Hacker News Reader

Comment by NovaJehovah | Hacker News Reader

It's generally a political challenge for a free society to get the power and the megaphones back from the people they were given to during a crisis.

After an acute terrorism threat ends, it's hard to get power back from the military and the police.

In this case, it will be hard to take back power and the narrative from the public health establishment.

While they perform a crucial role in our society, they will tend to value safety over freedom and quality of life to an extent that would be crippling if we let them continue to set the agenda after the acute phase of the crisis has passed.

View on HN

The “public health establishment”.

Is this a joke considering the vast majority of Western countries have basically ignored their “public health establishments” for almost all of the past year? Ironically (or not) the only country that has really followed their “public health establishment” until recently was Sweden. Which isn’t surprising because theirs was the only one not asking the government to make tough choices.

> In this case, it will be hard to take back power and the narrative from the public health establishment.

Sitting in California where county sheriffs basically comprehensively vetoed the public health establishment throughout the crisis, I don't see that likely to be a real problem.

That didn't stop thousands of businesses from being closed.

But regardless, the narrative is just as important. After some threshold of vaccine distribution, people need to be convinced that it's ok to return to normal life, and that they don't need to cower in fear in their homes or wear masks for years and years just because we haven't completely eliminated covid. There's a cost to all of this.

> After some threshold of vaccine distribution, people need to be convinced that it's ok to return to normal life, and that they don't need to cower in fear in their homes or wear masks for years and years.

No one has suggested people should cower in fear, and people seem pretty happy going about without masks, or with masks worn in an openly defiant manner (under the chin, off of one ear, etc.) in public places with prominent mask mandate signage today, so, again, I don't think the issue you are alluding to is even remotely serious. As a society, whatever the formal provisions of law say, we haven't given public health authorities the power in practice that you argue we will have problems with when we need to take it away.

All the "long covid" stuff is essentially fear mongering. There's no science behind it.

The implication is that everyone should be terrified, stay home as much as possible, and wear masks as long as there's any chance of catching covid. Even after being vaccinated.

Sure, people flout the restrictions, and they are met with social disapproval for doing so.

The worst thing is the hugely negative psychological effect this is all having on children. It shouldn't be taken lightly.

> All the "long covid" stuff is essentially fear mongering. There's no science behind it.

That's not true. Studies are showing large fractions, say 10-25% of COVID patients are suffering symptoms after a month.

COVID infections have demonstrably damaged pretty much every organ in the body.

That's very different from the initial assumption, whence all policy, that COVID is like the flu, and passes in two weeks if it doesn't kill you.

> Even after being vaccinated.

However, these vaccines are stupidly effective. Once enough people are vaccinated, COVID will die out in the community, just like measles. You're right that we can't fear COVID forever.

It's not surprising that when a disease almost kills you, it (or the medical interventions that saved you) might leave your body in bad shape.

But this is being spun to imply that it's a serious threat to people who are otherwise in extremely low risk categories for severe covid. There's no solid evidence for that.

> But this is being spun to imply that it's a serious threat to people who are otherwise in extremely low risk categories for severe covid. There's no solid evidence for that.

It's a numbers game.

When hundreds of millions of people are infected, you're still going to get a lot of hard hit people in 'low risk' categories, aren't you?

Yes, just like a lot of people die in car accidents every year. People have always been willing to take some risk for the sake of freedom and a better life.

The lie here is that it's anything other an extremely minor risk for the large majority of people.

I believe that the flu causes more long term damage than people give it credit for. For example, here's a paper talking about the flu and heart swelling: [0]

> During the Sheffield, England influenza epi- demic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.

It could be that the flu is worse than covid in this regard, the few studies I looked at were surprising/sobering. They were talking for years about "long-flu" after the 1918 pandemic.

Until we have numbers to back it up I would not make the assumption that covid is any worse or different in this regard. Conventional wisdom is that every virus that attacks the body leaves some people with long term lung, heart, and or brain damage.

[0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685...

> The implication is that everyone should be terrified, stay home as much as possible, and wear masks as long as there's any chance of catching covid. Even after being vaccinated.

Apparently there is insufficient data to back up that the vaccine reduces transmission. That much is mostly true. It doesn't seem like they're trying particularly hard to find out.

Why are we not studying unvaccinated household members of vaccinated individuals and comparing with household members of the unvaccinated. Could be as simple as adding a data collection step after receiving a test result, given that it's pretty much a given you will infect people you live with we should notice a large difference very quickly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com