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Comment by mariodiana | Hacker News Reader

Some of us would argue that the year-long (and counting) lockdowns are the result of neurotics imposing on the rest of us. Some of us have been arguing since the beginning of all this that the old and infirm should have been the ones to isolate themselves — with accommodations and support from the rest of society — while the rest of us took sensible precautions and continued on with the business of life. Some of us trusted that "two weeks to slow the spread" was the sensible policy and what our governments would follow. Instead, what happened was an extended and irrational panic by some forced on the rest of us.

So, I think it's terrific if people would accept their neuroses and not bother the rest of us. But there is no evidence that that's how things work.

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Some of us would argue that the year-long and counting failure to ever once have an actual lockdown - just vague restrictions within the realm of what was politically popular - was the result of people-who-can-be-referred-to-with-a-pejorative imposing on the rest of us. Some of us have been arguing that the old and infirm are no less worthwhile members than the rest, and that a true lockdown, without carriers wandering everywhere, would have resolved the situation within a bounded amount of time. Instead, what happened was an extended and irrational panic ('the economy will collapse!!! suicide rates are up!!! my oxygen levels are too low!!!") by some forced on the rest of us.

You realize that what you are proposing is not just illegal in the U.S., but unconstitutional? Thankfully we have something called the Bill of Rights.

The absolute zealotry of the "Zero Covid" movement, displayed for us in the comment above, is truly terrifying.

No, I don't realize that - can you explain?

Forbidding citizens to leave their homes quite clearly violates the right to free expression and free assembly in the First Amendment. I assume you're familiar with it.

Thankfully, we haven't had to test these yet in a court of law over covid. That's the beauty of having these rights enumerated explicitly. Would-be tyrants are afraid to challenge them.

I'm familiar with it, but I think I'm familiar with a different version than you are, because I don't see "expression" in it. I see "speech". I also see that the right to assembly is "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

In any case, quarantines have in fact been implemented in the US repeatedly over the years. So either the Constitution has changed recently (which might explain why your copy is different from mine), or they were so obviously not a violation of the First Amendment that nobody bothered to test it in a court of law.

For instance, here's a 1902 Supreme Court case confirming the ability of a state government to prevent passengers on a ship (some of whom were US citizens attempting to return to their homes) from leaving the ship: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/186/380

No mention is made of the First Amendment.

> That from an early day the power of the states to enact and enforce quarantine laws for the safety and the protection of the health of their inhabitants has been recognized by Congress, is beyond question. That until Congress has exercised its power on the subject, such state quarantine laws and state laws for the purpose of preventing, eradicating, or controlling the spread of contagious or infectious diseases, are not repugnant to the Constitution of the United States, although their operation affects interstate or foreign commerce, is not an open question.

(And the implication is that the only thing that would prevent a state from passing laws about quarantines is the federal government passing laws about quarantines and preempting the states - i.e., that Congress could certainly enact a nationwide quarantine if it wanted.)

Anyway, this is all beside the point - plenty of places other than the US, with no First Amendment or equivalent, have also failed to ever implement a real lockdown, because a real lockdown would have been politically unpopular. So it's not a matter of constitutionality.

Quarantines of actually sick individuals, you mean.

The use of PCR tests with ridiculously high thresholds to determine "asymptomatic carriers" was an extreme overreach.

It was such an overreach that the public health establishment has already backtracked on this level of sensitivity in PCR testing, with respect to vaccinated individuals, because they keep getting all these pesky "false positives" after vaccination. It's really messing with their outreach campaigns, understandably.

You can be sure this will all be clarified in litigation over the next few decades while the Trump appointees get to work.

Unless, of course, the restrictionists come down off the ledge. It seems you all are folding on all fronts recently. My genuine prediction is that all of this will be moot in a years time once no one pays any mind to the coronabros anymore.

No, I don't mean quarantines of actually sick individuals. I mean quarantines of anyone and everyone, regardless of testing. From the Supreme Court case I linked to:

> ... on September 29, 1898, the vessel arrived at the quarantine station some distance below the city of New Orleans, was there regularly inspected, and was found, both as to the passengers and cargo, to be free from any infectious or contagious disease, and accordingly was given a clean bill of health, whereby the ship became entitled to proceed to New Orleans and land her passengers and discharge her cargo. This, however, it was asserted she was not permitted to do....

Nobody on board the ship was sick, according to tests, and they were still lawfully quarantined, and the law was constitutional.

But you're right, this will all be forgotten in a few years and relitigated afresh in the court of public opinion (in every country) next pandemic, just like this particular case has been completely forgotten, the quarantines of the Spanish Flu have been completely forgotten, etc.

You’re completely misrepresenting the supposed similarities between your example and the reality in 2021. The document you reference is talking about quarantining travelers from abroad before they officially enter the US:

> "It was asserted that the plaintiff, a corporation created by and existing under the laws of the Republic of France and a citizen of said Republic, on or about September 2, 1898, caused its steamship Britannia to be cleared from the ports of Marseilles, France, and Palermo, Italy, for New Orleans with a cargo of merchandise and with about 408 passengers, some of whom were citizens of the United States returning home, and others who were seeking homes in the United States, and who intended to settle in the state of Louisiana or adjoining states, and that all the passengers referred to at the time of their sailing were free from infectious or contagious diseases. It was further averred that on September 29, 1898, the vessel arrived at the quarantine station some distance below the city of New Orleans"

It does not in any way justify indiscriminately restricting the constitutionally protected freedoms of American citizens, on American soil, for more than a year. Try telling someone in the early 1900's that their church or synagogue is closed for the next 15 months, by order of the U.S government. Good luck. In this case, when Americans have chosen to travel abroad, it justifies a limited quarantine when they return to the country. Nothing more. Indefinite lockdowns of entire states or the entire country is not quarantine. Rather, it's a grave human rights violation that we cargo culted from Communist China.

Edit: lol to the comment below. gnight bro.

Are you claiming that American citizens have fewer constitutional rights when not on American soil but attempting to return? Where in the Constitution does it say that?

Anyway, once again, this is all beside the point. I'm not talking about one particular country. I'm talking about the worldwide desire to avoid serious lockdowns.

And I don't know about your church or synagogue, but my church closed voluntarily - and remains closed (we're reopening in limited amounts in a couple of weeks) - because our religion teaches us that when Satan says "You will not surely die!" and tempts us with short-term freedom, we say no. We've been online. It works great.

Sure. But this is an entirely different topic.

"Lockdowns achieved nothing"

"We didn't actually lockdown"

"Lockdowns are illegal"

The point is that a huge portion of businesses were completely open through the entire pandemic. A large number of people did not follow health guidelines.

This might be true if American society as a whole embraced safety measures to keep the rest of society safe. That didn't happen. A significant portion of the country believe the pandemic was a hoax and took no precautions whatsoever.

Is this your explanation for the recent COVID waves in Taiwan, Vietnam, and Guangzhou as well? I thought they were strictly adhering to protocol?

Google tells me that Taiwan has had a grand total of 124 deaths for a country of 23 million people. That's 0.00053913% of the population, while the US has had 594k deaths for 328 million people - 0.18109756%. Taiwan's "wave" looks like a slow day for the US.

You're talking about total cases while I'm talking about recent cases. Shouldn't the continued use of masks prevent recent cases in Taiwan? What changed?

On top of that, it's pretty clear by now that East Asian populations have some level of preexisting resistance to this family of respiratory viruses, given their proximity to past outbreaks of genealogically similar viruses. It would make sense that their totals will eventually be lower than those in parts of the world that haven't been exposed to SARS like viruses.

I've mostly lost faith in the ability of my country to have an orderly, happy society together at this point. As a recovering agoraphobic I can easily see the same disordered thinking that was once the core of my own mind not only present in other people, but lauded on the news and in mainstream culture.

Here's to hoping things get better, but knowing that the nuts run the nuthouse now.

Very interesting perspective. Thank you for sharing.

Edit: May I ask which country you are from?

>Some of us would argue

This is a tenuous link at best. China does not have the same cultural makeup of the United States, and they shut down more aggressively than any western nation. (bear in mind this is not a compliment, I would not like to see US officials literally weld people into their apartment complexes.)

You'll get a fine or a short jail stay in the US if you defy the mask orders/social distancing orders.

You might just get a bullet in China for defying those orders.

> Some of us have been arguing since the beginning of all this that the old and infirm should have been the ones to isolate themselves — with accommodations and support from the rest of society — while the rest of us took sensible precautions and continued on with the business of life.

That is what happened.

> Some of us trusted that "two weeks to slow the spread" was the sensible policy and what our governments would follow.

Western governments largely did follow that policy, but the US was never able to get out of free-fall. So COVID policy became a bang-bang controller of lockdowns, then slight reopenings, then more lockdowns, because there was never a two week period where spread slowed enough to materially change the risk landscape.

Even when there were lulls in the second derivative, limited re-openings resulted in enormous case spikes. If our numbers ever reached DE or NZ levels, we would've been back in offices and schools. And, in fact, I had plenty of conference calls with Germans who were sitting in their offices last summer.

The re-opening criterion didn't change (except to become more liberal over time, the exact opposite of your characterization). What happened is that the lockdowns -- for whatever reason -- never got spread under control in the USA. That wasn't true everywhere.

> irrational panic

On April 1, 2020 there 26K new cases in the USA. One year later, on April 1, 2021, there were 77K new cases. Vaccination rates among at-risk populations were starting to pick up, but nowhere near where thy are today.

What is the rational policy that would call for lock downs in March 2020 but not in March 2021?

> some would argue...

And others would argue that the expectation that a pandemic should last exactly and only two weeks is its own rather extraordinary neurosis.

There's your problem. There is no such thing as rational lockdown policy for an airborne virus.

Pray tell: where exactly did lockdowns work? Surely not in East Asia where multiple countries are experiencing exponential growth in covid cases right now due to seasonality. Despite widespread adoption of masking, contact tracing, etc.

Certainly not in Sweden, where they never implemented them, yet they continue to have either middling or above average results in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

Also: no one ever expected the pandemic to be over in two weeks. We did expect our public health officials to stick to the second part, "to slow the spread". Clearly, that was a line to manipulate the public, as things quickly shifted to "until we have a vaccine". People on my side of this issue will never forget or forgive the bait and switch.

> There's your problem. There is no such thing as rational lockdown policy for an airborne virus.

OP states that the original lockdowns were reasonable but then complains about continued lockdowns, and my comment was responding to that sentiment.

You're making an entirely different argument -- that lockdowns were always unreasonable.

> Pretell: where exactly did lockdowns work? Surely not in East Asia where multiple countries are experiencing exponential growth in covid cases right now due to seasonality. Despite widespread adoption of masking, contact tracing, etc. Certainly not in Sweden, where they never implemented them, yet they continue to have either middling or above average results in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

This is probably one of the least intellectually humble/curious things I've ever seen someone write on hacker news.

There's an entire literature base being developed on exactly this question, and the answer is very clearly "it's complicated". For each of your examples I can give a counter-example, and that exchange would be completely specious and unscientific political punditry. This is not a question that can or should be effectively litigated in the comment section of a hacker forum by armchair epidemiologists, at least not without thousands of hours invested. And certainly not helpful if not entered into as an honest search for truth without preconceptions.

I don't feed trolls.

> This is probably one of the least intellectually humble/curious things I've ever seen someone write on hacker news.

Goodness. Unfortunately, you'll be positively devastated to learn that this exact discussion has been ongoing in countless threads here for over a year.

> There's an entire literature base being developed on exactly this question, and the answer is very clearly "it's complicated"

It's not that complicated. We have enough data at this point to start revealing signals where they exist. So far, there is some evidence that individual behaviors (e.g., masking, physical distancing) can have positive effects. There is also increasingly strong evidence that state-imposed controls (e.g., lockdowns and mask mandates) have not significantly affected the long-term course of the pandemic.

> This is not a question that can or should be effectively litigated in the comment section of a hacker forum by armchair epidemiologists, at least not without thousands of hours invested.

If your constitution cannot abide listening to people discuss this (or any) topic without first completing your requisite thousands of hours of research, I might gently suggest that HN isn't a safe place for you.

I marvel at OP's ability to make sweeping claims via a wall of text in an HN comment section, then refuse to respond to criticism. Fascinating.

I bill $850/hr, if you want the conversation that badly ;) otherwise, the audience is approximately zero and you aren’t interested in being convinced, so what would even be the point?

Why would I pay you anything? You're still here attempting to defend yourself. Free of charge.

They're refering to the money they make at their day job. This person seems fond of telling their HN audience about their high income. It usually only comes up in job- or tax-related threads though.

I love your comment above, nate. And your dedication to refuting this individual. But I have to offer this in response to their comment:

I have the opportunity of a lifetime for anyone who pays u/throwawaygh $850 per hour for any type of work.

I own a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn. It's all yours for the right price. I'd love to talk to you about it.

I have the opportunity of a lifetime for anyone who pays u/throwawaygh $850 per hour for any type of work.

I own a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn. It's all yours for the right price. I'd love to talk to you about it.

The "two weeks" originated from the idea of instituting periodic, local lockdowns in order to keep hospitals from filling to overflow. The idea wasn't to keep people from dying from COVID-19, per se. The idea was that there would be some people who would be affected severely by the virus, but who could pull through if given supportive care in a hospital. What we didn't want was numbers getting so high that people who could have pulled through wouldn't because there were no available bed for them. That's the original idea behind how lockdowns were supposed to be used.

But, returning to my original point, once things locked down, a number of politicians realized that they would be blamed for any deaths that occurred when the lockdown was lifted. These politicians received support from the "if we can save even just one life" crowd — which I'm characterizing as the neurotic.

I couldn't agree more with your assessment, especially considering that the presidential election was occurring around the time when the lockdown began. Ultimately, it was the politics that screwed us.

At this point, 15 months later, I'll take what I can get. You can certainly count me among the "some of us".

I find this viewpoint exceedingly arrogant. That you somehow know what's best in the case of a novel global pandemic?

Let me make myself clear. I am suggesting that from the beginning we should have encouraged the statistically vulnerable to isolate themselves: meaning, isolate themselves voluntarily. I'm suggesting that the rest of us should have supported such people who reached out for support through private and government action. I'm suggesting that other individuals should have been encouraged to take what precautions they deemed sensible.

I think that, by and large, mask mandates should have been effected privately: meaning, business owners should have been free to institute mask policies the same way the do shirts and shoes policies. Government should have publicly given such policies support.

Lockdowns should have been periodic and local: meaning, focused on time and place. The aim of lockdowns would not be to "save even a single life," but to try to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, so that people who could pull through with supportive care would have an available bed to recover in. In the meantime, government should have endeavored to setup emergency hospitals to make more beds available, relocating them as necessary.

Every point I'm making stresses free choice and personal liberty; and every point I'm making stresses the idea that there are no easy answers and no one has the "master plan."

Instead, what I saw — what we all saw — was federal bureaucrats and state governors dictating what hundreds of millions of people should do, based on conjecture and even whim, and dare I say, even at times personal vanity.

But I'm the arrogant one?

Is there an example where individuals taking personal responsibility of a widespread problem has led to a favorable results? What I've seen is that this line of thinking disconnects the values from the result ie: "We did the right thing, so we have to accept the results." This re-frames the debate from results-orients to values-oriented.

The same reasoning is being used in the climate change debate. Corporations are gearing up PR teams to promote individual responsibility campaigns so that corporate action can be minimized. Again, it disconnects the values from the results so that at the very end when nothing changes a group can be happy that even though it fails, we did the right thing. The end result is cynicism and skepticism to these tactics.

Is there an example where centralized planning has led to favorable results? The centralized planning in the face of this pandemic has resulted in widespread economic destruction, not to mention rioting, looting, arson, and portions of American cities being taken over by "anti-fascist" warlords.

Okay, that's just my opinion, right? Fine. Call me crazy for believing that prolonged isolation, idleness, and political repression leads to egregious economic dislocation and social unrest, but I'm going with that until I hear a better explanation.

That's weird. It's almost like talking about the advocacy of individual responsibility come from a premise that centralized planning failed. What a strange foundation to base a response around. I'm open to a discussion about individual responsibility from first principles and systems-level thinking, but it's as if we're trying to avoid that discussion for some reason.

This sounds almost precisely like what was implemented. There was no widespread state or federal enforcement of mask mandates, even if they were installed. Basically all mask requirements were either implemented or ignored by local businesses. I know people who live in towns where almost zero businesses required masks. The number of businesses that qualified as "essential" meant that there weren't consistent "lockdowns" outside of a few areas (schools being the huge one) and a large portion of remote work arrangements were done on a largely voluntary basis by businesses.

Don't take @mariodiana's word for it. There's a large group of eminently qualified epidemiologists that have been arguing for this for many months:

https://gbdeclaration.org/

Thank you. I'm not even taking my own word for it. I didn't dream up any of what I've said on my own, nor by cobbling together either anything Sean Hannity or Chris Cuomo had to say on the subject. I read the paper from the Imperial College (where "social distancing" and "lockdowns" originated, as far as I know) shortly after it came out and have been trying to follow along with the best sources I have been able to find since then.

But, let me come clean about my prejudices. I live in New York. When Governor Cuomo was on television every day, I saw — every day — comments to his feeds on Facebook and Twitter from people saying things like, "Thank you, Governor. Whenever I listen to you I feel calm and safe. I listen to you every day for my sanity."

I wish I were making this up! But, as I said months ago, I am astounded by the people who I imagine have no qualms going on about "patriarchy" bestowing what I see as sycophantic praise on a governor whose entire affect reminds me of the stereotype of an immigrant family's "papa."

This is, in part, why I say "neurotic." We can't have a free country when we have so many people — voters! — like these. The SARS-CoV-2 virus isn't the scariest thing about this pandemic.

Interesting - I wasn't aware of this.

That might be because of social media censorship. GBD had their Facebook page deleted in February [1]. Martin Kulldorff has had his Twitter account suspended more than once, though it is now available [2].

[1] https://twitter.com/gbdeclaration/status/1358449223197466627...

[2] https://twitter.com/martinkulldorff

> I find this viewpoint exceedingly arrogant. That you somehow know what's best in the case of a novel global pandemic?

Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20. I find the GP's argument very persuasive. Sitting here in June of 2021 and looking back it's so easy to agree with his plan.

But back in May of 2020? All options looked bad, and I think things were a lot less clear. The "full lock down" did only last a couple of weeks, while things things got incredibly muddled quickly as different organizations and regional governments put their own spin on things.

I don't think we really understood enough of the actual mechanics of the virus, nor enough of the social pressures, until it was far too late to course correct (for the reasons the GP describes).

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