Comment by whb07 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whb07 | Hacker News Reader

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Because everyone keeps parroting what you're saying. We are effectively now in a fear bubble. So now everyone's mindset is "stop the world lets hunker down and cower in a corner for the impending doom. Nothing positive or new data can change my mind."

In a couple weeks/months they'll start testing people to find out if they did have the virus. The tests right now only show if you currently have it. Once the real numbers come out I am confident it will be a massive over estimate for the CFR.

The fear bubble is causing people to underlook the data in places like SK, SG, Japan, Germany and overlook the data in Italy, China, Iran. It could be quite possible that a mixture of smoking, age, over reporting causes, and bad healthcare (gasp not in Italy where socialized medicine is world beating) is being overlooked.

So what we get now is stopping of society and the economy, millions of people will go through displacement and a host of negative things. People's savings will be depleted, not to mention teacher's/public servants/ pension and 401ks will take a MASSIVE hit. Oh and add to that more trillions of USD to the debt.

The alternative to over reaction is under reaction. I'd rather take extreme precautions and deal with the economic fallout then under react and deal with the situation that italy is currently in.

I think in this situation fear is good, it ensures urgency and assists with decisive action making, coupled with humility to change course when your wrong. Apathy is much scarier than fear in these situations.

It’s hard to take you seriously when you just dodge the question.

Also, the idea the economy will just keep rolling along somehow if we don’t do anything to slow the virus is wrong. When people are dying in the streets due to lack of health care capacity you’ll see what a real panic looks like. The economy is going to hard stop, probably including the food supply chain.

The most comprehensive analysis of the disease puts the average age of death from COVID at about ~80 years. Almost all of victims had a pre-existing condition. Fully choking the economy now means that we are much more likely to choke the supply chains and the healthcare system since we are stopping even healthy, younger people who are usually the main contributors to economic output. Without that output, it will only get harder to help those most vulnerable to the disease.

So the argument that stopping the economy now to help it later, eventually, even if we don't know how long we will need to keep it shut doesn't make any sense imo. We are jeopardizing our future ability to fight against the disease, big time

Sorry, forgot to add a source for the numbers. There it is:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...

You’re dancing around my question: what would you do right now with what you have available right now?

Just let 5% of your population die and tell the rest to get back to work, restaurants, vacation?

That's a ridiculous false choice fallacy. First of all, the 5% doesn't make sense and is demonstrably false. You are cherry picking the data that fits you and assuming everyone infected got tested. Also, if you go by your logic, why do you think killing 5% of the population better than killing even more people by completely wrecking the supply chains that allow us to treat enough people?

Also, you've literally ignored all of my argument that addressed what would be better and why it would be better. You also shifted back to a rhetorical question to avoid talking about whatever you said about dead people in the streets. It's absurd to move the goalposts like this.

But even if you are clearly being dishonest here, I'll say it again. The best option would be to not lock down the vast majority of the population because it will only mean less resources to help the sick and fight against the disease itself. It will also only lead to a breaking point where people will simply not be able to afford to stay on lockdown no matter how bad it gets. That will make the whole thing much more deadly because people will simply not follow any measure if they are hungry or completely broke.

You’re suggesting letting the virus spread, uncontrolled. That means a million dead in the US, assuming everyone had access to good care. Of course, not everyone has access to good care on the best of days in the US. Once the healthcare system is overloaded few will get good care and the mortality rate from Coronavirus and everything else, for everyone will be much higher. And, as people die in the streets, the economy will shut down anyway.

So your plan is to essentially let this spread unchecked to save the economy. Unfortunately, that’s not how this will play out. That’s how you collapse a medical system and see mortality rates above 5%, and almost certainly wreck the economy anyway. There’s a reason literally no country has done that. Thank science you’re not in charge of anything.

There isn’t some magical good option or plan here. It’s a choice between terrible, terrible options, and you’re sticking your head in the sand and ignoring that.

You didn’t answer my question. What is your plan?

It sounds like your plan to deal with an exponential outbreak is to wait a few weeks until you have better testing to see if this is really something to worry about, or if those disaster countries that came before you were just a fluke.

Do you not see the problem here? No one is suggesting we don’t test. But the disease is rapidly spreading while we dither about, and if you’re wrong about the CFR, it’ll be way, way too late by the time we know that.

The only country that has correctly dealt with the virus is SK, because the had the test infra ready to test enough people to actually do science.

The others countries have all had debate on optimistic vs precautious solutions, buying time vs saving the economy, but the reality is that none are able to correctly assess the spread of the virus. They can’t do correct science.

HK/Singapore/Japan numbers also don't seem too bad either[0]. Seems their responses have been pretty good? SK's numbers are higher (last I checked), but I know they had the issue with those religous gatherings hampering their containment efforts.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

I’ll tell you what we do. We don’t shut down the country and destroy millions of lives and future generations. We definitely don’t do it if there’s already overwhelming evidence this impacts the 70+ year old crowd.

We can talk dream scenarios if this actually impacted the youth. Because in that case then there’s actual risk to future societies.

Have you seen an actuarial table for a 70 year old? Go ahead and tell me those numbers and how they compare to the sub 1% CFR seen in Germany, SG, South Korea and Japan.

Still waiting for you to share your plan. We all are well aware of what you think we shouldn’t do. So what should we do?

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