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The risk of Covid has never been the individualized risk. It's the collective risk of what happens when hospitals and ICUs reach capacity when too many people c
by _vertigo 5y ago
The risk of Covid has never been the individualized risk. It's the collective risk of what happens when hospitals and ICUs reach capacity when too many people catch Covid at once. For example, what is happening in India.
This was widely known in the US on the first week of March in 2020.
When hospitals reach capacity, people in their 40s and 50s become much more likely to die from Covid. Lots of preventable loss of life is going to occur, from Covid and from everything else that can't be attended to because the hospitals are full.
The point of lockdowns is not to reduce the individual risk. It's to reduce the collective risk of getting hit by a runaway train that completely overwhelms our health systems.
- logicchains 5y ago>For example, what is happening in India. What is happening in India? The death rate per capita there is still way less than in the US or UK. How come the death rate in Florida is less than that in California and New York, in spite of no lockdowns and an older population in Florida? There's no statistical evidence that countries with stricter lockdowns had a lower death rate than those without.
- ShroudedNight 5y agoThe signals I'm seeing from India strongly suggest that their death rate is massively under-reported. http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess-mortality-due-covid-19-and-scalars-reported-covid-19-deaths http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess...
- garyfirestorm 5y agoDeath rate per capita I think is a misleading way to look at it. If covid wipes half of my say 10 ppl family and half of someone else’s say 4 ppl family, I lose 5 ppl and they lose 2 ppl. Per capita rate is fine for statisticians after the fact. But during the pandemic you can’t tell me we lost same ppl per capita. Obviously I lost much more (hypothetically)
- _vertigo 5y agoI think it's well understood that deaths in India are massively underreported. California and New York both came close to having their health care systems overwhelmed in certain counties, Florida did not. That's exactly my point. > There's no statistical evidence that countries with stricter lockdowns had a lower death rate than those without. Honestly, you would expect it to be the other way around. Lockdowns are a last-resort tool to prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed. You would expect areas that implement lockdowns to be either denser (thus, hypothetically having less warning time between rising case counts and hospital saturation) or, more likely, to have an existing large scale Covid problem that they need to get under control. Lockdowns are correlated with bad Covid outcomes because lockdowns are implemented in places that are liable to, or are already having, bad Covid problems.