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Comment by orbifold | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting how different countries and cultures deal with the same challenge. Streets were pretty empty and shops were closed for maybe a month here in Germany. Now (almost) everything is open again, the streets are full. Unemployment rose somewhat but not catastrophically. The images and videos we get from the US feel apocalyptical in contrast.

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You have to be careful with what you look at in the US. The media here is definitely cherry picking the worst of the worst to show people. Were some places hit really hard? Yes. Absolutely. Does the entire country look like NYC? No. Not even close.

Hey, even the outer boroughs seem more-or-less normal. It's just Manhattan that looks post-apocalyptic, and even there it depends greatly on the neighborhood.

but the pictures on the article are from San Francisco?

I live 90 minutes outside Manhattan, upstate.

Things aren't normal here. I can definitely see how one might mistake things for being normal because businesses are opening up and people are going outside, but if you look more closely, about half of the shops and restaurants remain closed, and the places that are open are operating at half-capacity. If you talk to the business owners, things are rough. Some local businesses aren't staying open because they're making money, they're staying open because they lose less money by being open (which is a big difference). The hope is that they'll be able to start operating profitably again, but that's far from guaranteed.

I really doubt that we have insight yet into how this is going to play out.

There is a very clear division between people in my friend group who know someone who has died of Covid, and people who don't. The majority of the people from the former group live in NY, the majority of the people in the latter group don't.

NYC, due to its population density, certainly has a higher potential for pandemic death than anywhere else in the US, but there's good reason to believe that NY didn't reach anywhere near that potential, due to the interventions taken by the community which prevented that from happening. We see much worse infection and death rates in some areas of the world with less dense population, due to different responses. So there's no reason to believe that the rest of the US can't get just as bad as NYC, and worse. And given the almost complete lack of response in some parts of the US, I think we'll get to see what that looks like; if not in the next few weeks, then in the fall when cold weather hits.

The pictures look much more apocalyptical than they otherwise might because many of the storefronts are boarded up to prevent looting.

Unemployment in Germany didn't go up much because they reclassified the "unemployed" as "furloughed". The end result is the same though, recipients are living entirely off government assistance.

7.3 million germans are currently fourloughed. That is 21% of the workforce!

A major difference is between losing your job and keeping it, and businesses keeping their trained workforce. A lot of people work less instead of not at all. Come better days, it will be much easier to get back on track, hopefully.

Media in USA is primarily concentrated in New York City. It was hit HARD. The rest of the US wasn't.

The numbers demonstrate this. The pictures and essays from New York based journalists say something different.

Also, it's an election year, and that politicized decisions on reopening.

Here in Colorado, mostly business as usual, but kids are miserable because camps and pools are closed.

Two impressions can both be precise and not comparable.

The "libertarian" states implemented the worst possible solutions: a lockdown that was big enough to damage businesses, but not early enough or thorough enough to actually limit the spread.

> The "libertarian" states

Which states are those exactly?

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