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Comment by thrwhizzle | Hacker News Reader

For some people the goalposts are moving faster than the speed of light.

The goal was to flatten the curve. Remember that? Flatten. The. Curve.

Is the curve not flat? How much flatter do you want it to be before returning to normal life? Do you want literally 0.000% risk?

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There is a worryingly large constituency, mostly on Twitter, who believe that any unjust death at all is damning evidence that all of our institutions and economic systems must be destroyed and rebuilt. Of course unjust death is tragic, but it's not an excuse to throw out all of society and start over again. I think many of these people saw mask mandates as that "rebuilding society" step, and to get rid of it so quickly (despite it being like a year) is evidence that the state "learned nothing", so to say. I even saw someone say something like "I can't believe the anti-maskers won" which so succinctly ties up the stupid reality of our political atmosphere: you can't do anything, anything at all without it being seen as a goal attempt into the other side's net.

I really do believe that a large amount of people do want 0.000% risk, and they'd be happy to wear masks until 2030 to guarantee it.

As for myself, I'm fully vaccinated but will continue to wear masks to make other people feel comfortable. But even before being vaccinated I didn't care too much if people wore masks around me and I certainly won't care now.

I’d be pretty careful drawing any conclusions about the mood of the nation from Twitter. The Twitter crowd are very loud and quite extremist but I believe they are small in number. To be honest I’d just avoid Twitter all together. Nothing good comes out of it.

I wish companies and politicians would follow your recommendation.

You could post this in nearly every hackernews thread and I'd upvote you each time for being the most relevant comment on the page.

Debating how small or big they are is fruitless when their power and impact via their network effect is palpable. "Avoiding Twitter" and it's collection of extremists (and their followers that signal boost) is not possible. These people have their tweets and reactions in the news, they are constantly quoted on blogs and websites.

I'd argue the opposite that you are. Twitter extremists influence the rest of the nation and it's easy to see how the network effect has some decay on their ideas, but the thorny points remain.

At some point you have to stop treating Twitter and Twitter users like an isolation zone.

If you are someone who is active on Twitter, your thoughts about how important Twitter is are biased by your engagement with it. None of the actual people I know and talk to in real life harbor any sort of extremist views one way or another. Literally none of them ever mention Twitter in daily conversation. (And many of them are software devs.)

IMO their statements are amplified by things like national media because of their extremism; the extremism generates strong feelings (whether positive or negative), and strong feelings leads to more eyes on the media for longer. That doesn't mean the people consuming the media also have those extremist beliefs.

> If you are someone who is active on Twitter, your thoughts about how important Twitter is are biased by your engagement with it.

I don't have Twitter.

> Literally none of them ever mention Twitter in daily conversation. (And many of them are software devs.)

Network effects do not cause or force you to acknowledge a source. They merely require you to trust the mental gymnastics of the person who communicated the idea to you.

> That doesn't mean the people consuming the media also have those extremist belief

Generally the people adopting will adopt bits an pieces, this is what I described as "decay".

The rest I agree with.

I wish these people would go after cars, they're much worse and they seem to be effective at changing policy.

The individuals on Twitter are an extremist “mob” on both sides of the political spectrum that really has little relevance to larger society, except for politicians and the like who use it for communication.

Follow the science and draw your conclusions for your own life and don’t let the mob bully you, they are living in a world where dogma/politics trumps science [full disclosure that is word choice, I’m independent btw & not a Trump supporter].

I double masked up until 2 weeks after the second mRNA shot (early April), at which time COVID was effectively over for me. If others want to wear masks for years of that makes them feel better that’s totally ok, but the reality is that the pandemic is over for the vaccinated, although I’d get a booster if needed.

Also if we do have to wear masks for another pandemic I absolutely will, but not any longer than needed they really mess with my ability to read facial expressions and communicate.

The political landscape has also changed now so that the government is forced to admit that and now the fully vaccinated can go shopping without masks. It is about damn time. This pandemic has damaged the mental health of the nation but finally rolling back restrictions is the best way to give everyone an end to the pandemic that is in sight.

The goal was to minimize casualties and human misery, to prevent what some countries are going through right now. Flatten the curve was a slogan.

Lock downs also cause huge misery. Recessions are not victimless.

lesser of 2 evils

What recession?

social, educational, economic

You would choose what is happening now in India instead?

if Indian numbers have to be trusted they are really not that bad, some European countries had even worse numbers per capita

people sometimes forget the size of Indian population and just look at nominal numbers instead per capita numbers, considering how poor is India and how bad is Indian healthcare these numbers comparable wiuth Europe are actually pretty low

Those European countries have markedly different age pyramids than India

I don’t think anyone trusts the Indian government numbers; they are downplaying, lying, and just overwhelmed. It will take a long time probably before before we get a real accounting for deaths, but everything I’ve read points to at least 5x - 10x the official numbers.

You’ll eventually get your answer though to the question of “what if we didn’t do lockdowns and just let it run” - I don’t think it will be pretty.

All the news articles I've seen mention that actual numbers are perhaps 10x or more the reported numbers due to lack of testing and overwhelmed healthcare.

Pretty sure if you’d allowed or even encouraged unmitigated spread of the virus, you’d also get the same or similar recession, though perhaps slightly later.

Of course. If going out and working and consuming is dangerous, many people will not do it, even if there is no lockdown. More people will just be extremely careful. And there is some direct cost to the sickeness and death.

This was published well over a year ago.

https://news.mit.edu/2020/pandemic-health-response-economic-...

What's happening in India is a culmination of immense population density, dismissing and ignoring of recommendations by the government, dissemination of propaganda, massive incompetence, etc etc

It's not a binary choice. There is a huge amount of room between the two. I believe you know that, so think about whether your comment was made in good faith.

The situation in India is the result of all the things you mentioned + recklessness of people. You have to see it first hand that how reckless people acted in large cities. They were acting like this covid thing doesn't even exist and that is one crucial point.

Lock downs didn’t last that long. By the time the second wave hit, everything besides large in person gatherings wetback to normal. At least in the mid west.

> a slogan

So it was a white lie?

Perhaps reality is too nuanced to fit into a single sentence? Or new information comes along that updates our understanding of the world?

It wasn't a single sentence. Articles, explainer videos, infographics etc. The goal was to force daily numbers and active hospitalizations below healthcare capacity. To smear out the infections across time. So instead of 2 weeks, it would be several months. The idea was that even if we can't reduce the total infections, we can prevent deaths if we reduce the load on hospitals. But people have extremely short memory span and nobody remembers anymore.

I remember it very well. Yep, they said flatten the curve. People did, there was confusion about masks, guidance changed. The president said some things about bleach, lockdowns, recession, NYC overloaded, stimulus, reopenings, public protests, Sturgis, peace in the middle east, vans picking up people off the street, elections, the Thanksgiving surge, hospitals full, Jan 6. So forgive me if I don't really put a lot of weight into what was initially said at the beginning of the pandemic. It reflected the understanding of the time.

As an aside, I'll just say I my opinion that it worked. With a few limited exceptions we didn't experience what India is doing through right now. I credit lockdowns and mask wearing for much of that.

We are under lockdown for more than a year now to save old and obese people, most of whom would have died anyway in this year (or perhaps in <5).

Started as just a few weeks and became over a year and who know if next year will be back to normal...

Oh I'm totally in favor of pushing fat granny in front of the trolley. Take the utilitarian approach! But it does kill younger people in lesser numbers, and potentially permanent damage to be people's brains, cardiovascular systems. What about them?

As an aside, my fat granny is watching my kids right now so she's not totally useless.

nobody ever said the end goal was to flatten the curve. like everything else, we are playing it by ear, to suggest we had plans to do otherwise is just writing your own history

> Is the curve not flat?

Yes, thanks to all the regulations.

> How much flatter do you want it to be before returning to normal life?

When returning to normal life, you want to curve to stay flat. So when a majority of people are vaccinated.

> Yes, thanks to all the regulations.

No. That was months ago. What about those with vaccination or reconvalescence immunity? Those don't affect the curve?

A majority of people ARE vaccinated in the US. And you're vaccinating over 1% more per day. Don't undersell yourselves.

36.3% are fully vaccinated. It is great progress. But it is not a majority.

Currently 46.6% of the population. Over 2m/day on average being vaccinated.

NB: codingdave is referring to fully vaccinated individuals, while greedo is referring to individuals with at least one shot. Both are correct.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...

@scrollaway is most definitely _not_ correct however, since no number below 50% is “a majority” of the population by definition, and regardless that is not a sufficient number to deliver value in the form of herd immunity via vaccine.

"flatten the curve" was essentially a marketing slogan (which worked remarkably well, by the way, in terms of market penetration). So let's not worry too much about that.

With exponential growth, numbers either trend to 0 or to infinity, and they do so very quickly. There's only 2 endgames possible in a pandemic:

(1) The numbers trend to 0 and the risk is 0.00% (see: polio)

(2) The numbers trend to infinity (i.e. the disease goes endemic) and risk is equal to whatever risk the disease carries on infection/reinfection over your lifetime (see: the spanish flu)

Pre-vaccine, "flatten the curve" and other marketing-speak meant "stall on option 2 because we can't handle that level of risk in our society right now" - hospitals overflowing, etc. The death rate would have been out of control if we went straight to infinity at the infection rates we were seeing.

With the vaccine rollout, and with medical advances in treating severe covid, we've dramatically lowered the risk of option 2, and additionally we've opened the door to potentially taking option 1.

The CDC is probably gunning for option 1 here (and based on data in Israel it seems like it's possible with a high enough vaccination rate, although I think globally it will be a challenge).

If you keep this framework in mind, the goalposts haven't really moved at all- just the marketing used (hence: "flatten the curve" became "new normal" which then became "get vaccinated")

Edit: Evidently discussion about this sort of thing is quite polarizing. Just to be clear, this is a personal analysis of decision makers' true "goalposts", as the parent post seemed distressed by the moving of goalposts

I'm not advocating for or defending any particular policy, so please don't interpret my post as such. Thank you.

Yes, I want the virus eliminated.

This is completely unreasonable. We've never been able to eradicate any disease that affects humans other than smallpox, and not for lack of trying.

The case numbers coming out of Israel show their (still ongoing) vaccination effort is on the precipice of eliminating it locally. So it seems incredibly reasonable it will be eliminated, at least from the developed world. From that point any reintroduction of the virus is unlikely to gain a foothold.

yeah then what happens when you reopen international travel lol

As I said, it can't get a foothold. If vaccinations are enough to keep the r0 below 1, which seems to be the case, it doesn't really matter how many infected people enter because it will fizzle out again. Vaccines are also likely to be mandatory for anyone traveling.

This is false. We've eradicated SARS-CoV-1, for example. The last case was in 2004. And New Zealand, Australia, and Taiwan outright eliminated COVID community spread domestically (Australia did it twice!), proving it is possible.

I thought with SARS-CoV-1, no people have it, but animals still do, and it could jump back to people from them, so it isn't considered eradicated yet.

And stopping community spread in a few countries is totally different than global eradication.

Well no thank you, I'm not an Australian or American but I want my citizens to be allowed to turn home. Saving your population from each covid death is perfect excuse for fascism, Trump should have been used it to build 3 walls by the look of how people are willing to accept this position.

Can I ask why? That feels like an enormously bigger lift for not much more gain over "the virus exists but vaccines relegate it to the level of a mere cold amongst vaccinated people," for instance.

COVID's long incubation time while infectious makes it potentially the most lethal disease ever. Most colds and flus evolve to be less lethal because lethal variants die out before spreading too far, making them evolutionarily less advantageous. That is NOT true of COVID, so there is potentially nothing preventing it from morphing into something more like MERS with a 20-30% fatality rate.

As bad as COVID was, we dodged an existential bullet. But why stay in the line of fire? We need to eradicate this disease.

> COVID's long incubation time while infectious makes it potentially the most lethal disease ever.

"Most lethal disease ever" is a really strong claim, so I would like to see some of the evidence that leads you to believe that. The r0 of measles, which still infects 20 million people a year, is substantially higher than COVID's, and though its death rate in developed countries is lower, the higher r0 means it is potentially more deadly.[1]

Would you share some of the evidence backing the claim that COVID will not/is unlikely to evolve to become less lethal? If COVID did morph into something more lethal, wouldn't that affect its evolutionary fitness in such a way that the more lethal variant would eventually die out, as both SARS and MERS did?

I understand that you feel COVID is a unique threat and needs a unique response. I'm not convinced COVID is so unique that it escapes the same rules of evolutionary biology that impact other viruses, and even if it did, I am not convinced the necessary response is therefore 100% eradication. (And even if I were, I'd be extremely worried about perfect being the enemy of good.)

> But why stay in the line of fire?

We are still, and always will be, in the line of fire. COVID is not the first coronavirus of its kind to come up this way, and it won't be the last.

That doesn't necessarily mean we should or shouldn't eradicate it, but I think there may be a bias here where we assume that because COVID is the disease we're dealing with now, it is also the worst one.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Your comment doesn’t address what I wrote. Unlike most other diseases, COVID has no evolutionary pressure to become less lethal over time.

It did - I asked you to provide evidence for that claim, and some of the others you made. It's a strong assertion and it needs strong evidence.

To be clear, I'm not trying to suggest COVID isn't lethal or isn't unique at all. I am suggesting that the idea it is so unique as to be excluded from selective pressure to become less lethal over time is a claim that requires evidence.

You mean like we did with flu?

Stay inside or wear an N95. The rest of us are returning to life.

You can't flatten the curve and then immediately throw away all caution and go back to the behavior that made the curve a geometric progression.

Fortunately, we’re not. In between, there was a vaccine developed and deployed and the science strongly (overwhelmingly is probably more precise) suggests that fully vaccinated people are at minimal risk to themselves and minimal risk to spread, which is of course the entire point of vaccines and entirely unsurprising given our understanding and long experience with other vaccines, which almost all exhibited the same disease control properties.

Getting vaccinated seems to me to be the exact opposite of throwing away all caution.

I quite agree, but I think the message from health authorities has also been problematic here: they repeated that "vaccinated individuals will still spread the infection".

That is true of course: some vaccinated individuals will still spread the infection because efficacy is not 100 %. But the public has, predictably, got this message wrong: I keep getting told that "vaccinated people will get the infection and spread it just the same".

No, not just the same. Vaccinated people are radically less likely to infect others. I do understand that the officials wanted to be careful and not encourage people to move around after being vaccinated, but perhaps they could have again worded their message differently, to be more honest and direct.

I think many of us on HN object to imprecise messaging, sometimes to the point where it’s technically incorrect.

But I also have to admit that “Defund the Police”, “Flatten the Curve”, “I have a dream”, “Think Different” are more effective than a precise 2-page memo laying out a concrete plan.

Some people struggle with nuanced, complicated messaging. Others struggle when messages are over-simplified. I posit that the first group is a few orders of magnitude larger, at least in terms of effect of public comms.

Yes, that's the confusing bit.

In February, the CDC said that those with the vaccine can have asymptomatic infections (https://web.archive.org/web/20210209162120/https://www.cdc.g...). The NY Times used the term "silent spreaders".

Then in March the CDC's guidance was to continue wearing a mask after vaccination, except in situations where transmission risk was minimal (such as when everyone present has been vaccinated). They said we should do this while we're still learning about how vaccines affect the spread of the virus (https://web.archive.org/web/20210308164227/https://www.cdc.g...).

Now the CDC is saying fully vaccinated individuals do not need to wear a mask (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...), but no reason has been given for the change on that page. Were they wrong on asymptomatic infections in fully vaccinated individuals, or has the risk of spread simply been lowered because of the number of individuals who have received a vaccine?

Without knowing the reason behind the change in guidance (I'm sure there is one), I find it easy to be cynical and distrusting.

The changes can be explained by two simple factors, without the need for some grand nefarious conspiracy:

* The CDC's default position is caution * We know more now than we did in the past

In February, we realized vaccinated people could still get asymptomatic infections. Out of an abundance of caution, the CDC recommends vaccinated people keep wearing masks because the vast majority of the population isn't vaccinated.

As evidence accumulates in the intermediate time, we realize that vaccines also lower the percentage of people with asymptomatic Covid-19 [1]

With even more evidence, we realize vaccinated people overwhelmingly avoid hospitalization, which is the real issue we are trying to avoid [2]

With those two pieces of information, the CDC can now change their recommendation. Nothing nefarious going on, nothing 'unknowable' to anyone paying attention.

The problem is when people who are already predisposed to distrust the CDC - most likely due to their media diet - and put 0 effort in understanding the changing landscape see the CDC change the recommendation and assume it must be 'something political'. Those of us who were paying attention weren't that surprised about the announcement.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0428-vaccinated-adu...

I don't have a source for you, but my understanding is that the main reason for the change is that very recent studies have shown that people with vaccines and asymptomatic "breakthrough" infections carry a much lower viral load + viral shedding than previously thought. So even those vaccinated people who may have an asymptomatic infection are really at an extremely minimal chance to spread it to anyone else; they just aren't shedding enough virus particles to make the risk high.

There's almost a year between the time we originally went into lockdown to 'flatten the curve' and the time a significant part of the population got vaccinated. You can't pretend that not using a mask now - once someone is vaccinated - is the same as not using a mask back then.

I didn't wear one then, and don't wear one now.

So basically what you are saying is that you drew your conclusion back then - who knows based on what data - and you are so set in your ways, there’s nothing that will change your mind.

Sounds like a super healthy way to approach life.

N95 masks ($2/day) + vaccines would almost certainly eliminate COVID19.

Wouldn't it be nice to eliminate COVID19?

Look at the heroics for WWI and WWII. And those caused fewer combat deaths.

You can't pretend Americans haven't grown selfish and lazy.

Once we achieve widespread (and seemingly very effective) vaccines, it’s not at all clear to me that spending trillions per year on masks for everyone and generating that additional amount of trash is the best use of those funds or “inconvenience points”.

Trillions?

That's the harm to the economy. That's not the cost of masks.

Providing everyone in the US with two high-quality N95-equivalent masks each week for a year would be at most $60 billion. ($2 per mask * 100 masks * 300 million people, at retail prices).

We didn't do that. Our kids have a half-year of learning loss. Small businesses around me closed, and a ton of people fell behind on mortgages. We're looking at pretty high inflation from how we've expended our money supply, eventually. Etc.

Part of the reason these things look like bad use of funds is that people don't do ROI calculations, and confuse millions, billions, and trillions. A trillion is a thousand times more than a billion, and a million times more than a million. But to everyone a MILLION dollars looks like a big number, as does a TRILLION dollars.

People also confuse the ridiculously high effectiveness of proper masks with the fairly low effectiveness of cloth masks.

> Providing everyone in the US

Can people not in the US harbor the virus? I assumed you were trying to eradicate it and to do so with your original figure of $2/day/person masks, it’s trillions per year worldwide. You later silently amended (not sure if in error or moving the goalpost) that figure to 2 masks/week in your $60B/yr estimate to cover most, not all, of the people in the US.

$2/day/person * 365 day/year * 7.5 B people/world -> over $5T/year/world

Thanks for the unneeded lesson on powers of 10, though.

sigh

* My comment was about the US. See the last line of my comment.

* In the US, the economic gains of having rolled out N95 and equivalent masks when they become widely available would have cost orders-of-magnitude less than the masks. Ending COVID19 sooner would still pay for a program like this today.

* Whether or not the vaccine will stop COVID19 is still TBD. We don't have good numbers on impact on spread, on ultimate vaccination rates, nor on mutations. It seems on-track, but still TBD.

* Yes, similar measures would need to be taken elsewhere to fully eradicate the virus, and that's assuming no animal stores. Doing math there brings up a million apples-to-oranges comparisons.

* Numbers in second post were was based on similar (successful) programs implemented in Taiwan and Korea, which did stop COVID19 (pre-vaccine) and allowed those economies to continue functioning, while ours imploded. Quotas were 2-3 per week, and everyone was required to use (and reuse) them. My second comment was more precise, if anything.

Half of the US population is vaccinated now. There's no going back to a geometric progression.

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