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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?

#371

Post by elliekelly »

tomp wrote: post #244
hellofunk wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen this attitude quite a lot among younger people lately, it’s just super irresponsible and arrogant. In a situation like this, the responsibility must be shared, no one should consider themselves free from the responsibilities of stopping the spread this virus.

> In a situation like this, the responsibility must be shared Why not in other situations though? The elites avoid taxes, Boomers have houses, banks are pumping up the asset bubble, while young people have student debt, can't buy a place to live (or even a car), have no assets and, if they're lucky and productive and high-earners, they "enjoy" 20% higher tax rate than owners of capital... Why exactly should anyone no…

You might find T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other interesting.[1]

[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/127602229/Scanlon-1998-What-...

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

#372

Post by ajross »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #297
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…

It’s already too late. They’re on the Italy path. This “herd immunity” thing is nonsense. So much so that doctors and scientists are warning against it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/14/coronavirus-nh...

It's not "nonsense". It's real. It works for almost every other virus out there (even colds and flu, even though it's imperfect: new seasonal cold and flu strains don't become pandemics, because many people have some immunity from previous infections). If you let a large enough fraction of the UK contract and recover from COVID-19, we have every reason to suspect that the society will develop good enough herd immunity to make further pandemic-scale propagation impossible. This part is good science, and reasonably well understood.

The question is on the impact side. The reason this theory seems to work is that the seeming danger from COVID-19 is all on the elderly and immunocompromised. If you can prevent them from getting the same disease everyone else is, then they'll be protected by the herd -- new clusters won't form and infect them.

So this all comes down to those assumptions:

1. The virus is genuinely of low danger to the young and healthy

2. The vulnerable can be adequately protected during a pandemic of the general population

If either is wrong, we're looking at a staggering disaster. Are they wrong? We have no fucking idea. I'm not even on the continent and I'm terrified.

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

#373

Post by saalweachter »

milansm wrote: post #346
roenxi wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economy is a tool to get people goods and services. It is less important than life & death on a mass scale. 0.1% to 1% of the population unexpectedly dying is huge . If the government was implementing a plan that they had considered and prepared over a number of years, carefully assessed the evidence and weighed the options? Costs and benefits have been weighed and it is hard to ask for more. Government has no id…

I agree with what you just wrote. But, the premise is wrong, I think; We don’t know if lockdown now vs lockdown later (in UK’s case) will result with 0.1% vs 1% of life lost, respectively.

Let's do math!

I'll use US numbers, because I know them.

The current worst case scenarios on the table are between 1% and 5% of the individuals catching the disease dying (there are better numbers, but we're worst casing it). For achieving herd immunity, numbers like 40-70% of the population infected and recovered are bandied about.

So worst case, you're looking at 1.3-11.6 million deaths in the US.

Now, the US government values the lives of its citizens at $7-9 million dollars a piece.

That puts the economic cost of this strategy, in the US, at $9.1-104 trillion dollars.

That dwarfs what is happening in the stock market right now; shutting down the entire US economy for a year makes sense when faced with that magnitude of potential loss.

I assume the math is similar elsewhere.

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

#374

Post by phpnode »

roenxi wrote: post #319
pjc50 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if the Tory press back them up. Brexit has shown that the narrative can be spun in their favor.

The impacts of Brexit are relatively abstract; COVID-19 is piles of dead bodies and 1 in 20 families losing a grandparent. Spinning that positively is mighty challenging.

I don't personally think politics are playing a major role in these decisions. UK elections are 5 years away, that's a lot of time for them to change the narrative if things don't end well.

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

#375

Post by RealityVoid »

wtvanhest wrote: post #311
lozenge wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 th…

That seems like the exact gamble. IMO, the US has taken the right approach. Keep things going until it starts to replicate in the community, then get aggressive before the hospitals are overrun. Some communities will have too many cases, but most will hopefully be ok. And we will have a first step of Hurd immunity, concentrated on people most likely to transmit later like package delivery, restaurant workers, drivers…

> Keep things going until it starts to replicate in the community, then get aggressive before the hospitals are overrun.

How is that not a bad strategy? By this point the disease will have some sort of transmission inertia, so establishing containment just before hospitals are overrun pretty much guarantees they will be overrun.

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

#376

Post by [deleted] »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #355
lozenge wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 th…

I don't think killing a larger portion of Britons than of Continental Europeans is going to be good for the British economy.

[deleted]

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

#377

Post by knzhou »

TheGallopedHigh wrote: post #358
knzhou wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the models the government's epidemiologists are using explicitly don't account for all possible actions. Back when this was taking off in China, a bunch of epidemiologists came out and said it was completely uncontrollable there. They were wrong, because they hadn't accounted for the extreme actions the Chinese government was willing to take; it was not even a possibility in the models. The same story repeate…

You don’t think professional epidemiologists have not thought of these? There are many papers in the literature that discuss this.

Clearly they have. I'm just saying that the word of each individual epidemiologist is not absolute law. They can disagree, because they base models on different assumptions. As a result, many, many predictions shouted far and wide by epidemiologists in the past months have turned out wrong.

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

#378

Post by patrec »

simonh wrote: post #265
patrec wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so preventing breakouts is just flat out not possible Why not?

Because it isn’t possible to screen every single person entering a country like the UK, which means it is inevitable the virus will get in again and you’ll have another outbreak. However that’s assuming you can eradicate it. That might be possible in an isolated population centre like Singapore, but the UK has an extensive rural area where the virus can hide out, slowly propagating through many different sparse popul…

> Because it isn’t possible to screen every single person entering a country like the UK

Why not? Personally, if I were put before the choice of not having more people enter my country than I can screen or killing off 1M+ of my electorate, I'd at least seriously consider the first option. Meanwhile the UK government clearly thought that even stopping the flow of people from an epi-center, fleeing quarantine (or at least tracking them) would be a grave over-reaction.

> You might track down some of these smouldering brush fires, but not all

I don't see why you can't keep it reasonably contained even with occasional flare ups. I'm not saying you are wrong, but it is certainly not self evident. Since the Chinese were willing to kiss good bye to something in the vicinity of $1T, presumably they think they can. If you keep perfecting testing and procedures and hold out till you've got a vaccine, I don't see that would not be a winning strategy.

> That’s how flu keeps coming back every winter.

Well, this is way worse than the flu and may get worse still, so we should be very motivated to kill it whilst we can. Also, looks like there'll be more where this one came from. Just taking a big hit to global life expectancy every few years will probably start to add up over the long run.

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

#379

Post by mirimir »

lallysingh wrote: post #356
mirimir wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I'm personally offended, being unimaginably (for me) old, this does make some sense. After all, many countries have been angsty about demographic inversion. And SARS-CoV-2 could resolve that within a decade or less.

Apologies for the offense, but I was being serious for the reason you mentioned.

NP. I was mostly joking about the offended part :)

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

#380

Post by willyt »

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.

The equivalent of the entire population of Glasgow passes through Kings Cross station in the morning rush hour. There are 4 other stations with similar flows. Over 20 million people live within an hour or 30 miles of Piccadilly Circus.
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