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Comment by jeremysalwen | Hacker News Reader

You are spreading misinformation. First, the vast vast majority of transmission in the united states was not from visitors, but from community spread, even in highly visited cities like NYC.

The 2 million number from the imperial paper everyone likes to quote is explicitly

> In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour

Where specifically voluntary quarantine (50% compliance) and case isolation (70% compliance), and closure of schools are exanples of interventions discussed. In what world do the current death totals (340k in the United states) disprove the idea that interventions saved lives, and more effectively managed interventions would have saved more lives (as they did in other countries).

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I am not spreading "misinformation." That term is the new slander. I am referring to initial infections, not pretending that tourism has been going full swing since March. You cannot compare New Zealand to New York City. I don't even think you can compare Seoul — and I accounted for the difference in interventions, regarding Seoul. But you conveniently leave that out.

As for your "everyone likes to quote," I in fact said: "you'll note that death estimates in the United States were from 200 thousand (if we followed their recommendations) to 2.2 million (if we did nothing)." Are you pretending now that I am misrepresenting the paper? You are simply repeating what I've written, and pretending to be contributing something new to the conversation.

If you are referring to the initial infections then you are just as misleading. Again, we don't need to speculate about how much the coronavirus was initially spread to different cities based on their tourist populations, we can just look at the facts of how much initial spread there was to each location/

On February 24th, there were 14 cases diagnosed in the United States, and 39 people who were infected and repatriated to the United States[1]. In comparison, at the same time there were 564 cases in South Korea[2].

The difference between 350k deaths (so far) and 200k deaths (total) is a lot, and is perfectly consistent with the paper's findings that if you perform some interventions but not all of them, hundreds of thousands of people will die unnecessarily.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6908e1.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_South_Kor...

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