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Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?

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Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?

#451

Post by i_love_limes »

bananapear wrote: post #449
i_love_limes wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first point is already demonstrably false. Similar countries right next to each other have different death tolls in the order of multiples (Sweden vs. other Nordics). Also, similar geographic and demographic countries have performed vastly different in different parts of the of world (eg. South Korea or Japan vs. UK in order of magnitude)

I think it’s certainly demonstrably complex enough to make drawing a binary conclusion difficult at this point. This is an interesting study which takes a wide variety of factors into account - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...

I'm not arguing it's not complex or that a lot of factors go into the response. I am however suggesting your original claim that non pharmaceutical interventions had little effect is demonstrably false. Comparing the 1 death in Taiwan and the to tens of thousands in the UK, including strong quarantines and contact tracing quite obviously had an impact.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?

#452

Post by bananapear »

i_love_limes wrote: post #451
bananapear wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s certainly demonstrably complex enough to make drawing a binary conclusion difficult at this point. This is an interesting study which takes a wide variety of factors into account - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...

I'm not arguing it's not complex or that a lot of factors go into the response. I am however suggesting your original claim that non pharmaceutical interventions had little effect is demonstrably false. Comparing the 1 death in Taiwan and the to tens of thousands in the UK, including strong quarantines and contact tracing quite obviously had an impact.

Though likely a much smaller impact than other factors such as cross-immunity from previous HCoV epidemics such as SARS and MERS.

There are no studies which have found statistically significant links between political measures and excess COVID deaths.

From the conclusions section:

“Regarding government's actions (i.e., containment and stringency index), no association was found with the outcome, suggesting that the other studied factors were more important in the Covid-19 mortality than political measures implemented to fight the virus, except for the economic support index.”

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?

#453

Post by dang »

whb07 wrote: post #447
dang wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please stop posting flamewar-style comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly lately, and it's what we're trying to avoid here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when commenting, we'd be grateful.

I’d like to know what exactly I’m “flamewar-style” comments on? Parent commented on the “liberal GA candidates” one of whom is a known anti-Semite and literally beat/assaulted women, and that they “would be well liked”. Other comments posts I’ve made have questioned the extreme views commonly held by those in this site, where events like CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle became well favored and liked. Yet obviously, no one then c…

Snark and provocation on divisive topics equals flamewar. These are the sorts of comments that don't belong on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25254922

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25255196

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25097468

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25097867

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270544

Too ideologically generic and predictable, not enough information.

A lot of your other comments are good though! I probably shouldn't said "repeatedly" above—it's technically true, but I normally only say that when it's more obviously true.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?

#454

Post by i_love_limes »

bananapear wrote: post #452
i_love_limes wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing it's not complex or that a lot of factors go into the response. I am however suggesting your original claim that non pharmaceutical interventions had little effect is demonstrably false. Comparing the 1 death in Taiwan and the to tens of thousands in the UK, including strong quarantines and contact tracing quite obviously had an impact.

Though likely a much smaller impact than other factors such as cross-immunity from previous HCoV epidemics such as SARS and MERS. There are no studies which have found statistically significant links between political measures and excess COVID deaths. From the conclusions section: “Regarding government's actions (i.e., containment and stringency index), no association was found with the outcome, suggesting that the o…

SARS and MERS didn't reach anywhere close to spreading through the population, so cross immunity (if it's strong, which we don't know), wouldn't have done much. The fact that you bring that up as a rebuttal is telling.

One difference with those is that their governance and infrastructure to tackle a pandemic already existed, which counts. You could write that off to existing 'public health', as you have tried to stretch from the paper, but that is a disingenuous of that research.

A quick search implies that you are also not looking very hard to find studies that don't find linkages. "The results presented in this paper suggest that policy interventions may well explain the majority of cross-country variation in officially reported Covid-19 deaths."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-020-00466-5

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?

#455

Post by bananapear »

i_love_limes wrote: post #454
bananapear wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though likely a much smaller impact than other factors such as cross-immunity from previous HCoV epidemics such as SARS and MERS. There are no studies which have found statistically significant links between political measures and excess COVID deaths. From the conclusions section: “Regarding government's actions (i.e., containment and stringency index), no association was found with the outcome, suggesting that the o…

SARS and MERS didn't reach anywhere close to spreading through the population, so cross immunity (if it's strong, which we don't know), wouldn't have done much. The fact that you bring that up as a rebuttal is telling. One difference with those is that their governance and infrastructure to tackle a pandemic already existed, which counts. You could write that off to existing 'public health', as you have tried to stre…

My prediction for 2021 was widespread acknowledgement by the end of the year that lockdown measures had less impact than other factors.

Since we’re not there yet, let’s wait and see.

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