At what point are more people killing themselves than are getting saved by quarantine orders? No one is seriously making this calculation.
It's also not politically advantageous to even consider it, let alone talk about it. In a year, when nobody cares anymore, and people are killing themselves, it will never come back to haunt the policy makers that provoked it all.
Economic problems would've happened anyway. Global supply chains were already in disarray even before March, as China essentially lost two months of manufacturing output, container ships stopped sailing, and the whole chain was pushed into oscillations it'll take a year or more to recover from (affectionately known as the "bullwhip effect"). Airlines and hotels were done the moment the virus landed in Italy - at this point everyone with half a brain started to cancel any trip they could cancel, weeks before governments in Europe got a clue and started locking down their borders.
The only way the government could've saved restaurants, nail salons, et al. from suffering similar fate would be by suppressing all information about the virus and going to full denial mode. Otherwise, the customer base would've mostly evaporated anyway, lockdown or no lockdown, and you'd still have rolling shutdowns as place after place had to be quarantined for 2+ weeks after some employee or customer was found sick. With hotels and restaurants barely surviving on fumes, the pressure on the food supply chain would've been only little worse than it is with these places shut down.
Anyway, it's not like the governments around the world started to shut down their countries because they were bored, and wanted to stir things up. They actually dragged their feet for weeks after people following the evolution of the virus started stocking up, limiting interactions, pushing for WFH and practicing social distancing.
1. You don’t live alone.
2. You have a job.
I think we’re all a little short on empathy these days.
Point taken. Thank you for reminding me. You're correct in both guesses, and I do sometimes forget that I'm not suffering through the worst of it.
3. You and your loved ones are not dealing with mental illnesses that were under control before the lockdown, but losing control during and after it.
This thing is really hard on some people.
(The above is not intended to castigate you or drag you through the mud. Just a reminder that everyone's a little different.)
Are you arguing that OP's analysis of the situation is wrong because of a lack of empathy for people affected more severely by pandemic?
1. Live alone
2. Have not worked for nearly a year now. Technically I’m on leave due to extreme burnout, so I’m even more hosed (can’t collect unemployment).
3. (see below) Have been dealing with a wicked combo of depression/anxiety/ADD/OCD for 20+ years now, but the last 3 or so have been worse. I’ve been extremely isolated for the last year—I’ve spent countless days in bed, not eating my first meal until 11pm. I was just starting to improve in February, trying to get back on my feet and out into the world. My lifelines were the climbing gym (social+exercise time) and libraries/coffee shops. Luckily I (finally) got into a therapist in January, which is still available and co-pay free.
Despite all this, I think the lockdowns were a necessary emergency response to the crisis, with one major caveat—we did (and are doing) too little, too late, and too incompetently. It was glaringly obvious back in February that we needed to start taking measured action to mitigate the spread of the virus (as other countries—Taiwan, NZ, SK, etc did). Our response was an abject failure of reason and leadership, and I hope no one ever forgets that.
So although I’m pretty thoroughly fucked, I’m adapting and surviving. In many ways, it’s comforting and galvanizing to have a common cause to rally around. My attitude is that this crisis could be a catalyst for profound personal and societal growth.
And therein lies the source of some genuine hatred that is beginning to bubble up towards people that aggressively flaunt even the most basic courtesies and precautions, like wearing any form of nose/mouth covering whatsoever when inside a building. Just yesterday I saw a couple (in their 60s) stiff arm the door greeter at WF who was handing out free mask. It was nonstop people brusquely walking headlong into me. This says nothing about the unhelpful binary thinking around open vs. closed, economy vs. health, normal life vs. totalitarianism. Society’s tool of choice for preventing and solving unfolding catastrophes seems to be to pretend they don’t exist and give up, to reflexively fracture ourselves rather than come together to solve a challenge. And I find that to be the most profoundly depressing thing of all.
To me it seems this claim contradicts what actually happens in places that didn't impose lockdown or lifted lockdown earlier.
To give one example, here's a video from Sweden's bars and restaurants: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/newsbeat-52618788/coronavirus-ho...
A pedestrian street in Stockholm on Apr. 1: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2020/04/01/TELE...
A market in Malmo during the pandemic Apr. 24: https://media.voltron.voanews.com/Drupal/01live-166/styles/s...
5000 gather to see a concert in Tel Aviv: https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2020/05/coronak... (https://www.timesofisrael.com/thousands-pack-tel-aviv-concer...)
You are right. I don't think anyone knows exactly what makes certain places suffer more than others from the virus.
I wasn't trying to compare, though. My point is people still go to restaurants, nail salons, et al. during the pandemic. So the claim about evaporating custom base doesn't seem to be grounded in reality.
Remember that video with Italian majors loosing their cool? One of them was mad at people breaking the lockdown rules to get a haircut. https://youtu.be/Uo2clI631uA?t=37
Perhaps different strains of the virus explain this?
Found an article that mentioned a dominant strain infecting Europe and parts of Asia [1]. Maybe other areas have a strain that is not as dangerous?
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/is-there-more-than...
Maybe being told to stay indoors spikes hopelessness, or it could be that living in a country with an out of control pandemic with no end in sight spikes hopelessness.
There's a lot of factors that make the world a stressful, bleak looking place besides stay at home orders.
Perhaps let's first explore the question whether they were right. Epidemiology 101 seems to say they absolutely were. The less people interact in close quarters, the less a sickness spread.
I have a feeling we're forgetting here that there's an actual virus on the loose. The pandemic isn't a media construct, it's not a mass hysteria. So I think we should also entertain the option that a virus spreading fast through our communities is also responsible for some of the economic damage.
- This coronavirus spreads asymptomatically, which means people under 50 mingling with each other are deadly threats to people over 50. In particular, to their parents, grandparents, aunts, and neighbors.
- The chance of dying is low for young people, the chance of suffering serious damage to lungs and other internal organs that takes months to recover is a bit higher (some of it may be permanent, but that's yet to be determined).
- The chance of dying for everyone goes up several times if the medical system gets DDoSed by COVID patients.
EDIT:
> It makes little sense to force young people to stay at home and get fired
One of the most important effects of the lockdown being done top-down by governments is that employers can no longer fire people who wanted to protect themselves, their families and their communities from getting sick. Leaving this choice entirely to individuals is in practice equivalent to forcing them to choose between staying safe and having a job.
This is why those at risk of death should self-isolate.
>the chance of suffering serious damage to lungs and other internal organs that takes months to recover is a bit higher
Do you know where I can find the statistics for the risk of permanent lung scarring by age, or something approximating this? This is something I hadn't considered but would like to explore more.
>The chance of dying for everyone goes up several times if the medical system gets DDoSed by COVID patients
It's almost entirely getting DDoSed by old people.
>employers can no longer fire people who wanted to protect themselves
Employers are firing everyone. We're hitting some of the highest unemployment levels in American history. This is a moot point.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid#case-fatalit...
The infection fatality rate and the case fatality rate are two very, very different concepts.
"The IFR differs from the CFR in that it aims to estimate the fatality rate in all those with infection: the detected disease (cases) and those with an undetected disease (asymptomatic and not tested group)... The IFR will always be lower than the CFR..." [1]
Spanish government's estimates of COVID-19's IFR are[2]:
For the age group under 50, the estimated IFR is about 0.003%
For the age group 50 - 69 yo, it's 0.04%
And for those over 70, it's 4.1%
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate#Terminology
[2] https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/a... Look for the table on page 15
Keeping all the elderly together in shared living spaces didn't work to their advantage by the way.
>> Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus.
Looks like some people are, and it made the news.
Yes, who could have possibly known about covid19 in January? [0]
>and as if you have inside knowledge of what those people are investigating right now. Do you? The news on this has just come out. Maybe give them a chance to react before judging?
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that forcing people to stay at home, to socially distance themselves from their social support network, and to quit earning a living would have a significant impact on their mental health and a dangerous impact on the mental health of those with mood disorders. Every doctor has been educated on mental illnesses. The CDC had chances to make the right choices in January. It had chances to make the right choices in February. It had chances to make the right choices in March. How long until you think we can judge the CDC?
[0] (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-testin...)
This is some "we have always been at war with Eastasia" doublethink. The CDC told people for a long, long time that masks were harmful and using them was stupid. The CDC shut down private and university covid19 testing in Washington.
> and now you're lashing out at the CDC for not having predicted when the first side effects would start to occur in some cities within 1 day of when you heard the news?
Ask your doctor if job loss and isolation from friends and family is a risk factor for suicide. I talked to a doctor back in early March who predicted that more people would die from suicides than from covid19.
You do not screw around with highly communicable, severe upper respiratory diseases. Especially not while people's lungs are already being assaulted by high pollution levels.
Furthermore, Public health agencies are taking some things into account while dismissing others. CDC's guidelines for school reopening for instance demonstrate the highest level of both ignorance and wishful thinking I've ever seen in terms of keeping public education systems running. Parents don't check their kids health before sending them in on a regular basis, buses cannot get the job done running 1 kid to a seat, and there is no way you're keeping masks on kids, and a minimum distance of 6 feet separation between kids in place all day, every day in schools.
The suicides exceeding virus deaths indicates the measures are working. Once we start seeing meaningful localization of the virus to the point contact tracing can take over and allow the rest of us to let down our guard, then we can talk. Suicides aren't "contagious" in the way the virus is, and if you perform due diligence on your own, there is no reason you can't maintain levels of exposure to your social network. You just have a few more questions to ask people before coming over, and to be ready to play the contact tracing game if somebody you know gets sick.
It's like a choice whether to evacuate a city that's threatened by an active volcano. The volcano may or may not erupt. It either kills everyone, or nothing happens. But announcing the evacuation is sentencing some people to death: think of all the people in emergency rooms, on life support, etc., many of whom will not survive being moved. And then you'll have "death by economics" among the evacuated, as they fail to adjust to their new reality in emergency housing, with no jobs, living among strangers not too happy about the sudden population increase in their area.
It's a tough choice, but it's a game of numbers. To a first approximation, even if lockdown is going to kill 0.01% of people one way or another, if it prevents 0.1% of people from dying, it's worth it and it's the right choice. In reality, there's uncertainty around these estimates that need to be taken into account, but the idea is the same.
(Tangent: I hate point estimates with a passion; I wish there was an easy and standardized way to express distributions in plain text.)
That doesn't make any sense. You're basically advocating for stopping treatment as soon as progress is seen, not when the treatment is successful. It'd be like an oncologist saying:
> Good news! Your tumor is starting to respond to the chemo, and we've seen a reduction in its rate of growth, so we're going discontinue treatment.
The stay at home orders shouldn't be lifted when the curve is flattened, but when the capability is known to exist to keep it flat without the orders.
Counting death is hard, and counting suicide death in the US is particularly hard because of the regional variations in use of medical examiners and coroners and the cultural drive in some areas to say that a death by suicide was accidental.
Here's a link to a CDC page: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
> Finally, the estimates of excess deaths reported here may not be due to COVID-19, either directly or indirectly. Upward trends in other causes of death (e.g., suicide, drug overdose, heart disease) may contribute to excess deaths in some jurisdictions. Future analyses of cause-specific excess mortality may provide additional information about these patterns.
also, should be obvious, but we cannot know how many more people would've died if there was no lockdown, so comparing numbers as they are today is really dumb.