Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

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> Liquor stores are still open

One of the massive secondary effects is the huge rise in alcoholism. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) cannot meat in many States during lockdowns. Something like substance abuse accountability cannot be done effectively via video conference. They need to happen in person, without masks, where you can look into each other's eyes and tell people it's going to be alright.

Liquor stores and weed stores (in places where it's legal) are open, but AA is not. Child abuse ER visits have gone up 35%[0], and keep in mind, when a child goes to an ER for child abuse--they've been abused to the point where they have broken bones or critical injuries.

The current death rate for all Americans is 0.0022% if you look at a pure population vs fatality rate, even including the inflated numbers (and they are inflated; people with gunshot wounds who die with CoV-2 are COVID-19 deaths). The idea the lockdowns are stopping the spread just doesn't pan out when you compare countries across the planet with their different methods and levels of lockdowns and how they haven't really done a damn thing. I wrote a post on all the secondary effects recently: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/

I wish our leaders would stop dicking, around, stop making this political, and realize nothing is going to stop this spread, hospitals aren't being overrun and Gates/GAVIs mythical vaccine won't show up before this thing has already burned through the entire population.

[0]: http://adam.curry.com/enc/1593719588.319_scottatlasonschools...

> https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/

In general, I’m not swayed by blog posts that claim I might not be capable of “critical thinking” because I disagree with your interpretation of data. Who’s your audience here, exactly?

For others who might take your post at face value, I offer the following food for thought:

> The current death rate for all Americans is 0.0022% if you look at a pure population vs fatality rate

Look at NYC instead. Death rate is 0.29% of total population of NYC. Serology testing suggests 25% of NYers were infected. Extrapolate this to the country and you have ~4 million dead, if everyone is infected. That’s the scenario people in public health are trying to avoid.

Yes, there are huge errors bars on all those numbers. It could be just a few hundred thousand dead. It could be 10 million if everyone gets sick at once and hospitals are swamped. We definitely don’t have a lot of certainty — but you have to have a very loose interpretation of the data to say that lockdowns “haven’t really don’t a damn thing”.

But, it’s true that the negative effects of lockdown are very high, and we need to do more — much more — to mitigate the other negative effects, including unemployment compensation, strategies to reduce loneliness, getting kids out of the house, etc.

Claiming that the lockdowns only have costs and not benefits, and citing, for example, the case of Sweden, which didn’t impose a lockdown but has a similar infection / death curve as places that did, ignores that Sweden also didn’t just “stay open” — people stayed home due to fear of the virus, and the economic costs were just as high too. In the USA, many people stayed home long before the official lockdowns were imposed.

The upshot is that this is a humanitarian and an economic disaster whether we impose lockdowns or not, because many people will self-lockdown out of fear. Official lockdowns might help us beat it a little faster, but any kind of lockdown / fear of virus is really hard on people, and as a society we should do more to mitigate that.

It's not just about the death rate, the long-term/permanent damage being caused (lung damage, senses, brain damage) and the fact that immunity doesn't seem to help much (perhaps a year) are other factors to consider. Long-term damage (months or maybe forever) are, unlike fatal complications, being seen extensively in non-vulnerable populations.

> the long-term/permanent damage being caused (lung damage, senses, brain damage)

Do you have any actual evidence for this? I keep hearing people bringing up 'permanent damage' but it's impossible to say something in 'permanent' when this has been around less than 6 months. Lung damage from pneumonia takes 3~4 months to heal (I had pneumonia in University, as well as one of my good friends. It took me out for over a month and he had to drop out for the semester. My lungs did not fully recover for 3 months, but they've been fine in the 20 years since).

Every article I've seen is either vary vague, or it's talking about elderly people in care homes with other existing conditions. The permanent damage narrative feels like straight up fear-mongering.

You're of course right that it's hard to know (but not impossible to know) the permanent effects of a novel virus (because the damage could be like other diseases/conditions we've seen).

Brain damage is just as concerning to me as lung damage. The lung damage at least seems to be more likely to be long-term rather than permanent (brain damage seems less clear). I've seen some articles also taking about kidney and heart damage.

Some articles discussing research/studies (which you may have already seen): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-brains... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/health/coronavirus-recove... https://scroll.in/article/965138/covid-19-patients-may-suffe... https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-som...

Obviously hard to say anything long-term about a novel virus, but studies have been made of its cousins.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7228737/

Your attitude (and people with similar) are the problem. If we isolated for four weeks, wore masks, and focused on contact tracing early on, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. But suddenly, we have a whole crop of arm chair doctors and statisticians who disregard basic instructions by medical experts and attempt to minimize (or dismiss outright) the threat of this disease.

Worse yet, we now have a sizable portion of our population that honestly believes that the economic damage is worse than losing 1% (or more) of our population. Given the unpredictability of how people cope with this virus, you are telling me I should risk my family because we are too stupid and/or lazy to do basic things like wear masks and observe a quarantine?

You can do AA over Zoom. It's not perfect but it's possible.

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