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Comment by monkeycantype | Hacker News Reader

The accidental lab leak theory proven would actually be great news, as the alternative is that civilization has reached the threshold where we have a hyper connected population in contact with so many natural disease reservoirs that pandemics are emerging spontaneously. If it’s a lab leak we change pathogen containment practices, otherwise we curtain our freedom of movement and association

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Are you claiming that Covid is particularly severe relative to historical pandemics, or that Covid-level issues are a particularly modern phenomenon?

In fact the opposite is true. If it had emerged in any other century, Covid would barely even be on anyone’s radar.

>If it had emerged in any other century, Covid would barely even be on anyone’s radar.

Surely you can't be serious. I mean, I think we would have noticed. In fact, it would have been on a lot of people's radar. They definitely would have noticed in India, Italy & Brazil.

I mean, are comments like this hyperbolic, and I'm just not in on the joke?

Not intending to make the case that Covid-19 would barely be on anyone's radar, but here is a comparison with some past pandemics that went relatively unnoticed (afaik):

1957-1958 H2N2 pandemic[1]

- 1.1 million deaths worldwide (0.04% of world population of 2.9 billion)

- 116,000 deaths in the US (0.07% of US population of 174.9 million)

1968 H3N2 pandemic[2]

- 1 million deaths worldwide (0.03% of world population of 3.5 billion)

- 100,000 deaths in the US (0.05% of US population of 200 million)

Covid pandemic (so far)

- 3.39 million deaths worldwide (0.04% of world population of 7.9 billion)

- 586,000 deaths in the US (0.18% of US population of 330 million)

---

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemi...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.htm...

I suspect some readers are thinking ok, so it's ~6x worse, surely that's noticeable. But the COVID numbers are seriously inflated relative to past epidemics by the enormous testing programme, and the way mass PCR testing has cut doctors out of the loop. These numbers of deaths are deaths in which a positive PCR test was roughly temporally co-present, regardless of what an expert on the ground said the cause of death was, which is a much weaker standard than was previously used for ascribing a cause of death.

Another way to look at this is overall mortality levels. In the UK, which has a reasonably high death rate, COVID raised overall mortality (per million) to around the level it was in the year 2000. Nobody was worried about that mortality level at the time, it was normal. Nor has anyone really noticed or commented on the general improvements in mortality since then. In Sweden age-adjusted mortality went back all the way to 2012 levels, and that with quite minor restrictions.

This is suggestive that we perceive the impact as large because it tends to be phrased in terms of deviation from a 5-year model baseline, and because of the general expectations created by enormous 'expert' predictions. Having sacrificed so much via such extreme measures, people need to view it as an extreme event to justify a worldview of 'experts are generally honest and correct' (which can be seen in this article as a very, very strong prevailing world view at the NYT!)

> Nobody was worried about that mortality level at the time

They were sufficiently worried to increase cigarette taxes, ban advertising, educate the population to stop smoking.

Anti-smoking campaigns were decades earlier and did not involve measures anywhere near as harsh as currently deployed.

They would have noticed a few unusually bad “flu” seasons, but relative to smallpox, plague, measles, malaria, and even some historical outbreaks of the actual flu, it wouldn’t have registered as a particularly generation-defining event as it is now.

Hello Umanwizard, I'll try to make that less ambiguous. What I mean is, over the last century it has become common to believe that we are taming pathogens - smallpox, polio, maybe malaria next, diseases that have been with us for a very long time. As our technology enables this, I fear another trend pushes us in the opposite direction, that as we encroach further and further into fuller exploitation of remaining wilderness we are encountering novel potential pathogens at a greater rate, and our highly connected single global population means that transmission happens very quickly. So my question doesn't concern the lethality of Covid, rather that is is novel and has spread globally quickly - whether this might be an early data point in a future data set, that will indicate we are now be generating new novel pandemics at a greater rate. If that is the case, that will be a more difficult problem to solve than the problem of lax lab safety.

There are interesting points in this thread, about how well we would respond to confirmation that the pandemic was triggered by a lab leak, so I'm not saying that there would be a good outcome from knowing it was a lab leak, rather that even if we never know the truth, it would probably be a better thing for the future of our civilisation it was a lab leak, rather than the first significant event in accelerating sequence of naturally generated pandemics. These are not the only two options of course, but that was the ambiguously stated meaning of my comments

cheers

monk

I mean, that's obviously happening anyway, and it's not only a modern occerance. Pandemics have a long and varied history, no? I guess this would modify how often we think that happens?

We can have all of the best possible pathogen containment practices but if they're not followed then they're of no use. We would also need a way to ensure that they're followed

That might be great from a public health standpoint, but I'm not so sure from an overall global perspective. Proof of a lab leak and subsequent coverup would be a hugely destabilizing political event that could have severe consequences as there would be people pushing for some type of retribution for the millions of deaths. At the very least that would lead to further political division and racial animosity in places like the US. At the worst, it is the first domino on the way to WWIII.

EDIT: Just to get in front of the responses that are already popping up, this isn't an endorsement of a coverup. It is just recognition that if a coverup did occur and was revealed that wouldn't be "great news".

Unfortunately that outcome is happening already, from just the hearsay

Well the heresay comes from people like Donald Trump and the longer the Democrats ignore the theory the more credibility they lose and give to him, even if the way he said it was inflammatory. Seems like it would be far less destructive to bring it out into the open now than to just let people think that someone calling it the Kung Flu was more transparent than the political party that pretended like the lab leak is just a racist conspiracy theory.

The Democrats (and the many “gullible” reporters like the one that wrote the referenced link) are simply waiting this out in hopes the average reader forgets that Trump and others including a few brave scientists pointed towards the obvious possibility of a lab leak early in the pandemic.

And were subsequently labeled racist and likely lost their jobs.

What would you say in response to someone who believes that widespread belief of a coverup would do more to sow distrust and division than a transparent admission of the truth?

The truth is the truth and we shouldn’t cover it up because of the harsh realities it may bring.

For persons of average intelligence or more, it is indeed good news.

For persons of Asian appearance, living in physical proximity to persons of lower than average intelligence, it's dangerous news, unfortunately.

Can you provide recent statistical data during the pandemic about actual hate crimes to back that up, specifically about the race committing the crime?

https://www.csusb.edu/sites/default/files/FACT%20SHEET-%20An...

https://secureservercdn.net/104.238.69.231/a1w.90d.myftpuplo...

Increase from 49 to 122 is certainly a big increase, but these are extremely small numbers, considering they are derived from cities with combined populations of tens of millions of residents.

> The accidental lab leak theory proven would actually be great news

For humanity, yes, for the CCP, not so much.

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