Comment by Ididntdothis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ididntdothis | Hacker News Reader

I am starting to wonder if there is any good way for dealing with this. If you lock down preventatively, you are at risk of hurting the economy, losing a ton of jobs and looking silly if things turn out to be not as bad. If you wait, you are at risk of killing people. It seems only in hindsight there is a clear path that balances all factors. I definitely wouldn’t want to have to make decisions right now. You can pretty much only fail in one way or the other.

I think what we should learn is that we need to put much more effort into vaccines even if they are not profitable immediately but the cost of a pandemic is just so high that it’s worth being on top of things.

In a way we are lucky that this didn’t happen some decades earlier when remote work was much less of an option. When I look at my company there are definitely problems from not being able to access equipment at the office that keep accumulating but overall things are moving along pretty well. Without a 100 megabit connection I would not be able to do much.

It's a lot more than just 'looking silly'. The lockdown kills many jobs leading to people losing hope and triggering a recession worse than 2007's. That will have its death toll too.

On the other side, without a lockdown many people would have stayed home anyway. The hospitals would have been overwhelmed and there would be a general sense of panic.

It's not clear to me the economic result would be much different.

Worse, without an official lockdown there isn't any instrument available to get people back into the world once it's safe.

Does anyone have figures for the increase in deaths during the last great recession?

I'm tired of the cure cannot be worse than the disease rhetoric. Economies will recover. The dead won't.

But this situation will also lead to deaths. I already hear the mental hospitals are overflowing.

And really, if we would do everything possible to prevent deaths, we would have tackled traffic, alcohol, poverty, pollution etc. In some countries even poor healthcare overall (Trump is still fighting 'Obamacare').

It's not as black and white as this; the virus isn't the only problem in our society.

Approximately 36k deaths per year in the US are from traffic [1]. About 88k from alcohol [2]. Poverty and pollution is harder to pin down with a quick web search. According to [3], deaths-per-day from COVID-19 flattened at about 2000 deaths about three weeks ago. So in that time ~40k deaths from COVID. That’s with the curve flattened...with the curve flattened it was approximately equal to traffic deaths. If exponential growth had continued what would it be? I think deaths-per-day would doubled about 4 times. So 32k per day. Each day we’d be in the ballpark of traffic deaths. Wait a few days and it would have eclipsed alcohol-related deaths.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...

[2] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...

[3] https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en

National economies will recover. Many towns and small cities will not. Medium to large cities are reasonably well diversified to weather the storm.

I came to the conclusion a while ago that the current situation is essentially a mental "trap" for people who are "big thinkers" used to being able to look at large, complex problems and come up with reasonable plans to solve them. There's just an impossible amount of variables and every choice is "wrong" in that it has unconscionable downsides. There are no "good" solutions to Covid-19 only horrific solutions at every turn.

Agreed there really are no solutions without major downsides in this. Anyone who can't synthesize pros and cons of various approaches probably shouldn't be in charge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com