Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose.

Also, as a vaccinated New Zealander who after spending 5 months at home is now traveling again, I can assure you people there are happy and mostly oblivious to what has gone on overseas.

The travel restrictions whilst draconian, aren’t absolute and are being eased when needed. The travel bubble with Australia being a good example of this.

Sounds worse than many places, ie Switzerland which is completely landlocked with diverse neighbors and open borders.

Very few travel restrictions, mostly in spring 2020, just do your part and do the right choices in ie hygiene and travel destinations.

Switzerland has had just under 11,000 people die, NZ 26 (twenty-six).

Not to mention, NZ had complete lockdown for all of two months. The rest of the time peoples daily lives were unchanged. No masks (generally), concerts with 10,000+ people no problem. Summer holidays etc etc.

New Zealand was exceptionally successful, and other areas which tried that strategy weren't so lucky. Some parts of Australia were shut down for something like 9 of the past 18 months. (Sydney is under lockdown orders today!) And I think it's hard to find fault with the strength of lockdowns in France, Spain, or Italy - their lockdowns just didn't fully eliminate transition, so we put them in the "weak lockdown" bucket, even though as a matter of government policy they were doing the same thing.

> Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose.

How so? The first result I could find[1] estimates that life expectancy decreased by 1.18 years in the US due to the pandemic, which doesn't strike me as extreme.

1: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2014746118

Life expectancy is a long term trend. Why would you use it to measure the impact of a pandemic?

Answer: Because you can hide the one bad year with the last 100 good years of data and trending.

Maybe you should use population growth projections from 1970 to 2070 to show that this isn't even a pandemic?

That's 1.18 years despite all the countermeasures the US has implemented.

Are you aware how hard it is to move the needle by any significant percentage when you are dealing with sets of millions? Life expectancy is essentially an average of when people die.

Not to mention life expectancy was going up. So it not only stopped whatever gains we had, but reversed it by a substantial amount.

We were expected to gain 2 years from 2017 to 2030. That's 13 years to go up 2 years.

About 2.8 million people die in the US each year. The current life expectancy is about 80 years. To make that 80 become 78.8 is the equivalent of 1.5% of the people or 42,000 babies dying as soon as they were born.

Anything that can move the needle that much in such a short time is pretty extreme.

Yea, statistics can make a case for anything.

Life expectancy went down, but the average age of a covid death was 82 years old, meaning half were older than 82.

These octogenarians and older are pulling the average life expectancy up every year they continue living.

It would be a way different story to have the average life expectancy go down because a bunch of, say, 20 year olds died.

Yes, old people living longer pulls up the average life expectancy. That's how it works.

And that's been happening every year by a little bit every year (about 0.15 years). Until this year.

When it decreased by 0.1/year for three years in a row, it was a big deal.

Having it drop by 1.2 in just a single year is effectively astronomical. It is a significant event.

It depends on how it drops by 1.2

If all you care about is the numbers, then a drop of 1.2 is a horrible terrible outcome and we should all recoil in horror, no matter how it happens.

To me and almost every other human, having a bunch of 80 year olds die, losing out on say, 1-5 quality-adjusted years of life, is not great, but it is nowhere near a tragedy.

Having a bunch of young healthy people with say 50-70 quality-adjusted years of life left, is an absolute horrific nightmarish cosmic-scale terrible outcome.

But to you, it's 1.2 either way.

> nowhere near a tragedy

It might be useful to tone down any highly idiomatic usage of English here, because this sounds very weird.

edit: sort of has this vibe. me: "I was sad when my grandmother died" hn: "WAAAAYYY off there, buddy."

If half are over 82, what does that make the other half?

I'll wait for you to figure that one out.

1.2 is major, no way to slice it. Because either we've been lucky for decades with all of the slight increases or something major just happened.

Now you're trying to color the discussion by projecting things onto me. I never used the words "horrific" or "nightmarish" or even "terrible".

I used the words significant and astronomical. Because they apply. When we've been slowly gaining by 0.1 years/year, a drop of 1.2 years is a -1.3 change. That's a 1300% decrease compared to previous years. Those sorts of scales of difference are typically found in astronomy.

Why do you have a vested interest in downplaying what happened over the past year?

> if every country simply locked down for 3-4 weeks

This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world.

> But no, muh freedom, and but the economy!

Your mocking tone is out of place. I do in fact think freedom and the economy are both important. Don’t you?

I'll try with a different tone.

The intention of keeping freedom and not harming the economy was IMNSHO not matched by that effect and the discrepancy wasn't really surprising.

The authorities where I live decided to keep more open than I considered wise, and not much later closed a lot of sports, for example. The effective choice was freedom now against freedom later, even if the intention was to choose more freedom rather than less.

Yes, my freedom over the course of almost 1.5 years was adversely affected because we couldn't handle a month without it.

And yes, the economy was adversely affected because most small businesses were shuttered for half a year and swaths of them went out of business since we could not bear closing everything down for a sixth of that time period.

Edit: Please explain to me how swallowing real estate, employee, and supply chain expenses for 30 days would have been more difficult or less preferable to the splintered schedule of mandated closings over a far longer time period.

The importance of freedom and the economy are not in dispute. The point is that both would have suffered less in the long term if "draconian" lockdowns had been implemented in the short term. It's game theory, and NZ chose the winning strategy while much of the world chose the losing one.

>This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world.

China and the countries of Oceania did just this and have largely suppressed COVID without MRNA vaccines. China has a massive, porous land border. They've protected themselves from inbound infection by quarantining all visitors on arrival.

> every single country

The pandemic is estimated to have cost the world >$16 trillion already. Now politicians are telling us we will have to live with it forever.

For that price, we literally could have paid every human on earth $2,000 to shelter in place for 4 weeks.

What others did is not fantasy but possibility. If your leaders cannot deliver that, replace them.

It's a little more complicated than that.

When you live on islands thousands of miles away from anywhere with a fairly homogenous population and diversified economy, it's easier both physically and politically to take isolation action against a pandemic.

I think the crux of the matter is that I speak with the benefit of hindsight whereas governments had no such luxury. I think, perhaps, if we truly knew with certainty that the pandemic was a more prolonged situation than one could hope for (despite being warned of such), that a more organized and simultaneous effort to shutter economies and travel for a temporary short-term would have been an easier position to argue politically.

Perhaps. In the United States, the Federal government lacks the power or manpower to make such a decisions, and given that there are 50 states, you’ll always have exceptions.

Valid point. That's a whole extra tier of cooperation necessary. I suppose in this case it would not be unfair to treat each state similarly to a country on the global level, but it does complicate the path to the success condition.

The very fact you’re suggesting every country locks down for 3-4 weeks” as a solution shows youre ignoring reality.

All it would take is for 1 person to travel for the epidemic to continue. Maybe developed nations could do it but developing nations are still dealing with illegal border crossers even 1 year into the epidemic.

So great theory but it falls flat in reality.

In my scenario travel in both directions would be disallowed for the time period. This also requires neighboring nations to do the same, as well as farther off countries to implement checks at the airport. All this was somewhat done regardless but in a haphazard manner devoid of full international cooperation.

So we suffered the major drawbacks anyway all while reaping a partial reward.

Just because something is disallowed doesn't mean people stop doing it.

The insinuation is that in such a scenario there would be a strong enough disincentive.

And perhaps also the incentive of not having a years long pandemic.

Yeah the farmer in SE Asia whose family is starving because he can’t get to market will certainly not try and break any rules.

Love these solution designed by people who work from home.

Food distribution certainly falls under essential services. Pharmacies, too. But not much else is absolutely necessary.

What is a strong enough disincentive? Would you recommend building physical walls along our borders and using violence against people who attempt to cross without authorization?

No, I wouldn't. Gosh, and if I didn't respond it would almost look like I did support that wouldn't it? Toss out these cheap tactics...

There are obviously many levels on the spectrum of what could be done to sufficiently increase compliance without falling back on martial law and giving the governments more reason to erode our freedoms.

And if we banned all drugs, all drug use would stop too?

That's a strawman for an entirely separate discussion.

But I'll bite. No, it wouldn't. However that's not only why we shouldn't. It is most effectively and altruistically addressed as a medical and humanitarian issue.