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Comment by danenania | Hacker News Reader

Oh fun: the game where everyone puts their pet biases forward in an attempt to explain the behavior of a poorly understood complex system.

It reminds me of the financial news. "Commodities markets are spooked as backlash to latest Justin Bieber video mounts!"

In all seriousness, apart from the vaccination rate and strictly enforced lockdowns, I have yet to see an explanation for cases going up or down in a particular region that isn't contradicted by the results in some other region. I think we should just admit that except for vaccines and physically forcing 90% of the population into isolation, we don't have a clue what works and what doesn't.

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As a tangent, one way to get much more accurate data in a much quicker way is to accept human challenge trials.

We don’t even know the answer to whether delta is vaccine resistant. With challenge trials it would be dead simple. Take 10,000 vaccinated volunteers, randomize into a delta and alpha groups. Spray them in the face with Covid. Compare rates one week later. Question answered immediately with statistical certainty.

Right now, we’re trying to answer questions like this using nothing other than extremely messy observational data that’s subject to all sorts of uncontrollable confounding variables.

The lockdown thing doesn't work as well as you'd think either.

We have nearly the world's toughest lockdown in Sydney, and weeks later the cases are higher than ever.

Same thing happened here in Melbourne last year, with "officially" the toughest lockdown in the world, for 120 days. It was absolutely miserable.

It eventually works - but the UK eventually saw a similar precipitous decline, along the same timeframe, while only relinquishing restrictions.

The only common thread is that in 5-8 weeks, the spike reverses and plummets, regardless of policy.

(Lockdowns may keep the spike much lower, along with the general spread. But I'm more interested in why they seem to have no effect on arresting or reversing the spread once it takes hold.)

Perspective: Aussie, plugged in, watching the West and India closely.

Probably these lockdowns were actually very soft "suggestions" that people didn't follow.

Until we find viruses capable of teleportation, quarantine will remain a very effective strategy.

The lockdown works pretty well in other countries. It's just people in Sydney being ignorant. There are still house parties and carefree people. The anti-lockdown protest didn't help, but it wasn't totally unexpected considering the incompetence of the NSW gov. A lot of Aussies don't want to get vaccinated too, which is an important part to reduce infections. I got my Pfizer shot months ago, because people either didn't turn up or cancelled.

There's a lot of evidence about what worked what didn't work. Dozens of countries and well organized societies responded well to the pandemic.

I remember reading that the deaths in countries corresponded pretty tightly with obesity levels in the population. If that's true, that throws lots of "evidence" right out the window.

Edit:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-obesit...

This BBC story speculates that Delta became the main variant in part due to the cold weather. But I'm not sure any one factor can be singled out.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57489740

I saw a doctor on YouTube (just a private guy with his own channel) apply this same reasoning to Florida. Right now is Florida's "winter": meaning, people tend to stay indoors with the windows closed (to avoid the oppressive heat of the July and August).

> There's a lot of evidence about what worked what didn't work

If that was true why can I take the population adjusted graphs for any interesting statistic, overlay several countries or states, and see the shape of them all is basically the same?

I would assert that for any of these non-pharmaceutical interventions to have been worthwhile the effect on such charts should be absolutely noticeable to any layman on the street. If you need PhD level math to tell a country who "did it right" apart from a country who "did it wrong"... it probably means that it wasn't worth "doing right".

That's just not true? there have of course been outbreaks in many countries so the graphs _look similar_, but usually at totally different scales.

Did you forget about the half-million dead in the richest country in the world? That didn't not happen, and is extremely different from other places.

Adjust for population and the nature of the country (ie values freedom highly), and then testing rates, and you'll see it's not as unique as you think.

Many other countries had huge death rates but didn't test much before and don't test the dead, unlike the States.

Then control for age and obesity, the two factors that make a population most vulnerable.

That is true and you are lying.

Please show me a chart where competent governments like NZ, Japan, Australia, China and Indonesia are somewhat similar to incompetent ones like Brazil, USA or South Africa.

This is a myth. There aren't any (which are open in their figures and policies) that have done consistently well, with significant population.

Everyone had bad spikes and changes in circumstances eventually.

The US did uniquely badly in the first wave relative to Europe, and their fortunes reversed in the second wave.

Japan and Taiwan did great up front and more poorly later on.

It's not over yet, don't count anyone in or out.

It's not clear that even lockdowns work long term. With a single exception, all the countries that initially did well by having lockdowns early had worse later spikes because they had no herd immunity at all. And the last country is probably lying.

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