[notatoad]

we're in the middle of a pandemic. at some point you've got to accept that dystopia is here, and the dystopian things that are happening are realistic ways of dealing with the situtuation.

you can't reject solutions because they sound dystopian unless you've got better, non-dystopian solutions. and everybody has to stay in their homes at all times and all non-essential services are shut down is not a less dystopian solution.

[chatmasta]

Fair enough. But I hope that line of reasoning has limits. After all, it would be safer to send everyone by truck to a quarantine camp instead of back to their apartment where they might infect their neighbors in the lobby, wouldn’t it?

[ceejayoz]

That's actually how China handled it. If you test positive, you don't go home - you go to a facility to be quarantined and treated if necessary.

[walterbell]

That's been proposed in the northeast US (MA, NY, NJ, CT, RI). Hotels would be used for mandatory quarantine. Tests and contact tracing (manually, then smartphone) would determine who gets isolated.

[zaroth]

The flu comes every year, and it’s not even a order of magnitude less fatal. Maybe COVID will come back every year too.

What “solution” are you looking for to solve this relatively small share of “death from natural causes” that we call COVID? How much damage should we inflict upon ourselves in this moral quandary?

How many people should die because we’re willing to spend trillions of dollars due to our innate fear of a virus rather than our innate fear of much much bigger problems, like poverty or starvation?

Why can we muster so much energy in this case, and so little on much bigger problems? My theory is that you can’t catch hunger on the subway, you can’t catch underprivilege from a doorknob, and you can’t catch climate change from shaking hands with constituents.

There’s a lot wrong with our planet, it’s too bad we’ll all go bankrupt and unemployed chasing such a trifling disease as COVID when there were actual real problems we could have solved with mountains of cash that large, rather that burning the cash in effigy for modest to no effect once COVID has run its course.

[dang]

Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? This sort of rhetoric and polemic destroys curious conversation, which is what the site exists for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[zaroth]

It seemed in-kind with the “dystopia is here” rhetoric, but I understand answering in the same vein doesn’t make things better.

If I could still edit the comment, I would replace the first “you” with “we”, as none of the comment is meant to be directed personally at OP.

The dystopia we have is purely one of our own creation. One which TFA seems to not only welcome with open arms, but seeks to capitalize upon. It’s really quite sad.

[perl4ever]

There are two things that don't make sense to me about your original post.

One is that cash is not a resource. It's even less of a resource when it's not only not metal, but mostly not paper either.

The other is that the flu comparison doesn't make sense to me on multiple levels. Given deaths from COVID at the moment are nearly ten times flu on an annualized basis, given the partial shutdown, obviously they would be more than ten times without the shutdown...but what is even significant about exactly one order of magnitude?

[zaroth]

Thanks for the feedback!

I’m not quite sure what to say to “cash is not a resource”. Even if just a proxy for attention cash is obviously a resource. But really, cash in itself is a resource. $10 trillion dollars can do a lot of things if spent wisely. $10 trillion dollars can also be destroyed for practically no benefit at all.

I agree it’s not strictly $1 spent on A means $1 less to spend on B. But it’s at least true to some extent, and again, as a proxy for attention and willingness to enact change, it’s a valid measure.

So the flu comparison is because they are both respiratory illnesses which kill a lot of people. In the 2017-2018 season the flu killed 61,000 in the US. Hospitals in NYC were stretched very thin. Nobody really noticed. It wasn’t even declared a pandemic.

Obviously it’s impossible to say with certainty if we have seen 1/4th, 1/3rd, or 1/2 of the total deaths that we are going to see from this SARS-CoV-2. But I think nobody is currently out there claiming that we’ve only seen 1/10th of the total deaths from SARS-CoV-2 that we’ll get by the time it’s over. (SARS-CoV-3 is another story?)

“Ten times flu on an annualized basis...” So 50k times 4 is 200k. That’s not nearly 600k. Just trying to follow your math. If we’re halfway through now (IHME thinks we’re about 3/4 through) then we‘ll have seen in COVID the equivalent of two bad years of flu.

Orders of magnitude generally provide rough measures of classification and are a nice rule of thumb for telling if one thing is “radically different” than another thing. So, flu kills up to 650k globally per year. Maybe COVID will do roughly the same, maybe 2-3x, but I think at least we’ve long past the days of claims that COVID will kill 5 million worldwide are being tossed around. And it’s not because no one’s caught it and we just need to keep hunkered down. It’s because a massive number of people caught it and overall its just not that deadly.

If governments around the world had done their jobs and shared data and been truly prepared and with a little luck and a lot of hard work this whole thing perhaps could have been avoided by early and arduous contact tracing. That day is long behind us.

I worry that by now so much energy and ink has been spilled getting the country into lockdown, and people are so politically invested in it, and all the social pressure campaigns have ramped up to max,... that now as data finally emerges which demonstrate it was all a gross overreaction, we will be too slow to correct.

In the meantime 10s of millions have lost their jobs, perhaps millions have lost their businesses. A $1T deficit seems like a quaint memory (sorry grandkids!).

And it was all for, what, exactly? When herd immunity is the endpoint and the IHME hospitalization predictions were wrong by 10x... overbending the curve only causes suffering and does not save lives. Bending the curve too far into next winter could actually cost lives, which the CDC acknowledged earlier this week in a very roundabout way. And bending the curve at all only helps if additional medical treatment availability would have actually saved more lives, something which I have not seen a strong case for.

[perl4ever]

"$10 trillion dollars can also be destroyed for practically no benefit at all."

$10 trillion is probably over twice the (financial) cost of WWII adjusted for inflation. Having numbers of that size written down, deleted, moved around, doesn't mean we are suffering that level of loss.

As far as comparing covid to flu, I was talking about annualized daily deaths from covid, compared to a normal year of flu. That was deliberate. I'm saying, if it neither increases nor decreases from this point on, it's nearly ten times the rate in the long run.

You are comparing the total deaths from covid, assuming it declines and goes away in due time. That would be fine in a vacuum, but you're using the consequences of trying to stop it to argue the efforts to stop it are unnecessary. What is the point of this sophistry?