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But those mostly killed people still the prime of their lives, while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who l

But those mostly killed people still the prime of their lives, while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different. Cynical thought: COVID lockdowns are extreme largely because unlike most public health problems it affects the rich too, and the decision-makers behind them fall into the high-risk categories. Sobering thought: if you think COVID-19 is bad now, wait until there's a pandemic of something like the Spanish Flu that does target and kill the young and healthy too.

robocat 6y ago
> while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. The average years lost is 10 years of life in the US and 16 world wide[1] - and I think you need to reconsider how callous your comment comes across (to me at least, and I would guess others too). [edited: added detail] I also feel your comment entirely disregards the point made by the parent comment: “I personally know a couple of people who are now effectively long-term disabled with respiratory issues - well enough to leave hospital, but their previous lifestyle can't come back.” https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=years+lost+covid https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=years+lost+covid
- graeme 6y ago
  > If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different. I think you missed this part of their comment. They were arguing the deaths weren’t the same kind of deaths as in past catastrophes, but the long term ailments are bad and real. Though I agree the years lost is bigger than people think.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  I'm sorry if it comes off as callous, but we're comparing incidents of mass death here and disability-adjusted life years is how insurance companies and demographers do it. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good thing that 500k people have died from COVID in the US, but simply that having same number of young, healthy people getting gunned down in the Battle of the Somme is almost any measure objectively worse.
  - solosoyokaze 6y ago
    Do you really not know any young people who have been permanently damaged by COVID? I know multiple people in their 20s and 30s that spent weeks in the ER and will never be the same. I'm always surprised to find people who think the lockdown is excessive. COVID is absolutely no joke even if you're young, it's not the flu. Not even close, you don't want it.
    - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
      My anecdotal experience is the opposite of yours - everyone I know in their 20s and 30s who had a positive COVID-19 test got through it within a week and it was about the same as the flu. If my anecdata is irrelevant, then so is yours. The only people I know who have had permanent damage from COVID-19 in this age range, have all had their trauma caused by excessive lockdown policies. You know what's even less of a joke than COVID-19? Our histrionic, insane, and completely violent overreaction to it.
      - solosoyokaze 6y ago
        > You know what's even less of a joke than COVID-19? Our histrionic, insane, and completely violent overreaction to it. Quick question: how would you propose dealing with a global pandemic? Social isolation seems like the most common sense solution, since in 2021 we know how disease is transmitted and how to deal with that.
        AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
        Social isolation may be the best solution. Fine. Don't force it on us. If it's the right solution, then it will be followed. I am not going to entertain further the notion that we have locked people into their homes, given trillions of dollars to multinational corporations, and restricted the lives of everyday people, just because of a pandemic that kills less than 1% of the people infected. This is such an obvious cash-grab and overt attempt to impose further fascism upon people, just like what happened after 9/11 in the US with the imposition of the Patriot Act.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  That's not how anyone should assess risk. You can't take an average and assume that it applies to everyone. The elderly hare far more likely of losing 10 years off their lives than young people who are very unlikely to lose 40+ years off their lives. For instance, the chance that I will die from COVID at my age and health are, for all intents and purposes, 0%, according to the CDC. It would be ridiculous for me to take a statistic that is more apt for the sick and the elderly and use that to determine the course of my life. By the way, the truth can be very callous. I don't think it's particularly useful for you to point out how callous someone sounds on the internet unless the other person has some demonstrable intent of cruelty. We all know that we have the potential to sound like bad people through text online.
  - rcpt 6y ago
    The metric you're looking for is QALY "quality adjusted life year". It's studied a lot in health economics but generally disregarded wrt covid because we don't have 2060's actuarial tables yet. Yes there is evidence that 10-30% of covid infections have not resolved at 6 months https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v... which is roughly what SARS 1 looks like (and those people are still sick). But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making.
    - robocat 6y ago
      “A study published in the Journal of Public Health finds that for each person in the U.S. who died after contracting COVID-19, an average of nearly 10 years of life had been lost.” - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200923124557.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200923124557.h... > But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making. That isn’t relevant to the 10 year statistic although it is an interesting point - you are saying the final result for years of life lost due to Covid could be a higher number than 10 years (after we get to finally tally the numbers in the decades to come as people die). Depends on how you paint your statistics I guess. [para edited to add clarity]
gregmac 6y ago
> COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway What a disgusting attitude. How is this different from "Why bother treating cancer patients? Most are going to die early anyway"? Do you think old and sick people simply provide no value to society? I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but it's really not necessary to rank lives against each other in this way. This attitude seems to be what's largely made this pandemic so bad: it was viewed as "just the flu" and "only affects people with pre-existing conditions" and so rather than fast, decisive action (reducing burden on healthcare system, preventing deaths, reducing the need for lockdowns and shortening the time they take), many countries instead delayed and did half-measures, causing an exponential increase in cases, which causes everything to be worse. The completely obvious outcome of willing to let old and sick people die to "save the economy" was an economy that's in turmoil as well as a massive death toll.
- derefr 6y ago
  > I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but it's really not necessary to rank lives against each other in this way. No, the GP is pointing out the well-established social-psychology theory that people already implicitly rank things this way, and that this is why the death toll doesn’t have more of a mental impact on people in changing their decisions, even when they hear about it. It’s the same reason that news like “baby of suburban WASP nuclear family gets kidnapped” turns into a whole-community man-hunt with special ribbons that gets remembered for years, while news like “baby of urban black single mother gets kidnapped” never even gets acknowledged by the community. When people who are high-status to society go away, the whole of society mourns. When people who are low-status to society go away, only those directly affected mourn. Any death-toll number, in the mind of most human beings (or rather, of any human being who’s only engaging with the problem using System 1 thinking), isn’t interpreted as “raw numbers” of lives lost, or even QALYs lost — instead, it’s felt as an aggregate of social-status lost, subjective to the listener’s personal social-status ranking function. For the same reason that people don’t tend to worry much about disasters half-way across the world (the aggregate social-status weight computed through their status ranking function still sums low), people won’t tend to worry much about the impact of a local disaster if it’s only directly hurting local low-status people. Even if it’s indirectly impacting high-status people by taking away people they care directly about, that still doesn’t generate the sort of performative shame for not having acted that comes when high-status individuals are taken†. And since that very performative shame is what policy-makers rely on as a group impetus to for getting changes pushed through on a society-wide level, a lack of it means that nothing can really change, even when there are clear rational reasons to implement change. —————— † Evo-psych just-so hypothesis (i.e. take this with 50 grains of salt): people are expected to sacrifice to protect high-status people; people who do so are rewarded by the high-status people; and so, over generations, it became a eusocial instinct to feel an urge toward performative shame when you “fail to protect” a high-status person in your community—even one you never personally knew. But people aren’t expected to sacrifice for low-status affiliations of high-status people (since it’d “only” be the high-status person, and not the rest of the community, enforcing the norm on you), so a similar eusocial instinct toward performative shame for failing to protect those people never arose.
iancmceachern 6y ago
Boo! Life is life, who are we to judge who's is more or less valuable?
- rebuilder 6y ago
  We are doing so now, by choosing to take the suicides and mental health problems lockdowns will result in over the deaths the pandemic would cause without lockdown. I mean, I'm not opposed to the lockdowns generally, but you can't pretend we aren't making choices about who suffers. Mostly we're choosing to take our chances on the unknown long-term consequences over the fairly well-understood risks we face now. The people who pay the cost will be different.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Yup, and I wish more people would recognize/admit this. The lockdown decisions may be the best decisions, but let's not pretend we're not trading some deaths for others.
  - iancmceachern 6y ago
    That's fair, I agree.
Damogran6 6y ago
More to the point, I think these statement show a lack of empathy on the part of the person making them. 'at least they're old' This has wiped out FAMILES. 2.4M worldwide and nearly 500k in the US. And it flies past people due to fatigue and habituation.
- pb7 6y ago
  2.4M people is 0.03% of the global population. Heart disease alone kills 0.23% of the global population per year.
  - Uberphallus 6y ago
    > 2.4M people is 0.03% of the global population. Heart disease alone kills 0.23% of the global population per year. One would have thought that by now we wouldn't be comparing fatality rates of a disease that propagates exponentially when left unchecked, with a more or less stable family of diseases that isn't contagious, but here we are, apple pies to orange sorbets.
    - pb7 6y ago
      Masks and social distancing alone would have sufficed. South Korea is proof of that.
      - kelnos 6y ago
        If we're talking about South Korea, you need to add widespread testing, mandatory quarantine for confirmed cases, and isolation for people possibly exposed. Regardless, areas of the US that have mask and social distancing mandates still have high case rates. It seems like the driver of surges in those areas are mainly due to people violating other restrictions, like having indoor gatherings.
Kluny 6y ago
> the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different. It's a hell of a thing for someone who only had a few short and precious years left, to have those ripped away from them as well. I'm hard of hearing - people joke that there's no point in wearing ear protection since I'm already deaf. No, the opposite. Because I have only a little hearing left, it's so much more precious to me than normal hearing is for most people. I protect it jealously. I get your point, but I can't forget the human part of that equation.

robocat 6y ago

> while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. The average years lost is 10 years of life in the US and 16 world wide[1] - and I think you need to reconsider how callous your comment comes across (to me at least, and I would guess others too). [edited: added detail] I also feel your comment entirely disregards the point made by the parent comment: “I personally know a couple of people who are now effectively long-term disabled with respiratory issues - well enough to leave hospital, but their previous lifestyle can't come back.” https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=years+lost+covid https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=years+lost+covid

graeme 6y ago
> If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different. I think you missed this part of their comment. They were arguing the deaths weren’t the same kind of deaths as in past catastrophes, but the long term ailments are bad and real. Though I agree the years lost is bigger than people think.
Clewza313 6y ago
I'm sorry if it comes off as callous, but we're comparing incidents of mass death here and disability-adjusted life years is how insurance companies and demographers do it. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good thing that 500k people have died from COVID in the US, but simply that having same number of young, healthy people getting gunned down in the Battle of the Somme is almost any measure objectively worse.
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  Do you really not know any young people who have been permanently damaged by COVID? I know multiple people in their 20s and 30s that spent weeks in the ER and will never be the same. I'm always surprised to find people who think the lockdown is excessive. COVID is absolutely no joke even if you're young, it's not the flu. Not even close, you don't want it.
  - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
    My anecdotal experience is the opposite of yours - everyone I know in their 20s and 30s who had a positive COVID-19 test got through it within a week and it was about the same as the flu. If my anecdata is irrelevant, then so is yours. The only people I know who have had permanent damage from COVID-19 in this age range, have all had their trauma caused by excessive lockdown policies. You know what's even less of a joke than COVID-19? Our histrionic, insane, and completely violent overreaction to it.
    - solosoyokaze 6y ago
      > You know what's even less of a joke than COVID-19? Our histrionic, insane, and completely violent overreaction to it. Quick question: how would you propose dealing with a global pandemic? Social isolation seems like the most common sense solution, since in 2021 we know how disease is transmitted and how to deal with that.
      - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
        Social isolation may be the best solution. Fine. Don't force it on us. If it's the right solution, then it will be followed. I am not going to entertain further the notion that we have locked people into their homes, given trillions of dollars to multinational corporations, and restricted the lives of everyday people, just because of a pandemic that kills less than 1% of the people infected. This is such an obvious cash-grab and overt attempt to impose further fascism upon people, just like what happened after 9/11 in the US with the imposition of the Patriot Act.
ravenstine 6y ago
That's not how anyone should assess risk. You can't take an average and assume that it applies to everyone. The elderly hare far more likely of losing 10 years off their lives than young people who are very unlikely to lose 40+ years off their lives. For instance, the chance that I will die from COVID at my age and health are, for all intents and purposes, 0%, according to the CDC. It would be ridiculous for me to take a statistic that is more apt for the sick and the elderly and use that to determine the course of my life. By the way, the truth can be very callous. I don't think it's particularly useful for you to point out how callous someone sounds on the internet unless the other person has some demonstrable intent of cruelty. We all know that we have the potential to sound like bad people through text online.
- rcpt 6y ago
  The metric you're looking for is QALY "quality adjusted life year". It's studied a lot in health economics but generally disregarded wrt covid because we don't have 2060's actuarial tables yet. Yes there is evidence that 10-30% of covid infections have not resolved at 6 months https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v... which is roughly what SARS 1 looks like (and those people are still sick). But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making.
  - robocat 6y ago
    “A study published in the Journal of Public Health finds that for each person in the U.S. who died after contracting COVID-19, an average of nearly 10 years of life had been lost.” - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200923124557.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200923124557.h... > But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making. That isn’t relevant to the 10 year statistic although it is an interesting point - you are saying the final result for years of life lost due to Covid could be a higher number than 10 years (after we get to finally tally the numbers in the decades to come as people die). Depends on how you paint your statistics I guess. [para edited to add clarity]

gregmac 6y ago

> COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway What a disgusting attitude. How is this different from "Why bother treating cancer patients? Most are going to die early anyway"? Do you think old and sick people simply provide no value to society? I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but it's really not necessary to rank lives against each other in this way. This attitude seems to be what's largely made this pandemic so bad: it was viewed as "just the flu" and "only affects people with pre-existing conditions" and so rather than fast, decisive action (reducing burden on healthcare system, preventing deaths, reducing the need for lockdowns and shortening the time they take), many countries instead delayed and did half-measures, causing an exponential increase in cases, which causes everything to be worse. The completely obvious outcome of willing to let old and sick people die to "save the economy" was an economy that's in turmoil as well as a massive death toll.

derefr 6y ago
> I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but it's really not necessary to rank lives against each other in this way. No, the GP is pointing out the well-established social-psychology theory that people already implicitly rank things this way, and that this is why the death toll doesn’t have more of a mental impact on people in changing their decisions, even when they hear about it. It’s the same reason that news like “baby of suburban WASP nuclear family gets kidnapped” turns into a whole-community man-hunt with special ribbons that gets remembered for years, while news like “baby of urban black single mother gets kidnapped” never even gets acknowledged by the community. When people who are high-status to society go away, the whole of society mourns. When people who are low-status to society go away, only those directly affected mourn. Any death-toll number, in the mind of most human beings (or rather, of any human being who’s only engaging with the problem using System 1 thinking), isn’t interpreted as “raw numbers” of lives lost, or even QALYs lost — instead, it’s felt as an aggregate of social-status lost, subjective to the listener’s personal social-status ranking function. For the same reason that people don’t tend to worry much about disasters half-way across the world (the aggregate social-status weight computed through their status ranking function still sums low), people won’t tend to worry much about the impact of a local disaster if it’s only directly hurting local low-status people. Even if it’s indirectly impacting high-status people by taking away people they care directly about, that still doesn’t generate the sort of performative shame for not having acted that comes when high-status individuals are taken†. And since that very performative shame is what policy-makers rely on as a group impetus to for getting changes pushed through on a society-wide level, a lack of it means that nothing can really change, even when there are clear rational reasons to implement change. —————— † Evo-psych just-so hypothesis (i.e. take this with 50 grains of salt): people are expected to sacrifice to protect high-status people; people who do so are rewarded by the high-status people; and so, over generations, it became a eusocial instinct to feel an urge toward performative shame when you “fail to protect” a high-status person in your community—even one you never personally knew. But people aren’t expected to sacrifice for low-status affiliations of high-status people (since it’d “only” be the high-status person, and not the rest of the community, enforcing the norm on you), so a similar eusocial instinct toward performative shame for failing to protect those people never arose.

iancmceachern 6y ago

Boo! Life is life, who are we to judge who's is more or less valuable?

rebuilder 6y ago
We are doing so now, by choosing to take the suicides and mental health problems lockdowns will result in over the deaths the pandemic would cause without lockdown. I mean, I'm not opposed to the lockdowns generally, but you can't pretend we aren't making choices about who suffers. Mostly we're choosing to take our chances on the unknown long-term consequences over the fairly well-understood risks we face now. The people who pay the cost will be different.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Yup, and I wish more people would recognize/admit this. The lockdown decisions may be the best decisions, but let's not pretend we're not trading some deaths for others.
- iancmceachern 6y ago
  That's fair, I agree.

Damogran6 6y ago

More to the point, I think these statement show a lack of empathy on the part of the person making them. 'at least they're old' This has wiped out FAMILES. 2.4M worldwide and nearly 500k in the US. And it flies past people due to fatigue and habituation.

pb7 6y ago
2.4M people is 0.03% of the global population. Heart disease alone kills 0.23% of the global population per year.
- Uberphallus 6y ago
  > 2.4M people is 0.03% of the global population. Heart disease alone kills 0.23% of the global population per year. One would have thought that by now we wouldn't be comparing fatality rates of a disease that propagates exponentially when left unchecked, with a more or less stable family of diseases that isn't contagious, but here we are, apple pies to orange sorbets.
  - pb7 6y ago
    Masks and social distancing alone would have sufficed. South Korea is proof of that.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      If we're talking about South Korea, you need to add widespread testing, mandatory quarantine for confirmed cases, and isolation for people possibly exposed. Regardless, areas of the US that have mask and social distancing mandates still have high case rates. It seems like the driver of surges in those areas are mainly due to people violating other restrictions, like having indoor gatherings.

Kluny 6y ago

> the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different. It's a hell of a thing for someone who only had a few short and precious years left, to have those ripped away from them as well. I'm hard of hearing - people joke that there's no point in wearing ear protection since I'm already deaf. No, the opposite. Because I have only a little hearing left, it's so much more precious to me than normal hearing is for most people. I protect it jealously. I get your point, but I can't forget the human part of that equation.