Hacker News Reader

Comment by jquery | Hacker News Reader

What’s the purpose of comments like this?

EDIT: I see someone mentioning Trump below and I can’t reply. Trump was never interested in managing covid-19 or effective border control. This would’ve been the perfect opportunity for him to show why having smart borders was useful. He would’ve received support from within the government. He would’ve managed covid-19 successfully perhaps, and won re-election.

The problem was Trump was a completely ineffective and incompetent leader, who didn’t care at all about the things he claimed to care about. Mandatory quarantines and tests for people traveling to America would’ve been a lot of work and Trump was allergic to that. He was a man who preferred the cheers at his rallies over the difficult work of administrating and governing.

View on HN

That, or "Covid behaves like viruses usually do", describes plenty of headlines of the past 15 months. Remember how everyone was worried that antibody levels drop after an infection? Judging by the media coverage, you'd think memory cells and T cells were a recent, Covid-related discovery. We've known about them since the sixties and they continue to work as advertised.

Probably that patience has worn thin for the extremely overly cautious people who have been hiding in their homes for a year when they are realistically at zero risk of severe illness.

We have known since early summer of last year that being fat or being old are your two biggest risk factors. Beyond that, if you have some serious pre-existing condition that makes you susceptible to all illnesses.

The messaging should have been "Stay home if you are a high risk group. Otherwise live your live." All current data shows areas that have taken that approach are significantly better off today than the places that hid in a hole the past year.

We have let people treat this like it's an end of the world scenario and it's been good for no one.

I'm a healthy male who's been "hiding in [my] home for a year". I mean, other than shopping trips, and running, and cycling, and skiing, and.. However, I've done no social events, seen no friends, etc.

But, sorry if you think trying to avoid illness, trying to avoid passing on illness to others who don't have the comfort of working from home, passing on the illness to elderly family members, etc, is a waste of time. It's a pretty minor inconvenience for me to be largely isolated for a year, compared to those who are less fortunate than me.

How about a big 'ol [citation needed] on

> All current data shows areas that have taken that approach are significantly better off today than the places that hid in a hole the past year.

You know, a citation that doesn't involve correlation with countries that happened to have extreme lockdowns initially, acceptance of mass testing and screening and social restriction when necessary, etc.

By the way, my wife works in rehab in a hospital, and sees your "low risk" young people whose lives have been, as far as we can tell, permanently altered by the virus that some of us are seeking to avoid.

This whole situation is just so sad.

My uncle is in the hospital in pretty bad shape, on oxygen so far. He was spewing conspiracy shit non-stop on facebook. My father urged him to take the vaccine, then to come to the hospital sooner, he did a CT scan on my uncle, told him, showed him how messed up his lungs were, my uncle refused to be administered in the hospital, made a big fuss that the doctors wanted to kill him in the ICU; two days later he was brought in in an ambulancr.

If he was a stranger, maybe I would have laughed "serves you right", I just cannot understand how an above average intelligence person got himself brainwashed with anti-covid conspiracy theories.

It's nice that you have been able to deal well with the situation this last year, but try to remember that your experience is not necessarily representative of the whole:

> The districts, large and small, rural and urban, serve more than 2.2 million students across the United States. Of the 74 districts that responded, 74% reported multiple indicators of increased mental health stresses among students. More than half reported rises in mental health referrals and counseling. Nearly 90% of responding districts cited higher rates of absenteeism or disengagement, metrics commonly used to gauge student emotional health

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-c... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26532588)

> All current data shows areas that have taken that approach are significantly better off today than the places that hid in a hole the past year.

Source?

I'd argue current data shows that those that showed an overabundance of caution, like New Zealand, are the ones significantly better off than everyone else.

> like New Zealand,

You mean an island nation with strict control over their ports and borders?

And had mandatory lockdowns

Mandatory lockdowns make a lot more sense when you’re an island nation that can plausibly eradicate the disease. You reasonably can expect a month of pain and then resume business as usual, but the America’s, Europe, and Asian enjoy no such hope.

I know! Which is why it’s silly to use NZ as an example of anything.

Mandatory lockdowns are like cancer surgery. They can be very effective if everything is still localized, but if the cancer has already metastasized, it really doesn't solve the problem.

I’m not saying it would actually solve anything in the US, only that you can’t just say “look NZ resumed business as usual — the US should too!” because the situations are not at all similar.

Not sure why this is downvoted; it’s absolutely correct. European, Asian, and North/South American supply chains are internally integrated. A truck driver transports goods from the Czech Republic to France and unloads them at the destination. For New Zealand it’s not like the ship’s crew is unloading goods at the last mile. A similar effect is at play in Hawaii, but the latter can’t deny entry to US residents because unlike New Zealand it isn’t a sovereign nation.

> European, Asian, and North/South American supply chains are internally integrated. A truck driver transports goods from the Czech Republic to France and unloads them at the destination.

But does that truck driver need to have direct contact with other people to do their job? Why can't they unload their cargo, sleep at a quarantine facility, and then drive a new truckload in the opposite direction, without an opportunity to infect anyone else?

Also, island nations still have internal traffic. What's different about the borders between parts of Australia that allowed them to be closed when European borders had to stay open?

> Island nations still have internal traffic

Internal traffic among 4 million people is a much easier problem than traffic among a continent of 800 million people.

> But does that truck driver need to have direct contact with other people to do their job?

I’m sure there are better ways to do things, but truck drivers often unload shipments, confirm receipts, etc and they still need to visit truck stops and restaurants for supplies, food, etc.

> Why can't they unload their cargo, sleep at a quarantine facility, and then drive a new truckload in the opposite direction, without an opportunity to infect anyone else?

Quarantining between shipments would mean drivers are mostly idle, driving the cost of shipping through the roof. Changing supply contracts so drivers exchange cargo at the border requires completely reworking highly optimized logistics networks and isn’t going to happen in a few years, certainly not by fiat from some bureaucrat or politician that has no experience in logistics.

> Internal traffic among 4 million people is a much easier problem than traffic among a continent of 800 million people.

Can you fill in the details of how exactly it is easier?

> Quarantining between shipments would mean drivers are mostly idle, driving the cost of shipping through the roof.

Well, if they don't need to sleep between shipments, I guess they can drive back directly and get their supplies and food at home. I wasn't suggesting a full two-week quarantine if they don't intend to have any contact with locals anyway, just staying for the night isolated from anyone they could potentially infect.

For a freight truck to cross Europe can take multiple days, especially as drivers are not allowed to drive more than 9 hours a day (all European trucks are outfitted with a tachograph) and in some countries they have to stop for all of Sunday. During those days on the road, drivers need to be able to stop and use a quality toilet and buy food, which generally means a petrol station. That is the existing infrastructure – your vision of hermetically sealed, disease-free places to stop is simply unrealistic as considerable time and money would be needed to build these everywhere in Europe that a driver would need to stop.

> That is the existing infrastructure – your vision of hermetically sealed, disease-free places to stop is simply unrealistic as considerable time and money would be needed to build these everywhere in Europe that a driver would need to stop.

All countries with quarantine facilities I'm aware of are using existing buildings. They don't have to be hermetically sealed, just ensure that people don't come into contact with each other inside.

All those countries with quarantine facilities are using a handful of locations around a handful of airports or ports. Truck drivers in Europe need to stop in an exponentially larger amount of places, and even repurposing existing facilities would be too great a challenge on that scale. Again, you don’t seem to understand how freight transport works in Europe.

>Also, island nations still have internal traffic. What's different about the borders between parts of Australia that allowed them to be closed when European borders had to stay open?

Australian states' borders aren't like those between New York and New Jersey (or Colorado and Wyoming), or Belgium and the Netherlands. There are a handful of highways that can be and were completely blockaded, and otherwise the borders are completely empty desert. (Even on the highways, there are dire warning signs about having sufficient water/gasoline/supplies in the more remote parts.)

New Zealand’s results are largely due to it being a small, isolated nation. Hawaii similarly enjoys the fewest COVID cases per capita of the US.

Hawaii, the only state that requires a COVID test within 36 hours of flying there? I mean, of course they'd have the lowest cases per capita when they're the only ones actively refusing entry to those who have it.

How many entry points does Hawaii have compared to the average state? How do those points of entry compare in terms of staff and systems to operate those restrictions? Hawaii gets a lot more mileage out of its restrictions than Iowa is going to do. We can acknowledge these differences without conceding that restrictions aren’t worth the squeeze; it just means that New Zealand isn’t a good reference point.

A fair number of states did have travel restrictions in place but there were oodles of exceptions and AFAIK no real enforcement although it probably did limit cross-border travel some.

Right, but if all states had a handful of ports of entry manned by TSA who could enforce those restrictions and supply chains that were already inadvertently optimized to prevent disease transmission, then the US would probably look a lot more like New Zealand!

And if I looked like an eagle I could flap my wings and fly.

We didn't even shutdown widespread commercial traffic between the US and Canada (although otherwise travel was largely shut down).

> And if I looked like an eagle I could flap my wings and fly.

???

> We didn't even shutdown widespread commercial traffic between the US and Canada (although otherwise travel was largely shut down).

Why bother? It’s not like any significant number of transmissions are coming via commercial transit with Canada. I don’t pretend to be an epidemiologist but it seems pretty intuitive that a small island nation and one of the largest countries are going to differ.

I think I misread the tone of your reply. Yes, the situations are nothing like the same and the idea that the US could have been just like NZ if only is silly.

And furthermore their border is still essentially closed. Their approach was almost certainly the right one for them but locking down access in that way was never practical for most countries.

You’re totally right. It’s strange to see random self-righteous, presumably highly-educated, safety-minded people suggest that the US should just be New Zealand. There’s been some really wildly unworkable things offered as though it’s just obviously correct.

| they are realistically at zero risk of severe illness.

I didn't do it for me.

Every single person who "didn't do it for me" relied on an enormous network of people putting themselves at risk daily to keep the supply chains functioning.

It's virtuization of fear and little else.

I'm confused. Is it a risk or is it not a risk?

| at risk daily to keep the supply chains functioning

That sounds like crocodile tears to me. I don't see how going to bars and flying commercial would have made the people working in grocery delivery and amazon safer.

And it would absolutely have put the people in my life who are at the highest risk at an even greater risk if I had done so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com