Only existing market leaders are benefiting from coronavirus lockdowns | Hacker News Reader

Only existing market leaders are benefiting from coronavirus lockdowns

thedrum.com

90 pointssbachman49 comments

Well, you know, except for all the people not getting the virus due to reduced transmission.

But yes, when distribution networks are stressed, bigger players will obviously have more pull and smaller businesses will have more trouble getting in what they need and/or delivering their products, at anything beyond a very local scale.

The big players also had the benefit of having themselves declared necessary for life while small companies that sold the same items were declared nonessential. This results in Walmart making money while mom and pop stores go out of business. Hence the lawsuit in PA. https://youtu.be/InCIyID5rkE

During Pennsylvania's red phase, groceries and hardware stores were kept open (to name two examples). Mom and pop groceries and hardware stores were allowed to be open as was Walmart, which sells both. Pennsylvania has a lot of state-level corruption but that isn't it. The governor's overreach arguably prevented a lot of disease spread. Now tell me why the state run liquor stores were declared "essential."

Initially the state run stores were closed for quite some time.

Alcohol withdrawal can be fatal. Also taxes

Hence why WA kept weed stores open too.

Taxes and let people mellow out.

Not to mention homemade booze. That can kill you too.

A Super-Target selling groceries was still allowed to sell toys, linens, and everything else in their store.

A stand-alone toy store could not be open.

So what do you propose? An ever changing list of what, exactly, could be sold, or could not be sold, and fines for anyone who breaks it? That seems rather problematic too. Convenience stores having to tell customers they can't buy knick knacks, grocery stores telling customers they can't buy cards or flowers, etc. It was unpleasant enough for workers to deal with customers irate at only being able to purchase 2 things of toilet paper; I can't even imagine what trying to prevent the purchase, at all, of things the stores stocked would have caused.

They could have roped off the toy and game sections since toy stores were forced to be closed. It isn't exactly rocket science.

So the only reason we were allowed to buy video games at Target was to avoid inconvenience, and nothing to do with safety? If that's the case, why couldn't we buy them at GameStop too, to reduce inconvenience even further?

You could buy games at Target because if you have to allow the store to be open for people to buy essential items like groceries, drugs, and hardware there is very little or no increased risk in letting them pick up other, non-essential stuff while they are there. (It might even reduce risk slightly, by decreasing the average density of customers in the store).

GameStop only sells non-essential items.

How do you know people aren't coming in to Target just to buy non-essential items, thereby increasing the risk just as much as they would by going to GameStop?

Where I lived in New Jersey, they roped off non-grocery items EVERY SINGLE SUNDAY. Well not target, target chose to close, but Walmart, and a couple other supermarkets.

Yes. If a store’s point of sale system can prevent selling beer in Texas before 12pm on Sunday, it can be programmed to disallow the sale of goods outside of “this is essential” categories.

That would have been the fair way to do it, putting all market participants on the same footing. Courts in Germany and France even ruled exactly that. If some businesses can be open while others are not, the former must only sell the essentials because to do otherwise unjustly enriches those who are deemed “essential with extras.”

Selectively closing certain stores while leaving others open did nothing for public health. People were still buying the same stuff. They were just forced to do it at big box retailers (who also sold "essential" products) instead of small, independent retailers. In the end the virus exposure risk was there same.

In the long run it would have been better to leave all retailers open. Bad economic conditions literally kill people. They die slowly from deaths of despair (chronic disease, substance abuse, suicide) but in the end they're dead all the same.

That ruling was overturned.

No. It was stayed. There is a difference. Stayed means that it is not put into effect until a higher court reviews it.

> "Well, you know, except for all the people not getting the virus due to reduced transmission."

well, you know, except that that's popular (political and media) dogma, not scientific truth. many things can theoretically reduce transmission and it's far from certain that a nominal and arbitrary lockdown (as US states have employed) in as complicated a system as a society actually does so, especially when many mitigations are occurring simultaneously and haphazardly, and none are tested for efficacy in isolation because it'd be unethical to do so.

the null hypothesis there is that lockdowns don't change the outcome appreciably, and that has not been rejected conclusively by any means.

If people started by acting like adults and wear a mask instead of acting like crybabies we would have avoided a lot of restrictions. I get why countries are enforcing harsh lockdown, it's the only way to make these animals behave. But then again we're talking about a country in which the president organises massive events without enforcing any social distancing nor masks so all bets are off.

If only things were so simple.

That is indeed the simple solution to a complex problem advocated by government propaganda, yes.

> and it's far from certain that a nominal and arbitrary lockdown (as US states have employed) in as complicated a system as a society actually does so

The key phrase there is as US states have employed.

Lockdowns have been successfully deployed to eliminate national COVID-19 outbreaks in developed countries. Both theory and that experience confirm their effectiveness. However political polarization caused both government authorities and individual citizens to undermine and severely compromise the effectiveness of the strategy in the US. This is one of those things were compromise to a half way solution doesn't work.

If you gave everyone time and resources to prepare for a total 3 week lockdown, then did it, the virus would be totally eliminated at the end of it. Afterwards, with strict traveler quarantine measures and contract tracing, the economy could open up completely. Unfortunately, we have too many people who refuse to distance at all or even wear a mask, so we get to live in an extended garbage fire.

Whether or not you agree with his approach, Anders Tegnell described the lockdown model used in most of Europe as "not sustainable," and the UK, Spain, France, Poland, Czech Republic, Netherlands, and more are proving him right.

> If you gave everyone time and resources to prepare for a total 3 week lockdown...

This is a great idea in theory, but it ignores a lot of realities. You have to keep some level of basic infrastructure running; that will cause spread. There will always be some level of violations. Borders are more porous than people think. The mental cost of lockdown is also higher than people originally thought. "Listen to the experts" really meant "listen to epidemiologists," but this is their first time trying this at this scale, and it ignores psychologists and economists, even though those forces are going to be major drivers of behavior.

There's also the elephant in the room: If Covid-19 were 10x more deadly or 10x less deadly, people would actually take it very seriously or brush it off. It falls in a very awkward place, and a lot of people are looking at the death rate for their age group, weighing the risk against 1-2 years of partial lockdown, and deciding if the risk is worth it.

> Whether or not you agree with his approach, Anders Tegnell described the lockdown model used in most of Europe as "not sustainable,"

I don't think I trust the judgements of the epidemiologist responsible for Sweden's strategy.

> There will always be some level of violations. Borders are more porous than people think

Obviously, but those are things that can be managed.

> The mental cost of lockdown is also higher than people originally thought.

Maybe the mental cost of a shambolic pandemic response is also pretty high, too?

> "Listen to the experts" really meant "listen to epidemiologists," but this is their first time trying this at this scale, and it ignores psychologists and economists, even though those forces are going to be major drivers of behavior.

The non-outlier epidemiologists are the right experts to trust right now. If a town is about to be overtaken by the front lines of a war, you don't ask the economists about the economic cost of closing main street or the psychologists about the emotional costs of forcing people from their homes. You listen to the people who understand war and evacuate the civilian population. You don't tell people to stay put and keep their shops open while the shells fly because some economist's model predicted unemployment and reduced growth if they leave.

Lest we forget the second wave in the US due to mass nationwide protests? Masking up is great, and there are too many busybodies in convenience stores getting upset because an employee asked them to wear a mask, but the problem is obviously deeper than a couple of anti-maskers

Cities with large protests did not suffer from increased rates of COVID--see New York City, for example. Cities with lower rates of mask usage did experience high rates of COVID infection--see Phoenix, Arizona.

A percentage of HNers will say "Correlation is not causation." But the history of places like NYC and San Francisco that had huge demonstrations against police brutality without increased rates of transmission disproves "the second wave in the US due to mass nationwide protests."

If some countries aren't successful at containing the spread of the virus despite lockdowns, its because they didn't lockdown hard/good enough. If a country locks down hard and still many deaths occur, claim that the virus would have killed many more if they didn't lockdown.

Morton's Fork. If deaths are low it's because lockdown worked. If they're high we didn't lockdown hard or early enough. Two outcomes, same conclusion: More lockdowns. No consideration to the null hypothesis.

It's the no true Scotsman fallacy.

> "This is one of those things were compromise to a half way solution doesn't work."

well, we seem to agree that the half-measures here are bad compromises and don't work. but while it's tantalizing to believe we could have eradicated the virus, there was no chance of that given its characteristics, people's natural and wide-ranging behaviors, and the sociopolitical underpinnings of our governments.

the US would never accept hard lockdown, for very good and hard-won reasons, so we're left needing to convince, not force, the populace to take reasonable mitigative measures with the understanding that we're going to have to ride it out. the response from the beginning should have focused on instilling good intuition about infectious diseases, which has the nice by-product of raising trust and people independently implementing real mitigations, rather than manically choreographed safety theater.

the explosion of politically-charged disinformation however, has left people mentally and emotionally exahusted, and struggling to tease apart the effective strategies (modest distancing and avoiding crowded indoor gatherings) from the ineffective (masks everywhere and incessant cleaning). people give up, tune out, and arbitrarily choose the simplest anxiety-quelling option (like wearing masks in public) rather than the harder, but more effective (avoiding large parties).

this is where the failure of leadership manifests, not in failing to institute an unacceptable and likely ineffective authoritarian lockdown.

A three week total lockdown would obviously not eliminate the virus. No matter what we need certain essential workers to keep working or society will collapse, which would be far worse than the virus. Plus there are presumably still animal reservoirs out there somewhere. Are you going to exterminate all the bats and pangolins?

Not only has it not been rejected, there is strong evidence that the lockdowns were, in fact, largely useless.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-failed-experiment-of-covid-...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

Argentina has had a relatively strict lockdown for months, and yet their death rate continues to be much higher than many other countries with looser lockdowns. So the null hypothesis appears correct.

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

yes, and the potential counterargument there is that it flattens the curve rather than directly decreases death rates. however, that's subject to the same sort of null hypothesis, where relatively light mitigations (modest distancing, avoiding crowded indoor gatherings, and mask usage at the margins) probably do just as well at flattening the curve, which means there's no rational room for lockdowns in this pandemic.

Don’t start reading, it gets blurry at middle (unless you login I suppose).

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Running this in the console removed that for me:

document.querySelectorAll('.freewall--disable').forEach(item => item.classList.remove('freewall--disable'));

Reader View clears it up.

article is blurry

If we look at the price people are paying for the lock down vs the risk, the other diseases and (often preventable) ways to die and the 637 B profits made by billionaires it doesn't prove it is one big CONSPIRACY but to label it "unintended consequence" is rather naive.

I'd much rather see [say] diarrhea cured (which kills 2200 children per day) and risk dying than implode the economy and abolish relationships to save old people.

The numbers suggest 0.4% is infected and 0.01% died of which the large majority had poor health. We simply don't have practical ideas to save the victims. It would be much easier to save a few millions if we focus on nutrition.

> to save old people.

We're "saving" old people in one sense, and accelerating their decline in many others.

Nursing homes are locked down and they haven't been able to see family for over six months now.

It's basically like being in prison, except you are old, infirm, and also likely have some level of dementia.

Basically a living hell.

I know a senior who's family had to remove him from the nursing home due to a massive psychological break from prolonged isolation, especially a lack of familiar faces being able to visit him.

He was so dissociated from his environment, they decided that the risk of death was much less of an issue than the degree to which his quality of life had degenerated.

My aunt posts basically daily about how hard this has been on my Grandma.

Maybe a month and a half ago, they started allowing outdoor visits, but they have to maintain 6 feet distance.

My aunt said if my Grandma (98) was a little more independent she would take her in at her house, but as it is, she has moderate dementia and forgets what's going on very easily. Basically they wouldn't be able to leave her home unattended.

We also get frequent bored calls. The elderly get no visitors and all other activities canceled too.

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