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In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

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Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#191

Post by jiggawatts »

I love watching people argue over COVID-related politics. It's such a perfect example of how tribal politics and scientific illiteracy affect public opinion and unfortunately, all too often, public policy.

I went out of my way to study especially some of the mathematics used for modelling projections into the future.

I not only read about the SIR model, but poked around a few of its variants like SIRV, SEIS, MSEIRS, etc... I even ran a few up in Mathematica and toyed around with different parameters, trying to get a feel for how the errors accumulate and what can and can't be predicted.

Just that little tiny corner of the pandemic response is insanely complicated once you get into the weeds. You have to account for what fraction of the infected actually turn up for test. What fraction of the tests are false positives or negatives. How fast mutations spread and distort the test results. How other countries or even counties report their statistics differently. And so on, and so forth.

Once you get a good feel for a tiny part of the big picture like that, it makes it much easier to gauge who's spouting bullshit, and who's also been in the same weeds as you have and is covered in cuts and leeches.

At the end of the day, the numbers said 'x'. Everyone that sounded like they knew what they were talking about agreed with 'x'. Everyone who sounded like they were making things up to suit their selfish agenda never used terms like MSEIRS, "infection-to-test ratios", or any such thing. They also seemed to use many different numbers, sometimes making up new numbers in the same conversation. More commonly, they wouldn't use numbers at all, and talked instead about freedom or human rights. Emotions and feeling that might get hurt.

Here's a number: so far at least 6 million people have died, of which 1.1 million were in the United States alone.

The numbers said it would have been a lot worse if prompt action wasn't taken. Ten times more deaths or even worse were entirely within reasonable projection bounds.

Yet... people keep arguing as-if 6 million people hadn't died. As if hospitals hadn't been overwhelmed. As if we lived in some sort of counter-factual universe, or we could choose to live in such a place through sheer force of will.

As if we could berate the virus into not mindlessly replicating exponentially in order to appease our God-given right to freedom and profit.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#192

Post by peteradio »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #138
mabbo wrote: post #111

> Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity The point of the lockdown was not to entirely stop the spread- that was obviously not happening. It was to slow the spread to avoid overwhelming hospitals. It allowed us to reduce the lethality of COVID-19 by having more resources per sick person.

It wasn’t even entirely that, although it certainly was in the seattle area at the beginning and in New York when refrigerated trucks were filling up fast. It was to “flatten the curve,” which was to allow for effective treatments and buy time for vaccine development. Unlike in the 1950’s, we knew early on we could produce an effective vaccine. The vaccines that were eventually developed were designed within weeks of…

> we knew early on we could produce an effective vaccine.

How?

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#193

Post by fnordpiglet »

peteradio wrote: post #192
fnordpiglet wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn’t even entirely that, although it certainly was in the seattle area at the beginning and in New York when refrigerated trucks were filling up fast. It was to “flatten the curve,” which was to allow for effective treatments and buy time for vaccine development. Unlike in the 1950’s, we knew early on we could produce an effective vaccine. The vaccines that were eventually developed were designed within weeks of…

> we knew early on we could produce an effective vaccine. How?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8052930/

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#194

Post by nicoburns »

TeeMassive wrote: post #176
nicoburns wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but an infectious disease is also limiting on people's freedoms, so it's equally not obvious that those rights override the rights of people to be protected from infectious diseases.

People are free to stay inside if they're afraid of getting sick. Rights can only be overridden if and only if there are no other choices, which is not the case here. Me getting to an hospital doesn't limit someone else's freedom.

> People are free to stay inside if they're afraid of getting sick

By that logic, people are free to stay inside if I'm standing outside their door with a gun and they don't want to be shot. Yes, they're free to stay inside, but they're not free to go outside.

I think it's reasonable to believe that the rights of free movement override the rights to be protected from diseases in this case, but I don't think you can argue that via a general principle of rights. I think you have to argue that based on the specific consequences, and on your personal values.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#195

Post by landemva »

CalRobert wrote: post #127
mabbo wrote: post #111

> Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity The point of the lockdown was not to entirely stop the spread- that was obviously not happening. It was to slow the spread to avoid overwhelming hospitals. It allowed us to reduce the lethality of COVID-19 by having more resources per sick person.

It also was to increase the number of people who got covid after being vaccinated, instead of before. Edit - to elaborate, I just mean that it made sense to try to keep infections down and give companies time to develop a vaccine. Not sure why this struck a nerve.

[flagged]

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#196

Post by s1artibartfast »

nicoburns wrote: post #170
black6 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What right to be protected from infectious diseases? If it exists then it's been violated my entire life.

Well, it's not an absolute right (and it's obviously constrained by the limits of what it is even in our power to control). But then neither is the right not to be detained, or really any other right. All rights run into limits when they come into conflict with other rights.

I think it was a witness test of people's moral philosophy. Rights are fundamentally philosophical position, not a law of physics.

Those that favor preserving negative rights over positive rights generally objected to the lockdown.

In general, people who favor negative rights do so because they don't come into conflict with each other. Positive rights come into conflict with other positive rights and negative rights, and require trade-offs

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#197

Post by landemva »

magicalist wrote: post #184
saiya-jin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but there were and are nasty side effects to this, covering literally hundreds of millions or rather billions of people in some form. Missed social interaction is super important for child development, but how do you want to measure that, how many harm points do you assign to this versus some old or frail person dying. And look at ie India, delaying the height of infection didn't help them at all, estimated numb…

> And cases like Sweden show that restrictions were mostly stupid flexing of control powers I wish this meme would die. Not only did Sweden not do well in the pandemic, they also ended up enacting a ton of restrictions, some more stringent than what much of the US had in practice.

Like USA, Sweden mistakenly put old infected people together instead of isolating those people. It tore through the elderly in both countries.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#198

Post by landemva »

gizmo wrote: post #113
rewmie wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can probably extend that to your family, maybe a bit further, but at a certain scale it just becomes impossible (and undesirable) because of individual variations in occupation, lifestyle, risk and infinitely many other factors. And because someone has keep the wheels of society turning. There was no lockdown for supermarket cashiers. I don't understand what point you tried to make. There were naturally essenti…

Lockdowns were sold to the people as something that would stop the spread. If you can get every infected person to infect less than one other person on average, you can stop the spread of an infectious disease completely. At least in theory. There are two variables here. How infectious the disease is and which percentage of the population can isolate themselves at home without society breaking down. If everybody stay…

> Deutsche Bahn still required masking in January.

I was surprised Germans didn't do anything about that policy. They did seem to widely ignore it, but it remained enforceable.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#199

Post by Pet_Ant »

nicoburns wrote: post #151
TeeMassive wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No, but an infectious disease is also limiting on people's freedoms, so it's equally not obvious that those rights override the rights of people to be protected from infectious diseases.

Fundamentally, morally speaking those those aren't facts but opinions. Legally, I think it differs from country to country. Individual rights versus the needs of the state is something that we have really changed perspective on in the last hundred years.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#200

Post by peteradio »

jiggawatts wrote: post #191

I love watching people argue over COVID-related politics. It's such a perfect example of how tribal politics and scientific illiteracy affect public opinion and unfortunately, all too often, public policy. I went out of my way to study especially some of the mathematics used for modelling projections into the future. I not only read about the SIR model, but poked around a few of its variants like SIRV, SEIS, MSEIRS,…

100k young men dying is not the same as 1m very very old people dying.
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