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Comment by shaggy | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Rio sees many visitors regularly. What Rio does not see is an influx of visitors from nearly every country on earth. It's that spread that is the problem. The financial impact on hosting the games is already negative for host cities. That's no longer debatable without ignoring fact. Your argument that all the experts studying the Zika epidemic and drawing the ever more cemented conclusion that this is a very serious problem are wrong is what is hogwash.

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But will you at least concede that THIS is what should have been the focus of the article? While perfectly valid, all of the scientific discussion around Zika is mostly irrelevant to the point the author was trying to make -- the true variable of interest is how the games shape the quantity of visitors and the distribution of those visitors around the world. But there's hardly a line in the article about that -- just the 500,000 number is thrown around with absolutely no citation.

Instead,the article does some of the worst things we'd expect from scientists with sentences like "All it takes is one infected traveler" -- this is fear-mongering and irresponsible and the author should be ashamed of that comment.

I maintain that it is not a careful, reasoned argument about the issue.

I'm sorry, but there seems to be a bit of a logical disconnect here. This looks like a knee-jerk pattern match on the "all it takes" phrase. My understanding is that this is factual in this case. That is how it works with a lot of diseases -- with many kinds of self-replicators -- all it takes is one. That is how it works with various insect and fungal blights that have ravaged California forests. A public awareness of the relative risks is a public good.

Single patients flown to the US from the Ebola stricken regions did not spread infection, because of the particulars of infection mechanisms. Zika can be spread by mosquito. If the Olympics increase the traffic to resource-thin countries with populations of the right kind of mosquito, this should be considered carefully.

Actually RJ does have an influx of visitors from nearly every country on earth.

source (see page 97): http://www.dadosefatos.turismo.gov.br/export/sites/default/d...

So sending an even larger influx into an outbreak is good... why exactly?

Its like arguing that some subset of people drive drunk right now, therefore it would be a great idea if more people would drive drunk this summer.

No, it's like arguing that some people get into car accidents, so more people driving is a bad idea.

On the surface that's not a bad argument. It becomes a bad argument at certain scales though -- the difference between a 1% and a 100% increase matters. The point at which it matters depends in part on the transmissibility of the disease, which is low for zika.

Yes, yes it is.

Yes. It's why that argument is made about airport security all the time, for instance by BloomBerg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-18/airport-se...

Devil's advocate: I think the argument is that the damage of the disease is disproportional to the people exposed, because the increased pairs of interactions are what can make it spread fast.

So doubling the number of people congregated in Rio won't just double the danger, but quadruple it. If car accidents obeyed a similar dynamic -- where they increase (much) more than proportionally to the number of vehicle-miles driven, we should be similarly more cautious about additional drivers.

Aren't those pairs composed of a foreigner and a contaminated native? One of those populations is staying constant.

That’s a pretty reasonable argument. Building better train networks between economically linked cities, getting people to choose other forms of transportation for their commutes, giving buses/light rail their own lanes, designing infrastructure to better segregate drivers from pedestrians/cyclists, encouraging car-pooling and use of smaller lighter cars wherever practical, and in general trying to slow down the speed of automobile traffic (ideally all urban driving would be <30 mph if not slower) would save a lot of lives.

Automobiles, while often convenient, are one of the leading causes of death, and we should try to organize public policy around reducing their use and the deaths they cause to the extent possible without overly compromising their convenience.

Reducing the number of automobiles would also have a big positive environmental impact, and reducing the number and widths of roads and parking lots would free up a lot of space which could be used for other purposes. Other forms of transportation also scale a lot better with population density, and denser cities use a lot less other infrastructure per capita.

Once self-driving cars become effective, I have high hopes that they will replace a large proportion of current human drivers, something else which should save many lives.

Well, it's a matter of cost vs benefit - while it may be valuable to take some costly, unpopular measures if that would have a meaningful change in spread of Zika, I'm not convinced if it's worth doing such things only to achieve, say, a 8% reduction (some of estimates here on impact of Olympics to tourist traffic) in risk of spreading the disease.

Those numbers aren't particularly compelling, especially for the countries the author listed as not having the resources to deal with an outbreak:

Nigeria: 265

India: 4,522

Indonesia: 0

Considering the number of olympic athletes from these countries, what evidence there is that these numbers will increase?

There's a good point. The number of visitors from those countries actually remained typical or declined in London for 2012. It is conceivable that the increased hotel and airfare costs actually deter travel from poorer countries.

http://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/number-international-visit...

As an Indian I can tell you even a few infected people can come into the country and cause an outbreak here.

Its not like in US, the sewage infrastructure in India is very bad. There are open air sewage drains, mosquito infestation is every day life and in cities people live in very densely crowded homes. All of this contributes to a rapid spread in case of a outbreak.

In fact dengue outbreaks are common in India every summer, or a few months.

The negative financial impact of the games comes mostly from building and maintaining the Olympic infrastructure. Cancelling the games doesn't solve this problem, on the contrary as it denies the country the income and touristic reputation boost. Public health concerns go first of course, but it's not gonna be a financial win.

sorry but no, Rio sees visitors from most countries out there. it's not an even spread like it would be in case of olympics, but not that far from it.

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