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.
Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?
121–130 of 772 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?
#122I’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.
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?
#123Earlier 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.
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?
#124Earlier 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.
Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?
#125Earlier 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?
Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?
#126The 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…
From https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?
#127Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?
#128It 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
Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?
#129This 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…
Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?
#130Earlier 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?