Hacker News Reader

Comment by CubsFan1060 | Hacker News Reader

And I'm in continued amazement that people don't seem to understand that "beating it" was never the goal. It was to flatten the curve, not eliminate it. Empty hospitals likely mean we went too far.

Staying quarantined until a vaccine is available is likely not a sustainable plan.

View on HN

There is, and was, a lot of confusion about what the goals were, although they all aligned in immediate massive action.

'Crushing' the curve and getting back to contact tracing levels is one. 'Flattening' and avoiding Lombardy is another.

I was hoping we would have used the time to have massive testing programs by now in the US, to follow Korea's example, but that hasn't happened at all.

Paul Romer's plan is my favorite but the country has seen little progress since he proposed it https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/paul-romer-on-how-to-...

The US has more testing capacity than South Korea relative to total population (so we've ramped up significantly), the problem is that our numbers of infected are too high to use that capacity for suppression.

> And I'm in continued amazement that people don't seem to understand that "beating it" was never the goal

I've argued with many people who firmly believe it is worth burning the economy to the ground in order to "save lives". Eventually, the argument distills down to: "Do you care more about corporate profits and bankers and billionaires OR peoples' lives?"

What makes that question even harder is when you take into account the huge body of people back in January which were right at the margin of famine.

When supply chains stop how will the lowest of the lowest on the ladder cope?

"About 265 million people around the world are forecast to be facing acute food insecurity by the end of this year, a doubling of the 130 million estimated to suffer severe food shortages last year." [0]

Excess death because overrun hospitals should never happen, but the global perspective is horrifying and will never give any easy answers.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/global-hunger-...

It doesn't even boil down to that. Plenty (essentially all) of credible economists attribute much of the economic harm to the disease epidemic, and not just to the government response.

People have to feel like eating at a restaurant is safe for being open to matter.

I think that's very true. That being said, the government response and the media has certainly ratcheted up the fear.

> That being said, the government response and the media has certainly ratcheted up the fear.

This is not brought up enough. There's a family of immigrants in my neighborhood from Sierra Leone, and the mom is so terrified of covid-19 that she won't let her kids go out and play, or even go to the local elementary school for free meals (they are on government assistance). We've delivered them food because of this fear. I've tried to explain that kids are at low risk and that it's probably worse to keep them locked inside for months vs. letting them play out side, but alas, the fear is too strong...

Depends which government and which media. People who were going to spring break in Florida in March apparently weren't scared enough, and messages from the government and Fox News that this would be over by Easter didn't help that.

No, the argument doesn't distill down to "corporate profits and bankers".

It goes down to - do you want to save lives of wealthy - usually old middle class people in 1st world countries who can "afford to quarantine" or do you want to save more lives of people who are going to starve, become homeless or die due to massive economic disruption this extended quarantine is going to bring upon.

It's only middle class pencil pushers who can quarantine at will semi-indefinitely and work from home who think extended general quarantine is even a viable option in the first place.

Value of a Statistical Life

"VISCUSI: If you multiply the 1 million lives saved [Trump], and if the lives are worth $10 million each [OHSA], the result is $10 trillion. … Ten trillion dollars is half of the U.S. GDP, which means that in order to justify completely opening businesses back up, the economy would need to lose half of its value."

[1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843

The 'economy' is not some abstract entity. It is us, the people, going about our business every day. A hard lockdown is destroying all of the economy. No accounting tricks can mask that. We should not play accounting tricks to begin with. If we want to stoop at the article's level, note that the numbers are flawed, as they don't account for age distribution of the risk.

https://twitter.com/AndyBiotech/status/1241741127205572609/p...

Addressed in the article.

But feel free to add the 38% USG pensioner discount (or 100% if you care).

You'll still come out at a very, very large number.

To be pedantic, Covid is far more fatal to the elderly whose statistical "worth" is significantly less.

Er no, as TFA mentions, when the USG they tried that American protested with signs saying "Granny for sale". Sufficiently that the USG dropped the 'pensioner discount'.

You'd have to argue why its suddenly OK now.

You can also argue to discount children - where I live, we make them by the dozen. It is less applicable to COVID-19 through.

But VSL the correct framework because its based on the premium the average American at large puts on jobs to compensate for the risk of injury or death.

What could be more democratic?

But $10T is such a large envelope that even if you added the granny discount, you would still come out at an enormous fraction of USA and hence world GDP.

Your perspective, i. e. "flatten the curve", is outdated. It's entirely obvious now that R can be pushed below 1.0. The data from Germany, for example, implies their (medium) level of lockdown came out to about 0.5. China, with harsher measures, did even better.

Germany is now trying to feel its way to a best possible compromise of somewhat lesser/better targeted restrictions that still keep R<1.0 and, thus, the virus on track for elimination.

We know much more about the virus than before. Even without a vaccine, gaining as many time as possible until we catch it, can make a huge difference.

The plan is to almost beat it, get the new infections down to almost zero by strict lockdowns. Then commence contact tracing and quarantine for each new infection and all first, second and maybe third order contacts while general restrictions are eased. This continues until a vaccine or cure is found. If you want to know more, google Hammer and Dance.

Flattening the curve just below hospital capacity is shown to be dangerous because you cannot control the infection rate with sufficient precision, causing slipups and second, third, fourth waves necessitating repeated longer lockdowns. All in all this damages the economy more because of the panic it periodically creates, repeated longer lockdowns (albeit maybe not as strict) and the uncertainty. There is always another lockdown looming just a few bad numbers ahead. Flattening the curve is sooo March 2020 ;)

Respectfully, that's the plan that you may have wanted, but it's not the plan that most governments have actually implemented. "Almost zero" is not generally considered feasible.

That is unfortunately accurate.

Exactly! I am amazed at how many people have said, "Well we'll have a vaccine in 18 months." This is absolutely irresponsible of the big-pharma industry to push. Safe vaccines take years or decades to develop, and some of the techniques they're clinically trialing now have never created vaccines that made it through the approval process before. Could one of these magically work? Maybe, but it's still highly unlikely everything in these trials will go perfectly.

Places like NZ are looking at total eradication, but the rest of the world will most like just have this spread through our populations before any effective treatment of vaccine is produced. Countries like NZ .. might not ever be able to open their boards again.

If the antibodies don't last long, yes we could see reoccurances for the rest of our lives. It's in our environment. It took 20 years of very big vaccination efforts to eradicate smallpox. Sure we have better technology now, but to think we can eliminate this in less than a year is hubris.

I wrote this post last week, about how we might just be in denial that our life expectancy might now be lower, and how we might need to just come to terms with that:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-hon...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com