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I agree, but I think there is now a non-trivial group who are either a) in total denial about the virus or believe it's a conspiracy, b) overwhelmed by news of it and unable/unwilling to process anything new, or c) believe in herd immunity and might even welcome a faster spread on that basis.

Arguments about exponentials mean nothing to anyone in any of these buckets— they'll be flaunting a lockdown up until and perhaps beyond the point where it is administered by force.

I don't know how to deal with this reality, but it feels like the greatest threat at this point.

We're at a weird mixture of competence.

Extremely good coordination with vaccine invention, extremely bad with all other aspects.

Humanity is irrational, most people believe crazy, inconsistent things, and are easily manipulated.

The average citizen is stupid, the government is vulnerable to sentiment from the average citizen (and partisan media orgs that seek to influence those citizens for their own power or money).

It's a bad situation.

It's basically like Asimov said, "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

I'm shocked that many of the comments here are dismissive of the seriousness of the situation. I thought the HN crowd would be more rational.

I'm taking it very seriously. This is a meta-discussion about reasons other people may not be, and how to address that both personally and at a policy level.

I don't know. I would say I'm d) believe that the West cannot and should not enforce a lockdown the same way authoritarian China or Singapore can, and therefore it is doomed to fail.

So: * lockdowns are guaranteed not going to eradicate the virus the way it has in China. * lockdowns are guaranteed to crush small businesses and restaurants, creating an L-shaped economic recovery and putting the West at a disadvantage in future geopolitical conflicts. * the vaccine works but will take a year to rollout to everyone and it is unimaginable that the public will tolerate a lockdown for more than a month * herd immunity might work

I truly welcome any debate on this as I'd love to be wrong about my critique of my country's (Canada) approach to all this. We seem to be not having our cake and not eating it too.

Waterloo Region here. Up until the end of August, I was pretty happy with the response where I am, at all three levels of government— it seemed like the policies were basically working and the spread was contained, with new flare-ups presumably being seeded from elsewhere (Toronto, the US probably) and quickly dying out.

And then cases started spiking in September, I suppose due to some combination of back-to-school, lockdown fatigue, increased indoor gatherings, etc. At that point I became extremely unhappy as it became apparent how little the Provincial gov't in particular had taken advantage of the long summer of low cases to build up test and hospital bed capacity, and to make plans for vaccine distribution. The second wave hit and it felt like basically just rewinding to March. This was apparent to everyone and I think it probably became a positive feedback loop as more and more people gave up and had in-person Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings.

> This change in the virulence is more scary.

I think you mean infectivity (relating to transmission), not virulence.

Thanks, I edited the sentence.

> People are concerned about the lethality getting worse, but they shouldn't be

They should. Lockdowns deal with the exponential phase, but in the long term the process is not exponential. The virus is probably going to infect half of population anyway. There simply aren't ten times more people it could infect. On the other hand, there are ten times more people it could kill or cripple.

Percentage wise the total population infection rate even in the US and UK isn't actually high, something like 9-11 percent at the moment after a full year of the virus spreading.

Even with this faster spreading strain, it's possible that the vaccination efforts will win out and halt the spread before it reaches 50% of the population.

Nothing in nature grows exponentially. If it did it would overwhelm the universe.

YC News is mostly a forum for software developers, which means most of us have a tendency to want to keep things simple. That's fine for simple thinks like operating systems or proving all problems in NP are also in P. But nature is on a completely different level.

We are right now observing exponential spread of a virus. And we don't want to hit the natural end of exponential spread for this virus.

I've been hearing that for months. If coronavirus had a doubling time of 7 days we should be well over 1,000,000,000,000,000 cases by now.

And you or nobody else knows what the natural end would be for this virus.

A fast spreading variant could overall reduce deaths over the next 5 years.

The projected natural end of this pandemic would come within a year when the majority of the population got infected. As a society we've decided to not let this happen. Which is why the numbers diverge from your simplistic formula.

> A fast spreading variant could overall reduce deaths over the next 5 years.

What do you mean by this?

> What do you mean by this?

Assume being infected from this variant grants some protection to future variants. If everyone was infected (or vaccinated) and protected then it would be difficult for the virus to spread and mutate.

A slower spreading virus would produce more mutations over time and its possible one of those mutations could be catastrophic (though unlikely). Not only do you have more mutations but you also have fewer people protected.

> A slower spreading virus would produce more mutations over time

Mutation is not primarily a function of time but of infections. So mutation is higher when there are more hosts. Letting the virus infect people leads to more mutations.

Now we're probably not talking about the same thing when we say mutations. I mean the sum-total of mutations. You mean successful mutations. But here comes the connection: The virus is more likely to evolve into infecting vaccinated people when it is more widespread. Because there are more mutations and consequently more chances for one of them to evade the immune response of vaccinated people.

Coronavirus will grow exponentially IF you let it!

That's why we're all wearing face masks, limiting social interaction and even put whole countries in a full lockdown. WE all do this to LOWER the spread of the virus.

Nothing grows "exponentially" for long. Because if it did it would overtake the universe.

Good analysis but small nitpick: the use of "Θ" in Θ(a×exp(R×𝑡)) is slightly inaccurate (or is it the use of "a"?) because the set of functions Θ(a×exp(R×𝑡)) is the same for all positive a.

Well, yes, of course: isn't "a doesn't matter" the core of the point of the parent comment?

How do we know that lethality ("a") has increased? My understanding is that there is an evolutionary pressure to become less lethal.

The virus getting deadlier is a hypothetical scenario.

Yes we can assume there is selection pressure for more benign strains. But that doesn't mean those strains will win.