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Comment by throwarayes | Hacker News Reader

I question the supposition. We are interested. Since November, many I know went from occasionally seeing friends outside socially distant to keeping to themselves. People don’t need to google about it, we know it’s bad. Of courses search metrics will decline.

Emotionally, I think we feel defeated. We’re counting down the days till a functional government can be put in place and forestall disaster. It feels like everyday we need to wait causes more needless death. But sadly there’s little we can do about this.

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I also wonder if there is better reporting of the data, so searches are not necessary. For example, I can read my local news online, and get the appropriate daily numbers for both the country and my county.

That's what I was wondering as well. I can't imagine it applies to everyone in every region, but after Jan/Feb 2020, I personally didn't need to search Google (or wherever) for this info because it became a prominent feature on the landing page of the NYT and other news outlets I check fairly frequently.

The trend is pronounced enough that there's likely more at play than just "see on website instead of searching" but "I already know it's bad so I don't bother looking it up" and "I already see this data regularly on other outlets without specifically searching for it" surely combine to cause some of this result.

Exactly, I already have my sources for updates and I don't need to search anymore.

I'm not sure what a future government can do.

Early on, some crucial things come to mind (Federal mask mandate, directing Federal funds to rapid testing and PPE), but, now, the wildfire rages everywhere. Making vaccines free, including for illegal immigrants (it's incredibly stupid and self-defeating to deny it to them, as some places have purportedly done), and directing a lot of resources toward distribution and education are the only obvious things to me.

Like in an RPG, some countries put points into skill trees that lets them handle this kind of problem very well. If the U.S. has a weakness, culturally, legally, economically, and geographically, a pandemic is it; it's just not the kind of thing it ever specced to handle.

> Federal mask mandate

I'm not sure what difference that would make since masks are already mandated everywhere by state and local authorities. The real issue with masks is that (a) many people don't wear them properly (I routinely see people with it only over their mouth, not their nose, or with a huge gap between their face and the mask) and (b) anything that covers your face qualifies as a "mask", no matter how coarse the weave of whatever material it is made of.

People say this but the obvious point is that flu numbers are much lower if not vanishingly small, suggesting people are in fact largely complying with mitigation efforts.

So the only argument I see otherwise is that there's some radical difference in the R number between the viruses such that masks only lower substantially enough for flu and not SARS-CoV-2. But that's a much more specific argument that I don't see being argued much less substantiated and proven.

> flu numbers are much lower if not vanishingly small, suggesting people are in fact largely complying with mitigation efforts

The flu viruses are a different class of virus (rhinovirus) from SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) and could be expected to be affected differently by mitigation efforts. I don't know that the much lower flu numbers tell us that people are wearing masks properly; they could be due simply to social distancing and people staying home. Also, AFAIK there is not significant evidence of transmission of flu by asymptomatic people, whereas there is for COVID-19, so it is easier for people to avoid transmitting flu by self-isolating if they have symptoms.

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