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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

We're starting to see just how misguided the US was by not taking lockdown seriously early on and pushing to keep the economy going despite the long-term risks to mortality and commerce.

Here we are months later, and ground zero for the epidemic seems to largely be operating business-as-usual while the US is still seeing ~1k deaths per day as we approach flu season. I was watching an Aussie rules football game the other day and they're allowing fans back in the stands. I couldn't dream of going to a sports event in many areas of the US right now.

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It is entirely feasible to keep things going on, as long as you have a high enough level of testing (not just people with symptoms) and strong contact tracing. We have neither.

And we don't seem to be making very rapid progress towards having significantly higher levels of testing in most of the US.

On top of that, I got tested last month and it took 6 days to get the results, 7 from day of scheduling the appointment. Doesn't matter how many tests we perform if they're rendered nearly-useless by being out-of-date by the time they come back. In fact, I worry about "security theater" use of these that falsely give a sense of confidence.

You have higher levels of testing than pretty much any other major country on the planet, from all the figures I've seen. The easiest demonstration is just going to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and sorting by tests per capita. (The UK is similar and Russia is better on paper but their figures have been extremely fishy even by global standards. China's testing seems to be heavily concentrated on high-profile stuff like testing all of Wuhan and Beijing; they've tested less overall, and there's been weird incidents like patients hospitalized with symptoms in a region already known to be a hotspot not getting tested promptly and entirely missing an outbreak elsewhere until it spilled over into Beijing.)

The reason you don't seem to be making progress is that no matter how much progress there is, your press has worked very hard to convince you that the necessary level of testing is always much higher than you currently have and you're uniquely failing to achieve it because of Trump. They use techniques like carefully only comparing the amount of testing to countries you're worse than, not comparing overall testing levels at all and instead falsely claiming test positivity levels were a measure of overall testing (by that point it mostly measured infection levels - the number of tests required to test, say, everyone with symptoms is almost entirely unaffected by the number of Covid infections unless you have so many of them your healthcare system is collapsing), and most recently literally using the fact that you've tested more to make it look like you're doing worse: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html

For context, the big reason the US has "five times as many cases as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined" is because you've been testing massively more than Europe, Japan and South Korea did during their outbreaks, and people are only counted if they're tested. European testing was particularly bad - from what I could tell, the countries with big outbreaks basically only tested people who were hospitalized, and the much higher test positivity rates and hospitalization and death rates amongst confirmed cases seemed to confirm this. That won't show up so well on more recent overall stats because everyone did plenty of testing after the outbreaks had died down, though still not at US levels. Though with the way European and South Korean cases are picking up that might change. (For bonus points, the other thing that article uses to prove that the US is a unique failure is the length of its outbreak... after everyone had been pushing for "flatten the curve" which literally extends the length of the outbreak.)

This isn't correct. Europe has lower test positivity rates than the US. We'd need to conduct 3-5x more tests to have the same number of tests per positive case as Europe.

I beg to differ. We still have no idea which policy will prove correct in the long run because the Covid-19 timeline (6–8 months) is still too short. It's not outside the realm of possibility that letting the virus burn through the population is more beneficial; it's possible that in 2-3 years the United States will have herd immunity and Covid-19 is in the back-mirror, while countries that followed China's model still has to shut down cities relatively frequently as outbreaks inevitable occur.

And note that this isn't a "oh maybe in the future" thing - coronavirus lockdowns in China never stopped, they just fell out of the news cycle. The city of Urumqi has been under full lockdown for the past month or so.

Have we reached herd immunity against other coronaviruses?

Influenza type ZZ-plural-Zα?

Yes. Herd immunity doesn't mean that the disease is eradicated, just that outbreaks are self-containing. We don't see cases where the existing coronaviruses spread suddenly across an entire city, and they're deadly enough to at-risk populations that we'd notice if it happened.

It's a bit of reductionist false dichotomy. I think it's fair to say that China is putting a decent amount of weight on vaccine development as well.

>I was watching an Aussie rules football game the other day and they're allowing fans back in the stands

What other day? Victoria is totally locked down. Melburnians can't leave 5k from their homes, and they may only go outside for 1 hour per day for solo exercise or collecting essentials, or be subject to arrest.

They're all being played outside of the state of Victoria, as was organised.

I'm in Melbourne and while I 'may be subject to arrest' if I violate the rules, I am not in fear when I move about outside. Like I could go walk about the streets for the next 8 hours before curfew and I highly doubt I would attract any police attention unless I did something stupid.

On top of that the police here aren't really like the US police.

Welding folks into their homes was a bit extreme... but at least they can get back to their normal lives now! /s

No need for /s, judging by some comments made above Australians are as happy to house-arrest thousands of their fellow citizens with no trial, no anything, just because said citizens happened to live in the same building as some other people who got the virus. And all this is presented as healthy competition with neighboring New Zealand.

If someone would have told me one year ago that this discourse would have been seen as normal in a non-dictatorship country like Australia I would have branded said person as a lunatic.

It's additionally ridiculous that New Zealand is being hailed as a paragon of responsibility when all they have to do (as a comparatively small population island) is the courageous, genius act of stopping the planes /s

And these fans have gladly taken to the stands haven’t they?

You cannot have a nanny state and a free country at the same time. This is the sort of thing you have to accept and live with.

At this point anyone still complaining about “covidiots” is severely misguided at the general level of proaction/intelligence/mentality of people, and how it translates into having a stable, productive society. Learning to live with it should be groundwork for anyone who actually wants to do bigger things in life than just a 9-5.

As much as I love the panic and the incessant doom posting from every which way, the stark reality is that everyone’s time is running out anyway. The panic, when not driven to sell clicks, is driven by people who haven’t had an awakening with what it means to be mortal.

Upside: I do hope more people pick up general life philosophy and stop shopping and drinking as a means of ignoring their purpose in life, but I doubt that will happen.

How does someone find "their purpose in life"?

For a non-trivial amount of people, it seems like a serious confrontation with death does it. For others, tuning out the distractions might offer some space for new things to come into their day-to-day lives that make them question as to why they haven't done it sooner.

> You cannot have a nanny state and a free country at the same time. This is the sort of thing you have to accept and live with.

You have to live with hemorrhaging 1000 lives daily to be free?

A number like that in a vacuum is absolutely meaningless. The death rate in 2020 vs. historical averages is much lower in the US compared to the UK, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, etc., but if you believe the media uncritically you'd think that America is a hellhole with people dying on the streets from Covid-19, when in fact that's just not the case. Our response was better than Europe's. We wear masks at a higher rate than other countries.

https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/17/upshot/corona...

>> Our response was better than Europe's.

US's response to covid-19 was better than all countries in the whole of Europe?

Or, did you mean to say the US's response was better than Europe's, on average?

In what way was it better?

How high does the death rate have to be until you'd be willing to enforce stay-at-home?

Let’s start at higher than 3x the flu. And a lower average age than 78-years-old.

If we're going to pass legislation based on death rate, why don't we start with heart disease?

Heart disease kills 647k people per year, for consistency shouldn't we also mandate exercise and outlaw junk food?

> but if you believe the media uncritically you'd think that America is a hellhole with people dying on the streets from Covid-19

But, in reality, they're dying in their homes because Americans are too afraid of surprise hospital fees ruining their entire life.

> Our response was better than Europe's

Americans had the brunt of the European and Chinese outbreaks to observe, learn, and listen, but none of these things come easy to us, so we instead decided to sacrifice our non-remote workers.

Also, according to the ECDC, there have so far been 179,793 total deaths in the EU [1] vs 169,870 in the US [2]. In terms of cases 1 946 748 for the EU, 5,422,242 for the US. Keep in mind the population of the EU is roughly 40% larger than the US.

We could also probably start looking into food insecurity rates increasing, eviction rates increasing, widespread civil unrest, but, hey, why throw more tinder onto the fire? The response has been exceptional, but in a brutally American way.

[1] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/cases-2019-ncov-eueea [2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/case...

"Hey Internet Stranger, here's a bunch of non-sequiturs that get to the crux of my real belief that AMERICA BAD!!! Try to prove me wrong, haha"

Could you please stop posting flamewar or political battle-style comments to HN? This is unsubstantive, baity stuff, and not what HN is for.

The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. That goes regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The epidemic is not just about mortality, the disease could severely impact your quality of life without killing you.

That’s true for the flu, as well. Can you name all of the long-term complications of the flu without looking them up?

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