Re:Bill Gates calls for nationwide shutdown
by ModernMech on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @10:48AM
(#22749141)
You seem to be suggesting that the right response is unknowable ahead of time. But the people who listened to epidemiologists early had better outcomes, so it seems like we did know what to do -- we just didn't want to or were in denial. I just don't see how given that any slack is warranted in the aftermath of this.
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Re:Bill Gates calls for nationwide shutdown
by jerf on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @10:53AM
(#22749210)
There's a wide range of measures that lead to effectively no infection. You have no way of knowing that the "correct" measures were taken, only that measures at least as expensive as necessary were taken. They could well be far more expensive than necessary.
That's the future-history perspective, too, where we assume that we can already count them as having successfully contained the disease; in the here-and-now perspective, there's plenty of time for it to develop that they in fact didn't do enough either and will explode in disease in the next two weeks or something. Or months. Or, in the worst scenario, years. (See Spanish Flu history, as you've probably seen cited; what we know of as the "Spanish Flu" was not the original outbreak, but a later one.)