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Comment by choutos | Hacker News Reader

I just don't buy that argument of "let's let people die" to save the economy. That's evil.

Even when not saving the economy leads to people dying?

Not sure if this is free to read, but it offers some of the reasoning behind the difficulty of shutting down the economy in poorer countries: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/03/26/the-coronavirus... Short quote: "The worry, as Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister says, is that “if we shut down the cities...we will save [people] from corona at one end, but they will die from hunger.“"

According to this paper[1] public health interventions temporarily depress the economy but it quickly bounces back. OTOH widespread death due to choosing not to intervene depresses the economy for much longer.

1: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560

You're telling me that a paper about the outcome of something that happened 100 years ago in the US is valid for something happening now in Brazil (or other less developed countries)? From their Conclusion: "Finally, when interpreting our findings, there several important caveats to keep in mind. First, our analysis is limited to data on 30 states and 43 to 66 cities. Second, data on manufacturing activity is not available in all years, so we cannot carefully examine pre-trends between 1914 and 1919 for the manufacturing activity outcomes. Third, the economic environment toward the end of 1918 was unusual due to the end of WWI. Fourth, while there are important economic lessons from the 1918 Flu for today’s COVID- 19 pandemic, we stress the limits of external validity. Estimates suggest that 1918 Flu was more deadly than COVID-19, especially for prime-age workers, which also suggests more severe economic impacts of the 1918 Flu. The complex nature of modern global supply chains, the larger role of services, and improvements in communication technology are mechanisms we cannot capture in our analysis, but these are important factors for understanding the macroeconomic effects of COVID-19."

It's not great evidence for intervention but it's good evidence against the idea that curtailing intervention will save the economy. Many people seem to be assuming the latter.

Edit: I'm not advocating either. I believe that we can have our cake and eat it too: reopen the economy AND keep people from dying. It requires two things. Massive testing and tracing (https://medium.com/@sten.linnarsson/to-stop-covid-19-test-ev...), and allowing businesses to reopen when they have proper protection, isolation and cleaning protocols in place.

Of course both these things require large amounts of money so developing nations are screwed, as usual.

The public health interventions the paper covers do not appear to rise to the level of what is currently being done in many countries. There are entire sectors of the economy that are effectively producing zero output (hospitality, tourism, transportation) in most countries. Furthermore, the economy is very different today than it was in 1918.

You forgot the part about some (less fortunate) economies depending heavily on exporting consumer (discretionary) goods to developed countries, which means that the dip in spending in US/Europe/China will lead to a big downturn in these countries.

Here's an archived copy[1] of that page.

[1]: http://archive.is/CKxPG

The problem is that people who contract COVID-19 don’t just wake up one morning and die. They tend to develop serious symptoms which, if presented at hospital, result in potentially prolonged care over a week or more involving the use of rare icu beds and (currently) rare and expensive ventilators.

If you can convince the population to take your stance “for the good of the economy!” then have the decency to also inform them not to seek treatment and therefore not overload the health care system for those who wish to live.

I'm not sure you understand that my point is that this is a compromise between dwo plights that cannot be resolved by armchair economists and epidemiologists. Sure, Bolsanaro might be wrong, but there are leaders out there who have to make a decision about which of the two options would affect their countries more. Simply defaulting to "just quarantine EVERYONE" might be correct from an epidemics perspective, but people don't only die or suffer from diseases.

So just keep an open mind.

Ah, the classic false dilemma logical fallacy.

There are more than two ways to address this problem. I am not an epidemiologist but I did watch a 3blue1brown video on YouTube last night. As I understand it, one of the most effective containment strategies is to test everyone, then take anyone who is infected as well as recent contacts of that person and ask them to self-isolate.

Imagine if we had rapid-result test kits that were deployed at all central choke point locations (say supermarkets, doctors offices, etc). If you needed food, you would have a test and the test would determine whether you contracted the disease. If the test was positive, you would have to submit your recent activities and contacts (perhaps aided by technology, such as tracking phone records or an app that tracks nearby bluetooth). The sick people would be placed into isolation and the contacts would be asked to quarantine.

What I see is a lack of foresight and innovative thinking from the very leaders we are seeking advice from. They're just giving us lazy answers that serve their own agenda. It's disgusting. We could have had effective testing in the US by now - we have made a conscious choice (probably out of inaction) not to develop them.

Thing is, we don't have rapid tests to test presence of virus. Only to test antibodies. And even those take sometime and would create a bottleneck.

Face masks for everybody is best so far. In case you're infected and didn't notice that yet (or asymptomatic at all), you don't spread it.

Problem with "test everyone" is that by the time you test the last person, you can't be sure that the first person didn't caught it. And then you have a good chunk of false-negatives.

My points still stand:

1. there are more than two options available to leaders (false dilemma)

2. there is a lack of true leadership and innovative thinking by our elected officials

3. you can't point to the side effect of the current strategy ("look at the economy!") and hand-wave away the side effect of another (lack of hospital resources to handle a peak infected load, causing even more suffering, loss of life, and public panic, most likely also affecting the economy)

The fact that I can't come up with a more effective solution as a layman in five minutes on an Internet comment board should not indicate that there are none.

In other words, you don't like either of existing solutions, don't know any better solutions and you're pissed off that people can't come up with better solutions.

That's not exactly a productive stance TBH.

I'm sorry if you felt that I was arguing against you- I think your suggestion of encouraging mask use is a great one! But nobody has done that, in fact, they've suggested the opposite (since there is a scarcity of 75c masks - so that masks are available for first responders and medical personnel, last I heard)

You are strawmanning my argument. My argument is, yes, I believe that there are more than two possible solutions to this. I also argue that the "do nothing" solution has its own downsides. If, however, you force me to choose from the two solutions presented (social isolation, or do nothing)- I pick social isolation because I believe, at least in the US, a good balance between flattening the spread and economic impact.

Yes I'm pissed off, why aren't you? I don't accept mediocrity from my coworkers or direct reports; why would you accept it from your government?

I feel like we're all experiencing mass learned helplessness at this point! We need to demand more from our leaders, not less!

Sometimes magic bullet solution just doesn't exist. Is this one of those cases? I'm not 100% sure, but it looks like things are going that way. Imperfect solution is not necessarily mediocrity. Looking back at history, people rarely take perfect solutions at the time. Sometimes even decades later nobody has came up with a perfect solution for decades old issues.

Personally I'm more pissed off at people who try to spin this situation to take a stab politicians they don't like for other reasons. Or just expect magic pill to appear out of nowhere.

The disinformation campaign "masks do no good!" brought more bad than good IMO. Sad to see lots of people believe that it's not worth to cover one's face out in public. Shitty propaganda in good faith is still shitty propaganda. Who could have thought people believe what they're told and don't change their mind on a whim when they're told opposite!

It's extremely conceivable to me that the conditions of developing countries means quarantine is one of those "cure is worse than the disease" scenarios. Their fate is already written based on the resources they can muster, and when many countries GDP is dramatically less than the healthcare spending of developed countries, that's not much. It's counter-intuitive to pretend otherwise. Rich countries have the luxury of saying "you can't work if you're dead", when the ground reality in poor countries is "you're dead if you can't work. The demographic pyramid of poor countries with disproportionate youth is more resilient against COVID than the Spanish Flu that targeted the young - they're in a favourable position to get through the pandemic milder interventions.

Many political leaders around the world seem to be downplaying the severity of this virus.

So lets consider some details:

1. Looking at past events, pandemics do kill (i.e. many tens of millions where killed by the Spanish Flu).

2. This Covid 19 also kills (i.e. high deaths tolls in Italy/Spain and rising etc).

3. Covid 19 also appears to be highly contagious (i.e. look at New York).

4. From what I have read the reason the virus kills is hospital get overrun so patients have zero treatment options (i.e. hospitals run out of ventilators, medical staff, space, drugs etc etc).

Now I suspect if Pakistan goes down the path of trying to save its economy before tying to control the virus, they are in for a world of hurt.

Letting the economy collapse is also killing people, it's just less direct.

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