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Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

It’s almost hopeless to really understand Brazil from the outside.

On the one hand, response to Coronavirus has been really frakked at the top messaging level; if not a full-on denialist, Bolsonaro seems blinded by the existence of a jobs-deaths tradeoff and can’t seem to work with it. He’s not a terribly sharp person.

On the other, there’s a lot riding on making things look worse than they are. And every time you read something bemoaning how un-excellent someone like Orban is, you have to factor who’s rooting for them to fall. There is always a bigger story.

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Edit: Jesus, dang, why is a perfectly reasonable reply to this comment [dead]?

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As I've simulated numerically [1] (which has been discussed elsewhere on HN [2]), there is no tradeoff between saving lives (due to COVID-19) and reducing widespread economic damage. Counterintuitively, the policy frontier (economic vs human damage) is concave and non-monotonic, and has three distinct regions, as you can see in the linked graph.

However, this is a highly technical argument designed for engineering-minded or economics-minded thinkers. If we have leaders who are "not terribly sharp" as you say, I'm not sure what we can do about it.

[1] https://www.circuitlab.com/blog/2020/05/28/surprising-covid-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23418252

Great work! I think simulations/models are a great tool.

some feedback:

>there is no tradeoff between saving lives (due to COVID-19) and reducing widespread economic damage

It is easy to show that there is no tradeoff by assuming that economic damage is only dependend on the duration of the lockdown. Why not aim for R=0? This would save even more lives and reduce the duration of the lockdown to what? 3 weeks? It will just stop all economic activity for 3 weeks. More severe policies have a greater impact on economy. And my intuition is that this dependency is non-liniar. Each reduction of R by 0.1 could for example double(?) the damage to economy. I only skimmed your article [1] - so maybe you already addressed this?

>Counterintuitively, the policy frontier (economic vs human damage) is concave and non-monotonic, and has three distinct regions.

Not surprising at all. I think the right hand side negative slope region of the policy curve is the herd immunity strategy (at least I call it so). It was discussed (and rejected) months ago.

I’m totally out of the loop on Hungary. Who’s hoping for Orban to fall, and why is that problematic for Hungary?

First time I hear people rooting for orban to fall due to his Corona politics.

I mean, the guy is normally batshit crazy and I expected him to blame Gates and Soros for the virus... but his response so far has been surprisingly good.

To your edit: that account is shadowbanned it seems.

that's true. It's true that Bolsonaro isn't being able to deal with the media and normally overreacting and being paranoid. However you have a giant part of the media rooting for them to fail. Worse is better for huge part of the global media, and to see a Political leader which doesn't fit failing, is priority number one of the media today.

Watching the news in Brazil, looks that Brazilian government is doing what they can, but you don't build at least 30 years of missing infrastructure in 6 months. That's for sure not Bolsonaro's fault.

> Political leader which doesn't fit

He doesn't fit because he's more incompetent, more corrupt, more egocentric, emptier of any moral values, more oblivious to the interests of his co-citizens, than any other political leader ever was (in Brazil and elsewhere), right?

Let me put this in a more constructive way: why do you think "global media" are rooting for Bolsonaro's failure? And: given the less than ideal infrastructure to face the pandemic, what has been Bolsonaro's policy to counteract this? Can we honestly say that he's been "doing what he can"?

> why do you think "global media" are rooting for Bolsonaro's failure

He was from center-right, old and conservative. Example: First month of his government, Siberia was on fire, Australia was on fire, Amazon was on fire, and the news was "Right extremist Jair Bolsonaro is burning Amazon down, exterminating the indigenous folk".. I mean he is a moron, but no, it wasn't him, but a system built over the years. The world explores the Amazon since 1500, that's why the Portuguese landed there at first place right?

Regarding the COVID-19, I think the government is reacting well, but Lockdown is a luxury in Brazil. You cannot put a Favela in Lockdown, you cannot stop an economy where 60% of the population is "self-employed", asking people to stay home. I mean you can try but, the vast majority in Brazil don't want it.

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