Hacker News Reader

Comment by w3mmpp | Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com