That's not quite the right way of phrasing that question. Models are made with and without interventions taken into account, and the lockdowns were a reaction to models showing reduced deaths and hospital strain if lockdown measures were in place. I'm not sure what that guy is talking about.
But if you're actually interested, you should go and read the papers used for modeling yourself, since the odds of finding a rando on hacker news who is an actual epidemiologists is zilch. The ones who were public communicators that I followed over COVID were the podcast "This Week in Virology" which is just about the best resource you're going to find, and the blog "your local epidemiologist", who is also fantastic
The fear with COVID was mutation of the disease into something more deadly and more contagious. What looks like fearmongering now was cautious behavior around mutation at the time. Conversely, Ebola isn't likely to mutate now, so we don't need that same level of caution.
You travel back to 2016 and tell people we'll have a pandemic in the US, 1 million people will die, and then large groups of people will attempt to shrug that off as "nothing to get concerned about", people would find that incomprehensible.
If I were to post a comment on HN in 2016 suggesting that people would shrug off 1 million deaths due to a pandemic because it doesn't align with their worldview I would have been downvoted into oblivious for holding such a laughably ridiculous and cynical opinion.
Same could be said of the countless other climate related impacts that people in the very near distant past would consider horrific and impossible.
The power of the "this is fine" culture to not see reality is terrifying.
quite a lot of people do and have seen obesity as an urgent issue needing addressing. People at many levels of government, in both political parties, and for many years....
They didn't need much more than noting Rt and experience of Wuhan, if you're thinking "IMHE!", sort of a red herring: yeah, they predicted X million of deaths, but it wasn't anymore complicated than take Rt, use in formula, and yeah we should probably see if we can eradicate this thing locally, early. Was never a global decision.
