Hacker News Reader

Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

Or, the only thing that we have learned is that a small, radicalised minority will ignore best available public health guidance and requirements it conspiracy-minded politicians instruct them to.

It's worth reading the article though - it's quit enlightening. The pros and cons of lockdowns are complex to evaluate.

View on HN

That doesn’t really address their comment which was about the ethics of detaining people in lockdowns, not the effectiveness of lockdowns for preventing transmission of disease.

There are many things we could do in society that would be extremely effective from a medical standpoint but are nonetheless unethical and therefore not done (organ harvesting from deceased prisoners for instance).

Well, there are countries, like Austria, where we harvest organs from everyone (as necessary) unless the person opts out. Quite sensible in my opinion.

it's a lot more concrete than just ethics in my view. A lock-down for isolation precludes a huge number of actions that are very positive for society. There was no consideration of the quality of the results as that would be political suicide.

Well, in the US, ethics was covered of course by faucci's wife!! Her position was to advise her husband!

No conflict of interest there. Move along....

the only real lockdown is in China, everywhere else it was just a temporary voluntary sheltering at home. but whoever coined it as lockdown won, and people "felt" restricted as result of the wording... and hell it was effective at least in New Zealand

Your statement is categorically false. No country is/was as strict as China, but plenty of countries had mandatory restrictions ('lockdowns' if you will), upto mandatory stay-at-home, or stay-near-home. Just look at the (very partial) wiki list:

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

Was it justified? I believe quite a lot of it was, but it did happen.

mandatory yes, but if you resisted what would they do? a fine? slap on the wrist? not sure if you've seen the severity of lockdown in China, they literally stuck a bolt in concrete to prevent people opening their doors in apartments, and soldered people's doors

Yea, I wrote that no country was as anywhere strict as China. However, quite a few countries had curfews which elicited fines and possible jail time (fines happened, but I don't think jail was used in practice). One example:

https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2020/11/20/ohio-curfew...

Worked in Singapore and Taiwan too. Only 3 places I ever want to be during another pandemic is New Zealand, Singapore, or Taiwan.

> everywhere else it was just a temporary voluntary sheltering at home

Except it wasn't voluntary.

Next week - how Tsunami warnings are "forced expulsions"

As an outsider, it seems to me that both sides in the US were massively radicalised, letting all things related to covid become a partisan issue rather than about optimizing outcomes for the population.

In Republican areas, resistance to vaccines seemed to be at an irrational level, where Democrat areas seems to have enforced lockdowns, maskwearing etc to an extent where it caused much more harm than good. (Mental illness, loss of learning for school children, economic disruption, etc.)

Or, the only thing we learned is that you cannot trust the beaurocrats who call themselves scientists, and the politicians who are all too happy to try and force performative displays in order to gain more control and power over anyone who lacks the critical thinking skills to question them in even the most basic way, such as:

"Hey, that politician/"health official" told me and my family that we can't go to school or work, and we have to wear masks everywhere and stay 6 feet away from everyone. So why do I see those same politicians/"health officials" breaking their own rules, partying with people, unmasked, shoulder to shoulder, as if the so-called "life or death" rules only apply to everyone else?"

Or, how about this question:

"Hey, how come my kids and I can't go to work or school, but Hollywood studios are getting exemptions from those rules to keep filming? Isn't my ability to provide for my family, or my child to learn just as important as Tom Cruise's desire to finish filming Top Gun, or the Academy Awards' desire to put on their vapid showcase of gaudy wealth and unhinged political virtue-signaling?"

Well, that minority turned out to be right — lockdowns to achieve 0.2% reduction were a bad idea.

The majority fixated on a solution that was always a bad idea and went rabid trying to force it on everyone… something called “mass formation psychosis”.

https://www.wmar2news.com/news/coronavirus/johns-hopkins-uni...

This entire lockdown experiment in my home state actually has me looking at moving. I am never going to establish a customer-facing business in any state that has a risk of lockdown, period. In my home state, countless small businesses that I loved went bankrupt. Who knows where their owners are now, or how their families are doing. Hopefully (for how hard it was on them) they got counseling.

Did you read the article? It discusses this: economic loss due to lockdown vs economic loss due to increased fatalities. Also discusses non-Covid fatalities due to reduced screening vs overloaded health system.

I do not need an article to say that I would prefer economic downturns and less sales, compared to no sales for more than half a year which no small business or family can support.

Plus, this is still a hot political issue and my trust of these defenses of lockdowns is so thin now, I am not going to take any of these studies seriously until at least ~5-10 years later in retrospective.

The "best available public health guidance" failed spectacularly, beginning with "keep going to bars and restaurants and parades" from the NYC health official and mayor. Then "masks don't work" from the CDC. Then asking people to make cloth masks that actually don't work. Then advising people to stay indoors where the virus spreads and to stay away from outdoor spaces like beaches where it doesn't spread. Then closing schools and putting masks on toddlers. Almost all of their advice was precisely the opposite of what should have been done. It harmed not only children and small family owned businesses, but also public health as an institution.

Ignoring their counsel and doing the opposite was literally the wisest thing to do. The only thing they got somewhat correct was the vaccine and even that they flubbed badly.

This does not even begin to address the reality that many public officials disregarded the regulations. They, too, realized it was garbage.

The reason they did so, was not because masks don't work, but because of the following:

1) Masks only have a limited effect. If the messsage were that masks provided protection (similar to condoms, say), people might feel they didn't have to socially distance while wearing them. Instead of thinking like a mask like a condom, it provides protection (to use a similar metaphor) more akin to pulling out.

2) Early on, there were not enough masks available. It was important at the time to avoid creating a panic buying, as that might prevent those who really needed them from being able to get hold of them.

#2 is an attempted defense of our publicly elected officials lying, supposedly for the greater good. Let’s not start that precedent.

As for the masks, they completely ignored other hazards now becoming more well known. The amount of micro-plastics and fibers in the lungs is going to be awful long-term and it gets worse the more we know.

#2 is an attempted defense of our publicly elected officials lying, supposedly for the greater good. Let’s not start that precedent.

I was saying #2 even as it happened, though. To me it was always obvious that masks would provide _some_ protection, just not perfect protection.

> As for the masks, they completely ignored other hazards now becoming more well known. The amount of micro-plastics and fibers in the lungs is going to be awful long-term and it gets worse the more we know.

As we started to understand the mortality rate from covid, this becomes a good point. During the first couple of months, though, while deaths were still rising exponentially (also corresponding to the time slot where we were told NOT to wear mask), we did not know the real mortality rate. It could have been significantly higher than it turned out to be.

Still, during those months, there were not enough of the masks to go around.

>Or, the only thing that we have learned is that a small, radicalised minority will ignore best available public health guidance and requirements it conspiracy-minded politicians instruct them to.

But the article isn't about HIV or monkeypox.

That learning has important implications for work on climate change as well.

This is how you can tell that someone REALLY doesn't care about climate change: They would rather use fossil fuels for energy than nuclear. (Including natural gas.)

> it conspiracy-minded politicians instruct them to.

You got it right but backwards. It’s the radicalized (though not so small) conspiracy-minded minority instructing their politicians to ignore health guidance and requirements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com