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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting to see how Italy (lockdown) compares with the UK (just let it infect everyone) compares with South Korea (extensive testing & contact tracing, plus social distancing) in a couple months.

My sense is that the UK will probably fold and institute a lockdown once their ICU capacity gets overwhelmed and healthy young people start dying in the streets. Either that or they'll face a revolution and then have a lot more problems. Of course, by the time it gets to either of those points it'll be too late to effectively change course.

But it's interesting to see at least one country take the position that "Hey, we're going to let this run its course, take our lumps now, and try to get back to business as usual ASAP." I could be wrong, and maybe this is a genius application of heartless logic. Time will tell.

RemindMe!2months ;-)

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>My sense is that the UK will probably fold and institute a lockdown once their ICU capacity gets overwhelmed and healthy young people start dying in the streets. Either that or they'll face a revolution and then have a lot more problems. Of course, by the time it gets to either of those points it'll be too late to effectively change course.

Looks like that's already happening: https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/coronavirus-uk-strategy...

> Looks like that's already happening

Is UK ICU capacity overwhelmed and are young people dying in the streets?

No.

Don’t spread rumours in this situation.

No, what's happened is they've already changed to a lockdown strategy, as the link above details.

There's still no lockdown in the UK, as of now

They aren't rumors. UK ICU capacity is already overwhelmed.

Nobody is dying in the streets of the UK. This is silly nonsense.

Yes, sorry, what I meant was that the lockdown was likely going into effect already, but not for completely apocalyptic reasons.

that article is pure gold, if it was the onion i wouldn't be able to tell.

> "We were expecting herd immunity to build. We now realise it’s not possible to cope with that," professor Azra Ghani, chair of infectious diseases epidemiology at Imperial, told journalists at a briefing on Monday night.

i can multiply numbers fifteen times in a row and come to that conclusion. alternatively, i can watch italian tv. did these people never looked up from their models to confront them with actual reality?

Truly incredible

How long did it take them to no longer expect herd immunity to build? 12 hours? That must be one of the most ridiculous acts of about-face in public policy in this generation.

> UK (just let it infect everyone)

is completely false. It was hyped by some out of context quotes by some media outlets and spread like a literal virus and people didn't bother to find out the reality, and so we see the same mis information being shared here.

We need to flatten the curve of these misinformation viruses

you must have missed that in the UK, unlike the rest of Europe :

- schools/nurseries open

- theatres/bars/restaurants open

- stadiums open

- large gatherings allowed

The Mayor of London was still organising mass events a few days ago ( https://www.facebook.com/sadiqforlondon/posts/30260791107781... )

Most of that changed as of 5 hours ago.

Theyve only asked, tho. Legally nothing has changed. Walked by my local at 9pm and it was half full...

Nope, schools are still open.

Boris asked nicely for people to think about maybe not going to the pub.

But they're crammed as usual.

And businesses can't claim insurance money if they close, as they're not required to close by law.

Research group at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland has updated their COVID19-scenario explorer. https://neherlab.org/covid19/

If you run their model for UK with weak mitigation, Moderate/North epidemiology, you get 390,000 total deaths.

Hm, if you change amount of beds total deaths don't change in their model.

Your post is out of date as of about 5 hours ago.

From https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51917562 social distancing is now in place.

The original announcements said that it would always be in place, but that they wanted to wait because it is hard for people over prolonged periods.

"social distancing" recommendation...but everything is still open

> My sense is that the UK will probably fold and institute a lockdown

They (we) have already shifted towards a lockdown (voluntary for now, but people have been told to avoid office, pubs and travelling[0]) due to the model used being updated with the data from Italy.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51917562

A couple of teleconferences with Italian doctors was what spooked Norwegian authorities to institute wartime measures while we still had only 200 confirmed cases. Glad the rest of the world seems to follow.

Uk tactic looks very sensible to me. They will institute a lockdown long before that. But they recognize a lockdown for a prolonged time is very challenging in itself and there aren't many good reasons to be doing it too early.

Maybe they want a flat curve in the sense of a rectangle. You know rapidly rise until just what the system can take and then keep it there..

You can't really do that. If you think of this in terms of the control over the virus being a Proportion-Integral-Derivative type system, then given how long it takes to gather more information about the current infection level in the populace you're either going to overshoot after the corner(too little pressure applied) or undershoot(too much pressure applied) after the corner. You can't apply perfect control to this kind of system such that the corner is perfectly square.

Especially where our knowledge is imperfect and subject to a lot of latency, we have to accept that we have very little actual control over how quickly the curve speeds or slows. Thus the bell-shaped curves.

That's... completely insane. There "aren't many reasons to be doing it too early"? Stopping, or at least slowing the spread of a worldwide pandemic isn't a good reason? Preventing 3% of your population from dying over the next year isn't a good reason?

Waiting until the problem obviously seems like a real problem is exactly what crushed cultures under epidemics in the past.

The UK strategy is based on the idea that the pandemic cannot be stopped, but can be slowed down and directed away from the most vulnerable. So there are certain assumptions there that people can agree or disagree with. But its not 'completely insane'.

And yes South Korea and China seem to have stopped the pandemic in their countries, and have done an impressive job at it, but its early days and not at all clear how sustainable their approach is, or whether that approach would work everywhere.

No, it is not.

It is too late for stopping it and you can barely delay it either.

You delay a few days or maybe 1-2 weeks if stringent but it won't be as effective when you desperately need it to be. Likely more will die if you start too early.

Yeah, the pragmatic mindset might as well calculate the savings on pensions from deceased elderly. I personally find this unacceptable. More should have been done earlier and it didn’t happen. We’ll see how this affects the next elections though..

The UK backed away from this insanity and will be implementing social distancing.

Thank god.

They were always going to eventually, and they said so.

Everything is still open in the UK

Was out tonight going to supermarket, the social distancing isn't enforced. I still saw half full pubs. Bare in mind it's Monday, if nothing changes expect full pubs and business as usual coma Friday. Nothing has changed.

So far number of cases has been multiplying by 10 every ~16 days. Incubation period is 4-14 days. I.e. when you institute quarantine, cases will still multiply like crazy for another 4-14 days. In other words, you have to do it "too early". If you do it when you're nearing ICU capacity, you are waaaay too late.

Don't think anyone is waiting for the ICU to be at capacity.

This. I expect duplication every three days where I'm writing this until the effects of lockdown measures show up clearly in around two weeks time.

Think about something akin to some sort of nuclear reactor with control rods up you've just started to insert.

25 to 35% growth rates seem like the norm withiut (or nearly withiut) any restrictions and nearly no public awareness. That a full lockdown quickly stops the spread is obvious, but it will be interesting to see how well the UK/Swedish model works with. strict social distancing but without lickdowns or even shutdowns of e.g restaurants.

Our math might need some correction. The statistics I was citing is daily contamination rate of 15-25%, and multiplication by 10 every 16 days (which comes out to a daily contamination rate of 15%). A daily rate of 25% gives you multiplication by 10 every 10.5 days.

UK has just made what apparently is a 180, U-turn, or however you want to call it and started implementing more serious containment measures.

AFAIK the UK line has consistently been "we'll do it, but not yet, because we can only do it for a limited time and so far the numbers don't warrant it". That's not a U-turn, that's doing pretty much what you said you were going to do.

the 'soon' was always weeks from last Friday but miraculously happened today. i say somebody added uprising probability to the model.

The always said they thought the peak was 10-14 weeks away and that the UK was about 4 weeks behind Italy. They now say that the UK is about 3 weeks behind italy and we are at the beginning of the dramatic up-swing so, time to apply the brakes.

It might already be too late for UK. Italy missed the mark by a week and it's a disaster in parts of the country. I'm from Slovenia and we implemented a total shutdown of public life. Now we are now waiting to see if it'll work. We went from 1 confirmed case to a shutdown in 10 days. And it's far from guaranteed that shutdown will work as it might be a few days too late.

I'm pretty confused by the European government's responses. While the UK is the most brazen, all others are essentially also saying that there's no other way other than letting a non-negligible percentage of the population die, and that the best they can do is try to ensure that everyone who needs an ICU gets one. And all the while incurring a massive economic cost. Italy, France, Switzerland and Austria have effectively halted most of the economic activity, initially for 2 weeks to a month, but it's likely that it's either going to be longer, or that they'll have to repeat the process. That's 100s of billions of dollars gone just there, not counting for the long-term impact and all the social problems that'll follow. I'm puzzled that the idle workforce and the lost money isn't diverted to urgent and massive scaling of testing and protection equipment.

Of course, all it takes is a UK to screw everyone over by not playing along and providing a population pool for the virus to mutate. And then a ton of poor countries who probably can't do anything even if they wanted, where it's just starting.

Add Norway and Denmark to the list of countries that have halted large part of their economic activity.

Honestly, I think the UK, Sweden et al. will be "voted out" here. Commerce can't continue between countries that follow the China/South Korea model of keeping R0 < 1, because frequent large outbreaks are bound to follow. Britain can't economically dominate its neighbors like that today. Sweden, forget about it.

This is a spectacular high-stakes experiment. But if Boris Johnson isn't persuaded by public opinion and a high death toll, his trading partners will.

Both approaches put strong selection pressure on the virus to mutate to a milder form, so even in the absence of a vaccine, we'll win in the long term.

> there's no other way other than letting a non-negligible percentage of the population die.

That's not what is being said. What is being said is that specifically to avoid people dying, you need to stop ICUs being overwhelmed, but that in their judgement and modelling an immediate hard clamp down is not the best way.

Who are you comparing Europe to?

Trump just announced advice not to gather for 2 weeks. A 2 week restriction is a drop in the sea.

China is celebrating lifting of many restrictions. But the virus will come back in those areas and the restrictions will come back too.

uk announced social distancing and non mandatory isolation

>"Hey, we're going to let this run its course, take our lumps now, and try to get back to business as usual ASAP." I could be wrong, and maybe this is a genius application of heartless logic

Related, if we take the numbers out of China at face value: A tiny tiny fraction of the population has been infected (acquired immunity). So what now? Lock everything down until a vaccine is discovered?

Here's how China claims to be handling day-to-day life: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM

Basically, masks in public, no-contact thermometers everywhere, and QR codes that you scan to enter a subway or a building. There's more, but that's the core.

If you have a fever, then they send you to a specialized fever clinic: https://mobile.twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1238604080571772...

There, they determine if you've been infected. If you have been, they send you to a group isolation ward, where you spend a few weeks chilling out and doing group dance exercises. If can't stand up and dance, you get treatment.

It's clearly a society at war, and I'm sure some ugly details are hidden. But it looks better than hiding indoors while our medical system burns and our elderly relatives die (and at least some of us younger folk wind up with scarred lungs).

Immunity? There are two strains of corvid in China. Even if you had it you can get another variant.

Unfortunately it's not just the UK. Also in the Netherlands we have to live through this social experiment.

That's not even close to true, schools, restaurants, pubs and sporting establishments are shut down. Events with 100 or more people attending are not allowed and the government is actively working to help companies deal with less productivity due to people working from home or in staggered shifts. They also recommend social distancing. This is not "Hey, we're going to let this run its course, take our lumps now, and try to get back to business as usual ASAP." as the grandparent mentioned.

If U.K. goes it alone they will be out of sync with the rest of the world in terms of travel restrictions. No one will be going in or out of U.K. until everywhere else has caught up to their herd immunity or we have a vaccine. Not sure how this lack of travel affects their economy.

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