Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

What do we do next time? 18 months of shutting down the economy again? What if it happens again in just a few years?

Maybe we could actually shut down next time rather than doing what we did: unenforced and ignored stay-at-home orders, unenforced and ignored business closures, and unenforced and ignored mask mandates. Do it right and then perhaps we could get rid of the disease in a shorter amount of time.

Yes, so much this. Everyone was shocked about the Chinese methods in spring 2020, but looking back, the Chinese did something right there. Maybe nailing shut doors was a little excessive, but their success proves them right. (If one can trust their numbers, that is).

Except no country that wasn’t either an island or dictatorship managed to do that, not even Germany.

And how many actually tried?

Last spring the US was like "Hey, travel from Italy is all good, let's not worry about it" at the time when severe travel restrictions might have been effective.

I'll grant that people wouldn't put up with them for long, but reasonable measures employed before the infection base gets big can have an enormous impact on the total number of people that get infected.

A lot of Europe tried.

It's really hard unless you can control borders. Even if the US locked down for 3 months and got to zero, it could be undone by one group of illegal immigrants crossing the border with COVID.

The US and EU were already pretty well infected before they realized what was happening. Only China, S. Korea, and Australia had major outbreaks that were contained, and even those, the outbreaks were fairly isolated (Wuhan, Shincheonji Church, Melbourne).

There is some threshold below which contact tracing and isolation work. A few dozen infected people crossing the border could be dealt with.

We've not bothered to do much support for isolation, have high case counts and a year of encouraging people to respond poorly to contact tracing, as if consenting to disease control measures is some unforgivable affront to autonomy.

> A few dozen infected people crossing the border could be dealt with.

There are something between 50 000 and 100 000 people each year who are caught trying to illegally cross southern US border. The number of people who are not caught is obviously a multiple of that. This probably could be dealt with, if the government was actually trying to do that.

It'll come back looking more like seasonal influenza or the common cold.

It won't ever come back at full strength again.

We probably just get yearly shots for different strains at worst.

Maybe not even that, it could be a typical childhood ailment that you get once in your life and never again.

I suspect that, in retrospect, the first inclination of many parents when the pandemic began to hold "COVID parties" for children like the familiar "chicken pox parties"—inclination that wasn't followed, because of dire warnings about long-term health effects—was the right one.

Fairly definitively that was always the wrong answer.

In the future:

1. Most people will get SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from their mothers

2. Early life exposure will happen

3. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will be force to make expensive mutations to avoid immune escape will come at a cost to fitness.

None of the conditions can be created by what you suggest. You have the problem of having the relatively most-lethal / most-transmissible version of the virus spreading unhindered in a population of >40 year olds who have no natural immunity. The "COVID party" solution maximizes the death and cost of the virus.

Right there are at least four other endemic human coronaviruses, with HCoV-OC43 being very similar to SARS-CoV-2. Without a vaccine the safest option for most individuals is to catch it as a child. The resulting immunity isn't perfect but it usually protects most people from serious symptoms with later reinfections.

What is it that you propose? Have you informed yourself about the effects of your proposal and considered alternatives?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com