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Comment by deathgrips | Hacker News Reader

>You say that as if we've known this since January or something

Yes, who could have possibly known about covid19 in January? [0]

>and as if you have inside knowledge of what those people are investigating right now. Do you? The news on this has just come out. Maybe give them a chance to react before judging?

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that forcing people to stay at home, to socially distance themselves from their social support network, and to quit earning a living would have a significant impact on their mental health and a dangerous impact on the mental health of those with mood disorders. Every doctor has been educated on mental illnesses. The CDC had chances to make the right choices in January. It had chances to make the right choices in February. It had chances to make the right choices in March. How long until you think we can judge the CDC?

[0] (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-testin...)

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Come on dude. "Known this" in my sentence was not referring to "the existence of COVID-19" but rather "the fact that we would start seeing more suicides than disease deaths today". The right choice was shutting things down. The only question was how long it needs to keep going, which people were still trying to figure out. Now this event might give them more information that might help them figure it out. If you're reasonable you'll give them a chance to see if they'll take it into account. You know full well much of the rest of the executive didn't show remotely as much competence as the CDC about the disease itself for months despite being repeatedly warned even after the outbreak had already occurred, and now you're lashing out at the CDC for not having predicted when the first side effects would start to occur in some cities within 1 day of when you heard the news? Sheesh.

We don't know that was the right choice at all. This is a new, untested pandemic response that hasn't been used before, essentially a planet-scale experiment with everyone's futures: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distan... It had some definite opposition from experts when it was developed, and seems to have won out for political reasons.

To clarify: I meant "the right choice" given the information, ideas, and means they had available at the time. Not "the right choice if everything was possible and known".

The CDC wasn't circulating the same facts that South Korea and Singapore were dealing with. Do you remember what Asia was doing in February? The CDC basically created this disaster. We could have shut down air traffic, told the public to use masks in February, and allowed universities and private labs to conduct testing. Instead the CDC lied.

Yes. We do know. We know very well it was the right decision; it is just difficult because China has decided to play coy and gaslight the rest of the world with their death figures, resulting in death rates having to be measured by indirect means such as number of funerary urns delivered, and terminated cell phone plans.

You do not screw around with highly communicable, severe upper respiratory diseases. Especially not while people's lungs are already being assaulted by high pollution levels.

Furthermore, Public health agencies are taking some things into account while dismissing others. CDC's guidelines for school reopening for instance demonstrate the highest level of both ignorance and wishful thinking I've ever seen in terms of keeping public education systems running. Parents don't check their kids health before sending them in on a regular basis, buses cannot get the job done running 1 kid to a seat, and there is no way you're keeping masks on kids, and a minimum distance of 6 feet separation between kids in place all day, every day in schools.

The suicides exceeding virus deaths indicates the measures are working. Once we start seeing meaningful localization of the virus to the point contact tracing can take over and allow the rest of us to let down our guard, then we can talk. Suicides aren't "contagious" in the way the virus is, and if you perform due diligence on your own, there is no reason you can't maintain levels of exposure to your social network. You just have a few more questions to ask people before coming over, and to be ready to play the contact tracing game if somebody you know gets sick.

>The right choice was shutting things down . . . You know full well much of the rest of the executive didn't show remotely as much competence as the CDC about the disease itself for months despite being repeatedly warned even after the outbreak had already occurred

This is some "we have always been at war with Eastasia" doublethink. The CDC told people for a long, long time that masks were harmful and using them was stupid. The CDC shut down private and university covid19 testing in Washington.

> and now you're lashing out at the CDC for not having predicted when the first side effects would start to occur in some cities within 1 day of when you heard the news?

Ask your doctor if job loss and isolation from friends and family is a risk factor for suicide. I talked to a doctor back in early March who predicted that more people would die from suicides than from covid19.

Nobody said shutting down will not have its own casualties. There was never a bloodless option on the table.

It's like a choice whether to evacuate a city that's threatened by an active volcano. The volcano may or may not erupt. It either kills everyone, or nothing happens. But announcing the evacuation is sentencing some people to death: think of all the people in emergency rooms, on life support, etc., many of whom will not survive being moved. And then you'll have "death by economics" among the evacuated, as they fail to adjust to their new reality in emergency housing, with no jobs, living among strangers not too happy about the sudden population increase in their area.

It's a tough choice, but it's a game of numbers. To a first approximation, even if lockdown is going to kill 0.01% of people one way or another, if it prevents 0.1% of people from dying, it's worth it and it's the right choice. In reality, there's uncertainty around these estimates that need to be taken into account, but the idea is the same.

(Tangent: I hate point estimates with a passion; I wish there was an easy and standardized way to express distributions in plain text.)

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