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

Neither can be said to be right without reference to a fixed context. If your field standardizes on a lab setup that's drier and sunnier than what ferns like, you'd indeed conclude that ferns grow slower in that context and that's OK because the growth rate is at least well defined. If there's a use case for comparable growth rates in different contexts, OK, define separate names for those rates and measure them separately. Or try to isolate the effect of heat and light such that the growth rate of any plant can be computed from the equivalent of e=mc^2.

Likewise you wouldn't try to measure the infectiousness of HIV in people, clearly. If you want to measure the relative "infectiousness" of viruses in humans using precise numbers then you'd need a controlled experimental environment, presumably something in vitro. That would miss a lot of factors that are important if you're trying to predict epidemics at the society-wide level, but OK, so be it. You need a firm footing of the basics before you can progress to more complex scenarios.

I don't really agree that it's unreasonable to expect CS-level rigor in biology. Microbiologists seem to manage it? It's expected that if two labs sequence the same organism they can in principle get the same DNA sequence, and if they do Xray crystallography on the same protein they'll derive the same structure. So we're not even comparing biology and CS here, we're comparing microbiology with epidemiology. The latter seems to be far closer to a social science in terms of its methods and rigor.

To be clear, it's also fine to do epidemiology using less rigorous methods if it was done in the way it mostly used to be done. When I read papers from the 80s they seemed to be much more appropriate to the actual data quality - largely prose oriented, very limited use of maths, presenting falsifiable hypotheses whilst admitting to the big unknowns. That's fine, science doesn't always have to be precisely quantifiable especially on the margins of what's known. But if scientists do precisely quantify things, then those quantities should be well defined.

Did you actually look at the population pyramid for Italy, and compared it to the one for the US, before you made that argument? I don't think you did.

Besides, even if the true number was 3.8% or 4.3%, that wouldn't change the conclusion.

I get that for whatever reason folks like yourself don't want to believe it, but trust me, masks work. Just ask anyone who works in asbestos abatement or BSL-2+ facilities.

> Right, which is why I followed up with a categorical and complete description of the problems with your nonsensical word salad.

Just because you disagree doesn't mean you have to be provocative and impolite. It's also against HN's rules BTW.

> Habeas corpus is the mechanism by which a person can report a suspected unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court,

You're making a distinction without making a difference. People were detained without charges or probable cause and were not allowed legal remedy.

> Obviously this has nothing at all to do with vaccines except in the fever swamps.

I was talking about lockdowns...

> Not therefore a right, got it.

Just repeating a statement won't make it true, it just makes you arrogant.

Informed consent directly derives from the right to bodily autonomy. It is such a basic right that if its blatant violation can be prosecuted regardless of jurisdiction. It is also protected by the 4h Amendment.

> What you're referring to as 'socialized' here is the government, which we as citizens and resident aliens agree to recognize in order to increase and defend the common good. For example, we agree to being policed, we agree to being taxed, we agree to being bound by laws, and we agree in particular in this case to working together to try to stop the collapse of healthcare systems, even if that is inimical to the political chances of the president at the time.

Actually "we" didn't "agree", what ever that means. The "common good" was never the foundation of the US, it was a Republic (thus power by and for the people) with limitations to protect individual liberties to limit the tyranny of the majority (the funding fathers were actually very critical of Athenian democracy BTW).

Taxes and police have their legitimacy through elected officials. But lockdowns and forced vaccination were put into place through edicts, the vast majority of whom were struck down by the Supreme Court, and thus never had the consent of the people nor respected individual rights.

> That would miss a lot of factors that are important if you're trying to predict epidemics at the society-wide level, but OK, so be it. You need a firm footing of the basics before you can progress to more complex scenarios.

That's how EE/CS stuff usually works (at least outside ML), building complex systems hierarchically out of well-understood primitives. The life sciences are different. There's almost nothing there we understand well enough to build like that, so almost all results of practical importance (a novel antibiotic, a vaccine, a cultivar of wheat, etc.) are produced by experiment and iteration on the complete system of interest, guided to some extent by our limited theoretical understanding.

This discrepancy has been noted many times; it's just a completely different way of working and thinking. If you haven't, then you might read "Can a biologist fix a radio?".

> Microbiologists seem to manage it?

A grad student in microbiology can grow millions of test organisms in a few days, at the cost of a few dollars, and get all the usual benefits of the central limit theorem. A grad student in epidemiology absolutely can't, since their test organisms are necessarily people. So you're quite correct that it's basically a social science, since it depends on aggregate human behavior in the same way e.g. that economics does, and is therefore just as dismal. Unfortunately it's also the best and only science capable of answering questions of significant practical importance, like whether the hospitals are about to be overrun. I'd tend to agree that stuff like Imperial College's CovidSim has so many parameters and so little ground truth as to have almost no predictive value. R0 seems fine to me though, and usefully well-defined, in the same way that the CAGR of a country's GDP seems fine.

In the life sciences, it's often possible to design an experiment under artificial conditions that will get a repeatable answer, like the growth rate of a plant in a certain controlled environment. It's much more difficult to use the result of such a repeatable experiment for any practical purpose; consider, for example, the steep falloff in drug candidates as they move from in vitro screens (cheap and repeatable, but only weakly predictive) to human trials (predictive by definition, but expensive and noisy). I'm absolutely not a life scientist myself, in part because I think I'd find that maddening; but essentially all results of practical benefit there came from researchers working in that way.