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Comment by throwaway22032 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway22032

Because those other things haven't been dealt with via massive overbearing state intrusions.

Climate change is a far far graver threat than coronavirus.

But we're not really doing anything about that. By contrast, it was illegal for people in the UK to visit their friends and family for six months and an enormous propaganda campaign was launched which ensured that even without policing this people were convinced into dismantling society.

That's why I'm upset, anyway, because my life was turned completely upside down for something that's actually quite minor in the grand scheme of things, whilst we're leaving the big stuff alone.

If we banned fast food it'd be annoying and I'd be pretty pissed off. I don't think we should do it, but it would have a massive impact on obesity rates and add a bunch of quality adjusted life years to the country.

But it'd really not be that big a deal compared to stuff like saying "healthy 20 year olds in their prime at near zero risk from this virus are now legally forbidden from dating".

I often wonder if people have already forgotten just how hilariously ridiculous 2020 was.

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> That's why I'm upset, anyway, because my life was turned completely upside down for something that's actually quite minor in the grand scheme of things, whilst we're leaving the big stuff alone.

I'm going to be frank - I don't think you care about the bigger stuff that much in comparison. You just care that your life was affected. Just like you don't care that much that some random civilians in another country were killed because of <insert injustice>.

Am I wrong?

EDIT: I'm not saying I'm any different. But I have experienced the effects of COVID19, so to me it's not a "small" thing. I'm still living with the effects every day.

Yes, completely wrong. I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that I only care because it affected me.

Coronavirus has affected and still does affect me. I know people who have suffered and died from it.

No, I said you don't care that much about bigger things in comparison. Think about it - you cared enough about this "small thing" to make a throwaway account. When last did you do that about anything else?

In any case, I'm not here to preach. I would just like people to have some honesty and perspective in their opinions and arguments.

You're willing to risk the lives of the elderly and people with people with a less-effective immune response if you think the lives of the general population would be "better off"? Just say so. If people feel uncomfortable doing this realise that part of that discomfort is called "cognitive dissonance" (and realise that decision-makers have to do the same thing). Have a serious conversation with yourself before you decide that you need to create anonymous accounts on the internet to air your views.

You've created a strawman of my position.

I don't believe in risking the lives of the elderly and those with a less effective immune response, I have friends and family members in those positions.

What is your point then?

The dichotomy being presented (e.g. "state intrusion" vs "vulnerable people die") is not a genuine representation of the choice we have/have had.

There are far more variables involved than that. The most obvious counterpoint is that after about March 2020 (e.g. zero-covid off the table) there is no realistic situation in which 80 year olds can just go to the pub and not be at high risk.

I think he's upset that we turned civilization upside down for a virus, which in the grand scheme of things is a moderate problem, but not for air pollution or climate change, which are cataclysmic problems.

Yeah, but it's worse than that.

Most of the world's response to coronavirus, in my view, was and is about as sane as if we decided to like, live underground to combat climate change.

Even if it works (why would it) you've lost, because now you live underground.

In 2020 we didn't know exactly what things would look like if we didn't do lockdowns. The situation looked dire, and we reacted the way we did to give ourselves time to protect people while we assessed the situation, and made proper protections available.

The lockdowns weren't permanent (or even that long, to be honest). The protective measures we have in place aren't very stringent (in most of the world). If we hadn't done what we had done, the loss of life would have been considerably worse, and even with the choices we made, it was still quite bad.

I understand that you're unhappy with having a couple years of your life inconvenienced, but you're very much not showing empathy with those who've lost considerably more than you, and aren't really putting much consideration into how much more could have been lost without your inconvenience.

I'm not unhappy about my own personal situation, I'm unhappy because I think that the response was net negative overall.

The relevant variable is not my or your own personal situation but the sum total of all of the experiences of the people in the country.

I disagree that not supporting restrictions is not showing empathy with those who have lost loved ones from coronavirus. I think that this is a false dichotomy.

> You're willing to risk the lives of the elderly and people with people with a less-effective immune response if you think the lives of the general population would be "better off"

And you are willing to risk lives of people living near poverty line in poor countries, because stopping the economy and printing money in 2020 increased the number of people in extreme poverty and caused many more of them to die than would die otherwise.

To that point:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56425115

The QALY tallies are not pretty.

How is it that you know exactly what the thinks?

Your argument is exactly equivalent to me telling you that you don’t really care that much about the rights of the individual.

It’s easy to come to that conclusion from what you wrote.

> But it'd really not be that big a deal compared to stuff like saying "healthy 20 year olds in their prime at near zero risk from this virus are now legally forbidden from dating".

It sounded like you weren’t thinking how your behavior could result in spreading the virus to people who are more vulnerable.

I'm (unfortunately!) not 20. I'm describing the sum total of all interactions, not just my own personal preference.

I don't believe that "spreading the virus to people who are more vulnerable" is a meaningful concept for coronavirus. If you're immunocompromised (as, for example, my uncle is) then the outside world is now effectively a poison cloud and remains so regardless of what other people do in all realistic cases.

It's theoretically possible of course that if everyone else isolated as well the virus could die out, but post-April 2020 this became a 'frictionless plane' style scenario that couldn't actually exist in the real world.

I come to that conclusion as well. Literally millions of people died of this thing you called ‘minor.’ But those deaths don’t register because they happened out of view, in an overwhelmed hospital or out in the street or at home when capacity ran out. You don’t think about them because you didn’t see them. All you can see is the inconvenience to yourself.

Let’s flip this conversation on its head. why is it that people are surprised that a failure to make a basic decision to protect both oneself and others from a potentially lethal illness is met with sharp criticism and scorn, as it should be?

You're creating a strawman by claiming that people who do not believe in coronavirus restrictions are only interested in the inconvenience to themselves.

It all registers. I could equally say that you're disregarding the other ~99.9% of people whose lives have been affected by lockdowns. I don't think that's true though - I expect that you think their sacrifice was minor in comparison. Is that right?

We don't disagree that people should do basic things to prevent illness - what we disagree on is what a "basic thing" is.

I got rid of my social accounts a while back, including the one I had here. My enjoyment from using this site has risen considerably since doing so. I am someone different than who you are talking with, but I felt compelled to make a single-use account to say this:

This line of commentary, in the context of conversations like these, reminded (really, triggered) a strong feeling of conviction that it was a wise decision to leave. For me personally, receiving comments of this nature from strangers on the Internet just began to feel wrong. It epitomized the general noise of the pandemic that has made it all that much worse. Insinuations and "gotcha's" abound!

Anyways, it just didn't feel emotionally healthy over the long term to regularly subject myself to these modes of discourse.

For what it's worth, in person these types of conversations seem more palatable; perhaps it has something to do with higher bandwidth and trust between friends conversing in person?

Now then, back to lurking. Thanks for listening. :)

I can relate with what you wrote. I felt ilitirit tyring to be mean telling throwaway22032 who they are and what thier motives are without knowing them, probably to make themselves feel superior. It's a very junior high kind of show. And it's always usually wrong to ascribe motivations to someone you don't know.

So the above makes it really easy for me to ignore and discount ilitirit. But still it can hurt and illitirit knows that. That's the game and often I don't want to play either.

First throwaway, not other throwaway that you're responding to.

Personal attacks don't really hurt me. "Someone is wrong on the Internet" hurts me more. That's probably a character flaw I should work on. :)

I'm glad to hear that throwaway22032. throwaway194523 seemed to have more of a problem with it, which I sometimes share but I'm overcoming it. Yes, I have your character flaw too, but there's only so much time in the day!

Not downplaying covid, but diarrhea kills 10M+ people globally. I also find turning a blind eye to other important topics and media laser-focus on covid a bit upsetting. But also understanding how media is profiting from it. Further on that, big pharma lobby is huge on boosters for young people. There is very little benefits for boosters for under 40's. You are talking a 0.1% decrease of hospitalization (from 0.2%). Countries like Spain didn't even roll them out until very recently for this reason (although last October they said they will not roll it out at all for under 30s).

I figure it's a loss aversion thing.

Coronavirus is new and therefore feels like a loss we can revert, whereas solving diarrhea or other issues would feel like a gain.

It's irrational but then, we be meat bags innit.

> But it'd really not be that big a deal compared to stuff like saying "healthy 20 year olds in their prime at near zero risk from this virus are now legally forbidden from dating".

This idea that young people are at near zero risk is not true. Pro athletes in their prime have gotten covid and suffered terrible side effects. Jayson Tatum is 23 and needed an inhaler after getting covid because he couldn't keep his wind. Tom Sweeney got myocarditis and had to end his football season early. Several young MMA fighters and pro wrestlers have nearly died. These are all people in their fitness prime.

Near zero is not zero, I agree.

More young people die or are horribly injured in the years of "normal" living than would have died or suffered long term consequences from covid. Indeed the typical death spike in young people from normal risk taking was essentially removed by keeping them locked away.

Covid can and does have consequences for everyone. Look at the charts for actual rates and tell me with a straight face any healthy 20 year old needed to have their freedoms removed for that level of risk.

Given that we all live together and can be carriers and spreaders even if we are not ourselves individually impacted, it should be acceptable that regardless of age a person/family stay isolated or take measures to distance themselves and reduce the chances of inhaling or exhaling a virus. Jointly taking such measures for the greater good - ending the spread of a virus - is not a "taking away of freedom".

> Jointly taking such measures for the greater good - ending the spread of a virus - is not a "taking away of freedom".

It absolutely is taking away freedom. It is also taking away opportunity, damaging mental health, and stunting progression.

The trade off being made is that young people suffered so the old would die slightly later. I was fine, I had it easy, I am not young. The pretence that we are all doing this for the "greater good" is wild. The Quality Adjusted Life Year outcome from most lockdowns was negative imo. It is just coincidence that the active voting population was the segment of society being prioritised eh?

Ah, I should have pointed out that I’m neither a US citizen nor a current resident. In many other parts of the world, we tend to have a different view of collaboration.

I am also not from the US, my views are not merely a representation of a weird pocket of the world you can just dismiss with a smug self satisfaction...

Well, in many parts of the world, we have followed safe distancing and other protocols without complaints about freedoms being taken away.

> That's why I'm upset, anyway, because my life was turned completely upside down for something that's actually quite minor in the grand scheme of things, whilst we're leaving the big stuff alone.

How is Covid-19 minor?

"In the grand scheme of things" contains things like 3C above pre-industrial if we keep burning shit.

I wouldn’t call losing close to 1% of the population (or more if fully unchecked and without health care capacity) minor. That’s pretty damn major.

Multiple things can be bad all at the same time and at different scales without making one of them minor.

So far we've lost about 0.3% of the US population. That's a major public health crisis but nowhere near 1%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Nice link. I appreciate that page, actually. Hadn't seen it.

However, this is with all of the interventions, plus vaccines in. It's with the curve flattened as much as all of the interventions allowed.

What you don't have is the counterfactual of what would have happened with no intervention of a highly contagious air-borne virus, and a matching health care collapse. In the beginning we were closer to 1% and higher in some places. This is US stats, where people have access to higher quality healthcare than much of the world (and vaccines), plus mixed interventions (since local/state dictated much of that).

We were never higher than a 1% fatality rate in any place. The high rates that some people estimated early in the pandemic were due to garbage data from very limited testing of asymptomatic cases. The CDC did a more thorough analysis and estimated a 0.6% infection fatality rate back when no one was vaccinated.

Wasn’t that before Delta and Onicron?

Also before vaccination and prior infection. Either or both of those mean that the risk involved with catching Delta or Omicron is generally far lower than it would have been had they just "appeared" in March 2020.

If it were 1% (it's 0.3% in the UK and US) then it's about a normal year, again.

So over two years we go from losing 2% of the population to losing 3%. Assuming you're talking excess deaths.

Yeah, it's pretty bad.

I don't think it's "make it illegal to visit your mum, ban all social events, close the schools, bars, pubs, stop flights, wear things on your face, stop going to work normally, ..." bad.

But that's just a value judgement thing. Without those things there is no life to save. YMMV.

Here in my region of Spain overall deaths were lower than in a normal year. Media attention is so skewed towards covid it's almost impossible to even think of anything else. Heck, even googling 'list of cases of deaths globally' directly redirects to covid-related hits. On the first two pages there isn't anything that's not covid. I think this has to stop.

Please tell me the way in which a virus that swept the globe and killed nearly 6 million people (and those are just the deaths we counted) in 2 years is ‘minor in the scheme of things.’

<0.1% of the population in 2 years is quite minor in the context of the response in my view.

It justifies things like washing your hands and getting vaccinated.

It doesn't justify lockdowns and things like making it illegal for family members to visit each other. That's a net loss on all of society.

So what's the line?? Is it 10 million? 1% of the human population? If so, why should it be 1% and not 0.1%? Because it seems more significant?

Depends on the situation.

If we're faced with a situation in which we can collectively give up 1% of our lives to save 5%, I'd say that's worth mandating.

1% for 2%, I'd grit my teeth and say we need pretty solid data on that 2%.

1% for 1%, nah.

I don't think coronavirus was even close to that, if you just look at the full lockdown and the reduced ones (e.in the UK and ignore all of the associated mitigations, that was ~1% of our collective lifespan given up. Did it save 1% of people?

I don't think it was even close. And that's not even taking into account opportunity cost. Most of the 'savings' here comes from the fact that by locking down you're also barricading the vulnerable away.

On the outset I think the ability for it to spread and cause general mayhem in the population was good enough reason to shut things down. The main cause for concern was overwhelming emergency systems. We need to remember that death is only one statistic. You would still visit the hospital as an alive, infected individual and put a strain on that system even when you fully recover and go home.

Or to put it another way, even if the virus was not deadly at all, but it could take people out for a few weeks at a time, that would be reason enough to impose mask mandates, get a vaccine rolled out, tell people to work from home for awhile. Especially if people needed hospital services.

One of those things is not like the others.

Offering people a vaccine is an obvious win. The only way in which it could not be is if the virus were so mild that the R&D and distribution cost weren't worth it. That's obviously not the case for coronavirus.

The other things are just authoritarian desires that you're not able to even quantify.

The fact that you'd delete my career and social bonds for the sake of a theoretical virus that might just put people in bed for a while means this discussion is over, I don't engage with terrorists, good luck.

Overreaction there for sure

This is the main issue I have had with the response to the pandemic. Covid is not the first time in modern history we have had a contagious virus that kills people regularly (see: flu). So pre-Covid, everyone was gambling that their non-social distancing behaviors would kill someone through spreading a contagious disease. The risk was very small but clearly non-zero, and members of the public clearly decided en masse that going about their normal lives was more valuable than that increased risk of killing someone with the flu.

Now comes covid and people who happily accepted the risk of flu exposure/spread pretend that value judgement has never been made before and it is gauche to even talk about it. At some point it is a reasonable possibility that the threat of covid in terms of death and disease will be equal to or less than the threat of flu. It's difficult to predict exactly what that number is but it is at least theoretically quantifiable number. What's the point of maintaining restrictions at that point when the known value system of the public accepts that level of risk?

That number should be talked about, and people should stop pretending that weighting convenience and other factors against numbers of deaths is a sociopathic thing to do. Everyone has been doing it long before covid.

It goes beyond that.

We are constantly gambling all of the time that we might have some external effect on the world, it's the human condition.

Generally we distinguish between overtly dangerous behaviours that could have easily been mitigated (e.g. drinking ten pints and going out for a drive), and behaviours that happen to be kind of a little bit dangerous but aren't explicitly malicious (e.g. just driving under normal circumstances).

The difference here with coronavirus is that for whatever reason, some people decided to apply a completely unreasonable standard of assuming that anything anyone did ever was a malicious act, which is completely incompatible with civilization. If we didn't have all of the exceptions for the proles (sorry, "essential workers"), society would have completely fallen apart.

The arbitrary exceptions are pretty nice. In an industry I am aware of, people absolutely have to be onsite and also need to eat lunch. When lunch is being eaten in the cafeteria, you got a bunch of maskless people in the same room spread out at least six feet. It's been long established that the virus, particularly the omicron variant, easily spreads at distance.

But those six feet, when blessed by corporate, make all the difference.

ETA

I do take the virus seriously, am vaxxed, and actually do a good job of social distancing, unlike many of my peers who preach the seriousness of the disease and yet engage in behaviors that are high risk in terms of transmission. Level of concern about the virus and belief in public health authority narrative are orthogonal dimensions.

If you're sitting down you can't get coronavirus though. It only travels above 4ft.

Unless you're on a plane. Something to do with the low ceilings I guess.

Personally I'm warming up to where we assume COVID is endemic and we resume most of our older tendencies. Face masks probably become more normal on public transit. But I do agree there's a number where the virus remains but we're comfortable with it.

The whole idea originally was that the virus could be more or less deadly than we knew and would lock up hospital services. Even with this less deadly variant, the hospital bed shortage is a reality for many communities, which has downstream effects.

Re: prepping for known unknowns.

That valuation framework has also existed historically in terms of the periodic low-key freakouts about bird flu, swine flu, etc. Also the periodic filling of hospitals during flu season (though, it has been stated here and elsewhere that hospitals filling up is frequently just a feature of how the healthcare system is run).

I think there would be a lot more useful debate if 1) people admitted that there is nothing truly unique in kind about the current situation (just degree) and 2) the "return to normal number," however that number is defined, is a real thing. The folks more concerned about the virus could advocate for more stringent constraints on reopening and vice versa. But people would at least be using a common framework that's grounded in the reality that people are willing to live with a certain amount of risk without doing much about it.

I think we'd have a lot more rationality in politics if we didn't have this "fear" that basically some people just want to see the world change forever.

I'm forced to push harder than I actually want to in order to counteract the contingent of oddball "but 2019 was bad, I had to go outside, never go back pls" people.

no idea what you're even talking about anymore

I have heard this argument so many times now. It’s so easy for someone to say stuff like this in hindsight.

But on day zero, no one knew what this “flu” really was and what it was capable of. What we knew at the time was the infection rate was accelerating globally.

You didn’t have any evidence to weight until now. The response that we took was right given limited information.

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