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Unemployment directly leads to suicide over the long run, and that’s not even mentioning the extra suicide and overdose-related deaths from the unique condition

Unemployment directly leads to suicide over the long run, and that’s not even mentioning the extra suicide and overdose-related deaths from the unique conditions of isolation and constant fear mongering we are all collectively being exposed to. It’s not clear that our interventions are going to help, given that the economic damage is going to introduce mortality (dud to the aforementioned suicide/overdose) in individuals who never would have been harmed by covid. Meanwhile, it’s still a reality that majority of the globe will be exposed to this, so the lockdown is not avoiding death but instead just _postponing_ it. We need to hunker down insofar as we are close to exceeding medical capacity, but when we are not on the brink of medical collapse we need to be opening up. Unfortunately the public policy has been built around irrational fear rather than “straight talk”. Thus why people are scared shitless that their teenage children, or elementary school children, will did if they return to school (rather than merely being a vector to infect their parents). I’m on mobile but I have citations for the link between unemployment vs suicide that I’ll try to edit and stick in here in an hour or so. Last thing is that people should understand that the serological data, while not entirely reliable, is indicating from multiple sources that true IFR is .2-.8%, and furthermore that relative risk varies massively as a function of age/obesity/etc. So this seems to be one of the worst diseases to be practicing national lockdown for. (Avoiding hospital overrun was a great goal but the goalposts have now moved over time). Also the IMHE model is so laughably bad that I actually am shocked that the authors are considered “experts”. It predicts 0 deaths after some point in June (I forget the day, I think june 6) because it naively assumed a .3 R_0 based off of the wuhan data, which they apparently assumed would hold for the US. In other words my understanding is the model is pretending that we’re going to contain covid. And they actually were crazy enough to lower the estimated deaths to 60,000 which we can already see is ridiculous. I really wish I was in Sweden right now...

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
I forgot you can't edit comments on HN later. Here's a study linking unemployment and suicide: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1732539/pdf/v057p00594.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1732539/pdf/v05... Note that they call it "causal" but it's still using statistical magic, but I think the idea that unemployment leads to suicide is one of those that seems like a sane default assumption, so as much as I distrust these kinds of analyses in general, I think it's relevant here.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  I have question. If you don't care about one out of 20 of your friends, family and neighbors drying, people you know. Why do you pretend to care about some out of work schmuck you don't know offing himself? Seems like your argument is trying to abuse the fact that I care.
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    Where are you getting that 5% mortality rate? That is an order of magnitude higher than what the data currently indicates, and is exactly what I meant about widespread fear mongering. BTW the rhetorical technique you are using seems to basically be concern trolling. It’s the debate equivalent of a thought terminating cliche. It will never lead to a useful discussion.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      Because 5% morality is what you get when the healthcare system breaks down. Which would be a direct result of letting the pandemic rip. It's easy, take the 0.7-1% measured fatality rate. Double that to account for under counting. Then triple it to account for complete breakdown of the healthcare system There 5%. Advice: None of this is hard to sort out and you are flailing at it.
      - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
        Your 0.7-1% fatality rate is not in line with current figures, which peg it closer to 0.35%. I've been rounding up to 0.5% for the US to account for the poor state of health here. The rest of your napkin math is completely absurd and is just you progressively multiplying an arbitrary number until you magically hit that 5% number that you started out with. Funny how that works. You should understand that even the 5% mortality when hospitals are overran is likely to be a huge overestimate for the same reason that we have been overestimated CFR all along. The vast majority of cases are not a big deal and don't need medical care whatsoever. But particularly for those over 70, you get covid and you have like a 1/8 chance of dying. It's that population that does get crushed when hospitals are overwhelmed, but when you run the hospitalization numbers, it's not clear that we would overrun the hospitals. Which is a moot point btw since my actual position is end the lockdown but reinstate policies briefly if we are at the edge of the precipice. Looking at https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g4tqvk/dutch_antibody_study_of_blood_donors_reveals_3/fnzkn4k/ https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g4tqvk/dutch_antib... you can see that for every 500 20-29 year olds who get infected, we have one hospitalization. Even 60 year olds only have a 3.4% hospitalization rate, which while high does not support your assertion without a much, much more rigorous analysis. Thanks for the discussion. I'll keep following along.
cycomanic 6y ago
So your argument is that suicide rates might be higher in the future because of unemployment and that those deaths might outweigh the deaths from COVID19. Now this might be true, however the reduction in traffic deaths will outweigh them both. Just to show that number of deaths by itself is a poor measure.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago

I forgot you can't edit comments on HN later. Here's a study linking unemployment and suicide: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1732539/pdf/v057p00594.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1732539/pdf/v05... Note that they call it "causal" but it's still using statistical magic, but I think the idea that unemployment leads to suicide is one of those that seems like a sane default assumption, so as much as I distrust these kinds of analyses in general, I think it's relevant here.

Gibbon1 6y ago
I have question. If you don't care about one out of 20 of your friends, family and neighbors drying, people you know. Why do you pretend to care about some out of work schmuck you don't know offing himself? Seems like your argument is trying to abuse the fact that I care.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  Where are you getting that 5% mortality rate? That is an order of magnitude higher than what the data currently indicates, and is exactly what I meant about widespread fear mongering. BTW the rhetorical technique you are using seems to basically be concern trolling. It’s the debate equivalent of a thought terminating cliche. It will never lead to a useful discussion.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    Because 5% morality is what you get when the healthcare system breaks down. Which would be a direct result of letting the pandemic rip. It's easy, take the 0.7-1% measured fatality rate. Double that to account for under counting. Then triple it to account for complete breakdown of the healthcare system There 5%. Advice: None of this is hard to sort out and you are flailing at it.
    - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      Your 0.7-1% fatality rate is not in line with current figures, which peg it closer to 0.35%. I've been rounding up to 0.5% for the US to account for the poor state of health here. The rest of your napkin math is completely absurd and is just you progressively multiplying an arbitrary number until you magically hit that 5% number that you started out with. Funny how that works. You should understand that even the 5% mortality when hospitals are overran is likely to be a huge overestimate for the same reason that we have been overestimated CFR all along. The vast majority of cases are not a big deal and don't need medical care whatsoever. But particularly for those over 70, you get covid and you have like a 1/8 chance of dying. It's that population that does get crushed when hospitals are overwhelmed, but when you run the hospitalization numbers, it's not clear that we would overrun the hospitals. Which is a moot point btw since my actual position is end the lockdown but reinstate policies briefly if we are at the edge of the precipice. Looking at https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g4tqvk/dutch_antibody_study_of_blood_donors_reveals_3/fnzkn4k/ https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g4tqvk/dutch_antib... you can see that for every 500 20-29 year olds who get infected, we have one hospitalization. Even 60 year olds only have a 3.4% hospitalization rate, which while high does not support your assertion without a much, much more rigorous analysis. Thanks for the discussion. I'll keep following along.

cycomanic 6y ago

So your argument is that suicide rates might be higher in the future because of unemployment and that those deaths might outweigh the deaths from COVID19. Now this might be true, however the reduction in traffic deaths will outweigh them both. Just to show that number of deaths by itself is a poor measure.