I usually stay out of the political/topical threads on HN but this is personal to me. From my point of view few if any of us commenting here are knowledgeable enough to connect all the disparate data points we keep snatching at and synthesize them into conclusions that are likely to be correct. The people who can do that are working on it, and generally too busy at the moment to post on forums or give interviews. The misinformation and unfounded conclusions that are flying around, and especially the atmosphere of political strife and mistrust are very frustrating to them (and all of us I'm sure). Most of us here have chafed at similar situations when people who don't really understand what we do express strong opinions about how we should do it. They understand how people are being impacted, but they can't give us certainty at the moment however badly we want it.
The mortality rate in this place or that; the experience on a cruise ship, or in Sweden, or in North Dakota vs. that in New York or Italy; the percentage of people who are positive and asymptomatic vs. presymptomatic vs. symptomatic; whether this or that drug seems to have a good effect on outcomes; they absolutely don't know how all of this fits together yet. All of them, doctors, nurses, researchers, are going in every day, treating patients, participating in daily conference calls to share information on outcomes, trying different therapies. They're figuring this out and all they have asked us for is some time. All these studies and hypotheses and numbers from various places don't always reflect what's actually happening on the ground.
Someone mentioned quarantining the "vulnerable" people and letting everyone else get back to work and develop our "herd immunity." Are researchers certain we gain long term immunity? Can they precisely define "vulnerable?" My wife is clinical care coordinator on a covid unit in northern New Jersey (that's the personal part). Her first patient was 51. I bet that's younger than most of you are thinking when you think "vulnerable." It looks like he's going to make it and drop into that large "didn't die" bucket I see referred to here over and over, but to get there he spent _five weeks_ in an ICU bed on a ventilator. My wife has treated lots of elderly people. She's also treated people in their 30's and 40's. People in those age groups have died. Children have died, too. How many of each type of person will be affected by this or that containment policy? We don't know.
When this thing started my wife's hospital was running about 2:1 patients to nurses. They're now flirting with 4-6:1. They don't have proper PPE. At another hospital near us a nurse was suspended for bringing her own to work. The general opinion is that the system can't handle much additional strain, and I don't think any of us are in a position to argue the point with them. It's been a month. We can absolutely make it through a few months if we have to, while they do their work. I personally think that would be easier with strong and consistent federal leadership, but that's a separate discussion. At the very least we should be willing to heed the people we expect to save our lives if we get sick.
And that's why government action to shut down businesses, should absolutely be coupled with action to protect workers salaries. In the UK, government is paying 80% of furloughed workers pay up to a certain amount, and there is relief on property taxes etc for businesses.
In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.
Some people think the richest country in the history of the world could figure something like this out, but those people don’t seem to understand how it became the richest country to begin with. The United States was built on laissez faire exploitation and that is not going to change overnight.
This is right, except the “predator nations” are really a ”predator class”. Working American have gotten a very raw deal. We have lost industry and jobs and wages galore to globalist projects. We may be the consenters of imperialism, but we are not the beneficiaries.
Here in NZ the govt hasn't sent people $1200, nor have they given large amounts of money to businesses to stay alive while we're all locked up.
What they have done is:
- allowed companies who's income has dropped by 30% to claim $600/employee/week of salary support
- negotiated with all the banks to allow mortgage holidays
Think of it as trickle up stimulus and trickle down rent subsidies to keep people connected to companies and as many companies as possible still viable
We're getting close to having Covid beat(only 5 new cases today, all from known sources), next week we slowly start dropping out of lockdown
Correction: "here in UK the taxpayer is covering 80% of furloughed workers pay". Governments have no money, they take it from taxpayers and redistribute. Moving money from a pocket to another does not fix the problem of decreasing resources if people don't work.
You can't simply "protect the salaries", government isn't some omnipotent god who simply needs to do some hand-waving to fix things. There isn't a fountain of wealth that the government is hiding from us! You can print more money (often bad), or make businesses pay salaries while taking no revenue (also bad)
I know that this is a shocking idea, but you can, in extraordinary circumstances, use a variety of government measures, including dipping into reservers to ensure that people don't starve and that businesses aren't forced to lay off people that they will need when businesses restart.
Yes, government isn't some omnipotent god but neither is it some helpless pathetic entity that can't sort things out at a time of extraordinary crisis.
When you control the mint, it's basically the same thing. Doubly so when its the USD and the rest of the world has exactly the same problem you do, so you hardly need to worry about the depreciation vs other currencies.
(Even if you hardly needed to before just by sheer size.)
That assumption is incorrect for sovereign currencies issuers (like the US, UK, Japan). They would just issue bonds, which is not at all like you or I taking out a loan.
> The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.
Of course it doesn't. Governments all over the world aren't making decisions for the benefit of the economy right now, they're doing it to save the lives of their citizens.
>The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.
Funny you say that because it seems to be no problem when it comes to bailing out corporate investors. Of course, near-zero federal interest rates didn’t make “economic sense” either, but yet here we are.
The term "bail out" is usually understood to mean replacing funds after the owner of them lost them through bad decision making. What's happening here isn't a conventional bailout. Governments have destroyed the businesses of private investors deliberately and explicitly - reductions in the damage aren't bail outs.
The virus would have shut them down anyway if they had stayed open and their employees and customers became ill. The bad decision making here is the lack of foresight to keep cash on hand to weather a storm like this, despite making record profits in the billions. We are all told if we don’t keep 6 months of cash on hand we are financially negligent. Large companies were begging for money within two weeks of shutdowns happening, after spending so much of their cash on stock buybacks to pump up stock prices.
Bay area issued the first national stay at home order on March 13. By then demand had already dropped precipitously. If your restaurant is seeing 60% fewer bookings, are you going to keep as many wait staff? Are you going to order as much food? How is that going to impact your supplier? And their supplier?
On the flip side we have places like Smithfield food that stayed open and their workforce became infected. Smithfield alone has as many infected as the entire country of Sweden reported newly infected yesterday. These are problems of different orders of magnitutde. How does a factory stay open with 500 people infected at once?
Given how many people have mild symptoms and how age-dependent it is, it's entirely plausible that 500 infections would yield only a handful of employees to sick to work.
And yet Sweden still disproves your point. Businesses have stayed open, including restaurants and other such businesses, and yet Swedish companies are not evaporating due to their workforces being too sick to work. That's not even close to happening, is it?
Again, Sweden is not the US, they have not been hit nearly as hard. More people will die today in the US than have died total in all of Sweden. Sweden is not immune from the effects of Covid. They have imposed measures to limit the size of gatherings, have closed secondary schools and colleges, and have imposed restrictions on restaurants. Despite their looser restrictions they are still expecting to see the economy contract and have experienced record unemployment:
```
A record 36,800 people were handed their notice in March, more than 10 times the number from the same month last year.
The government has offered loans and guarantees and expects to increase expenditure by around 84 billion Swedish crowns ($8.35 billion) this year.
At the same time, the central bank has poured money into the financial system, offering 500 billion Swedish crowns in loans to companies via banks and boosting its purchases of securities by 300 billion crowns.
Most self employed people are eligible to claim up to 80% of the average of their previously declared income up to 2.5K for the last 3 years. There are some notable gaps, but the vast majority are protected.
The U.K. government is also backing loans for businesses to limp on with, interest free for the first 6 months or year (I forget the specifics).
Fortunately many states are suspending unlawful detainer and eviction actions until the crisis is over and people can get back to work. They are similarly restricting foreclosure actions for impacted landlords who would otherwise use the rental income to pay their mortgages. This is also the humane thing to do because this crisis is no fault of the renters.
> many states are suspending unlawful detainer and eviction actions until the crisis is over and people can get back to work
So how does that work? Instead of right now, they'll get evicted and become homeless as soon as things open up, because they've been piling up rent with no income in the meantime? Would you find that comforting?
If everything just starts up with rent due and evictions happening to a significant population you just have a second wave of recession and a collapse of the rental market. I’d assume most people, particularly landlords and local government would want to avoid that.
> I’d assume most people, particularly landlords and local government would want to avoid that.
This seems like a “prisoner’s dilemma” situation. It’s rational for an individual landlord to evict a delinquent tenant and seek a new one. However, if everyone does this the entire market collapses. It’s better for everyone if the landlord takes a short term haircut to preserve the market.
Since cooperation is expected to break down between individuals, the government must step in to prevent collapse.
Then they do what everyone else does. Sell the asset and cut back on expenses.
Capital owners are not a special class of citizen. If you have assets and need cash, there is a way to convert one to the other. It's called a "market". You may have heard of it.
It seems that during recessions, asset-rich/cash-poor people, nominally Capitalists, turn into overnight socialists because making cuts to the ol' lifestyle is for the little people, not them.
Why do you assume that would be the outcome? That is the cruelest, most pessimistic prediction that one could make. Come on, have a little faith in common sense and decency.
> Why do you assume that would be the outcome? That is the cruelest, most pessimistic prediction that one could make. Come on, have a little faith in common sense and decency.
Honestly, because its unlikely that most people will be able to share the burden of theses costs and we need only look at 2008 to see how a financial crisis reduced people to forced evictions (of people who even owned their homes, no less) because of delinquency.
Personally, I want to believe we could do more as individuals, as relying on the Government for solutions isn't going to work.
I'd prefer to enact a local/community based approach for this pandemic but I have serious doubts as to how it will take place or who would actually honor them when its clear so many businesses (even large corporations) are insolvent in the US. not to mention the level of wide-spread ignorance as seen with these quarantine protests taking place.
I'm starting to really wonder, especially as this can easily lead to a global depression if hasn't already, if we will have to have a debt jubilee given the severity of COVID.
I'm not saying that will be for everyone, just that it is likely to be for many people, and those people may not be able to know if they're in that category until it's too late either. Obviously some landlords will be understanding and defer/waive payments long enough that people can repay, but my common sense says that, as cruel as it might be, what I described will also happen to a lot of people. I imagine in those cases they'll get served with a pay-your-rent-or-we'll-file-for-eviction notice as soon as that's legally possible. And unless some legal barrier is placed, I expect many landlords will evict as soon as they're able so that they can get their own income and pay their own bills.
I am having trouble understanding the landlord's perspective here. Say my tenant just missed 3 months of rent because they could not work during quarantine. Now, the economy reopens and they get their job back (yes, this is an assumption). Now they are able to pay rent but, because their job is not high-paying, they are unable to pay back the 3 months of debt. I can either waive the debt or evict and find a new tenant. But I lose the debt in either case, so why would I prefer to evict and have to suffer the hassle of finding a new tenant?
That legal barrier already exists - and the proscription is very broad. Why do you think we’ll just rip the bandage off instead of gradually phasing rent and mortgage payments back in?
There has been no suggestion that this debt will be cancelled. If a family can barely make ends meet in normal times, how will they pay back several months' rent arrears? And what will happen when they don't?
Why make these temporary suspensions at all then? Surely the people who need the government to prohibit them from evicting people during a pandemic who are unable to pay rent because of that pandemic, don’t inspire the most faith.
> You and I can. Many of my friends have missed a rent or car payment, and may soon miss another. Most people cannot work from home.
Sure, and I'm very aware of my privilege in that sense. If people have the choice of getting the disease or missing rent payments that is a social failing we should all be ashamed of. I also don't mean to ignore the global perspective. The U.S. is materially wealthy enough that we could take care of people who need help as we get through this. Other nations don't necessarily have the resources.
In Canada everyone out of work gets a $2000 check almost right away and basically no questions asked. And we're definitely less wealthy than the US (even per capita). So very unclear to me why the US can't do the same
The modern economy is a human invention. We can patch it with things like stimulus payments and eviction holds instead of blindly following it off a cliff into a worse health crisis. Sure we don't have infinite control over it, but we still have a lot.
How many fractional-people are willing to kill or injure for that payment, which should (but isn't, because this is America) be bailed out by the government responsible for the quarantine?
This is the statistical morality question that we're very bad at dealing with. Here, move this trolley switch lever. There's a 1/100 chance that doing so kills somebody. No, you can't tell whether it will, or even whether it did afterwards. Here's your cheque.
> which should (but isn't, because this is America) be bailed out by the government responsible for the quarantine
This makes me wonder if there might be some kind of eminent domain case to be made: If the government orders a business closed due to no fault of the owner/management, is that sufficiently similar to seizing the property that they owe some kind of remuneration for the action?
What happens in the event of other disasters, like hurricanes where the government can step in to close things? When there is an evacuation, is the government suddenly on the hook to remunerate? Running a business comes with risks, and one of those risks is having to shut down for some amount of time, for any reason. Should businesses that are not robust to this be bailed out?
Something I've been wondering for a while is how long Facebook et al would let conspiracy stuff run wild once it came close to damaging their own interests. It's one thing to look at a forest fire from a distance and say "it's people's right to play with matches", quite another thing when it reaches your own office. Neither Facebook staff nor management are immune to the consequences of a pandemic.
There is a legitimate place for cost-benefit analysis. There isn't for "5G causes coronavirus" or "it's a myth being put about by the new world order". Those kind of memes are also a kind of virality that needs to be quarantined.
(Let's not pretend there's a censorship rubicon; Facebook will remove anything vaguely "adult" or related to copyright infringement very aggressively.)
The problem is relying on FB as the arbiter of truth. Ideas that sounded insane a few weeks back, and might have been censored for the sake of the confused masses, like the possibility the virus escaped from a bio-lab or that masks really help, are now respectable. FB, Google, Twitter, etc, will, by default, protect the status quo, the safe, consensual views, and censor anything else. This is very dangerous.
This isn't a first amendment problem. This is what an antitrust problem looks like in the information age.
Privately-run communication channels have always been arbiters of truth. Fanzines and newsletters chose what to publish. The town supermarket chose what flyers it would allow on its bulletin board. The local book store chose what books and magazines it would sell. Social clubs imposed standards on their membership. And this has always been (at least arguably) both their right and their duty.
The problem is not that Facebook does this. Unless and until they seek some form of common carrier status, they continue to retain the same curatorial rights as pretty much any other private organization that isn't a telecom. The problem is that the town bookstore is gone, the town grocery store no longer has a bulletin board, the Masonic temple and the Elks club have been converted to condos, and we have generally allowed the available media for disseminating information to consolidate into a worldwide oligarchy, with Facebook as its most powerful member. The problem is that my mom gets almost all her information about the outside world, including what's happening in her local community, from Facebook, and I honestly don't know where else she can go.
And that's a problem even if Facebook doesn't try to actively arbitrate truth, because you'd still have all the other problems: The tying of access to information to an abusive monetization policy. The tying of most opportunities for community engagement to an abusive monetization policy. The single, easy target for astroturfing and political manipulation. The way that lies and misinformation generally have to be left to spread like wildfire because you can't do anything about it without people complaining about free speech.
Yes, you have it exactly. Facebook is used as if it was a the utility for information dissemination but it is run as a publisher with editorial license to suppress and boost whatever it wants. This is a new and unholy combination that should be explicitly considered in the law.
Best comment in this whole thread. While people war over the morality of Facebook Inc. banning speech is disfavors from it's own platform, most people aren't addressing the fact that Facebook shouldn't hold such a market position in the first place.
If you're treating FB as the arbiter of truth, that's a you problem.
The internet allows a wealth of information, and you should not trust FB as the arbiter of information anymore than you should absolutely-without-question trust Washington Post, Buzzfeed News or the freaking Daily Stormer.
FB 'censoring' some ridiculously unscientific and dangerous information, like COVID19 disinformation, doesn't completely hide that. You can still find it out there, but you have to look for it.
I would agree it opens up a door. You censor one thing, you think it might be worth censoring another thing and so on. But 'slippery slope' is a logical fallacy for a reason, and this disinformation is an inherently difficult problem, we can't just look to easy answers like "don't allow censorship."
Like the physical epidemic, there will be false positives and false negatives. The idea that masks would help was never ludicrous, but it was disreccomended for bad reasons. The "virus escaped from a bio-lab" theory is still rather lacking in evidence, which may be very hard to find, but that doesn't actually affect how to treat it. The "virus is spread by 5G" is both wrong and getting masts burnt down. The "virus is a hoax" is extremely likely to get a lot of people killed.
(Does anyone have a definitive "masks will not help" statement from the WHO? Rather than a "masks should not be worn" one)
The point is that FB has a disproportionate influence over speech and it should not be trusted with that sort of power (no one should really, but least of all an unelected, unaccountable, for-profit organization).
Always remember that "the NSA is spying on everybody" was "conspiracy stuff" too. Right until it wasn't.
And regarding Corona: Sweden never introduced a quarantine, and they seem to be in good shape compared to others. Not saying I agree with that policy, because I don't. But the topic isn't as "black and white" as it appears.
Here in Germany, as of today, many of the already few restrictions where lifted as well.
Just pointing out to you and people replying that you guys have already degenerated into just the sort of data-point-cherry-picking-with-no-comprehensive-knowledge-base debate that HN User markbnj was talking about.
We don't have the data was markbnj's point. (I'd go even further and say most of the people on HN don't even know what data would be good to have, and wouldn't have the capacity to comprehend the full meaning of those datasets even if we did have them.) He's also correct when he posits the very strong likelihood that the people who do have the data and the capacity for actionable understanding thereof, don't spend their days on trivialities like posting to HN right now.
He's right, they are busy. They're doing the real work of extricating us from this situation and they need a bit of space. Adding more pressure on them right now is not necessarily going to help. In tech terms, it's like working on a giant software release with features that have never before been implemented, (coronavirus), and telling your boss, (the people), you're not sure you can hit the release date 4 weeks from now.
Then your boss decides to help you by only requiring you implement the most difficult features, and moving the release date up to friday.
> Here in Germany, as of today, many of the already few restrictions where lifted as well.
This is a misleading way to phrase (or perceive) it. Yes, most shops are open again under strict limitations. No restaurants, bars, churches, stadia, theaters, big shopping malls etc., even in the most permissive state (NRW). No gatherings even in private. At the same time, more and more German states are requiring citizens to wear masks for shopping and transportation. Travel within the country is subject to limitations. A few schools will now open to conduct final exams, but most schools and especially kindergartens will remain shut for months. With the R0 still close to 1 anything else would be madness.
Sweden has considerably more total deaths and deaths per capita than their neighbours Norway and Denmark.
Sweden is currently seeing an increase in both confirmed cases and deaths.
The only reason things aren't worse in Sweden is that they've implemented a mild form of lockdown. There's a lot of debate in Sweden about their approach, and plenty of people think they need to be on tighter lockdowns.
There is still great difference in how deaths are counted between countries. For instance, Italy mostly counted dead at hospitals. In Sweden, if someone dies, it's up to the doctor in charge to call for a post mortem test or not. There has been quite a lot testing in homes for the elderly.
What all of this means, is that it's very difficult to compare between countries. I think it will be much clearer in retrospect, but maybe not even then.
And this mild lockdown is the point - no tracking of citizens with apps, no quarantine orders, no Police and Military (Finland!!) or closed roads. People are changing their behaviour without all of that. The politicians in charge are worried that a hard lockdown will create fatigue - and they want us to be able to keep up mitigations for a long time, because the virus may be with us for a long time.
Funny, I just heard today that Oktoberfest was going to be cancelled. That's hardly a back to normal situation.
Germany is one of the few countries that has managed to do test+trace well enough to contain outbreaks. It's definitely a model to be copied .. but you have to get the testing in place first!
And yet shops up to 800sqm are open again and the shopping street in in front of me apartment (in a larger German city) is crowded.
And no, we didn't contain the outbreak. But we have 20,000 ICU beds. Unlike France, Italy or Spain, who only have about 5000 each.
While in those countries, people could not be treated for lack of capacity, here in Germany we still have about 50% free ICU beds (as of two days ago, according to the health ministry).
That's why we have low mortality, while still having a pretty large number of infected people.
There are increasing reports that ventilators are doing more harm than good, that in fact the way this virus starves the body of oxygen isn't pneumonia, but rather in the blood. It's like a reverse survivorship bias - most patients vented die.
Yeah, I asked my wife about that the other day because I read some of the same reports. They are trying many different things but for various reasons the most serious patients still end up on ventilators.
>> Sounds crazy - even if it was something in the blood, if you are oxygen starved, how can it be worse to flush your lungs with pure oxygen than not?
Absolutely not an expert and being married to a critical care nurse doesn't make me one. From what she has told me and what I have read ventilators are not about oxygen, they are about the mechanical work to move the diaphragm in and out, something the body gets too tired to do at some point after a long battle with respiratory illness. In fact the arguments against ventilators that I have read is specifically that they put pressure on the lungs without actually increasing the absorption of oxygen. But this is one of those things the actual experts are trying to figure out right now.
I have no expertise in this subject area. My layperson understanding is that ventilation is a fairly invasive procedure. There are risks involved, such as infection from improperly sterilized equipment. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can elaborate further.
I had to google the ratio of patients to nurses in various countries, because 2:1 seemed very low. In Germany it is 13:1 under normal circumstances and according to a German newspaper it is 5.3 : 1 on average in the US. So something very unusual is going on at your wives hospital or the number of ICU nurses per patient is just higher than in normal stations.
It could be that it's a small regional hospital, or it could be something else, I don't know. It could be that the statistics are measuring something different. She's been on the cardiac critical care unit (converted to negative pressure covid-19 ICU beds for the duration) for 12 years so I suspect she's at least as aware of the normal ratio as google.
This is the wrong comment for this post - you cite 'misinformation' as problem, and then go on to mislead/misinform with a misrepresentative anecdote.
1) Your anecdote is not consistent with the national concern - it's local to your area.
My father is currently in a hospital for an unrelated reason and it's almost empty -> they are 'prepared for war' and there isn't a single COVID patient in the entire area, let alone hospital. They are all empty.
The vast majority of hospitals in the US are not warzones they are quiet.
"The general opinion is that the system can't handle much additional strain, and I don't think any of us are in a position to argue the point with them. "
Yes - we are! Your local hospital is not 'the system'. We have to take this into consideration.
2) It's disingenuous to somehow imply that 'because some hospitals are busy' that this means 'all doctors think we must be locked-down, everywhere' and more importantly, that people should not be able to protest the lockdown, or that major media outlets should be suppressing this.
3) In the fact of a lot of different variables, people absolutely have the right to come to their own conclusions, and protest, and certainly to drum up support for said protests.
Edit: to be clear, I agree with the lock-downs, but we really should not be suppressing people's will to express themselves. I see a lot of doctors talking about policies without a real instinct as to how existentially destructive they are. Folks we are printing money as never before seen in history, there was a 'fire in the engines' and so we shut them off, but we are now headed straight down to the earth, very quickly. We have to be conscious of that and look very hard at other things (Korea, Sweden etc.) and be real smart about it.
>> My father is currently in a hospital for an unrelated reason and it's almost empty -> they are 'prepared for war' and there isn't a single COVID patient in the entire area, let alone hospital. They are all empty.
Which is just as anecdotal. The virus doesn't spread everywhere at once, and there are a lot of places in the country/world that aren't NYC/North Jersey yet. If they have similar population density and do a similar job of social isolation then what magic do you suggest will make the outcomes different there?
Of course it's an anecdote, that's my point - an anecdote doesn't give the national picture.
" social isolation then what magic do you suggest will make the outcomes different there?"
If you'd bother to consider outside the narrow confines of the USA you might want to consider what 'magic' the Singaporean, Hong Kong and S. Korean systems are using because they are considerably more dense and doing really well. Sweden is also dong 'kind of ok' without any lock-down.
The real issue however is the suppression of people's right to communicate and gather, even if online.
We have a situation in which the nation is forcibly locked into their homes, and large conglomerates are suppressing further their ability to communicate. This is existentially disturbing.
The most important right we have is to effectively gather and confer with one another, because the first thing authoritarian regimes want to do is stop people form 'meeting to figure out how to get rid of the regime'.
I wish the protestors would practice better social distancing, and I do think we should remain locked-down, but I absolutely support their right to voice their concerns.
In fact the government should be doing much more to mollify concerns over freedom of movement and expression etc, legislating limits to such rules, requiring oversight etc..
Recall that the outbreak started in central Europe weeks before the USA locked down. Even in the harder hit countries, there are quiet hospitals almost everywhere. Look at Switzerland - it shares a huge land border with northern Italy and has large numbers of people who move across the borders, it volunteered to take Italian patients in. Swiss hospitals are receiving financial bailouts because they're so quiet, it's on the downcurve for a long time now yet it has never implemented house arrest (just closing shops and other gathering places). Even the Italians didn't need to send Ticino patients in the end.
There's a lot of experience with this right now. There are a few cities or local hotspots where for unclear reasons the disease hits harder than the vast majority of places. But even in those harder hit places field hospitals are hardly used.
It is incredibly bad news that Facebook is attempting to interfere with the social processes of figuring out when lockdown should end right now - and yes, that includes protests. There's no evidence lawmakers have any better insight into what's going on than anyone else, and quite a bit of evidence they may have worse insight. Silicon Valley needs to butt out or see its reputation sink the journalism-like lows.
Your link doesn't say that or even lay the groundwork for that. It says the protest was organised by "a conservative group linked to Betsy DaVos [a conservative politician". There's no mention of funding anywhere.
Really, think about what you're implying here - that Americans somehow care so little about being placed under house arrest that they'd need to be paid to turn up to a protest about it? That's not the America I know.
As for "conservative group with links to conservative politicians", given the vague nature of the term "links" that's going to encompass a vast number of politically active people in the country. There's nothing surprising or sinister about people who distrust centralised state power organising protests against totalitarian actions. It's exactly what you'd expect to see.
> There's no evidence lawmakers have any better insight into what's going on than anyone else, and quite a bit of evidence they may have worse insight.
Yes, I'm sure dark money funded protestors who blocked ambulances from going to hospitals have better insight than anyone else. What a load of nonsense.
Facebook is a private platform. It can moderate how it pleases.
"Someone mentioned quarantining the "vulnerable" people and letting everyone else get back to work"
I am one of those, who think that way, as a preferred solution. Now there are of course many problems with this approach, because who is "vulnerable"?
Who decides on that. Because it also means, that those categorized as not vulnerable, would be expected to go to work etc. and those who do get quarantined should get compensated, otherwise they must go out, out of basic needs (money).
Now for some, this would mean, you can get paid vacation, if you just say, you have been a heavy smoker. Abuse of the system. So medical tests for classification of "vulnerable"? And then who compensates the relatives of the people who were classificated "non-risk" and forced to work, but did get sick and died of it?
So it is not easy. But I still think, that direction would be easier, because "We can absolutely make it through a few months if we have to, while they do their work" is only valid, for people with lots of savings. People who live from paycheck to paycheck cannot. They would need help (from government most likely) or die. And who helps all those, who spend years building up a business and have it all wasted, to protect other people? Is that fair? And there are government programs in place all around the world, but I have serious doubts, that they really compensate in a meaningful way. So the result will be most likely, the big survive and prosper (see Amazon) and the small vanishes. So killing the weak in the name of protecting the weak?
Now yes, it is usually a different thing to die economically and to die literally, but for some the result might be the same. Their live work shattered.
So this is the other side.
There is no easy solution I see, but for context: look at all the poor countries, they really have no other way, than "let it wash over them". You can't really lock people in their home for long(even though they try), if their home is a crowded metal shed in the slums with no AC, power or even running water. They will be cocked, before they starve to death. So what can they do? Live on. But it does not seem to me, that Covid-19 really takes a higher death toll, than all the other diseases are already taking. Some die, but the rest lives on.
This is harsh, but the way it is for them and somewhat working. And in any case, that also means, that the virus cannot really be wiped out globally. So is the solution really to lock the rich world in and the poor world out, until someday maybe a reliable cure or vaccine gets deployed?
Well, that seems to be the current plan and it might work, but not if the total lockdown goes on forever. Because then, some parts of the "rich" world will also turn into "poor", with no other choice than working again and take the losses.
What you're suggesting probably will happen, just not right now. As people go back to work, most high-risk people will continue to stay home (hopefully with government support). But as OP points out, we don't even have a full understanding of who's high risk. Every day we lockdown we're buying time to figure it out. We're also buying time to develop medications, manufacture equipment, study immunity, ramp up testing, and so on. It can't go on forever, but these are valuable days.
Several European nations have already started to ease lockdowns. High risk people still stay home, but a lot of people get to go back to work. If the US gets it's shit together, that can happen here too.
> We can absolutely make it through a few months if we have to
What I hear from those I talk with: at what cost? Businesses are permanently closing. People are losing jobs. One report suggested 30% unemployment as an optimistic stat and that is worse than the Great Depression. Another report was that 50% of people under 45 have lost hours, been furloughed, or been laid off. 80% of Americans don’t have $500 in case of an emergency.
A lot of people are more scared of losing their home than of dying even if mortality rates are over 10%. They hear news that mostly immunodeficient and the elderly are at risk and many feel that those populations should keep under quarantine while the rest get back to business as usual.
Your right, we should ignore statistical evidence and go with your wife's anecdotal evidence. Your also right about letting the experts run our lives. After all they know far more about how the world works than we could ever know and we should just buckle down and do the menial tasks we're good at and let the experts take care of us.
>> Your right, we should ignore statistical evidence and go with your wife's anecdotal evidence.
I didn't offer anecdotal "evidence" of anything. I told a story from a professional who is on the front lines of this fight to illustrate that the numbers of people who die don't make it clear where the pressures on the medical system come from. They come from people needing care, whether or not they die. In fact whether they eventually die probably has little impact on the overall system load. If your statistical evidence, which is really just the odd bits of studies and reports you probably don't fully understand, disagrees with practitioner experience then it's probably wrong.
From wikipedia- anecdotal evidence is evidence collected in a casual or informal manner and relying heavily or entirely on personal testimony. The third paragraph presents as if you are trying to dispute the statistical evidence that has been accumulated with anecdotal or personal testimony.
I appreciate your clarification, but no that is not what I was trying to do. My intent, as already mentioned, was to highlight that the mortality rate among various categories of people doesn't tell the whole story.
Two months ago we were being told the most important problem that needed immediate resolution was planetary climate change. We needed to rely on experts for that one too. It also didn't matter what costs the industrial world would have to pay. It needed resolution. Actually if climate change is the problem the experts claim it is, I would put that one above the current medical crisis. It effects all life on the planet, not just a certain subset of mammals. In six months the crisis du jour will be the economy. Of course the experts will be sure to tell us how we must change our lives to survive that. After that we'll have an environmental crisis because 3 to 4 billion starving humans will wreck havoc on the Eco-systems they live in.
> Her first patient was 51. I bet that's younger than most of you are thinking when you think "vulnerable." It looks like he's going to make it and drop into that large "didn't die" bucket I see referred to here over and over, but to get there he spent _five weeks_ in an ICU bed on a ventilator. My wife has treated lots of elderly people. She's also treated people in their 30's and 40's. People in those age groups have died. Children have died, too.
Anecdotal cases don't tell anything. Those people and kids could have other undiagnosed diseases or preconditions, they could lie about age, they could even have been miscategorized. All statistics shows that people at risks are 60+ , and people with another comorbidity. Just one example of study :
I think the point there is that the person clogged up an ICU bed for five weeks and will likely recover. Focussing on who will most likely die does not answer the who will overwhelm hospitals question. Increasing pressure in that sense will increase death rate even further amongst vulnerable (to dying from lack of ICU beds) populations.
Now I don't know if what is going on really makes sense or not, and I'm pretty happy to wait 6 months before I decide myself who should and shouldn't have done what - apart from the obvious stuff like the US CDC banning private companies from selling test kits has to be the stupidest crisis response I've seen in my lifetime. The reaction is going to look stupid in hindsight whatever happens, people were forced to make urgent decisions with lousy data.
All that said 'the hospitals are being overwhelmed' isn't a good reason to shut down most of the economy. If people are going to park up in their houses for months anyway there isn't much difference whether they are sick or not. I know a bunch of work-hungry lunatics who would much rather catch the disease, risk whatever may happen and get back to work and the data I've seen says it is debatable on whether that is the wrong approach for someone in their 30s or 40s. And on the flip side I don't think there has ever been an experiment like shutting everything down to see what happens. We have no idea if we are playing with fire or or a fluffy pillow for some of these decisions around shutting down industries. There is a correlation with bad economies and war breaking out. Does that happen when the economic wounds are self inflected in a crisis? We really don't know. Probably not. But things are happening very quickly and a lot of serious turbulence is hitting the system.
It is a fair observation and somewhat compelling but there needs to be a better reason than 'ICU nurses are overwhelmed with work' to strip people of their right to make their own mistakes. It is good evidence but it is not the end of the conversation.
> the US CDC banning private companies from selling test kits has to be the stupidest crisis response I've seen in my lifetime.
What happens when the kits are faulty or non-experts interpret the data? Lots of folks will think they're safe and go home to visit at-risk elders.
> All that said 'the hospitals are being overwhelmed' isn't a good reason to shut down most of the economy.
The hospitals are overwhelmed, so there will be no help for you when you need it. Any care that would have addressed accidents, infections, major medical emergencies will be under duress. People will die from preventable reasons.
> There is a correlation with bad economies and war breaking out.
This is outrageous to suggest.
> there needs to be a better reason than 'ICU nurses are overwhelmed with work' to strip people of their right to make their own mistakes.
Unfortunately when you get covid-19, you can spread it along and become part of an infection chain that leads to the deaths of others.
Do people have the right to drive under the influence?
> What happens when the kits are faulty or non-experts interpret the data? Lots of folks will think they're safe and go home to visit at-risk elders.
That is basically what the CDC did. Having one organisation in a position where a totally ordinary and probably routine failure will kill tens of thousands of people, or worse, is stupid. It isn't like government officials are the only people in the world who care about stopping a blossoming pandemic; the law shouldn't pretend otherwise.
Better to ban tests if there is something wrong with them than preemptivly screw up the response.
Incidentally, they're not always even always overwhelmed. In the UK, where we were told initially that it was not even a question of if the NHS would be overwhelmed but how overwhelmed the NHS would be, hospitals are now operating with record high levels of capacity. There are as many free beds in the NHS today as there are people in beds. The 3,000 extra bed field hospital they built (one of six) has so far seen 19 patients.
It’s not nurses have too much work and are sad because they are overworked it’s that having no capacity means more people die because they can’t get the care they need whether they are Covid patients or a family who got in a car wreck.
I guess it is easy to dismiss the message from ordinary people, since they do not express themselves as well as the professional speakers we are used to listen to. If instead of saying "I want a haircut.", they would say like Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." would they be taken more seriously?
In the movie version of "I Robot", since the three laws of robotics prioritize saving life over following humans' wishes, the AI ends up locking down every humans in their own homes for their own safety. Could facebook sensor this movie since it pictures the lockdown as an evil action?
For instance, in France, more than half of private sector employees have already been furloughed. This is unprecedented. So, who could predict what would be the consequences, including in terms of life? The food production in Southern Europe is down. Can we know for sure that their will be no starvation?
Several countries have not decided to do a stay-at-home-lockdown including Sweden, most of Germany, Japan, South Korea, 95% of China. Praising the strategy of these countries should be authorized. Several eastern and northern Europeans countries are opening up as well, even though the disease is still there.
People should be able to take a calculated risk. When people drive to their job, they consider the risk of having an accident, and the benefits of being able to reach their work place, then they take a decision.
The most accurate data about the fatality rate of covid-19 may come from the Diamond Princess cruise boat where everyone has been tested. The 60-to-80 year old infected passengers had a fatality rate of ~2%. There was no fatality among the infected much younger crew.
Now, the government should inform people with data, and let them take a decision. For now, it seems that the overwhelming majority of people in France, Italy, and Spain want the lockdown, so they should be able to get it. But people who want the opposite should be able to express their voice as well. Otherwise, the democracy cannot work.
(Sorry for the bad English, it is not my native language.)
>Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." would they be taken more seriously?
Just to point out that quote is a textbook example of historical revisionism. Benjamin Franklin wrote this to the Penn family who governed the state of the same name on behalf of the general assembly.
The Penn family wanted to make a one time payment to be excluded from any future tax obligations, and Franklin's quote here is very literal, that is to say, making a one time payment to absolve oneself from duty to the state (in this case taxes were to be used to finance the Indian and French war efforts), is immoral.
So in contrast to what you're trying to imply, Franklin made the case that long term social obligations and the ability of the assembly to govern were more important than dodging one's obligation.
Ironically enough I think this may even be transferable to the covid-19 situation. A little temporary economic boost is probably not as important as following rules to safeguard public health.
I think I have heard at least four different versions of the alleged history of the Franklin quote over the years (one of which being that it is apocryphal and he never actually said it), all from people willing to tie themselves into a knot to avoid the words having their ordinary plain meaning.
It's a rhetorical device, not a history book. A lot of other people have said the same thing over the years, but if you attribute it to them instead, the words are still the same and so is the meaning intended to be conveyed by the people using the quote now.
On top of that, the quote still can't be used for what you're using it for, because giving up the power to tax (note also that at the time the taxes had to be apportioned) is not at all the same thing as usurping the power to infringe rights held by the people.
>It's a rhetorical device, not a history book. A lot of other people have said the same thing over the years, but if you attribute it to them instead, the words are still the same and so is the meaning intended to be conveyed by the people using the quote now.
By putting the quote into the context of the founding fathers the precise meaning is to imbue it with the idea that a sort of anti-governmental stance is Ur-American, no explanation or examination necessary, slogans will suffice.
It's not a minor thing to use historical figures and turn their words on their heads, and it's done very deliberately. To pick up OPs point, if an ordinary person were to argue that shops should reopen during a pandemic because they need a haircut they would be dismissed, and they ought to be because that's a terrible argument.
> By putting the quote into the context of the founding fathers the precise meaning is to imbue it with the idea that a sort of anti-governmental stance is Ur-American
A sort of anti-governmental stance is Ur-American. They didn't fight a revolution because they were satisfied to live under the rule of a far away unaccountable government. The implication being ascribed isn't out of character.
Franklin also said things like this:
> Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.
Which isn't as pithy but was treasonously anti-government in that era.
More to the point, he said the one about liberty and temporary safety more than once, so focusing on one instance as if that context is the only one is just as misleading. Here's a different one:
> As to the other two Acts, The Massachusetts must suffer all the Hazards and Mischiefs of War, rather than admit the Alteration of their Charters and Laws by Parliament. They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
So here's Franklin arguing that they must go to war sooner than give up their liberty to Parliament in peace, i.e. context in accordance with the usage for which it's typically quoted.
Franklin was telling the government that if they
"give up essential Liberty to levee taxes for temporary safety (immediate funding)", they deserve none.
Anyway, Franklin wasn't God. He was a brilliant person and a clever rhetorician who new how to manipulate with words.
> If instead of saying "I want a haircut.", they would say like Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." would they be taken more seriously?
Most people sound more like the latter than the former. If people were saying "We have a need for haircuts etc, this is serious", they'd get a lot more consideration than some appeal to "but our freedoms". Most people sensibly realize that a lock-down in the face of a pandemic is not a regression in our fundamental rights as US citizens, but just a temporary measure to save lives.
If instead you argue that you're legitimately going to see more harm done due to closures, and you back that up sensibly, people will care a lot more. You'll probably be wrong, but people might listen and take that seriously. In fact, they very obviously already are listening to this feedback, and it's a huge part of the communications from govt officials right now - how we are balancing saving lives via lockin vs dealing with the fallout of that exact policy. They're hardly ignoring the issue!
> Could facebook sensor this movie since it pictures the lockdown as a evil action?
Sure they could take it down, it's their platform. Would they? No, probably not, that would be really silly?
> Now, the government should inform people with data, and let them take a decision.
The role of our government is not to provide data but then otherwise let people do whatever.
You say "People should be able to take a calculated risk." - how would they calculate it? Most are not capable of making an informed decision like that, and likening this situation to driving is just ridiculous (and ironic, given that car safety was heavily regulated due to huge numbers of people dying while car manufacturers were left unaccountable. The government stepped in with license requirements, manufacturing requirements, etc.).
> Most people sensibly realize that a lock-down in the face of a pandemic is not a regression in our fundamental rights as US citizens, but just a temporary measure to save lives.
The problem is that it may not be temporary due to legal creep. See: U.S. Patriot Act.
Very little about this feels like the Patriot Act. I also don't really see why the government would want to tank its economy. I mean, I can think of some really out there reasons, but I don't really feel it's worth entertaining given the far more reasonable reason for lock-in during a pandemic.
edit: When I say 'this' I mean enforced lock in, specifically.
We have governor's calling for detention of people who have comitted no crime. We have officials suspending HIPAA. The president is claiming he has total authority and isn't limited by the constitution.
That feels very much like an erosion of civil liberties to me.
I think it would be sort of a waste of time to compare 9/11 to Covid with regards to government overreach. Off the bat, the threat is of a completely different nature, we understand the threat in a completely different way, the threat is taking place within our borders and, of course, globally.
The measures are not broad, relatively. They are explicitly intended to be short term. They are being discussed out in the open.
I don't know, I could probably spend the whole night listing differences but it's so obvious I really don't think I will. Unless you're simple enough to boil both responses to "well it's a thing that a government did", idk, the similarities end super quickly.
You'll have to excuse my skepticism. My government has a pretty poor history when it comes to the interests of its people, having sent yet another generation of its children to war on the other side of the planet based on false statements...I'm jaded, I'm biased and I'm most likely ignorant-as-fuck.
Please, forgive my doubt. It's seeded in deep levels of trauma. I even bought into the whole "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" meme, thinking I was clever.
> measures are not broad
I would call trillions of dollars of stimulus injections and virtual lockdowns quite broad. However my point is more that while a panicked, fearful public is distracted with the News of the Day, governmental agencies, lobbyists and others will play. "You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste."
To be fair there are many on the 'net who are die-hard and staunchly rooted in the anti-governmental camp. I'm rational and seeking discourse to expand my knowledge and evolve a complex, multi-faceted worldview; many others are not.
I’ll jump in. I was considering joining the Army, ready to fight our enemies, and 100% for helping recover in any way we could. But I was also annoyed by security “Theater” and the “See, what did we tell you!” attitude towards racial profiling as though it would have helped prevent anything.
Nobody wants to “tank the economy”, but lots of panicky people are on HN and reddit, every day, calling for extensions of these lockdowns “because people are dying!”, even though the original pretense was quite different (“flattening the curve” doesn’t change the area under the curve). The premise of the thing is shifting, and censorship of contrary opinions is growing (as you can see from reflexive downvoting of comments here).
The people who are doing this are mostly well-off enough not to feel the direct consequences of their actions (yet), which is why they do it.
It’s the same moral hazard that leads politicians into war: gauzy moral sentiments can be very compelling when you’re paying with someone else’s lives.
Lots of panicky people are on HN and reddit, every day, calling for extensions of these lockdowns “because people are dying!”, even though the original pretense was quite different (“flattening the curve” doesn’t change the area under the curve).
How was it different? One of the main points of flattening the curve was to minimise the risk of overwhelming (particularly) health services by ensuring that pressure was spread out over time. Overwhelmed health services = people dying, and not just because of the virus.
Now you may think that argument is wrong, but if so it would be better to understand the reasoning (or if you understand it then at least respond to it, rather than misrepresenting it) before dismissing people who argue it as "panicky".
”One of the main points of flattening the curve was to minimise the risk of overwhelming (particularly) health services by ensuring that pressure was spread out over time. Overwhelmed health services = people dying”
You are illustrating the problem perfectly: the goal of this is not (and was never) to prevent ”people dying”. It was only to prevent “collapse of the healthcare system”. To the extent that we have accomplished this goal, it is a moral imperative to move on to less drastic interventions, even if continuing might save additional lives.
Any scenario where you think that shutting down for longer “saves more lives” creates a moral hazard, and shifts the goalposts from the original intent of this drastic approach.
Country dependent obviously, but it is very preliminary to think we have anywhere near accomplished it.
it is a moral imperative to move on to less drastic interventions, even if continuing might save additional lives.
I'd agree that the next steps will be phased but am not as optimistic as you on time-frame; also I'm still not clear how you adopt such an assured understanding of the situation to consider the loss of additional lives to be worth relaxing the constraints and to be dismissing the opinions of others, the point of my original response?
> Most people sensibly realize that a lock-down in the face of a pandemic is not a regression in our fundamental rights as US citizens, but just a temporary measure to save lives.
But that's not what we're talking about here. Facebook isn't going to an event and shutting it down, they're preventing people from discussing having an event.
There is also a bit of a different trouble with the government shutting down the event itself:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
Going to a public event right now is dumb. But some of the things people have a right to do are dumb and they still have a right to do them.
And this is unusually problematic when the purpose of the event is to discuss the lockdown. It's like saying you can't have a public debate on something because the thing you're debating has already been decided against you before you get a chance to make your case. How are you supposed to organize the movement against that decision then?
Maybe they have a point and the only reason we don't agree is that they haven't been able to organize into a group that can effectively convey their message.
> The role of our government is not to provide data but then otherwise let people do whatever.
They should try it sometime. Most of the evils they aim to prevent come from people not having the right information to make a good decision. Just having a strong record of making good recommendations that people can trust would cause nearly everyone to follow them, since people would learn that following them is easier and leads to better outcomes than not. Whereas if they have a record of making bad decisions then how is it better for those bad decisions to have the force of law?
> The government stepped in with license requirements, manufacturing requirements, etc.
There is some evidence that this has caused the rate of improvement of vehicle safety to slow because they basically hard-coded a lot of 1970s-era technology which is now required even if incompatible with something better, and license plates have turned out to be a mass location privacy violation as a result of ALPR.
Now compare this to the alternative where they don't mandate anything but still publish vehicle safety ratings so that customers know which vehicles do the best in crashes and making a safe car is thereby something manufacturers have to compete on to win customers.
> Most people sensibly realize that a lock-down in the face of a pandemic is not a regression in our fundamental rights as US citizens, but just a temporary measure to save lives.
This way many of the rights in the Constitution and Amendments were slowly eroded (reduced), permanently. Technically, it is a slippery slope even if it is driven by good intentions. One day there will be nothing left, because this is how lives were saved, think of the children, etc. The only thing that I can think of in this context is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
Operation Enduring Freedom, the Iraq War, the Patriot act, etc, were all based on the premise of defending our freedom, when the reality is Iraq nor Al-Qaeda posed any existential threat to it.
The reason freedoms are often infringed upon in times of crisis are because it is often pragmatic to do so. Also, most of these protestors have little to any idea how the US government works, let alone how its founding father's intended it to. Many would probably be upset at what they read.
No, they are not. Maybe someone said that, but it is quite obvious you don't go to fight in Afghanistan to protect your free speech or the right to bear arms, is it?
That someone is the entire US military. Operation Enduring Freedom.
As for the patriot act, from justice department:
> the Patriot Act has played a key part - and often the leading role - in a number of successful operations to protect innocent Americans from the deadly plans of terrorists dedicated to destroying America and our way of life.
I just learned that Facebook censors gifs from Team America World Police, so I’m not sure that it should be relied on for a conversation about anything critical.
America is strange. The idea of censorship seems to rile up more than the practicalities of it. Facebook is hugely censored, and has been for years. There's a distinct lack of gore, of child porn, or even just porn in general. There aren't torrent links to download the latest TV show or video game. And, dare I say it, it's better for it.
Really, you mean I can't post an "America, Fuck Yeah" gif, but it's not because of the language? FB usually has a rationale for something, do you know the reasoning here?
Unfortunate for me. :( I'm sincerely uncertain. I'm probably closer to the middle of the Bell-curve of smarts than the majority of this board, which is why it's the only community I try to engage with.
I don't know how to filter the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, when it comes to the online fire-hose of (what seems to be) an increasingly loud amount of ignorance, vitriol, panic-porn, condescension and misinformation.
I sincerely ask "who do we trust, and why," because I'm simply exhausted. Maybe HN has a solution that's not overly taxing on my mental energy? Do we vet every single argument, by every news outlet or institutional press release? Do we all become epidemiologists? Am I missing a fundamental life-skill?
Maybe another commentor can help placate my (certainly over-inflated) discomfort of existing in the modern info-sphere.
IMO, fall back on first principles. Trust no one and err on the side of caution. Weigh your actions as if you will be turned away at the hospital if you do get sick.
Trying to choose between one size fits all top down solutions is the path to madness. State shutdown orders are really just a crude response to an economic treadmill meant to push everyone into working. They're imperfect, as all one size fits all solutions are.
If you do need to continue to come into contact with others to take care of yourself and family, consciously accept the risk and do the prep work to minimize it rather than going full cognitive dissonance and backfitting justifications as to why it's perfectly safe. We've seen enough twitboast->obituary pairings.
If you're exhausted, take a break. Recognize that information for information's sake isn't just unhelpful, but actively harmful to your own psyche right now. Don't drink from the firehose unless you have a very good reason. Intellectual curiosity isn't a good enough reason.
Some amount of unease aso comes from the fact that we don't know much about COVID-19, and in this day and age, that's hard to live with. The amount of scientifically-prove, peer-reviewed information about Covid-19 is vanishingly small so personally until there are peer-reviewed papers upon which to act, I'm learning to be comfortable with not knowing things. Trying to divine a fatality rate when there's a dearth of rigorous studies, globally is recipe for a descent into madness. (I stop reading threads when there's yet another re-hashing of how the Diamond Princess does/doesn't apply.)
Don't blindly trust a "who", but trust that the truth will emerge. It may take some time, however.
Evolutionary pressure on the virus should be towards a "wimpy virus", not a virus that "has the power to kill a perfectly healthy young man or woman within 24 hours of showing the first signs of infection".
And yes, it is important to balance the economic damage and public health risk. And it is important to take into consideration that there is a public health risk from economic damage.
In practice, the solution is probably pretty simple. The economy should be reopened in a controlled manner, in a few months. Sport events, concerts, conferences should stay closed, until there are either: antivirals, herd immunity or vaccines.
You're talking about this as if a "calculated risk" is limited to that individual, but it's not. Someone's "calculated risk" is literally death knell for others.
In this case, the health of the society as a whole is at stake. Therefore, people need to collectively follow rules, and understand that minor inconveniences such as not being able to get a haircut will only affect them for a few weeks or months.
Or, yeah, maybe it is just like the flu, except
(1) covid-19 is more contagious,
(2) Covid-19 is much more likely to kill you if you get infected, and
(3) much of the population has immunity so seasonal flu, while almost nobody has immunity to Covid-19,so it would run roughshod over a population if people didn't social distance (unless testing/contact tracing infrastructure was in place to keep it in check).
Take a good read through this article and tell me why you want to continue comparing Covid-19 to the flu:
False equivalence. Car accidents are not transmitting at viral rates. Cars are not infecting other cars even when they are working perfectly well. Seasonal flu is not killing 2% of those infected, and even then we take necessary measures to avoid the common flu.
> You are endangering others‘ lives each time you drive. And yet you’re not inline at the DMV surrendering your license, why?
You are endangering other drivers' lives with their consent; any time they get behind the wheel, they acknowledge the risk to themselves from other drivers as well as themselves. You're also required to carry insurance to help cover the cost of screwing up and hurting or killing other people.
Please tell me how other people are consenting to your risking of their lives because you want to go get a haircut. Also please let me know which insurance company will pay out in the case that you directly and recklessly infect someone and they die.
> Seasonal sickness also isn’t new. My coworker gave me the flu and I gave it to my grandmother. Who’s at fault there?
Not sure what this has do to with anything. I'm trying to assume a charitable interpretation of what you're asking, but this just sounds like trolling.
Some of the UK/US response was supposedly based on this study [0], which predicted maybe 250,000 deaths if there was no lockdown. That's something like 140 years worth of traffic deaths for the UK, in one go. So yes, we take calculated risks all the time, but the comparison to driving isn't useful IMO.
Smoking isn't a fitting example. You can do whatever you want to yourself in your own home, but it is significantly restricted in public were it effects other people. It's obviously about calculated risk, but that is weighted very different once others are involved.
An interesting other aspect is the change to the status quo. To stick to the better example: Humans accepted that some traffic deaths will happen. But lets imagine that for unknown reason all around the country, car tyres start to just suddenly burst, steering cars into incoming traffic. I'd not be surprised if driving would be restricted until we got to the bottom of such a phenomenon. Even if the average chance of dying on a given day for the average citizen didn't increase manyfold.
Now that I've written that... kind of reminds me of a certain Boeing plane.
All the comments in response are clear then that it is a question of degree. At x deaths caused, we stop permitting this. That means the discussion is only moved to determining what that threshold x is. And so the right thing is to move past that to find what the cost-benefit analysis is.
X is the number of people who would overwhelm your local hospital system. If the cost of you getting a haircut is that it renders healthcare inaccessible for your region, such that they cannot care for people who need it (e.g. people who get in car accidents) then that cost is too high.
This is where the pyramid makes more sense than left/right. This is authoritarianism/centralization top of the pyramid, where people think they know what's best for other people and a top-down approach to "fixing stupid" is the best solution.
I personally think it's okay/normal for there to be idiots in society and trying to fix stupid by stopping them from protesting via opaque big tech companies moderation policies is a terrible way to go about it (or courts via government interference on public property, for that matter, but the constitution covers that already). I'd much rather have some stupid people protesting than have FB/outrage mobs driving what is okay to protest about.
That has little to do with being left/right leaning.
Weeding out astroturfing campaigns is also distinct from this, you can narrowly remove stuff that is atroturfed without being political about it. But just because some stuff is astroturfed shouldn't mean anything to do with it should then be shut down.
This can also be phrased as a choice between one side that is trying to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and one that is not.
I don't care if the first group does it out of ignorance, or simple disregard for human life. They are free to play Russian roulette with their own lives. They have no moral right to do so with the lives of their neighbours.
The outrage mob is free to protest all they want. Or to freely speak. I don't see how this group would differ?
I merely used stupid here to make a point, to generalize or pander even, it's hardly just 'stupid' that people try to control. That misses the point entirely.
Regardless the other commenter already noted the very important distinction. I’m not trying to control the mob or define who or what is stupid using some top down hierarchy of wrongthink (trying is the key word here, I could rant about the costs of control and false positives vs the efficacy of FB events, ignoring the large existing willing audiences they always tapped into, and Russia spending a few hundred K in a multibillion dollar election, but I’ve fought that war enough times - the philosophy of how to deal with society in general is what we’re discussing).
I'm mostly against the people who carry high powered weapons around and hope they don't accidentally kill me. It would be nice if they don't kill me by spreading easily avoidable diseases.
> Several countries have not decided to do a stay-at-home-lockdown including Sweden
The Swedish approach is based on the idea that people who have any symptoms at all are able to stay home from work.
I really doubt that that approach would work in countries like the US where workers' rights are much weaker.
And although Sweden is not in a mandatory stay-at-home lockdown pretty much anyone who is able to work from home is doing so and the streets are much emptier than usual.
> People should be able to take a calculated risk.
... with their own lives. You're talking about allowing people to risk other people's lives, and no, that's not ok.
> The most accurate data about the fatality rate of covid-19 may come from the Diamond Princess cruise boat where everyone has been tested. The 60-to-80 year old infected passengers had a fatality rate of ~2%. There was no fatality among the infected much younger crew.
You're contradicting yourself. If the Diamond Princess is perfectly representative of the world population, then no young people should die, anywhere. But that's not the case -- young people have indeed died from this -- so therefore the Diamond Princess does not give us an accurate picture at all.
> Now, the government should inform people with data, and let them take a decision. [...] But people who want the opposite should be able to express their voice as well.
Express their voice, yes, I agree with that. Make their own decision, no, not at all. The average -- even above average -- person does not know how to interpret the fractured data we have right now to the point of being able to make an informed decision. This is one of those frustrating times when we must rely on the people who live and breathe this every day to make those decisions for us. I'm not saying they don't need to explain or show their work, and I'm not saying we need to just blindly trust, but we do need to carefully consider whether we know better than people who are literally trained to know how all this works. (Hint: we don't, and can't, know better.)
In my country we don't just let people drive however they like on public roads. You have to be above a certain age, have passed a test, not be drunk or stoned, be driving a roadworthy vehicle, and follow many other rules. Your risk to other people's lives is carefully managed.
And yet it is the leading cause of premature death among accidents and thousands of times less safe than alternatives such as trains or airplanes and... surprise, surprise - staying at home!
It would kill a lot more people if the roads were a consequence-free free-for-all with no speed limits, highway enforcement, safety or licensing requirements.
> Now, the government should inform people with data, and let them take a decision.
The problem with this argument is that there isnt that much data around, and what is available is only understandable to a subset of the population as it's in scientific papers. If you let everyone decide, what would happen is most people would listen to their authority figures which would be their governor, mayor, pastor or news anchor. The problem is those people will each have their own agenda and aren't going to give an unbiased recommendation, and those people don't necessarily have the knowledge themselves to understand the data.
What you are saying is similar to saying people should have a choice of whether to smoke or not. The risks of smoking are pretty well known, and its easy to make that call. This is more like deciding whether to take a new party drug - your friends take it and everything is fine, but you've all heard about the story of that couple that died from taking it. (And that doesn't take into account that you can infect others who are more vulnerable than you)
When you go out to the streets, you're not putting just yourself in danger. You're transmitting a virus that can kill lots of innocent people, including health care workers, essential workers, senior citizens, etc.
> People should be able to take a calculated risk.
That is not at all what we're talking about here. People should not be able to take a calculated risk with the lives of others. Let me tell you why it's not like driving: the NHTSA reports 102 car fatalities a day in 2016. NYC just got under 500 COVID deaths a day. One city. 5x the fatalities. Compared to a country of 300 million people.
This is, by far, the most outrageous, insanely reckless thing I have ever read on HN. I beg you to please, stop doing this. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of lives maybe are at stake.
Important to remember what led up to that. High risk people were going about their daily activities, no one was social distancing. It’s disingenuous to imply that anyone who is anti-lockdown is talking about a complete return to pre-pandemic behavior that caused the numbers we are seeing in NYC.
> It’s disingenuous to imply that anyone who is anti-lockdown is talking about a complete return to pre-pandemic behavior that caused the numbers we are seeing in NYC.
Yeah I'm not denying there are people who are genuinely protesting the shelter orders. But what's actually happening is a concerted, right wing political campaign [1].
> Any argument that cites NYC results for restrictions on non-NYC behaviour is ignorant at best and most likely disingenuous imo.
There are outbreaks in several other cities and the recommendation is the same: either get a robust testing system in place, or shelter. Those are your options right now.
you realize when someone dies in a car accident that they may have otherwise lived another 40 or 80 years, whereas with covid they probably had two months.
The distribution of case fatalities from SARS-CoV-2 is still very much up for debate. But it sure as hell isn't as simple as 'they were about to die anyway'.
Also something that mainstream news coverage mostly ignores is that 1: about 20% of all patients regardless of age require supplementary oxygen to survive the infection and it'll be straight up the worst experience of their life. And 2: those who develop pneumonia (again no corr to age) run a pretty high risk of suffering permanent lung damage.
If you want to inflict this on yourself, go ahead. But you absolutely don't have the right to take actions that put others at risk of these outcomes. You don't even have the right to ask for a hospital bed if you end up being one of those 20% that needs oxygen if you recklessly infected yourself. That hospital bed belongs to an actual victim.
>The distribution of case fatalities from SARS-CoV-2 is still very much up for debate.
Really? It seems to follow the same pattern everywhere.
>1: about 20% of all patients regardless of age require supplementary oxygen to survive the infection and it'll be straight up the worst experience of their life.
You mean all patients in bad enough state to end up in the hospital? 20% of all patients who have contracted SARS-CoV-2?
>And 2: those who develop pneumonia (again no corr to age) run a pretty high risk of suffering permanent lung damage.
A little googling, and everything seems to corroborate that it is in fact correlated with age and given that smoking seems to be big risk factor, even if age in and of itself wouldn't be, we'd see it a lot more in older people.
Pretending like massive lockdowns aren't having a very negative effect on drug abuse, mental health, domestic violence, and increasingly looking like food production as well, would be disingenuous. Now, maybe all of those negatives are outweighed by whatever would happen if we opened up, but surely it must be okay to at least have the discussion.
This might be a bit provocative, but I'm genuinely curious. Let's assume that suicide hotlines are filled up due to mental health problems from being forced to stay inside. If someone is advocating for a lockdown, should they not have the right to call?
Regarding the smoking, there's reports and studies of smokers doing better than the general population. Whether the smoke makes their lungs more resilient to the virus or something else is up for debate
This crisis shows you who some people really are. It seems a lot of people can't care less about the life of someone they don't know. That's a good thing. I now know what to think of those people. Who to avoid.
But even better: it warms my heart to know the vast majority of people think it's okay to take an economic hit to save lives, to prevent the collapse of our healthcare systems, to buy time on our way to a vaccine. We're in this together, young and old. We don't want other people to spend the last days of their lives suffocating in their own lung fluids. Not if we can help it. Some people will kill someone for a couple of bucks and there are different limits for everyone, and there comes a point where we're no longer the majority, but right now I'm happy with what I see.
From the perspective of people who see the virus as not in fact that dangerous in the grand scheme of things, it looks like a lot of people couldn't care less about the lives of others: the people who are trapped on their own for months at home under house arrest, the people who spent their lives building a business who tomorrow will have to tell their teammates it's all over, the people who are losing everything, and that's before we get to the risks of knock-on effects like food shortages, critical equipment failures due to the manufacturers of a special widget going bust and so on.
I don't understand people who hear "the economy" and appear to think of going on holidays? Or gambling in a stock market? They don't think of a supply chain that leads to a replacement filter in their local water treatment plant. They don't think of the builders who are trying to grow a family by constructing their house. They don't think of food being harvested in the fields or internet companies linking loved ones by video chat. They think it's all "just a couple of bucks".
It's not just user spiderfarmer above - we've seen actual politicians talk like that, which is terrifying. The economy isn't optional, the economy is life support and everything else that makes life worth living.
This is just strawman after strawman. No one's saying we shouldn't do essential work like maintaining water treatment plants. No one's saying the economy is just spring breakers. In fact, they're demanding financial support from Congress to help people while the economy is shut down.
Please do more research and be more responsible. The stakes are very high.
You've missed my point. There's no working definition of "essential". The water plant depends on regular deliveries of components. The components come from factories which in turn need more components, and those components come from factories that depend for business on orders from some "non essential" industry. So they shut down to preserve cash, and that ripples through the supply chain until suddenly water pressure is falling because treatment works can't get the supplies they need.
The economy is one giant web. You say it's a strawman argument, but that would mean I was putting words in people's mouths. The problem is that this is the opposite of what's happening: people aren't talking about these kinds of problems because they seem to perceive the economy as this optional nice-to-have thing which governments can neatly and instant partition into "needed" and "frippery which shouldn't matter if anyone is sick". That's just not how economies work.
Finally, please don't engage in childish condescension like your last statement. Describing people concerned about the economy as irresponsible is exactly the kind of behaviour I am condemning. There's nothing naive or irresponsible about the people sounding the alarm right now.
There is, it's whatever your government says it is. They're consulting with experts and people on the ground to make and update those determinations.
> Water plant, etc.
Yeah there are tons of cases like this. All to be handled by your government in consultation with experts and people on the ground. When the water treatment plant needs X, they'll figure out how to get it (after figuring out if it's worth the risk).
> You say it's a strawman argument, but that would mean I was putting words in people's mouths.
No a strawman is mischaracterizing someone's position to make it radical, and thus easy to discredit. Here's what you've said about others:
> I don't understand people who hear "the economy" and appear to think of going on holidays?
> it looks like a lot of people couldn't care less about the lives of others
This is mischaracterizing someone's position to make it callous and naive, and then calling it callous and naive. No one's saying these things. You also did it again when you said "they seem to perceive the economy as this optional nice-to-have thing which governments can neatly and instant partition into "needed" and 'frippery which shouldn't matter if anyone is sick'." No one is trivializing the economic impact, in fact many (including me) are deeply worried about it. But coronavirus is worse, and we have other tools to deal with the economic fallout. The only thing we can do to fight coronavirus is to shelter until we have testing.
> Finally, please don't engage in childish condescension like your last statement.
I wasn't condescending, I was admonishing. When I said "please do more research" I meant "research what your government is doing and the dangers of breaking shelter too early." By "be more responsible" I meant don't engage in strawman after strawman to try and persuade people that breaking shelter is a good idea, because you haven't done adequate research. By "the stakes are very high" I meant lots of people might die and it doesn't seem like you know, because you haven't referenced it. Your posts have been one-sided in favor of breaking shelter.
I think you should re-read the comment I replied to originally. The part about "it looks like a lot of people couldn't care less about the lives of others" is more or less a direct quote from that where spiderfarmer said:
"It seems a lot of people can't care less about the life of someone they don't know."
and my whole point was that this can be turned around exactly - people who treat shutting down the economy as if it were a trivial, obviously good thing to do don't appear to care about the lives of others who they don't know and who will be seriously negatively affected by that. As exemplified by the comment about how "Some people will kill someone for a couple of bucks".
So that's the opposite of a straw man!
They're consulting with experts and people on the ground to make and update those determinations
Unfortunately they really aren't. The only people with expertise in command economies (which is what our economies have suddenly become) know they always result in ridiculous outcomes. The shutdowns aren't some hyper-precise expert driven brilliance: they're shambolic, chaotic and riven with extremely stupid results.
Here in Switzerland I went to the supermarket the other day. You can buy many things there, but the toy shelves were covered, with a sign saying you're not allowed to buy them. There's no health justification for that because the people are in the supermarket anyway. And for the millions of parents stuck at home with bored kids, toys are rather important. Instead this is a side-effect of the way the law is written - it bans sales of particular goods, not openings of particular types of stores. They could have phrased it differently but then of course every store would start selling vegetables so they could remain open. Regardless of how such a law is written you get nonsensical and frustrating outcomes with no health justification.
In the UK the government is supposed to be buying essential items like PPE. Instead it's flailing around in a swamp of incompetence:
- Politicians are causing diplomatic incidents by claiming orders weren't dispatched but
- Those same orders weren't actually submitted to the sellers days or even weeks after it was claimed they were
- Private companies with PPE in UK warehouses are shipping it to other European countries, because the government didn't bother to actually buy it after import
- When equipment is ordered, it's bought from dodgy suppliers who routinely ship wrong or defective items.
You can find news stories about all these events in the British press.
We're living in a world where governments can't reliably purchase gowns and masks or make an exception so toys can be sold in supermarkets, let alone evaluate the tens of millions of products and firms to decide what's essential and what's not. Even conceptualising the size of such a task is beyond them. The idea the shutdowns are coordinated by experts on the ground is a pleasant dream, but sadly not real.
Fact: if we do nothing and don't buy time to prepare, our healthcare system collapses, a lot of people die and there'll be a lot of unforeseen consequences. You can say, think and believe that that's not much of an issue, but you can't proof it.
Your argument: "the economy is important, we can't do without"
Yes it is, but the economy will rebound like it always does. It will not disappear. We need to flatten the curve, gain more insight in other consequences. We don't need to lockdown forever, but we can't immediately reopen either. Both would be stupid, we need to find a middle ground.
We assign value to human life all the time, in dollar terms or otherwise. And we most certainly assign a higher value to certain lives over others, you just do it implicitly. It’s the reason you don’t drop everything you’re doing in your life right now to go fight HIV in Africa, or aren’t organizing protests in front of the White House Lawn everyday to try to prevent the US from dropping another bomb on a Pakistani village. The personal and economic costs to do so are too great, therefore you’ve at least placed an upper bound on the value of those lives, which is something like the cost of maintaining your current lifestyle. In fact, the the true price of those lives can probably be approximated by looking at how much you’ve actually contributed in dollar terms to trying to preserve them, which is basically zero.
Are you saying that it’s immoral to at least consider the implications of a prolonged economic shutdown, or to advance a timetable for reopening that isn’t contingent on waiting 6 months for a vaccine?
Save us the sanctimony, you and everybody else is engaged in the exercise of assigning different values to different lives everyday.
Hi, let me try and defuse this a little. I'm sure we're both doing our best and these are trying times. Let's endeavor to be civil and not assume things about each other. For example, you have no idea what I did all day, so let me tell you. I work in social good, trying to close the access to justice gap. The way I justify not taking a plane to some hotspot is that I think I can "do the most good" (in the immortal words of Hillary Clinton) as a software engineer working in this field.
I'm not letting you in on this to high road you. I also bought a new phone instead of donating that money to COVID relief, for example.
Rather, my point is that we need to find sustainable ways to improve the world. We're not gonna solve genocide, famine, etc any time soon, and we shouldn't beat ourselves up for enjoying life while we work to improve it. It's the only way it will ever get done.
> Are you saying that it’s immoral to at least consider the implications of a prolonged economic shutdown, or to advance a timetable for reopening that isn’t contingent on waiting 6 months for a vaccine?
I'm confident that isn't what I said. Consider away. Please don't minimize the danger of COVID-19.
Sorry if I sound irascible, but I think my point stands. Any reopening of the economy before the entire population is vaccinated will necessarily put some lives at risk. The destruction being wrought by continued mothballing of the economy is awesome, and it may well result in the premature deaths of millions of people. Pointing this out is not minimizing the danger of covid-19, it’s putting it into context. And accusing somebody who entertains a perfectly normal line of reasoning of engaging in a “ghoulish” exercise of human life valuation is a perfect example of virtue signaling.
Yeah I'm also a "recessions kill people" person, and people I'm close to personally are struggling.
If we're gonna have a reasonable policy discussion about this, my understanding is the plan is to not evict/foreclose/repossess for the time being, and print money to bail people out. That seems within our power. Containing the spread of coronavirus without sheltering or a massive testing regime doesn't.
It doesn't solve everything, people's lives are put on hold in more ways than just financially and we need to keep looking for answers. But again I think we can figure that out.
I'm happy for those decisions to be made by educated, trained, licensed professionals according to strict guidelines and under the scrutiny of other similarly qualified people when small numbers of lives are at stake and where it has no chance of persuading anyone that it's alright to potentially let thousands and thousands of people die.
is a classic moral dilemma. a train heading for some people on track a or you can pull a lever and send divert it to track b where there is one person. if you do nothing, many die, if you pull the lever, one dies, but you killed him because he wouldn't have died otherwise. what would you do? there isnt one right answer, but our world is complex and we are always making decions that affect everyone else. it turns out different people have different intuitions about what is the 'right' thing to do. thats ok, and people who think this debate is as simple as "we must save lives from the virus at all costs, duh, #stfh" are totally ignorant of that
This isn't the trolley problem. We have tools to address the economic destruction, but we only have 1 tool to address coronavirus: shelter in place. It's not any more complicated than that.
that is false. first of all, a lack of imagination does not mean we have a single tool to fight a coronavirus. shelter in place is perhaps the single tool in your mind, not in the world. secondly, it is absolutely more complicated than that. economy vs health is a flase dichotomy. like the trolly problem one option seems obvious (save the crowd) but the implications for the other choice are, importantly, equally valid if less obvious : it means mudering a person. so maybe letting the trolly hit the crowd is the moral choice? in this case what are the effects of each choice? im not an american but dont americans pay for healthcare? so isnt a poor american worse off in terms of health outcomes? anyway even focusing on the health, here's an exercise that might get you to think deeply about it. coronavirus is a respiratory disease. it turns out that means if you're in good lung health you have much better odds of recovering. so one way to think about 'treatment' is treating lung health. many health problems are addressed this way -- holistically. where is our cure against lung cancer? its too hard to fight lung cancer qua cancer. but we are doing a fantastic job of eliminating it by eliminating smoking. you can stay inside your home and not catch any transmissable disease whatsoever. but the consequences of this are absolutely not merely economic!
while i dont follow the logic (what color is your shirt? if you need to imagine other options it means you only have the one?), if i interpret you charitably you might have thought i meant "imaginative" as in not realistic. but i simply meant there are other possibilities. the phrase "failure of imagination" has a somewhat technical definition: it means something obvious in retrospect that most people didnt think about until after a fact. like how it is obvious a plane could be hijacked. if i had to guess, id say the common conception (at least in NA) that there aren't other options to fight this virus is possibly because public knowledge of the pandemic is largely via news/entertainment media (compare for reference any other subject matter).
so it's a hard topic nobody wants to think about genuinely but isn't there truth to it? the nursigng homes that are being ravaged the most -- people are there for end of life care. by definition. they are generally under a policy of do not recussitate. thats very different than any hn readers experience (nobody here is commenting as a nursing home patient). this is not to say their lives dont matter but the context does
NO. THERE IS NOT. Less than 50% of COVID deaths are over 75 years old. That means that more than 50% are under 75. A full quarter of deaths are below 64. These are not people dying anyway. These are not people in nursing homes. These are people like you.
Those numbers are really damning for public transportation. If just one of the many diseases being spread around on the NYC subway system kills 5x as many as an entire nation of cars, it clearly isn't acceptable to operate public transportation.
It would have been fine if shelter in place had been ordered sooner. Further the first outbreak was in Westchester which is far outside the NYC subway system (there are still trains but ridership numbers are far lower).
Hyperbole much? People do take calculated risks with the lives of others - again driving is a dangerous activity, you take the lives of everyone in your car and those around you in your hands while driving. Even chefs are responsible for not giving people food poisoning. Because of our hyperconnected world, we depend on people taking risks around us constantly.
Additionally, NYC had 500 deaths because its approaching its peak - soon most people will recover and be immune to this disease, then its gone forever. But the economic costs - the careers and education opportunities lost to regular people will impact their whole lives.
Yeah, let me rephrase. COVID is the deadliest thing most people will ever have a chance of coming into contact with, you'll spread it to others before you even know you have it, thus it's almost certain you won't be the only one "taking the risk". It's not like driving, flying, takeaway, or any other inane, minimizing comparison. It is a highly infectious, stealthy, lethal pathogen. If we let everyone get it, at even .5% fatality rate, that's millions and millions of people dead just in the US alone. It kills everyone, infants, the elderly, the healthy, the comorbid, just at different rates.
Here is what you should do:
- shelter in place
- if you must go out, wear masks and gloves, stay at least six feet away from others if possible, and wash your hands thoroughly when you return
- lots of places need volunteers, please help them if you can and follow their safety protocols
- donate money to funds for responders and local business/community relief
Here's what you shouldn't do:
- flout shelter in place orders
- minimize the risk in public forums
- engage in armchair epidemiology; this isn't like having an opinion on tabs vs spaces
I'm sympathetic to (indeed terrified by) the economic destruction of this, and I know it's happening right now. Let's stay alive and keep each other alive first. We'll figure the rest out later.
When we have a plan that doesn't involve the likely death of thousands of people.
I get it's frustrating to not have a timeline and that the stakes are high. But as shitty as it's gonna sound, life's not fair.
But in terms of metric, people are actually talking about what stats to look at, mainly the reproduction rate (Cuomo refers to it as infection rate in his watch the dial slide) vs. hospital capacity. Angela Merkel went on at some length about it. But it'll take time, and to avoid new waves, we need testing, and I haven't heard anything about US plans for that, which honestly scares me.
There's been some testing. It generally shows that _way_ more people have (or had) COVID-19 than we thought, and that most of the cases are so mild that people never even knew they were sick.
NYC Hospitals find that 15% of pregnant women have COVID-19: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/04/20/new...
That particular article doesn't mention it, but other reports I've heard of said only about 1 in 8 of that 15% were symptomatic.
> most of the cases are so mild that people never even knew they were sick
These studies don't add up, and there have been numerous criticisms of them referenced elsewhere in this discussion.
Just in your post, you're suggesting that 1 in 8 of infections are asymptomatic /and/ that 1 in 2 are asymptomatic. Those are very different figures.
Anecdotally, friends and acquaintances of mine who have had the disease are reporting that contact between people is very likely to result in a symptomatic infection.
Take the UK cabinet as a "public anecdote": the UK PM got the disease (and required intensive care), the PM's fiancee had to isolate with symptoms, so did the UK health minister, and the chief medical officer who shared the PM's press conferences, and the PM's chief advisor.
I don't know how many people Boris Johnson was in close contact with, but that outcome feels consistent with the 40-50% asymptomatic cases assumed by e.g. the Imperial study. It could easily be a bit outside that range, but it doesn't feel consistent with the idea that vastly more people are asymptomatic than not.
Of course, we need good data rather than anecdotes, and hopefully we'll get them soon. My money is on less than 50% asymptomatic though.
All that the antibody studies have shown is that antibody studies grossly overestimate the number of people that have COVID-19.
If the studies are accurate, only 1/600 affected people die... Which means that every single man, woman, and child in NYC has already been infected, and that the death rate will drop to zero tomorrow. I find that rather difficult to believe.
Yeah! A major way people spread things is through their hands, so wearing gloves and taking them off before you get home helps you not bring it inside. You can then remove your mask and wash your hands.
That’s actually not true. We are talking 0.2-0.3% lethality which is still a lot but it will bellow 250k deaths even if we are back to full normal right now.
Current estimations are 60-70k deaths from it but the doubling of suicides resulting of lockdowns this year to 100k make us more likely to die from suicide than covid-19.
I think those numbers are way low. Based on demographic numbers:
Older than 85: 650k deaths
65-84: 150k
55-65: 400k
I don't think everyone will be infected, but lets say it's half. That's 600k. Let's say it's 10%. That's 120k. By any measure, the loss of life is... just breathtaking. But either way, parent was taking about letting everyone get it to build herd immunity, so that's where "everyone gets it" is coming from.
> the doubling of suicides resulting of lockdowns this year to 100k make us more likely to die from suicide than covid-19
This had been circling the internet a little, but I would caution against extrapolating an uptick in suicides into doubling by the end of the year. There are no doubt consequences to sheltering in place, domestic abuse is a concern as well for example. But this is the best we've got.
Do you have citations to back up those numbers? I've been looking for things to read that try to quantify the potential harm of shelter-in-place orders, but haven't found much that go anywhere beyond wild guesses.
Yeah! Well, not the suicides. The stuff I found was like "9 suicides in Tennessee" (which is tragic but not indicative) and a lot of coverage of Trump's lies about it. But COVID-19 I used:
Are you personally willing to be civilly and criminally liable if you injure someone by transmitting a disease to someone despite the known risk? You have to be so willing when you drive; and you can usually find an insurer to cover your civil liabilities.
If you can’t find an insurer to indemnify you if you make someone ill, that should tell you something about the level of harm you could cause someone else.
> you take the lives of everyone in your car and those around you in your hands while driving.
The key point there is that you do that with their consent. Also you are required to be insured to cover you in the case that you screw up and hurt or kill people. Please show me the insurance company that will cover you if you recklessly spread COVID-19 to someone who then dies.
I don't consent to you risking my life and the lives of people I care about just because you're getting a little cabin fever.
> you take the lives of everyone in your car and those around you in your hands while driving.
Says who? The data we have so far does not support (or refute) that. We just do not know yet.
> But the economic costs - the careers and education opportunities lost to regular people will impact their whole lives.
Yes, that's potentially true. But if you want to be persuasive, you're going to need to quantify that, with error bars and probabilities. We have pretty solid estimates as to how many people are likely to die based on various social distancing, shelter-in-place, full quarantine, etc. scenarios. Those lost lives can't be "fixed" after they're gone.
Economic harm can be lessened and even fixed. No, I do not have confidence that everyone will be made whole after this; unfortunately governments and people in general are far from perfect. But that's not an excuse to take other actions that will directly cause deaths.
We have tools to combat an economic collapse. The defense we have against COVID is to shelter in place until we get a huge testing system up and running (which we currently don't have a plan for).
> Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of lives maybe are at stake.
You are extrapolating only to spread FUD. Covid19 could kill only a few people, but very fast, which could also explain the data we have for now.
There is no evidence "that millions of lives are at stake" and the available data shows cars and tabacco have killed and will kill more people than the covid19 over 20 years
"We could all die from covid19" hypothesis was valid the first 2 weeks of December. It has been long found that only a segment of the population is at risk, and we should help them, but not stop the entire economy pretending we will all die.
Even with the lowest lethality rates 1.2 million people over 55 will die from COVID if they're all exposed. That's why we need to shelter in place until we set up adequate testing.
The "tobacco also kills us so we should let COVID kill us faster" argument makes no sense, by the way.
> The most accurate data about the fatality rate of covid-19 may come from the Diamond Princess cruise boat where everyone has been tested. The 60-to-80 year old infected passengers had a fatality rate of ~2%. There was no fatality among the infected much younger crew.
The trouble with this assertion is that we don't know if it is statistically valid. Consider the number of crew to the number of passengers on a typical cruise ship. If there were only 20 crewmembers, is that enough to form a valid conclusion of "young people don't die from this disease"?
Furthermore, were emergency services able to help every infected passenger on board? Yes, the fatality rate was 2%, but how many were infected and required treatment?
The big issue in the states is that if enough people (just 1% in some areas) require treatment, the hospital systems will be overwhelmed and people who have a treatable illness will die due to lack of available resources. So the best thing society can do is either self-isolate to prevent the spread of COVID-19, or hospitals can somehow advocate for legislation to refuse patients with COVID-19 symptoms to prevent their resources from being overwhelmed.
"Praising the strategy of these countries should be authorized."
I've heard variations on this argument made 3 of the last 5 days by the President Of the United States. In what sense is this not authorized? The most powerful person in the world is promoting variations on this idea. Also, turn on Fox News and they have been making this argument almost continuously for the last 72 hours. No one is censoring them. Indeed, if you watch that channel, you might think this argument is the mainstream view.
There is nothing wrong with the argument itself, which is why it is getting so much air time. Still, the actual gatherings that are being organized are a different issue. Until there is more transparency about who is funding the anti-quarantine movement, a certain caution would be wise, otherwise we are potentially stumbling into another fiasco like the 2016 election.
I'd buy into the argument that people should be free to make their own risk choices, if most people were in the position to make their own choice at all. Unfortunately for many, needing to go to work to pay rent is not a choice. Closing non-essential businesses is one of the few avenues of collective action available. It's horribly unequal to essential employees, but it's better than everyone simply being forced to carry on as normal, especially without PPE or new procedures.
What is shutdown and what is open certainly needs to be refined. (Simple example: there is a private park near me that is closed, in spite of it being a good place to get out of the house while distancing) But it's awfully hard to have nuanced discussion when it's drown out by obtuse ignorant nonsense.
If a country is unwilling to make reasonable accommodations for working people to vote, defending in-person protests during a global pandemic as necessary for said country's democracy is beyond parody.
I've voted in three states. In California, permanent absentee registration is simple (now, it wasn't 30 years ago), and the state mandates time off to vote. In Washington state, all voting is vote by mail. I don't remember what voting in Wisconsin was like (at the time, I did same day registration, but I think they went back and forth). In the US, voting is a state issue, for better or worse, and there are plenty of examples of states where voting is reasonable.
If these were private matters affecting only particular individuals as a consequence of their particular decisions, then yes, I would broadly be open to allowing private choices.
But it's not. Folks breaking shelter-in-place orders impose a non-trivial risk on everyone else. This is a classic externality problem and the classic answer, if a market mechanism cannot be formed, is regulation.
Since viruses don't respect cap-and-trade schemes, we are stuck with what we have and we should absolutely punish those who impose substantial risks (2% is absurdly high, are you kidding?) on the rest of us against our will.
Serious question: would you make the same argument about censoring anti-vaccination views?
Reopening the country has undeniably turned into a political issue, and one thing we know for certain about Facebook and social media in general is that they are rife with political disinformation. I don't think it's accurate to explain this activity as the speech of "ordinary people" when there seems to be just as much evidence, if not more, that most Americans are concerned about COVID-19, and that these campaigns to organize protests are barely-disguised astroturfing. See also Trump's "LIBERATE $STATE" tweets.
I think Facebook is terrible and should be destroyed, but I must admit they have a very challenging problem on their hands in distinguishing malicious, manipulative speech from ignorant speech, and ignorant speech from speech that goes against the majority opinion but is, in fact, correct. And even if they can classify content correctly most of the time, how should they deal with all those categories and all the shades of grey within them? Do you think they should turn a blind eye to political disinformation? Do you think they should enable the spread of manipulative ignorance, theft of elections, and so on?
Given that some people will disagree with everything they do, and that at the scale of billions of users they will invariably fuck up a lot of individual cases, I think banning astroturfed campaigns to get people out in the streets blocking ambulances and harassing medical personnel during a global pandemic is A-OK. The people propping these things up should be fucking ashamed of themselves, but I know they aren't capable of such things. This activity has nothing in common with good-faith speech questioning the value of these lockdowns.
Here's a radical idea: allow people that want to ignore lockdown to do so, in exchange for refusal of anything but palliative care if they get sick with Coronavirus.
It's worth noting that there is a lot of discussion in serious circles (including here on HN) about the balance between too much and not enough with respect to quarantine, lockdown, etc., both in terms of where we are now and what we should do in the near future.
I see little reason to doubt that all involved are trying to minimize general death and misery, even if they may disagree radically about how to do that.
It'd be pretty wild if (say) Google decided that Chrome would no longer display pages that were "too far" in their discussion and advocacy of the options.
>that all involved are trying to minimize general death and misery
Unless the anti-quarantine events are organized by a hostile power.
And this seems likely since they are insanely harmfully, arose suddenly and with widespread and great organization and have a lot of precedent. [1][2][3]
And especially since it's already been explicitly shown for at least some of the domains connected to the protests.[4]
I can tell you "from the field" that there are plenty of real people who really do feel the lockdowns are being overdone and doing more harm than good, yes, even accounting for the possibility of an increased infection rate. The damage being done by the lockdown is a big number, and quite concrete; the damage that would have been done if we didn't lock down is a widely variable number under any honest analysis and the minimum of that range quite likely extends below the concrete costs of the lockdown, even as the maximum dwarfs it. It's not a situation amenable to quite as easy a choice as many here seem to be implying. And those costs are bourne unevenly, which doesn't make the debate any easier. For those of who, like me, are nearly unaffected (so far), it's pretty easy to argue that the costs of the lockdown don't really matter.
It doesn't have to be one or the other, of course. It would be far from the first time that a true grassroots movement was taken over by some non-grassroots group for their own purposes.
I will point out that one of the reasons this may seem to be exploding suddenly though is that everybody is being exposed to the same conditions at the same time. Under those circumstances it should actually be expected that large social changes occur in relative lockstep at a pace that wouldn't have been possible during "normal" times. Mere speed of motion is not really a reason to be suspicious that the entire thing is being manufactured.
And note I am specifically speaking about that argument and no other. There is plenty of evidence that the sites in question are too organized to be a simultaneous grass-roots effort springing up in multiple states at once at this speed with this similarity. That is also so unsurprising as to be something you should expect in advance. I'm just suggesting that it's not a good idea to therefore conclude there isn't a significant group of people who really do feel this way; marginalizing that group of real people will if any tend to empower these fake organizations by making them the only place those people feel like they can get any respect.
Read Krebs' article, there is fairly clear evidence that there was a coordinated effort to create these groups and promote them. There was sentiments, but no grassroots movement that was co-opted, this started as astroturf and received coordinated support.
Think about the implications of a foreign power being able to spread disease and death with disinformation. Is it 'war' if a million people end up dead, even if no bullets were fired? Who are the combatants, and how, as Americans could we win that war?
There is a strong case for reopening ASAP and the pressure is becoming more real by the day. Its perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about the overreach of Government power, and even to take action against it. That said, in this time, with the scale of the infection in the US, opening too soon is an unnecessary danger to millions of people.
> The damage being done by the lockdown is a big number, and quite concrete; the damage that would have been done if we didn't lock down is a widely variable number under any honest analysis and the minimum of that range quite likely extends below the concrete costs of the lockdown
It's really interesting to see that view phrased that way, because I see it oppositely: the "damage" as you put it, is "human lives lost" in one case, and financial and economic losses in the other. The latter can certainly cause the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything but hand-wavy attempts to quantify it. While the potential death toll due to relaxing shelter-in-place and social distancing measures isn't absolutely known either, I find the estimated ranges to be both persuasive and unacceptable.
We can make people whole financially (though I admit I have little confidence that this will be accomplished all that well) after the fact, but we can't bring people back from the dead.
"and financial and economic losses in the other. The latter can certainly cause the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything but hand-wavy attempts to quantify it."
There's a few reasons for that. One is that people are very reluctant to hear than there is a finite limit to the amount of money that other people should spend to save their lives. Another is that it is highly situation-dependent, so there really isn't one solid number.
Nevertheless, yes, at scale your mental conception of "economic damage" is probably incorrect. You are probably, if you mentally examine your conceptions, basically taking all the economic damage as coming out of "discretionary income"; who cares if we all lock ourselves up for a while and as a result, people can't buy the 65" new flatscreen TV they wanted and have to stick with what they have? Were that the truth, yes, economic damage would be something we could basically wave away.
It is not the truth. The economic impact does not entirely come out of discretionary income. Connect some other pieces in, such as the HN favorite "Most households can't handle an unexpected expense of a $1000." Connect in the fact that poverty isn't just not buying flatscreens, but food insecurity, childhood stress that we've had links to studies showing the long-term negative impact of, and the general badness of poverty. Economic damage is true damage, and will in the long term kill people. Moreover, we are choosing economic damage now that will persist for months or years, still hurting people, after the coronavirus would have been gone. It also hurts the poor more than the rich; frankly the coronavirus up to this point has hardly affected me personally at all, but that doesn't mean I should underestimate how it is affecting others. At the moment I can't name anyone who has been totally, utterly "fired" to the point that they are guaranteed they have no job to come back to, I can name many names of people currently not being paid, who may or may not all be made up by government checks.
Also note I'm not making a new argument, I'm still just defending my original claim that the range of possible outcomes is so wide that there are non-trivial options where coronavirus would have hurt less than a full lockdown. (Especially if you include other options, like, "tell everyone to wear masks, even impromptu ones made of T-Shirts over your face, wash your hands, limit social gatherings and cut schools (huge germ transmitters), but otherwise let the economy go. There's a lot of reason to believe that would have worked fairly well, beyond the scope I can go into right now.) But economic damage really will hurt people.
(On the other, other hand, it has been observed that the total death rate in the US is down right now, which also factors in somehow.)
Basically, I'm saying there's plenty of other contexts where we have no problem saying that economic hardship is really, really bad. It should be the same in this context, too. Otherwise, the next time someone is talking about how bad poverty is for someone, intellectual honesty would compel you to dismiss that argument the same way you are dismissing the idea right now that economy hardship is bad. If you are unwilling to agree with the proposition that "economic hardship isn't really a big deal in the long run" in that context, you shouldn't be agreeing with it in this one either.
Given this the number of people even on hacker news who are throwing very dubious arguments around and completely ignoring the fact that these protestors are obviously either acting in bad faith or very ignorant is a bit concerning too.
The biggest one is claiming that these people are protesting because they're actually in financial trouble - all the protestors I've seen seem to be well off people complaining they want to get haircuts or go out to eat... There's also a large number of conspiracy theorists in these crowds claiming that the virus doesn't exist, or it's some kind of hoax.
We should never discount the idea that a hostile state-level power could be involved in our politics. And we pay a huge number of people in government to be paranoid about that.
That said, I doubt these protests have much effect. It's kind of like people standing on corners waving signs, or the pro-antifa vs anti-antifa stick-fests. Amusing or mildly appalling and worth a click-bait article, but does anyone really care?
If there's any real effect, I suspect it'll be just to mark that there are people suffering, people who have lost their livelihoods, can't make their rent, and just want to go back to their okay-but-not-great jobs so they can live their lives.
I’m too tired at the moment to figure out where I stand on this [issue of free speech / assembly] but I have a general question: I thought the Supreme Court has already shown that there are limits to speech, such as yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater. I guess the distinction is how directly the speech leads to harm. Would that apply in this situation where most medical experts would agree that the quarantine is necessary for saving lives? Or is the thinking that this is too far removed — like telling people they can’t protest seat-belts.
Edit: I’ll clarify by saying that (my personal opinion) is that the protests are at best ... misguided. My question is about precedent on free speech / assembly under circumstances where harm might occur or it violates something like a quarantine or shelter-in-place order. The Atlantic article linked below is fascinating because I definitely have always thought of the “fire in a crowded theater example.”
> I thought the Supreme Court has already shown that there are limits to speech
Yes correct, freedom of speech is not absolute, there are a lot of limitations in the U.S.: “libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations
The problem in this case is it can be reasonably argued that quarantine is damaging to some people, and not quarantining is damaging to other people. Even if it really is a bad idea to protest, it might be really difficult to establish clearly and legally that protesting is causing unnecessary harm, and greater harm than not protesting.
I’ve read the Wikipedia page on Freedom of Speech before, but I just noticed for the first time the interesting criteria called “Imminent lawless action”. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems possible this could apply even if harm can’t be demonstrated.
“Under the imminent lawless action test, speech is not protected by the First Amendment if the speaker intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
> libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury.”
Half of this doesn’t apply to the US.
In the same Wikipedia article:
> The opinion in Brandenburg discarded the previous test of "clear and present danger" and made the right to freedom of (political) speech's protections in the United States almost absolute.
> Brandenburg [...] made the right to freedom of (political) speech's protections in the United States almost absolute.
Ah, yeah that is a good point, since these protests are political speech. Does it matter that the protests are assembling? I could imagine the protected ability to say anything you want about politics, while reserving some rights about the ability to do anything.
Personally, I don’t think it should be illegal to protest this. It doesn’t seem like a particularly bright idea though.
This situation doesn’t have a lot of legal precedent, and it might cause some to occur right now. But since communicable disease is a threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the law and constitution weren’t exactly written with global pandemic in mind, do you think the ability to assemble should be absolute?
* Actually, would you mind listing the specific exceptions above that you believe do not apply to the US? I could be wrong, but I scrubbed through all of them and can’t find a single one that doesn’t seem to apply at least partially.
In the US, fighting words, obscenity and pornography are there explicitly; false statements of fact covers things like libel, slander, dignity and perjury; the imminent lawless action exception covers sedition and incitement; commercial speech and speech owned by others covers classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, and non-disclosure agreements; right to privacy is implicitly granted by several amendments in the constitution, and the right to be forgotten has legal precedent. I think that’s all of them. What did I miss?
Given that the gatherings themselves would be illegal due to shelter-in-place orders, planning a protest would seem to be speech that "incites a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely".
But then I guess you have to contend with the question of whether or not making gatherings illegal in the first place is constitutional, even for the purposes of curbing a public health crisis. I personally hope it is constitutional, but I'm no legal scholar.
I wouldn’t frame it that way, it’s not a question of whether gatherings are constitutional. They are, and legal, peaceful protesting is protected in this country. But there already are some kinds of gatherings that are illegal and unprotected, so it’s not some kind of slippery slope. Whether it’s legal, protected and/or constitutional always depends on what kind of gathering you’re talking about.
"Would that apply in this situation where most medical experts would agree that the quarantine is necessary for saving lives? Or is the thinking that this is too far removed — like telling people they can’t protest seat-belts."
Medical experts and scientists can provide data that helps inform people. Just because medical experts say something will "save lives" does not mean we should blindly follow that as policy. There is unfortunately a dearth of data that would allow us to make well-informed policy choices.
> Medical experts and scientists can provide data that helps inform people.
I add: when the data is clear cut. At worst, when data is noisy or little is known, you get (at least what I've seen in Italy) declarations from experts in the news that can be easily contradictory. Worse when some of the experts, because they're human, are a little more attached to their ideas.
In a way, this pandemic brought the scientific debate to light in public, in the sense that ideas are often challenged and adjusted based on discussion, and even harsh contrast. But this is a problem when communicating outside, because lay people usually regard experts as holders of truth, or at least part of it.
See the current debate on serological tests' sensitivity and specificity and the consequences on the results. I can likely understand the issues and the criticisms, but I can't expect lay people (not because any fault of them, of course) to understand them.
> Medical experts and scientists can provide data that helps inform people.
There are tons of data available. Even at a layman level, it should be pretty obvious that doing no or late lockdown ends up in situations where there are large numbers of deaths.
>it should be pretty obvious that doing no or late lockdown ends up in situations where there are large numbers of deaths.
Even this is debatable.
I have no skin in this game and no strong opinion, but let's be honest -- lots of people were expecting total disaster in Sweden since they decided not to implement lockdown, but so far their daily cases chart looks not that different from other nordic countries.
> I have no skin in this game and no strong opinion, but let's be honest -- lots of people were expecting total disaster in Sweden since they decided not to implement lockdown, but so far their daily cases chart looks not that different from other nordic countries.
>situation where most medical experts would agree that the quarantine is necessary for saving lives
The same experts (like WHO) told everyone 3 month ago that masks don't work, that no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission was found, etc.
If they made such obvious mistakes and we still have to obey their orders now, what's the point of having government at all? Let's just accept the rule by the experts and get rid of elections and stuff.
It’s not really a question of intelligence. It’s a question of is the WHO interested in health or politics. Parroting China’s “findings” was good politics. It wasn’t good for world health.
the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" quote is not a particularly good example to bring up for this topic.
see this article [0] for a longer discussion, but tl;dr: it's from an ancillary opinion (ie, not part of the actual ruling) from a case that was overturned many years ago.
While I don't endorse this state of affairs, the federal government has been putting constraints and obligations on private (especially commercial) speech for decades.
the collection of arguments being made by the protesters (as reported) mostly seem farcical and incoherent, but we should very much support their right to protest and challenge the authoritarian-prone position that we must be locked down indefinitely to beat this pandemic.
administrative directives need to convince a (super-)majority of the populace with evidence to gain trust and compliance. antagonistic pressure needs to remain so that the implied force behind those directives are removed as soon as possible (no sooner, no later).
An interesting aspect: Protesting a law should be possible without disobeying it. But the usual mass gatherings are kind of a problem in this specific situation.
Thus how to protest responsibly?
Holding a "Its just a Flu" poster while wearing a face mask might not be that ridiculous after all.
it's not clear that these protesters are being unlawful by disobeying rules implemented via emergency powers rather than legislation. while there's force of law behind emergency powers, it's not concrete who might be harmed by the protesters (other than themselves, and they're unlikely to sue each other given the nature of the protest).
with that said, yes, it's prudent to wear a mask around random strangers in close proximity while shouting (spitting) a lot, to keep from infecting each other. note that the flu is deadly too (30-60K/yr in the US), we just don't shut down the economy for it.
We tend to want to lump people into camps so we don't have to go through and see all the various sub-categories and determine if they are OK or not.
Some states are restricting fishing and hunting... That's not a team sport and if I use a lure (edit: as in I don't even have to go to the store for bait) I'm not going to affect anyone else.
Some protesters want to get haircuts.... GET OVER IT.
I feel like both sides have some valid and various levels of invalid points. In the expedience of not needing to sort the chaff, i'd side with the stay at home crowd, but there really is some shit they closed down that seems.... a little too far.
I'd like to point out that some people equate "invest in public health infrastructure" with free healthcare.
The two aren't the same. To deal with a pandemic you need a pandemic response plan for the spike to the system. This can be done in even in the US under our current system. It'd just magnify the pros/cons of our any system in place.
I'm for state run healthcare, but the argument about pandemic readiness isn't about that (imo).
I agree that they are two separate concepts. But if a community ensures that homeless people are vaccinated and not a risk to those privately insured and also wants all children vaccinated, no matter who their parents are, that is a form of healthcare. Public health requires an investment in healthcare.
Healthcare is never free. Some cultures invest in it. Some don't.
But as we've seen from spots in Europe, you also have to invest wisely. I think (as harsh as it is to say) we can learn from this and pick healthcare models that work well even under strain.
No, we've built our economy on non-essential work. That's good 99% of the time but it's definitely not essential. The government shutting down these small businesses means, it should (imo) maintain the business owners it shut down. But to call that service essential is not correct.
I'm speaking to the vanity of wanting to get your hair dyed during a pandemic, not the businesses that were shutdown. We should accept as a society that we incurred a great debt by shutting the economy down for the duration we have. And that we owe it to the businesses we shutdown, to keep them afloat.
Money to buy food is essential for the barbers. Not the haircuts. There is plenty of food and delivery machinery, thanks to the good people working on it, who deserve to paid funds they can spend later or on socially distant goods and services.
> I see little reason to doubt that all involved are trying to minimize general death and misery, even if they may disagree radically about how to do that.
It's interesting that even with the best case scenario there are entities with enough power to control behavior like that.
That fact is scary.
If they have ulterior motives.
That fact is scarier.
They don’t have the power to control behavior arbitrarily though. If they tried to shut down business last year for no reason at all, you can bet there’d be push back, protests and eventually they’d be voted out of office and laws would be changed etc.
However when there is a pandemic overwhelming hospital systems around the world, they do have the power to shut things down precisely because most people agree with that decision. Clearly right now there is a vocal minority who disagrees and has chosen to protest. And as far as I can tell they are suffering no consequences besides being ridiculed and called “stupid” by the folks who consent to staying in for the greater good. The us government only has the power to shut things down when most people agree that they should have that power.
> It's worth noting that there is a lot of discussion in serious circles (including here on HN) about the balance between too much and not enough with respect to quarantine, lockdown, etc., both in terms of where we are now and what we should do in the near future.
The problem is that the "followers" in the "Reopen All The Things(tm)" camp is ASSUMING that you get immunity once you get Covid-19.
We do not have information about this. We also do not have information about how long immunity lasts if you do get some. We also do not have data as to whether a person who has an asymptomatic case of Covid-19 can later get a case which puts him into the hospital.
Herd immunity has significant limitations if immunity burns out every 6 months.
The awful truth, I suspect, is that immunity will be for a limited duration, like the common cold. However, the people who are most likely to die from the virus will mostly die in the first round. Those who live through it will be far more likely to experience it as a rather unpleasant flu. And perhaps life will go on like that.
Pure speculation, of course.
But, we've never succeeded at a vaccination for a corona virus, and it's far from clear that we'll have one soon for this one. It could be that this will play out no matter what we do.
I think total immunity will be a for a limited span-- perhaps long enough to prevent another outbreak for a long time, perhaps only for a moderate time.
But we keep partial immunity to coronaviruses for a long time. Right now it looks like our best estimate of infection fatality rate is 0.3%, and it may very well be a lot less if the disease re-emerges in a few years because past encounters will be protective.
That is, would 229E be pretty damn bad in an immunologically naive population? I think it might.
Sweden has open schools, movie theaters, restaurants (limited people; tables further apart) and bars (can't buy beer). People are working from home when they can. High risk people and older people are told to self isolate. Their hospitals are not overwhelmed. Their people do no wear masks. They hope the infection can spread slowly and they can deal with it.
Sweden is criticized heavily, but if their strategy works, they could have very little SARS-CoV-2 in the next few months while the rest of the world constantly re-surges because the lockdown didn't really stop anything, just delayed it.
We have no idea which one will be true. Predicting the future with math has never worked for the stock market. Why did we think it would work here?
To be clear, they have closed high schools and universities, and kept open junior schools under the theory that many children would need childcare anyway (over 80% of families have two working parents). Enough parents are keeping their kids home anyway that they are sending out warnings. 50% of the workforce is now working from home, under government orders for employers to support it where possible. People who have higher than normal vulnerability can stay home even if they can't work from home and they will receive unemployment benefits. Employers can furlough employees for three months at half pay, and the government will cover the other 50%. 70% of Swedes say they have reduced social activities, cell phone data shows 90% reduction in Easter holiday congregation. I haven't seen it measured but it's plausible that the amount of in-person contact between Swedish people is lower than the UK or US.
If that's the case, then the question is not "did we really need to reduce activity that much" but "could other countries have achieved the same low social contact rates without enforcing it?"
Sweden started out well but recent numbers indicate some concern. 1,580 deaths [1] as of Apr 20. Here are some comparisons and projections. I'm just using other people's estimates (I'm no expert but IHME ([3]) is). Sweden's expected total deaths of 5,890 by IHME, looks to be about 4,000 more deaths (preventable?) than comparable countries per capita (comparing Sweden to Switzerland which has 1429 current deaths). All data as of April 20, 2020 evening time PST us, or Apr 21 6am utc.
Current deaths per million population: Sweden 156 deaths/mil, Norway 63 d/m, Finland 33d/m, Switzerland 165 d/mil; overall populations Sweden 10 mil, Finland 5.5 mil, Norway 5.x mil, Switz. 8.5 mil.
Sweden not doing well compared to Norway & Finland but it's doing better than Spain, Italy, France (446 deaths/mil, 399 d/m, 310 d/m). If you look at Sweden's daily numbers it varies a lot in a kind of repeatable way. That's apparently attributable to private labs are closed on the weekends and there's a delay in reporting (similar things in other countries); some countries report 1 day late to add up everything too.
Doubling per day time [2], [4], [5]. This is more complicated but Sweden is growing faster than comparisons. I don't have exact current numbers.
Predictions of total deaths [3]: Sweden 5,890 and Switzerland 1,584 (recall pop is 10 mil vs 8.5 mil). Notice Sweden has many more deaths per capita. Norway 280 expected deaths (5+ mil pop). Sweden will have disproportionately more deaths than Switzerland (pop adjusted Switzerland 1584-> expected 1863 per capita (1585*10/8.5). But expected deaths is 5,890, 4000 more!
[3] says 1000+ ICU beds needed and capacity 79 (!?) when actual numbers are 1000+ beds, of which about half are in use.
So I would heavily discount its conclusion that deaths in Sweden will somehow surpass Germany (!?). In any case be mindful of the confidence intervals, they are huge and the projections seem much more volatile in general than local ones.
Agree this is far from an exact science and these estimates are adjusted as information and situations change. Still the much higher deaths expected per capita is shocking. One days passing has new info, higher deaths for Sweden than Sweden (185 vs 7) and also in new positive cases (545 vs 129). It's just one day but the trend is terrible. It's far worse in the us where I live, with multiple states about to open up and kill people unnecessarily.
Right, I'm saying these expectations - and evidently some of the source data - are a bit out of sync with the ones in play on the ground.
Any model is only as good as its inputs, after all.
Daily numbers made me react as well, they say it's a post-weekend thing. Perplexing to me but then that's what rolling averages and trends are for, I suppose.
Only two of Filmstaden's cinemas are open and they are by far the biggest cinema chain in the country. So to say that movie theatres are open is pretty disingenuous.
There was never a law that forced them to close though, they took that initiative themselves after the government started recommending that large crowds should be avoided.
The same goes for all the ski resorts which are now closed.
Sweden's approach is also heavily based on the idea that people who have any symptoms are able to stay home from work. In countries where the workers' rights aren't as strong, that is much more difficult to achieve without stricter regulations.
Even assuming a high undetected multiplier, a small fraction of their population has been exposed. There's not much reason to expect it to slow down any time soon, their overall immunity isn't going to be much different than anywhere else at this point.
"people in Sweden live alone" you stating this as the cause of why Sweden is doing Ok-ish while not introducing drastic measures. All without any shred of proof.
The most plausible one I've heard was to heavily quarantine people at higher risk of dying or having severe complications from COVID-19 while having looser restrictions on people highly unlikely to suffer serious consequences. This would, theoretically, allow the virus to propagate throughout the population and a herd immunity to develop naturally.
It's relatively close to what's being done in Sweden, so I guess we'll at least end up with something of a test-case in retrospect.
You can't quarantine vulnerable people completely. If everyone gets it, every bag of groceries is going to be covered in COVID and an enormous number of quarantined people will die.
You can't tell who's going to die from it.
You can't have everyone getting sick at once. The death rate will go up tremendously if nobody can get treatment when they have treatable symptoms. This is what "flattening the curve" means.
We don't have enough protective equipment, medical supplies, hospital beds, healthcare workers, or even morgue space. The only tool left is staying inside, and so that's what we're doing now.
"Herd immunity" uses the word "herd" because we don't normally use it to describe actions taken toward human beings.
Sweden absolutely bungled their response and have 10x the number of deaths from this as compared to their neighbors who shut shit down.
Some experts in Italy have called for quarantines up to 24 months until there is a vaccine. The net effect this has done is just to scare the population, at this point.
You're using quite inflammatory language here that's distracting from your points. Calling the US a failed state, saying we're demanding workers be buried in the ground, etc.
If you want to discuss actual policy, then do so. I'm not interested in following platitudes.
It's close, but their lives are marginally more valuable. Because when someone says "oh, looks like somebody is going to have to commit suicide for the group" that person has just volunteered.
"every bag of groceries is going to be covered in COVID"
Just as a random factoid, somewhere I was just reading that someone was doing testing of surfaces in a hospital, and on average they found maybe 80% contaminated with the virus, but the floor of the pharmacy was 100% even though no patients had been in there...
"as medical staff walk around the ward, the virus can be tracked all over the floor, as indicated by the 100% rate of positivity from the floor in the pharmacy, where there were no patients. Furthermore, half of the samples from the soles of the ICU medical staff shoes tested positive"
Other objects were not as high as I recalled, but computer mice in the ICU were 75%.
>>You can't quarantine vulnerable people completely. If everyone gets it, every bag of groceries is going to be covered in COVID and an enormous number of quarantined people will die
Yes you absolutely can. The workers interacting with the quarantined subset of the population could use PPE to avoid transmitting it to them. Packaging on groceries, as well as the grocery bag, can easily be disinfected before being transferred to the quarantined individual.
1. We can't even get PPE. We won't have PPE for a long time. Not even doctors have enough.
2. We're not going to train minimum wage workers and quarantined vulnerable individuals to follow sanitary procedures to any adequate degree.
3. We don't even have enough trained medical workers to treat dying people, so no they aren't going to make the deliveries. This problem will only get worse if you go all "herd immunity" because a shitload of people will be in the hospital being triaged because they were classified as "non-vulnerable"
The only option the US has is quarantine, because it is a failed state.
If the US really doesn't have enough PPE for safe deliveries, then the health authorities can improvise, and have delivery workers leave packages at the door.
I don't see why training delivery workers to follow sanitary procedures would be infeasible either.
Whatever costs/challenges in ensuring no disease transmission from the majority to the quarantined minority pales in comparison to the challenges posed by completely collapsing the economy by requiring everyone to be quarantined.
>>a shitload of people will be in the hospital being triaged because they were classified as "non-vulnerable"
The chances of a person infected with the coronavirus ending up in critical condition or dead from COVID19 are vastly smaller if they're under 45.
Instead of testing people who already have symptoms, maybe we could use those tests to ensure sick people don't come into contact with their groceries?
Of course quarantining part of the population is hard, but I fail to see how it is harder than quarantining the whole population
We can't test people doing deliveries because we don't even have tests.
Even if we did have tests, at some point nearly everyone is going to have the virus- especially delivery workers. There will literally not be enough people to make clean deliveries.
Quarantining the population is easier for us because the majority of us have dwellings already. We do not have tests or ppe.
Should the government be obligated to offer you support for that choice? That would probably mean at minimum money to replace your work income, something like a new category of 'being high risk' a qualification for unemployment. Or should your choice be limited to self isolate and starve, or keep working?
What support? Said person will just have higher chances to die. Their choice. They're not inflicting death upon the others as accordingly to proposal there are no restrictions on younger carriers without symptoms.
I'm unsure if the person you responded to undertstood what you meant. I understood it as "if I am >60+, e.g. at risk, would i be free to not participate in the quarantine if partial quarantine were to happen"
I'd argue that no, you should not be. Because if you get it, you will most likely require care and overload hospitals, which is what the whole point of that (partial) quarantine is. Either that or you forfeit your right to healthcare, which has loads of moral issues
Well you've got no moral rights to lock person up for a year or two with totally unknown outcome. If you are so eager to save public funds you have a lots of places to start shaving. You might be amazed when you look how governments spend money. Also if locked up for extended amount of time said person is likely develop whole bunch of ailments include mental that would "overwhelm"(tm) healthcare as well unless you deny them treatment and let them wonder the streets. Likely loss of income will cause the same thing, them being kicked out from their dwellings.
I agree that you have no rights to lock someone up, but society seem to have already accepted that others have the right to tell you what to do with your life, e.g. locking down someone for suicide attempt
I was also comparing lockdown vs partial lockdown, which I feel still does more damage to more people to be total
That's the major problem with society. Many people could sell their rights in return to some mythical crap that politicians sell them often under deliberately false or mistaken pretense.
On a particular topic. This hardly qualifies as suicide attempt. Just increased risk. Maybe the same as selling alcohol to people knowing that many of them will end up driving drunk or many other similar things.
>I see little reason to doubt that all involved are trying to minimize general death and misery, even if they may disagree radically about how to do that.
Wait, are you talking about the people who want to send everyone back to work now, even though we don't even have masks for doctors yet? Are you saying they are trying to minimize death and misery? Or are we talking about completely different people here?
I don't know about the particular motives of each protester. But it's obvious that there are large numbers of people facing immediate financial ruin. And very shortly thereafter, risk of death for themselves and their loved ones.
I'm not in that situation, but I wouldn't be caught dead silencing their voices.
The answer to financial ruin is not to force everyone back into contact again, it's to give normal people their fair share of the bailout. We took something like 15,000 dollars out of everyone's future earnings for the bailout, and threw them back 1,200 of it.
With those people taken care of, the protests are reduced to landowners demanding blood for their haircuts and Fuddruckers.
I don't think the protesters are asking for people to be forced back into contact. (though admittedly, restarting will mean pressure on those who'd rather not)
And I seriously doubt any of the protesters are landowners, aside, perhaps from "owning" their houses. ("owning" == mortgages, in most cases)
>Wait, are you talking about the people who want to send everyone back to work now
This is an argument made in a bad faith. You can't send "everyone to work now", if you are not running a gulag. People who are financially secure can stay at home till 2021, nobody can force them to go to work, this is obvious.
It's a question of being able to make a personal decision between staying at home or going to work.
>People who are financially secure can stay at home till 2021, nobody can force them to go to work, this is obvious.
>It's a question of being able to make a personal decision between staying at home or going to work.
Double speak. You mean rich people can decide to quarantine until 2021, and poor people can decide between work followed by exposure and possible death, or homelessness followed by exposure and possible death.
Why is it double speak? Yes, I think that healthy 29 y.o. male with wife, kid and mortgage should have the ability to make a decision between going to work or losing his home.
To make this decision for him looks unethical to me. And why exactly poor? It might be solidly middle class person.
EDIT: I'm pushing forties, can sustain myself for 1.5 years without working maintaining the same lifestyle, and I would go to work if I could. I'm damn tired working from home.
Interesting. I work from home 20 years already and have no desire to sit in a cubicle or waste my time in downtown traffic. I have my own company and products but also develop products for other companies on order and my first ever requirement is that unless there is some super duper meeting I only work at my own premises.
Do not feel lonely either as I have enough friends with whom I can socialize to my heart's content whenever we feel like.
OK, it's not just work from home, it's the whole lockdown hysteria. I barely left my home for last 5 weeks. No live music, no bars, no meetings with friends, no long walks. I don't know about covid, but my mental well being and my productivity are clearly taking a hit. I'm especially annoyed by the fact that weekends are not, in fact, weekends. It is two days of solitary confinement without work.
By the standards of the HN crowd, I'm not rich at all. But, I'm fortunate in that I can stay at home, working some, eating rice and beans, for the rest of my life. And maybe I will.
It seems to go a bit farther than that. IIUC, people posting about these events can have accounts suspended (not just the particular post).
Beyond that, though, presumably a lot of my friends would be interested in what I have to say. FB getting in the middle of that seems pretty heavy-handed.
(Personally, we're way past the point where I'd care to have a Facebook, Twitter, etc. account, partly for reasons like this, and I've deleted mine years ago.)
I agree. Regardless of your opinions, overreactions by authorities can breed extremists. The typical profile of a “freedom fighter” is somebody who first sees their future group being treated “unfairly,” eg by watching a peaceful protest broken up violently. That’s sort of when the indoctrination begins.
I see little reason to doubt that all involved are trying to minimize general death and misery
At the risk of sounding inflammatory, there are pretty clearly some actors who would welcome death and misery upon others if it meant they made some money.
It's a quibble, but I'm stretching to think of any example of a person welcoming death and misery upon another for the purpose of monetary profit. Generally those who welcome death do it for other reasons, and those motivated by money accept or ignore others' deaths, but do not particularly welcome them.
To further inflame things, it seems to me that government directing corporations to suppress peoples’ human rights of free speech and assembly is a textbook example of fascism.
Sure, like China using its influence over the WHO to mislead about the nature of the outbreak within its borders and exclude Taiwan from the international health community. I'm more worried about that than some powerless randos who are mad about the massive QALY loss we're currently going through.
> Nobody has excluded Taiwan from anything, but they are not a member state of the UN and therefore not part of the WHO.
Speaking from the cheap seats, Taiwan is obviously a sovereign country. They'd like to be in the UN. The UN apparently excludes them because of the influence of mainland China. So yes, they are excluded.
There are areas of Colombia that are a sovereign country because they are controlled by guerrillas. The same goes for Russian controlled areas of the Ukraine and Georgia.
What makes them sovereign countries with a right to be in the UN is the amount of recognition they get from their peers. I don't have anything against the Taiwanese, but they are embroiled in a conflict just like the previous regions I described. Until they solve those issues one way or another and gain more international recognition they will not be able to participate in the UN, the Olympics or other places as a country.
Really the only thing Taiwan "lacks" is the approval of China. It's not unlike Macedonia, which "lacks" the approval of Greece (with respect to its name).
One can imagine guerilla-controlled areas Columbia to be just like Taiwan, but I won't be travelling there...
I saw that video and it proves my point. Taiwan is not recognized as an independent country, and the reporter, which is from a Hong Kong network, knows perfectly well that situation and wanted to ask a pointy question, so don't be surprised by the result. The staffer just did not know how to answer that well without getting into political issues since he's just trying to do his job.
But if you think this is definitive proof of a conspiracy, then you should check where the financing for the WHO comes from (China is nowhere near the top list), and second China actually ignored some recommendations from the WHO during the initial stage of the outbreak.
These are Americans exercising their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Whether you agree with the protestors or not is irrelevant. Your rights are impacted, too, by this arbitrary platform bias. This cannot stand for long. We have to move away from centralized monopolies on the web.
It's only "astroturfing" insofar as at least some of these protests are part of an organized drive to protest. I think you'll find that most protests entail some level of organization. Do you think black lives matter protests or women's march protests are "grassroots?" Would you be surprised to learn they are also backed by organizers?
I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were also backed by the same organizers. It would match the push-pull dynamic I imagine I see with online controversy. Not to mention the reported activity on Facebook and elsewhere around the 2016 elections.
This is not astroturfing. I saw the protest in Austin this weekend. 22 million people have been laid off in the last 4 weeks. I've seen the footage of tens of thousands lining up at food banks across the country. This is just getting started.
I don't see the link here. Yes there are 22 million laid off. But given a choice between being alive and being jobless, I think people would choose being jobless. The people protesting are not the same people lining up at food banks.
I have seen wapo video of Michigan protest. People there were angry because they want to get their hair done or buy paint and fertilizer. They want others to go to work to they can stay home.
Think of people having a "vitality score" that decreases with age, and of disease as a stressor that kills people with the "vitality score" under a certain threshold. That's how the yearly flu works, by culling people under the threshold. We attribute the death to "the flu", but we could easily also call it "death by old age".
Most working age people will be just fine. Except they are jobless. Terrible times.
Nitpick: The percentages sum up to 100, and represent the percent of total deaths, not deaths among people of certain age.
Not sure pointing fingers helps. Someone could also point fingers and claim "so you're willing to let people starve in the streets, how altruistic of you". It's a highly emotional and volatile situation, let's keep our cool.
Considering that the more data we get with regards to fatality rate, it's looking more and more along the lines of the seasonal flu (which has a vaccine, generally). The drastic measures taken to protect a tiny minority of people are looking to be more and more pointless. We would not tolerate shutting down the world economy to protect people from the seasonal flu, and we should not tolerate it for this.
I would love to bound the death rate, both lower and upper, ideally by age group. Right now I'm torn between 'it's a nasty flu, soldier up' vs. 'it's a supernasty disease that's going to severely upend life once it becomes endemic'. With the caveat that, given how easy it spreads, we might not be able to realistically do anything to prevent it becoming endemic.
Would you please be able to expand on the 'seasonal flu' point you made?
The fatality rate of the seasonal flu is around 0.1%. We originally thought that COVID-19 had a fatality rate fo 2-3%, but now that antibody testing is more and more widespread we are finding more and more cases of people testing positive for antibodies - indicating they had and recovered from the virus - without ever having any symptoms.
A study from Santa Clara just recently found that there are probably 50 to 85 times MORE infections than originally thought, just that the vast majority of them were asymptomatic.
Should we be focusing our energy on protecting our elderly and immunocompromised? Yes, absolutely.
Should we be mandating that people stay home, putting millions of perfectly healthy people out of work? It's absolutely insane to me that this was even considered, let alone implemented.
I agree, the fatality rates reported in the media smells of overhype. A lot. Over here in WA, the testing policy is along the lines of "Test patients hospitalized with severe lower respiratory illness or people working in critical sectors, and then maybe consider people with 100.4+ fevers and/or shortness of breath" [0]. That population selection has an elevated death risk, and also muddles the positive/negative ratio: symptomatic people test positive, whereas health workers test negative. We get high negative test ratios, falsely indicating we're early in the outbreak, and also high mortality ratios among positives, falsely indicating a high fatality rate. Extrapolating to the entire population is wrong and irresponsible.
The flu and vaccine point is also well taken. For the entirety of human history the flu was a health risk for the elderly and life expectancy [excluding under 5s] was 60-70 [1]. The contemporary expectation that everyone should make it into their 80s and 90s is a strong outlier.
OTOH, people counter by pointing out that NYC is already at 0.16 [14000 / 8400000] fatality rate [2], and it's unclear how many more until this wave recedes. Then anecdotes about dead healthcare workers, reinfections, mutation rates, etc.
I don't. Do you? We are 3 months into this mess and have wildly divergent facts that can't be reasonably reconciled.
Some attempts:
* The regular flu season uses 75% capacity of the system. A disease that's 3x worse will lead to 225% capacity needs.
* Maybe this disease is remarkably more contagious than the flu. In a tightly packed place like NYC, you might get all the cases that you're ever going to get flowing through the system within x weeks, whereas a less infectious flu season might trickle the same caseload within 2x weeks.
* This is out of the ballpark deadly, 10x-100x worse than the flu.
Those aren't reconciliations, they are contradicting the assertion that this is just another seasonal flu by identifying a way in which it is worse. I don't know what you mean about having "wildly divergent facts"?
Not all hospitals and morgues are overrun, a lot of them are actually massively under capacity. The media hysterics about this is complete nonsense for the majority of hospitals. NYC is not the US. Hell, NYC is not New York STATE.
How many hospitals or morgues should be overrun before it becomes evidence that we are not dealing with the same kind of problem as we do every flu season?
Ok, NY counted some that they shouldn't have. There's a vast majority of the country other than NYC that is affected by the virus and vast rest of the world too. You decided to nitpick one example and made it sound like a pattern.
Paraphrasing Dr. Birx: "There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let's say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem, some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. The intent is ... if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that."
Paraphrasing mostly, but this is Dr. Birx admitting that the government is overreporting by default. So even if you exclude NYC, it doesn't change my point.
That's how that works. Take for example, HIV. Nobody dies of HIV, but because HIV causes immunodeficiency, you can die because of common cold or flu. That doesn't mean the person died because of common cold, they died because of HIV/AIDS.
Similarly if you have type 1 diabetes and you get infected with corona, you probably died with diabetic complications, but without corona you would have been totally fine.
Not sure how that doesn't change your point. In fact you are conflating two different things. On one hand you are arguing about overreporting and on the other hand don't even want to take into consideration common practices in disease statistics. Almost makes me think you are not arguing in good faith.
People aren't catching type 1 diabetes because they are sick by coronavirus - they already had it. Comparing it to an immunodeficiency disease is not the same. It makes zero sense to generalize the fatality rate across a healthy population and include those with pre-existing conditions when trying to gauge the response for an entire state/country when the vast majority are healthy and those who are dying are not. When I want to know the risk to me or my family, I don't care that an 81 year old with stage 4 lung cancer died when he got COVID-19 - I want to know what my chances are among healthy people - but the media hysterics cling to the vulnerable people when it has no bearing on healthy ones.
We need detailed demographics of infections and deaths. We need to break down the risks, because a blanket totalitarian response of "SHUT DOWN LITERALLY EVERYTHING" is absolutely ridiculous when the general population is going to be fine. We didn't shut down the world economy for SARS, H1N1, MERS or any particularly bad flu season and we shouldn't shut down for this. We should focus our limited resources on protecting the vulnerable and let everyone else get back to work. More lives will be destroyed from an extended shutdown than this virus ever could.
May be for healthy, but not for the people with certain underlying conditions like diabetes, high BP, obesity etc. Also even if you are not vulnerable to the disease, you could be spreading this to the others who are even without showing symptoms.
Look at Sweden. They decided to let the people at risk stay home while others go out and about their business. Didn't work out too well for them.
Sweden has about the same per-capita death rate as the US and Switzerland, and lower than the UK, Spain, and Belgium. (See https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/). It's certainly possible that they'd be doing better with more restrictions, but if their strategy is as disastrous as many people seem to think then they'd be at the top of the charts, and they're not.
That sort of proves my point. UK didn't even want to restrict anything. Netherlands, Italy and Spain acted too late. Sweden decides to selectively restrict. In US people are willing to sacrifice human life for economic activity and no wonder all these countries are worse off as far as fatality rate goes compared some other countries like Germany or India.
It's just odd that I constantly hear how horribly Sweden is doing, and not a peep about Switzerland.
In US people are willing to sacrifice human life for economic activity
How many additional COVID19 deaths would you accept to avoid a crippling economic depression? If the answer is zero, you are not being serious. If the answer is more than zero, then as Churchill noted, we've established what kind of person you are and are now haggling over price.
I'm thankful right now that I live in Canada where every week—sometimes multiple times a week—measures are added or adjusted in order to prevent anyone from falling through the cracks. Some businesses have faltered or are closing permanently, but many others are receiving substantial support.
We're currently beating the projections in Ontario, and while this is not an easy time, every action necessary is being taken to at least try and prevent as many deaths by this thing as possible.
I think things would look different if the United States had taken different measures to support people during this crisis.
The barber in this narrative should receive enough aid to get by, and enough support for their business for it to persist until it can reopen—and the people who just want their hair done should just have to wait.
Sure, if the government replaces your livelihood, it becomes much less of an issue.
Of course, such measures can only work for a while until things start breaking down. We can do without barbers for quite a while, but the more professions are offline, the worse the accumulated effect is.
I don't think these measures were ever intended to be in effect in perpetuity. They're widely understood to be a stop-gap. It seems like a good strategy to me because it appears to be working. It's not perfect, but it's definitely helping. It's even making me believe in good government. Not perfect, but good.
The "choice between being alive and being jobless" is a matter of probabilities, which people are not great at. If you are not elderly, you likely have a higher chance of being unemployed than dying of COVID-19. So the choice is not between being alive and being jobless, it is an abstract unknown person getting sick and dying vs. you personally losing your income.
It's not just a personal calculation though. People that are infected spread the disease and consume medical resources. Those things both impact the rest of society.
What makes it astroturfing is that the organizers are being paid by GOP donors. You can agree with their objective or oppose it but it meets the definition of astroturfing.
Part of astroturfing is getting the grass roots to participate.
Are you implying that the "other side", insofar as it exists, is a grassroots movement? That seems to be the implication of pointing out that people who want to reopen the economy aren't grassroots.
No, it's a guy in Florida who went through and parked a bunch of domains with the same pattern. Maybe because he believed in the cause, and maybe because he wanted to make a few quick bucks.
"Astroturfing" would be when paid shills or robots spam FCC comment boards. It's not astroturfing when thousands of genuine supporters of a cause show up at a protest, whether or not there is coordination (surprise, all protests need coordination).
Trying to turn this into a sinister conspiracy -- and not genuine discontent -- is a cheap mental shortcut which lets you discount that a lot of people feel differently than you.
I read the links, and like I said in the original comment, I think it's very disingenuous to equate "national political organization with real human supporters" with "artificial or paid shills"
You could use that logic to brand the ACLU or other civil rights organizations "astroturfers", because they are trying to coordinate or bootstrap local movements. Do you think that Black Lives Matter protests have to independently, randomly coalesce in cities for them to be real movements? Obviously not. Social change is hard, and claiming "oh, but there's someone out-of-state helping them organize" is just a cheap way to invalidate any protest you don't like.
It's no better than Putin branding all NGOs as "foreign agents", to trash any civil society the Kremlin doesn't like. We can do better.
It's astroturfing, but astroturfing organizations have the same free speech rights as any other party: unions, NGOs, nonprofits, and evil corporations.
This is a deeply disingenuous statement and essentially false.
a) The protestors at the rallies clearly believe in their cause. You can't delegitimize their opinion.
b) CNN just published a study showing 2/3 worried about opening to early 1/3 worried about not opening soon enough.
That's 100M Americans, out of them it only takes a few to be very concerned.
The snippets from a recent protest of individuals describing how they are going out of business, will lose their livelihoods, homes and going destitute cannot be dismissed.
S. Korea has no lock-down with tracing. Sweden has no lock-down and is going 'kind of ok'.
It's deeply disturbing to see major companies suppress individuals' right to reasonable expression and it's not helpful to diminish their views just because a few idiots in Russia may like it.
The protests are fine, except for all the guns, which is a little spooky.
This entire comment is a strawman. This is not the same as "arbitrary platform bias". This is not Facebook saying "we have a certain political view and we talked to the government and they agreed so no other views are acceptable". This is them stopping stupid people from killing a lot of other people.
Also, your rights aren't affected. This is Facebook telling stupid people to shut up and stop spreading fud that could actually hurt people, not the government breaking up peaceful and legal assemblies.
> not the government breaking up peaceful and legal assemblies
But the government is breaking up peaceful and legal assemblies. While I don't have the article handy, there have been arrests over the past few days for refusing to leave.
As for "legal" - the First Amendment is very clear on this matter. The federal government (and through the incorporation doctrine, the governments of the several states) is specifically denied the power to prohibit this.
> But the government is breaking up peaceful and legal assemblies
First let's assume for the sake of argument that you're right: it still doesn't matter, Facebook is not the government. Facebook can tell stupid people to shut up and stop putting innocent people at risk and that is not breaking up "peaceful and legal assemblies" as you put it.
Now, going back to the government breaking up "peaceful and legal assemblies" (which these are not), it still doesn't matter: you are not guaranteed every right in the constitution at all times equally. A good example of this is time, place and manner restrictions: the government can't tell you that you're not allowed to advocate for a candidate for office, that would violate the first amendment. However, they are allowed to tell you that you can't advocate for a candidate for office at 1AM with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood. That's effectively what these people are doing: there is a pandemic, their actions could hurt a lot of people, so their stupid assembly is not legal. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and nothing I say constitutes legal advice)
The Federal Government is granted these powers through federal statute, the Commerce Clause within the Constitution, and executive order of POTUS.
Also:
> In addition to serving as medical functions, isolation and quarantine also are “police power” functions, derived from the right of the state to take action affecting individuals for the benefit of society.
You don't have the right to post on Facebook unless they want you to. They paid for the servers, not you. If you want to organize a protest, find another host or buy your own servers.
This would only be true if coronavirus was more deadly than the dramatic increase in poverty that the resulting economic destruction of the shutdown will cause, which is extremely doubtful.
Unemployment is deadly. The mortality rate while in poverty is over 2.5x.
Unemployment is only deadly where incompetent government doesn't put policies in place to cushion businesses and individuals from the closedown. If your government isn't putting these policies in place, you should ask why
I'm not sure how many tens of trillions of dollars we'd need to cushion every business from closing but it'd be substantially more than we are now, and we'd likely never pay off that debt. The US doesn't have the borrowing power to prop up that many companies and people for 18 months. That much printing is deep in hyperinflation territory.
That's an impossible claim to backup. A traditional unemployment rate may result in a 2.5x increase in mortality rate, but this isn't a normal period of unemployment -- congress just injected an unimaginably large amount of money into the economy with the deliberate goal of keeping the unemployed afloat until things can re-open.
You can't really look at a past study of unemployment effects and expect it to be anything like what we're about to experience; we literally have no idea.
You're correct that we have no idea, but it's likely to be worse. Some communities won't come back from this.
The economy cannot be paused without massive stimulus to keep it afloat (and no, the current stimulus isn't keeping it afloat). Some companies are entering bankruptcy as we speak. They aren't coming back.
You need to account for positive second order effects, e.g. reduced deaths from pollution. That pushes "extremely doubtful" firmly into "we can't even guess if quarantine will be a net plus or minus" in the 2020 death rate. It also heavily depends on how long quarantine goes on for -- would the mortality rates be changed from a 1 year recession? Or would it take many years?
People don't just drop dead upon becoming unemployed. It's just a higher per year mortality rate. Also, economic destruction is not necessarily temporary.
A very large number of industries, companies and communities will be permanently wiped out from this.
How do we know the higher per year mortality rate from poverty will exceed the lower death rate from reduced pollution, reduced car accidents, etc? It's not clear how these balance.
There are also industries growing, and industries that will be created. And some of the industries that may be permanently eliminated may be a net positive -- cruise lines are a complete blight.
I don't know what the net-net will look like, but it's important to push back on the assumption that economic downfall will be all negative in terms of lives lost.
The government can be forcing Facebook's hand by making Facebook fearful of being investigated, fined, broken up, etc if they are found to have allowed manipulation of the 2020 election in any way, and the coronavirus and related topics have become unfortunately intertwined in that.
Huh? If any forcing is going on -- which there isn't -- they would presumably be forced to toe the Trump party line, not to suppress or censor it. Wouldn't the present Federal government be happy if Facebook were to encourage protests and general disrespect for warnings from health authorities? If anything, Facebook's actions here are courageous.
It takes a lot to get me to defend Facebook, but the arguments popping up in this thread are proving to be more than sufficient.
Well, the official Trump party line is indeed that social distancing and other restrictions are still necessary. This is a very confusing situation since the protesters against the protective measures seem to be almost exclusively from Trump's base.
As assemblies of people, corporations have rights. In fact, the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition the Government for redress of grievances is explicitly protected in the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Are you OK with similar rights being stripped from your hometown newspaper on the grounds that they are a "corporation", despite the explicit specification of the press as a protected entity in the First Amendment?
This doesn't mean what you think it means. Not all rights that attach to people attach to corporations. The bill of rights doesn't uniformly apply to corporations, and different rights may or may not attach under certain circumstances.
More importantly, the government declaring something doesn't make true. See anything from the entire Soviet Union to the various attempts to legislate that π = 3.
Even with the shelter in place ordinances in place you still have the right to protest. They didn't remove that. You just need to protest while distancing your self or blocking access for the emergency services.
Creating a group of people standing closely together and/or blocking the streets is a safety issue at the moment.
If the only way you can protest is to do it in public, you lack imagination.
Quite so. There was a protest in Israel over the weekend against Netanyahu (the incumbent prime minister who has been indicted for corruption), but where the protesters just spread themselves over a larger are while maintaining physical distancing.
This is a bogus argument. The protestors are advocating for behavior that will literally kill people, including medical personnel. The protesters are no different than those who call for deadly riots or civil war. They deserve to be shut down for jeopardizing public health and safety.
any decision can kill people, whether its motor traffic laws, junk food laws, or smoking laws, or quarantine laws. its all open for debate and should not be deplatformed for mere protest. There is a point where quarantine does more damage than good, especially when thinking big picture and government control.
Heart disease is responsible for a quarter of all deaths in the US. Facebook distributing adds for Coke is going to cause for more deaths than all the worlds quarantine protest groups combined. Deplatforming groups for petitioning the government is a tremendously alarming decision from Facebook. Regardless of what you think about FB being a corporate platform, the worlds civil liberties have been switched off along side the economy. Governments have a terrible track record of abdicating the powers they seize during crises, and are all talking about a “new normal”, as if we shouldn’t expect freedom of movement or privacy to return once this is over. These people have every right to petition their government (in the US at least), and FB deplatforming them is a serious cause for concern, especially under the guise of “misinformation”.
The legal questions of what FB’s rights are to control their platform are irrelevant to a discussion on the merits of how they choose to do it (and I’d suggest aren’t as clear cut as your implying).
If you’re isolating, then you also can’t catch coronavirus from somebody attending a protest. If you’re out in public, then you could also be randomly struck by a car (unintentional injuries are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US). Do you have the same view on advertisements for Ford?
These people are exercising their constitutional right to petition their government. Facebook is trying to prevent them from doing it because they don’t want them to. No matter how justified you think that is, it is anti-civil liberties, and anti-democracy. They are also doing so (at least according to the reports I’ve read), under the guise of preventing misinformation. Again, no matter how justified you think it is, it has nothing to do with misinformation, and is a clear signal of how they intend to apply “misinformation” moderation.
The problem that underlines all of this is that no private organization should have the power to control citizens to this extent. Regardless of what you think of these protestors, Mark Zuckerberg should not be the final arbiter on whether or not they’re allowed to organise themselves. HN and many other communities like it are very vocal about what services people should have access to, things like housing, transport, healthcare... but for speech all of a sudden we need a central authority to determine who’s worthy of access.
Facebook is a corporation that can make decisions based on what they believe the shareholders would want.
To simply throw out their rights to control their platform is anti-civil liberties and anti-democracy as well.
If you and others do not want to visit Facebook that's your right and your right to publicize, they do not owe you or me, anything.
If it turns out more people agree with you, Facebook will feel it with their stock price and most likely make adjustments. To say that they owe the public a free-space, is a leap if not a huge jump..
> The legal questions of what FB’s rights are to control their platform are irrelevant to a discussion on the merits of how they choose to do it
But nice attempt to derail the conversation.
It’s amazing how quickly this community turns into a bunch of free market libertarians the moment censorship is brought up.
Using your line of reasoning, Verizon is a corporation that can make decisions based on what they believe the shareholders would want.
To simply throw out their rights to control their network is anti-civil liberties and anti-democracy as well.
If you and others do not want to use Verizon that's your right and your right to publicize, they do not owe you or me, anything.
If it turns out more people agree with you, Verizon will feel it with their stock price and most likely make adjustments. To say that they owe the public a neutral-network, is a leap if not a huge jump..
The deaths caused by the coronavirus will be nothing compared to the deaths caused by economic destruction.
A 30% unemployment rate will kill substantially more people than the coronavirus.
In fact, you could argue the protesters are advocating for behavior that would prevent people from dying (people who get laid off and are now in poverty).
As you should know, poverty carries a much higher mortality rate.
Looks like you have no data supporting this argument. You also have to look at the economical impact of doing nothing. Hundreds of thousands of member of society dying/crippled/in hospitals (who's paying for that?). Add to that, regardless of shutdown, tons of people would be so scared of public interactions that they would stay home anyway, and also end up impacting the economy. Making the argument that there would be no economical destruction from doing nothing seems a bit weird.
What proof do you want? I figured everything I said was common sense. 30% unemployment isn't outside the bounds of possibility and poverty has been repeatedly proven to have a much higher mortality rate.
We could fix the things that cause the poverty mortality rate to be so high, if we wanted. It's a lack of will, leadership and compassion that holds us back.
Your claim that the ensuing poverty will cause more deaths then corona virus. Do you have anything to support this? You made a claim so the onus is on you to provide supporting data. I don't need to refute anything at this juncture.
I don't think that's the part that's tripping people up. You're kinda just hand-waving over the link between the newly unemployed facing the same conditions that create an increased mortality rate for those in poverty. Not all who are unemployed lack the means to continue living an unimpoverished lifestyle (savings, benefits, depending on a partner, budget reduction, etc) and presumably many of the unemployed will become employed again when economic conditions improve.
This is the part that isn't "blindingly obvious" and requires a bit more of a substantive argument to backup the statement that "the deaths from coronavirus will be nothing compared to the deaths caused by economic destruction".
Is your position that people who will be made unemployed as a result of the economic destruction have enough savings and that we are providing enough benefits for them to survive?
59% of Americans could not afford $1,000 in an emergency. [1]
So you're talking about an optimistic runway of $1,000 + a $1,200 one-time benefit payment. The average person will be in poverty within 60 days.
I think you're dramatically overestimating the wealth of the average American.
Of course I’m not. I’m pointing out why looking at the mortality rate of poverty doesn’t support the argument that the economy implications of shelter in place are somehow deadlier than the disease itself.
The onus is still on you to make a meaningful argument to support that statement.
It's a prediction based on opinion and data, so I'm not able to support it beyond background references.
You're asking me to prove something that hasn't occurred yet.
My point is, poverty is deadly, the coronavirus response causes massive unemployment, unemployment causes poverty and so it's pretty obvious that the economic implications have a death rate associated with them that won't shake out for years. In my opinion, it'll be significantly worse.
I don't like it when people hand wave away the blight of those in poverty for personal safety. These people have awful outcomes, and they're treated as collateral damage.
The media talks about death from poverty all the time, except for now. Why? You cannot pause the economy without dramatic upheavals in industry and community.
For example, one particular study found that from the 2008 economic crisis there were nearly 5,000 excess suicides in a single year. Well, this crisis is substantially worse and will last substantially longer.
Why not monitor the movements of the ones in the group and alert the local police of their whereabouts, maybe arrest a few of them and it would be an even bigger statement
Your comment exemplified the basis of all tyranny. Mindless hyperbolic fear.
> The protestors are advocating for behavior that will literally kill people, including medical personnel.
No they are not. No more than those advocating for the repeal of prohibition advocated for drunk driving.
> The protesters are no different than those who call for deadly riots or civil war.
They are very different. You're mindset is akin to blaming those who protested for civil rights for "deadly riots or civil war". It's amazing how your arguments are so similar to those who wanted to shut down civil rights' protests.
> They deserve to be shut down for jeopardizing public health and safety.
This type of thinking is why constitutional rights are under so much threat. Just an extreme rehash of "Won't you think of the children" fearmongering to take away rights.
Fine, they can do it in the public square, just like they always have, subject to health department regulations.
Facebook is not a public entity; they are a private company and the Constitution does not constrain it. You can argue that Facebook is depriving you of your Constitutional rights until you're blue in the face, but it'll probably get you nowhere in court.
Facebook's constitutional right to free speech and assembly means they have the right to decide what speech they want to host and what speech they want to censor. The first amendment just means that the government can't throw you in prison for your speech, it doesn't mean you can force private organizations to provide a platform for your speech.
You are ironically and hypocritically violating their free speech rights by demanding that the government force them to host speech against their will. It's equivalent to the government forcing you to put up a yard sign for a candidate you don't support.
This is a tough question because on one side freedom of speech is something that ought to be protected and it is somebody's opinion of what means misinformation or not.
But on the other hand, if you allow people that spread extreme ideologies like fascism/nazism, communism, hatred between religious or ethnic groups, that is where you should draw the line.
In here, supporting freedom of speech and therefore the ability for deniers to have a platform sets a dangerous precedent for the whole population. Just like anti-vaccine groups, they are creating a massive hazzard for people that disagree with them, so just like the law says, your right ends where mine begins.
you know, i'm pretty tired of people hiding behind "constitutional rights" in support of domestic terrorism.
i'm the least fan of corporations, but you know what also can't stand for long? a president executing authoritarian power and promoting domestic terrorism that then "true americans" lap up and execute.
No, these people are spreading misinformation that in all likelihood will result in higher body counts. Free speech isn't shouting fire in a crowded theater.
I agree and we'll see how this affects the lives of each protester and those around them. Will many fall ill ... im hopeful they won't and with hope in mind these idiots (what many label them as) show us that we can get back to semi-normal sooner then later.
Most places (outside of super dense metros) actually don't need quarantine at all. Maybe for people working in eldercare.
With these new statistics the risk of death for those <65 is about the same as the normal risk of random death through other circumstances over the course of 2 months.
That preprint [1] is a great example of how far ahead of the skis you can get with motivated reasoning, bad math, and no peer review.
They recruited people over Facebook at a time that California's COVID tests were backlogged (with ads not presented in the paper, with links to signup that could, anecdotally, be shared out); in that situation, avoiding selection bias towards people that were sick with something previously and want to know about potential immunity would be rather tough. (Per WTO protocol, they asked about symptoms in their sample but poof for some reason that data isn't in the paper).
They got a 1.5% positive rate in their sample with 50 individuals testing positive. They then immediately applied demographic weighing to move that raw number to around 3%. Only then did they contemplate the false positive rate, taking the data of the manufacturer and 30 samples as a point estimate to figure out a 95% CI of positives around that 3%.
That's a no-no for correctly propagating uncertainty. The statistically legitimate way to do that would've been to generate the 95% confidence interval for belief about the test's false positive rate and carry that forward in the demographic reweighing. That basic math would've avoided the frankly laughable result that a randomly selected person in Santa Clara county could have a 5% chance of having had COVID-19 while in the same county people seeing a doctor and getting tests through their doctor are only around 10% positive for COVID-19 [2].
I'll add that this high rate is mirrored in several countries doing anti-body tests on blood donors (though one could argue blood donors are a self-selecting group):
>In this sample 11% has antibodies and the test detects 70-80% of people with antibodies. So, that leaves us with 14.6% immune. With a population of 2,377,081, that means 347053 people would be immune in Stockholm now, for an IFR of 0.27%.
Wow -- really enjoyed the write up by Balaji S. -- I had heard about these flaws earlier, but didn't realize how great they really were.
I still maintain the gist of my point though -- we don't have sufficient evidence for widespread quarantine. New York and Italy are outliers, and should be understood as such. Even if the results are 5x or 10x instead of 50x -- it still means decisions were made on grossly inflated worst case data.
> New modelling predictions show that the wave of new, community spread cases of coronavirus in Ontario appears to have peaked, but the spread in long-term care homes and other group settings is still growing.
> Earlier models predicted the peak would be hit in May, however according to data released by the province’s Ministry of Health, public health measures and social distancing have brought it forward.
In spite of this we are not yet moving to reopen, rather deciding not to cut the parachute just because it started to slow our fall.
Totally... no one is saying that we get off scot-free if we stop quarantine. The quarantine can't last forever, and the virus at some point will spread... so even if you are at-risk if you don't get it now you might get it 6 months from now -- unless of course, younger folks get out there and build herd immunity.
Never understood this argument. Let's take a cause I disagree with. I'm pro-equality, but still think Christian Mingle shouldn't be forced to match up same-sex couples. Because I disagree with their values, of course, I'd never use their website. OF COURSE conservative Christians should be allowed to have a website that aligns with their values. Not only don't I think this website should be outlawed -- I also don't think it's a "bad idea" that shouldn't exist. I simply disagree with the values, so I don't belong to it.
Moving back to the current situation...
I only want to belong to a social network that values science and public health. Why shouldn't I be allowed to be a user of a website that has those same values? You're going to tell me that the kind of website that I want to belong to should be outlawed and not allowed to exist? Or, let's not even go that far... that it's BAD that it exists?
Keep in mind, you can have any view you want. This is whether or not Facebook wants to use their social network to help spread events that would endanger the general public. A "keep things closed" event would be treated the same way.
(I agree FB is too big and should be cut into multiple pieces. And they shouldn't have been allowed to buy Instagram. But for very different reasons. Mostly I worry about their impact, as well as Google's, on publisher ad revenue.)
> I only want to belong to a social network that values science and public health. Why shouldn't I be allowed to be a user of a website that has those same values?
I think it's a problem of expectations.
Some expect Facebook to just be a social network. Others, like you, expect it to be a safe space where unapproved opinions aren't allowed. Neither kind is bad per se, but I don't think most people expected Facebook to be of the latter kind.
I'm rolling my eyes at your "safe space" ridiculousness and bizarre claim that I think unapproved opinions shouldn't be allowed, but putting that aside....
We should both agree that the real problem is monopoly. That if Facebook (and Google btw) weren't so powerful, people would be perfectly cool with the idea that maybe different people can have different values from one another and that maybe different companies could accommodate those different values.
That's unfortunate! If you would have read on, you would have found that I described the other side of a debate as simply having a different set of values, having legitimate views, and that everyone should be respected.
I view the term the same way I view "pro-choice" and "pro-life." Both terms frame the sides in favorable light, are how people self-identify, and so I use both of them (even the one that's in a category I don't fall into).
The same people who ranted about facebook being evil and untrustworthy are now praising and defending zuckerburg and his censorship. It's amazing how agenda drives people's comments. No principles, no values, no honesty. Just agenda.
I'm a civil engineer. When we decide to buy, for example, protection side fences for a road, we calculate how many people will pass the road, how many will die with and without and how much cost the fence. If the price per life is bigger than target, lets say, we spend 5M$ to save 1 life, we Don't put the fence.
What you should do is to put a price to lifes, and then put a price to goods, and then make simulation to see how much goods are produced and lifes are taken in 2years range scenarios. Take in to account soft and harder measures, risk of second waves, asymmetrical lockdown by regions and ages and genders, inmunology ID, Testing, night work options to reduce contact... Anything!
Let the doctors do, let the engineers simulate, and let the best option execute as planned
I'd argue that the other HN story about Krebs doing investigative journalism about who the players are behind the "reopen*.com" is a much more interesting discussion.
This story is going to dig up the usual FB hatred, battles over "freedom of speech" vs "corporate platform", and tired discussion topics that have been re and rehashed again here.
Facebook will censor itself out of relevance as its usefulness for connection and building relationships is replaced by insistence on creating a safe space for pro-establishment propaganda.
It was already selectively flagging certain news articles as true or not, countering certain misinformation while conveniently missing others. It's a questionable practice to become the gatekeepers of fact when the fourth estate itself is held to no such legal standard.
The centralized web needs to stop this subtle censorship. We can't rely on the opinions of a few to censor the many in any fair or equitable way, look at Twitter/Reddit/YouTube...
Personally this ventures into the same area of "baker refuses cake for gay wedding". Facebook does not want to profit from what they see is a "bad event". But do they have a right to refuse service on such bases ? (Of course there are legal differences such as protected class vs unprotected class. But either ways the moral principle is the same.)
I personally would side with Facebook on this one.
I guess Facebook has done some calculation about the potential fines/time sitting in congressional hearings in the aftermath of this versus revenue.
I think it is strange to criticise this move as suppressing free speech. If you value free speech you wouldn’t be using facebook, a for-profit venture controlled by a few people with their own agenda.
Fake news. Facebook communiqué actually reads "theories like physical distancing is ineffective" is now considered "misinformation". https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/ Facebook goes too far. Communications company should not be forming its own opinions on heartbreaking policies necessary during an emergency that academy is still working to fully understand. If economy is asking people who didn't have 19b cash on hand to make sacrifices then nouveau riche sysadmins should not be denying them voice to express feelings online to friends and family too.
Facebook is performing an editorial function on the information they distribute by removing content that is not illegal. They're a publisher, it's as clear as day. By stepping into this role they should forfeit any exemption from liability[0] for the content that they publish. I'm sure that they pay a bunch of lobbyists to distract lawmakers from this fact, but they won't be able to escape it forever.
I think the anti-quarantine protests are motivated by the most idiotic non-goals and were started by the Proud Boys before they were boosted by Fox News and the administration which are desperate to reopen the economy at the cost of any level of blood sacrifice on the altar of the DOW.
That said, allowing Zuckerberg to simply silence protest movements on a whim is insane and will bite all of us incredibly hard in the future. He should not have this kind of power.
I'm curious what would currently be the statistic for the level of death I cause as a consequence of choosing to socialize? Surely we should have some idea by now?
I just think it be an interesting metric, if I decide to go get a hair cut, did I also just decide for 2 person to die?
Maybe I am too dumb or naive but for me, all these cases of censorship/deplatforming etc come down to answering one simple question? Is this post/tweet legal? Yes? Carry on.
This action will "prove" to some people that the tech industry has a liberal bias. I don't know that there's a good counter action to these protests, though.
The propaganda* play for the American right these days is to be absolutely shameless, so any action to circumvent or suppress the protests will inevitably be blown up as the last straw obliterating America-as-we-know-it now and forevermore. In this light, the reaction to the reaction of the protests should be disregarded as a matter of government and corporate policy, because the organizers of the protests are acting in bad faith to simply discredit democratically elected Democratic governorships.
*Propaganda is not meant to be used as a derogatory term in this context; it is a tool, like a gun that can shoot deer for food or humans for conquest.
This religion of 'lockdown' is righteousness is pretty indicative of normal human behaviour now.
If you actually read the 'lockdown' scriptures it does state the 'lockdown' will end, it also talks about how the devil of herd immunity will eventually live amongst us.
The exact time of rapture of ending the 'lockdown' is not stated in the scriptures but it's not totally unreasonable to think it's now.
I'm overly simplifying, but I don't understand the fuss.
The incubation is ~14 days. So if _everyone_ can act together, stay at home for 2-3 weeks, then it'll all be over and we can get on with our lives, right?
For those who don't want to follow (the deviants): force them to sign agreement, "If COVID-19 happens to me, that's solely my problem." and let them do whatever freedom they want, as long as they're not near non-deviants.
This is similar with smokers. In many countries, smoking is still allowed in designated areas: closed room where all smokers smoke. You think smoking is okay? Fine, do it with the rest of you, but don't inflict damage to non-smokers.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm perplexed by the selfishness. You want it your way? Go ahead, but don't risk others.
No, no group of ordinary humans can all act together at the same time, with discipline. Occasionally this works in the military or something, but they're heavily trained.
Plus, the problem with "deviants" as you put it, is that if they don't "conform", they can infect a lot of other non-deviants.
The mortality rate in this place or that; the experience on a cruise ship, or in Sweden, or in North Dakota vs. that in New York or Italy; the percentage of people who are positive and asymptomatic vs. presymptomatic vs. symptomatic; whether this or that drug seems to have a good effect on outcomes; they absolutely don't know how all of this fits together yet. All of them, doctors, nurses, researchers, are going in every day, treating patients, participating in daily conference calls to share information on outcomes, trying different therapies. They're figuring this out and all they have asked us for is some time. All these studies and hypotheses and numbers from various places don't always reflect what's actually happening on the ground.
Someone mentioned quarantining the "vulnerable" people and letting everyone else get back to work and develop our "herd immunity." Are researchers certain we gain long term immunity? Can they precisely define "vulnerable?" My wife is clinical care coordinator on a covid unit in northern New Jersey (that's the personal part). Her first patient was 51. I bet that's younger than most of you are thinking when you think "vulnerable." It looks like he's going to make it and drop into that large "didn't die" bucket I see referred to here over and over, but to get there he spent _five weeks_ in an ICU bed on a ventilator. My wife has treated lots of elderly people. She's also treated people in their 30's and 40's. People in those age groups have died. Children have died, too. How many of each type of person will be affected by this or that containment policy? We don't know.
When this thing started my wife's hospital was running about 2:1 patients to nurses. They're now flirting with 4-6:1. They don't have proper PPE. At another hospital near us a nurse was suspended for bringing her own to work. The general opinion is that the system can't handle much additional strain, and I don't think any of us are in a position to argue the point with them. It's been a month. We can absolutely make it through a few months if we have to, while they do their work. I personally think that would be easier with strong and consistent federal leadership, but that's a separate discussion. At the very least we should be willing to heed the people we expect to save our lives if we get sick.