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Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

At this point wouldn't it be better to just implement a Chinese-style martial law lock-down? The damage to the economy is already here. Might as well shut things down for 3-4 weeks and slowly open up sections of a city. That seems better to me then dragging this thing out for 3 months or longer. I feel like these "stages" of lock-down are doing nothing but delaying the inevitable which will cause more damage in the long run.

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I don't think authoritarian tactics like that, while effective, would fly in the US. I for one would not be ok with that. Once the government takes that authority once, who knows what they end up doing with it when they see they can get away with it.

Yeah... America is a big and weird place, and has large swatches of people who deeply distrust the police or the government for some reason or another. And literally everyone is already on edge.

My neighborhood might comply, but there's a real risk that police state tactics would lead to massive social unrest, rioting, and total economic collapse in pockets across the country. If anyone thinks this is impossible, may I refer you to the 1960's.

On the other hand, what the authoritarian minded commenters seem to miss is how powerful social pressure and distributed decision making can actually be.

> I don't think authoritarian tactics like that, while effective, would fly in the US.

Much of this hinges on how it's done. First, you can't take away rights unless there's a compelling governmental interest. This interest clearly exists; however, it still doesn't fly UNLESS you restrict rights by the least restrictive means possible.

By trying voluntary restrictions first, they can demonstrate that these lesser restrictions were ineffective, and then successfully defend the more aggressive mandates in court if necessary, later.

Postscript: For more on this, see https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/3/10/21171464/co...

I don't disagree, but we seem to be approaching that end in little stages anyway all the while extending the financial losses felt by households across the nation. I'm saying if we're heading to that outcome, might as well make it quick short and stern.

Something like that should come with a massive political cost - maybe after the crisis, all sitting politicians become ineligible for re-election on the basis that they shouldn’t have let it come to that point in the first place.

I agree, as alarming as it sounds I think we'd need something much higher than a 2% fatality rate to justify completely giving up our civil liberties.

If anything it should be the elderly and vulnerable that are forced to isolate while the rest of society slows down for awhile, but even that I think is too egregious at this point.

You're not gonna get 2% fatality rate without serious quarantine measures. That rate assumes you can get all the serious cases to the ICU and into a ventilator. If you let it grow exponentially, we need to start imagining what is the fatality rate basically without any hospital care. Scaling hospitals will be absolutely impossible once the cases start heading into six and seven figures.

Lincoln used marshal law during the civil war and even that was deemed unconstitutional in some areas. As long as there are functioning civil courts, marshal law is not considered justified, as I understand it.

It's "martial" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/martial#English) rather than "marshal" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/marshal#English). The two are homophones, but the first means 'military' and the second is a particular rank or role within an army or government.

Imperial College doesn’t think that’s going to do enough good

who cares abt you though

Exactly. All this talk of "flattening the curve" is counterproductive if the curve remains flattened right at capacity for an extended period of time, which is what these measures will cause, rather than spiking for a short period.

No one in this country is mentally ready for hospitals to just not be available for an unknown amount of time. IMHO this would cause complete societal breakdown. It's one of our basic needs like food and shelter.

One wonders why they don't call it elongating the curve.

Yeah, because a quick spike wouldn't have any outside effects at all.

You sound as if you're ok with millions of people dying miserably.

You think a long period of decreased economy is bad, the spike might cause outright panics and armed unrest.

We can print dollars, we can't resurrect the dead.

Can you print economic output though? Printing dollars only works when there are things to buy and sell. More money and less things to use it on only makes the money less useful (inflation). Usually the economy can absorb that extra supply pretty well to the point of being insignificant, but that doesn't work when you just stop said economy.

Also, how do you think we will be able to support and help those more vulnerable if we don't have any economic output? Will printing money make supplies appear from nowhere?

Why not make the death fast? The argument is for euthanasia not a poor life to slowly die.

It's not "death fast", it's: 1) way more deaths and a complete congestion of medical services vs. 2) less deaths, manageable medical service and a period of painful stagnation for the economy.

If you get critically sick or injured (not COVID19 related) and hospitals are overflowing, you will suffer when no one can see you because of COVID19 cases.

And the problem is that during an extended period of curve reduction there will still be people pushed out of medical care due to surging cases (but not spiking!). The total area between the number of patients and hospital capacity curves may be similar in both cases.

This also assumes an invariant capacity. Extended period gives us the opportunity increase that capacity through means including getting folks trained as hospital techs (4 week training) and having local teams sew & build our filters and masks.

Essentially given a will, we could transition part of our economy to a war footing (against the virus). Do we have the will?

Or do we capitulate and decimate the population?

Why not move to a system where those most likely to live with minimal resource consumption move up? You’d probably need a multiplier for those that are useful to society but need more resources

That sounds an awful lot like a romanticized perfect democracy, which cannot exist outside of fiction, or a social credit system. There's an ongoing study on the effectiveness of a social credit system. It's happening in China. Go test it out and report back.

The only logical reason he might be doing it slowly is to limit the number of people trying to leave the city or state. This way people will trickle out instead of having a rush, like Italy, that caused it to spread

>> The damage to the economy is already here

You think it can't get worse?

On the contrary, I know it will get worse regardless of what we do. The question is does it get more worse with a long drawn out lock-down or a short and stern one?

EDIT: a word

I'll support lockdowns when the governments (local, state, federal) provide an economic relief package to go with it for all the businesses that will suffer absurd losses.

It's real easy to shut down businesses and livelihoods when politicians are not responsible for the economic fallout.

Governments would love that. Also, don't think things regarding their newfound powers would go "back to normal" either after.

What "newfound" powers? Did they pass any new laws for these powers? Seems like they always had them, so your scenario doesn't make sense.

In the late 19th century New York City used to send people with serious infectious diseases to a Sanitarium. Unless they could afford to be under a doctor/hospitals care. Most didn't come back.

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