Hacker News Reader

Comment by CyanBird | Hacker News Reader

I know 5 people personally that have died of this virus, forgive me if I take offense at your hand waving of it

I know 2 young perfectly physically healthy people personally whose mental health deteoriorated to the point that they became suicidal. So forgive me if I take offense at your comment.

That doesn't mean any of these NPI's work, are ethical, or are worth their immense cost to society. It is entirely possible to "take this serious" but feel that society is causing itself far more harm with all these measures than it would have by doing absolutely nothing at all. None of these thing were in any playbook prior to march of 2020. And here we are almost a month from 2022 still working from this unwritten, untested playbook and still we have no clue if any of it works.

About the only thing we know works is vaccines and all these cool treatments we've figured out.

Masks are cheap and simple with no drawbacks. Ventilation is easy in many cases. Keeping one's distance costs nothing (which is not the be-all of social distancing, I agree). Vaccines are free.

These are all ethical, very effective and cost the individual almost nothing.

Enforcing social distancing is complex and incurs costs. For outdoor venues it seems to be less effective. What other methods are causing far more harm than good, far more harm than doing nothing?

> Keeping one's distance costs nothing (which is not the be-all of social distancing, I agree).

Actually this costs trillions of dollars.[0]

[0] https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/gross-domestic-product-2nd-qua...

> None of these thing were in any playbook prior to march of 2020.

Which things do you think are wild new tactics for trying to contain a pandemic? Social distancing? Lockdowns? Wearing masks in public? Because if you think any of those are untested wacky "nobody's ever tried anything like this before!" approaches, you need to spend a few more minutes with your favorite search engine.

You've been severely misinformed. You can read for example the UK's pre-pandemic playbook at (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...) - note they specifically call out universal masking, border closures, and restrictions on public gatherings as bad policies they don't plan to implement because there's no good evidence they help. Maybe they were wrong (I definitely think they were wrong on masks!), or maybe the difference between true influenza and a coronavirus with similar symptoms matters, but it's just not accurate to present these kinds of policies as the pre-pandemic consensus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com