Ten countries kept out Covid, but did they win?

Agreed. I’ve been quite taken aback, seeing HN’s response to Covid threads. I’ve always assumed the community was willing to ask tough questions and entertain alternative points of view that are backed by data, but with Covid there’s a complete unwillingness to think about anything other than “deaths bad, lockdown good”. It’s a shame that more nuanced comments get voted down so hard as they’re important to discuss too.

My theory: There must be something about us tech industry types that makes a ‘germaphobic’ response more likely. For instance, the WHO have said there’s no point wiping down food packaging because it just isn’t a vector for the virus. Yet I’ve seen dozens of HN comments about doing this and/or leaving groceries in quarantine for days. It really isn’t rational or logical and yet it’s this response that gets the support of the community. Very strange.

There is a mix of arguments and opinions in this post, in my view some are totally debatable (ie, very unlikely that everyone in NYC has been in contact with the virus, or the 'flat out wrong' characterization of the initial data), and some are totally agreeable (ie, why the issue, and the discussion of it, is political and should be debated).

But at the end of the day, is a comment that is not insulting or attacking anyone or other political positions, so why the downvotes? If it is because some people dont like any questioning of the goverment's response to the covid-19 pandemic (as vary as it is in the world) then those are just proving the point that some views are "basically ostracized and chased away as if they were flat earther or antivaxxer" which is a very very dangerous path to be in.

Combine that with a refusal to do (or for the government to enforce) simple, easy things that reduce spread even in otherwise relatively normal life (masks), and you get a situation that will require a longer, more painful response than if we did the more invasive stuff early on.

> there's quite a difference in Italy for example from the "hundreds new cases a day" in march, with a unknown size pool of undetected cases, and "hundred new cases a day" but everyone else is fine and contact tracing will find the rest.

I think you're also underestimating the difference a bit. It went from 5,000 new cases per day to ~100 per day, although there's since been an uptick to around 1000 cases per day.

But the level of containment in those nations is such that its generally safe to have offices open. Less so in most of the US.

And similar logic can be applied to many other countries struggling with obesity (latino, south east asians and so on).

Now we put in cardiovascular, lung and immunity issues. Add older people. And suddenly its not 1% but much, much larger group.

> Most of the terrible economic outcomes have been due to the lockdowns not the actual deaths.

First, it's not lockdowns vs deaths. The biggest factor by far in the US was the existence of the virus. https://privwww.ssrn.com/abstract=3631180

"While overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 percentage points of this. Individual choices were far more important"

But you don't need a fancy study. States that didn't have lockdowns saw similar economic declines to other states, even though they should have experienced a boom on the border as people traveled in to do business if it was the lockdown.

Second, deaths are not the only cost. People get sick, too, and it's a pretty big deal for many of them even if you don't see it on TV. It's possible they'll have permanent organ damage and shorter lives. Those people call in sick, or worse, they go to work and get others sick.

Third, if you let it get out of control, you overwhelm the hospital system. It's hard to see how that helps.

Probably anomalies. We're talking small, small population groups on isolated islands.

I mean it's possible there is a Polynesian DNA thing that helps make them resistant, sort of a smallpox-in-reverse advantage, but my money says it's just because 1) super isolated, and 2) because of point 1 they can very effectively filter traffic and quarantine those who are questionable.

In these cases or many others where a developing country shied away from heavy-handed lockdown, government support of the type you mention is nearly nonexistent. That you take its existence for granted suggests to me that you yourself live in a place where there is support and simply assume it should be the case anywhere (it's not).

The same for the taxes you mention for social support. Sure, the taxes some developer pays in California, or the UK, or New York or X developed place might be used to help social benefits programs in that place. In many if not most other places in the world though, any collected taxes for social programs are mismanaged, often stolen or simply don't exist in the first place. Again, that's how much of the world actually is, most of its people very definitely don't have much access to government support or public healthcare.

I speak from experience here by the way, living in a large developing country with a famously corrupt government at all levels, and 60% of its 130 million person population living day to day, hand-to mouth. I can't even begin to image the social and even humanitarian catastrophe of full lockdown here had it been applied (fortunately it wasn't despite the pressures of COVID deaths). Even partial quarantine has been damaging enough.

I don't even understand the meaning of your last sentence. This isn't about "weakly collapsing" at the first sign of trouble, it's about the hard math of what inevitably happens if you force-stop daily outdoor economic activity in any country with a majority population that must engage in exactly such activity in order to keep from literally going hungry.

Of course, almost every economy is printing money as there is no tomorrow, diluting current assets dramatically, and who will suffer that most are those with fixed income like pensionist. Is a very very bad scenario that we are getting into it.

In the US, people wonder how markets are growing since the beggining of the pandemic despite the colossal impact in the real economy, there are many reasons but my contention is that people should take that growth as the new baseline of value, and see how their assets compare with that growth. The difference is how much value your assets lost in that timeframe. Printing money is the magic invisible taxation that most people don't see or complain until its too late.

[0] Maybe Norway and its massive sovereing fund is an exception, but the fund took an over 100B USD loss in the first quarter of 2020, and it will be a lot worse in the second. Even that sovereing fund, which is the gold global standard for a rainy day state fund, can be depleted very quickly with the current scenario