The reality is that everyone is prepared to allow others to die for their own convenience. I intentionally phrased that harshly, but it is indisputably true. In the US, 70,000 people died from the influenza season of 2018-2019. We could have sharply reduced that through quarantine measures. But no one wants to do that.
Once you accept that everyone is prepared to allow others to die preventable deaths for their own convenience, then all you are talking about is a matter of degree. It can't be immoral to believe 1 death is okay, but 2 is wrong. That's just an opinion. The only difference between believing 70,000 is okay, and 700,000 is not is a gut feeling about how much preventable death is worth it to maintain our living standards.
This occurred in Italy, New York City, etc., and is now being seen in some cities in Texas and Florida. This condition is what incentivizes societies to lock down, not just the mere occurrence of a new disease.
If a society's healthcare system can handle a severe influx of serious Covid cases, then you typically have seen that government's restrictions lift.
Not Florida. An article from yesterday (https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/2020/06/18/florida-has-l...) ominously claims that "less than 25%" of ICU beds are available in the state, but actually read it and see that 90% occupancy rates are normal, and only a few of those in the ICU are COVID19 cases.
Texas? Let's look at Houston, where for a month it's been "we'll be running out of ICU beds in two weeks" every week.
Italian and New York hospitals were overwhelmed because a) both places put sick elderly into old age homes. b) Like elsewhere early on, doctors put everyone serious onto ventilators in a mistaken belief that they should treat patients like they do ARDS cases based on blood oxygen levels. This damaged healthy lung sacs and caused long-term dependence on mechanical respiration that doctors found almost impossible to wean patients from, and other side effects like deep vein thrombosis; Nick Cordero is a recent example. This article from three months ago (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...) was completely vindicated in retrospect.
(And even NYC being overwhelmed was thankfully temporary. That's why the military hospital ship sent there was not used.)
The mean time between symptoms and death is 14 days (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...). 99% of cases where people with COVID19 stay in the hospital for months is because of b), and neither a) nor b) is happening now.
I agree that there’s a lot to criticize in how NYC handled their hospitals, and that in a pinch hospitals in Texas and Florida can scrounge up extra beds. But those hospitals are filling up.
0: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/07/health/us-coronavirus-tuesday...
1: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5efcd4b7c5b612083c5618d0?...
2: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...
There are 306 ICUs in Florida (https://bi.ahca.myflorida.com/t/ABICC/views/Public/ICUBedsHo...). As of today, 16.8% of all ICU beds are available.
As I said, a 90% ICU load is normal; hospitals routinely transfer patients elsewhere to maximize utilization across as many facilities as possible. Again, only a small portion of ICU patients are there for COVID19, and a good chunk of the remainder are people who postponed procedures during the lockdown.
COVID19 patients are not making up a large percentage of ICU patients at the moment; see, for example, the hospital in the aforementioned article with 100 ICU beds. Yes, the 100 beds are full at that moment, but only seven are COVID19 patients; no doubt some other fraction are patients who put off procedures during the lockdown. That hospital is sending new patients it can't handle elsewhere, and will also move some existing patients elsewhere when practical/safe. This is possible because there is no overcapacity on a regional or statewide level.
Anyway, your point stands, but there are people who think covid deaths are no higher than a bad flu, and your numbers seem to mislead in that direction.
Initially lockdown was to "flatten the curve", stop the hospitals an in particular the ICU beds from getting overwhelmed. That worked, and while it got close to breaking point here in Spain we made it through.
I noticed as new data emerged from Sweden - they hadn't spiralled out of control as many, including myself, predicted. Flatten the curve seemed to be forgotten about, and it turned into a pointless competition of who has the least cases, least excess deaths - pointless because this is far from over.
Or maybe we are past the worst of it already - the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed only 20% of the passengers infected - so maybe covid only affects 20% of the population.
Someone here mentioned how Vietnam handled it, they reacted quickly and had steep fines (for their income) and achieved 0 deaths and now it's 80 days since last infection was reported.
There are other countries that handled it really well: Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea, Finland.
I wouldn't look at any state in the USA for evidence of whether lockdown works or not, because it pretty much wasn't done here.
> Can you explain why the estimates on this page are different from previously published and reported estimates for 2017-2018? (For example, total flu-related deaths during 2017-2018 was previously estimated to be 79,000, but the current estimate is 61,000)?
> The estimates on this page have been updated from an earlier report published in December 2018 based on more recently available information. There is a trade-off between timeliness and accuracy of the burden estimates. To provide timely burden estimates to the public, clinicians, and public health decision-makers, we use preliminary data that may lead to over- or under-estimates of the true burden. However, each season’s estimates will be finalized when data on testing practices and deaths for that season are available.
> The reality is that everyone is prepared to allow others to die for their own convenience.
It may be so. Those people are morally wrong however. This is a deep point that I have insisted on in other comments as well. Casually weighing human life against economic cost is not acceptable in what we might call a civilized society.
> The only difference between believing 70,000 is okay, and 700,000 is not is a gut feeling about how much preventable death is worth it to maintain our living standards.
That is not true. Deaths caused by the regular flu are deeply regrettable and should be prevented as much as possible. If you dig into the data however, you will see that the coronavirus not only kills many more people than the flu, but it also kills people who would otherwise have many more years left to live. Diabetes, a heart condition or age > 65 yrs. shouldn't be death sentences in a modern civilized society.
The reality is quite different. We accept a risk of death to ourselves and others in everything we do. You do it, too. Everything. You even risk death by doing nothing.
You could say "if it cost $1b to save this life, we should do it". But how many lives could be saved at $1b each before we run out of money? Then what? And what about the lives that could have been saved at $1m apiece?
If someone not willing to give up all of his assets to save someone else's life, is he uncivilized and morally wrong?
This a common, yet unrealistic, hypothetical. In reality, of course, death is inevitable regardless of the economic costs. Past a certain point everybody, so far, has died. The amount of things that we can do in order to prevent any given death doesn't scale with the economic cost, past a certain (quite low) point. Spending 1B on a person won't get you 1000 times better 'medical stuff' than spending 1 million; therefore, a trade-off of e.g. one life for 1B vs 1000 lives for 1m is illusory.
In practice all societies have limited resources. My position is, however, that those limited resources, in the case of an acute health crisis, should be focused as much as possible on mitigating that crisis, without having primary concern for the economic costs.
It absolutely isn't; it is complete nonsense.
Firstly, it directly conflicts with right to die; it asserts that if we can intervene in any suicide, then we should. How can stepping on the right to die be elevated to a gold standard?
Some people take risks, and those risks are fatal. Deaths in dangerous sports and other activities are easily preventable: just forcibly take away the right to engage in them. Closing off Mt. Everest to climbers will certainly prevent deaths. By your gold standard, that must be what should be done.
Preventing some deaths may even require lives to to be imperiled; someone has to be asked to risk their own life to save others.
No, no, no; live and let die is the gold standard.
People should be sometimes left to the consequences of their actions and circumstances and that includes dying. Obviously not always, and not as a rule, but sometimes. Often enough that "all preventable deaths should be prevented" is utterly preposterous.
Secondly, most of your post conflates me engangering myself my choice ( i choose a dangerous sport and suffer) vs someone else endangering me (unsafe building collapses on my head).
I'm willing to bet that you have taken many unnecessary car trips in your life. By doing so you have increased the risk to other drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians of suffering a fatal accident. Sure, it's a very small increase, but surely that outweighs your selfish desire to visit your friends or go to a movie.
Casually weighing human life against economic cost is not acceptable in what we might call a civilized society.
It's not only acceptable, it's essential in order to make reasonable decisions.
Deaths caused by the regular flu are deeply regrettable and should be prevented as much as possible.
So, quarantines every winter?
Casually? Sure that’s not good. But we weigh human life against cost all the time.
In the U.K. they value 1 QALY (Quality adjusted life year) at $50k. It’s very explicit.
People forget that economic activity is what pays for healthcare, welfare, etc.
You can’t ignore economics.
The collective response has been outsized to the actual risk of death, and I believe this is due to fear rather than sensible policymaking.
If it really was about reducing all cause mortality, most governments could do so much to reduce the primary causes of death, like heart disease and cancer, by banning things like cigarettes and enforcing healthier diets among the populace.
Imagine what banning sugar alone would do to the rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes in the US. But no one wants to do that.
We abort 600K fetuses in the US every year. By our behavior, life is cheap.
You are just making up some arbitrary standard of "civilized society" that doesnt exist and is meaningless.
Economists have determined that people value their lives at about 100K. The govt through policy values a human life between 8 and 10 million
Right now you could spend $100 to save a life of a child in africa, yet instead you spend that money on frivolous luxuries.
Yes, in reality a lot of people die driving cars all around the world no matter the amount of on board safety devices and yet cars are legal everywhere. There are countless similar examples.
Preventable is what people agree or tolerate to prevent.
Secondly, the flue has quite reason, like year 2000, taken more lifes in Sweden then what Corona has taken this year. And I would be surprised if that would be exceptional to Sweden. That not even consider there are more people living in Sweden today then 20 years ago. A couple of years earlier, the death rate per 100 000 was higher then Corona this spring.
Source, Swedish statistical agency. http://SCB.se/
And yes, there are some strong indications that there was Corona in Sweden in December, in Svärdsjö, Dalecarlia. A woman that has not been outside of the region got Corona signs on X rays of her lungs. And that I guess isn't exceptional either. So, we probably hade Covid-19 a lot earlier than we has thought. Which could explain the explosion of the spread.
Human life and economic cost are not separate things. The economy is a comprehensive (if incomplete) description human life. When we shut down the economy we cause millions to lose jobs, to lose incomes, to lose structure, to lose community, to lose activities that give their lives purpose and joy.
The economic shut down is killing people. It's also reducing quality of life and length of life. That's not to say it's not worth it. The effects of lockdown are hard to measure and no one can be sure if it's worth it or not. But this framing of economic cost vs human life as if it's just a little money is wildly inaccurate and damaging.
I agree that it's a reasonable assumption. Ivor Cummings dives into some statistics a bit more, and it isn't so clear that the lockdown had the effect, rather that it might be do to with seasonality and the way the virus spreads. I am interested if anyone has any decent criticism of the numbers he bring up in that video, as they seemed reasonable to me?
That's not true. The flu seasons in 1968, 1957, 1918, and 1889 each killed over a million people worldwide, twice as many as COVID-19 in roughly the same timespan, and that out of a lower total population, and despite lockdowns and quarantines.
(Who is downvoting this simple truth? How is anyone going to discuss this issue if we can't even talk about basic facts?)
But that is corona with social distancing and very widespread working from home, so it isn't really an apples to apples comparison.
And why wouldn't I include 1918 in a list of flu pandemics that killed over a million people?
But even that simple statement of fact is suppressed, even here on HN, because this issue is so heavily politicized.
Youre are going to have the same number of deaths sooner or later as long as the hospitals aren't overwhelmed.
Corona isn't going anywhere.
So I think this proves the argument wrong.
If you consider the other costs you're avoiding, long term issues for sick people, the cost of treating all these people in hospital, the potential for people to get sick with this multiple times (we don't know if you get any immunity by getting sick) then it's even clearer.
Hopefully a vaccine is discovered.
- Virtually no travel in and out of the country (goods still flow though).
- No gatherings > 50 people.
- Keep 2m away from others (except for "bubbles").
- Wash your hands.
- Masks in certain situations (not mandatory for most).
- Various limitations in place as to how businesses operate, e.g. distance between tables in restaurants, physical barriers, cleaning, one way aisles in stores etc etc.
Since I'm not the type or age who goes partying out in crowded bars or to packed concerts that stuff doesn't really bother me personally. Sure, it's no fun, but the alternative seems like a lot less fun. In my (global) company we all switched to wfh when this started and I'm fine with that.
There's lot of room for optimization/improvements. Travel might be ok to locations that have this under control, for example. We might find better solutions for keeping the transmission low. We could decide to clamp down harder and eradicate the virus locally so that we can trade off local restrictions vs. travel restrictions.
It's just between all the bad options here this seems to be the least bad. 2 years of the disease raging through the community until (maybe) there's herd immunity sounds so much worse. I'm pretty sure the Americans who think this is the way to go will change their minds come this fall assuming the current trend continues. Maybe I'm wrong... Let's catch up in December ;)
Even assuming there's never a vaccine or effective cure, this is not true: temporarily reducing the R number (lockdowns, distancing, masks) reduces the overshoot in the total number of people who get the disease (some proportion of which will die). It's the difference between scenario 0 and scenario 1 in the excellent https://ncase.me/covid-19/ playable models.
What I said: "temporarily reducing the R number (lockdowns, distancing, masks) reduces the overshoot in the total number of people who get the disease (some proportion of which will die)."
How are these "completely different"?
It will go back to its normal r value one society returns to normal.
There's no avoiding society returning to normal as people need jobs to pay rent and buy food.
> There's no avoiding society returning to normal as people need jobs to pay rent and buy food.
You've moved the goalposts, but even so, the later sims suggest other things that can be done with less invasive measures like test and trace, wearing masks and social distancing. These don't prevent people doing jobs. They do decrease the number of people who die.
How do you know there's a vaccine on the horizon?
What's a preventable death? Everybody dies eventually, there's no such thing as a preventable death. There's delaying death, but everyone dies. Period.
I will give it my best shot at clarifying:
Preventable refers to what a given society can be expected to manage given its limited resources and given other moral constraints, such as not impinging on people's freedoms unnecessarily. A number of the terms I have used have vague meanings that can't be clarified (not by me at least) within the scope of an HN comment. A good faith interpretation of my statement would be that a society should hold saving lives as its highest priority, as long as this does not cause catastrophic costs or dystopian levels of population control. Some temporary economic costs and some temporary restrictions on certain freedoms should be accepted, I think.
> in this thread people are quite stubborn about interpreting things literally, or misinterpreting them all together.
My complaint is a bit different. I'd say "preventable deaths should be prevented" and people will interpret that as if it said "all". I reply that if I meant "all" I would have said "all".
Your case is a bit different, because you said "all" but did not mean "all".
That's my impression about the Internet as a whole these days...
Cancer is a rather big problem. It taxes society quite a bit, costs a lot of money and in general inconveniences quite a lot of people that need to support or help cancer patients.
Would you agree then that perhaps it's a better idea to let cancer patients die rather than try and find cures or reduce the chances of dying? Why or why not? If you had cancer but of the curable kind, would you accept the state killing you because it inconveniences others?
Rather, my point was that it's hypocritical to argue that anyone that does not want to continue major disruptions is either immoral, uncivilized, or an absolute monster.
Everyone attaches some value X to human life, and some value Z to normal functioning. Not everyone values these things the same. But everyone certainly has a value, and almost everyone is okay with allowing many tens of thousands annually to die a preventable death in order to avoid disruptions to life. That being true, let's stop the moralizing arguments, and focus instead on why coronavirus is worse than other illnesses, and why it's worth it to continue our efforts to disrupt it.
In other words, my argument is really about language and rhetoric, not the coronavirus itself.
For example, being against the treatment of the Uighurs in China would be an example of moralizing if we took your argument to the extreme. The government in China simply places lesser value on their lives and since we all attach different values to human lives it's hypocritical to criticize their treatment.
You're avoiding the actual argument at hand in favor of nitpicking the rhetoric. Basically, tone policing. And I don't think tone arguments solve anything over than diversion.
That's not the argument he was making. And as a society we have to accept some negative externalities and weigh up the benefits, otherwise things like (recreational) road-trips would be banned.
In the past, generations have willingly sacrificed their lives at war, ostensibly fighting for the common good, yet today we can't even stomach a year without pedicures and dining out? That's pretty sad and gross.
Unless you're claiming that no civilised society exists, that's not true at all. A civilisation built around minimising death as much as possible would look very differently to any that currently exists.
Resources are always a trade off. People working at those festivals and cinemas could have went in to medical care pre corona virus. People building festival stages and cinemas could have been building hospitals. If festivals and cinemas didn't exist then that would be less driving and less road deaths.
At some level festivals and cinemas existing is putting some peoples fun over others right to life, corona virus or no.
But this is just a tautology now, as the entire question is what constitutes "reasonable."
>It's not fun, but suggesting that your right to fun should trump others' right to life is, again, uncivilized, immoral and irresponsible.
One death a year vs permanent lockdown? We won't lock down. 99% of society dying vs washing your hands once a day? We'll make hand-washing mandatory. The deaths from Covid-19 and the responses to it are somewhere between those extremes.
The important point here is: it's not a matter of moral principles, it's a matter of where on those scales you put the deaths/counter measures. Pretending that it's a moral argument (as in "you're immoral if you accept any amount of unnecessary deaths for non-essential things like going to festivals or having pineapple delivered to your door") is simply not working unless you (demand to) ban plenty of things.
I would like a argument. Any. Instead there's just a bunch of people treating corona virus as this exception where you're sociopath to consider any other facet of life when deciding how to respond to it.
This is acting under the assumption that something can be done, that the thing done is effective, or for that matter, isn't harmful. There were, of course, many things done. Were all of them effective? Were some of them harmful?
Doing something harmful, like for example forcefully depriving many of a livelihood during a pandemic, can be considered immoral and irresponsible.
These are all measures that a modern state can take to prevent people from suffering economically.
Politicians keep kicking the can down the road and it is not fair to future generations. Nobody seems to be talking about that.
If you let someone go bankrupt, lose their job, house, etc. they are suddenly not contributing to the economy and other people start losing their jobs. And that person then needs welfare payments anyway to avoid starving to death etc.
In the former case the government might borrow to pay for that, but if you borrow money, you have to borrow it off someone. Someone has to buy those bonds; e.g. pension funds.
"The young" will be not will be worse off overall; it has to balance out overall. Some of them will be creditors. The balance won't be evenly distributed, but future governments can decide by how much with tax strategies.
Compare to climate change, a problem we are very definitely kicking down the road to future generations.
I think it's a bad idea to have people with little understanding of economics, but a high sense of moral superiority, fix the problems they create through their incompetence. Politicians are the last people you want doing this.
Freeze evictions? Landlords go bust. Freeze mortgages? Mortgage servicers go bust. Now what? Mortgages when created are aggregated into securities with guaranteed contractual payments. No payments? What happens to the securities and the organizations that own them? Banks, pensions, retirement accounts, etc? What happens to the mortgage market and the young family who needs to buy their first home?
Actions have consequences. It's nice to have ideas over the internet, but reality is a bit more complicated.
Not sure who you're referring to here.
> Freeze evictions? Landlords go bust. Freeze mortgages? Mortgage servicers go bust.
Corporations are legal fictions that do not have a right to life. Let them go bust and save the individuals working for those corporations. Once the crisis passes, they will re-create the legal fictions and continue their work.
> Mortgages when created are aggregated into securities with guaranteed contractual payments.
This should probably not have been allowed to happen in the first place.
In general valid replies to your comments are easily available. Your condescension is, however, tiresome, so I will not pursue this thread any further.
If an economic system can't cope with a relatively minor external stressor - and Covid is not nearly as dangerous or destructive as some stressors - then the problem is with the economic system.
Actions do indeed have consequences - and trying to use the wrong tool for the job because you can't imagine a better tool is possible is not a wise action.
That's like throwing all doctors in jail and saying there is something wrong with our medical system because it not longer works.
What problems? There are no major structural problems yet. There will be major structural problems if OP's ideas are implemented because they're not sound. That's not related to the economic system, that's related to OP's ideas.
I'd argue that a 40% jobless rate is a major structural problem.
The real shame about this is that it's absolutely avoidable to a big degree.
At a cost? Sure, but I'd argue that it's exactly this, which a civilized society makes.
In what country? In the US, the unemployment rate is 11.1% right now?
Do you have any data to support that? For many people their mental health has a great effect on their physical health, and in a country like Sweden where a lot of people have mental issues already (including stress, loneliness, various forms of depression etc.), yes you could make a case that making people even more isolated by sitting at home would increase their stress and loneliness which has an effect on the health.
All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy?
I have octogenarian parents who I love deeply and would prefer to see live forever. I also have a young son. I would grind up my parents and feed them to my child if that's what it took for him to thrive. And I would expect my child to do the same for his children.
Stop moralizing, this isn't "right vs wrong". It's basically picking which demographic bears the brunt of an extremely unfortunate but naturally occurring phenomenon. I'm not at all sure we picked the right one.
One study found the average loss of life per COVID-19 death is 11 years for men and 13 for women.
https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75
It's potentially a lot more if you let the virus get out of control. The hospitalisation rate is difficult to pin down, but could be something like 4% for people in their 40s. That proportion starts to get closer to the overall death rate if your health system is overwhelmed.
Among patients dying of COVID-19, there appears to be a considerable burden in terms of years of life lost
I don't think you are deliberately misusing statistics here, but this common confusion massively overstates the risk of infection in the same way that the early focus on Case Fatality Rates did. To be meaningful, those Years Of Life Lost numbers need to be multiplied by the Infection Fatality Rate.
I can't find an IFR for 75+, but the CDC currently has 1.3% for age 65+. The average 65yo has 19.1 years of life remaining (2010 stats, also from the CDC).
1.3% * 19.1 years = ~0.25 years, or about 4 months.
This is probably a conservative estimate - older people have fewer years remaining.
Look, if covid-19 actually reduced the average lifespan of the population by a decade, I'd be in a panic too. Thankfully, it doesn't.
You said "All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy", which gives the impression that the virus is only taking people a couple of months ahead of their natural death; this is not the case if you look at the average. People are dying with years of useful life left.
You might also like to do that calculation for the worst-case scenario of hospitals being overwhelmed, to see the much more serious situation we're trying to avoid.
In a "More or less" episode the insurance industry debunked that "an extra month or two": it's more like 5 years on average in a first world country.
That's some significant grand-parenting time.
Also, "flattening the curve" was not only about trying to save those old people but to not overwhelm hospitals and cemetaries. The system cannot handle so many excess deaths in so little time.
Your argument sounds like we should have let the virus go rampant and in 6 months:
1. let health workers go grazy
2. wipe out all 75+ people from the planet
Maybe the grand-children could give kisses of death to grandparents and problem is solved?
The big difference this time around is that the rich West is confronted with some of their organizational and political failures.
Grinding up your parents if that's what it took for your son to thrive is a false choice, your son will thrive regardless of whether or not your grind up your parents because it isn't the end of the world to lose a year of schooling. Just work a bit harder the next year and you'll be fine.
It's not clear yet whether the schools here will be opened this fall. A lot of it depends on the outcome of discussions like these - and the "save lives at all costs" crowd is pushing strongly for "no". It really doesn't help to throw around terms like "survival of our species" - there is no plausible scenario where the survival of our species is threatened by Covid-19.
Extra years. There's plenty of elderly with additional risk conditions who could manage and live with them for years w/o the extra strain of a poorly understood high-impact novel infectious agent.
But the idea that vulnerability is confined to the retired is wrong. Excess death stats are also up in the 45-65 range. And I'm personally acquainted with cases 45 & under people are already looking at severe lasting health effects and have been informed of COVID attributable deaths in that age range a degree or two out from my circle. This is unsurprising at a certain breadth of infection no matter the relative difference in risks for younger demographics. Very small numbers across very large populations = large absolute impacts. Let it burn through the population without suppression measures and it's not going to look prettier.
And that includes the economic effects. They're bad. But the idea that we could have chosen not to have them is false. Once contact takes on additional risks, some large portion of people stay away from contact underlying many economic activities whether there's civil direction or not, because all transactions are still cost/benefit. The only way to stop that would have been to totally suppress knowledge of the pandemic or have crushed the disease itself from the start. Distancing measures and other civil restrictions we're left with are basically a question of how coordinated activity is, not a difference in the order of the impacts. That kind of reduction happens when people are confident they're safe and they don't present a risk to those they care about.
Also, while everyone whose career has crossed the last crash or two knows it sucks, it isn't clear the impacts move beyond economic:
https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-economy-life-e...
And while we're considering quality of life issues -- are we really saying that a year of public education is worth the tradeoff of having a parent or grandparent relationship? I think it's interesting that some of the societies that are doing much better than the West seem to have a culture of respect for the contributions elders make to their families and societies in general. I wonder if there's a connection.
And as for whether people should be moralizing: these are moral issues, which usually makes it a good time to do so. Apparently you agree, given that your own comment does. Which might even be appropriate if your moral case were the stronger one.
Probably impossible to estimate how many people died because of this, and how many will have their lives shorter because they didn't get treatment earlier. Here at local cantonal hospital, this has been recognized as a big failure of general directions given to the population, and is a huge problem for old people.
Its far from the trivialization you make out of it about some kids missing some festivals and parties.
What are your thoughts on a state of permanent lockdown in order to eliminate the tens of thousands of worldwide deaths that occur every single year due to the common flu?
Perhaps life to most of the world involves balancing several factors, one of which is risk to personal health.
Total lock-downs might not be necessary. From what I can tell, the working from home-thing pretty much stopped this year's flu epidemic; one of my customers talked about sick-leave being down by over two thirds since the pandemic hit. They've already changed their policies so that anyone with cold or flu symptoms are required to work from home from now on.
> Perhaps life to most of the world involves balancing several factors, one of which is risk to personal health.
No doubt about it. However, this pandemic has shown us that there are plenty of measures that can be taken without major disruptions.
Personally, I'm all for telling people with a sore throat and fever that they should stay the fk away from things like sports events, even if it's just a flu in that specific case. The only reason the flu does go around like it does is because we let it. We don't have to.
Yes, people die. That's true of all countries and all times. What we might call civilized societies have however strived to reduce those numbers as much as possible. This was done by trying to avoid violence, improving lifestyles and developing better medical techniques in order to prevent or repair diseases and injuries.
Containing and minimizing the effects of a pandemic is just one aspect of what we might call a civilized attitude towards human life. Conversely, not doing so is uncivilized and I might add immoral and irresponsible.
> there will be an entire generation of people who have effectively "lost" a year of the things they hoped they would do in their lifetime
This almost doesn't merit a reply. A few months of not going to festivals and the cinema is by no measure a catastrophe. It's not fun, but suggesting that your right to fun should trump others' right to life is, again, uncivilized, immoral and irresponsible.