Hacker News Reader

Comment by sheeshkebab | Hacker News Reader

“Opinion polls have generally shown a bipartisan majority of Americans want to remain at home to protect themselves from the coronavirus, despite the impact to the economy.”

I’ll trust public opinion with my next health decision, it’s always spot on.

View on HN

The point of that is to counteract the claims of politicians that Americans want to return to normal. They don't.

Health officials have been saying to stay home all along. It's politicians that are saying it's ok not to.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather take advice from health officials instead of politicians.

I'm not saying health officials are wrong, but they're rightfully focused primarily on health implications. Politicians should be responsible for determining policy -- balancing economic, legal, and health considerations after listening to experts.

Politicians are supposed to represent the people. The majority of people want to stay home.

I don't see how this is relevant to my comment at all. And politicians are free to and often should disagree with their constituents. We have a representative democracy and you're free to not vote for them the next election but they don't have to follow every poll for every decision.

I’m not sure if you are being sarcastic.

People don’t want to get sick especially given the enormous costs of hospitalization in the US.

The problem is that the majority of states reopening were on course to exhaust their unemployment budgets.

Consequently, this looks like a bunch of Republican governors trying to deny people unemployment benefits rather than a positive move to get back to normal.

Reopening or not is a simple balance between "risk of avoidable deaths" vs. "risk of economic damage". Different people put a different value on each one of those, which makes it a political decision.

It's remarkable that people are begging their governors to take away their civil liberties.

Table 2 is all a rational person should need to see to realize the quarantine is the work of fear-mongering by politicians and the media:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

(For those who need an explanation - over the last two months, the data compiled in this chart shows that for people under 54, they are vanishingly unlikely to die from COVID. It shows that there is no rational reason that people under 54 should be locked down.

The flu killed 5x more people under 24 in the last two months than COVID did)

Covid-19 deaths are what they are because social distancing works. Even then, it’s the second cause of death. Only surpassed by heart disease.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see in Table 2. I see more dead than Influenza. And that's despite most everything being closed. We don't close the country for influenza. So clearly this thing is way worse.

Help me understand your position.

I look at table 2 and see almost 30k people that died DESPITE a nationwide lockdown. Given what we know about the virus, that number would've hit 2M-4M had we not had the lockdown. What am I missing?

I think the idea is that as more data comes in it looks like this virus is not as bad as was first feared. There is no current data supporting a U.S. death toll of 2-4 million.

And a lockdown at this point doesn't save any lives, it only postpones the inevitable spread of the virus. It is not reasonable to stay in lockdown for a couple years until there is a vaccine, not for a virus that kills only 1 of 500 people.

yes, additionally, it is probably better to face the tide of covid cases during the warm weather rather than waiting for cold weather to compound its severity

Real-world hospitals in the US in areas that were hit hard by COVID-19 were/are overwhelmed by it. And even areas that aren't that hard hit can't provide enough tests to know who is actually infected.

Fear mongering? You can literally see the exponential growth just looking at the number of digits in the first column of table 1!

You know 7,600 people die every day in the US right? 2.8M a year. We don't shut anything down for those.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

Im not saying COVID isn't a big deal. I'm saying the response was an overreaction. We need perspective on the actual severity. If the serological studies coming out are accurate, the total number of deaths is likely ~250k max. That's an alzheimers + suicides. National policy needs to be driven by statistics not emotion.

>> If the serological studies coming out are accurate

That's a BIG optimistic assumption to make. And every optimistic assumption that's been made relative to COVID has only fucked us over further. I'm not sure I'm ready to buy into that yet, cuz if it's off and the CFR is tipped the other way, we could be talking up to 30M deaths, not just 250k...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com