7 ms·

The virus itself is doing far more to damage mental health than stay-at-home orders ever will. Around the world, we’re talking about millions of grieving peopl

The virus itself is doing far more to damage mental health than stay-at-home orders ever will. Around the world, we’re talking about millions of grieving people who have lost parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends, coworkers, .... Millions more people who struggled to stay breathing and may now suffer severe long-term (or maybe permanent) symptoms. Health care workers around the world who will have PTSD from harrowing shifts treating an extremely high load of unbelievably sick people for month after month. Etc. In places with significant community spread, people are rightfully afraid that anything they do around other people is exposing them to significant risk of severe illness or death. Even people who take every precaution sometimes turn up sick, and the sources can be hard to trace. Dealing with that for months is extremely stressful. All while a significant part of the population continued to blithely party on as if their actions had no consequences, and “leaders” baldly lie about it day after day, month after month. If we want people to return to normal life feeling free and safe, then controlling the virus must be the #1 priority. Indeed, in places where the virus was controlled via strong leadership and community solidarity, life is nearly back to normal; in places where leadership was absent, it will continue to be a horror show for many more months.

_-___________-_ 6y ago
I'm not sure if you genuinely believe the extreme hyperbole in the second paragraph of your post or if you're just trying to counteract the people who act like the virus is nothing at all. If it's the former, you should probably find some more reliable information sources. If it's the latter, truth and accuracy are a better counterpoint than taking the opposite extreme of misinformation.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  What do you think is the hyperbolic part? That millions of people have died and millions more were extremely sick is a simple statement of fact. As far as I can tell there is nothing even slightly controversial in what I wrote. Your response is a weird combination of vague and rude/patronizing. I’m not sure what your point is.
  - shadowprofile77 6y ago
    Well, just for starters, millions of people haven't died of the virus. At last count, the death toll so far is just over 1.5 million. A terrible number, to be sure, but if you claim to not be engaging in hyperbole or misstatement of facts, it would be good to back that by not making your very first statement completely non-factual.
    - jacobolus 6y ago
      There have been 1.5 million confirmed Covid deaths, but the total number of people who have died from Covid is far higher than that, I would guess at least 1 million more, but possibly higher. Even wealthy countries with developed healthcare/government infrastructure are missing a significant fraction of deaths (in the USA alone, we have probably missed about 100k Covid deaths from the confirmed count). In many less developed countries, a majority (in some cases an overwhelming majority) of Covid deaths are never counted as such. It will be hard to get a total estimate until at least a year or two after the pandemic is over, because even in developed countries death reporting can lag by up to a year (that’s leaving aside cause-of-death attribution). If you check back in a year or two WHO, CDC, etc. will have much better estimates for the total death toll in 2020, with (possibly wide) error bars you can largely trust. Beyond that, this is weak pedantry about the definition of “millions”. People commonly use this plural to mean >1 million; we’re talking about the order of magnitude here, not the precise count.
      - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
        "Died with Covid", not "died from Covid". Regular old respiratory infections are a frequent indirect cause of strokes and heart attacks, but we've never claimed before that common colds cause "millions" of deaths.
        watwut 6y ago
        I love how the assumption is always that confirmed covid death that were actually unrelated to covid are more frequent then covid death that were not confirmed. But, chances are that latter are more frequent. Covid tests are not done on all deaths precisely in places where situation is worst.
devin 6y ago
I understand why this was downvoted, but I am a bit annoyed at the downvotes because _we can do both_. We can do more to control the virus, and we can do more for people dealing with the fallout of mental health issues exacerbated by the pandemic. That these two very related things are seen as mutually exclusive is the real bummer of this whole scenario. The number one priority is not controlling the virus or helping people with mental health or addiction issues. The "number one priority" is helping people who are struggling, pandemic-related or not, period.
lmeyerov 6y ago
I struggled to find, but the JAMA podcast (https://www.stitcher.com/show/jama-author-interviews https://www.stitcher.com/show/jama-author-interviews) had a good semi-recent interview of authors on an article on the covid bereavement major depression wave If I remember right, the authors estimated the scenario as: * Project 500K-750K excess deaths in the US until mass vaccine availability based on current public health practices (conservative/linear, ignoring exponentials involved) * Someone dying generally has ~10 people close to them => half will experience ~depression for 1mo, 1 quarter for 2mo * Something like 10-20% will have severe forms (major/ptsd/..) * So something like 3 million people across all of above That's a lot. Not quite as high as # of addicts in the US afaict, but up there. I could have easily got parts wrong, so worth going to the interview+article if you're truly interested. They also have some articles on depression in elderly and other groups being especially impacted right now. Pretty real.
timeeater 6y ago
Children don't generally die from Covid19. Your numbers are exaggerated, Covid is not the only cause of death around the world. The load of sick people is also not exceptionally high, at least not in the intensive wards (don't have data for normal hospitalizations). Here in Germany we have daily updates on the number of ICUs in use. It shows Covid is only a fraction of the patients, even now only 10% despite of soaring infection numbers. https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen
- adrianN 6y ago
  Of course there is an exceptional number of ICU patients. Many hospitals in Germany already are running at capacity and can't admit any more ICU patients. And that's despite every postponable operation being postponed.
  - jansan 6y ago
    The offical numbers say that German's hoslitals are not running at their limits. In average roughly 20% of intensive care beds are not occupied. https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/kartenansichten https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/kartenansich...
    - adrianN 6y ago
      The regional differences are pretty high, and beds are in many cases not the limiting factor. It's ICU nurses. If you can read German here is a source for Berlin: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/zu-viele-corona-patienten-auf-vivantes-stationen-berliner-grosskrankenhaus-vor-aufnahmestopp/26668216.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/zu-viele-corona-patienten... TLDR is only 85% of the beds are full, but there aren't enough nurses, so the emergency room will be closed. Several other hospitals in Berlin already stopped admitting new ICU patients.
      - jansan 6y ago
        Yes, I read German. But this is not a singular event that has never happened before. Here is a report from 2017 that sounds familiar: https://www.welt.de/regionales/bayern/article161869919/Kliniken-schliessen-wegen-Ueberlastung-ihre-Notaufnahmen.html https://www.welt.de/regionales/bayern/article161869919/Klini...
overgard 6y ago
I don't think the grief of losing someone to the virus is any greater or less than losing someone to an overdose or suicide. A death is a death and always tragic. I'm sure the mother grieving her sons suicide is just as sad as the person grieving the death of an elderly parent. (Of course in reality people care less about addiction deaths because many still mistakenly see it as a moral failing rather than a disease). The focus needs to be on controlling the disease while also limiting the collateral damage as much as possible. Don't forget: most of us are likely to get this disease at some point anyway, even with a vaccine it will mutate. The important point has always been to slow the spread. Preventing it completely is near impossible without very extreme measures.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  > most of us are likely to get this disease at some point anyway If you live someplace like South Dakota with grossly irresponsible leaders at every level of government, this is probably true. If you live somewhere with decisive and responsible leadership like South Korea, New Zealand, Finland (among many successful countries around the world, rich and poor), or Vermont, then probably not. Notice that multiple effective vaccines are here. We just need to hold out through this winter, so that production can spin up enough to start getting a substantial proportion of the population vaccinated.
  - overgard 6y ago
    The flu also has a vaccine and yet we have never managed to eradicate it, and this is even more contagious.
    - jacobolus 6y ago
      It will be quite hard to “eradicate” Covid around the world, but with luck vaccines will provide lasting immunity, enough to end the pandemic, return life to more or less normal, and prevent tens of millions of deaths. Empirically, SARS-CoV-2 mutates much more slowly than influenza viruses, and if a new strain eventually pops up that the vaccine and people’s antibodies do not work on, the current vaccines should be faster to modify than to recreate from scratch.

_-___________-_ 6y ago

I'm not sure if you genuinely believe the extreme hyperbole in the second paragraph of your post or if you're just trying to counteract the people who act like the virus is nothing at all. If it's the former, you should probably find some more reliable information sources. If it's the latter, truth and accuracy are a better counterpoint than taking the opposite extreme of misinformation.

jacobolus 6y ago
What do you think is the hyperbolic part? That millions of people have died and millions more were extremely sick is a simple statement of fact. As far as I can tell there is nothing even slightly controversial in what I wrote. Your response is a weird combination of vague and rude/patronizing. I’m not sure what your point is.
- shadowprofile77 6y ago
  Well, just for starters, millions of people haven't died of the virus. At last count, the death toll so far is just over 1.5 million. A terrible number, to be sure, but if you claim to not be engaging in hyperbole or misstatement of facts, it would be good to back that by not making your very first statement completely non-factual.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    There have been 1.5 million confirmed Covid deaths, but the total number of people who have died from Covid is far higher than that, I would guess at least 1 million more, but possibly higher. Even wealthy countries with developed healthcare/government infrastructure are missing a significant fraction of deaths (in the USA alone, we have probably missed about 100k Covid deaths from the confirmed count). In many less developed countries, a majority (in some cases an overwhelming majority) of Covid deaths are never counted as such. It will be hard to get a total estimate until at least a year or two after the pandemic is over, because even in developed countries death reporting can lag by up to a year (that’s leaving aside cause-of-death attribution). If you check back in a year or two WHO, CDC, etc. will have much better estimates for the total death toll in 2020, with (possibly wide) error bars you can largely trust. Beyond that, this is weak pedantry about the definition of “millions”. People commonly use this plural to mean >1 million; we’re talking about the order of magnitude here, not the precise count.
    - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
      "Died with Covid", not "died from Covid". Regular old respiratory infections are a frequent indirect cause of strokes and heart attacks, but we've never claimed before that common colds cause "millions" of deaths.
      - watwut 6y ago
        I love how the assumption is always that confirmed covid death that were actually unrelated to covid are more frequent then covid death that were not confirmed. But, chances are that latter are more frequent. Covid tests are not done on all deaths precisely in places where situation is worst.

devin 6y ago

I understand why this was downvoted, but I am a bit annoyed at the downvotes because _we can do both_. We can do more to control the virus, and we can do more for people dealing with the fallout of mental health issues exacerbated by the pandemic. That these two very related things are seen as mutually exclusive is the real bummer of this whole scenario. The number one priority is not controlling the virus or helping people with mental health or addiction issues. The "number one priority" is helping people who are struggling, pandemic-related or not, period.

lmeyerov 6y ago

I struggled to find, but the JAMA podcast (https://www.stitcher.com/show/jama-author-interviews https://www.stitcher.com/show/jama-author-interviews) had a good semi-recent interview of authors on an article on the covid bereavement major depression wave If I remember right, the authors estimated the scenario as: * Project 500K-750K excess deaths in the US until mass vaccine availability based on current public health practices (conservative/linear, ignoring exponentials involved) * Someone dying generally has ~10 people close to them => half will experience ~depression for 1mo, 1 quarter for 2mo * Something like 10-20% will have severe forms (major/ptsd/..) * So something like 3 million people across all of above That's a lot. Not quite as high as # of addicts in the US afaict, but up there. I could have easily got parts wrong, so worth going to the interview+article if you're truly interested. They also have some articles on depression in elderly and other groups being especially impacted right now. Pretty real.

timeeater 6y ago

Children don't generally die from Covid19. Your numbers are exaggerated, Covid is not the only cause of death around the world. The load of sick people is also not exceptionally high, at least not in the intensive wards (don't have data for normal hospitalizations). Here in Germany we have daily updates on the number of ICUs in use. It shows Covid is only a fraction of the patients, even now only 10% despite of soaring infection numbers. https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen

adrianN 6y ago
Of course there is an exceptional number of ICU patients. Many hospitals in Germany already are running at capacity and can't admit any more ICU patients. And that's despite every postponable operation being postponed.
- jansan 6y ago
  The offical numbers say that German's hoslitals are not running at their limits. In average roughly 20% of intensive care beds are not occupied. https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/kartenansichten https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/kartenansich...
  - adrianN 6y ago
    The regional differences are pretty high, and beds are in many cases not the limiting factor. It's ICU nurses. If you can read German here is a source for Berlin: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/zu-viele-corona-patienten-auf-vivantes-stationen-berliner-grosskrankenhaus-vor-aufnahmestopp/26668216.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/zu-viele-corona-patienten... TLDR is only 85% of the beds are full, but there aren't enough nurses, so the emergency room will be closed. Several other hospitals in Berlin already stopped admitting new ICU patients.
    - jansan 6y ago
      Yes, I read German. But this is not a singular event that has never happened before. Here is a report from 2017 that sounds familiar: https://www.welt.de/regionales/bayern/article161869919/Kliniken-schliessen-wegen-Ueberlastung-ihre-Notaufnahmen.html https://www.welt.de/regionales/bayern/article161869919/Klini...

overgard 6y ago

I don't think the grief of losing someone to the virus is any greater or less than losing someone to an overdose or suicide. A death is a death and always tragic. I'm sure the mother grieving her sons suicide is just as sad as the person grieving the death of an elderly parent. (Of course in reality people care less about addiction deaths because many still mistakenly see it as a moral failing rather than a disease). The focus needs to be on controlling the disease while also limiting the collateral damage as much as possible. Don't forget: most of us are likely to get this disease at some point anyway, even with a vaccine it will mutate. The important point has always been to slow the spread. Preventing it completely is near impossible without very extreme measures.

jacobolus 6y ago
> most of us are likely to get this disease at some point anyway If you live someplace like South Dakota with grossly irresponsible leaders at every level of government, this is probably true. If you live somewhere with decisive and responsible leadership like South Korea, New Zealand, Finland (among many successful countries around the world, rich and poor), or Vermont, then probably not. Notice that multiple effective vaccines are here. We just need to hold out through this winter, so that production can spin up enough to start getting a substantial proportion of the population vaccinated.
- overgard 6y ago
  The flu also has a vaccine and yet we have never managed to eradicate it, and this is even more contagious.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    It will be quite hard to “eradicate” Covid around the world, but with luck vaccines will provide lasting immunity, enough to end the pandemic, return life to more or less normal, and prevent tens of millions of deaths. Empirically, SARS-CoV-2 mutates much more slowly than influenza viruses, and if a new strain eventually pops up that the vaccine and people’s antibodies do not work on, the current vaccines should be faster to modify than to recreate from scratch.