6 ms·

So this past year the government has been willing to let unemployment, suicides and drug overdoses jump due to isolation and loneliness caused by lockdowns, chi

by hn8788 6y ago

So this past year the government has been willing to let unemployment, suicides and drug overdoses jump due to isolation and loneliness caused by lockdowns, child abuse to skyrocket and mental health to plumment due to schools being kept closed, all because we needed to stop covid at any cost. Now one person dies out of almost 7 million who received the vaccine, and we need to stop administering the J&J vaccine "out of an abundance of caution"? I'm starting to think more and more that the shitty decisions regarding covid in the past year were because it was an election year.

captainredbeard 6y ago
Government over-reactions to COVID19 have been disastrous. There would have been an economic hit for sure but things would have returned to near normal by August 2020 if they had respected freedom (or if people had disobeyed in mass).
- hedora 6y ago
  Yeah. The US is apparently already at ~50% antibodies, not counting vaccination. So, there’s a floor on the upside of the vaccine: It did no more than halve deaths. We’re in the middle of a surge, and it looks like most of the remaining 50% will end up catching covid before being vaccinated, so the percentage saved by vaccination will continue to drop. The ideal strategy without hindsight was conventional wisdom: Protect the vulnerable and stiff upper lip for the rest. That would have more than halved casualties. With the benefit of hindsight, a 3 month shutdown while hospitals got their acts together (combined with protecting the vulnerable) would have roughly quartered the remaining deaths, but at far lower cost than the full shutdown. This was predicted by some of the old-guard epidemiologists, which is why they were against the shutdown in the first place. The cancel culture folks lumped them in with MAGA anti-vaxxers (I blame both sides) and got them censored by the big platforms. Here we are, with 100,000’s unnecessarily dead, trillions squandered, and many careers, businesses and educations ruined. I suspect roughly zero people have learned a lesson from this. Hopefully I’m overly cynical.
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    > With the benefit of hindsight, a 3 month shutdown while hospitals got their acts together (combined with protecting the vulnerable) would have roughly quartered the remaining deaths, but at far lower cost than the full shutdown. Where was this "full shutdown" you speak of? Not anywhere in the US. In Wuhan, and some other Asian countries, sure. Didn't we kind of have the 3 month shutdown-lite you're referring to? Mid-March through about June for most places were at varying levels of shutdown in the US. But recall things started opening up in June of 2020. And cases started rising again into July. > The US is apparently already at ~50% antibodies, not counting vaccination. Citation? That seems like about 3X the most optimistic numbers I've heard from credible sources.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - hedora 6y ago
      As for shutdown vs shutdown lite: No; the economy didn’t completely reopen in July. The recommendations from March 2020 were for more strict targeted shutdown protocols, but over a shorter duration (Strict reverse quarantines for nursing homes, but only for a few months for example.). The idea was to get less vulnerable groups to herd immunity faster. I’m saying a general, country wide shutdown for three months, concurrently with a strict targeted lockdown for about 5-6 months would have been more effective and cheaper (and, we’d have been done by last August, as the parent of my other post suggested.) Source for 50%: Wall street journal. We were above 33% (based on random sampling, not confirmed cases) a few months ago. This one from Feb predicted herd immunity a bit too early. They ran one with updated numbers last week, but I can’t find it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731 https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-apri...
  - cujo 6y ago
    I suspect a lot of folks learned (in the US) is that if you have a president who politicizes a pandemic and shits the bed on leadership, the populous is screwed. Let's not pretend that rational discourse was ever an option, and the media isn't the place for blame.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  > returned to near normal by August 2020 The problem is the virus, not the government reaction to it. Personally, I tend to think governments under-reacted in most Western countries. I'm not sure how things would have returned to "normal" if the virus was raging out of control. A good precentage of people would see the deaths and still avoid going out to shop or whatever. I'm assuming you mean by "normal" that people would return to some normal pattern of economic activity - and even if 10 or 20% of people changed their behavior that would still impact the economy.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    > A good precentage of people would see the deaths and still avoid going out to shop or whatever. That seems hard to believe, since significantly more people die every year of all causes than could possibly have died of Covid, even if every single person in the world caught it. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was different. > even if 10 or 20% of people changed their behavior that would still impact the economy. Maybe so, but the economy is not the only or even the most important casualty of our Covid response. The importance of human social gatherings, the freedom to leave one’s home and go wherever one pleases, the education of children, and so on cannot be measured in economic terms. > The problem is the virus, not the government reaction to it. Places where there were very few or only brief restrictions, like Serbia, Belarus, or Florida, largely avoided the issues I described above with only a small or in some cases unmeasurable increase in all cause mortality for 2020.
    - kaitai 6y ago
      It's not at all hard to believe. All the people in my family, for instance, have changed grocery habits and stopped discretionary shopping in stores essentially entirely. Why? Many are older and have risks yet also have full lives and want to live to play with their grandkids. We prioritized gathering with each other cautiously over spending money shopping and changed habits immediately (I started working from home March 12, before any US guidance). Sweden is an interesting example. Comparing Sweden and Finland, for instance, older people essentially cloistered themselves in Sweden because they had no trust that they'd be safe in society, and their spending dropped by a higher amount than old people in Finland, who changed their habits less due to the swift and more stringent government response? My old-person family members in Finland were able to keep shopping, going to church, and having birthday parties with many families due to that response (as opposed to in the US where we limited ourselves to gatherings with max 3 households and did everything masked or outdoors due to several people still working on site). Perhaps you live in a very different place. You certainly interpret statistics quite differently given your example of Florida.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  How many dead people would that "normal" have been worth to you? If, instead, people had behaved responsibly in mass and we had used the time we got from that to establish coherent contact tracing and testing, things would have returned to normal by August as well, only without many the deaths your way would cause.
  - captainredbeard 6y ago
    > How many dead people would that "normal" have been worth to you? A lot
- electrondood 6y ago
  Or if they just followed the plan for this exact scenario that was handed to them by the last administration, if we're talking about the US, where more than half a million people died preventable deaths. I'd argue that the "response" at the Federal level was a massive under-reaction. Months of denial didn't seem to work out so well.
joelfolksy 6y ago
Suicides decreased in 2020, btw: https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-mental-health-26196eaf-a245-4d21-85eb-eeb864a24449.html https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-me....
- Miner49er 6y ago
  Deaths of despair increased though: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deaths-of-despair-during-covid-19-rose-by-up-to-60-in-2020-new-research-says-2021-01-04 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deaths-of-despair-during-c...
  - spookthesunset 6y ago
    As did unintentional injury, which was due to overdoses.
    - webdevadventure 6y ago
      Alcohol and drug abuse is way up as well, that will have long term ramifications.
- scienceOverFear 6y ago
  Like the article mentioned, there may be long term effects we can't foresee. Seeing the chaos in the economy and current real estate prices make me concerned that anyone without a home/mortgage in 2020 will be permanently lower class and renting due to inflation. Free government money for a year is like eating candy. The stomach ache has yet to come.
- Izkata 6y ago
  The CDC only tracks actual suicides, not attempts. Suicidal thoughts and attempts are up: https://www.aappublications.org/news/2020/12/16/pediatricssuicidestudy121620 https://www.aappublications.org/news/2020/12/16/pediatricssu... Besides, in the CDC table, "unintentional injuries" is up by way more than suicides are down. This includes things like car accidents, and is a little suspicious, like suicidal behavior led to a death that wasn't classified as suicide. Also note that the table is "deaths with covid or presumed covid", not "deaths by covid": https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234
sp332 6y ago
It is not stopped. It is paused for a few days while updated training is rolled out.

by hn8788 6y ago

captainredbeard 6y ago

Government over-reactions to COVID19 have been disastrous. There would have been an economic hit for sure but things would have returned to near normal by August 2020 if they had respected freedom (or if people had disobeyed in mass).

hedora 6y ago
Yeah. The US is apparently already at ~50% antibodies, not counting vaccination. So, there’s a floor on the upside of the vaccine: It did no more than halve deaths. We’re in the middle of a surge, and it looks like most of the remaining 50% will end up catching covid before being vaccinated, so the percentage saved by vaccination will continue to drop. The ideal strategy without hindsight was conventional wisdom: Protect the vulnerable and stiff upper lip for the rest. That would have more than halved casualties. With the benefit of hindsight, a 3 month shutdown while hospitals got their acts together (combined with protecting the vulnerable) would have roughly quartered the remaining deaths, but at far lower cost than the full shutdown. This was predicted by some of the old-guard epidemiologists, which is why they were against the shutdown in the first place. The cancel culture folks lumped them in with MAGA anti-vaxxers (I blame both sides) and got them censored by the big platforms. Here we are, with 100,000’s unnecessarily dead, trillions squandered, and many careers, businesses and educations ruined. I suspect roughly zero people have learned a lesson from this. Hopefully I’m overly cynical.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  > With the benefit of hindsight, a 3 month shutdown while hospitals got their acts together (combined with protecting the vulnerable) would have roughly quartered the remaining deaths, but at far lower cost than the full shutdown. Where was this "full shutdown" you speak of? Not anywhere in the US. In Wuhan, and some other Asian countries, sure. Didn't we kind of have the 3 month shutdown-lite you're referring to? Mid-March through about June for most places were at varying levels of shutdown in the US. But recall things started opening up in June of 2020. And cases started rising again into July. > The US is apparently already at ~50% antibodies, not counting vaccination. Citation? That seems like about 3X the most optimistic numbers I've heard from credible sources.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hedora 6y ago
    As for shutdown vs shutdown lite: No; the economy didn’t completely reopen in July. The recommendations from March 2020 were for more strict targeted shutdown protocols, but over a shorter duration (Strict reverse quarantines for nursing homes, but only for a few months for example.). The idea was to get less vulnerable groups to herd immunity faster. I’m saying a general, country wide shutdown for three months, concurrently with a strict targeted lockdown for about 5-6 months would have been more effective and cheaper (and, we’d have been done by last August, as the parent of my other post suggested.) Source for 50%: Wall street journal. We were above 33% (based on random sampling, not confirmed cases) a few months ago. This one from Feb predicted herd immunity a bit too early. They ran one with updated numbers last week, but I can’t find it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731 https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-apri...
- cujo 6y ago
  I suspect a lot of folks learned (in the US) is that if you have a president who politicizes a pandemic and shits the bed on leadership, the populous is screwed. Let's not pretend that rational discourse was ever an option, and the media isn't the place for blame.
UncleOxidant 6y ago
> returned to near normal by August 2020 The problem is the virus, not the government reaction to it. Personally, I tend to think governments under-reacted in most Western countries. I'm not sure how things would have returned to "normal" if the virus was raging out of control. A good precentage of people would see the deaths and still avoid going out to shop or whatever. I'm assuming you mean by "normal" that people would return to some normal pattern of economic activity - and even if 10 or 20% of people changed their behavior that would still impact the economy.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  > A good precentage of people would see the deaths and still avoid going out to shop or whatever. That seems hard to believe, since significantly more people die every year of all causes than could possibly have died of Covid, even if every single person in the world caught it. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was different. > even if 10 or 20% of people changed their behavior that would still impact the economy. Maybe so, but the economy is not the only or even the most important casualty of our Covid response. The importance of human social gatherings, the freedom to leave one’s home and go wherever one pleases, the education of children, and so on cannot be measured in economic terms. > The problem is the virus, not the government reaction to it. Places where there were very few or only brief restrictions, like Serbia, Belarus, or Florida, largely avoided the issues I described above with only a small or in some cases unmeasurable increase in all cause mortality for 2020.
  - kaitai 6y ago
    It's not at all hard to believe. All the people in my family, for instance, have changed grocery habits and stopped discretionary shopping in stores essentially entirely. Why? Many are older and have risks yet also have full lives and want to live to play with their grandkids. We prioritized gathering with each other cautiously over spending money shopping and changed habits immediately (I started working from home March 12, before any US guidance). Sweden is an interesting example. Comparing Sweden and Finland, for instance, older people essentially cloistered themselves in Sweden because they had no trust that they'd be safe in society, and their spending dropped by a higher amount than old people in Finland, who changed their habits less due to the swift and more stringent government response? My old-person family members in Finland were able to keep shopping, going to church, and having birthday parties with many families due to that response (as opposed to in the US where we limited ourselves to gatherings with max 3 households and did everything masked or outdoors due to several people still working on site). Perhaps you live in a very different place. You certainly interpret statistics quite differently given your example of Florida.
InitialLastName 6y ago
How many dead people would that "normal" have been worth to you? If, instead, people had behaved responsibly in mass and we had used the time we got from that to establish coherent contact tracing and testing, things would have returned to normal by August as well, only without many the deaths your way would cause.
- captainredbeard 6y ago
  > How many dead people would that "normal" have been worth to you? A lot
electrondood 6y ago
Or if they just followed the plan for this exact scenario that was handed to them by the last administration, if we're talking about the US, where more than half a million people died preventable deaths. I'd argue that the "response" at the Federal level was a massive under-reaction. Months of denial didn't seem to work out so well.

joelfolksy 6y ago

Suicides decreased in 2020, btw: https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-mental-health-26196eaf-a245-4d21-85eb-eeb864a24449.html https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-me....

Miner49er 6y ago
Deaths of despair increased though: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deaths-of-despair-during-covid-19-rose-by-up-to-60-in-2020-new-research-says-2021-01-04 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deaths-of-despair-during-c...
- spookthesunset 6y ago
  As did unintentional injury, which was due to overdoses.
  - webdevadventure 6y ago
    Alcohol and drug abuse is way up as well, that will have long term ramifications.
scienceOverFear 6y ago
Like the article mentioned, there may be long term effects we can't foresee. Seeing the chaos in the economy and current real estate prices make me concerned that anyone without a home/mortgage in 2020 will be permanently lower class and renting due to inflation. Free government money for a year is like eating candy. The stomach ache has yet to come.
Izkata 6y ago
The CDC only tracks actual suicides, not attempts. Suicidal thoughts and attempts are up: https://www.aappublications.org/news/2020/12/16/pediatricssuicidestudy121620 https://www.aappublications.org/news/2020/12/16/pediatricssu... Besides, in the CDC table, "unintentional injuries" is up by way more than suicides are down. This includes things like car accidents, and is a little suspicious, like suicidal behavior led to a death that wasn't classified as suicide. Also note that the table is "deaths with covid or presumed covid", not "deaths by covid": https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234

sp332 6y ago

It is not stopped. It is paused for a few days while updated training is rolled out.