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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I don't think people were ever arguing that the virus is particularly deadly. Like ~2% death rate is really really high for a flu but it's not the black plague or anything. If you're a young-ish healthy adult with a normal immune system then (statistically speaking) quarantine likely didn't benefit you at all.

The thing that makes COVID novel is that it's extremely contagious. Your part in quarantining is not spreading it to the more vulnerable/unlucky people in your life. Because a 2% death rate in a country of 300 million people is still 6 million dead in an entirely preventable way.

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It's not 2%. The WHO currently pegs IFR at 0.5-1%, and that's heavily tilted towards known risk groups, particularly the elderly.

https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating...

1.5-3 Million still feels like a lot, regardless of if it's my parents and their friends or if it is me or my friends.

our response to the virus has caused more harm to more people than the virus itself, and the goalposts to end restrictions keep moving once the previous criteria are met.

where is your 2% number coming from? CDC estimates the infection fatality ratio as: 0-19 years: 0.00003 20-49 years: 0.0002 50-69 years: 0.005 70+ years: 0.054

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

> our response to the virus has caused more harm to more people than the virus itself

That can happen from failure or from success. The far more important comparison is response vs. what the virus would have done without that response.

> the goalposts to end restrictions keep moving once the previous criteria are met

Criteria like what? The only one I've seen is trying to get the rate of spread down and we really haven't managed that.

> our response to the virus has caused more harm to more people than the virus itself,

That’s not a bad thing. A bad thing would be if our response caused more harm that the additional harm the virus would have caused but for the response, but that it caused more than it allowed the virus to cause is not a problem.

> and the goalposts to end restrictions keep moving once the previous criteria are met.

No, they haven't. It's true that both the restrictions in place in some jurisdictions and the criteria for step down have been revised based on better understanding of the virus and associated activity-related risks, but that's not the same thing (and has resulted in loosening of some restrictions directly and easing of some criteria, as well as tightening other a restrictions and criteria.) But they haven't moved in response to meeting preexisting criteria.

You think we should just ignore new information ?

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