5 ms·

"In California, teenage sucide increased 24 percent, leading to 134 deaths in 2020. In contrast, only 23 California minors died of Covid-19." More teenagers di

"In California, teenage sucide increased 24 percent, leading to 134 deaths in 2020. In contrast, only 23 California minors died of Covid-19." More teenagers died of lockdown, than died with COVID. Why havn't all restrictions across the land (including masks and endless testing) ceased immediately?

aplummer 5y ago
Well 1. because it’s only due to the masks and endless testing the Covid death count is so low 2. Without the masks and endless testing, young people would infect many many older people, creating even more deaths This isn’t a conspiracy. Doctors do want the least number of deaths in the community.
- kansface 5y ago
  No, emphatically, no, our doctors and our health care institutions did not act to minimize deaths! See for example the distribution of vaccines which did not go to demographics in proportion to their risk. It is totally unimaginable to me that men would ever be prioritized over women even when they are 60% of the fatalities in the US with similar stats for long term hospitalization. I haven’t done the math, but that surely cost us thousands or possibly tens of thousands of lives. Instead, we get endless reports in the media about how the pandemic has been hard on women! I accept that it has been hard on women, but you know, it’s at been fatal to 50% more men! Could you imagine the reporting and response if the situation were reversed? It’s a similar story for distribution to other sub populations as well, and the same basic story over and over - health care in the us is subject to politics and the politics of the health care providers themselves, typically to the detriment of all of us.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    > No, emphatically, no, our doctors and our health care institutions did not act to minimize deaths! Some tried, but yeah, mostly it's been suppressed by politics: The MATH+ protocol would've cut the death rate to about 1/3 what it currently is, but it isn't well-known because of artificial controversy over some of the drugs it uses.
  - btilly 5y ago
    It is worth noting that your facts are basically right. Studies like https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31748-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... say that men die more than women do, and therefore targeting men first would have saved lives. Of course failing to target men more heavily was not as egregious as making it available to essential workers at the same time as older people to create more racial equity in who got the vaccine. Even though the CDC figures said that targeting older people first would have saved more lives, and even more minority lives. See https://reason.com/2020/12/18/vaccine-cdc-essential-workers-elderly-racial-covid-19/ https://reason.com/2020/12/18/vaccine-cdc-essential-workers-... for more on that topic. And, of course, a lot of people simply showed up, said they delivered for DoorDash, and got the vaccine. Knowing that nobody would check up on them. There is an element of sometimes ugly politics to this. :-(
    - aplummer 5y ago
      Even in the abstract it says that hypothesis based on risk factors (which are accounted for in distribution) are the underlying cause of this distinction. As well, this is analysis after the fact, and not at the time of the decision making - totally different. So parent is emphatically wrong.
      - btilly 5y ago
        The article that I pointed to predated the vaccines by a number of months. So it is not analysis after the fact. The Reason article that I pointed to is at the same time as the CDC policy, and pointed out that other countries were adopting a different policy at the same time. Again not analysis after the fact. The grandparent comment is more strongly stated than I would agree with. But not wrong.
  - xf1cf 5y ago
    This is correct but a little ranty. Men have consistently surpassed women in both suicide attempts and suicides (see upthread for statistics) but no one seems to care. This "why won't someone think of the women" politicking is all too common these days when in fact focusing on the highest risk group (teenage boys) would probably save more lives on an absolute scale. The same goes for COVID which has an outsized effect on men when compared to women. We are several decades away at this rate from getting our boys better help in school, mental health support, and other things that society seems to think they don't need.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  >Doctors do want the least number of deaths in the community. Like how they won the Nobel prize for lobotomies in the seventies? Doctors would take out sections of women's and kids brains to make them quieter so your house wife talked back less and unruly kids would calm down. And it had a 14% mortality rate That's not a conspiracy that's documented fact. It's logical fallacy called 'appeal to authority' that Doctors/Experts are these angels that have no agenda and just want what's best for us. They can be wrong and are quite often. There's absolutely no evidence for either of the points you're making. If what you're saying wasn't a mainstream narrative it could be considered a conspiracy theory. The only difference between religion and a cult is mainstream acceptance. Most of the country has lifted covid restrictions fully and we're only at 40%ish vaccination rate. If you were correct and mask usage was effective we would see infection surges instead of RECORD LOW numbers of covid cases all over the country. All of it was medical theater and was never necessary to begin with there's no proof otherwise. It's okay to admit you were wrong and light of new evidence.
simondw 5y ago
Imagine a pill that completely cures cancer, 100% of the time. But maybe one in a million pills gets stuck in someone's throat and they choke to death. So instead of 10 million cancer deaths per year, suddenly we see zero. But also 10 extra choking deaths. "The Anti-Cancer Pill caused 10 people to choke to death this year. In contrast, 0 people died of cancer. 10 is much bigger than 0! Why hasn't this pill been banned immediately?"
- vixen99 5y ago
  You have a point to make and you choose your assumptions to make sure it's made.
  - Blackthorn 5y ago
    Yes, that's how communication works.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    What assumptions? It's a thought experiment showing off one end of the spectrum.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  Lockdown is different than a pill. Lockdown is more akin to a straight jacket. A more accurate analogy is only 20% of the population 55 or up is vulnerable to cancer. Now the government puts everyone in a straight jacket with no end in sight to keep that 20% safe. Now substitute the word cancer for covid and straight jacket for lockdown. More people die of car accidents yearly than died of covid in the 80% of the population that is below 55 years old. The average death from covid is 80 years old with multiple comorbidities. We appear to be totally fine as a society to let kids kill themselves to save unhealthy old people. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
klyrs 5y ago
So 111 excess suicides, versus 64k covid deaths in California. Classic trolley problem. Even if we did prioritize the hundred over the thousands, I see ending lockdowns, but what's your justification for ending mask policies and testing?
- jackson1442 5y ago
  Not to mention that suicide has been trending up, so even if there wasn’t COVID, not all of those lives would be saved.
geofft 5y ago
"Died of lockdown" is attributing causation in a way that this paper does not attempt to justify. Even if there is a causal relationship, there's not enough evidence to conclude that it's a direct causal relationship between lockdown and suicide, let alone between masks/testing and suicide (what?). For instance, I'd bet that at least a few of the excess deaths are from harmful parents - whether physically abusive, intolerant of something about their kid's identity, etc. In my social circles I know a whole lot of people who have a strained if not nonexistent relationship with their parents and for whom leaving home for college quite literally saved their life. I can easily see a loss of hope for students in their final years of high school, and the study also includes 18-25-year-olds - which includes students who had already moved to dorms and were then sent home. These kids probably could have survived lockdown just fine, were they living on their own or in a supportive household. They just didn't survive their parents. The causal relationship is that we instituted lockdown without any regard for harmful family situations. It seems both possible and ethical to study statements made by people who died by suicide (suicide notes, public social media posts, statements to friends, etc.), and I think that would be a lot more scientifically useful for the cause of preventing suicide than assuming that the reason was that they didn't like lockdown per se.
jstepka 5y ago
i agree with you. folks over 65 and 40% BMI got their go in life. prioritizing around the make makes more sense to me. thankfully the lockdowns are no stomach anymore in most of the states. a visit to an airport and any city not in california or ny and you can see and feel the difference in an instant.
slipframe 5y ago
My guess is lockdowns and school closures probably drive substantially more suicides than masks and testing. I doubt the latter two move the needle much.
jwilber 5y ago
“Died of lockdown” - choice word “of” and not “during”, completely ignoring the myriad confounding variables going on during this one year period (eg social media changes). Regarding the lockdown comment, again I’ll write that things don’t exist in a vacuum- optimizing policy over a demographic with 23 deaths, at the expense of demographics with hundreds of thousands of deaths, is probably not a trade many politicians/public health officials/etc think is good. But who knows, maybe guy-in-the-chat knows better. Should probably brush up on his basic stats first, though!.
kube-system 5y ago
Yes, if you do the math, the difference is a whopping 3 people. Basically, well within a statistical margin of error, and this is if we (wrongly) assume that the trend is 100% due to COVID. Meanwhile, COVID affects other populations at a much greater degree. So, no statistical change in harm to children, and a much greater benefit for adults. That's why the restrictions make sense.
frakkingcylons 5y ago
See the thing about COVID is that you can spread it to other people who are much more likely to die. > Why havn't all restrictions across the land (including masks and endless testing) ceased immediately? "across the land"? What kind of medieval clown talk is that lol
rossdavidh 5y ago
Well, lockdowns have ended in most places. Even in Michigan, which had the last big spike in the U.S. (so far), the governor decided not to use a lockdown. Now this may have been primarily because it didn't appear to have had much beneficial impact; this is further supported by the fact that Michigan's last spike ended just as quickly as the prior ones when there were lockdowns. However, it may be that the impact on mental health had some influence over the governor's decision. Our society hadn't really dealt with a pandemic of this size since 1919 (although that one was far bigger), and hadn't dealt with a pandemic of any significant size since 1968, so clearly we did some things wrong. It's kind of like a military which has not fought a war in decades; you can expect them to not be very good at strategy for the first year. By the way, masks and "endless testing" do not cause anywhere remotely as much stress as lockdowns, I don't believe.
verytrivial 5y ago
Umm .. 24% increase to 134 means, what, 26 extra deaths? And how many more than 23 would have died due to COVID without mitigations (quite aside from teenagers being vectors.) So you are saying entirely lift all mitigations due to a couple of dozen (very sad) deaths in the middle of literally 100s of thousands of deaths, and also exclude e.g. reduction in other deaths due to reduced transport and other infections. So, yeah, the restrictions haven't been immediately lifted because that would be entirely unjustified.

aplummer 5y ago

Well 1. because it’s only due to the masks and endless testing the Covid death count is so low 2. Without the masks and endless testing, young people would infect many many older people, creating even more deaths This isn’t a conspiracy. Doctors do want the least number of deaths in the community.

kansface 5y ago
No, emphatically, no, our doctors and our health care institutions did not act to minimize deaths! See for example the distribution of vaccines which did not go to demographics in proportion to their risk. It is totally unimaginable to me that men would ever be prioritized over women even when they are 60% of the fatalities in the US with similar stats for long term hospitalization. I haven’t done the math, but that surely cost us thousands or possibly tens of thousands of lives. Instead, we get endless reports in the media about how the pandemic has been hard on women! I accept that it has been hard on women, but you know, it’s at been fatal to 50% more men! Could you imagine the reporting and response if the situation were reversed? It’s a similar story for distribution to other sub populations as well, and the same basic story over and over - health care in the us is subject to politics and the politics of the health care providers themselves, typically to the detriment of all of us.
- Izkata 5y ago
  > No, emphatically, no, our doctors and our health care institutions did not act to minimize deaths! Some tried, but yeah, mostly it's been suppressed by politics: The MATH+ protocol would've cut the death rate to about 1/3 what it currently is, but it isn't well-known because of artificial controversy over some of the drugs it uses.
- btilly 5y ago
  It is worth noting that your facts are basically right. Studies like https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31748-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... say that men die more than women do, and therefore targeting men first would have saved lives. Of course failing to target men more heavily was not as egregious as making it available to essential workers at the same time as older people to create more racial equity in who got the vaccine. Even though the CDC figures said that targeting older people first would have saved more lives, and even more minority lives. See https://reason.com/2020/12/18/vaccine-cdc-essential-workers-elderly-racial-covid-19/ https://reason.com/2020/12/18/vaccine-cdc-essential-workers-... for more on that topic. And, of course, a lot of people simply showed up, said they delivered for DoorDash, and got the vaccine. Knowing that nobody would check up on them. There is an element of sometimes ugly politics to this. :-(
  - aplummer 5y ago
    Even in the abstract it says that hypothesis based on risk factors (which are accounted for in distribution) are the underlying cause of this distinction. As well, this is analysis after the fact, and not at the time of the decision making - totally different. So parent is emphatically wrong.
    - btilly 5y ago
      The article that I pointed to predated the vaccines by a number of months. So it is not analysis after the fact. The Reason article that I pointed to is at the same time as the CDC policy, and pointed out that other countries were adopting a different policy at the same time. Again not analysis after the fact. The grandparent comment is more strongly stated than I would agree with. But not wrong.
- xf1cf 5y ago
  This is correct but a little ranty. Men have consistently surpassed women in both suicide attempts and suicides (see upthread for statistics) but no one seems to care. This "why won't someone think of the women" politicking is all too common these days when in fact focusing on the highest risk group (teenage boys) would probably save more lives on an absolute scale. The same goes for COVID which has an outsized effect on men when compared to women. We are several decades away at this rate from getting our boys better help in school, mental health support, and other things that society seems to think they don't need.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
>Doctors do want the least number of deaths in the community. Like how they won the Nobel prize for lobotomies in the seventies? Doctors would take out sections of women's and kids brains to make them quieter so your house wife talked back less and unruly kids would calm down. And it had a 14% mortality rate That's not a conspiracy that's documented fact. It's logical fallacy called 'appeal to authority' that Doctors/Experts are these angels that have no agenda and just want what's best for us. They can be wrong and are quite often. There's absolutely no evidence for either of the points you're making. If what you're saying wasn't a mainstream narrative it could be considered a conspiracy theory. The only difference between religion and a cult is mainstream acceptance. Most of the country has lifted covid restrictions fully and we're only at 40%ish vaccination rate. If you were correct and mask usage was effective we would see infection surges instead of RECORD LOW numbers of covid cases all over the country. All of it was medical theater and was never necessary to begin with there's no proof otherwise. It's okay to admit you were wrong and light of new evidence.

simondw 5y ago

Imagine a pill that completely cures cancer, 100% of the time. But maybe one in a million pills gets stuck in someone's throat and they choke to death. So instead of 10 million cancer deaths per year, suddenly we see zero. But also 10 extra choking deaths. "The Anti-Cancer Pill caused 10 people to choke to death this year. In contrast, 0 people died of cancer. 10 is much bigger than 0! Why hasn't this pill been banned immediately?"

vixen99 5y ago
You have a point to make and you choose your assumptions to make sure it's made.
- Blackthorn 5y ago
  Yes, that's how communication works.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  What assumptions? It's a thought experiment showing off one end of the spectrum.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
Lockdown is different than a pill. Lockdown is more akin to a straight jacket. A more accurate analogy is only 20% of the population 55 or up is vulnerable to cancer. Now the government puts everyone in a straight jacket with no end in sight to keep that 20% safe. Now substitute the word cancer for covid and straight jacket for lockdown. More people die of car accidents yearly than died of covid in the 80% of the population that is below 55 years old. The average death from covid is 80 years old with multiple comorbidities. We appear to be totally fine as a society to let kids kill themselves to save unhealthy old people. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/
- Dylan16807 5y ago

klyrs 5y ago

So 111 excess suicides, versus 64k covid deaths in California. Classic trolley problem. Even if we did prioritize the hundred over the thousands, I see ending lockdowns, but what's your justification for ending mask policies and testing?

jackson1442 5y ago
Not to mention that suicide has been trending up, so even if there wasn’t COVID, not all of those lives would be saved.

geofft 5y ago

"Died of lockdown" is attributing causation in a way that this paper does not attempt to justify. Even if there is a causal relationship, there's not enough evidence to conclude that it's a direct causal relationship between lockdown and suicide, let alone between masks/testing and suicide (what?). For instance, I'd bet that at least a few of the excess deaths are from harmful parents - whether physically abusive, intolerant of something about their kid's identity, etc. In my social circles I know a whole lot of people who have a strained if not nonexistent relationship with their parents and for whom leaving home for college quite literally saved their life. I can easily see a loss of hope for students in their final years of high school, and the study also includes 18-25-year-olds - which includes students who had already moved to dorms and were then sent home. These kids probably could have survived lockdown just fine, were they living on their own or in a supportive household. They just didn't survive their parents. The causal relationship is that we instituted lockdown without any regard for harmful family situations. It seems both possible and ethical to study statements made by people who died by suicide (suicide notes, public social media posts, statements to friends, etc.), and I think that would be a lot more scientifically useful for the cause of preventing suicide than assuming that the reason was that they didn't like lockdown per se.

jstepka 5y ago

i agree with you. folks over 65 and 40% BMI got their go in life. prioritizing around the make makes more sense to me. thankfully the lockdowns are no stomach anymore in most of the states. a visit to an airport and any city not in california or ny and you can see and feel the difference in an instant.

slipframe 5y ago

My guess is lockdowns and school closures probably drive substantially more suicides than masks and testing. I doubt the latter two move the needle much.

jwilber 5y ago

“Died of lockdown” - choice word “of” and not “during”, completely ignoring the myriad confounding variables going on during this one year period (eg social media changes). Regarding the lockdown comment, again I’ll write that things don’t exist in a vacuum- optimizing policy over a demographic with 23 deaths, at the expense of demographics with hundreds of thousands of deaths, is probably not a trade many politicians/public health officials/etc think is good. But who knows, maybe guy-in-the-chat knows better. Should probably brush up on his basic stats first, though!.

kube-system 5y ago

Yes, if you do the math, the difference is a whopping 3 people. Basically, well within a statistical margin of error, and this is if we (wrongly) assume that the trend is 100% due to COVID. Meanwhile, COVID affects other populations at a much greater degree. So, no statistical change in harm to children, and a much greater benefit for adults. That's why the restrictions make sense.

frakkingcylons 5y ago

See the thing about COVID is that you can spread it to other people who are much more likely to die. > Why havn't all restrictions across the land (including masks and endless testing) ceased immediately? "across the land"? What kind of medieval clown talk is that lol

rossdavidh 5y ago

Well, lockdowns have ended in most places. Even in Michigan, which had the last big spike in the U.S. (so far), the governor decided not to use a lockdown. Now this may have been primarily because it didn't appear to have had much beneficial impact; this is further supported by the fact that Michigan's last spike ended just as quickly as the prior ones when there were lockdowns. However, it may be that the impact on mental health had some influence over the governor's decision. Our society hadn't really dealt with a pandemic of this size since 1919 (although that one was far bigger), and hadn't dealt with a pandemic of any significant size since 1968, so clearly we did some things wrong. It's kind of like a military which has not fought a war in decades; you can expect them to not be very good at strategy for the first year. By the way, masks and "endless testing" do not cause anywhere remotely as much stress as lockdowns, I don't believe.

verytrivial 5y ago

Umm .. 24% increase to 134 means, what, 26 extra deaths? And how many more than 23 would have died due to COVID without mitigations (quite aside from teenagers being vectors.) So you are saying entirely lift all mitigations due to a couple of dozen (very sad) deaths in the middle of literally 100s of thousands of deaths, and also exclude e.g. reduction in other deaths due to reduced transport and other infections. So, yeah, the restrictions haven't been immediately lifted because that would be entirely unjustified.