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Comment by Thorentis | Hacker News Reader

COVID does not have a death rate of 33%.

You're missing the forest from the trees here; no one's suggesting that. Instead, we're saying that perhaps you shouldn't use Sweden as evidence supporting non-intervention when their deaths per capita was an order of magnitude higher than similar countries with more aggressive policies.

Potentially you're also missing the forest from the trees: it may be an order of magnitude higher, but in relation to the population size, the number of deaths is minuscule regardless.

Your argument seems to approach that any measures against covid that significantly impact daily life are bad utilitarian policy, since even the most extreme outcomes where healthcare capacity has collapsed leads to less than 1 percent of the total population dying.

Could you post a clarifying remark on what you consider the correct place to draw the line where more inconvenient quarantine measures are warranted?

It's pretty obvious that this is a very contentious subject. But it's also very obvious that a considerable democratic majority in most Western countries seems to agree on where the line should be drawn for their community, and that this line is much more conservative (on the side of public health getting priority over business as usual) than with most earlier pandemics. This is an interesting policy development.

Well then I have to ask: what hypothetical rate of death could exceed your definition of minuscule? How many per capita deaths do we need to reach before you will agree that societal intervention is warranted? A number would be appreciated.

The simple answer is public policy always lags the public therefor is always a bad idea to implement NPIs. Public policy should be concentrating on increasing hospital capacity, therapeutic/prophylactic distribution. Presumably never on "lockdowns" or travel bans or masks. People will lock themselves down if it's bad enough, and more importantly at finer granularity and with more equity.

Right, but I could make the same argument about influenza. We had an order of magnitude of deaths higher in 2019 compared to 2020 due to influenza. That fact alone isn't enough to justify lockdowns for influenza, so it shouldn't alone be enough to justify lockdowns for COVID.

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