Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No | Hacker News Reader

Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No

wsj.com

20 pointsmrfusion21 comments

Maybe we should have a conversation about the age distribution of the deaths. Because no one in the media is willing to publish aggregated world data.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deat...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109867/coronavirus-deat...

I believe it is widely known that the disease disproportionately affects older people.

Are you saying you wish we had worldwide stats for the demographic breakdown of the deaths? (If someone does that, could I also request a breakdown that shows the size of the demographic -- for example, in the charts the parent poster shared, I assume that there just aren't many 90+ year olds alive (as a percentage of the population), and so there aren't many deaths -- but a ratio would make it way easier to tell.)

I only hear raw casualty numbers from the news and not that most people dying had a pre medical condition.

I don't think it is that interesting how many 80+ year old people are living because life expectancy has risen in Italy since 1950 with 15 years to 82. 50 years ago nobody was lucky enough to even reach 80, let alone 90.

I included your requested pyramid anyway and you can draw your own conclusion how many lives we should save.

I think it is the wrong discussion and we should agree on a age limit to decide which people aren't relevant in economy shutdown tradeoff . https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2019/

I think they're saying we should realize that a septuagenarian or an octogenarian is, economically speaking, a drain on society and we should be having a conversation about whether stopping the world economy to keep cost centers running makes sense.

Yes, because the elderly among us are, like all human beings, merely vehicles of economic value.

My parents wish I would call or write to my cost centers more, but I don't see the incentive to invest my valuable time for little to no ROI.

It takes 80 years to construct an octogenarian but less than a year to make a baby. That octogenarian is full of experiences and learnings, while the newborn will still take decades of processing to become an economically valuable adult.

By your reasoning we should terminate the ones we can’t afford to develop right now (we can always make more later) and concentrate our resources on saving the ones that may have the insight we need.

This honestly looks like a propaganda piece that directly contradicts a ton of evidence to the contrary.

I think calling something propaganda is a great way to silence discussion.

It's arrogant to assume that the lockdowns are the only way to respond to this virus. I don't want to assume. I want to be informed by the data. That landscape is shifting, and I want our leaders to be willing to change their minds as new data comes in and we learn more.

Maybe we carry on with lockdowns, maybe they were a good idea in cities, but never for suburbs. It's really hard to tell at this point.

I was for the lockdowns, and I'm willing to stay that way, but I'm willing to hear more facts ,data, and analysis.

We all work at keyboards, and get to stay employed. The cost/benefit analysis for coders as individuals is a hell of a lot different than it is for construction workers, restaurant workers, retail, etc. We should really try to be sensitive to that, instead of acting as if economic devastation doesn't cost lives, and is just a bit of pain to endure while we save lives from the virus.

I grew up in an economically depressed area. Poverty, loss of livelihood and misery kill people too. Think about the fact that this is mainly being done to protect elderly people who have already earned the money they need for life, and is primarily costing young earners their livelihoods.

The political system in the US already favors the elderly at the expense of the young. Do you think you're ever going to see Social Security checks equivalent to what you are paying in?

> I was for the lockdowns, and I'm willing to stay that way, but I'm willing to hear more facts ,data, and analysis.

Then look at the data. There's an entire subreddit of all the latest papers and analysis regarding the disease and its spread, and the ineffectiveness of lockdowns has been debunked time and time again, especially now that we have models that have high approximations of the real-time spread of the disease. We have examples from Singapore, Germany, Brazil, and various US states about how easing lockdowns without concern for the necessary sanitary measures has a very measurable impact on new infections and deaths.

In the beginning there were no clear exit scenarios. We have multiple governments that have expressed them now, with specific goals and measures that have to be considered to not reignite the spread of the disease.

So yes, I consider this propaganda because the basic premise of the article is flawed and is the subject of journalists failing to navigate the current state of research, and its implied motivation of defending premature openings at the cost of an additional tens of thousands of lives.

> evidence to the contrary

It depends on what you mean by lockdowns saving lives: when this first started, the catch-phrase was "flatten the curve". That means, we're all going to get it eventually, but we're going to try to spread out when we get it. If it's fatal to X% of the population when they get it, then it will be fatal whether they get it today or two months from now.

Now, on the other hand, if we stay locked down until a vaccine is invented, or just stay locked down for the rest of our lives, then yes, of course, the lock down will save lives and will continue to save lives, at least until the lack of commerce leads to mass starvation. Which will happen before a vaccine can be developed.

> To normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state. A state’s “days to shutdown” was the time after a state crossed the 1 per million threshold until it ordered businesses shut down.

Can someone better at stats walk through this? Doing a simple test like this and then claiming lockdowns don't work does not seem genuine.

The places that are slow to shut down are the places that are more dispersed and thus have a lower R0. Thus this is totally bogus.

Suppose perfect lockdowns, so no new infections after lockdown, not even family members.

Suppose incubation is 1w, then 1w of worsening syntoms, and then death at 3w, consistent with Italy and other countries (sp. in places with enough beds, deaths seemed to have occurred later).

Then, isn't the whole premise wrong? You want to study lockdowns but only look at deaths from infections BEFORE the lockdown?

Am I missing something?

Any idea how one could procure this wihtout the paywall?

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/do-lockdowns-save-many-lives...

Excerpt:

Do quick shutdowns work to fight the spread of Covid-19? Joe Malchow, Yinon Weiss and I wanted to find out. We set out to quantify how many deaths were caused by delayed shutdown orders on a state-by-state basis.

To normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state. A state’s “days to shutdown” was the time after a state crossed the 1 per million threshold until it ordered businesses shut down.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE OPINION NEWSLETTER

We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. (The trendline sloped downward—states that delayed more tended to have lower death rates—but that’s also a meaningless result due to the low correlation coefficient.)

Isn't that just an excerpt? It links to WSJ at the end...

You're right, thanks! - edited

Larger excerpt.

http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2...

The author is a well known government hands-off libertarian, so keep the bias in mind.

Wikipedia:

> Rodgers is known for his public relations acumen, brash personality, and strong advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism

> Laizzes-faire is an economic system in which transactions between private parties are absent of any form of government intervention such as regulation, privileges, imperialism, tariffs and subsidies

The saying is only 3 meals from anarchy. Pick your poison: economic collapse or avoid coronavirus. I'd take the virus, personally.

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