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Comment by api_or_ipa | Hacker News Reader

The better question that Sweden may help answer is whether shutting down the economy was worth it. Was the deaths of 5,500 people worth keeping the economy open, in other words, could you have saved more lives by pursuing other health priorities and let covid run it's courses as Sweden elected to do?

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This. The deaths directly attributed to the virus alone aren't the only relevant deaths. Suicides are up. Domestic violence is up. Child abuse may be up but schools are all "virtual" so good luck detecting it (as if it wasn't hard enough when kids were mostly in school).

Talk about throwing out the baby with the bath water...

I don't at all doubt that lockdown has had a number of second order problems (and benefits too), but the the figures I quoted at the end were excess all cause mortality, so those are all already included. And indeed, many countries with net 0 excess all cause mortality certainly had corona virus deaths, but lockdown and related benefits appear to have saved more people than the virus killed in those countries.

I think most people who are worried about secondary effects from lockdowns don't think that these will be visible immediately during the pandemic. But rather as a higher baseline of mortality in the coming years. This is just my guess. I'm not an epidemiologist, so I have no real expertise in how these effects usually manifest themselves in the statistics.

Could you show any data that supports your assertion about rates of suicides, domestic violence, and child abuse?

I didn't consider those second order effects. When I wrote my comment, I had in mind only the dollar cost of averting the disaster. When we spend whatever trillions of dollars shutting the economy down and limiting output, we necessarily take from other priorities, like strengthening emissions controls, or making cars safer, or re-wilding spaces, or spending money on providing people with affordable preventative medicine that could extend the duration of life.

in NZ suicides were down over the lockdown period.

NZ is an outlier in a lot of ways, to include population size and distance. The also cracked down on firearms ownership recently, too -- #1 choice for suicidal men.

huh. Thats such a weird place to go.

It was only the automatic weapons, Im pretty sure any suicidal men could probably still hit themselves in the head with a single shot from a distance of 0.2 feet...

Just for some perspective: during the 2017/18 season 2822 people died from the flu in Denmark. https://www.ssi.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2020/influenzasasonen-201...

Actually the figures I gave at the end there were excess all cause mortality, not coronavirus deaths. So far, they have definitely not saved more lives.

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