I broadly agree, but careful because IMO "common sense" is very much a trap-concept. It's how we usually convince ourselves that our preconceived ideas are right. If science teaches us anything, it's to be very wary of that.

Elon is right about one thing: the value of reasoning by first principles! :)

> IMO "common sense" is very much a trap-concept. It's how we usually convince ourselves that our preconceived ideas are right.

To add more to this, I would argue that our tendency to oversimplify subjects is a large part of many of the issues we face today. Important to remember that first principle reasoning is not the same as first order thinking. Most of the problems we face today are deceptively complex (appear simple on the surface but aren't) and first order approximations aren't good enough and can actually lead you away from a solution rather than towards. First principle thinking does require you to reevaluate your assumptions as well as constantly having serious doubt (challenging your own ideas).

To me, common sense should always be derived from first principles, and there should be legally required that every concept/argument be also decomposable and provable from first principles. Things/concepts should only become common sense after being battle tested socially for 1+ generations. Your parents teach you common sense and there is a paper trail to that common sense's origin. You don't get to create new "common sense" without doing the hard work.

Congratulations on your novel definition of "common sense", however if it takes a generation of socially battle testing a thing to become common sense, you've excluded e.g. "people have smart phones".

Ah yes, “10 Days to Stop the Spread.” The memories of the common sense foisted on me…

So this is pretty close to my area of expertise. It would have been totally feasible to completely stop the thing in a matter of weeks. This thing did not have an outrageously high R_0, and we knew enough in March 2020 to stop the spread.

However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing.

I don’t believe a single country on earth stopped the spread, even China succumbed after wounding their economy for years

Infectious diseases spread.

If one country is doing all the right things but not enough other countries are, then that country doing all the right things won't be able to stop the spread on its own, even within its geography. That's normal and to be expected.

This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason.

> This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason.

Nobody wants more clueless WHO driving things

Nobody wants to pay taxes either, but sometimes doing things we don't want to do is the best way to optimize quality (and quantity) of life for everyone.

It all comes down to epidemiology, actuarial science and medical economics.

It comes down to a phantasy world complete with unicorns and all that does not exist anywhere except in your mind.

They have an authoritarian government -one which could weld shut windows and doors ignoring any fire safety issues to lock down a block because there was one case…

And it still spread. No, 10 days with democratic governments don’t allow one to truthfully say ‘10 days to stop the spread’. It’s either ignorance or willful misinformation/lying.

I think you should read my comment more slowly and more carefully, because if I copy-pasted it right here it would be an adequate response to your response.

Th premise is all governments would have the power to shut things down. They don't. We have civil liberties. It was unfeasible. Even absolute world-wide martial law would not stop it [you can't freeze people in place for ten days straight]. So the statement that it could have been stopped in 10 days if... No, that "if" was not going to happen.

I think you need to draw an actual timeline of all the measures that were taken, and where and when they happened. That should help clarify.

Do you recall the very early days when there was a cruise ship where a passenger caught SARS-COV2 and they anchored it in the SF bay and didn't let anyone off even while some succumbed to the disease and treated passengers as if they had Ebola? Yet, it still jumped and infected people (landlubbers). There was no way "10 days to stop the spread" was going to be effective.

Alright that's one measure, keep going, that timeline of all measures is not going to fill itself!

> keep going, that timeline of all measures is not going to fill itself!

That’s rude and arrogant. “Copy and paste my previous reply”, “the timeline is not going to fill itself”. mc32 is trying to present his argument and you reply with these short quips.

If you’re trying to present a counter-argument, this strategy works against you, as it makes mc32 appear more reasonable and knowledgeable.

Those people were then transferred into a quarantine facility for two weeks where they weren’t isolated from each other, and then sent home on planes all over America without even being tested for COVID on exit from quarantine.

It's a mistake to think "authoritarian" means "effective". It doesn't. Authoritarian governments derive their power from the appearance of power, and that amongst other things means being brutal and never admitting that you're wrong.

In China's case, it means that simultaneously a bunch of people would be welded into their apartments, but that the government would also cover up and ignore high-enough level officials who disregarded orders, or criticism that they were ignoring important vectors. China is very corrupt: whatever they announced they were doing publicly wasn't done remotely effectively - it was PR for how tough and untouchable the government is.

I'm sorry, but this just bolsters my position. There is no society where people will perfectly obey "stay put" orders. It's not possible. You have to tend to the infirm, you have to run critical systems, people need to eat (not even 50% people have ten days worth of rations stocked up; who is going to distribute more food, water and meds as they run out, etc?)

> There is no society where people will perfectly obey "stay put" orders. It's not possible.

It doesn't need to be perfect. Depending on the specific intervention in question, you only need to exceed some critical threshold of compliance to get R_t below 1.0.

i think the last two years shown that nothing acceptable from a human rights pov could have been done to stop the pandemic from spreading once it was out of the bag.

i'm not sure which example makes you think things could have been different.

R_t was under 1 in the US for extended periods of time, so your idea that the required measures can't be implemented there is empirically false.

Original COVID had an unmitigated R of about 3. All you have to do is reduce transmission 66% and you beat it. China did this very successfully. The later variants were much more transmissible though.

With BA.5 the unmitigated R is probably north of 10 and China had to throw in the towel, because reducing transmission 90+% is much harder.

"china did this successfully"

We have absolutely no idea what happened in china. We know they hid things in the beginning, and in the end ( when they stopped counting infections after opening the fates to omicron). What makes you think they told the truth in the middle ?

Because we know what a disaster it was at the end?

We got the footage and reports of hospitals and mortuaries overwhelmed when it ran rampant at the end, but in the middle we just got complaints about how much the isolation policies sucked.

Why did the propaganda masters hide all the death in the middle but not at the end? Why did it look like a disease spreading through a mostly-naive population in the end, rather than a wave-N population like everywhere else?

Doubt was a reasonable position in the middle, from the outside, but after how it ended it looks pretty clear there was very little in the way of COVID in China for two years.

If there were widespread covid on the scale of every other country, China is not so closed off that they could keep that a secret.

So the lockdowns, school closures, and authoritarian measures taken by governments were useless unless all countries on earth were aligned? So if that wasn’t possible, it seems odd that we were locked down anyway.

The initial lockdowns were intended to prevent a rapid spike in cases that would overwhelm the medical system. That was important, and largely successful. If such measure could have been taken in a globally coordinated, and fairly extreme manner, which was never realistic, then in theory the virus could've been eradicated early on. But that doesn't mean they were worthless otherwise.

After that period there were measures of varying strictness applied in different areas, some of which were beneficial, and some did more harm than good. Some were based on a mistaken notion that the virus could be locally eradicated. Others were based on good science to blunt spikes of infections, again to reduce strain on the medical system, or to buy time for vaccinations.

We can't look at complex issues as black and white.

Let's not go down this tangent please.

If you genuinely want to discuss this honestly (I am skeptical, but prove me wrong), we should do it in a more appropriate forum / context.

We repeatedly kicked it out of New Zealand, but eventually you've got to allow overseas travel.

I think it was more that it was realised (by Feb 2022) that omicron was so much less lethal than delta (and paxlovid came available).

Australia and New Zealand also had COVID fully contained for a long time (not as long as China). It was possible but very difficult. We just weren’t up to the task.

The hope was that the vaccine would make COVID like Measles, i.e. a few cases here and there, but you get your shot and basically never worry about it again. Unfortunately the vaccines aren’t good enough/COVID evolves too fast, so we are just living with massive death and disability.

> . It would have been totally feasible to completely stop the thing in a matter of week

You must be dreaming. There was not even any way to assess who was infected in the early days. Nobody was able to contain it either so your expertise needs to face hard facts

For people wondering how this could happen, epgui is assuming action happened early on. April 1st 2020 there were 18k new daily cases (<200k cumulative) and <460 deaths (<4k cumulative). The reproduction rate was already in sharp decline (US even had <1 by May 3rd).

To oversimplify things: you can't spread a virus if there's no one to spread it to.

(we also learned a lot though, like how viruses spread through central ventilation systems in apartment complexes)

Sources:

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-states

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

> So this is pretty close to my area of expertise.

Oh great, another "expert". Yeah, if only we put you in charge things would've been totally different, right?

I think it's pretty clear by now that the reaction to the disease has been grossly mishandled by the so called "public health experts" which acted against evidence that was already available at the time (children not in serious danger from COVID), or which made up evidence (vaccines stop infection, etc..).

> However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing.

Exactly. So whatever you said about stopping the spread is unfeasible in the real world.

Vaccines do prevent infections at the population scale.

(cue: how many minutes until commenter replies with some bad counter-argument that ignores exactly half of the words I used in that sentence? I'm even going to tell you which ones ahead of time because I don't want to bother replying to your upcoming reply: at the population scale.)

I'm gonna guess that there was significant silent transmission. I.e. people who were asymptomatic were spreading the disease. If that's the case, then there is no stopping once it went beyond a few dozen people. The last date that we could've stopped it was probably in 2019, before anyone even knew there was a problem. The Covid-19 might have been one of those few examples of the future being totally ordained and completely unchangeable.

There's no need to guess, we know that for sure.

That (along with the k-factor) was a curve ball, but it doesn't change what I wrote at all, and it is totally false that we did not have the capacity to stop the spread. You don't necessarily need to identify every individual case, although being able to do so definitely helps.

Even among identified cases, we did not put even a small dent in the rate of new daily cases until the very end of 2020: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...

Since that was about the time we had vaccines available, that suggests that none of our isolation strategies were capable of stopping the outbreak. It could only have slowed it down.

It's so tiring engaging with the public about this. No.

Literally the only indicator you need to look at is R_t, and R_t was less than 1.0 at various times in various places throughout all of 2020. All you need to do to make an infectious disease go away is keep R_t below 1.0 for long enough (this depends on the lifecycle of the pathogen, but in this case we're talking weeks).

But it simply didn't happen. At all in fact, once you look at the whole world. And all of this is based on reported data. We never got a clear picture of what unknown transmission looked like. If I had to guess, it was many-fold worse.

You need to keep it low enough, for long enough, with no reservoir. It's the last part that's the problem. You'd either need to prevent all travel for years, or arrange for everywhere in the world to take action at the same time. The latter is basically impossible.

I'm sorry, but no. Yes, this might work at an academic level, but dealing with the politics of the world and human nature, this thing that you ask cannot happen given the diversity of the politics and cultures of the world.

It's the same reason a carbon tax type system will never work, because there will be some subset of our world that would want to take advantage of a situation for their own financial gain, even if it hurts everyone else in the long run.

Not to mention what was done, when it was done well, took pressure off the health care system (which was, and is, extremely stressed by the pandemic) which ultimately saved so many lives.

Is this parody? You do know about china?

A stronger example would probably be New Zealand, just because stats from China are very difficult to ascertain. (China did a lot of things right, but they also did a lot of things very wrong.)

New Zealand, a small, wealthy nation that is famously isolated and has no land borders with any other countries.

It's an almost completely useless model to apply to countries like Bangladesh or Peru.

I used to think this but I don't any longer. Two reasons : 1) asymptomatic spread makes infection control much harder and 2) your own admission that it would have required "very heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world". This second reason made it impracticable to stop the spread in March 2020. There are countries in the world where you simply cannot apply such heavy-handed action; there is not the level of control of or essential support for the population available.

Btw, I've looked through your earlier replies to others under this comment, and I have to remark that you took a very patronising tone, which I found unfortunate.

Not to mention that we massively underestimated the spread of COVID in other species. It’s all well and good to pretend that we could lock down humans, but good luck getting wild animals to socially distance.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...

You can't stop the spread because a large percentage of the workforce simply has to keep working to keep society functioning. Electricity, water, garbage pickup, supermarkets, hospitals, fire department, etc. You can't do without those. And people who work in those vital industries need to bring their kids to daycare/school, otherwise they can't work.

If literally everybody stays home you can stop a disease like covid19. Otherwise, even with draconian countermeasures it will take way too long to snuff the thing out.

The lockdown idea is appealing but the devil is in the details, you have to limit group sizes. If the transmissible window is say 3 days, and the group size limit is 5, that's a 15 day lockdown. In practice big households are impossible to limit so in theory if you don't lock down for O(household members) you waste time.

This is 100% delusional thinking.

The only countries that somewhat managed do achieve that, are Australia and New Zealand, which are islands with long-term restrictive border control (completely a no-go in the US). And even they needed months of lockdowns. And ultimately failed.

Australian here. It didn’t “ultimately fail”, it partially succeeded. The practical point of lockdown wasn’t a vain attempt to eradicate the virus. It was to buy the population time for vaccines to get tested, manufactured and injected. The statistics leave no room for doubt that thousands of deaths were avoided as a result. The only question is whether the lives saved was sufficient to justify the economic, social, and psychological consequences. Good arguments be made both ways.

Wasn’t Sweden's excess mortality over the whole period smaller than Australia's though? And smaller than most of the lockdown-happy countries as well.

That seems very implausible and needs a better argument than an "area of expertise". By March 2020 there were cases popping up everywhere [0] and it wasn't just travellers from China. It'd take a handful of undetected cases in India and Africa and then how exactly would you plan on stopping COVID spread?

> However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world.

This is infeasible. If we had a system for global heavy-handed coordinated action we'd be much worse off than what COVID did; the political ramifications of that sort of measure would be disastrous. We went in to COVID with economic concerns and a bit of turmoil in the world and came out the other side with a rolling economic crisis and a potentially brewing WWIII. Having a reliable mechanism for triggering that sort of thing would end poorly. Also the US already spies on everyone, having mechanisms to be able to enforce its whims would only make the situation worse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...

It's a very simple argument. If you hold R_t under 1, the number of cases decreases exponentially. Eventually, you can unlock localities while restricting movement, and after some time the whole thing is dead in its tracks. This is something that almost every country eventually got around to doing anyways for probably longer on aggregate than it would have taken, it just wasn't timed right.

There is no need for digital mass surveillance to enforce a quarantine. It's been done before computers were invented.

Ooh! Oh we have to keep R_t under 1! Nobody thought of that. I wish the experts had spelled that out for us. Sorry to drip sarcasm but that is upsetting me.

How do you intend to achieve this miracle? Will the plan involve Maoist policies? How will the plan be hardened to prevent its being used for Maoist policies? Any mechanism that could possibly coordinate a worldwide lock-down of everyone is eventually going to be used to implement a "common sense" policy that starves ... these days it could be a billion people if coordinated globally. That is a much worse idea than the COVID pandemic which, apart from the lockdowns, was nowhere near as bad as a system that could allow global coordinated action to disable the world economy in coordinated fashion on demand.

We already did manage to keep it under 1 for extended periods of time, in the US. The biggest issue was timing.

COVID spread is an exponential process - you can't possibly do anything to stop R_t dropping below 1 from time to time. It saturates then recedes until a new variant appears. It it could possibly stay above one, we'd literally all have multiple cases of COVID right now. And I bet it does that fractally, so particular populations are all saturating and then seeing cases recede all the time.

The thing you're avoiding talking about seriously is the part that isn't already a certainty. Ie, the entire question.

R_t fell under 1 when the population was still naive. If you don't let the virus proliferate massively to begin with you won't have variants that are adapted to human immunity.

It's a certainty because it happened. R_t fell under one as a result of NPIs, not immunity.

You don't have to keep R_t under 1 forever. Just for long enough that the virus fizzles out. It's possible and in fact it has been done repeatedly.

"The vaccine is 100% effective and will keep you from getting or transmitting COVID." You mean that kind of common sense? The difference between Elon and most people on here is he has a long enough memory to realize he's being gaslit. With regards to politics, he has a memory long enough to remember when the left was pro-free speech and anti-war and how quickly that all changed over the last few years.

I don't know who you're taking medical advice from, but nobody relevant ever claimed vaccines were 100% effective. It's a complete straw man.

"you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations. "

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/health/pfizer-vaccine-adolesc...

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/12/01/modernas-covid-vaccine-...

And on, and on, and on. Oh yeah there was also this fun one:

“But it’s here now and it’s spreading and it’s gonna increase. … We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death,” the President added.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/16/politics/joe-biden-warnin...

(The aforementioned winter of severe illness and death didn't happen)

And today we have

"Growing share of Covid-19 deaths are among vaccinated people, but booster shots substantially lower the risk"

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/11/health/unvaccinated-covid...

Gaslighting, moving the goal posts, etc.

Link 1

Donald Trump is the last person you should take medical advice from. He was criticized nonstop by medical professionals, scientists and even scientific journals for saying all kinds of crazy things, and this is the least of it.

Link 2

That study has a confidence interval that is not reported in the news article.

Link 3

The article says the data shows 100% effectiveness against "severe covid" (which is defined in very precise terms), but again this will have a confidence interval which is not reported here.

Link 4 / Biden quote

"you’re protected from severe illness and death" is accurate. No mention of 100%.

Link 5 / last quote

Also accurate.

---

Bottom line: politicians are not who you need to listen to for medical advice (yes that sucks, and yes they should do better). Also you can't blame scientists, doctors and public health experts for your own misunderstanding, for the fact that you get your information from dubious places, and for your inability to grasp nuance. Also, public health messaging is insanely difficult even in the best of conditions: even when the message is 100% accurate there will be second-hand reports that get it wrong, and people who understand the complete opposite of what is said. You need to understand this if you want to hope to understand what's happening.

To "flatten the curve" is what I remember.

Of course! Just give up a little freedom here, and a little freedom there, and once we're all in prison cells we will have all the security we need! Common sense.

Nope, I think the vast majority of opinions on covid have been idiotic, driven by groupthink, and are very much in need of low level knowledge.

Humans are quite bad at evaluating low risks, comparing low risks, and balancing individual freedoms vs group good. The default position of most people was that authorities should use force to make everyone conform to one position.

Truthfulness, knowledge of statistics, and the ability to change positions based on new incoming information were severely lacking. Most people picked a team and fought for it relentlessly.

I agree with this as well, but it's not necessarily mutually exclusive with what the parent comment said. For the average joe, the right opinion for most medical questions is "I'm not sure".

It looks to me that Americans misplaced (until omicron came along) their fear of covid from mid 2022 and chose to kick it around as part of the political football that is partisan politics eg starting with that bikers convention and carrying on with the BLM movement through summer 2020.