Hacker News Reader

Comment by giantDinosaur | Hacker News Reader

Can you put a figure on 'pausing the global economy for 5 weeks'? How do you know it would be less expensive? The global economy is massive so you'll have to provide some well reasoned figures to support such a claim. Such a pause could easily trigger much larger problems, how do you know it wouldn't? And why did you pick five weeks? The disease won't be eliminated in five weeks of everyone doing nothing; plus a lot of the global economy is essential to human civilisation.

View on HN

The net cost would be very small. There would be a planned period of increased activity prior and a period of make up after. And then you'd have 5 years of the economy running without a pandemic to make up any loss.

Substitute some other plan of coordinated action for the five weeks if you want. I don't care to argue about it, it's clear from New Zealand and Taiwan and so on that coordinated action works very well, if it is made to happen. It's also reasonably clear that it's cheaper than dealing with a raging pandemic.

You said 'pause the global economy', and now wish for me to substitute in any other effective plan, which kind of begs the question, doesn't it?

Right, I was just suggesting a severe coordinated action for the sake of making the comment. I don't care about convincing you.

So not only do you admit it would never happen, you cannot even provide any actual figures to support your claim. New Zealand and Taiwan have had success because they effectively eliminated the disease at the start of the pandemic, they didn't shut down with 30% of their population infected and millions of current infections, which is why that particular comparison is poor.

It isn't unreasonable to ask for justification of your claim that it'd be so much cheaper to shut down the global economy or take 'severe' action at this time. So, thanks for providing absolutely nothing beyond some vague claims about ideal actions that won't happen?

Yeah, you should probably discount my comment if those are problems for you.

It may be helpful to look at HN comments more as a discussion forum than a peer reviewed journal with documented justification for claims and so on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com