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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?

#111

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

beaunative wrote: post #85

It looks like to me just a comfort pill for the public. They basically acknowledged that they can't handle the crisis already. So what they gonna do? They want it to appear to be an advice from expert, to persuade the public, rationalize a forced decision. 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 n…

> the deaths of thousands or more

More like a million deaths assuming 50% UK infected and 2% death rate.

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

#112

Post by gimboland »

dang wrote: post #84
simonh wrote: post #31

I’m going to try and lay out the case in as neutral terms as I can, although to be clear I think they are probably right. They’re going to take an awful lot of stick for it though, and indeed already are. They believe that there are basically two mitigation strategies. One is to have a very drastic early lockdown that shuts down the virus before it spreads widely. The problem with that is, once you lift the lockdown…

Please don't post duplicate comments to HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22577808 ). It strictly lowers the signal/noise ratio and makes merging threads a nightmare.

Merging threads?

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

#113

Post by new2628 »

mattmanser wrote: post #64
stefano wrote: post #33

One region of Italy is close to their ICU beds limit, despite a full lockdown. And they have more beds per person than the UK. Without a full lockdown, won't they run out of beds very quickly, thus increasing the death rate a lot?

Italy is almost a month ahead of most of the world in infections though, their first outbreaks were weeks ago and the source for infecting most of the rest of Europe. A lot of the UK infections can be traced to Italian holidays, for example. Even if the government does plan to lock down the UK eventually, every day must cost 10s of millions, you can understand the strategy to wait longer, and even to play it down a b…

According to the growth rates along the exponential curve, it seems more like a week or two than a month.

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

#114

Post by akerro »

xadoc wrote: post #90

There is no proof immunity will happen, the UK Gov is thinking in economic terms and worried about GDP. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/mar/13/coronaviru...

Killing older population will provide £350M/weekly for the NHS and decrease financial gap between generations.

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

#115

Post by peteradio »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #72
simonh wrote: post #31

I’m going to try and lay out the case in as neutral terms as I can, although to be clear I think they are probably right. They’re going to take an awful lot of stick for it though, and indeed already are. They believe that there are basically two mitigation strategies. One is to have a very drastic early lockdown that shuts down the virus before it spreads widely. The problem with that is, once you lift the lockdown…

It seems like trying to time the stock market. You can make an educated guess, but in the end it's still a guess.

Unless, oh I don't know, you test for the disease.

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

#116

Post by patrec »

beaunative wrote: post #85

It looks like to me just a comfort pill for the public. They basically acknowledged that they can't handle the crisis already. So what they gonna do? They want it to appear to be an advice from expert, to persuade the public, rationalize a forced decision. 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 n…

Death of thousands or more???

You are living in some pleasant fantasy!

Back in reality, the UK wants to infect about a cool 40M people (for the herd immunity!). Last I heard they expect 50% (20M) to get it in a 3 week interval. Meanwhile they have about 4k ICU beds, which are at close to capacity already. Assuming cocooning works so great that only 3% of people need urgent care (rather than a more likely 5-10%) and only for one week on average (again, unlikely!), that's 200k people for 4k beds for a period of 3 weeks. Surely the fatality rate for those 3% is going to be way over 60%. At which point you have close to half a million dead in those 3 weeks alone.

I'd like to see numbers for a realistic scenario where this strategy does not result in something in the millions of deaths.

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

#118

Post by Animats »

beaunative wrote: post #85

It looks like to me just a comfort pill for the public. They basically acknowledged that they can't handle the crisis already. So what they gonna do? They want it to appear to be an advice from expert, to persuade the public, rationalize a forced decision. 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 n…

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 caring for an elderly population that consumes but does not produce.

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

#119

Post by Silhouette »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #92
Silhouette wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the policy of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, who are doing great. All of which have tiny populations compared to the UK. For larger nations, there simply aren't enough tests available, nor enough treatment facilities for those who are likely to become very sick if the virus spreads rapidly through the population.

> All of which have tiny populations compared to the UK. Is 66 million really that qualitatively different than 24 million?

The honest answer is that I don't know. Perhaps I generalised too readily before, given Taiwan is quite a bit closer to the UK in population than the other two.

Even so, assuming that strategies that appear to have been relatively successful in a smaller, more densely populated country will necessarily also work in a larger and less densely populated one seems to be dubious. We know that we don't have the resources we'd need to implement that strategy in the UK right now, and I haven't personally seen any experts arguing that it's a viable option for us, so I'm cautious about extrapolating too much here.

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

#120

Post by grey-area »

TMWNN wrote: post #77
happierlook wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> through very little fault of his own https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/ Get out of here with this. We had expert teams and processes in place to combat the possibility of this exact thing and his administration fired them without any replacement. The virus existing is not his fault, but nearly all of the national consequences rest directly at his feet.

>Get out of here with this. We had expert teams and processes in place to combat the possibility of this exact thing and his administration fired them without any replacement. Ah yes, yet another person who looked at the Snopes piece's headline and nothing else. One would think reading only that, or the Twitter thread (!) the piece is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or…

No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either.

No, he only proposed cutting the CDC budget. Luckily, saner minds prevailed.

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