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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

> The virus didn’t magically halt economic activity

This is the opposite of true. Most businesses cannot survive on half of their normal traffic and when it became known that it wasn’t safe to linger indoors many people voluntarily restricted their activities to essentials. Groceries count, mall chocolates do not.

The right-wing counter factual you’re spreading is an attempt to distract from the damage caused by certain bad calls made early on to prevent the normal public health response for political reasons.

Consider how massive the government response was in Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, etc. - and how that has supported a more normal economy along with saving many thousands of lives.

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Your examples are two islands and a peninsula that might as well be an island...

I can't help but notice that pattern, and wonder if it might have something to do with their success.

You left out the massive travel connections to China and putting experts in charge of the response. The United States wasn’t deluged with spread from Mexico and Canada, and there is no reason why we couldn’t have used the same airport quarantine system they used, public mask requirements, and paying inherently unsafe businesses like indoor dining to close until spread was under control.

The difference is that our response was dictated by political calls made by people who famously dislike expertise whereas the countries I mentioned followed scientific principles. The earlier SARS outbreak helped but the US CDC was hardly unaware of that - this is almost exactly a practice scenario they used years before in the Obama-era playbook the Trump administration ignored. The 2019 HHS exercise had travelers to China bringing back a novel influenza variant but otherwise was very similar: no antiviral drugs or vaccine, depleted PPE stockpiles, local governments refusing to close schools and restaurants, etc.

Your political bias is obvious and evident. Why don't you compare the US to countries that aren't island nations or quasi-island nations, like the EU?

Do you think the EU doesn't believe in science?

You also ignore the fact that the majority of public health governance in the US, by a wide margin, is at state and local level. I voted for Obama, twice. I volunteered for his campaign. And I don't think his administration handled the Swine Flu well at all. I had a toddler at the time with asthma, who was in a category of vulnerable people. Folks like you didn't care about Swine Flu, but for those of us who did, it was unpleasant. I rode a subway to work daily at the time, and it was widespread and completely uncontained. I'm not a partisan. I don't think the Trump administration handled the virus well at all. I also don't think the Obama administration would have handled it well. Better? Likely. But they wouldn't have done a good job. If you think the US government does a good job at anything other than warfare, you haven't worked with the US government on much.

Your comparisons of the US vs. island nations (SK is not able to be accessed from the north, as you damned well know) with fractions of the population of the US is ridiculous, and betrays a partisan bias that believes that the Federal government in the US is supremely capable, as long as my preferred candidate runs it. Obama, who again, I voted for and campaigned for, couldn't handle launching a website for his flagship legislation. Because the US Federal Government is broken and can't execute on shit. And because of partisans, who truly believe the government magically becomes competent when the leader changes, it won't get fixed. Never mind that over 90% of the personnel of any agency remain no matter who is president. No, this time, they'll get the (funding|scientific backing|whatever) they didn't get from the previous person in the other party. What a load of tripe.

> Why don't you compare the US to countries that aren't island nations or quasi-island nations, like the EU?

How is the EU a quasi-island nation in a way that the US doesn’t also qualify as?

I selected those countries because they’re democracies who learned from the original SARS and immediately deployed strong measures to prevent economic damage. We failed to contain spread and are paying the economic price now for that earlier politicization because we have so much community spread that control is much harder now than it would have been. You should be directing your anger at the people who refused to take basic safety precautions or operate their businesses safely and ensured that we would have no option which isn’t expensive and painful.

"The right-wing counter factual you’re spreading is an attempt to distract from the damage caused by certain bad calls made early on to prevent the normal public health response for political reasons."

And that statement is emblematic of the problem. I'm immediately lumped into "right wing" by people like you because I challenged the narrative you believe. I'm not a right winger, and that "counter-factual" isn't right wing either. It's real.

If closing restaurants, both indoor and outdoor, is such a great strategy, then we should expect to see less infections in places that close restaurants vs those that leave them open. That is not the case in the United States. Feel free to compare Florida to California in the cases/deaths per capita metrics.

Whether or not you self-identify as right wing you’re simply parroting what has been prevalent in right wing media for the last year. We have a lot of data showing how the disease spreads and that wearing masks significantly slows it, which makes unmasked activities like eating far riskier. If people had complied with milder measures last year it’d be different but once safety was politicized spread increased to the point where we are needing strict measures like what the countries I mentioned did until vaccinations rates are high.

Again, you are putting thoughts and words in my mouth. When did I say masks were bad? I was an early advocate for masks in March, when Fauci was still lying to the public with a well-intentioned strategy of preventing a run on N95 masks.

Again, the puritanical "if people had complied" bullshit. Just like abstinence only sex education, you create a policy that is against human nature to adhere to, and then blame the citizens when the horrible, useless policy that will never work fails.

I wear a mask, I socially distance, etc. But you assumed I don't believe any of that because my opinion on one dimension. I'm not "parroting" anything. But because you are in a political tribe, I must be in the other one.

If you read my comment more carefully, the words I was objecting to was a specific claim you made:

“The virus didn’t magically halt economic activity. Governments did, and we need to keep that in mind, because depending on the state, the government response was often far too harsh and not backed by science.”

This is like saying you were hurt by the airbag, not the crash. You could say that specific government reactions made things worse, or the failure to provide economic assistance forced people into risky situations but the root cause was the entire world learning that it was quite risky to be in close proximity to other people.

> And that statement is emblematic of the problem. I'm immediately lumped into "right wing" by people like you because I challenged the narrative you believe. I'm not a right winger, and that "counter-factual" isn't right wing either. It's real.

You may not be right wing, but you're repeating several right-wing memetic shibboleths around COVID and other things, so don't be surprised at the confusion.

Also, you're trying to re-litigate stuff that got settled months ago without actually adding anything new to the discussion, which is tiring.

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