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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> Alexandra and Daniela Del Gaudio had never been to a political rally before, let alone one to protest a coronavirus lockdown and recall Gov. Gavin Newsom. But things had changed in the sisters’ lives since they opened the Wild Plum, a yoga and wellness space, in 2018.

> The Wild Plum, in California’s San Fernando Valley, closed in March when Mr. Newsom issued pandemic stay-at-home orders for the state.

It's a special kind of "wellness" that wants to expose a bunch of people in close quarters in an enclosed space to a deadly virus.

Probably not a representative sample, but the NYT photo of the recall protest shows precisely zero wearing masks.

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You have to take look at an empathetic view - it's very easy for someone like me (and assume you), to tell everyone else to comply with the lockdowns while you continue to take a salary from $tech. If you are business owner watching your savings whittle away while the state forces you to stay closed and congress continues to do nothing, what can you do? What do you say to those people who look at Florida who have stayed opened to only have have similar per-capita numbers than that of California?

I don't put the blame entirely on Newsom, but America's COVID response has been a failure. We failed to enforce lockdowns, failed to do any sort of contact tracing and failed to give people confidence that there is any light at the end of tunnel.

> I don't put the blame entirely on Newsom, but America's COVID response has been a failure. We failed to enforce lockdowns, failed to do any sort of contact tracing and failed to give people confidence that there is any light at the end of tunnel.

Who would have thought that keeping citizens locked inside and spying on them when they are out of their dwellings effectively indefinitely isn't going to fly in "the land of the free." The reaction of the people is exactly what I would expect from a society that respects its freedoms while watching their leadership scaremonger and act against their own rhetoric and the media/big tech refuse dialogue and blatantly shut down any opposing views on the pandemic. We can blame whomever we want for this, what happened in America is the best thing that could've happened without completely stomping on civil rights.

>Who would have thought that keeping citizens locked inside and spying on them when they are out of their dwellings effectively indefinitely isn't going to fly in "the land of the free."

I'm sorry but this is completely pretentious. When it comes to saving lives we are the "land of the free" but when it comes to (1) making money and (2) indefinite war in the middle east then that goes out the window. It's pure cope to help us feel better about not having a government that can adequately function in time of crisis.

I fully disagree, America could have handled this 100 times better but political grandstanding came first at every step of the way.

Define “similar per capita rates” Financial times shows that Florida had 20% more deaths attributed to COVID per capita cumulatively. I do agree that CA failed to build on top of the success of early shutdowns, but I disagree that a hands off approach of Florida or the Dakotas can be deemed as a success by anyone.

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart

Some comparisons:

https://boogheta.github.io/coronavirus-countries/#country=US...

I will also note that FL has a significantly larger elderly population than CA.

>but I disagree that a hands off approach of Florida or the Dakotas can be deemed as a success by anyone.

First, you are right, I think I misremembered; California has a similar number of cases per capita. However, it was not my intention to show Florida as a success; I only mean to point out that it's hard to convince people to continue with the lockdowns when the results feel marginal.

Risk assessment is ultimately the individual’s choice.

You may have had a point in the beginning when so much was unknown about the virus. How it spreads. Who it affects.

But distributions are much clearer now.

If you’re part of the vulnerable cohorts stay home, cleanse everything from the outside. That’s your safe choice.

A person who makes risky decisions is putting their own health and the health of everyone around them at risk. It's not a personal decision. We're 12 months into this thing, I thought that was well understood?

I go along with the lockdown policy only out of a sense of duty to my community, but ultimately I can protect myself alone. That being said, eventually people are going to decide they want their lives back if this isn't improving.

Your analysis is not symmetric. If you're making a decision on what level of risk you're ok with, that is (by definition) in relation to other people also making similar calculations

I thought the point of the lockdowns was to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed?

Has that problem gone away?

Two weeks to flatten the curve. Remember that one?

It was flattened. Then it skyrocketed again.

"Two weeks to flatten the curve" feels like gaslighting in retrospect

It's a special kind of authoritarian who believes that everyone except them are incapable of making an informed assessment of the risks and exercising their freedom to participate or not in the activity. Many of history's greatest human rights abusers committed their crimes in the firm belief it was for the greater good.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It's repetitive, tedious, and unusually nasty. Definitely not what we're going for here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Good thing we all have our own rights and responsibilities and can make decisions for ourselves.

When you don't wear mask, you make decision for other people. The mask effect is more about protecting others in case you are asymptomatic infected.

Maybe you should be telling that to Newsom who was maskless inside a building while not socially distancing.

How does Newsom not wearing a mask lend weight to your argument that we should not wear mask?

All it really shows us is that you and Newsom are a holes.

This whole thread is about Newsom not about wearing masks. If Newsom can just not be bothered to follow his own rules then he shouldn't be governor.

I was not making a statement on whether or not one should wear a mask and instead of asking for clarification you just jumped to conclusion and insulted me. I think "all it really shows us is that you and Newsom are a holes."

I don't know Newsom. If Newsom came here writing same thing as person I reacted to, I would react with same thing. I was not looking at username.

Thank goodness that people have the choice to wear a mask if they need to, well everyone else is forced practically at the end of a bayonet.

how do you know they don't have good ventilation and/or an outdoor space?

furthermore, it's not deadly (though possibility of long-term organ damage?) for most people, especially under ~70 years of age and in otherwise good health. making low-risk people stay at home, indoors, is generally making their mental and physical health worse. not to mention their economic situation in many cases. that all needs to be factored in too.

Agree that we're making the healthy unhealthy. I've experienced mental and physical degregation like never before under the current restrictions. Would not wish it on the worst of em.

> how do you know they don't have good ventilation and/or an outdoor space?

The article has a photograph.

It's not nearly as deadly as we feared when we initially started this lockdown insanity. Survival rate is what, 99.7% now? Back in March the fear was another 1918 (CFR of like 2-4%). It's by basically every country's estimates an order of magnitude less deadly than we feared.

Yet here we are, many folks scared so much they're praising their jailers and starting to love their cages.

The nearly 500k dead Americans would like to think otherwise.

I'll bet a good chunk of that 500k also disagree with locking people in their homes and ruining the prospects of multiple future generations.

Being anti-lockdown does not mean being pro-death. Now we know more about the virus the lockdown measures must be re-evaluated.

Dude there’s been no lockdowns in this country. Stay at home orders haven’t even been enforced, and people like yourself make them useless anyways.

Thanks for generalising. I don't break the restrictions just because I'm arguing against them. Nor am I an American.

What I do know is my American friends are suffering for the same reasons my local community are, and it's abhorrent to continue supporting these policies when it's destroying so many lives.

I'm sick of hearing stories about children trying to commit suicide, people getting fat and lazy, domestic abuse reports skyrocketing, small businesses going under and taking generational wealth out of the working class.

This isn't worth it, and we need a better solution.

Ok I’m not going to argue anymore but let me point out some things since it sounds like you’re getting a distorted picture of what’s going on here.

Everyone is free to travel anywhere in the country and even outside to places welcoming people. Schools are opening back up pretty quickly. Restaurants are doing in person again despite all common sense. Amusement centers are either already open or on the path to open, most are not even hurting that bad and some are flourishing (look at Disney’s stock price, what pandemic?). The only people really hurting the most are bars.

And I really hate to say it but if someone is going to kill themselves over these “lockdowns” they’re already mentally ill and still would be without the pandemic. That’s another discussion around the poor state of mental health globally.

The only thing destroying so many lives are families deciding to host massive parties and watching all of their relatives die from covid over a month.

I guarantee unless your friends own a bar, they’re not hurting as much as they might lead on to believe.

> taking generational wealth out of the working class.

Do you have a source for that claim? Household savings were up across all American income categories in 2020.

The $600 / week federal unemployment benefit that ended in July 2020 was the most significant (accidental) antipoverty program in decades. It lasted long enough that it’s effects will probably be felt for a year or more.

"I don't break the restrictions" liar.

You don't know me. I have no reason to break to break restrictions. But I'm a comfortable tech worker while others aren't so lucky.

You should write headlines for CNN.

How does the fact that 2019 had a much much less deadly flu season fit into your narrative? And 2020 magically did away with the flu, eradicating this awful virus, plus reduced heart attacks massively.

So to get your cooperation the next time the world needs collective sacrifice, the people defining the emergent worldwide problem on day one must be precisely correct in their predictions for what will happen over the next year?

Of course not.

But they have actually acted in such a way as to completely obliterate any credibility they had. From lying about masks being useful (Fauci), to the WHO carrying water for China, to the "it's 100% proven zoonosis, couldn't possibly be a lab creation), to the rapid shift away from any commentary about IFR/CFR once it became clear that it was an order of magnitude off.

What's strange is I'm not arguing against crazy strict measures during a deadly pandemic. What I'm arguing is that we have learned a lot about this coronavirus, which is just one of thousands/millions of coronaviruses, and even though we learned it was nothing like what we feared, the policy response never changed.

Why do you associate the lack of credibility with investigation into the virus's origin? What lends any credibility to the lab theory? Science isnt a team sport, yet a certain group of people seem very invested in the sinister explanation.

It's been repeated over and over that initial recommendations against mask usage was in the hope that people didn't hoard them and prevent healthcare workers from getting them. Predicting the irrational behavior of large populations is a key skill of leadership. Judging by way people hoard toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and other goods, that prediction seems pretty spot on.

The disease being less deadly than we feared, and our response to it remaining the same are not contradictory. Even 10x less deaths than originally predicted is still a major crisis. It is still worthy of attempts to mitigate the problem, and the mitigation strategies are still the same.

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