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

Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 381 posts

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#131

Post by parrellel »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #37
rawfan wrote: post #13

The author, Marty Makary, is a surgon. He does not have any expertise regarding viruses or epidemiology. He's completely ignoring all other reasons why infection might go down, the most important one being effective countermeasures, like wearing masks and social distancing. He's also ignoring that the case rates are stagnating due to the British variant. Germany is in that phase now. Cases of the British variant are…

Part of my current out of my butt theory why cases are going down is all the dummy's have partial herd immunity. The reasoning is simple. If you listen to what people that actually know what they are talking about they say in the US total cases are about 20%. Lets consider Gallant. Gallant does all the things to stay safe. Is the infection rate among Gallants 20%? Hell no. It's probably a 1/3 that or 6-7%. Consider G…

The "stupid people" demographic reaching saturation and there being a depression in transmission as a result does make a lot of sense just from observed behavior. Then we'd expect the next surge when people start to relax safety measures.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#132

Post by nimbius »

handelaar wrote: post #111

I for one love it when mouthy oncologists get picked to talk about epedemiology in the Journal. Next week, tune in for a sculptor's hot take on the Mars lander.

s/We'll have/I really really want/

These sadly arent the exclusive purvey of the journal. plenty of other dog-trainers and nightly consumer-news shows often feature what amounts to a thinly-veiled quarantine tantrum masquerading as insightful critique.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#133

Post by helge9210 »

tinus_hn wrote: post #110
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking back at the strategies that different countries have pursued over the last year, the most effective strategy has undoubtedly been to implement a strict lockdown for several weeks, nearly completely eliminating the virus, and then following up with aggressive contact-tracing whenever any case pops up. Countries that have done this have had far fewer deaths and have suffered less economically. The alternatives…

No, the only solution that has worked is being an isolated nation and blocking international travel from the beginning. For 90% of countries that was never an option anyway and for most of the rest that ship has long sailed. The countries that have tried, like Israel, have seen so much success with that strategy they are now in their third lockdown. And that’s with the best vaccination numbers of the world.

Israel is not a good example. Lockdown application here is very uneven. They have nothing to do with the virus and are mainly used by politicians in power to suppress secular way of life and to redistribute business opportunities.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#134

Post by aww_dang »

tinus_hn wrote: post #104
acdha wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic damage is being done by the pandemic: people aren’t going to congregate when it’s risky and many businesses can’t survive without high in-person volume. Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan). What won’t work is attacking medical precautions or dissembling about vaccine effectiveness — and on…

Ah. The ‘it works on an isolated island with 5 million people’ fantasy. Except it doesn’t work on continents with billions of people with multiple governments. And then the magical mask fairytale. If only people had worn masks this would all be over. Except now it turns out people have to wear three masks on top of each other. How could that be if masks had solved all the problems? The answer is clear: they don’t. Th…

>There is no point in blameshifting to people that ‘didn’t wear the masks and didn’t lock down’.

If we accept your analysis, we can say this serves a political purpose.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#135

Post by anoonmoose »

EricE wrote: post #121
acdha wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic damage is being done by the pandemic: people aren’t going to congregate when it’s risky and many businesses can’t survive without high in-person volume. Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan). What won’t work is attacking medical precautions or dissembling about vaccine effectiveness — and on…

"Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan)." How do you explain Florida, not locked down, vs. California with some of the strictest lock downs in the country having similar rates of death/infection? It's even more of a puzzler for those pushing lockdowns since Florida has a population tilted way more in the…

If one football team got beat 8-0, and another football team got beat 9-1, should we really be spending time arguing about which team is better when they're both pretty obviously not very good?

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#136

Post by tinus_hn »

acdha wrote: post #101
tinus_hn wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claim lockdowns are effective because they are effective: if cases are going down without lockdown, it’s because of some unknown outside factor. If cases are going down with lockdown, it must be because of lockdown. Lockdown is both necessary and unnecessary.

Cases go down when the virus is spreading less. We know lockdowns are effective because that’s happened everywhere which effectively implemented them, but nobody is saying that it’s the only option: for example, if anti-maskers woke up one morning and decided to be decent people the rate would reliably slow, too. What doesn’t help is pretending that the risks aren’t real and haven’t been well-understood for roughly t…

Oh sorry, is South Korea in the ‘everything is going great’ list again? Last thing I remember they were in their third wave with restrictions for 3 months already. They must have forgotten how to wear their magical masks.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#137

Post by djrogers »

cheph wrote: post #34

This "pandemic" has given me permanent damage to hips, back and knees, without once having COVID, or ever meeting someone who has had COVID, or meeting someone who knows someone who has had COVID. I only know one person that knows a person who had COVID, and that person is on the other side of the planet. I would much rather have had COVID. COVID lasts some weeks, maybe months with long COVID, I have damage for the r…

> This "pandemic" has given me permanent damage to hips, back and knees,

It sounds far more likely that some poor decisions in how you managed your lifestyle and/or ergonomics during the pandemic led to those conditions.

Nobody forced you to work from your couch/bed/floor or whatever it was that caused your unfortunate condition. Ikea and Office Depot remained open nearly everywhere...

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#138

Post by tinus_hn »

helge9210 wrote: post #133
tinus_hn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the only solution that has worked is being an isolated nation and blocking international travel from the beginning. For 90% of countries that was never an option anyway and for most of the rest that ship has long sailed. The countries that have tried, like Israel, have seen so much success with that strategy they are now in their third lockdown. And that’s with the best vaccination numbers of the world.

Israel is not a good example. Lockdown application here is very uneven. They have nothing to do with the virus and are mainly used by politicians in power to suppress secular way of life and to redistribute business opportunities.

Ah, so the no true lockdown isn’t strict enough.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#139

Post by ncallaway »

thehappypm wrote: post #88
ncallaway wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we do have is proof that increased gatherings lead to increased transmission. We have, I think, a pretty reasonable assumption that holidays lead to increased gatherings. So, a cautious assumption until data shows it's not accurate that "holidays lead to increased transmission" seems to me to be warranted. Have you seen data that shows holidays don't lead to increased transmission?

The upward curve started well before Thanksgiving -- really around October 1 we started seeing the summer flatness yield to an upward curve, it was steepest in November, peaking around mid-January. If the holidays were end of November through December, wouldn't the spike have started around December 1?

That is not evidence that holidays do not lead to increased transmission.

It is evidence that other things can also lead to increased transmission.

If my hypothesis were "ONLY holidays can lead to increase transmission", then that evidence would falsify it.

But my hypothesis is that "holidays can lead to increased transmission", so that evidence doesn't falsify it.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#140

Post by 40four »

I'm not sure how much stock I would put into this type of claim in an opinion article, but anecdotally, I've been tracking the daily new cases and percent positive in my area very closely for a while.

Especially in the last couple of weeks the percent positive & new cases has fallen dramatically. Seemingly for no good reason. In my state, we are now consistently seeing percent positive less than 10%. After the holidays, especially Christmas, it spiked up to 25% or more. This makes me wonder if we are in fact nearing some sort of turning point as the number of folks who have contracted it must be pretty high, and people are getting vaccinated.

Are others seeing this same trend in their area?

Post reply on HN