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Comment by solveit | Hacker News Reader

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!

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> 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.

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.

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