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Comment by miketery | Hacker News Reader

It's all about risk. Humans are terrible at understanding probability. There must be a threshold where it becomes ok to take on the risk (e.g. driving a car everyday for most Americans). So where is that threshold?

Another way to think about it is, what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years? What activities do we allow and under what new mode of operation / conditions?

It might be the case that opening schools for younger ages with 2 shifts to reduce density (2 weeks in person, 2 weeks from home) could have an acceptable risk profile.

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> Another way to think about it is, what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years? What activities do we allow and under what new mode of operation / conditions?

Then we'd actually put real effort into controlling it so we could go back to life as normal even with the virus not fully eradicated.

The problem with all of these simple "risk profile" analyses is that we as a country are being forced to accept risk we don't have to. With cars, we understand there is some amount of risk but also we as a society also care about those deaths and make tons of regulations and improvements to make driving safer. As such, death rates have fallen over the decades even as miles driven have accelerated.

Whereas with the pandemic we seemingly are just accepting high death rates and hoping for the best instead of putting in the level of effort to fix it. That makes it not just about risk tolerance, but frustration with the level of concern the country is putting into fixing the problem.

> Then we'd actually put real effort into controlling it so we could go back to life as normal even with the virus not fully eradicated.

ok now imagine the virus lives on surfaces for 5+ years and never dies. now what? you can’t eradicate this virus by quarantining, someone, and it only takes one, is going to spread it somehow.

now answer with that in mind. “we would just fix it” is a cop out, we can’t fix it.

Your comments are all dead and I vouched for this one, but it's clear from your comment history why. Nobody likes reading "angry programmer" comments here because you're just not special around here, so nobody has to bear the cost of your malice in order to divine the meaning behind your words. "Shut the fuck up" and "delete your account" are really intolerable, stupid ass comments for HN, and if your response to this is that you know but you don't care, I would suggest finding a technical community that places more emphasis on free speech absolutism (like EFNet maybe) than just wasting bandwidth as you are here on HN.

You can see the death rate dropping while cases are dramatically going up which one could argue is that exact mitigation happening.

Masks, sanitation, and distance have likely lowered the overall viral load even if one does contract it. Obviously higher testing rates contribute to the decreasing death rate but given the blind studies from asia I don't think it would be that drastic of a reduction.

It gives me some hope we can lower the risk enough to have children interact with the caveat being adults actually enforce masks/sanitation/distance.

The big question marks are "Long COVID", which I haven't seen mentioned about kids (so, good news?), and ADE reaction (Antibody Dependent Enhancement , of the virus) which we'll see in the second wave, when people get re-infected.

I think this is textbook confirmation bias. When you have two seemingly equivalent theories (the threat of C-19 is serious vs overblown), you select the one that is more convenient for your worldview.

Mr. and Mrs. Applecart both have full-time jobs and four children; they don't have time to home-school and wouldn't know how if they did. Their lives would be more functional if the threat is overblown, so they believe the threat is overblown.

Mrs. and Mr. Bandersnatch work in the mining industry. If scientists are correct, the fossil fuel industry is going to lead to climate collapse within about twenty years. Their livelihoods depend on oil extraction. They have a vested interest in being skeptical of scientific authority.

As someone else here pointed out, the study doesn't seem to factor economic security. I bet you would find a very strong correlation between economic security and willingness to keep children at home that would cross political lines.

(yes, I know, confirmation bias cuts both ways)

> yes, I know, confirmation bias cuts both ways

Indeed. I suspect people who are adamant for more aggressive lockdowns are those who have good WFH options and good job security.

... and who ought to be advocating for better social safety nets for everyone. I feel a lot of the "get back to normal" fighters are failing to imagine a sensible social safety net that might enable a lot more people to remain home/locked down.

That's an easy allegation to throw out. Someone can advocate for a social safety net and still have bills due next month.

Risk and uncertainty go hand-in-hand. It’s clear what the risks are, generally, with cars. It’s unclear what the risks are with a novel pathogen.

If its unclear yet then don't shut down school ? Its clear that there are risk of closing school.

> what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years?

What societies have done throughout history for diseases like smallpox, polio, malaria, tuberculosis, the flue, etc. Essentially, we learn to accept it.

Yes, I know, eventually a vaccine was found for smallpox, etc., but those diseases had been around for centuries (millennia?). Only very recently have we found ways to deal with them.

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