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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

Yup. In a fit of hysteria and panic, we destroyed a decade of urbanization.

Oh yeah, and we completely f’d over our kids. Like, shamefully so.

History will harshly judge the people who pushed these public policies.

I don't know if I fully subscribe to this view, but a friend of mine pointed out that the age of our leadership (President, Senate, Congress, Governors...) are all very old. They are the ones most at risk, and that may have biased their response towards harsh restrictions for people at low risk.

As a thought experiment, what if the pandemic mostly hurt 20-somethings? Would our old leaders stop everything to prevent transmission of that disease? Or would young people be told to suck it up? Or would they have asked 20-somethings to just stay home while everyone else went about their business? I'm not sure...

Do you remember the initial response to AIDS? There's your answer.

(AIDS was originally attributed to only gays and sexually promiscuous people. Best case, leadership simply ignored it. Worst case, innocent victims were attacked [read the Wikipedia article for "Ryan Wayne White"].)

Fauci ran our response to AIDS too. He held back treatments for years expecting a vaccine. The Dallas Buyers Club is a good dramatization of what people were going through.

There's also some clips of him warning people not to have casual contact with gays (he says people with AIDS).

"As a thought experiment, what if the pandemic mostly hurt 20-somethings?"

This happened [1]. They told young people to go ** themselves. People had school, people went to eat, people carried on with jobs, NO government checks sent out. Deaths: 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.

"Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, 20-40 years old"

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n...

I am sure I know the answer. The old men would have asked the young to die. It has happened during every war since the beginning of history.

I would argue that our current response is what we did have done if the young were more at risk. What Sweden did was the more correct response to the current pandemic. But I wouldn't necessarily blame the older leaders. My company sent everyone home before the nation shut down, and it seemed mostly because people were worried about their kids

I guess you're talking more generally, but this specific problem of car shortages is due to chip shortages. It doesn't have anything to do with any public policy measures. Factories may shut down briefly overseas, but the enormous demand surge for other electronics is the biggest culprit.

There may have been blunders with the policies, but if we're talking about history judging things harshly... I think it's far more likely that the massive disinformation campaigns, irrational and willful non-compliance with reasonable safety measures, and cowardice when faced with the need for vaccination that will get the brunt of it.

So in your argument, even smart well intentioned people who disagree with these public policies are spreading misinformation? You are asserting that everybody who disagrees is wrong and harmful to society, correct?

Because I don’t think that such a thing promotes healthy, much needed dialog. The idea that any criticism or skepticism of the core tenants of the last year and a half of public policy is misinformed ramblings of crazy people…

>So in your argument, even smart well intentioned people who disagree with these public policies are spreading misinformation? You are asserting that everybody who disagrees is wrong and harmful to society, correct?

Whereas you're asserting that it's impossible for smart people to spread disinformation?

I find it fairly easy to find specific bad information campaigns promoted by smart people. For example, those two doctors in Bakersfield California created misleading arguments using bad math [0].

[0] https://www.dailynews.com/2020/04/28/california-doctors-with...

Meanwhile the media is full of anecdotes about kids dying and people saying “I regret not taking covid seriously” and stuff like that. Then you have that Dr. Ding guy on Twitter spreading fear and panic. Is that not dangerous misinformation?

You are committing a logical fallacy. Claiming that there have been misinformation campaigns around Covid is not the same as claiming that all disagreement is misinformation. Your outrage is therefore completely off the mark.

I don’t think that everyone who disagrees with the public policies are spreading misinformation. I also don’t think that the people making the restrictive policies are acting in bad faith, or without reasonable advisement, or are just stupid or something like that.

What part of it is hysteria and panic? Over 600k people died in the US alone.

That doesn’t mean any of what we did helped. It could have made things much, much worse.

[citation needed]

You can see effectiveness of response based on various states and regions that responded differently.

Turns out somebody took public, government source data and tried to compare regions. Good luck telling regions apart.

https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/

Nope, the restrictions really didn’t do anything at all.

holy shit.

I see 5 cherry picked examples without considerations of many factors. All of this ignoring the clear trend we see in current deaths with Delta.

Just two basic things the charts don't consider:

1. If people followed mask mandates in states (e.g. Alabama vs Florida)

2. Population density and disease spread models (e.g. comparing Montana and Idaho felt like a reach, California vs Nevada doesn't consider spread in major cities vs how many major cities there are in each)

We absolutely should study this later, but some of these restrictions were little to no cost. Let's not lump them all together. Wearing a mask indoors vs if your kid can go to school or not are two very different value equations that may merit different answers of "if a restriction is worth it"

One of the last questions literally has all 50 states represented. How is that cherry picking?

~400K Americans die of preventable medical errors every year. No hysteria. No pandemic. Not even news coverage. Our population grew by 0.58% during the pandemic.

The media does its very best to blow everything out of proportion for ratings. COVID is no exception. What a win for big pharma. 640,000,000 doses of a drug they can't be sued for. It's absolutely fantastic for them.

Now look at who they bribe.

It's been an incredibly good couple of years for our oligarchy.

Tu quoque, COVID: we foolishly ignore other fixable problems so we should ignore this too?

Strawman version of what I said, of course.

You had no idea about the preventable medical errors killing 400K people a year did you?

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