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Any death is unacceptable. This is, of course, unattainable in practice, so I would suggest looking at Eastern European or East Asian societies for a rule of t

Any death is unacceptable. This is, of course, unattainable in practice, so I would suggest looking at Eastern European or East Asian societies for a rule of thumb (e.g. Czechia, Slovakia, Greece, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam etc.).

jdminhbg 6y ago
> Any death is unacceptable. This is not how society works. We could drastically curtail the number of deaths by outlawing cars, alcohol, and social interaction indefinitely, regardless of covid, but we don't. Refusing to understand that tradeoffs are involved is not helpful.
- leto_ii 6y ago
  While not explicitly specified, my comment was referring to deaths caused by the coronavirus. If you read past the first sentence you will also notice that I explicitly said that this is an unattainable standard and I have provided a number of countries that can be taken as reference for what an acceptable death rate might be.
  - jdminhbg 6y ago
    > Any death is unacceptable. vs. > what an acceptable death rate might be Maybe you just misspoke?
    - leto_ii 6y ago
      I did not misspeak. I will try to clarify this once more: from an high level/abstract point of view, all deaths (I am now specifically referring to the coronavirus, but this works for deaths in general) should be avoided. This is obviously not possible in practice, hence some deaths have to be accepted. What can be considered acceptable is relative, but it helps to look at the countries that have managed to keep their deaths low and take their numbers as a yardstick for other societies.
      - coding123 6y ago
        I think it was the wording. You said not acceptable and acceptable for the same exact thing. In this last post it was all deaths should be avoided, but that some deaths are acceptable. I think everyone can agree that all deaths _should_ be avoided, and probably those same people would agree that it would be impossible to attain that goal... specifically for Covid.
  - kspacewalk2 6y ago
    Some deaths are caused not by the coronavirus itself, but by the lockdown. Suicides, as well as consequences of foregone or delayed diagnostic tests and other medical appointments, for example. In the US, where unemployment often means no health insurance, many thousands of lives are lost per percentage point of unemployment. I'm the third world, you've got future deaths due to foregone immunizations. So the goal is not minimizing Covid deaths at all. The goal is minimizing deaths, and it's not at all clear that going into max lockdown mode in fact minimizes the sum total of deaths.
    - yters 6y ago
      Also, how many elderly people have died due to flatten the curve procedures that sent positive cases back to nursing homes to free up hospital beds for younger patients? An enormous percentage of the US deaths were nursing home occupants. It is precisely the lockdown procedures that have resulted in such high death rates. This is the huge uncovered scandal of the pandemic response.
- yters 6y ago
  Also leads to undesireable conclusions. If the metric is minimize death, best way to achieve this is kill everyone alive today, or at least sterilize them. Everyone alive today will die someday, guaranteed. If they do not have any kids, there will be consequently be no further deaths. Same outcome for all sentient life. If minimizing suffering is the ultimate meteric, then the optimal solution is elimination of all sentient life.
  - takeda 6y ago
    If anything, the metric would be number of deaths per population.
_-___________-_ 6y ago
The inclusion of Vietnam on these lists always surprises me. There is no excess mortality data for Vietnam, nor any data on infections (e.g. from random population sampling). All we have is their self-reported number of cases (i.e. confirmed infections) and deaths (zero!), which come from triumphant news releases from the Communist Party (usually paired with reminders about how great this success will be for their economy in the post-COVID world), repeated with zero critical thought by overseas media. - Nobody knows if there was some excess mortality here, because there's no monitoring. - There were thousands of "suspected cases" in the official reports, which remained suspected cases and never progressed to a confirmed case or a confirmed non-case (as they would if they were tested) until they stopped reporting numbers. - People with confirmed close contact with known cases were told to isolate and were only tested if they showed symptoms (this is also normal practice in many/most Western countries). - The supposed "large" number of tests carried out in Vietnam represents only 0.2% of the population. - A significant portion of those tests are of people who had to be tested anyway, rather than community testing (e.g. overseas Vietnamese arriving home; the large number of charter flights that were allowed as exceptions from Korea and other countries, for employees of large firms with factories in Vietnam - e.g. LG - who did not stop during the lockdown). - The lockdown was largely not enforced, and while streets were much quieter than usual, there were many people outside throughout. Smaller bars and restaurants only closed for a few weeks, and of course nobody wore a mask inside them. Many informal businesses (e.g. street food) never closed. I think Vietnam's "success" is largely down to some environmental factor (average temperature/humidity, sunlight exposure, the general "outdoor" way most people socialise) keeping the number of infections or the severity of those infections down, and I think the chances that COVID caused exactly zero deaths are almost zero.
- somewhereoutth 6y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/01/testing-vietnam-contained-coronavirus https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/01/testin... "As in wartime, almost every sector, including aviation, healthcare and food production, has been mobilised and dedicated to containing the pandemic." They fought the virus, not each other. They won.

jdminhbg 6y ago

> Any death is unacceptable. This is not how society works. We could drastically curtail the number of deaths by outlawing cars, alcohol, and social interaction indefinitely, regardless of covid, but we don't. Refusing to understand that tradeoffs are involved is not helpful.

leto_ii 6y ago
While not explicitly specified, my comment was referring to deaths caused by the coronavirus. If you read past the first sentence you will also notice that I explicitly said that this is an unattainable standard and I have provided a number of countries that can be taken as reference for what an acceptable death rate might be.
- jdminhbg 6y ago
  > Any death is unacceptable. vs. > what an acceptable death rate might be Maybe you just misspoke?
  - leto_ii 6y ago
    I did not misspeak. I will try to clarify this once more: from an high level/abstract point of view, all deaths (I am now specifically referring to the coronavirus, but this works for deaths in general) should be avoided. This is obviously not possible in practice, hence some deaths have to be accepted. What can be considered acceptable is relative, but it helps to look at the countries that have managed to keep their deaths low and take their numbers as a yardstick for other societies.
    - coding123 6y ago
      I think it was the wording. You said not acceptable and acceptable for the same exact thing. In this last post it was all deaths should be avoided, but that some deaths are acceptable. I think everyone can agree that all deaths _should_ be avoided, and probably those same people would agree that it would be impossible to attain that goal... specifically for Covid.
- kspacewalk2 6y ago
  Some deaths are caused not by the coronavirus itself, but by the lockdown. Suicides, as well as consequences of foregone or delayed diagnostic tests and other medical appointments, for example. In the US, where unemployment often means no health insurance, many thousands of lives are lost per percentage point of unemployment. I'm the third world, you've got future deaths due to foregone immunizations. So the goal is not minimizing Covid deaths at all. The goal is minimizing deaths, and it's not at all clear that going into max lockdown mode in fact minimizes the sum total of deaths.
  - yters 6y ago
    Also, how many elderly people have died due to flatten the curve procedures that sent positive cases back to nursing homes to free up hospital beds for younger patients? An enormous percentage of the US deaths were nursing home occupants. It is precisely the lockdown procedures that have resulted in such high death rates. This is the huge uncovered scandal of the pandemic response.
yters 6y ago
Also leads to undesireable conclusions. If the metric is minimize death, best way to achieve this is kill everyone alive today, or at least sterilize them. Everyone alive today will die someday, guaranteed. If they do not have any kids, there will be consequently be no further deaths. Same outcome for all sentient life. If minimizing suffering is the ultimate meteric, then the optimal solution is elimination of all sentient life.
- takeda 6y ago
  If anything, the metric would be number of deaths per population.

_-___________-_ 6y ago

The inclusion of Vietnam on these lists always surprises me. There is no excess mortality data for Vietnam, nor any data on infections (e.g. from random population sampling). All we have is their self-reported number of cases (i.e. confirmed infections) and deaths (zero!), which come from triumphant news releases from the Communist Party (usually paired with reminders about how great this success will be for their economy in the post-COVID world), repeated with zero critical thought by overseas media. - Nobody knows if there was some excess mortality here, because there's no monitoring. - There were thousands of "suspected cases" in the official reports, which remained suspected cases and never progressed to a confirmed case or a confirmed non-case (as they would if they were tested) until they stopped reporting numbers. - People with confirmed close contact with known cases were told to isolate and were only tested if they showed symptoms (this is also normal practice in many/most Western countries). - The supposed "large" number of tests carried out in Vietnam represents only 0.2% of the population. - A significant portion of those tests are of people who had to be tested anyway, rather than community testing (e.g. overseas Vietnamese arriving home; the large number of charter flights that were allowed as exceptions from Korea and other countries, for employees of large firms with factories in Vietnam - e.g. LG - who did not stop during the lockdown). - The lockdown was largely not enforced, and while streets were much quieter than usual, there were many people outside throughout. Smaller bars and restaurants only closed for a few weeks, and of course nobody wore a mask inside them. Many informal businesses (e.g. street food) never closed. I think Vietnam's "success" is largely down to some environmental factor (average temperature/humidity, sunlight exposure, the general "outdoor" way most people socialise) keeping the number of infections or the severity of those infections down, and I think the chances that COVID caused exactly zero deaths are almost zero.

somewhereoutth 6y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/01/testing-vietnam-contained-coronavirus https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/01/testin... "As in wartime, almost every sector, including aviation, healthcare and food production, has been mobilised and dedicated to containing the pandemic." They fought the virus, not each other. They won.