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Comment by ticulatedspline | Hacker News Reader

forgot 5. Covid was exactly the right amount of deadly, 0.5-1% which made it easy to "roll the dice" on making containment harder.

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> Covid was exactly the right amount of deadly, 0.5-1%

Tough to say that's "exactly the right amount of deadly" for a pandemic when the Black Death and Spanish flu killed larger fractions of their total affected populations (in the latter case, of humans) [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemic...

Perhaps fairer to say post germ-theory pandemic. During Spanish Flu it was in its infancy. During the black death it was all about miasma.

Also, the window for spread with the ability to get on a plane and be on the other side of the world post infection, but pre symptoms is a "latter half of the 20th century" thing.

It was good practice for pandemic response. I think (blasphemy, which on its own is wild) the global reaction was too strong on an acute level, but was worth it as prepararion for a deadlier pandemic.

It was a natural reaction though. People saw the Italian hospitals overflowing and thought "oh crap! We can't let that happen here!" At least where I am they tightened and/or relaxed restrictions on a county by county level based on how full hospital beds were getting.

Which makes sense - the british called it flattening the curve. No matter how well funded your health service, it doesn't have enough beds, staff or supplies (like ventilators) for a widespread pandemic, because that would be wasteful (of public funds in a single-payer system, and of money that would otherwise be profit in a private system).

In another time it might have been good practice, but in reality I think, between the grifters pushing fear and those just too self-centered to go a few months without a haircut (yes oversimplifying and straw-manning), it actually precluded the chance that many people will ever cooperate with a pandemic response again.

Or it was too little because it still spread easily?

I'm on the border of three countries and you'd always see symptom reports go up in a region, sewage analyses go up, hospitalizations go up, and finally shortly before mortality started to show an increase (several weeks' lag from the moment of infection) they'd decide "guys, here's the statistics, we have to lock down now". Yeah great, now that everyone caught it they have to pretend being on the ball. And people still literally rioted against lockdowns. Or the masking thing, the resistance against filtering your breath... at this "too strong" level in your opinion, I don't see that the outcome was significantly different from "yolo protect yourself as much as you like but don't expect anyone else to be mindful"

The IFR for COVID was ~0.1%, about the same as measles.

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