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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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