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Comment by ziml77 | Hacker News Reader

The pandemic has also made me more aware of the same thing. I already knew that people were selfish and bad at risk analysis, but the degree to which they are is what astounded me.

I wish there was some good answer to how to deal with the problem. The government can't get too heavy-handed because that will just drive even more distrust and possibly lead to revolution (the distrust has already happened after lockdowns and vaccine mandates, compounded with any distrust that was already there).

There'd have to be a big culture shift if we wanted people to take societal issues seriously. It's pretty clear this is the case when you consider that people are actually losing friends if they decide to get vaccinated. So much for "my body, my choice" (a phrase which has been stolen and twisted by people opposing the vaccines).

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> The government can't get too heavy-handed because that will just drive even more distrust and possibly lead to revolution

The pandemic has taught me to be even more cynic about the limits of democracy that I already was.

My country's government, like many others (including the US, I think?), blatantly lied about masks at the beginning, saying that they didn't work or were counterproductive for laypeople which, honestly, was very hard to believe in the face of common sense as well as the know-how from Asian countries that have been using them routinely for years. When mask shortages ended, the messaging changed and suddenly masks began to be useful or even mandatory. The purpose of the lies was clearly to guarantee supply to medical workers.

Later on, a lot of hyperboles were suggested about vaccines, like that they made you "immune", that vaccination would mean that no restrictions would be needed anymore, or that once a threshold of 70% was reached we would have herd immunity and the pandemic would be over. This was clearly not true, but it pushed many hesitant people into vaccination.

The thing is, I'm a person with principles and thus my gut reaction is that a lying government is a bad thing. But if I place myself in the government's shoes and go back to March 2020, I don't think I can really defend that things should have been done differently. If the efficacy of masks had been acknowledged from the beginning, laypeople would have depleted the supplies, shortages in medical settings would be more severe, and more people would have died. If vaccines or herd immunity had been hyped less, vaccination takeup would be smaller (because many people only seem to think in absolutes, they don't care about risk reduction or spread reduction if they don't have a boolean goalpost) and more people would have died.

With this I don't mean that I'm against democracy, of course. In my own country we had an authoritarian leader who was also a bigot and a moron, so I'm fully vaccinated against authoritarianism. But it seems difficult to dismiss the idea that there are some things, like pandemic management, where you can't really count on laypeople to decide anything.

> My country's government, like many others (including the US, I think?), blatantly lied about masks at the beginning, saying that they didn't work or were counterproductive for laypeople (...)

You should really revisit those claims because it's quite likely you got them all completely wrong.

I'm also living in a country where its government argued against mass adoption of surgical masks and gloves, but the argument was no way close to your claim.

The rationale was that this mass increase in demand for surgical masks and gloves would deplete the current stockpile and production capacity, thus leaving healthcare professionals and other frontline workers without access to basic protective equipment.

We're talking about a spike in demand that directly lead to the death of healthcare and frontline workers[1].

Consequently, we've saw multiple governments and health officials stating that the public should not go on a shopping binge for protective equipment to lower the pressure from the supply-side.

The same problem was also observed in a run for respirators.

In all these cases, once the production capacity was ramped up, governments naturally started providing incentives and even mandating their use.

[1] https://www.medicaldevice-network.com/comment/healthcare-wor...

> You should really revisit those claims because it's quite likely you got them all completely wrong.

> I'm also living in a country where its government argued against mass adoption of surgical masks and gloves, but the argument was no way close to your claim.

I'm not making wrong claims, because I'm not saying all governments did the same thing. In my country the messaging was definitely as I said. The argument was that masks wouldn't work for laypeople because they needed specialized training to be worn right (another clear lie, my wife is a doctor, has always used masks and never got such training beyond a few simple instructions that can be given in 30 seconds. And that did not change with the pandemic) and we would probably make the problem even worse by wearing them incorrectly, touching them with our hands and contracting the virus.

If your goverment was more sincere and still succeeded in preventing people from hoarding masks, I suppose it can be counted as evidence against my claim that lying was actually the best thing to do. But not all societies are equal. In my country I'm quite convinced that if the government had given the same messaging as in yours, people would have hoarded and made the shortage in healthcare worse. Although of course, this is just from my subjective impression of how my countrymen work and not a scientific claim.

> I'm not making wrong claims, because I'm not saying all governments did the same thing. In my country the messaging was definitely as I said. The argument was that masks wouldn't work for laypeople because they needed specialized training to be worn right (another clear lie, my wife is a doctor, has always used masks and never got such training beyond a few simple instructions that can be given in 30 seconds.

Again, I feel you should really revisit the events and review your claim. Even if we accept it at face value, it only makes any sense to raise concerns over "hey didn't work or were counterproductive for laypeople" if they were advising against mass adoption, and advising people to not go out of their way to buy surgical masks and latex gloves only makes sense if the goal is to mitigate spikes in demand to ensure the medical community still has access to them.

Let's put it this way: did you saw any government at all advising against buying toilet paper?

> Later on, a lot of hyperboles were suggested about vaccines, like that they made you "immune", that vaccination would mean that no restrictions would be needed anymore, or that once a threshold of 70% was reached we would have herd immunity and the pandemic would be over. This was clearly not true, but it pushed many hesitant people into vaccination.

It was true then - it was what the math showed before Delta was around. The required size of population for the herd immunity to take over depends on the contagiousness of the disease - it is pretty much inverse of the R number at least in the SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered/Removed) model.

For the original variant, the number was about 75 %, with Delta being more contagious, the number is a out 85 %. Worth to mention that this is of total population that can get the virus - you see news like "country X vaccinated 80 % people" but sometimes that is eligible population which is not the same as all susceptible population. When you see antivaxxers claiming vaccines don't help "because of Israel", this is exactly the difference - Israel had almost 80 % eligible population vaccinated, but only about 60 % of total population, which wouldn't be enough for the original variant, much less for Delta.

> It was true then - it was what the math showed before Delta was around.

True, but it was a very rough estimate (COVID R0 confidence intervals were, and to my knowledge still are, very wide) and the potential for change due to new variants appearing was known and discussed very early in the pandemic (the March 2020 variant that ravaged Europe was already an "updated" version of the original virus). And all this didn't prevent our president from confidently appearing on TV and saying that when we reached 70% vaccination rate, we would have herd immunity. He even provided exact dates when that would be achieved, so some people actually expected that he would hold a press conference that day declaring the pandemic over. Of course, the messaging became diluted later on.

While perhaps not an outright lie, at the very least it was a half truth, and unrealistic hyping.

> At the very least, it was a half truth, and unrealistic hyping.

It was what the data showed at that time. Calling if half-truth because people couldn't predict course of a pandemic year in advance seems over the top. Do you know what will happen in a year?

No idea who is your president, so I can't comment on that specific communication.

So much for "my body, my choice" (a phrase which has been stolen and twisted by people opposing the vaccines).

Twisted how. It's exactly the same argument, identical in every way, to the one used for years by abortion supporters. It was seen as noble and obvious correct back then by the same people who deem it to be beyond the pale now. It's obvious they have no internal consistency.

Twisted because a contagious virus is not just a personal issue. The virus will continue to mutate and weaken the efficacy of both natural immunity and the vaccine if its spread is not halted.

Abortion isn't a personal issue - it affects the life of the unborn baby. That's why abortion activists have talk about bodily autonomy so heavily.

Meanwhile, vaccines not only don't stop you spreading COVID but they appear to make it worse as UK and Swedish data shows. Thus there could easily be an argument to force you to not take the vaccine, on the grounds that you don't personally need the protection and it makes the epidemic worse. Would you like that?

> Twisted how.

It doesn't apply. It makes the (false) claim that anti-vaxxers don't have body autonomy. They do. No one is holding them down and making them take a vaccine. You've given the choice: get the vaccine or don't. But if you don't there are some negative consequences.

This was already the case prior to Covid. For example: sending unvaccinated children to public school.

When the penalty is having your livelihood destroyed yes, people are being forced to take it. No different to how people are "forced" to pay fines or do anything else the government wants - being physically forced is the very last step and most people never get there because they know what happens next. After all, what do you think happens to businesses that refuse to comply? The police turn up and punish them until they do comply.

Stop engaging in mental gymnastics and admit what you are supporting: mass forced violation of people's bodily autonomy.

"the government" is just people, perhaps selected for even higher levels of selfishness and poor risk analysis skills.

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