This is ironic in a comment otherwise concerned with death rates.
The risk of disablement is much higher, as is the risk of sequelae.
A lot of emphasis was placed on preventable deaths. That is; situations where we’re turning away a patient that we could’ve saved, because we don’t have a bed available for them.
I thought this was a solid, intuitive approach. Preventable deaths are really, really unfortunate.
Do we need to call in military hospital ships? Maybe we do stuff that reduces communication of disease, reduces driving to reduce road accidents, etc.
Where I live it was communicated more than once, “avoid doing riskier things this holiday season because the emergency services you expect to be available may not be.”
But if after every hockey game 20 hospital beds get used up, that's as risky for the health system as allowing a restaurant to serve uncooked chicken for an evening.
Here in Ontario, the McKinsey-driven "Science Table" frequently referenced hospital capacity in their reports, but their modelling often ended up being off by orders of magnitude.
While I concur that preventable deaths are unfortunate, I don't think there's evidence to suggest that most - all? - of the restrictions put in place had any noticeable impact on preventable deaths from Covid.
If anything, those restrictions very much enabled other deaths - from mental health challenges, isolation, depression, substance abuse, delayed medical screening - that very much were preventable.
While we don't have a full picture yet, it's telling that excess mortality remains heavily elevated even though most of the population has had Covid and been vaccinated.
"Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates."
https://videos.elmundo.es/v/0_djmhws8v-la-policia-baja-a-bus...
https://www.levante-emv.com/safor/2020/04/13/helicoptero-pol...
Fascinating how natural it comes to us: “my experience must be everyone’s experience.”
I live in Paris, and at the height of "stay at home" mandates, it was a ghost town. I had an actual reason to get out a few times, and let me tell you there were less people outside in broad daylight than there currently is in the middle of the night, which was really eerie.
There was enforcement too, since the police had pretty much nothing else to do there during the full mandates (not the latter weaker ones).
W.Australia's COVID-19 vaccine roll-out began 22 February 2021.
The state remained isolated from 24th March 2020 until 3rd March 2022, by which time essentially every person in the state had been double vaccinated.
For the most part people continued life as before, now and again the capital city would have portions "locked down" when there was an active case in order to contain spread and test potential carriers.
The first active case was the 21st February 2020, contained. The first COVID death was 1st Mar 2020. Active case numbers stayed low until There was no real increase in active cases until February 2022. There was no significant increase in deaths due to COVID until March 2022.
"Shelter in state until vaccinations rolled out" for a state that was already largely independant and isolated worked just fine - the deaths started once the borders opened, but at rates greatly below those seen elsewhere in the world thanks to a vaccination buffering.
W.Australian cases Jan 2020 - now: https://covidlive.com.au/report/daily-cases/wa#2020
W.Australian deaths Jan 2020 - now: https://covidlive.com.au/report/daily-deaths/wa#2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Western_A...
It is an extremely rare situation though, and would not have been possible if it were not the most isolated capital city in the world.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19&oldid=94...
My works HR department got sick of having people use "logic" and "evidence" to argue against their policies. After kicking a few people out the door and generally saying you can't talk about this at work anymore, nobody talks about it.
Luckily my workplace was mature enough to decide to leave those topics for the pub and social media so we didn’t have to be told that.
She responds to his excuse that his mistaken conclusions were logical:
`` Jack said slowly, "You used 'logic' again. What you call 'logic.' Rod, you use the stuff the way some people use dope. Why don't you use your head, instead?" Rod flushed... ''
At the end of the day, you can always choose not to play.
edit: I dont want to name the policy as it may identify the company. It was a particularly idiotic one though.
There is no scenarios where the collapse of the medical system is a viable outcome for policymakers that is also compatible with a functioning economy. A collapse of the medical system means non-covid fatalities also increase. Heart attacks, car accidents and childbirth all become mortality contributors. The most likely outcome of a medical system collapse would be martial law, mass graves, economic collapse and potential collapse of essential systems like food distribution.
The idea that policymakers were primarily constrained by the thought of grandpa dying a few years early and weighing it against the grandkids social isolation needs to die.
It's very easy to make decisions in retrospect when you have all the information that could be useful. It's very hard to make decisions in the present when that information doesn't exist yet.
The argument I am criticizing never mentions rearward metrics as a problem.
The assumption that friends and family will calmly watch a family member’s untended death from covid when ICUs are over capacity and that essential workers will continue to show up for work knowing there is no hope for care if they fall ill is unrealistic in my opinion.
Are 200,000 lives meaningful enough?
Silver's regression model shows that for each 1% increase in the vote share for the blue candidate, the covid death rate in that state (statistically) would fall by 15.5 per million population.
In areas where the blue candidate received 20% of the vote, and the red candidate received 80%, the model predicts 1,793 deaths per million.
And in areas where blue got 80% and red got 20%, the model predicts 864 deaths per million.
A 300% greater death rate [1] is a startlingly high penalty to pay for an ideology. This is at least 200,000 deaths [2] attributed to political ideology. Not to mention the tremendous excess suffering that did not result in death.
And, no, it's not because red areas are older than blue areas. It's because red ideologues got the vaccine in far lower numbers.
[1] Coefficients show that blue at 0% would have a death rate of 2,103 per million, and blue at 100% would have a death rate of 554 per million.
[2] 2,103 - 554 = 1,549 excess deaths per million for red, multiplied by 45% of the US population is roughly 230,000.
Pretty sure it was something like 60% vs 70%. That doesn't seems like anywhere near different enough to explain those numbers.
Vaccine refusal played a part, certainly, in connection with the fact that conservatives are older. In many instances, a lot older. In other instances, not really that much older. The trend is unidirectional but the degree varies by state, as you'll find when you start comparing West Virginia and Florida to Maine and Vermont.
But the truth is inescapable: the older someone was, the more they needed to get vaccinated and boosted... and the less likely they did.
*The differences in state death rates are very likely because of differences in vaccine uptake*
Just to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that COVID is intrinsically more likely to target Republicans or anything like that. Rather, my claim is that COVID is considerably more deadly in people who haven’t been vaccinated, and since Republicans are less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats, state partisanship serves as a proxy for this.
Indeed, we can look at vaccination directly.
... age and vaccination rates alone explain more than half of the variation in COVID death rates between states since Feb. 2021.
Right-wing media figures consistently fed their audience a diet of vaccine skepticism, conspiracy theories, and promotion of useless alternative treatments; e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/us/politics/coronavirus-v... . Because their audience skews older, this messaging had unusually-deadly consequences.
Why there's anything controversial about any of this, I have no clue. How does it make sense for him to write "I don't mean to say that COVID targets Republicans," followed by a paragraph that states exactly why it does?
The point of that statement is, the virus doesn't target someone because they're a Republican, but Republicans have been more likely to die from it because they're more likely to be unvaccinated.
The at home treatment option was to watch the patient drown in their own fluids. There are few people in that scenario that would have the emotional capacity to calmly give support to a close family member or friend when there was no ICU capacity. Their more realistic scenario would be people loading the patient into the car and driving to the nearest hospital. Some percentage of that population will likely turn violent.
The public's frustration is that these prolonged, seemingly arbitrary measures outlasted their initial justification.
Regional programs were put into place to shift patients during a local surge and to mobilize hallways and other non-traditional capacity. In California once capacity dropped below 10% health orders went into effect.
At the beginning of 2023 and well after widespread vaccination the California statewide capacity was at 24% availability with 7% of beds being taken by Covid patients.
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/Reg...
https://gothamist.com/news/fema-begin-strategic-drawdown-lar...
And everyone working at those hospitals didn't see any light for month/years
Hospital protocols also improved over time to reduce the need for respirators and the disease moderated but there was no magic protocol that really reduced disease progression or duration. Out of my social circle there were anti-vaxers that contracted covid late in the pandemic and spent weeks in the hospital (four total, two deaths) even with late stage protocols.
The whole medical system doesn't just stop because COVID wards are full.
Any competent system could have adjusted and isolated the overflow to its logical areas.
Furthermore ACE2 inhibitors like ivermectin or the now patented Pfizer whatever you call it and other effective treatments were available the whole time and only blocked for bs political reasons ( likely by regulatory capture by big pharma ).
Namely, the ivermectin was only administered with patients after 7 days of symptomatic COVID infection.
Meanwhile Paxlovid, the patented ACE2 inhibitor is received as a proven treatment when administered early in infection.
7 days after symptoms appear is not early. The game is rigged my friend
No it’s not. You are dramatically overestimating how many people need life-saving medical services. If we had no emergency healthcare system at all and everyone who needed to go to the hospital just died instead, yes it would suck and yes we would have lower life expectancy but civilization would largely continue.
There were multiple countries where the medical system came close to collapse. India in 2021 is a case study of a medical system pushed beyond its limits (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/world/asia/india-coronavi...) and civilization largely continued.
But there is a lot of latitude between normal and survived.
Let’s assume that US policymakers considered taking no-action and let the ICUs collapse. Could policymakers in that scenario reasonably expect that teachers would continue to teach? Would the school system function if 20% of school teachers decided to not risk death and opted out?
That answer was easy to get and the answer was that schools would be shutting down.
How many essential workers would opt-out? How many need to drop-out to care for children? How many because they are sick? For how long? How does that impact fuel and food distribution?
Can we expect crowds would gather at hospitals? How many in that case become violent? How do we control crowds? Do we call in the national guard?
I’m not sure I can see any scenario that a policymaker could consider where reducing spread wasn’t the only viable option.
The controversy occurred when people found out that they were definitely negatively affected by all the lockdown policies when they still hadn’t had COVID.
Today, most countries are not going to do lockdowns for Covid due to the data. That was temporary for a highly infectious airborne virus that we didn’t know much about at the time, which was overwhelming our hospitals.
Today, no one is closing anything since we know much more about the virus, and it’s becoming less lethal. All people are asking today is for everyone to either regularly vaccinate, wear good masks indoors (no need for this outdoors), or both. That isn’t going to result in either isolation or depression.
I had this same thought during COVID, but like you said, it's not something others want to talk about. COVID was serious, but the American reaction to it was so strange. The whole approach to masking at restaurants has to be one of the most bizzare moments of American history.
I am familiar with the case of Spain, but I’m sure in other countries the situation was similar.
In the grand scheme of things, all those who died purely from COVID were going to die anyway.
A more important question is what has happened as a result of societies responses to this pandemic, especially in light of how marginal this virus' lethality was (this was no plague).
It has set precedent that in the case of relatively minor social distress, the government can take unlimited power, and the populace will just knod their heads.
It has also set precedent that the old can parasitize the young even further. Saving a few boomers a few years is worth masking up young school kids, affecting their communicative and social development.
The only silver lining to this has been the resulting explosion of remote work, which of course the boomers are now trying to undo. Fortunately, that's a cat-out-of-the-bag.
It's unfortunate that the boomers didn't learn an important lesson from their parents, who fought WW2 - sometimes dying is the right and proud thing to do.
In Australia there is huge pushback politically about holding an inquiry to determine what could be done better, a lot of politicians hid behind faceless "health advice" for their actions that wouldn't last a minute when the public servants involved face an inquiry.
Current estimates of the jobkeeper program put it at $110,000 per job saved, in comparison to the median wage of $52,338. Basically all of it went into the pockets of big companies rather than paid directly to people. That was just one of many programs at the time, debt blew out by hundreds of billions which the populace on both sides strangely cheered on.
Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them?
I’m guessing it’s hard to quantify and compare. A lot of things like general depression, isolation, kids missing half a year of school, etc. can’t really be evaluated against people dying. And on its surface it seems obvious: uh, people dying is much worse than any of those things.
But if I said that everything we did was to save one life, people probably would generally agree it wasn’t worth it (obviously so: people don’t seem too interested in preventing all kinds of deaths at all costs). What about ten lives? One thousand? Ten thousand? There’s some subjective level where it starts to feel obvious to more and more of us, until a majority of us agree.
But do we have any general sense what that number is? How do we decide how much to care? It might seem ghoulish to decide how many dollars is worth a life, but we do it every day.
With the data we have now, I imagine we can somewhat quantify this given enough sample jurisdictions with different rules? “Masking saves x lives per 1000.” “Closing schools saves y lives per 1000” etc. And perhaps then we’re able to decide “is x lives worth the qualitative harm done?” Probably. “What about y?” Maybe not.