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Comment by w3mmpp | Hacker News Reader

So, let me get this straight, we stopped the world economy because of mitigation actions based on a R0 of 2 and, it ends up, the R0 is almost 6 which make those same mitigations actions completely inadequate?

Well, if I was one of those scientists I'll start looking for another career right now, one that doesn't have anything to do with numbers, because it's the blunder of the century right there.

Edit: the blunder I'm talking here is by the scientists that have been telling us R was between 2 to 3 for months.

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As R0 goes higher, physical distancing is more effective, not less. That's five less people you've infected, not two less.

Anecdote: At my workplace, the people who were the most concerned about the adequacy of mitigation actions were the scientists. We stopped the world economy based on scientists begging for strong measures, and getting weak measures instead.

Do you call what we have now weak measure? The whole economy is shut, what more do you want?

Moderate measures. And disproportionate burden.

The whole economy isn't shut, quite a lot of people are considered essential services, so they still get called into work, and have no option to just quit. It's a luxury for people who can work from home, order in groceries or take out. The essential workers continuing to make the luxury alternative possible, are at much higher risk. Are they being compensated for it? If they get covid19, and end up in ICU, let alone with life long cardiac or pulmonary complication, who compensates them? What compensation would you want for yourself if you had no other choice but to stock a grocery store, or be a nurse/doctor taking care of covid19 patients, and got this thing?

For a reminder into how American society cares about this sort of thing, 9/11 responders were consistently screwed over for nearly two decades. People died horrible deaths, never having been made semi-whole. “Not all Republicans oppose this, but everyone who has opposed it is a Republican. It’s unacceptable.” - Jon Stewart

It took publish shaming, over years, to make it somewhat right. There's every reason to believe that's what's in store for the portions of society who disproportionately take on the burden of this disease.

It's really a vindictive, cruel, and uncivil culture that does this.

In Wuhan they were welding apartment building doors shut, and the government was delivering food. There were drones flying around telling people to go home. There are videos of people being forcefully dragged home. None of the current "it's ok to go out and exercise and buy groceries," which is what is currently happening in NYC.

So yeah there are further measures available.

Whole generations of people have been killed for freedom and you're ready to give it all back for a 1% fatality rate?

It's a bad bargain imo.

At what death rate would a nationally forced lockdown of a few weeks be acceptable to you?

A Wuhan-severity lockdown of a few weeks? If we're assuming the scenario by fiat, a relatively low one, probably overlapping with the upper range of coronavirus fatality estimates.

The problem is that I wouldn't trust anyone who wants such a thing to actually end it as promised. I've seen a lot of people, some of whom I know to otherwise be reasonable and honest, transition from "we've gotta stay at home for a few weeks" in early March to "we've gotta stay home for months" today.

It was clear from Imperial's models published in mid-March that the lockdowns would need to last for months, not just a few weeks. That governments failed to clearly explain this to their citizens was an explicit political choice.

The models also show that post-lockdown a brief lifting of restrictions for 1-3 weeks would permit the next "small" wave of infections to occur whilst limiting load on health services. And then the lockdown cycle repeats. At best, this continues for 12 to 18 months. Longer, if a vaccine is not developed.

Again, most governments have not clearly informed the public, not only because the immediate political cost too high, but because of fears a significant proportion of citizens may for any number of reasons (disbelief, panic, despair) behave unhelpfully in reaction to this stark reality.

Right, that’s the attitude I invariably see from hard lockdown proponents. They’re not thinking of targeted interventions to accomplish a bit of good. They’re proposing to abolish all public life for the next 18 months and all social activity for 12 of those months, because some disease model they read said that strategy minimizes the number of deaths. That’s a dystopian, super dumb idea, and I’m glad to see that my country at least doesn’t take it seriously.

At this point, with an R0 at 6, it's likely the number of people that have been infected is 100X bigger, which means the real fatality rate is 100X smaller.

An no, current tests can't show that because those people are likely cured already and never have been counted.

So, if we say today the CFR is officially at 1%, 100X smaller would be 1 over 10,000. To me, it's definitely not acceptable to lockdown people for such a death rate.

That 100 factor could end up being different but the reasoning is the same, we didn't count most of the infected people.

You ignored my question, you already said less than 1% is unacceptable, and just repeated yourself. Forget COVID, I'm referring to a future theoretical disease - at what death rate does a nationally enforced lockdown of a few weeks become acceptable?

10 times the rate of the flu is a good basis I think, or 1% death rate. But confirmed, not like right now where we all know we haven't counted a lot of people in that number of cases and therefore the death rate is a lot lower.

Another thing, it's not weeks, we're talking months here, May 1st it's not gonna be back to business as it was before.

Currently reported cases in New York is 160038

Multiply by 100, get 16 million

Population of New York state is 19 million

Maybe there's still more to learn about the COVID-19.

Remember, this virus has circulated weeks before the confinement, so don't you think a doubling R0 have completely changed the number of cases that have been modeled so far, and therefore the CFR?

Of course we have much to learn and this new R0 number is part of that learning process, but imo, we can't think like 2 days ago when we thought the R0 was between 2 and 3.

Still, the total reported cases in the US is 460k, so if there are 100 unreported cases for every reported case, that's 46 million, or 1 in 5 people.

But I'm open to new evidence. At the very least, we'll know in a week if this still makes sense. ;-)

I'm just reading about that city in Germany, Gangelt, where they did those blood tests to 1000 people, they found out that 2% are actively infected, and 14% have the antibodies (indicating a prior infection):

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tes...

So we're talking 1 in 7 for that particular city.

Didn't the whole generations fight for something more complex than "the right to be not told to social distance during a pandemic"? Democracy, actual freedom of speech, freedom from power structures etc.... what rights have we given away? I haven't heard of people being arrested in many western countries for violating these stay at home orders (but there's any infinite list of right wing provocateurs bemoaning the orders). The idea that we've permanently lost rights seems a little silly when the government is desperate to open the doors (prematurely if you ask me) to local business again. Also this conflation of a higher R0 with a death rate is not correct. If you calculate the death rate for the world it's not 1/10000, a higher R0 doesn't mean a smaller death rate directly. And no one is making the tradeoff on fatality rate, but rather human life. "1% fatality rate" is 90000 dead people, which will be and could be much much worse with no social distancing. I would put up w/ some social distancing to prevent more pain to that many more people - absolutely.

> Didn't the whole generations fight for something more complex than "the right to be not told to social distance during a pandemic"?

Read the parent comment to which I responded. Particularly the "There are videos of people being forcefully dragged home " part.

> but there's any infinite list of right wing provocateurs bemoaning the orders

Like there is an infinite list of left wing provocateurs who can't wait for full martial law.

> a higher R0 doesn't mean a smaller death rate directly

I may not be a virologist but:

higher R0 => more cases not counted (especially at the begining without lockdown) => lower CFR. I don't see how that cannot be true, but please, I'm open to any explanation if my logic is flawed.

> I would put up w/ some social distancing to prevent more pain to that many more people - absolutely.

Yes and it's exacly what most americans are doing right now. And yes, it's worth doing if the mortality rate is 1%, not if it's 0.1%, or in this case we'll have to close the country every year for influenza.

The idea that we "stopped" the world economy doesn't really make sense from the point of view that lockdown orders don't apply to the economy, but rather to people moving around. A lot of industries will suffer but the idea that there is an economy switch which is easy to turn on/off as a trade off for human life doesn't seem realistic. If the virus is more contagious than expected, I don't follow your logic... that it's so bad that we might as well stop trying to protect ourselves? Also the idea that one person wants to view the world with a certain level of restriction "what more do you want" seems a bit bizarre. It's quite a wakeup call that even with these mitigation steps the virus can still spread. Things will be exponentially worse if we let up, not linearly worse. Also of course it's odd to blame "scientists" globally as though there is a single scientist who thought that the R0 value was 2, and now there is a smarter one who thinks it is 6....there are thousands and thousands of people sifting through data, in addition to layers of governments and nations and news outlets interpreting and communicating this information. No doubt this analysis from Los Alamos is only possible w/ data time and talent. We will probably learn much more about this virus moving forward, but I don't think that renders all old information or work pointless.

> that it's so bad that we might as well stop trying to protect ourselves?

No the logic is if it's that much more contagious, a whole lot more people have caught it than the numbers show and therefore the fatality rate is way lower.

20% unemployment and mostly letting people do what they want is not stopping the whole economy. It's certainly unprecedented and extreme, but it's not nearly as extreme as it could be.

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