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Comment by mkolodny | Hacker News Reader

> it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it

I have yet to see data that shows any evidence of this theory. If you are aware of any existing data that points to this conclusion, I'd love to see it.

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Of course there isn't data about the long-term societal effects of a global lockdown in a modern society. But there are huge numbers of kids being denied education and social interaction right now. There are people who have lost money and are not eating right or living in healthy conditions, etc. So there are clearly going to be massive negative impacts from the mitigation, and nobody will know the scale for decades to come.

For example, just US children are on track to miss 9 million vaccinations in 2020. [1]

Worldwide poverty and deferred healthcare for vaccines and cancer screenings will have a decade the rack up an order of magnitude more deaths than will ever be directly attributed to COVID.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/health/coronavirus-childh...

Children can, and, according to the CDC, should get vaccinations during lockdowns.

"CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend every child continues to receive routine vaccinations during the COVID-19 outbreak." [0]

Personally, I'm hoping vaccinations against COVID are what ends the pandemic.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/visit/vaccination-durin....

Did you know that the Spanish flu of 1918 wasn't really Spanish?

Edit: Okay so maybe I skipped to the punchline. Just trying to say politics influences data or lack of data.

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