the developed world. From that point any reintroduction of the virus is unlikely to gain a foothold.
      • ffggvv 5y ago
        yeah then what happens when you reopen international travel lol
        • flukus 5y ago
          As I said, it can't get a foothold. If vaccinations are enough to keep the r0 below 1, which seems to be the case, it doesn't really matter how many infected people enter because it will fizzle out again. Vaccines are also likely to be mandatory for anyone traveling.
    • garmaine 5y ago
      This is false. We've eradicated SARS-CoV-1, for example. The last case was in 2004. And New Zealand, Australia, and Taiwan outright eliminated COVID community spread domestically (Australia did it twice!), proving it is possible.
      • josephcsible 5y ago
• greesil 5y ago
  The goal was to minimize casualties and human misery, to prevent what some countries are going through right now. Flatten the curve was a slogan.
  • google234123 5y ago
    Lock downs also cause huge misery. Recessions are not victimless.
    • nielsbot 5y ago
      lesser of 2 evils
    • ajmadesc 5y ago
      What recession?
      • hansel_der 5y ago
        social, educational, economic
    • dalyons 5y ago
      You would choose what is happening now in India instead?
      • Markoff 5y ago
        if Indian numbers have to be trusted they are really not that bad, some European countries had even worse numbers per capita people sometimes forget the size of Indian population and just look at nominal numbers instead per capita numbers, considering how poor is India and how bad is Indian healthcare these numbers comparable wiuth Europe are actually pretty low
        • selimthegrim 5y ago
          Those European countries have markedly different age pyramids than India
• dguaraglia 5y ago
  You can't flatten the curve and then immediately throw away all caution and go back to the behavior that made the curve a geometric progression.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    Fortunately, we’re not. In between, there was a vaccine developed and deployed and the science strongly (overwhelmingly is probably more precise) suggests that fully vaccinated people are at minimal risk to themselves and minimal risk to spread, which is of course the entire point of vaccines and entirely unsurprising given our understanding and long experience with other vaccines, which almost all exhibited the same disease control properties. Getting vaccinated seems to me to be the exact opposite of throwing away all caution.
    • ptaipale 5y ago
      I quite agree, but I think the message from health authorities has also been problematic here: they repeated that "vaccinated individuals will still spread the infection". That is true of course: some vaccinated individuals will still spread the infection because efficacy is not 100 %. But the public has, predictably, got this message wrong: I keep getting told that "vaccinated people will get the infection and spread it just the same". No, not just the same. Vaccinated people are radically less likely to infect others. I do understand that the officials wanted to be careful and not encourage people to move around after being vaccinated, but perhaps they could have again worded their message differently, to be more honest and direct.
      • sokoloff 5y ago
        I think many of us on HN object to imprecise messaging, sometimes to the point where it’s technically incorrect. But I also have to admit that “Defund the Police”, “Flatten the Curve”, “I have a dream”, “Think Different” are more effective than a precise 2-page memo laying out a concrete plan. Some people struggle with nuanced, complicated messaging. Others struggle when messages are over-simplified. I posit that the first group is a few orders of magnitude larger, at least in terms of effect of public comms.
• koonsolo 5y ago
  > Is the curve not flat? Yes, thanks to all the regulations. > How much flatter do you want it to be before returning to normal life? When returning to normal life, you want to curve to stay flat. So when a majority of people are vaccinated.
  • scrollaway 5y ago
    A majority of people ARE vaccinated in the US. And you're vaccinating over 1% more per day. Don't undersell yourselves.
    • codingdave 5y ago
      36.3% are fully vaccinated. It is great progress. But it is not a majority.
      • greedo 5y ago
        Currently 46.6% of the population. Over 2m/day on average being vaccinated.
        • totalZero 5y ago
          NB: codingdave is referring to fully vaccinated individuals, while greedo is referring to individuals with at least one shot. Both are correct. https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-tracker https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...
          • jen20 5y ago
            @scrollaway is most definitely _not_ correct however, since no number below 50% is “a majority” of the population by definition, and regardless that is not a sufficient number to deliver value in the form of herd immunity via vaccine.
  • cromka 5y ago
    > Yes, thanks to all the regulations. No. That was months ago. What about those with vaccination or reconvalescence immunity? Those don't affect the curve?
• dosethree 5y ago
  nobody ever said the end goal was to flatten the curve. like everything else, we are playing it by ear, to suggest we had plans to do otherwise is just writing your own history
• helen___keller 5y ago
  "flatten the curve" was essentially a marketing slogan (which worked remarkably well, by the way, in terms of market penetration). So let's not worry too much about that. With exponential growth, numbers either trend to 0 or to infinity, and they do so very quickly. There's only 2 endgames possible in a pandemic: (1) The numbers trend to 0 and the risk is 0.00% (see: polio) (2) The numbers trend to infinity (i.e. the disease goes endemic) and risk is equal to whatever risk the disease carries on infection/reinfection over your lifetime (see: the spanish flu) Pre-vaccine, "flatten the curve" and other marketing-speak meant "stall on option 2 because we can't handle that level of risk in our society right now" - hospitals overflowing, etc. The death rate would have been out of control if we went straight to infinity at the infection rates we were seeing. With the vaccine rollout, and with medical advances in treating severe covid, we've dramatically lowered the risk of option 2, and additionally we've opened the door to potentially taking option 1. The CDC is probably gunning for option 1 here (and based on data in Israel it seems like it's possible with a high enough vaccination rate, although I think globally it will be a challenge). If you keep this framework in mind, the goalposts haven't really moved at all- just the marketing used (hence: "flatten the curve" became "new normal" which then became "get vaccinated") Edit: Evidently discussion about this sort of thing is quite polarizing. Just to be clear, this is a personal analysis of decision makers' true "goalposts", as the parent post seemed distressed by the moving of goalposts I'm not advocating for or defending any particular policy, so please don't interpret my post as such. Thank you.