Like, it's been 2 years. We shouldn't be doing any of these restrictions at all. We should be angry at our governments wasting 2 years of our non-refundable time on this earth while they did nothing. Blaming the public for hospital capacity at this point is absurd.
The first wave of COVID killed a bunch of doctors and nurses, and burnt a lot more out.
Then Delta made a bunch more doctors and nurses quit, with wide reports right now that 20% of nurses are looking to up and leave their job. Talking to my friends who are nurses, they are short staffed, and have been for some time.
On top of that, the way the US does medical training for both nurses and doctors ensures we don't have enough medical professionals during normal times. Nursing schools can't find instructors (pay is too low) and hospitals are purposefully limiting the number of residency spots available to ensure prices for medical care stay high (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)#Financing...)
So, you know, business as usual in the US.
I never heard about it before. Could you provide link to your claim?
All of that is pre-delta, remember that when COVID first hit in 2020 we still didn't have a good idea how it spread.
The tl;dr is that the US government doesn't do a good job of collecting statistics of how many health care workers died of COVID.
1.5k nursing home workers seems to be the one reliable # from the first article, and The Guardian is saying around 3600 healthcare workers in total.
https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/21/who-estimate-115000-heal...
WHO reports over 100k deaths of healthcare workers world wide.
So statistically a small #, but it doesn't account for the # of nurses who got COVID and had long term symptoms that kept them from going back to work, or who just decided to no longer work at all.
And it looks like these #s are highly biased towards major population centers, so it wasn't an even distribution from the country or anything.
Their methodology is based on an assumption that healthcare workers are as likely to die of covid as the general population, that is, their job does not expose them to elevated risk. You can see the start of their methodology as:
"As a start, the number of deaths among HCWs was simply estimated by applying the crude mortality rate from each country (namely, the number of deaths reported to the WHO COVID-19 Dashboard divided by the population size) to the estimated number of HCWs in each country derived from ILOSTAT . This simple estimation considers HCWs to have a similar exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infection and risk of death to that of the general population..."
From there they do adjust for some things, but they are the ways that healthcare workers are different, demographically, from the general population. They are not looking at occupational risk.
I could still totally believe that healthcare workers are at elevated occupational risk, but a paper that assumes their risk is what you would expect from their demographics isn't going to help us answer that question.
I'm not an actuary though, I only have statistics background.
The lack of healthcare capacity has been a conscious choice. There's been no serious effort to build it out. We've chosen to indulge this fantasy that humanity can get control of COVID and we'll just vaccinate it out of existence, despite decades of knowledge about how difficult that would be from our research into other coronaviruses. So when I hear that we need to give up another year of normal life to "keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed", it is frustrating to hear.
No, there wouldn't, because, among other things, comorbidities that must be managed, especially in the population most COVID hospitalizations come from.
> Combat soldiers learn basic emergency medical techniques, even to the point of running IVs
Which allows them to serve as, basically, better-than-nothing EMTs in the absence of anyone else, which is useful on the battlefield to keep people alive to get to proper medical care; they don't replace doctors and nurses, though.
This is a battlefield. It's an emergency, remember? Do whatever it takes. We forced people to sacrifice their short-ass lives in lockdown so these people could figure it out. Where is the results? 2 years and these "experts" still want us to continue locking down to protect a healthcare system they had 2 years to build up specifically to manage covid.
It's as if every one of our lives is worthless in the eyes of people making excuses. No. We paid with our time--something we'll never get back. It is a complete travesty that governments continue to blame the public for their own inability to figure shit out.
No, it's literally not.
> It's an emergency, remember?
Yes and all battlefields are emergencies but not all emergencies have the same conditions (and thus make the same measures expedient) as battlefields.
> Do whatever it takes.
Sure, but what you are suggesting is not what it takes, or something that would be reasonably expected to be useful and effective.
> 2 years and these "experts" still want us to continue locking down
We never generally locked down in the US and no one is suggesting lockdowns now, so I have no idea what “continue locking down” is supposed to mean. (Some US jurisdictions had brief and mostly unenforced policies that, if enforced, would have been local lockdowns, but even the on paper policies expired without renewal quite some time ago.)
Do y'all not value your lives or short time on this earth at all? You should be furious the government is still playing the "protect healthcare capacity" card. They literally wasted 2 years of your life. No results. And they have the audacity to blame you and the rest of society for their failure!! How on earth is that excusable?
I reject that that's an even remotely accurate description of anything that has happened, or has any other relevancd to reality.
> many places are locking down yet again
What places? Unless you are using “locking down” as loosely as you’ve used “battlefield”, that's not actually happening, anywhere.
> And they have the audacity to blame you
The only people I’ve seen anyone in government even approximately blame are particular government decision-makers who allegedly deliberately acted to make things worse and the unvaccinated, neither group of which included me. So, again, I reject that this description is grounded in reality.
And if the goal isn't to flatten the curve to build supplies and increase healthcare capacity, please inform me what the goal actually is. 'Cause if that ain't it... I have no fucking clue what we are doing.
When you use a dramatic-sounding word like "lockdown", there's an implicit bargain you're making. You get to have a stronger emotional effect on me, and in exchange I get to call bullshit if it turns out that you're using it for something that doesn't justify that stronger emotional effect.
It sounds as if you're calling _every_ restriction anyone imposed on anyone in the name of fighting COVID-19 "lockdown". In which case, I call bullshit. For instance, being required to wear a mask when indoors with other people (I guess this is the sort of thing that the bare word "masks" in your list means): yeah, it kinda sucks, but it is a long way from anything that justifies the term "lockdown".
The same goes for your words about the government (I'm not sure which government, but never mind) "flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain". I don't know exactly what's happened in your life, nor in the life of anyone else who isn't me; but while lots of things have been worse than usual for the last two years it's a long way short of "flushing my life down the drain". In fact, here are some things that two years of would be (1) much worse than what I have endured for the last two years but also (2) much less bad than "flushing (those years of) my life down the drain". (a) Being out of work. (b) Getting divorced. (c) Having a substantial disability such as deafness or the loss of a limb. (d) Major depressive disorder.
At least one actual underlying point you're making is a cogent one: governments across the world were concerned about their healthcare systems being overwhelmed, they asked or required people to make sacrifices that (as well as protecting the people making the sacrifices) made that less likely, but they didn't take steps to make substantial increases in the capacity of those healthcare systems that would make such sacrifices less necessary in the future.
That's partly because making substantial increases to the capacity of your healthcare system is hard and takes time. Hospitals take time to build. Doctors take time (a lot more than two years) to train. Etc. But, still, it's probably true that one thing we should have been trying to do alongside panic-mode COVID-19 fighting is to make longer-term capacity increases.
And, yes, all those restrictions governments have imposed have costs as well as benefits, and we should be weighing those up and not just assuming we should do everything that has benefits.
But you don't do either of those points any favours by tying them to hyperbolic language for all the things governments have been doing in the short term to try to reduce the spread. Nowhere has been "locked down" for two years, unless you take "locked down" to mean "doing anything at all to try to reduce the spread of COVID-19", and you shouldn't do that because words have meanings and connotations and that isn't what "locked down" means. Some people have indeed suffered terribly, but by and large we have not had two years of our lives "flushed down the drain", unless you take "flushed down the drain" to mean "made a bit worse", which again you shouldn't do because that's not what those words mean.
Say "Wearing masks kinda sucks, and we should actually look at whether the benefits justify the costs" and I'll warmly agree (though I might or might not end up agreeing with you about how the calculation comes out). Say "Working from home kinda sucks for many people and is basically impossible for others, and having everyone do it has severe economic consequences, and we should weigh those up against the benefits and not do it if it's net negative" and I'll warmly agree (though, again, I don't guarantee to agree about how the calculations come out in every particular case). But say "the government is flushing your life down the drain" or "we have been in lockdown for two years" and, no, sorry, I call bullshit. Those things are not true, and when you say them I can't help suspecting motives I can't endorse such as a preference for labelling everything a government does with the most negative labels you can find.
It takes a remarkable amount of privilege to say something like this.
We stole peoples proms, first dates, high school dances, drunken college hookups, funerals, weddings, livelihoods, social lives, you name it and we stole it in a failed attempt to “flatten the curve”.
People who minimize or brush away the impact the last two hellish years of our existence are either privileged as fuck or have a pathetic, miserable pre-pandemic life. I hardly know what else to say.
How dare anybody say last two years was “made a bit worse”. Speak for yourself… but you have no right to make that claim of others. These last two years seriously fucked my shit up and I’m hardly the minority. Screw people who gaslight us by saying “made a bit worse”.
What "takes a remarkable amount of privilege" is equating what has happened over the last two years to the awful, awful things that can actually flush two years (or more) of a person's life down the drain.
Note that you didn't just claim that some people's lives were impacted badly enough to amount to flushing them down the drain. (That might well be true. The Plague Years have been much worse for some people than for others.) What you wrote, to someone about whom so far as I know you know nothing to speak of, was: "So you are totally okay with the government flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain". "Your life", not "my life" or "some people's lives". And, if I may borrow your language for a moment: you have no right to make that claim of others.
To repeat something I already said (but you apparently didn't read, or decided to ignore because if you acknowledged it it would be harder to maintain the desired level of outrage): yes, it's been much worse for some people than others. If you tell me your life feels like it's been flushed down the drain for the last two years then I'll believe you. But you don't get to point at some random person on HN and claim that the same is true of them.
No.
The things that were about flattening the curve were about avoiding acute health system overload and increased mortality that would result from that (for all causes, not just COVID, since no ICU capacity kills people regardless of the reason they can't get into an ICU) to provide time for the development of effective preventive and treatment interventions, minimizing deaths on the route to that. (I suppose you can call that “building healthcare capacity”, but the goal has never been prinarily about bulking up the number of seriously I'll people hospitals can concurrently treat on a sustained basis, but the capacity to prevent people from getting seriously ill.)
(The original research indicated that after a general lockdown period, cycling local, often more modest, control measures would likely be necessary to that end.)
While the particular half-measures adopted and half-heartedly implemented have had mixed results in preventing health system overload (since we've seen temporary overload various places at various times), we have, in fact, developed various effective interventions and are on the road to more.
So we agree it is about healthcare capacity. You know the best way to avoid healthcare collapse? Build more of it!
You know the unethical, immoral way of avoiding healthcare collapse? Force hundreds of millions of people into this purgatory we are living in right now while doing absolutely fuck-all to build capacity. Then blame them all for "not taking this seriously" when their brilliant plan of doing fuck-all fails.
Seriously. Do you not see how much bullshit it is to just expect the entire world, billions of people to put their lives on hold indefinitely for exactly one specific illness when the solution could be to simply build capacity to deal with covid surges? These governments did fuck all to solve the capacity problem. They dont respect any of us at all!! They pissed our lives away so they didn't have to do anything.
Do you not value your time on this earth at all? 'Cause if you do, I'm sorry to tell you but the government just hoodwinked you into thinking it was your job to sacrifice your life so they didn't have to do anything at all.
Life is short dude. Expecting everybody to do this because "original models" by some bullshit "expert" said so... bleech...
No, the best way is to not need it in the first place. Vaccinating people is vasty more efficient in terms of people's time and money.
Universal vaccination uptake would obviate that.
So why don't you run for office and do it differently?
Who else's fault is it? It isn't the public, that is for sure. You can't blame people for human behavior and "not taking this seriously". These governments asked us to pay one of the highest costs you can pay--they asked us to donate 2 years of our short lives to their cause. And thus far, they have done absolutely nothing but blame the public for their failings.
Life is short. Being asked to flush 2 years of your life down the toilet in this purgatory we are in is a huge ask. Don't you think we should see some results now?
I also wish the various levels of government would have responded differently. I'm assuming you mean in the US, but that's where I am so I'll go with that. I wish the Trump admin would have responded differently, the Biden admin, the US Senate and House (2020 and 2021 members), my governor in Michigan, the senate and house in Michigan, the county health department, my local mayor, and more.
At least in Michigan, they didn't ask me to donate 2 years of my time, much of that has been my choice, frankly against what the Michigan Congress voted. The governor pushed for strong closures in the beginning and the Congress overruled that. Many of the people here have been acting as if there is no pandemic, doing almost exactly what they did before covid-19 existed. Frankly, even many elements of the Trump admin and US Congress have told us to live our lives as normal.
So if anything, I think the government, at its various levels, have provided mixed messages on what we should and should not do. From complete and total lockdown, to open but wear masks, to complete and total return to normalcy. At least in my experience, I haven't heard a coherent "donate 2 years of our short lives to their cause," but rather a mixed message, coming from politicians, who, just as the public are people with human behavior.
IDK, I'm in a fairly 'cautious' state, and things are pretty normal. My kids are in school, stores are open. Restaurants are open. People wear masks. It's not really a big deal.
Do you wear masks 8 hours a day for work? 'Cause I'm sure all the people who do might beg to differ.
Plus masks interfere with communication. Faces are important.
I wore an N95 on a series of flights to Europe over the summer. It was not the most pleasant thing, but I was ok with it. Doctors and nurses regularly work 8/10/12 hours while masked up.
We managed to build giant ships in like 3 or 6 months in WWII. I'm pretty sure we could figure out how to staff 400 or so ICU's with people capable of managing sick covid patients. It might be all these people know how to do... but we could do it. We have almost unlimited resources to do so.
Somehow I remain unconvinced that "thinking outside the box" conjures doctors and nurses into existence or makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job. I guess you could demand the military have doctors and nurses work at the point of a gun, all so John Q. Public probably still couldn't go to Target without a mask on two years hence. That sounds great.
Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Build a second story on their house. I don't care. This shit is an existential emergency where we asked hundreds of millions of people to put 2 years of their life on hold to build healthcare up. Figure it out. If healthcare capacity was the reason we did all this, then we should have poured the entire nation's worth of resources into building healthcare capacity. Period.
It is absolutely inexcusable to continue playing the "healthcare might collapse" card 2 years into this. If people used this many excuses back in WWII we'd have lost the damn war. "Oh, it takes 4 years to design a build a ship... sorry. we can't just pull ships out of our butt. Guess we will just have to let them win". Bullshit. We made it happen. We could make it happen for this too.
This is supposed to be an emergency, remember? Every second you have people in lockdown is a second of each of those peoples very short lives you've now wasted. Figure it out!
They have a moral obligation to not waste my life... which they completely did. Why there aren't riots on the street over the fact that the public is still being blamed for not "taking this seriously" is beyond me. Get fucked, dudes--y'all had 2 years to figure this out.
For me personally it shows it isn't that serious as the fear mongering would like us to be believe
Okay, and who does their job? I mean "no-one can get chemotherapy because the oncology department was told to go work in the ICU" probably isn't a great outcome, either.
ICU capacity can, and in many countries has, been expanded to some extent. But you're not realistically going to 10x it or anything; the main area of concentration has to be reducing the demand on it in the first place (via vaccination, pre-hospital treatment, public safety measures, and, as a last resort, lockdowns).
Vaccination was the end goal because it would mean we could reduce all that emergency capacity we were supposed to build up. Non pharmacutical interventions like masks, social distancing and lockdowns for healthy people are extreme asks and should be used for extremely short durations while you pour your nations entire pool of resources into building healthcare capacity up.
What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals. The fact that all of these were shutdown virtually unused after a month but we continued with all these stay-at-home orders shows exactly how little respect these "experts" and government officials have for the general public. The day those things closed was the day we should have gone back to full normal. That these "experts" doubled down on this crap is so immoral and unethical it amazes me people continued to support it.
That is, of course, far too few (Where is that? I've never heard of a ratio _that_ low for a developed country). But unfortunately, the time to fix it was about five years before it became a major crisis.
> You absolutely could 10x that or even 50x that given the fact you have asked hundreds of millions of people to put their lives on hold.
With what staff?
> What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals.
As far as I can see, those were envisaged as a solution to a regional problem; if covid was only a big problem in a few regions, then this could work via redeployment of staff, drawing on limited reserves of staff (military, bringing people back from retirement, and so on). In practice, very few countries managed to maintain covid as a regional problem, so temporary hospitals became less interesting because _you can't staff them_.
It’s 100% excuses. If healthcare capacity was an actual issue we’d have fixed it already and gone back to pre-pandemic normal.
Covid itself had 0 impact on my life, I don't know a single person that died of it. All the suffering come from restrictions.
It's ok if you have a super boring life without friend or family, never doing anything out or traveling but at least have empathy for others that got miserable because of all those undue restrictions.
That being said, it sucking is not the same as years being wasted. You still have opportunities to do plenty of other stuff. The only reason these years would be wasted is if you do not try to adapt. Are they going to be among the best years of your life? Probably not. Are they necessarily wasted and "stolen"? No.
Covid having a low impact on your life personally is missing the mark on a couple of levels. The low impact might very well be connected to the restrictions in place. In an alternate timeline where restrictions never happened, you might have been equally or more frustrated over the lack thereof as you lost a loved one.
How do you quantify how much discomfort for the general public is worth it to save X amount of lives? You and yours might have gotten dealt a shitty hand because of the border shutdowns, but on the aggregate I think the restrictions have been reasonable.
This is a much better way of describing my reaction to these claims. I appreciate you making it soberly.
There are absolutely folks who've been dealt a rough hand over the last two years--but I certainly wouldn't call my life "boring", and somehow I've figured out ways to make the last two years two of the best of my life: building a wood shop, getting away from the computer more, learning more about myself. And while I'll go back to traveling, etc. once things settle down, I have learned that I don't have to go places to be fulfilled.
Focusing on what one can't do is probably a great way to have made the last two years suck, though.
Drafting people for war works fine because, for the most part in those situations, you're handing someone a gun and telling them to be a meat shield. A similar approach to treating the sick at home is a bit more difficult.
> Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way.
What makes you so sure?
It isn't like this staff has to treat anything else.
Just an idea. Like I said, I'm no expert but the fact that absolutely nobody has attempted to figure it out is bullshit. They haven't even tried. They just keep throwing out excuse after excuse and blaming the public for their failures.
They literally have almost unlimited resources. They could get shit figured out somehow.
This doesn't really pass the sniff test. There are a LOT of different countries and states in the world, with a fairly wide variety of responses to Covid. I'm not aware of any country where they managed to magic up some hospitals fully staffed to handle Covid cases. If it didn't happen despite all the different societies that could have attempted it then it is far more likely that it was considered (and tried even!) and rejected as unworkable.
In other words, you are certainly not the first person to think "what if we just had more hospital beds and staff and throw heaps of money at it to make it happen". The reason no country (that I know of) has done this is because it is impractical. The alternative is a grand conspiracy involving collusion in hundreds of countries and states and their leaders, including all the departments of health and the various officials, in democratic countries, communist countries, authoritarian countries and so on, some of whom are literally at war with each other.
If there's one thing we should've learned from Corona, it's that this line of thinking is wrong. Even facing an emergency like a global pandemic, that has cost the world millions of lives and trillions of dollars of economic damage, most governments did a lot of things very obviously wrong. Clearly, emergencies don't suddenly cause politics to stop and politicians to act perfectly.
Personally, after 2 months of being angry with the ridiculous response of the government I just accepted that you can't fight with mass stupid and moved on to areas of my life that are not affected by covid.
But I still get surprised from time to time you know, you'd expect politicians to accept that everybody had the chance to get vaccinated and lift all the restrictions so that darwinism can do its work, but it seems they want to impose vaccine mandates instead... trying to protect people who don't want to be protected, what's the grand idea behind that?
There's no real end in sight to be honest, it's better to ignore it as much as possible and focus on areas you do control
If we are going to see constant new variants and new waves, then its the only choice we have.
Realistically, the only viable course is probably to vaccinate and boost as many people as humanly possible, and await better vaccines and therapeutics. Paxlovid should hopefully help when it's available in quantity.
Considering how relatively minor covid was, and how simple the situation is, that so many people continue to disagree on basics suggests to me that we have learned very little from this (indicating our capacity to learn certain things is not great), and that if we ever get a serious pandemic (or serious anything), we might be f*cked.
If we had a serious pandemic where dudes were dropping like flys on the street and they had horse drawn carrages stacked with bodies, I don't think many people would have an issue dealing with it. The problem with covid is our response to it was way out of line with the actual illness. People kinda have a problem being asked to make huge sacrifies for something they don't perceive to be a major problem.
That said, I think massive numbers of people (likely the majority still, although the tides seem to be shifting extremely quickly lately) would strongly disagree with us on the degree to which covid is a "major" problem. I am very worried that the inability for people to even mutually agree upon a way of discussing (let alone agreeing on anything) culture war topics, and our inability to take such phenomena seriously, is going to be a gift that keeps on giving for decades into the future (just in time for the climate change culture war).
For example, how many people know the:
- Case fatality rate of COVID-19 (in the U.S, it's 1.6%) - Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 (can only be estimated, but probably around 0.1-0.3%) - Hospitalization utilization (not just now, but also before COVID-19 so one can compare to prior flu seasons and such. Personally I have not found this data) - Demographics of those who died with COVID-19 (in the UK the median age of death is 84, above the life expectancy of 82. Most deaths are old people and/or those with co-morbidities)
Most people drastically overestimate the danger (eg. by at least 5x according to one survey) because they're bombarbed with news and government fear-mongering, forced to take vaccines and be subject to draconian restrictions, then told to shut up and "trust the experts" while being kept in the dark on the data. Even Big Tech was censoring those who questioned the mainstream narrative (eg. Chris Martenson briefly being banned on Youtube)
In any civilized democracy, the citizenry should be educated so they can make the most informed decisions. There obviously seems to be no interest in educating the people except when it serves the narratives of the elite - which right now is basically "get your shot" and do whatever it takes to reduce COVID-19 numbers regardless of any collateral damage (eg. businesses going bankrupt, people losing work/income, hospitals reducing capacity for other kinds of care, schools shutting down, mental health crisis, restriction of freedoms like movement, general fear).
> What's most shocking to me is how little interest there seems to be in educating the population.
I think it's even stranger than it seems at first glance. There is no shortage of people calling for "moar critical thinking", as in "why don't those whose job it is to teach critical thinking do a better job"....but have you ever seen the conversation go beyond that?
To me, it is clear as day that overall humanity has a very serious problem with "critical thinking", and when I say that I'm casting an extremely wide net, one that would capture not just Trump supporters, conspiracy theorists, and over-enthusiastic progressives, but also 90% of the HN userbase (an arbitrary line can be drawn anywhere according to the drawers wishes, but it is not difficult at all to draw a line that captures ~everyone, according to an explicit standard/methodology). I truly believe that things are in a far worse state than anyone realizes, and my reasoning for that is that each individual overlooks one crucial detail: critical thinking is implemented by the human mind, and the human mind is an illusion machine....and, due to millions of years of evolution, it is so good at conjuring illusions (such as each of our respective entire conceptualizations of reality) that we are unable to realize when what we're seeing is an illusion....or worse: the possibility never even crosses our mind. And, if it does, we will ask our mind "Is this an illusion?", and the answer will come: "No, it is not, this is reality", which will be enthusiastically accepted as fact. And that I propose is "how it works", and how nobody realizes what is going on. (There's more strange stuff over and above that, like if you mention this particular idea to anyone, the majority of the time they will get ~angry and insist on changing the conversation, or, engage in non-logical rhetoric, character attacks, scolding, etc etc etc - but this is the essence of the problem imho.)
That will be the fun one for sure. What I do know is the knuckleheads running the show right now up and down the west coast are the last people I’d trust to handle that correctly.
Believe it or not, but 2020 hospital capacity was lower than projected using projections before anyone knew what covid even was.
[0]https://truthout.org/articles/20-rural-hospitals-closed-in-2...
The thing that needs to not happen is filling up hospitals. People died where I live because they could not get access to 'elective' surgery due to the medical system being slammed during the most recent Delta wave.
Once that's not a factor, things will start getting more normal.