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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?

#121
post #114
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.

Stop it. This is bigger than Brexit.

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

#122
post #15
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…

But there's a third strategy that works better than either: don't lockdown, but do effective testing, case tracking, and treatment, well enough so that exponential growth can't happen in the first place. That's the policy of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, who are doing great.

It's far too early to say whether they're doing great. Several months too early. Their lockdowns are preventing virus spread now, but at some point, the lockdowns will end, and then there is a vulnerable population waiting to be infected by a carrier coming from abroad. Will they be able to keep carriers out? Will they be able to respond to further outbreaks with more lockdowns indefinitely? Will there be a vaccine soon enough that they can protect everyone and then end the lockdowns before it all goes wrong?

I don't know enough to say that the UK strategy is correct (i hope it is - i live here, and more importantly, so do my parents). But i think the situation isn't cut and dried.

Hopefully, we will get a lot more detail in the next few days, and then the real experts can come to a consensus.

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

#123
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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

Presidents do not pass the budget; Congress does, under the Constitution. The annual President-proposed budget is just that, a starting point from which to negotiate from. Both the House (currently controlled by Democrats) and Senate (Republicans) have to pass it.

If you criticize the president for starting out with a proposal for cutting the CDC budget (and for most other agencies), why not also praise him for signing the final budget that raised its budget?

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing what someone else does, but a week later doesn't necesarily mean you made a mistake, or that you are a week late in making a decision.

If they do indeed go into lockdown it’s almost certainly a massive mistake.

I am not knowledgeable enough to endorse/criticise the plan. But watching the various statements yesterday by the government/scientists it's clear that they do plan for lockdown, just not yet. But it's fully expected in the coming weeks.

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

#125
post #82
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average age of a fatal case is still north on 80 years. 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…

Are we sure that you're immune once you've been infected?

We only know that you are likely to be immune for six month. Whether you will have life time immunity is anyone’s guess.

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

#126

The government isn't going with a herd immunity strategy. It's waiting for the most impactful time to lockdown.

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...

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

#128

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…

>Under the assumption everyone will get infected anyway Under that assumption you presumably have no choice? The question is whether that is a good assumption

Well, with no isolation whatsoever that's an likely outcome, it's not possible to know at this time since we don't really have any other country opt to use such desperate measures, and hence no stats available.

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

#129

This strategy is not insane only if there is also a concerted effort to protect those who are vulnerable while the virus spreads. The problem is there isn't one. At all. None. Zip. Zero. Some care homes are, off their own back, banning visitors but apart from that the old and the vulnerable are not being asked to self isolate or engage in social distancing, only those who have symptoms themselves are being told to se…

^^^ 2000% this, a large proportion can't change their ways, is not paying attention or simply doesn't care. It's shocking to still tonight walk past a packed pub on a Saturday night

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

#130
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sometimes there are two (or more) threads for what is essentially the same story. When this happens, Dan (or one of the other moderators) frequently chooses one thread to keep, and copies the comments from the thread(s) to be deleted into the thread to be kept. If commenters have already posted the same comment to both threads, this requires more manual cleanup by the moderators. There's a lot of moderation that happens behind the scenes here to keep the site as usable as it is.
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