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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

This is a bad take. At most, Covid was a wealth transfer from governments and middle-class to many lucky corporations and wealthy investors. But in reality, everyone is suffering.

Let's say the opposite reaction happened and we prioritized heathy youths over vulnerable seniors. There would have been orders of magnitude more deaths by now, society would have collapsed in some places temporarily or permanently as healthcare systems break down entirely.

The wealth transfer from the youth to the elderly is nothing new, it's been pretty continuous and generally correlates with elderly population. Covid just put pressure on the whole system.

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There is no evidence society would have collapsed. Many countries do not have the health infrastructure the US has and have not undergone societal collapse. Yes more elderly would have died. More people with comorbities would have died. But societal collapse?

The shutdown lasted for far too long. Mock Florida all you want, but they weathered the pandemic far better than many states with strict lockdown regimes (California/New York). Consider Florida has one of (if not the) largest senior populations in the US too.

Why do you assume I am referring to the US? Maybe for you it's normal for there to be looting and rampant crime in the face of crisis or emergency scenarios but I don't think that speaks for the rest of the world.

> Many countries do not have the health infrastructure the US has and have not undergone societal collapse.

What does this mean? We have universal healthcare and in my city emergency services are so overwhelmed and overworked the wait time for the past day is over an hour. You could probably rob a storefront in open daylight and get away with it right now.

The US is the highly developed country poster child for fucking up handling Covid. Other countries don't need whatever impressive health infrastructure you're alluding to because they responded better in the first place.

Finally, I don't have a horse in this race besides not letting people die, but I'd like to point out that Florida current situation looks like hot garbage to me. You couldn't pay me to go there right now.

> We have universal healthcare and in my city emergency services are so overwhelmed and overworked the wait time for the past day is over an hour.

That tells more about your healthcare system than about anything else. My city had virtually no lockdowns (but 2 weeks at the beginning until the measure became really unpopular), nobody ever cared about distancing or masking, the vaccination rates are low as hell, schools and businesses work as usual and yet here we are safe and sound. No societal collapse you promise, no mass extinction, nothing. Some people in their 80s died which is a tragedy since that had never happened before (aren't people supposed to live forever). But other than that, life as usual. What are we doing wrong?

What city is this ?

Locations with low level of travel had less severe infections. For example countries in Eastern Europe got the wave later and it was smaller compared to Italy, UK, etc.

> emergency services are so overwhelmed

Is it because of the vaccinated or unvaccinated people?

California did way better than Florida [1].

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...

California has a way younger population, probably much healthier too.

That doesn't explain it. Add in the other states with similar percent elderly populations to Florida and Florida still has a far worse delta wave than they do. And its not vaccination status because Florida has good vaccination rates among the older people.

You could also look at per county data to compare counties in Florida with counties with similar demographics in other states, or dive into the breakdowns that states give by age group.

Do all that and it will become clear that Florida's terrible delta wave outcome is because the state government largely stopped taking COVID preventative measures, and actively tried to stop local governments and businesses from doing so.

Look at per capita deaths by state. Florida's policies have worked well enough.

Is it really a bad take? my parents & aunt had 28,34% gains respectively on the value of their main properties in just 1 year. I'm going to have to pay for that (or settle for a lot less living space) if i want to own anything here in the future. Definitely feels like a wealth transfer.

Yeah, inflation tends do that. The pandemic has been good fuel for inflation and continues to do so, but the fire would have burnt anyways. The fire is monetary policy trying to force growth no matter what. And why is growth forced? Because it's the only way to allow the poor to slightly improve without questioning the endless accumulation of the wealthy.

> The pandemic has been good fuel for inflation and continues to do so

Not just some abstract "pandemic" but specific policies adopted by specific people. Don't turn it into a Hegelian providence as if no one is responsible and it's a self propagating process that would happen regardless.

It's because

- people couldn't go on vacation so they all switched to buying durable goods at the same time. (that's why supply chains don't hold up, it's a crisis of abundance not deprivation.)

- workers in some industries died (like meatpacking) or quit (like restaurants).

- we haven't built enough houses since 1970 and everyone decided to buy a house at once.

It's not because of stimulus though; making people poorer so they can't buy cars is not a good solution to cars being too expensive.

Words words words. Tl;dr yeah he’s right. That $250k house you were supposed to buy? Yeah, it’s $450k now. Pay up.

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