Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

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> "BEFORE VACCINES, BEFORE masks, before much at all was known about how the novel coronavirus spread and whether it lived on surfaces (remember wiping down grocery bags with Lysol?)"

There is a strong "what were they thinking" behind this because we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020. But the public health apparatus found that keeping people as fearful as possible (even for irrational reasons) was useful for getting them to follow their guidelines. Double bonus for highly visible, borderline superstitious rituals like hand sanitizer, which helped identify those who were compliant from the dissidents such as myself.

I live outside of Boulder, and long, long after this was known, the businesses were still engaging in surface sanitization theater. My daughter's swim school had employees walking around with large devices, spraying fluid on every chair in between classes. This was going on all the way into 2022. I asked the employees if they knew that covid didn't spread on surfaces and that what they were doing was useless. They knew, but did it anyway because the owner "wanted to show customers they took covid seriously".

As a person who was demonized by my colleagues for not wearing a mask OUTSIDE on a windswept hiking trail, I'm frankly triggered by comments like this where people pretend like the information and data showing how irrational and panicked the social reaction was didn't exist. It did, and the people who were the most irrational, panicked, and aggressive towards those attempting to be rational are the ones making excuses like this.

There needs to be a reckoning on this insanity and the public health authorities who deliberately chose a "stop covid at any cost" strategy. "At any cost" is correct. They completely refused to do any form of cost/benefit analysis for the absurd panic they produced. I, like many on HN, had relatives who refused to leave their homes, and were wiping down boxes from Amazon for months. These were relatively young people with no health issues. There's a reason why the average American overestimated their likelihood of being hospitalized from covid by 50x, and that's the combination of public health and the overly compliant, ideologically blinded media in the western world.

The obvious fearmongering and irrationality, especially from so-called "experts", was quite intense and prolific in Canada, too.

Even as early as June of 2020, the public health authority in Canada's most-populous city (fourth highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious:

"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."

https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...

By mid-2021, we started seeing news reports like the following:

"Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili...

Stuff like that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Sadly, the widespread foolishness continued throughout Canada for most of 2022.

Even now, there are still remnants of it remaining in some cases, along with the irreparable long-term harm caused by the numerous unjustifiable policies put in place then.

> The obvious fearmongering and irrationality, especially from so-called "experts", was quite intense and prolific in Canada, too.

So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling!

A more serious take: excess deaths worldwide put us at 20+ millions deaths [1].

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

Yeah, all the people saying this was a 'cold', what about all the dead? What do you mean we overreacted, or it was fake, or a conspiracy? Look at all the dead, how do you ignore that.

This is bogus data, they took the officially reported numbers -- which were insane because they reported 'covid deaths' without taking into account comorbidities --, and quadrupled them for 'reasons'.

> So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling!

You should be ashamed of yourself for this hyperbole, you people have ruined many young people's lives for nothing, the least you could do is apologize. And this habit of constantly looking for numbers that are always wrong and feeding into your taste for impending doom is the greatest setback to science and the rational spirit I have ever witnessed in my entire life.

You can clearly look at year-over-year statistics and see the increased death count. What do you think caused it? An increase in eye-sight-related car accidents? All the people complaining about 'comorbidities' don't understand how cause of death is reported. When someone has Cancer, but dies from Pneumonia, should they list Cancer or the Pneumonia? All diseases have some 'comorbidities'. But if they didn't have Covid they would be alive. So Shame on you.

Sweden has the lowest excess deaths count in the western world. They didn't lock down. That's not a coincidence.

Lockdowns increased social dysfunction, and this is the root of excess deaths. Funny how you also aren't mentioning the education disaster that the hysterical, statistically illiterate cowards who closed schools caused. Schools in EU and Asia were open. Just the North American fools closed theirs.

Btw, I know many people who blame excess deaths on the mRNA vaccines. They have the same data that you do for your theory of covid infection causing excess deaths: correlation and nothing else.

Drug overdoses are way up. Crime is up. Loneliness and depression and mental illness are at all time highs.

The vast majority of covid deaths were senior citizens. The vast majority of excess deaths happening now are working age people. And cowards who became irrational won't admit this because it's too painful for them to admit their complicity.

> Sweden has the lowest excess deaths count in the western world.

This is false and full-on misinformation. It's sad to to see it in a forum like HN.

> They didn't lock down.

This is misleading as well. The Swedish public works differently. There is a high trust in government and authorities. The govt said this is dangerous, stay at home if you can, so people did. The degree of distancing was on par with all other Western countries. Source: I live there.

It's not possible to do this in other countries because people wouldn't give a damn unless there is a fine.

I won't comment the rest, you are too deep into conspiracy theory territory.

It's not false, and it's not "full-on misinformation". You provide zero sources to refute this claim, and claim that you "live there", as if that makes a single difference with the statistics or data.

Sweden indeed has the lowest excess deaths from all cause mortality, according to the OECD statistics referenced and linked to in this article, which is one of hundred published on this topic. Note that Sweden's excess deaths were not the lowest in the height of the pandemic, but fell to the lowest in 2022.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-...

"Conspiracy theory territory" is an ad-hominem smear with zero substance behind it. I said nothing in my comment to claim any "conspiracy", and if you think that then you should reread what I wrote.

Not Swedish but a cursory read seems to show that they did ban gatherings (as small as 8+ people!). So, if Sweden is the pinnacle of Covid response then banning people from gathering (i.e. lockdowns) was correct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_government_response_to...

That the vaccine causes more deaths than the virus itself is kind of a conspiracy theory. How is that even being used as reasoning these days?

Just saying correlation isn't causation is a cop out, just because something is correlated doesn't mean it can't be reasoned about, used as a data point.

Everything you say is true, it was hard times for a lot of people, drug use, crime, suicides, all up. What is wrong is using that to justify that we should have let more people die from the disease itself.

"Man, we would be so much better off, with less drug us, less crime, less suicides, if we had just allowed more people to die. If we only had the courage to let this spread naturally and allow more people to die, and be put out of their misery, times would be better now".

Isn't Sweden already spread out? Kind of isolated already? It does seem like Sweden is held up as some special case as justification that lockdowns didn't need to happen. But aren't Swedes generally thin and healthy? Americans are fat and sick already, and probably less sanitary too, so not having lockdowns would have bigger impact.

> Sweden has the lowest excess deaths count in the western world

Is that per capita or absolute numbers? Could you provide a reference?

There were a lot of people avoiding medical treatment or diagnosis out of fear of Covid at hospitals and medical clinics, and this led to extensive delays in elective surgeries and delayed diagnosis of medical conditions such as cancer. Thus, fear of Covid resulted in numerous excess deaths. There were other factors too, like increased traffic deaths due to increased reckless driving due to emptier roads due to pandemic lockdowns.

It's also disingenuous to say that all deaths of people who had Covid were due to Covid. Many of them who caught Covid while in hospital for serious conditions would have died regardless of Covid.

This is looking at total excess deaths. Those numbers are reliable, esp in middle to high income countries, because you're looking at the total deaths.

See https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... for example.

Yo Triggered. Maybe spring 2021.

Guess part of problem with any issue these days, half of what you say is true, the other half starts to sound like 'crazy old guy screaming at the wind'.

Yes, there was some group hysteria, no there wasn't a group intent on 'scaring' the population to 'gain control'.

Yes, requiring a mask out on a nature trail is little nutz, but also there were some going the other way 'I can cough on your grandpa if I want, this is a free country'.

Maybe a problem less controversial was the absence of trusted public health figures making concerted efforts to calm fears. And those that did try were belittled, minimized and castigated. They were the ones labeled as dangerous.

Which sometimes drove them to perceive and describe a conspiracy of pro-fear institutions and actors, undermining their believability further than just the smearing of their status.

I remember it differently. The medical community was crying out that we needed to take action, and the administration downplayed it and delayed. It was opposite, those that spoke up to do something were squashed in favor of those saying 'its just a cold, suck it up'. The government didn't do anything until private companies started realizing something had to be done, namely the NBA. Nothing was moving until the NBA cancelled the season, then suddenly it was taken more seriously.

Exactly. The reason the medical professionals weren't calming people down was because the general consensus was that we should have been panicking more. I was raised by a doctor and all I can remember is them being so tired. No one was following the recommendations, people were dying, and they were at an increased risk.

No doctor was going to come on, lie, and tell people to do less. We barely did enough as was

I didn't say "gain control". You said that and put it in quotes.

Public health leaders, such as Debbie Birx, believed that the ends justified the means, and knowingly obfuscated the risk stratification by age in a cynical effort to get younger people to comply with lockdowns out of self preservation.

She wrote about this in her book, and also wrote that she and her colleagues KNEW that "2 weeks to flatten the curve" was a white lie, because otherwise the public would never have agreed to lockdowns in the first place.

Isn't that the point? If we let everyone catch it 'naturally', the young, then it would be impossible to isolate the groups at risk. Everyone seems to decry the lockdown, but if it was allowed to spread naturally, to all the young and healthy, then how would you prevent all the old teachers from getting it? Partial isolation in our world is impossible. I think you are cherry picking from her a little, at the time people were not listening at all, so being extra scary, and end-justifying to save people probably did occur to some as ok. But her saying there was a 'white lie' isn't a gatcha, there was a conspiracy, it doesn't mean suddenly the entire endeavor was wrong, we should do nothing, no lockdowns, let it spread.

I know of people who still won't go to church because of all of the above and are, for all intents and purposes, still deathly afraid to leave their homes. Regardless of what some might say in argument against your point(s), I absolutely do think that part of the public health emergency was the abject panic that ensued following COVID.

I stopped exercising caution earlier on in the pandemic, because in my estimation my relatively good health, age, and literature that was available (D3 being an important predictor of outcomes) meant that I was unlikely to have a poor outcome. I did eventually get COVID in Dec 2021, but aside from a total loss of smell for 12 days and a dry cough it was little more than an annoyance. I isolated, as appropriate, for a week or so (never had a fever) and went about my business. Yet, nearly two months later, I remembered telling someone that I had had COVID, they recoiled and backed away as if I were still infectious. Fear is a strong emotion.

Part of it is that the general public doesn't understand viruses. We can't see them. That's a problem, because it's an unseen enemy with (at the time) unknown outcomes—especially with rapidly changing information. I don't think the media helped either, because they relish in bad news.

My mother was very nearly hospitalized last year, though. Not from COVID but from RSV. I suspect over-sanitization reduced our baseline immunity to your typical run-of-the-mill pathogens, but I'm neither a doctor nor a biologist so that's little more than a guess. I have some friends who are nurses who suggested the theory, and they may be right.

Both you and I had similar experiences.

My wife was hospitalized for unknown bacterial infection what the doctors assumed was caused by masks.

I contracted covid in February 2021, before my age group was eligible for vaccine. Like you I had recognized relatively early on that my level of physical fitness and nutrition likely made it low risk for me. Like you I had minimal symptoms except for a total loss of sense of smell. And also like you I encountered a completely irrational response when I would tell people months later I caught it. This included people who should have been educated enough to know better.

The really fun part was then having people pretend like the fact I had caught covid and recovered from it didn't translate into immunity. This despite the fact that only months earlier they had been asking people who had recover from covid to come in and donate plasma to help treat vulnerable patients. And also despite the fact that there had already been studies including millions of data points from Israel and Qatar that showed natural immunity to be robust.

Like most things with covid, the null hypothesis was inverted. Instead of assuming that like the vast majority of viruses, natural immunity was a thing, they inverted it to assuming that natural immunity was not a thing until proven otherwise.

Living in Boulder, one of my favorite things was noticing how the same exact people who refuse to eat genetically modified vegetables for produce of any kind elevated a genetic products efficacy above the organic immunity provided by the human body fighting off the actual virus.

No matter your position on natural immunity from covid, I think we can all agree that a person refusing to eat genetically modified produce having this opinion is irrational and inconsistent.

I think I eventually concluded that the vast majority of the public are mathematically and statistically illiterate, and therefore are incapable of understanding science despite claiming that they "follow the science". In case anyone thinks I'm only picking on one side, I also have a half-brother who is obese and in his fifties who refused to get the vaccine when he obviously should have. He ended up catching the virus and being bedridden for over a week at his house, and then hid this from the family until his wife told us.

There is a lot of opinions now, and you seem to be conflating a lot of groups of people ad-hoc just as they are of you. It is true that you can re-catch Covid, so the people claiming Natural immunity as some cure-all for the situation are wrong. What if we didn't lock down, and let it spread naturally, then the entire population like your brother would be sick at the same time, thus overwhelming the system and more people dying.

> Like most things with covid, the null hypothesis was inverted. Instead of assuming that like the vast majority of viruses, natural immunity was a thing, they inverted it to assuming that natural immunity was not a thing until proven otherwise.

This is not "inverting the null hypothesis", it's the precautionary principle. The danger is unknown, there were indications that the virus was spreading rapidly and ICUs in certain pockets of the world filled up quickly early on, so it's better to be too careful than not careful enough.

Let's just look back at 1918. 17-50 million dead who'd have loved to have had the option for a more cautious handling of the situation. I'm glad we didn't have to repeat that, even though some of the measures definitely went to far, especially in hindsight.

> Living in Boulder, one of my favorite things was noticing how the same exact people who refuse to eat genetically modified vegetables for produce of any kind elevated a genetic products efficacy above the organic immunity provided by the human body fighting off the actual virus.

What does this have to do with living in Boulder?

Living in a Nordic country, one of my favourite things was noticing how the exact same people that have no problem with GMO food were talking about WHO and Bill Gates running gene experiments on the world populace with mRNA vaccines.

> No matter your position on natural immunity from covid, I think we can all agree that a person refusing to eat genetically modified produce having this opinion is irrational and inconsistent.

Just because you don't agree with their reasons or don't know them does not make their behavior irrational or inconsistent. One could argue that a single shot (or 2-3) with a well-understood mechanism vaccine against a pandemic virus is worth the risk while daily nutrients coming from GMO plants are not worth that risk for personal health and the environment impacted by it. I don't share most of that view, but I don't consider anybody holding it to be irrational. So, no, we can't all agree on that.

> I think I eventually concluded that the vast majority of the public are mathematically and statistically illiterate,

Math education levels in the world, especially in North America, leave a lot to be desired, I agree with that. But let's not call everybody illiterate who is of differing opinion. Especially as somebody who accuses others of ad hominem and may themselves need a refresher for concepts like "null hypothesis".

To be fair, not going to church was about the most impactful thing somebody could to if going to church was a normal activity. And this is probably still saving those people some cases of flu and influenza.

This has to be weighted against the benefit, but in a time of free-spread and lots of people dying, closing churches was a very good policy.

In hindsight, much more important than closing schools.

> I suspect over-sanitization reduced our baseline immunity to your typical run-of-the-mill pathogens

This is an old wives’ tale, we’re swimming in pathogens at any moment of our lives. Our immune system is always working.

> we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020

No we didn’t and it obviously can. What we found out is that it spreads very efficiently through aerosols, thereby making contact-based infection nearly irrelevant for public health.

> There is a strong "what were they thinking" behind this because we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020.

Is this a true statement? If so, do you have any sources to back up your "spring 2020" claim? Heck, I didn't even think this was a true statement now, that is my understanding was that airborne transmission was the primary route, but transmission by fomites was still possible, e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...

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