Cynical thought: COVID lockdowns are extreme largely because unlike most public health problems it affects the rich too, and the decision-makers behind them fall into the high-risk categories.
Sobering thought: if you think COVID-19 is bad now, wait until there's a pandemic of something like the Spanish Flu that does target and kill the young and healthy too.
The average years lost is 10 years of life in the US and 16 world wide[1] - and I think you need to reconsider how callous your comment comes across (to me at least, and I would guess others too). [edited: added detail]
I also feel your comment entirely disregards the point made by the parent comment: “I personally know a couple of people who are now effectively long-term disabled with respiratory issues - well enough to leave hospital, but their previous lifestyle can't come back.”
By the way, the truth can be very callous. I don't think it's particularly useful for you to point out how callous someone sounds on the internet unless the other person has some demonstrable intent of cruelty. We all know that we have the potential to sound like bad people through text online.
Yes there is evidence that 10-30% of covid infections have not resolved at 6 months
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v...
which is roughly what SARS 1 looks like (and those people are still sick). But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making.
> But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making.
That isn’t relevant to the 10 year statistic although it is an interesting point - you are saying the final result for years of life lost due to Covid could be a higher number than 10 years (after we get to finally tally the numbers in the decades to come as people die). Depends on how you paint your statistics I guess. [para edited to add clarity]
Note I am all for people doing whatever they want with their own lives - if you want to go to a Covid party I would love to support that. I love taking certain risks myself.
However, when the choices of one age group can kill my mum, dad or friends, I would hope we agree to serious restrictions to help prevent that. With engineering balance to the compromises, given that prevention techniques cause significant human costs.
I am from New Zealand, so I can resoundingly support everyone acting together in concert to protect everyone else (as most kiwis did, with a good outcome for us).
If my anecdata is irrelevant, then so is yours.
The only people I know who have had permanent damage from COVID-19 in this age range, have all had their trauma caused by excessive lockdown policies.
You know what's even less of a joke than COVID-19? Our histrionic, insane, and completely violent overreaction to it.
Quick question: how would you propose dealing with a global pandemic? Social isolation seems like the most common sense solution, since in 2021 we know how disease is transmitted and how to deal with that.
I am not going to entertain further the notion that we have locked people into their homes, given trillions of dollars to multinational corporations, and restricted the lives of everyday people, just because of a pandemic that kills less than 1% of the people infected. This is such an obvious cash-grab and overt attempt to impose further fascism upon people, just like what happened after 9/11 in the US with the imposition of the Patriot Act.
I'm sorry, I simply cannot let this go unchallenged. Even a moment's thought should demonstrate that that's not the case:
* It may be the objectively-best-solution for society as a whole, but not-best for an individual (for instance, a young healthy individual who is at low-risk for long-term impact for COVID, but who could act as an incubator and carrier to spread it to more vulnerable folks). The overall-harm-done by these free-circulating individuals will, I am willing to bet, be much more than the "harm" done to them by asking them to stay home. * It may be the best solution, but to recognize that as such requires specialized scientific knowledge that the average person doesn't have. Meanwhile, propagandists are free to influence society as they wish with more-easily-consumable (but, possibly, less true) messages. * Similarly to the 2nd point - it may be the right solution, but that might not be obvious until late in the process. In this situation, trusting experts and following their advice earlier will reduce the overall harm done.
The calculus of impact here is "what is the harm done by following advice if it's wrong?", vs. "what is the harm done by not-following advice if it's right?". Folks are free to make their own decision on this, but almost-every analysis I've seen suggests that "staying home" is the massively better choice, _even if_ the global pandemic turns out to have been less-severe than first expected (in fact, the opposite seems to be true). All of that is leaving aside the fact that much of the harm done by isolation could have been offset by basic social welfare programs (stimulus cheques, UBI, etc.)
Contrary to the common American mindset, freedom is not, in fact, always an unalloyed good - especially when incentives for an individual are in opposition to incentives for a group. (ironically, I wrote this summary _before_ reading your second paragraph, but it works even better. Your argument that "a previous social program restricted freedoms in an unproductive and unhelpful way, therefore any social program which restricts freedoms is unproductive and unhelpful" does not hold)
* I'm not assuming that you are American, but I _am_ contrasting my position with a mindset that I have noticed disproportionately _among_ Americans.
Do you actually, really believe this? Do you really believe that if that the research studies come out and say “hey stay inside” that everyone will read the studies front-to-back and go “oh, it’s in the public interest for everyone to stay inside”? Is this a thing that you think will happen in America?
> impose further fascism
What is fascism?
When the government does something I don't like /s
Yet 3000 people in the U.S. are dying each day from COVID.
Does that not indicate that this virus is a particularly nasty virus worthy of special measures? That it’s still spreading widely when the flu can’t?
People are still dying from respiratory viruses at a totally unacceptable rate. We're a very sick culture who cannot handle a respiratory illness without freaking-the-fuck out.
We have way bigger problems than COVID-19, which is nothing more than a symptom of those problems.
Social isolation isn't an opt-in kind of measure. Furthermore, the average person doesn't have the background or tools to evaluate whether it works. It's a public health matter, and you do have to follow the advice of the relevant authorities.
This is like the law against drinking and driving in many countries: you cannot decide to opt-out of this restriction. It negatively affects others who do decide to comply with the restriction. If caught, you will be subject to some kind of penalty (such as having your license revoked), for good reason.
I'm opting out anyway.
"What are you in for, son"?
"Being outside without an excuse."
Clown world.
"Drinking and driving, but I actually drive better while I'm drunk, these cops know nothing!"
It's illegal in the UK to take a picnic to a park bench.
I'm sorry for your loss. But no, it's not drunk driving, it's existing as a human being.
Best of luck.
It's about not being selfish and helping contain or flatten the contagion. It's about thinking about others and not just yourself.
> it's existing as a human being
A selfish human being, yes.
If your country is less restrictive, I'm happy for you.
It's been illegal for me to have a friend over for 100 days.
It's illegal to have a picnic on a park bench.
So yeah, I'm not doing this any more. If you think that's selfish - cool, I'm selfish according to you. I'm not going to kill myself for your social credit score, stop trolling.
What country is that? We've had about 295 days of social distancing -- we recently moved from almost total lockdown to a less restricting stance, which also requires social distancing and discourages gatherings of people.
> If you think that's selfish - cool, I'm selfish according to you. I'm not going to kill myself for your social credit score, stop trolling.
I really hope nobody gets sicks or dies needlessly because of you then.
As for your accusation of trolling: please follow HN guidelines and do not encourage flamewars.
If you don't want to interact with me, that's cool. If you want to ban large gatherings and restrict smaller ones for a period of time, I get it.
When it gets to the point that it becomes illegal to be outside without an excuse, 300 days in, you're just subjecting people to cruel and unusual punishment at this point.
The idea that people are going to die in greater proportion than the damage caused by preventing people from going for a walk to the park and sitting down with a cup of coffee is not backed by evidence, and I absolutely believe that you are trolling if you think we can all just endure this indefinitely. You're just gonna have to throw me in prison because I will treat those basic freedoms as absolute until the day I die.
I hope you stay safe, best wishes.
It's not about you, it's about not spreading disease to others.
"You cannot leave home for recreational or leisure purposes (such as for a picnic or a social meeting)."
So your statement that the commenter's "entire argument is false" is, well, false.
> Social isolation may be the best solution. Fine. Don't force it on us. If it's the right solution, then it will be followed.
I think your own statement is proof that this is not the case. We know social distancing works, yet you don't want to implement it.
> just like what happened after 9/11 in the US with the imposition of the Patriot Act.
I agree that governments will always do this. That doesn't make COVID any less of a threat though. The lockdown isn't the only lever of authoritarian control. There's plenty of others you can fight to increase individual liberty. Things that won't put millions of others (and yourself) at risk.
I said I don't want to force it on people - I never said it was a bad idea to remove yourself from close contact with strangers during a pandemic. Forcing it on people is how you get deaths of despair, run everyone's businesses to the ground, and ruin every healthy person's life who isn't at risk.
You don't have to force it. Social distancing is a decision an individual makes, and a rational individual would choose to do this if they wanted to live without the risk of getting infected.
Allowing anyone to opt out disproportionately negatively affects people who are unable to isolate for whatever reason: essential job, medical emergency, etc. People not isolating creates more risk for the grocery checkout person or power plant operator, for example.
> Social distancing is a decision an individual makes, and a rational individual would choose to do this if they wanted to live without the risk of getting infected.
It's just selfishness (or at best rank ignorance) to believe that whether or not you personally isolate only affects your health.
The latter is just nature being nature, and while we can respond in some ways to reduce deaths, it will never be perfect. I get that in some ways that feels worse, because there's a feeling of powerlessness. But the former is humans being shitty and murdering each other in the name of nationalism, land, resources, religion, whatever.
We now know enough about the nature of disease that we can be somewhat effective dealing with it. If people embrace the science that is.
It would be interesting to do a relative comparison of physical and psych effects of lockdown versus post-Covid complications. It isn’t clear what the severity for the “33.6%” was.
The control group in that study is people who had the flu during lockdown.
It's anecdotal for sure, but once you see it with your own eyes it definitely makes you take it seriously.
I think you missed this part of their comment. They were arguing the deaths weren’t the same kind of deaths as in past catastrophes, but the long term ailments are bad and real.
Though I agree the years lost is bigger than people think.
It's a hell of a thing for someone who only had a few short and precious years left, to have those ripped away from them as well.
I'm hard of hearing - people joke that there's no point in wearing ear protection since I'm already deaf. No, the opposite. Because I have only a little hearing left, it's so much more precious to me than normal hearing is for most people. I protect it jealously.
I get your point, but I can't forget the human part of that equation.
What a disgusting attitude.
How is this different from "Why bother treating cancer patients? Most are going to die early anyway"? Do you think old and sick people simply provide no value to society?
I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but it's really not necessary to rank lives against each other in this way.
This attitude seems to be what's largely made this pandemic so bad: it was viewed as "just the flu" and "only affects people with pre-existing conditions" and so rather than fast, decisive action (reducing burden on healthcare system, preventing deaths, reducing the need for lockdowns and shortening the time they take), many countries instead delayed and did half-measures, causing an exponential increase in cases, which causes everything to be worse. The completely obvious outcome of willing to let old and sick people die to "save the economy" was an economy that's in turmoil as well as a massive death toll.
> rather than fast, decisive action
It is worth noting that even if there had been the "fast, decisive action" that epidemologist advisers wanted, that would have still imposed border closures in perpetuity. Life might have gone on "like normal" within a country, but people could not interact with their neighbors.
We see already some Australians advocating for hotel quarantine to be obligatory even after COVID, because a year of closed borders has made them regard outsiders as dirty. How long before border closures awaken old nationalist conflicts that freedom of movement and actually getting to know the other side had largely put to rest?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_rationing_in_the_Un...
And global warming might as well not exist as far as lawmakers are concerned. The comfort of the old is our nation's top priority.
Locking down the near-entirety of life has long-term physical and mental health implications that we probably don't fully understand. There have already been suicides directly attributable to COVID-imposed isolation.
It's possible -- and even likely -- that the lockdowns are the right move overall, but the lockdowns themselves have destroyed lives too. Taking measures to protect against something that overwhelmingly affects one segment of the population has a big negative effect on everyone else as well.
You do realize that every day we decline to treat cancer patients because they are close to dying anyway, right?
No, the GP is pointing out the well-established social-psychology theory that people already implicitly rank things this way, and that this is why the death toll doesn’t have more of a mental impact on people in changing their decisions, even when they hear about it.
It’s the same reason that news like “baby of suburban WASP nuclear family gets kidnapped” turns into a whole-community man-hunt with special ribbons that gets remembered for years, while news like “baby of urban black single mother gets kidnapped” never even gets acknowledged by the community.
When people who are high-status to society go away, the whole of society mourns. When people who are low-status to society go away, only those directly affected mourn.
Any death-toll number, in the mind of most human beings (or rather, of any human being who’s only engaging with the problem using System 1 thinking), isn’t interpreted as “raw numbers” of lives lost, or even QALYs lost — instead, it’s felt as an aggregate of social-status lost, subjective to the listener’s personal social-status ranking function.
For the same reason that people don’t tend to worry much about disasters half-way across the world (the aggregate social-status weight computed through their status ranking function still sums low), people won’t tend to worry much about the impact of a local disaster if it’s only directly hurting local low-status people. Even if it’s indirectly impacting high-status people by taking away people they care directly about, that still doesn’t generate the sort of performative shame for not having acted that comes when high-status individuals are taken†.
And since that very performative shame is what policy-makers rely on as a group impetus to for getting changes pushed through on a society-wide level, a lack of it means that nothing can really change, even when there are clear rational reasons to implement change.
——————
† Evo-psych just-so hypothesis (i.e. take this with 50 grains of salt): people are expected to sacrifice to protect high-status people; people who do so are rewarded by the high-status people; and so, over generations, it became a eusocial instinct to feel an urge toward performative shame when you “fail to protect” a high-status person in your community—even one you never personally knew.
But people aren’t expected to sacrifice for low-status affiliations of high-status people (since it’d “only” be the high-status person, and not the rest of the community, enforcing the norm on you), so a similar eusocial instinct toward performative shame for failing to protect those people never arose.
'at least they're old'
This has wiped out FAMILES. 2.4M worldwide and nearly 500k in the US. And it flies past people due to fatigue and habituation.
One would have thought that by now we wouldn't be comparing fatality rates of a disease that propagates exponentially when left unchecked, with a more or less stable family of diseases that isn't contagious, but here we are, apple pies to orange sorbets.
Regardless, areas of the US that have mask and social distancing mandates still have high case rates. It seems like the driver of surges in those areas are mainly due to people violating other restrictions, like having indoor gatherings.
Mostly we're choosing to take our chances on the unknown long-term consequences over the fairly well-understood risks we face now. The people who pay the cost will be different.
Approximately 0.2-0.3% of the UK population has died due to coronavirus.
But my personal risk of psychosis as a result of lockdown is far higher than that, it's starting to approach 1, and when it happens, it doesn't matter if those figures are 10%.
Maybe it's just me, but I really doubt it is. Social unrest is coming if we do this for much longer, I can't see any other way.
I can't live in a world that doesn't allow me to have a friend over for a cup of tea indefinitely; compromise really needs to happen soon.
The death toll dwarfs every single "disaster" in UK modern cultural history. Aberfan, Lockerbie, Dunblane, Piper Alpha, Grenfell, Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough, Herald of Free Enterprise, Marchioness, Titanic, Lusitania, Harold Shipman: COVID exceeds all of those put together. Invisibly. Any given one of those is dwarfed by the daily COVID death toll.
A rate that starts to rival wartime deaths. At the recent peak the death toll for 19 January was almost one HMS Hood per day.