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Comment by detritus | Hacker News Reader

On my walk to work this morning, I detoured down a local main street, curious to see what shops were considering themselves 'essential' and remaining open.

Apparently this time around, travel agents and jewellery sellers have added themselves to the list, with a few barbers clearly operating illicitly behind half-drawn shutters.

I was bemused by the very chi-chi local middle class deli near my home insisting they'd be staying open when I enquired on Saturday evening. I mean, sure they sell food, but really - I'm unsure how vital to survival artisanal cheese and pasta is!

Bluntly, without the sincere threat of fines or whatever, no action will be taken. UK-dwellers' sense of entitlement to 'freedoms' seems drastically diluted compared to what I witnessed on the continent a few months back, when I was able.

We deserve everything we get.

- ed, whups - clearly I meant something like 'drastically inflated', not 'diluted'.

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> I was bemused by the very chi-chi local middle class deli near my home insisting they'd be staying open when I enquired on Saturday evening. I mean, sure they sell food, but really - I'm unsure how vital to survival artisanal cheese and pasta is!

Let's not repeat the mistakes of the first lockdown. If you close down too many places, all that causes is everyone cramming into the same few places still open, causing superspreader events. At one point, LA shut down outdoor farmers markets and many cities including London slashed their public transit schedules, leading to overpacked busses and trains.

In the march/april stage of the pandemic, I chose to shop at such "shi-shi" places exclusively because a) there were no lineups, b) their non-frozen supply chain meant they had to sell meat or it would rot, c) they were owned by people with families in the neighbourhood/city, and d) the higher prices kept out hoarders, panic buyers, and the mentally ill.

On the last point, there was almost always some psycho causing problems in the regular supermarket because it appealed to their sense of drama and got them attention. The extra %15-20 was worth avoiding the risk of an altercation.

The contempt some people have for local shopowners who provide services that are actually worth a premium is shocking, albeit typically british.

Not addressing your main points, but that is a seriously prejudiced view of people struggling with mental illness. Mentally ill people aren’t “psychos”, many people in all walks of life struggle with anxiety, depression or something else. That’s not to say violent people don’t have underlying mental health issues. It’s quite an outdated view that mentally ill people are distinct from “normal” people, and aren’t just people who’ve suffered trauma. What happens if you find yourself dealing with these issues, are you going to shame yourself into not seeking treatment?

During a public emergency with uncertainty like the beginning of the pandemic, a person who becomes physically aggressive in a supermarket, makes a point of coughing and spitting on shelves and aisles, and threatens the cashiers and stock staff everyone else depends on, because they want to provoke a confrontation that makes them feel powerful - does not earn sympathy.

Equating people experiencing depression with those who have violent delusions and borderline tendencies creates a worse stigma on seeking treatment than recognizing that dangerous people are just plain dangerous. Sure, we're all people etc, but in an emergency, there are men and women you can trust, and there are ones you can't. A psycho is someone who threatens or harms others for gratification, and it is an epithet they earn. If that's "prejudiced," perhaps we're just from different cultures.

The stakes change when there was a reasonable threat that their actions could put people and their families at risk.

You're attacking a straw man of your own invention here. In casual use (like above), "psycho" means somebody acting in a bizarre or dangerous manner, eg. trying to buy all the toilet paper in the store and not taking "no" for an answer. Nothing to do with actual mental illness.

Obviously the etymology of the term comes from psychological illness via a certain famous Hitchhock movie, and that's one reason why the term du jour these days is "Karen" instead.

I assume not, but if your final sentence was aimed at my tongue-in-cheek appraisal of the value of chi-chi delis (which, obviously, i was shopping in) during a pandemic, then please appreciate that I also today spent 35 minutes waiting in a queue for a local butcher and over the past months have been highly appreciative of my local Turkish-run mini-market.

I'm not sure I do think it's a British thing to hate on local shopowners, if anything - the opposite, what with us being a nation of them, and all.

Sure major Supermarkets have captured most of the spend, but that's just the way things are. Convenience comes in different forms.

The way things were announced in the UK, they just set up for what India did: a no-notice lockdown that causes people to disperse on crowded trains. Oops.

Am I right in saying that the goal of any lockdown is not to completely stop the spread of the virus, but to instead merely keep hospitals from filling up?

The health of the population, in general, is not the primary concern. We just need to stop the hospitals from collapsing.

We live with all manner of sickness and disease every day of the year without trying to eradicate them. Covid is only different from heart disease, lung cancer, and rabies in that it has the potential to swamp us.

Adjusting the throttle for spread might mean jewelry shops being open but sandwich shops being closed. It might just as well involve lockdown for anyone born in an odd month, or with a name ending in a vowel, or ginger hair. The measures are arbitrary and only used as a throttle for the inevitable spread.

This is how I sleep at night. The alternative is the worrying thought that no one in power really knows what they are doing.

Lockdown had a variety of goals but the current situation can generally be classed as a policy failure. Hospital collapse is the worst case scenario but isn’t the only goal. Other important goals include:

* keeping schools open (mostly a success)

* avoiding economic disruption (mixed, tending towards failure)

* avoiding unnecessary deaths and long run health issues (failure)

* Avoiding a second lockdown and the related uncertainty and stress (failure)

* returning to normal life (failure)

* avoiding dangerous mutations (failure)

The UK is an island and could have fairly easily done a NZ/Australia strategy over the summer when seasonality made elimination easy. Jurisdictions that made that choice are doing better on all front.

I live in one such jurisdiction (atlantic canada) and we’ve spent less time in lockdown, had a good economy, and mostly avoided deaths and hospitalizations. Seems a clear winner.

Perhaps a country in the middle of europe couldn’t have done it but the Uk certainly could have.

And no, this pretty clearly shows govts had no long run or even medium run strategy. Europe will be in rolling lockdowns till april or so, because of a premature declaration of victory in the summer.

It is way easier to leave the UK than it is to leave Australia/NZ - there are only the airways and no roads or ferries.

Ireland was interested in doing covid zero, but the uk wasn’t, other than scotland.

So once you exclude ireland, you have the channel tunnel, and a handful of ferries to france/belgium. All of which arrive at terminals and where you can do tests or register people for isolation requirements.

Australia and nz aren’t the only successes. You also have taiwan and vietnam. Very close to china, and vietnam has land borders. The biggest difference is these countries tried.

The West simply has not demonstrated the ability to enact an actual lockdown. So we're stuck with these half-measures, that rely on minimum-wage store greeters for enforcement, and even those get protested.

> Am I right in saying that the goal of any lockdown is not to completely stop the spread of the virus, but to instead merely keep hospitals from filling up?

The lockdown in New Zealand had that goal to stop it completely, and achieved it.

Also, it is in general not impossible to eradicate a contagion and suppress it completely. For example, this was done with smallpox, which is about as transmissible SARS-COV2. Smallpox has been eradicated world-wide, for a quite modest price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication

> UK-dwellers' sense of entitlement to 'freedoms'

Seriously?

We (the West, I'm not from the UK) are losing our freedom at an unimaginable speed even a few years ago and you think freedom is negotiable? I find this appalling how easy we ease into a dictatorship everywhere in Europe.

It's interesting that no one seems to give a shit about real freedoms like free speech or democracy, detention without trial or access to lawyers. But when you close the pubs (or the artisnal pasta makers), suddenly we're on a dictatorship.

Hence my enclosing Freedoms in single quotes.

I tend to communicate quite drily - that's often hard to put across online.

I think you're exactly correct.

It drives me nuts when people talk about freedom, they have no actual idea what freedom is or takes and their actions undermine it. Freedom doesn't mean "I can do whatever I like with no consequences", but that's what people really want.

Freedom is just a better sounding word than selfishness these days :(

<Steps-down-from-soapbox>

>Freedom doesn't mean "I can do whatever I like with no consequences"

Depends on your definition of freedom. The issue with this kind of freedom is that your freedom encroaches on other people's freedoms, so most societies agreed that we should have less freedom in favor of fairness.

Exactly where the trade-off is to be made is subjective and cannot be derived from facts alone.

We have a lot of freedoms that encroach on other people's freedoms, it's impossibly to make a clear cut on where fair ends and personal freedom begins.

Allowing people the freedom to sell sugar will inevitably lead to more diabetes and earlier death. It tastes good and it's addictive.

Sugar costs a lot of people some of their freedom to live and move. But if we didn't allow selling sugar we would take away the seller's freedom and the freedom to choose from the consumer.

Your sugar example is no good. Sugar doesn’t take people’s freedoms away. It has no agency and doesn’t enforce anything. Like any action, eating sugar may have consequences good or bad for the individual, but that has nothing to do with freedoms unless the government starts telling people they may not eat more than x grams per day or something like that.

In the case of masks and lockdowns the "freedom" in question is more analogous to drunk driving. This is in the sense that exercising the freedom could cause the people around you some severe life-altering problems, and you're imposing that risk without their consent or knowledge.

Without their knowledge or consent? You can’t tell whether people are wearing masks and make a decision about whether to be around them? I suspect that even a blind person could do so the moment somebody started talking.

I’m sure there are still better comparisons than drunk driving. If you are under 55, the risk is about the same as dying from a car accident.

That's always been the case. Thousands of people die every year from influenza spread by asymptomatic carriers. COVID-19 is more deadly, but that's just a difference in degree. Where do we draw the line?

Cue Mel Gibson as William Wallace.

This is so unjust: you don't know me but you basically reduce me to an angry guy that can't get drunk with his friends.

ALL our freedoms are attacked: the social media censorship reached crazy levels lately, and let's not talk about democracy given the disgusting spectacle the US has shown this year (my country doesn't fare any better).

When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship.

As I said I'm not from the UK but as far as I know people in London had more freedom during the WWII aerial bombings.

During Rationing, you mean?

Yes. During rationing.

When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship.

On the other hand, people are actually dying of Covid. Given the choice I'd take financial ruin over death.

Why does there have to be a dichotomy here? Another option would be to lock down but also to provide for people who will otherwise be ruined by the lockdown.

That seems to be the most humane option. Make it illegal to evict people, provide them with a reasonable base income that allows them to lead a dignified life through the lockdown, and then shut everything down for a little while.

Suggesting that the lockdown is synonymous with loss of livelihood is exactly the problem here. Surely the same elected officials that have the power to close everything down also have the power to authorize emergency payments to those impacted by the lockdown.

> Another option would be to lock down but also to provide for people who will otherwise be ruined by the lockdown.

Well, that's will just establish a beachhead for socialism, and that is reserved for big business.

Frankly, people are always dying. Deaths don't automatically outweigh everything. This logic quickly breaks down once you apply it consistently. Traffic accidents are a huge cause of deaths, yet we don't ban all vehicles.

There are massive costs associated with lockdowns, most of which we can probably only judge accurately once everything is over, and certainly there are second order effects which cost lives also. Such as suicides due to depression amplified by social isolation.

Those costs should be factored in. It's not as simple as a blanket "people are dying so everything is justified".

How many of those suicides are from people who are broke for pandemic-related reasons, and could've been prevented had we controlled the pandemic early (i.e, with a strict lockdown)?

Devils advocate: how many of those suicides are caused directly by the restrictions and not the pandemic, how many extra would have lost their sanity due to a stricter lockdown?

Truth is we're not taking much time to measure the non-covid, non economic outcomes

The whole point of a strict lockdown would've been to nip the problem in the bud via drastic measures. Based on the experiences of other countries, it should've lasted about 3-4 weeks.

I think this idea is idealistic. It's easy to say now that we should've reacted immediately. But try just getting public support for drastic lockdown measures when the virus was new enough to have about as much impact on people's daily lives as the latest hospital bombing somewhere in Afghanistan.

I lost my sanity during this year's "lockdowns".

I wish you the best. Hope you get better.

You're talking about death as something abstract. I'm not. I'm saying I would prefer not to die, even if it costs the economy a lot.

Perhaps you'd give up your life, or your child or partner or parent, to save a handful of jobs but that's quite weird in my opinion. Economies can be rebuilt. Dead people can't be brought back.

The situation as it is does not pit option A: "you die right now" vs. option B: "save a handful of jobs". You are still oversimplifying the issue. In reality, both options are just modifying chances, and both options entail a huge number of second order effects. This needs to be weighed. It's not as simple as saying "well option A is literal death, so the other must always be better". And pointing that out does not mean I'd die to save a handful of jobs.

The flu also kills hundreds of thousands of people, and it does so each and every year. So should we be in permanent lockdown? After all, it's lives versus a handful of jobs.

There was never a "freedom to post" on social media, so you haven't lost that. The idea of "freedom of speech" was formed during a period of time when there were natural barriers to speech such that bat shit crazy qanon conspiracy theories and other such nonsense couldn't propagate widely. Nobody ever intended "freedom of speech" to equal a right to use a frictionless machine to propagate lies to billions.

Prior to the internet you could for the most part visually distinguish between the crazy and the legitimate - the crazy was in crayon on cardboard scraps, full of misspellings. The higher quality crazy was type written on a misaligned sheet of paper, thick with whiteout, still full of misspellings. The legit was professionally edited and published. Not 100% of the time, but a good fraction of the time.

Now we have spell checkers and grammar checkers and blog services like medium that make everything look really really good. That visual heuristic is gone. We need a way to invert our current equilibrium of "it is easy to get bad information out, and hard to get good information out" at least back to how it was: "it is hard to get good information out, but it is even harder to get really bad information out." That isn't censorship.

As for democracy in the US, as a US citizen I can tell you it is on the ropes, mostly due to social media, but it is better off today than it was four years ago just because people are at least starting to think about how to get social media under control.

Every freedom my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had I have, and more. I'm hard pressed to identify a single one that is under attack.

So far the outcome of the "disgusting spectacle" in the US has provided evidence against the risk of incipient dictatorship, not for it. States mobilized to various degrees of success to enable voting despite the pandemic, and the result was the highest turnout since 1900.

And you should really familiarize yourself with the actual government response in the UK and US during World War II. The censorship regime was extensive, far more so than anything we've seen in recent memory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship

Furthermore, rationing of food, fuel, and other commodities was extensive. In the UK, this included substantial control of the operating hours, prices, and even the menus of restaurants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...

In the Netherlands, although not in every city, in some COVID-19 is an excuse for banning demonstrations.

It was made law in the UK

To many people democracy is just a means to an end. And the end goal is a simple life with simple pleasures.

Re the deli and other quasi essential shops, it would seem unfair if they closed when you can still buy your fancy cheese and olives in a supermarket.

I don't know why you expect it to be fair. The policy needs to be effective first and foremost. Schemes like furlough are there to support people who are most affected.

The issue isn't really whether that shop is essential. The issue is that the greeting card store next door is also open, because they've decided they're essential. And none of these stores (including the super market) is enforcing mask requirements because none of the others are and they don't want to be the only one.

In 1000 little steps you are suddenly miles away from a real lockdown. You're basically BAU, but the pub is shut ever other week (unless you buy a scotch egg in which case it is also essential).

I don't care if people are eating gourmet olives. But we need to realise that making excuses for doing nothing is still doing nothing.

It's essential to the owners or their employees, who may risk losing their home if they can't make a living.

Lockdowns have gone on long enough that people are deciding to risk it because they have far more pressing concerns.

> I mean, sure they sell food, but really - I'm unsure how vital to survival artisanal cheese and pasta is!

I suppose we could close all food shops other than Asda, and restrict Asda to selling only their most basic range (and no sweets, chocolate, fizzy drinks, etc- after all, you can survive without those). On the other hand, that would mean that Asda would be more crowded as people who normally shop in your "chi-chi local middle class deli" now have to go there.

The chance of transmission in a small, quiet deli is significantly less than in a crowded supermarket. Several older residents in our town have switched from the Co-op to the local deli for exactly that reason. Unless you’re going to start deeming what food is essential and what isn’t, then your distinction is counter-productive.

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