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Comment by ygjb | Hacker News Reader

The Overton window on the feasibility of lockdowns would get a bit of a shift if it becomes a pandemic with a 60% (or even a substantially lower) fatality rate.

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That's if you could get a sizeable chunk of the population to accept the data. Unfortunately, as we've seen with covid there are all sorts of "the guberment is lying to us!" type conspiracy theories out there and it could take a while before the truth sinks in - from seeing friends, family and neighbors experiencing serious illness and/or mortality. But when it gets to that point it's kind of too late.

I think we're in a vulnerable space right now where in some ways the divisions that were exposed and heightened by the covid pandemic leave us less able to deal with another serious pandemic in the near term. Add in pandemic fatigue and it's even worse.

It's not a conspiracy theory when they actually do lie; take Dr. Fauci for example:

"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85." [0]

Lots of talk of "just so we can flatten the curve" turned into "so noone ever gets infected again". The role of NIH/NIAD in funding gain-of-function research. etc. etc.

There's no denying that plenty of people didn't believe things that the government said were actually true. The problem, of course, is that it is hard to tell which statements are lies and which statements are true.

[0] https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-...

I've come to the conclusion that reducing beliefs like that is not a matter of education. I mean the message is out there loud and clear, it's not that if only people heard it louder and more often that they would change their minds.

No, I think at this point, the best way to reduce the number of people who believe the government lies to them is to reduce the amount of lies that the government tells them.

Covid was a "perfect" conspiracy disease because the symptoms were so different person-to-person.

A 50%+ lethal disease won't leave many survivors to say "it wasn't that bad, everyone overreacted!". The initial wave of conspiracy-minded folks won't have a great time to say the least.

A 5 to 10% lethal disease would be horrific enough.

There is a growing chunk of the population that has now begun beating the drum of "COVID never happened - nobody died and there was no flu." It is extremely easy to underestimate just how ignorant some people can be.

Yea. I’m more interested in the manufacturing capacity of high quality masks, that seems like a low cost high payoff investment from a global health standpoint.

I'm more interested in just shutting down air travel every winter or just period. It's much easier and actually works. Sure we have to go back to a period around 60 years ago but the alternative is going back 100 years in civilization.

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