6 ms·

I think you need to wait a little longer to make these comparison. Given the demographics of Covid victims, it may only have accelerated deaths by a few months.

• moron4hire 6y ago
  Yeah, soooo restrictive of civil liberties that half the country refused to wear masks, partied hard, and caused not one, but two resurges. You know what, man? I'm getting so sick of hearing this, "but muh civil liberties" line from the anti-lockdown crowd. You weren't planning on going to any protests. You're not pretty enough to consider "showin' muh face in the grocery store" to be protected speech. This is just childish feet kicking. It's ex-post-facto rationalization to come up with some way of complaining about being asked to care about the other people in your community.
  • cm2187 6y ago
    You are a hero!
  • gotoeleven 6y ago
    If old and fat people have a high risk and everyone else is basically fine, why not just lock down the old and fat people?
    • FDSGSG 6y ago
      For the same reason why you're expected to wear a mask even if you had COVID-19 a month ago.
    • imglorp 6y ago
      If young and healthy people exercising on the road are at high risk for being struck by drunk drivers, why not lock down the young healthy people?
    • adrianN 6y ago
      Because "old and fat" people make up about half of the population and you can't isolate them from the other half effectively when the infection is rampaging there. This has already been explained countless times.
  • dx87 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm sure the increased suicide rate, drug overdoses, and alcohol related deaths are just childish feet kicking. They hate wearing masks so much that they kill themself instead.
    • moron4hire 6y ago
      Ask a bunch of self-centered people to stay home and suddenly they become experts on all the suicides the kids are doing. You are just bringing that up to argue.
      • bananaquant 6y ago
        Of course not, that's what the experts are for. I couldn't find much about young people, but data on adults should be suggestive enough (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2770146 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...): "In this survey study that included 1441 respondents from during the COVID-19 pandemic and 5065 respondents from before the pandemic, depression symptom prevalence was more than 3-fold higher during the COVID-19 pandemic than before." And not to antagonize you, but just a post earlier you were talking about protecting people in your community. Caring about their wellbeing is one of the ways of doing that.
        • davrosthedalek 6y ago
          Was the depression higher because they had to stay home because of a mandate, because they had to stay home because they were scared of the pandemic, because they were scared of the pandemic, or because the pandemic killed their friends/family, or because they had empathy with all the people who lost friends/family/employment because of the pandemic?
        • DanBC 6y ago
          https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352.full?ijkey=NDYZgh6xGYgX9az&keytype=ref https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352.full?ijkey=NDYZgh6... > Nevertheless, a reasonably consistent picture is beginning to emerge from high income countries. Reports suggest either no rise in suicide rates (Massachusetts, USA11; Victoria, Australia13; England14) or a fall (Japan,9 Norway15) in the early months of the pandemic.
  • jeofken 6y ago
    Let’s please keep HN discussion civil and communicate in good faith, without snark and sarcasm. HN is such a rare community for this reason. You are free to argue why the stance my country Sweden has taken is misinformed or unwise but let’s keep to data and first principle arguments rather than snark and sarcasm.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • moron4hire 6y ago
      You only argue in good faith with people who are arguing on good faith. People bringing up civil liberties and suicides are just puppetting conservative think tank scripts, trying to "pwn the libs".
      • pessimizer 6y ago
        Not being able to respond to scripts you're aware of quickly and concisely shouldn't be a point of pride. The game isn't to detect a conservative, it's to discover a strategy that does the least harm and to convince others of its merit.
      • stolenmerch 6y ago
        If you have actual evidence or data to share about suicide risk this year or if you have a bona fide legal opinion on civil liberties, please share. Otherwise, your comments have added next to nothing to this conversation. Here is a study that isn't a conservative talking point if you'd like something to read. https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article/113/10/707/5857612 https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article/113/10/707/5857612
        • DanBC 6y ago
          Early data on suicide doesn't appear to show any increase in deaths yet. These are preliminary data and we do need to guard against an increase in future, but we're not seeing an increase at the moment. https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352.full?ijkey=NDYZgh6xGYgX9az&keytype=ref https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352.full?ijkey=NDYZgh6... http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=51861 http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=51861
  • salmon30salmon 6y ago
    I think you need to do some research before being so flippant. You should have understood that the United States is in the middle of the pack with mask wearing at nearly 80%. That's higher than Britain, Germany and Denmark and just below China and Canada. Furthermore countries with higher compliance are also seeing additional waves (Italy and France). Perhaps instead of acting like a fool on the internet you research the nonsense you spout. Spreading lies just makes the world more divisive. Source: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/06/pandemic-fatigue-may-be-setting-in-across-much-of-the-world https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/06/pandemic...
• ChrisClark 6y ago
  Oh no! Wearing a mask and caring about others is taking away my civil liberties! Ugh.
  • FDSGSG 6y ago
    This feels like a rather dishonest interpretation of the parent comment. The restrictions in many countries have gone far beyond "wearing a mask and caring about others". The government is certainly taking away your civil liberties by severely restricting your ability to meet your friends or even go outside.
  • dx87 6y ago
    What point are you trying to make by being deliberately obtuse? It isn't "just wear masks and care about people", it's also being prevented from seeing friends and family, and not being allowed to go to work. Not everyone is fine being alone for 6+ months.
    • bachmeier 6y ago
      > It isn't "just wear masks and care about people", it's also being prevented from seeing friends and family, and not being allowed to go to work. Not everyone is fine being alone for 6+ months. No, actually it isn't. It's not a binary thing, where it's either prevent you from seeing people or going out of the house, or zero restrictions. Sweden's choice was to go with purely voluntary restrictions. The alternative is some restrictions. Where I live, we've had a mask requirement for quite a while and basically nothing other than that, and that is indeed an alternative Sweden could have chosen. In addition, "being prevented from seeing friends and family, and not being allowed to go to work" was to a large extent dictated by the circumstances. When some areas got to the point that they no longer had hospital capacity, they had no choice. A simple look at the correlation between restrictions and health outcomes is a textbook example of bad reasoning for an intro statistics course.
      • 0xy 6y ago
        >When some areas got to the point that they no longer had hospital capacity That's false. Areas in Australia had extremely strict lockdown requirements, including disallowing any movement (to the point that newborns actually died as a result of movement restrictions) meanwhile ICU utilization in those areas was hovering around 1% of capacity. ONE PERCENT. Outside of ICU, hospital utilization was way down.
• olodus 6y ago
  I agree with you. It is a bit too early for this kind of analysis. Let's just hope the new infection surge is mitigated before the death charts have time to follow. The most interesting stat to me though that I only see mentioned briefly in this post is the fact that over 90% of the deaths was over 60 years old. I think that gives us very clear signs of how to focus the prevention of further deaths.
• modo_mario 6y ago
  >And not only Sweden didn't do particularly bad, but it's done better than many major European countries like France, Italy, Spain or the UK. It also still had people social distancing, wearing masks and disinfecting, a very low population density, a robust healthcare system which at no point in time got overwhelmed unlike let's say northern Italy. Covid just never really blew up there but at the same time one can't exactly argue that the lack of certain policies contributed to that.
  • alva 6y ago
    > wearing masks not true at least in Stockholm
  • marviio 6y ago
    > a very low population density This fact is brought up a lot. Isn't nation-wide population density a bad measurement? If a country, like Sweden, has huge areas where nobody lives, it says nothing about the density relevant for a virus spreading. While Stockholm's underground transport is nothing like Tokyo's, it's not different to other medium cities in the world.
    • jkinudsjknds 6y ago
      This is a good point. If you sprinkle one donut in a dozen, the average (mean) donut has few sprinkles or (median) no sprinkles. But the average sprinkle is nearby many, many sprinkles. The metric we care about shouldn't be population density of land, but average density of people around a randomly chosen individual. Counter-intuitively not the same.