Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

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The way forward requires coming to terms with the fact that none of this needed to happen in the first place. This disease is really just not that deadly for non-elderly and non-obese people, and we've known for a while.

Every institution under the sun failed.

We say we need to trust the science, but the scientists were all wrong: LANL put out a preprint paper that estimated r0 at ~7 near the beginning of the pandemic, where it's more like 2.5. The scientists told us that a vaccine wouldn't be ready for years, it was actually ready in months. The media was so addicted to the story that they failed to inform the public of these changing expectations. Meanwhile, the government spent a lot of money, and it's not entirely clear that it did anything except bubble up tech stocks. Did it save many jobs? No, not really, just like all these other institutions failed.

The way forward won't happen, at least for a while, because these institutions are powerful and need to save face.

I don't really wanna be part of a society that sacrifices the old and unfit at the expense of the whatever point you are trying to make. 500,000 COVID deaths across the country shouldn't be taken lightly.

I am surprised if you are taking all "scientists" as a collective group that you are focusing on early attempts to create models rather than the delivery of a vaccine (by scientists) and overall improvement of disease handling by scientists.

What powerful institutions need to save face exactly?

> I don't really wanna be part of a society that sacrifices the old and unfit at the expense of the whatever point you are trying to make.

That's an easy way to dismiss the real harm that has been done with lockdowns. If it's cost-free, of course, let's value and protect all life. But these lockdowns have a huge impact on people, too. It's a trolley problem, can we at least be honest about that?

just playing the devil's advocate. I don't support as well the idea of sacrificing the old and unfit and neither believe that "only the strong should survive", but isn't the old and unfit from today responsible for the status-quo and all the bad decisions that we took regarding research, environment and health in the last 30 years?

It sounds tragic to “let” 500k people die, but it is also tragic that millions die yearly of hunger. And most people do nothing about it.

How many million people die of hunger in the US each year? (500k is the US only number, many more than that have died worldwide)

I don't understand this reasoning, it's such hyperbole, we are not sacrificing anyone. You are already part of a society that makes these types of tradeoffs and calculated risks all the time. We don't spend an endless amount of money on extending everyone's life at any cost. And people who are overweight and unfit have a personal responsibility as well, and can also isolate themselves, why do we have to traumatise a whole population of healthy people unnecessarily with lockdowns.

It's so unbelievable far fetched, that asymptomatic people should still transfer virus through contact surfaces and that this will in any significant way increase the infected health care professionals at the elderly peoples homes, despite them having professional equipment, and those elderly people, who are a part of the risk group, while another VERY large part of the risk group can isolate themselves, still would be enough to motivate a lockdown.

It's getting so incredibly unreasonable, everything will be impossible if you put an endless price to every second of a human life.

We could have had a hard strong lockdown in early 2020, but people like you made the arguments you're making now, and so we've had a see-saw year of restrictions being imposed and lifted, and here we are: the economy's fucked, huge numbers of people are dead, we have new variants[1] in circulation, and we're now saying "let's just kill off anyone who'd, or obese, or has diabetes, or asthma".

[1] Notice how all the worrying variants are from countries with inadequate lockdowns?

You don't know that. There are already plenty of examples of countries that have had hard lockdowns, no lockdowns and medium lockdowns, and the results are really inconclusive. The only pattern I can see is that the number of the infections is following the weather and the season, like flu viruses always do.

"huge" numbers of people are not dead, look at excessive mortality, adjusted for population, compare 15 years back. Lo and behold we have had several deadlier years.

In Germany all restrictions were lifted for six months and nothing happened, then suddenly infections went up when the weather got cold and OMG it's because we let people go out. Then we lift the restrictions slightly and now when infections go up again, following the next spell of cold weather, we are certain that it was because we let some people go to the hair dresser.

In Germany, the end-of-summer spread happened due to several factors, bad weather because autumn, lowered restrictions (as were all summer) and start of schools after the summer holidays. There is no single silver bullet to stop the spread (except maybe "prevent all contact"), but there are several factors that need to play together.

However, the lowered restrictions during German summer also had a visible effect, look at the numbers between June 2020 and August 2020 and you will see a distinct rise there. It isn't nearly as bad as in September, but it is there.

You realise that cancer kills many many times the number of people that die from corona, but we still continue to "sacrifice" those people just to have a functioning society, make profits and also just for fun, by producing cigarettes etc. How can you be part of such a society?

> The scientists told us that a vaccine wouldn't be ready for years, it was actually ready in months

I remember the messaging at the beginning of last year being to expect at least 18 months, possibly much longer. For most people, 18 months will be about accurate, for a few people, they will have beat the estimate, but that's not surprising - it's an estimate. It's a hell of a lot more accurate than a couple months.

> these institutions are powerful and need to save face

You just explained above that these institutions are not powerful, and that they have limititations. Which one of these are true?

> I remember the messaging at the beginning of last year being to expect at least 18 months, possibly much longer.

I remember messaging about timelines of several years. The fact that science eventually arrived at a consistent and accurate message doesn't mean that there wasn't consensus around the wrong opinions when it was most critical.

> You just explained above that these institutions are not powerful, and that they have limititations. Which one of these are true?

Nowhere did I claim they are not powerful, I simply claimed that they made bad decisions.

Messenger RNA vaccines, which are a new technology, turned out to work much better than expected. They can be synthesized fast. It took two days to make the first mRNA vaccine molecules for coronavirus. Traditional vaccine technology is slower. Bulk production was a problem; encapsulating those fragile mRNA molecules without breaking them requires a difficult bit of microfluidics technology. But it's difficult in the sense that IC manufacturing is difficult. Once the manufacturers got the tooling and the process right, it worked well.

Here's the list of vaccines under development.[1] There are 105 different vaccines in the pipeline. Most of those are more traditional approaches and don't work yet, need further testing, don't work as well, or have other problems. What we have now is the minimum viable product - two doses, difficult handling and distribution, requires an injection. Some of the ones in the pipeline are skin patches, nasal sprays, or pills. The Merck pill, though, turned out to be a dud - provides only weak protection.

The non-injection schemes may help overcome some of the vaccine resistance problems.

Throwing money at the problem did help. Usually, vaccine R&D consists of finding the most likely candidate, setting up the Phase I/II/III trials, and waiting to see how it works. If it doesn't work, the developers go on to another candidate. Developing 100 different vaccines in parallel improved the odds. A lot.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...

US deaths in 2020 jumped about 15% from 2019. Even if you think the pandemic response was a failure that somehow made it worse, you can’t also think that the crisis didn’t justify a strong reaction. That’s an enormous increase in mortality for a single year.

I have no idea why you've been downvoted, you made a really strong point. The only thing I can really say in response is that there's gotta be some sort of middle ground between the reaction we had and under-reacting.

I feel like that’s assuming that our reaction was over done. If anything, that we still had 500 thousand dead Americans seem to suggest we should have reacted harder, faster, and possibly differently.

A new paper estimates the economic benefits of the first billion spent on vaccines at $17 trillion, and $1 trillion for each of the next few billions spent. We should have spent a lot more money on vaccines.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/03/bi...

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