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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I don't find it to be newsworthy that you can find 21 doctors to sign just about anything. They are people, and people believe all kinds of stuff.

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Especially when they have another petition in the article arguing for the opposite.

Interesting that on one (lockdown) side is mostly doctors in University Health Network and Unity Health Toronto (arguable the top hospitals in Canada), and the other (don't lockdown) letter is mostly professors at McMaster and University of Toronto (arguably the top medical schools in Canada).

Probably just circulating petitions within their networks. The numbers are small enough that this could be little more than grabbing some colleagues through the intranet.

Interesting. How's the discussion between those groups going there?

The chasm here in Germany seems to range between a majority of epidemiologists and virologists advising on sensible measures going forward and a few economics folks, a bunch of private clinic doctors and a vocal group of clearly right wing / conspiracy people. The latter group either sings the tiring "it's just the flu" or "people die for many reasons anyway" song and can be seen on Twitter, discovering basic epidemiological models in real time. Their arguments are very similar to those of flat earthers honestly, precluding any notion of a grounded debate on what measures are sensible in order to keep the health system in working order and shield those that are vulnerable.

>Their arguments are very similar to those of flat earthers honestly, precluding any notion of a grounded debate on what measures are sensible in order to keep the health system in working order and shield those that are vulnerable.

From the opposite perspective, the people who keep insisting that measures like that are necessary to "keep the health system working" in spite of Sweden providing a strong counter-example (no lockdowns or masks, but deaths have steadily trended downards, there wasn't a second wave, and it isn't even in the top ten deaths-per-capita countries now) seem anti-science.

Swrdish culture, support systems and economic incentives, and consequently behavior in the absence of mandates, and the Swedish health Systems, aren't the same as, for instance, the American versions of each of those. So, it makes little sense to assume that the behaviors necessary to protect the Swedish health system are identical to those which would be necessary for a dissimilar country, or that even if they were that they would necessarily be acheived by the same policies.

The proof of this is that, Sweden, without a firm mandatory lockdown, experienced pretty much all the economic consequences of one—because without a mandate for lockdown, Sweden acheived the near behavioral equivalent.

Yeah, I've read your other posts here. Note that I did not argue for a complete lockdown in my post but a grounded discussion of effective measures. This "but Sweden" argument is exactly how much of this discussion reads like a bunch of political nonsense.

The UK tried a Sweden, saw it wasn't working, and switched policies. Sweden itself didn't have a full on lockdown but it's had other measures put in place (e.g. restriction of public gatherings that last I checked were now more restrictive than Germany) and we have plenty of places were heavier local outbreaks clearly led to the negative implications we want to avoid going forward (e.g. NYC, Italy). You're free to call that anti science but absolutism in the face of many unknowns isn't scientific either.

I wonder if the Covid-19 lockdown actually harmed many (non-hospital) doctors financially, people can't make an appointment with them. Of course there is online but you can't charge much for no operations performed

I love how people say ‘Just listen to the experts’ and then go pick and choose the experts they say what they want. No no not these experts, listen to these ones.

That and they're doctors, rather than epidemiologists

Yeah, tell me percentages, like 70% of doctors in Ontario agree on avoiding lockdowns and then that would have some weight.

Because it goes against the narrative of lockdowns being a matter of "settled science".

I think any topic of "settled science" has expert detractors. But a lockdown can't be a matter of settled science because it it a question of priorities and tradeoffs, not of science. That is outside the domain of science and firmly in the domain of politics and economics.

Politicians love to pass off their opinions as "facts" or "settled science". It leaves your ideological opponents with less room to maneuver in.

It only becomes a domain of politics and economics if you ignored the settled science for too long like it happened in the US, in countries like South Korea, Vietnam or New Zealand where they have now near zero cases it was as never a politics or economics issue.

>South Korea, Vietnam or New Zealand where they have now near zero cases it was as never a politics or economics issue.

How can you claim this when South Korea's response was completely different than Vietnam and New Zealand's (no forced lockdown/stay at home orders in Korea)? If they were all following settled science, presumably all those countries would have responded the same?

Absolutely false, South Korea isolated the people with the disease after making very fast and swift vast amount of tests per day (30.000) after a joint effort with the private sector and such proceedings could be perfectly be labeled as "isolation"[0] which is exactly what a lockdown is.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-south-korea

Did they lockdown the whole country for months?

No, because they caught their cases incredibly early, and were entirely willing to aggregate pretty much all data they could get to track spread, and do things that would have caused riots in different cultures (like the US).

I mean, look at how little people trusted the Google-Apple contact tracing model vs South Korea where they actually track everyone using QR codes and get mobile data to trace chains of infection.

It's a very different culture, and it appears to be based on their more recent experience of pandemics (like MERS and SARS). Note that Montreal has done pretty well here too, and was one of the few places in the West with a SARS outbreak.

Well said.

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