> exhibited a severe chest X-ray 70%-80% of the time

With a sample size of what? That's a nonsense statement that can't be scrutinised.

Edit, found this: The finding is promising but will require further research given the small size of the study with only 82 patients, mostly male and average age over 50

82 people over the age of 50. It also doesn't mention how healthy these people were.

This is typical of pretty much all media coverage: very little facts but also very little to throw back at them...

What I don't understand with people who reply like this is why bother taking the chance? My thought is that people have never experienced a severe respiratory illness before, while I have and because of that I'm appropriately level set on how bad the consequences can be for an individual.

Nothing like back to back cases of bad pneumonia 19 years ago to make me take this whole thing seriously.

My understanding is the hospitalization rate even for young and healthy (20-44) is around 10%. 1 in 10 odds for something happening is really a quite good chance of that thing happening.

And you have every reason to be incredibly cautious. Were I in your shoes I'd likely err on the side of caution too.

Hospitalisation rate says nothing other than they were in hospital. It could have been because they were feeling a bit rough but utterly terrified due to all the scaremongering that's going around. Or they may have been close to deaths door. No way to tell.

The figures don't lie: There are vulnerable groups that can be severely symptomatic and even die from this but they make up a tiny tiny fraction of the population.

The figures don’t lie. Of one hundred people with covid, two will die and ten will be suffering three months later. The portion suffering long covid is growing too, and it’s poorly understood. Damaged hearts and lungs for example and there are plenty of accounts about.

What are you pushing for? There are places we can look to where covid ran free, it isn’t pretty.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

Balance, that's what I'm pushing for.

Assess your actual chances of catching and suffering from covid. Then balance it against the risk of a rushed experimental gene therapy still in initial trials.

Edit: Remember that none of the media and government published figures show recovery rates - this is hugely important.

I saw this study from USC: https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/

You can't link to the exact thing, but choose "Coronavirus Risk Perceptions" and split by age.

People under 40 believe that their risk of dying from the virus is over 10% on average. The actual risk for that age group is somewhere around 0.02%, which means they're overestimating their risk of dying by a factor of 500.

Five hundred! It's mindboggling how wrong people are.

But once you see those numbers, it becomes clear why there is such widespread support for strict lockdowns.

However, even with the accurate numbers, I would still say the case for the mRNA vaccines is strong. I think you are exaggerating the risks of the mRNA vaccines, in the same way that regular people are exaggerating the risks of the virus.

I'm quite confident people probably over-estimate their chance of dying in a plane crash by a few orders of magnitude as well. People are careful about their own lives, which is probably a good survival mechanism.

What specific policy are you suggesting? The more <40 year olds that get the virus, the more virus there is. The more virus there is, the more people who are spreading the virus, the more people who can get the virus, including people at very high risk of dying or being disabled from it.

As far as I'm aware no place has let the virus spread uncontrollably, think everything was fine, and not lock down at some point. The policy clearly has to be somewhere in between fully locked down and fully opened up, and I'm not sure discriminating by age and health is going to be some magical solution.

> What specific policy are you suggesting?

I think the biggest problem is the hyper-focus on a single cause of death. People look at the covid-19 death numbers, and have no idea how many people actually die in a normal year.

And this causes people to focus on ensuring nobody dies of covid-19 to the exclusion of everything else. Yes, it absolutely sucks that a lot of vulnerable people in elder care facilities have died of it, but it's equally tragic that a lot of them have died of cognitive decline due to not being allowed to see their family and friends, or not being allowed to see each other.

Or that people are dying or going to die because hospitals and patients alike are postponing care and checkups and routine surgeries, because they're afraid of hospitals being overrun with covid-19 patients, or because they're afraid hospitals will increase spread.

I belong to the privileged class of people who can work from home, I've done it for years, and I live far away from friends and family, so I've been doing weekly video calls for years. The effect for me, personally, is pretty much zero. A lot of people who drive policy are like me, and therefore think lockdowns are no big deal.

But lockdowns are absolutely miserable for a large amount of people. There's a very good reason that we're seeing violent anti-lockdown protests in several countries, because a lot of people are completely fed up with the restrictions.

So, in terms of specific policy, I want governments to encourage and enable people to isolate and distance and keep themselves safe, but I don't want them to enforce it. People have to be allowed to make their own choices, their own risk analysis, and live with the consequences. As we already do for a lot of things.

One example of encouragement is to have good sickpay policies in place, so that no-one feels they "have to" get to work even though they're sick or possibly infected, either out of social obligation or financial necessity.

> and I'm not sure discriminating by age and health is going to be some magical solution.

It's too hard to lock down and isolate a fraction of the population, therefore the solution is to lock down the entire population, except "essential" workers? This argument doesn't make sense to me.

> the solution is to lock down the entire population, except "essential" workers? This argument doesn't make sense to me.

This is how covid has been eradicated in NZ and Australia. Locking down part of the population doesn’t work - isolating the vulnerable from those that are less likely to die isn’t possible.

> People have to be allowed to make their own choices, their own risk analysis, and live with the consequences.

And where has this worked? A portion of people refuse to listen to advice, refuse to wear masks and refuse to isolate. People go out while sick, they congregate in groups. Why should the vulnerable have to be exposed to this? If everyone follows the rules, you get back to normal faster.

An approach based on evidence is the way to get results.

Yeah, this is a false dichotomy. There are other options other than lockdown vs no lockdown. You can have a social safety net and pay people to stay home. But if you're insistent that these are the only two options, look at Sweden. Their economy suffered despite not locking down last year because guess what, it turns out people don't want to go out and risk dying. So if your economy is doing to have mass unemployment, you may as well do that and avoid the death and injury. Or better yet, borrow at low interest rates and let people be unemployed but not destitute.

> Their economy suffered despite not locking down last year

A forecast, but with data up to November 2020, which means it's probably not gonna change substantially when we have the full year data:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102546/coronavirus-euro...

So, Sweden is third least affected country in that list. It's missing Norway and Finland, though, but a quick google shows Norway at -3.5% and Finland at -4.0%, both worse than Sweden.

At the same time, the covid-19 deaths in Sweden is pretty close to the EU average, now, after the winter surge:

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

The obvious conclusion of that data is that lockdowns destroy your economy, but don't actually save lives.

> You can have a social safety net and pay people to stay home. But if you're insistent that these are the only two options, look at Sweden.

I think that first sentence sounds like a great strategy, and it's perfectly in line with what I suggested. Coincidentally, that's exactly what Sweden did as part of its strategy. So I'm not so sure how Sweden is an example of the opposite?

> guess what, it turns out people don't want to go out and risk dying.

If people are voluntarily doing that, what's the point of having the government enforce the lockdown?

> So if your economy is doing to have mass unemployment, you may as well do that and avoid the death and injury.

Again, lockdowns aren't 100% free. They also cause death, injury, and misery. Suicides are up, domestic violence is up, cancer screenings are down, drug overdoses are up, alcoholism is up, depression is way up. Poor kids in the US who relied on school lunches as their only decent meal of the day are suffering nutritionally, and will lose years of their life because of malnutrition now.

I have a friend who was sick with covid for months, and she's got a long way to recovery. I have a friend who just got out of the ICU after having been there a couple of weeks, he's in shit shape, but alive. That sucks. But I also have friends who were close to suicide because they were unemployed, isolated, and really depressed. That also sucks.

There are no easy choices in this mess, and yet lockdowns are sold as an easy choice by people for whom it is easy, and failure to lock down is portrayed as some sort of moral failing, which is horrifying to me.

> Again, lockdowns aren't 100% free. They also cause death, injury, and misery. Suicides are up, domestic violence is up, cancer screenings are down, drug overdoses are up, alcoholism is up, depression is way up.

In NZ the suicide rate dropped, despite a lockdown that was considerably more severe than done in many places. Possibly making this misleading, NZs suicide rate is atrocious to begin with.

Yes, there was a hell of a lot of grim news and poor stats - but the below seems a little hard to to believe. They will lose years of life?

> Poor kids in the US who relied on school lunches as their only decent meal of the day are suffering nutritionally, and will lose years of their life because of malnutrition

https://www.mentalhealth.org.nz/assets/Suicide/Chief-Coroner...

I'll take a look at the data. But I don't think that big problem is suicides, it's people getting evicted and starving.

Elsewhere in this thread you argue that because only 400 people without underlying conditions have died, restrictions should be removed. The other 100k don’t seem to be of concern. I don’t think ‘balanced reporting’ is the full extent of what you are after.

I'm talking about balancing the risk! Yes that 400 figure is foundational to my argument and yes, we should lift the restrictions.

But if you are really sick, you'd be at home, in your bed taking it easy anyway especially if your symptoms are as severe as some of the COVID reports suggest.

And it's not balanced reporting I want either, it's accurate reporting with facts that can be challenged or verified: most articles are incredibly vague when it comes to COVID and some have incredibly low numbers that, at first glance, look damning but are still tiny numbers.

Edit: deleted the 100,000 sentece - In response to that number, yes it may be a large number but there is no breakdown of the cases. For all you know, they were all 90+ years old with previous underlying conditions. All the figures we see have very little behind them that can substantiate the measures taken, while at the same time trigger responses in all of us that make them hard to argue against without coming across as callous but the numbers are not there to justify the lockdowns.

The "70-80%" figure is based on thousands of the doctor's own patients.

https://observer.com/2021/01/covid-long-term-health-impacts-...

It's not a peer reviewed study, and it includes only the people whose situations were severe enough to be sent to a radiologist. But it's enough to conclude that it's more than just a dismissably small number of cases.

Sorry, it says nothing of the sort. All the evidence, including government statistics, tell is it is precisely that, a dismissably small number outside known vulnerable groups.

You realize over 70m people in the US are obese right and another 100m are overweight? Known vulnerable groups include 170m people right there. I can't take your argument seriously.

And I bet you think the public health experts that sat by and watched 70m Americans get obese are just the people we should turn to now, don't you?

I think if you think the people who handle pandemics are the same people who handle dieting I have a bridge to sell you.

Of course there are specific individuals that are focused on one or the other, but there are also specific individuals who span both concerns. Significant examples include the secretary of health and human services and the surgeon general, among other high level administrators, who ultimately decide who will be managing both problems.

If said leadership wanted people that would take the clear and simple steps needed to solve the obesity crisis to be in charge of that problem, then the obesity crisis would have been solved. The obesity crisis has not been solved, so we can only conclude that the leadership does not want the right people to be involved. Yet presumably we should also believe that said leadership has our best interests in mind now that there's a new virus going around, when they have already irrefutably demonstrated that they don't?

Sorry. Can you expand on this argument? In it's current form it makes almost no sense.

Public health experts, in the US and other western countries, deserve no credibility due to their handling of the obesity crisis. There are clear and obvious steps that governments could take to end obesity, but public health experts have failed to even make an effort to make them happen. Instead they have sat by and watched millions upon millions of people become obese, which is vastly more harmful to the average person's health than the coronavirus.

I do not even think an argument can be made that their failure is due to incompetence.

Oh yes. I'm sure that a population that can't follow simple recommendations to wear a damn mask will listen to the CDC when it says to stop eating Big Macs.

And if you would like to become educated on the government's role in fighting obesity, and its recommendations, you can go to https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/strategies/index.html

Telling people not to eat McDonald's is the best you can come up with?

How about requiring every high school student to spend two hours per day doing strenuous physical exercise in order to graduate? How about considering it a failure for a student to graduate without being in excellent athletic form, on par with the student being unable to do algebra?

If the people in charge wanted to make that happen, they could do it by spending a tiny fraction of the public money at their disposal on propaganda, but all indications are that they don't want a population that's in great physical shape, even though it would obviously be good for them.

People who are in great shape when they graduate high school might still become fat, but people who graduate from high school fat will almost certainly spend their lives that way.

They could also regulate extremely sugary foods like how tobacco, which is less harmful, is regulated, where you have to be 18 to buy it and have to ask for the cashier to get it for you, rather than having it in your face at the checkout aisle.

Whining about how hard it is on their website is exactly the sort of reason why they have no credibility. They're not really trying, and pretty much everyone can sense that, even if they don't have it spelled out for them.

Thank you for illustrating my point.

> exhibited a severe chest X-ray 70%-80% of the time

What is a "severe chest X-ray"? This story was debated on Twitter[1].

I agree with the (unforgiving) statements put there.

[1] https://twitter.com/Craig_1_1_7/status/1351203220878716928