4 ms·
The combo tradeoff between saving tens of thousands of lives of people who had, on average, 6-12 months of life expectancy, versus potentially shortening the li
by smeej 4y ago
The combo tradeoff between saving tens of thousands of lives of people who had, on average, 6-12 months of life expectancy, versus potentially shortening the lives of millions or billions of people by only months or weeks, and not seeing those effects for 70-80 years, seems to have been part of the covid shutdown tradeoff calculation.
Granted, it has all the additional complication of the uncertainty of the real world, but there were a lot of claims of, "I can't believe you won't shut down for (weeks/months/years) to save grandma!"
I wonder, in the end, if those decisions will end up having saved or cost more total days of human life.
How many people's lives are you willing to shorten by even a week or a month due to increased stress to save the life of someone whose comorbidities will likely kill them in 6 months anyway?
- qsdf38100 4y agoWhy is saving grandma going to cost months of life expectancy to other people ?
- smeej 4y agoStress. The kind of social, personal, financial stress people experienced, especially the "essential workers" who had to continue working in person, or people who were already struggling to make ends meet who suddenly didn't get paid what they were expecting, went through significant life stress events. Or around the world, millions of additional people have been added to the ranks of the "food insecure," who now run increased risk of malnourishment and starvation. There's certainly an extremely privileged cohort, probably heavily represented on HN, for whom transitioning to WFH was no big deal or actually a benefit, but we're still feeling the effects of supply chain disruptions even in the wealthiest countries, and there are millions (billions?) of people whose lives are much more severely impacted.
- qsdf38100 4y agoBeing 70 yo makes you high risk wrt Covid, but it doesn’t mean you have a life expectancy of 6-12 months. You must confuse with terminally ill cancer patients. Where are your numbers coming from?
- smeej 4y ago"High risk," yes, but when they were reporting on people who were actually dying of covid, for most of the first year, the data was that it was people with comorbidities, people who already had significant health conditions. It wasn't the 70yo marathoners who were dying. It was the ones who had CHF or COPD and obesity who were. (OF COURSE there are exceptions to this, but the majority of people who were dying were not otherwise healthy.)