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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Contagion got things pretty much spot-on. Conspiracy theorists with fake cures, political officials who fight mitigation measures, contact tracing, panic buying, at-home substitutes for school events, fairly rapid vaccine development and the initial scarcity of it.

The major difference was the mortality rate; the movie's virus killed something like 25%. One of the odd difficulties with COVID is it's deadly enough (especially pre-vaccine) to make a serious pile of excess deaths on a population-level scale, but low enough people can just get used to it.

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The inaccurate part of the movie is that all that stuff worked. In real life, what "ended" the pandemic was a combination of mother nature and the human willingness to accept a lost cause and move on.

Are you deliberately ignoring vaccination? I genuinely can't tell if I'm being trolled into a conspiracy argument or not. But just in case:

The vaccines turned an extremely dangerous pandemic into a tolerable-if-still-worrisome endemic disease. This lancet paper represents a pretty good consensus belief that vaccines saved 14M lives. Our "willingness to accept a lost cause" was informed heavily by the justfied belief that it wouldn't kill us.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Basically, yeah. "All that stuff worked".

>This lancet paper represents a pretty good consensus belief

The paper represents an effort to support a particular hypothesis using curve-fitting. The Bible represents a "pretty good consensus belief".

> The vaccines turned an extremely dangerous pandemic into a tolerable-if-still-worrisome endemic disease.

Effective vaccinations were pretty much limited to the first world countries. Third world countries either did not have access to vaccines or used subpar ones like russia's sputnik. I would like to see a scientific study comparing the duration of pandemic in vaccinated vs non-vaccinated countries. It would be apples to oranges comparison but there are be some interesting insights to learn.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/05/04/9925440...

It says that most Haitians are young (see the population pyramid for example to get an idea how young) and were not affected much by the virus and they don't care (about their old) that much because they have their own difficulty to stay alive and not starving.

But it for sure affected them https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CDRT.IN?location...

And an effective vaccine, as far as death and severe illness is concerned.

https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/new-study-shows-fewer-p...

> The findings, based on data across 2,558 counties in 48 US states, show that counties with high vaccine coverage had a more than 80% reduction in death rates compared with largely unvaccinated counties.

We're going to need to determine the cause of the unexplained spike in recent all-cause mortality before we can have any sort of meaningful conversation about the risk/benefit analysis of the covid vaccination program.

What's even more alarming is that this increases in all-cause deaths were present in the vaccine clinical study data. The vaccine group had fewer covid deaths but had significantly more overall deaths that the non vaccine control group.

Citations needed, this is sounding like some 5g microchip conspiracy nonsense.

https://aaronsiri.substack.com/p/pfizers-clinical-trial-had-...

One would expect more deaths in the placebo group from all the people who died of covid. Which makes the data even more striking.

Well I poked around, I’m not sure exactly what you’re seeing. One would expect more covid deaths in the placebo, and that is the case. Most of the deaths in both groups are indeed unrelated to Covid at all. You can see exact cause of death for all participants here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2021/07/28/202...

I suspect the number your focusing on is the 4 cardiac arrest deaths. At a glance it seems 4x higher than the one reported placebo death. But the number is 4 vs 1 for over 20k people. Why not instead focus on placebo group having 2 vs 0 myocardial infarction? The reason why not is that dying is noisy business, and things like cardiac arrest have a pretty high baseline, and this is such a small sample the variance is likely noise.

Perhaps you could present a proper statistical analysis to convince otherwise? Something similar to the methodology for determining Covid vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing Covid deaths. After all, the data is all there. I didn’t see anything resembling such an analysis in your linked source. Just the confused ramblings of someone nontechnical, clearly out of their depth in reading a fairly basic research paper.

The issue isn't the possible noise in non-covid deaths. It's this rather bold statement:

"None of these deaths were considered related to BNT162b2 by investigators"

How would they know? What investigators and what criteria? If there was a 20% increase in seemingly-unrelated deaths, would it be detected? These are the questions that Pfizer should have explained but instead we just got this one pithy sentence. Also remember, this is industry with a history of fraud and criminality. GSK was fined billions for covering up heart deaths in a diabetes treatment only a few years earlier and Pfizer is up on the list too. Our FDA needed to be our advocates and a lot of people feel let down seeing this rubber-stamped.

I don't believe that is true.

Definitely a big win, but 80% reduction means it prevented fewer than half of the vulnerable from death, when the hope had been much closer to preventing virtually all deaths. Those are not pandemic ending numbers, certainly not to those who espouse a zero COVID strategy.

> 80% reduction means it prevented fewer than half of the vulnerable from death

What are you trying to say here? That math doesn't make sense to me at all. Pretty clearly the reduction in deaths comes primarily from... those who would have been vulnerable to dying.

It was at first but we're at the point now where that's been dropped too. Here in Spain I haven't even been able to get it anymore in the last year and a half. I've had COVID twice, one time recently, and it was mild. Same with everyone else. Last week in the Netherlands there was nobody even in the ICU anymore in the whole country with it.

Even without the vaccine we would have got here but it would have taken longer and cost more lives.

And the most important thing: the Ukraine - Russia war that took over the media's short attention span.

> The inaccurate part of the movie is that all that stuff worked. In real life, what "ended" the pandemic was a combination of mother nature and the human willingness to accept a lost cause and move on.

The war in Ukraine and the market correction in Nov '21 helped to divert attention from the immense amount of coverage that COVID otherwise got. In fact, Ukraine was doing tracing and the QR code vaccination passports (per EU standards) in the Fall of '21 and it's infection rates and deaths only increased in the Winter due to low vaccination rates [0].

Then the invasion happened and no one cared and all the grifting from things like VC juicing of stocks like Zoom, Peleton, retail getting locked out and losing GME gains etc... also got swept under the rug as intrest rates were on the rise and cost of living rised with it and Putin became the reason for all of it and not the immense amount of fiscal policy repercussions of Quantitative easing, ZIRP and immense spending on all of these fake measures to contain COVID.

Putin is a bastard and a despot and deserves all the ire and hopefully a swift death for the inhumane things in this senseless war, but it also gave the West pre-text to divert the ills of society's occurring since at least 2008 an over-simplified narrative to convince the masses with the abomination of the war footage from Western outlets and get it to be the new normal.

0: https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraine-capital-tightens-lockd...

Not to mention the long term effects, such as increased risk of diabetes, heart problems and neurodegenerative conditions. Plus a bunch of other symptoms which get labeled as long covid.

These are not enough to make people afraid of catching the virus. The effects are not immediate and humans are bad at long-term risk assessment. See climate change or smoking as examples.

Contagion also compressed time quite a bit because it’s a movie meant to entertain. It couldn’t show the long months of research, development and testing that actual science requires. Still a great movie.

Fun fact: I worked in the office building where they filmed the CDC scenes (spoiler: it’s not and never was the CDCs real office), was kinda cool to walk the halls and enter the clean room they used.

It wasn’t too bad, the movie spanned 4 months from outbreak to vaccine. Pfizer’s Covid trial started 5 months after outbreak. If Covid was killing 20% like the virus in the movie, we could have matched or beaten the movie timeline.

Good point.

Although if we do have a pandemic with 20% mortality rates I feel like we would experience societal collapse in a much larger scale than in the movie. Much larger as in: we can’t finish developing a vaccine because world order is severely degraded.

Thank goodness COVID's mortality rates for nonsmokers aged 18-50 without diabetes were 2-3 orders of magnitude lower than that.

And mortality rates in children was even lower. I think that really helped cool things down. And even then, we all know how crazy things got.

Right, I think it is fascinating that basically the whole world decided to wait for the trials to finish. If death rate had been higher I'm sure some countries would have just started vaccinating and hoping for the best.

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