Comment by ryankemper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryankemper | Hacker News Reader

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> Let's take this concrete example. Say there is some worker in this factory. They don't want to go to work. They don't feel safe. Now they are torn between two authorities. What happens if they do show up? What happens if they don't show up? Will they be seen as "not a teamplayer"? Will their career stall out compared to their yes-men colleges? Maybe even get fired without any cause given. Half a year later so as not to make it obvious?

Yes, I think pretty much exactly that would happen. (I'm not super up-to-date on the CARES act or other legal measures that they might be able to take, or if unemployment pays out to people who "quit" their jobs currently, so there's a small chance that those are options)

However my conclusion is that's an example of why forcibly shutting down businesses was a terrible idea in the first place and never should have been done.

But yes I totally agree, our governmental systems are not set up to handle these questions.

I must confess that when the "flatten the curve" meme started spreading around and the initial 4-5% case fatality rate and 20% hospitalization rate numbers were being given, that I actually believed in flattening the curve and thus initially supported the lockdown. I should have known at the time that the goalposts were going to be moved. In retrospect it's incredibly obvious.

I think a lot of people are starting to wake up to the threats of “new normal” and how damaging the response has been and continues to be.

The math didn’t check out on “Flatten the Curve” from the very start. It is very, very hard not to get caught up in the panic response, and in that moment the sheer number of people who would accuse you of endangering lives for even doubting the response was necessary, correct, proportional, scientific, or even legal, was enormous.

In MA ~60% of COVID deaths have been in nursing homes. That’s 3,000 deaths in an extremely narrow population (< 50,000 people) and the state was busy shutting down life as we know it and totally failed the people actually at risk. In NY they sent known COVID cases into their nursing homes. In RI 70% of their total fatalities have been in nursing homes.

We need the end of lockdown, we need to halt the drift into totalitarian and draconian tracking measures, and we need strictly targeted and laser focused protections for the at-risk population.

As far as TFA, it’s the typical Elon lightning rod effect but the fact is all the other auto manufacturers have reopened, and Alameda County is no hotspot. It should be entirely uncontroversial that Tesla is reopening and in the meantime challenging any continuing shutdown order in court. I doubt a preliminary injunction would be granted based on the required legal standard, although judges have surprised me in the past!

>we need strictly targeted and laser focused protections for the at-risk population

Exactly. And if we had been prepared with enough testing capability and protective equipment, that would have been the way to go. But we were not prepared. So we had to go with plan B. The US is not good at health care. There are consequences for that.

You realize that even if the lockdown ended tomorrow, that doesn't change the fact that the economic effects are still going to exist from other countries suffering from Coronavirus related issues, yes?

The rallying cry around ending the lockdown is complete and utter bullshit considering other countries that have tried reopening (including South Korea and parts of Japan) were slammed by a second wave of infections.

Opening up won't stop the at-risk population from being afraid to work, nor will it stop people from getting sick and being unable to work.

Economic effects are still going to exist. This is a tautology. What matters is the change or trade-offs in effect from taking one course of action or another.

We have over 20 million unemployed (probably a significant undercount) through a self-inflicted lockdown in just a couple months. Leading economic experts such as the US Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve have warned strongly of “permanent economic damage” if we continue the lockdown. I would speculate this lockdown is firmly ushering in the next era of “essential” mega corporations and the utter destruction of small business.

And in New York, the majority of new cases in the last few weeks have been from people “strictly observing social distancing.”

Like focusing a laser increases the energy that can be brought to bear on a single point and magnifies the overall effect, so too can highly targeted common sense measures save more lives than this “utter bullshit” general lockdown.

I’ll give the specific example again. While we’re doing ~30k tests a day nationwide, we still haven’t tested every nursing home patient and worker. In fact, NY Times reports many nursing homes have not gotten access to barely any testing at all, even for their recently deceased. So a sub-population of 1.3 million residents is bearing 35% of total fatalities (in 14 states it’s more than 50% of all fatalities) and this lockdown diverts massive resources and energy away from saving those lives.

Do I have that right? 0.4% of the population has seen 35% of the total deaths? Over-represented by 87x. By the way that’s an undercount because only 33 states actually break out data for nursing home deaths. But instead the political response is fear mongering, preaching a new normal, and shaming people who go to the beach.

> the initial 4-5% case fatality rate and 20% hospitalization rate numbers

Those are the current stats I believe. The IFR is of course lower, but probably not wildly lower. As of yesterday the UK's chief medical officer was estimating it at 1% or a bit less.

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