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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

The death rate is 0.5% IF there's really good medical treatment. If there isn't then not only does the death rate from the covid go up but so do death rates for every other condition requiring medical treatment. And not only during the pandemic but for a some time afterwards as the health system recovers. That's not counting those who survive but have some form of permanent damage.

The way to avoid that is to at least spread out the impact over time. Telling people it'll be okay leads to no one listening and the health system collapsing. That's human nature. Telling people it's the apocalypse means most listen and the health system survives. Welcome to humanity.

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I'm just very skeptical of this kind of noble lie. If authorities are known to tell people what's convenient for them to believe rather than what's true, is anyone going to end up listening to them in the end?

It is not a noble lie to tell people it won't be ok if it really won't be ok.

Really, if every jurisdiction in the world overwhelms their hospital capacity it won't be ok.

Agreed, it'd be wrong to tell people it's okay. It's not okay, a lot of people are going to die, and even more people would have died if we didn't take costly measures to stop it. This has been and will be the worst experience of a lot of people's lives, and it'd just be a lie in another direction to pretend that's not so.

What seems to be a noble lie is the apocalyptic mindset, where the coronavirus is literally the only thing that matters and we must never ask if a particular mitigation is worth the cost. Many authority figures are promoting this idea, even though they clearly don't believe it themselves and couldn't formulate effective policy if they did.

> even more people would have died if we didn't take costly measures to stop it.

The example of Sweden seems to disagree with this assumption. They never locked down, and the current mortality is (1,203 / 10,330,000) * 100 = 0.0116%

First case on Jan 31st, no lockdowns, death rate has already flattened. Where is that crazy scary exponential growth?

Sweden as the great success story when it is suffering the same economic devastation as its neighbors but a higher death rate is an interesting argument.

The thing about the lockdowns is that evidence so far indicates that stopping 80% of non-essential economic activities voluntarily is about as bad for the economy as stopping 90+% on a mandatory basis, but it seems that the health outcomes are much better in the latter situation.

> The death rate is 0.5%

You can't know that without testing the whole population, or at least getting some controls.

They did random anti-body testing in a small town if I remember correctly and found it to be 0.5% or so.

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