Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

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> It isn't "just wear masks and care about people", it's also being prevented from seeing friends and family, and not being allowed to go to work. Not everyone is fine being alone for 6+ months.

No, actually it isn't. It's not a binary thing, where it's either prevent you from seeing people or going out of the house, or zero restrictions. Sweden's choice was to go with purely voluntary restrictions. The alternative is some restrictions. Where I live, we've had a mask requirement for quite a while and basically nothing other than that, and that is indeed an alternative Sweden could have chosen.

In addition, "being prevented from seeing friends and family, and not being allowed to go to work" was to a large extent dictated by the circumstances. When some areas got to the point that they no longer had hospital capacity, they had no choice. A simple look at the correlation between restrictions and health outcomes is a textbook example of bad reasoning for an intro statistics course.

>When some areas got to the point that they no longer had hospital capacity

That's false. Areas in Australia had extremely strict lockdown requirements, including disallowing any movement (to the point that newborns actually died as a result of movement restrictions) meanwhile ICU utilization in those areas was hovering around 1% of capacity. ONE PERCENT. Outside of ICU, hospital utilization was way down.

> to the point that newborns actually died as a result of movement restrictions

I'm a Victorian, and I've heard this claim before. I assume it's referring to the newborns in Adelaide that died after not receiving critical heart surgery.

The article that I read[1] (from The Daily Mail, no less) had claimed that under normal circumstances, these cases would be airlifted to Melbourne which has the facilities necessary to treat them, but the Victorian lockdown prevented them from doing so.

This is misinformation. Emergency care was an exception to the rules throughout the entire lockdown. Dan Andrews was asked to clarify this on the following day the article was published, and said exactly as above - there is no reason that they could not have been airlifted.

It was down to individual clinical decisions at the hospital in question, and had nothing to do with the lockdown restrictions.

I realise that I'm critiquing a single claim in what was a torrent of falsehoods, but this one was particularly offensive. Using the death of babies as political fodder is notably egregious in what was an unending campaign against one of the few political leaders that listened to science, and successfully suppressed a second wave.

1: https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/why-victorias-lockd...

This is a strawman argument. I specifically stated that the newborns died as a result of lockdown restrictions. This is objectively true. Whether they were physically prevented or not is irrelevant (and doesn't make reverse the damage to the families).

For whatever reason, the sheer disorganisation and lack of communication resulted in death.

You erroneously stated that I claimed they died as a result of being denied entry to the state, a claim I never made. Would they have died with zero travel restrictions? Very likely not.

Functionally, being denied entry to the state and one side not bothering to even try to enter them into the state is a distinction without a difference (either way, they die).

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