Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qNjFIwRYEIo

Well, no, because the world at the end of the lockdown is not the same as the world before the disease started spreading. Some differences:

- People now know there is a dangerous disease and how to act and sanitize to mitigate its spread.

- Manufacturing and other logistics for medical providers have had the time of the lockdown to ramp up.

- Testing has had the time of the lockdown to ramp up.

- A vaccine is that much further along--which is the only viable long-term strategy.

- And most important, scientific understanding of the disease has had that much longer to develop.

Britain's "expose the youngsters" strategy has a terrible flaw, which is that we don't know if the disease is actually safe for young people! All we know are some basic statistics about messy data that was reported by overwhelmed medical systems with spotty testing.

There are reliable reports of a) some young people getting very sick from this disease, b) people who seem to have recovered going back into decline and in some cases death, and c) long-term lung damage among those who did not die.

The ideas that this disease is somehow safe for young people, and that contracting it once confers long-term immunity, are ideas that are yet to be scientifically proven. They are, for now, at best heuristics to aid triage.

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 lockdown, either the lockdown suppresses spread, in which case ending the lockdown risks re-igniting the epidemic, or it doesn't, in which case it didn't help materially anyway.

If the UK can get 10x or more of the cases with only the same hospitalization numbers, they'll be in better shape than everywhere else.

The core question ends up being whether they're able to effectively inoculate that many young people without it spreading to just everybody.

Flattening the curve preserves medical capacity somewhat, but it also prolongs the epidemic. And since the lockdowns required to do the flattening have their own cost on lives, it's unclear whether the incremental increase in the number of lives that the medical system can preserve will or will not exceed the number of other lives caught short because the disease and also the lockdowns are extended by the extra time.

You might not be saving lives, just changing which people die.

Or you might save some, or you might lose more. Counting in advance is... let's say nontrivial. Even counting afterward will be hard and full of wide error bars.

It's relatively easy to count how many died directly from an illness, difficult to count how many will die because they delayed necessary non-emergency care for 4 months (unrelated to the virus except for the need to preserve hospital capacity or avoid infection risk) instead of 2 months because the outbreak was prolonged, and virtually impossible to count how many die from things like "I lost my job and my life savings at the same time, and I never fully recovered, and now my whole family is much poorer, which gives us higher all-cause mortality"

Everybody's talking about the first group. Occasionally, I see people admit that the second might exist and be non-empty. But, I keep feeling like I'm the only person on HN (and in my regular life) reminding people that the economy actually affects real life in major ways. (I'm probably not the only one, but still...)