5 ms·

I feel like we got lucky with COVID-19. It just wasn't that deadly. Not to be too cold about it, but it had the potential to be a good test run to see how we de

I feel like we got lucky with COVID-19. It just wasn't that deadly. Not to be too cold about it, but it had the potential to be a good test run to see how we deal with a more fatal pandemic. In some ways we passed the test pretty well. In others, not so much. My question to HN is: what could we do better next time? edit: to be clear, "we" in what could we do better = our global civilization and maybe separately in each user's country of residence.

tokai 4y ago
I feel like that the things that didn't go that well would have gone better if the bodies really had stated to pile up. Maybe I'm too optimistic.
- gjulianm 4y ago
  Well, bodies did literally start to pile up in morgues and hospitals and still some groups of people managed to convince themselves that it was fake or made up.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Bodies piling up in morgues is one thing but bodies piling up in houses because there's no more room in the morgues and no one going around to collect them is quite another.
    - gjulianm 4y ago
      That also happened. I remember seeing the reports from some south american nations (don't remember exactly which one) of people who had dead relatives in their houses and no one could go and fetch them.
      - starkd 4y ago
        That may have been a sensationalized media story. I think that regularly happens in normal times as well, due to lack of services.
        gjulianm 4y ago
        It was not a sensationalized media story. It was something that happened and that wasn't normal. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/don-t-leave-him-here-ecuadorians-live-dead-relatives-mid-n1175101 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/don-t-leave-him-here-ecu... https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-04-01/el-coronavirus-desborda-ecuador-y-abruma-a-su-poblacion-por-la-acumulacion-de-cadaveres-en-casas.html# https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-04-01/el-coronavirus-desbor... It got to the point that the COVID task force coordinator had to issue an apology: https://twitter.com/EcuadorTV/status/1245492946675347460?s=20 https://twitter.com/EcuadorTV/status/1245492946675347460?s=2... I think your comment really proves my point. Even when there's overwhelming evidence of how bad it really was, there's always someone who will downplay it or even deny it.
        tokai 4y ago
        Did people downplay the severity in Ecuador, or did the piles of bodies make people take it seriously? Where I'm from (Northern Europe) the bodies were definitely not piling up. It's even hard to show that any excess mortality over the period. If the people of Ecuador didn't take covid serious after that horrible situation, I guess I can forget about westerns rallying against a more deadly pandemic.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    There's no need to be so disagreeable about this: GP's only point is that it could have been much worse from a lethality perspective.
    - gjulianm 4y ago
      I'm just pointing out that when the evidence of bodies piling up emerged, people denied it, so I assume that will still happen even if bodies pile up even more.
- starkd 4y ago
  If that did happen, I think it could have been a civilization ending event. There are some viruses with 50% fatality rate. That would have been non-deniable, pushing people to wearing full hazmat suits for daily activity. It is hard to see how any renormalization could have happened.
taeric 4y ago
This is almost backward, from my understanding. If it was much more deadly, it wouldn't have spread. I'm sure there is an inflection point on the "deadly" nature versus the "spreads" factor. That said, I fully endorse your closing question. I'm not at all sure what we learned. Other than folks get heavily invested in their narratives and don't back down. Pretty much ever. (Though, I think we already knew that?)
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Would a virus with a lethality of, say, 10% really have its infectiousness damaged that badly by 1 in 10 sufferers dying? I appreciate that once you get up to a more substantial fraction, people die before they can spread the disease... but "too deadly to spread" is a much higher number than "deadly-enough to literally decimate its carriers".
  - taeric 4y ago
    Agreed, I was assuming too high of a value being discussed.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Erm, the article is about influenza. It hit a pretty good sweet spot of deadly and contagious a little over a hundred years ago.
  - taeric 4y ago
    Sorta. Comparisons to any disease/outbreak from before antibiotics are doomed to use for comparisons. They are not useless, to be sure. But they will be very dirty in the stats.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      Wut? Influenza is viral.
      - 4y ago
saboot 4y ago
Do better? I'm expecting we'll do significantly worse next time.
Pxtl 4y ago
My worry is that the public's willingness to take a pandemic seriously has been burned out by COVID-19, so our response to a far more lethal bird-flu pandemic will be weaker than our COVID-19 response was (and it was legitimately impressive how everybody pulled together for like a few weeks back in March 2020).
throwaway4aday 4y ago
Entirely depends on how deadly it is but we F'd up big time by blowing all our social capital on the last one.
Brybry 4y ago
I think trying to control human behavior better might be futile but something we could improve would be the supply chain issues. And for added benefit that would also apply to other potential disasters. Like imagine the impact if the Port of Los Angeles couldn't operate for X period due to an awful earthquake.
- starkd 4y ago
  Perhaps I am mistaken, but most of the supply chain issues seem to have been caused by the reopening more than the pandemic. The economy cannot be shutdown and re-opened on a dime. I think it was a big mistake to think it could be.
qclibre22 4y ago
Human challenge vaccine trials.
doublepg23 4y ago
I’m no a COVID scold but it is behind only cancer and heart disease for leading causes of death, in the US. It certainly could have been worse, but, pardon the pun, that’s nothing to sneeze at either.
- ed25519FUUU 4y ago
  How in the world is a disease that we have a vaccine for still the 3rd leading cause of death?
  - peteradio 4y ago
    Its probably not and OP is misquoting.
    - azernik 4y ago
      It is absolutely true. COVID isn't the army-crippling societal disaster it was in 2020, but it's still a really really nasty virus. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
  - myth_drannon 4y ago
    Stupidity is a human condition that is more dangerous than cancer.
  - azernik 4y ago
    Because COVID is insanely contagious. The non-specific measures we took (social distancing, masking, &c) absolutely crushed the flu, but only maintained partial control over COVID spread pre-vaccine.
    - nostromo123 4y ago
      I don't know about "insanely contagious". In my small company we are cca 25 people and we have very cramped quarters. However, it has been more than once that some colleagues have had covid but nobody else was infected, despite being in meetings with the sick guys. You can get lucky, but not this lucky with something that's really contagious.
imjk 4y ago
It may be counter intuitive, but in some ways the opposite may be true. Viruses that are more deadly, are much less likely to cause massive pandemics like we experienced with Covid. When a virus is so virulent that it kills its host quickly and consistently, it dies off faster as the host doesn't have as much time to pass the virus to another host.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  But it could easily have killed children disproportionally and not the elderly, without changing much in its spread.
rogerkirkness 4y ago
Take our 72 hour mRNA solution to the virus and put it in an intranasal vaccine that is property dosed to provide sterilizing immunity.
- nradov 4y ago
  Nasal vaccines hold promise but we still don't have one approved for COVID-19. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/nasal-covid-vaccine-shows-promise-early-clinical-trial-rcna71841 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/nasal-covid-vacci...
  - rogerkirkness 4y ago
    Yeah I know which is crazy. mRNA is way riskier and newer tech than intranasal is.
albatross13 4y ago
[flagged]
- albatross13 4y ago
  Fine what about this instead: a forced government propaganda campaign that is amplified 50x over, by all mainstream media corporations, that is designed to coerce you into getting a shot created by a company that has been fined over 10bn in the last 20 years. This propaganda campaign will scare you, demoralize you, and ultimately try to split apart tribes (friends, families, churches, etc). It will threaten, and in some cases take, your job and your livelihood. It will restrict your travel and it will call you insane, a conspiracy theorist, and a murderer if you disagree with it. There. That's a lot more palatable than forced government injections at gun point.
enkid 4y ago
Who are the we here? As a civilization, we could willingly take precautions with an understanding that it's worth while to try them even if we're not 100% sure they would work (i.e. wearing masks). We could prep emergency plans for extended telework. We could do research on the best remoting learning methods so students don't lose substantial educational time (and we may even be able to apply those in beneficial ways.). We could mandate workplaces must not allow sick people to come to work instead of the hodge podge of workplace policies we have. And we could react with empathy towards the sick and the ones who could lose loved ones instead of anger.
- consumer451 4y ago
  > Who are the we here Yes, as a civilization is what I meant. But good question. Also maybe in any HN'ers home country.
throwaway22032 4y ago
The issue with "what could we do better" is that in a system of intelligent free actors (as opposed to some sort of sim game in which the 'creator' has control over everything) the actions that people take will change depending on the effects (for example lethality) of the virus in question. There are personal values in play here, but very roughly, if we have a pandemic with an x% risk of death or serious debilitating injury then it's worth spending x% of our time, resources, etc trying to prevent its' spread. Everyone is going to have a different number there, some will think we should just never give up ever, others will just think "screw it, I'll take the personal risk", but that's a good average. We do this all of the time - people can get post viral syndromes from common colds, but we accept that this is an incredibly unlikely situation and so most people don't get into a panic when around other people. And that's actually what we saw with coronavirus. The vast, vast majority of people at least in the first weeks of the pandemic took it seriously. After a few months a lot of people simply stopped caring because it wasn't as fatal as we feared. For whatever reason this became extremely politicised in a way that I can't quite understand.
- starkd 4y ago
  I think people stop caring, because it is impossible to keep up a high level of vigilance for an extended period of time. Plus the risk becomes normalized. People are not very good at evaluating risk. From an evolutionary perspective, we mainly do it by copying others. I cannot comprehend what a X% fatality rate really means on a personal safty evaluation. But seeing what other people are doing gives favorable odds. Of course, this heuristic has its pros and cons.
ouid 4y ago
how society reacts to a pandemic is not independent of how lethal the disease is.
tokinonagare 4y ago
> My question to HN is: what could be do better next time? About everything. For a start weighting in more factors like quality of life, economy, health (everything else than the pandemic at hand & including mental health) than just just a few metrics. Second graduating the response to the dangerosity of the disease. It was clear 3 months in that only a small subset of the population was really at risk so it made no sense to punish the whole population. Young people were affected proportionally harder than older folks: best of social and love life gone, poor education for a few years, difficulty to enter the job market, while the people most at risk already lived for more than a century, have a home, often kids, etc. Third let citizens have basic human rights. I shouldn't have to right it, but if basic human rights like movement and commerce can be removed with a finger snap (they were) we are not living in a democracy. Four, don't push untested pharmaceutical products made by firms with proven contempt for human life on millions of people. Don't put resistants in camp (Australia) and don't censor divergent opinions like an autocracy: public debate must be this, a debate and made publicly. Five, base policies on real science, not the reverse around where "science" is twisted to fit a narrative.
- taeric 4y ago
  Somewhat agreed in direction, but disagree in statement. We weren't "punishing" the whole population. Nor were basic movement and commerce flat out taken from most people. There are some countries that did that, true, but I was always able to make it in to a mostly empty office to do work. And buying things was never fully impacted. I would love to see an even handed comparison of the different responses in all countries to know if any had meaningful impact. But with how wildly different the virus acted in places, I am worried nobody will believe any analysis. At the least, we know not everyone will. And I fully cede my understanding may be sadly behind. I remember the damage/death it was doing at the beginning in Italy and how we were all trying to not overwhelm hospitals. Then, the next few years had case counts that were off the charts, and I'm not sure what changed. Do we have a good handle on that, now?
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
A year in, it had between 1.5 and 3.5 percent mortality rate, the first few months it was up to 15 percent in some areas and segments of the population [1]. Even today at 0.1-1 percent fatality rate [1], the odds are horrible for something so easy to contract. NB the statistic does not differentiate by vaccination status. Yet, despite those odds, an enormous segment of the population of the US failed to all sorts of cognitive biases, and is convinced, contrary to all evidence [2], that it's better to get covid than a vaccine. This indicates to me that the US has failed as a society to respond well to such a preventable disease. Denmark ( where I lived during Covid ) handled it much better and is a similarly capitalistic society, but with a different attitude towards institutions, and the issue was not politicized. The general population listened to the CDC-equivalent institution. The government offered free testing, (rapid+the more expensive ones), and was proactive with respect to vaccination. The government coordinated a very successful booster vaccination campaign in early January of 2022, effectively ending the covid era. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status?country=~All+ages https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-co...
- taeric 4y ago
  The death rate is so hard to really interpret. It is stupid skewed by age in ways that so many other things aren't. Even for non-vaccinated people, you have to get into the 30s before you see that number jump above .1 after the initial wave. And the initial wave being so high just screams that we weren't counting the accurate number, as we didn't know how widespread infections were. As we learned that more and more infections were effectively asymptomatic, early numbers on what was happening are hard to take at face value. None of which is to downplay it. Lots of people died. I hope we can find actionable things to help for any future outbreaks.
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    > As we learned that more and more infections were effectively asymptomatic, early numbers on what was happening are hard to take at face value. According to [1], it's 40.5% of the confirmed population. It's indeed a high rate, but those cases are also taken into consideration wrt to mortality rate as far as I am aware. It also highlights just how transmissible this virus is, allowing it to eventually infect the vulnerable population. We also learned that covid was a component in a very large portion of excess deaths. Yes, somebody may have died of cancer, but covid was also present. It's possible that the patient sans covid would not have died. Plus, there is the inverse, long covid and its symptoms lingering and weakening the population making it susceptible to subsequent diseases. The problem however, in all of this, is that any trust to certain institutions in the US is now gone, which will only cause more harm. [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2787098 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... > In this meta-analysis of the percentage of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections among populations tested for and with confirmed COVID-19, the pooled percentage of asymptomatic infections was 0.25% among the tested population and 40.50% among the confirmed population.
nradov 4y ago
Sure, we could do better. We could stop wasting effort on ineffective measures such as school closures and mask mandates. https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/10-myths-told-by-covid-experts-now-debunked/ https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/10-myths-told-by-covid-experts...
lr4444lr 4y ago
Stop all non essential air travel much faster. Hard to flatten the curve if an asymptomatic infectious virus has no geographical limits.
randomdata 4y ago
> it had the potential to be a good test run to see how we deal with a more fatal pandemic. Wasn't the AIDS pandemic already a good test run? It appears AIDS killed twice as many people in the African region in the year 2021 alone than COVID-19 has all told. Particularly with respect to the Americas, I expect AIDS would have proven to be far more deadly if it weren't for our effective proactive measures. That we seemed to be running around like chickens with our heads cut off when COVID-19 came around, even after the lessons learned from the previous major pandemic not that many years earlier, suggests that we simply don't learn (or tells that pandemics can be different enough that the lessons aren't transferrable).

tokai 4y ago

I feel like that the things that didn't go that well would have gone better if the bodies really had stated to pile up. Maybe I'm too optimistic.

gjulianm 4y ago
Well, bodies did literally start to pile up in morgues and hospitals and still some groups of people managed to convince themselves that it was fake or made up.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Bodies piling up in morgues is one thing but bodies piling up in houses because there's no more room in the morgues and no one going around to collect them is quite another.
  - gjulianm 4y ago
    That also happened. I remember seeing the reports from some south american nations (don't remember exactly which one) of people who had dead relatives in their houses and no one could go and fetch them.
    - starkd 4y ago
      That may have been a sensationalized media story. I think that regularly happens in normal times as well, due to lack of services.
      - gjulianm 4y ago
        It was not a sensationalized media story. It was something that happened and that wasn't normal. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/don-t-leave-him-here-ecuadorians-live-dead-relatives-mid-n1175101 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/don-t-leave-him-here-ecu... https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-04-01/el-coronavirus-desborda-ecuador-y-abruma-a-su-poblacion-por-la-acumulacion-de-cadaveres-en-casas.html# https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-04-01/el-coronavirus-desbor... It got to the point that the COVID task force coordinator had to issue an apology: https://twitter.com/EcuadorTV/status/1245492946675347460?s=20 https://twitter.com/EcuadorTV/status/1245492946675347460?s=2... I think your comment really proves my point. Even when there's overwhelming evidence of how bad it really was, there's always someone who will downplay it or even deny it.
        tokai 4y ago
        Did people downplay the severity in Ecuador, or did the piles of bodies make people take it seriously? Where I'm from (Northern Europe) the bodies were definitely not piling up. It's even hard to show that any excess mortality over the period. If the people of Ecuador didn't take covid serious after that horrible situation, I guess I can forget about westerns rallying against a more deadly pandemic.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  There's no need to be so disagreeable about this: GP's only point is that it could have been much worse from a lethality perspective.
  - gjulianm 4y ago
    I'm just pointing out that when the evidence of bodies piling up emerged, people denied it, so I assume that will still happen even if bodies pile up even more.
starkd 4y ago
If that did happen, I think it could have been a civilization ending event. There are some viruses with 50% fatality rate. That would have been non-deniable, pushing people to wearing full hazmat suits for daily activity. It is hard to see how any renormalization could have happened.

taeric 4y ago

This is almost backward, from my understanding. If it was much more deadly, it wouldn't have spread. I'm sure there is an inflection point on the "deadly" nature versus the "spreads" factor. That said, I fully endorse your closing question. I'm not at all sure what we learned. Other than folks get heavily invested in their narratives and don't back down. Pretty much ever. (Though, I think we already knew that?)

Pxtl 4y ago
Would a virus with a lethality of, say, 10% really have its infectiousness damaged that badly by 1 in 10 sufferers dying? I appreciate that once you get up to a more substantial fraction, people die before they can spread the disease... but "too deadly to spread" is a much higher number than "deadly-enough to literally decimate its carriers".
- taeric 4y ago
  Agreed, I was assuming too high of a value being discussed.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
Erm, the article is about influenza. It hit a pretty good sweet spot of deadly and contagious a little over a hundred years ago.
- taeric 4y ago
  Sorta. Comparisons to any disease/outbreak from before antibiotics are doomed to use for comparisons. They are not useless, to be sure. But they will be very dirty in the stats.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Wut? Influenza is viral.
    - 4y ago

saboot 4y ago

Do better? I'm expecting we'll do significantly worse next time.

Pxtl 4y ago

My worry is that the public's willingness to take a pandemic seriously has been burned out by COVID-19, so our response to a far more lethal bird-flu pandemic will be weaker than our COVID-19 response was (and it was legitimately impressive how everybody pulled together for like a few weeks back in March 2020).

throwaway4aday 4y ago

Entirely depends on how deadly it is but we F'd up big time by blowing all our social capital on the last one.

Brybry 4y ago

I think trying to control human behavior better might be futile but something we could improve would be the supply chain issues. And for added benefit that would also apply to other potential disasters. Like imagine the impact if the Port of Los Angeles couldn't operate for X period due to an awful earthquake.

starkd 4y ago
Perhaps I am mistaken, but most of the supply chain issues seem to have been caused by the reopening more than the pandemic. The economy cannot be shutdown and re-opened on a dime. I think it was a big mistake to think it could be.

qclibre22 4y ago

Human challenge vaccine trials.

doublepg23 4y ago

I’m no a COVID scold but it is behind only cancer and heart disease for leading causes of death, in the US. It certainly could have been worse, but, pardon the pun, that’s nothing to sneeze at either.

ed25519FUUU 4y ago
How in the world is a disease that we have a vaccine for still the 3rd leading cause of death?
- peteradio 4y ago
  Its probably not and OP is misquoting.
  - azernik 4y ago
    It is absolutely true. COVID isn't the army-crippling societal disaster it was in 2020, but it's still a really really nasty virus. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
- myth_drannon 4y ago
  Stupidity is a human condition that is more dangerous than cancer.
- azernik 4y ago
  Because COVID is insanely contagious. The non-specific measures we took (social distancing, masking, &c) absolutely crushed the flu, but only maintained partial control over COVID spread pre-vaccine.
  - nostromo123 4y ago
    I don't know about "insanely contagious". In my small company we are cca 25 people and we have very cramped quarters. However, it has been more than once that some colleagues have had covid but nobody else was infected, despite being in meetings with the sick guys. You can get lucky, but not this lucky with something that's really contagious.

imjk 4y ago

It may be counter intuitive, but in some ways the opposite may be true. Viruses that are more deadly, are much less likely to cause massive pandemics like we experienced with Covid. When a virus is so virulent that it kills its host quickly and consistently, it dies off faster as the host doesn't have as much time to pass the virus to another host.

actionfromafar 4y ago
But it could easily have killed children disproportionally and not the elderly, without changing much in its spread.

rogerkirkness 4y ago

Take our 72 hour mRNA solution to the virus and put it in an intranasal vaccine that is property dosed to provide sterilizing immunity.

nradov 4y ago
Nasal vaccines hold promise but we still don't have one approved for COVID-19. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/nasal-covid-vaccine-shows-promise-early-clinical-trial-rcna71841 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/nasal-covid-vacci...
- rogerkirkness 4y ago
  Yeah I know which is crazy. mRNA is way riskier and newer tech than intranasal is.

albatross13 4y ago

[flagged]

albatross13 4y ago
Fine what about this instead: a forced government propaganda campaign that is amplified 50x over, by all mainstream media corporations, that is designed to coerce you into getting a shot created by a company that has been fined over 10bn in the last 20 years. This propaganda campaign will scare you, demoralize you, and ultimately try to split apart tribes (friends, families, churches, etc). It will threaten, and in some cases take, your job and your livelihood. It will restrict your travel and it will call you insane, a conspiracy theorist, and a murderer if you disagree with it. There. That's a lot more palatable than forced government injections at gun point.

enkid 4y ago

Who are the we here? As a civilization, we could willingly take precautions with an understanding that it's worth while to try them even if we're not 100% sure they would work (i.e. wearing masks). We could prep emergency plans for extended telework. We could do research on the best remoting learning methods so students don't lose substantial educational time (and we may even be able to apply those in beneficial ways.). We could mandate workplaces must not allow sick people to come to work instead of the hodge podge of workplace policies we have. And we could react with empathy towards the sick and the ones who could lose loved ones instead of anger.

consumer451 4y ago
> Who are the we here Yes, as a civilization is what I meant. But good question. Also maybe in any HN'ers home country.

throwaway22032 4y ago

The issue with "what could we do better" is that in a system of intelligent free actors (as opposed to some sort of sim game in which the 'creator' has control over everything) the actions that people take will change depending on the effects (for example lethality) of the virus in question. There are personal values in play here, but very roughly, if we have a pandemic with an x% risk of death or serious debilitating injury then it's worth spending x% of our time, resources, etc trying to prevent its' spread. Everyone is going to have a different number there, some will think we should just never give up ever, others will just think "screw it, I'll take the personal risk", but that's a good average. We do this all of the time - people can get post viral syndromes from common colds, but we accept that this is an incredibly unlikely situation and so most people don't get into a panic when around other people. And that's actually what we saw with coronavirus. The vast, vast majority of people at least in the first weeks of the pandemic took it seriously. After a few months a lot of people simply stopped caring because it wasn't as fatal as we feared. For whatever reason this became extremely politicised in a way that I can't quite understand.

starkd 4y ago
I think people stop caring, because it is impossible to keep up a high level of vigilance for an extended period of time. Plus the risk becomes normalized. People are not very good at evaluating risk. From an evolutionary perspective, we mainly do it by copying others. I cannot comprehend what a X% fatality rate really means on a personal safty evaluation. But seeing what other people are doing gives favorable odds. Of course, this heuristic has its pros and cons.

ouid 4y ago

how society reacts to a pandemic is not independent of how lethal the disease is.

tokinonagare 4y ago

> My question to HN is: what could be do better next time? About everything. For a start weighting in more factors like quality of life, economy, health (everything else than the pandemic at hand & including mental health) than just just a few metrics. Second graduating the response to the dangerosity of the disease. It was clear 3 months in that only a small subset of the population was really at risk so it made no sense to punish the whole population. Young people were affected proportionally harder than older folks: best of social and love life gone, poor education for a few years, difficulty to enter the job market, while the people most at risk already lived for more than a century, have a home, often kids, etc. Third let citizens have basic human rights. I shouldn't have to right it, but if basic human rights like movement and commerce can be removed with a finger snap (they were) we are not living in a democracy. Four, don't push untested pharmaceutical products made by firms with proven contempt for human life on millions of people. Don't put resistants in camp (Australia) and don't censor divergent opinions like an autocracy: public debate must be this, a debate and made publicly. Five, base policies on real science, not the reverse around where "science" is twisted to fit a narrative.

taeric 4y ago
Somewhat agreed in direction, but disagree in statement. We weren't "punishing" the whole population. Nor were basic movement and commerce flat out taken from most people. There are some countries that did that, true, but I was always able to make it in to a mostly empty office to do work. And buying things was never fully impacted. I would love to see an even handed comparison of the different responses in all countries to know if any had meaningful impact. But with how wildly different the virus acted in places, I am worried nobody will believe any analysis. At the least, we know not everyone will. And I fully cede my understanding may be sadly behind. I remember the damage/death it was doing at the beginning in Italy and how we were all trying to not overwhelm hospitals. Then, the next few years had case counts that were off the charts, and I'm not sure what changed. Do we have a good handle on that, now?

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

A year in, it had between 1.5 and 3.5 percent mortality rate, the first few months it was up to 15 percent in some areas and segments of the population [1]. Even today at 0.1-1 percent fatality rate [1], the odds are horrible for something so easy to contract. NB the statistic does not differentiate by vaccination status. Yet, despite those odds, an enormous segment of the population of the US failed to all sorts of cognitive biases, and is convinced, contrary to all evidence [2], that it's better to get covid than a vaccine. This indicates to me that the US has failed as a society to respond well to such a preventable disease. Denmark ( where I lived during Covid ) handled it much better and is a similarly capitalistic society, but with a different attitude towards institutions, and the issue was not politicized. The general population listened to the CDC-equivalent institution. The government offered free testing, (rapid+the more expensive ones), and was proactive with respect to vaccination. The government coordinated a very successful booster vaccination campaign in early January of 2022, effectively ending the covid era. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status?country=~All+ages https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-co...

taeric 4y ago
The death rate is so hard to really interpret. It is stupid skewed by age in ways that so many other things aren't. Even for non-vaccinated people, you have to get into the 30s before you see that number jump above .1 after the initial wave. And the initial wave being so high just screams that we weren't counting the accurate number, as we didn't know how widespread infections were. As we learned that more and more infections were effectively asymptomatic, early numbers on what was happening are hard to take at face value. None of which is to downplay it. Lots of people died. I hope we can find actionable things to help for any future outbreaks.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  > As we learned that more and more infections were effectively asymptomatic, early numbers on what was happening are hard to take at face value. According to [1], it's 40.5% of the confirmed population. It's indeed a high rate, but those cases are also taken into consideration wrt to mortality rate as far as I am aware. It also highlights just how transmissible this virus is, allowing it to eventually infect the vulnerable population. We also learned that covid was a component in a very large portion of excess deaths. Yes, somebody may have died of cancer, but covid was also present. It's possible that the patient sans covid would not have died. Plus, there is the inverse, long covid and its symptoms lingering and weakening the population making it susceptible to subsequent diseases. The problem however, in all of this, is that any trust to certain institutions in the US is now gone, which will only cause more harm. [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2787098 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... > In this meta-analysis of the percentage of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections among populations tested for and with confirmed COVID-19, the pooled percentage of asymptomatic infections was 0.25% among the tested population and 40.50% among the confirmed population.

nradov 4y ago

Sure, we could do better. We could stop wasting effort on ineffective measures such as school closures and mask mandates. https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/10-myths-told-by-covid-experts-now-debunked/ https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/10-myths-told-by-covid-experts...

lr4444lr 4y ago

Stop all non essential air travel much faster. Hard to flatten the curve if an asymptomatic infectious virus has no geographical limits.

randomdata 4y ago

> it had the potential to be a good test run to see how we deal with a more fatal pandemic. Wasn't the AIDS pandemic already a good test run? It appears AIDS killed twice as many people in the African region in the year 2021 alone than COVID-19 has all told. Particularly with respect to the Americas, I expect AIDS would have proven to be far more deadly if it weren't for our effective proactive measures. That we seemed to be running around like chickens with our heads cut off when COVID-19 came around, even after the lessons learned from the previous major pandemic not that many years earlier, suggests that we simply don't learn (or tells that pandemics can be different enough that the lessons aren't transferrable).