Tribalism comes for pandemic science

Towards the end of March I started to realise that I kept reading about the supposed impending ventilator shortage, but it should have happened already and yet we didn't seem to be ever quite running out. Then a newspaper published some article about the history of Professor Ferguson and his failed foot-and-mouth disease models. I went and read some papers about the failings of epidemiology and was really shocked at how divergent the views were on the utility of these models.

Then in the comments on that story, I found someone linking to https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ which just had so much data, so many links to raw sources and interviews with skeptical doctors. At that point I started to realise that many of the comments I was reading here on HN appeared to be mixing up predictions with reality; I kept reading people here talk about how Italy was experiencing mass deaths and hospital overflow yet on the SWPRS site there were links to actual articles in Italian where hospital officials said they hadn't yet run out of capacity, they weren't yet turning people away, they were just worried it might start soon. And this kept happening. Moreover my attempts to point this out kept getting voted down, so that's when I realised it was going ideological. A lot of people were desperate to correct "misinformation" and were just getting angry at anything that contradicted the official narrative. There was no rational reason to vote down posts saying "actually the situation is better than you think" yet it was happening.

So I guess that's the point I became a serious lockdown skeptic. The disparity between what people consuming regular media believed vs what the raw (often non English) data was saying just became too wide. And after that I believe everyone has been catching up, especially now with this "protests against health policies are dangerous but protests against racism aren't" nonsense.

It is not this simple. You can't, in our current system, shift wealth that readily and quickly. Even if you could, how would you approach possibly selling this in a democracy? And assuming it was feasible, and we could get popular support for it, how would it be implemented? Rationing cards? Government ran food stores?

This is NOT the Spanish Flu. It is very different in its behavior. There is currently no evidence to expect a more deadly, virulent second wave. Please remember that the Spanish Flu was anomalous because it had a more deadly second wave. Almost all viruses, as a function of evolution, become less deadly over time.

And this ignores all of the vast improvements in our understanding of sickness and hygiene, our availability of clean, sanitary conditions etc. Hell, even the change in density between 1918 and 2021 is massively changed.

I don't know how to respond to that - I technically agree with you, the loudest least educated voices probably wouldn't have wanted to lock down. The lack of info and the panic level probably positively contributed to saving more lives. I'm totally okay with that. I believe that knowing then what we know now, we absolutely should have done what we did, and then some. We didn't have enough testing capacity. We know that if we had locked down even earlier, we would have saved a significant number of additional lives.

It's true that part of the argument was based on hospital capacity. But the models today are still consistent with the view that the capacity in many areas would have been overwhelmed in many places had we done nothing. I think the key there is that civilians were going to "do something" and stay at home even if the government didn't tell them to, no matter what.

> But I am seeing none of that. It is all partisan bickering over "full lockdown" or "full reopen" and both sides claiming the other is "anti-science"

It's best to step away from that kind of absolutist language (none, all) - it just tends to bait people.

My take is that the whole field is extremely underfunded and that breeds levels of competition and short term profit seeking, but that's probably a biased opinion.

I'm sure if the field had the level of VC support that traditional software/computing gets we would be making huge strides with our humanity.