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Comment by shreyansj | Hacker News Reader

But if everyone had stayed locked in for 6 weeks and if that had prevented 50000 deaths, how is that not worth it?

It depends on the denominator. There is no free lunch. If there is an estimate for death prevention, what is the estimated cost in lives?

Given that death is a certainty for all, how many lost person-days do the 50k deaths represent? Since the lock down means no normal activities such as routine doctor visits, how many person-days would be lost due to undetected illness or delayed treatment?

Staying locked in is a strategy for preventing excess deaths from overwhelming a health system. It isn't a long term strategy for eliminating all virus related death.

Here's the other side - How many deaths are acceptable? If death is a certainty for all, should we just get rid of the health care systems? Should we stop research into some of the diseases? Which ones? How many person-days/productivity has been lost because of preventable deaths?

We are talking about a 4/6/8 week lockdown, that's not long term, that's immediate term.

No, no, please don’t waste time constructing persons of straw. One insinuating that my position is “get rid of healthcare” is especially odious since the counterfactual I raised was one considering impacts of preventative care missed due to lockdowns. You made a rhetorical claim: “locked in for 6 weeks and if that had prevented 50000 deaths, how is that not worth it?”

How do you know if it is worth it or not if you don’t know the cost of being locked in for 6 weeks? Ignoring the other track doesn’t seem a path to a well considered decision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

So you make an exception for essential services, and count health care as an essential service. Tune the lock down so that it makes sense.

I'm not sure if it's worth it or not, but after you end the lockdown, you have the same situation you did at the start of the lockdown.

I think there's a huge misconception in many media sources that lockdown will somehow eliminate the virus. It can change the onset pattern of the virus, but that's it.

It's amazing to wonder whether any step, any inconvenience is worth saving even lives when the magnitude of that is in the thousands. Countries have literally been bombed over far fewer deaths.

Such a good point. Ppl really do not seem to understand this.

> Countries have literally been bombed over far fewer deaths.

This virus, itself, isn't anti-American or "terrorist" enough for the U.S. to wage war against, yet it's far deadlier.

Even if the US is in the same situation now as we were at the start of the SIP orders in March, given that many other advanced countries have the virus under control, we should have an easier time getting materials and equipment to deal with the virus now.

Plus we have more evidence to base our decisions on. We can look at specific other countries and see what works, assuming people don't turn it into politics like they did with masks. It's really sad that some people believe wearing a cloth mask decreases your blood oxygen saturation, regardless of their education or previous interactions with doctors/dentists/etc that already wore masks on a regular basis pre-pandemic.

One of the main points of the lockdowns were to get the infection rate down to a level where testing and tracing is tractable, not to outright eliminate the virus necessarily. It seems like most states in the US were not prepared for that when they decided to open back up, and now places like FL are in this impossible situation — how do you trace 10k+ infections a day?

Especially if it takes a week to get a test result.

The way that tracing was presented bred a lot of mistrust at least in the midwest.

How could that possibly have happened? Food needs to be planted, harvested(in many situations primarily by migratory workers from other countries) and delivered, power needs to be kept up, necessary medical supplies needs manufactoring, water needs to be cleaned and delivered. There's no scenario where the world gets to collectively take a break

Right, but the world could have refrained from partying on the beaches [1]

[1] - https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2020/07/16/vacati...

Did beaches make a difference? They did that in Florida during spring break in March, but Florida has low cases until just recently.

Weren't the spring breakers mostly from out of state?

They could have also refrained from protesting and rioting over a demonstrably false narrative of death-by-police.

And beer must be drank "Bar lives matters", as Austin Texas bar owner said.

But if everyone had of x for y weeks and that prevented z deaths, how is that not worth it?

x=stopped driving y=52 z=34,000

x=not gone skiing y=4 months z=41

I'm not sure where the line is, but there are a number of things we could ban to lower the death rate. That doesn't mean I disagree with your assessment, but I'm just not sure I have any logical cut off point for what I would support and what I wouldn't other than just the way it feels looking at the numbers and how much it inconveniences me personally. (And I happen to like lockdown...)

If you're talking about US, that's 275,688 person days in lockdown per death prevented, although that seems so extreme I'm afraid my math is off.

Is this a serious question?

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