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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Appropriate context: right now, daily US deaths from covid19 are about equal to heart disease and cancer. That's pretty high for a threat that didn't exist a few months ago.

We try pretty hard to reduce heart disease and cancer deaths, but we don't social distance for them because they're not contagious. If we allow covid's exponential spread to resume, it will be our leading cause of death before long.

Meanwhile, countries that did strict lockdowns for a while and used that time to roll out lots of testing are getting through this with little damage.

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The problem with your math there is that by and large, we are talking about the same people - only the timeline is different.

It is just as possible that over a longer time period say a year the math will be radically different. We'll have fewer cancer deaths because the patient had already died of COVID. It is possible that a country has many deaths because up to that point it was able to keep large swaths of "terminally ill" people alive.

Delay, isolation and testing do not actually solve anything. For large segments of the population the virus is not a risk at all, they can't even tell that are infected.

Long term it is not obvious who gets out better, the population where the infection rates are high and they can reduce the crippling economical restrictions or populations where they managed to have no infections but the sanctions remain for years.

History, in general, is characterized by surprising twists and turns where it was impossible to tell what comes next.

To conclude that a lot of covid victims would have died anyway, you would have to show that the total number of deaths is up less than the number of covid deaths.

In fact, we see the exact opposite: total daily deaths has increased by more than the known covid deaths. This appears to be partly from missing covid deaths (e.g. from people dying at home), and partly from heart attack and stroke patients delaying trips to the ER from fear of covid.

But wait, you mentioned that "the timeline is different." Well of course, we're all going to die eventually. That doesn't mean we should just lay down and die today.

Epidemiologists strongly disagree with you about delay and testing. If you lock down enough so the replication rate goes below one, you can get the virus down to manageable numbers. If you cautiously open with lots of testing, you can isolate the cases that show up, and tests all their contacts.

On the other hand if you shut down without bothering to build your test and trace infrastructure, then you're right, the delay didn't help at all, because you were incompetent.

The idea that we can just open up and people will happily go back to work and shopping while the bodies pile up is unrealistic, to put it mildly. We're actually extending the economic crisis, not shortening it.

If you look at how the infrastructure for managing dead bodies has held up in places where covid hit the hardest, it's pretty clear that many more people are dying than normal. If we were just shifting the cause of death from an existing complication to a new one, our current infrastructure would be fine. It's not.

This virus is killing people years and decades before they would otherwise die. Having a chronic medical condition (e.g. diabetes or heart disease) is very different than having a terminal illness with only months to live.

All deaths are just people who would have died later anyway.

Yes, we are all going to die. This is not a helpful observation.

What you should be asking are two questions: what impact those deaths happening all at once has on everyone else when the medical system is overwhelmed and how much earlier are COVID victims dying than they otherwise would?

In the latter case, the early studies suggest even elderly people are losing at least a decade early. That’s a lot of time to casually blow off the way you’re doing even before you consider the younger victims. Maybe you’re young, healthy, and low-risk but do you really have no older people you know that you wouldn’t want another decade to share time with?

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/05/02/would-mo...

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people-coronavirus-dying-10-ye...

I agree with you, and I think your parent comment does as well. They were pointing out the flaw in an argument made in their parent comment.

It’s possible - there’s enough misinformation floating around here that it’s become necessary to avoid ambiguity on certain topics.

If the countries you are referring to are South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand, it may be that the rest of us have very little chance to follow suit. We are too interconnected and too diverse to counteract the exponential nature of the threat.

At some point we have to make peace with ourselves.

South Korea started early with a massive amount of testing. Asian countries in general have had a high rate of mask wearing and good compliance with social distancing measures. We could do this sort of thing in the U.S. If our challenges are more difficult, that's not a good reason to do less.

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