Dismissing action as motivated by fear is ridiculous, we should be scared of dangerous things and let that fear motivate us to take rational action.
when this whole thing started, I did what any self respecting analyst would do: try to calculate the numbers and calculate the likely outcomes and risks (primarily to my own family).
And I kept arriving at the conclusion: it's statistically bad in the sense of spread and infectiousness, but as a virus and comparative lethality it's not THAT bad. The main danger was from responses/strongly compressed infection timing, and assuming you didn't overreact and your health system held out, if your family were in their 50s or younger and healthy, existentially it wasn't much worse than the flu (and for the youngest, possibly even less dangerous).
but what I was scared of was the human response.
Because it targets the old and infirm, and because they largely control most wealth and power, and because we largely don't have mature ways of dealing with mortality in common cultural discourse, and because a lot of our countries have become increasingly partisan, I figured the response would probably be bad/chaotic/ and have lots of badly targeted over-reactions, unintended consequences, and probably a lot of name calling, fear mongering and virtue signalling. our media has just gone crazy.
6 months later (and in the lockdown in Melbourne), I stand by most of my initial judgements. One problem locally (and maybe NZ shares this problem, I dunno), it's that the trump/Johnson swing to the right/populism left the opposition (we have Labor in power locally too, so the opposition is conservative) being relatively flirting with anti-science and anti-int tellectualism as well as general juvenile behaviour and responses, so even though one might not fully support local actions (I don't fully support the lockdown extents in both Melbourne or NZ long term), there isn't really a viable political alternative presented either.
It’s hard to argue that our response is going to cause more deaths than the US response. It almost feels like cheating to compare NZ to USA where covid is concerned.
This is the story from the UK, something like this might happen everywhere: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8848991/Dead-31-che...
NZ hospitals have been fine.
So every organisation from kindergartens to factories was affected by coronavirus, but hospitals were not affected at all? I don't believe so.
Also, you need citations for everything in the first sentence.
This is a perfectly valid and reasonable comment.
The whole upvoting/downvoting system in HN sometimes works just for silencing the minority opinions which is quite dangerous.
There's a competent, pro way of handling pandemics, and incompetent, amateur way of handling them.
The pro way is brief but comprehensive shutdowns + distancing + masks + sanitizing + testing & tracing + travel restrictions. It only takes 4-8 weeks of that to shut down a pandemic, then everyone can get back to being their normal, self-centered, freedom-loving selves.
The amateur way is to scream about it like a child, refuse to take measures to help stop the outbreak, and be so brainwashed that you're unable to distinguish a conspiracy for a real emergency. Which is of course what Trump and half the US has done.
Sometimes a pandemic is just a pandemic, not a conspiracy of the global elites.