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Comment by senthil_rajasek | Hacker News Reader

The article does not say anything about what if any data was used to make this decision.

Conflating this as a human rights issue as some commenters have tried to on this thread is a dangerous trend.

In other cities, like La crosse, WI for instance college campuses tended to be the hotspots.

The same was true of senior housing a few months back.

So I am leaning towards the public health officials targeting this based on data for hotspots and demographics and not just to ground some group of people.

The virus needs to be quashed and NY is the evidence.

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It’s a human rights issue regardless of the data, and your assertion that “the virus needs to be quashed” goes against reality. We’re not practicing containment in the US, therefore this virus WILL diffuse through the population. All we can choose is how many lives we want to destroy before we accept that reality. (By the way, even if we were practicing containment - which we’re not - it would still eventually spread. Look at New Zealand for an example of the folly of human hubris).

They are undertaking this measure because of a spike in COVID “cases” (read: positive PCR test results). A spike in cases without a corresponding increase in deaths or hospitalizations should be a good thing, but we treat it the same as having an equivalent number of centenarians get sick. Completely absurd and it goes against everything we knew about public health before this mass global hysteria took root.

It is a public health issue. What about the rights of people that are vulnerable. Why would public policy risk fatality of the vulnerable population over restricted movement of a few targeted populace in an emergency.

The reality is that compared to March New York city in September has quashed the virus, per data.

Yes, COVID is basically over in New York. You know why? Because it passed the real herd immunity threshold. (Simplistic models overestimate the true HIT due to not accounting for heterogeneity across the dimensions of genetic susceptibility, genetic transmissibility, and social contacts).

Ironically, the hysteria is partially why New York’s IFR is the highest in the world; fears of hospital overrun scenarios that never materialized (and in retrospect never could have, but we didn’t have good data at the time) led to Cuomo sending infected into nursijg homes. And a doctrine of early invasive ventilation led to iatrogenic harm and therefore death. And deprivation of sunlight/exercise/sleep all serve to destroy the body’s natural immunoregulatory mechanisms.

Unfortunately, Jacobson v Massachusetts has given legal precedent for forced sterilization and forced detention based off of race, so I’m sure Jacobson can be used to justify these mortality-inducing lockdowns from a legal standpoint. That neither makes it ethical nor good for public health.

What arrogance to think that New York is not experiencing cases because of the interventions taken. Is it just a coincidence that Sweden, which never locked down nor mandates masks, is also done with COVID? No, it’s all just seroprevalence. Which so many of us have been trying to tell you guys for half a year now. Meanwhile the third world is about to experience an unprecedented mass starvation that will eclipse the COVID mortality by far.

> fears of hospital overrun scenarios that never materialized

You sure about that? I had friends who are doctors there tell me back during the peak (~April) they had run out of anesthesia and had to intubate patients without it.

Yes, isolated cases of specific hospitals running out of certain resources is not really the overrun scenario we were warned about.

Intubating without anaesthesia sounds very not-fun though.

BTW New York followed a doctrine of early invasive ventilation which almost certainly caused iatrogenic harm. So perhaps an over-reliance on intubation contributed to your friends' hospital(s) running out (that's besides the point but just interesting to note)

A spike in cases without a corresponding increase in deaths or hospitalizations should be a good thing, but we treat it the same as having an equivalent number of centenarians get sick.

Lots of people that don't get hospitalized are reporting significant lingering symptoms. An effective vaccine appears to be ~months away. Do either of those things matter at all?

The short answer is that the supposed “long-term impacts” aren’t really real. I recommend reading the literature on SARS-CoV-1, the “original SARS”, which spreads less easily but is far more severe. A normal SARS-1 case is like a severe SARS-2 (“covid”) case.

With SARS-1, there can be lingering fatigue and minor cognitive deficits for a few months post infection, but radiological abnormalities of the lungs, etc clear away within months and are certainly gone at the 1 year mark.

The evidence in SARS-2 is incredibly weak and especially for those who are asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic the chance of lasting harm is essentially zero. Remember that the real damage occurs from the immune response, so if you have no symptoms you cannot have damage. The notion being promulgated of having totally asymptomatic COVID-19 and then randomly showing organ damage (heart, lungs etc) is absurd.

Finally for mathematical purposes we need to consider long-term damage - which again just doesn’t really happen - as not as bad as a death. So we can still work it into the math just fine, whether you want to call it a tenth of a death or half or whatever.

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Oh finally, quick point that vaccines are not without risk either. Go read the data on the Moderna trials. Or the history of rushed-out vaccines that caused paralysis (it was either for swine flu or avian flu, I forget which)

There's a difference (a significant one) between vaccines carrying some risk and a vaccine being as harmful as infection.

We don't have that information about a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine yet, but you are just hand-waving here, it's likely enough that one of the many vaccine candidates will be less harmful than a course of infection (In general, vaccines are safe enough that we use lots of them…).

You also aren't working long term damage "into the math", you are doing just what I was getting at, dismissing it.

You haven't really given me any math to dismiss. But simply put, I believe the risks of locking down until a vaccine outpace the risks of allowing SARS-CoV-2 to spread normally in the general population (not in high-risk categories).

Your position also implicitly relies on the notion that SARS-2 isn't spreading right now, but it is, so by the time we get a vaccine we will have a lot of exposure. Data from NY and Sweden implies somewhere around 20% seroprevalence is when we hit herd immunity.

Since you haven't given me much to work on, and I don't feel like digging into the vaccine side, let me give you some research on long-term damage:

["Follow-up Chest CT findings from discharged patients with severe COVID-19: an 83-day observational study"](https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-27359/v1) - First Submitted May 4, Published online May 12

> Radiological abnormalities in patients of severe COVID-19 could be completely absorbed with no residual lung injury in more than two months’ follow-up.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1843... (SARS-1 pathology)

> Preliminary evidence suggests that these lung function abnormalities will improve over time

and here's just one effect of lockdown: loneliness.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/15/5797.full.pdf

> mortality was higher among more socially isolated and more lonely participants. However, after adjusting statistically for demographic factors and baseline health, social isolation remained significantly associated with mortality (hazard ratio 1.26, 95% confidence interval, 1.08–1.48 for the top quintile of isolation), but loneliness did not (haz-ard ratio 0.92, 95% confidence interval, 0.78–1.09). The association of social isolation with mortality was unchanged when loneliness was included in the model.

You haven't done enough work to tie the second 2 links to the 2020 pandemic. You are just asserting that they apply. You are the one dismissing government epidemiologists, you owe the math, not me.

For the first link, only 40% of the patients had (in the sense of the Chest CT study) recovered after 2 months. But that's a single measure, it would be good to have additional assessments of the health of those folks, rather than just the single factor.

If college campuses are an issue, then maybe something should be done about college campuses instead of drastic measures for everyone who happens to be in that age group? (EDIT: looking at the text of the order, it does have more specific restrictions for students and people living in some specified properties, which makes the general ban on top even weirder)

It's also a very dangerous trend to ignore human rights because it is convenient for your current goals.

Or, the exact opposite. College campuses aren't exactly known for dense populations of people the most at risk (people over 70.)

College campuses are the best possible location for herd immunity to take place.

Human rights are always dangerous.

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