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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?

#661

Post by MrPatan »

rzwitserloot wrote: post #398
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 th…

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistiguishable from malice

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

#663

Post by leemailll »

thu2111 wrote: post #648
leemailll wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's two different things

No it isn't. Vaccines create immunity, that's the point. Also, what diseases that don't kill you also don't result in immunity? "There's no evidence of immunity" seems an absurd statement, we can literally see the antibodies people create in response to the infection. That seems like just looking for an excuse to attack the UK.

do you ever heard of plague?

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

#664

Post by MaxBarraclough »

madaxe_again wrote: post #562
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is something cold, clinical and unemotional about the UK's strategy to tackle this pandemic I don't see that this is a criticism. This kind of decision-making should be based on expertise, not emotion. It seems unlikely that they're unconcerned with the harm done. Minimising harm is the entire point of responding to the pandemic, after all. > you can't "nudge" people to adopt certain behaviours in one country…

Harm to what? The populace, or the bank balances of the cabinet?

I agree that misaligned wealth-incentives for politicians can be a serious issue, but I'm not convinced it's likely to apply here.

Unlike many political issues, this one threatens the nation's leaders personally, and the cabinet presumably has a far higher average age (and therefore vulnerability) than the general population.

As we've already seen with Iran, the people at the top aren't safe from infection.

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

#665

Post by endogui »

willyt wrote: post #380
Marsymars wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That level of population flow and population density are not as special as you are making them out to be. The transfer station nearest Seoul's most recent cluster (discovered 7 days ago) gets about 25% more annual traffic than King's Cross, according to Wikipedia (125,000 per day at Sindorim Station vs. 34 million at King's Cross annually). Despite the cluster having developed at the beginning of March, Seoul is finding fewer than 100 new patients per day. With masks, reduction in ridership, cancellation of meetings, extensive WFH, extensive testing and isolation measures, this epidemic is not as hopeless as the UK seems to be making it out to be.

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

#666

Post by CaptArmchair »

viraptor wrote: post #126
CaptArmchair wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary reason why other countries go into a lockdown is to prevent their strained healthcare systems from collapsing. It's not just sick people who can't get a hospital bed. It's everyone else too. People who get heart attacks, strokes, accidents, other illnesses,... A lock down is NOT meant to stop the virus in its tracks. It's meant to slow the infection rate and avoid hospitals and health care centers from ge…

This is not updated for March, but here's a chart that disagrees. China's new cases started dropping after the lockdown: https://miro.medium.com/max/9350/1*r-ddYhoUtP_se6x-NOEinA.pn... From https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

I think the core message of Tomas Pueyo's blog post is sound, but he undermines it completely with the number juggling.

He's not a specialist. He's not an expert. This is an entrepreneur who knows how to create viral content. His previous blogpost was "How to deliver a funny speech".

So, I wouldn't accept the details, the number or the graphs he has cobbled together at face value. This is true for pretty much anything that is published on medium.com and doesn't come from a sources verified by experts or officials.

While people are slightly optimistic about China and South-Korea, I think it's far too soon to try and make any detailed forecasts on how the next few weeks will pan out. We simply don't know enough yet. All we know is that this is an infectious disease spreading at a lightning speed. Stay home, and adhere to WHO and health administration protocols. That's all there is to do right now. Anything else is conjecture until this has played out completely in a few weeks time.

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

#667

Post by starfallg »

Qwertious wrote: post #660
starfallg wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A lot of the UK public now seem to realise this is serious and have automatically changed behaviour without government mandating it. I had no choice but go out and to do my weekly food shopping yesterday. This was definitely not what I experienced at all. Families crowding out in the supermarket with small children and grandparents abound. People coughing openly, not maintaining distance and so on. People still have…

To be fair, if all the "take it seriously people" stay at home as much as possible, you'll be far less likely to encounter them and 90% of the people you'll encounter in public are the people who don't change their behaviour.

If that's the case, I would also encounter a lot less people than usual in my weekly food shoping. That didn't happen. There's no need to bring all out your extended family out to Waitrose, Tesco or Costco. People are still doing it, nothing's changed.

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

#668

Post by tigershark »

andy_ppp wrote: post #611
golem14 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the UK have an extra month, exactly ? It did not take Italy 1 month to to go from 1,143 (today's UK number) positives to 21,157 (today's Italy number, per https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... ), did it ?

Testing in Italy was far less, the totals for there need to be inferred from the deaths and cases and the amount of testing!

Italy had 21 deaths on the 28th feb, so 2 weeks ago.

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

#669

Post by visarga »

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…

> 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.

Before quarantine we had many people infected not knowing they are infected, spreading the virus around.

After a few weeks of quarantine the ones infected will be known and separated from the rest, so the virus should be stopped. That is assuming the quarantine is strict.

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

#670

Post by tigershark »

thu2111 wrote: post #647
egr wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, they did not communicate an overall strategy or comprehensive action plan. The basis of this thread are a series of tweets making assumptions about what the government strategy could be (given a lack of measures taken as a basis). I do not understand how not communicating a comprehensive action plan is meant to be the harder choice ("a decision many other countries [...] not able to make") when cont…

They held a press conference live streamed on YouTube where the PM and the two chief scientific advisors answered questions and explained their strategy for nearly an hour. The answer to one question alone took over ten minutes. You may not be aware of their communication about their strategy but it's on YouTube waiting for you.

That hour long press conference, that I’ve seen live, can be condensed in don’t do anything at all, let’s get 60% of the population infected so we’ll have herd immunity.
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