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Comment by KarlKemp | Hacker News Reader

It has been part of the literature since the early 1980s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+distanc...

It just wasn't a widely-known term because we didn't have much need for it.

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We watched the old movie "Outbreak" at the start of Covid, and was surprised that the term "social distancing" is used in that movie to describe mitigations we should use during the pandemic. That movie is from 1995.

Fun movie to watch at the start of the pandemic. "Contagion" is almost crazy prescient too

I found Outbreak a pretty poor movie and hard to sit through after watching Contagion first.

At the same time there was an large ebola outbreak in africa. Imagine the conspiracy theories nowadays about this coincidence.

Well, we did have a need for it but we just chose to ignore that need. Something like 30,000 people died every year from the regular flu in the USA alone, before pandemic. Social distancing (and masks) would bring that number to close to 0.

So if we're going by metrics of, we'd like to save 30,000 people every year, we absolutely had a need for social distancing all this time. But I get it, our society has a large tolerance for mass death, so in that view, we "didn't have much need for it". But taking that view we still don't have any need for it.

Obviously from my perspective we've had a need for it this whole time but just blissfully ignored that fact.

You're forgetting about the need for closeness and connection. Suicide rates among youth are at an all-time high. Crime and murder rates have gone up tremendously since the beginning of the pandemic. Saving 30,000 from the flu sounds great, but there are serious impacts from the extreme mask mandates and social distancing and the ones I mentioned are just what are immediately obvious. I imagine when you see the educational impact that many low income students actually end up suffering the most during the pandemic. Many teachers simply don't care if students aren't in school anymore. After all, if a student has the sniffles they'll get quarantined from school for 10+ days with no supplemental education.

I find what you're proposing might actually say more about your mental state than that of the people you think are endangering others by existing and wanting human connection.

Social distancing doesn’t always and automatically mean widespread prolonged lockdown. We are dealing with a novel coronavirus right now which how it spread and testing wasn’t immediately at hand. For something like the flu that we’re quite good at testing for social distancing could be as simple as stop incentivizing employees to come to work sick, and stop incentivizing parents to send their kids to school or daycare sick.

> Suicide rates among youth are at an all-time high

Suicide rates were rising pre-pandemic as well (IMO, due to social media and the Internet). Suicides overall declined in 2020 in the USA, for instance, so social distancing didn't have the feared effects. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/health/coronavirus-suicid...

However I agree broadly that the downsides of social distancing are real and unsustainable for more than a short time like a year at most. If we faced a 5 year vaccine development timeline for instance I don't think it would be acceptable to keep people from socializing that long.

> Suicide rates among youth are at an all-time high.

No they aren't. Where are you getting your stats from?

I should have been more specific. I was referring to youth suicides:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youth-suicide-attempts-...

Data is from the CDC. I also ask you to look into suicide rates in other countries, not just the US.

One thing i admired when traveling to south east asia in the years before covid - people wearing masks to protect others in case they got any kind of respiratory sickness, or protecting themselves. In comparison, even in progressive countries like Switzerland, during initial phase of Covid people wearing masks to work and outside were sometimes badly ridiculed by natives young and old, and in some cases even fired from work for 'spreading panic' (I know a guy on immunosupressants who had no other choice).

In comparison with usual western coughing and sneezing on all public transport it seemed extremely considerate and I've expressed numerous times the wish west would adopt this at least a bit.

But maybe my optics is flawed and this was an after-effect of SARS which missed west completely and before that, it was same situation there.

> Something like 30,000 people died every year from the regular flu in the USA alone, before pandemic. Social distancing (and masks) would bring that number to close to 0.

How many of that number are people dying with flu, as opposed to from flu?

It wasn't long ago that pneumonia was called "old man's friend".

Measures to coddle our immune system can also be counter productive. The flu season in the UK is feared to be bad this year, as people have spent so long without mixing.

> Something like 30,000 people died every year from the regular flu in the USA alone, before pandemic. Social distancing (and masks) would bring that number to close to 0.

Flu and pneumonia vaccines were also available and uptake was nowhere near 100% (my doctor's office is always plastered with posters about "Get your flu shot" etc, but most people don't go out of their way to get it).

For instance a friend once told me that they always get the flu when getting the flu vaccine (??! obviously nonsense, but they sincerely believed it) so would not get it anymore.

Social distancing when a vaccine is available just doesn't make sense. We have to take the downsides of social distancing into account as well.

So all we need to do is just stop being human and then we can save all these lives!

Cheers mate. Do you have an actual cite rather than a Google assertion?

To pick from one of the random sources that went into creating that graph:

> at least once, his symptoms were interpreted as a social distancing mechanism. [0]

The term has been in use for a _very_ long time. You'll also find it in editions of the Oxford dictionary from the 80s.

[0] Diseases of the Nervous System. Volume 36, Issues 1-6. (1975). Page 73.

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