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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

How many of those friends and family members died of causes that could be prevented through temporary social distancing? And how many years was that spread over, vs the single month we'd be looking at here with an uncontrolled coronavirus pandemic?

You're underestimating how bad things can get.

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Social distancing will save at most 1million lives (mostly 60-is 70 year olds, who had 10 years left anyways) in America.

6 months of quarantine in the US would cost 2 millions lifetimes of going outside. Full lifetimes, that is, not 10-year-lifetimes.

This is aside from all the economic damage. The cure is worse than the disease.

It's not remotely equivalent to compare a year spent dead to a year spent indoors. You need to put a large multiplier on that.

Everyone I know who has died could have been at least temporarily saved by extreme, civilization-destroying efforts.

“Temporary social distancing” is much less benign than you make it sound. More like “intentionally creating an economic depression of unknown severity”.

Life went on mostly as normal after the Spanish flu, by the way, which is the closest thing we can compare this to.

Are you not aware that, during the Spanish flu, entire cities were shut down for months, exactly like what's happening now? And that without these actions the effects of it would have been much worse? You bringing this up is exactly proving the opposite of the point you're trying to make.

Enforced social distancing is nothing NEW. It's as old as pandemics themselves.

Medical science barely existed at that time.

They weren't idiots. They understood that the flu spread from person to person, and that shutting gatherings of people would curtail the spread.

This happened. It's part of history. You can't argue against it. There are thousands of contemporaneous newspaper articles about all the measures that were taken to curtail the spread of the Spanish influenza.

My point being that we have significantly better data to inform us on exactly how to reduce the transmission rate, we have constantly-improving testing methods, we have the ability to research medicines than can help, we have the ability to research a vaccine. Not only is the not the Spanish flu, it is happening in a profoundly different context. The comparison is superficial.

Define normal in this context. The effects of the 1918 flu pandemic really were region dependent, because some regions were more strict than others (in terms of social distancing, curfews, etc.) and those regions that were more relaxed were affected more heavily (the classic American example is Philadelphia vs St. Louis). We see some evidence of this happening now in places taking stricter measures globally, although the data is too early to say anything conclusive.

> intentionally creating an economic depression of unknown severity

Okay, assuming it's a strict trade-off between 1) no social distancing, economic disruption happening at some point in time in the future, and significantly higher death rates; or, 2) social distancing, economic disruption now, and lower death rates, which is better? This is the reality of the situation -- there will be economic disruption no matter what, and so if we don't attempt to quantity the disruption, the two differences here are social distancing and number of deaths.

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