the US Needs a 9/11 Commission for Covid | Hacker News Reader

the US Needs a 9/11 Commission for Covid

bloomberg.com

19 pointsmakaimc12 comments

I can't imagine it doing any good. It will be accused of partisanship, no matter how non-partisan the construction of the panel.

And they'll probably be right, given that somebody has to put the panel together, and they'll end up nudging it one way or the other. In all likelihood they'll end up with one member representing a specific view, in the name of fairness, and they'll disagree wildly with the final report. The news will consist of discussions between that guy and one other person, making it look like it's an equal-and-opposite argument.

I'm not saying that guy is wrong, or that he's right. I'm saying that I cannot imagine a circumstance in which the result settles anything.

Biggest issue in my eyes was authorities denying that covid was airborne until it was scientifically verified. It should have been treated as such in the beginning until proven otherwise, it's better to be safe than sorry and it should have been obvious by how fast the virus spread that it was not via contact.

Absolutely yes.

the world in general (and the US in particular) needs to accept that the pandemic could have been over in months if not weeks if people hadn't taken a softball "man v nature" project and immediately turned it into a "man v man" storyline about themselves.

https://xkcd.com/2287/

> We're not gonna make it, are we? People, I mean. —JC

Remember the fuss over Ventilators. People saying "don't put people with weak pulmonary capillaries on these machines" were "trying to kill everyone" then just ignored. That pattern kept repeating with anyone attempting to point out risks and problems: "we're all in this together, pull your oar" into disaster.

> Remember the fuss over Ventilators.

I do. Although they are written with a lower case letter. Just "ventilators".

> People saying "don't put people with weak pulmonary capillaries on these machines" were "trying to kill everyone" then just ignored.

We have people who specialises in respiratory support. Figuring when to put someone on a ventilator, and what type of ventilation they require and for how long are complex questions. There are many many dangers involved which the doctors working with these procedures are very well aware of. These decisions are best made by the patient/patient's legal healthcare proxy in consultation with the healthcare team. Everyone else can be and should be ignored quite honestly.

>We have people who specialises in respiratory support. Figuring when to put someone on a ventilator, and what type of ventilation they require and for how long are complex questions. There are many many dangers involved which the doctors working with these procedures are very well aware of. These decisions are best made by the patient/patient's legal healthcare proxy in consultation with the healthcare team.

What kind of "the experts always know what they're doing" pablum is this? h2odragon's point is that those specialists were completely wrong.

>Everyone else can be and should be ignored quite honestly.

This article from April 2020 <https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...> was completely vindicated in retrospect.

> What kind of "the experts always know what they're doing" pablum is this?

Didn't write anything like that.

> This article from April 2020 <https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...> was completely vindicated in retrospect.

"some critical care physicians" those are the experts I'm talking about.

"Sohan Japa, an internal medicine physician at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital" That's an expert I'm talking about.

Remember when medicine was unequipped to deal with COVID because it presented as-yet unforeseen challenges in treatment? It was a crazy time, I remember it well. It took months, but practices and procedures caught up. It wasn’t perfect, and I hope that we’ve learned enough that next time we do better. But medical professionals gave every ounce of their beings and sacrificed their safety, and often their lives, to provide medical care for a novel disease. While I’m sure you sat on your ass remote working from home.

Maybe something more credible than the 9/11 Commission.

This should remain the only comment except for a non-paywalled archived source.

https://archive.ph/xg9V3

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