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Rental properties are an investment, why in the world would we subsidize investment losses? The fault is having housing for the majority of people classified as a financial instrument. There is no scenario where the landlords should be compensated.

Also your argument that they imposed lockdowns that were economically destructive and caused death is exactly the opposite of what we know to be true as evidenced by the countries that successfully implemented lockdowns initially and slowed the spread. It's these types of mental gymnastics that represent our failure as a nation to combat this.

Why is Sweden back below normal excess mortality if lockdown works so well? Somehow everyone in “your camp” refused to accept evidence that the herd immunity strategy does work. Note Sweden should have done a better job with their elderly care facilities - but so should have New York and California.

The continued belief in this herd immunity bullshit by people who apparently cannot comprehend basic statistics is simply beyond me. Sweden fucked up. They choked on this one, big time. Their excess mortality was far in excess of their neighbors and the Swedes know it. They killed thousands of their own citizens and did not even get the economic benefit that they had hoped for. The only morons who still think that Sweden performed admirably are right-wing Americans desperate to pretend that lockdowns don't work.

Sorry, are we looking at different statistics? From [1] I see that Sweden death rate is somewhere between that of France and Italy.

I wouldn't call it "admirably", but not a "choked up" either. Just in the middle of the pack.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

EDIT: You weren’t even replying to me. I’m sorry for totally misinterpreting your whole comment. That’s what I get for being on mobile.

Leaving my comment up cause the points themselves are still valid

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(1) Middle of the pack while having never locked down is incredible. Most pro-lockdown people still trot out Ferguson’s model which predicts about .8% of the entire population dying.

(2) You didn’t really look at the number I said to. Look at excess mortality over time. Sweden at this point had no excess mortality. They are done with COVID mortality.

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Unfortunately there is a vested interest in ignoring Sweden’s success. They fucked up the nursing homes, Tegnell has said as much, but they got the important part right: they NEVER locked down and COVID-19 mortality is no longer a thing.

Sweden with a lower population density and actually having meaningful warning about what was about to happen vs. Italy who took the brunt of the more virulent first wave? Yeah, Sweden failed. Take a look at the map on your own link and you will see Sweden as a dark blue failure surrounded by light blue neighbors who succeeded at containing the spread.

Herd immunity is a natural emergent phenomenom. I don’t know how your “side” has suddenly decided it’s a myth. It’s just math.

BTW, you never answered my question about how Sweden’s mortality is back at or below baseline in the absence of lockdowns nor universal masking. All you did was screech angrily about politics, not realizing that it is the lockdown-loving camp that made this whole thing about about politics over public health policy.

The bullshit is that Sweden has reached herd immunity. People in this thread clearly understand that there is a certain level of population immunity where R₀ goes below 1, they are arguing that Sweden has not reached the point where things are 'normal' and R₀=1, they are taking various measures to control the virus, and the rate of spread will go up if they relax those measures. That's not unqualified 'herd immunity', it's not even close.

(https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-decline-coronavirus-d... discusses some of the things that Sweden is doing, which are indeed largely voluntary)

I'll chalk it up to an innocent typo, but you got the terminology wrong. R_0 means R(t) where t=0. In other words, it by definition means the basic reproduction number which does NOT account for any level of immunity.

R, or as I prefer to call it, R(t), is the number that factors in how many have immunity. So you mean herd immunity is when R(t) < 1.

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Anyway, I was having trouble understanding exactly what you were saying about Sweden, but to be clear, Sweden has hit herd immunity, unless you think that the utter absence of COVID mortality at this point is due to seasonality.

What you need to understand is that simplistic models view the population as homogenous, both in terms of mixing (social connections) AND susceptibility/transmissibility. Neither are true. Essentially, the people who tend to get infected sooner in the pandemic are the ones who tend to spread more, so the first, say, 10% of antibody prevalence is worth a lot more than the next 10%.

There's also the presence of pre-existing T-cell cross-reactivity; exposure to other hCoVs is protective against SARS-2. It seems that it does not protect infection, but it does make the disease course a non-issue: this probably explains the high degree of asymptomatic infection (with part of it just being explained as an artifact of the PCR cycle threshold fuckery). Technically these findings are already implicitly factored into the estimates we have for R_0, etc. (BTW, initial studies were claiming R_0 of 5.2, 5.5, etc, but now with more data it seems it's around 2, give or take)

Many, and I am in this category, believe that the true herd immunity threshold is somewhere around 20% of the population. That explains what we've seen in places like New York, Sweden, etc. This is lower than what the classic herd immunity formula would predict, because that formula does not account for a non-homogenously-mixed population (as I mentioned earlier), nor does it account for certain individuals having an innate genetic resistance that makes it less likely that they get infected.

Is Norway even more immune than Sweden then?

Ssshhhhhh.... Sweden can only be used as an example when you compare it to complete fuck-ups like the US or UK, or if you add in countries that were hit early before we knew how virulent covid-19 was and that it could be spread asymptomatically. If you put it into context with its similar neighbors then the failure of the herd immunity plan is laid bare.

So bad form to reply to one's own comment, but am I the only one who finds it quite ironic that today the Swedish PM was warning of a growing second wave there because people were not following social distancing suggestions and it turns out that they were not even close to achieving herd immunity.

Show me what Tegnell said. I haven't seen what the PM said but they almost certainly don't know what they're talking about.

BTW, this is what Sweden looks like now:

https://twitter.com/SeanCollins66/status/1309179008018513926

Sure, the PM didn't know what they are talking about, but an ill-informed rando on HN who clearly has no expertise in either medicine, epidemiology, or statistics is the one we should pay attention to... Case numbers are rising. Death rate still far in excess of Norway, Finland, or Denmark. Well, at least we get a no-name comic tweeting pictures of life in Sweden to prove our point. This whole conversation is such a waste of time.

> why in the world would we subsidize investment losses?

We do that all the time. Major industries are bailed out all the time by the government with negligible interest loans. We've literally done that in COVID times already.

We should have deferrals up the chain if the government is preventing people from working.

Punishing landlords seems like an odd choice, I’d begin with the CDC punishing themselves for testing lags and not forcing people to wear masks.

Like, imagine I have a bug in my Production hospital billing system, and instead of looking inwards, I decided to say “there is now a moratorium on car sales — they sell cars which cause accidents which land people in the hospital, to hell with the dealerships — those dealerships are investments and deserve to lose!

> Punishing landlords seems like an odd choice

That's a odd choice of words to describe policy that is preventing people from dying from exposure during the worst pandemic in a century.

> why in the world would we subsidize investment losses

Well, I think if you are changing the rules of the game, then you ought to compensate my losses.

The government essentially expropriating your investment is not a part of traditional risk profile.

Becausr you imposed those losses?

> Rental properties are an investment, why in the world would we subsidize investment losses?

Unless you can change the reality that rental properties are investments, making them artificially riskier will reduce new housing construction and lead to less affordable housing overall.

Investments are things you place a gamble towards. Stocks, Lottery, Bonds, Business and etc.

Once your investment has renters and a legal document it's a contract and a business. And the person that signed the lease made an agreement and the gamble is almost over, now the issues you have afterward are quite risky ( maintenance, evictions, and etc ). I am glad the CDC is stepping up to stop people from being kicked out during issues of business being closed. But a contract is in place which ends the fact its an investment and turns into a structured business.

> if they want to prevent evictions they need to pay the landlords what they’re owed

There is cognizable legal argument that this order might qualify as a 'taking' within the terms of the 5th amendment, which might require the government to compensate landlords, but I don't think that argument will be successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_...

Honestly, that argument seems plausible.

As an aside, I wish Jacobson v Massachusetts was never a thing. It opened such a big can of worms. Public health pseudocrises now allow our government to take on full emergency powers in perpetuity.

If the explanation you imply here (COVID deaths are just misclassified deaths that would have happened anyway) were true, then we’d see the overall all-cause death rate holding steady, as COVID-classified deaths replace other deaths and cause heart attacks etc to drop. In fact, we see the opposite - all cause mortality has risen substantially, even more than the COVID-classified deaths account for. In uncontrolled outbreaks like Spain, Italy, New York early this year we saw the death rate more than double. In controlled outbreaks like we have in the US now, it’s more like a 10-20% increase. Either way, it’s clear the COVID is causing a significant number of additional deaths.

I don’t deny that COVID has caused deaths, I am just stating that a huge chunk of these so-called COVID deaths are not. Excess mortality is real, I agree (altho not solely due to COVID obviously).

I believe that lockdown policies worsen COVID-19 mortality. Severe COVID-19 is an immunoregulatory disorder, and lack of vit d / nitric oxide, lack of exercise/sleep, unwarranted fear/anxiety, lack of socialization all make the immune system incapable of regulating itself properly.

So I believe we would have less COVID death amortized over a year without lockdown. Look at New York’s absurd mortality rate, it’s worse than having done nothing. (NY was iatrogenic harm from early invasive ventilation which in retrospect was a horrible idea, plus lockdown depriving people of sunlight and exercise, plus Cuomo’s famous nursing home gambit)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

+1 to __blockcipher__ 's points. Maybe in the beginning draconian measures might have been justified, but current panic over cases (casedemic) and continuing moral panic and lockdowns are not.

BTW, since there's not a good place to make this point, I wish more people understood that IFR is not this fixed thing. As a contrived example, if you get medical advancements that lead to half your population living to 200 years old, even the most pathetic common cold virus would appear to have a crazy high IFR.

I live in California, and every year our misguided leaders let wood and dry brush stack up like crazy. Every year wildfires erupt and every year we artificially suppress them. The result is there's a huge pile of fuel just waiting to go up.

Similarly, when you have a minor flu season for a couple years, you get a large population of elderly people that build up and are capable of being taken out by a pathogen like SARS-2.

SARS-2 already, even with the inflated death toll, is weak enough overall that we'd have barely noticed it (in our day-to-day lives) if we'd never knew it existed. But go back a few centuries to when it was rare to have people live past 60, and it would literally be an unnoticeable virus.

Anyway, that's enough rambling for now.

I can actually get behind a lot of what you say, but you go too claiming the death count is inflated. It is not.

You can look at excess mortality all around the world, and there are large, otherwise-unexplained spikes in mortality everywhere. Sweden has the same large spike in deaths from all causes.

I guess I should have spoken more clearly. There are real COVID deaths. Excess mortality is real. But a vast majority of the deaths classified as COVID deaths are not COVID deaths.

The problem is that if you die and are PCR-positive for COVID, that's a COVID death. We don't use that standard for any other disease because it's the wrong standard.

Once you get infected and recover, you still test PCR-positive for months afterwards even when you have NO viable SARS-CoV-2 inside your body. This is because the rt-PCR cycle threshold is set at 40-something when it should be 30 maximum. This means we're magnifying DNA by several orders of magnitude beyond where we should, and thus hitting on the presence of viral debris.

This is why, for example, George Floyd was PCR-positive despite having recovered from SARS-2 infection weeks or months earlier.

BTW, I also believe that lockdown increases COVID-19 mortality. Meaning if you do get infected you are more likely to die, since you've been stuck inside out of the sun, riddled with fear and anxiety, with almost all avenues for exercise closed down, etc. But like you said, in places that never locked down, like Sweden, there was still excess mortality.

BTW, I wish more people talked about life-years over lifes. Flu is a bimodal distribution; it kills the very young and very old. COVID kills the very old but not the very young. Look at the average age of death. I haven't ran the numbers but each COVID death probably only represents an average of 2, 3, 5 years of life lost. As opposed to a baby dying of the Flu, which would be 70+ years (picking the most extreme example of course).

Haven't the landlords suffered enough :(

I'll see you with reparations when we do it for the Tulsa massacre survivors and generally survivors of slavery.

Also survivors of Japanese concentration camps.

I seriously think those have a FAR higher precedent than landlords.

Even Sweden failed to engage in the common sense risk-stratification that experts have called for. They didn't even isolate nursing homes.

Sweden failed with that part, yes. But what they got right was not locking down.

Universal lockdown, ignoring constitutional rights for a second, increases the proportion of at-risk individuals who must get sick before herd immunity is reached.

If you have a population of 100 people, the HIT is 20% (assume homogenous mixing), of which half your population is high-risk and half is low-risk, you can enforce universal lockdown and end up with 10 high-risk and 10 low-risk infections, or you can encourage just the at-risk to isolate and end up with like 18 low-risk and 2 high-risk. It should be self evident which course is better.

Unfortunately the world has been tricked into viewing “herd immunity” as a dirty word as opposed to an emergent phenomenom.

You're right that 'asymptomatic' doesn't necessarily make sense when counting prevalence of a disease, but it does make sense when trying to contain that disease, as asymptomatic people can still be contagious. The metrics that have been published come from the context of trying to slow the spread, not from the context of counting the people most badly affected.

That’s fine, I agree. I disagree with containment as a strategy but IF you want to practice containment asymptomatic infection is relevant. Altho just so you know there is essentially no evidence that COVID-19 spreads asymptomatically. However I can point you to a bunch of studies strongly demonstrating pre-symptomatic spread (important distinction).

My point is COVID-19 stands for coronavirus infectious disease 2019. If you have no symptoms you have no disease. You don’t have COVID-19 without symptoms, you have a SARS-2 infection. The distinction is incredibly important.

landlords: we deserve to make lots of money because we risk our money when buying property

also landlords: we need a bailout from our risky investments

So if your grandma rents out her second house to someone, they should be allowed to live there rent-free past the eviction deadline?

I disagree. When a company goes under for a bad investment, they need to not be bailed out. But when the government comes in and says it’s illegal to work your job period, the government needs to pay all the lost income from that forced closure. That’s all I’m saying.

This loss is from (insane) government intervention, not a natural risk.

> if they want to prevent evictions they need to pay the landlords what they’re owed. Reparations.

Why should the government back up somebody's risky investment?

If you prefer it this way, they should pay the renters who should pay the landlords. Happy?

My point is the government should not make it illegal to generate income and then turn around and say that renters need to pay rent, but neither should they say that landlords must be stuck holding the bag.

Do people understand that landlords aren’t this mysterious class of evil overlords? They’re just people. I’ve taken evil landlords to small claims court before, but that doesn’t mean I think I should be entitled to live in someone’s house for free.

I am absolutely flabbergasted by how “billionaire” and “landlord” are now bad words.

I think its for good reason that “billionaire” and “landlord” are now bad words. It doesn't take a that much reading to see why the mere concept of a billionaire is horrible, for everyone. It is especially bad in context of wealth inequality and how many billionaire simply dont give back to the collective in any way and only horde mass amounts of wealth for themselves. It also requires only looking at the homeless statistic and the housing market to figure out that being a landlord is also pretty immoral, at least if you think that shelter and housing is a human right.

Bilionaires get wealthy by producing value and capturing some of it. They wouldn't have gotten that money if someone didn't pay them for a product or service.

The only exceptions are those who made fortunes via government monopolies, which is yet another example of why the State needs to have its power checked. Unrestrained capitalism is not the problem, crony capitalism is, and crony capitalism is a function of Statism.

I mean, I don't think they should, but they did it with the banks in 2008.

Ironically I disagree with that, I only think the government should pay reparations because the government literally caused the harm.

Although you can argue that the gov did punish banks for not loaning to low-income individuals. I’m rusty on those details. But you get the point.

Banks paid the loans back with a hefty interest on top.

You: The government messed it up. The government needs to fix it.

Government: Absolutely! We too would also like to become a larger socialist entity that puts everyone on the dole. We will fix it all for you! Just give us complete control!

That’s why I think we never should have forcably closed businesses in the first place. But once we did, it’s only right that they foot the bill.

How can you make it illegal to work and then demand someone pay rent? Neither is it fair to make landlords be stuck holding the bag.

Landlords probably should have considered this possibility when making their investment in rental property. They wouldn't be in this position had they left that home on the market for an actual resident to buy.

You don’t want to live in a society that is forever at risk of forced government closures. It drives up risk which drives up the necessary return for an investment to be worth it which makes starting new ventures prohibitively difficult. It makes thinking long-term impossible because you can’t risk hiring full time employees.

Here in California, my rock climbing gym, which has to pay sky-high rent, was closed down when we locked down 6+ months ago. When gyms were allowed to reopen they weren’t classified as a gym and somehow were never allowed to reopen. Now gyms are closed again anyway (thanks Newsom). It’s been like 7 months of them being completely closed while paying sky-high rent. They weren’t swimming in money before all this; rock climbing is a niche market. What was done to them is WRONG.

The government is broke. They will just have to take on more debt to make the proposed business "reparations." I think it's all gone. There's nothing that can fix what has happened to this nation... from the criminal monetary policies to this situation...America is gone.

>if they want to prevent evictions they need to pay the landlords what they’re owed

My landlord told me to get a second job after I got laid off. Maybe the landlords should get second jobs.

The landlord is providing you with resources. Nobody has a right to resources for free. Don’t you see the absurdity of your position?

If that's your position, then people will begin resorting to violence. Your property is only secured by force. Put the people in desperate situations and they will no longer play by the rules which put them at an extreme disadvantage.

This is the lesson every corrupt nation learns the hard way. We agree to the laws of the nation to secure peace, but when that peace becomes oppressive, when that peace means slavery to the oligarchy, that peace is no longer peace but silent war.

The people will not tolerate this extreme inequality anymore.

Edit: to those claiming what I've said is "hateful" or incendiary...this is simply the truth -- as proven by history. Don't shoot the messenger.

To anyone following this comment thread, this is exactly where the belief “others should be compelled to give me resources” leads. Thanks for illustrating where your hateful ideology ends up.

The person you're responding to can perform a similar dismissal of your comment. The only thing that you have illustrated is that it's easy to create straw men for each other to feel smug about, when you have no goal of understanding or finding common ground. Pushing an obtuse overly-simplistic narrative merely attracts others to respond in kind. No wonder we're headed towards civil war.

IMO the underlying don't-fight-your-fellow-citizen analysis here is that the debt treadmill has to bind up some time. Housing rent is at the first level, followed by mortgages, then muni bonds, wall st paper games, etc. All these levels of recurring payments that have been created to channel real wealth upwards and force everybody to keep working in spite of technological abundance. If it does not bind up now, that's just delaying the inevitable to some time in the future when the phony asset valuations have gotten higher and even less serviceable.

I'm not sure if you've ever considered the fact many do.

In their myopic worldview, landlords are this abstract notion of evil capitalists, not real people. Thus seizure of their resources is not just justified, it’d be immoral not to.

Suffice to say I disagree. Call me old-school, but I believe in the rights to life, liberty, and property.