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Comment by rindalir | Hacker News Reader

I am really not appreciating the comparison in this article. There's a world of difference between living in a beautiful place in a functional country with a long winter darkness (and adapting yourself to it) and living somewhere where it is effectively illegal to see other people as a consequence of your government's abject failure to manage an epidemic and its inability to have a conversation about the trade off between getting sick with this specific disease and suffering all of the other mental and physical health problems that this level of lockdown causes.

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"effectively illegal to see other people as a consequence of your government's abject failure to manage an epidemic"

Surely though the current situation is as bad as it is because of other people's inability to manage themselves during an epidemic, as opposed to the government being to blame? I'm not having a poke, but I notice here in Ireland for example, when the government comes out with clear guidelines e.g. "Don't go around licking people's eyeballs. If you do you might get sick" then the general populace is all like "oh but it's so confusing! What if I only lick one of their eyeballs? What is the definition of 'might'? We need more guidance!". So then the guidance comes back "Do not lick people's eyeballs, ever" and BOOM - someone takes a constitutional challenge High Court because "Civil Liberties".

And I do think it's kind of the same in most countries, the government is not to blame, the general population is.

Just a thought :)

The anti-masker crowd is annoying but not the majority. You aren't going to ever fix stupid.

The failures of the various governments to respond promptly is more alarming. Guidance on masking in the US is still regional; and the CDC is seized by political infighting. Testing is a train wreck. Some states are trying to fight the spread while their neighbors are busy pissing in the pool.

Deflecting the blame to the 'general population' might work if there was anything coming close to competence at the federal level but it honestly just strikes me as making excuses.

It's true, a major part of setting public policy is making things as uncomplicated as possible, which results in often stricter statements than would be necessary if people were better at following directions. But from my observations (I live in the US but I read a lot of UK and European news), the government in the UK (less so Scotland) has been whipping back and forth on directives: Don't go in people's gardens! Get back to the office you lazy people! Go to school! Stop talking to people across your garden walls! You can only leave the house for an hour a day! By all means go to the pub, but leave before 10 pm when the corona comes out!

I think you have to take into account what people are going to be able to do for months on end, and it seems unreasonable to me to expect the population of an entire country to avoid seeing friends and relatives for half a year (as is now looks like will be the case going into the winter). While the US in general seems to have failed at this, we have had here in New England some good regional success thus far, without making human connections illegal (within limits -- I'm all for limits on gathering sizes, keeping bars closed, etc). The longer this goes on, the more the trade-offs need to be considered.

It is the government's job to protect responsible citizens from irresponsible ones. Only the government has the legal authority and power to prevent irresponsible citizens from acting out and putting everyone else at risk. If the government can't do it, then it is not competent.

In Sweden the culture, political system and standard of living etc is quite similar to its neighbors. But the government took the herd immunity approach to corona and it so far has resulted in 10x deaths per capita compared to the neighbors, which took a prevention approach.

So it really has very direct meaning on what the government does. They really have a lot of responsibility.

Sweden had a high initial death rate, however they have been down to an average 1 per day for the past month. So whatever they're doing lately seems to be working quite well. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?minPopu...

Worse for the first six months. Sweden's curve was comparable to Italy and USA in some sense.

«Herd immunity» was never part of Sweden’s approach though, just tune in to any AMA session with Tegnell. They have had much of the same response as other countries, although a more lax version with recommendations instead of strict rules and lockdowns.

You are both right.

Individual behavior is a combination if individual choices, local culture, and surrounding leadership.

Most individuals in the US are making smart choices (though you wouldn't be able to see that from the news since they are by nature not newsworthy). Local culture varies widely across the US. Some places are more science-focused than others. Local and state leadership is all over the place. Trump is obviously doing a catastrophically poor job.

All of these things affect the outcomes we see.

But if your government was downplaying the seriousness of licking eyeballs when the whole world knows how bad locking eyeballs is, you can lay at least a little blame on said government, right?

The US has over 200k dead from COVID-19. This could have been avoided if the government had been staunchly pro-mask and social distancing from the start. Instead, they downplayed it as nothing to be worried about at best and a full-on hoax at worst. If the government had done the right thing from the start, all these people who can’t manage themselves would at least be wearing masks and staying away from each other if for no other reason than their president told them it was the right thing to do. I think we can safely blame the government for this one.

> I think we can safely blame the government for this one.

It's interesting how the "American" tradition of individualism and self-determination is quietly forgotten when things go wrong on a societal scale.

Yeah, the article's giving me the same vibes as an article in 1990s Afghanistan saying "here's how to chill out and relax once music is banned". I'm not exactly mad at the author, it's great to share coping strategies for bad things, but the underlying assumptions going unquestioned are glaring.

Thank you! Your comparison made me laugh (dark humor, of course)

Maybe you're missing a sense of humor.

As a winter dweller, trust me, sense of humor is not what is missing. The sun and heat is what is missing.

Have you considered moving, even if only temporarily? Based on your comment, I'm assuming you're talking about the U.S. but it's a huge country and there are many beautiful places you could live which also have decent enough internet to allow remote work.

I was actually talking about the UK (since it's a guardian article). I actually live in Vermont in the US, which is currently much more like northern Norway than England.

How long did you stay in Norway?

Edit: word. If you're gonna compare A to B, get some B experience...

Unfortunately only a few weeks, and I never made it north of Trondheim. Someday, when travel is allowed again ....

>I actually live in Vermont in the US

So you probably don't have a real appreciation of what is happening in the UK.

how would you know?

I don't know where the commenter is, but the source article is from the UK, where many commentators are expecting a second lockdown next month.

What do you mean failure to manage the epidemic?

The Imperial College modelling that was done predicted half a million deaths in the UK and 2 million in the US. That was the justification for lockdown, as such it appears that we have managed it incredibly well avoiding 90% of the predicted deaths.

it's not over yet. too early to say we have avoided the deaths.

Fair point, but looking at the curves, deaths rates the virus seems to have run its course in many countries. Sweden didn't bother with lock down and the virus appears to have run it's course there.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

No, it's not a fair point.

It's the same crap they have been spewing for months in order to justify the lockdowns and lifestyle restrictions.

We just don't know = lock down the world for months or years with no tradeoffs, no discussion of how to end them, and no questioning the lockdowns because > 1 people will or have died.

This "we just don't know so we're going to restrict the entire world and pretend individuals can't choose for themselves" argument is the reason that lifestyles have been restricted.

I'm not anti-mask I'm pro-choice.

Let individuals choose, not government.

The trouble with that argument is that it leads to people who choose not to care, infecting those that do, which can lead to deaths, which many people dislike.

Historically, pandemics are one of the few acceptable reasons for such restrictions in the US, and it's very odd to me that it's been so controversial in that country.

The same as every flu season that we have had for years.

If the flu had no pre-existing immunity and 8x the mortality rate along with unknown side effects lasting months/years, then yes, exactly like the flu.

How would that work? You go to a grocery store because you have to, and there's someone spewing out aerosols, potentially infected, while your mask protects them? Are you all for freeloading like say, making taxes optional?

What happens if people infect their elders? Who pays for the hospital costs if not the public? What if ICU capacity is taken up by anti-maskers and people who were taking precautions got unlucky and then have to die?

If you go by the doomsday forecasts of what will happen if nothing is done, then yeah, everyone did great. But the US and GB could've done better, which we know by seeing how things played out in other countries.

Countries locked down based on such doomsday scenarios. Millions have lost their jobs or had their businesses destroyed as a result of these doomsday scenarios. Why are we changing the rules afterwards?

It's been a while since i read about the SAGE / Imperial College Model, so I'm rusty on the details. However, my recollection is that a. there were serious technical issues with it, in terms of quality of construction, stability of results from run to run, and with the assumptions that went into it, and b. it predicted a much higher number of deaths even with a full lockdown.

I don’t think the IC model considered social distancing. It was a worst case. However: New York State (about 1/3 the population of the UK) has a cumulative total of 1700 deaths per million, and the UK is close to 600 per million. There are some differences between those populations, but it does seem there’s good evidence that things could have been much worse in the UK without relatively early social distancing.

The question then is why lockdowns were based on this model? Sweden demonstrated that it wasn't needed. Why are we still listening to Neil Ferguson when his track record is absolutely abysmal?

The reason is that the U.K. is not Sweden. Nobody knows why Sweden was so relatively mild, but the fact that the U.K. had a worse outcome even with a lockdown strongly indicates that their no-lockdown outcome would have looked more like NYC or Lombardy than Sweden.

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