Every dissent winds up getting framed this way. The numbers don't matter. The way you win is by having "your side" be the side who's policy kills people less directly. When you take it to extremes like "make everyone do backbreaking labor and all the health problems that comes with that to save a few dozen kids with cancer" the absurdity becomes obvious. It's maddening but this is the nature of a lot of arguments we have in society today. For example you have Safety Sally wanting to do something that will crush an industry in order to save a few dozen workplace injuries. How many years of life will be lost from all those people's reduced standard of living? Hard to tell. But Safety Sally always wins because she can argue that anyone arguing against her policy is killing people more directly, numbers be damned. Sometimes (e.g. coal industry) the numbers do work out in her favor. Often times it's hard to tell and then you get into arguments about who's analysis is more accurate
Sad days
To put some examples in the current context: The speed at which medical facilities are researching this virus has never been seen before in the history of mankind, and many of the findings are shreding light on understanding how viruses work (not only this one), including knowledge for when (_not if_) a virus much stronger and infectious that coronavirus pays us a visit.
This reminds me of the French economist Frederic Bastiat's essay "That which is seen, and that which is not seen". The media (tv, newspapers and internet) were all hyper-focused on the number of deaths (initially) and later number of cases but always failed to take into account secondary consequences like those you mention.
Link to Bastiat's essay: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays_on_Political_Economy/T...
And even if the media didn’t, politicians did. To the point that nearly every country in the world has passed economic and financial aid measures that probably exceed anything they’ve done in the past, certainly during peacetime, and globally the world has put more resources into mitigating the second order effects through all sorts of programs than it almost certainly ever has before.
This whole narrative about how dissenters are not heard, when they are parroted the loudest is ridiculous. Even the Scientific A,Eric an article puts the great barrington declaration, with absolutely no scientific backing, with 0 footnotes and references, and a signee list that is completely unvetted, on equal footing with the John Snow memo which has vetted every signee, has references to actual papers littered through it to the point that the text in footnotes probably exceed the entire scientific content of the GBD, if not the entire GBD itself.
Why guess, we have The spanish flu to compare to. There was no internet then. There was however significant restrictions on people to control it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Responses
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but lack of correlation is pretty strong evidence for lack of causation.
In general though, there has been a huge variety of policy responses across the globe and over time, so I'm not sure what you mean be 'we' 'shutting everything down'. My state came closest to shutting everything down for a month or so in the spring, but there has been a constant effort since then to adjust policy to balance health risks and economic/social pain. Italy had a super hard lockdown. South Dakota isn't even wearing masks.
Really? Do some digging into historical pandemics. City entrances would be boarded up. Villages might be "shut" and their people would literally starve to death if the they could not sustain themselves. Harbor chains were raised against suspected plague ships. Innocent people were confined to pest hospitals, even exiled to dedicated colonies on remote islands. Londoners once feared being boarded up in their own houses should they get ill. The pre-computer past was full of much more draconean efforts than anything COVID-19 has brought us.
And for all the horrors of being locked indoors with covid, just spend a few minutes reading about the kids polio trapped inside iron lungs. That was within living memory.
It's probably more apt to state that the 1918 Pandemic was worse than the 2019/2020/2021 Pandemic - probably true. Virus to virus? Probably not.
The lower bound on Spanish flu's IFR is 3%. Covid's IFR is around 1%, and almost all of that is in old and sick people. Spanish flu killed far more at far younger ages. Had covid hit a century ago, its IFR would likely be lower because those hit worst by the covid (the old and sick) would have already died of something else.
Again, Spanish flu infected 1/3rd of the world and killed at least 1% of the world population. It was the last time in history that human population declined over a year. Even in 3rd world countries, covid can't approach that level of lethality.
I'm not trying to imply that Spanish Flu was not a killer - my home country of India suffered ~ 13 millions deaths. Yet the policies of the Colonial Administration also made a bad situation much worse. My suspicion is that given those circumstances, COVID would be just as bad, if not worse. At this point we can only speculate.
If a pathogen with identical risks and outcomes struck today, I guarantee government restrictions would be greater than in the past.
You know what, I call bullshit on this.
It’s pretty easy to argue in favour of or against specific measures when done in good faith and with evidence. What it’s hard to do is engage in this sort of shallow middlebrow meta-argument.
My take on this is that, without the internet, we would (1) either still choose to lock down and cause much greater economic harm[^1], or (2) not choose to lock down and lose more lives. I'm not disagreeing with the fact that we still need to perform a cost–benefit analysis before going into lockdowns. But the internet has lowered the "cost" part of this analysis, by allowing most people to continue to work during lockdowns.
[^1] Note that during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, there were also lockdowns: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/how-citie...
This is a false dichotomy. Look at the countries that acted quickly and had cooperation from everyone - they have many fewer deaths, and the impact of the pandemic has been much, much less.
We are only in this position we are in because people did not want to cooperate from the start. This attempt to blame the side effects on people advocating for masks is not an accurate depiction of reality. If people had done the right thing from the beginning, we wouldn't be in the predicament.
The government even has programs trying to encourage people to go out eating and to travel within the country.
Numbers are very low compared to similar populations elsewhere including deaths so we're not killing people here. At least not yet. They are at their highest rate yet but it's still 1/100th of similar populations in the west.
Americans bring up examples of countries with 10X the discipline, like America would have an infection rate closer to Japan if we _had not_ locked down.
It's fucking ridiculous.
2. Flattening the curve is a strategy to lessen stress on healthcare by lengthening the time that the system can cope with stuff. A steeper curve leads to more deaths but ends quicker.
Thus. Lockdowns and people abiding with the rules does not make it end earlier, we want it to go on as that means a flatter curve.
To say the equivalent of "if you only wore masks this would have ended sooner and we wouldn't need lockdowns" is false but it makes sense at an emotional and behavioural level as most medicines, interventions, treatment promise quick results from compliance. It also more natural to blame people instead of an invisible virus for the crisis.
We want compliance so that it goes on for longer as that means less deaths.
How do you know that?
Will people still get infected? Yes, I'm sure they will since typical face masks are not P100. But when you're preventing ~80% transfer on an exhale and ~60% on inhale, if both participants had masks on then that filters a lot.
Granted this assumes other precautions would be followed as well since obviously places like bars and restaurants where you have no mask on will continue to be an issue.
For all intents and purposes, they don't have COVID.
Japan is seeing all-time record case counts:
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/tags/82/
South Korea is seeing infections growing "at their fastest pace since the early days of the pandemic":
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-southk...
Taiwan is actually seeing case growth, as well (albeit from a small base):
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
And not that you brought it up, but Hong Kong just saw an infection spike that has them instituting a bunch of new restrictions:
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic...
Public health coupled with the communication of it is a damnadly hard subject.
On top of science, the mask guidance in the US has switched multiple times [2]. We had a chance get this messaging right but we (the Trump administration) completely fucked that up. A lot of US institutions have lost their credibility, and it is not going to be easy for them to get it back.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339321846_Impact_of...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/19/health/face-masks-us-guidance...
"many of the people that are against shutdowns (that don't have an ulterior motive) are against them because people are out of work and creates issues with poverty. They are not against it because it doesn't help. So rather than saying no shutdowns, how about we take the proper steps and have a moratorium on rent and mortgages so solve the root of the issue."
inspires me to believe that the brutal and short shutdown, with the planned measures to prevent ordinary people getting penalized during it would in fact be the best treatment imaginable, with the least long term consequences.
But I also imagine enough those who would never be ready to accept such an approach for having huge ideological objections.
Thinking even more about it, some kind of such a response indeed happened in the world and gave the results. Knowing that result and proper planing can surely allow for even less negative effects than those observed.
Though given how hush hush China is about everything, it's also possible they've had a vaccine they've been using on their population for a while and just deigned not to tell or share.
In the US, New York had also to respond hard to the first wave.
Italy and US compared in deaths per million due to Covid-19:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
China, having the hardest and the most restrictive lockdowns, managed something even better than both: binging the numbers to effectively zero, very early. They also managed to maintain the minimum of new cases by mass testing actions when there was a suspicion of the outbreak:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54504785
"Covid-19: China's Qingdao to test nine million in five days"
And they have still kept wearing the masks this year, whenever they aren't alone, if I understand it correctly.
We also know that such kind of mass testing can be done in Europe too, if mandated, as in Slovakia:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/slovakia-offers-proof-tha...
So, no, it wasn't about the vaccines up to now. The measures simply work, proved in Europe, and even in the US, when they are consistently introduced. As simple as that.
I was in favor of one hard lockdown and strict border controls, and that is mostly what happened. I was not in favor of shutting down butchers, bakers, and green grocers because that just crowded everybody into supermarkets making social distancing difficult and creating long lines at supermarkets. It also crushed several businesses into bankruptcy unnecessarily, caused lots of food to go to waste, and propped up the already-too-powerful supermarket conglomerates.
NZ had extreme advantages: an island nation with easy to control borders, a large lead time to prepare, a low population density, a unified jurisdiction, no constitutional restrictions on the government's power, first world medical infrastructure, a timid compliant population that overwhelmingly just does as they are told and doesn't makes a fuss, high social cohesion, double helpings of common sense. Cowardly risk-averse and boring people that will never amount to much more than a hill of beans by American standards, but happy nonetheless [this sentence was meant as tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating humor, sorry if anyone was offended or took it seriously].
The US does not have the options NZ had. The federal government does not have jurisdiction to enforce a national lockdown, and even local lockdowns are being ruled as unconstitutional. And if you can't do one coordinated severe lockdown to squash it completely and then strictly close your borders requiring two week quarantines for anyone coming in... then I say don't bother with lockdowns at all. Oh, and stop blaming everything on your president.
How do you figure this? Is the US approach courageous?
> NZ had extreme advantages: an island nation with easy to control borders, a large lead time to prepare, a low population density
NZ discovered cases just days after the US. The US is also not heavily populated. It depends on the source but NZ is about 15 people per km/2 and the US is about 36 per km/2.
A comparison could be made between Hawaii and NZ, and the contrast in how things have gone is quite something.
Cowardly is too strong for what I meant to say and I take it back. I meant it in an 'avoiding fighting' sort of way, choosing to not stand up and fight for one's rights, or choosing to give in so as to avoid confrontation, and in direct contrast to Americans seeming to fight over everything to the bitter end, with laywers, wars, refusals to comply, etc. Now that I read the definition, it was far too negatively connotated.
The pop. density of NZ is 15/km2. The pop. density of France is 119/km2. France also shares land borders with 7 other countries.
People saying "NZ's lockdowns worked" without actually having done the hard part is not helping.
How do you think we eradicated community covid several times?
I guess my point is that this is a multi-faceted thing, and focusing on one predictor is likely to be misleading.
If you have stats on density of occupied land, I'm happy to work with that.
I can't find any instance of the scientific community encouraging permanent lockdowns.
The stats I've seen seem to indicate that COVID has behaved (in terms of waning) more seasonally than in response to lockdowns.
For example Sweden, who didn't have lockdowns anything like what we've seen in other countries, have a curve[1] that tapered off too. At deaths per capita, they're lower than UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and many more.
Which is not difficult because you picked the worst of the worst to compare them with. Compare them with other nordic countries like Norway or especially Finland and Sweden suddenly looks like a complete failure.
Most curves look a lot like an explosion that burns out locally too fast to sustain a continuous fire. This could lead to some kind of seasonal dynamics without external factors.
One exception is maybe Argentina. Since the beginning it was more like a continuous burning fire - until they stopped. What did they do?
You can see normal flu seasons and the out-of-season huge spike. Then you can see subsequent bumps on a per-country basis. Some countries had multiple spikes and lockdowns etc.
These charts tell exactly the story I'm telling. The peaks and troughs appear at the same time for countries with strict lockdowns as for those with less strict / non-existent lockdowns.
You would also expect to get no (average) excess mortality for the year if you just killed off the frail earlier than normal. This is not the case, excess mortality just returned to normal levels. You would need either a spike in the other direction or a step change down to fit with your theory.
You can track the yearly excess mortality data here for a few countries.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
This isn't going to correlate to one thing. The seasonal impact is real, but that doesn't mean lockdowns don't work.
Keep an eye out.
The black plague -the biggest one we have ever gotten as far as we know- lasted 7 years, I don't think that constitutes under any definition a "one time 'excess deaths' hit"; also I'm pretty sure that given 50% of the population died nobody was free from depression (or loneliness/suicide for that matter) given that in all likelihood half of the people you knew had died when it ended.
It's very hard to dissent against the current narrative because any dissent can easily be framed as "killing people". I blame technology for our current predicament. If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything. We might be wearing masks and washing hands, but I would bet life would be largely the same.
But because technology dangled the carrot of "we can save lives by doing everything virtually with computers" we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects of that (loneliness, depression, suicide, homelessness, civil unrest, economy). In some ways, taking a one time "excess deaths" hit as we have done with past pandemics does have measurable benefits in other ways, but you'll get shouted out of the room if you bring up that position even as a hypothetical.