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Comment by natural219 | Hacker News Reader

mass civil disobedience against COVID restrictions is not only awesome, it a very explicit and central civic value of the American political mythology. I can't emphasize enough how bizarre and soviet-esque that this is even on the table as a contentious issue these days.

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YouTube pulled the TidePod-eating challenge videos because they endangered public health. This is no different.

Probably has something to do with the 600k+ dead Americans.

Not much evidence that any of these interventions would have prevented that: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/state-vs-state

The major underlying factor behind the deaths (apart from just old age) is obesity, secondly probably air pollution, but these factors are ignored.

To say nothing about the costs of globally increased hunger, unrest, depression, deaths of despair, neglected+abused children, and on and on - that billions of people in the world will continue to pay for years to come in order to try to save at most a couple million lives of people with mostly significant pre-existing conditions and of advanced years that were mostly "on their way out".

Why not forget about the future and younger generation - they don't matter - we need to save the people that are going to die soon anyway at _all costs_! \s

Covid sucks but for most of the population it is now just an inconvenience to mitigate it. We don’t need to do big lockdowns anymore. I’m ok to take a vaccine or wear a mask indoors to save ten million lives.

I think you protest too much about simply wearing a mask or getting a shot.

Every year, ~647,000 Americans die from heart disease alone. Even if the COVID death numbers aren't over-inflated, I guarantee you that if I were to time-travel to 2019 and ask you if you think that it would be worth precipitating a global supply chain disruption, missed schooling and medical appointments for children around the globe, both first and third world, and the greatest erosion in civil liberties in Western society since at least WW2 (since we've already eclipsed 9/11 in loss of liberty, shockingly)...all over 4 million and change deaths globally, you would think that was crazy

600k deaths after huge mitigations. Without any mitigation’s is it 3 million in the US dead?

Exactly. People who complain about the NSA spying on Americans don’t appreciate how many terrorist incidents were stopped. It would be way worse otherwise.

Compare states - Florida with almost no mitigation, vs New York, New Jersey, or California with extreme mitigation.

Go ahead and check the pre-vaccine data - there is no indication that the extreme mitigations did anything.

Have you actually looked at the data? Take a look at this study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261286v...

And you do realize that in the past month Florida has 3x as many deaths as California, while being a much smaller state.

This is an unfalsifiable claim. Sweden used but a fraction of the mitigations Israel did, yet the former is better off now.

How can you prove the mitigations worked? The only controls out there (Sweden, some US states, etc.) aren’t very robust (nor in favor of mitigation efforts).

There are 50 states in the US, all of which had different responses and mitigations in place last year. There is no compelling evidence that they made much difference, let alone a 5x one.

All you have to do is look at a deaths/infections curve before and after mitigations.

it's been looked at several times, and a vast majority of the convincing evidence seems to fall in favor of the camp that overall mitigations do nearly nothing compared to control samples of places with no/fewer restrictions

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-wh...

That article is more than a year old. A far newer, more complete assessment shows that mitigations do you have an impact in reducing deaths and infections:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261286v...

Yes, but you need a control to compare it against. How do you get one?

Just look at the trend line? You might also want to look at the excess statistically significant deaths numbers.

https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac8...

You need controls to account for confounding factors. Looking at a trend line does not account for confounding factors.

Ok, what would be a confounding factor?

There's no convincing evidence the mitigations made a real difference, especially in the long-run. I'd expect to see bodies in the streets in Sweden given that they largely avoided the ritualistic behavior that the rest of the western world engaged in.

Unfortunately, people have it so drilled into their heads that the lockdowns and masks worked, that I don't know what I could possibly say to convince someone otherwise.

I can’t tell if this is a serious comment. Surely you know heart disease isn’t contagious.

The contagiousness is irrelevant (I’ve heard the “it’s not exponential” talking point a million times in the last year, and boy am I tired of it), but you should know that all social behaviors are contagious, and social behaviors correlate with health outcomes like cardiac disease. If you smoke your friends are likely to start too. If you sit on a couch all day your friends are more likely to, etc.

My point was just about putting a contextless “600k omg” in perspective

If anything Covid deaths are significantly undercounted. How much is hard to tell but it's probably over a million and was likely 900k during March based on excess death estimates

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...

Dramatically false. In fact over the past few months many places have reduced their Covid death counts by ~25%, as they took off the ‘died from X but had COVID’ people. Alameda county, Santa Clara county and others…

I, for one, wouldn't think that was crazy, no. Not when the preventability of those deaths is proportional to how well people stick to pandemic mitigation protocol. Very, very few people are willing to just shrug and say "600,000 preventable deaths is acceptable" in this context.

The pandemic creates challenges that are uniquely tuned to impact the American "rugged individualism" approach to problem solving that works well in most circumstances. Pandemic mitigation is a serious collective action problem (at the limit, it wouldn't take more than total isolation for four weeks to completely burn the virus out... And that's never going to happen in the United States, nor should anyone expect it to).

> "rugged individualism" approach to problem solving that works well in most circumstances.

I would love a source for this, because "rugged individualism" is the reason why US has the worst healthcare and homelessness of developed nations.

> and homelessness of developed nations

That's false by a large margin. The US rate of homelessness has been massively reduced over the past 20-30 years and is comparable to Austria.

The US homelessness rate is far below Sweden, France, Britain, Australia, Canada. It's also below the Netherlands.

The housing first program by the US worked exceptionally well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...

People travel from all around the world to obtain US healthcare. Say what you will about affordability (I would contend that the main problem is that we don't have a free market for healthcare, we have an unholy crony capitalist hybrid system), but the quality of the healthcare itself is unparalleled anywhere in the world.

If you're at serious risk of death you want to be in a US hospital. I hate the trend of conflating "access to affordable healthcare" with the actual healthcare itself.

Agreed. Those are two more circumstances that it doesn't work well for.

It does seem to do a decent job of encouraging and rewarding entrepreneurism.

I see you'd been here a lot longer than I have so you know you're fighting a lost battle. I am surprised how tech folks, that I always thought had a libertarian bent, have gone full on religious conformist due to covid. I like to read HN for the tech discussions and have a bad habit of getting drawn in to these silly religious things. All I can say is I hope the mainstream extremist view here is not representative of real people.

But of course Covid is killing people, so we should abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms to continue the great work we've done stopping it.

> But of course Covid is killing people, so we should abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms to continue the great work we've done stopping it.

I'm entirely confused by this sentiment. What's been abandoned? Serious question, I have no clue what people mean when they post stuff like this.

Even Biden admitted the moratorium is unconstitutional. Nobody seems to care.

As an aside, you can see the way the parent (comment you replied to) wanted to shift the conversation to some kind of definition of terms argument instead of actually discussing any salient points. And how they jumped on your example and used it as a kind of strawman to dismiss and explain why your point is baseless.

Actually, I wouldn't have guessed at the eviction moratorium, so it was interesting that that was the chosen example. If that's the kind of thing in question then clearly this is a fundamental difference in perspective on where things started and have been, so differences in opinion on where they're going will probably be impossible to bridge without addressing that, in much the same way that if someone's sailing South from the US and tells me they're going to keep on going that way in order to visit the Arctic, we're going to need to sort some things out before understand what's going on—did they mean Antarctic? Do they know something I don't? Are they just very confused? Hard to say.

And yes, of course I suspected that was the case. But now I know. And this wasn't some kind of ploy—given my understanding of American history I genuinely do not know what someone (you) might have meant by "abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms". The pandemic response measures seems basically normal to me, in the context of how the US usually operates, in practice. Mild and tame, even. Progress we gain in fits and starts, regressions here and there, often pretty terrible for long stretches of time. Liberty-limiting measures during emergencies, including other pandemics, are typical. We evidently didn't abandon the project of liberal democracy any of those dozens of other, often worse, times when liberty's been more restricted and even heading toward, in the moment, being further restricted, if that project remains as something that can yet be abandoned, so what should I think is meant by that claim? It's either that the writer has a different understanding of the lay of the land, so believes all the above context is incorrect (why? Perhaps we've read entirely different history books? Who knows), or knows something about what's going on, that I don't. It looks like it's the former—unless the eviction moratorium was a bad example of the kind of thing you meant.

Ok, so the eviction moratorium? Maybe we just have very different historical perspectives, and that's why I don't get it. "Abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms" seems like wild hyperbole, given how the country usually operates, and has basically forever. We're still way on the "more free" side of things, as far as the spectrum in which the US has historically operated, by a long shot, and I don't see a strong trend the other way.

Half the population had no problem trying to actually overthrow a constitutional election earlier this year and the previous President still claims it was all rigged. I'm not at all surprised that Biden's actions are not inspiring much outrage.

Need to look up Typhoid Mary if you want to understand our liberal democratic values when it comes to disease.

Just because Eric Raymond (who is more famous for his mouth than for his technical achievements) is a libertarian, and billionaires are libertarian, doesn't mean techies are in general.

I don't know who Eric Raymond is. What I was referring to, and just my opinion mind, is the impression from e.g. reading slashdot 15 years ago and other similar discussions. There are still elements today, when we get into age-related tracking, what apple is up to, censorship and privacy, etc, but I feel like there has been a swing in the mainstream viewpoint towards conformity away from individual rights.

It's frowned upon but the term "Long March Through the Institutions" may be applicable here.

There's libertarian as a religion, and practical libertarian. I'm the latter type: free markets are generally good, and people should generally be left alone to live their lives. But public health is a real thing that matters, and governments should step in to make sure externalities are charged to the people who caused them. I still think I'm a libertarian, but the religious type might disagree.

So only fanatics can disagree with you, is that how we should understand your setup?

Regardless, call me a fanatic, but a big part of individual rights, and I believe liberal democracy, not just libertarianism, is not to be subject to other people's panic. Whether that is a border wall or its enforced mobility and gathering restrictions, there are things the government should just not be allowed to do, because they allow for a tyranny of the majority.

There have been discussions, long before covid and largely precipitated by Trump, about how our system only works if we all generally follow some norms and don't abandon them in some kind of populist panic. I would argue this is what's happened here.

It's not acceptable that there are magic words (science says, "public health is a real thing that matters" as you say) that anyone can say that allows government to bypass civil liberties and impose stuff on people. Freedoms only actually exist if there is weight behind them and they can't just be discarded when someone shouts that lives are at stake.

For me it's not a question of disagreeing with any science about how covid is transmitted or vaccines or severity. People should behave sensibly about it and do what they can to limit the impact. Giving power to government just creates populist measures designed to cater to the masses and make them feel good (exactly like a border wall). This is not a power government should have. Call me a fanatic (religious type as you say)

All governments already have this power, and always have. You can argue that public health measures should not be the province of government, but that would be a pretty fringe position. You are essentially arguing that there is never a good reason for governments to infringe individual liberties. This is the religious libertarian I am talking about. I recognize it. I used to be one.

If you say instead that it is a legit function of government, but shouldn't be used in this case because on balance the risk is too small to sacrifice liberty for, that's certainly a discussion that could be had.

There is nothing libertarian about mass media convincing a herd of people to reject common sense mitigations for a respiratory pandemic. The FUD on this topic is as top-down as you can get, starting with an authoritarian conman whose most intelligent moment was brainstorming about injecting bleach.

As a libertarian I wholeheartedly reject this fig leaf of "freedom" touted by anti-maskers. Freedom is an ability to choose the right thing, not simply being a contrarian for contrarianism's sake. I think hard drugs should be legal, but I similarly wouldn't support people becoming junkies to spite society.

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