America needs an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus | Hacker News Reader

America needs an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus

usatoday.com

31 pointssmacktoward20 comments

It seems probable that the inability to close down critical infrastructure (ie medical, utilities, food) and the exceptional contageousness of the virus will likely thwart any attempt to eliminate it via isolation. It lowers the burden on the medical system for sure, but it just delays the eventual spread. Consider that 50 to 95% of Native Americans died from infectious disease after Europeans arrived, while the fastest method of transport at the time was a horse and most food was locally grown.

It's commonly stated that the average US citizen lives paycheck to paycheck, and it's fair to guess a large fraction of those would be laid off during this period.

If you're optimizing for strain on the healthcare system, then I suppose a 5 week lockdown makes sense. That said, unless a plan addresses providing for the millions of people who can no longer afford food and rent during said lockdown, it seems likely we'd encounter an entirely different set of problems. I don't know what the effect of a 10% contraction in GDP would be, but I think that's what you would need to weigh slowing the spread of the virus against. I'd be interested if someone knowledgable could do the math on lost years of life from 14% of the elderly dying vs such a severe economic contraction.

This is insightful, but one missing point is that we actually can provide necessary support to allow people to remain in place for the duration. It wouldn't be without discomfort, but we don't need to cast anyone adrift.

In which case, we just need to make those details an equal part of the plan.

> I'd be interested if someone knowledgable could do the math on lost years of life from 14% of the elderly dying vs such a severe economic contraction.

That's not a math problem. There is no equation for comparing the death of a human being with economic contraction.

There are some really fundamental questions here that I don't think we're going to answer soon. It's making me wonder about the nature of the US itself, with authority scattered between DC, states and counties. With a priority (arguably an obsession) with free market economics over all else.

When the dust settles the country is going to need to ask a lot of questions about how it operates. Failure to do so (and don't get me wrong, I suspect we will fail) just means the next time a pandemic like this comes around it's going to devastate the country even more.

Economic contraction would lead to decreased lifespan. There's definitely a math problem here which optimizes for saved human life. Consider that a 100% economic contraction would result in the majority of humanity dying. 10% likely means some number of deaths among the poor (I've been the poor, there's not a lot of wiggle room when you're barely scraping by deciding between heat or food in the winter).

It's not that we can't lock down and accept economic contraction, it's that we should do the math before we commit to that path. Lockdown may be the clear winner.

Economic contraction can be countered by government spending in the short term. For instance in the UK the government has pledged to pay up to 80% of unemployed workers wages during this crisis. There will certainly be a hole to dig out of later, but it means no binary choice between economic contraction and people dying.

Agreed.

You just need to push the R value below 1.0 in order for it to die out of the populace.

As an extension to your point I would also like to add one aspect that is often forgotten when discussing lockdowns. Which is that a complete lockdown might potentially be worse. Because what more important than social distancing is keeping young and old apart. Families that have elderly and the young in them would just be locked in and cause the elderly to get infected and potentially die due to the virus affecting them more. Furthermore what about the medics and their families? in a lockdown they would have to return home and potentially spread it with children and elderly. So a more surgical approach is needed in which isolation happens for the vulnerable groups specifically and the young would be able to participate in the economy and we could weather both the effects of the virus and the economy but im afraid a complete lockdown might cause us to end up in a lose/lose situation. In which case i only see a vaccine as saving grace.

Buying time does get you better drugs, better testing, better data as to how much distancing is needed (there are a range of options), ability to tailor response to outbreaks in specific areas, and ultimately the vaccine. All this information is useful for future outbreaks which will potentially be worse. Alternatively if everyone gets sick at once there will be a massive percentage of people either too sick to work or out of work caring for others.

Someone I know made the assertion that the disease is "topping out" and based this on the fact that "testing is increasing faster than positive results". I am highly skeptical of this claim simply based on the fact that literally no expert is making this claim, but I don't know how to dismantle this assertion. Anyone have stats/numbers that would refute this (seemingly) bogus claim?

We are testing a more diverse group as we test more. Before we were testing people we suspected to be sick. Our data has been extremely biased all along in most countries.

That's a very good point, thank you.

https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

Plot confirmed cases and deaths vs. date on a log scale for countries with more than N cases/deaths.

You'll see USA following similar pattern to Italy, and other European countries, without significant slowdown of exponential trend yet.

Thanks. Is this the right dataset to look at https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/blob/master/csse_... ?

I guess I need the confirmed cases csv as well?

Up next: suspending trading on all stock markets/exchanges during the lockdown?

Perhaps I'm being wildly naive, but this would seem to be the next obvious step. Hopefully then the administration would turn ~90% of it's focus on the health/welfare of the population. Finally, the remaining ~10% of effort should be on brainstorming approaches/protocols to restore the financial systems once the national quarantine is lifted.

This would mean that companies couldn’t raise capital for five weeks and individuals wouldn’t be able to liquidate stocks for necessary cash. Not a great idea.

how to exercise options?

Finally, the plain truth.

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