Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

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ChrisMarshallNY

Lower fatality rate (and longer gestation times) are things that make a disease spread farther (not necessarily faster -but we take care of that, with international travel).

The OG Ebola had almost 100% fatality rate, and a short gestation time (I think only a few days). It didn't spread too far. The one that killed a few thousand people, though, had about a 50% fatality rate, and I think its gestation period was a bit over a week (these are the products of a faulty memory, but quoting LLM output isn't considered polite, hereabouts, and, for all we know, they could hallucinate the stats, anyway). Also, a hemorrhagic fever pretty much chews up your organs, so it's likely to drive bad health outcomes, for the rest of our lives, even if we survive.

HIV/AIDS has (the meds just keep it at bay) a 100% fatality rate, but a very long gestation period.

COVID, I believe, had about a 1% rate, in the OG variant, and that brought the world to a standstill. I think Spanish Flu (another world standstill), had about 2.5%, and a relatively short gestation period, but it was also quite communicable.

> COVID, I believe, had about a 1% rate, in the OG variant, and that brought the world to a standstill.

The claims that caused lockdowns were 3-10% death rate.

The world was brought to a standstill primarily due to massive fearmongering. The earliest high rates came from three things: Conflation of "infection" and "case", rationing of tests to people doctors were already pretty sure had been exposed (suppressing the denominator and inflating the rate), and biased samples (for example the Diamond Princess cruise ship was weighted towards the most susceptible population and maxed out 1.2% a month after the lockdowns had begun).

I try to keep an open mind, and this is something that you might legitimately convince me of. However:

1. A comment on this forum is not really the place to convince people of such a bold claim. It deserves at least an article/blog post, and maybe even a short book.

2. There is a large jump between the claims [the initial fatality estimate was high] and [the world was brought to a standstill due to fearmongering]. This gap is perhaps something you could address in a longer blog post

This is exactly the kind of topic that I’d love to see gwern or slatestarcodex tackle. There might be some truth to your story, but it’s a complex topic and needs a _ton_ of discussion

I used to have an open mind about this myself, until I saw the other side of healthcare.

Even with the lockdowns, Covid nearly overwhelmed the healthcare system in America. It led to a massive nursing shortage as nurses quit. The system could not have handled more cases appearing faster.

Lockdowns were not after very very early numbers ever based on lies or fearmongering. The fatality rate we observed in the developed world was based on bad cases being able to receive prompt treatment.

Had it expanded faster it risked not only infecting a larger portion of the population pre-vaccination but also seeing more people who would have been salvageable with treatment dying innecessarily.

Pretending we could have experienced the death rate we did in our experience whilst also adopting a different strategy is farcical reasoning.

Also, in my country, more hospitalizations would be quite severe, as the hospitals are already short staffed. There were also not enough masks for everyone to mitigate it.

I think a lot of anti-lock down claims are too simplistic. There were too many unknowns, and there's little consensus about the ideal outcomes.

(I'm a bit biased: I was able to do remote work and move to my parents house, which is quite spacious and near the woods, so I could go outside a bit - so it didn't affect my finances or mental health too much)

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