Hacker News Reader

Comment by bearjaws | Hacker News Reader

Only two states have continued preventing elective surgeries, one state (Texas) that was overwhelmed stopped but has since re-allowed them.

Around 60,000 cancer patients will be under-treated due to corona virus. The current estimates are that 10,000 people will die due to missed treatment. Just for the "fun" of it, lets assume all of them died due to under-treatment, that is still 1/4th the death toll of the virus itself.

If the goal is fewer deaths, why don't we encourage more treatment AND continue practicing social distancing? We can have both in this case.

I am 100% sure that the number of people who have died due to the lock down is a tiny fraction of those that have died of covid...

View on HN

In Poland, cancer prevention literally got obliterated this year. That's thousands people whose cancers could be found early and treated, but won't be.

That's not to mention any other long-term disease.

Just the GDP drop, and the ensuing under-financing of healthcare etc, I think may well easily kill more people than Covid.

>I am 100% sure that the number of people who have died due to the lock down is a tiny fraction of those that have died of covid...

Are you sure? The economic fallout of lockdowns is pushing millions of people in poorer countries into poverty, and causing thousands of children to starve: https://www.france24.com/en/20200728-coronavirus-linked-hung...

> that is still 1/4th the death toll of the virus itself.

That is the wrong comparison. We all die.

One better comparison could be expected years of life. The number I read was that Covid causes an expected decrease of 10 years in lifetime. What was the expected decrease in lifetime for those cancer patients because they missed out on treatment? I know you are only calculating a ballpark figure, but I suspect your ballpark is too inaccurate to be useful.

A sibling comment mentions quality-of-life-adjusted years.

In medicine, people like to talk about quality-of-life-adjusted years. Why? Because there's no point in making somebody live more years that are subjectively bad (e.g due to treatment side-effects), rather than less years that are subjectively good. When it comes to policy-making that affects us all, it's time to extend that to the collective level.

We need to ask ourselves, how much suffering can younger generations be expected to endure to make the older generations live statistically a bit longer? Remember, the average COVID death is in their eighties, which is already beyond life expectancy.

>Because there's no point in making somebody live more years that are subjectively bad (e.g due to treatment side-effects), rather than less years that are subjectively good.

This also applies to locking down the elderly, as lockdowns cause more loneliness, which increases the risk of mental deterioration: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-highlights-loneliness....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com