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What's the upper bound on mortality attributable to lockdown and an environment of unprecedented fear and hysteria? Maybe start with the impending global food

What's the upper bound on mortality attributable to lockdown and an environment of unprecedented fear and hysteria? Maybe start with the impending global food shortage. And the fact that we've went backwards on poverty, went backwards on vaccines for everything that isn't SARS-2, etc. And the fact that the physiological and psychological state lockdown puts us in, almost certainly makes us more likely to die of COVID-19 if we get it? I don't carelessly accept the upper bound. I rationally set an upper bound and ask myself, "is this worst case something I would rather live with, rather than the worst case of the lockdown scenario?". Then I compared the average cases. What I found was that the worst case scenario of lockdown is worse, and the average-case scenario is worse. Only the true "best-case scenario" of "we magically get a vaccine in a month, the vaccine works for everyone without any significant repercussions and we manufacture 8 billion doses and the entire globe voluntarily accepts it" is better (although the corresponding best-case scenario of no lockdown is also similarly absurdly positive so best-case scenarios are useless anyway). -- Tell me, what is the logic in practicing "indefinite postponement" (containment), which accrues on-going, non-linear costs (as well as the obvious linear component), and only ends when we develop a game-changer treatment or vaccine, which is a temporally-unbounded future event. When has it ever been good public policy to hinge everything upon an uncertain future event? That's just bad strategy. To use a starcraft analogy, we're trying to sit on one base and tech up while a skilled opponent would be on 4 bases, have a strong econ and then out-tech us anyway since they, you know, actually have a sustainable, functioning economy.

IAmEveryone 6y ago
There is no "impending global food shortage". It's also baseless speculation that "psychological and physical consequences of lockdown" make you more or less likely to die. There is ample precedent, however, of doing lockdown right and basically being done with it: Asia and Europe have many countries with drastically lower infection rates than the US. And most of them are further along the way of opening back up than the US.
berdon 6y ago
> What I found was that the worst case scenario of lockdown is worse, and the average-case scenario is worse. That is assuming that prolonged lockdown continues to be our response. It clearly doesn't have to as other first-world countries cases have actually been floored. Aside from complaining about our first run at this, we could/should probably just all wear masks and then spreading is mitigated such that new cases approach zero.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  You can't just lockdown and then stop, unless you eradicate the virus entirely, which is impossible. It only stops in the absence of lockdown when the herd immunity threshold is reached. Period. The only question is what that threshold is. Without these findings of heterogenous susceptibility, that threshold would be 70-90% depending on your estimate of the effective reproduction number. With these findings, that number drops to a much lower threshold. Much, much lower. -- If I can ask you one question, what is your explanation as to how cases have floored in other first-world countries, in the absence of herd immunity, if they are not practicing lockdown?
arrrg 6y ago
Your perspective is a very weird American one where the response has been one giant failure, whether you think lockdowns are great or not. Others are doing much better. There are hardly any new cases in, say, Germany, with by now extremely minimal measures and no lockdown. Your epic texts seem to come from a weird parallel world.
- jdminhbg 6y ago
  This is just circular reasoning. Countries with lower rates of cases/deaths "did well" and countries with higher rates "did poorly." The total heterogeneity across the types and timing of responses in countries across both groups doesn't ever seem to raise any questions. In fact, that's exactly the implication of the Nature paper that's ostensibly the reason for this thread. The more we learn about pre-existing resistance to this coronavirus, the more we can figure out whether measures taken made a difference or were simply coincident with a less-vulnerable population.
  - arrrg 6y ago
    But I don’t think scientists think that previous common cold exposure actually makes you immune? The hypothesis I heard is that this immune response due to previous common cold corona virus exposure could explain the high proportion of asymptomatic cases or cases with very mild symptoms. Those are already priced in, so we already know about their existence, it would just be an explanation as to why they exist. I‘m also not sure why you think that even neighboring and very similar countries are so wildly different based on wildly different levels of pre-existing immunity. That doesn’t seem very plausible. Why should, say, Germany and Italy be so different? Or Germany and France?
    - jdminhbg 6y ago
      > But I don’t think scientists think that previous common cold exposure actually makes you immune? That's the subject of the paper being discussed, it's worth going back and looking at it. The researchers demonstrated T-cell reactivity against it not just in blood from people who had SARS-Cov-1/2 but those who had neither. So something else is going on -- maybe one of the common cold coronaviruses, maybe some other infective but not dangerous coronavirus, maybe something else. > I‘m also not sure why you think that even neighboring and very similar countries are so wildly different based on wildly different levels of pre-existing immunity. That doesn’t seem very plausible. Why should, say, Germany and Italy be so different? Or Germany and France? Since we don't even know the source of this pre-existing immunity, much less how it varies between countries, it's impossible to say. But it's clear that there are many differences between what happens in countries that aren't just lockdown timing/severity. Immunity, density, demographics, climate, sheer luck, etc.

IAmEveryone 6y ago

There is no "impending global food shortage". It's also baseless speculation that "psychological and physical consequences of lockdown" make you more or less likely to die. There is ample precedent, however, of doing lockdown right and basically being done with it: Asia and Europe have many countries with drastically lower infection rates than the US. And most of them are further along the way of opening back up than the US.

berdon 6y ago

> What I found was that the worst case scenario of lockdown is worse, and the average-case scenario is worse. That is assuming that prolonged lockdown continues to be our response. It clearly doesn't have to as other first-world countries cases have actually been floored. Aside from complaining about our first run at this, we could/should probably just all wear masks and then spreading is mitigated such that new cases approach zero.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
You can't just lockdown and then stop, unless you eradicate the virus entirely, which is impossible. It only stops in the absence of lockdown when the herd immunity threshold is reached. Period. The only question is what that threshold is. Without these findings of heterogenous susceptibility, that threshold would be 70-90% depending on your estimate of the effective reproduction number. With these findings, that number drops to a much lower threshold. Much, much lower. -- If I can ask you one question, what is your explanation as to how cases have floored in other first-world countries, in the absence of herd immunity, if they are not practicing lockdown?

arrrg 6y ago

Your perspective is a very weird American one where the response has been one giant failure, whether you think lockdowns are great or not. Others are doing much better. There are hardly any new cases in, say, Germany, with by now extremely minimal measures and no lockdown. Your epic texts seem to come from a weird parallel world.

jdminhbg 6y ago
This is just circular reasoning. Countries with lower rates of cases/deaths "did well" and countries with higher rates "did poorly." The total heterogeneity across the types and timing of responses in countries across both groups doesn't ever seem to raise any questions. In fact, that's exactly the implication of the Nature paper that's ostensibly the reason for this thread. The more we learn about pre-existing resistance to this coronavirus, the more we can figure out whether measures taken made a difference or were simply coincident with a less-vulnerable population.
- arrrg 6y ago
  But I don’t think scientists think that previous common cold exposure actually makes you immune? The hypothesis I heard is that this immune response due to previous common cold corona virus exposure could explain the high proportion of asymptomatic cases or cases with very mild symptoms. Those are already priced in, so we already know about their existence, it would just be an explanation as to why they exist. I‘m also not sure why you think that even neighboring and very similar countries are so wildly different based on wildly different levels of pre-existing immunity. That doesn’t seem very plausible. Why should, say, Germany and Italy be so different? Or Germany and France?
  - jdminhbg 6y ago
    > But I don’t think scientists think that previous common cold exposure actually makes you immune? That's the subject of the paper being discussed, it's worth going back and looking at it. The researchers demonstrated T-cell reactivity against it not just in blood from people who had SARS-Cov-1/2 but those who had neither. So something else is going on -- maybe one of the common cold coronaviruses, maybe some other infective but not dangerous coronavirus, maybe something else. > I‘m also not sure why you think that even neighboring and very similar countries are so wildly different based on wildly different levels of pre-existing immunity. That doesn’t seem very plausible. Why should, say, Germany and Italy be so different? Or Germany and France? Since we don't even know the source of this pre-existing immunity, much less how it varies between countries, it's impossible to say. But it's clear that there are many differences between what happens in countries that aren't just lockdown timing/severity. Immunity, density, demographics, climate, sheer luck, etc.