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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

>lessons from COVID

what in our response to COVID was better and more effective than our response to Black Death and Spanish flu? I don't see any improvement despite 700 and 100 years of accumulated knowledge and technology development since then. There has so far been no indication that the only things we were able to muster - archaic lockdown and masks - can prevent it from reaching the 20-30% spread, basically the level of unmitigated spread.

I mean, for example, 700 years ago people couldn't know that that ship coming into the port of Venice brings the infection. A year ago we knew that this plane from Wuhan most probably does.

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Maybe not the USA but Asians countries which one could argue will carry the torch of progress did improve.

yes, like Taiwan who 1. did learn the lesson from SARS and did immediate quarantine upon just hearing (i.e. de-facto using modern communication technology) about some strange flu appearing in China. 2. Used modern technology to do contact tracing. 3. Quickly scaled up extensive testing - again modern science and technology. Most places did nothing like these 3 steps. Those steps weren't available centuries ago and could have prevented the covid from becoming pandemic.

Another noticeable difference is that Taiwan actions were real actions where the government did actually performed them whereis typical "actions" we see around like lockdown and masks are just government orders without the governments actually doing anything.

Many orders of magnitude fewer deaths, for one?

Orders fewer? Lets look at the Spanish flu in US - the US wasn't ravaged by WWI/revolutions/rebelions, didn't have systemic hunger, etc. and had time to and implemented some of those measures like quarantines/lockdowns/masks, so very reasonable to compare to today. Spanish flu killed 700K in US . Covid already 250K in US - even if we imagine that we're at the peak today, it still means end number like 500K.

I would only like to add that the US population was only around 100m around 1920, and travel would have been much more limited. But overall I agree that the worldwide handling in 2020 has been sobering.

One interesting thing to consider is that the US isn’t actually the center of the world, so generalizing it’s reaction to the rest of the world makes no sense.

Looking at the world instead, COVID has killed just over a million people so far, and Spanish Flu is esimated to have killed anywhere between 17 and 100 million people, at a time when the world population was much less and travel was much harder. So yes, orders of magnitude.

Food for thought:

- The average age of death during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was 28 [1].

- 70% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths are age 70 and above [2].

These are very different pandemics, and it's not clear what comparisons between the two actually tell us.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoratio...

[2]: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/22035

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