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Comment by neaden | Hacker News Reader

This is an awful and irresponsible article. This is not a war, nurses are not soldiers and shouldn't have been put at such risk. The fact that they were was the result of a complete abdication of duty of our nations leadership. In regards to schools, based on recent outbreaks at schools that have reopened and summer camps it seems pretty clear that with the US's current level of transmission, trying to open schools is incredibly irresponsible. If we really wanted to have schools open as a priority we should have gotten our transmission down in the summer. We failed, and this is the result.

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Indeed, this is a terrible point of view. Sending kids back to school before the epidemic is under control just makes it worse for everyone, including the nurses on the front lines. I understand her frustration but it still is stupid.

I wonder how acceptable it would be to swap nurse/pandemic/get sick with soldier/war/get shot, or with fireman/forest fire/get burned. Some professions have different risk profiles than others.

The right thing to do is obviously to reopen the schools, but the virus has to be under control first.

I also despise the appeal to some false authority. The entire premise for the argument seems to be, "well, I was a nurse and had to go in even when I was at risk, so they should do the same". The fact that she was a nurse or felt a duty to work has absolutely no weight in the argument.

>This is not a war,

Feeling like this is not a war is a big reason we have all had to endure so much risk. We have been unwilling to make the tough decisions, unwilling to move ahead with imperfect information, unwilling to sacrifice trivial liberty to do what is clearly safer for our fellow humans.

That is seriously wrongheaded thinking. This is just plain not a war, it is a plague. We do need to make sacrifices, but the ideals expoused in this article, needlessly throwing people into danger out of some misguided ideal of lionizing sacrifice is just going to get more people sick.

The number one thing that could have been done was the easiest, government sponsored ramp up of PPE at the first signs of an epidemic. It took nearly half a year for the Federal government to get their head in the game, and even then they've been flubbing it.

I think the war analogy is useful, in that the Federal government should be able to have access to higher authority to execute on strategies quickly. I mean, we use the "War on ____" analogy enough, this pandemic is certainly more fitting than most of those issues.

"I think the war analogy is useful, in that the Federal government should be able to have access to higher authority to execute on strategies quickly." Serious question, why? We come up with checks and balances for a reason. We have existing laws on how to handle pandemics, and states have existing laws for isolation and quarantine. We have the CDC, the Public Health Service, the NIH all as existing agencies with duties and plans that were supposed to be used for this. And those plans were ignored. We had months to prepare before the first cases appeared in the US. Our current federal leaders have proposed multiple strategies that would harm people without helping, such as promoting unproven therapies. What part of any of the federal response to this makes you think they should have had more authority?

Just because this administration has done such a poor job of it doesn't mean a competent one wouldn't have been able to use the authority given during a crisis to do something effective.

I also don't think there is any new law that would need to be enacted to grant additional authority to the executive branch. I agree, they had all the tools in the toolbox before and after the pandemic hit us. I didn't mean to seem to advocate that the executive needed more authority than they already posses, just that the authority they already posses is higher than we would normally be comfortable with without a crisis.

I mostly meant that the war analogy is useful from a public perspective, because there are a lot of people who don't think in shades of grey, it's either war or peace, and to get them to do or accept what needs to be done, they need to be motivated.

A pandemic is a war of sort. A war in which medical staff are front line troops that will be put through a lot.

Getting transmission rates and new cases right down quickly requires sweeping, war-like measures and mindset. This failed because no-one has been willing to take them, and a significant portion of the public thinks that individual freedoms trump everything else.

There are a lot of issues with using war as a mindset. There is no enemy here, it is a natural disaster. There may not be an end, even with a vaccine this may never go away. I've seen how the War on Drugs, War on Poverty, and War on Terror have been absolute failures in my lifetime and promoted incorrect thinking on how to handle these issues, I do not want to see the same thing happen here.

Using war as a mindset is very apt: It means discipline, effort, thinking as a group, individual sacrifice. All positive and useful things when fighting a pandemic.

I don't see a problem with the term.

Edit: I'm puzzled by some of the replies and ideas on what being at war means.

It does mean solidarity, collaboration, cooperation, including extensive international collaboration. A prime example is WWII.

It think it is not unreasonable to call covid-19 an enemy that must be defeated if that focuses minds. It is in fact very common to use war-like analogies in campaigns against diseases. That includes smallpox and polio.

War means enemy, killing, strict hierarchy, dehumanizing the enemy, us vs. them mindset. We need a collaborative, cooperative, understanding approach for dealing with this.

In your response to your edit I think you have a very rosy view of war. WW2 involved setting cities on fire, locking up ethnic minorities because of their ancestry, and forcing removal of people from one country on the other based on their ethnicity and language. And all of that was on the part of the U.S.

Assuming OP is an American...

Warning, generalizations ahead: Unfortunately you really can't take coordinated, collective political action on anything in the USA unless you pretend it's a "war". That's why we name things like "War on Drugs" and "War on Terror". The only way you can even hope to convince Americans to put their political team aside and get behind an idea is to convince them that they are fighting a war against some kind of enemy. So I can understand the attempt to label this a war--the intentions are good.

IME as an American calling something as a war is a way for the people calling it that to start demanding a lot of power and money and casting their opponents as soft. I don't want to see a Patriot Act/AUMF equivalent for the Coronavirus.

A war means an enemy you need to shoot at and ultimately defeat. An enemy power that want to take something (or refuses you take something) and that you need to subdue and negotiate with. The point of a war is never to exterminate a people or species. Modern asymmetric warfare already stretches the concept, but it is entirely unhelpful here.

Everything you mention should exist even without a war, it is just the foundation of a civilised society. Rule of law by definition requires us to discipline ourselves. There are plenty of situations besides playing soldier where we work with others towards a common great goal.

Seeing everything as a war just reinforces black-and-white thinking and seeing everything as a zero-sum game, when the times call for solidarity and international collaboration. We need the opposite of the knee jerk phony patriotism and nationalism that get exacerbated by all this tough talking. It is a natural disaster, not a war.

We have analogies that work. We eradicated smallpox and went almost there with polio. There is no need to find ennemies.

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