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> In today’s COVID-19 wars, the global scientific divide leans heavily in favor of active, and sometimes even draconian, public health interventions, including

by umvi 6y ago

> In today’s COVID-19 wars, the global scientific divide leans heavily in favor of active, and sometimes even draconian, public health interventions, including widespread locking down of nonessential business, mandating masks, restricting travel and imposing quarantines. On the other side, some doctors, scientists and public health officials are questioning the wisdom of this approach in the face of massive unknowns about their efficacy and in light of the clear and growing evidence that such measures may not be working in some cases, and may also be causing net harm. It's very hard to dissent against the current narrative because any dissent can easily be framed as "killing people". I blame technology for our current predicament. If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything. We might be wearing masks and washing hands, but I would bet life would be largely the same. But because technology dangled the carrot of "we can save lives by doing everything virtually with computers" we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects of that (loneliness, depression, suicide, homelessness, civil unrest, economy). In some ways, taking a one time "excess deaths" hit as we have done with past pandemics does have measurable benefits in other ways, but you'll get shouted out of the room if you bring up that position even as a hypothetical.

bharam 6y ago
> we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects This reminds me of the French economist Frederic Bastiat's essay "That which is seen, and that which is not seen". The media (tv, newspapers and internet) were all hyper-focused on the number of deaths (initially) and later number of cases but always failed to take into account secondary consequences like those you mention. Link to Bastiat's essay: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays_on_Political_Economy/That_Which_Is_Seen,_and_That_Which_Is_Not_Seen https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays_on_Political_Economy/T...
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  Literally every media outlet I have encountered has published extensive coverage of the wider economic, health, social and political impact of the virus itself and the response to it.
  - bharam 6y ago
    I would agree with you that there is some coverage of these issues...lately. Yesterday for instance CNN ran a story about the suicide trend in Japan. However there was very little coverage of the secondary effects until late in the summer.
    - cfmcdonald 6y ago
      It takes time for secondary effects like that to show up. But I recall reports of large numbers of restaurant closures as far back as late spring.
  - smolder 6y ago
    Media outlets are too broad a category for "literally every" one to have done that.
  - addicted 6y ago
    The idea that the media did not focus on the second order effects is so obviously wrong it’s hilarious. And even if the media didn’t, politicians did. To the point that nearly every country in the world has passed economic and financial aid measures that probably exceed anything they’ve done in the past, certainly during peacetime, and globally the world has put more resources into mitigating the second order effects through all sorts of programs than it almost certainly ever has before. This whole narrative about how dissenters are not heard, when they are parroted the loudest is ridiculous. Even the Scientific A,Eric an article puts the great barrington declaration, with absolutely no scientific backing, with 0 footnotes and references, and a signee list that is completely unvetted, on equal footing with the John Snow memo which has vetted every signee, has references to actual papers littered through it to the point that the text in footnotes probably exceed the entire scientific content of the GBD, if not the entire GBD itself.
    - throwaway201103 6y ago
      They didn't have scoreboards overlayed on the news displaying number of suicides, number of business closures, number of lost jobs, number of domestic violence incidents. It was Deaths, and Cases. Every hour, on the hour. The other stuff got covered, but not nearly with the same intensity.
cfmcdonald 6y ago
I guess life would be largely the same except for the millions of dead people? In general though, there has been a huge variety of policy responses across the globe and over time, so I'm not sure what you mean be 'we' 'shutting everything down'. My state came closest to shutting everything down for a month or so in the spring, but there has been a constant effort since then to adjust policy to balance health risks and economic/social pain. Italy had a super hard lockdown. South Dakota isn't even wearing masks.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  It is also enlightening to consider the success of various strategies too. This will take years to piece together but one comparison from my corner of the globe is the contact tracing in New South Wales and Victoria. In NSW contact tracing successfully prevented a large second wave while in Victoria it did not, and they were forced into a strict lockdown which eventually worked. Remarkably, both states become free of COVID around the same time. There isn't much difference in socioeconomic status or population density between NSW and Victoria so the difference likely lies with the effectiveness of the contact tracing or just good/bad luck.
nojito 6y ago
The initial lockdowns early this year worked quite well...which is why we are able to withstand the subsequent waves because the healthcare systems weren't overwhelmed and we could focus on getting proper clinical treatments created. I can't find any instance of the scientific community encouraging permanent lockdowns.
- fastball 6y ago
  Do you have evidence for that? The stats I've seen seem to indicate that COVID has behaved (in terms of waning) more seasonally than in response to lockdowns. For example Sweden, who didn't have lockdowns anything like what we've seen in other countries, have a curve[1] that tapered off too. At deaths per capita, they're lower than UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and many more. [1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
  - thebruce87m 6y ago
    https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ You can see normal flu seasons and the out-of-season huge spike. Then you can see subsequent bumps on a per-country basis. Some countries had multiple spikes and lockdowns etc.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Yes, a huge spike which quickly tapers off. You can't kill the most vulnerable in the population multiple times in a year. People don't get vulnerable that quickly. These charts tell exactly the story I'm telling. The peaks and troughs appear at the same time for countries with strict lockdowns as for those with less strict / non-existent lockdowns.
      - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
        The huge spike happens and people adjust. They take less risks. Government mandates step in, businesses make decisions to close. This isn't going to correlate to one thing. The seasonal impact is real, but that doesn't mean lockdowns don't work.
pjc50 6y ago
> taking a one time "excess deaths" hit as we have done with past pandemics does have measurable benefits in other ways Can you explain what those might be and which relatives of yours would be better as the excess deaths?
- rattlesnakedave 6y ago
  Very good point! To avoid anyone having a dead relative, I think we should all stay inside until no one ever dies again, for any reason. If you disagree, you literally want to kill grandma.
- fastball 6y ago
  Annndddd, there it is.
- rustybelt 6y ago
  "but you'll get shouted out of the room if you bring up that position even as a hypothetical."
  - pjc50 6y ago
    I'm just asking a followup question. Does that read as shouting to you?
    - fastball 6y ago
      Asking someone which of their relatives they'd like to die is clearly not arguing in good faith.
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      Yes. "I'm just asking a question" is very commonly used for reasons that aren't actually related at all to the question itself.
- nradov 6y ago
  I flagged and down voted your comment because it's a low-effort appeal to emotion and attempt to shut down further discussion. We can do better than that.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
.
- JW_00000 6y ago
  Which platform has removed questioning of lockdown measures? I see these debates happening daily here, on Twitter, on Facebook, on reddit, and in the mainstream media.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    At least, individual Reddit moderators remove them (I have first hand experience). I've heard reports of removals on many platforms.
    - throwaway201103 6y ago
      It varies by subreddit. It's basically whatever the mods want to allow.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    Interesting how this person who was apparently complaining about being oppressed now oppressed himself. Like that comic about the guy sticking a rod in his own wheel.
hanniabu 6y ago
You're acting like we're all enjoying this. If everyone wore masks then we wouldn't be where we are. The reason we need the shutdowns is because people don't listen to other guidance so shutdowns are the only option left to slow the spread. If everyone wore masks (and wore them properly) then yes, we could go about our lives as if nothing happened, but anybody with a pair of eyes can tell you that's not the case. Also, many of the people that are against shutdowns (that don't have an ulterior motive) are against them because people are out of work and creates issues with poverty. They are not against it because it doesn't help. So rather than saying no shutdowns, how about we take the proper steps and have a moratorium on rent and mortgages so solve the root of the issue.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Exactly. All we need to do is get the "days since somebody last infected somebody" counter up to 14.
  - fastball 6y ago
    You make this sound easy and side-effect free.
    - hanniabu 6y ago
      New Zealand has done this multiple times
      - fastball 6y ago
        New Zealand is an island with more sheep than people. The pop. density of NZ is 15/km2. The pop. density of France is 119/km2. France also shares land borders with 7 other countries.
        hanniabu 6y ago
        Misleading statistic. You need to look at the density of occupied land.
alexfromapex 6y ago
I think another issue is that methods for sharing and debating scientific research needs to catch up to the age of computing. Publishing research in scientific journals has some serious flaws and it would be interesting to incubate some new and improved methods for sharing scientific info and peer review. Not only new means for publishing research and peer review but also a lot of global standardization of medical indications etc. since until recently it’s been a bit of a Wild West.
- nradov 6y ago
  Medrxiv.org allows anyone to read and comment on pre-print journal articles.
JW_00000 6y ago
> I blame technology for our current predicament. If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything. My take on this is that, without the internet, we would (1) either still choose to lock down and cause much greater economic harm[^1], or (2) not choose to lock down and lose more lives. I'm not disagreeing with the fact that we still need to perform a cost–benefit analysis before going into lockdowns. But the internet has lowered the "cost" part of this analysis, by allowing most people to continue to work during lockdowns. [^1] Note that during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, there were also lockdowns: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/how-cities-flattened-curve-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic-coronavirus/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/how-citie...
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>It's very hard to dissent against the current narrative because any dissent can easily be framed as "killing people". Every dissent winds up getting framed this way. The numbers don't matter. The way you win is by having "your side" be the side who's policy kills people less directly. When you take it to extremes like "make everyone do backbreaking labor and all the health problems that comes with that to save a few dozen kids with cancer" the absurdity becomes obvious. It's maddening but this is the nature of a lot of arguments we have in society today. For example you have Safety Sally wanting to do something that will crush an industry in order to save a few dozen workplace injuries. How many years of life will be lost from all those people's reduced standard of living? Hard to tell. But Safety Sally always wins because she can argue that anyone arguing against her policy is killing people more directly, numbers be damned. Sometimes (e.g. coal industry) the numbers do work out in her favor. Often times it's hard to tell and then you get into arguments about who's analysis is more accurate
- kodah 6y ago
  In my observation this is just the way that people debate these days. They know that there are one or more contenders in the room but at least one that is in stark contrast to their view. They arrive at the most maximal conclusion possible, apply a moralistic impetus (everyone will die because of you and your ideas), we accept the proverbial threat and move on. If someone who isn't in stark contrast to their opinion continues to object then they just find a way to shove them in the box of whatever that stark contrast group is and follow the normal rules. The really creative part is when their contender also does this. At this point it's a race to the bottom of describing their opponent with various pejoratives and unrelated adjectives or sometimes it's as simple as having the best meme.
  - graderjs 6y ago
    Pretty good description of the internet circa 2020 Sad days
- mattigames 6y ago
  As in biology systems societal systems also become more resilient to the difficulties they encounter, so to put it in your own words is completely possible for Safety Sally to enforce restrictions that do kill more people indirectly in the next 10 years but at the same time save way more people in the next 100 years... To put some examples in the current context: The speed at which medical facilities are researching this virus has never been seen before in the history of mankind, and many of the findings are shreding light on understanding how viruses work (not only this one), including knowledge for when (_not if_) a virus much stronger and infectious that coronavirus pays us a visit.
bawolff 6y ago
> I blame technology for our current predicament. If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything. Why guess, we have The spanish flu to compare to. There was no internet then. There was however significant restrictions on people to control it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Responses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Responses
- nradov 6y ago
  We can also compare it to the 1889 "Russian flu" pandemic. It killed about a million people worldwide and in most places there were no significant restrictions on people to control it. There is now circumstantial evidence to indicate that pandemic was not caused by influenza at all, but rather by another coronavirus. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
  - bawolff 6y ago
    I fail to see how that's evidence of the internet causes people to lock down. Seems more like its evidence that the internet has nothing to do with the lockdown, and other factors control whether societies choose to lock down or not. Correlation doesn't imply causation, but lack of correlation is pretty strong evidence for lack of causation.
    - ImaCake 6y ago
      I don't think nradov was disagreeing with you. More that they were providing a counterpoint. If anything the fact we have examples swinging both ways makes the argument that internet !~ lockdown even stronger.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything. Really? Do some digging into historical pandemics. City entrances would be boarded up. Villages might be "shut" and their people would literally starve to death if the they could not sustain themselves. Harbor chains were raised against suspected plague ships. Innocent people were confined to pest hospitals, even exiled to dedicated colonies on remote islands. Londoners once feared being boarded up in their own houses should they get ill. The pre-computer past was full of much more draconean efforts than anything COVID-19 has brought us. And for all the horrors of being locked indoors with covid, just spend a few minutes reading about the kids polio trapped inside iron lungs. That was within living memory.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chroma 6y ago
  You're referencing responses to pandemics from before the germ theory of disease. More recent responses to pandemics were far less restrictive. For example: The Spanish flu was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history. It infected 1/3rd of the world and killed 1-6% of the population (depending on which estimate you want to cite). It was a much deadlier virus than covid. It killed the young and healthy at a much greater rate. There was zero chance that a vaccine would be developed. Despite all of those greater dangers, the response of first world countries was to implement similar restrictions to today: encouraging or requiring masks, doing more business outdoors, reducing business occupancy, etc.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    Polio.
    - chroma 6y ago
      Which polio epidemic had more restrictions than covid? As far as I can tell, US authorities closed movie theaters and public pools. They also warned people to avoid amusement parks and quarantined families that had confirmed infections. These restrictions only happened in a few cities at a time. That seems far less restrictive than what we're experiencing today, and for a far deadlier disease. The case fatality rate for the 1916 polio epidemic was over 20%, and most of those who survived were paralyzed. If a pathogen with identical risks and outcomes struck today, I guarantee government restrictions would be greater than in the past.
matthewmacleod 6y ago
It's very hard to dissent against the current narrative because any dissent can easily be framed as "killing people". You know what, I call bullshit on this. It’s pretty easy to argue in favour of or against specific measures when done in good faith and with evidence. What it’s hard to do is engage in this sort of shallow middlebrow meta-argument.
mattigames 6y ago
> taking a one time "excess deaths" hit as we have done with past pandemics The black plague -the biggest one we have ever gotten as far as we know- lasted 7 years, I don't think that constitutes under any definition a "one time 'excess deaths' hit"; also I'm pretty sure that given 50% of the population died nobody was free from depression (or loneliness/suicide for that matter) given that in all likelihood half of the people you knew had died when it ended.
gfxgirl 6y ago
Yes, it's very frustrating. Japan is basically open. Restaurants, coffee shops, bars, are full and people have their masks of when in them. Shops are open, movie theaters are open, shopping centers are packed. There, people do have masks on. When someone is without a mask it's usually a non-asian foreigner. The government even has programs trying to encourage people to go out eating and to travel within the country. Numbers are very low compared to similar populations elsewhere including deaths so we're not killing people here. At least not yet. They are at their highest rate yet but it's still 1/100th of similar populations in the west.
- mattigames 6y ago
  Until we know what Japan did right [0] (or any non-behavioral advantage they may have had) is completely pointless to try to frame them as an example or anything alike. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53188847 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53188847
- verall 6y ago
  Japan did aggressive contact tracing (which people actually respect) and there is already a mask wearing culture - people already wore facemasks when feeling ill. In the US there was a plan to send free cloth facemasks to every household that was stopped because it could "cause too much panic". Americans bring up examples of countries with 10X the discipline, like America would have an infection rate closer to Japan if we _had not_ locked down. It's fucking ridiculous.
jmcqk6 6y ago
>But because technology dangled the carrot of "we can save lives by doing everything virtually with computers" we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects of that (loneliness, depression, suicide, homelessness, civil unrest, economy). This is a false dichotomy. Look at the countries that acted quickly and had cooperation from everyone - they have many fewer deaths, and the impact of the pandemic has been much, much less. We are only in this position we are in because people did not want to cooperate from the start. This attempt to blame the side effects on people advocating for masks is not an accurate depiction of reality. If people had done the right thing from the beginning, we wouldn't be in the predicament.

by umvi 6y ago

bharam 6y ago

> we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects This reminds me of the French economist Frederic Bastiat's essay "That which is seen, and that which is not seen". The media (tv, newspapers and internet) were all hyper-focused on the number of deaths (initially) and later number of cases but always failed to take into account secondary consequences like those you mention. Link to Bastiat's essay: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays_on_Political_Economy/That_Which_Is_Seen,_and_That_Which_Is_Not_Seen https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays_on_Political_Economy/T...

matthewmacleod 6y ago
Literally every media outlet I have encountered has published extensive coverage of the wider economic, health, social and political impact of the virus itself and the response to it.
- bharam 6y ago
  I would agree with you that there is some coverage of these issues...lately. Yesterday for instance CNN ran a story about the suicide trend in Japan. However there was very little coverage of the secondary effects until late in the summer.
  - cfmcdonald 6y ago
    It takes time for secondary effects like that to show up. But I recall reports of large numbers of restaurant closures as far back as late spring.
- smolder 6y ago
  Media outlets are too broad a category for "literally every" one to have done that.
- addicted 6y ago
  The idea that the media did not focus on the second order effects is so obviously wrong it’s hilarious. And even if the media didn’t, politicians did. To the point that nearly every country in the world has passed economic and financial aid measures that probably exceed anything they’ve done in the past, certainly during peacetime, and globally the world has put more resources into mitigating the second order effects through all sorts of programs than it almost certainly ever has before. This whole narrative about how dissenters are not heard, when they are parroted the loudest is ridiculous. Even the Scientific A,Eric an article puts the great barrington declaration, with absolutely no scientific backing, with 0 footnotes and references, and a signee list that is completely unvetted, on equal footing with the John Snow memo which has vetted every signee, has references to actual papers littered through it to the point that the text in footnotes probably exceed the entire scientific content of the GBD, if not the entire GBD itself.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    They didn't have scoreboards overlayed on the news displaying number of suicides, number of business closures, number of lost jobs, number of domestic violence incidents. It was Deaths, and Cases. Every hour, on the hour. The other stuff got covered, but not nearly with the same intensity.

cfmcdonald 6y ago

I guess life would be largely the same except for the millions of dead people? In general though, there has been a huge variety of policy responses across the globe and over time, so I'm not sure what you mean be 'we' 'shutting everything down'. My state came closest to shutting everything down for a month or so in the spring, but there has been a constant effort since then to adjust policy to balance health risks and economic/social pain. Italy had a super hard lockdown. South Dakota isn't even wearing masks.

ImaCake 6y ago
It is also enlightening to consider the success of various strategies too. This will take years to piece together but one comparison from my corner of the globe is the contact tracing in New South Wales and Victoria. In NSW contact tracing successfully prevented a large second wave while in Victoria it did not, and they were forced into a strict lockdown which eventually worked. Remarkably, both states become free of COVID around the same time. There isn't much difference in socioeconomic status or population density between NSW and Victoria so the difference likely lies with the effectiveness of the contact tracing or just good/bad luck.

nojito 6y ago

The initial lockdowns early this year worked quite well...which is why we are able to withstand the subsequent waves because the healthcare systems weren't overwhelmed and we could focus on getting proper clinical treatments created. I can't find any instance of the scientific community encouraging permanent lockdowns.

fastball 6y ago
Do you have evidence for that? The stats I've seen seem to indicate that COVID has behaved (in terms of waning) more seasonally than in response to lockdowns. For example Sweden, who didn't have lockdowns anything like what we've seen in other countries, have a curve[1] that tapered off too. At deaths per capita, they're lower than UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and many more. [1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
- thebruce87m 6y ago
  https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ You can see normal flu seasons and the out-of-season huge spike. Then you can see subsequent bumps on a per-country basis. Some countries had multiple spikes and lockdowns etc.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Yes, a huge spike which quickly tapers off. You can't kill the most vulnerable in the population multiple times in a year. People don't get vulnerable that quickly. These charts tell exactly the story I'm telling. The peaks and troughs appear at the same time for countries with strict lockdowns as for those with less strict / non-existent lockdowns.
    - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      The huge spike happens and people adjust. They take less risks. Government mandates step in, businesses make decisions to close. This isn't going to correlate to one thing. The seasonal impact is real, but that doesn't mean lockdowns don't work.

pjc50 6y ago

> taking a one time "excess deaths" hit as we have done with past pandemics does have measurable benefits in other ways Can you explain what those might be and which relatives of yours would be better as the excess deaths?

rattlesnakedave 6y ago
Very good point! To avoid anyone having a dead relative, I think we should all stay inside until no one ever dies again, for any reason. If you disagree, you literally want to kill grandma.
fastball 6y ago
Annndddd, there it is.
rustybelt 6y ago
"but you'll get shouted out of the room if you bring up that position even as a hypothetical."
- pjc50 6y ago
  I'm just asking a followup question. Does that read as shouting to you?
  - fastball 6y ago
    Asking someone which of their relatives they'd like to die is clearly not arguing in good faith.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    Yes. "I'm just asking a question" is very commonly used for reasons that aren't actually related at all to the question itself.
nradov 6y ago
I flagged and down voted your comment because it's a low-effort appeal to emotion and attempt to shut down further discussion. We can do better than that.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

JW_00000 6y ago
Which platform has removed questioning of lockdown measures? I see these debates happening daily here, on Twitter, on Facebook, on reddit, and in the mainstream media.
- mistermann 6y ago
  At least, individual Reddit moderators remove them (I have first hand experience). I've heard reports of removals on many platforms.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    It varies by subreddit. It's basically whatever the mods want to allow.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Interesting how this person who was apparently complaining about being oppressed now oppressed himself. Like that comic about the guy sticking a rod in his own wheel.

hanniabu 6y ago

You're acting like we're all enjoying this. If everyone wore masks then we wouldn't be where we are. The reason we need the shutdowns is because people don't listen to other guidance so shutdowns are the only option left to slow the spread. If everyone wore masks (and wore them properly) then yes, we could go about our lives as if nothing happened, but anybody with a pair of eyes can tell you that's not the case. Also, many of the people that are against shutdowns (that don't have an ulterior motive) are against them because people are out of work and creates issues with poverty. They are not against it because it doesn't help. So rather than saying no shutdowns, how about we take the proper steps and have a moratorium on rent and mortgages so solve the root of the issue.

pjc50 6y ago
Exactly. All we need to do is get the "days since somebody last infected somebody" counter up to 14.
- fastball 6y ago
  You make this sound easy and side-effect free.
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    New Zealand has done this multiple times
    - fastball 6y ago
      New Zealand is an island with more sheep than people. The pop. density of NZ is 15/km2. The pop. density of France is 119/km2. France also shares land borders with 7 other countries.
      - hanniabu 6y ago
        Misleading statistic. You need to look at the density of occupied land.

alexfromapex 6y ago

I think another issue is that methods for sharing and debating scientific research needs to catch up to the age of computing. Publishing research in scientific journals has some serious flaws and it would be interesting to incubate some new and improved methods for sharing scientific info and peer review. Not only new means for publishing research and peer review but also a lot of global standardization of medical indications etc. since until recently it’s been a bit of a Wild West.

nradov 6y ago
Medrxiv.org allows anyone to read and comment on pre-print journal articles.

JW_00000 6y ago

> I blame technology for our current predicament. If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything. My take on this is that, without the internet, we would (1) either still choose to lock down and cause much greater economic harm[^1], or (2) not choose to lock down and lose more lives. I'm not disagreeing with the fact that we still need to perform a cost–benefit analysis before going into lockdowns. But the internet has lowered the "cost" part of this analysis, by allowing most people to continue to work during lockdowns. [^1] Note that during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, there were also lockdowns: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/how-cities-flattened-curve-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic-coronavirus/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/how-citie...

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>It's very hard to dissent against the current narrative because any dissent can easily be framed as "killing people". Every dissent winds up getting framed this way. The numbers don't matter. The way you win is by having "your side" be the side who's policy kills people less directly. When you take it to extremes like "make everyone do backbreaking labor and all the health problems that comes with that to save a few dozen kids with cancer" the absurdity becomes obvious. It's maddening but this is the nature of a lot of arguments we have in society today. For example you have Safety Sally wanting to do something that will crush an industry in order to save a few dozen workplace injuries. How many years of life will be lost from all those people's reduced standard of living? Hard to tell. But Safety Sally always wins because she can argue that anyone arguing against her policy is killing people more directly, numbers be damned. Sometimes (e.g. coal industry) the numbers do work out in her favor. Often times it's hard to tell and then you get into arguments about who's analysis is more accurate

kodah 6y ago
In my observation this is just the way that people debate these days. They know that there are one or more contenders in the room but at least one that is in stark contrast to their view. They arrive at the most maximal conclusion possible, apply a moralistic impetus (everyone will die because of you and your ideas), we accept the proverbial threat and move on. If someone who isn't in stark contrast to their opinion continues to object then they just find a way to shove them in the box of whatever that stark contrast group is and follow the normal rules. The really creative part is when their contender also does this. At this point it's a race to the bottom of describing their opponent with various pejoratives and unrelated adjectives or sometimes it's as simple as having the best meme.
- graderjs 6y ago
  Pretty good description of the internet circa 2020 Sad days
mattigames 6y ago
As in biology systems societal systems also become more resilient to the difficulties they encounter, so to put it in your own words is completely possible for Safety Sally to enforce restrictions that do kill more people indirectly in the next 10 years but at the same time save way more people in the next 100 years... To put some examples in the current context: The speed at which medical facilities are researching this virus has never been seen before in the history of mankind, and many of the findings are shreding light on understanding how viruses work (not only this one), including knowledge for when (_not if_) a virus much stronger and infectious that coronavirus pays us a visit.

bawolff 6y ago

> I blame technology for our current predicament. If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything. Why guess, we have The spanish flu to compare to. There was no internet then. There was however significant restrictions on people to control it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Responses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Responses

nradov 6y ago
We can also compare it to the 1889 "Russian flu" pandemic. It killed about a million people worldwide and in most places there were no significant restrictions on people to control it. There is now circumstantial evidence to indicate that pandemic was not caused by influenza at all, but rather by another coronavirus. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
- bawolff 6y ago
  I fail to see how that's evidence of the internet causes people to lock down. Seems more like its evidence that the internet has nothing to do with the lockdown, and other factors control whether societies choose to lock down or not. Correlation doesn't imply causation, but lack of correlation is pretty strong evidence for lack of causation.
  - ImaCake 6y ago
    I don't think nradov was disagreeing with you. More that they were providing a counterpoint. If anything the fact we have examples swinging both ways makes the argument that internet !~ lockdown even stronger.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything. Really? Do some digging into historical pandemics. City entrances would be boarded up. Villages might be "shut" and their people would literally starve to death if the they could not sustain themselves. Harbor chains were raised against suspected plague ships. Innocent people were confined to pest hospitals, even exiled to dedicated colonies on remote islands. Londoners once feared being boarded up in their own houses should they get ill. The pre-computer past was full of much more draconean efforts than anything COVID-19 has brought us. And for all the horrors of being locked indoors with covid, just spend a few minutes reading about the kids polio trapped inside iron lungs. That was within living memory.

deleted 6y ago
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chroma 6y ago
You're referencing responses to pandemics from before the germ theory of disease. More recent responses to pandemics were far less restrictive. For example: The Spanish flu was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history. It infected 1/3rd of the world and killed 1-6% of the population (depending on which estimate you want to cite). It was a much deadlier virus than covid. It killed the young and healthy at a much greater rate. There was zero chance that a vaccine would be developed. Despite all of those greater dangers, the response of first world countries was to implement similar restrictions to today: encouraging or requiring masks, doing more business outdoors, reducing business occupancy, etc.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  Polio.
  - chroma 6y ago
    Which polio epidemic had more restrictions than covid? As far as I can tell, US authorities closed movie theaters and public pools. They also warned people to avoid amusement parks and quarantined families that had confirmed infections. These restrictions only happened in a few cities at a time. That seems far less restrictive than what we're experiencing today, and for a far deadlier disease. The case fatality rate for the 1916 polio epidemic was over 20%, and most of those who survived were paralyzed. If a pathogen with identical risks and outcomes struck today, I guarantee government restrictions would be greater than in the past.

matthewmacleod 6y ago

It's very hard to dissent against the current narrative because any dissent can easily be framed as "killing people". You know what, I call bullshit on this. It’s pretty easy to argue in favour of or against specific measures when done in good faith and with evidence. What it’s hard to do is engage in this sort of shallow middlebrow meta-argument.

mattigames 6y ago

> taking a one time "excess deaths" hit as we have done with past pandemics The black plague -the biggest one we have ever gotten as far as we know- lasted 7 years, I don't think that constitutes under any definition a "one time 'excess deaths' hit"; also I'm pretty sure that given 50% of the population died nobody was free from depression (or loneliness/suicide for that matter) given that in all likelihood half of the people you knew had died when it ended.

gfxgirl 6y ago

Yes, it's very frustrating. Japan is basically open. Restaurants, coffee shops, bars, are full and people have their masks of when in them. Shops are open, movie theaters are open, shopping centers are packed. There, people do have masks on. When someone is without a mask it's usually a non-asian foreigner. The government even has programs trying to encourage people to go out eating and to travel within the country. Numbers are very low compared to similar populations elsewhere including deaths so we're not killing people here. At least not yet. They are at their highest rate yet but it's still 1/100th of similar populations in the west.

mattigames 6y ago
Until we know what Japan did right [0] (or any non-behavioral advantage they may have had) is completely pointless to try to frame them as an example or anything alike. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53188847 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53188847
verall 6y ago
Japan did aggressive contact tracing (which people actually respect) and there is already a mask wearing culture - people already wore facemasks when feeling ill. In the US there was a plan to send free cloth facemasks to every household that was stopped because it could "cause too much panic". Americans bring up examples of countries with 10X the discipline, like America would have an infection rate closer to Japan if we _had not_ locked down. It's fucking ridiculous.

jmcqk6 6y ago

>But because technology dangled the carrot of "we can save lives by doing everything virtually with computers" we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects of that (loneliness, depression, suicide, homelessness, civil unrest, economy). This is a false dichotomy. Look at the countries that acted quickly and had cooperation from everyone - they have many fewer deaths, and the impact of the pandemic has been much, much less. We are only in this position we are in because people did not want to cooperate from the start. This attempt to blame the side effects on people advocating for masks is not an accurate depiction of reality. If people had done the right thing from the beginning, we wouldn't be in the predicament.