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Comment by morpheos137 | Hacker News Reader

I would respectfully submit that the death rate of covid does not justify the scale of the response. It is unreasonable to shut down society for a disease whose median age victim is about 80 and whose whole population case fatality rate is in the low single digit percent at worse.

The elderly and well off want to minimize their risk at the expense of the young and the poor. Who do you think delivered your Amazon packages while you worked from home?

At both extremes a part of the population is unwilling to compromise and is willing to force another part to pay for their "freedom." In my opinion the yuppies obessively using instacart and Amazon are just as selfish as the Trump supporters and rednecks who may have denied covid existed. Both groups want what they want the cost be damned.

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Wuhan has been reopened for a long time now. We had every piece of information to make a good decision at the time in February 2020. Now we are thrashed about in a sea of half-measures, societal tension, and the total closing up of public life. We were so lost even by the time the CDC was encouraging people to not wear masks because it'll give you higher risk of contracting covid. Now our future's truly new.

Actually large sections of China are being locked back down again as they contend with new outbreaks. The whole concept of the Immaculate Covid Response has aged terribly as one "did it right" country after another either has had major outbreaks (Japan) or resorted to completely draconian and even militarized responses (Australia, NZ) to keep the spread down.

How is Taiwan doing?

Edit: Looks like they had a huge spike in May but are now around 7-day avg of 20 cases. With 7 day average of deaths around 2-3. Vax rate 1st - 40% 2nd 2.9%

Looks pretty good.

Sweden has a rolling 7 of 500 ~ 700. Rolling seven of deaths 0. Vax rate 1st 69.5% 2nd 59.2%

Interesting because they never locked down.

As usual, death rates for the last couple of weeks in Sweden must be taken with considerable amounts of salt, because of the lag in reporting.

Things have only gone this way recently because of the delta variant, if all countries had taken the virus as seriously as those countries the delta variant probably wouldn’t exist and these countries would now be able to effectively vaccinate their populations.

Yep, new variants are always the excuse. These perfectly designed and implemented "public health" measures would have worked to eliminate the virus if only India had put itself into a nationwide lockdown -- it might have caused tens of thousands to starve but we're just going to assume it somehow would have prevented the Delta variant from coming into existence!

What death rate would cause you to reconsider a lockdown?

Why would the onus work that way? What death rate do you think government should start restrictions at? Driving? Eating certain things? Smoking? The mental health fallout from living as some technocrat wants you to?

Smoking is a good example. My country has quite bad COVID numbers both in number of cases and deaths. Yet: in one and a half years of pandemic fewer than 4500 people died from COVID. About 6000 die each year from smoking-related diseases. You all probably know how different government takes on these issues are.

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