Comment by orwin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orwin | Hacker News Reader

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> For people without underlying risk factors, the illness is generally quite minor.

1. Kawasaki disease increase for children is not yet tied to a risk factor other than covid19

2. Pulmonary fibrosis occurs also with patients with no risk factors. Although most of those patient spent time in ICU tied with an intrusive ventilator, this is not the case everytime (not enough data yet to know how many have minor lung scarring though).

3. Hypoxemia caused by covid19, even with very mild symptoms is dangerous for the longterm heart and brain health. If you do sleep apnea AND you have covid19, please do not hesitate to go to a hospital (22 millions americans are suffering from sleep apnea and 80% are undiagnosticed according to this [0]). Hypoxemia also have impact on mental health.

I agree that other view exists and should be allowed to be heard. But you probably don't have family in a hotspot, and if you have, it's probably in a major city where the effect are not that visible, especially with lockdown (and overall a few percentage is hit). I have family in a low-density hotspot (around Colmar, France) and they are medical workers. Everyone was hit around them. Around 300% excess mortality in the area (still less than Bergame, so lucky them), at least three parents died, as well as a long-time friends and two colleagues. He told us that not going in self-lockdown was criminal and begged us to ask to work from home if we could (this was 5 day before government-enforced lockdown).

[0] https://www.sleepapnea.org/learn/sleep-apnea-information-cli...

Your reasoned response and respectful tone are truly appreciated. Thank you! As a matter of fact, I do have family in NYC, Queens, and CT. It's perhaps the hottest "hotspot" in the world. In general, children below 5 and older adults don't have immunocompetence comparable to older children or younger adults. So caution is certainly called for for those age groups.

At the same time, for me personally, after spending years in biotech and healthcare (doing academic mathematical research on hand hygiene, including published peer-reviewed study of compliance rates of doctors to their own hygiene protocols, working within and analyzing clinical trials, doing pharmacokinetics, publishing epidemiological studies, mathematics of mass decontamination, etc.) I've realized a few things.

One is that doctors in particular are always calibrating their behaviour to what butters their bread. In the same way American police write "to serve and protect" on their cars, when it really it should say "to serve and protect [THE STATE]", doctors believe they should "do no harm [TO MY CAREER]". Meaning, the treatments and recommendations for patients are totally different than the standards they apply to themselves and their own children. It's safer, and garners more power, to prescribe a lockdown, than to risk getting caught out on the off-chance this is another Black Death.

You'll see the same repetitious behaviour with respect to things like dietary supplements, lockdowns, and masks: do as I say, not as I do. And what I say is always going to be coming from a cover-my-arse perspective. It's the outrageous hypocrisy that drives me mad. No doctors that I know or work with personally believe the hype, yet the peer pressure to conform in public and lick boots is overwhelming.

The impact of the deaths from delayed non-covid-19 medical treatments, mental issues, depression, hunger, economic distress, and so on is going to be enormous. There is no accountability in this scenario, because of the mass hysteria. All the damage gets ascribed to the virus, and none to the policy makers, similar to how iatrogenic deaths get swept under the rug.

The only positive that I see is that the mask has slipped and the possibility exists that soon, some proportion of the people will see what maniacal control-freak lunatic weirdos the people in charge of the state have become. Never shake hands again? Guess what, if strangers never touch each other, it will be the end of the human race in just 50 years. God help us.

Okay, i understand your point of view, and i agree on some points, but this still is not an argument against lockdowns.

My opinion is that lockdowns if you can't stop the spread should be locals, way more local than a state in the US, and i agree that global lockdowns are bad if you can't completely stop the epidemics.

a point for future argumentation: the food situation is okay in western europe (notwithstanding sever cut in animal protein consumption) , troubling in eastern europe (but this is not caused by the lockdown and can be offset by less animal feed), my company is hosting FNSEA/INSERM project doing food previsions so i'm well aware of this. No data on other countries sadly.

Also to nitpick:

>The impact of the deaths from delayed non-covid-19 medical treatments, mental issues, depression, hunger, economic distress, and so on is going to be enormous.

Yes, again, i have family working in hospital at Colmar, my cousin is the SMUR chief and his wife is an addiction doctor so i'm well aware of this, but during the height of the epidemic, almost no care were given to emergencies because they had to focus on patient. Since two weeks ago they can now take care of people suffering addiction, they did not redirect emergency operation to hospitals in Lyon (no free helicopter trips anymore). Also the diminution of road accident was also a really nice side-effect for them.

> No doctors that I know or work with personally believe the hype

They should have come to Colmar France or Bergame Italy and helped then.

The global response is not the best, but really you should talk to doctors in community with 300%+ excess death, their point of view might be a bit different.

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