5 ms·

I'd happily trade a 10x higher death rate (to a high of 0.014%, mostly among people who weren't far off from dying anyways) in exchange for everyone having 2 ye

I'd happily trade a 10x higher death rate (to a high of 0.014%, mostly among people who weren't far off from dying anyways) in exchange for everyone having 2 years of having a non-miserable life. I know it's incredibly taboo to say something like this; but people are completely overvaluing the impact of the few absolute numbers of deaths, vs. the much harder to quantify widespread misery caused by these overreactions to the situation.

emmelaich 5y ago
Scott Alexander has a great post on this https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness... and a follow-up: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writing-the-lockdown https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writi...
- kenneth 5y ago
  The key takeaway I had from Scott's post was this stat: >It takes people ~50 months of strict lockdown to save one month of someone's healthy life. Or another way to look at it, it takes 50 people locking down for a month to save each one month of life expectancy for one person. 600 people locking down to save a single person's life expectancy by one year. 6000 people for 10 years of life expectancy for a single person. Whether that's worth the misery is up to the reader. I have my own opinion here, but it's undeniably subjective. It's a trade-off.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    Another way of looking at it: those telling us that we must lockdown seem to not even try to think about it from any perspective other than simply saving lives, regardless of consequences. Every year my confidence and trust in politicians and any expert with a role in setting policies gets lower.
    - choward 5y ago
      See Goodhart's law. > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
jkhdigital 5y ago
Hey, you said it! I’ve been waiting for a comment like this. I always have to go back to Frederic Bastiat, the “seen and unseen”: Covid deaths are visible. Effects of lockdowns, not so much, especially as they play out over the ensuing years (observable effects on children can be particularly delayed).
nmfisher 5y ago
At the risk of having everyone jump down my throat for saying it, I feel very much the same. I'm consciously aware of how many (or how few) years I have left, and I would never have agreed to losing two of them by not being able to see my family (including 2 babies born) in that time). I don't really have a problem with social distancing/masks/quarantine/etc, but locking people in their homes (and locking people out of their countries) was entirely too much. "Living" shouldn't have been treated as just a transmission vector for COVID.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
foxylad 5y ago
Your higher death rate comes with these exciting free add-ons! - significant loss in productivity due to varying levels of incapacitation from Covid19 - additional loss in productivity due to cautious people isolating anyway - new strains due to more mutations of the virus Also delta seems to be killing young people better, so we're not talking about "disposable" old people any more. And I won't be suprised if we have an epidemic of early-onset Alzheimers in ten years time.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>new strains due to more mutations of the virus How much does one country having slightly more transmission affect the global mutation rate? >>Also delta seems to be killing young people better, so we're not talking about "disposable" old people any more. Do you have a source on this? In England, the data indicates otherwise: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/29/who-is-most-at-risk-from-the-delta-variant.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/29/who-is-most-at-risk-from... >>Nonetheless, the data showed that there have been 117 deaths among people in England who had the delta variant with the majority being in the over-50 age group. >>There have been eight fatalities among the under-50s with six of them in unvaccinated individuals and the other two in people who had received one dose.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
Slatestar Codex did an interesting look at it. The entire thread is worth a read. It's taken a little out of context as he's just joking and playing around with numbers but still interesting to think about. """ Suppose you reopened the economy tomorrow. You tried as hard as you could to put profits above people, squeezed every extra dollar out of the world regardless of human cost. And then you put a 1% tax on all that economic activity, and donated it to effective charity. Would that save more people than a strict lockdown? If a lockdown costs $5 trillion, then the 1% tax would make $50 billion. That’s about how much the Gates Foundation has spent, and they’ve saved about ten million lives. Ten million is higher than anyone expects US coronavirus deaths to be, so as far as I can tell this is a good deal. """" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-when-all-you-have-is-a-hammer-everything-starts-looking-like-a-dance/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-wh...
eitland 5y ago
My biggest problem with all this is the thought that have got rid of this entire virus by being a little more strict. Norway was down to 0-5 infections a day last summer even when the society was open. Then we opened the door for foreign workers (and not a bad thing about them) and the industry who had promised to take care of quarantines etc failed so hard that all of a sudden wehad another wave. I'm moderately conservative but disappointed with both conservative politicians and rhe industry for this.
snowwrestler 5y ago
It’s incredibly easy to trade statistical deaths for statistical happiness. Ask yourself instead if you would be willing to kill yourself and your family if you knew it would make your neighbors happy. Sounds aggressive, I know. But it’s a solid way to illustrate that there are real people behind statistics. If 10x more people die, “everyone” is not going to have 2 years of a non-miserable life. The people who lose their spouses, parents, friends, children, etc will be horrifically miserable. It’s easy to trade lives when you assume you won’t be one of those people (or worse, one of the prematurely deceased).
- kenneth 5y ago
  Actually, I do trade the statistical risk of killing myself for some statistically greater benefit pretty much every single day and every action I take, from driving a car, to traveling for work, to any number of recreational activities like surfing or skiing. Your argument is the precise fallacy I'm arguing against — risks and benefits should be quantified and weighed. The fact that it takes 50 man-months of quarantine to avoid a single one-month earlier than expected death, to me, is absolutely not worth it. Perhaps you think locking up 50 innocent people to give someone an extra month is worth it. I don't. But I do understand that it's a subjective assessment.
  - thebruce87m 5y ago
    “… each life cut short by 10 years on average” https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-potential-years-of-life-lost-to-covid-19 https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-...
    - kenneth 5y ago
      Yes, lock up 6000 people for one month to save one life that had 10 years left. Still not worth it to me.
      - thebruce87m 5y ago
        Ok, how many years would be worth it?
KingOfCoders 5y ago
The Holocaust was highly profitable to non-Jewish German people. "Hitlers Volksstaat", Aly, Götz
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  That's a really excellent, if depressing, book.
honzzz 5y ago
>> I'd happily trade a 10x higher death rate (to a high of 0.014%, mostly among people who weren't far off from dying anyways) in exchange for everyone having 2 years of having a non-miserable life. 1. I think you underestimate how much of that misery comes from the pandemic itself and not from the reaction to the pandemic. I live in a country that went back and forth between relatively strict lockdowns and almost complete opening up. Yet even during the opening up phase people were afraid it would inevitably cause another wave, many would not go to pubs or clubs, businesses were not thriving... 2. I think you might overestimate the misery, which depends on personality, details of the restrictions in a given country etc. I am sure many suffered under the restrictions and I do not want to diminish that. However, I live in a country where I could go out running or cycling and nobody would prohibit me from visiting my family or going for a walk with a friend even during the strictest lockdowns (I am actually surprised by some experiences mentioned here, like not being able to see new babies born in the family - I make a resolution to examine more carefully what people mean when they talk about "lockdowns"). And I could work from home, which greatly improved my quality of life. And I am not alone in this - we are saying with my introverted colleagues that the pandemic would be great if it was not for the illness. For me, basically all the stress comes from the fear that my parents of my grandmother could catch it or that I will catch it and have the bad luck of some long term problems. Virtually none of the stress comes from the restrictions. Again, I don't doubt that many do suffer, I just wanted to balance your view by a counter-view.
retsibsi 5y ago
You're not taking into account the misery caused by covid. Death is far from the only bad consequence of an unchecked pandemic
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
I don't think that choice was available. If you let the virus spread unchecked then people would have been locking themselves down. Cafes and restaurants were emptying in my area before the official lockdowns started. Even now with our (UK) lockdown over and high vaccination rates many people are still wary. Use of public transport is still way down.
ak_111 5y ago
To be clear about this, you are saying that if you wrote down a list of 100 of your close relatives, friends and co-workers that are above 60 years of age, you would happily trade "2 years of having a non miserable life", for the high statistical chance that 10 randomly selected individuals from the list will die? I think there is a cut-off at some point, but 10x more deaths is way above my threshold.
- kenneth 5y ago
  So, you're suggesting that 10% of all people over 60 years old died of Covid since this began? I would love to see you try to find me a source for this statistic. I'll wait…
  - ak_111 5y ago
    No, I am saying that roughly 1% of over-70s died of covid the last two years, then 10x that.
    - kenneth 5y ago
      Then you should maybe look at the context of what's being said — I was replying to a comment about Norway trading it's "10x lower" covid death rate with Sweden — where 0.014% of people died of Covid. Your numbers are beyond absurd. But let me quickly disprove it: this study[1] shows the infection fatality rate among patients 70 and older in Stockholm was 4.3%. So, even if every single person over 60 was infected and was actually 70+, then you'd still not have 10% of the people you know over 60 die. But obviously, 60 year olds are not all 70+, so their rate is lower, and not everyone gets infected (in Sweden so far, only about 10% of the country got infected) — so in your ridiculous example, it's over 50% likely that not a single one of the 100 people you listed dies in this contrived scenario. But please, show me the data that shows otherwise. [1]: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391be54f5d959ead9131edb771/infection-fatality-rate-covid-19-stockholm-technical-report.pdf https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391b...

emmelaich 5y ago

Scott Alexander has a great post on this https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness... and a follow-up: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writing-the-lockdown https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writi...

kenneth 5y ago
The key takeaway I had from Scott's post was this stat: >It takes people ~50 months of strict lockdown to save one month of someone's healthy life. Or another way to look at it, it takes 50 people locking down for a month to save each one month of life expectancy for one person. 600 people locking down to save a single person's life expectancy by one year. 6000 people for 10 years of life expectancy for a single person. Whether that's worth the misery is up to the reader. I have my own opinion here, but it's undeniably subjective. It's a trade-off.
- mistermann 5y ago
  Another way of looking at it: those telling us that we must lockdown seem to not even try to think about it from any perspective other than simply saving lives, regardless of consequences. Every year my confidence and trust in politicians and any expert with a role in setting policies gets lower.
  - choward 5y ago
    See Goodhart's law. > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

jkhdigital 5y ago

Hey, you said it! I’ve been waiting for a comment like this. I always have to go back to Frederic Bastiat, the “seen and unseen”: Covid deaths are visible. Effects of lockdowns, not so much, especially as they play out over the ensuing years (observable effects on children can be particularly delayed).

nmfisher 5y ago

At the risk of having everyone jump down my throat for saying it, I feel very much the same. I'm consciously aware of how many (or how few) years I have left, and I would never have agreed to losing two of them by not being able to see my family (including 2 babies born) in that time). I don't really have a problem with social distancing/masks/quarantine/etc, but locking people in their homes (and locking people out of their countries) was entirely too much. "Living" shouldn't have been treated as just a transmission vector for COVID.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

foxylad 5y ago

Your higher death rate comes with these exciting free add-ons! - significant loss in productivity due to varying levels of incapacitation from Covid19 - additional loss in productivity due to cautious people isolating anyway - new strains due to more mutations of the virus Also delta seems to be killing young people better, so we're not talking about "disposable" old people any more. And I won't be suprised if we have an epidemic of early-onset Alzheimers in ten years time.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>new strains due to more mutations of the virus How much does one country having slightly more transmission affect the global mutation rate? >>Also delta seems to be killing young people better, so we're not talking about "disposable" old people any more. Do you have a source on this? In England, the data indicates otherwise: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/29/who-is-most-at-risk-from-the-delta-variant.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/29/who-is-most-at-risk-from... >>Nonetheless, the data showed that there have been 117 deaths among people in England who had the delta variant with the majority being in the over-50 age group. >>There have been eight fatalities among the under-50s with six of them in unvaccinated individuals and the other two in people who had received one dose.

nickthemagicman 5y ago

Slatestar Codex did an interesting look at it. The entire thread is worth a read. It's taken a little out of context as he's just joking and playing around with numbers but still interesting to think about. """ Suppose you reopened the economy tomorrow. You tried as hard as you could to put profits above people, squeezed every extra dollar out of the world regardless of human cost. And then you put a 1% tax on all that economic activity, and donated it to effective charity. Would that save more people than a strict lockdown? If a lockdown costs $5 trillion, then the 1% tax would make $50 billion. That’s about how much the Gates Foundation has spent, and they’ve saved about ten million lives. Ten million is higher than anyone expects US coronavirus deaths to be, so as far as I can tell this is a good deal. """" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-when-all-you-have-is-a-hammer-everything-starts-looking-like-a-dance/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-wh...

eitland 5y ago

My biggest problem with all this is the thought that have got rid of this entire virus by being a little more strict. Norway was down to 0-5 infections a day last summer even when the society was open. Then we opened the door for foreign workers (and not a bad thing about them) and the industry who had promised to take care of quarantines etc failed so hard that all of a sudden wehad another wave. I'm moderately conservative but disappointed with both conservative politicians and rhe industry for this.

snowwrestler 5y ago

It’s incredibly easy to trade statistical deaths for statistical happiness. Ask yourself instead if you would be willing to kill yourself and your family if you knew it would make your neighbors happy. Sounds aggressive, I know. But it’s a solid way to illustrate that there are real people behind statistics. If 10x more people die, “everyone” is not going to have 2 years of a non-miserable life. The people who lose their spouses, parents, friends, children, etc will be horrifically miserable. It’s easy to trade lives when you assume you won’t be one of those people (or worse, one of the prematurely deceased).

kenneth 5y ago
Actually, I do trade the statistical risk of killing myself for some statistically greater benefit pretty much every single day and every action I take, from driving a car, to traveling for work, to any number of recreational activities like surfing or skiing. Your argument is the precise fallacy I'm arguing against — risks and benefits should be quantified and weighed. The fact that it takes 50 man-months of quarantine to avoid a single one-month earlier than expected death, to me, is absolutely not worth it. Perhaps you think locking up 50 innocent people to give someone an extra month is worth it. I don't. But I do understand that it's a subjective assessment.
- thebruce87m 5y ago
  “… each life cut short by 10 years on average” https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-potential-years-of-life-lost-to-covid-19 https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-...
  - kenneth 5y ago
    Yes, lock up 6000 people for one month to save one life that had 10 years left. Still not worth it to me.
    - thebruce87m 5y ago
      Ok, how many years would be worth it?

KingOfCoders 5y ago

The Holocaust was highly profitable to non-Jewish German people. "Hitlers Volksstaat", Aly, Götz

anigbrowl 5y ago
That's a really excellent, if depressing, book.

honzzz 5y ago

>> I'd happily trade a 10x higher death rate (to a high of 0.014%, mostly among people who weren't far off from dying anyways) in exchange for everyone having 2 years of having a non-miserable life. 1. I think you underestimate how much of that misery comes from the pandemic itself and not from the reaction to the pandemic. I live in a country that went back and forth between relatively strict lockdowns and almost complete opening up. Yet even during the opening up phase people were afraid it would inevitably cause another wave, many would not go to pubs or clubs, businesses were not thriving... 2. I think you might overestimate the misery, which depends on personality, details of the restrictions in a given country etc. I am sure many suffered under the restrictions and I do not want to diminish that. However, I live in a country where I could go out running or cycling and nobody would prohibit me from visiting my family or going for a walk with a friend even during the strictest lockdowns (I am actually surprised by some experiences mentioned here, like not being able to see new babies born in the family - I make a resolution to examine more carefully what people mean when they talk about "lockdowns"). And I could work from home, which greatly improved my quality of life. And I am not alone in this - we are saying with my introverted colleagues that the pandemic would be great if it was not for the illness. For me, basically all the stress comes from the fear that my parents of my grandmother could catch it or that I will catch it and have the bad luck of some long term problems. Virtually none of the stress comes from the restrictions. Again, I don't doubt that many do suffer, I just wanted to balance your view by a counter-view.

retsibsi 5y ago

You're not taking into account the misery caused by covid. Death is far from the only bad consequence of an unchecked pandemic

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

I don't think that choice was available. If you let the virus spread unchecked then people would have been locking themselves down. Cafes and restaurants were emptying in my area before the official lockdowns started. Even now with our (UK) lockdown over and high vaccination rates many people are still wary. Use of public transport is still way down.

ak_111 5y ago

To be clear about this, you are saying that if you wrote down a list of 100 of your close relatives, friends and co-workers that are above 60 years of age, you would happily trade "2 years of having a non miserable life", for the high statistical chance that 10 randomly selected individuals from the list will die? I think there is a cut-off at some point, but 10x more deaths is way above my threshold.

kenneth 5y ago
So, you're suggesting that 10% of all people over 60 years old died of Covid since this began? I would love to see you try to find me a source for this statistic. I'll wait…
- ak_111 5y ago
  No, I am saying that roughly 1% of over-70s died of covid the last two years, then 10x that.
  - kenneth 5y ago
    Then you should maybe look at the context of what's being said — I was replying to a comment about Norway trading it's "10x lower" covid death rate with Sweden — where 0.014% of people died of Covid. Your numbers are beyond absurd. But let me quickly disprove it: this study[1] shows the infection fatality rate among patients 70 and older in Stockholm was 4.3%. So, even if every single person over 60 was infected and was actually 70+, then you'd still not have 10% of the people you know over 60 die. But obviously, 60 year olds are not all 70+, so their rate is lower, and not everyone gets infected (in Sweden so far, only about 10% of the country got infected) — so in your ridiculous example, it's over 50% likely that not a single one of the 100 people you listed dies in this contrived scenario. But please, show me the data that shows otherwise. [1]: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391be54f5d959ead9131edb771/infection-fatality-rate-covid-19-stockholm-technical-report.pdf https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391b...