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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> is the critical effects of sleeplessness and promoting healthy sleep as a national public health priority.

> It seems to me this is just another pernicious example of how lockdowns and disrupting a population’s routines directly and indirectly damages public health

And people literally dying from a virus isn't a public health priority?

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I don't think that was either stated or implied. Pandemics being bad for you doesn't automatically mean lockdowns are good for you, and vice versa!

By suggesting any negative effects of lockdowns, you have inadvertently challenged a tenet of the new national religion.

You mean like this article from the UN World Food Programme[0] that states due to overzealous lockdowns, that up to 80 children "elsewhere" are at very high risk of starvation for every over-70 US citizen it perhaps saves?

Yes...mentioning things like this sure gets in the way of all the virtue-signalling that's going on these days.

[0] https://www.wfp.org/news/wfp-chief-warns-grave-dangers-econo...

> people literally dying from a virus isn't a public health priority

(This is going to seem combative, but it's not meant to be...)

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sit...

Look at the deaths by age and pre-existing-condition ("Tab 3 Deaths by condition")

If you are under 60 and healthy, you are appear to be at almost no risk from C19.

Yes, in the immediate term C19 does not appear to impact mortality as a direct consequence of the virus if you under 60 + healthy.

There are going to be a lot of long haul knock-ons to the health system, like cardiovascular issues, from what I'm reading.

> There are going to be a lot of long haul knock-ons to the health system

Citation?

The effects of lockdowns are presumably also going to cause a significant effect on health in the medium and longer term?

The economic effects are certainly going to be felt for decades.

Citation: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects....

I wrote a long response to your claim. However, for my mental health and your time, I will simply state that your assessment that the mental health impact of lockdown means it is not worth lockdown is superficial, misaligned to understanding the nation-cratering impact of a health system collapse, and should be reconsidered.

Please do not suggest that the public health effects of lockdowns are limited to mental health and economic effects.

There are remarkably fewer people diagnosed with early stages of cancer, for example. The question is then, if suddently the incidence went down or will people die unnecessarily from worse screening programs and non emergency care?

Things like kids missing out on school is a clear factor in lower life expectancy, one of the few things which hold true independent of country and age group studied.

So, not really any different from long-term effects of, say, flu viruses [0] we've lived with all our lives.

The primary thing this pandemic has taught me is that people (myself included) weren't aware of what the flu could do to a person.

[0] https://www.health.com/condition/cold-flu-sinus/flu-long-ter...

Correct, with a dramatic increase in magnitude for COVID-19 compared to an average flu season (where I also acknowledge bad flu seasons exist and have massive impact).

> with a dramatic increase in magnitude

According to a recent paper[0]

"in-hospital mortality for COVID-19 was nearly three-times higher than for seasonal influenza"

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

Here's an in-hospital mortality chart of flu vs. COVID versus age. The in-hospital mortality is basically equivalent up until age 55+.

https://twitter.com/malkusm/status/1343672439734235136?s=20

People literally dying from a virus shouldn't be the only public health priority. There has to be a balanced focus on total public health accounting for all causes of morbidity and mortality.

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