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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

People are taking more risks because the vaccine is close[1]

When the vaccine is close you should be taking fewer risks. The potential cost to those risks stays the same, you can still kill your elderly relations and/or develop "long COVID" yourself. But the benefit is much less. Going back to normal life now only nets you a few weeks of normal life with the vaccine in sight vs an indefinite time without.

Also, the hope of a vaccine helps immensely with the mental stress of isolation.

The end is in sight! Hang in there folks, keep being careful!

1: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/scotland/coronavirus-in-s...

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"Coronavirus in Scotland: People are taking risks because vaccine is close, says John Swinney"

This reminds me of the speculative rationalizations that are given after-the-fact whenever the stock market rises or falls.

So let me chime in with the speculation:

The biggest factor is probably the realization that COVID is not as big a personal risk as feared, no matter what the media or the government says. People are gladly using COVID as an excuse to work from home or avoid meeting their elderly relatives, but when it comes to avoiding infection in order to save "the system", enough people simply don't care anymore. It's too abstract.

Doesn’t feel that way in the Midwest. My Wisconsin relatives had been actively downplaying the existence (not just severity) of COVID until people they know started being hospitalized. So it goes, I guess - but the tone has changed.

Of course, the perceived risk is quite different from the statistical risk.

Currently, about one in 4000 Scots is hospitalized, which says that approximately only one in 40 Scots directly knows someone hospitalized with COVID, assuming they know 100 people each.

However, the chance of directly knowing someone that had a positive COVID test is 1 in 40, which says most Scots will know someone who had a mild case of COVID.

Exactly, early on we weren't sure what the risk of covid was to the average person. It feels like now their is enough data on cases, broken down by age, where you can assess your own risk.

If you are under 25, the risk to you from Covid is basically tiny. I can understand young people not accepting having their life destroyed from living under a lockdown over a virus that is unlikely to do them harm.

In Scotland

            Infections       Hospitalization     Deaths
    0-4      1,137             62                  0
    5-14     2,973             30                  0
    15-19    6,771             41                  0
    20-24    7,896             65                  1

I think we need something smarter than a blanket lockdown that affects everyone the same regardless of age. How we are 9 months into this and still haven't figured out anything better is really disappointing. We are destroying peoples lives, income and mental health when for the majority of them there is no risk.

Even if the risk were greater, it would be unreasonable to assume that the age group of 15-25, which is most likely to die from risky behavior, could easily be convinced to change said behavior.

It may not be a risk to the young people, but they need to understand that their actions have consequences for the people around them (which is exactly why people are encouraged to wear masks). A lockdown may not be the best solution, but it surely makes it so young people have a harder time infecting those who are immuno-compromised.

"I think we need something smarter than a blanket lockdown that affects everyone the same"

We have this in NY and CA among other places. That the Midwest and South are going from "pretend everything is fine" to "full scale lockdown again" was a decision those states made. But NY and CA are still far from requiring a second full scale lockdown and are instead focusing on specific areas and counties.

Due to a limitation in technology, people are forced to take the population risk as their own, which aligns self interest with collective interest. However, that will not always be the case and, at some point, people will be able to see their own individual risks. I find it interesting that people have no problem justifying their selfishness by showing that they are just being selfish. It will be interesting to see how that will develop.

That’s reading people’s mind. I do my own mind reading and I say that compliance to lockdown is down because people are fed up, and because the virus turned out to be nowhere near as dangerous as initially claimed by the media (I remember a headline dated from end of April from The Times claiming covid was as deadly as ebola...)

Covid has killed more people in total than Ebola. Maybe that was what the headline was implying?

No the headline was a very misleading statement based on the fact that people showing up in ICUs with severe forms of covid had about the same death rates than Ebola.

Ebola has a fatality rate of >80%. That's what the headline was implying.

And meanwhile some people actually took the time to look at the statistics. A lot of countries with lockdowns had more trouble than countries without lockdowns. e.g. Argentinia with masks and lockdowns has one of the worst curves of the planet... while Sweden is doing fine.

And COVID-19 is strictly following Gompertz-Mathematics - just like a seasonal corona-virus. For any usual outbreak (f'/f) is falling exponentially all the time... There are no visible trend-changes around most policy-changes.

And there's no statistical epidemiological evidence that masks did anything good. In some countries with masks things got a lot worse. (more efficient catch+inhale? Or catch+transmit without being infected?)

Most of the hype around COVID-19 is just cheating by using "reporting date" instead of "date of death" to make Gompertz-Functions look like seriously dangerous exponentials...

If you have some datasets that allow to compare "reporting date" with "date of death" it is astonishing to see how many reporting-anomalies appear around policy-changes...

What puzzles me is those serology studies in Spain and Italy that show that people who were locked down were infected at the same rate than essential workers who were not locked down (except, understandably, for healthcare workers). It seems to be a major data point on whether a lockdown actually has any impact and it seems to have been completely ignored.

I think you should take another look at Sweden's data. Sweden (and a lot of countries) were doing fine, likely because the weather is nice and people were spending their time meeting outdoors, where infection risk is way lower. Now that it is getting cold, their case counts are on the way back up as are their deaths. It is worth noting that most of my Swedish friends say that many people were staying home anyways, just because they did not have a government mandated lockdown doesn't mean many people did not decide to avoid the risk themselves.

There are plenty of datasets that include date of death instead of reporting date and they show the count of deaths increasing again as well, on a lag, just like you would expect.

The low fatality rate we have enjoyed recently has been partially a result of the availability of improved medical care. Unfortunately that is a stepwise function where once you have surpassed the amount of available care, the improvements we have made in care revert to some extent. We don't know how much.

I see that you only really post about COVID stuff on hackernews, and I don't know why anyone would bother, but what truly blows my mind is the amount of hubris it takes to sit at home, read a few news stories, and say "I know better than the majority of people who have spent their lives studying disease because I know some statistics and read a few articles that disagreed with the mainstream."

I just looked at the data for Sweden today. Looks like a seasonal outbreak starting mid-September (infection date). Parameters of the curve look like the first wave (Gompertz-Exponent ~0,06) with less force.

Start is hidden under other smaller outbreaks, so it's not so easy to measure it exactly. But soon it should peak (if it hasn't already...).

If they don't do any nonsense that changes the mathematics of COVID-19 completely Sweden will be fine. The curve has normal size of a seasonal flu. Other countries in Europe are doing a lot worse.

The mathematics of COVID-19 is not that hard - and has been known since pretty much the beginning. No need for hatred and personal attacks..

Lets do some real mathematics.

1) Get good data (e.g. death by date).

2) Take a look at the Logarithm of the growthrate ln(f'/f)

3) Spot all those straight lines - those are the curves of outbreaks

4) Turn those lines into a working formula for an outbreak

5) Calculate predictions - evaluate trend-changes - look when new outbreaks happened.

It's just that simple. Results won't give you insight about the mainstream, but it will give some insights about reality.

Some countries are easier (Mexico, Germany, ...).. Some have more outbreaks and complications. But the basic principles of the mathematics of COVID-19 outbreaks around the globe are the same.

Calculating the new outbreaks of Sweden is more advanced because the start of the new curve is hidden behind another outbreak. But now there's at least enough visible to give good estimates.

Just because the media did a horrendously bad job at reporting on this virus does not mean it isn't a serious threat. We see now in the US how it can spiral out of control if we let it.

"Scientists say virus as deadly as ebola for hospital victims"

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-19-death-rates-are-...

Apparently that claim was based on this study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.20076042v...

There are a few comments on that page about how that claim was misleading and/or inaccurate and mis-reported by the media.

Well it's still going to be until next Spring at the earliest when most of these vaccines will get widely distributed. A lot can happen in half a year...not to mention many of the people taking the most risks believe in some Bill Gates/Deep State conspiracy about vaccines.

" many of the people taking the most risks believe in some Bill Gates/Deep State conspiracy about vaccines"... oh, how many have you talked to?

Most people I know who are engaging in "risky" behavior when it comes to covid spread are either (1) just tired of being coped up and so being reckless (2) old enough that they don't want to spend 2 of their final years of life not seeing their family, and think the risk of catching it is worth it (3) young and relatively risk free (e.g. x3 flu mortality rate range) so don't worry about it for them or those they're seeing (others in the same boat).

Do you live in the Midwest or deep South? You would have a very different picture of things if you did.

Middle of the Midwest. You're just stereotyping based a few. Yes there are some who believe in such things. But most don't.

You are putting words in my mouth. I said the majority of people engaging in risky behaviors believe the whole thing is "about control" and other conspiratorial nonsense. Most others are just following the recommendations as best they can.

At the rate we're going now, many of the people taking the most risks will be infected with the disease, if they haven't been already. Prior infection has largely the same effect as a vaccine.

I agree with you. We're in for a rough winter, at least in the US -- but it seems that there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel.

Yes, good to point this out and this is a serious problem leadership is not addressing.

The new public messaging needs to be: "It Ain't Over Yet" kind of thing.

And a vaccine doesn't immediately solve the problem; distribution is a thing, plenty of people who will refuse to take the vaccine (especially early adopters). Basically, even if there was a vaccine released TODAY, it would still take at least six months before we can start going back to normal, and (I believe I read about) three years before we can consider the disease to have ran its course.

>plenty of people who will refuse to take the vaccine

Hopefully this doesn't turn into a very messy public fight given that I fully expect a lot of schools and workplaces to require vaccination to physically enter a school or an office.

Simply wearing a mask has been a messy public fight. It would seem likely that fighting over vaccine requirements will be at least as messy.

People are taking more risks because it's been 9 months of restrictions.

The first month or so in the Bay Area people were super diligent. There was nobody on the streets, hardly anybody shopping. Within a month you noticed more people on the streets, by 6 months, traffic was 75% of what it was before Covid.

You can't expect people to put their lives on hold indefinitely, especially people at low risk. I know that in Canada 20-30 year olds accounted for the vast majority of new cases. They were just willing to take a chance.

And even though these two vaccines look promising, you won't get a significant number of people vaccinated until the second half of 2021. That's another 7-8 months away.

Reminds me of that movie scene in Apocalypse Now when they are getting mortared on the beach while trying to surf - "The tide doesn't come in for six hours, do you want to wait here for six hours?" - Lt. Col. Kilgore

> You can't expect people to put their lives on hold indefinitely

And now with the promise of a vaccine, the word "indefinitely" no longer applies.

It’s still indefinite until someone defines it, and I haven’t seen any public health official who’s willing to specify a date when things will be back to normal. Many aren’t even willing to say that we can go back to normal once we’re vaccinated.

I'm now at July. Before this I was at early 2022. Every successful trial pushes my date back a bit. If the oxford and J&J both successfully finish trials by the end of this year I might push back to as early as march.

Of course roll out matters. Rochester MN (Home of the Mayo clinic) might open before the rest of the country just because the ratio of health care vs everyone else is enough that they may as well vaccinate the whole town and let it open up.

When I read postings like yours, I sometimes really wonder who pays people like you to spread FUD like this.

"kill your elderly". Dont you feel bad for doing what you do? Seriously, please, reconsider the way you connect with fellow humans.

IMF and World Bank buys them some cheap human capital to spread it.. Effortlessly.

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