Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 231 posts

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#121

Post by JohnCohorn »

djsumdog wrote: post #93
lamplighton wrote: post #68

I live in Southwark, and it's always astonishing how people don't wears masks around here. Customers, Cashiers, Barbers... Iceland, Off-license, Asda... It's like people don't care at all. Only about 50% of people are wearing masks. Sharp contrast with France where people need to wear masks all the time, and it's heavily enforced. I don't expect the number of cases to go down TBH.

That masks are scientifically shown to do anything. They are more superstition at this point. You can look at numbers between regions with high mask usage and low mask usage and there's literally no correlation. Meanwhile they are contributing massive amounts of plastic waste, textile waste, and provide a placebo while also providing alienation between individuals. The larger factor that correlates is population dens…

There’s debate on how much masks reduce spread, and obviously a lot of variation in effectiveness given wildly different materials and design for masks that are not designed to be protective. But I’ve never heard of any serious scientific debate about their helping to some reasonable degree. With possibly high benefits and very low cost(in dollars and in freedom as compared to other measures) wearing masks while indoors in public seem like a no brainer.

There are probably issues with how much people obsess over them though. I feel like people get a false sense of protection. People tend to stand right next to you in line when masks are required rather than keeping some distance!

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#122

Post by Silhouette »

matz1 wrote: post #67
chacha2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitals are quickly filling up, young people need hospitals as much as anyone. What's your suggestion, allow elderly covid patients to die at home?

Except they are not, vast majority of people infected with covid do not require hospitalization. If the hospital can't handle this virus then the health care system must be really bad in the first place. The solution is to fix and improve it, not lockdown. Lockdown measures is just cop out.

If the hospital can't handle this virus then the health care system must be really bad in the first place.

Any health system has finite resources available: facilities, equipment, trained staff, the money to pay for all of it, etc.

If the NHS had already been set up to handle this once-in-a-century black swan event better, it would have been less effective at handling other conditions that have affected patients in the more than a century since the last outbreak of similar severity.

I haven't been impressed by how our national government has handled this situation, but if you stop and think about what's happened in the past year or so, it's actually pretty amazing how quickly and effectively our NHS staff, scientific community and others playing supporting roles in our society have adapted. They are fixing and improving our healthcare system, and they're doing it right before our eyes in real time.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#123

Post by xemoka »

iridium_core wrote: post #62
chacha2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitals are quickly filling up, young people need hospitals as much as anyone. What's your suggestion, allow elderly covid patients to die at home?

Overflow hospitals in the UK have never been used: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/covid-patients-england-ni... The UK Government is arresting people who film empty hospitals: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13619752/moment-anti-covid-loc... Meanwhile less than 400 people under age 50 have died with/of COVID in the UK. The fundamental driver of this pandemic is the ill-health of the population - driven by sugar (obe…

That 400 number seems off to me. Without more information on where you've pulled that number, what I can find is that there's ~74.7k deaths where COVID-19 was mentioned on the death cert in England and Whales since January last year. They didn't seem to really start counting that until March, until that point they were just classified as respiratory diseases.

Current statistics show that there's around 1'400 deaths of those under 50 with COVID-19 listed on their death registration, ( https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... ).

Where's your data from?

> Lockdown seems to drive deaths, at huge social and economic cost, rather than prevent them.

This could easily be a reversed causality, that deaths drive lockdowns... which, on the surface seems to make sense as high deaths seem to force politicians to lockdown (either for reality or perception).

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#124

Post by cygx »

qeternity wrote: post #105
cygx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always surspised that we're still arguing about this. Look at the excess mortality in Belgium: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... Supposedly, that's with the percentage of Covid cases still in the single digits. It seems obvious that if you do not get a handle on this, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed eventually. No sane person wants to see that happen, hence the drastic mea…

> I'm always surspised that we're still arguing about this. Ignoring the fact that Belgium is one of the worst affected countries, I'm not even sure what you're arguing? Yes, covid is bad and yes it kills people. Did people in Belgium die who otherwise wouldn't have? Yes. Can we move on to the real issue? > If you do not get a handle on this, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed eventually, and no sane person w…

Ignoring the fact that Belgium is one of the worst affected countries, I'm not even sure what you're arguing?

Belgium is the prototype for what would happen elsewhere if you're just a bit less successful at getting a handle on the pandemic.

Did I suggest that I want out healthcare to be overwhelmed?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be arguing for a lessening of restrictions for the general public, right now. Here in Germany, there already are a few regions where some hospitals are close to capacity, and modelling suggests that without continued restictions, the health care system might get overwhelmed by March.

Ignoring this ridiculous strawman attack (if I disagree, I'm insane)

I realize this might come close to violating (or even cross the line of) HN guidelines, but that's how I see it.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#125

Post by CodeGlitch »

qeternity wrote: post #113
Silhouette wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look at the data instead of parroting headlines. Or, even better, talk to anyone who works in a front-line NHS role, particularly in areas like A&E/intensive care. People who understand the context of the statistics and how they translate to real standards of patient care do not think everything is OK right now. As it happens, I've spent some time over the past few days travelling to and from various medical facil…

> Or, even better, talk to anyone who works in a front-line NHS role, particularly in areas like A&E/intensive care. People who understand the context of the statistics and how they translate to real standards of patient care do not think everything is OK right now. Yeah I know that, my best mates girlfriend is a doctor. But that's not at all proof of anything. There is a reason that wars aren't planned and architect…

So if the foot soldier in the trench keeps complaining that they don't have enough bullets, and saying that without bullets they can't fight and will loose the battle, they shouldn't be listened to?

I think they are exactly the ones we should be listening to.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#126

Post by jeofken »

flagrant wrote: post #108
jeofken wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In [0] it states that 2020 is an average year in deaths, but only writes exact numbers for different quarters. In [1] it shows averages for the previous years in numbers summing while years up. I’m getting HTTP error 500 (iOS safari from a Swedish domestic IP) when going to the statistics database - idk if it’s just me or if they deployed something buggy recently. Can therefore only find articles atm, but they are st…

> In [0] it states that 2020 is an average year in deaths It does not. > In [1] it shows averages for the previous years in numbers summing while years up. This still has no relation to deaths in the year 2020. You cannot tell anything about deaths caused by coronavirus from data that only goes up to 2019. > "The growing spread of Coronavirus in the community is not year showed any change in the number of deaths in S…

Is the part we are disagreeing about what “not _yet_ showing any change” means? I doubt hospitals have ten thousand deaths which they procrastinated reporting.

More likely the author meant that November and December is not yet counted, and therefore must add the “yet” to the sentence.

As you say, [0] states that a slightly larger than average number of deaths occurred during Q2, and a smaller number during Q3. It may be a tragedy to die in spring and not in fall, and miss one last summer. Please keep in mind though that the claim you’re responding to was that 2020 the year didn’t see a significant increase in deaths - it was a very average year to die as a Swede.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#127

Post by JohnCohorn »

protoman3000 wrote: post #4

What are the reasons why we can’t have a very hard 4-week long Chinese style total shutdown?

It doesn’t seem self evident to me that we can afford the economic hit. Despite the US being “the richest country in the world” we run massive deficits and have a massive debt. I suspect Euro nations are similar. There are known and unknown economic consequences to just borrowing to pay for a lockdown on top of what we already charge on the card.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#128

Post by Silhouette »

qeternity wrote: post #113
Silhouette wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look at the data instead of parroting headlines. Or, even better, talk to anyone who works in a front-line NHS role, particularly in areas like A&E/intensive care. People who understand the context of the statistics and how they translate to real standards of patient care do not think everything is OK right now. As it happens, I've spent some time over the past few days travelling to and from various medical facil…

> Or, even better, talk to anyone who works in a front-line NHS role, particularly in areas like A&E/intensive care. People who understand the context of the statistics and how they translate to real standards of patient care do not think everything is OK right now. Yeah I know that, my best mates girlfriend is a doctor. But that's not at all proof of anything. There is a reason that wars aren't planned and architect…

But that's not at all proof of anything.

Do you realise that in two successive comments, you have literally just claimed that hospitals are not really filling up, then claimed that reports from front-line staff working in those hospitals don't prove anything?

There is a reason that wars aren't planned and architected by the foot soldier in the trench. They don't have perspective and the task at hand detracts from the bigger picture.

A curious metaphor. There is a reason for the saying that an army is run by its sergeants. All the plans made by generals aren't worth squat if you don't have boots on the ground who know what they're doing to implement those plans.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#129

Post by CodeGlitch »

rbritton wrote: post #51
qeternity wrote: post #11

In the UK, 95% of the deaths are people over 60. There are more deaths for people over 90 than under 70. When are we going to start putting all these efforts and resources into focusing on the vulnerable populations and not painting with a broad brush. We know that lockdowns are too blunt an instrument which is why most of Europe is having to engage in ever more draconian measures. We are mortgaging our future here,…

Consider the age group(s) for most of the world's politicians.

Why is ageism so widely parroted on HN?

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#130

Post by qeternity »

cygx wrote: post #124
qeternity wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm always surspised that we're still arguing about this. Ignoring the fact that Belgium is one of the worst affected countries, I'm not even sure what you're arguing? Yes, covid is bad and yes it kills people. Did people in Belgium die who otherwise wouldn't have? Yes. Can we move on to the real issue? > If you do not get a handle on this, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed eventually, and no sane person w…

Ignoring the fact that Belgium is one of the worst affected countries, I'm not even sure what you're arguing? Belgium is the prototype for what would happen elsewhere if you're just a bit less successful at getting a handle on the pandemic. Did I suggest that I want out healthcare to be overwhelmed? Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be arguing for a lessening of restrictions for the general public, right now.…

> Correct me if I'm wrong

...

> I realize this might come close to violating (or even cross the line of) HN guidelines, but that's how I see it.

Ok, you're wrong. And worst of all, you've decided that anyone who doesn't share your exact opinion is insane. No wonder you've got it so wrong, you've cut yourself off from any real discussion.

What I argued was that lockdowns don't work. We have done serious lockdowns across the world, and in the best case all the do is buy a little time. In the worst case, they do nothing. The US printed $4T in 2020...do you really not believe that with that money, we could have a devised a better approach that put tremendous resources into isolating the vulnerable population and accepting the stunningly low risk to the rest of the population?

It's amazing to me that people on HN, a site dedicated to the constant advancement of the human condition, looks at a failed strategy concocted during panic and says "yeah, that's as good as it gets and can't be improved".

Jesus, when it comes to covid all I hear are people asking for faster horses.

Post reply on HN