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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

My government has just spent 2 years - a pretty significant percentage of a lifetime - working to keep me from travelling more than 5km from my home and made it illegal for me to see my friends. And I'm not even going to have a sympathetic audience if I try to claim this is against my wishes or wellbeing.

Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a nice minimum standard? These people have no respect for my rights. They don't think my rights rate on the scale of their objectives. And they want to spy on my mail - possibly to figure out from my phone if I've gone 6km from my home? I would quite like strong encryption by default and a weak government, please.

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Whilst you’re entitled to your opinion, it wasn’t 2 years, it was 6 months of not travelling to the regions in NSW: the rights that were protected were the rights to preservation of life as evidenced by the significantly lower excess mortality in Australia. You obviously value these things differently to me, and it’s hard to have this argument without conflating the other aspects of our federal government that I think we would absolutely agree with, but a once in several generations pandemic is a good reason to do something drastic

Sorry for you, but your country's democratic process is probably broken. In my country covid measures were always just the bare minimum to keep things running and lifted/alliveated as soon as possible.

You’re the exception. Out of curiosity, what country is that ?

In switzerland there was no strict confinment, rather a strong recomendation to stay at home. The most that was imposed was closure of bars and non-essential shops, and restriction of private gatherings to 5 people. Work for home was mendatory unless you could not work from home.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Switzerla...

I'm probably making assumptions, so I'd like to clarify, which government prohibited travel to such a degree?

In the my US Midwest jurisdiction, the truly restrictive lockdowns closed indoor business, and discouraged gathering, but to my knowledge it was never illegal to travel. And indoor gathering restrictions didn't last more than a few months in private spaces. Although, certain behaviors were strongly discouraged for quite a long time.

I'm assuming based on your units you are not in the US, however.

Australia. NSW to be specific since each state had its own response. But US law affects a lot of services I use.

And I wish our government had taken a light-touch approach like yours. Dare I say I wish they'd adopted a philosophy of weak governance and respecting people's rights by letting them make their own choices.

The people of Australia get to vote in 4 months for a new government. If people really hated the covid restrictions as much as you, then they will get rid of the people who implemented them.

Wellz it’s a bit more complicated than that, the upcoming election is for the feds who had not much to do with the lockdowns (which was the state govs)

True in respect to direct lockdown orders. However the Feds were responsible for obtaining vaccine supply. A pretty dismal timetable for that led to the term Vaccine Strollout...

My government has restricted travel in order to stop a pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the population dying instead of 0.5%.

Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.

With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. The disease isn't that deadly, even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes).

If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I might note that the government will only revoke my rights in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue that strong governments will somehow protect me from a threat that only emanates from government. This "strong governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government.

Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea" is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough to tell if the interventions worked.

Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of the population. And me.

> With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying.

There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with COVID can't get the medical care they need.

Countries are reporting in-practice death rates as high at 0.6%, worst case, slight outlier [0]. So even if it were possible for somehow no-one to get medical care (which is difficult to see happening, it takes a while for a wave to burn through and most people don't catch it so there is a lot of potential to beef up the response short-term) and the death rate multiplied 10-fold (which is also open to challenge, depends on a lot of factors and assumptions about how effectively community care could be provided) it still wouldn't reach 10%. That 0.6% might even be a country where the hospital system fell apart, I don't know what healthcare looks like in Peru.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

The USA has 900k covid deaths from 74M cases. The real number of cases are likely to be double that, but it's still a very high rate - from the richest country in the world.

The USA may be the richest country in the world but it doesn't mean much when facing the virus, especially considering how widespread inequalities are.

If the real number of cases is double that, then that would be a death rate of ... about 0.6%. And not everyone catches the disease in one pandemic wave, so the total population death rate in the US isn't going to reach that.

And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical. It is one of those sounds-scary-not-likely scenarios that doesn't play out at scale. The part people were initially worried about - ventilators, which can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency - turned out not to even be especially useful in managing COVID.

There are basic questions about whether the hospital system would have been overwhelmed in practice. People keep saying the response was bad, and yet there aren't any instances anywhere in the world I'm aware of where the hospital system really crumbled under pressure. There were lots of instances I heard of where where some people didn't get treated, and that is bad, but not so bad that death rates more than doubled to like ~1% in a local area. And even if the hospital system literally vanished, an order of magnitude worsening from 0.6% still wouldn't get death rates to 10% of the population.

It has been 2 years. We have the data now. 10% was never a possibility although that was less clear in the opening months. Even 1% appears not to have been reached in practice with the worst response policy response of any country in the world.

The hospital system literally vanishing is not really a possible failure condition. It just doesn't work like that, medical staff will always keep trying to treat whoever they can with whatever resources they have.

The hospital system being overwhelmed looks like what you said, "some people didn't get treated". Triage assigns resources to patients based on need, if there are more patients (because there are more COVID cases) or less resources (because medical staff are getting sick too), that still doesn't mean no one is getting treated, just that people who would have gotten treated sooner before now have to wait. And while they're waiting, some of those people would die. People were worried about ventilators, but medical staff can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency either.

Also, of course, all the statistics you're mentioning are with the response.

As long as their is oxygen support and health care people show up for work you are correct. In Mexico and other countries with less access to modern health care the death rate seems to be an order of magnitude higher. (if the CDC data is valid)

This was just a trainer pandemic. :-) Imagine one where the children and young people are dying instead of seniors.

Amazingly, it's true, in countries like Mexico and the USA the death rate was an order of magnitude higher than in Australia: 0.23% and 0.27%, respectively, rather than 0.016%. But even in countries with good access to modern health care the rate was often pretty bad; Italy had 0.24%, the UK 0.23%, Spain 0.20%, and France also 0.20%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

> And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical.

No it isn't: the USA already rolled over and shrugged when their hospital system reached the state (mainly with regards to financing) it was in pre-pandemic.

If you want to see how the virus correlates with death you ought to look at rates of obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure, not wealth.

The argument I think was never any concrete number of deaths. Our constitution (Germany) at least makes quantitative and qualitative arguments about human life difficult (epidemiology can still inform political decisions).

Normally the pandemic would have been considered an increased risk of life: restriction of basic freedom would have been cancelled by any court. However, we saw triage like situations in countries around us. At the beginning of the pandemic France supposingly had people dying in elderly care because the hospitals were overloaded. Italy and Portugal were close to a failure of their hospital system.

Now with many people vaccinated and omicron in the game the situation is different. But I also see this slowly acknowledged by political decision makers. This does not excuse the often really messy and not consistent, often randomly changing rules. There were prepared protocols for (influenca) pandemics but they were not enacted when the WHO announced the pandemic. We IMHO never got ahead of what was happening since.

I am currently having COVID being healthy and boostered, I am quite happy that I did not catch it earlier.

> Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government.

Nobody has ever betrayed my trust quite like my own Government, either.

I live in the UK, which (for now) has Boris Johnson as its Prime Minister. This means that while they were fining people for having Christmas parties, going outside, and forcing people to stay indoors, he had a string of parties (12) which did not follow the COVID rules.

It's honestly sickening to watch (the Jacob Rees-Mogg video, too), and it's a great example of how the Government really doesn't stand by the people who put them in power. How would you even go about fixing this?

The thing happened everywhere. French prime minister met with mayors and had political meetings unmasked, shaking hands and stuff, at the peek of the pandemic, got covid, then blamed his 11 yo daughter for it.

Macron had a huge party at the president office, with people chanting and dancing, not wearing masks, while people were still supposed to take extreme precautions.

The only original thing about boris johnson is that he put minimal numbers of restrictions on his population for as long as he could. For that you can thank him.

> even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes).

My elderly father fell in December and broke his hip. Luckily, he got a bed.

A month later, when he fell again in January, there were no beds available. Luckily, he didn’t need one as the fall was more mild. But had he needed a bed, there were none at all.

Nothing was oversold. If we just allowed a free-for-all, the system would buckle and break.

I’m surprised you’re happy about the pass. the only thing the pass does is insure the minority of people who didn’t want the vaccine are forced to be vaccinated. I suppose you didn’t have to be forced, so why do you care ?

so why do you care ?

Because the people who didn't want to be vaccinated take up all the hospital and intensive care beds, leading to many postponed surgeries.

E.g. in The Netherlands in October, unvaccinated people took 70% of the intensive care beds allocated to COVID patients, while only being ~16% of the 18+ population. [1]

[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...

We had this statistic in france too, but it happens that ICU saturation occures every winter, for flu and such. it’s been on the headlines for almost a decade every year. Mostly due to population getting older, and hospitals poorer. I wonder if it isn’t the same everywhere.

I’m not getting the vaccine and had covid twice. I have antibodies, which should be recognized in lieu of vaccine. I took no space in a hospital.

It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?

Good for you :), but it's not about individuals. Only a small portion of unvaccinated people are hospitalized. However, even 1% of a dense population is still a lot of people and hospitals + ICs get clogged up. The probability of hospitalization is 17x smaller for vaccinated people and the probability of needing IC treatment 33x smaller [1]. So, if all people were vaccinated, we wouldn't have the issues we had last 6 months. Now we have a lot of delayed surgeries, including cancer surgeries, etc.

It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?

As the statistics show, no. Though luckily, things are changing now that Omicron is dominant, so I think all limitations are lifted pretty soon here.

[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...

Here in New York Andrew Cuomo spent the last decade closing hospitals and reducing hospital capacity at the behest of HMOs, for-profit hospitals, health insurance companies and associated banks and Wall Street investors. It is expensive to maintain hospitals and have enough spare hospital capacity in case of a crisis, and officials at the state and federal level chose profits over capacity.

For the last 2 years, these same officials have telling us that we have no choice but to give up our freedoms, civil liberties and bodily autonomy because there aren't enough hospital beds. This was a manufactured crisis (even beyond the likely manufacturing of the virus in a CDC-funded Wuhan lab).

1975: U.S. population: 219 million Hospital beds: 1,465,828 Ratio: 1 bed per 149 people

2019: U.S. population: 334 million Hospital beds: 919,559

https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hos...

I've lost a grandma, auntie and am about to lose a father-in-law. All have cancer that was either detected late or was not operable because of there being no IC spaces available.

All because the hospitals and IC are full of people who chose not to vaccinate but who do get priority for medical care.

Perhaps the healthcare industry reacted poorly.

The amount of yearly cancer deaths is similar, but higher, than Covid.

I’m more familiar with hospitals giving cancer patients ultimatums to face icu, surgeries, and intensive treatments alone - and I saw this in an underwhelmed hospital well before there were vaccines.

It was never going to be 10%. The virus is too localized on the elderly, who isolate and vaccinate themselves well anyway.

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