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Comment by finaliteration | Hacker News Reader

Honest question because I’ve seen a few comments stating this without totally clarifying: What does “lock everything down” mean? Are you suggesting people be locked up in their homes for weeks or a month? Or just shutting down non-essential businesses and buildings? Domestic travel restrictions? I legitimately am asking not to be snarky or confrontational, I’m just trying to get some clarity on what people mean when they say this.

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Austria has banned gatherings of more than five people.

Italy has closed all stores other than grocery and drug stores. All non-essential travel is banned. There's a short list of valid essentials, like taking care of aging parents; there are roadblocks, they'll make you fill out a form stating your purpose, it's a crime to lie about it, and they do sometimes check.

In China, every place you go you get your temperature taken. Go in a building, get on a bus, they take your temperature. Show a fever, they take you to a dedicated fever center, where they check you for flu and bacterial infection. Come up clear on those, you're waiting four hours for a covid-19 test. Come up positive, you're there for the duration. You don't go home to your family because they've found 80% of transmissions are in family clusters.

Sounds worse than coronavirus.

It's temporary, and it's not worse than mass unnecessary deaths because there weren't enough ventilators.

Would you say that to someone whose loved one died?

When it turns out auto deaths drop, does that mean the shutdown goes on for ever? What will you say to the family of the first auto crash victim after the shutdown is lifted?

I do think it’s important to consider the pros and cons of any given policy, but I think this comparison is a bit extreme.

There are about 35k car crash deaths in the US each year [0].

I’ve seen estimates for total infection rate all over the map. Conservatively (?) if 30% of the US population is eventually infected and the fatality rate is 1%, that’s 1 million people, and basically two orders of magnitude larger for a comparable (?) time period. If we don’t do more than we currently are to limit transmission, these figures don’t seem that implausible.

Auto deaths are still a huge problem, but we can take more targeted action like improving transit coverage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...

For some more perspective:

Italy has 3,333 deaths from car accidents per year. Currently 0.04% of Italy has confirmed covid-19. They have 1809 deaths from it.

And that is exactly why this is enforced on a state level and not left up to the individual.

Because the individual makes the wrong call for the whole.

You can isolate the individuals who are infected and misbehaving instead of the whole state.

Saying the individual makes the wrong call for the whole is remarkably stupid. The West is built on correct decisions for the whole by individuals.

Mindless politics.

COVID-19 is a smart disease, it comes off as a mild disease at first but it can still spread easily. You can even spread it without feeling symptoms yourself. If a person feels too ill to not be moving around, it would already have passed the virus down to many contacts.

Social distancing is therefore vital when patients keep coming out of nowhere. If there's a group of people they could easily spread the virus before they even know. If people don't listen, it may have to be enforced for public safety. It's the approach China, Singapore, and South Korea have done and succeeded in various levels.

If you're young and healthy, I can totally see how a lock down might feel worse than the risk of getting the coronavirus.

But it's not just about you. It's about the elderly, the sick, the weak around you. Even if you end up fine after getting the disease, you're going to transmit it to other people, directly or indirectly, who may end up dying because of you. That's what R0 is about.

So yeah, a lock down will suck for you, but I hope it makes you feel better to know that it will help save someone else's life.

Here are the details of Austria’s lockdown, for the curious: https://fm4.orf.at/stories/3000031/

What Italy's doing seems pretty close to the most you can do in a western country. It just took them too long to do it.

* Only stores open are grocery stores, pharmacies and some other essentials.

* No going out except to go to work or go food shopping, or a brief walk in your neighborhood, on your own.

* No weddings, funerals, church.

* No travel outside your town, except for work.

* Work from home if you can.

* Some companies, like Ferrari, are simply shutting down for a bit - they're not a key element in anyone's supply chain.

I’d also like to see a lock down that doesn’t completely throw away our civil liberties. This is a serious issue, but I don’t want to be locked at home because we’re fighting a “war on viruses” twenty years from now

I worry about this too. I can’t believe you’re being downvoted.

I hate to say it but this whole thread gives me the vibe of democracy dying to thunderous applause.

Exactly! The "lock it all down" attitude has a heavy streak of unthinking authoritarianism to it that makes me very uncomfortable.

Reasonable precautions? Of course. Going nuts and disrupting everyone's lives and businesses like that? I'd rather not.

> I'd rather not.

Every other nation would rather not too but, as soon as every single hospital collapses due to the sheer volume of cases (it's really that bad)... oh, you'd all rather yep, just like we did. It doesn't look like the US is going the South Korean way.

And when I say "the hospital collapses" I really mean it cannot even take care of other emergencies. There are not enough ICU beds nor ventilators. Period. Normal operation is mostly halted too (I know this from first hand).

The worst is I know you won't listen, just like nobody else listened until it was too late. Quote me on that.

As I see it, you have a choice between three options.

1. Go nuts and lock everything down, Wuhan-style. 2. Be really competent at testing people, tracking everyone they've come into contact with over the previous ~2 weeks, test them too, and recurse. South Korea/Singapore-style. 3. Accept that ~60% of your population will get the virus and take the ~million deaths.

Obviously 2 is the best choice to take, but in the absence of competent government, you will inevitably get overreaching government because reasonable precautions taken by mediocre government DOES NOT WORK!

60% of your population will get the virus and take the ~million deaths

this implies 0.5% fatality rate. That's about an order of magnitude off.

You're right. I chose the optimistic end of fatality estimates because that's the conservative choice (for making the point I was making) but given that infrastructure will collapse in this scenario the true fatality rate is almost certain to be a lot higher.

I don't think there's enough data to say for sure on this in the sense that outside of S Korea, very few asymptomatic people have been tested.

Not according to S Korea

South Korea's infections have all overwhelmingly come from the same religious group, which tilts heavily towards the 25-35 year old demographic. People in that age group have a very low chance of dying from the disease.

South Korea has kept their infection rate low enough that it doesn't overwhelm their hospitals. The fatality rate is more like 5% if you can't get treated because the hospital is full.

I would wager that a 0.5% mortality rate is closer to the “real” rate than the 5% figure.

Look at South Korea. Do you see a 5% CFR there? Of course not.

> As I see it, you have a choice between three options.

You left out a fourth option:

4. People exercise common sense and take precautions on their own initiative to minimize their risk.

You don't have to wait for the government to tell you what to do.

You can look around to see how realistic that fantasy is. People are notoriously bad at risk assessment and in many cases the costs are borne by other people: those healthy 25 year olds hitting the bars all weekend probably don’t have much to worry about, but that’s almost certainly not true for everyone they cross paths with during the period where they’d be contagious.

This is exacerbated by the political angle: once a huge, well-funded and entrenched propaganda system picked this up, it became inevitable that there’d be a lot of people who will take inordinate amounts of personal risk because they think doing so is somehow sticking it to liberals. The latest NBC poll showed a stark partisan divide on even basic personal safety measures:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/sixty-percen...

People are hoarding toilet papers and you expect them to somehow channel knowledge through common sense and magically understand which places/activities to avoid?

> People are hoarding toilet papers

Yes, this was the oddest thing I noticed while shopping for necessaries. Every single place I went to was totally cleaned out of toilet paper. Other paper products were depleted but not completely out, but TP--nada. I don't get it.

Its a symptom of those who have the virus, a intense need to collect toilet paper.

We can pinpoint the start of a virus in Wuhan China, and a global supply chain of toilet paper by competent western companies, with accountability and regulations to follow cannot supply a single reason why there is no TP. It's a joke.

Ah, yes, the "people will magically stop being people" approach.

All the people I know are taking common sense precautions (including my wife and me). Do you know a lot of people who aren't?

I'm taking common sense precautions.

There are parents at my kids' schools rolling their eyes and planning playdates. The local ski hill closed and people are complaining falsely "it's less lethal than the flu". There are people filling bars all over the country.

It doesn't take all that many of these people to flood the hospital ICUs - which already run pretty full in normal times - well beyond capacity.

I do. A shit ton. Most people I've talked to, in fact. Not that it matters who you or I know. Option 4 is the same as option 3: do nothing like the UK. People will act in what they perceive is their own self interest. For most people, that does not align with what's good for society. It's too late for mass testing. There's only one option: lock down.

A lot of countries thought they were taking that option like Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US. But eventually, Italy and Spain realized that there was no option 4 and they'd msitaken chosen option 3 so they switched to option 1.

> A lot of countries thought they were taking that option

At least in the US, I think it's too early to tell what the outcome of that option is.

Yeah, the issue is that the long lag time between infection and hospitalization combined with short doubling times means what once we order a lockdown it could get 20x worse before it gets better.

The die was cast well over a year ago, but the exponential function had us proper fucked a week ago.

We are not solving this through cleverness anymore, if it was ever on the table.

That clearly isn’t happening, though.

If you act early when total cases are in single or low double digit, 2 is a choice you can make. But for most of the world, that option is gone. Now the choices are 1 and 3.

I like choosing lock-down to reduce no of wild cases to a small number followed by option 2. I believe that is what they are planning in Wuhan and China. They'll lift off the lock down gradually but will continue with aggressive monitoring/testing and tracing. This will bring back the economy while still keeping the risk of epidemic.

I've been thinking this is a good test run to see how much authoritarianism the Western governments can get away with. If this turns into part of the yearly flu (which I've been hearing is getting more likely), then the 'war on viruses' could very well be a thing.

This. I live in China and while it is great that my city has only seen a handful of new infections over the past month, there are still fences up around neighborhoods, checkpoints everywhere, nervous cops doing "stop and frisk" to confirm people have valid travel passes etc. When I look at Taiwan, South Korea and other countries that have managed this outbreak without an extensive lockdown, I know what I'd prefer.

Yeah, sure, we would all have preferred to have responsible politicians who handled this correctly. Guess what? That ship has sailed. Most countries have "leadership" that handled this abysmally and now we have to deal with all this crap in order to flatten the curve until there are treatments and vaccines available.

My mom and dad are 73 years old and I don't give a damn about someone's tin-foil-hattery about "fighting the war on viruses 20 years from now", if I can keep them from dying. Go read some first-person accounts from people living in Italy, not just the ones about the roadblocks and forms you have to fill out, but also the ones from people who couldn't even say goodbye to their loved ones who died or the ones from HCWs about the collapse of their hospitals.

All of us who are pissed off about the lockdowns should hold on to that anger and express it fully after we have to stop worrying about our parents and grandparents being left for dead.

I don’t think it has to be a tinfoil approach though. I just mean, if we are going to restrict people, have aggressive sunset provisions on those orders (or poison pill the bill somehow to get more incentive to repeal it as soon as we beat this)

People are eager to give the government power when they're scared. You can feel the panic in the HN threads -- at the end of the day, most people are herding animals. A free society can't effectively force a quarantine, outside of the voluntary recommendations already being provided for social distancing. That seems like a trade-off many would find reasonable if the plague wasn't currently on their minds (2% chance of dying in a plague every century in exchange for having civil liberties the rest of the time).

What a free society could do is massively incentivize and subsidize new drug research, while lowering the barrier to entry for human trials. Right now this is only being done manually in the US with a few drugs and major players, such as Remdesivir, instead of allowing a systematic approach for non-major players to skip the line, too (e.g. university research labs).

The quarantine in China will end at some point, but you claim it won't end in the US if we give the government that power, a power it already has. Which one's the free country again?

The US is the free country, because we have no lockdown.

The US constitution gives the federal government the right to implement a quarantine and enforce it:

"If a quarantinable disease is suspected or identified, CDC may issue a federal isolation or quarantine order.

Public health authorities at the federal, state, local, and tribal levels may sometimes seek help from police or other law enforcement officers to enforce a public health order.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Coast Guard officers are authorized to help enforce federal quarantine orders.

Breaking a federal quarantine order is punishable by fines and imprisonment."

https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...

They’re just referencing the commerce clause. Can the commerce clause supercede the bill of rights?

Commerce clause has been used for all sorts of 2A regulations.

If you're thinking of the gun free school zone law, I don't think it quite supports your point. I believe the Commerce Clause was used to justify federal regulation of gun purchases/ownership, as opposed to it having to be a state law. It was not used (I believe) in any way to abrogate the rights afforded by the Second Amendment. I could be wrong — I never practiced law in this area — but I can't remember ever hearing about the Commerce Clause being used as a limitation on the Second Amendment. That is effectively what would be required here.

The federal government regulates firearms under the commerce clause the same whey they regulate pharmaceuticals under the commerce clause. The difference is they can outright prohibit marijuana and not rifles because the latter prohibition would violate the second amendment.

The commerce clause doesn't override the second amendment (or any other part of the bill of rights), there are only cases where a particular amendment was found not to apply.

What you're looking for is emergency powers, but they're not actually in the constitution. In practice what has happened is that Presidents do whatever thing in an emergency and then get sued over it after, and typically lose, but by then it's years later and whatever temporary measures they ordered in the middle of the emergency are long since discontinued.

It's kind of a kludge, but it also kind of works, because it keeps the emergency measures from extending longer than it takes for the courts to catch up to it, and also gives the victims of rights violations the ability to get compensated after the fact for being done wrong in the midst of a big mess.

The Federal government requires local cooperation to enforce any such orders, they operate at the pleasure of local authorities. This limitation on Federal power shows up routinely in other matters when local authorities disagree with Federal enforcement actions. Hence the reference to CBP and the Coast Guard, which do have authority to enforce such things at points of entry into the country.

There are also strong restrictions on the scope of quarantine orders that would be allowed to circumvent due process in emergencies.

Seems like the two are a bit mutually exclusive no? I mean lock down implies limiting movement, which limits civil liberties. I don't really see how you can have a lock down without limiting civil liberties.

You'd only be allowed outside to go to work or to the supermarket or pharmacy. All other shops closed. So factories and office buildings mostly stay open, just more reduced (home office as much as possible). Every country has different limits currently. China indeed locked doors (with tape) to check if people stayed it, food delivery only through windows.

Yes, you're fairly accurate. It means cafes, non-essential retail stores, restaurants, etc. should shut down. People should only venture outside for groceries, medicine, or if their work demands it. Work that is non-essential should be put on hold. No non-essential travel, no going out for dinner, no casual shopping for goods, no hanging out or drinking with friends or family.

Stay at home as often as you can, reasonably. You don't need a curfew, yet!

Spain has drones yelling at people to go home if they're spotted hanging out even in parks and whatnot.

People should stay home unless they're getting groceries/medicine or going to work in a hospital or other piece of critical infrastructure.