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Comment by rwcarlsen | Hacker News Reader

Since top comments here are anecdata about how terrible covid is for a young person, just thought I'd share my experience. Everyone I know who has gotten covid - several neighbors (and their households), most of my wife's hometown (400 people) - including her parents (in their 70s) and two of her siblings and all their children (15 people) all had it. For everyone it was somewhere between nothing and a bad cold. Nobody has any lingering issues. We don't want to paint our picture of the situation using only extremes. How about we include the "average" anecdata too?

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Because even those who are vehement supporters of lockdowns/wide spread health measures understand that this only affects a small percentage of those who contract it. We don't need examples of people who had no issues, 99%+ of people won't have issues.

Everyone knows its not going to kill most people, that's not what they're trying to prevent. They're trying to prevent it getting into long term care homes, or into at risk communities (indigenous, low income, obese, etc). They're trying to give you good reasons to want to wear a mask, want to cut down on your social interactions, and want to help stop the spread.

Yes - but when we only hear about, think about, and look at the extremes, it becomes too easy to let our thought-processes about the situation become (even subconsciously) skewed. It's too easy to forget that the constant barrage of stories and information is actually about the extremes. It takes deliberate effort to keep the balanced view.

For sure; that's why people reiterate the 99%+ metric. This isn't a cataclysmic virus that will wipe out life on earth, but it will tax health care systems far beyond what they're capable of handling. It will devastate economies, lock downs or not, globally.

It's far to easy to dismiss the effects if we see it "only" hurts <1% of people; which is why people feel the need to constantly reinforce the negative impacts.

Serious question, I don't have a political agenda by asking this: How will a virus that hurts <1% of people devastate economies, lockdowns or not?

Economic devastation from lockdowns is clear. Economic devastation from a virus that primarily hurts the elderly is not clear to me.

Again, I'm not making any points about the value determination of lives saved vs GDP saved, only asking how you quantify the economic impact of a virus.

> How will a virus that hurts <1% of people devastate economies, lockdowns or not?

Imagine 1% (or 0.5% or 0.2% or whatever) of planes crashed. How well do you think the airlines would fare? How many people would still fly?

1% is an insanely high number of deaths.

0.1% of London bus drivers died: https://www.ioshmagazine.com/2020/08/11/london-bus-driver-co...

If they were dying in bus crashes, people would notice.

1% is not insanely high, it's roughly how many people die each year.

Then indeed, doubling the number of people who die would be significant.

Of course, but so is the damage caused by lockdowns.

Are you suggesting that lockdowns are doubling the number of animal deaths?

anoncake writes:

> 1% is not insanely high, it's roughly how many people die each year.

So another percent on top of that is a doubling. As many people again dying from Covid-19 as die from all other causes. How is that NOT “insanely” high?

Given the average age of covid deaths, there's probably something like 80-90% overlap there. Nowhere near double.

How much does people dying disrupt our lives every year? Not at all, basically. Two times "not at all" still isn't much.

My understanding of the numbers is that < 1% of people will die. ~20% of cases require hospitalization (~10% including asymptomatic infections). It's that hospitalization number that's the worrisome. 10% of the population is way more than the hospital capacity of anywhere - in the U.S. we have about 1 bed for every 300 people, 0.3%.

Without hospitalization a fair number of the 9% that is hospitalized but won't die will instead just die. This is why you see death rates of close to 10% in areas like Lombardy or NYC where the hospital system was overloaded. And even if they don't, they're too sick to go to work. Most industries will have serious problems if 10% of employees call in sick. Then there are issues with people who have non-COVID illnesses (say car accidents) who won't be able to find beds because all the hospitals are filled with COVID patients.

When #FlattenTheCurve came out people had very legitimate criticisms that centered around them doing the math and computing that if we flattened the curve enough to avoid overwhelming the hospital system, we'd be locked down for the next 20 years. Realistically, the only solution was to lockdown, social distance, and wear masks long enough for a vaccine to come out, then vaccinate everyone who hadn't already gotten it. It looks like that'll actually be the outcome in wealthy coastal areas like the Bay Area or New England, but in the middle of the country we'll just overload the hospital system and see what happens.

The fear and media has convinced people like you that crazy things are true like a 20% hospitalization rate. But check out the cdc: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi... . It looks like the hospitalization rate of (cases) is hovering around 7%. That means the positive hospitalization rate of _infections_ (which would include people that never got tested and never went to a hospital, but also got covid) would be even considerably lower than that. Which would square with my experience - being acquainted with ~100 people that have had covid and knowing nobody that went to the hospital.

Like, but that's still far more than the capacity of many Western medical systems.

It doesn't matter how much you overshoot medical capacity, because as soon as you do, death rates go way, way up.

So you're saying my media is evil and trying to make me fearful using false exaggerated information, but somehow your media has no motivation besides giving you perfect accurate information. I'm an easily fooled rube while you're able to float above it and extract only the good info .

You've just cited the overriding mantra (for everyone) of our times.

"Everyone I disagree with is either acting in bad faith and trying to manipulate people or is a rube who's being manipulated. All of my opinions come exclusively from rational philosophical means achieved independently of any external media influences."

How much capacity do you think there is in the healthcare system?

If the healthcare system gets overwhelmed the damage is longe term because doctors and nurses will die and it takes along time to replace them.

Doctors and nurses dying is a negligible concern IMO. Yet again - there have been a few highly publicized cases of things like this, but at scale it is just not something that happens at a non-negligible frequency. I have multiple family members in the medical field. None of them report any such issues - including my sister who is a doctor working in a covid unit in Indianapolis.

They may not die, but I'd bet a lot of them want to leave, or will have significant psychological trauma after dealing with this.

The UK NHS is recruiting at the moment, in the most visible campaign I can remember. I'm wondering if this is linked - certainly I wouldn't want to be faced with the upcoming winter in a medical role dealing with this, given what happened in March to June this year.

Yep, NYT had an article about exactly this yesterday: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/health/Covid-doctors-nurs...

I suspect that if the system gets overwhelmed, various processes will break down as they start accumulating tent cities outside the hospital and run out of equipment.

That's because the system hasn't collapsed.

Comments level getting to deep - trying to reply to a sibling. But 1% of planes crashing kills more evenly across demographics. The 1% here are almost exclusively the elderly and infirm who were contributing (directly anyway) almost nothing to the economy - and in many cases actually being a drain on the economy. Just like the parent comment - I'm not saying they aren't worth saving at economic cost, but just saying that them living also is an economic burden.

I ask this in all seriousness - do you have parents who are still alive? Do they have any chronic conditions that make them more vulnerable?

The economy is not the only thing that matters, and if children can have their grandparents for another 5-10 years, then that's massively important to them, while being irrelevant to GDP.

Full disclosure: Both my mother and my wife's parents are in the age group that is super vulnerable to Covid, and I'd like my daughter to remember them.

Not having vulnerable people close to you is not the only way you can hold my position/view. I have three grandparents who I love dearly in their 80s - one with diabetes, one with rheumatoid arthritis, and the other with lung scarring from tuberculosis. My parents are approaching 60. My wife's parents are in their 70s (both have had covid already). And I have several of my own children. My position is that, yes covid sucks. In my personal view/opinion, the danger/risk levels of covid don't warrant anything nearly so severe as what has been going on all over the world. Let people live. Don't treat them like babies that need to forced to take their medicine. We've long since crossed the liberty/safety threshold I'm comfortable with.

100% agree with your take in this comment and your others in this thread. Thanks for the nuance and perspective!

It seems you were lucky enough to not have a detrimental COVID experience with your immediate family members. I wonder how much your view would change, had you lost one or more family members. You seem to lack empathy for the 1M+ people that have lost someone (globally), and probably millions more that were potentially permanently damaged by COVID.

for what it's worth, my mom and aunt are in their 70s and will have cleared COVID this coming Thursday. When she said they both had COVID i was in tears thinking it was a death sentence given what I've read online. My mom had a fever for one day and just sniffles and body aches since. Same goes for my aunt who is also a breast cancer survivor.

I bet the experience differs a lot for different people and different cultures. My mother has diabetes and is in the vulnerable age group but from all the adults I know, she and her friends around her age are the people who were the least concerned about the virus since the beginning of the epidemics. No isolation, no masks, they just don't care and even get angry at the attempts to keep them isolated. And to be fair, I totally get it. Kind of, it is better to die standing than to live kneeling. We'll all die sooner or later.

Just because the elderly are more vulnerable it does not mean other age groups are not experiencing a higher death rate due to covid.

Per the CDC: "Overall, an estimated 299,028 excess deaths have occurred in the United States from late January through October 3, 2020, with two thirds of these attributed to COVID-19. The largest percentage increases were seen among adults aged 25–44 years and among Hispanic or Latino (Hispanic) persons."

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm

I would argue that "adults aged 25–44 years" are a pretty integral component of the economy and more of them dying than normal is not great.

The largest percentage increase may have been in that age group, but since the base rate is very low, it still amounts to few deaths overall.

The economic impact isn't coming from people dying, its from the measures being used to prevent people from dying. It seems like the economy operates on such a knife edge a little push has serious repercussions. We shut down restaurants because they're a prime locus for spreading. Now those employees are out of a job. The restaurant closes or can't pay its rent, now the owner of the building has knock-on effects.

Even without mandated lockdown, the effect is the same. If I have a 1% chance of dying/long term effects, and I can reduce it if I don't go to restaurants, I won't go to restaurants.

Agreed. Even with significantly reduced capacity it doesn’t seem restaurants around here are turning people away.

Demand has dropped off. Whether there are government restrictions or not, people have overwhelmingly decided it’s not worth the risk.

For the vast majority of people, that chance is significantly lower.

For dying, yes, for long term effects, it's not so clear. And I would also count "I infected my parents and they died" as long term effects.

There is no evidence for long-term effects, only anecdotes.

I'm sure many New Yorkers whose parents died will disagree.

They don't use your private definition of "long-term damage".

And you know that because you have asked them all?

I will neither use your personal terminology nor play games like this. Good day.

>The economic impact isn't coming from people dying, its from the measures being used to prevent people from dying

I would say the economic impact is from the fact there is a pandemic. Even Sweden, which tried to avoid lockdowns, still saw an economic impact because people will avoid going out during a pandemic.

The fact that businesses are forced to close, or in the other case, that people would have been forced to work during a pandemic for fear of being homeless is a public policy failure.

The economy is impacted by people not spending as they were pre covid due to the desire to both avoid contracting the virus in locations they would have previously frequented as well as people saving more in fear of a weakening economy.

My savings rate has increased significantly since Covid as I am barely eating out at all due to the risk of contracting Covid via restaurants as well as worrying that the economy could get much worse and wanting to be prepared. I am just an average person so I would assume that there are many hundreds of thousands of people doing the same as me, thus the economy contracts.

My state is essentially not shut down at all, so very little impact is due to government regulations and almost all of it is due to personal spending choices. The less restrictions in place, the more the virus spreads and the less money I spend.

The economy is highly dependent on people spending and many people dont want to spend right now.

The less restrictions in place, the faster the pandemic and all its effects are over.

how so? Is there proof getting covid grants lifetime immunity? If not, how does that effect the plan if we assume that everyone gets covid at least once a year? Every year you now have a chance of dying from Covid, and overall life expectancy is chopped globally. Are you ok with 250k deaths a year from covid every year going forward? Why would people spend more if the virus just keeps going? Again, my state has no restrictions in place that I am aware of and no one is spending and businesses are closing. That does not seem like a great plan.

I think a better plan is to keep the virus under control, prevent needless deaths and then get vaccinated, especially now when we are so close to a vaccine release. Why risk the lives of tens of thousands of people when we can just all wear a mask and get vaccinated?

> Is there proof getting covid grants lifetime immunity?

No, and there never will be since medicine is not mathematics. But nor is there any reason to believe our immune systems can't deal with this virus like they deal with any other virus.

> Are you ok with 250k deaths a year from covid every year going forward?

250k/7.8 billions = 0.003%. Yes, I'm fine with that.

> Why risk the lives of tens of thousands of people when we can just all wear a mask and get vaccinated?

That's a hypothetical question considering we don't have a vaccine yet and masks are hardly the only restrictions.

Also many of those people who didn't die will have anywhere from mild effects to serious impairments for the rest of their lives.

A huge amount of people who survive will deal with increased depression, anxiety, etc.

Even though its easy and callous to write off the lives of millions of (easily preventable) deaths with a hand-wave, there are going to be serious and long-term effects for those who didn't die and for their families, jobs, etc...

I personally know many people who are suffering from severe pandemic-related anxiety and depression who have not contracted the disease.

The current discourse and societal response to the disease seems likely to have as big or larger of a mental health effect than the immediate consequences of the disease itself.

The lack of a proper societal response to the disease, and what that reveals about the fragile state of our civilization is what's responsible for severe pandemic-related anxiety.

There's truth to this, but I don't think it's the whole picture. It's certainly possible to be concerned about the state of civilization without "doomscrolling" or checking covid death numbers each morning. These behaviors are consequences of the media landscape more than of the disease itself.

That is simply not true and just speculation - especially for a disease that has been around for less than a year. Most of the studies that reported things like heart damage and other kind of side effects were retracted, but the retraction never made it in the press and social media, just the initial poorly ran studies that got hundreds of thousands of shares. One of the so called long COVID studies was done through people recruited through Facebook groups and Reddit communities, all of them having self reported symptoms, but none having actual positive tests.

I don't agree that it would necessarily tax health care systems "beyond what they're capable of handling" (for my definitions of those words). I also disagree that economies would be devastated if we had avoided all lockdown and economy-affecting mitigations. But I understand that reasonable people could disagree with me on both those issues and that is fine.

Durinng their peak earlier this year, Italian doctors were choosing who lives and who dies in the normal course of triage. That's the definition that matters to public health policy.

To me, beyond what it is capable of handling - means that the system gets damaged - not the people that it is treating. What you described is what I would call "beyond it's peaking capacity for treating patients". Not a general "beyond capacity to handle". Imagine driving a car. Not being able to fit all your friends in the car is different than the car frame being crushed because too many people climbed onto it. I'm saying that the former is what we have/will experience - not the latter.

Tbh that sounds like a ridiculous standard. Our hospitals are fine as long as they haven't been hit in a nuclear first strike and are still standing?

This feels a bit tortured. COVID has, is, or is threatening to overload our healthcare system as evidenced by:

1) Severely reduced in-take of new patients of patients due to lack of beds available (and longer COVID recovery time)

2) Reduced ability to effectively care for other patients due to limited beds and transmissibility of the disease, and workforce reductions as healthcare workers get sick (this is not a hypothetical, this is happening in the hospital my wife and brother work at).

3) Forcing healthcare works to perform their jobs without subsequent PPE for their own protection, increasing their own health risks and creating serious issues for mental well-being when working in this environment day-in and day-out.

The healthcare system is designed to treat patients. Believing the system is not exceeding what it can handle because somehow "the system itself" is not damaged (which I'm not even sure what you mean by that) but dismissing patient care and outcomes is like evaluating a vehicle's crash rating, but not evaluating the damage to the vehicle occupants.

That is not true on two fronts. First, doctors were not choosing who lives and who dies. They were deciding who would have the higher chance of survival if they were treated. There is no certainty that a) the selected treatment group would survive or b) the unselected would have survived but for the triage.

Secondly, that is exactly what triage is! People die, doctors are trained to decide of a group of people which are dying, who has the better chance of not dying.

I think this is missing the mark. Italian doctors were choosing who would get an ICU bed and who would not. There were more patients needing ICU beds than the beds available. Not giving an ICU bed to someone in need meant basically a death sentence. That is not the normal state of affairs, as far I can understand.

Well again, not _really_. We were also ventilating people who didn't need it. You don't need an ICU bed if you aren't vented. Furthermore, the mortality rate of being on an ventilator is non-negligible.

I would be interested in seeing if there is data to say whether being put in the ICU actually _increased_ risk of death. Of course this would be hard to prove as only the most sick went to the ICU etc.

This fake story should die already.

(from another post) >To me, beyond what it is capable of handling - means that the system gets damaged - not the people that it is treating

I think your definition of "what they are capable of handling" (for some reason I can't reply to your other clarification of this definition) isn't one that many people would think is a good one. It may be technically correct in some domain, but this isn't it. Healthcare systems are there to provide healthcare for people, and if they can't do that (as in this situation) then they are incapable of handling it. In addition (in the UK at least, can't speak for anywhere else), this has led to not only ICU capacity being exceeded, but also routine healthcare being diminished - either because of people being unable to visit a hospital, or unwilling to do so.

I think the 99%+ metric is reassuring. However the 1% will have a massive cost to our healthcare system, we are in extremistan as Nassim Taleb likes to say. For example, in normal times 10% of the US population represent 64-66% of the health care costs (https://youtu.be/2qhrPa7paAU).

The thing is, it's more likely to be skewed in the wrong direction, the direction that it is safer than you think. So actually its important to understand how bad it is for those who get it. We have consistently had >1k deaths per day in the US and then many others with longterm issues.

> [everyone] understands that this only affects a small percentage of those who contract it

This is highly questionable. There are many articles (whether factual or not) suggesting widespread lasting effects, e.g. just last week on HN one suggested 1 in 5 patients develop mental illness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046157. With all these articles floating around, I just wouldn't agree that there's some sort of consensus that 99%+ of people won't have issues.

1 in 5 get a virus and contract a mental illness? This seems highly suspect.

Please heed this warning from the linked thread:

> Comments like this are gonna quickly turn this place into just another /r/science, where people of no particular qualification chime in and try to make themselves feel smart by contradicting a peer reviewed study without taking the actual effort needed to properly question a peer reviewed study, especially one in as prestigious a journal as the Lancet.

Thank you. Nobody’s interested in your level of incredulity, however you italicize it.

>especially one in as prestigious a journal as the Lancet

While I agree in principle, the Lancet aren't immune to crummy papers (indeed, no-one is). Even just this year, they published that super-dodgy Surgisphere paper that turned out to be completely irreproducible (to put it kindly).

Scientific papers are written by people, and the peers of people who (for example) don't really understand statistics are likely to also not understand statistics, so while peer review is definitely helpful, one should always read scientific papers sceptically.

That being said, low-effort dismissals based on anecdotes are much, much worse than the average scientific paper.

It's because the study qualified anxiety as a mental illness.

Anxiety disorders are classified as a mental illness.

https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness/Mental-Health-Cond...

Sure, nobobody is saying that anxiety disorders aren't a mental illness. But it's also likely the reason why the rate of mental illness was found to be 1 in 5. From your own link, 1 in 5 adults already have anxiety:

>Over 40 million adults in the U.S. (19.1%) have an anxiety disorder.

So it follows that undiagnosed anxiety disorder would be found in abundance in people recently diagnosed with covid.

It looks like they accounted for that or at least did as much as they could to account for that.

>In patients with no previous psychiatric history, a diagnosis of COVID-19 was associated with increased incidence of a first psychiatric diagnosis in the following 14 to 90 days compared with six other health events.

So it looks like they compared it to six other health events and it (anxiety, insomnia, dementia) was still higher with COVID, but they add "we cannot exclude possible residual confounding by socioeconomic factors."

From: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

I hope it's not true, but it looks like more and longer-term studies need to be done.

Good catch, thank you for digging and sharing that.

It is a garbage number- 18.1% took a diagnostic test that showed they had any mental illness- with no accounting for whether they had one before. For 5.8%, they hadn't received a diagnosis before, but it was not shown whether they were undiagnosed or developed the condition as a response to the pandemic itself, rather than the infection.

I remember that thread, and that claim is disingenuous. From the actual study:

>The incidence of any psychiatric diagnosis in the 14 to 90 days after COVID-19 diagnosis was 18·1% (95% CI 17·6–18·6), including 5·8% (5·2–6·4) that were a first diagnosis.

So only 5.8% of people got a first diagnosis, and the remainder of the 18% were people who had been previously diagnosed with one of these conditions.

Further, if you looked at the normal flu the same way, you'd see a 13% incidence rate.. and that's without the impact of lockdowns or media hype.

https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1326041350404415489

Your numbers are wildly off.

Assuming 99% of people had zero issues then you would see 52 million people completely fine and 520,000 hospitalizations except many people get severely ill without going to a hospital so we would easily be approaching herd immunity.

Instead it’s likely closer to ~3-6% hospitalizations with nearly half of those people dying. With 70,000 people currently in the hospital, expect the death toll to keep increasing. The numbers do look better for young people, but if your thinking of 55+ as old, a huge hunk of the population is old.

PS: The recent bump hit 1,000 deaths per day, but daily peak is still increasing rapidly so expect that to rise significantly.

Yes, exactly.

I'm the father of an at risk child, there is absolutely no way we can totally isolate ourselves from society at large.

I could go into depth about our situation, but what I came here to say is: don't believe any hand waving politician who says we can set up some sort of parallel society, where all the venerable are sheltered, whilst the rest go about our lives. It's just the latest incarnation of survival of the fittest.

If New Zealand, with probably the world's best geographic / technological isolation, can't prevent infection, how can we expect that from a family of 4, an old man living alone, a recuperating heart patient?

These arguments about whether the virus is 'bad' or not are entirely subjective. Not having to hear them anymore will be one of the biggest upsides of this vaccine.

Then we need to heavily isolate those specific high-risk communities, while simultaneously maximizing the freedom of everyone else.

And it makes enough people sick enough to require hospitalization to the extent that lockdowns can keep our healthcare infrastructure from being overwhelmed (and driving up deaths because people still get sick, need surgery and treatment for all the non covid reasons and they need access to healthcare too).

When hospitals are overwhelmed by the so called “nothing but a cold”, and you have a heart attack or some other emergency and waiting outside the hospital, you will then understand when it’s too late.

Take a look at what’s currently happening at El Paso Texas. There’s no hospital to go to.

This. A million times. I live in an area where people are so more often than not downplaying how big of a deal Covid itself is because "99% have no lasting symptoms. Just a bad cold is all." or "My spouse had it. NBD."

Mostly, you can't convince them otherwise. But I wish they could just see the effect it would have on non-covid hospital cases and think about that, if nothing else.

For the record, this happens every few years due to influenza too. Most recently in 2018:

https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

Averages don't matter. Most people walk away from car accidents unhurt. Still, seatbelts are mandatory.

We choose a level of precautions (cost) according to the risk. Which is what bugs me about the non-mask crowd cause it costs NOTHING.

Having yourself injected with a newly developed substance is a different thing.

Let's face facts, the long-term effects are unknowable - you trade that for the short-term protection.

i’m not comparing them but you could say the same for the flu. as there are many people who die from it.

it’s all a matter of where you draw the line of risk/reward

Our healthcare systems are designed to handle a bad flu season. COVID is different in so far as it's far more deadly, and that it puts a higher burden on the health care systems because the average time spent in an ICU is way longer.

> COVID is different in so far as it's far more deadly

It's not really "far more" deadly. The main problem is the lack of immunity and everyone getting it at once.

Which results in way more deaths.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

The estimate for this flu season is 24k to 62k deaths.

246k people have died from Covid so far, despite precautions.

Its a substantial difference.

And flu season hasn't even started.

Covid hit after flu season, so those numbers are probably a better case scenario.

Its also extremely disappointing that we don't treat the seasonal flu more seriously. People talk about this, it just took a pandemic for most people to pay attention.

Folks should be wearing masks when they are or even might be sick with ANY transmissible disease. Its actually pretty insane that pre-covid, folks would go into public and work while endangering who knows how many people (I know a lot of people don't have the option, which is a whole other bag of worms).

I find it extremely depressing that people compare this to other easily preventable deaths (I see it often online and from my own family) and say: "See we handle the seasonal flu pretty horribly, why are we trying so hard with COVID-19?"

My hope is that masks become much more socially acceptable for regular cold/flu after all this.

I heard a stat that in the southern hemisphere's 2019 flu season, the rate of flu tests that came back positive was something on the order of 13%. This flu season, the test positivity rate is 0.6%. Obviously lockdowns and even significant social distancing aren't going to happen for the flu, but I think you're right that we could easily do so much better when it comes to other transmissible diseases, and I hope that at the very least masking sticks with us.

Amen! We should all: - Wear a mask when even slightly ill - Stay home as much possible (even getting another person to pickup food) if you have symptoms - Get the flu shot

Stores, schools, etc. should also really think about circulation, hand sanitizer, and perhaps even nightly UV-C disinfectant.

Company culture needs to change: when sick, people should work from home for a job like programming and companies need give more sick leave for jobs like teaching where telecommuting doesn't work as well. Businesses really need to think about their part to play in protecting their customers.

As a side note, my mother who is older wasn't interested in the flu shot and I always wondered why. Even if it's 60% effective, that's just halving your chances of a sometimes fatal disease for $20 and a fifteen minute visit to a pharmacy. The US in particular needs to figure out how to do public health better.

Yeah, that's always my take on wearing masks: it's a decision of risk management. The potential downside of not wearing a mask is just too much larger than that of wearing one, especially when we still have much to know about the virus.

> Let's face facts, the long-term effects are unknowable - you trade that for the short-term protection.

Sure, lock yourself in your house until the virus goes away. We are fine with that.

Just don't impose those restrictions on everyone.

Let's apply that thought process to climate change, condoms, and surgical PPE too! Don't you dare impose reality on me!

> Let's apply that thought process to climate change, condoms, and surgical PPE too! Don't you dare impose reality on me!

Or drunk driving.

What about the people who don't have that luxury to lock them selves away but want protection. The people stocking shelves, picking and packaging your food, delivering your stuff from Amazon

I wouldn't say it costs us "NOTHING".

Most no longer make eye contact. Or shake hands. I can't tell whether someone is genuinely smiling or laughing. Voices are muffled. They're a distraction.

I miss face to face conversations with strangers. I miss talking fast, getting excited, and not having my glasses fog up because I apparently breath fast when excited.

There's an element of humanity that's simply been lost.

EDIT: This isn't a response to what is the appropriate trade-offs for lives lost.

It's specifically a response to the idea that "nothing" is lost when wearing a mask.

So do I. I desperately want to get back to being able to see random strangers, and my colleagues in an office.

I want my newborn to see her grandmother and my family.

I'm just not willing to trade off a bunch of deaths for that.

I can't wait for them to be gone too, but I happily wear one if it protects the people around me.

For how long?

5 years? Ten years? The rest of your life?

I expect that the pandemic will follow Bill Gates's prediction—the developed world will be back to "normal" sometime near the end of 2021. For at least a decade, I expect it to be socially acceptable to wear a mask. However, I think that we'll be comfortable going to concerts and grocery shopping with no social distancing or masks long before then.

I do my part and wear a mask in public but I can't wait to stop breathing so much re-circulated CO2... I can practically feel my blood-oxygen levels dropping after prolonged use (perceived or actual)...

You mean medians don't matter?

> Since top comments here are anecdata about how terrible covid is for a young person, just thought I'd share my experience. ... We don't want to paint our picture of the situation using only extremes. How about we include the "average" anecdata too?

The reason for those anecdotes is to counter the false narrative that young people are basically invulnerable to Covid, and should therefore live like it doesn't exist. That false narrative has been quite prevalent, even here, as an oblique way of arguing against public health measures.

There's no actual prevalent narrative that no one escapes Covid unscathed that needs to be countered.

Nobody is invulnerable to anything. But we should never make generalized/universal policies to the detriment of the masses motivated by long-tail extremes. Just because we don't know how to reliably measure the (real and large) impact of mitigations, doesn't mean we can/should pretent that impact doesn't exist. It's all about tradeoffs. And I'm tired of emotional heart-strings cases that are "easy" to measure stamping out all the real effects of mitigations that are "hard" to measure. And I've also heard way too much about, "but if we could have responded effectively/quickly like China/Vietnam/New Zealand then we wouldn't have been _forced_ to do these other damaging mitigations" - that is a theoretical idea/world that we don't live in. Given the actual situation - that we live in a country with free-spirited/selfish people with pretty significant individual liberties, how should we address the virus? That is the real question.

> There's no actual prevalent narrative that no one escapes Covid unscathed that needs to be countered.

Maybe not on HN, but if you talk to regular people that get their news from newspaper or cable news, they tend to be very misinformed about Covid-19’s severity and prevalence.

A poll done in the UK found that people, on average, thought Covid-19 deaths were 100 times more numerous than they actually are.

https://www.kekstcnc.com/insights/covid-19-opinion-tracker-e...

1700 people under the age of 35 have died in the USA. Let that sink in. Out of EVERYONE in this country, only 1700 have died under 35

> 1700 people under the age of 35 have died in the USA. Let that sink in. Out of EVERYONE in this country, only 1700 have died under 35

That's the wrong way to look at it. How many people over 35 in the USA have died or was hospitalized because an under-35 was a link in the transmission chain? How many people under 35 have expereinced short or long term medical harm because of an infection that didn't manage to kill them?

How many of the under 35 infections had no lasting effects? How many of the under 35 did not infect others?

The reason why extreme cases are showcased, is because it fits a certain narrative. We all know what that narrative is - that Covid prevention should take precedence over everything else.

The fact that the prevention is worse than the disease, in terms of economic hardship, depression, deprivation of education, etc; the fact that prevention measures hit poor people and minorities much more than rich people (who can move around and educate their kids in private schools that largerly do not shut down) - these are all inconvenient facts.

At least be honest - say you know lockdowns are horrible for many people that even if they got the disease would be fine (save for the extreme anecdotes!) but we still decide to impose them.

Really hard to have an honest conversation based on facts these days.

Agreed, changing up my habits to wearing a mask in public was definitely a much bigger hardship compared to the lucky few that met their maker.

Let’s try to keep snark and sarcasm out of the discussion, and instead argue out of data or first principles. HN is a rare bastion of light on the internet - a refuge of civil discussion

Countries that actually are serious close bars not schools. Life is basically normal in Wuhan and New Zealand. Meanwhile Christmas is cancelled this year because Western governments didn't do exactly what China did.

Wuhan's lockdown was extreme however; literally locking people inside their homes. Most western societies will not stand for that.

New Zealand had the advantage of having a huge amount of experience with protecting their biodiversity. I'm willing to bet a lot of that experience was transferrable to this situation.

Nonsense. Everything New Zealand or Taiwan or South Korea or now also Australia has done is public knowledge, very simple, and easily implementable in any developed nation that cares to. Australia had a big second wave surge with anti-social anti-maskers protesting too (not surprisingly most of their press is owned by Murdoch). They took the necessary action, enforced mask rules, got case numbers down to zero. Now they can start to live like normal.

Being an island. Yada yada. Has nothing to do with it. It’s all about the simple actions they took that we could repeat but some people don’t want to because they’ve been conned.

Being anti-mask and knowing it puts others at risk is purely an antisocial behavior. It’s a FU to everyone else. It costs nothing to do, it saves lives, and ironically is what would enable us to be as normal as we possibly can by controlling this thing. Being anti-mask and believing it doesn’t put others at risk is a sign they were conned by a few sociopaths who wanted to exploit this for their own political gain.

Well we could also have normal life by ignoring this pandemic.

? How do you force people to ignore an increased chance of death and disability? Can you mandate it?

You tell them that it's in the noise w.r.t. the danger of being alive - because it is. But instead we have news and social media shouting from the rooftops that everyone is going to die or have some nightmarish long-term effects. All of which are no more significant than the risks people take every day on _purpose_. Driving, hiking, swimming, socializing, getting drunk, etc. Sure it's communicable - we've been happily spreading communicable diseases for millennia that kill people. Nature is cruel. But don't expect society to stop "living" to avoid dying.

>You tell them that it's in the noise w.r.t. the danger of being alive - because it is.

If you remember, this is exactly what China did. It failed because despite how hard you try to tell people that it's nothing to worry about, people will start to realize that hospitals are overrun. Your solution is not only demonstrably poor, but is also how we ended up in this mess. It's a tall order to tell people there's "nothing wrong" while nurses are working 12 hours shifts.

It's a problem that fixes itself quickly. Things suck for a few months, then it's done. Rip the bandaid off quick.

What data is this based on? Can I see the source? I would hate to think you are suggesting actions that would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people based off nothing but an ignorant opinion.

It's a matter of extrapolating the fatality/damage rates out to everyone on the globe. We take that hit plus a bit of fallout - or we can try to continue dealing with things in the big, long, drawn-out, messy way much of the world has been doing. Sucks both ways. Some people prefer one suck - and others prefer a different suck.

If someone told me that the increased risk of dying from covid is just a part of life and that I should ignore it, I would very much ignore that person's advice on all things going forward. I would also very much not vote for that person. Covid is additive risk, its additional, controllable risk on top of existing risk. As its controllable and communicable, I choose not to contract it and not to spread it. My spending choices reflect those choices; so do the spending choices of hundreds of thousands of other people. Get the virus under control and lets get the economy back. Your advice is very much in the nature of 'lets not use seat belts, wear helmets, or masks'

I would argue a large part of the economic hardships in the US are not due to lockdowns but due to changing spending habits caused by the virus. There is a large amount of economic uncertainty right now and so people increase savings. Restaurants around me are open right now but I don't go to them as I have no desire to risk getting Covid, I used to spend ~$500 a month eating out. I now spend close to 0. I think many tens / hundreds of thousands of people are doing the same as I am. So despite a non locked down economy, restaurants are going out of business.

Until the virus is cured, people will continue to increase savings where possible as the virus causes economic uncertainty regardless of lockdown status. To think that if we just lifted all restrictions life would go back to normal is not accurate. If we lifted mask requirements in stores, my spending would sink even lower as my risk would go up.

> Nobody has any lingering issues.

I think it’s too soon to declare that, with long term lung/organ damage being indicated for people (of course, this also depends on a few different factors).

So why is it too soon to declare about long term covid damage, even tho we had it for almost a year now and have data of millions of people who had it, but it’s not too soon to declare that a vaccine that was created in 2 months and tested on 50k healthy adults is safer?

We understand that covid is causing scarring on the lungs heart and kidneys and other organs, in some cases. This would reduce function of those organs, and that reduction may not impact people until they are older. That's why it's too soon to declare it for covid in any individual case. Vaccines work differently, if they caused such scarring for example, it would be accompanied by a bunch of other symptoms which would have been spotted and tested. As a result you can't point to something like I have for covid and make the same argument. Yet, we do understand the vaccine protects us from covid, so we can make an argument about it being a net positive overall.

I don’t think the parent has said that, though.

All they’ve said is we shouldn’t draw conclusions yet about long-term COVID damage. No mention of vaccines.

Because we can extrapolate from our scientific understanding of both?

We know fairly well what damage covid-19 does to the body, and we know fairly well what other similar Corona viruses have done.

Similarly we know the qualities of these vaccines and the likelihood of their success and failure rates.

The vaccine isn't created by pure chance. It's a result of an iterative scientific process.

Long term lung damage is indicated at least among those who have had severe symptoms and suffering. I never said anything about the efficacy or the safety of the vaccines in my comment. I personally think that these preliminary results from these trials are also not completely reliable. While we should all be thankful for the results, the current announcements aren’t the end of the story. Even when they get to further trials, we wouldn’t have had enough time and enough broad range tests to conclusively state certain things (and the unfortunate fact is that we don’t have the luxury of time).

If you look at what the experts say, you’d find them being cautious with their words when commenting on vaccines, efficacy, etc. It’s in people’s best interests to follow precautions like wearing masks, washing hands with soap and maintaining some distance from other people, regardless of what news comes on the vaccine front.

Technically correct, but "long term" means a few months at most in this case.

Because long-term effects require a long term to show up, and the vaccine was created using a very well-understood technique for which that type of data is available.

Are you sure about that? AFAIK both Moderna and Pfitzer vaccines are novel mRNA vaccines, of which (according to Wikipedia) none have been yet approved for human use.

Because no one knows what potential problems people may face in 1, 2,5,10,15,20, to years after being sick with Covid. Think of elevated risk of cancers, stokes, and other maladies.

From Mayo clinic: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

Before we get this thing under control, in US we will at current rate expose almost 10% of population to COVID-19 (now at some 11M people[1]). We should really pray that long term effects are negligible because otherwise we have non-insignificant part of population that are partially damaged and further hinder US in the global competition against China and others.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

You seem to misunderstand the point I was trying to make. That same argument can be brought up against potential problems of a vaccine which is based on a novel technology and has not been tested for 1,2,5,10,15,20 years.

The people you know don't matter. The goal is not to overburden the health system. Hospitals have a limited amount of intensive care units. And if Covid patients fill them up doctors need to do triage (that happened on the first wave in Italy). Then it's not only an issue of people who have Covid, but also a problem of other people who need an intensive care unit.

Also just because you don't know anyone doesn't mean it's bad. If we can reduce people dying it's worth doing it. And it's just not a few in this case.

That's the thing though. If we scare the shit out of everyone then they will all run to the nearest hospital the moment they have even mild symptoms. And then things will get worse for everyone. Doctors who are already exhausted might catch it and die, patients who entered the hospital for other reasons might also catch it and die, and the list goes on. We need to chill the f*ck down because there's enough panic spreading around.

Of course we don't need panic. People should go to their family doctor first (and before going there just call, mine now only works with appointments for flu like symptoms). Here in Germany doctors can also give out a sick leave over the phone. The hospitals should only be visited in severe cases.

Hospitals are already filled with Covid patients. There’s almost 70,000 people who are hospitalized with the virus. Elective surgeries are being postponed again. People don’t understand the seriousness of the virus and it continues to spread uncontrolled straining our medical infrastructure.

Yes, and most of them shouldn't even be at the hospital. That's the point I'm trying to make. By making everyone hysterical they run to hospitals like flock, hindering the ability to nurse other patients with serious problems. Just stay home if you have covid, in the majority of cases hospitals can't help you either way.

Most of the people in the hospital have been there for days or weeks. There is a small admissions of figuring out who needs to stay in the hospital vs just send home, but that is comparatively easy, just run a few tests and you will know. The real problem is those who need special care in a hospital bed. So long as there is a bed with staff to treat 80% will walk out after a few weeks. But as soon as there are not enough staff 100% will die in a few days.

Humans are excellent at recognizing patterns, and as a result, we have strong heuristics for determining which things are worth worrying about, based on our own experiences. This particular virus has landed in a weak spot in our collective judgement mechanisms. Most people would consider a 1% chance of some event happening low enough to not worry about the impact of that event, and indeed, in a typical group of people that number is low enough that probably none of your friends or family will die of it.

But if we recalculate the odds in terms of a particular in-group, and tell you that, of the 25 people you know and care about, there's a 22 percent chance that one of them will die, that seems like a large risk, and one you would work hard to avoid.

And if we then polled all of the people like that, the majority of them wouldn't know anyone that had a bad case! We'd have anecdotes popping up constantly telling us "actually it wasn't that bad" and "stop worrying so much", alongside other anecdotes like "my sister was in the hospital for 3 weeks" and "my wife died in the waiting room". And if you look around in reality, you do in fact see both sets of anecdotes.

(I used a 1% rate for serious cases because it's easy to work with, and not because it's accurate. Reality is as always more complex.)

> if we recalculate the odds in terms of a particular in-group, and tell you that, of the 25 people you know and care about, there's a 33 percent chance that one of them will die, that seems like a large risk, and one you would work hard to avoid.

Isn't that 25% chance that someone will die of the personal cohort?

Not exactly, but yes my math is wrong - it should be 22% that some member of the cohort dies. (`1.0 - (1.0 - X)^N`). I'll update the post.

Last night my neighbor suffered heart failure as a result of COVID. We won’t know how he got it, but it torments me that the movers he hired last week refused to wear masks while in his house. You’re right that catching COVID is unlikely to kill you, but if you flaunt precautions the loved ones of those who died will remember and be pained by your lack of concern.

Keep in mind that most people on HN are white and middle/upper income with good health insurance, so I'm not sure you'll get a good representative sample here. This disease is exacerbating existing differences in health and healthcare access. Black Americans are twice as likely to die from this than white, and have higher risk of infection as well.

Some of my family members work(ed) at a south-side Chicago hospital that treats mainly low-income black people. The hospital is shutting down because of the pandemic (or at least using it as an excuse to get out of a low-value market). The area already had poor healthcare access, and it will get much worse in the near future.

I feel a lot of well-off people are not considering effects like these, which will likely be quite large, when they weigh the long term consequences of our disease response. And it's weird to me that even the most progressive people in my life are happy to use grocery delivery and similar services that essentially transfer disease risk from privileged groups to poor minorities. It's like people don't have the emotional bandwidth to be worried about the disease and inequality at the same time.

> use grocery delivery and similar services that essentially transfer disease risk from privileged groups to poor minorities

Is using a grocery delivery service a greater risk vector than making a trip to the store in person? That's not obvious to me, certainly poor minorities can work at grocery stores too.

Is is it necessary true that grocery delivery service providers are poor minorities? At the risk of revisiting the Prop 22 debate, my downstairs neighbor is a college student who's happy to go out and do some deliveries as time allows.

If you order through e.g. instacart somebody usually still has to make an in-person trip to the store and take things off shelves. It's the same vector, but you are paying someone else to be exposed to it.

It's not necessarily true but it is statistically true. Gig workers are more likely to be non-white and have lower educational attainment than traditional workers, and non-white gig workers are more likely to rely on gigs for primary income than white workers.

Overall you could posit that a single gig worker doing the shopping for 20 households is safer for everyone that 20 individuals doing the shopping for 20 households. The gig workers are often shopping for multiple clients at once - fewer trips, fewer people, fewer chances of infection.

The delivery person could have a higher risk due to visiting all the households, but my experience is that they are all hands off. The gig worker drops the groceries at the door and leaves.

It certainly reduces risk for the clients, but also increases risk for the gig worker. It might reduce societal risk overall, though I'd argue it's hard to say without a deeper understanding of overall behavior, especially since poor people are already at higher risk due to a number of other factors.

Concentrating harm in an already disadvantaged group in the name of the 'greater good' is ethically thorny though. It can be used to justify a lot of not-so-great things.

There are more people involved here than the gig workers and the advantaged, The grocery store employees are at a decreased risk if one person does the shopping of. The managers may have a pretty comfortable salary but the bag 'boys' or the workers stacking pallets behind the scenes could also be disadvantaged.

If a gig worker reguarly goes to multiple grocery stores (which is pretty common, moreso than for individual shoppers), there might not be much benefit for grocery store workers. The ability to transfer disease between grocery stores might increase risk in a major way. It's also not clear that interacting with one high-risk gig worker is better than interacting with twenty low-risk remote workers.

I'd be wary of coming to strong conclusions here without data; you can easily come up with plausible arguments either way.

We had it in our family few weeks ago. Total 6 persons got it. Thankfully for most was very mild, including me. One person had a bit prolonged cough/cold for 5-6 days.

Since we have reasonably reliable data about hospitalizations, deaths, and transmission rates I don't think we should rely on anecdotes at all.

Saying that isn't going to stop the news from running a story about the one healthy young person who died from it. The only way to counter this sort of disinformation campaign from the media is to individually tell the story of the 99,999 other healthy young people who got it and we're fine.

I think a lot of criticism is quite fair. I'm actually very keen to learn much more about the covid cases around you.

What symptoms did they display? What was the timeline of their symptoms, or how did their illness develop/proceed? How soon after initial infection, did person-to-person infection begin? When were the infections/illnesses occurring (Feb/Mar/Apr? Or more recently?) What are the symptoms that stood out to you/them the most? What made them think that it was covid vs another upper respiratory disease? Did they get tested, what tests were used, and how accurate were those tests? What were the treatments, and treatment modalities that were recommended to them by public health officials or private physicians? Do they have post-illness physical records you're willing to share?

I, too, (and I'm sure we all do) have quite a bit of other anecdata I could share - in my workplace, a number of people and their families have been infected. There's a wide variance of experiences - from very mild, to multiple deaths. I chose not to include that information because I couldn't verify their disease progression, or symptom development, or treatment regime. I can provide that actual in-depth information on my experience, based on counsel from my physician and medical health professionals.

Ultimately, the most important questions: how do you create policy for a population, when their experiences are so different? Is this really the best we and our governments can do?

I've known two people who had it.

One died.

This might skew your "average" anecdata a bit.

Sex workers have continued to see clients without using masks or observing social distancing rules. Yet they have not been noticed as a particularly affected group or even as a large transmission vector.

So either we're not collecting the data that would reveal them as actually a problem, or something else has to explain why they are immune to the devastation that is supposed to be associated with Covid.

Individual interactions 1:1 aren't the primary spread concern. Super spreader events and individuals are. Covid-19 is primarily spread by a small set of individuals who spread it to a large number of people.

And people aren't likely to mention the sex worker they saw to a contact tracer, meaning the vector will be overlooked.

Combine that with a relatively young demographic, and an ability to control who you interact with fairly carefully.

So you're saying there are a lot of situations where masks and social distancing aren't important. This is a message you should spread more widely because it is currently lost in the noise.

No.

You might, might be able to interpret my comment as saying that for the very unique set of circumstances that involve sex work, masks aren't important. But that still wouldn't be a charitable interpretation. Please follow the hn guidelines.

Masks and social distancing are always important, and always reduce the likelihood of spread. There are situations when those aren't possible. For example my dentist can't exactly maintain 6 feet of distance from me at all times. But can I wear a mask while in the office.

For that reason we should maintain social distancing and mask precautions where possible, to keep the chance of spread low. While most transmission is via super spreader individuals, you can't know if the one person you give covid-19 will end up a spreader.

> Individual interactions 1:1 aren't the spread concern

I don't think my conclusion from your assertion is abusive to your position. There are many many 1:1 interactions in this world.

For instance, we could simply say, as long as your store is low volume, only has 1 cashier, and only lets 1 healthy looking person in at a time, you don't represent a "spread concern".

> While most transmission is via super spreader individuals, you can't know if the one person you give covid-19 will end up a spreader.

Yet as far as we know, no such event has ever been tracked back to a sex worker. Not conclusive, but if you're honest you have to at least wonder why and if we have some mistaken assumptions in our models.

A cashier is interacting with tens or hundreds of people per day, they aren't taking part in individual interactions.

Like I said, you're parsing my comments with an agenda. Please stop.

> Like I said, you're parsing my comments with an agenda. Please stop.

Just because I have an opinion that is different than yours, does not make my attempt at refuting your assertions, or at least showing their weaknesses, any more agenda based than you doing the same to mine.

Stop putting yourself in the position of moral superior and arbiter of truth. Make your arguments and refute mine to the best of your ability. I will do the same, thanks.

You seem to not want your reasons for dismissing any concern about sex workers considered or applied anywhere else. But that is a good test of their truth, if they can be used to judge other situations too, which is all I was doing.

Sex work is largely illegal (at least in the US) so there won't be any sort of official data collection on it. There's no legal entity/association/etc. representing them to do that kind of work.

Yes, but we have a world wide sample to choose from, even countries where it is legal. Yet it has not been identified as a problem point. Not to mention that there is enough awareness of Covid that if there was an issue it would surely be shared informally amongst those workers. Yet, such warnings are absent.

There are associations of sex workers that advocate for their rights. Unclear if that's the kind of work they'd want to do.

Geez, because there are more than first-order effects from the person who contracts the virus... this argument ticks me off so much, as if the only concern is "well, I don't die/get sick/have lasting effects, so what is the big darn deal?"

Let me tell you what the big darn deal is, from the perspective of someone who likely won't get sick either.

My wife just suffered through sepsis from a previous surgery. She ended up being admitted into the ICU for three days. I learned after the fact that there are roughly 40 staffed ICU beds in the entire county, population ~400,000. Those beds could easily be taken by COVID patients in a situation where you have uncontrolled community spread, and the hospital is now making difficult choices of who deserves those beds.

Now as she recovers her immune system is still fragile. In her normal condition, she probably would be OK after contracting COVID-19. Now, perhaps not so much. If others around me assume that contracting COVID-19 is "no big deal" and end up transmitting it to her, that may not be a problem for those people. It would be a huge deal for me.

What's missing in these rosy pictures of COVID-19 is the lack of awareness that... gasp... we live with other people, and that we all have a duty to protect each other, not just ourselves! What is so wrong with that? If wearing a mask helps me protect others around me, then why not do it? Honestly, if that's the worst encumbrance you've encountered in your life so far, then you've had quite the privileged experience, and as I'd say to my children, you're damn spoiled.

If you don't want to listen to me, listen to the people who have taken an oath to protect my life and yours: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-enraging-deja-vu-of-a.... It's absurd the entitlement that some people display, thinking "well, if something bad happens to me, there will be someone to save me". At the end of the day, the nurses and doctors that treat you are people too. Respecting them means more than sending flowers or banging on pots, it means doing your part to help ensure they can care for the true emergencies and not just idiots who can't be bothered to follow some simple rules to help out the greater good.

Just because people drive like A-holes around me when I'm riding my bicycle on the road doesn't mean that I should try to get the government to take away their cars by force. Or to force them to never go over the speed limit. Or to force them to only drive smaller cars with better visibility out the windows. Sure it would be nice if people did all these things. But I don't think it's right to force any of it. I'm sorry about your wife - that would be really scary and suck. I hope that both of you are able to stay safe and healthy.

You've made your own argument against your point. There are rules about all those things. You speed too much or in the presence of a cop, you'll get pulled over. In my state, you go more than 20 over and you have a mandatory jail sentence. There are strict rules and crash tests from insurance associations for all vehicles to reduce the risk from car crashes.

Furthermore, as a bicyclist you can manage your own risk and the risks aren't correlated. Viruses don't listen to Fox News or MSNBC. You can't wish away exponential growth. Just because a car crashes into your bicycle, doesn't mean that three other crashes occur in close proximity. I'm sorry, but your comparison doesn't make any sense.

That was a good rebuttal. My point, which apparently I didn't make very well, was that we accept some danger in order to avoid some limitations on liberty. It is not a binary tradeoff. We could choose to enforce those rules or make them more strict and save even more lives potentially, but we don't. Because society has decided to draw our line in a certain place on the liberty/safety spectrum. You and I and many others draw our lines in different places on this spectrum. That's fine. I don't dismiss other arguments against my position as being made by dumb, uninformed people. We need to be careful to avoid judging all the sides by their "worst" proponents.

I think we can find some common ground here. For example, I find 'helicopter parents' to be very frustrating. I am closer to (but admittedly still fall short of) the "free range parent". On the whole, our society overemphasizes "zero risk" policies of which I am not a fan, especially when it comes to children. In summary, I am not a fan of the "nanny state". So perhaps you find my vehement defense of masks incongruent.

However, I have a strong sense of duty to a cause larger than myself. So when there is a tradeoff between a minor inconvenience to myself (say a vaccine or in this case a mask in public places), I tend to err on the side on a minor personal inconvenience to help out the larger whole. When it comes to matters of personal responsibility that have consequences limited to the individual engaging in the activity, I tend to say that is their choice.

I'm curious - you haven't mentioned any concern with other communal health mandates. After all, clothing mandates for private businesses aren't even all that crazy. Have you tried entering a restaurant--or indeed any business--without a shirt or shoes? (I have) You'll be politely asked to leave. Why should your freedom to wear (or not wear) clothing of your choice be infringed by the proprietors of these establishments?

BTW- I used to think that these requirements ("no shirt, no shoes, no service") were part of local health codes, but as I was researching my comment here I came across this: https://people.howstuffworks.com/where-did-shirt-shoes-requi.... I have no idea if that's true or not, but I find it even more interesting that nobody has a problem complying with that rule but when it comes to reducing the risk of a highly contagious airborne virus, wearing a face covering is suddenly a huge imposition.

Here's the thing though. You (and the others you mention) are not likely to have had any diagnostic testing done to see if there have been knock on effects from the virus. That you may not have symptoms of other problems does not in itself mean there has not been damage done to organs or nervous system.

The small minority who get serious symptoms are enough to overwhelm hospitals if many people get the disease. Then hospitals cannot treat heart attacks, strokes, car accidents and other serious emergencies.

I had it too. Symptoms were pretty negligible, a medium severity headache and an exhaustion for a day. Slept for 12 hours straight, next day I was as good as new.

Did you get tested?

I did an antibody test a few months later. I couldn't be tested when I had it because I didn't think it was covid. Only after talking to someone who have had covid and developed similar symptoms I realized that I might have been infected too.

Including it is fine. Amplifying it to the point where people don't recognize the potential for suffering the serious effects of the virus or passing it on to others that will suffer the serious effects is dangerous.

I find it unlikely that you would have much insight into the severity of disease in the 400 people in an entire community unless you just mean that no one died or hospital admissions were low. Because covid (or the flu for the matter) can be awefully severe and miserable and long lasting without requiring hospitalization.

Are these average towns? Or millionaire towns?

Think of a typical ag-focused rural town filled with mostly below-median incomes.

Thanks for posting this. While the rate of cases in my vascinity isn't as high as your seems to be, I only hear about mild to "strange weird cold". I am glad for them. Doesn't seem like the big danger the media is trying to sell. At least not in my circles.

Why not just use the actual data and not anecdata at all?

And also, the extremes are important because statistically more people hit those extremes than with other respiratory viruses. There are states reporting nearly full ICUs right now. There are states (re)opening field hospitals.

The whole reason for lockdowns and restrictions isn’t to prevent a huge amount of deaths. Most people don’t die from Covid. The whole point is to keep our hospital system above water.

Why was the most upvoted comment before mine anecdata? Obviously people find anecdata relevant or it wouldn't be so upvoted.

Why are you worried about who is upvoted?

I'm not - I just wanted to try to provide a more balanced view after the fashion that the community seems to be interested in.

That's not now the modern internet works.

It's now competition and one of the best ways to score points in this competition is by manipulating the empathy of your fellow human.

I wish the internet was still about real discussion but now it's about heartstrings and upvotes.

Haven't you notice the same pattern with the "long covid" stories? Light on science, heavy on heartstrings.

An internet based off of rational discussion is long dead, even here on HN. Just watched the mods (hi @dang ) wipe nuke a story about Sweden's Covid-19 success off the front page. [1]

Oh well.

[1] = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112382

It's surprising to me how difficult it is to have a discussion in the (cyberspace) open holding what I consider the internet-minority-viewpoint on covid. Even on HN (among other platforms), which is one of the places where I often go to find good balanced viewpoints, when sharing anything remotely different from toeing the covid line (i.e. vaccines will save the day, everyone must get vaccinated, we must force people to wear masks, schools should be closed, the virus is causing the economic disaster, etc.) I see people get downvoted, censored, etc. to oblivion. It's nice to see that there are other folks out there that don't exhibit the wild levels of fear and concern for what I consider to be much ado about nothing.

It doesn't at all help that we have both China [1] and political parties manipulating public opinion for votes [2]

I miss the old internet where I could talk to rational people like you but now Eternal September has truly arrived.

[1] - https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid...

[2] - https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-kamala-harris-got-big-soc...

> It's surprising to me how difficult it is to have a discussion in the (cyberspace) open holding what I consider the internet-minority-viewpoint on covid.

The thing is, not all viewpoints are equally valid, and some are both unreasonable given the facts and have actually dangerous implications.

For instance, minority viewpoints like promoting herd immunity as a solution at this point (like some prominent people were doing as recently as a month ago [1]) is about the dumbest thing ever. It's pretty much "let's try to get everyone sick (with the death and disability that entails) just before our vaccine effort bears fruit and would make that pain unnecessary. It's nonsense, and at this point it makes more sense to downvote than to beat the same dead horse yet again.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-embraces-idea-herd-imm...

Why isn't it valid to acknowledge all the data/risks, and still feel like we should just let the virus run its course? I know of tons of people who feel this way. You are arguing against a straw-man. Yes, there are many conspiracy theory nutcases out there. But people who believe all the numbers and still think we are overreacting are still being censored/ignored to oblivion. Not only that, but my (highly reliable ;-) anecdata tells me that most of these people are busy raising kids and growing the food you eat. Just because they don't have the time to spray their opinions all over the internet and petition their govt officials to freak out doesn't mean that their viewpoints are less valid.

> Why isn't it valid to acknowledge all the data/risks, and still feel like we should just let the virus run its course?

It's technically valid, but tiresome to rehash the same broadly rejected viewpoints over an over. What you called "toeing the covid line" above is basically agreeing with the consensus of experts who actually know what they're talking about.

> But people who believe all the numbers and still think we are overreacting are still being censored/ignored to oblivion. Not only that, but my (highly reliable ;-) anecdata tells me that most of these people are busy raising kids and growing the food you eat. Just because they don't have the time to spray their opinions all over the internet and petition their govt officials to freak out doesn't mean that their viewpoints are less valid.

Oh, I know some of those people, and they're part of the reason the state my parents still live in has been a covid shitshow for several months and only just came around to imposing a mask mandate and occupancy limits. Their viewpoints are definitely less valid, being either wishful thinking or lack of concern for others.

I live in one of those "shitshow" states. And the vast majority of the population here is completely fine with how things are panning out - except maybe the reduced restaurant capacity and part-time schooling - those are pretty annoying. You can't force people to care about things they just do not care about. I acknowledge that some people (legitimately) have different values w.r.t. tradeoffs of dealing with covid. They don't have to be stupid or uniformed or brainwashed to think differently than me. And neither do I or many of those shitshow makers have to be brainwashed or uniformed to think/feel differently than you.

> You can't force people to care about things they just do not care about.

Exactly, so don't complain about downvotes again next time you want to resist "toeing the covid line." To make an analogy, there are probably people (maybe even whole communities) who want to resist "toeing the drunk driving line," but the ship has sailed on that and few people care to hear their arguments that they should be able to drive when the blow a 0.12 or whatever.

Mods? Users flagged that one. No mod even saw it. (Edit: I've restored the post now.)

Edit: would you please stop using HN for political and ideological battle? It turns out you've been doing that a ton, and basically exclusively. That's not what this site is for, and we ban such accounts. Please view https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.

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