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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

The author considers letting the epidemic run its course on the demographics most at risk, to be the most unrealistic outcome. He writes:

> I care about my privacy, but not nearly so much as I care about my mother.

Most people care about their own mother. But if lockdowns, unemployment and poverty continue, I can definitely imagine people saying, "I don’t care about your mother, so why should I stay unemployed and confined to my home just to keep her safe? I’m sure my mother will be fine." Of course, believing that one’s own parents will escape the epidemic might be mere wishful thinking, but this is the way that human beings rationalize things in times of crisis.

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In the UK they're now making noises about letting the 20-30 year olds who live alone go back to work first.

I imagine this is really code for "if we infect all these low-risk people first, we get a large proportion of our workforce immunised, for a fairly low hospitalisation proportion".

I don't know enough about the models, but I also guess having a large chunk of your low-risk population already immune reduces R0 for later waves too.

I can also see it back-firing when these same people think it's alright to nip round Mum's to say hi and give her a quick hug, it's only 5 minutes after all.

I've also heard that a large fast food chain estimates it will take up to 8 weeks before they can get supply chains up and running again. As an example the sheer quantities of lettuce they need aren't being planted because there's no demand for them, and you can't just magic them out of thin air when someone says 'you can open your stores again'.

> I imagine this is really code for "if we infect all these low-risk people first, we get a large proportion of our workforce immunised".

I think it’s really code for “let’s repeat the mistakes we made early on when we adopted ‘herd immunity’ rather than isolation as an I itial strategy and spread this as rapidly as we can and create another critical peak”, because those people aren't completely isolated from the rest of the population, and spreading it more rapidly in that segment of the population will also spread it more rapidly in the rest of the population.

But I guess it's good to know the the incompetence of the present British government is resilient enough to survive the temporary incapacitation of the PM as a fairly direct result of the incompetence on the very same issue. I'm not even sure the US federal administration would be that committed to it's own (otherwise more complete) incompetence on the issue.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but the herd immunity thing was a throw-away statement tacked on to the end of an initial briefing, it was never the plan.

Also, we shut-down pretty quick when it became clear how much worse Italy was faring than the stats China had claimed.

There seems to be some pretty ridiculous things being said in foreign papers at the moment about Britain's response as it's an easy way to deflect criticism of themselves.

The only people who have the right to throw shit are the Germans, Soth Koreans, Taiwanese as they're the only ones who seem to have got ahead of this thing.

The British is on a similar trajectory (if not lower) then America/Italy/Spain/etc., if you put aside the frankly unprofessional and crazy IMHE projection (which is already failing to match real-life three days later).

> but the herd immunity thing was a throw-away statement tacked on to the end of an initial briefing, it was never the plan.

This is incorrect. Herd immunity very much was the plan, driven by the fucking idiots in the nudge unit.

Here's David Halpern talking about cocooning and herd immunity: https://twitter.com/BBCMarkEaston/status/1237694665824047111

Here's a thread demolishing David Halpern's work. https://twitter.com/sophie_e_hill/status/1242512602112155650

> The British is on a similar trajectory (if not lower) then America/Italy/Spain/etc.,

Yes, it's among the worst hit as all those you name are, and like the US that's mostly a result of national government incompetence and not other circumstances that put it in that group (Italy seems from what I understand to be other circumstances, Spain I'm less clear on.)

Current plan for Norway is to start gradually opening up after Easter:

* Opening up kindergartens, physiotherapy, hair salons and allowing cottage holidays from 20th April

* Opening schools for 4 youngest classes, After School and some higher education in final years from 27th April

So you go after lowest-hanging fruits gradually, but it's a learning phase and could need rollback if people don't follow restrictions enough to contain contagion. This advice is a mix of political and expert analysis, after observing decline of new cases and deaths, after timely though not early, lockdown.

Norway is a small and nimble country, so could more easily be leading the response in the West. Though a new normal will have to include pandemic response in nearly all aspects of social life. The clustering and stochastic nature of the spread may become somewhat managable, with enough tracking, testing and preparations.

Does anyone know why I've seen various reports that they think opening schools will have a low impact on the virus spread? Kids still get infected, so will spread the disease (and I would assume more than most people being careful) as well as then spread it to their households.

Is it because children rarely commute outside a community, so it wouldn't spread between communities, just within communities already infected?

Contagion very rarely trace back to kindergarten and schools, kids have much higher chance of mild infections and it is possible low amounts of virus exposure are safer. Not enough evidence so leaders need to lead and experts collect data and analysis, what measures may not contribute enough to justify.

I'm going to be pretty miffed if hair salons here are able to reopen before dentists.

To some degree it could be true, as we see that Covid 19 hasn’t been a racially blind phenomena [1]. In the US, not all communities are in the same boat, even during an international crisis.

If we want more unity then this has to change.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/8/21213974/african-americans...

Texas still allows religious groups to meet in size of 50, declaring it an essential service, while abortion clinics have been closed. We aren't in the same boat.

A simple alternative would have be to quarantine the at risk people (60+ and pre-existing conditions) and let the rest of the world create the wealth necessary to help keep the at risk groups alive, focusing our healthcare attention on the at risk groups.

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