Hacker News Reader

Comment by downerending | Hacker News Reader

This article mostly ignores the larger picture. Winning the COVID-19 fight by itself is not "winning". The real win is to minimize the total number of deaths (or perhaps adjusted life years) and general misery.

We have a lot more information now with which to project the benefits and costs of locking down to various degrees. It's all a guess, of course, but it's becoming clear that the costs of locking down are quite harsh, in terms of collateral deaths, etc.

Being smart is not "losing one's stomach to fight".

View on HN

We need to look at the costs of social distancing, sure.

We also need to look at how a lack of centralized response means the good work done to socially distance was wasted in part because as a country the US never took this seriously at the same time.

Look at the comments in here. People are saying a virus that has killed over a hundred thousand people in three months was “overblown”. We didn’t stop the spread, we don’t have a good plan to go forwards, and we’re going to keep seeing second waves.

The US lost it’s nerve to fight, and opened up businesses early. Not allowed visits from grandparents early, opened up businesses early. That’s more than enough to undo the work we’ve done. We’re fucking up.

I haven't seen evidence the US didn't take the lock downs seriously. The goal initially was to flatten the curve aka. reduce/delay the load on hospitals. It was successful to the point hospitals had plenty ICU capacity and they had to layoff staff. Unfortunately there was no step 2 for the lockdowns.

It's been months now since epidemiologists acknowledged the US could not eradicate COVID-19 without a vaccine. I don't think any large country has been able to (China might be close?). Economists have all been clear that we can't lock down for another year.

There simply is no fight to have at this point. Mitigating damage is the only option.

The fact that the virus (directly) killed 100K people doesn't tell you much of anything about the quality of our response. It ignores two crucial questions: (1) How many people were indirectly killed? And (2) How much better could we have done in terms of total damage with an available alternative?

The answer to (1) is starting to look like "a lot". And most tragically, it could be that a large number of those were due to well-intended actions like locking down.

It's within the realm of possibility that the right thing to do was pretty much "nothing". As in, the basic health procedures specified for flu season, etc.

Reams of papers and probably shelves of books will be written studying this, so perhaps eventually we'll have some idea.

In any case, as others have pointed out, the protests have pretty much wiped out the idea of locking down. The economic costs (think: people who will go broke and die from it) even more so.

The US opened its businesses after cases started to level off. There are some strategies where this isn’t the right time to open, but we’ve achieved what most people understood as the original goal of keeping hospitals up and running.

I don’t think many Americans didn’t take the virus seriously. What they were scared about is what we’re seeing in India and Mexico, where lockdowns had to be rolled back before they accomplished any suppression at all. This is just a complete disaster, sure to set back their economic and political development by decades, and I don’t think lockdown advocates had good reasons to believe it couldn’t happen here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com