Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordan_curve | Hacker News Reader

This is a horrible argument. The article itself went through the reasons that the previous common belief was not applicable to this unprecedented pandemic. Yet it concludes, without any evidence, this must have been caused by public health experts being so biased by their personal political convictions that they cannot interpret their scientific findings objectively.

View on HN

There's an appeal to basic logic that goes "if the disease spreads from person to person and persons don't cross borders then the disease can't either." That might be a simplistic model but it's obviously correct upon inspection unless the disease spreads from distant persons which in this case it does not.

The reason you might reject the policy implications of said model is that the assumption going in (we can sufficiently restrict border movement) are in your mind impractical or impossible.

Where does it provide "reasons that the previous common belief was not applicable to this unprecedented pandemic"? I've looked over the article twice and can't see what you're referring to.

Furthermore, what's the explanation for the (very counter-intuitive, and at least in this case seemingly incorrect) previous common belief in the first place?

The Vox article about Vietnam that they list the URL of (but don't link?) is far more in depth on the complexities for and against the idea than this blog post. There don't appear to be any easy answers to take from this.

https://www.vox.com/22346085/covid-19-vietnam-response-trave...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com