In my country there is no clear distinction of what type of people make up the crowd which is "still" socializing. While you get some pockets of conspiracy theorists, covid-deniers, mixed with conservative or right-wing elements, the left, or even politically abstinent are also there. It doesn't make them all abnormal people. There are some who I have perfectly communicated before the pandemic. But the pandemic has made many people mentally struggle (without a need to lump them all together into "abnormal").
My guess is those who have already been (mentally) vulnerable are now even more so because the world around them is becoming even more depressive/depressed. It's not that there are only abnormal people left who to socialize with. It's because many just die because they were anyway hanging on to a bare minimum before. It doesn't require the presence of "abnormal" people to kill them. It's enough when a support structure that they previously had (a friend, a source of fund/support, etc) simply breaks away. it's not an addition that hurts them but something that is taken away. (so it's actually less complicated/complex/conspirational and more ugly/sad as to why this happens)
The point I'd meant to make is that some people have 60-70% of their connection to eccentrics, online communities, etc. But they typically also have some contacts with work, from seeing family, when traveling, or chit-chatting with people at the store. Suddenly all of these other contacts are gone or much less frequent.
And the "normal" people you talk to are, as you say, depressed and much less normal.
I'm certainly in this boat to some extent.
I think it would be arguably reasonable for someone like this to socialise right now. The risk is lower than the flu of any complications. The only reason you are being locked down right now is because we have decided governments need to enforce lockdowns on everyone, rather than individuals deciding what's responsible.
I don't think you need to be super crazy, or a covid denier, in the case above, to carry on living your normal life.
The other element of this that's highly questionable is the claim that "the risk is lower than the flu of any complications". I'm really not sure this is actually true; a significant portion of people seem to be COVID "long-haulers". Even if you're not, maybe some of those other people you're socializing with might turn out to have those risk factors.
...and how many new addicts and mental illnesses are being created
quarantine and flattening the curve is important imo, but the way governments go about it is not. there needs to be a parallel campaign educating people about the effects of quarantine - which are well researched. Also I highly recommend reading up on the psychological effects incarceration has on felons.
Quarantined people aren't prisoners but there are parallels due to effects of isolation. Every re-socializing attempt of a prisoner even in the most "progressive" manner, has at its core idea to _first_ rob that person of their own agency.
Isolation opens up minds to new ideas and to cause them question everything. What minds are being fed in such a state is absolutely crucial to how they're reorienting themselves and what they latch on-to. Isolation breaks everyone except the hardest psychopaths, which is why it's used in every society (since earliest civilizations) as an instrument of control.
This lancet research paper isn't talking about felons but there are some hard to ignore parallels, maybe this is why politicians avoid the subject.
Although we have some subset of the US population that rebels against being educated. And many others who simply don't have the time, or interest, or intellectual curiousity. We get our education from social media.
It's really not lost at all. Most people know about the secondary effects of the lockdown. Loss of jobs, loss of schooling, mental health effects. It's all front and center.
The math is simple. Without lockdowns, millions die, so we lockdown to some degree.
It's not that government officials are enacting lockdowns in a callous disregard of their negative effects, we simply have no other sane choice.
Around the world, we’re talking about millions of grieving people who have lost parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends, coworkers, .... Millions more people who struggled to stay breathing and may now suffer severe long-term (or maybe permanent) symptoms. Health care workers around the world who will have PTSD from harrowing shifts treating an extremely high load of unbelievably sick people for month after month. Etc.
In places with significant community spread, people are rightfully afraid that anything they do around other people is exposing them to significant risk of severe illness or death. Even people who take every precaution sometimes turn up sick, and the sources can be hard to trace. Dealing with that for months is extremely stressful.
All while a significant part of the population continued to blithely party on as if their actions had no consequences, and “leaders” baldly lie about it day after day, month after month.
If we want people to return to normal life feeling free and safe, then controlling the virus must be the #1 priority. Indeed, in places where the virus was controlled via strong leadership and community solidarity, life is nearly back to normal; in places where leadership was absent, it will continue to be a horror show for many more months.
If it's the former, you should probably find some more reliable information sources. If it's the latter, truth and accuracy are a better counterpoint than taking the opposite extreme of misinformation.
Your response is a weird combination of vague and rude/patronizing. I’m not sure what your point is.
It will be hard to get a total estimate until at least a year or two after the pandemic is over, because even in developed countries death reporting can lag by up to a year (that’s leaving aside cause-of-death attribution). If you check back in a year or two WHO, CDC, etc. will have much better estimates for the total death toll in 2020, with (possibly wide) error bars you can largely trust.
Beyond that, this is weak pedantry about the definition of “millions”. People commonly use this plural to mean >1 million; we’re talking about the order of magnitude here, not the precise count.
Regular old respiratory infections are a frequent indirect cause of strokes and heart attacks, but we've never claimed before that common colds cause "millions" of deaths.
But, chances are that latter are more frequent. Covid tests are not done on all deaths precisely in places where situation is worst.
There is no such assumption. Read my post again: millions and millions of people died from the common cold before 2020. The media never reported those deaths as 'common cold deaths', though, even though it would have made just as much sense as reporting 'Covid deaths' does.
The official death toll in Germany from the 2017/2018 flu season is still higher than deaths from COVID-19 so far. And I suspect that if we used the same method for COVID-19 deaths that was used for the flu (indirect measurement), the flu of 2017/18 would surpass COVID-19 by far.
The method used to estimate flu deaths every year is far more expansive than the method used for confirmed Covid deaths.
One interesting thing to see is that the social reactions vs. Covid have radically reduced the amount of flu spread this year vs. previous years.
Two points:
a) 'Flu' is a different disease than respiratory viral diseases. (A.k.a. "common colds".) Covid is a kind of respiratory viral disease.
b) "Common colds" are also deadly and cause a huge number of deaths each year. They just get classified as deaths from stroke or heart attack, not the common cold: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=does%20the%20common%20...
So counting mortality rates is not a simple issue and depends a lot on cultural factors, political incentives, etc.
It'd really be halpful to frame with some kind of context. TB kills that many annually. To make matters worse, it's a curable disease, so these deaths are entirely unnecessary, but when was the last time you heard a peep about that? It's been raging for decades, and WHO is targeting 2030 as the end of it.
Thankfully all around the world people have taken significant steps to slow the virus down, and so hopefully the vaccine will arrive in time to save tens of millions.
I am happy to agree with you that humanity could do a whole lot more to prevent deaths from infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.
Your link estimates the Covid IFR in the USA to be about 0.6%, compared to e.g. 0.4% for China where the population skews younger or 0.8–1.1% for several European countries and Japan where the population skews older.
https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/images/november2020/1124...
I’m somewhat suspicious about the numbers for lower-income countries though. In Mexico for example Covid deaths have been grossly undercounted. These kind of high-level estimates are hard to do reliably when they are built on poor-quality low-level data.
I don’t know why you are pretending that “good medical care” (by which I mean, the average in a typical developed country with a well funded medical system that has not yet been completely overwhelmed; as compared to the “poor” level of care available in many developing countries or in places where hospitals are collapsing) is equivalent to “exceptional treatment”. I don’t know what you mean by “exceptional treatment”, but your link says nothing about it.
There have been a large number of estimates of IFR, and they consistently range from about 0.4% to about 1.5%, mostly toward the middle of that range. Judging by the best current science, the 0.5% number I used is probably a slight underestimate, but it is at at any rate in the right ballpark.
If you e.g. guess the actual number of deaths in absence of any countermeasures would be more like 10–20 million instead of the range I gave of 15–50 million, that seems plausible enough (though I stand by my estimate). It’s a counterfactual in any case, since in practice extreme countermeasures were adopted in many parts of the world.
But, the way this control has been achieved is that the US and many other rich countries require anyone applying to immigrate (and many people not applying to immigrate, if they are from a risky country) to be screened for TB and be treated successfully before they are allowed to enter the country (with some waivers where treatment is unlikely to be available where they are). On top of all these border controls, at least $100 million is spent specifically on TB just inside the US every year, in order to keep the number of annual cases down somewhere around 10,000. Until 2019 healthcare professionals in the USA were required to be screened for TB every year. People in America who do contract active TB disease are required to take medication daily, personally supervised by a healthcare professional, for six months - to make sure they do it correctly.
And all this is only possible because TB takes a pretty significant amount of contact to spread, and there's a detectable latent stage (sometimes lasting an entire lifetime) of infection before it becomes contagious - neither of which is true with covid.
Show me the 3 million excess deaths, before you continue with the alarmism.
If you have let’s say two years left to life and COVID ends up finishing you off, that’s a death due to COVID.
And what if somebody has only one month to live, and dies with Covid, also a death from Covid? Maybe yes, but really worthy of hyperbole then?
My grandmother died from the flu, at 99 years old. I never felt I should blame her death on the flu pandemic, though.
If I remember right, the authors estimated the scenario as:
* Project 500K-750K excess deaths in the US until mass vaccine availability based on current public health practices (conservative/linear, ignoring exponentials involved)
* Someone dying generally has ~10 people close to them => half will experience ~depression for 1mo, 1 quarter for 2mo
* Something like 10-20% will have severe forms (major/ptsd/..)
* So something like 3 million people across all of above
That's a lot. Not quite as high as # of addicts in the US afaict, but up there. I could have easily got parts wrong, so worth going to the interview+article if you're truly interested.
They also have some articles on depression in elderly and other groups being especially impacted right now. Pretty real.
The load of sick people is also not exceptionally high, at least not in the intensive wards (don't have data for normal hospitalizations).
Here in Germany we have daily updates on the number of ICUs in use. It shows Covid is only a fraction of the patients, even now only 10% despite of soaring infection numbers.
https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/kartenansich...
If you can read German here is a source for Berlin: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/zu-viele-corona-patienten...
TLDR is only 85% of the beds are full, but there aren't enough nurses, so the emergency room will be closed. Several other hospitals in Berlin already stopped admitting new ICU patients.
https://www.welt.de/regionales/bayern/article161869919/Klini...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333785335_Managemen...
And if it is really such a limiting factor, the statistics should be adjusted accordingly.
I think it is just a wildcard argument without any specific numbers. You can imagine whatever you like. How many nurses are available? How many are sick, specifically?
Also, sick nurses tend to be well again after two weeks (if they have Covid).
Optimal rate depends on the country, but about 75% is typical.
In general it makes sense to use existing ICU beds at capacity (or slightly below), to, you know, make use of them.
Surely you could also still adjust by delaying surgical procedures that are not urgent, if things would get worse.
As for nurses working overtime, do you have any data for that? Quoting some individual hospital managers warning of "possible collapse" is not really evidence. They can also be politically motivated ("see, we really need more money for our ICU section"). You can also find individual hospital managers saying everything is fine.
If you live someplace like South Dakota with grossly irresponsible leaders at every level of government, this is probably true.
If you live somewhere with decisive and responsible leadership like South Korea, New Zealand, Finland (among many successful countries around the world, rich and poor), or Vermont, then probably not.
Notice that multiple effective vaccines are here. We just need to hold out through this winter, so that production can spin up enough to start getting a substantial proportion of the population vaccinated.
Empirically, SARS-CoV-2 mutates much more slowly than influenza viruses, and if a new strain eventually pops up that the vaccine and people’s antibodies do not work on, the current vaccines should be faster to modify than to recreate from scratch.
Until recently, I'd it was pretty clear that Sweden (no lock-downs) and the US (many lockdowns of varying length and enforcment) have suffered the same per capita fatality rate.
I don't know if I'd describe it as passively as "getting lost". Very visible people have been talking about it, including the outgoing President, who mentioned the mental health costs of lockdown multiple times. Leaving aside the fact that even true things that Trump says are discounted due to his lunacy, most people are too dim to understand the concept of trade-offs, so anything that gives "aid and comfort to the enemy" is systematically downplayed among most of those that are pro-Covid-restrictions (I say all of this as someone who think that restrictions have tragic costs but are necessary).
That is to say, the problem isn't that no one has thought of factoring this into decisions, it's that the discourse upstream of policy is driven largely by the majority of voters that don't actually care about pandemic policy as anything other than another wedge issue to fight pre-existing cultural/religious wars over.
[1] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/riverside-county-sheriff-sl...
Further, by advocating for aggressive enforcement, you are also advocating for the ultimate super spreader event: filling jails with people that don’t belong there, where the virus already runs rampant. Most of these people would be booked in, get the virus, and then bail out or be released by a judge a few days later. Then, they would take the virus out into the community and spread it further.
These restrictions are a fun exercise in virtue signaling, but are impractical and actually enforcing them would increase the spread of the virus.