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Comment by NonContro | Hacker News Reader

If you examine ancient (ie. 'pre-COVID') CDC documents for recommended responses to influenza Categories, based on the global CFR of 0.66 COVID is classed a 'category 3' influenza variant.

Go to page 9 and see what was mandated for that: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mit...

It was voluntary isolation of the sick, 'consider' shutting down of schools but only for 4 weeks or less, and to 'consider' social distancing - based only on the age profile of virus deaths.

We've ignored everything previously established for pandemic response.

You'll also note that in this document, there is zero mention of contact tracing. Its basically impossible and fruitless for a respiratory virus. Attempting contact tracing is really just about pushing acceptance of general location tracking onto the population.

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> We've ignored everything previously established for pandemic response.

Looks like we actually forgot a lot also from much older events.

The following is from over 100 years ago.

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/spanish-flu-...

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/07/16/multimedia/03even...

We did not forget. We did experiments with gauze face masks. Here’s one from 1920:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362677/

I’m not aware of any recommendations to wear gauze face masks.

I was referring in general to wearing masks, not strictly gauze ones. They probably realized afterwards that gauze ones weren't the most effective, but some of todays people jumped straight to refusing masks.

Impossible and fruitless? Contact tracing has been quite effective in Taiwan unless I’ve been completely fooled by propaganda. And contact tracing apps don’t require you to accept general location tracking. They anonymously exchange temporary tokens and, when you report yourself as a positive case, the tokens you’ve used in the past two weeks get uploaded to a central authority so that anyone who has received them can see that they represent contact with an infected person.

Testing, (manual) contact tracing and isolation is imho the biggest preventive measures that have been taken here in Norway. They do struggle in big outbreaks though to map everything but all in all it seems to have worked.

Now we are at at 1/10th of the deaths of our neighbour by population.

Let's not forget about S Korea, they've even labeled some of the bigger outbreaks and identified where and how they've happened.

>Go to page 9 and see what was mandated for that: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mit...

Interesting how COVID has killed more people than the "projected" (though how confident these projections are, who knows) number. And of course, that's with us taking stricter precautions than some of the suggestions.

Assuming cause of death data is accurate of course.

Assuming that the years is currently 2021 and not 1985. Assuming the people existed in the first place. Assuming they are even dead.

Assuming those precautions actually work… which there is scant evidence of.

The document is from 2007. It doesn’t talk about contact tracing because phones were still using rotary dials at the time. It does mention, for example, quarantines for family members and work colleagues, which is just contact tracing by another name.

Contact tracing, as currently implemented in iOS and Android, does not reveal location data to third parties. There are many widespread uses of location data that are far worse for privacy.

For contact tracing to be useful, you need to:

- believe in the germ theory of disease

- believe in the ability to trace contacts at any level than pure randomness

These requirements are so low, it makes contact tracing at least theoretically useful at a level close to a tautology.

I find your document quite interesting in that it seems to recommend a lot of measures that we are using now.

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