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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

> and I think "my kids dying horribly in a resource war or food riot".

I still think "I'll believe it when I see it". Scientists are very good at making apocalyptic predictions based on theoretical worst case scenarios, but reality just never seems to match said predictions. In reality, stuff happens more slowly on much longer timescales.

Just look at covid - back in March, the predictions were pretty dire - it was predicted millions were going to die in the US alone... 6 months later it turned out it wasn't nearly as deadly as we thought and a lot of measures we took (like SIP, shutting down economy, etc.) probably caused more harm than good.

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At the end of March, Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted between 100,000 and 200,000 US residents would die of COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic[0]. Now, only at mid-September, we're closer to his upper limit. Not to mention flu season's coming, and we're seeing outbreaks as schools and universities reopen. So that prediction was probably too conservative.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

Dr. Fauci was just one voice in many at the time. It's easy to pick out the most accurate voice in retrospect.

Take a look at this HN thread from 6 months ago. People in the comments were extrapolating CDC/WHO statements and predicting millions of Americans were going to die.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552137

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548715

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548952

Random HN commenters vs a leading expert on infectious diseases?

Assuming everyone has the same expertise is also one way climate change deniers sow doubt about the science behind carbon emissions.

Let's start by clarifying something. There are two uses for predictions: making decisions based on the knowledge that something will be X units by a specific date (e.g. buying stocks), or making decisions to avoid something becoming X by that date (e.g. planning interventions). Nearly all predictions of COVID-19 death tolls are the latter. They're meant to predict the outcome if all things remain the same so we can decide if something more needs done. If we respond to predictions by changing behavior, and the eventual number is lower, that's a good thing. The prediction worked. The model assumed no change, so you can't use reality after a change to dismiss the model.

Your link is a discussion about a news report from March 11th, before the US and state governments started taking drastic actions. I'm not surprised the model predicted dire results and was followed by drastic action.

He's not just the most accurate, he's also the designated official responsible for coordinating the nationwide covid response. You're comparing him to randos on HN making armchair extrapolations.

I'm highly skeptical of your claims, nearly 200,000 people have died of covid, despite having shutdown the country. You've presented no information to suggest that the scientific consensus that millions would likely have died without the measures we went through is false.

I wonder what would have happened if we gave a 2 week advanced notice for people to stock up, and then shut everything down 100% for 4 weeks straight. Would we have been out of this whole mess by now as opposed to this lingering?

I think for starters this would never happen in the current US both due to a lack of political will and highly varying circumstances (things were fine in Texas at the start, why would they lock down?). Not to even mention legal challenges. I believe people would need to be dropping dead nationwide to the tune of one in a hundred or thousand per week for this to happen here.

But even if we could I don't think it would save us for some of the following reasons, though it might have bought us a couple week or month reset. However, if this were followed up by strict adherence to social distancing, mask usage, and restrictions on social and work gatherings, we'd likely be in a much better place than we are now.

Completely eradicating the virus when there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases seems unlikely to me. Enough cases are likely to persist through propagating within large households, cases with extended infectious time period (I'm not sure how likely this is? It seems to me like it should be possible for some cases to remain infections for longer than normal periodas of time, but I haven't read anything about this), and people not following the guidelines to give a sizable enough base for the virus to recuperate. And even if some areas do eliminate it, it can come back through domestic or international travel.

Right around the time shelter in place orders took effect, supermarkets were sold out of various items. Toilet paper was the most infamous one, but depending where you were, you might also have had a hard time finding chicken and canned soup, for example. It goes to show that the supply chain is decidedly not prepared to handle the event of the entire population suddenly decicing to stock up on provisions for extended periods of time.

We wouldn't be. The countries that control the coronavirus with shutdowns have had to continually impose new shutdowns as cases arise. I'm not saying policy doesn't matter, but I don't think any country is or could have been out of the mess right now.

Yes, for covid.

For climate, we seem to be moving along faster than expected for many measures. Ice loss is trending with worst-case predictions to give the most recent example I can think of. https://www.sciencealert.com/ice-sheet-melting-is-perfectly-....

IPCC reports explicitly _do not_ consider self-sustaining positive feedback mechanisms, which seems concerning.

The thing is, when it comes to climate change, those predictions are often a best case scenario given the evidence. They assume that we will take the necessary measures, which we have been falling way short of doing for decades. We now only have a narrow window within which to take extreme measures to keep to those best case scenarios, if we are lucky.

With covid, many followed the suggested measures, so we avoided extreme results where the appropriate precautions were taken. The fact that scientists predicted doom and gloom and many people actually did what scientists recommended to avoid it shows that we should be following their recommendations for the climate too. In the case of covid, it was in the interest of short term political/corporate outcomes that we did something. Climate acts on longer timescales so we continue to see inaction...

A lot of it isn't even scientists, it's media picking up the most extreme opinions, distorting them to make a vague possibility sound like certainty or to make them sound worse than the actual prediction, then amplifying them for the clicks.

Agreed with your first paragraph. I don't think your comment about covid makes much sense (200K+ dead in 6 months is pretty damn dire).

> 200K+ dead in 6 months is pretty damn dire

Disagree. At least 450k die per year of preventable health conditions (lung cancer + obesity) and nobody bats an eye (that's 4.5M deaths per decade). The flu alone kills orders of magnitude more than covid over longer timelines. A once-in-a-lifetime virus kills medically compromised people at elevated rates for 6 months and people lose their minds? It's not rational.

The spanish Flu killed about 600k Americans. We're on target to hit 400k+ by January. So, it's a safe bet we'll beat the Spanish Flu by next spring.

These are people who didn't need to die, who wouldn't have died for another reason. Do you really place such a low price tag on people's lives? What if it were your life, would you gladly sacrifice it?

> The spanish Flu killed about 600k Americans.

USA population was also only 100M in 1918. So 600k back then was .6% of the total population. So far covid has killed .06% of the total population, or one order of magnitude less.

Spanish flu pandemic lasted a little over 2 years, we are just now coming up on 8 months.

Out of morbid curiosity, how would you describe 200K+ dead from a contagious disease in 6 months? I'm sticking with "pretty damn dire".

It's not like covid can continue at this rate... there are only so many people with comorbidity or otherwise compromised health. In the year 2030 we will look back and say:

"Over the past 10 years, covid killed (on average) X people per year, and the flu killed (on average) Y people per year"

Do you predict X or Y will be the higher number? Because I predict Y will be the higher number. And if not in the decade timeframe, certainly Y would be higher in the century timeframe.

So, "it's just fat and sick people that are dead, and they'll all be gone soon enough, who cares"?

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