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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

If we ignore the party politics of these decisions, and think about it from an abstract/philosophical point of view, should how much prosperity to trade for safety be a state-by-state decision? Given that states have the police power, should they be fully accountable for the consequences of their decisions, or should the federal government provide some sort of state-to-state redistribution? I think these questions go to the core of federalism.

More to the point of the article, I find Fauci's appreciation of non-sickness issues to be refreshing and helpful. Most doctors are so focused on the disease itself that they don't seem to take 'collateral damage' from containment into account.

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We’re already seeing a huge disparity between states, with strong enforcement of social distancing NOT correlating with a reduced death rate. The point is we don’t fully know yet what the best policy will be.

By leaving it up to the states, we’re creating a distributed system where there can be failure without bringing down the whole country.

There are thousands of confounding variables. It seems highly unlikely that social distancing is not having a significant effect on spreading covid.

It's entirely possible that it doesn't have a huge effect on the death rate, though. It almost seems like there are two seperate but linked sets of outbreaks: one in the general population with a low death toll, and one in places like nursing homes and hospitals with a high death toll. Social distancing measures targeting the general population don't appear to have so much effect on the other, more deadly spread.

That depends on which social distancing measures you're referring to. The results of contact tracing indicate that large indoor gatherings such as concerts, nightclubs, and sporting events do cause a lot of virus transmission. But there has never been any direct evidence that closing beaches and parks has a significant effect.

> social distancing NOT correlating with a reduced death rate.

The point is to reduce the infection rate so that the total number of hospitalizations (Covid19 or otherwise) does not exceed the healthcare system's capacity. I doubt your uncited claim here is comparing apples to apples.

> there can be failure without bringing down the whole country

Why not succeed as a country? Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan are doing much better than the US with their country-wide responses:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus

Likewise, how much responsibility should the estates shoulder? There are trillions in private wealth that could be redistributed.

I think you're talking about liability, as I think you're looking at the rich as a source of money. It doesn't seem like the accumulation of wealth was responsible for this pandemic.

Indeed, a virus was responsible. But I do think the accumulation of extreme wealth played a role in the following way: Wealth influences policy. So far, virtually all policy discussions have focused on a tradeoff between saving lives, and saving "the economy" implicitly while leaving private wealth untouched. A focus on protecting stock prices -- a measure of wealth -- definitely played a role.

A little more speculative is my suspicion that a capitalist society storing its surplus in private hands may be correlated with a society that is unprepared for a crisis of this magnitude. The first time the President came on the radio to talk about the crisis, his tacit message was: We are hopelessly unprepared for this.

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