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Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

> We're all being forced into a medical experiment against our will.

I'm disappointed by your false equivalence between being told to stay home and safe and being made into a guinea pig.

If being home and safe means you lose necessary income, then your ire should be directed at your governments at all levels for refusing to prepare critical safety nets and regulatory environments that would make it possible for you to stay alive and safe without laboring every day. But advocating a regression on everything that history has taught us about medical ethics is terrible and bad. We're talking about thousands of years of accumulated and refined history lessons here. Medical ethics is a perfect example of why learning history is important.

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> I'm disappointed by your false equivalence between being told to stay home and safe and being made into a guinea pig.

This is the false equivalence. How long does one have to stay home in order to be "safe"? If things calm down now, will they be worse in the winter? Will we still have to be "safe"? How do the consequences of curve flattening strategies that look more like half-hearted eradication attempts be compared to approaches that look literally like curve flattening?

Noone knows these answers.

Yes, the natural experiment is being right now. You have the Western European countries with a social safety net that allows people to stay home for a few months to ride out the plague and the US, where such a thing does not exist.

This has economic repercussions. A good amount of meat processing plants are now idled because the workforce is off sick due to lack of protective equipment and sick leave. We are looking at meat shortages. I hope people make the right connections.

Might-have-beens have no relevance to the ethics of the choices we make now. We are in the middle of a vast medico-economic experiment. It is bizarre to consider the ethics of only the medical side of the experiment, not the experiment as a whole.

What "medico-economic" experiment?! This is much an experiment as "living in a war-torn country" or "being hit by a major natural disaster" is an experiment.

If people start to starve because we stopped being able to produce food or people start dying of other causes because our basic infrastructure start collapsing, then you can start talking about ethical dilemmas.

> If people start to starve because we stopped being able to produce food or people start dying of other causes because our basic infrastructure start collapsing, then you can start talking about ethical dilemmas.

I think its a safe bet that this is already happening on small scales. Noone is measuring the degree.

Food insecurity already happens in many places around the world, even rich countries. However, in those places it is an social-economical issue, not a lack of labor/resources to produce the food needed for the population.

There may be images of long lines of unemployed people that have to get from the government or food banks, but the food is still there. Farmers are still producing, distribution networks are still working, essential services operating. That part of the economy is still going.

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