Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 772 posts

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

#391

Post by lotsofpulp »

beaunative wrote: post #194
m0zg wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no reliable estimates of overall fatality of the virus. Only the estimates of how many people _who required treatment_ have died, which the press deliberately misinterprets as the overall fatality rates most of the time, because higher numbers drive more clicks. Watch epidemiologists speak about this: they will go out of their way to point out that we don't know these percentages, and we won't know them for…

Not true. These estimates are of overall fatality based on number of people diagnoised. Not based on those who required intensive treatment. That means we have crude estimate on death rate for people showing some symptoms. Crude in a way not everyone in the pool is recovered, or dead for that matter, so it's not possible to be that accurate yet, but it will only be higher not lower.

Wouldn’t we only have a crude estimate on the death rate for people diagnosed with the virus? If we find that many people are not getting tested for the virus and just recover by themselves, then it’s possible for the fatality rate to be lower.

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

#392

Post by lotsofpulp »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #136
Animats wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The uncomfortable truth is, the British government have weighted cost and benefit, and they have decided, the death of thousands or more is not worth the cost of near-absolute lockdown of a country, It might lead to total breakdown of the economy, full-recession, and that may cost more lives anyway. And so begins the Great Reaping. Get rid of the old and the sick, so the nation can move on, freed of the burden of car…

isn't the current government disproportionately voted in by the old? It seems somehow short-sighted this.

They will be replaced by the next set of old. A population can always be segmented, they might just not be as old as before.

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

#393

Post by OJFord »

another-dave wrote: post #190
OJFord wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only those who have symptoms [...] Where 'symptoms' includes 'a cough'; not just definitely-COVID-19 symptoms. > [...] themselves are being told to self isolate, and not members of their households. That's not true.

From the Guardian on Thurs, quoting Boris Johnson: “At some point in the next few weeks we are likely to go further, and if someone in a household has those symptoms then we will be asking everyone in that household to stay at home. I want to signal now that this is coming down the track.” — https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/12/uk-moves-to-de... Which would suggest that's not the advice currently. Would be i…

> The move to launch “shielding” of the elderly and infirm and “whole family isolation” is an escalation since Thursday, when the government said that only individuals with a persistent dry cough or temperature should stay at home for seven days.

Paywall, sorry, but from:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-death-toll-le...

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

#394

Post by ksec »

cactus2093 wrote: post #176
ksec wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a few difference. HK, Taiwan and Singapore all acted extremely early on, to the point where HK knew before the news broke out in China. And the culture allows you to wear mask, which seems to be something most western nation are completely against. Most part of Europe and UK reacted very late in the cycle. Since the Virus has an extremely long stable period before any symptoms appeared or to the point…

Isn’t that the whole point of a lockdown? After ~6-8 weeks you get the new infection rates down low enough that you basically reset the clock and have a second chance at responding like Hong Kong and keeping it in the containment phase. Then you have to keep that up for hopefully 9 months until a vaccine is available. It’s certainly not easy, but it seems possible and it’s not clear this would be much worse on the ec…

>Isn’t that the whole point of a lockdown?

You will need a Lockdown AND Mask, or you will simply just need Mask and not even lockdown. I would argue social distancing only is not enough. But somehow even people in Italy refuse to wear mask. So I think a culture issue is also a problem there.

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

#395

Post by arcticbull »

protrate wrote: post #320
arcticbull wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'm 30, have no contact with folks over 65, have no co-morbid conditions and so I have no reason to keep away from folks. I'm at zero risk. In fact if I get it now and develop an immunity, all the better. I have to assume the same is true of the folks at the pub -- otherwise it's them who are being irresponsible, not me.

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#396

Post by pmorici »

Herd immunity and keeping the total infected at any one time to a manageable level is the end game everywhere. I think the difference you are seeing is a difference of opinion over how extreme the measures need to be to keep the total infected from overwhelming the hospitals. It's possible that moderate measures early might be enough clearly if you wait too long more extreme measures definitely seem to be necessary.

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

#397

Post by rzwitserloot »

Most comments here raise excellent points.

One more in the mix: Many companies in many countries are working on vaccines and cures. So far some are reporting moderate successes; as I understand it, those with the experience to tell seem to think odds are pretty decent there'll be some sort of vaccine available within a span of a year, maybe sooner.

Whether corona infections 'outpace' the time when a vaccine will be generally available depends a lot on how long it'll take to get a vaccine out the door, but presumably a ton of resources (and a lot of leeway on relaxing regulations) are spent on this, as well as exactly how fast corona spreads.

If it spreads very fast, all of this 'planned herd immunity' stuff is nonsense, all the taps you can close should be closed and stay closed and it'll still spread. The UK would be mismanaging this and should be closing more facilities.

If it doesn't, then the UK is probably mismanaging this, in that it'd be better to try to slow the spread because the end game is the vaccine.

Effectively then, they appear to be betting on a creative and untested solution that they more or less have to keep secret because it doesn't work well if it is generally known, which requires accurate forecasts from lethality rates amongst various parts of the public to spread rates in circumstances that are probably unique to the UK then, if they are the only country to go with this plan, __whilst__ betting that the vaccine solution is not going to be fruitful for a long long time.

I'm going with 'insane' on this one.

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

#398

Post by rzwitserloot »

knzhou wrote: post #209

Their reasoning is that if the only things you can do are China-style lockdown or nothing, then the disease will just resume exponentially growing the second lockdown ends, so it's pointless to do it at all. While that may be technically right (under some optimistic, unverified assumptions, e.g. no reinfection), it's a false dichotomy. Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea aren't under lockdown, they're stopping the…

I haven't checked too closely, but surely the age distribution of conservative voters is such that if they are so callous as to treat corona as a convenient boomer remover, they torpedo their own re-election chances.

So, _even if_ you ascribe to the current UK government a conspiracy-esque, cold as nails approach to just effectively _murder whole boatloads of older folks_, it doesn't actually make sense: Who would they be so cold as to just casually acquiesce to a solution that results in a lot of death, but they are still human enough to care about the country first and are willing to sacrifice the electoral future of their party?

I'm on 'do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity', modifying it slightly to 'incompetence'.

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

#399

Post by saalweachter »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #383
saalweachter wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gover…

I don’t understand how we can have reliable mortality/morbidity statistics when it’s only been out for a few months, and many people that get it don’t even get diagnosed with it and so aren’t counted in the survivors. How can there be a representative sample of data available yet?

We work with what we have, and update as more information becomes known.

At the very least, we have a current floor that 0.002% of the total Italian population has died from the disease so far; conversely, we know a minimum of 21,157 have contracted it in the same population, and 1,966 have recovered, so the mortality rate is probably less than 90%.

Now those two numbers are very far apart, so you might be inclined to wait and see whether the final number will lie, but the problem with that is, once the final number is known, it is too late to act.

We either have the option of acting now, as seems best with our current information, and correcting course as the new information reveals itself, or doing nothing at all, and waiting for better information, and our current information says that doing nothing at all is not the best option.

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

#400

Post by vanniv »

yulaow wrote: post #339
vanniv wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To clarify current national-level lockdown effects are expected to be seen starting twelve days from now. Some or the old red zones which covered the starting point of the infection are currently with 0 new detected cases since 3 days so it seems lockdown works IF u put them in place soon enough. [ https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&... ]

Of course, if you ever let up on the lockdown, the disease will immediately start spreading again.
Post reply on HN