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Comment by skyzyx | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the pandemic fatigue is real. Yes, it would be wonderful to hang out with my friends in person, or to drive 100 miles crossing the border to go visit my children.

But the reason this is lasting so long, and things are shutting back down is because people are ignoring the truth. You can talk about the economy all day long, but the fact of the matter is that if we all would’ve taken this seriously and shut everything down, we would be through the worst of it already.

Comparatively, New Zealand and Canada have done a dramatically better job than America. People there appear to be willing to set aside their selfishness in favor of the common good.

And the people who don’t believe that it’s real? All I can say is that it’s extremely clear that we are living in a second Cold War. But instead of fighting with nukes, we’re fighting with misinformation, and Russia is winning.

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Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. That's the last thing we need here. Well, tied for last anyway.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

the fact of the matter is that if we all would’ve taken this seriously and shut everything down, we would be through the worst of it already

This isn't supported by the available evidence. Spain was forbidding people from leaving their homes except for essentials, and now they're worse off than the US in terms of hospitalizations and deaths. Many other countries also had stronger lockdowns that have not spared them from winter surges.

You can say that they didn't do "real" lockdowns, and that if people would just sit quietly in their homes for six months then it would have gone away. Which is about as useful as saying that if everyone ate less and exercised more then obesity would be eliminated, or if everyone stopped having sex outside of marriage then STDs and teenage pregnancies would no longer be problems. Humans do not have infinite willpower, and if your plan is to assert that they should and then shame them for their horrible selfishness of wanting to occasionally visit their families, it is going to fail.

Spain did do real lockdowns and it worked. And then they stopped doing real lockdowns. So it is in fact supported by the evidence.

It didn’t solve the problem, meaning, unless you are willing to lock down indefinitely, the virus will come back. So in the pedantic sense you are right, lockdowns work, but clearly are not a solution.

Clearly it is a solution. The problem is that places like Spain stopped their lockdowns. What we really need is a flexible and informed approach, where the stringency of lockdowns is implemented on a sliding scale determined by actual real-time case numbers. Masks and other basic measures should be everywhere and always required and more stringent steps applied proactively as hot spots emerge. This coupled with rapid testing and contact tracing works. It has been proven multiple times in multipel places.

The actual problem with Spain is that they have a decentralised system of contact tracing (which is normally good), but which didn't really get implemented quickly enough.

Madrid in particular did pretty poorly at this.

Additionally, their economy is so dependent on tourism that they felt they needed to open back up to avoid ruination.

This lead to loads more cases, coupled with pandemic fatigue and here we are.

I was there and remember the sequence of events clearly. The lockdown worked and cases across Spain were very low right after the quarantine. Then tourism opened back up, because the economy, and tons of people from countries that did not quarantine all flocked to Spain. Spain’s numbers started going up immediately.

Lockdown works; Spain would have been fine by now if they were more careful with opening (not allowing the British in for instance). But alas it is worse than ever and there is no stomach for another lockdown so people wear masks but restaurants are crowded every day and there are few travel restrictions so...

The lockdown brings the numbers down. Contact tracing, quarantines and testing keeps it down. If you do not follow up the lockdown with these measures, you are bound to fail.

Depends on what problem you are trying to solve. If you are trying to make COVID19 go extinct then yes, lockdowns aren't sufficient. If you are trying to avoid overwhelming health care resources (so they are available to dying patients of all kinds) then it can help as it reduces the hospitalization rate.

Lo, the flaws inherent in taking assertions way too literally.

Spain has a different economy than other countries. There's depends unusually heavily on tourism compared to other countries in the Western world.

What do you think happened in the last year that would prevent tourists from coming to Spain?

Seriously, HN, we are better than this inanity.

It's not an unsolvable human nature problem. Look at just about any country in East Asia.

> Spain was forbidding people from leaving their homes except for essentials, and now they're worse off than the US in terms of hospitalizations and deaths.

That second wave has started months after Spain lifted all those restrictions.

Yes, that is exactly the point. Lockdowns don’t make all of this go away sooner, because as soon as you lift them, the outbreak resumes.

It was only ever supposed to buy us time (to develop treatments, vaccines, reorganize workplaces) and avoid overwhelming the capacity of services like hospitals.

I don't think anyone credible has said that lockdowns were going to put the genie back in the bottle. It is only one component of a complete response.

They _have_ argued that a complete response might permit more economic normalcy somewhat sooner, and that appears to be bearing out.

The country dealing better than any other with Covid has been Taiwan. No lockdown and > 200 days without new Covid case [1] see e.g. [2] for how they did it. It probably helped having had an epidemiologist as vice-president [3].

   Russia is winning.

Why did you have to end an otherwise insightful post with a many-times debunked conspiracy theory? May I recommend removing the last paragraph?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/29/taiwan-domesti...

[2] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Chien-jen

It's not just Taiwan, it's all of East Asia. At this point it's beyond irresponsible for people to keep comparing the US's handling to other Western nations – EA showed how it's done (in both democratic and autocratic societies), but we have some weird cultural blind spot that makes us not want to see.

The problem is, there is no “how it’s done” to point to. All of the east asian countries did radically different things.

Taiwan slammed it’s borders shut before cases got into the country, and hasn’t done much else. Korea adopted large-scale contact tracing and isolation interventions. China uses authoritarian rule to lock people up when they have it. Japan hasn’t tested much at all, kept offices and restaurants open, and never even came close to “stopping“ the virus. And yet, even there, the fatality level isn’t nearly what we’re seeing in the west.

It isn’t unreasonable to hypothesize that something else is going on.

Your description of Taiwan's response is wrong.

As outlined in [2] I linked to above, Taiwan permitted the docking of the Diamond Princess [1] and allowed passengers to disembark in Keelung (near Taipei), on 31 January, before the ship left for Japan. The ship was subsequently found to have numerous confirmed infections onboard. In reaction, Taiwan's government published the 50 locations where the cruise ship travelers may have visited and asked around 600k citizens who may have been in contact with the tour group to conduct symptom monitoring and self-quarantine if necessary. So at least in the beginning of the pandemic, Taiwan was not closing the doors. Today, Taiwan has essentially the same 14-days entry quarantine as most countries. Another important difference is that Taiwan takes quarantine very seriously and monitored those sent into quarantine via mobile phone location tracking. That too is outlined in [2]. Police will talk to you if mobile phone movements indicate that 14 day quarantine is violated. In contrast, quarantine is de facto voluntary in many European countries.

There is no good reason as far as I can see, why other countries don't adopt similar policies.

I must admit, I am not pleased that I am loosing 1 year of my life because the countries that I live in are not adopting best practises. Indeed, are mostly not even aware of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Princess_(ship)

[2] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689

It seems to me that the one difference that is just stark, between the US and all of those cultures, is that they already had a system wherein it was acceptable (or even encouraged) to wear a face mask.

Is it that? Is it that simple? Those are honest questions.

Face masks have been normalcy on public transport in winter in south east Asia for a while, I think, but am not sure, since SARS Cov-1, in 2003.

The quarantines are only one tool in China’s response. They were also quick to adopt masks and contact tracing.

Characterizing quarantines as “locking people up” seems to me the root cause of the mass deaths in the West. The iconography of individualism has trumped the idea that walking around expelling a cloud of deadly material makes you a threat against the life and liberty of others.

>Why did you have to end an otherwise insightful post with a many-timed debunked conspiracy theory?

I believe they're making the extraordinary claim that Russia is solely responsible for Americans not believing in mask wearing, as if Russia is in total control of the most wealthy & strong country in the history of the planet. Americans love a bogeyman to distract from the reality of a completely politically split country who create their own misinformation and spreads it under their own power through domestic social media.

_Solely_ responsible? No, of course not.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=russian+covid+disinformatio...

I oppose lockdown/shut down, doesn't mean I don't believe that covid is real, nor I believe there is 0 risk from covid but simply I'm comparing the cost/risk of lockdown vs cost/risk of covid.

I acknowledge though that this cost/risk can be very subjective.

So what do you think of intensive care bed running out and people dying at the hospital entrances like in Italy? Also, what is the cost you speak about? How many minutes of Bezos income? How many F35? How many days of US budget deficit?

I mean avoiding lockdown is possible at a certain time. After a certain threshold of infection it becomes unavoidable. But lockdown or no lockdown, this must be done right. A few places have not done it right, for example Spain letting people party in the summer or France with packed cafes.

A friend of mine explained it well. When treated, COVID has a mortality of .5%. We are doing better than in March because for example elderly care person wear masks and isolate properly the risk population. If they wouldn’t, the mortality would be in the low percents, which would already be a lot. But when you are running out of ICU capacity, then you land in the 10% deaths. That’s what everyone is trying to avoid at the moment.

>So what do you think of intensive care bed running out and people dying at the hospital entrances like in Italy?

It is bad, I didn't say nothing should be done about it. Some that can be done: Increasing intensive care capacity, redistribute capacity to other hospital, do not admit patient with mild symptom, increasing effort for better treatment/vaccine, etc.

I'm still open to lockdown but certainly not for this virus. Doesn't make sense if the cure is worse than the disease.

Keep in mind vast majority cases is asymptomatic or only have mild symptomp.

cdc estimate of the ifr : https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

0-19 years: 0.00003

20-49 years: 0.0002

50-69 years: 0.005

70+ years: 0.054

Its very low.

>Also, what is the cost you speak about?

Lockdown cost: unemployment, bankruptcy, mental health issue, kids receiving poor education because they can't go to school, delayed treatment for other diseases, suicides, domestic violence, etc

> Comparatively, New Zealand and Canada have done a dramatically better job than America. People there appear to be willing to set aside their selfishness in favor of the common good.

Or even temporary constraints in favor of better things. In New Zealand you wear a mask but at least you can hang out with your friends. It's not even selfishness at that point, just denial and stupidity!

> But the reason this is lasting so long...

Masks and social distancing and banning birthday parties are not about speeding up or ending the pandemic but slowing it down (to minimize deaths) until a vaccine is ready. This is what 'flattening the curve' is all about.

It's also weird to see Canada among your success stories. Their 'worst of it' is right now.

We're fighting with misinformation alright.

> Masks and social distancing and banning birthday parties are not about speeding up or ending the pandemic but slowing it down (to minimize deaths) until a vaccine is ready. This is what 'flattening the curve' is all about.

Not quite. NZ took the route of hard lock down early, 30 days (2 infection cycles). They basically managed to get covid to burn itself out, so they're just dealing with imported cases, and contact tracing the heck out of out them to bust any potential clusters.

Canada's lockdown isn't nearly as long, and people didn't take it nearly as seriously. PHAC dragged their heels on mask use; and now on rating COVID as potential aerosol risk. We did it all half-assed, the province didn't use the time to really amp up contact tracing, learning techniques from jurisdictions that had success, such as South Korea, or Taiwan; nor did we really make testing work during the summer lull. The Feds didn't / can't squeeze some kind of national standard in dealing with things, in part because of the minority government, and in other parts of not knowing when doing the right thing matter more than dealing with idealists bitching about divisions of power.

We get cold faster and longer, and people tend to stay inside, so there can be more clusters. I'd expect things to get worse.

In this situation, NZ has unique geographical advantages. Others that have tried similar measures without those advantages haven't found the same success. I think most European and North American nations recognized very early on that NZ-style elimination was not a viable choice for them.

I agree with everything you say about Canada, which is another reason why I wouldn't put it in the same category as NZ.

> But the reason this is lasting so long, and things are shutting back down is because people are ignoring the truth. You can talk about the economy all day long, but the fact of the matter is that if we all would’ve taken this seriously and shut everything down, we would be through the worst of it already.

This is untrue to the point where it hurts. The reason it's lasting so long is because covid-19 is a highly infection virus that's already out in the wild, and it's going to spread despite our best efforts to contain it until a vaccine is invented and deployed or until we reach herd immunity.

We are not gods. We can't wave our hand at biology and make the virus disappear. We must take all necessary and sane precautions, and accept the consequences of our life.

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