Hacker News Reader

Comment by pwinnski | Hacker News Reader

This is great news! "Shelter in place" orders flattened the curve as was predicted and as we hoped. We were ready (mostly) for the worst case, and people complying with these orders meant we never hit it.

Next up, I hope we don't end up needing these field hospitals because of states re-opening things too soon.

View on HN

That's not what the article said. It was highlighting how despite some hospitals being overrun, these field hospitals still went unused because there were no plans in place to utilize them.

We didn't flatten the curve enough to make these hospitals useless. We simply didn't use them despite needing them.

That's a gracious reading. If there had been an absolute need for more beds, plans would have been developed to make use of the space.

Instead, it might imply hospitals were dealing with increased load, perhaps needing more beds than they had but not so much of an increased load to justify implementing and following a plan to use these facilities.

This isn't true though. Non-Covid patient load plummeted because people were forced to stay at home.

Field hospitals were never designed to handle covid patients in the first place.

That's going to be the biggest challenge here - how do we transition from acute to chronic care of this pandemic. I hope someone is creating lessons learned and new operating plans for all this stuff so that they can react efficiently over the coming months and years to pocket outbreaks which are sure to occur.

> pocket outbreaks which are sure to occur

We don't know that, as weird as that sounds. We have no idea if there's significant or lasting immunity from having it, whether it's seasonal like the flu, or what the longterm behavior of the virus and it's likelihood to evolve is.

Which makes having longterm plans very difficult because we don't know what we should be planning for.

There's still areas all over the world which have not been hit too badly solely by luck - for instance, here in Alberta Calgary has been hit with an order of magnitude more cases than Edmonton without a great reason why. Regardless of the potential of immunity, these lightly hit areas are still open for initial infection and community outbreaks. I can't see why they wouldn't occur - on a long enough timeline luck just runs out.

> likelihood to evolve

We also don't know how lockdowns caused it to evolve.

Given that it should have less opportunity to evolve, isn't this not a particular concern?

Maybe "evolve" isn't quite the right word, but lockdowns select for variants that spread better.

You made an assumption there. What's another possibility?

https://twitter.com/Kingfreespeech/status/125862859092672921...

We were ready (mostly) for the worst case

This is false. Tends of thousands of people died and many more suffered unnecessarily because the federal government refused to take timely action. We did as well as we did for as long as we did through heroic efforts by state governments, local governments, and NGOs.

To claim that we were somehow prepared and executed on a preparedness plan is at best a dangerous misreading of the events, and at worst outright political propaganda.

Which professional published best case death estimate did we not beat? I am not aware of one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23028036

Those model predictions are not for the first 3 months, but for the whole epidemic. We could very likely breach some of those predictions in the next 1-2 years.

Also, the Imperial College paper was one of the more extreme models. It is the one that supposedly scared the White House and lots of states into action. In this way, it was not a best case estimate, but was self-selected to be an outlier.

It contains different estimates based on different actions taken, and yes, there is a best case estimate, I linked directly to that breakdown.

As I said, there are no published best case death models that we have not come in under. Yes, yes, I know "wait two weeks" (now years).

"Wait for the second wave" is the new "Wait two weeks"

> outright political propaganda.

Which is what you're doing right now with that comment.

How so? Both political parties fucked this up, but one party more than another stands to gain from pretending like they didn't.

Edit: also my statements are factual as far as I can tell. We had since January to prepare, and instead our leaders -- political party aside -- decided to fuck around and play misinformation games with the public instead.

Well, you're making statements but not backing them up with sources (if we learn one thing from the pandemic it let it be that provenance of information matters more than the information itself.)

You're also, apparently, trying to influence people's opinions of government.

So... propaganda.

But really: Dude, I'm sorry. I was just really cranky this morning and I was being snarky. I apologize. You are obviously not propagandizing there. I was being an idiot. I'm sorry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com