6 ms·
Mortality isn't the only negative outcome.
by howinteresting 5y ago
Mortality isn't the only negative outcome.
- bobthechef 5y agoIndeed, and the lockdown and other impositions have introduced numerous ills that don't necessarily register, at least not immediately, as deaths.
- spookthesunset 5y agoWhat about all the negative outcomes from continuing all the restrictions?
- xg15 5y agoStill less severe than long covid, sorry.
- adolph 5y agoPersistence of various symptoms in people who recovered from COVID-19 (collectively called Long COVID) is a major health issue worldwide. It could be due to various mechanisms such as post-intensive care syndrome, post-viral fatigue syndrome, permanent organ damage or others. Proper clinical evaluation will help identify the etiology, and to customize treatment. As the disease is new, it is too early to know the true long-term outlook. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/
- howinteresting 5y agoI think mask mandates and ratcheting up the pressure to get vaccinated is a far better use of the "restriction budget" than full lockdowns on the entire population, yes. Lockdowns on people who aren't yet vaccinated by choice seem pretty great to me.
- spookthesunset 5y agoWhy should a vaccinated person wear a mask? Do vaccines not work? What is the point of getting one if I still have to wear a mask? Naw. Masks need to go away.
- howinteresting 5y agoIt's not binary.
- _djo_ 5y agoBecause all of these things work at population level, not necessarily at an individual level. Masks reduce the amount of aerosols a person emits, thereby reducing the distance and amount of viral particles an infected person can spread in any given situation. As a side benefit some masks protect the wearer to an extent, particularly N95s, but the main purpose is to reduce spread from infected people in the first place. Vaccines, similarly, are not a magic shield that protect you from even getting COVID. Instead, they dramatically reduce your likelihood of getting severely ill and being hospitalised and reduce the duration of disease therefore also reducing transmission. But that only works if enough people are vaccinated that the cumulative effect of that reduced transmission can meaningfully bring down the R0 value. This pandemic has exposed how few people are able to consider issues or questions at a broader community level versus merely how it affects them directly.
- ipaddr 5y agoYour living in delta but the vaccine doesn't help as much in this new variant era. That means lockdowns for all. Still sound great?
- 5y ago
- hogFeast 5y agoAnd lockdowns can cause mortality too. In England, the waiting list for operations (these are procedures that a doctor has determined are required medically, some are elective but England doesn't do many electives because of cost) is expected to hit 12m in a few years...the total adult population in England is 56m. Ignoring the economic turmoil that they cause, ignoring the social turmoil. There are no very good choices. But the high cost of lockdowns should dictate that they only be used when the alternative is extremely large numbers of people dying (at least in the UK, this was probably met at some point last year but hasn't been met for the majority of the Covid period).
- Pyramus 5y agoHow many people is "extremely large" in your opinion? And who? Or to put it another way: Would you be okay to go, while we keep everything open? How about your parent, or grand-parent?
- jseban 5y agoIsn't this exactly what measuring excess mortality is for? But it's not reported anymore since there is none, and media has instead shifted to infection rate. If you were old and had little time left, and had a compromised immune system that made any slight infection possibly lethal, and you had the choice to close down society to lower your risk of infection, would you do it?
- _djo_ 5y agoWhat? There has been significant excess mortality, as summarised here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... My own country alone has seen nearly 300 000 excess deaths compared to the annual average, with the waves of excess deaths neatly tracking those of known COVID infection waves.
- jseban 5y agoThis is exactly the problem, you're using an absolute number without reference "look big number = scary" and you are simply comparing to an average, which doesn't say anything about whether or not this is an unusual or especially different situation. "The temperature outside is 2 degrees higher than average". Ok what conclusions can you draw from that? Very little. Just because you make a big scary number without reference, doesn't allow you to jump to a conclusion out of fear, it's just manipulative misleading misinterpretation to make it look as scary as possible, to disable people's critical thinking and support a point that actually doesn't have any basis.
- boringg 5y agoYou should add Mortality + mortality in the following year. Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year.
- lbj 5y agoInteresting, I did not know. Have a source?
- user764743 5y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/01/severe-covid-infection-doubles-chances-of-dying-in-following-year-study https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/01/severe-covid-i...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JoshuaDavid 5y ago> Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year. I'm curious how those studies would disentangle the effect of "COVID damages your health, and severe COVID damages your health more so you're more likely to die in the next year" from the effect of "if you are in worse general health, a COVID infection is more likely to be severe, and also you are more likely to die in the next year". Even if you try to control for factors like age, sex, smoker vs nonsmoker, BMI, etc etc you're likely to miss something. But maybe they did something clever with their control group that serves as a good proxy for "people who would have had severe covid and survived, but didn't get infected". I'm interested to see which study you're referring to.
- boringg 5y agoAgree there are disentangling challenges. However if you think about it logically from a health perspective - if your respiratory system goes under severe stress that will likely exacerbate any respiratory issues that were in your system beforehand. It is surprising that the risk is so great for the following year, but not shocking considering how taxing this disease is on peoples health. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/severe-covid-tied-high-risk-death-mostly-other-causes-within-year https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/severe-c...
- Eelongate 5y agoIf the plan is to continue lockdowns until every last hypochondriac stops complaining about 'long covid', then lockdowns will never end. There needs to be a cutoff somewhere.
- airza 5y agoAs far as I know, the latest research says that more than half (!) of people experience fatigue and other symptoms after 6 months. I don’t know if lockdowns are the right solution, but if the modal outcome is chronic fatigue than it seems a little flippant to call someone a hypochondriac.
- arsome 5y agoA vague symptom like "fatigue" is also one of the most commonly reported symptoms of placebos.
- Eelongate 5y agoWhen people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are revealed to have never had covid in the first place. And anecdotally, every last person I personally know that claims long covid is a person I already knew to be a hypochondriac. I do believe some people will have lingering respiratory problems, as is the case for all viral respiratory illnesses. But I don't think there is much more to it than that, and I think most of the complaints come from the sort of people who always think they have the latest trendy affliction.
- xg15 5y ago> When people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are revealed to have never had covid in the first place. Source?
- leesalminen 5y agohttps://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...