Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dahoon | Hacker News Reader

32%. About the percentage of effectiveness of the government's handling perhaps?

Compare covid weekly deaths per 100,000 capita over time to see the effect of different government responses.

Comparing different governments means comparing different cultures of people as well. It's not clear if comparing the same government over time is isolating government response, medical learning, environmental changes, or cultural changes among the people.

America's biggest failure against COVID was to not take it seriously enough at the citizen level. The government response failed when we didn't have a quick test rolled out quickly and even after we realized that was our problem we still didn't get a same-day test rolled out at scale.

The govt. response ‘failed’ in so much as it is prescribed goals that each citizen is free to prescribe.

The curve has been flattened from the peak. Without a vaccine, all models point to >50% of people getting infected. Vaccines are not for sure going to even exist. The only known short-term vaccine is surviving covid.

The government response in the USA might have failed. The response by by other governments [TW/NZ/ROK/JP] are keeping the virus under control without a vaccine, and if we had a national mask mandate along with a new CCC-like program for contract tracers then we could also have much less than 50% infection.

However Trump will probably be re-elected, Obamacare will be overturned with a new SCOTUS pick when RBG dies in a couple months, and corporations will get immunity to COVID lawsuits from employees. Just my prediction.

Aerosol transmission is leading cause for indoor superspreader event, ergo N95 masks are required when someone is indoors for an extended period of time.

The govt. response failure is from the fact we weren’t making N95s at full production for the past decade plus to prepare for this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com