Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

An uncontrolled pandemic is also a deathblow to small businesses.

It's telling that even Sweden is giving up on the #YOLO approach.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/long-a-holdout-from-covid-19-re...

> After a late autumn surge in infections led to rising hospitalizations and deaths, the government has abandoned its attempt—unique among Western nations—to combat the pandemic through voluntary measures.

> Like other Europeans, Swedes are now heading into the winter facing restrictions ranging from a ban on large gatherings to curbs on alcohol sales and school closures—all aimed at preventing the country’s health system from being swamped by patients and capping what is already among the highest per capita death tolls in the world.

> The clampdown, which started last month, put an end to a hands-off approach that had made the Scandinavian nation a prime example in the often heated global debate between opponents and champions of pandemic lockdowns.

cases are not hospitalizations are not deaths. San Francisco had their first death in 9 days this week.

They are not the same thing, no.

Pretending they aren’t related is insanity.

In many places they aren’t even correlated due to changes in testing prevalence and other factors. So even saying “related” is only sometimes true and not in a way which is easy to distinguish.

In which "many places"? Cause like all graphs I have seen trail each other pretty close with cca 2 weeks delay.

The testing prevalence don't just jump without reason - it is predictable at this point.

It’s a real shame “Yolo” and “shut down everything” are the only options!

There aren’t the only options. Health officials should be monitoring the data and recommending only those measures most likely to help.

Should have included the “/s”

Ah, yeah. :) My state seems to be doing pretty well, mostly. They break everything up by region and county, so they can monitor available beds, new cases, new hospitalizations, etc. They are doing contact tracing so as they change the rules I assume they are using that data to make sure the rules actually are affecting the places where people are getting infected. So far, the hospitals aren’t getting overwhelmed so it looks like they are doing it right.

> An uncontrolled pandemic is also a deathblow to small businesses.

How so? At worst 5% of the population are expected to die, mostly the old and infirm. Not doing anything against it would clearly be a deathblow to nursing homes, but which other businesses would greatly suffer?

As an example from early on:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-is-hitting-...

> But even before DeWine’s March 15 order, restaurants were already feeling the impact of the coronavirus as customers began to avoid crowded areas in their cities.

> But no matter whether the governor has issued an order or not, restaurants in every state available in the OpenTable data set have experienced declining dining attendance over the last two weeks. As public pleas for social distancing get louder, diners are forced to order food for take-away or delivery, or simply to cook at home.

We saw the same in Sweden: Despite a fairly laissez-faire approach and fairly minimal restrictions, the economy still suffered greatly as people voluntarily said "it's not worth it" to things like indoor dining.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c...

> This is what has happened: Not only have thousands more people died than in neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, but Sweden’s economy has fared little better.

> And Swedish people responded to the fear of the virus by limiting their shopping — not enough to prevent elevated deaths, but enough to produce a decline in business activity.

So fear-mongering is bad for business? Who'd thought.

There are legitimate reasons to fear an uncontrolled pandemic.

You still make it sound like it would be the zombie apocalypse. Sure, if you're an elderly man, than you better take precautions -- the rest of us are more likely to die of other reasons.

Do you understand that there are common outcomes for the non-elderly between “death” and “bad cold”?

Numbers please. In the USA there have been more than 10 million cases. Of course you'll find all kind of weird and wonderful side effects (of the illness itself, as well as the experimental and sometimes hair-rising treatment the patients received). Most people however allegedly don't even noticed that the ever had it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com