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Comment by smallgovt | Hacker News Reader

Actually, I think it's likely going to be seen as an overreaction in hindsight by the general public (even though it may not be).

If these actions are successful in curbing the virus' spread, most people won't appreciate how bad things could have really gotten.

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It's a common thread in Incident Response & "Resilience Engineering" that preventative measures that reduce the blast of incidents are always blamed, especially if they work. Whatever ends up working to fix the incident, you should have done it sooner or it was too drastic a response. (No matter the fact that it _did_ fix the incident, outsiders will blame you that way).

One example is the Knight Capital trading disaster, where they eventually noticed (I don't remember the exact number) X minutes after the runway trading bot had been put into place, and shut it down, but got blamed for not shutting down the trading soon enough.

Can't find any links about this right now though :(

I see this in Programming/IT a lot. Also a very similar case whereby the person fixing the issue gets pressure to complete the fix and even blame after the fact.

It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick.

> It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick.

To be fair, I am sure doctors experience that a lot.

It depends. I blame the dentist that fixed my tooth in a substandard way and then I had to have it removed, because the bad fix had it broken a couple of years down the line.

I also blame him because, over the years, other patients of him had trouble for his sloppy work.

I absolutely praise the dentist I went after that one, who made his best to fix everything, explained me the pros and cons of every decision he made, and ultimately got me top notch (as best as could be done).

Sorry for he weird "counterpoint", but the example could be open to ambiguity. I still get the point: don't blame the guy fixing things when it's someone elses responsibility.

In my case: I'd be wrong to blame the 2nd dentist for the mistakes of the 1st.

Sure, I just wanted to say that the criticized behavior of blaming the problem on the person that is trying to solve it is something that also happen to doctor. Simply to say that it is not a prerogative of programming or safety.

Sure, and in retrospective my answer was a bit more to gp than to you.

I'm reminded of year 2000. Yes complete overreaction, but I'm also certain it would not have been such a non-event if it weren't for that extreme attention it got.

You mean Y2K? Yeah I remember there was even a Simpson episode about it being absolute chaos (one of the Tree House Horror episodes). And then pretty much "nothing happened" (a few ATMs here and there spitting money randomly, a few funny incidents, but nothing of scale) and the world thought IT people had been paranoid over nothing.

Fast forward to 2020, we still have Feb 29 bugs around (I saw a few posted on twitter, none in person). The response back then was huge and adequate, but totally underappreciated as time went by.

One of the Feb 29 bugs I saw this year was that when I logged on to Skype for Business Monday March 2nd, everyone in my company that had logged off their computers on Friday Feb 28th, had a message about being offline for anywhere between 20-40 days. It just didn't know how to handle that day.

Most of the bad things predicted by the media wouldn't have happened even if no effort was spent. However there would have been a lot of things not predicted by the media that would have been bad. The bad things the media predicted were easy to put into a sentence, while the bad things that would have happened would take books to explain. They would only really be bad because of the sum total happening all at once.

This.

Everyday people in the leadup to y2k assumed it meant that every computer would somehow explode. Almost nobody stopped to actually reason through the real life consequence of a program getting the date and time wrong.

"Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after will seem inadequate" --M. Leavitt DHHS

There is one thing that will help avoid some of this: across every county, state, and nation, there will be differing levels of response, and when it's all over it will be clear who got their medical systems overwhelmed as a result of denialism, and who wasted a bunch of money due to alarmism.

Yeah, I've been thinking something similar.

In the American context, a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction. The administration responsible (federal or state) would be blamed for the economic damage and voted out.

It would take a very strong leader who was willing to act without thought to reelection to really meet the crisis head on. That would be ... rare.

>a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction.

Seems likely. Since solving the problem would make it look like there was no problem in which case what was the point of all the work.

This is also one of those cases where you have to overreact to begin with because once you have an actual problem its too late.

I think you're right, and that economic damage is something I think too many people are worried about. I've seen a lot of business magazines more worried about the dow-jones than the number of people who could die.

>a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction

This is what worries me the most. Is there a name for this bias? Seems similar to survivorship bias, I'm sure it's seen across all kinds of contexts.

Have you thought about inverting your thinking? Every pandemic this century ended up being a damp squib despite WHO et al promising doomsday.

Was it the WHO promising doomsday? Or the media reporting on it?

The WHO

Did they end up being a "damp squib", or were corrective and protective measures implemented to slow them sufficiently so as to control them before they became endemic?

It may be that when the Boy Cried Wolf, the wolf didn't show up precisely because the villagers had turned out with torches and successfully scared it away, unseen.

Damp squib

And your rationale for that characterization is...?

He is all over these threads downplaying the seriousness of this virus, best to just ignore him.

I'm aware. That's why I responded to him. Because it's better to confront this kind of mendacity.

The WHO predicted that 150 million people would be killed by avian flu [1]. Nothing happened. They predicted 750,000 people would die in the UK, it was more like 200. For swine flu it was minimum possible deaths of 11k but up to 70k. It was more like 400. They got upset when people wouldn't use their case fatality rates which turned out very wrong. Over half a million people died of flu related deaths last year. Don't recall reading a single news article about it

1, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/emergency....

2, https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555.abstract

Places like Singapore and Taiwan have had successful responses and the locals seem happy with them. The US response re testing is just awful. (I've just read the NYT article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...)

So what do we do if this virus festers for another couple of years? We can't shut down society forever.

The goal at this point should be to flatten the curve as much as possible to prevent overwhelming healthcare until a vaccine is developed and tested. Nobody thinks this is going to be a permanent measure.

I don't disagree with the flattening the curve bit, but I do wonder - my understanding is that a vaccine is at minimum a year out. Would we need to keep doing this for that entire time period, or are there other factors at play here?

I think that there is a rough relation between the infection rate and the percent of the population that gets infected.

Consider raw r0 of 3.0. Each case infects three other people. But as more and more of the population gets infected and acquires immunity the infection rate drops. Say half the population is immune due to prior infection. The rate is now half r0 = 3.0 * 0.5 Left unchecked 66% of the population will get infected and then the disease dies out.

Social distancing, hand washing, quarantine reduces r0. And reduces the total number that the virus can infect before is dies out. Cut r0 from 3.0 to 1.5 and the number of infected goes from 66% to 33%.

In the US that would be 100 million people. And maybe a million fewer deaths.

Scuttlebutt is China and Taiwan due to high early compliance have r0 down to about 0.3, which means the epidemic is in a state of exponential crash.

There are shortages in the supply chain; hand sanitizer, masks, and tests for coronavirus in addition to overwhelming hospitals by sick people. If there aren't open beds or staff (ideally who aren't overworked), people who otherwise would get medical attention will die.

If a vaccine wasn't even in the picture flattening the curve would help with these things.

That's a good point. Also, my understanding is that antiviral medications might be an option in a "few" months.

There are a lot of things in the future. Antivirals show promise of working in a few months - but we don't actually know they will work (or for that matter that the virus won't evolve a new unique resistance to them). It will take time to figure out what works best for treatment.

Or even just more personal protective gears for medical personnel, more isolation wards, and more ventilators could be readied. The medical system can be built up and reconfigured to take care of this disease but it needs time.

A good analysis on this point from a public health perspective: https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

They can just slow it down and prevent hospital systems from becoming overwhelmed. A lot of people will get immunity to it, which should confer some herd immunity that will protect older people.

They’re eventually going to lift quarantines after it burns out in different areas.

Maybe there will be vaccines, better treatment.

In this case though we've examples of how bad it can get. Iran comes to mind. As this progresses we'll see what happens to countries who didn't attempt any quarantine or drastic measures at all.

That won't be the US though which is already quietly quarantining things. Conferences are being postponed. Companies are stopping all non-emergency travel. Nursing homes are not allowing visitors.

Hopefully, we'll see articles like the recent articles talking about how closing schools during the 1918 flu saved lives. Specifically, closing schools before there were any identified cases were much more effective than waiting until one was detected.

So a Y2K style hindsight? I wonder if there is a phrase for that type of thing.

"Closing the barn door after the horses have left" ?

Closing the barn door before the horses leave and being blamed for the barn being too warm is actually what is happening.

It depends on how bad it gets, if people are dying by the thousand I think the conventional wisdom will be we should have done more. Even with these measures I fear it wont be nearly enough to avert catastrophe.

Hum. On the other side it is the story of the madman holding an umbrella in the middle of the summer. Someone asks him why he is holding an umbrella, it's not raining. He answers that it is to keep pink elephants from flying around. But there aren't any pink elephant flying. The madman responds: you see, it works.

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