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> In an average year, 13/1000 Swedes die anyway. Yes, people die. That's true of all countries and all times. What we might call civilized societies have howev

> In an average year, 13/1000 Swedes die anyway. Yes, people die. That's true of all countries and all times. What we might call civilized societies have however strived to reduce those numbers as much as possible. This was done by trying to avoid violence, improving lifestyles and developing better medical techniques in order to prevent or repair diseases and injuries. Containing and minimizing the effects of a pandemic is just one aspect of what we might call a civilized attitude towards human life. Conversely, not doing so is uncivilized and I might add immoral and irresponsible. > there will be an entire generation of people who have effectively "lost" a year of the things they hoped they would do in their lifetime This almost doesn't merit a reply. A few months of not going to festivals and the cinema is by no measure a catastrophe. It's not fun, but suggesting that your right to fun should trump others' right to life is, again, uncivilized, immoral and irresponsible.

revnode 6y ago
> Containing and minimizing the effects of a pandemic is just one aspect of what we might call a civilized attitude towards human life. Conversely, not doing so is uncivilized and I might add immoral and irresponsible. This is acting under the assumption that something can be done, that the thing done is effective, or for that matter, isn't harmful. There were, of course, many things done. Were all of them effective? Were some of them harmful? Doing something harmful, like for example forcefully depriving many of a livelihood during a pandemic, can be considered immoral and irresponsible.
- leto_ii 6y ago
  There are many ways of mitigating the harmful effects of the lock down. State aid targeted directly towards individuals (and not corporations) is a good idea, I think. The same goes for a freeze on mortgage payments, rents, evictions etc. These are all measures that a modern state can take to prevent people from suffering economically.
  - revnode 6y ago
    > There are many ways of mitigating the harmful effects of the lock down. State aid targeted directly towards individuals (and not corporations) is a good idea, I think. The same goes for a freeze on mortgage payments, rents, evictions etc. I think it's a bad idea to have people with little understanding of economics, but a high sense of moral superiority, fix the problems they create through their incompetence. Politicians are the last people you want doing this. Freeze evictions? Landlords go bust. Freeze mortgages? Mortgage servicers go bust. Now what? Mortgages when created are aggregated into securities with guaranteed contractual payments. No payments? What happens to the securities and the organizations that own them? Banks, pensions, retirement accounts, etc? What happens to the mortgage market and the young family who needs to buy their first home? Actions have consequences. It's nice to have ideas over the internet, but reality is a bit more complicated.
    - leto_ii 6y ago
      > I think it's a bad idea to have people with little understanding of economics, but a high sense of moral superiority, fix the problems they create through their incompetence. Not sure who you're referring to here. > Freeze evictions? Landlords go bust. Freeze mortgages? Mortgage servicers go bust. Corporations are legal fictions that do not have a right to life. Let them go bust and save the individuals working for those corporations. Once the crisis passes, they will re-create the legal fictions and continue their work. > Mortgages when created are aggregated into securities with guaranteed contractual payments. This should probably not have been allowed to happen in the first place. In general valid replies to your comments are easily available. Your condescension is, however, tiresome, so I will not pursue this thread any further.
      - nradov 6y ago
        It's easy to dodge the questions and act morally superior when you don't personally have to make the hard decisions or accept responsibility for the consequences. Others don't have that luxury.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
jlmorton 6y ago
> Containing and minimizing the effects of a pandemic is just one aspect of what we might call a civilized attitude towards human life. Conversely, not doing so is uncivilized and I might add immoral and irresponsible. The reality is that everyone is prepared to allow others to die for their own convenience. I intentionally phrased that harshly, but it is indisputably true. In the US, 70,000 people died from the influenza season of 2018-2019. We could have sharply reduced that through quarantine measures. But no one wants to do that. Once you accept that everyone is prepared to allow others to die preventable deaths for their own convenience, then all you are talking about is a matter of degree. It can't be immoral to believe 1 death is okay, but 2 is wrong. That's just an opinion. The only difference between believing 70,000 is okay, and 700,000 is not is a gut feeling about how much preventable death is worth it to maintain our living standards.
- leto_ii 6y ago
  All preventable deaths should be prevented - this is the gold standard. In reality, of course, things don't work out that way. The analogy with a flu season is deeply misleading. The coronavirus has, in half a year, killed more people than the worst flu seasons, with extraordinary measures in place all over the world. It's completely reasonable to assume that without lockdowns we would have had millions of deaths already. > The reality is that everyone is prepared to allow others to die for their own convenience. It may be so. Those people are morally wrong however. This is a deep point that I have insisted on in other comments as well. Casually weighing human life against economic cost is not acceptable in what we might call a civilized society. > The only difference between believing 70,000 is okay, and 700,000 is not is a gut feeling about how much preventable death is worth it to maintain our living standards. That is not true. Deaths caused by the regular flu are deeply regrettable and should be prevented as much as possible. If you dig into the data however, you will see that the coronavirus not only kills many more people than the flu, but it also kills people who would otherwise have many more years left to live. Diabetes, a heart condition or age > 65 yrs. shouldn't be death sentences in a modern civilized society.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
saiya-jin 6y ago
The problem is, covid has tons of indirect negative consequences on people's health. Folks overall stopped moving around and exercising so much. Tons of people with all kinds of medical complications stayed at home rather than receiving checks and treatment in hospitals. Imagine finding some lump on your body, but staying at home. Or missing regular health check. Probably impossible to estimate how many people died because of this, and how many will have their lives shorter because they didn't get treatment earlier. Here at local cantonal hospital, this has been recognized as a big failure of general directions given to the population, and is a huge problem for old people. Its far from the trivialization you make out of it about some kids missing some festivals and parties.
austhrow743 6y ago
>What we might call civilized societies have however strived to reduce those numbers as much as possible Unless you're claiming that no civilised society exists, that's not true at all. A civilisation built around minimising death as much as possible would look very differently to any that currently exists. Resources are always a trade off. People working at those festivals and cinemas could have went in to medical care pre corona virus. People building festival stages and cinemas could have been building hospitals. If festivals and cinemas didn't exist then that would be less driving and less road deaths. At some level festivals and cinemas existing is putting some peoples fun over others right to life, corona virus or no.
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  I think it was implied that we try to reduce deaths as much as is reasonably possible, not at the cost of everything else.
  - austhrow743 6y ago
    What's reasonable is exactly what's up for debate though and they didn't say "civilisation is 5000 fun utils to 1 QALY saved ratio but doing nothing about corona virus actually costs you 3 QALY for every 5000 fun utils so that's disgusting, what they said was >It's not fun, but suggesting that your right to fun should trump others' right to life is, again, uncivilized, immoral and irresponsible.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      I really don't understand what you're trying to accomplish here: are you seriously asserting "unless you can assign objectively quantifiable values to 'right to fun' and 'right to life' and prove the latter is larger than the former, your argument is invalid?"
      - austhrow743 6y ago
        They're not even trying to say that one is larger than the former without objectively quantifying it! That would be a start. I would like a argument. Any. Instead there's just a bunch of people treating corona virus as this exception where you're sociopath to consider any other facet of life when deciding how to respond to it.
grapehut 6y ago
> It's not fun, but suggesting that your right to fun should trump others' right to life is, again, uncivilized, immoral and irresponsible. That's not the argument he was making. And as a society we have to accept some negative externalities and weigh up the benefits, otherwise things like (recreational) road-trips would be banned.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I'm not exactly sure what OP's argument was, but it sounded like "Think of all the fun activities people sacrificed while we tried to handle a deadly worldwide pandemic!" I don't think this is really convincing to a lot of people and frankly it sounds borderline disgusting to me. In the past, generations have willingly sacrificed their lives at war, ostensibly fighting for the common good, yet today we can't even stomach a year without pedicures and dining out? That's pretty sad and gross.
xienze 6y ago
> A few months of not going to festivals and the cinema is by no measure a catastrophe. It's not fun, but suggesting that your right to fun should trump others' right to life is, again, uncivilized, immoral and irresponsible. What are your thoughts on a state of permanent lockdown in order to eliminate the tens of thousands of worldwide deaths that occur every single year due to the common flu? Perhaps life to most of the world involves balancing several factors, one of which is risk to personal health.
- menybuvico 6y ago
  > What are your thoughts on a state of permanent lockdown in order to eliminate the tens of thousands of worldwide deaths that occur every single year due to the common flu? Total lock-downs might not be necessary. From what I can tell, the working from home-thing pretty much stopped this year's flu epidemic; one of my customers talked about sick-leave being down by over two thirds since the pandemic hit. They've already changed their policies so that anyone with cold or flu symptoms are required to work from home from now on. > Perhaps life to most of the world involves balancing several factors, one of which is risk to personal health. No doubt about it. However, this pandemic has shown us that there are plenty of measures that can be taken without major disruptions. Personally, I'm all for telling people with a sore throat and fever that they should stay the fk away from things like sports events, even if it's just a flu in that specific case. The only reason the flu does go around like it does is because we let it. We don't have to.
rimliu 6y ago
In my country less than 80 people have died because of the COVID-19. One can argue that many more have died because of lack of access to the medical help. Not because the health care system was overwhelmed—far from it. But the access was very limited for the sake of "preparation" to deal with COVID.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  You can argue that if you have access to the excess death figures for your country and then subtract back out the COVID-19 related deaths.
  - Gwypaas 6y ago
    That's not a number we will know for decades. Saw an article in Sweden saying cancer detections are down 30% since the start, those undetected cancers are still developing. Unless they somehow can be caught a couple of years down the line they will sadly show up in the stats.
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
> A few months of not going to festivals and the cinema is by no measure a catastrophe. Do you have any data to support that? For many people their mental health has a great effect on their physical health, and in a country like Sweden where a lot of people have mental issues already (including stress, loneliness, various forms of depression etc.), yes you could make a case that making people even more isolated by sitting at home would increase their stress and loneliness which has an effect on the health.
stickfigure 6y ago
Young people aren't just losing a few months of festivals. A generation of kids are losing a year (possibly more!) of schooling. Young adults are graduating into career-crippling unemployment which may haunt their lives for decades. People are getting laid off, burning through their meager life savings, losing businesses that they've worked themselves half to death to establish. Suicide rates are up. We're just beginning to see the economic and geopolitical consequences... the last great depression precipitated a world war that killed 3% of the world population. All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy? I have octogenarian parents who I love deeply and would prefer to see live forever. I also have a young son. I would grind up my parents and feed them to my child if that's what it took for him to thrive. And I would expect my child to do the same for his children. Stop moralizing, this isn't "right vs wrong". It's basically picking which demographic bears the brunt of an extremely unfortunate but naturally occurring phenomenon. I'm not at all sure we picked the right one.
- minusf 6y ago
  > All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy? In a "More or less" episode the insurance industry debunked that "an extra month or two": it's more like 5 years on average in a first world country. That's some significant grand-parenting time. Also, "flattening the curve" was not only about trying to save those old people but to not overwhelm hospitals and cemetaries. The system cannot handle so many excess deaths in so little time. Your argument sounds like we should have let the virus go rampant and in 6 months: 1. let health workers go grazy 2. wipe out all 75+ people from the planet Maybe the grand-children could give kisses of death to grandparents and problem is solved?
- r_c_a_d 6y ago
  It's not as simple a choice as you paint. Economic consequences can be fixed by civilised people; death cannot be fixed by anyone.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Newsflash: the world isn't steady state. What we think is 'normal' today can change, and by adapting to change we ensure our continued success and survival as a species. Entitlement as to what you feel your life should be like is a good way to be frustrated and rather than to see that a generation of kids lost a year of schooling (which isn't actually the case, most countries had only a few months interruption the bulk of which got caught by remote schooling) think about it this way: we don't get all that worked up about those countries where there are very few or poor levels of school to start with and even in the rich West 200 years ago (an eyeblink on the scale of human history) there was hardly any schooling to begin with. The big difference this time around is that the rich West is confronted with some of their organizational and political failures. Grinding up your parents if that's what it took for your son to thrive is a false choice, your son will thrive regardless of whether or not your grind up your parents because it isn't the end of the world to lose a year of schooling. Just work a bit harder the next year and you'll be fine.
mlang23 6y ago
Yeah, we've heard all of that. However, is it really true? How many lifes could be saved if we directed 50% of world wide military budget towards ending hunger? Let that sink for a while, and let me know if you still think the "we are just protecting you" narrative is really honest.

revnode 6y ago

> Containing and minimizing the effects of a pandemic is just one aspect of what we might call a civilized attitude towards human life. Conversely, not doing so is uncivilized and I might add immoral and irresponsible. This is acting under the assumption that something can be done, that the thing done is effective, or for that matter, isn't harmful. There were, of course, many things done. Were all of them effective? Were some of them harmful? Doing something harmful, like for example forcefully depriving many of a livelihood during a pandemic, can be considered immoral and irresponsible.

leto_ii 6y ago
There are many ways of mitigating the harmful effects of the lock down. State aid targeted directly towards individuals (and not corporations) is a good idea, I think. The same goes for a freeze on mortgage payments, rents, evictions etc. These are all measures that a modern state can take to prevent people from suffering economically.
- revnode 6y ago
  > There are many ways of mitigating the harmful effects of the lock down. State aid targeted directly towards individuals (and not corporations) is a good idea, I think. The same goes for a freeze on mortgage payments, rents, evictions etc. I think it's a bad idea to have people with little understanding of economics, but a high sense of moral superiority, fix the problems they create through their incompetence. Politicians are the last people you want doing this. Freeze evictions? Landlords go bust. Freeze mortgages? Mortgage servicers go bust. Now what? Mortgages when created are aggregated into securities with guaranteed contractual payments. No payments? What happens to the securities and the organizations that own them? Banks, pensions, retirement accounts, etc? What happens to the mortgage market and the young family who needs to buy their first home? Actions have consequences. It's nice to have ideas over the internet, but reality is a bit more complicated.
  - leto_ii 6y ago
    > I think it's a bad idea to have people with little understanding of economics, but a high sense of moral superiority, fix the problems they create through their incompetence. Not sure who you're referring to here. > Freeze evictions? Landlords go bust. Freeze mortgages? Mortgage servicers go bust. Corporations are legal fictions that do not have a right to life. Let them go bust and save the individuals working for those corporations. Once the crisis passes, they will re-create the legal fictions and continue their work. > Mortgages when created are aggregated into securities with guaranteed contractual payments. This should probably not have been allowed to happen in the first place. In general valid replies to your comments are easily available. Your condescension is, however, tiresome, so I will not pursue this thread any further.
    - nradov 6y ago
      It's easy to dodge the questions and act morally superior when you don't personally have to make the hard decisions or accept responsibility for the consequences. Others don't have that luxury.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

jlmorton 6y ago

> Containing and minimizing the effects of a pandemic is just one aspect of what we might call a civilized attitude towards human life. Conversely, not doing so is uncivilized and I might add immoral and irresponsible. The reality is that everyone is prepared to allow others to die for their own convenience. I intentionally phrased that harshly, but it is indisputably true. In the US, 70,000 people died from the influenza season of 2018-2019. We could have sharply reduced that through quarantine measures. But no one wants to do that. Once you accept that everyone is prepared to allow others to die preventable deaths for their own convenience, then all you are talking about is a matter of degree. It can't be immoral to believe 1 death is okay, but 2 is wrong. That's just an opinion. The only difference between believing 70,000 is okay, and 700,000 is not is a gut feeling about how much preventable death is worth it to maintain our living standards.

leto_ii 6y ago
All preventable deaths should be prevented - this is the gold standard. In reality, of course, things don't work out that way. The analogy with a flu season is deeply misleading. The coronavirus has, in half a year, killed more people than the worst flu seasons, with extraordinary measures in place all over the world. It's completely reasonable to assume that without lockdowns we would have had millions of deaths already. > The reality is that everyone is prepared to allow others to die for their own convenience. It may be so. Those people are morally wrong however. This is a deep point that I have insisted on in other comments as well. Casually weighing human life against economic cost is not acceptable in what we might call a civilized society. > The only difference between believing 70,000 is okay, and 700,000 is not is a gut feeling about how much preventable death is worth it to maintain our living standards. That is not true. Deaths caused by the regular flu are deeply regrettable and should be prevented as much as possible. If you dig into the data however, you will see that the coronavirus not only kills many more people than the flu, but it also kills people who would otherwise have many more years left to live. Diabetes, a heart condition or age > 65 yrs. shouldn't be death sentences in a modern civilized society.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

saiya-jin 6y ago

The problem is, covid has tons of indirect negative consequences on people's health. Folks overall stopped moving around and exercising so much. Tons of people with all kinds of medical complications stayed at home rather than receiving checks and treatment in hospitals. Imagine finding some lump on your body, but staying at home. Or missing regular health check. Probably impossible to estimate how many people died because of this, and how many will have their lives shorter because they didn't get treatment earlier. Here at local cantonal hospital, this has been recognized as a big failure of general directions given to the population, and is a huge problem for old people. Its far from the trivialization you make out of it about some kids missing some festivals and parties.

austhrow743 6y ago

>What we might call civilized societies have however strived to reduce those numbers as much as possible Unless you're claiming that no civilised society exists, that's not true at all. A civilisation built around minimising death as much as possible would look very differently to any that currently exists. Resources are always a trade off. People working at those festivals and cinemas could have went in to medical care pre corona virus. People building festival stages and cinemas could have been building hospitals. If festivals and cinemas didn't exist then that would be less driving and less road deaths. At some level festivals and cinemas existing is putting some peoples fun over others right to life, corona virus or no.

dwaltrip 6y ago
I think it was implied that we try to reduce deaths as much as is reasonably possible, not at the cost of everything else.
- austhrow743 6y ago
  What's reasonable is exactly what's up for debate though and they didn't say "civilisation is 5000 fun utils to 1 QALY saved ratio but doing nothing about corona virus actually costs you 3 QALY for every 5000 fun utils so that's disgusting, what they said was >It's not fun, but suggesting that your right to fun should trump others' right to life is, again, uncivilized, immoral and irresponsible.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    I really don't understand what you're trying to accomplish here: are you seriously asserting "unless you can assign objectively quantifiable values to 'right to fun' and 'right to life' and prove the latter is larger than the former, your argument is invalid?"
    - austhrow743 6y ago
      They're not even trying to say that one is larger than the former without objectively quantifying it! That would be a start. I would like a argument. Any. Instead there's just a bunch of people treating corona virus as this exception where you're sociopath to consider any other facet of life when deciding how to respond to it.

grapehut 6y ago

> It's not fun, but suggesting that your right to fun should trump others' right to life is, again, uncivilized, immoral and irresponsible. That's not the argument he was making. And as a society we have to accept some negative externalities and weigh up the benefits, otherwise things like (recreational) road-trips would be banned.

ryandrake 6y ago
I'm not exactly sure what OP's argument was, but it sounded like "Think of all the fun activities people sacrificed while we tried to handle a deadly worldwide pandemic!" I don't think this is really convincing to a lot of people and frankly it sounds borderline disgusting to me. In the past, generations have willingly sacrificed their lives at war, ostensibly fighting for the common good, yet today we can't even stomach a year without pedicures and dining out? That's pretty sad and gross.

xienze 6y ago

> A few months of not going to festivals and the cinema is by no measure a catastrophe. It's not fun, but suggesting that your right to fun should trump others' right to life is, again, uncivilized, immoral and irresponsible. What are your thoughts on a state of permanent lockdown in order to eliminate the tens of thousands of worldwide deaths that occur every single year due to the common flu? Perhaps life to most of the world involves balancing several factors, one of which is risk to personal health.

menybuvico 6y ago
> What are your thoughts on a state of permanent lockdown in order to eliminate the tens of thousands of worldwide deaths that occur every single year due to the common flu? Total lock-downs might not be necessary. From what I can tell, the working from home-thing pretty much stopped this year's flu epidemic; one of my customers talked about sick-leave being down by over two thirds since the pandemic hit. They've already changed their policies so that anyone with cold or flu symptoms are required to work from home from now on. > Perhaps life to most of the world involves balancing several factors, one of which is risk to personal health. No doubt about it. However, this pandemic has shown us that there are plenty of measures that can be taken without major disruptions. Personally, I'm all for telling people with a sore throat and fever that they should stay the fk away from things like sports events, even if it's just a flu in that specific case. The only reason the flu does go around like it does is because we let it. We don't have to.

rimliu 6y ago

In my country less than 80 people have died because of the COVID-19. One can argue that many more have died because of lack of access to the medical help. Not because the health care system was overwhelmed—far from it. But the access was very limited for the sake of "preparation" to deal with COVID.

jacquesm 6y ago
You can argue that if you have access to the excess death figures for your country and then subtract back out the COVID-19 related deaths.
- Gwypaas 6y ago
  That's not a number we will know for decades. Saw an article in Sweden saying cancer detections are down 30% since the start, those undetected cancers are still developing. Unless they somehow can be caught a couple of years down the line they will sadly show up in the stats.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

> A few months of not going to festivals and the cinema is by no measure a catastrophe. Do you have any data to support that? For many people their mental health has a great effect on their physical health, and in a country like Sweden where a lot of people have mental issues already (including stress, loneliness, various forms of depression etc.), yes you could make a case that making people even more isolated by sitting at home would increase their stress and loneliness which has an effect on the health.

stickfigure 6y ago

Young people aren't just losing a few months of festivals. A generation of kids are losing a year (possibly more!) of schooling. Young adults are graduating into career-crippling unemployment which may haunt their lives for decades. People are getting laid off, burning through their meager life savings, losing businesses that they've worked themselves half to death to establish. Suicide rates are up. We're just beginning to see the economic and geopolitical consequences... the last great depression precipitated a world war that killed 3% of the world population. All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy? I have octogenarian parents who I love deeply and would prefer to see live forever. I also have a young son. I would grind up my parents and feed them to my child if that's what it took for him to thrive. And I would expect my child to do the same for his children. Stop moralizing, this isn't "right vs wrong". It's basically picking which demographic bears the brunt of an extremely unfortunate but naturally occurring phenomenon. I'm not at all sure we picked the right one.

minusf 6y ago
> All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy? In a "More or less" episode the insurance industry debunked that "an extra month or two": it's more like 5 years on average in a first world country. That's some significant grand-parenting time. Also, "flattening the curve" was not only about trying to save those old people but to not overwhelm hospitals and cemetaries. The system cannot handle so many excess deaths in so little time. Your argument sounds like we should have let the virus go rampant and in 6 months: 1. let health workers go grazy 2. wipe out all 75+ people from the planet Maybe the grand-children could give kisses of death to grandparents and problem is solved?
r_c_a_d 6y ago
It's not as simple a choice as you paint. Economic consequences can be fixed by civilised people; death cannot be fixed by anyone.
jacquesm 6y ago
Newsflash: the world isn't steady state. What we think is 'normal' today can change, and by adapting to change we ensure our continued success and survival as a species. Entitlement as to what you feel your life should be like is a good way to be frustrated and rather than to see that a generation of kids lost a year of schooling (which isn't actually the case, most countries had only a few months interruption the bulk of which got caught by remote schooling) think about it this way: we don't get all that worked up about those countries where there are very few or poor levels of school to start with and even in the rich West 200 years ago (an eyeblink on the scale of human history) there was hardly any schooling to begin with. The big difference this time around is that the rich West is confronted with some of their organizational and political failures. Grinding up your parents if that's what it took for your son to thrive is a false choice, your son will thrive regardless of whether or not your grind up your parents because it isn't the end of the world to lose a year of schooling. Just work a bit harder the next year and you'll be fine.

mlang23 6y ago

Yeah, we've heard all of that. However, is it really true? How many lifes could be saved if we directed 50% of world wide military budget towards ending hunger? Let that sink for a while, and let me know if you still think the "we are just protecting you" narrative is really honest.