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At what point are more people killing themselves than are getting saved by quarantine orders? No one is seriously making this calculation.

mehrdadn 6y ago
> At what point are more people killing themselves than are getting saved by quarantine orders? No one is seriously making this calculation. >> Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus. Looks like some people are, and it made the news.
- deathgrips 6y ago
  No one in the CDC or state health departments seem to be taking this into account. They're only optimizing for one variable: number of infected and number of covid19 deaths.
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    You say that as if we've known this since January or something... and as if you have inside knowledge of what those people are investigating right now. Do you? The news on this has just come out. Maybe give them a chance to react before judging?
    - deathgrips 6y ago
      >You say that as if we've known this since January or something Yes, who could have possibly known about covid19 in January? [0] >and as if you have inside knowledge of what those people are investigating right now. Do you? The news on this has just come out. Maybe give them a chance to react before judging? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that forcing people to stay at home, to socially distance themselves from their social support network, and to quit earning a living would have a significant impact on their mental health and a dangerous impact on the mental health of those with mood disorders. Every doctor has been educated on mental illnesses. The CDC had chances to make the right choices in January. It had chances to make the right choices in February. It had chances to make the right choices in March. How long until you think we can judge the CDC? [0] (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-testing-specialrep/special-report-how-korea-trounced-u-s-in-race-to-test-people-for-coronavirus-idUSKBN2153BW https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-testin...)
      - mehrdadn 6y ago
        Come on dude. "Known this" in my sentence was not referring to "the existence of COVID-19" but rather "the fact that we would start seeing more suicides than disease deaths today". The right choice was shutting things down. The only question was how long it needs to keep going, which people were still trying to figure out. Now this event might give them more information that might help them figure it out. If you're reasonable you'll give them a chance to see if they'll take it into account. You know full well much of the rest of the executive didn't show remotely as much competence as the CDC about the disease itself for months despite being repeatedly warned even after the outbreak had already occurred, and now you're lashing out at the CDC for not having predicted when the first side effects would start to occur in some cities within 1 day of when you heard the news? Sheesh.
        deathgrips 6y ago
        >The right choice was shutting things down . . . You know full well much of the rest of the executive didn't show remotely as much competence as the CDC about the disease itself for months despite being repeatedly warned even after the outbreak had already occurred This is some "we have always been at war with Eastasia" doublethink. The CDC told people for a long, long time that masks were harmful and using them was stupid. The CDC shut down private and university covid19 testing in Washington. > and now you're lashing out at the CDC for not having predicted when the first side effects would start to occur in some cities within 1 day of when you heard the news? Ask your doctor if job loss and isolation from friends and family is a risk factor for suicide. I talked to a doctor back in early March who predicted that more people would die from suicides than from covid19.
        makomk 6y ago
        We don't know that was the right choice at all. This is a new, untested pandemic response that hasn't been used before, essentially a planet-scale experiment with everyone's futures: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distancing-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distan... It had some definite opposition from experts when it was developed, and seems to have won out for political reasons.
    - ponker 6y ago
      No, 3+ weeks ago it was obvious that we did “flatten the curve,” healthcare systems would not collapse, NYC would not need 30,000 ventilators, and that is when the stay at home orders should have been lifted. We’re not going to burrow underground until we have a vaccine, so the time is long overdue to start restoring our mental health and economic well being. Those at high risk can isolate further, but the general population has delivered what was asked of it.
      - ardy42 6y ago
        > No, 3+ weeks ago it was obvious that we did “flatten the curve,” healthcare systems would not collapse, NYC would not need 30,000 ventilators, and that is when the stay at home orders should have been lifted. That doesn't make any sense. You're basically advocating for stopping treatment as soon as progress is seen, not when the treatment is successful. It'd be like an oncologist saying: > Good news! Your tumor is starting to respond to the chemo, and we've seen a reduction in its rate of growth, so we're going discontinue treatment. The stay at home orders shouldn't be lifted when the curve is flattened, but when the capability is known to exist to keep it flat without the orders.
        ponker 6y ago
        That assumes we go to pre-lockdown behaviors when the order is lifted. Data show that this is not true, that social distancing and work from home started before the orders and will continue after they are lifted. Lifting them allows people to make their own choices.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    No, the CDC will be working hard to understand the rise in rates of death by suicide. Counting death is hard, and counting suicide death in the US is particularly hard because of the regional variations in use of medical examiners and coroners and the cultural drive in some areas to say that a death by suicide was accidental. Here's a link to a CDC page: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm > Finally, the estimates of excess deaths reported here may not be due to COVID-19, either directly or indirectly. Upward trends in other causes of death (e.g., suicide, drug overdose, heart disease) may contribute to excess deaths in some jurisdictions. Future analyses of cause-specific excess mortality may provide additional information about these patterns.
ibejoeb 6y ago
It's going to be impossible to track, but surely the financial ruin the governments have compelled people to endure is going to kill many, many thousands of people. It's also not politically advantageous to even consider it, let alone talk about it. In a year, when nobody cares anymore, and people are killing themselves, it will never come back to haunt the policy makers that provoked it all.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  If only many, many thousands of people die due to economic issues, that's still a huge win over what the virus would have done if left to run through the country at full speed. Economic problems would've happened anyway. Global supply chains were already in disarray even before March, as China essentially lost two months of manufacturing output, container ships stopped sailing, and the whole chain was pushed into oscillations it'll take a year or more to recover from (affectionately known as the "bullwhip effect"). Airlines and hotels were done the moment the virus landed in Italy - at this point everyone with half a brain started to cancel any trip they could cancel, weeks before governments in Europe got a clue and started locking down their borders. The only way the government could've saved restaurants, nail salons, et al. from suffering similar fate would be by suppressing all information about the virus and going to full denial mode. Otherwise, the customer base would've mostly evaporated anyway, lockdown or no lockdown, and you'd still have rolling shutdowns as place after place had to be quarantined for 2+ weeks after some employee or customer was found sick. With hotels and restaurants barely surviving on fumes, the pressure on the food supply chain would've been only little worse than it is with these places shut down. Anyway, it's not like the governments around the world started to shut down their countries because they were bored, and wanted to stir things up. They actually dragged their feet for weeks after people following the evolution of the virus started stocking up, limiting interactions, pushing for WFH and practicing social distancing.
  - noobaccount 6y ago
    I immediately know two things about you: 1. You don’t live alone. 2. You have a job. I think we’re all a little short on empathy these days.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jazzyjackson 6y ago
It is the same conflation as "the lockdown hurts the economy"/"an out of control pandemic hurts the economy" Maybe being told to stay indoors spikes hopelessness, or it could be that living in a country with an out of control pandemic with no end in sight spikes hopelessness. There's a lot of factors that make the world a stressful, bleak looking place besides stay at home orders.
- makomk 6y ago
  We have other pandemics that we could probably test this hypothesis with, but I suspect that it would be more accurate to say that how we see this particular pandemic is what causes both the massive economic damage and the feelings of hopelessness, suicides, etc. Businesses are losing customers not because the government imposed a lockdown, but because people think they can stop the pandemic and avoid death by staying away. Though there's probably not going to be much enthusiasm from the media towards exploring this idea, since it puts the economic damage etc squarely on their heads.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > Businesses are losing customers not because the government imposed a lockdown, but because people think they can stop the pandemic and avoid death by staying away. Though there's probably not going to be much enthusiasm from the media towards exploring this idea, since it puts the economic damage etc squarely on their heads. Perhaps let's first explore the question whether they were right. Epidemiology 101 seems to say they absolutely were. The less people interact in close quarters, the less a sickness spread. I have a feeling we're forgetting here that there's an actual virus on the loose. The pandemic isn't a media construct, it's not a mass hysteria. So I think we should also entertain the option that a virus spreading fast through our communities is also responsible for some of the economic damage.
    - noobaccount 6y ago
      Maybe we overreacted just a little bit. Some of these people might’ve just needed a friend.
raziel2p 6y ago
maybe let's focus less on the lockdown as the cause of this, and more on the awful social security and mental health services. lockdown/quarantine doesn't suddenly turn normal people suicidal, it just escalates already existing economic hardships or mental problems. also, should be obvious, but we cannot know how many more people would've died if there was no lockdown, so comparing numbers as they are today is really dumb.

mehrdadn 6y ago

> At what point are more people killing themselves than are getting saved by quarantine orders? No one is seriously making this calculation. >> Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus. Looks like some people are, and it made the news.

deathgrips 6y ago
No one in the CDC or state health departments seem to be taking this into account. They're only optimizing for one variable: number of infected and number of covid19 deaths.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  You say that as if we've known this since January or something... and as if you have inside knowledge of what those people are investigating right now. Do you? The news on this has just come out. Maybe give them a chance to react before judging?
  - deathgrips 6y ago
    >You say that as if we've known this since January or something Yes, who could have possibly known about covid19 in January? [0] >and as if you have inside knowledge of what those people are investigating right now. Do you? The news on this has just come out. Maybe give them a chance to react before judging? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that forcing people to stay at home, to socially distance themselves from their social support network, and to quit earning a living would have a significant impact on their mental health and a dangerous impact on the mental health of those with mood disorders. Every doctor has been educated on mental illnesses. The CDC had chances to make the right choices in January. It had chances to make the right choices in February. It had chances to make the right choices in March. How long until you think we can judge the CDC? [0] (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-testing-specialrep/special-report-how-korea-trounced-u-s-in-race-to-test-people-for-coronavirus-idUSKBN2153BW https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-testin...)
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      Come on dude. "Known this" in my sentence was not referring to "the existence of COVID-19" but rather "the fact that we would start seeing more suicides than disease deaths today". The right choice was shutting things down. The only question was how long it needs to keep going, which people were still trying to figure out. Now this event might give them more information that might help them figure it out. If you're reasonable you'll give them a chance to see if they'll take it into account. You know full well much of the rest of the executive didn't show remotely as much competence as the CDC about the disease itself for months despite being repeatedly warned even after the outbreak had already occurred, and now you're lashing out at the CDC for not having predicted when the first side effects would start to occur in some cities within 1 day of when you heard the news? Sheesh.
      - deathgrips 6y ago
        >The right choice was shutting things down . . . You know full well much of the rest of the executive didn't show remotely as much competence as the CDC about the disease itself for months despite being repeatedly warned even after the outbreak had already occurred This is some "we have always been at war with Eastasia" doublethink. The CDC told people for a long, long time that masks were harmful and using them was stupid. The CDC shut down private and university covid19 testing in Washington. > and now you're lashing out at the CDC for not having predicted when the first side effects would start to occur in some cities within 1 day of when you heard the news? Ask your doctor if job loss and isolation from friends and family is a risk factor for suicide. I talked to a doctor back in early March who predicted that more people would die from suicides than from covid19.
      - makomk 6y ago
        We don't know that was the right choice at all. This is a new, untested pandemic response that hasn't been used before, essentially a planet-scale experiment with everyone's futures: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distancing-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distan... It had some definite opposition from experts when it was developed, and seems to have won out for political reasons.
  - ponker 6y ago
    No, 3+ weeks ago it was obvious that we did “flatten the curve,” healthcare systems would not collapse, NYC would not need 30,000 ventilators, and that is when the stay at home orders should have been lifted. We’re not going to burrow underground until we have a vaccine, so the time is long overdue to start restoring our mental health and economic well being. Those at high risk can isolate further, but the general population has delivered what was asked of it.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > No, 3+ weeks ago it was obvious that we did “flatten the curve,” healthcare systems would not collapse, NYC would not need 30,000 ventilators, and that is when the stay at home orders should have been lifted. That doesn't make any sense. You're basically advocating for stopping treatment as soon as progress is seen, not when the treatment is successful. It'd be like an oncologist saying: > Good news! Your tumor is starting to respond to the chemo, and we've seen a reduction in its rate of growth, so we're going discontinue treatment. The stay at home orders shouldn't be lifted when the curve is flattened, but when the capability is known to exist to keep it flat without the orders.
      - ponker 6y ago
        That assumes we go to pre-lockdown behaviors when the order is lifted. Data show that this is not true, that social distancing and work from home started before the orders and will continue after they are lifted. Lifting them allows people to make their own choices.
- DanBC 6y ago
  No, the CDC will be working hard to understand the rise in rates of death by suicide. Counting death is hard, and counting suicide death in the US is particularly hard because of the regional variations in use of medical examiners and coroners and the cultural drive in some areas to say that a death by suicide was accidental. Here's a link to a CDC page: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm > Finally, the estimates of excess deaths reported here may not be due to COVID-19, either directly or indirectly. Upward trends in other causes of death (e.g., suicide, drug overdose, heart disease) may contribute to excess deaths in some jurisdictions. Future analyses of cause-specific excess mortality may provide additional information about these patterns.

ibejoeb 6y ago

It's going to be impossible to track, but surely the financial ruin the governments have compelled people to endure is going to kill many, many thousands of people. It's also not politically advantageous to even consider it, let alone talk about it. In a year, when nobody cares anymore, and people are killing themselves, it will never come back to haunt the policy makers that provoked it all.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
If only many, many thousands of people die due to economic issues, that's still a huge win over what the virus would have done if left to run through the country at full speed. Economic problems would've happened anyway. Global supply chains were already in disarray even before March, as China essentially lost two months of manufacturing output, container ships stopped sailing, and the whole chain was pushed into oscillations it'll take a year or more to recover from (affectionately known as the "bullwhip effect"). Airlines and hotels were done the moment the virus landed in Italy - at this point everyone with half a brain started to cancel any trip they could cancel, weeks before governments in Europe got a clue and started locking down their borders. The only way the government could've saved restaurants, nail salons, et al. from suffering similar fate would be by suppressing all information about the virus and going to full denial mode. Otherwise, the customer base would've mostly evaporated anyway, lockdown or no lockdown, and you'd still have rolling shutdowns as place after place had to be quarantined for 2+ weeks after some employee or customer was found sick. With hotels and restaurants barely surviving on fumes, the pressure on the food supply chain would've been only little worse than it is with these places shut down. Anyway, it's not like the governments around the world started to shut down their countries because they were bored, and wanted to stir things up. They actually dragged their feet for weeks after people following the evolution of the virus started stocking up, limiting interactions, pushing for WFH and practicing social distancing.
- noobaccount 6y ago
  I immediately know two things about you: 1. You don’t live alone. 2. You have a job. I think we’re all a little short on empathy these days.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jazzyjackson 6y ago

It is the same conflation as "the lockdown hurts the economy"/"an out of control pandemic hurts the economy" Maybe being told to stay indoors spikes hopelessness, or it could be that living in a country with an out of control pandemic with no end in sight spikes hopelessness. There's a lot of factors that make the world a stressful, bleak looking place besides stay at home orders.

makomk 6y ago
We have other pandemics that we could probably test this hypothesis with, but I suspect that it would be more accurate to say that how we see this particular pandemic is what causes both the massive economic damage and the feelings of hopelessness, suicides, etc. Businesses are losing customers not because the government imposed a lockdown, but because people think they can stop the pandemic and avoid death by staying away. Though there's probably not going to be much enthusiasm from the media towards exploring this idea, since it puts the economic damage etc squarely on their heads.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Businesses are losing customers not because the government imposed a lockdown, but because people think they can stop the pandemic and avoid death by staying away. Though there's probably not going to be much enthusiasm from the media towards exploring this idea, since it puts the economic damage etc squarely on their heads. Perhaps let's first explore the question whether they were right. Epidemiology 101 seems to say they absolutely were. The less people interact in close quarters, the less a sickness spread. I have a feeling we're forgetting here that there's an actual virus on the loose. The pandemic isn't a media construct, it's not a mass hysteria. So I think we should also entertain the option that a virus spreading fast through our communities is also responsible for some of the economic damage.
  - noobaccount 6y ago
    Maybe we overreacted just a little bit. Some of these people might’ve just needed a friend.

raziel2p 6y ago

maybe let's focus less on the lockdown as the cause of this, and more on the awful social security and mental health services. lockdown/quarantine doesn't suddenly turn normal people suicidal, it just escalates already existing economic hardships or mental problems. also, should be obvious, but we cannot know how many more people would've died if there was no lockdown, so comparing numbers as they are today is really dumb.