1. What was the total excess mortality during that period? In many countries, the official totals are significantly lower because they only include lab-verified cases or don't cover things like, say, someone dying of a heart condition they had been successfully managing before contracting COVID.
2. How many people would have died without safety measures being in place, especially people who would have been unable to get unrelated medical care they needed because the medical system is over capacity.
The second number is obviously fuzzy but it touches on the biggest factor for ending it in my opinion: vaccination rates. If you have a high percentage of the population vaccinated, you are still going to see spread but that shifts it closer to something like influenza where you might still want additional measures for some high-risk activities (e.g. indoor dining without good ventilation) but you're not looking at ICUs being flooded. The current vaccines appear to give something like an order of magnitude reduction in that risk so those are what I'd tie re-opening to those rates.
If you calculate this way, you’ll lump the damage done by lockdowns with the damage done by the disease and use it as an argument for more lockdowns.
You can’t simply compare place a to place b because there are no two places that differ in just that one aspect.
You can’t just conclude lockdowns have no downsides because an unquantified ‘very few’ places had ‘lengthy restrictions on seeking medical care’. If you state that you assume that is the only reason which simply is an unfounded assumption.
A very simple basic fact is that if you lock down sports facilities, which happened in a lot of places, people will get less fit and thus more susceptible to COVID with a bigger chance of dying. I don’t think there is anyone who would deny that. But if you lump all excess mortality together, the resulting deaths will be an argument for more lockdowns.
And guess what, if you presumably describing what your favorite ‘actual experts’ are saying is handwaving, the logical explanation is that the thing you are describing is handwaving. Which, if you can look critically at the ‘actual experts’ really is quite a fair description of most of what they do.
Pretending the problems with your “solution” don’t exist and dismissing them as speculation or similar basic, hollow invalid reasoning, that is handwaving.
Further, when it goes unchecked, the hospitals get overwhelmed, which has follow-on effects. People with preventable illnesses are affected by a lack of beds.
Omicron is already less deadly by 10x. Covid has a 0.5% death rate pre-omicron. With vaccinations it brings the death rate down to negligible.
At thus point I think we need to stop trying to protect everyone. Some people as going to die. It’s tragic. But we can’t keep locking down everyone.
I am currently going through Covid. I could die from it. I probably won’t. It’s an annoying cold at this point. We have to change policy to accept that for 99.99% of people omicron will be mild and will confer immunity. Some people will die like the flu. We have medication now that works. We have vaccinations that work. We have masks that work.
Let’s move on.
To put another way, if you are right (I haven't seen definitive numbers, other than hopes/preliminary findings that the variant seems to be less deadly), the Omicron variant is about half as deadly as the annual flu (about 0.1% IFR).
Is it that we should be more aware of the long term deleterious effects of contracting a virus?
Because then I think we agree!
(Also, this doesn’t address the reality that we don’t know if long Covid is the same as with the flu. I just wanted to point out that even if we accept this premise, we would still se a decrease.)
We don’t know that COVID is any different—in absence of evidence it’s always best to assume the null case.
The psychological damage being done, in a society which doesn't have the tools to deal with it properly (and with this I mean pretty much the entirety of western society) is not even being taken into account. Quality of living for a good deal of society has gone to hell, I can't even take a walk in the park without a mask on (I happen to be Spanish). It's madness.
Public healthcare psychology is not even brought up by GPs anymore unless you risk suicide, and even then there is a waiting period of several months. Suicide attempts are at an all-time high and the amount of depression and anxiety backing it up can't be overstated.
I feel like we are pretending we solved the trolley problem all of a sudden.
https://twitter.com/kombatliberlism/status/14815700214909747...
I am astonished how many people prioritize the social/pub/restaurant/movie theater scene over the literal survival chances of millions of people. I guess I should stop being astonished and accept that people are driven primarily by their desires and self-interest. Cast them into the pit, I want a cheeseburger.
We all do. We have always done this. That's why drugs exist. That's why transportation exists. Life is not a "maximize your lifespan" game, it has never been.
I mean, why would you worry about if others are unmasked when you already are vaccinated and wearing an N95 mask on top of that?
> I wish we’d get some numbers that we can work towards, in terms of when we can open up society again. This is a very hopeless situation.
I'll give you a number that is kind of pulled out of thin air, but it gets the point across: 95% fully boosted.
In my country there have been around 21k deaths from COVID (officially). 0.9% of those deaths were people that were between 0-49 years old. That’s ~200 deaths, in two years. The age group 0-49 represents 59% of the population in my country.
I wish we’d get some numbers that we can work towards, in terms of when we can open up society again. This is a very hopeless situation.