Spread slows down rapidly long before reaching 100%. People hear “5x as infectious” and reason that due to the nature of exponential models, that much more than 5x people will be infected. This is extremely incorrect. In truth, far fewer than 5x people will be infected over the long term. And again, no, this is not because it’s hitting the upper limits of 100% of the population or anywhere near that.

I won’t be so bold as to say it’s probable, but given this is not a novel virus, it’s entirely believable to say that omicron could go on to infect fewer people than delta due to the past two years of vaccination and immunity and die off. Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.

Now we are at the point where fully vaccinated people and people with immunity from a previous infection have a low rate of death or serious illness. People who are very old or have a compromised immune system should lay low and take precautions now and during every flu season when it spikes. Those who choose not to get vaccinated and die, that is still on them.

So yes the vaccine has already saved million of lives, but I sure hope that this is not the new normal this winter or we are going to cross 1 million deaths fairly soon.

If that’s true, you’d see a decrease in mortality over the next few years. Covid is basically doing what the flu does every winter (but on a larger scale) - it pushes people close to death over the edge.

Less so with age group 75-84, but still visible.

For example the first omnicron death in the US was in their 50’s that had already had COVID but never got vaccinated. By many metrics that’s old but their still well below average life expectancy.

You can make that argument with any illness, and people do. E.g., you can't get cancer if you eat healthy, oh, you got cancer? You must not have been eating the right diet for your body type.

Subjective boundaries aren’t an excuse to cover your ears and ignore strong correlations.

Most people who contracted covid, 99.9% of them, are fine. Of those that have died, 100% seem to have had some underlying issue. You're acting as though it's unreasonable to account for comorbidities when determining the cause of death.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/blog/immunocompromised-...

The title itself suggests the immunocompromised are acknowledged as an overlooked group.

The CDC has some discussion at

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/duration-isola...

From the link above, the immunocompromised are a reservoir for the virus for a longer time, since it takes longer for the body to clear the virus. So certainly worth the extra attention, from an epidemiological standpoint if nothing else.

My sense is the immunocompromised would know the COVID response drill from all the other infectious agents they have to deal with so, maybe, they are more careful anyway, but…

The puzzling thing is (from the Johns Hopkins link) there are 15M immunocompromised in the US.

Which does beg the question: if COVID is truly a superbug, two years on, why aren’t they (the immunocompromised) dead yet?

A death rate of only 6%, over two years, for this highly vulnerable immunocompromised population would explain all the US deaths from COVID.

How can COVID be simultaneously

(1) the Plague of the Century and,

(2) two years on, also leave 94% to 99+% of the most vulnerable alive (depending on your assumption on the percentage of symptomatic/hospitalized/fatal COVID cases who are/were immunocompromised)?

Just another COVID “mystery”? Seems a bit odd.

"Immunocompromised" as a category includes a very wide range of people, and someone who's on a small temporary prednisone prescription is far less immunocompromised than a chemotherapy patient, solid organ transplant recipient, or HIV+ individual.

Seriously - what's the subtext here?

It wasn't a cakewalk but it was nowhere the nightmares of many other places.

Or Italy where they had to call in the military to cart away corpses:

* https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/italian-army-moves-coronavir...

First and foremost, we can only make predictions based upon the data we have. The data we have is mostly based upon people going for voluntary testing. Given the variability in symptoms that motivate testing, varying levels of awareness to potential exposure, varying willingness to get tested, and the availability of testing, the number of known exposures will make it look like we're in an exponential growth phase even when things are tapering off. It is hard to blame public health organizations for accepting this data at face value since the potential consequences of not doing so are extremely bleak.

The other consideration is that people will modify their behaviour based upon perceived risk, whether or not restrictions are imposed. People will tend to comply with restrictions, go about life as normal, follow some sort of middle path, or impose tighter restrictions upon themselves. It takes a truly special person to put themselves into a position of greater risk. Even then, there is a good chance that they are doing little more than translating one high risk circumstance into another (more or less balancing out the growth). We are facing a situation where scientists can make predictions based upon what is known, e.g. the outcome of restrictions, or making predictions based upon anticipated behaviour. Given there is not enough data to model anticipated behaviour, the natural response is to rely upon models that use expected behaviour (e.g. compliance with restrictions or no response). Since the average actual response will prefer over compliance, more bleak predictions are made.

Finally, everyone has a different understanding of life now as compared to life before the pandemic. I remember when the coronavirus first caught my attention: it was when major U.S. universities started shutting down. I remember when I first started taking it seriously: it was when my provincial government issued a shelter in place style order. Since that time, I have paid attention to what is happening and thinking about how I should respond. Sometimes it is in an acute manner. Sometimes is in a cursory manner. Either way, I am more likely to notice and respond preemptively to outbreaks. I suspect that many, if not most, people are the same even if their only actions are stocking up to prepare for the worse. Again, this will affect outcomes.

But before, here at least, it was repeatedly underestimating the in the aftermath clearly visible exponential growth, exactly as the r factor is calculated? Which scientist/MD doesn't understand there is a saturation, in the extreme even schoolers understand you cannot have more than 100% infected.

Yes, at some point it is becoming logistic, but the previous waves were not about getting anywhere there, but going from 0.1% to 1% or more, and there it was truly exponential growth and overwhelming the health care system, what the start of that logistic curve is about..?!

We all will get sick from flu. Do we keep harping the potential of Spanish flu return? If we treat everything with utmost cdc-lab4 kind of safety, a lot of things we can't do and even earn a living. Up to a point, people need to realize we have to live with Covid just like everyone living with the virus descendent of Spanish flu.

And Omicron should be viewed as blessing to some extend as it is less severe and is one way nature provide immunity to us. A lot of people would want natural immunity than constantly getting jab every couple of months (Israel going for 4th right now).

Providence hospitals on the west coast are overwhelmed

Hennepin hospitals are overwhelmed in Minneapolis

Trinity Health with hospitals in 25 states is also getting overwhelmed

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/21/1066093...

“ The troops deployed to hospitals will include doctors, nurses, paramedics and other personnel during January and February as needed, the senior administration officials said. The White House is also deploying six emergency response teams to Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona, New Hampshire and Vermont, the officials said.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/12/21/omi...

Anyway, I was suspicious so I looked up some of the hospitals you mention. It turns out they are actually short of staff not beds... because they fired them all for not taking the vaccine.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2021/12/...

The media is in full spin trying to cover up the reason why hospital workers are leaving, claiming it is because they are exhausted, and ignoring the fact they were fired.

https://www.fox9.com/news/people-are-exhausted-health-care-w...

The Hennepin hospital you mention is getting the army to send more staff

https://www.modernhealthcare.com/safety-quality/defense-depa...

Obviously they aren't short of beds or more staff wouldn't help.

2. Not all staff quit due to vaccine requirements. As some of the articles pointed out, they quit due to sheer exhaustion from the hospitals being continually overwhelmed

3. The percentage of nurses taken out due to vaccine requirements is less than 1%. Yes, every staff member counts, but that’s not the sole source or even the main source for hospitals being overwhelmed

4. The main cause of hospitals being overwhelmed is still due to a surge of incoming patients.

But more importantly it's well established that diseases that those diseases spread most widely that don't kill rapidly (or that more generally don't have severe symptoms) and that have a longer period between the start of infectivity (= shortly after infection) and the onset of identifiable symptoms. So you would indeed anticipate that any disease that runs sufficiently long in the population becomes more mild and has a later onset of symptoms as variants with these features outcompete thr others.

In other words: it is expected that covid mutates over time to become more mild on average. But that doesn't mean that everyone survives. Infection rates in many countries are higher than ever, which even if the % of severe cases is lower than with other variants, delta and omicron will still kill and have severe long-term effects on many.

I didn’t say every one was going to survive omicron. I said the spread was unlikely to be materially higher than its predecessor and likely have a lower negative impact.

A disease that spreads twice as fast is unlikely to infect twice as many people (over the long term). A disease that causes fewer adverse effects, let’s say half as often, needs to, by definition, infect twice as many people over the long run in order to cause the same amount of harm.

As a dumb mental model, if omicron is 30% less dangerous, then omicron needs to infect 42% more people to be as harmful to society. That is very difficult to achieve, especially given our collective immunity achieved so far. I would say there is little chance of this occurring.

The real concerns about omicron are that: 1) A rapid initial spread will overwhelm the healthcare system and 2) that if its basic R0 rate is sufficiently high, then even after remedial measures are taken, we will still be left with an effective R0 rate above 1 for quite some time.

I know you’re caveating “effective R0” but frankly that’s stupid. Saying as long it keeps growing it will keep growing purposefully ignores the point I am making which is that it won’t keep growing.

The effective R0 falls on its own. That is the point being made. It will absolutely not reach 100% of the population. Not even close.

And what I'm saying to you is that nobody believes otherwise. It's all known that diseases are self-limiting, and infection rates follow an s-curve and eventually drop off. This isn't a groundbreaking revelation.

[0] https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/rounds/how-scientists-quantif...

i’ve been mildly amused/dismayed by the constant misplaced focus on R0 over the past 2 years by the media/laypeople, given this essential context.

Virus evolution tends to optimize for replication and transmission, and not reduced severity. If a particular mutation causes a virus to replicate better than other variants, but it ends up killing hosts more often, it doesn't really matter what happens to the host afterwards, evoluntionarily, as the virus has already spread it genes more than it did before it mutated.

What appears to have happened with Omicron is that it has mutated in a way that increases transmission at the expense of lethality:

https://www.med.hku.hk/en/news/press/20211215-omicron-sars-c...

That depends on whether the mutations that cause it to replicate better also make it more virulent. The symptoms that help spread Ebola, for example, are the same symptoms that kill those who become infected with it.

I told my friends: "I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief if this thing turns over before it's infected most of us." In fact it's probably hard to speculate why it turned over, but behavioral measures are probably an important factor.

That’s the big assumption in R0.

And yet, you can go from a few rare cases in your country to hospitals overflowing in a couple of weeks. That's because of exponential growth, obviously.

1) exponential growth has consistently ceased before the hospitals overflowed too bad

2) exponential growth confuses readers into thinking that a small boost in spread rate means many more will be infected. This isn’t true because the exponential phase is brief and is a progression towards a ceiling defined by the graph, not an arbitrary period of time. Like what we are seeing in South Africa right now.

The big problem is that people think an increase in the spreading rate will cause an exponentially higher number of infected. But it won’t. The model is not appropriate.

I believe quite a few hospitals around the world overflowed pretty badly.

Here on vaccinated Denmark this is the truth. But we’re actually approaching last years levels regardless because of just how many people are getting covid this year. It’s more manageable thanks to the very high vaccination status, but we seem to have been too slow with the 3rd hit for a major part of the population. I have two shots myself, and my family is all in covid isolation all tested positive and “looking forward” to spend Christmas with ourselves and not our families. It’s not too bad for any of us, it’s not pleasant either, but the biggest thing for me is how much we’re having to shut down despite the high vaccination percentage.

You can’t go to a movie or actual theatre. Bars close at 22:00. Most major Christmas parties (this is a big thing here) have been cancelled. But the biggest impact is on culture business like the theatres, concert houses, Christmas markets, museums and so on. If covid is going to be a recurrent thing every winter, then I think that we’re going to see some drastic changes to those aspects of society.

I mean technically the lockdowns possibly make sense as a way to control the spread until a spread controlling vaccine (the existing mRNA ones aren't such) is widely applied - ie. that seems to be the case in China where initial spread was effectively controlled and they use inactivated covid virus vaccine instead of mRNA - though we don't know for sure because Chinese government info can be very different from reality.

I guess our government was too slow to roll out the 3rd shot since so many are affected.

The reason why we’re having lockdowns now is because the situation is that so many people are sick that we need to make sure there is enough people to staff things like power plants.

I don’t know about the light symptoms bit. I can’t remember the last time I felt this shitty, but I’m obviously not close to being hospitalised either. I’m probably fit for work by American standards, but I’ve been home sick since the 20th by Danish standards. This is very anecdotal of course, but I sure as shit don’t feel well.

But I've heard some claims that it already has started to displace Delta, though not from a source I'd feel confident citing. But just looking at it, if you believe the CDC estimate of 73% Omicron the other day, Delta must have dropped a lot despite it being winter. Appears like displacement happening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#Modeling_ear...

E.g. let’s say there is an office where everyone works in person and a bar with a group of regular customers. If someone in the office gets Covid, everyone in there has some decent chance of getting it. Similarly, if a bar regular gets Covid, each of the others has a decent chance to get it. But if only one person who works at the office is also a regular at the bar, then for the infection to hop from one cluster to the other, that person needs to get it from the initial outbreak, and they need to continue going into the office during their infectious period, and folks need to catch it from them, none of which is certain.

So, my guess is that after enough of these clusters get seeded to start a wave, “R” is initially high, but R decreases massively once enough of the infected clusters are saturated, possibly low enough to make the growth visibly non-exponential, even if the entire population infected rate is nowhere near the point where growth rate would decline in a simple logistic model.

The exponential part is easy and that works, but it's more complicated with isolation of the infectious, refractory periods, etc

While this does appear plausible, doesn't this depend to some degree on what exactly is the immunity conferred by vaccination or past infection? If vaccines and past infections are effective against severity of case/symptoms but ineffective against new/re-infection, then you could still see greater numbers with omicron than even with delta. No?

Still not forever exponential, of course.

Well, that should always be true: the people that are most at risk are already dead from earlier variants, and our treatments are light years ahead of where they were 18 months ago, reducing hospitalizations (and death) for everyone else.

Mathematical models are difficult because we don’t know the real inputs and fitting a curve in retrospect is easy to get a compelling looking answer which is wrong.

You can gain an intuition for it just imagining a random walk on a social network graph though. Just jump from friend to friend randomly on Facebook. Early on it is easy to spread to new people. Later on it’s very difficult to find new people. You get stuck in the same cohorts.

More simply just look at past covid outcomes. Or pretty much any epedemiological model. All of them claim only the initial period is exponential. It’s the issue of how to determine the slowdown period that’s tricky and frankly impossible without more data than we have. But assuming that the slowdown state will look similar to previous slowdown states is a good idea.

The graph of human social contacts is not even close to uniformly random, so it makes sense that simplistic formulas would not work.

I think it’s a bit silly to fixate on the base stats of the virus rather than it’s actually efficacy against the human population.

Take a look at these two charts. Omicron cases spiked in SA. Deaths didn't budge. At all.

https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png [1]

Omicron is a good thing, if your baseline is Delta. But I'm still waiting for the US media stop hyperventilating about it.

1. https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...

It does seem like Omicron is less deadly than Delta. The big concern is that because it's so significantly more contagious, that even though a smaller percentage of infected people will require ventilators, the absolute number will be high enough to overwhelm hospitals.

Sources: Dr. John Campbell, Dr. Larry Brilliant (WHO) https://youtu.be/YdVymGK3OzM https://youtu.be/ltXkJTSBeaE

This is a legitimate theoretical concern, however empirically it looks like South Africa's hospitalizations are peaking at slightly more than half their previous wave, with deaths on pace to peak even lower[1][2]

[1]https://twitter.com/thehowie/status/1473642495095496704 [2]https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covi...

I do think that the decision that was made to keep pushing boosters and basically do nothing else is probably the correct one, but not because it was the default thing to do and we have to wait until there's incontrovertible evidence that the default action will lead to ruin before doing anything else.

[1]https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare

That said, deaths are still dropping, and have been dropping since November, which was a local minimum in case numbers.

The pertinent fact, I think, is that the UK is vaccinating like crazy, coming up to 1m boosters per day recently (total population just short of 70m IIRC), even 12-18 year-olds are getting jabbed now.

Sure, I'd rather we didn't have Covid at all, but that's not been a realistic option for quite some time now.

The thing that needs to not happen is filling up hospitals. People died where I live because they could not get access to 'elective' surgery due to the medical system being slammed during the most recent Delta wave.

Once that's not a factor, things will start getting more normal.

Like, it's been 2 years. We shouldn't be doing any of these restrictions at all. We should be angry at our governments wasting 2 years of our non-refundable time on this earth while they did nothing. Blaming the public for hospital capacity at this point is absurd.

The first wave of COVID killed a bunch of doctors and nurses, and burnt a lot more out.

Then Delta made a bunch more doctors and nurses quit, with wide reports right now that 20% of nurses are looking to up and leave their job. Talking to my friends who are nurses, they are short staffed, and have been for some time.

On top of that, the way the US does medical training for both nurses and doctors ensures we don't have enough medical professionals during normal times. Nursing schools can't find instructors (pay is too low) and hospitals are purposefully limiting the number of residency spots available to ensure prices for medical care stay high (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)#Financing...)

So, you know, business as usual in the US.

I never heard about it before. Could you provide link to your claim?

All of that is pre-delta, remember that when COVID first hit in 2020 we still didn't have a good idea how it spread.

The tl;dr is that the US government doesn't do a good job of collecting statistics of how many health care workers died of COVID.

1.5k nursing home workers seems to be the one reliable # from the first article, and The Guardian is saying around 3600 healthcare workers in total.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/21/who-estimate-115000-heal...

WHO reports over 100k deaths of healthcare workers world wide.

So statistically a small #, but it doesn't account for the # of nurses who got COVID and had long term symptoms that kept them from going back to work, or who just decided to no longer work at all.

And it looks like these #s are highly biased towards major population centers, so it wasn't an even distribution from the country or anything.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29656232

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29656471

Their methodology is based on an assumption that healthcare workers are as likely to die of covid as the general population, that is, their job does not expose them to elevated risk. You can see the start of their methodology as:

"As a start, the number of deaths among HCWs was simply estimated by applying the crude mortality rate from each country (namely, the number of deaths reported to the WHO COVID-19 Dashboard divided by the population size) to the estimated number of HCWs in each country derived from ILOSTAT . This simple estimation considers HCWs to have a similar exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infection and risk of death to that of the general population..."

From there they do adjust for some things, but they are the ways that healthcare workers are different, demographically, from the general population. They are not looking at occupational risk.

I could still totally believe that healthcare workers are at elevated occupational risk, but a paper that assumes their risk is what you would expect from their demographics isn't going to help us answer that question.

I'm not an actuary though, I only have statistics background.

The lack of healthcare capacity has been a conscious choice. There's been no serious effort to build it out. We've chosen to indulge this fantasy that humanity can get control of COVID and we'll just vaccinate it out of existence, despite decades of knowledge about how difficult that would be from our research into other coronaviruses. So when I hear that we need to give up another year of normal life to "keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed", it is frustrating to hear.

No, there wouldn't, because, among other things, comorbidities that must be managed, especially in the population most COVID hospitalizations come from.

> Combat soldiers learn basic emergency medical techniques, even to the point of running IVs

Which allows them to serve as, basically, better-than-nothing EMTs in the absence of anyone else, which is useful on the battlefield to keep people alive to get to proper medical care; they don't replace doctors and nurses, though.

This is a battlefield. It's an emergency, remember? Do whatever it takes. We forced people to sacrifice their short-ass lives in lockdown so these people could figure it out. Where is the results? 2 years and these "experts" still want us to continue locking down to protect a healthcare system they had 2 years to build up specifically to manage covid.

It's as if every one of our lives is worthless in the eyes of people making excuses. No. We paid with our time--something we'll never get back. It is a complete travesty that governments continue to blame the public for their own inability to figure shit out.

No, it's literally not.

> It's an emergency, remember?

Yes and all battlefields are emergencies but not all emergencies have the same conditions (and thus make the same measures expedient) as battlefields.

> Do whatever it takes.

Sure, but what you are suggesting is not what it takes, or something that would be reasonably expected to be useful and effective.

> 2 years and these "experts" still want us to continue locking down

We never generally locked down in the US and no one is suggesting lockdowns now, so I have no idea what “continue locking down” is supposed to mean. (Some US jurisdictions had brief and mostly unenforced policies that, if enforced, would have been local lockdowns, but even the on paper policies expired without renewal quite some time ago.)

Do y'all not value your lives or short time on this earth at all? You should be furious the government is still playing the "protect healthcare capacity" card. They literally wasted 2 years of your life. No results. And they have the audacity to blame you and the rest of society for their failure!! How on earth is that excusable?

I reject that that's an even remotely accurate description of anything that has happened, or has any other relevancd to reality.

> many places are locking down yet again

What places? Unless you are using “locking down” as loosely as you’ve used “battlefield”, that's not actually happening, anywhere.

> And they have the audacity to blame you

The only people I’ve seen anyone in government even approximately blame are particular government decision-makers who allegedly deliberately acted to make things worse and the unvaccinated, neither group of which included me. So, again, I reject that this description is grounded in reality.

And if the goal isn't to flatten the curve to build supplies and increase healthcare capacity, please inform me what the goal actually is. 'Cause if that ain't it... I have no fucking clue what we are doing.

When you use a dramatic-sounding word like "lockdown", there's an implicit bargain you're making. You get to have a stronger emotional effect on me, and in exchange I get to call bullshit if it turns out that you're using it for something that doesn't justify that stronger emotional effect.

It sounds as if you're calling _every_ restriction anyone imposed on anyone in the name of fighting COVID-19 "lockdown". In which case, I call bullshit. For instance, being required to wear a mask when indoors with other people (I guess this is the sort of thing that the bare word "masks" in your list means): yeah, it kinda sucks, but it is a long way from anything that justifies the term "lockdown".

The same goes for your words about the government (I'm not sure which government, but never mind) "flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain". I don't know exactly what's happened in your life, nor in the life of anyone else who isn't me; but while lots of things have been worse than usual for the last two years it's a long way short of "flushing my life down the drain". In fact, here are some things that two years of would be (1) much worse than what I have endured for the last two years but also (2) much less bad than "flushing (those years of) my life down the drain". (a) Being out of work. (b) Getting divorced. (c) Having a substantial disability such as deafness or the loss of a limb. (d) Major depressive disorder.

At least one actual underlying point you're making is a cogent one: governments across the world were concerned about their healthcare systems being overwhelmed, they asked or required people to make sacrifices that (as well as protecting the people making the sacrifices) made that less likely, but they didn't take steps to make substantial increases in the capacity of those healthcare systems that would make such sacrifices less necessary in the future.

That's partly because making substantial increases to the capacity of your healthcare system is hard and takes time. Hospitals take time to build. Doctors take time (a lot more than two years) to train. Etc. But, still, it's probably true that one thing we should have been trying to do alongside panic-mode COVID-19 fighting is to make longer-term capacity increases.

And, yes, all those restrictions governments have imposed have costs as well as benefits, and we should be weighing those up and not just assuming we should do everything that has benefits.

But you don't do either of those points any favours by tying them to hyperbolic language for all the things governments have been doing in the short term to try to reduce the spread. Nowhere has been "locked down" for two years, unless you take "locked down" to mean "doing anything at all to try to reduce the spread of COVID-19", and you shouldn't do that because words have meanings and connotations and that isn't what "locked down" means. Some people have indeed suffered terribly, but by and large we have not had two years of our lives "flushed down the drain", unless you take "flushed down the drain" to mean "made a bit worse", which again you shouldn't do because that's not what those words mean.

Say "Wearing masks kinda sucks, and we should actually look at whether the benefits justify the costs" and I'll warmly agree (though I might or might not end up agreeing with you about how the calculation comes out). Say "Working from home kinda sucks for many people and is basically impossible for others, and having everyone do it has severe economic consequences, and we should weigh those up against the benefits and not do it if it's net negative" and I'll warmly agree (though, again, I don't guarantee to agree about how the calculations come out in every particular case). But say "the government is flushing your life down the drain" or "we have been in lockdown for two years" and, no, sorry, I call bullshit. Those things are not true, and when you say them I can't help suspecting motives I can't endorse such as a preference for labelling everything a government does with the most negative labels you can find.

It takes a remarkable amount of privilege to say something like this.

We stole peoples proms, first dates, high school dances, drunken college hookups, funerals, weddings, livelihoods, social lives, you name it and we stole it in a failed attempt to “flatten the curve”.

People who minimize or brush away the impact the last two hellish years of our existence are either privileged as fuck or have a pathetic, miserable pre-pandemic life. I hardly know what else to say.

How dare anybody say last two years was “made a bit worse”. Speak for yourself… but you have no right to make that claim of others. These last two years seriously fucked my shit up and I’m hardly the minority. Screw people who gaslight us by saying “made a bit worse”.

What "takes a remarkable amount of privilege" is equating what has happened over the last two years to the awful, awful things that can actually flush two years (or more) of a person's life down the drain.

Note that you didn't just claim that some people's lives were impacted badly enough to amount to flushing them down the drain. (That might well be true. The Plague Years have been much worse for some people than for others.) What you wrote, to someone about whom so far as I know you know nothing to speak of, was: "So you are totally okay with the government flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain". "Your life", not "my life" or "some people's lives". And, if I may borrow your language for a moment: you have no right to make that claim of others.

To repeat something I already said (but you apparently didn't read, or decided to ignore because if you acknowledged it it would be harder to maintain the desired level of outrage): yes, it's been much worse for some people than others. If you tell me your life feels like it's been flushed down the drain for the last two years then I'll believe you. But you don't get to point at some random person on HN and claim that the same is true of them.

No.

The things that were about flattening the curve were about avoiding acute health system overload and increased mortality that would result from that (for all causes, not just COVID, since no ICU capacity kills people regardless of the reason they can't get into an ICU) to provide time for the development of effective preventive and treatment interventions, minimizing deaths on the route to that. (I suppose you can call that “building healthcare capacity”, but the goal has never been prinarily about bulking up the number of seriously I'll people hospitals can concurrently treat on a sustained basis, but the capacity to prevent people from getting seriously ill.)

(The original research indicated that after a general lockdown period, cycling local, often more modest, control measures would likely be necessary to that end.)

While the particular half-measures adopted and half-heartedly implemented have had mixed results in preventing health system overload (since we've seen temporary overload various places at various times), we have, in fact, developed various effective interventions and are on the road to more.

So we agree it is about healthcare capacity. You know the best way to avoid healthcare collapse? Build more of it!

You know the unethical, immoral way of avoiding healthcare collapse? Force hundreds of millions of people into this purgatory we are living in right now while doing absolutely fuck-all to build capacity. Then blame them all for "not taking this seriously" when their brilliant plan of doing fuck-all fails.

Seriously. Do you not see how much bullshit it is to just expect the entire world, billions of people to put their lives on hold indefinitely for exactly one specific illness when the solution could be to simply build capacity to deal with covid surges? These governments did fuck all to solve the capacity problem. They dont respect any of us at all!! They pissed our lives away so they didn't have to do anything.

Do you not value your time on this earth at all? 'Cause if you do, I'm sorry to tell you but the government just hoodwinked you into thinking it was your job to sacrifice your life so they didn't have to do anything at all.

Life is short dude. Expecting everybody to do this because "original models" by some bullshit "expert" said so... bleech...

No, the best way is to not need it in the first place. Vaccinating people is vasty more efficient in terms of people's time and money.

Universal vaccination uptake would obviate that.

So why don't you run for office and do it differently?

Who else's fault is it? It isn't the public, that is for sure. You can't blame people for human behavior and "not taking this seriously". These governments asked us to pay one of the highest costs you can pay--they asked us to donate 2 years of our short lives to their cause. And thus far, they have done absolutely nothing but blame the public for their failings.

Life is short. Being asked to flush 2 years of your life down the toilet in this purgatory we are in is a huge ask. Don't you think we should see some results now?

I also wish the various levels of government would have responded differently. I'm assuming you mean in the US, but that's where I am so I'll go with that. I wish the Trump admin would have responded differently, the Biden admin, the US Senate and House (2020 and 2021 members), my governor in Michigan, the senate and house in Michigan, the county health department, my local mayor, and more.

At least in Michigan, they didn't ask me to donate 2 years of my time, much of that has been my choice, frankly against what the Michigan Congress voted. The governor pushed for strong closures in the beginning and the Congress overruled that. Many of the people here have been acting as if there is no pandemic, doing almost exactly what they did before covid-19 existed. Frankly, even many elements of the Trump admin and US Congress have told us to live our lives as normal.

So if anything, I think the government, at its various levels, have provided mixed messages on what we should and should not do. From complete and total lockdown, to open but wear masks, to complete and total return to normalcy. At least in my experience, I haven't heard a coherent "donate 2 years of our short lives to their cause," but rather a mixed message, coming from politicians, who, just as the public are people with human behavior.

IDK, I'm in a fairly 'cautious' state, and things are pretty normal. My kids are in school, stores are open. Restaurants are open. People wear masks. It's not really a big deal.

Do you wear masks 8 hours a day for work? 'Cause I'm sure all the people who do might beg to differ.

Plus masks interfere with communication. Faces are important.

I wore an N95 on a series of flights to Europe over the summer. It was not the most pleasant thing, but I was ok with it. Doctors and nurses regularly work 8/10/12 hours while masked up.

We managed to build giant ships in like 3 or 6 months in WWII. I'm pretty sure we could figure out how to staff 400 or so ICU's with people capable of managing sick covid patients. It might be all these people know how to do... but we could do it. We have almost unlimited resources to do so.

Somehow I remain unconvinced that "thinking outside the box" conjures doctors and nurses into existence or makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job. I guess you could demand the military have doctors and nurses work at the point of a gun, all so John Q. Public probably still couldn't go to Target without a mask on two years hence. That sounds great.

Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Build a second story on their house. I don't care. This shit is an existential emergency where we asked hundreds of millions of people to put 2 years of their life on hold to build healthcare up. Figure it out. If healthcare capacity was the reason we did all this, then we should have poured the entire nation's worth of resources into building healthcare capacity. Period.

It is absolutely inexcusable to continue playing the "healthcare might collapse" card 2 years into this. If people used this many excuses back in WWII we'd have lost the damn war. "Oh, it takes 4 years to design a build a ship... sorry. we can't just pull ships out of our butt. Guess we will just have to let them win". Bullshit. We made it happen. We could make it happen for this too.

This is supposed to be an emergency, remember? Every second you have people in lockdown is a second of each of those peoples very short lives you've now wasted. Figure it out!

They have a moral obligation to not waste my life... which they completely did. Why there aren't riots on the street over the fact that the public is still being blamed for not "taking this seriously" is beyond me. Get fucked, dudes--y'all had 2 years to figure this out.

For me personally it shows it isn't that serious as the fear mongering would like us to be believe

Okay, and who does their job? I mean "no-one can get chemotherapy because the oncology department was told to go work in the ICU" probably isn't a great outcome, either.

ICU capacity can, and in many countries has, been expanded to some extent. But you're not realistically going to 10x it or anything; the main area of concentration has to be reducing the demand on it in the first place (via vaccination, pre-hospital treatment, public safety measures, and, as a last resort, lockdowns).

Vaccination was the end goal because it would mean we could reduce all that emergency capacity we were supposed to build up. Non pharmacutical interventions like masks, social distancing and lockdowns for healthy people are extreme asks and should be used for extremely short durations while you pour your nations entire pool of resources into building healthcare capacity up.

What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals. The fact that all of these were shutdown virtually unused after a month but we continued with all these stay-at-home orders shows exactly how little respect these "experts" and government officials have for the general public. The day those things closed was the day we should have gone back to full normal. That these "experts" doubled down on this crap is so immoral and unethical it amazes me people continued to support it.

That is, of course, far too few (Where is that? I've never heard of a ratio _that_ low for a developed country). But unfortunately, the time to fix it was about five years before it became a major crisis.

> You absolutely could 10x that or even 50x that given the fact you have asked hundreds of millions of people to put their lives on hold.

With what staff?

> What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals.

As far as I can see, those were envisaged as a solution to a regional problem; if covid was only a big problem in a few regions, then this could work via redeployment of staff, drawing on limited reserves of staff (military, bringing people back from retirement, and so on). In practice, very few countries managed to maintain covid as a regional problem, so temporary hospitals became less interesting because _you can't staff them_.

It’s 100% excuses. If healthcare capacity was an actual issue we’d have fixed it already and gone back to pre-pandemic normal.

Covid itself had 0 impact on my life, I don't know a single person that died of it. All the suffering come from restrictions.

It's ok if you have a super boring life without friend or family, never doing anything out or traveling but at least have empathy for others that got miserable because of all those undue restrictions.

That being said, it sucking is not the same as years being wasted. You still have opportunities to do plenty of other stuff. The only reason these years would be wasted is if you do not try to adapt. Are they going to be among the best years of your life? Probably not. Are they necessarily wasted and "stolen"? No.

Covid having a low impact on your life personally is missing the mark on a couple of levels. The low impact might very well be connected to the restrictions in place. In an alternate timeline where restrictions never happened, you might have been equally or more frustrated over the lack thereof as you lost a loved one.

How do you quantify how much discomfort for the general public is worth it to save X amount of lives? You and yours might have gotten dealt a shitty hand because of the border shutdowns, but on the aggregate I think the restrictions have been reasonable.

This is a much better way of describing my reaction to these claims. I appreciate you making it soberly.

There are absolutely folks who've been dealt a rough hand over the last two years--but I certainly wouldn't call my life "boring", and somehow I've figured out ways to make the last two years two of the best of my life: building a wood shop, getting away from the computer more, learning more about myself. And while I'll go back to traveling, etc. once things settle down, I have learned that I don't have to go places to be fulfilled.

Focusing on what one can't do is probably a great way to have made the last two years suck, though.

Drafting people for war works fine because, for the most part in those situations, you're handing someone a gun and telling them to be a meat shield. A similar approach to treating the sick at home is a bit more difficult.

> Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way.

What makes you so sure?

It isn't like this staff has to treat anything else.

Just an idea. Like I said, I'm no expert but the fact that absolutely nobody has attempted to figure it out is bullshit. They haven't even tried. They just keep throwing out excuse after excuse and blaming the public for their failures.

They literally have almost unlimited resources. They could get shit figured out somehow.

This doesn't really pass the sniff test. There are a LOT of different countries and states in the world, with a fairly wide variety of responses to Covid. I'm not aware of any country where they managed to magic up some hospitals fully staffed to handle Covid cases. If it didn't happen despite all the different societies that could have attempted it then it is far more likely that it was considered (and tried even!) and rejected as unworkable.

In other words, you are certainly not the first person to think "what if we just had more hospital beds and staff and throw heaps of money at it to make it happen". The reason no country (that I know of) has done this is because it is impractical. The alternative is a grand conspiracy involving collusion in hundreds of countries and states and their leaders, including all the departments of health and the various officials, in democratic countries, communist countries, authoritarian countries and so on, some of whom are literally at war with each other.

If there's one thing we should've learned from Corona, it's that this line of thinking is wrong. Even facing an emergency like a global pandemic, that has cost the world millions of lives and trillions of dollars of economic damage, most governments did a lot of things very obviously wrong. Clearly, emergencies don't suddenly cause politics to stop and politicians to act perfectly.

Personally, after 2 months of being angry with the ridiculous response of the government I just accepted that you can't fight with mass stupid and moved on to areas of my life that are not affected by covid.

But I still get surprised from time to time you know, you'd expect politicians to accept that everybody had the chance to get vaccinated and lift all the restrictions so that darwinism can do its work, but it seems they want to impose vaccine mandates instead... trying to protect people who don't want to be protected, what's the grand idea behind that?

There's no real end in sight to be honest, it's better to ignore it as much as possible and focus on areas you do control

If we are going to see constant new variants and new waves, then its the only choice we have.

Realistically, the only viable course is probably to vaccinate and boost as many people as humanly possible, and await better vaccines and therapeutics. Paxlovid should hopefully help when it's available in quantity.

Considering how relatively minor covid was, and how simple the situation is, that so many people continue to disagree on basics suggests to me that we have learned very little from this (indicating our capacity to learn certain things is not great), and that if we ever get a serious pandemic (or serious anything), we might be f*cked.

If we had a serious pandemic where dudes were dropping like flys on the street and they had horse drawn carrages stacked with bodies, I don't think many people would have an issue dealing with it. The problem with covid is our response to it was way out of line with the actual illness. People kinda have a problem being asked to make huge sacrifies for something they don't perceive to be a major problem.

That said, I think massive numbers of people (likely the majority still, although the tides seem to be shifting extremely quickly lately) would strongly disagree with us on the degree to which covid is a "major" problem. I am very worried that the inability for people to even mutually agree upon a way of discussing (let alone agreeing on anything) culture war topics, and our inability to take such phenomena seriously, is going to be a gift that keeps on giving for decades into the future (just in time for the climate change culture war).

For example, how many people know the:

- Case fatality rate of COVID-19 (in the U.S, it's 1.6%) - Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 (can only be estimated, but probably around 0.1-0.3%) - Hospitalization utilization (not just now, but also before COVID-19 so one can compare to prior flu seasons and such. Personally I have not found this data) - Demographics of those who died with COVID-19 (in the UK the median age of death is 84, above the life expectancy of 82. Most deaths are old people and/or those with co-morbidities)

Most people drastically overestimate the danger (eg. by at least 5x according to one survey) because they're bombarbed with news and government fear-mongering, forced to take vaccines and be subject to draconian restrictions, then told to shut up and "trust the experts" while being kept in the dark on the data. Even Big Tech was censoring those who questioned the mainstream narrative (eg. Chris Martenson briefly being banned on Youtube)

In any civilized democracy, the citizenry should be educated so they can make the most informed decisions. There obviously seems to be no interest in educating the people except when it serves the narratives of the elite - which right now is basically "get your shot" and do whatever it takes to reduce COVID-19 numbers regardless of any collateral damage (eg. businesses going bankrupt, people losing work/income, hospitals reducing capacity for other kinds of care, schools shutting down, mental health crisis, restriction of freedoms like movement, general fear).

> What's most shocking to me is how little interest there seems to be in educating the population.

I think it's even stranger than it seems at first glance. There is no shortage of people calling for "moar critical thinking", as in "why don't those whose job it is to teach critical thinking do a better job"....but have you ever seen the conversation go beyond that?

To me, it is clear as day that overall humanity has a very serious problem with "critical thinking", and when I say that I'm casting an extremely wide net, one that would capture not just Trump supporters, conspiracy theorists, and over-enthusiastic progressives, but also 90% of the HN userbase (an arbitrary line can be drawn anywhere according to the drawers wishes, but it is not difficult at all to draw a line that captures ~everyone, according to an explicit standard/methodology). I truly believe that things are in a far worse state than anyone realizes, and my reasoning for that is that each individual overlooks one crucial detail: critical thinking is implemented by the human mind, and the human mind is an illusion machine....and, due to millions of years of evolution, it is so good at conjuring illusions (such as each of our respective entire conceptualizations of reality) that we are unable to realize when what we're seeing is an illusion....or worse: the possibility never even crosses our mind. And, if it does, we will ask our mind "Is this an illusion?", and the answer will come: "No, it is not, this is reality", which will be enthusiastically accepted as fact. And that I propose is "how it works", and how nobody realizes what is going on. (There's more strange stuff over and above that, like if you mention this particular idea to anyone, the majority of the time they will get ~angry and insist on changing the conversation, or, engage in non-logical rhetoric, character attacks, scolding, etc etc etc - but this is the essence of the problem imho.)

That will be the fun one for sure. What I do know is the knuckleheads running the show right now up and down the west coast are the last people I’d trust to handle that correctly.

Believe it or not, but 2020 hospital capacity was lower than projected using projections before anyone knew what covid even was.

[0]https://truthout.org/articles/20-rural-hospitals-closed-in-2...

Pretty good advice in my opinion.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-33095945

Probably waiting on hospitals to be fully staffed and less busy.

My sibling moved from being a pedatric nurse to a non-patient care position (not at a hospital). She'd been nearly permanently removed from her pediatric role and moved to be on the front lines for COVID care for over a year with no relief in sight. She spent 2 years in Iraq and said that this is much more tiring and exasperating since she's treating people that largely could have avoided being in the hospital at all.

Her hospital has been cancelling elective procedures, so everyone is suffering from the COVID wave.

This is not what caution looks like.

I may not have all the details right on that, just seems the approach some are taking to covid is the "yes we won't eliminate it and yet we can try to minimize exposure during times of high infectiousness."

0 - https://news.gallup.com/poll/356939/support-legal-marijuana-...

1 - https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/12/7/a-strong-majo...

Groupthink is so dangerous.

COVID was never going to be completely managed by states less than willing to take draconian measures, the purpose soft-lockdowns was instead to lighten the load on our healthcare system so that we didn't need to invest in field hospitals and a bunch of field-trained doctors and nurses. If we had done that instead not only would the optics be worse (not just many more people dying, think front page photos of them dying in muddy tents), it would also dilute the market capture of the existing entrenched healthcare system.

Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018? How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing? These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems.

In the past two years we've printed 80% of all US Dollars that have been printed in the history of the USD. We are not short on funding. Further it's not death or illness that is largely to blame for healthcare worker shortage as the only large drop in HCWs was on march 2020. Since then it's been growing, just hasn't recovered yet.

Yes, the issue there is sociopathic political maneuvering rather than an actual lack of national resources which could have been used to help our society in its time of need.

> Can you show me an area where the covid+ college age population was a healthcare capacity burden?

In the early days of covid it was irresponsible spring breakers spreading covid at destinations like Florida and then back home a week later. These days, look for areas with small purple cities surrounded by large red counties. As far as personal experiences go a couple Eastern states and the Pacific Northwest have issues with hospitals being literally over capacity. Many healthcare workers have been pushed past their breaking points and the national guard has been (and still is) providing manpower at the hospital next to my state's capitol (which is located next to a handful of universities). As other surrounding state's healthcare systems were overwhelmed with delta waves those states denied noncritical care and eventually sent patients out to my state. The collapse of the healthcare system is an issue for old people on vents and also a huge issue for college kids when their parents and professors up and die (caused a huge issue at one of the colleges here when a particularly irreplaceable professor passed away) and/or there are no hospital beds for them and there's a year plus waitlist on the mental health services they need now more than ever. College kids are a covid sink since they generally suffer only mildly from covid yet spread it rapidly due to their social habits and environment. The college kids are not the demographic wrecking the healthcare system, but they still spread covid and are affected by covid in their communities. Asking them to stay home to prevent spreading infections isn't that big a deal.

> Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018?

Because we've pushed them to the breaking point rather than supporting them. Some died, some retired, some straight up left the field. Back in June of 2020 the cops had no shortage of riot gear and were always able to dig up more crowd gas, meanwhile doctors and nurses had to reuse contaminated PPE for months while a bunch of supply chain fuckery played itself out. How do you think that feels as a doctor, watching a shipment of PPE your state paid for and imported for you get confiscated by the feds and put into a big pile to get sold back to the highest bidder? How do you think it feels to notice how the police can suppress riots for months on end with endless tear gas and yet you get one N95 mask every two weeks even though you spend your entire day around people dying of covid?

> How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing?

See the above, we chose to stress existing resources instead of training, building, and deploying new ones. We don't have new hospitals, we don't have nationwide boot camps to get young civically minded people the skills needed to help support society.

> These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems.

The indicators that we're lacking capacity are the shortage of replacement workers, the shortage of hospital beds during covid waves, the insane wait times to see specialists, and finally the countless secondary deaths caused by covid patients taking up resources that could've been used by someone close to me with once-treatable cancer whose care was delayed until it metastasized and who will now die a slow, painful, and what should have been preventable death in the next couple of years.

That chart shows it spiking just days ago (~Dec 15) in SA, not on Thanksgiving. So it’s still too early to know the effect on deaths (though I still agree that it seems they won’t be as bad).

That's not panic, that's justifiable concern about a new strain of a virus that has killed millions of people around the world already.

The situation was not caused by overstressed people going "you know, I really want to be fat".

I tend to think adults are capable of being responsible for their own decisions, including how much to eat.

But it's much easier to blame fat people than the pushers, and it feels so much more satisfying to break out the hauteur about them as opposed to the businesses that tech people with tech salaries might someday seek to emulate, so--I guess I get it.