Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pyramus | Hacker News Reader

By the way, now that we are already talking about R ~= 1 ...

Over pretty much the last year you could observe, in different countries all around the world, that the reproduction number was 'magically' floating around 1.

Only recently did I learn that this effect was puzzling for epidemiologists as well and was only solved around 2012 (?) in a model that assumes a network of information about the disease in parallel to the network of disease transmission. The resulting feedback loops lead to the meta-stability of R=1. Super interesting how society acts as this distributed information processor, similar to 'the market' in economics.

View on HN

A well-known Norwegian economic commentator pointed this out in a newspaper article a few weeks ago. You'll eventually be forced to maintain an R~=1 no matter what you do, so it's best for everyone if your cases have a low baseline when that happens. The measures will be the same, but the baseline risk can either be terrible or okay.

You can almost see the phenomenon in real time during this pandemic. Countries that have low trust in authorities will still freak out when the epidemic hits biblical proportions, and do various forms of impromptu distancing measures which will bring the R number down. Then when the signs of panic subside, they'll loosen them. And so on.

Societies with high trust in authorities will still pressure their authorities to loosen up when things feel safe, with predictible results, leading to further lockdowns.

The economic deviation caused by governments over reacting is your biggest pressure. Unless you shut down all travel, bars, restaurants, schools, universities and dating.

Then all of this will come back in the future and kick you in the teeth. Either we're going to have to accept this as a way of life, which is more detrimental. Or we're pushing off the inevitable.

No one has overreacted, unless you accept an outcome that both leads to improvised individual social distancing and the even worse worse economic devastation that follows.

This was uncertain to most people last year, but now we’ve seen so many examples that it really shouldn’t be so controversial any longer. But if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be discussing it.

The covid virus is evolved to fit exactly into the niche of societal behavior where it will be a big fucking problem but not so bad that it’s immediately obvious to enough people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com