Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

That's why my comment explicitly said "and other places." I agree that this needed to be a global effort to succeed, and in the past the US would have helped the cause rather than hindered the fight against the diseases. I am still absolutely shocked at the poor testing response of the CDC, both in 1) the huge lag before allowing testing by anyone, leading to the Univeristy of Washington discovering it against the wishes of regulators, and 2) completely botching the initial test manufacturing due to newbie mistakes. It was a failure mode that nobody even anticipated in planning, because it's so ridiculous that the CDCs capabilities fell so low.

View on HN

I agree with your criticism but also firmly believe that once COVID started spreading beyond a few handfuls of individuals, its fate as a human endemic disease was locked in. No difference in policy by any or all countries would have changed that eventuality, other than at most modify the timeline slightly.

Agreed, all that a good cdc response does is t+n the endemic.

No, a good CDC response reduces the number of deaths along the way to endemic

Are you referring to people who died but wouldn’t have had the hospitals not been filled?

No... early social distancing would have dramatically reduced R0. It's exponential growth. Fewer infections => fewer mutations.

Proper masks (electrostatic or nano layer) are widely available, and they all but stop the original COVID. They cost a buck. The nano ones can be reused several times. Providing those prior to vaccines would have been cheap and effective.

Masks + vaccines + modest social distancing would have stopped it then. They would have been to rush to get vaccines to everyone, and to prioritize by exposures (e.g. service workers before WFH employees).

Plus, look at China. If we all did what China did, we'd be done.

You can only do what China does with an authoritarian government. And I'll take a virus over that any day of the week.

> and they all but stop the original COVID

Would love a citation on that. I think masks definitely help reduce transmission but they are hardly a magic bullet.

Anyway we can reduce R0 to zero in the short term and it wouldn't matter to my thesis. COVID circulates in animals so as soon as we would take our foot off of the brakes it would again start spreading in an unbounded fashion. And the world can't undergo a complete global lockdown while we wait years for vaccine availability. It's just impossible from any point of view: political, economic, social, etc.

The best source I've seen are the tracing studies in China. Police state meant China could follow exact paths -- from camera footage -- of who caught COVID from whom. If both sides wore surgical masks (imperfect fit, but electrostatic layer), there was almost never any spread.

Singapore hospitals were good case studies too. Hundreds of COVID19 exposures early in the pandemic, with virtually no spread.

You can do web searches for both.

Million dollar question is how this impacts delta. Delta has higher viral loads, and it's perfectly possible filtering 95% of delta will still result in more virus than the original, unmasked. Things also get more complex with both sides filtering; naive math would place filtration at 99.75% effective, but I don't believe naive math in this case beyond saying "a lot more effective."

I wish I could find the study, but back in December there was a study indicating that frontline medical workers working directly with COVID patients every day and wearing N95 masks were more likely to have been infected by social contact outside of work then at work. I remember the day because it's when I went and bought KN95 masks.

The simple fact is that unmasked, the mean amount of time you can spend face to face with an infected person (with pre-Delta COVID) before you get infected yourself is maybe an hour or two.

Many, many doctors and nurses were caring for COVID patients every day for 9 months before they were able to be vaccinated. Many spent hundreds-thousands of hours in contact with COVID patients and didn't get sick.

This is extremely strong evidence that N95s work.

I am upset with the CDC too but even if we were perfect from Jan 2020 through Aug 2020 (or whatever) we'd still be getting hit with delta now.

The US just ordered 200M booster shots. Making these is pretty much cutting into the capacity of other countries to get their first shots. I am for this - they are American companies and the US should happily pay for them for its citizens. But when there 7.5B other people in the world its not really up to us when the next variant hits.

The primary fuel for evolution of new variants is the spread of infection. Every time the virus copies itself is a chance for a new mutation, another roll of the roulette wheel for the creation of a stronger sARS-CoV-2.

So by letting infections spread as far as they did, we gave the raw evolutionary fuel to create new, more contagious, variants.

If we had cut the number of global infections in half, we might be living in a timeline where a delta-like variant never evolved.

We developed vaccines in record time, but if we had a way to distribute them more quickly, maybe it would have been prevented.

It's a global fight, and every government that let it get out of control worsened our chances at containment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com