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Comment by cheph | Hacker News Reader

> I'm in no way part of the just-the-flu crew, but feel that the OMG-COVID crew hasn't necessarily thought the above aspects through either.

The incentives are all messed up for the media to provide a balanced information and with the economic devastation coming down the pipes I think both the flu and COVID will look like a walk in the park.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/lives-or-livelih...

> Using those somewhat more generous – but still frugal – thresholds, the number of poverty years in the world (235 million) is 54 times the number of lost years.

And yes, without lockdowns things may be even worse, but the fact remains that the biggest impact on lives from this pandemic will likely not be directly from COVID but indirectly from economic devastation.

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> And yes, without lockdowns things may be even worse, but the fact remains that the biggest impact on lives from this pandemic will likely not be directly from COVID but indirectly from economic devastation.

You say indirectly, I say directly. Even if everything was opened 100% tomorrow, many people are simply not going to go back to what they used to do. The way to avoid economic devastation was/is to deal with covid.

Things are pretty much back to normal in parts of Mississippi:

https://neckbeard.xyz/notice/9znbtKqgRaGgwdVxgm

..and the secondary effects of the economic and psychological devastation are pretty bad. I wrote this back in July:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/

It's been eight months! We cannot keep living like this. We know now the largest deaths came from a failure to protect the elderly and misusing nursing home facilities (Michigan, Kirkland/Seattle, NYC). We need to do more to protect the elderly, but other people need be able to assume their own risks again.

Most lockdown restrictions have ended in Ecuador. Florida and Mississippi are opening up. Pennsylvanian had a cord order by Stickman to open up, but it's been stayed pending appeal.

Humanity cannot be put into low power mode like a laptop. We are not cogs in a machine that can be stopped and started at will.

It's getting to the point on HN where the informative posts are greyed out and you have to find them before they get killed completely. Sad!

Daily new cases in Mississippi are still pretty bad. Removing restrictions because you feel like you should be done with the virus is just going to drag this out.

and yet Sweeden is doing very well. What is your long term goal/solution exactly? This thing isn't going away. Keeping people locked up delays infections, it doesn't stop it.

the US hasn't even been able to match the measures[0] Sweden put in place, though? there's still thousands of people showing up with no masks to breath on each other at rallies etc

[0]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251615-is-swedens-coro...

Sweden’s voluntary measures were/are likely followed better than the patchwork of measures in the US. I’m not sure they can be used as an example of anything that’s possible in the US.

Also, this whole ‘locked up’ straw man is growing tiresome. There is a large gradient between locked up and going out like there is no pandemic.

I agree that dealing with Covid is the way to go forward, but we simply cannot drag our feet with restrictions until summer/fall of 2021.

If politicians choose to do so anyway, they should know that economic devastation can be a very real outcome from going down that path.

Define restrictions. There is a large area between lockdown and doing nothing. Anytime I see people arguing about 'restrictions', it's usually a straw man of going back to a total lockdown. No one is talking about doing that nationally, and even locally it would only be in extreme cases of uncontrolled community spread.

If we hadn't politicized the virus every step of the way, we could have adopted some simple mitigation measures that would have already gotten us back to some level of normal. A national strategy of masks and distance could have kept things mostly open/got things re-opened. If people were generally trying to limit the spread, testing and contact tracing would work to control outbreaks.

Instead the US has a patchwork of rules with uncertain national leadership hoping the virus just disappears. All we have done is extend the time we have to deal with this mess, and possibly cause more deaths than necessary.

And, I just saw that the POTUS once again tweets it's just like the flu (which doesn't kill 100k Americans/year), further downplaying and extending how long any COVID recovery will take.

Ultimately, the 'economic devastation' you mention is not from the lockdowns, but our complete ineptitude around dealing with pandemic.

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