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> Hopefully at some point we will understand that the virus will follow its own curve regardless of what we try to do, after it has implanted in a country.

This comment is utterly infuriating. Who is we? Is it epidemiologists? Because I think they would disagree with you. Is it South Korea or New Zealand? They would disagree too.

COVID 19's spread and contagion isn't magic. It's basic germ theory, which we've known for over 100 years. The fact that this defeatist, anti-science sentiment can sit as the most upvoted comment on a site called Hacker News is... a sign of the times.

New Zealand (incredibly remote island with 4.8M, less than a few boroughs in London) shut down its borders before coronavirus season (which meant very limited community transmission outside of a few clusters) and did a hard lockdown. Once community spread has taken place (during coronavirus season), it's too late to act.

But if you have any argument other than ad-hominem attacks, please feel free to share and participate in the debate. Your only argument is outrage?

It's shocking that debate is now limited to insulting others of being anti scientific if they don't agree with one's point of view, backed with citations.

> shut down its borders before coronavirus season (

LOL, but you were trying to convince people isolation doesn't work and that the virus will just magically continue doing the rounds without any way of stopping it

Conspirationists don't have to make any sense, right?

There is nothing ad-hominem about their comment.

The most populated london borough has a population of around 400,000. Quite clearly New Zealand's population is greater than any london borough, or even a few combined.

> Who is we? Is it epidemiologists? Because I think they would disagree with you.

So basically, people who agree with you are “epidemiologists”, and people who show you facts you don’t like are “anti-science”.

What’s infuriating is when someone can post a well-sourced, factual comment, and it gets rejected by people who dismiss any and all facts that don’t fit their pre-determined narrative.

Regarding your third source: All of the countries you selected on this graph had a strong but not identical drop. Germany for comparison took only very light measures (schools and daycare close to 100% open) and has seen a much smaller drop.

(1) https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

No one spoke about identical drop. They've all dropped, their timelines might be lagging by a few days/weeks but they are all moving in the same direction in roughly the same timeline.

I believe that you made a dishonest selection of countries in your source: You selected countries with similar drops and you then inferred that measures have no impact in the virus. Germany had a ~5% drop, france about a ~60%. Germany has schools and daycare open, France closed them.

None of this is scientifically cause and effect. You are picking correlations which agree with your preferred narrative and extrapolating from there.

There is very strong evidence that the virus is less contagious to/from children and that schools and daycares are not a significant point of transmission.

1 - https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/risk-co...

2 - https://www.npr.org/2020/10/21/925794511/were-the-risks-of-r...

3 - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/health/coronavirus-school...

4 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/20/covid-19-...

What I stated was that this person selected data in a way to support their theory and that i could easily select a data point that contradicted his theory. I did not claim that my single example proved some other theory, I did not state a preferred narrative as you claim.

Please have a look at the guidelines, you should try to honestly understand my point.

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

Did you edit your comment since I replied? I can't say for sure anymore... I thought you were actually making the opposing claim.

However, it seems like we are emphatically agreeing!

Good to hear, gn

In the UK local lockdowns started before the national one. Also rising cases were plastered all over the media.

It's hard to pick these things apart.

It's not hard to pick these things apart. Infections peaked before lockdown (in both lockdowns) in the UK thus lockdowns weren't necessary.

People decided to be vigilant by themselves — sure. That still means that lockdowns weren't necessary.

That is one interpretation of the facts. An alternative one might go something like this:

In early Autumn it was apparent that infection rates were high in the North of England but lower in the (wealthier and economically more productive) South. The UK government adopted a local/regional approach to lockdowns, with the effect that the North was under lockdown-like conditions for most of Autumn. Infection rates began to fall in the North, but simultaneously started rising in the (non-lockdowned) South, though from a lower base. Once infections started rising in the South, the government adopted a national lockdown plan (with, coincidentally, vastly more financial support for firms and individuals). And so the fall in infections we see "before the lockdown" is the effect of the "tier 3" restrictions across the North, with the national lockdown intended to prevent serious increases in the spread of the disease across the South.

I am not saying that this story is true, just that it's an equally good fit for the facts. Presenting statistics is only ever the start of the conversation, not the end, as the statistics do not speak for themselves.

The conclusion doesn't follow. Perhaps the lockdown was the reason people were vigilant? If so, then the mere news of the lockdown made people vigilant and aware of the severity of the situation. It would make sense that peoples' behavior changed early then. And unless one could have conveyed the severity to the population in any other way - the lockdown was "Necessary" even if just as a means of signalling.

I really find it surprising how people will torture data until it shows them the BS they want to believe

You can't assert you passed the peak until a long time after you pass it. Given the primary source, the UK peak was around 2 Nov/3 Nov https://covid.joinzoe.com/data#levels-over-time Yes, the previous measures might be sufficient and more important than a lockdown

> (2) Infections in most of Western Europe are decreasing at the same time regardless of measures taken or when they were taken.

Except for Sweden, where it kept climbing and climbing, funny.

> we will understand that the virus will follow its own curve regardless of what we try to do

Physical isolation of infected people has been proven to work since the middle ages and the black plague but it seems that the new fashion is to invent some idiotic BS and repeat it as truth such as "the Earth is flat" or "people can be contaminated through closed walls". But if you think it doesn't matter might I suggest you go volunteer in a COVID ward. No masks needed.

> Six of 12 men wintering at an isolated Antarctic base sequentially developed symptoms and signs of a common cold after 17 weeks of complete isolation

If each person is infectious for 5 days, and it takes between 2 to 14 days for incubation, it is not hard to imagine how it goes on for 17 weeks. It might not even have been Covid (or a virus)

> Except for Sweden, where it kept climbing and climbing, funny.

Sweden’s cases started rising in early November, peaked in mid-November, and are now in clear decline:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

You don't know you passed the peak until you clearly passed the peak. This is not the case so far. (Just take the same graph and ignore the data after a certain date. If you go back to Nov 1, you would have thought you'd be over the peak already, but you arent)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-22/swedish-p...

There's a Swedish caveat in death data as well https://ourworldindata.org/covid-sweden-death-reporting

> You don’t know you passed the peak until you clearly passed the peak.

What manner of logic is this? Look at the plot: the daily case numbers are in decline. I don’t know what will happen three weeks from now, but I know that it’s factually incorrect to claim that cases are still increasing.

By the same logic you’re using, the very article this is attached to is nonsense: you don’t know if cases in the UK will go up again tomorrow.

Also getting your hand at good data isn't so easy nowadays. E.g. reporting date can be very different from actual date of death. My area once lagged 3 months.

Interesting to read about a peak at the start of November. Some regions of Germany where data for "date of death" is available also show a peak slightly before 1.Nov.

Some regions seem to have a constant lag for reporting. For others the curves using "reporting date" seem to be completely detached from the "date of death" data.

> Hopefully at some point we will understand that the virus will follow its own curve regardless of what we try to do, after it has implanted in a country.

This is just straight up wrong. Many countries like China, Singapore and Australia have gotten sizable outbreaks (tens of thousands of people) under control and effectively eliminated the virus in their territories.

I do agree that half-assed lockdowns are the worst of both worlds: you endure the economic damage of shutdown without putting much of a dent in the case count. That said, with mass vaccination on the horizon, even pushing back the peak by a few months is about to start having real benefits.

> This is just straight up wrong. Many countries like China, Singapore and Australia have gotten sizable outbreaks (tens of thousands of people) under control and effectively eliminated the virus in their territories.

Do you actually believe Chinese numbers...? Unrealistic to compare Australia (which shut down border before it was coronavirus season, hence no community spread) and Singapore (5M people, similar situation with borders shut during non coronavirus season).

> Do you actually believe Chinese numbers...?

The Chinese government isn't Oceania, with a near-total ability to force a narrative that's widely in variance to the facts. For example, just look at how well they've managed to convince the world that the Xinjiang camps don't exists and are fully of happy Uyghurs that are grateful for the education they're getting there.

If China had the same per capita COVID death rate a the US, they'd have had 1.1 million deaths at this point (and the associated stresses on their healthcare system). That's not something they could hide, because that's something my relatives would be able to personally report evidence of (especially since one is basically living in a Chinese hospital right now because of a bowel issue). Instead, they going about their business normally, often without masks, and no one's getting sick from COVID.