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Comment by Fordec | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I'm Irish, working in tech but my hobby that gets me more of a social life is involvement with an Irish political party.

The new variant accounted for 10-25% of these new cases over the period of that spike. The spike happened two weeks after Christmas when lock-down restrictions were lifted, as planned in October, so people could have a respite after 9 months of all this. Did the government misjudge just how much people would socially interact? You bet.

But to claim that this event is a sign of things to come is to willfully ignore what Irish medical professionals (NPHET) are saying about what the root cause has been and fully buy into the government politicians attempts to cover their butts by blaming the new strain and not their own operational strategy.

Also note that it is coming up to three weeks since Christmas and new infections today is half of what it was last week already and dropping.

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Also Irish. +1 on your assessment here. The virulent strain narrative was peddled by the Irish government who went against medical advice and tried to deflect blame. The evidence doesn’t support the narrative.

I think the COVID-fatigue angle is quite interesting though. As critical as I am of the government they were under a lot of pressure from the populous to provide some sort of respite.

Agreed. To be honest the minute Fianna Fail came into government things slipped a bit and it feels like the pressure from business was allowed overwhelm the health advice. It was plainly obvious what was going to happen when they opened up. The annoying thing was that the last year was wasted by not increasing emergency capacity in ICU and getting the correct processes in place to create a fast roll-out of vaccination. Right now they are two weeks in a one one week delayed and only doing 40k a week at max.

I think also we allowed ourself to be "ah sure we can't do that here" compared to New Zealand. The short term economic aspect of things blinded us. If you were coming to the country as the case in the NZ, you should be in mandatory hotel quarantine which all the strict rules in place as needed. With the exception of essential services like hauliers. Every one says in Ireland things can't be done, they can be and people will die because we weren't brave enough to make tougher calls. We would be in much better shape if we had of. Don't get me started on the mess up North throughout the whole thing.

Ultimately though this is about people taking individual responsibility. It's frustrating everyone blaming the government, I have many friends in frontline services and the irresponsibility of some over christmas was crazy. People's friends and family are suffering for it now.

Any Irish response or strategy is gonna be hobbled by the Northern Ireland lax response. We can't just shut the NI border, either legally or politically.

Which is unfortunate.

Isn’t this last bit in some sense a good thing? Representative government changing policies to reflect a shift in the population’s preference after ten months of dealing with these restrictions?

Representative government caving to demands when the demands are terrible, like in this case, is not a good thing. In that moment what is needed is enough guts to see the measures through and fend interest groups off. Loss of leadership and movement towards "the customer is king" politics is responsible for a lot of mistakes in the response to this virus.

Hindsight is 10/10.

Uh, there was and is no "hindsight" involved here. The scientific consensus about coronavirus and how to fight it (wearing masks, lockdowns and contact tracing) was clear pretty shortly after the whole drama began.

The problem was politicians, not just in the US, didn't have the guts to tell and explain their citizens that. The governments that did (New Zealand) or had prior epidemics experience / a population with a high compliance rate/trust in government (Japan, Taiwan) fared pretty well, as did the governments that resorted to authoritarian scale (China, Vietnam, Thailand).

For what it's worth even European countries such as Italy showed that hard lockdowns were and are effective, but politicians chose to disregard that evidence and prayed for the second wave to never appear...

Right. The mask data goes back a century and very good studies were published re SARS and masks after mask data was discarded and ignored by many during that illness. Quarantines and social distancing aren't new, never were.

the hindsight is not about what we should "ideally do to fight the pandemic regardless of everything else". But if people really wanted it (for economic reason for start, you know poor people like being able to eat)...

If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.

Which means believing that it's better to implement a terrible but popular decision than to override the will of the people.

So in this case, IF the majority supported lifting restrictions (and I'm not Irish so I have no idea what the public sentiment was), then the politicians did the right thing: They obeyed the will of the people.

Which also means that in this case, the people of Ireland f'd up and need to take responsibility for that, rather than blame the politicians who simply implemented their will.

We can't have it both ways. We can't demand a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and also let ourselves off the hook whenever our collective decisions suck.

Maybe we, the people, suck at governing in a crisis.

This is why democracies are usually republics versus direct vote democracies -- the will of the majority will always throw the minority under the bus. This is why you have laws, checks and balances against mob rule.

One way I look at democracy is that it’s the will of the majority + the rights of the minority.

It gets a little.. speculative.. once that minority in this case is “(future) victims of covid”. Not sure how to fully and clearly articulate the principle behind why we should give up a little impatience now, in a somewhat unpopular way, and how that is compatible with democracy, but I believe it is.

The US government is based on the idea that "citizens" (note: lots of problems with the way they defined them at the time) elect people who make decisions on their behalf. It was designed to have more and less democratic institutions so that there would be block on the popular will.

They believed that the purpose of democracy was to be able to remove the people who ruled you, to ultimately prevent autocracy. They didn't believe every decision should be a plebiscite.

> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.

Not necessarily. I think some people have said that democracy is designed to imitate revolutions without actually being violent: that if much of the populace is armed and not that many people have enough gear and training to make them enormously more effective than a random person with a gun, then "one person, one vote; majority wins" approximately reflects what would happen if there was a violent revolution, so people don't have much to gain by adding violence. If that's true, then appeasing the mob by letting them more or less get their policies implemented may be best even if those policies are not the best—because the alternative is risking a bloody revolution followed by the mob implementing their policies anyway.

That's one perspective, anyway.

> that if much of the populace is armed

Where is that the case? US and Switzerland?

> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.

What you are describing is leaning towards "direct democracy", which nobody tries to implement, vs "representative democracy" which is what we all experience. In the latter it absolutely is a feature that representatives will go against the preference of the majority at least some of the time.

> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people

Well, no.

If we believe in democracy, we believe that government must ultimately serve and be accountable to the people.

It's possible along with that to also believe that it is a bad idea for the crowd to have day-to-day responsibility for the detailed decisions of government (if nothing else because of the dynamics of extra-large groups a d the communications problems involved), which might motivate us to prefer that democracy be representative rather than direct, with a relatively small group, that it is accountable to the crowd, making decisions.

I don't know about Ireland in particular. But my sense is Covid restrictions many places in the Western world have begun crude and unfriendly to the individual because that's what's simple, cheap and what doesn't cost businesses money (with the US the worst but not the only offender). The US still isn't requiring sick-leave, isn't requiring safe working conditions around Covid.

Basically, not considerate of people's situation until people are at the breaking point and then just opening the flood gates.

Yeah, it’s really hard to be overly critical. You could argue the government did its civic duty here, public sentiment was overwhelming in favor of reduced restrictions.

Unfortunately, as detailed elsewhere in comments, enough of the populous didn’t respond in kind in fulfilling theirs - which is what the decision needed to work.

That said you could also argue this was predictable. Our diaspora are scattered about the globe, and coming home for Christmas is a common event and our UK border basically doesn’t exist. Similarly, folks who are originally from elsewhere in the EU flying home for Christmas then back.

Overlay the drinking/socializing culture, which hits its busiest period around December and watch the R number tip upwards.

Full disclosure: I agreed with this government decision at the time, but was quite surprised / shocked at the resultant case explosion.

Also Irish. 100% agree with the both of you. I have a limited amount of sympathy for the government as Christmas is hugely culturally significant, but I think they did a poor job (especially the handwaving over flights from abroad that can be paraphrased as "we recommend that people don't come home for Christmas unless they feel they really need to") and what we're seeing now is largely CYA.

I'm not sure that it's really a 2 week thing.

It was going badly before Christmas, compared to earlier, and the break of Christmas/St Stephens made a gap in the testing, and then it slammed upwards over the next week, overwhelming the IT and health professionals dealing with turning positive swab numbers into confirmed cases.

By NYE, there were 9k tests in limbo that weren't in the stats.

At the point where the daily positives get over 2k, that's with a different test population. They're no longer testing contacts of people with COVID, they're testing people with symptoms. The positive rate went from 8% -> 40% in that time.

Anecdotally, I had no 1st order contacts with Covid (i.e., I know them well, rather than my sister's friend sort of thing), and over Christmas that went to more like 5 in three separate clusters.

Actually the new strain is already responsible for 45% of infections in Ireland (as per yesterday's NPHET briefing) while it was 10% at the beginning of the year IIRC

So yeah it's not the whole story, but it is an important part of it.

There really is no convincing evidence in the public domain that new variants have caused the increase in cases, and there is a very convincing alternative explanation that opening up the shops three weeks before Christmas then relaxing the rules over the holidays (the u turn coming too late) would cause it.

If the new variant caused a big increase in R then I doubt the lockdown would have brought R under 1 in the U.K., which it clearly has, surprisingly from just about after Christmas.

I started out healthily sceptical that the new variant was significantly more infectious, and now I’m extremely suspicious.

Really? I would say the evidence is incredibly strong at this point, and it's very hard to explain it spreading this successfully via any effect other than selective advantage. The "founder effect" and "post facto identification" explanations are just not credible any more, given that the explosive growth of B.1.1.7 compared to the wildtype has continued for almost a month after it was raised as a concern, and the pattern having now repeated in at least three other countries with enough data to make prevalence estimates (Ireland, Denmark and Switzerland).

What alternative explanation would you propose?

If the new variant is 50% more transmissive, then to get R to 1 requires measures that would previously have taken R to about 0.66. Clearly that is possible to achieve. But it's also not really enough. Can they get it significantly below 1, and for how long?

Also let's not forget the porous border with Northern Ireland, which is suffering from London's stupid rules.

Also worth mentioning that due to low infection rates beforehand, the Irish population is more primed to be hit with bigger spike.

Infection has more chance to spread as only few people are immune. Other EU countries that already had large numbers of their people immune after recovering from covid.

And yeah, it was a perfect storm of badluck. Covid fatigue, xmas break, people from UK returning (with no oversight, spreading new strain) and of course Christmas dinner with uncles and aunts from each county :D

What everyone seems to be assuming is that this new strain will cause a constant increase in the reproduction number R of ~50% in every situation. I haven't really seen any discussion of if and why that is actually a good extrapolation to make.

So for example in a specific situation, with a specific type of intermingling of a population in which the R value was, say, 1.2, we think the new strain caused that to increase to an R value of 1.8. How does it necessarily follow that taking intervention measures that bring the R value of the base strains down to, say, 0.8 would bring the R value of the new strain to exactly 1.2?

There are just so many factors involved, it doesn't seem like this could possibly be knowable right now. So there may be some hope that things like getting everyone N95 masks and requiring their use, and closing down indoor activities, which are good measures to control the current strains anyway, could also bring down the reproduction number of the new strain below 1 as well.

However, this is all a purely academic exercise anyway. Even in places that are being "aggressive" in countering the virus like San Francisco, we have done exactly nothing to react to new information in the past 1.5 months. Our "lockdown", which is entirely optional and has no teeth, is clearly not working, but we have neither removed it or strengthened it. The health department has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine. It feels like we've just given up altogether, and we're praying that the private market saves us by somehow distributing the vaccines effectively. And on top of all that, we've handicapped the private market by making it illegal to distribute the vaccine to the vast majority of the population, even the elderly and vulnerable groups!

There are cases where restrictions have an additive rather than multiplicative effect on the reproduction number, but after better modeling they often end up as ultimately multiplicative.

For example, let's say you observe "closing schools" to bring Rt from 3 to 2.7, "closing offices" to bring Rt from 3 to 2.3, and "closing both" to bring RT from 3 to 2.

What's really happening is not that the two restrictions have a -0.7 and -0.3 effect. Instead, the two apply to almost disjunct subsets of people. Therefore it is more accurate to say that the "closing both" restriction is a *0.66 reduction of the reproduction number, while "closing schools" and "closing offices" only apply that 0.66 factor to a subset of the population. What is really additive is the amount of people affected by the restriction.

> The health department has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine

I'm in San Francisco and a family member runs a specialty clinic here. They worked directly with the health department last week to get their staff vaccinated as part of Phase 1a described here: https://sf.gov/covid-19-vaccine-san-francisco

I'm not saying the performance so far is outstanding or good, but it's simply not true that the health department "has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine".

I mean members of the board of supervisors can't even figure out if the health department has an actual plan or what it is https://twitter.com/MattHaneySF/status/1349189438241325057

I guess "exactly zero" is poor wording, but they seem to only have a very loosely defined plan that hasn't bothered going beyond phase 1A tier 1 even though vaccines started being distributed a month ago and 2/3 of them statewide are just sitting around.

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