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Comment by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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

> 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.

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