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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a fallacy here in that "because covid's impact wasn't great, covid wasn't that bad." Any time we have to mobilize a lot of effort to head off the worst outcome, there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort?" Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse.

It's our response to covid, not covid itself, that taught me a lot of what we're capable of in global crisis. We've come a long way since Spanish Flu.

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Reminds me of the millennium bug.

Everyone worked really hard to make the impact minimal, now people assume that it wasn’t that big a deal.

Is there a name for the fallacy you commited here - assuming it must have been a big deal, which was necessarily minimized by the effort?

It's a case of:

-- Why do you spend all these millions putting these plastic scarecrows all across Nebraska?

-- They keep sharks away.

-- But Nebraska doesn't have sharks!

-- Exactly! See how effective it is?

It would seem to be a kind of variant on the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy — if one thing follows another the second must have been caused by the first.

Only in this case you are looking at denials where “propter hoc” actually holds — the second thing really was caused by the first.

There really should be a catchy name for this, since it permeates a lot of political reasoning on topics such as remediation for ozone hole depletion, FDC regulations, environmental regulations, etc. People see that timely action averted a problem, but somehow take that as evidence that there wasn’t a problem in the first place.

>People see that timely action averted a problem, but somehow take that as evidence that there wasn’t a problem in the first place.

Depending on the situation, 2 cases are possible (and have happened):

(a) A thing was indeed about to become a grave problem and timely action prevented it.

(b) A thing was never to become a big issue, and all the action spent preventing it didn't have any significance.

In both cases the outcome is "thing didn't become a big problem".

But in (a) action is what helped with this, and in (b) action was irrelevant and wasted.

Now some people see the outcome (no issue) and think that action was wasted. That's accurate in (a) and wrong in (b).

My point is that whether "timely action averted a problem" or "the problem was oversold to begin with" is something to be argued and proved, not taken for granted.

We know it could have been a big problem by the small things that got omitted and became problems.

You can argue that we didn’t need to pump hundreds of millions into it; but it is a fact that there would have been a crisis had it not been actively averted.

The same issue exists now with 2048 and we’re already seeing problems (on things that date far into the future) and we will likely need to expend effort and energy in avoiding this issue: especially on embedded devices.

If you’re denying that there would have been a problem then I’m afraid you’re simply mistaken.

I could give you many citations if I wasn’t on my phone. There was even a documentary about it.

“Was the millennium bug a myth” or something.

> there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort?

Basically a third of our country didn't go through that effort and the country is mostly still chugging along. Were it much deadlier, things would not have turned out okay.

This is a weird argument to make. The rational thing is to make different decisions in different scenarios. The choices I would make for how/whether to participate in society, whether to take a vaccine, etc., would vary greatly depending on whether a given disease has a 1 in 50,000 chance of killing me vs if it's like something out of the movie Contagion that would have a 1 in 10 chance of killing me.

If covid had a 1 in 10 chance of killing me I would have made very different decisions over the course of the pandemic. You're saying that people would still behave the same as they did during covid no matter how deadly a given disease is, which seems pretty ridiculous.

My state took it just seriously enough to get us to vaccines (and even before that, buy some time until they realized they shouldn't just put everyone on a respirator). For all I know it may have saved my life and the life of several other people I know with comorbidities. Possibly my parents as well.

Yes, a third of the country didn't go through the effort and a lot of people died in those states also. The country might still be functioning, but not necessarily well, with significant labor shortages, supply chain issues, high inflation, a looming recession, record high gas prices, etc. (not all of that is directly because of the pandemic, granted, but it sure didn't help).

I think we're in violent agreement.

The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Let’s take ebola as an example which was very feared due to it being quite deadly, yet a flu-like virus managed to infect many orders of magnitude more people.

> The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread.

Not really. The two primary factors controlling how fast a disease spreads is the infectiousness (R0 or other similar measures), and how long victims are infectious before they display symptoms.

The deadliness, the victim living or dying, happens significantly after they've finished their role as spreader of disease and thus does not significantly affect the spread.

Ebola fails to spread, not because it's deadly, but because the symptoms are almost immediate and dramatic.

(I took graduate level course in the mathematics of epidemiology and got an A, which makes me no expert at all, but this is fairly fundamental.)

I gave the OP another example of a deadly and yet widespread virus, HIV.

He is not completely off the ball, though. Our immune systems are rather good, so (with significant exceptions like HIV) if some virus doesn't kill us quickly, we tend to clear it out of the organism or at least get it under control, so it won't kill us at all.

Viruses that are very deadly but take a long time to kill you (thus enhancing the risk of transmission), like HIV, aren't very typical.

A counterexample: HIV is pretty deadly, but slow to progress, so it infected a lot of people. In countries with insufficient healthcare infrastructure (Subsaharan Africa), it actually killed a significant percentage of the population, precisely because it was so successful in spreading. Without modern medicine, it could have wiped out entire cultures, especially those that were more sex-positive.

(An interesting question to chew on is: what was the impact of religious sex taboos in pre-modern and early modern era? If monogamous couples were more likely to have healthy offspring and nurse their kids into adulthood, it might explain some of the societal swings towards puritanism in the 16th-19th century, which was a period of endemic syphilis.)

Indeed as you and another commenter pointed out correctly, it is not the whole picture, and given an intelligent, evil design one could possibly create a disease that spreads fast and kills only much later (by let’s say, causing cancer). But fortunately we are not inside Plague Inc.

But if I am not mistaken, from a strictly evolutionary perspective there is no pressure towards such a disease — a genetic variation that is more deadly won’t dominate over its less deadly variant and thus deadliness could be a variable that only changes randomly from the initial level (and decreasing if it is actively detrimental to spreading, where I would say that in case of a human population deadliness does correspond with fear).

But IANAE, nor a mathematician.

>Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse.

I'm not so sure, given places that did nothing or not much (either out of policy or lack of resources) and still didn't have a toll anywhere comparable to the Spanish Flu (and more or less comparable to places that took "great effort", if not better).

Let's also not take too much of a Western perspective, as only 16.2% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose.

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Well said. I think if the vaccines hadn't come out at all, it could well have been as bad as the Spanish Flu.

> I think if the vaccines hadn't come out at all, it could well have been as bad as the Spanish Flu.

I'm very much for vaccines, but this is just not true at all. Covid was never going to be near as bad as the Spanish flu, even if no measures were taken at all.

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