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

The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 1001 posts

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#811

Post by hilbertseries »

orthoxerox wrote: post #626
johnnyanmac wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or what about the fact we are 2 years into this and we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals? I don't think 2 years is enough to just "build new hostipal", let alone staff them, supply them to hospital standards, and start taking business. It's not land that's short, it's talent.

> I don't think 2 years is enough to just "build new hostipal", let alone staff them It totally is enough time to build one. Staffing is more problematic, but if it was a state-run hospital you could've converted a lot of national guardsmen into nurses in the meanwhile. You don't need a lot of talent to handle most Covid cases, just people able to follow the protocol.

> You don't need a lot of talent to handle most Covid cases, just people able to follow the protocol.

Does this have any basis in facts? My understanding is keeping a covid patient alive in the ICU is incredibly demanding.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#812

Post by areyousure »

InvertedRhodium wrote: post #772
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have pointed out they're able to totally control their border and quarantine every single arrival. But more importantly, how will it end for them? Australia and New Zealand are among the worst corona zealot nations. New Zealand just shut down everything over a single case and the PM told people to not even talk to each other anymore. How will they get out of this? If they looked at the facts they'd understa…

Got a source on the NZ PM saying they can't talk to one another anymore?

"Don't talk to your neighbours." https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-coronavirus-children-...

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#813

Post by systemvoltage »

edejong wrote: post #741
paulddraper wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flu is endemic, but another 1918 could happen at any time. True, though usually viruses mutate into less virulent forms. There's good reason to suspect that long-term COVID will be on the order of influenza or the common cold -- common and mild for most patients. > Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life. Probably, but even the question of whether vaccines s…

> True, though usually viruses mutate into less virulent forms. Citation needed. The delta variant is the prime counter-example with higher R0 and slightly higher mortality. SAGE admitted SARS-CoV-2 will very likely mutate to defeat all build-up immunity. Variants of SARS-CoV-2 (SARS and MERS) showed the potential to have very high infection fatality ratios. There is no reason at all to suspect COVID will suddenly be…

Lots of misinformation in the parent comment as well as yours. I’m not going to correct it - I think discussion on HN has been on a large spectrum - interesting policy discussions, technical debates to insane upvoted misinformation and scaremongering.

We need to pay attention to virologists, not HN armchair experts.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#814

Post by chillwaves »

pacomerh wrote: post #561
autokad wrote: post #521

There is lots of competition for the top of the stupidity list. NYC locking down all summer and then 'opening up' in September seemed top of the list to me. It's not that I thought they should have stayed locked down the entire time, its that they should have opened in the summer so they could lock down in the winter if they really needed it. But seriously though, locking down in the summer to only open up in flu sea…

> some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? So why are they calling this the pandemic of the unvaccinated? - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/21/how-unvac... - https://www.healthline.com/health-news/risks-of-the-delta-va... - https://abcnews.go.com/Health/statistics-show-risks-vaccinat... and the list goes on and on.…

My theory is that the vaccines are not stopping transmission, just reducing the effects -- enough that people don't even know they are carriers.

Then we re-opened everything and vaccinated (and others) stopped wearing masks. So in effect, coronavirus is spreading as if there were no masking or social distancing since those have ended. And by and large it is the unvaccinated who are paying the price.

I might be wrong, but at least my explanation is plausible.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#815

Post by jshen »

beloch wrote: post #489

"The transition to endemic COVID-19 is also a psychological one. When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either. That means unlearning a year of messaging that said COVID-19 was not just a flu. If the confusion around the CDC dropping mask recommendations for the vaccinated earli…

“ When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either.”

There is no reason to believe this. Many top experts, like Yaneer Bar-Yam, believe there is a real chance it continues to mutate to be worse.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#816

Post by jimmyjazz14 »

dongping wrote: post #644

Nonpharmaceutical interventions do work. With Internet and E-commerce, full scale lockdown becomes tenable. Together with mass PCR testing, the virus can be eradicated. The virus can't teleport, and it is here to stay only because the decision-makers thought that it was the cheaper option to let it spread (it is not), then didn't want to admit being wrong. It is sad to see that with all the technologies available, th…

Speaking for the US at least pursuing a covid zero approach now that we have vaccines that are very effective against hospitalization and death just doesn't make sense. You act like doing a "real" lockdown would be trivial but we have already seen that even light lockdowns have had serious side-effects.

Its not March 2020 anymore, we have an answer and it is vaccines. Every public policy decision we make going forward should be assessed by asking the question "will this policy encourage better vaccine uptake?".

Personally I think forcing people to continue to socially distance and such even after getting vaccinated leads to more vaccine hesitancy.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#817

Post by Tobani »

IncRnd wrote: post #734
Tobani wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is pretty hard to interpret still. It could be that people with "some college" respond with oh 100% I'm getting it or 0% I"m not getting it. Where as somebody with a PHD is like yeah. I have concerns so I'm 20% worried, but I'm still planning on getting it. Also I would expect the more educated to 1) be more skeptical, 2) not change their mind when the information hasn't changed much.

Looking at the link that was posted, people who said “probably not” or “definitely not” to taking a vaccine, if offered one today, were considered to be vaccine hesitant.

Right the 20% hesitant in that be in the "waiting to see more data how safe it is camp." Or it could be on the "I don't trust the government camp." It would be interesting to see that breakdown.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#818

Post by strken »

hcurtiss wrote: post #568
tialaramex wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity New Zealand had 26 deaths in over a year of the pandemic. Not 26 per 100k population. Not 26 per day. Twenty six people full stop. Because in fact "We go hard and we go early" works. Right now they are locked down (since last week) because they had one case in their community, but of course it isn't ever one case a…

Yes. For small island countries like New Zealand it works "great." This was never an option for countries like the US, or even most of Europe. Much less so for countries like India. But we'll see how it goes. If New Zealand and Australia persist in this notion that they're going to stay locked down until the virus goes away, particularly with its endemicity now inevitable, I think you will soon find vast swaths of th…

One guy punching a horse and Queensland putting a hundred or so bored soldiers on the border to check permits of cars that drive past is not a state of open violent revolt.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#819

Post by twodave »

burlesona wrote: post #737
habosa wrote: post #700

At this point we almost know too much about the spread of this disease. Never in history have we tested so much for one thing. Never in history have we really worried about asymptomatic cases of anything. This is probably the first time in history that the whole world has the same scary thing as their front-page news. It's going to be really, really hard for us to shake the mindset that thousands of covid cases === d…

I don’t know if that’s true. Case in point, the reason that Florida is drowning in COVID right now is that the majority of people there don’t think it’s a big deal. It’s the same thing and many other parts of the country. There are still a lot of people who are freaked out, but most ordinary people are starting to tune out the news and lose interest because the media calls to be scared and panic just make them numb e…

I appreciate you sugar-coating it since I live there, but it's a bit worse than that. I live in Jacksonville. Of my friends, family and other connections there are just a few buckets people fall into: the informed, the purposefully-ignorant, and the idiots. Sadly, we've learned through the last year or so that many of our friends are actually idiots. That's been tough.

Re: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

#820

Post by justin66 »

cm2187 wrote: post #16

That's why I don't really understand why there are still covid restrictions in countries that are close to full vaccination, like the UK. There isn't really a next step after having vaccinated the population, it is "steady state". So do they want us to have these restrictions (countries you can't travel to, endless testing, mask requirements) forever?

> That's why I don't really understand why there are still covid restrictions in countries that are close to full vaccination, like the UK.

Until the number needed for herd immunity is achieved, the 30% (or whatever) of your population that is not vaccinated can suffer devastating spikes in cases. Mostly having herd immunity is not a thing.

Post reply on HN