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Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

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Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#281

Post by simonh »

Marsymars wrote: post #164
simonh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a very good point, you’re quite right. However all three of those are relatively very small population centres with very easily controlled borders. Britain does have the advantage of being an island, but it has a large rural hinterland that the virus can ‘hide out’ in, and many dense population centres without borders, so it’s a completely different environment. Take London. We could introduce a system of trac…

> millions of people flow into and out of London each week so it would be completely pointless and ineffective Was curious about this point in particular - checked the numbers, and Heathrow has essentially equivalent traffic as Hong Kong International.

I was mainly thinking about road and rail traffic into and out of the city, including daily commuters.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#282

Post by lozenge »

edouard-harris wrote: post #239

Here is a rule of thumb that will be familiar to many who manage risk in a professional capacity: The time to get creative is when you face a capped downside on the one hand, and an uncapped upside on the other. The time to get conservative is when you face the opposite condition. The reason for this rule is that creative policies almost never work; but when they work, they have a much higher chance of working extrao…

(warning: conspiracy theory, but at least an original one)

I'm thinking this only makes sense in the context of Brexit. Brexit will be a massive hit to the competitiveness of British businesses... somebody in government is hoping to counteract this by taking an approach different to the rest of Europe. If the UK's approach works, it will end up economically ahead of all the other European countries, something like the US post-WWII (but to a lesser extent).

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#283

Post by patrec »

mschuster91 wrote: post #146

This is utter, utter madness. Assuming UK has 66M people and 2/3 need to be infected, that's 44M people. Coronavirus has, depending on the quality, affordability and accessibility of the healthcare system, a fatality ratio somewhere along 0.7% in best case and 15% (at least!) in old and pre-conditioned people... which means that there is anything possible between 300k and 6.6M (!!) deaths. tl;dr: absolutely fucking n…

> If BoJo really tries to execute that plan, he has to be stopped.

But that's the beauty of the plan, it functions as its own dead man's switch.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#284

Post by tuna-piano »

I don't understand how Europe+US governments (and epidemiologists!) say things like "It's basically inevitable that 40-70% of our population gets infected overtime". It feels like the Western countries gave up without even trying.

But yet, there's at least temporary evidence among several Asian countries (South Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong) that it's possible to get the R0 In the US we spent only $7B to fight the virus but yet hundreds of billions to manage the economic impact. And yet, our companies/people will still suffer economically and humanitarily.

In an ideal situation, in ~8 weeks, Italy/US/Europe will only have dozens of new cases per day and will try extremely hard to contain these limited new cases and their spread. The only difference between Early Feb and Early May in these places will be that we had 3 months of potentially avoidable economic and humanitarian destruction- just to teach us the problem was serious and give us time to prepare systems to contain.

If the successful Asian countries (specifically Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, but also South Korea) show that this was possible to keep small, the voters in the Western countries should demand accountability from their scientists and government leaders.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#285

Post by oezi »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #162
m0zg wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we'll see, won't we. I mean for all the panic about Wuhan, fewer than 3.2K people died there so far, and when it all winds down, the death toll will likely be below 5K people. Probably fewer than died of flu complications in the same time frame. Given that the vast majority of the cases are not acute, probably most of their metro population was exposed to the virus, which is tens of millions of people. I know…

Wuhan disagrees with your argument much more than it supports it. The Chinese response in Wuhan -- after the failure of the initial attempts to suppress any news of the virus -- were swift, draconian, and competent. They locked everything down, heavily restricted travel, erected 16 temporary hospitals (just for that region alone), and pumped a ton of medical supplies in to it. So the argument that follows from that i…

... Only when you enact it at 400 cases (January 23rd) for a city of 15m or region of 55m (couple days later).

Germany and France are at 4000 cases, so even draconian lock-down of the entire country might end up with 32.000 deaths each.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#286

Post by thom »

magicsmoke wrote: post #226
thom wrote: post #38

You can read some of the rationale behind the plan here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... I'll be honest, I watched the announcement on Friday in open mouthed horror. I can't claim I have a concrete refutation for either the broad logic or the specific evidence underlying it, but even the best case scenario is a disaster of historic proportions. I wish us luck. I wish the rest of the wo…

You could think of this as the advantage of a decentralized world with every country making decisions and experimenting independently. Maybe the UK's approach is the right one, maybe it isn't. If it turns out to be more effective we'll learn something useful for future pandemics. If not then only the UK goes down the drain and we'll still learn something from it. Best of luck.

Well surely the advantage here would be for us to be able to observe and exploit the hard won knowledge of countries out ahead of us, but that doesn't appear to be what we're doing.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#287

Post by lozenge »

ubercow13 wrote: post #212

Modelling disease spread seems like the kind of scientific endeavour that one can dedicate one's whole life to becoming an expert in, and many people presumably do. Considering that, why should anyone give much credence to a random medium article on the topic by a 'silicon valley tech executive'? (lol) There are 10's of thousands of scientific research papers [1], by scientists, on COVID-19 already, and this guy is j…

Agreed, it would have been nice for them to invite an actual epidemiologist who disagrees with the UK strategy - there are many of them, some have already publicly stated this - unfortunately this is par for the course in the UK media.

Hey, at least it isn't bringing Nigel Farage on to talk about Coronavirus. (As the BBC did last week.)

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#288

Post by luckylion »

pmontra wrote: post #181
cirrus-clouds wrote: post #135

Here is a discussion on Channel 4 on the approach taken by the UK government. https://youtu.be/C98FmoZVbjs?t=590 Debating are: - John Edmunds: a professor in the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine - Tomas Pueyo: his modelling of the pandemic has gone viral on the web: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop... During the debate,…

A more cynical question: can a PM win the next elections or politically survive the next weeks if a lot of people die and he just shrugged his shoulders, when the rest of the world did their best to keep people alive, successfully or not? I bet he'll have to change course pretty soon.

In terms of realpolitik, I guess it depends on the extent, the speed and the affected population.

If it's a lot of people over a long time, they'll be out. If it's a lot of people over a short time, it'll come down to who dies, and how much time until the next election. The young and middle-aged, and generally "the productive" people die: they're out. If it's the old and those close to retirement age, it will be, quite literally, a rejuvenation for the country, lots of wealth will be passed down, the pension and health system will be unburdened, the job market might open up for the young, that could lead to a strong economic improvement for plenty of people.

The personal economic situation is very important, but you'll need some time between the event and the election. If aunt Mary just died last week, you're maybe not going to vote for the guy in office that is responsible for the policies. If aunt Mary died three years ago, your finances have significantly improved, you've inherited a house and your future looks bright, why experiment with a new leadership?

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#289

Post by vanniv »

yulaow wrote: post #220
vanniv wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average age of a fatal case is still north on 80 years. The UK plan is effectively to get as many people as possible that are young, and thus at a super low risk of needing hospitalization to get infected, so that they can recover and then be immune, thus making it hard for the virus to sweep through again. If 30% or more of the population were immune, it would be much harder to get a new outbreak started. With a…

A lot of young people still need icu treatments here in italy. If you don't flatten the curve early a lot of younglings too are gonna die and fast considering the very limited number of icu beds and the very high number of early contagions the uk seems to want to reach.

Some will. Possibly more than would have if we spread the illness over time.

But that set of outcomes has risks and costs too.

But regardless, it isn't really clear that the curve-flattening efforts are even effective. Italy is clearly experiencing an utterly uncontrolled outbreak. Despite pretty much the maximum amount of lockdown possible to achieve.

Don't believe that they have only 20k cases, or only 3k new ones today -- even with their increase in testing, they are still strongly test limited; that's why the Italian mortality rate looks so absurdly high -- they still aren't detecting most of the mild cases. (Either that or somehow the Italian version of the virus is about 10x as deadly as the everywhere-else version)

It seems much more likely that the mortality rate everywhere is relatively similar and it is the detection rate that varies. (Notice how all of the places that have really thorough testing all have the lowest -- and similar -- mortality rates? And the places with really high mortality rates are those with known inadequate testing)

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#290

Post by simonh »

egr wrote: post #206
simonh wrote: post #31

I’m going to try and lay out the case in as neutral terms as I can, although to be clear I think they are probably right. They’re going to take an awful lot of stick for it though, and indeed already are. They believe that there are basically two mitigation strategies. One is to have a very drastic early lockdown that shuts down the virus before it spreads widely. The problem with that is, once you lift the lockdown…

The lockdown as implemented by Italy and France aims at slowing down the spreading of the virus. It is not meant as a strategy to overcome the virus. It is meant to flatten the curve of the exponential growth of infection to minimize overloading the health system and to provide more time for preparation and for the acquisition of best practices regarding the situation. There is no disillusion that this might somehow…

Those are good points. Because Italy was hit hardest first they had very little time to prepare. The UK has had about an extra month, which puts us in a different strategic position, so we might be able to afford an approach not viable for Italy.
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