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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

At this point we almost know too much about the spread of this disease. Never in history have we tested so much for one thing. Never in history have we really worried about asymptomatic cases of anything. This is probably the first time in history that the whole world has the same scary thing as their front-page news.

It's going to be really, really hard for us to shake the mindset that thousands of covid cases === danger. I am sure there are many thousands of cases of many other diseases in my community right now that I will never know or care about.

I'm not trying to detract at all from the seriousness of the pandemic, just saying that going forward we'll have to pay a lot less attention to covid-19 if we want to have mental space for anything else.

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> Never in history have we really worried about asymptomatic cases of anything.

This was an extremely silly thing to write. Typhoid Mary was tracked down, was locked up for three decades and became a legend over a century ago. Before modern drugs and widespread vaccination programs people worried a lot about asymptomatic transmission of disease.

You might argue that not having to worry as much about survival now that we've got modern vaccination has made people think about asymptomatic transmission of infectious disease less, but seriously, that's also nuts. It's not like everyone somehow failed to consider asymptomatic transmission of HIV since the mid eighties. Worrying about it changed our culture.

> Never in history have we tested so much for one thing.

TB skin tests and strep tests have been much more widely used.

Point taken about Typhoid Mary. I should have said never before have we had so much information about asymptomatic disease transmission to see / worry about.

As for the testing ... I still do think Covid is extremely unique here. The US has given over 500M tests (~1.5/person) and the UK has given over 250M tests (~4/person) in less than two years. Many employers and schools are scaling up plans to do one or more tests per week per person. Sure maybe we haven't caught up to the total TB tests given across all time yet, but the rate of testing for this disease is far greater than anything that preceded it and looks like it will stay that way.

It's an interesting question of how to qualify your words when you talk about how widespread the tests are. I'm sure fewer than half the people I know have had COVID tests (versus tests everyone gets), which makes the tests per person metric potentially a little deceptive. I think it's a fair point that the possibility of constant testing tied to access to employment or entertainment could change our culture.

> I should have said never before have we had so much information about asymptomatic disease transmission to see / worry about.

I think this is much less of a problem than you make it out to be. Having a lot of information, and having the information gradually improve in quality, is a good thing. The media's inundation of people with the information and the insanely stupid public dialogue surrounding it all is... less good.

Nevertheless, to the original point, I think all the analogies a person could draw between today and the dynamics of the AIDS epidemic and those years of uncertainty, discrimination and death make what's happening today seem less psychologically traumatic by comparison. Maybe it's less clear because we were already dealing with Very Stupid Times before COVID 19 came along.

Totally agree. Having objective and open data sets on anything is great. Having daily headlines recoloring that same data is less great.

Speaking from the United States, if we had rolled out a more robust testing scheme at the outset, we could have saved lives and accelerated reopening. President Trump publicly ridiculed widespread testing. My local school district is going to randomly test up to 20% of students every week. That's what it takes to control a pandemic. If people could have rolled out that level of testing during past pandemics, I'd like to think they would have.

I don’t know if that’s true. Case in point, the reason that Florida is drowning in COVID right now is that the majority of people there don’t think it’s a big deal. It’s the same thing and many other parts of the country. There are still a lot of people who are freaked out, but most ordinary people are starting to tune out the news and lose interest because the media calls to be scared and panic just make them numb eventually.

I appreciate you sugar-coating it since I live there, but it's a bit worse than that. I live in Jacksonville. Of my friends, family and other connections there are just a few buckets people fall into: the informed, the purposefully-ignorant, and the idiots. Sadly, we've learned through the last year or so that many of our friends are actually idiots. That's been tough.

>the reason that Florida is drowning in COVID right now is that the majority of people there don’t think it’s a big deal.

Source?

Thousands of COVID cases is a small bit of danger, but there are many other things to worry about, and some pockets of the world are already "over" worrying about COVID. People mostly irrationally respond to fear and panic, I doubt whether we can accurately predict what the future mindset will be on various threats.

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