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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

A fascinating counterpoint to this is the German government, who not just as probably the first country did something distinctly different to quarantine (it's called contact prohibition and you can go anywhere you like as long as you don't meet with more than one person not from your household), but also rejected mass cell phone surveillance plans by a large margin.

People here are mostly calm, cautious and despite a few outliers have largely high compliance rates from everything I see on the streets.

More authoritarian governments have the clear upper hand in fighting COVID-19, but I'm very curious how this will play out and if we can weather this situation just as well as a free and privacy-sensitive liberal democracy.

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Roughly similar here in Norway. We are just encouraged to stay at home, work from home, go out shopping only when necessary and stay at least a metre away from people and we are forbidden from shaking hands. Not a lot of enforcement on an individual level. but it seems to be working.

It works well here partly I suppose because the local culture doesn't expect you to get very close even at the best of times. One metre of separation is pretty normal so now we cross the road to get out of each other's way.

Not everyone gets it of course and bars are now closed by edict in Oslo because they would not enforce the one metre separation rule.

Shops are open and have signs saying keep a metre apart and places where you queue have marks on the floor to show how much distance this is. Most also have alcohol gels and single use gloves available for those who want to use them.

There are also signs saying please pay by contactless card or mobile app if you can.

I go out for a walk for about an hour every day as usual and now it feels like Sunday every day.

Thanks! I wasn't aware of the German approach.

It would be very heartening if the German strategy works.

And I really like the way Germany remains consistently conscious of personal values, things like rejecting mass surveillance and looking for another way. It's one of the things I like best about Germany.

But it really depends how people behave next.

In the UK, the government has announcement a bigger lockdown with strong rules and enforcement, because at the weekend masses of people were simply ignoring requests to socially distance. Too many people were using the "time off" to go on holidays and cluster in high density situations, completely ignoring all health advice for the protection of themselves and others.

The German approach of "you're free to go around, but don't meet with more than one person" will only work if people actually comply.

> will only work if people actually comply.

this is pretty easy to enforce:

see N>2 people, fine/ticket/arrest/whatever.

Assuming you have enough enforcement officers.

The UK barely has enough to deal with crime at the best of times.

No country has enough enforcement officers to be everywhere all the time.

>>People here are mostly calm, cautious and despite a few outliers have largely high compliance rates from everything I see on the streets.

Shouldn't the virus spread little by little so people gain immunity and the hospitals can manage the number of patients? I doubt we can continue this shutdown for 12-18 months (vaccine) and who knows if meds cure it.

I think there are still some unknowns (number of infections without any symptoms, etc.), but so far, this approach doesn't seem viable: If we keep infections low enough that the health care system can deal with the severe cases, it will take us more than two years to develop herd immunity. By that time, we will (hopefully) have a vaccine anyways.

So the better strategy might be to not drive the health system to its brink (also not clear how well it could sustain that strain for long anyways) and instead keep infection numbers very low until we have a vaccine (while opening society and the economy as much as possible).

In each case, we need to keep R0 more or less exactly at 1.0 . If it is any bigger, we have exponential spread which will quickly overwhelm the health care system. If it is much smaller, we have gone overboard with containment measures and should relax them to ease the burden for society. The only difference is how much strain is put on the health care system (which is usually already operating close enough to capacity without a pandemic).

It is possible that immunity doesn't last forever. There could be a second wave in the future.

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