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It was a hard thing to broach at the time without people frothing at the mouth about how I must be anti vaccine or something: Has there been any attempt to cal

It was a hard thing to broach at the time without people frothing at the mouth about how I must be anti vaccine or something: Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them? I’m guessing it’s hard to quantify and compare. A lot of things like general depression, isolation, kids missing half a year of school, etc. can’t really be evaluated against people dying. And on its surface it seems obvious: uh, people dying is much worse than any of those things. But if I said that everything we did was to save one life, people probably would generally agree it wasn’t worth it (obviously so: people don’t seem too interested in preventing all kinds of deaths at all costs). What about ten lives? One thousand? Ten thousand? There’s some subjective level where it starts to feel obvious to more and more of us, until a majority of us agree. But do we have any general sense what that number is? How do we decide how much to care? It might seem ghoulish to decide how many dollars is worth a life, but we do it every day. With the data we have now, I imagine we can somewhat quantify this given enough sample jurisdictions with different rules? “Masking saves x lives per 1000.” “Closing schools saves y lives per 1000” etc. And perhaps then we’re able to decide “is x lives worth the qualitative harm done?” Probably. “What about y?” Maybe not.

fhcuvuvuc 3y ago
It doesn't matter. You can't have these conversations without being censored anymore. My works HR department got sick of having people use "logic" and "evidence" to argue against their policies. After kicking a few people out the door and generally saying you can't talk about this at work anymore, nobody talks about it.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Thats the company’s choice to make. A workplace isn’t exactly meant to be a town square. Luckily my workplace was mature enough to decide to leave those topics for the pub and social media so we didn’t have to be told that.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- comte7092 3y ago
  People who use “logic” and “evidence” usually tend to do so in a manner so out of context and so obstinately, it tends to negative the validity of their points, at least that is my experience.
- nemo 3y ago
  >use "logic" and "evidence" to argue against their policies. Many times when folks who tell me they're presenting "logic" and "evidence" in a debate they're personally invested in there's grave flaws in both their logic and evidence presented. The freedom to intellectually debate HR's policies in a company is rightly limited, you can call it "censorship" but endless uninvited earnest debate about policies isn't really wanted or needed in the workplace.
  - hfuyf65 3y ago
    And this is where the resentment came from as well. It was always well understood that HR is not exactly there to help you, but I know I personally snapped at one drone ( and eventually quit ) over those inflexible policies dictated from clouds above. At the end of the day, you can always choose not to play. edit: I dont want to name the policy as it may identify the company. It was a particularly idiotic one though.
logicchains 3y ago
Yes, there are papers attempting that, such as this recent one, which looked at whether shelter in place policies reduced overall excess mortality: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737 . "Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates."
- vcdimension 3y ago
  There's also this one: https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature... which is summarised here: https://www.facebook.com/econometricsguru/posts/pfbid0wtvVjJGG69FA2R8Ahm8CfxgufbH6qVPd7U1EbSK6unAeuHcAbr9fCy4iKvM43qMjl https://www.facebook.com/econometricsguru/posts/pfbid0wtvVjJ...
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Almost nowhere on earth did "stay at home" actually happen. We all had these so-called mandates, but people (especially in more rural areas) pretty much did whatever the hell they wanted with no repercussions since there was almost zero enforcement. They were out and about, shopping for their khakis at "essential" businesses, eating at the restaurants who refused to closed (also with no consequence) and basically ignoring the mandates. We don't have a valid experiment group because everywhere was the control group.
  - taway_6PplYu5 3y ago
    I guess you weren't in Spain at the time. Or China.
  - nkurz 3y ago
    I presume you are right for where you are, but I don't think your experience was universal. I live in a rural part of Vermont. My impression is that the mandates here were generally well obeyed. No restaurants were open. Grocery shopping was very limited. Public social gatherings did not happen. Whether coincidence or not, we seem to also be one of the areas with relatively low Covid deaths.
brody_hamer 3y ago
In Canada (and likely elsewhere), there were a number of restrictions which were tied to hospital capacity. As the number of available ICU beds dropped: more restrictions were put in place, and vice versa. A lot of emphasis was placed on preventable deaths. That is; situations where we’re turning away a patient that we could’ve saved, because we don’t have a bed available for them. I thought this was a solid, intuitive approach. Preventable deaths are really, really unfortunate.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Yeah that approach really resonated with me as well. A very straightforward concept: how much capacity do we have for higher risk behaviour? And in this case the cut-off for higher risk may be “yeah we’re not going to hockey games for a while.”
  - robhunter 3y ago
    What data is there to suggest that going to hockey games was "high risk behaviour"?
    - jameshart 3y ago
      For individuals, it may not have been. Thousands of people going along to each game all with relatively low individual risk of contracting COVID. But if after every hockey game 20 hospital beds get used up, that's as risky for the health system as allowing a restaurant to serve uncooked chicken for an evening.
      - jonahhorowitz 3y ago
        The confounder for this is that there was a 2 week lag between the hockey game and cases showing up in the emergency room and we basically (outside of China) gave up on doing contact tracing, so nobody knows how people were specifically infected.
    - Waterluvian 3y ago
chpatrick 3y ago
I think that's kind of with the benefit of hindsight though. In 2020 we really didn't know if this stuff would kill everyone or just be a nuisance/deadly if you're vulnerable.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  We did know by April at least (IIRC basically right after that cruise ship docked). Wikipedia for example [0] had CFR stats broken down by age group showing it was basically a nuisance to people under 50 and only breaking 1% mortality for people over 60 (i.e. it didn't affect children or the working population, so closing schools was known at the time to be a stupid idea. IIRC Fox News were pointing this out at the time), and IIRC at the time the CDC was estimating ~30% asymptomatic cases, so an even lower IFR. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19&oldid=948581532 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19&oldid=94...
vcdimension 3y ago
Most people don't even know how to mentally frame the problem. It's the number of life years lost that matters, not the number of lives, e.g. the death of a child with their whole life before them is worse than the death of an elderly person who's already on deaths door. Current statitics focus solely on number of deaths rather than expected years of life lost so we can't even make a fair assessment of the trade-offs involved in different policies.
- tessierashpool 3y ago
  Most people don't even know how to mentally frame the problem. This is ironic in a comment otherwise concerned with death rates. The risk of disablement is much higher, as is the risk of sequelae.
  - vcdimension 3y ago
    Sorry, I should have said quality-adjusted life years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
slv77 3y ago
The cost-benefit calculations in terms of excess deaths are irrelevant. It was clear even during the initial outbreak that policymakers primary constraints were the due to uncertainty about the virus and limits on availability of protective gear and ICU beds. Without protective gear there was no way to reduce transmission without isolation and once ICU beds are at capacity mortality rates double and people are dying in the streets and the medical system collapses. There is no scenarios where the collapse of the medical system is a viable outcome for policymakers that is also compatible with a functioning economy. A collapse of the medical system means non-covid fatalities also increase. Heart attacks, car accidents and childbirth all become mortality contributors. The most likely outcome of a medical system collapse would be martial law, mass graves, economic collapse and potential collapse of essential systems like food distribution. The idea that policymakers were primarily constrained by the thought of grandpa dying a few years early and weighing it against the grandkids social isolation needs to die.
- loeg 3y ago
  Your argument is incoherent. You’re saying deaths is an irrelevant metric because actually the risk is the medical system collapses and you get … more deaths.
  - Blackthorn 3y ago
    No, they're saying that excess deaths is a rearward looking metric that nobody had the luxury of actually having at the present time when decisions were being made. It's very easy to make decisions in retrospect when you have all the information that could be useful. It's very hard to make decisions in the present when that information doesn't exist yet.
    - loeg 3y ago
      Obviously rearward looking metrics were irrelevant and no one, including me, is suggesting otherwise. You can make policies with the goal of reducing deaths in advance of measurement, and policymakers did. The argument I am criticizing never mentions rearward metrics as a problem.
totetsu 3y ago
In the post truth era, the only rights answer is the one that serves one’s geopolitical goals. Don’t like China, look at what zéro Covid did to their economy. Don’t like America, look at all the people who died. Is it even possible to find an acceptable subjective answer when things are polarized?
Aeolun 3y ago
I think it’s a fairly simple equation for most people. “Am I going to be (negatively) affected by this?” And this was obviously true for COVID even from the start. The controversy occurred when people found out that they were definitely negatively affected by all the lockdown policies when they still hadn’t had COVID.
chaostheory 3y ago
You’d have a better argument if you cited the age population bomb where retired seniors are starting outnumber working adults. Today, most countries are not going to do lockdowns for Covid due to the data. That was temporary for a highly infectious airborne virus that we didn’t know much about at the time, which was overwhelming our hospitals. Today, no one is closing anything since we know much more about the virus, and it’s becoming less lethal. All people are asking today is for everyone to either regularly vaccinate, wear good masks indoors (no need for this outdoors), or both. That isn’t going to result in either isolation or depression.
shepherdjerred 3y ago
> There’s some subjective level where it starts to feel obvious to more and more of us, until a majority of us agree. I had this same thought during COVID, but like you said, it's not something others want to talk about. COVID was serious, but the American reaction to it was so strange. The whole approach to masking at restaurants has to be one of the most bizzare moments of American history.
felipeerias 3y ago
Some governments became drunk with power and ended up implementing authoritarian measures which were pretty obviously useless at actually stopping the virus. Stopping people from wandering the beach alone or sharing a car with their partner, for example. I am familiar with the case of Spain, but I’m sure in other countries the situation was similar.
isthispermanent 3y ago
Sweden
jalapenos 3y ago
This utilitarian reduce-to-numbers approach misses the important matter of the inevitability of death. In the grand scheme of things, all those who died purely from COVID were going to die anyway. A more important question is what has happened as a result of societies responses to this pandemic, especially in light of how marginal this virus' lethality was (this was no plague). It has set precedent that in the case of relatively minor social distress, the government can take unlimited power, and the populace will just knod their heads. It has also set precedent that the old can parasitize the young even further. Saving a few boomers a few years is worth masking up young school kids, affecting their communicative and social development. The only silver lining to this has been the resulting explosion of remote work, which of course the boomers are now trying to undo. Fortunately, that's a cat-out-of-the-bag. It's unfortunate that the boomers didn't learn an important lesson from their parents, who fought WW2 - sometimes dying is the right and proud thing to do.
onthecanposting 3y ago
I think key investors and patent holders in mRNA technology, which had been until recently waz a significant sunk cost, had made some manner of cost-benefit analysis and were satisfied with the results.
Grimburger 3y ago
> Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them? In Australia there is huge pushback politically about holding an inquiry to determine what could be done better, a lot of politicians hid behind faceless "health advice" for their actions that wouldn't last a minute when the public servants involved face an inquiry. Current estimates of the jobkeeper program put it at $110,000 per job saved, in comparison to the median wage of $52,338. Basically all of it went into the pockets of big companies rather than paid directly to people. That was just one of many programs at the time, debt blew out by hundreds of billions which the populace on both sides strangely cheered on.
alan-crowe 3y ago
People grow old and die. It takes about seventy years. Thoroughly wasting a year of everybody's lives is equivalent to 1.4% mortality.
- tempestn 3y ago
  Living under some restrictions for a year is not equivalent to having a year deleted from your life.

fhcuvuvuc 3y ago

It doesn't matter. You can't have these conversations without being censored anymore. My works HR department got sick of having people use "logic" and "evidence" to argue against their policies. After kicking a few people out the door and generally saying you can't talk about this at work anymore, nobody talks about it.

Waterluvian 3y ago
Thats the company’s choice to make. A workplace isn’t exactly meant to be a town square. Luckily my workplace was mature enough to decide to leave those topics for the pub and social media so we didn’t have to be told that.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
comte7092 3y ago
People who use “logic” and “evidence” usually tend to do so in a manner so out of context and so obstinately, it tends to negative the validity of their points, at least that is my experience.
nemo 3y ago
>use "logic" and "evidence" to argue against their policies. Many times when folks who tell me they're presenting "logic" and "evidence" in a debate they're personally invested in there's grave flaws in both their logic and evidence presented. The freedom to intellectually debate HR's policies in a company is rightly limited, you can call it "censorship" but endless uninvited earnest debate about policies isn't really wanted or needed in the workplace.
- hfuyf65 3y ago
  And this is where the resentment came from as well. It was always well understood that HR is not exactly there to help you, but I know I personally snapped at one drone ( and eventually quit ) over those inflexible policies dictated from clouds above. At the end of the day, you can always choose not to play. edit: I dont want to name the policy as it may identify the company. It was a particularly idiotic one though.

logicchains 3y ago

Yes, there are papers attempting that, such as this recent one, which looked at whether shelter in place policies reduced overall excess mortality: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737 . "Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates."

vcdimension 3y ago
There's also this one: https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature... which is summarised here: https://www.facebook.com/econometricsguru/posts/pfbid0wtvVjJGG69FA2R8Ahm8CfxgufbH6qVPd7U1EbSK6unAeuHcAbr9fCy4iKvM43qMjl https://www.facebook.com/econometricsguru/posts/pfbid0wtvVjJ...
ryandrake 3y ago
Almost nowhere on earth did "stay at home" actually happen. We all had these so-called mandates, but people (especially in more rural areas) pretty much did whatever the hell they wanted with no repercussions since there was almost zero enforcement. They were out and about, shopping for their khakis at "essential" businesses, eating at the restaurants who refused to closed (also with no consequence) and basically ignoring the mandates. We don't have a valid experiment group because everywhere was the control group.
- taway_6PplYu5 3y ago
  I guess you weren't in Spain at the time. Or China.
- nkurz 3y ago
  I presume you are right for where you are, but I don't think your experience was universal. I live in a rural part of Vermont. My impression is that the mandates here were generally well obeyed. No restaurants were open. Grocery shopping was very limited. Public social gatherings did not happen. Whether coincidence or not, we seem to also be one of the areas with relatively low Covid deaths.

brody_hamer 3y ago

In Canada (and likely elsewhere), there were a number of restrictions which were tied to hospital capacity. As the number of available ICU beds dropped: more restrictions were put in place, and vice versa. A lot of emphasis was placed on preventable deaths. That is; situations where we’re turning away a patient that we could’ve saved, because we don’t have a bed available for them. I thought this was a solid, intuitive approach. Preventable deaths are really, really unfortunate.

Waterluvian 3y ago
Yeah that approach really resonated with me as well. A very straightforward concept: how much capacity do we have for higher risk behaviour? And in this case the cut-off for higher risk may be “yeah we’re not going to hockey games for a while.”
- robhunter 3y ago
  What data is there to suggest that going to hockey games was "high risk behaviour"?
  - jameshart 3y ago
    For individuals, it may not have been. Thousands of people going along to each game all with relatively low individual risk of contracting COVID. But if after every hockey game 20 hospital beds get used up, that's as risky for the health system as allowing a restaurant to serve uncooked chicken for an evening.
    - jonahhorowitz 3y ago
      The confounder for this is that there was a 2 week lag between the hockey game and cases showing up in the emergency room and we basically (outside of China) gave up on doing contact tracing, so nobody knows how people were specifically infected.
  - Waterluvian 3y ago

chpatrick 3y ago

I think that's kind of with the benefit of hindsight though. In 2020 we really didn't know if this stuff would kill everyone or just be a nuisance/deadly if you're vulnerable.

ndriscoll 3y ago
We did know by April at least (IIRC basically right after that cruise ship docked). Wikipedia for example [0] had CFR stats broken down by age group showing it was basically a nuisance to people under 50 and only breaking 1% mortality for people over 60 (i.e. it didn't affect children or the working population, so closing schools was known at the time to be a stupid idea. IIRC Fox News were pointing this out at the time), and IIRC at the time the CDC was estimating ~30% asymptomatic cases, so an even lower IFR. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19&oldid=948581532 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19&oldid=94...

vcdimension 3y ago

Most people don't even know how to mentally frame the problem. It's the number of life years lost that matters, not the number of lives, e.g. the death of a child with their whole life before them is worse than the death of an elderly person who's already on deaths door. Current statitics focus solely on number of deaths rather than expected years of life lost so we can't even make a fair assessment of the trade-offs involved in different policies.

tessierashpool 3y ago
Most people don't even know how to mentally frame the problem. This is ironic in a comment otherwise concerned with death rates. The risk of disablement is much higher, as is the risk of sequelae.
- vcdimension 3y ago
  Sorry, I should have said quality-adjusted life years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

slv77 3y ago

The cost-benefit calculations in terms of excess deaths are irrelevant. It was clear even during the initial outbreak that policymakers primary constraints were the due to uncertainty about the virus and limits on availability of protective gear and ICU beds. Without protective gear there was no way to reduce transmission without isolation and once ICU beds are at capacity mortality rates double and people are dying in the streets and the medical system collapses. There is no scenarios where the collapse of the medical system is a viable outcome for policymakers that is also compatible with a functioning economy. A collapse of the medical system means non-covid fatalities also increase. Heart attacks, car accidents and childbirth all become mortality contributors. The most likely outcome of a medical system collapse would be martial law, mass graves, economic collapse and potential collapse of essential systems like food distribution. The idea that policymakers were primarily constrained by the thought of grandpa dying a few years early and weighing it against the grandkids social isolation needs to die.

loeg 3y ago
Your argument is incoherent. You’re saying deaths is an irrelevant metric because actually the risk is the medical system collapses and you get … more deaths.
- Blackthorn 3y ago
  No, they're saying that excess deaths is a rearward looking metric that nobody had the luxury of actually having at the present time when decisions were being made. It's very easy to make decisions in retrospect when you have all the information that could be useful. It's very hard to make decisions in the present when that information doesn't exist yet.
  - loeg 3y ago
    Obviously rearward looking metrics were irrelevant and no one, including me, is suggesting otherwise. You can make policies with the goal of reducing deaths in advance of measurement, and policymakers did. The argument I am criticizing never mentions rearward metrics as a problem.

totetsu 3y ago

In the post truth era, the only rights answer is the one that serves one’s geopolitical goals. Don’t like China, look at what zéro Covid did to their economy. Don’t like America, look at all the people who died. Is it even possible to find an acceptable subjective answer when things are polarized?

Aeolun 3y ago

I think it’s a fairly simple equation for most people. “Am I going to be (negatively) affected by this?” And this was obviously true for COVID even from the start. The controversy occurred when people found out that they were definitely negatively affected by all the lockdown policies when they still hadn’t had COVID.

chaostheory 3y ago

You’d have a better argument if you cited the age population bomb where retired seniors are starting outnumber working adults. Today, most countries are not going to do lockdowns for Covid due to the data. That was temporary for a highly infectious airborne virus that we didn’t know much about at the time, which was overwhelming our hospitals. Today, no one is closing anything since we know much more about the virus, and it’s becoming less lethal. All people are asking today is for everyone to either regularly vaccinate, wear good masks indoors (no need for this outdoors), or both. That isn’t going to result in either isolation or depression.

shepherdjerred 3y ago

> There’s some subjective level where it starts to feel obvious to more and more of us, until a majority of us agree. I had this same thought during COVID, but like you said, it's not something others want to talk about. COVID was serious, but the American reaction to it was so strange. The whole approach to masking at restaurants has to be one of the most bizzare moments of American history.

felipeerias 3y ago

Some governments became drunk with power and ended up implementing authoritarian measures which were pretty obviously useless at actually stopping the virus. Stopping people from wandering the beach alone or sharing a car with their partner, for example. I am familiar with the case of Spain, but I’m sure in other countries the situation was similar.

isthispermanent 3y ago

Sweden

jalapenos 3y ago

This utilitarian reduce-to-numbers approach misses the important matter of the inevitability of death. In the grand scheme of things, all those who died purely from COVID were going to die anyway. A more important question is what has happened as a result of societies responses to this pandemic, especially in light of how marginal this virus' lethality was (this was no plague). It has set precedent that in the case of relatively minor social distress, the government can take unlimited power, and the populace will just knod their heads. It has also set precedent that the old can parasitize the young even further. Saving a few boomers a few years is worth masking up young school kids, affecting their communicative and social development. The only silver lining to this has been the resulting explosion of remote work, which of course the boomers are now trying to undo. Fortunately, that's a cat-out-of-the-bag. It's unfortunate that the boomers didn't learn an important lesson from their parents, who fought WW2 - sometimes dying is the right and proud thing to do.

onthecanposting 3y ago

I think key investors and patent holders in mRNA technology, which had been until recently waz a significant sunk cost, had made some manner of cost-benefit analysis and were satisfied with the results.

Grimburger 3y ago

> Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them? In Australia there is huge pushback politically about holding an inquiry to determine what could be done better, a lot of politicians hid behind faceless "health advice" for their actions that wouldn't last a minute when the public servants involved face an inquiry. Current estimates of the jobkeeper program put it at $110,000 per job saved, in comparison to the median wage of $52,338. Basically all of it went into the pockets of big companies rather than paid directly to people. That was just one of many programs at the time, debt blew out by hundreds of billions which the populace on both sides strangely cheered on.

alan-crowe 3y ago

People grow old and die. It takes about seventy years. Thoroughly wasting a year of everybody's lives is equivalent to 1.4% mortality.

tempestn 3y ago
Living under some restrictions for a year is not equivalent to having a year deleted from your life.