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Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

It's almost like forcing businesses not to do business causes them to go out of business..

Shocking.

It's not guaranteed that keeping businesses operating would stop them going out of business either. It's possible that a better strategy is to force everyone to shut down and get it over with quickly, so that customers can feel comfortable going out and spending money again.

force everyone to shut down and get it over with quickly

On a purely factual point, the way to get it over with quickly is not to stop people coming in to close contact with one another. Everyone seems to have forgotten what the original and only purpose for the lockdown was: to avoid overwhelming hospitals.

I don’t think that’s as purely factual as you make it out to be. Maybe that was the purpose for the US, but other countries did it for the purpose of eradication (eg New Zealand) or to get it to a point that the contact tracing workload was manageable. The hospital capacity threshold is just one of many arbitrary targets.

It's not entirely arbitrary - the fact that the US is not a small island about 1000 miles from its nearest neighbour seems to comprehensively eliminate the New Zealand-style elimination option, given the trouble they're having with it. Like, even if you assume an equally competent lockdown in the US would have the exact same per-capita chances of infections slipping through from outside, with no disadvantage from the porous southern land border with a country that has a major outbreak, it still has 100 times the population. Which means that rather than causing a new major imported cluster once in 100 days, the leaks which the New Zealand government can't identify, fix, and reckons are likely an inherent limitation that they'll just have do deal with would cause them roughly daily. That means no elimination, not even if the numbers worked out slightly better than my rough estimate. And remember, New Zealand was the last big, well-known elimination success story left standing.

Canada manages pretty well with a "porous southern land border with a country that has a major outbreak". I wonder what the difference is. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/i-crossed-...

100x the size is neither beneficial nor harmful when controlling a pandemic. As demonstrated by the US’s successful reduction in spread before opening things up again.

0.9 new cases per existing case and it goes away. 1.1 new cases per existing case and it grows uncontrollably. There isn’t a true middle ground.

It doesn't even make sense to talk about cases per existing case for imported cases, because by definition they're not caused by existing cases within the country. Like, maybe that could help tame down the clusters from those imported cases, but then you have to impose lockdown restrictions indefinitely and lose one of the big benefits of elimination over the "try and keep R just below 1.0" strategy - being able to lift those restrictions and avoid the ongoing economic and social damage they cause.

Also, I think that in reality this isn't actually as scale-free as the nice simplified models suggest, and having 100x the population would make it harder to stamp out spread within the country. Remember, the number of cases per existing case isn't some fundamental physical constant - it's an average over a bunch of different opportunities for transmission with wildly varying expected numbers of new cases per existing case. 100x the scale means 100x the opportunities for low-probability superspreading events that ruin your day.

Reproduction rates is below 1 mean a small number of new cases from minor outbreaks or border crossings are effectively meaningless. The US is currently reducing the number of active infections with poorly implemented social distancing and minimal mask usage. DisneyWorld for example is open and without becoming a hotspot of infections.

Reaching that point 4 months ago was a completely reasonable goal. Sure, our current situation is improved by some herd immunity, but that’s far from the only effect in play.

The economic devastation here in Iowa seems objectively less severe than in states that locked down more completely.

People shit on Iowa at every turn for our pandemic response, but we've got a functioning economy and a whopping 3% of our population has tested positive for the virus so far.

Unfortunately, Iowa also has a relatively high positive test rate, which indicates that most cases there aren't being tested.

When your economy does not have as far to fall before it becomes tragic I guess the drop doesn't feel too bad. Iowa's pandemic response has been pathetic and between Covid Kim pushing for opening things up while the state continues to see increased growth of covid cases and a senator who claims there have only been 10K covid deaths I think Iowa has absolutely nothing to feel good about. I keep calling back to parents who are rightfully afraid to go out with the large number of maskless morons walking around town while oblivious neices and nephews enjoy house parties in Ames and Iowa City for the first week of classes.

You are less than two weeks from a peak of covid cases being diagnosed, schools are being pushed to open, and at this point it is no longer a question of whether you will see new covid diagnosis peaks by the end of the month but rather how high it will jump.

There are states that have had good responses to the pandemic, Iowa is not one of them.

> There are states that have had good responses to the pandemic, Iowa is not one of them.

I work in Ames and live in the next town over.

As I said before, and as I will repeat any time it comes up, for a place that is supposedly doing "everything wrong", there is very little impact on daily life.

As in, literally zero.

You wear a mask to the store. Other than that, life continues mostly as before.

People are in my opinion making a serious mistake holding Iowa up as the picture of failure because Coronavirus is literally a non-event in most people's lives here.

I've been told for months now that we're on the cusp of everything going wrong.

It's been one big nothing after another.

We're just looking at the data and making comparisons to similar situations that have played out elsewhere in the country. That it doesn't affect you right now is irrelevant to the public health concerns. The whole point is to make sure it doesn't affect you.

And all I'm saying is whatever models you are looking at are blatantly wrong.

I've been told every time it comes up since April that Iowa is on the cusp of being the next New York given how terribly we're handling everything.

It hasn't happened.

It's not going to happen.

You sound like an anti-vaxxer.

Maybe you're right, but you're missing the point.

Your post seems more like you are hoping that Iowa is going to suffer some terrible epidemic of cases, rather than talking about the data. You are speaking from the point of view of your parents, who are likely scared. For vulnerable people, they still really shouldn't be going out, and they have every right to be worried. But at some point, we have to say that the majority of the population that is very likely not going to be as negatively affected can be allowed to live their lives.

Looking at the number of cases in Iowa, they are slowly ticking up, but cases are a terrible way to determine if covid is getting to be a problem. You need to look at percentage testing positive, hospitalizations and deaths. And if Iowa is anything like California, Florida, and Texas, there will be a spike in cases among younger people, and a slow increase in hospitalizations. But it won't be as bad as everyone pretends it is, and in many cases, it won't help to start locking things down again or for the first time, you'll simply push the curve out. Nearly the same number of people will get sick, just over a longer time frame. In fact, that was the whole point of flattening the curve, it wasn't to stop covid, it was to push the cases out so that our healthcare system is not overwhelmed. The area under the curve would likely be similar to a non-flattened curve.

I don't see any evidence that Iowa will be overwhelmed, but perhaps you have better data that you can point to that shows everything going wrong.

Only in countries with no functioning federal government to take care of workers.

In countries with a functioning government non-essential businesses shut down fully but temporarily and the government ensured people got the basic necessities without being forced to go out in public and spread the disease.

But... but someone has to produce all these basic necessities while all the businesses are shut down?

Hence the "non-essential" qualifier in their sentence.

Yeah, that worldwide pandemic sure is a pain in the ass.

Don’t worry, we did the same thing in the 1920’s when we had a pandemic that targeted the youth, and was far more deadly, regardless of comorbidities...oh wait, we didn’t...

We also suppressed knowledge of it early on due to the war. That’s literally why it’s called the Spanish Flu, as a non-belligerent they were the only ones willing to report about it.

If we did nothing, over 2 million would have died.

We have only had 190k deaths, so we saved 90% of the people that were going to die to date.

> If we did nothing, over 2 million would have died.

We absolutely cannot know that.

I mean, we saw this pattern also in 2010, but then there was no government enforced lockdown, so it is a bit disingenuous of you to blame this on the lockdown it self.

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