Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

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FWIW, I don't feel that way at all (re throwing old people under the bus).

I think that what's happened is the opposite - the young have been thrown under the bus (even disregarding social activity we have things like school closures, university admissions, exams cancelled), and that economic activity is being hindered unnecessarily, which is having enormous knock-on effects already which will persist for a generation.

I think that the appropriate response is for the vulnerable (old, immunocompromised, or really just anyone with low risk tolerance) to isolate and be given the resources to do so.

Care homes, for example, should be dealt with via paying the staff much higher salaries and having them stay on-site, effectively 'sealing off' the care home and creating an isolated unit.

If you're poor and have to go to work, you should be given enough money such that it's your free choice and you can stay at home if you want.

My vulnerable friends and family are forced into doing this, lockdown or no lockdown, they're disinfecting packages, haven't been outside for months, and probably will be forced into a "new way of life" for the foreseeable future.

This is the sort of thing that we should be using the severe lockdown time for - determining an appropriate way of protecting the individuals which we know to have very high fatality/complication rates - the people for whom we're bothering to do this at all.

What I strongly disagree with is the idea that the lives of the healthy should be deleted in some asinine attempt to drag out the (in my view, inevitable) death toll over a multi-year period.

> Care homes, for example, should be dealt with via paying the staff much higher salaries and having them stay on-site, effectively 'sealing off' the care home and creating an isolated unit.

That's not feasible. Those people have families, too.

They can't even realistically do this with the NBA and associated support staff, and that's a hell of a lot fewer people than vulnerable/old people and their support staff.

I, too, wish it were that easy, but it's simply not.

"That's not feasible. Those people have families, too."

Why not? I don't think the parent meant staff should stay on-site forever.

There can be shifts. Staff on shift get tested or even stay isolated for two weeks, then enter the unit, spend a month on-site and leave for home.

Does this sound like a dream job? Not really, I guess.

Does it sound that different from sailors, long-haul drivers, deployed military personnel and many other professionals who stay away from their families for prolonged period of times?

Strawmen everywhere as of late.

It has to happen, because people cannot stay inside forever, with all the will in the world.

This is definitional unless you're planning to create a police state and forcibly prevent the young from interacting with each other for years at a time.

Protecting the vulnerable is the only practical solution.

>> Protecting the vulnerable is the only practical solution.

It is not a practical solution because there is no political will to do it and there is not the competency to do it even if the political will was present.

> Staff on shift get tested or even stay isolated for two weeks, then enter the unit, spend a month on-site and leave for home.

So we have four weeks of quarantine for every month worked. That means we would need double the staff, and also we would have to pay them way more to even find someone willing/able [1] to accept this shift arrangement. This means that a huge part of the inhabitants will be priced out of the nursing home market and forced to stay at home with inadequate care.

[1] Re "able to accept this", for instance, single mothers would not be able to work under these conditions at all.

But those things aren't in place and they won't be. Because our government sucks and are incompetent.

So now you're in a place where you're intelligent enough, and aware enough, that you follow the rules or you play Russian Roulette with people's lives.

Rage all you want about what could be and reality, the two rarely meet.

Yeah, I'm doing everything I can personally at the moment, this is more a discussion around how in N months I feel hands will be forced.

The current situation is some sort of distributed trade of mental health for physical health; the brains of the youth for the bodies of the old. It's not a stable state and will break at some point.

Regarding "russian roulette":

Everyone I know who feels at significant risk is doing the whole "don't leave the house" thing.

Care homes are almost certainly fucked regardless.

I tend to think the major impact is going to be amongst 50+ year olds who are in good health and decide that they can't be arsed with staying inside. We basically don't have a way to deal with this issue collectively.

>> The current situation is some sort of distributed trade of mental health for physical health; the brains of the youth for the bodies of the old.

The young are the old, in due time. I'm guessing that the majority of young people today would prefer to grow old in a society that will care for them, that has demonstrated that it will care for them, rather than one that is prepared to "throw them under the bus" to "protect the young".

All of us are young at some point and many of us will grow old. We must be treated fairly in both states. The sensible way to do that in the current situation is to establish some sort of protocol for interaction with each other that will allow economic life to go on, because obviously everyone wants that, but without exposing the vulnerable to the virus. And that doesn't mean locking them up until it's gone, because that is still throwing them under the bus. After all, there is a substantial minority of people with chronic diseases etc that are still young, and have many productive years of life ahead of them. But for the rest, also, there is what I say above: if we throw the old under the bus now, we'll throw the young under the bus also, when it's their turn to be old.

And this protocol must necessarily be a strict form of social distancing and some measure to reduce transmission, like wearing masks. We know that works. Until there is a better solution, that's the best solution.

So there's no point in saying "this can't be done, you'll find me at the pub". It has to be done. And it has to be done for the good of everyone, young and old, vulnerable and strong. There's no point in thinking that "I'm young, this doesn't affect me" and carrying on as before because "it only kills the old and sick". One day, you yourself will be old and sick. And whatever kills the old and sick at that point will get you, unless the young and strong around you take care of you, like we are asked to take care of the old and sick right now.

And if young people don't care for the old and sick right now, they're digging their own graves.

Why can't the old be "locked up"? They already are, along with the rest of the population!

> they're digging their own graves

Digging our graves for when we're old? Yes, we are all going to die, and probably when we are old. I find your framing interesting though, as if it would be the young treating old people like crap by ultimately choosing to get on with their lives as the mental health costs creep up and up. No, it's the virus, a force of nature, that is doing that. Denying our humanity by enforcing social distancing, well I fail to see how this is a objectively moral position, either.

Lockdown and social distancing is fine and good, but it cannot extend towards a year or more, people will not stand for it.

Risk of coronavirus is a gradient due to age. But more importantly IMO is the number of other people who are also at risk- the obese, the diabetic, the immunocompromised... and of course all the family and friends and roommates who also may go into isolation so that they don’t accidentally expose their loved ones.

That looks very close to a lockdown to me... (especially in my country with a very high proportion of obese people. There’s probably an order of magnitude more of people living with an obese person.)

>> Digging our graves for when we're old?

Yes. If we don't treat the old now as we want to be treated when we are old ourselves, why would anyone do us the favour? We work towards the world we'll live in the future, right now, in the present. What we do now, how we behave towards those whose place we will be in one day will determine how we are treated when we are in their place.

>> Denying our humanity by enforcing social distancing, well I fail to see how this is a objectively moral position, either.

This is a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think? "Denying our humanity..."? By not going to the pub?

I note also that the narrative seems to have shifted a bit lately. A few weeks ago it was along the lines of "we can't keep the lockdown for ever, or the economy will go bust". Now, judging from this thread, it's changed to "we can't keep social distancing for ever because our lives will be destroyed".

Or just because the weather is good and people must go to the pub.

>Yes. If we don't treat the old now as we want to be treated when we are old ourselves, why would anyone do us the favour? We work towards the world we'll live in the future, right now, in the present. What we do now, how we behave towards those whose place we will be in one day will determine how we are treated when we are in their place.

We wouldn't be treating old people badly by not completely shutting down the entire country.

>This is a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think? "Denying our humanity..."? By not going to the pub?

Humans are social animals. Being unable to socialise is dehumanising, yes. It's not just an inconvenience, it's very real and very harmful.

>I note also that the narrative seems to have shifted a bit lately. A few weeks ago it was along the lines of "we can't keep the lockdown for ever, or the economy will go bust". Now, judging from this thread, it's changed to "we can't keep social distancing for ever because our lives will be destroyed".

It's not a coincidence, it's because the human cost is creeping up. You're literally just observing the negative impact of lockdown on people's health, but instead you seem to be choosing to interpret it as a negative and selfish character trait. Lockdown is obviously and trivially unsustainable, but so too is social distancing in the not too long run.

>> We wouldn't be treating old people badly by not completely shutting down the entire country.

Can you show me in one of my comments where I advocated for "shutting down the entire country"? Or stopping people from socialising?

I'm sorry but I don't have much patience for that kind of conversation. It tends to waste too much time with clarifications and refutations of wrong assumptions.

Here are the HN guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please read them again, or for the first time if you haven't done so already. Especially the one about responding to the strongest interpretation of what someone says.

I might suggest that the issue is that you're attacking this from an angle of giving people minor manipulations on a state of full lockdown - "oh, you know, there will be changes for years, but not full lockdown", "X might re-open but with the 2 metre rule, maybe, not sure", etc.

From our perspective, that's you seizing control of the narrative and handing out minor concessions. The entire country is currently shut down, unless you change a _lot_, it'll still be mostly like that.

Stuff like 'ok, we'll do 2 meter rule in the pub, that's basically the same, right' feels like a complete joke. It's dreamed up by someone who like, doesn't go there anyway, so what do they care? It pretty much defeats the entire point of even going, and beyond that it's obviously not economically viable anyway.

But that's not all - not only are the suggested steps seemingly absurd (e.g. "soon", we can open restaurants, but can't meet family in their homes) - there's not even a real timetable, it's all conditional on Boris' mood! Months in, and we're still talking about "ooh err, maybe well, maybe this, I guess perhaps, but that, but this other thing".

Basically, it feels like not being taken seriously. It gets people's backs up. I apologise if in conversation I've seemed aggressive, but I hope the above explains why.

The virus exists regardless, but how we choose to respond to it is something that I'm not sure democracy is even capable of handling. I guess you could call it a power struggle?

At the moment the only possible method of contesting is to just ignore the rules, but you're not even taking that seriously, you're pretending it away as if people are irresponsible and just want to see death and destruction.

Re the whole old/young split: I think that the pensioner form of esotericn would be on board with my current views. I know that when I'm older I'm going to be more frail; I imagine spending time inside reading, studying, etc (depending on my eyesight), possibly spending time with my partner, perhaps we have pets, etc.

Sure - the theatre, galleries etc are things I'd like to do, but realistically, I wouldn't take the elevated risks of death in order to do them. If no-one does them though, they collapse, and I'm left with shit like Netflix in my old age regardless.

I haven't broken the site guidelines, we just have radically different perceptions of what is tolerable. My idea of shutting down the country is quite different to yours, presumably. Even mandatory 2m social distancing is utterly ridiculous and unsustainable in the short term, never mind lockdown.

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