Please make your substantive points without flamebait or name-calling. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It's also in your interest because it will make your comments more persuasive.

further, if your last question is not rhetorical, I support them in retrospect because I view things from an apolitical lens and think it was the best attempt at a societal cooperation to save lives. Yes, there were negative results, but there were also overflowing hospitals in 99.9% of the country

If you wanted to protect hospitals, then why were 15 year olds locked down and not primarily old and obese people (the vast, vast majority of the risk).

15 years old took the brunt of the lockdowns yet had almost zero risk from the virus.

Why is that? Shouldn't the people at actual risk of the virus shelter themselves?

The difference in risk between a healthy 15 year old and an obese 85 year old is orders of magnitude different. The virus might as well be the common cold to the former.

> there were also overflowing hospitals in 99.9% of the country

The hysteria over "overflowing hospitals" was mostly due to people not understanding the base rate of hospital occupancy, or how hospitals account for occupancy limits in general.

In reality, utilization of the medical system collapsed because people were scared to go to the hospital for routine medicine. Whether that was net positive or negative depends on how iatrogenic risks interact with the selection effects in play at the time.

Yes, the hospitals were quieter during the initial lockdown. However peak COVID deaths and hospital overload was in 2022. Our local hospital experienced 2 nurse suicides in 2022.

>but there were also overflowing hospitals in 99.9% of the country

Italian and New York hospitals were overwhelmed because a) both places put sick elderly into old age homes. (42% of US COVID19 deaths in 2020 occurred in old age homes!) b) Like elsewhere early on, doctors put everyone serious onto ventilators in a mistaken belief that they should treat patients like they do ARDS cases based on blood oxygen levels. This damaged healthy lung sacs and caused long-term dependence on mechanical respiration that doctors found almost impossible to wean patients from, and other side effects like deep vein thrombosis; Nick Cordero is an example. (This article from April 2020 <https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...> was completely vindicated in retrospect.) Neither happened after the first few months.

And no, none of those field hospitals built in parking lots and stadiums everywhere were used. In Wales, for example, Millennium Stadium was converted into a temporary field hospital with 300 beds and capacity to expand to 2000 beds. It was such a big deal that a public contest was held to name it Dragon's Heart Hospital <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Heart_Hospital>. However, said hospital never had more than 46 patients at one time, and was closed in six weeks for lack of use!

Even in NYC, which really did see overloaded hospitals briefly in March-April 2020, USNS Comfort treated a total of 179 patients. USNS Mercy treated a total of 77 patients in LA.

they empirically saved lives and were based on the best available scientific recommendations at the time. Their factual basis is not a matter of opinion.

Whether the opportunity cost of risking lives outweighed the cost of re-opening, second lockdowns, etc. is a whole different topic, but if you're speaking to the first "two week lockdown" then it is no question.

> were based on the best available scientific recommendations at the time

"Best" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. A more objective description might be "most widely expressed".

>were based on the best available scientific recommendations at the time

That's a statement of faith.

>Their factual basis is not a matter of opinion.

Another statement of faith.

>That's a statement of faith.

Aren’t all decisions based on probability and statistics (science and medicine) “faith” based?

They're not lost, they're still here. We could be making efforts as a country to help them catch up and at least make the gap smaller... it's not impossible.

People love to decry the lockdowns, but we knew next to nothing about the virus at the time. No vaccines. A million people died in the US died from Covid.

What would have been the acceptable trade-off for you? would 2 million deaths be fine if kids were in school? that's not the kind of math I'm comfortable doing.

>A million people died in the US died from Covid.

This claim is absurd and invented. Firstly, it takes two seconds to discover that the reporting requirements for Covid "deaths" do not say that Covid must be the primary cause of death, or even a contributing factor.

Reporting standards stated clearly that anyone who dies and happens to also have Covid can be included as a "Covid death". There are numerous cases of this occurring with people who were already terminally ill, people who had a motorcycle accident and other absurdities.

When the federal government financially incentivizes hospitals and medical institutions to inflate numbers that are loosely monitored, all of them will have their finger on the scale. There's documented evidence.

>we knew next to nothing about the virus at the time

We knew that lockdowns would destroy the economy, destroy the lives of children and irreversibly steal an entire generation. We also knew that Covid affected primarily old and severely unwell people, with obesity and other serious health conditions.

With this in mind, why wasn't the lockdown aimed at the old and the obese, the people who were seriously at risk?

A 15 year old had functionally zero risk yet took the entire brunt of the lockdowns. A 85 year old with obesity has massively inflated risk yet trades nothing off (they've lived their lives already).

Trading the lives of young people to save old people is despicable. When a boat is sinking, the first people off are children. Why weren't children prioritized here?

So how many people do you think really died from covid? 500,000? 100,000? how many more would have died without the lockdowns?

In your eyes, how many more deaths would have been acceptable if the economy would be stronger today?

We spent nearly $2 trillion in Iraq for a decade. 9/11 was the catalyst, and 3,000 people died.

I'm not saying you're wrong for being frustrated.

But to me these are all separate problems. The lockdowns almost certainly provided additional death. I think that's a noble cause. It wasn't only the elderly, even with lockdowns thousand of kids lost parents. No amount of being in school can fix that.

Now where's the $2 trillion for tutoring these kids and helping them catch up? that's what I'm mad about.

I feel a single "deaths" number is not that useful of a metric, and something like "life years lost" would be better. A healthy 20 year old would lose ~60 years; a diabetic obese 60-year old much less. Of course we should take reasonable efforts to protect those more vulnerable to disease, but with more nuanced data like this you can better decide what "reasonable" is.

The claims about motorcycle deaths counting as covid deaths were what the deniers were spreading at the time.

We now look back at excess mortality to know how many extra people died: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

The funny/not-at-all-funny part is that excess deaths likely underestimates as lockdowns reduce all cause mortality in a lot of other areas. But arguing with these anti-science folks is about as useful as slamming my head into the wall, so I'm out.

It's 2023 and we're still making attempts at discrediting covid deaths? Wow.

The economy was not "destroyed" nor were childrens' lives.

You know what was destroyed? One of my loved one's sense of smell. And it was definitely covid's doing. I could never call that "functionally zero" risk. We're talking one of the few senses people have and it can be gone with no hope. You might not value that much but I don't want to deny anyone their senses.

Trading the lives and senses of anyone to watch numbers go up in a spreadsheet is despicable.

> Trading the lives and senses of anyone to watch numbers go up in a spreadsheet is despicable.

Yet this is what we all do every day, from traffic to food safety, to public spending on health care, etc.

These sort of trade-offs exist everywhere. Every single time you take a flight or step in a car you are literally contributing to the death of people. None of this is hugely controversial, except ... in the case of COVID.

And it's not about "numbers", during great economic recessions quality of life does decline, sometimes greatly so. IMHO "destroy the economy", "destroy the lives of children", etc. is hugely overstating matters, but it did have a negative impact on many aspects.

Were lockdowns a good or bad trade-off? You can reasonably disagree on that. But to deny the trade-off exists in the first place is unhelpful.

Many people are doing the wfh thing barely working yet still getting a paycheck. Why would they complain?