Comment by bernulli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bernulli | Hacker News Reader

The "article" is conflating two completely different things: science, and battling a pandemic. Both have very different standards, methods, and goals.

"Scientific skepticism had to be shot" is the comment you get when you try to compare fighting a pandemic with scientifically studying a pandemic. When the firefighters rush in, they will not wait for the fire scientist to first finish all the measurements, write it up, have it peer reviewed, and published. You try to save lives, learning as you go along, that's necessarily messy but the best we have.

Were mistakes made? Surely - but what would have been the alternative? The primary goal was/is to beat COVID and save lives, not to completely understand it before doing something about it.

Also, the disparagement of automotive engineers hits needlessly close to home ;-) -- the simple fact of the matter is that there is a whole field that studies injection, sprays, aerosols. These are experts with decades of experience in how droplets form and propagate through the air. I'm not giving carte blanche, but this seems like knowledge and experience that could be usefully tapped in this case.

> The "article" is conflating two completely different things: science, and battling a pandemic. Both have very different standards, methods, and goals.

Science isn't just a game scientists play for fun; the scientific method is the correct method for making inferences and predictions. If you don't have enough information to make a scientifically/probabilistically sound prediction, you can't make an accurate prediction.

Sure the goal is to save lives, but if you don't have a robust, falsifiable and tested scientific model of what you're doing, you have no idea whether it will really save lives or not. For instance, the science suggests that harsh lockdowns did not in fact reduce mortality (did not save lives): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... . They did however contribute to significant excess deaths in under-65s; in Canada's case, more than the number of under-65s that died of covid: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210712/dq210... .

Again, those are two different things, as I discussed in my post.

But let's run with your argument for a minute: So what you're arguing is that we should kick out of our hospitals anyone with cancer, ALS, HIV/AIDS, heck, the cold and the flu - because if we don't know how to heal it, we clearly don't have enough data yet. How about letting people drive cars even though we haven't been able to solve 'accidents'?

Firefighting is probably the best analogy I've seen on this topic.

If you've ever seen the aftermath of a successful large-scale firefighting operation, you know the building is generally left uninhabitable. And this is preferable to the alternative, which is an uninhabitable building full of dead people (or a larger swath of dead people and damaged buildings).

The time to perfect the art of fighting fires is in the downtime between fires. During the fire, you rely on your training and preparation and you act. Not all those actions will be optimal; maybe, in hindsight, you didn't have to crush that wall or hose that room full of artwork. But unlike regular times when cautious action is preferred, neither a fire nor a pandemic will wait patiently while the optimal path to fighting them is found.

To be fair, I was without doubt influenced by one of these 'This is fine' memes, but instead with the line 'But what are the long-term effects of fire extinguishers?'.

>When the firefighters rush in, they will not wait for the fire scientist to first finish all the measurements

That's because the "science" on firefighting has already been settled. They know exactly what will happen when you do X to a fire and they know how to stop it fast and efficiently. They know what the consequences of spraying water on a fire are and when you won't be able to put one out etc.

It's quite different to run in and say we need to mask, lockdown, close businesses/schools, produce a vaccine and distribute it immediately. Ok why? Are you sure this will save lives? They had no idea, it was just a knee jerk reaction. You can partially justify these things when they didn't know how bad COVID was going to be but then they continued with them for 2 years with very little evidence to back up their decisions. At some point you have to back off and say "hey we don't have a damn clue what the best course of action is". If your fix is worse than the problem you might need to re-evaluate and wait for the actual science on it.

I think people make the assumption that you HAVE to do something immediately when bad things happen, sometimes doing nothing and observing is the better option. There are multiple examples of the choice to do something being worse than doing nothing during this pandemic (e.g. governor sends infected persons into nursing homes) and as time goes on I think we're going to see more fallout from some of these choices.

> Ok why? Are you sure this will save lives?

Yes, the CDC models out pandemic responses in advance between panedmics. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/rr/rr6601a1.htm

One obvious weakness of the options they have to do this is they're preparing for diseases we've seen, not novel diseases we haven't seen yet. But in the case of COVID-19, it's an airborne pathogen so the flu containment protocol was the best tool in the toolbox. Masks, hand-washing, and lockdowns didn't come out of a vacuum; they're part of the standard process (which most people perhaps didn't know because unlike, say, fire-fighting, we don't have regular TV shows about pandemics).

There are very few things settled in the science of fire, but that's beside the point.

I'd say the science is settled on what the most effective thing was to eliminate COVID: complete and total shut down, as soon as possible: New Zealand has the lowest casualties of any OECD country and held sporting events in full stadiums when the rest of the world was hoarding toilet paper.

Unfortunately at a global level it's not possible or practical for every country to have total and complete shut down. I'm thinking of the majority of the world's population who live in developing countries.

Thus as a strategy it's not really a sustainable one at all, but can work at a small level for a short time.

Yet another reason not to conflate the science of a pandemic with actually fighting it!

So you think the US should have completely shut down their borders?

I'm gonna guess that would have been immediately labeled as racist if Trump even suggested that. Oh... wait he did and immediately got labeled racist.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-coronavirus-borders_n_5...

"Trump clearly sees the novel coronavirus as just another foreign invader to keep out — a viewpoint reflected both in his policy proposals and the way he and his administration talk about the virus. This approach is in line with his overarching political strategy of exploiting Americans’ fears to justify racist, nativist policies."

No, firefighting is not trivial from a decision making perspective. Deluges cause severe water damage, even in the best circumstances where they ultimately save the day. Firebreaks have a moderate failure rate and can even help propagate fire if the wind is wrong. Backfires literally fight fire with fire. They all involve heavy tradeoffs and severe uncertainty, but as a culture we accept that these are necessary aspects of firefighting, and that even with such inherent uncertainty we want timely action rather than "wait forever and see."

It's actually a good analogy, it just points to exactly the opposite conclusion from the one you drew.

> That's because the "science" on firefighting has already been settled. They know exactly what will happen when you do X to a fire and they know how to stop it fast and efficiently.

That is not quite true. Where science is not available firefighters go by experience and best guesses. The same goes for cops and even doctors.

Not everything we do has good science behind it. Instead, science is coming pretty often much later, simply because actual science takes a lot of time.

Then why am I told to "trust the science" for every lock-down measure put in place?

You're being pedantic. I was just using a metaphor to explain we have a lot more data for one thing and it's pretty clear what path needs to be taken in a fire. Yeah it's not 100% but it's much further along than COVID "science".

The problem with that metaphor was that real life firefighters don't work like that. And it breaks that metaphors.

>That's because the "science" on firefighting has already been settled.

For this specific fire though? /s

COVID isn't the first Virus in the world. There is a good quantity of science on combatting viruses. Sure, we need to figure out where COVID falls in our overall knowledge of viruses but claiming "They had no idea, it was just a knee jerk reaction." is far from the actual situation.

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