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> Mass death Covid has killed a lot of people and created a lot of heart-break, and it would be heartless to try and minimise that or to view it in purely econ

> Mass death Covid has killed a lot of people and created a lot of heart-break, and it would be heartless to try and minimise that or to view it in purely economic times in this moment. However, I think that in 100 years, future historians will describe the effect of the deaths itself as being pretty negligable: maybe 10% over the expected rate without Covid in 2020 and 2021, maybe 5m people in each year total, against an expected death rate of 50-60m. Many of these deaths were people outside of the primary workforce, unlike say WW2 which killed off many of the young able-bodied men the mid 1900s economies primarily relied on. I guess all I'm really trying to say is that when the story of Covid is written in 100 years time, "mass death" probably won't get much of a look-in vs economical and mental-health costs of lockdown, disruption to business, and so on.

albertgoeswoof 6y ago
Doubt it. If current rates of progress continue, in 100 years five million deaths will be considered immensely tragic
steveBK123 6y ago
Arguably 10% may turn out to be the direct-attributable number if you zoom out far enough nationally or globally, but locally & temporally theres been significantly higher numbers. Also remember there’s a lot of death not captured in that number of people who died at home / were never tested / etc that gets captured in the “excess mortality” stat. In NY State and NYC in particular its closer to 30%. Counting total “excess mortality” in NYC is closer to 60% on the year. Note that we’ve annualized here and ~90% of the death in NY took place in about an 8 week period, where the daily death ratepeaked closer to 500-1000% of normal for a week or two. So yes, there was mass death. There are many similar stories in areas of California, Italy, England, etc.
kristopolous 6y ago
Right, I've personally suffered very little and I wanted to be careful to not minimize the tragedy and suffering of those who have. This has been a terrible and tragic event for millions of people. The worst is it was completely avoidable if some of our governments had only valued proper planning for such a predictable event
steveBK123 6y ago
Also, I’m not sure exactly how you meant it, so I won’t direct this at you, just generally... I can’t get over the techbro straw man of the “lockdown” I’ve seen thrown around a lot. First, compared to most of Asia that actually got this virus under control, we have never really had much of a true lockdown here. Second, it’s not the lockdown, its the pandemic. In most areas economic activity dropped off well before any lockdowns and has remained subdued regardless of lockdown duration as long as the virus remains active. That is - the economic activity drop is more correlated with level of virus outbreak than with any government orders. In NYC, everyone I know got sent home a week or more before any city/state lockdowns started. The only time offices were mandated to be closed in NYC was about 8 weeks when we had refrigerated trucks parked outside hospitals acting as mobile morgues, and the National Guard picking up 100s of bodies per day of those who died at home. For the most part companies have kept people WFH because they can get close to 100% productivity with close to 0% absences due to disease & death. The mental health angle of more time spent at home, I still think is a wash. For every extrovert craving lording over a conference room of coworkers, there’s an introvert enjoying reduction in forced social interactions. Lots of people actually like their family & enjoy spending more time with them.
- strken 6y ago
  Can't speak to the US lockdown, but Melbourne, Victoria, Australia had restrictive lockdowns (1 hour outdoor exercise with up to 2 people together, 1 daily trip to the supermarket per household, couldn't travel more than 5km from your house, police roadblocks out of the city and out of the state, non-essential industries shut down and some essential ones operating at significantly reduced capacity, 8pm-5am curfew) and was accompanied by a 22% spike in calls to the largest suicide hotline. Even introverts can miss going outside or seeing their family.
  - h0l0cube 6y ago
    > was accompanied by a 22% spike in calls to the largest suicide hotline A counterfactual: how many people would be affected if their spouse/parent died without the lockdown? These tragedies are unfolding in many countries, and by this misfortune we'll be able to see, in retrospect, the impact of government interventions vs outcomes in a pandemic.
snowwrestler 6y ago
I think the opposite; as society continues to get better at responding to disease and preventing death, the social allowance for "expected" deaths declines. The U.S. Civil War 150 years ago is a good benchmark. We look back now at the level of death with horror, especially deaths among those receiving what passed for medical treatment back then. But of course back then, that was how medicine worked and it was not remarkable that so many people died after surgery. Or if you want to look back closer to 100 years, look back on the level of death and disease related to World War I or the Spanish Flu. The benchmark for evaluating our response to COVID-19 will not be some percentage over the death rate we expect today, but the optimum that people 100 years from now think we could have achieved with a competent response. Historians will be in a better position to judge the details than we are (for example, by having full access to the collected archives of various national governments of today). But it's clear even now that the U.S. could have had far fewer deaths than we did, with a better response. Look at how well we did against SARS and MERS, or how well some other nations did against COVID-19.
- atom_arranger 6y ago
  I hope people 100 years from now have better things to do than judge or condemn their great great grandparents response to a pandemic.
- makomk 6y ago
  The trouble is that people's expectations for what a "competent response" should be able to achieve don't actually seem to have any basis in reality. Pandemic response plans just fundamentally aren't designed to stop a respiratory pandemic like this one, at best they try to mitigate a little of the damage and even a lot of that is experimental and untested. (We don't even know something as basic as how effective school closures are against flu pandemics!) SARS and MERS had very different characteristics which made contact tracing a lot more effective against them; the UK, US and most other countries tried using the same approach that worked against them and it failed (and started a bazillion conspiracy theories about why the UK abandoned it). People's expectations seem to have more to do with cynical partisan political attempts to exploit the pandemic than reality.
Barrin92 6y ago
Death is not and should not be judged purely based on some headcount, but in relation to the degree to which it was preventable, and the errors that were made to achieve exactly that. And on that front Covid may very well be the worst, most easily preventable pandemic mass death in this century. The sheer incompetence, misinformation, petty squabbling within and between countries is going to make it to the history books. Disruption to business won't even be a footnote.
vmception 6y ago
The upcoming COVID story is more likely to be about the other 99% who are living and simply listed as "positive case" or "recovered", and the estimated 800% more that are thought to have not been tested. Encephalitis lethargica killed 500,000 people and overlapped with the influenza of 1918, as it preceeded and continued afterwards and disappeared as quickly as it came. Subsequently many of the Encephalitis Lethargica patients developed coma-like states in the decades to come, and stayed that way for the rest of the century until they died. We already know COVID is a neurological disease too, which is why taste and smell get disrupted. So we'll see as time goes on.
njharman 6y ago
Ww2 death was much more spread out due to disease, famine, genocides in Asia and total war perpetrated by Stalin and Hitler. Most WWII deaths were not soldiers. Only the US and lessor UK proper concentrated in young men. Now WW1 with Spanish flu killed high percentage of prime of age people.
danmaz74 6y ago
The goal of all these lockdown measures is exactly to limit the number of additional deaths.
trent_lott 6y ago
It will have an effect on our population to have an additional 0.15% of Americans die in a year, especially in an event that affects countries more or less the same way Not a localized famine or war, but a global thing. What can it compare to? The number of dead is remarkable. With the growing antivax movement making herd immunity less certain...this will surely be known for the number of our dead

albertgoeswoof 6y ago

Doubt it. If current rates of progress continue, in 100 years five million deaths will be considered immensely tragic

steveBK123 6y ago

Arguably 10% may turn out to be the direct-attributable number if you zoom out far enough nationally or globally, but locally & temporally theres been significantly higher numbers. Also remember there’s a lot of death not captured in that number of people who died at home / were never tested / etc that gets captured in the “excess mortality” stat. In NY State and NYC in particular its closer to 30%. Counting total “excess mortality” in NYC is closer to 60% on the year. Note that we’ve annualized here and ~90% of the death in NY took place in about an 8 week period, where the daily death ratepeaked closer to 500-1000% of normal for a week or two. So yes, there was mass death. There are many similar stories in areas of California, Italy, England, etc.

kristopolous 6y ago

Right, I've personally suffered very little and I wanted to be careful to not minimize the tragedy and suffering of those who have. This has been a terrible and tragic event for millions of people. The worst is it was completely avoidable if some of our governments had only valued proper planning for such a predictable event

steveBK123 6y ago

Also, I’m not sure exactly how you meant it, so I won’t direct this at you, just generally... I can’t get over the techbro straw man of the “lockdown” I’ve seen thrown around a lot. First, compared to most of Asia that actually got this virus under control, we have never really had much of a true lockdown here. Second, it’s not the lockdown, its the pandemic. In most areas economic activity dropped off well before any lockdowns and has remained subdued regardless of lockdown duration as long as the virus remains active. That is - the economic activity drop is more correlated with level of virus outbreak than with any government orders. In NYC, everyone I know got sent home a week or more before any city/state lockdowns started. The only time offices were mandated to be closed in NYC was about 8 weeks when we had refrigerated trucks parked outside hospitals acting as mobile morgues, and the National Guard picking up 100s of bodies per day of those who died at home. For the most part companies have kept people WFH because they can get close to 100% productivity with close to 0% absences due to disease & death. The mental health angle of more time spent at home, I still think is a wash. For every extrovert craving lording over a conference room of coworkers, there’s an introvert enjoying reduction in forced social interactions. Lots of people actually like their family & enjoy spending more time with them.

strken 6y ago
Can't speak to the US lockdown, but Melbourne, Victoria, Australia had restrictive lockdowns (1 hour outdoor exercise with up to 2 people together, 1 daily trip to the supermarket per household, couldn't travel more than 5km from your house, police roadblocks out of the city and out of the state, non-essential industries shut down and some essential ones operating at significantly reduced capacity, 8pm-5am curfew) and was accompanied by a 22% spike in calls to the largest suicide hotline. Even introverts can miss going outside or seeing their family.
- h0l0cube 6y ago
  > was accompanied by a 22% spike in calls to the largest suicide hotline A counterfactual: how many people would be affected if their spouse/parent died without the lockdown? These tragedies are unfolding in many countries, and by this misfortune we'll be able to see, in retrospect, the impact of government interventions vs outcomes in a pandemic.

snowwrestler 6y ago

I think the opposite; as society continues to get better at responding to disease and preventing death, the social allowance for "expected" deaths declines. The U.S. Civil War 150 years ago is a good benchmark. We look back now at the level of death with horror, especially deaths among those receiving what passed for medical treatment back then. But of course back then, that was how medicine worked and it was not remarkable that so many people died after surgery. Or if you want to look back closer to 100 years, look back on the level of death and disease related to World War I or the Spanish Flu. The benchmark for evaluating our response to COVID-19 will not be some percentage over the death rate we expect today, but the optimum that people 100 years from now think we could have achieved with a competent response. Historians will be in a better position to judge the details than we are (for example, by having full access to the collected archives of various national governments of today). But it's clear even now that the U.S. could have had far fewer deaths than we did, with a better response. Look at how well we did against SARS and MERS, or how well some other nations did against COVID-19.

atom_arranger 6y ago
I hope people 100 years from now have better things to do than judge or condemn their great great grandparents response to a pandemic.
makomk 6y ago
The trouble is that people's expectations for what a "competent response" should be able to achieve don't actually seem to have any basis in reality. Pandemic response plans just fundamentally aren't designed to stop a respiratory pandemic like this one, at best they try to mitigate a little of the damage and even a lot of that is experimental and untested. (We don't even know something as basic as how effective school closures are against flu pandemics!) SARS and MERS had very different characteristics which made contact tracing a lot more effective against them; the UK, US and most other countries tried using the same approach that worked against them and it failed (and started a bazillion conspiracy theories about why the UK abandoned it). People's expectations seem to have more to do with cynical partisan political attempts to exploit the pandemic than reality.

Barrin92 6y ago

Death is not and should not be judged purely based on some headcount, but in relation to the degree to which it was preventable, and the errors that were made to achieve exactly that. And on that front Covid may very well be the worst, most easily preventable pandemic mass death in this century. The sheer incompetence, misinformation, petty squabbling within and between countries is going to make it to the history books. Disruption to business won't even be a footnote.

vmception 6y ago

The upcoming COVID story is more likely to be about the other 99% who are living and simply listed as "positive case" or "recovered", and the estimated 800% more that are thought to have not been tested. Encephalitis lethargica killed 500,000 people and overlapped with the influenza of 1918, as it preceeded and continued afterwards and disappeared as quickly as it came. Subsequently many of the Encephalitis Lethargica patients developed coma-like states in the decades to come, and stayed that way for the rest of the century until they died. We already know COVID is a neurological disease too, which is why taste and smell get disrupted. So we'll see as time goes on.

njharman 6y ago

Ww2 death was much more spread out due to disease, famine, genocides in Asia and total war perpetrated by Stalin and Hitler. Most WWII deaths were not soldiers. Only the US and lessor UK proper concentrated in young men. Now WW1 with Spanish flu killed high percentage of prime of age people.

danmaz74 6y ago

The goal of all these lockdown measures is exactly to limit the number of additional deaths.

trent_lott 6y ago

It will have an effect on our population to have an additional 0.15% of Americans die in a year, especially in an event that affects countries more or less the same way Not a localized famine or war, but a global thing. What can it compare to? The number of dead is remarkable. With the growing antivax movement making herd immunity less certain...this will surely be known for the number of our dead