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Comment by ascorbic | Hacker News Reader

And those are the factors that the epidemiologists and policymakers need to balance when setting the policies. But that's a decision that they should be making, with access to all of the available data. It's not a decision for one hot headed billionaire with a large financial incentive to reopen.

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The epidemiologists who have been advocating for lockdown have very explicitly ignored all of those sources of mortality entirely. They have only focused on COVID-19-attributable deaths and that's it.

Now the job of the modellers is to predict COVID-19 mortality under various scenarios, and it's the job of policymakers to counterbalance those predictions against the economic realities, etc. So, it's not necessarily a problem that epidemiologists would focus on predicting just along the dimension of COVID-19 mortality.

But unfortunately our policymakers have completely disregarded that need to weigh both the positives and negatives and instead have talked about "following the science" and basically myopically parroted whatever these highly opinionated epidemiologists (Ferguson, everyone at the IMHE, etc) were saying, without mentioning the negative externalities associated with lockdown, except in passing in a way that implies that economic damage will be constrained to shareholder returns (which is completely false).

>The epidemiologists who have been advocating for lockdown have very explicitly ignored all of those sources of mortality entirely. They have only focused on COVID-19-attributable deaths and that's it.

Do you have a source for this?

Two of the most influential models in shifting public policy have been Ferguson and the IMHE's model.

Here's Ferguson:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

> We do not consider the ethical or economic implications of either strategy here, except to note that there is no easy policy decision to be made. Suppression, while successful to date in Chinaand South Korea, carries with it enormous social and economic costs which may themselves have significant impact on health and well-being in the short and longer-term. Mitigation will never be able to completely protect those at risk from severe disease or death and the resulting mortality may therefore still be high. Instead we focus on feasibility, with a specific focus on what the likely healthcare system impact of the two approaches would be.

(From Page 4)

Now let's shift to the IHME model. They do make passing reference to the econonic impact, same as Ferguson, but don't go any further:

http://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/Projects...

> The overall financial cost over a short period of time is likely to be enormous, particularly when juxtaposed against the substantial reductions in revenue for many hospitals due to the cancellation of elective procedures and the broader economic consequences of social distancing mandates.

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Now as I said, it's not necessarily their job to forecast the economic harm. But unfortunately we have created this notion that being pro-lockdown means "believing science" and therefore thinking that the lockdown is a bad idea is being "against science". Our politicians use these exact words, and as I said their actions show that they are not holistically evaluating the downside risk. On the contrary it appears to be a very simple game-theory type calculation where their incentive structures are leading them to make irrational decisions. COVID-19 mortality is much more "visible" than the fuzzier and longer-term mortality caused by our (IMO misguided) response to COVID-19.

It is hilarious and sad at the same time that a country which is perhaps uniquely suited to embark on a moon-shot Apollo style program of testing regiment for EVERYONE instead chooses to self inflict all sorts of wounds.

It was in the cards, which makes it even more painful to see.

Testing EVERYBODY would be cheaper than what is happening now and an inspiration to the whole world, inspiring awe and respect.

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