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Comment by jamroom | Hacker News Reader

Our society includes people who are over 50 - how do ensure that YOU do not transmit coronavirus to them if you are under 50 and asymptomatic? I know a lot of people are pretty upset but it's not just about YOU. It's about everyone you come in contact with.

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Just a thought, but it seems like there can be a middle ground where people belonging to certain risk groups (age, preexisting conditions, etc) are encouraged to take stronger shelter in place measures, and in exchange are granted larger amounts of financial aid to compensate.

People not belonging to risk groups can resume working, still taking extra precautions to prevent transmission. The economy can gradually reopen while also slowly building up herd immunity among the least vulnerable population. It seems unsustainable to have an indefinite blanket lockdown, but I’m very open to changing my mind on this.

I'd truly love to hear a good counterargument to this. I've argued much the same thing only to have the same opposing talking points restated verbatim.

You and the parent posters are assuming that everyone lives on their own and that younger people don't live with or take care of older people. Once things open up, employers will expect younger employees to show up. Couple that with asymptomatic transmission, how do you practice social distancing in a closed home?

You do it the same way essential workers do it now, I presume.

The purpose of the lockdown is not to prevent everyone from getting the disease, or to hide in our homes until it magically goes away. The stated purpose of the lockdown was to 'flatten the curve'.

Don't go moving goalposts on us all now that we've flattened the curve, especially when we're talking about people's constitutional rights.

Moving the goalposts was always the idea. That's what the governor here in WA did, and said as much.

I, personally, am livid that the construction site right outside my bedroom window is now allowed to make ungodly amounts of noise for 15 hours a day and I have nowhere to go. This is insane.

Lockdowns have a tremendous cost in mental health. There's a point at which the toll is simply too high. We're not there yet, but it's not far. And waiting until "the data shows it" through elevated suicide rate is... not how I want us to play this, as a society.

Moving the goalposts could probably be a confusing bit of terminology here. OP means that the original intention was “lock down so that we don’t run out of ICU beds”, and now it is “lock down until there’s a vaccine”. The end condition is being changed every time we get close to it.

I agree that there are a lot of problems with continuing the lockdown as it currently stands. However, the phrase "now that we've flattened the curve" could be interpreted to imply the curve can't quickly become unflattened, which would be wrong.

The only thing that is going to keep the curve flat (this is kind of a mind-numbing terminology) is human behavior. Exponential growth is still a thing, and we aren't anywhere near achieving herd immunity.

(a physician friend mentioned the other day that we're not truly certain yet that COVID 19 sufferers cannot be reinfected, although that's the popular assumption. So there's also that)

Out of curiosity because I have little to no knowledge of immunology: what do you think that means if someone that already had the disease can be reinfected? Does that have any implication on the efficacy of a vaccine?

The physician I talked to was basically trying to rain on my parade when I said "hey, it will be great when there's a vaccine and we can all go back to normal." Maybe, maybe not.

I don't know that much about it, but sometimes people infected with a coronavirus can get sick again, not as ill as they were previously, but contagious. [1] COVID 19 hasn't been analyzed well enough, long enough to say for certain.

There were some scary stories early on, a month or two ago, about people becoming reinfected with full blown cases of COVID 19, but they really felt more like uncertain anecdotes. I strongly suspect the immunologists will know a lot more about this in just a few weeks. Researchers are already giving people test vaccines and sending them out into the world.

In a nasty - hypothetical - reality where people regularly get reinfected: things do not go back to normal, and we have to figure a lot of difficult social stuff out.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-immunity-r...

Unfortunately, yes. Consider the common cold: yes, it does mutate fast, but the other big barrier to producing a vaccine is that immunity to it doesn't last very long at all. So if COVID-19 immunity truly doesn't last long, that's a problem.

I doubt this is likely to be the case, though. Antibodies to SARS seemed to have long lifetimes (several years), and COVID is likely to be similar. It is certainly possible that for some people, immunity fades much faster for reasons specific to that person, and that may be what is being picked up in these reports.

It is also possible it's just shoddy lab work. There has been a ton of that going around lately, and it's not just caused by pressure from the situation. Not all scientists are equally competent....

(Disclaimer: my knowledge of immunology is likely little better than yours, but I did at least used to be a Real Scientist in a different field.)

The reason that antibodies to SARS have long lifetimes is because it is a much worse hit than COVID-19 in most cases, you can take the CFR as proof of that. Harder hit to the immune system but you survive: immunity will last longer is a good rule of thumb.

How about WHO's current stance...

https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-p...

Last sentence of the first paragraph kind of sums it all up:

There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.

The situation is rapidly developing. Our knowledge is constantly growing and will continue to do so. Under these circumstances, I don't think moving the goalposts is avoidable. Nobody is hoping for magic: they are waiting till it's safe to go outside. Perhaps a vaccine will make that a reality in...a couple years? Regardless of what the government does, I say, prepare for a long haul.

On the one hand there is a tremendous amount of real damage being done by everyone sheltering in place. On the other hand it's not the government's orders that are the direct cause, so much as the virus itself. We are in a global pandemic. It is unprecedented. Telling everyone to go outside again is not going to magically make it happen.

Can you imagine re-opening schools right now? Summer camps? It would be sheer carnage, and those who do want to protect themselves will be less able to do so. It would just shift the pain points around, and cause a lot of deaths right away. Would that be worse than it is right now? Probably. Would it be worse than another six months of sheltering in place? Nobody knows!

I am over 50 and asthmatic - if I feel that I am in danger I am free to self-quarantine. There is no need to impinge on everyone else's freedoms to ensure my safety - I am a big boy and able to take care of my own health decisions.

You can only choose to self isolate if you have the means to give up income. Needing to come up with necessary expenses like food and utilities would be understandable, but the largest bill is rent which is a mostly product of our financial system rather than an intrinsic requirement of existence.

I could be in favor of lifting shutdown orders if there were a corresponding federal push to either halt such payments or reimburse people (federal is where the bulk of the money is distributed/printed). But without that, it's disingenuous to frame the situation as some kind of choice, when it's really the same unempathetic turning of the screws on the marginalized.

People aren't going to be able to pay their bills regardless of whether they're locked down by mandate or by choice. However, if we allow the low-risk population to continue working, they will generate tax revenue that can be used to provide for the high-risk population. From that perspective, lifting the lockdown for low-risk persons is strictly better for the high-risk population than maintaining a blanket lockdown.

The difference is that with a shutdown mandate, many people are in the same boat, which necessitates a solution. It's not uniform ("essential" and remote workers), but it's better than putting even more people in the position of having to choose their health or eventual homelessness. Especially say, to just work in nearly-empty movie theaters.

The tax revenue is a red herring. Print the money, as was quickly done for the corporate bond bailout. Or better yet, do the sustainable thing and just suspend rent payments and mortgage interest, so that the debt black hole actually unwinds a bit.

There seems to a ton of people with long term organ damage from this thing. Brushing it aside as a non event for everyone else is dangerously misinformed.

> There seems to a ton of people with long term organ damage from this thing

Are there? I've seen only a few isolated anecdotes. In any illness affecting tens of thousands, there will be a few who experience particularly severe complications. It's not useful to portray these complicated and severe outliers as being typical. Right now, the data show that the vast majority of people who contract this virus fight it off without experiencing any symptoms whatsoever and suffer no long-term damage at all, which is exactly what you'd expect from a typical virus infection.

People keep claiming that this virus has exotic and dangerous features atypical of coronaviruses and viruses in general: I've seen everything from claims of immediate reinfection to 30-day incubation periods to long-term gonad damage. None of these claims has been substantiated on the basis of anything but isolated (and frequently unsourced) anecdotes, and a very strong Bayesian prior should be that this virus works like any other and doesn't actually do these random and exotic things.

There seems to be a contingent of very online people who want to sow as much fear and anxiety over this thing as possible, even if it means presenting a warped view of the data. We should reject this endeavor.

People are irrationally terrified by COVID. There is of course a rational level of respect we should have for it, but people are TERRIFIED. That's why you are getting downvoted (and I will too probably).

THEY are the ones who need to take extra precautions.

No, your right to shed virus particles ends at the tip of my nose.

That's a nice platitude you've got there. Too bad it means basically nothing.

It actually does mean something, which is that freedom is not unlimited. Your freedom of action ends at the point where it harms someone else. Classically, "your right to throw your fist ends at my face." It's the same reason (legally) you can't point a firearm at me.

What we have here is the problem that merely by breathing around someone, you can cause them harm. Unfortunately we lack the ability to determine whether or not you will, but given the contagiousness of this disease if you are infected (or become infected) it is quite likely.

Thankfully, you appear to be overwhelmingly outvoted in this "let's set up a peeing section for the swimming pool" position. Lockdown measures and the activist governors pursuing them are, for the moment, overwhelmingly popular --- the population as a whole is strongly more concerned that lockdowns will end too early, and strongly more worried that they will suffer health consequences from C19 than that they'll suffer economic consequences from lockdown.

> let's set up a peeing section for the swimming pool" position

Ha ha. I am going to borrow that line.

Sadly you seem to be of the opinion that we can cower in our homes until the disease magically goes away. That's not the way this works - it doesn't just go away.

I'm really disturbed by the number of people who seem to be perfectly happy moving the goalposts for these lockdowns as long as they're politically popular. Here's a hint - freedom and constitutional rights weren't intended to be politically popular (or particularly safe) as the popular opinions don't need protection.

This isn't responsive to anything I'm saying; it merely repeats points you've made earlier more emotively.

I think you're going to find that the message board logic of "a-ha, I read a tweet that says the goal of lockdown is flattening the curve; now that curves may be flattening lockdown has to end" isn't going to get you very far in the real world.

I understand people have strong feelings on this issue, but you can argue your position without using language like "cower" and "magically".

These lockdowns are very much constitutional. Perhaps you should actually read it.

I am over 50 and have immediate family members in high risk categories.

I was onboard with what was clearly a panic response by policymakers since the testing and the healthcare infrastructure was not in place. To the best of my understanding, there has been no movement from this initial panic to working through strategies that transition from massive shutdown to identifying and isolating the sick or those they have come into contact with. If we were moving forward on that front, I'd still be supportive of buying some time... I see none of that.

I see dull minded politicians and bureaucrats doing what they got away with early.

This has to stop and endless hiding in a hole waiting for some miracle vaccine or the disease to just go away of it's own accord simply is not acceptable.

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