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Comment by pchristensen | Hacker News Reader

Exponential growth can get out of hand very quickly. It doesn't take too many people to mess up, break rules, or get unlucky for this virus to erupt.

Also, way more people are indoors in November in Sweden than August. Many people travel to remote cabins in the summer - August in Stockholm is about as deserted as San Francisco during Burning Man. They're mostly back by September, bringing more people in proximity. I'm in Seattle and Washington is locking down again, as colder temps have brought the long predicted fall spike.

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"the long predicted fall spike."

If those in power knew a Fall spike would likely occur, would it have made sense to encourage healthy people to seroconvert during the summer, when the flu is less prevalent? Instead, this was purposefully stretched into the flu season.

Why? Who benefits from fear and lockdowns?

I don't understand why "fear and lockdowns" are equated here. Lockdowns aren't an agenda on their own - it's because of the virus, which exists whether you do a lockdown or not. I guess people believe that the virus is nothing to be scared of, and so then they believe that people fearmonger to whip up support for a lockdown, but this belief makes zero sense to me - why would anyone be in favor of a lockdown if the virus isn't dangerous?

it seems politically safer to do "something", than to do "nothing". if the lockdowns stop the virus you're a hero, if they dont, you're still a hero for thinking of the children... if instead you do nothing, and things get better, you're just seen as lucky, if things get worse, you get to take the blame.

> encourage healthy people to seroconvert

It's almost never a good medical strategy to intentionally get ill.

Pox parties are extremely dangerous.

That depends which pox. For chicken pox (varicella) before we had an effective vaccine almost everyone got infected at some point. The effects were more severe for older people so it was safer to catch it as a youth.

It was predicted because the change in weather causes more people to be indoors, and poor indoor air circulation is a big contributing factor for spreading. Same with the onset of the hot weather and A/C in the US South in May, around the time cases started increasing there.

Also, catching Covid sucks for a lot of people, even if they survive. Encouraging people to catch it during summer seems pretty irresponsible.

Seroconversion was avoided because it's potentially deadly. And while you're waiting for a vaccine to get ready, it kind of makes sense to spread things out.

Who benefits from fear? I'd guess weapons companies.

Who benefits from lockdowns? No idea. Pro gamers?

I can't really decide if you're posting here to stir up a reaction or if you are strongly convinced that seroconversion is a good idea. But just for the sake of discussion, you should consider that the chance of side effects is high enough that many people would actively resist seroconversion. So my guess would be that people who consider that to be a great idea are a 5% minority. That's why governments will likely not do it.

"That's why governments will likely not do it."

Japan did it. Japan learned from the docking of the Princess cruise there and the results from each passenger. Those results were quite interesting.

And death rates by age group are revealing. The young without co-morbidities have great prospects.

September Tokyo study said, "Boston Children’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School, Boston, say their study suggests that seroprevalence for SARS-CoV-2 rose to almost 50% ..."

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200924/Tokyo-citizens-ma...

These are mainstream medical professionals from USA making findings that Tokyo is at herd immunity.

That study uses seroconversion in the meaning that a previous infection becomes measurable.

But when people suggest active seroconversion they usually mean that you start infecting otherwise healthy individuals deliberately to increase herd immunity.

So while both groups use the same word, they mean quite different things.

> Why?

Well one part is incompetence. And the other is that a fall spike was just a hypothesis. We didn't know for sure.

Seems we can agree that it was incompetent to prevent healthy people from seroconverting last summer.

With even healthy people dying or having long term if not life long health impacts, was it really "incompetent" to prevent people from taking those risks?

Your sentence makes very little sense to me because the seroconversion has a high chance of causing life-altering side effects. I'd say it would be irresponsible to suggest that to the general public.

There's a counterfactual logic flaw there though. How do you know ahead of time that a healthy person would recover nicely? There are plenty of counterexamples. If you respond in a utilitarian manner, well then you have to compare it with other utilitarian approaches.

Nobody benefits from fear and lockdowns, that's why the conspiracy theories around them are so fucking stupid.

We did not encourage healthy people to seroconvert during the summer because achieving the necessary numbers of infected would have caused millions of deaths. This was the UK's original plan and they backed off when they actually ran the numbers and saw how many fatalities it would require.

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