The Cruise Ship Suicides
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It is becoming a political topic, which is always risky to weigh in on publicly, but I do implore people to keep in mind when deciding on policy the law of unintended consequences. Everything in life is a series of trade offs, including the decision to lock down. Even if you believe the lock downs have been effective, they cause real damage and disruption to people's lives and mental health. It is serious and needs to be considered and weighed.
What we have is a variation on the trolley problem, not a simple "save people with lock downs or not." I have no idea where the right balance is, but I've been shocked and saddened at the unwillingness of pro-lock-down people to consider the unintended consequences here. I have plenty of criticism for the anti mask crowd too, but this comment is already long enough.
[1]: I have no scientific data to back this claim up. This is my opinion extrapolated from anecdata. Take with a grain of salt
Really? Because the increase in suicides is quite small (8% is the last statistic I saw) and suicides in general are quite rare (~13 per 100,000 people).
It's obviously not only lock downs that have caused this, but they certainly added to it. My close friend had his marriage explode and turn horribly nasty. She took the kids and he ended up alone in a studio apartment for months, and then killed himself. His marriage was obviously not great before but they were making it work. Being stuck in the house together all the time was too much.
I'm guessing data on suicides due to lockdowns is as problematic as deaths due to covid because these are typically complex equations, but it would be interesting to see a study. In my small non-representative case study, suicides are up >200% from average. It's normally 1 every other year or so, except 2018 when there were 2 :'(
Depends on the state, and not every state is as progressive as one might expect.
Or said another way - even if he has the legal right, that doesn't mean he necessarily has the budget to fight it. Unfortunately, I found that Might Makes Right is a real thing in family law.
We passed laws pertaining to homosexual marriage a while ago here in WA and had "domestic partnership" laws before that. I have asked many lawyers since then how the courts would view a divorce situation between two men or two women as in light of these laws that continue to give favor to a "mom". I've yet to get a straight answer, yet somehow the courts are presumably processing divorces for marriages of all types.
That means five of every six are mothers (83.3 percent)
Seems bias to me.
[1] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
The state almost always awards primary custody to the wife/mother. There's a deep bias for mothers to raise children in the legal system.
Even great father's are looked at as deadbeats in these systems. It's one area I hope the law progesses in in the future.
I just hope everyone else is capable of finding comfort or finding a group which gives comfort to each other.
Young healthy people were in best position to not be isolated even in lockdown, unlike unhealthy people and old people who wont just play computer games for company.
It has been a right-wing deception that they were going to die anyway because they had pre-existing conditions, but most of those pre-existing conditions are things that are only slow killers if at all.
That isn't just data, it's data plus a set of assumptions. Won't you please further this discussion and share it instead of making vague allegations about right-wing conspiracies?
It's well known that Covid-19 is by wildly disproportionately more lethal as age increases[1] and it's also well known that older people on average have less life left than younger people.
Also please note that deaths of despair is a broader category than suicide[2]. Someone who drinks himself to death isn't counted as a suicide, even though it's a person taking action that ends his own life earlier than it otherwise would. Alcohol consumption has increased markedly during the pandemic[3].
Caring about 2nd and higher order effects isn't a right-wing conspiracy theory, it's just a sensible, intelligent, and compassionate thing to do. We should expect better than kindergarten tier reasoning from our leadership.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-same-number-of-people-...
[3] https://abcnews.go.com/US/alcohol-consumption-rising-sharply...
Only if you assume the 30 year old lives to be 95 and is not going to commit suicide age 31 from a different life stressor event. Unless they are actively helped, taking away one trigger event at one point in their life is not the same as them being saved from suicide until age 95.
> "also, suicide and other deaths of despair are far more socially costly"
and /more fixable/. Hopeless -> suicide is a pattern that cognitive behavioural therapy can work on. It shouldn't be the case that society has such poor mental health support that "their life fell apart which lead to their suicide" leads to this kind of life or death trade of "who should die to prevent their life falling apart?" instead of "help with the mental health part so they can survive their life falling apart".
Do you have any basis for that assertion?
I've seen that argument being made since lockdowns started to be declared but there is never a single shred of data or source or evidence substantiating any of those claims.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml
Taken from the page:
> During that 20-year period, the total suicide rate in the United States increased 35% from 10.5 per 100,000 in 1999 to 14.2 per 100,000 in 2018.
It seems that suicide rates in the us have been constantly increasing for the past two decades, and there is no break in the trend during the past year.
Large quotes follow:
"As many countries face new stay-at-home restrictions to curb the spread of covid-19, there are concerns that rates of suicide may increase—or have already increased.12 Several factors underpin these concerns, including a deterioration in population mental health,3 a higher prevalence of reported thoughts and behaviours of self-harmamong people with covid-19,4 problems accessing mental health services,4 and evidence suggesting that previous epidemics such as SARS (2003) were associated with a rise in deaths by suicide.5
"Widely reported studies modelling the effect of the covid-19 pandemic on suicide rates predicted increases ranging from 1% to 145%,6 largely reflecting variation in underlying assumptions. Particular emphasis has been given to the effect of the pandemic on children and young people. Numerous surveys have highlighted that their mental health has been disproportionately affected, relative to older adults,37 and some suggest an increase in suicidal thoughts and self-harm.8
"Supposition, however, is no replacement for evidence. Timely data on rates of suicide are vital, and for some months we have been tracking and reviewing relevant studies for a living systematic review.6 The first version in June found no robust epidemiological studies with suicide as an outcome, but several studies reporting suicide trends have emerged more recently. Overall, the literature on the effect of covid-19 on suicide should be interpreted with caution. Most of the available publications are preprints, letters (neither is peer reviewed),91011 or commentaries using news reports of deaths by suicide as the data source.12
"Nevertheless, a reasonably consistent picture is beginning to emerge from high income countries. Reports suggest either no rise in suicide rates (Massachusetts, USA11; Victoria, Australia13; England14) or a fall (Japan,9 Norway15) in the early months of the pandemic. The picture is much less clear in low income countries, where the safety nets available in better resourced settings may be lacking. News reports of police data from Nepal suggest a rise in suicides,12 whereas an analysis of data from Peru suggests the opposite.10
"Any change in the risk of suicide associated with covid-19 is likely to be dynamic. The 20% decrease in Japan early in the pandemic seemed to reverse in August, when a 7.7% rise was reported.9 Evidence from previous epidemics suggests a short term decrease in suicide can occur initially—possibly linked to a “honeymoon period” or “pulling together” phenomenon.5 Trends in certain groups may be hidden when looking at overall rates, and the National Child Mortality Database has identified a concerning signal that deaths by suicide among under 18s may have increased during the first phase of lockdown in the UK.16"
-- "Trends in suicide during the covid-19 pandemic" (https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352)
"“Based on preliminary data, Oregon has not seen an increase in the number of suicides for the first nine months of 2020 when compared to the same time period in 2019,” Oregon Health Authority communications officer wrote Aria Seligmann in an email.
"The monthly suicide surveillance updates published by the Oregon agency (https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/PREVENTIONWELLNESS/SAFELIVING/...) show the frequency of suicide-related visits to hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centers decreased in the first and second quarters of 2020. For the third quarter of this year, suicide-related visits were similar to 2019. Suicide-related calls in 2020 to the Oregon Poison Center are coming in at a similar pace to last year, too.
"Likewise, the Washington State Department of Health and the biggest local health department in the state reported no discernible upward trend, maybe even a slight decrease in suicide deaths, in the first three quarters of 2020.
"As of a November tally, there were 861 suicides statewide in the first three quarters of 2020, compared to 940 suicides in the same period of 2019. A Washington DOH spokesperson cautioned that there are delays in the state’s death data collection, so the preliminary tally of suicide deaths will probably be higher when finalized — and therefore track closely with the pre-pandemic trend."
-- (https://www.opb.org/article/2020/12/16/pandemic-2020-suicide...)
The data is, largely, not available, and suicide prevention is a very important aspect of the current healthcare situation, but as it appears now, COVID19 is a much greater health threat than pandemic-response-related suicides.
You can end the lock downs quickly if you do the lockdowns right. This of course also includes proper government response, such as testing, contact tracing enforcing isolation, having covid clinics, etc. Not the idiotic "see no evil, hear no evil, the virus will go away by itself" policy of the us federal government.
Here I should mention that you are also off topic. The cruise ship workers were subjected to much higher psychic stress than usual people. This is mostly due to the cruise companies irresponsible behavior during the pandemic.
I know many Vietnamese living in Vietnam. Beyond the much larger spread of previous coronaviruses, different genetics, climate and more, they tell me that their culture keeps these things quiet. The government plays a large role in this suppression.
There are whole years of investigation that need to take place before anyone can even potentially make positive statements about what happened.
I’m shocked on all sides about how everyone seems to “know” the truth. We have some ok leads, we’re far from answers.
A traveler to Afghanistan shows a city that has few mandates outside of the airport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nculZ8xu1wc Life is pretty much normal there, because in low-income countries it has to. And when these people actually see and talk to each other about the situation, they can express contradicting ideas and not be locked into a spiral of fear.
Int he US, EU, Canada and Victoria, Australia, separating people from one another is having a strong group think effect where no one is seeing things outside of a a very limited on-line or very local bubble. We are looking at the world through a straw, and it's greatly distorting our view of what's actually happening.
Those are inherently 'rules based' societies though where government also has an incredible amount of power to intervene.
If the 'general rules' both administrative and social were enforced in the West, we'd probably have a revolution.
It was never about 'lock-downs' over there - it was 'all of the other things' they did.
They were way more interventially concientous than us: when you land in Taiwan, they physically check you in your home to make sure you're in quarantine. They give you masks. They follow up. The Koreans do mass contact tracing, they search your Facebook + Social Media. Those are things that Americans in particular would balk at.
Paradoxically - Korea and Japan have particularily high suicide rates and my 'unscientific hunch' is that the high degree of social structure and expectations are the driving cause. While they may yield compliant, conscientious people - those who do 'fall of the bandwagon' really do fall off.
Taiwan response [1]
[1] https://www.asiapacific.ca/publication/secret-taiwans-succes...
Australia had a lockdown. The state I am in had a complete lockdown where our borders were even closed to other states in Australia. Melbourne had the longest, and toughest lockdown in the country. Since late August, the virus has been wiped clean from my state and there is no community transmission. This means that the lockdown was lifted, and businesses allowed to open as per normal except some slight contact tracing procedures in place. The story is fairly similar in rest of the country (except maybe Melbourne which had a second wave and needed another lockdown). While there is a small cluster in North Sydney, it is fairly small and hopefully contained. I go to work everyday, all businesses are open, and economy had one of the most minimal effects.
Australia isn't a very "rules-based" society either so a counter-example to consider.
It worked.
> If the 'general rules' both administrative and social were enforced in the West, we'd probably have a revolution.
We didn't.
A lengthy lockdown will obviously reduce the virus dramatically. Who is doubting that?
"If the 'general rules' both administrative and social were enforced in the West, we'd probably have a revolution."
Everywhere there was 'peak COVID' had lockdowns - but if the lockdown were as severe and controlled as Wuhan, or as consistentely interventional as Taiwan or Hong Kong, there would be revolts.
Much of that they did would be probably anti-constitutional and definitely challenged in courts by those who disagree.
If the police or medical authorities were going through facebook accounts for contract-tracing, there'd be a revolt, certainly in America, probably in Australia. The 'public health' issue is secondary, there are just enough people who'd consider that to be 'anti Constitutional' that it'd be a serious problem.
Politicians everywhere are testing the limits of what they can get away with, this is not a joke.
There are protests all over the Western world not being covered by the press because everyone is afraid the populism could get out of hand.
Case and point: Christmas. If this were any other time of year, the lockdown would have come sooner, but politicans were far too afraid, so in most places, they waited until just after. The UK had no choice to go before XMass.
- The lockdown in Melbourne was not dissimilar to China’s Wuhan lockdown.
- Police and Medical Authorities did go through facebook (publicly, not any kind of hacking) for contact tracing and policing of people breaking health orders.
- It was not anti-constitutional (because Australia has a different constitution) and Australia has specific laws that allow (in emergencies like pandemics) the Chief Health Officers to override existing laws.
- There were no revolts, in fact there is continued wide spread support for the state government in Victoria, and the federal government in Australia for their response.
Law and order problems still exist even in a lockdown and I think in Feb we'll see people push back against the oppressive atmosphere.
The Melbourne lockdown was as tight as anything in China and yes they did compulsory contact tracing including social media investigations.
We also have a phone app for contact tracing. The biggest issue with that is that it doesn't work, not privacy concerns.
Protests against it were widely covered here in Australia. There was little popular support for them, and the Premier of the state (think US Governer) is seeing his highest polling support ever.
Sure, I agree in the US there are groups that have been much more effective in exploiting fears of government than elsewhere. But the US is a pretty unique situation.
Just pick and choose the countries that are doing well and match them to your favorite measure. Be sure to say the measure ‘has to be done right’ but don’t define what is right, so if it fails you can always claim it ‘wasn’t done right’.
Beware though, because the situation may change any minute, like in the mask societies of Japan and South Korea. They must have suddenly forgotten how to wear their masks.
People think policy takes place in a vacuum or that those that write policy are so wise and fair that they have thought everything out.
Never the case.
This is one of those things that feels easy with the benefit of hindsight, but it's extraordinarily difficult to do up front.
Specifically: There are no modern studies that could quantify the negative externalities of mass quarantine on the mental health of a population. Obviously isolation will be detrimental to many, but where would you even begin to put a number on it?
Even more difficult, there are counterbalancing factors to mass quarantine such as a reduction in traffic fatalities. This one could maybe be estimated up front because we do have some statistics and models around traffic deaths.
Coronavirus is a unique situation because the negative effects are very non-linear. The fatality rate will skyrocket if/when hospital capacity is overwhelmed. Many policy decisions have been made in order to avoid those non-linear scenarios, which can look like overkill if you only consider them in the context of having avoided those scenarios.
But the real problems come from the political maneuvering that this opens up. Once you open the door to unmeasurable or unpredictable possible downsides of a policy, you will be flooded with "think of the children" type appeals that use fear of "what if" scenarios to grind progress to a halt. At scale, there is no such thing as a possible that doesn't have downsides to someone, somewhere. Trying to mitigate any and every downside is impossible.
> I've been shocked and saddened at the unwillingness of pro-lock-down people to consider the unintended consequences
Frankly, I think the average person doesn't fall into all out "anti-mask" or "pro-lockdown" categories, despite what you see on the news. We only hear about these extremist positions because the extremist voices tend to be the loudest. When considering one's own position, it's tempting to only look at the most extreme examples from the "other side" because they're the easiest to dismiss. In reality, the vast majority of the population is firmly in the middle. The average person doesn't like the idea of extreme lockdowns any more than they like the idea of a total laissez faire approach. We just don't hear about the middle ground on the news or social media because it's boring.
It is almost end of year, we have actual suicides statistics available. Suicides went slightly up, but not by much and they went slightly up in preceding years too. More people died from covid. Our best estimates say that if hospitals would get overfulled, in those places mortality would be even higher.
But that does not matter for "what about" political point. Because that one is not motivated by attempt to find best policy, it is motivated by wanting the other side to be wrong.
2% of covid deaths are people under 40, there is an at least linear correlation between risk and age.
I value a day in my life much higher at my current age than I would serval decades in the future, and in general I think this is true.
The issue is that the people with the most risk have the least to lose, and those with the least risk have the most to lose.
Eventually you have to get to the calculus of how many months of bored teenagers is worth how many months of saved life for the elderly?
When it comes to me personally, the pandemic and response has taken away a not insignificant chunk of the prime of my life. How many days of life did I save for my part and was it worth it?
People tend to have this notion to cling to every second of extended life, that’s not necessarily right.
Life is risk, and everything you do changes the risk. People tend to want to take one extreme without matching their choices with values.
Meanwhile, all the things people are doing are about as effective as TSA Security Theater. The lockdowns simply do not work. We can see that in the numbers between California, South Dakota, Sweden and others. Every nation or municipality that takes a hard approach is no better off, and often much worse, than places that did substantially less. The masks are a placebo at this point and the numbers show they probably do next to nothing (except contribute to massive pollution, waste, shame and make us fearful of each other).
In 50 years, the only way I think historians will look back upon this ear is pure mass hysteria; global mass hysteria on a scale never seen before. This is not a time of honor and should never be returned to.
We don't really know this because almost nowhere is actually locking anything down. We have these feeble and unenforced "stay at home" orders which are full of loopholes and largely ignored. If you go out for a drive in your town today (against stay-at-home guidance), you'll see all manner of stores open, people out and about horsing around, even restaurants. We're hardly taking any precautions at all. We don't know if lockdowns work because we haven't actually tried it.
It's like the Simpsons quote, "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!" [1]
A few places on earth like NZ and Australia actually did stay-at-home with far fewer loopholes, mandatory quarantining, contact tracing, and they're doing much better.
They failed horribly in countries where people care less about others and compliance is too low.
Over energetic, mindlessly ambitious, attention craving lunatics on the Left and Right get propped up and dominate all discussion these days thanks to the counts.
Everyone else has to enter into Count accumulating arms race to even be allowed into the room to speak.
The counts enable the best panderers in society and validate everything they do and say.
Was it ever any different? Pythagoras is on record saying something pretty similar to your words, ~2500 years ago.
Most of the obnoxious things people do are features of our biology, not some emergent effect of the blame target du jour.
They went from 700/cases a day 30,000 infections. To 0/Day 0 Infections in 16 weeks. Everything you said is categorically wrong.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-31/victoria-coronavirus-...
This doesn't prove that lockdowns don't work anymore than a car crash death proves that seat belts don't work.
/s
Write this down somewhere for yourself and look back on it in two decades.
Personally, this is not true for me when I look backwards two decades ago. I also doubt it will be true when I look back two decades from now.
I life in Australia and had intended to visit the UK this year or have her come over, now she will not likely see her grandchildren until sometime into 2021, nearly 3 years since she last saw them.
She was also looking forward to seeing my sister with her young kids this Christmas, she lives in the mainland UK, and has had to give that up as well.
Whether or not people who frequent HN value human interact much is irrelevant for my mother she very much enjoys seeing her family and that's not happening this year and makes her quite sad.
Am I correct in assuming this grandparent lives on a different continent than the grandkids?
>> I life in Australia and had intended to visit the UK this year or have her come over
Hard to read that any other way
If I were still in my 20s I'd be very upset over these conditions and how that will compound over the rest of my life. The compounding really, really matters for young people. They're being diminished. It's an extraordinary trolley problem as another poster stated.
My view: we're choosing to diminish youth to preserve the elderly. Maybe ok. Maybe not. Probably not; they're the future. I don't know what the balance should be—which way to swing the trolley switch. My judgement is that public debate is shallow, binary, and without nuance. The weakest and poorest suffer as a result.
I don't think there's any right or wrong answer here. But lots of people are getting hurt in different ways and in different durations.
But yeah I understand your point of view. It is frustrating all the same.
Bits of your life which don't go your way are still lived, and still your life.
You may as well argue that sleep takes your life away, and that illness does, and that employment does, and nickel and dime your way down to defining "your life" as just the bits you choose, and then further slice them all down into "the bits which went exactly the way I wanted". Newsflash, it's /all/ your life.
> "Life is risk
risk includes things not turning out how you hope, do you say that risks which don't pan out are "taking away my life"?
In the UK in 2019 there were 5,691 suicides, a massive increase and a general increasing trend
Provisional data for UK in 2020 showed 845 deaths from April-June, or a rate of 3,380, however the data can takes months to come out due to inquests, especially this year as they've been delayed.
https://www.itv.com/news/2020-09-01/male-suicide-rate-highes...
However even if suicide rates had doubled. In the UK in 2020 there have been 75,000 plus excess deaths. Based on the observed IFR, if Covid had run wild this would be more like 600,000 -- assuming no health care system collapse (which would have happened, and still might)
While suicide is a tragedy, and in the UK a worryingly high one, the effects of covid (which aren't all due to lockdowns) would likely have increased it (economic downturns cause suicide). In any case, it's a very small number compared with the excess deaths that covid causes.
However if Covid ran wild and infected 70% of the UK, and assuming no healthcare collapse, based on medium IFR figures from https://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/now-casting/
There would be
38,413 deaths for those age 45-64
and
3,037 deaths for those age 25-44
In addition to the 100k 65-74 year olds, and the 350k 75+
Even if you felt those were acceptable figures, how would you deal with healthcare collapse? Decide to withhold hospital treatment from over 65s?
I'm not going to engage with someone over the internet about the weighing of people's quality of life years or which side of the fence I come down on there. My post was merely pointing out that extrapolating a suicide rate for 2Q 2020 to the total suicide death number was in error.
At least it’s possible. Last I checked death was impossible to mitigate.
Studies are showing Covid-19 has IFR of 0.5-1% in western world (due to age).
This means if 100% of England got infected, 0.5 to 1% would die. This is not counting that if hospitals got overwhelmed, IFR would increase.
The range (95%ile I think) for 45-65 year old was 0.24% - 0.41%, median 0.32%. The full details are on the link.
It's not just loss of jobs/businesses/careers - loss of loved ones to COVID can be a cause of depression too. Allowing more COVID deaths could increase suicides.
You are implying that human life degrades in value as people age.
To take your view to it's logical conclusion:
We should harvest living old peoples organs to save babies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
I understand it makes people squeamish, but the medical profession triages lives and decides treatments every day.
Doing something QALY negative is malpractice — and lockdowns are QALY negative because they harm the young to save the old/infirm.
That isn't used by governments to decide on health or economic policy. Else we'd ban old people from hospitals (and save trillions in the process!) and in general make their lives a misery (high tax, low benefits) because their "value" would be approaching 0.
For example, it's used to prioritize people in transplant queues. The more "use" you can get out of a new organ, the more you'll be prioritized, but it's not the only decider.
You are going to have to show your work on that one. What numbers are you using?
You seem to be framing this that the opposite is QALY positive and we should not lockdown. Harm the old/infirm to "not harm" the young.
As other comment state, this is a "pick who suffers" exercise. Sadly, we can't save everyone. We can only do our best.
Or look at it in a probabilistic sense. I think the actuarial table puts an 85-year-old at having about 5 years left on average. For a 25-year-old it’s more like 55. So a loss of one causes a loss of much more human life.
As I commented in a sibling. Drs need these kind of tools to know who to treat first. But governments don't (and shouldn't).
There is a moral point here about the meaning and value of human life that can't be ignored.
As a government you can (and sometimes do) reduce lives to economic value (young will pay more tax over their life time), but other times you need to assess life on a more humanistic level. If we all know we hit the age of 60 and society stops giving a fuck, then I'm going to do very different things, converging on 100% selfishness as I approach 60, as that is the logical thing to do... but a society would fall apart if we did that.
These people aren’t dead but they are asymptotically close to it for all practical purposes. Even if things opened up tomorrow they would have nowhere to go.
> from March 2020 to more than five years from now, the impacts of lockdown and a resulting recession are estimated to reduce England’s health by over 970,000 QALYs – the health impacts of contracting COVID-19 are still unclear in the long term, but between March 2020 and March 2021, these represent 570,000 lost QALYs[1]
That being said,
> While these negative health impacts of lockdown exceed the impacts of COVID-19 directly, they are much smaller than the negative impacts estimated for a scenario in which these measures are not in place; without these mitigations, the impact of direct COVID-19 deaths alone on both mortality and morbidity would be much higher – an estimated 439,000 excess deaths resulting from COVID-19, and 3,000,000 QALYs lost.[1]
[1]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/news/statementsandletters/estimatingt...
The British Office for National Statistics concludes that the impact of the covid with lockdown in terms of QALY (quality-adjusted life year) is far lower than impact of covid without lockdown
To be precise, the cost of lockdown is 1/3 of the cost of unmitigated covid. The cost of lockdown is mostly borne by the young and healthy while the cost of non-lockdown is mostly borne by the vulnerable. It is a trolley problem.
*(Actually there are 10,000s of each)
Note that if your only risk factor is being 65 years old, implying you are female, it isn't necessarily the case that covid impacts you worse than lockdown.
[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
There is no trite healthy vs vulnerable tradeoff here, and it's simply a fantasy to believe that everyone under 40 would be able to get on with life without consequences while the over-55s were dying off quietly.
The reality is far more complicated. Letting Covid run wild would have been far more damaging than mitigation in a huge number of ways - economic, psychological, political, medical, and more.
The one area of valid debate is whether good mitigation strategies were chosen and implemented wisely. Often they weren't. Test and trace, masking, and PPE provision should have been central, allowing more limited lockdowns.
In the most badly hit countries none of that happened, and without them full-spectrum lockdowns were the only (blunt) tool that was left.
This exactly. I get really frustrated with the simplistic argument over whether lockdown measures have been better or worse than doing nothing, because it misses that these were not the only two options. Not even close. When you look at how countries that reacted quickly to the virus and implemented, masking, testing, PPE provisions and sensible social-distancing requirements, it is clear that those countries were able to recover, both economically and socially. In areas, like the United States, that waited until it was too late to do anything, and then were forced to implement lockdowns, the outcome is far worse and the aggregate human toll — irrespective of death count due to the virus — much greater.
As a strong supporter of civil liberties, I’m in a difficult position, when I try to balance some of the more draconian state-run actions of places like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, with the effects we see in the United States. For all of the many negatives of that kind of government/militaristic control, I can’t help but think that if the US had done that, the global economy, not to mention all of the industries that have evaporated in the US, would have recovered much more strongly by now.
This is absolutely not a trolley problem. This didn’t have to be a choice between two negative outcomes. There were ways to mitigate exposure that could have saved people from dying from the coronavirus, while also limiting the debilitating impact of lockdown. The world's biggest superpower just didn’t do that.
Could you elaborate on that? Why would there be more of these without a lockdown than with a lockdown?
> collapse of existing health systems
Yes, that seems to be a material and important factor.
> loss of essential skilled people at all levels
Perhaps, but would the impact be material? In particular, how would the number of skilled people lost to unmitigated Covid compare to losses due to natural factors (retirement, non-Covid health issues, moving to a job where the skills are no longer relevant, etc)?
I am not necessarily arguing against your point, but I do feel that your arguments need more refinement to be persuasive.
That is, instead of having 2 categories: (1) effects of COVID and (2) effects of lockdown, with economic downturn put in effects of lockdown, there should be 3 categories: (1) direct effects of COVID, (2) indirect effects of COVID, and (3) effects of lockdown, with economic downturn put in indirect effects of COVID (or at least largely there).
Furthermore, that elderly demographic that represents the real risk group, doesn't contribute to the economy much anyway. (In Russia and other economies based on resource extraction, for example, thinktanks have referred to such as "superfluous population").
Unfortunately countries like the UK, Canada, and Australia routinely use it. The UK does so especially, and it is well embedded in its NICE guidelines. In the US, this practice was generally abandoned with the passing of the Affordable Care Act. The US system, certainly is the most problematic system of all, though.
I think this is largely over-estimated. Such high fatality rate hasn't happened anywhere in the world, regardless of the lockdown policy or absence thereof. That being said, I concede that this wasn't known at the time of the first wave when strict lockdowns were put in place.
Another point to take into account is that the vast majority of covid victims had very short remaining life expectancy. Not to say that their death don't count, but it is to be taken into account when comparing with suicides. Rather than number of deaths, maybe we could count number of years of life lost.
It's a thankless task.
Source?
The first result I found said “for each person in the U.S. who died after contracting COVID-19, an average of nearly 10 years of life had been lost.” From: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200923124557.h...
10 years lost... I know averages are difficult, but the population of deaths is heavily skewed towards the elderly which implies that most covid victims lost many years.
I personally went through Italian data where they released deaths/infections by municipality and I found several municipalities where they had 0.5-1% of total population dying from Covid-19.
IFR is about 0.5-1% in countries with older populations (western world). Early on there was a lot of wishful thinking hoping that IFR is much lower but it didn't turn out that way.
This is a good point that I think people miss. The equation isn't as simple as "less lockdowns == less suicides". If the pandemic rages even worse, there are a ton of second order effects that could also trigger increasing suicide rates. Family members or friends dying to COVID, getting long term COVID complications yourself, just the emotional stress of hearing about so many deaths, economic impact.
How do we know that there would have been less suicide if there had been no lockdowns? We don't, and expressing it just as a trolley problem is an oversimplification.
There are orders of magnitude differences in the fatality rates of full lockdown mental health issues and zero lock down COVID deaths, it's not a hard decision at all. Compare Wuhan and New York WAY less death in Wuhan, with a much harsher authoritarian style lockdown (maximum mental duress you'd think).
Or Melbourne Australia with a very strict lockdown compared with pick any major American city you like. Major difference in death rates.
Edit: The trolley problem is really easy if one option kills 10,000 people and the other one kills 5... that's kind of difference we are talking about.
It wasn't always that way. Back in the day unless you said something totally out there and tone deaf (like something beyond the bounds of any commonly known ideology and on a highly sensitive topic) you didn't have much to worry about.
Edit: Better, non-hypothetical examples:
Mel Gibson had to drunkenly spout hateful things about people who are important in his industry to get kicked out of it. These days you don't even have to offend people relevant to you to get that kind of treatment.
Look at the flak that 2000s rappers caught for song lyrics that objectified women and glorified street violence. Now imagine what that kind of backlash would look like today. Probably much bigger.
WHAT?
You know that Mel Gibson was “canceled” and kept working right? He only had a few years of no new movies, barely even took a vacation.
The last possibility seems particularly unnerving given how many people have had COVID and the fact that there do seem to be a good number of 'long-haulers' (some of whom report psychological effects).
I don't know if there's a good way of quantifying this, but the idea that every suicide during COVID is 100% casually connected to lockdown measures (or the knock-on consequences of lockdown, such as job losses) seems like an article of faith.
For instance, what if lack of grief counseling after losing a loved one is a leading cause? We'd want to make sure people that need it can get the counseling, rather then just blame it on lock down.
I've had more than one conversation that eventually has somebody saying they feel like an asshole for saying so (because they know people are hurting), but they like the new normal.
The reality is that almost everywhere in the world did a lockdown of some kind, but in some areas it was effective and in other areas it was not; and, while everyone has suffered consequences of some kind, the consequences suffered by the latter group exceed those of the former by a wide and obvious margin.
The second and third order consequences of COVID restrictions are extremely difficult to quantify especially during the crisis. So we are forced to make decisions about trade offs without knowing nearly the full nature of the trade.
Sweden had no lockdown; The Lancet editor, a member of SAGE and the UK's former Health Secretary all said the UK lockdown was late and cost many lives for being late. Italy locked down on 9th March, Singapore on 7th April, Kuwait on 10th May, Bhutan on 11th August. It's not every country, it wasn't all at the same time, and it definitely wasn't immediate - e.g. within a few days of Wuhan's first lockdown on 23rd January.
> "presumably because of peer-pressure, to avoid being shamed."
Presumably because of a global disease pandemic.
> "I think it's quite possible that the medicine could be worse than the disease, but that discussion hasn't even been had."
It's been had a lot, months and months of it. Committees of medics, researchers, policy advisors, economists, politicians, civil servants, have debated it, Twitter threads have argued it, newspapers have written about it, it's being discussed right here in this thread on HN.
This is a back-of-the-napkin analysis to be sure, but it certainly suggests the anti-lockdown folks at least have a valid point that should be listened to in good faith.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/States_that_did_not_issue_stay-at-ho...
[3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/unemploymen...
Good because this is not a new problem [0], it's merely exacerbated by the pandemic.
Hopefully this finally gets the recognition it deserves and needs instead of being framed solely as a side-effect of the lock-downs.
Sadly mental health is still a topic that's mostly stigmatized in many places along the lines of "only weak minded people struggle with depression", while resources and institutions to deal with it have had their budgets cut, and been closed down, for decades.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221265701...
now, I send out applications daily, work on 'projects', and grind leetcode. It's so hard to get an interview without any network. I'm a very disciplined person, gym in the morning, eat breakfast in the office and work until my goals for the day are met. moving back home, unemployment, and no gym removed those structures from my life. I run a lot now days but the gym was my social life. my phd involved a lot of coding, hpc work, and 'data science', i don't understand why i can't get past recruiters. it sucks being 30, doing a difficult thing, and now being broke and unemployable. my undergrad students i taught have found jobs...i don't understand.
in the interviews i've gotten, it seems like if i make one little mistake, i'm out or ghosted. i wrote and app for a well-known start-up in my area and then they ghosted me. i don't get this market.
i'm starting to get really scared; these past two weeks i've sat in my room silently screaming and crying...I've never done that in my life. i run by some cliffs on a hillside and have really started to wonder...because i'm not afraid. i just don't want my family to have to go through it....creeping thoughts of uselessness, wasted life, and being a burden.
sorry it's fragmented and don't worry i'm not going to do anything drastic...i still want to learn to paraglide and get to the top of denali...i can't go through life without doing those.
..i think my going to find some open source projects to contribute to...i think that might be a good way of doing things.
anyway a view from the other-side. sorry for the vent...i don't have anyone to talk to.
IMHO it isn't qualifications you're lacking, but a method for "working smart" and proving you can adapt to the industry on top of being able to work hard; as you've surely noticed, the latter is seldom enough. You "don't get this market" probably because you haven't understood what the companies you're applying to are looking for, and you haven't understood what they're looking for likely because you need to recalibrate your understanding of value delivery and expectations in the industry as opposed to academia.
You can contact me (info in bio) in case you want me to look at your CV, want to do a mock job interview or want other sort of feedback.
In any case, stay strong! Also, https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions and https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestionsEU might come in handy.
You will find a job eventually. It's probably just difficult to get your foot in the door because everyone is looking for industry experience. That first job is the hardest, but the next one after that will be much easier to find, believe me.
My advice would be to persist. If you're having dark thoughts, you may want to consider antidepressants. They helped me when I was down. I can vouch for escitalopram/lexapro. I would at the very least suggest avoiding that hillside if it's a trigger for suicidal ideation. Pick a safer route for the time being.
Keep applying. Maybe settle for a less amazing job for the time being, just to pay the bills. Once you have a job, it will be much easier to get another job. You'll be in a better position to negotiate. You can settle for an OK job, and keep looking for your ideal job while not having to worry about making rent.
If you want someone to talk to, I can be that person. I wish you the best, and as cliche as it sounds, hang in there!
That they are. Maybe not rent-seeking, but they definitely hustle hard to build a very wide pyramid and take full advantage.
> my advisor discouraged me from looking for internships over the summer. kicked me to the curb
Ouch. The academy is f*ed up like that, and while I'm not surprised by your story, you certainly have my sympathy.
> my phd involved a lot of coding, hpc work, and 'data science', i don't understand why i can't get past recruiters
I think you probably mean HR, but if there's a single party in the hiring process most likely to impose dumb filters, you're right, that's them. You've likely heard everything I'm about to say, but overcommunication is cheap, while undercommunication is expensive, so I'll say it anyway.
The trick, of course, is figuring out which filters you're getting caught in. For academics looking to transition to industry, the usual problem is focusing on academic achievements too much, rather than focusing on programming skills too little. Trying to convince industry to positively value your prestigious publications is a hopeless task at the entry level (research labs excluded, of course, but those have a very high bar). You might even have to hide the academics entirely (PhD -> Research Programming). Another common problem is academics trying to sell their PhD as project management or engineering management to bypass entry level. PhDs are often exactly that, but industry never sees it that way, so don't try it unless you're getting tons of bites already.
Here's the problem: everyone in industry knows (or has heard of) a PhD who always drags their feet on engineering work and instead chases novel tangents that don't add value to the actual product, unless management actively identifies this and heads it off. From an engineer's perspective, or an engineering management perspective, that person is deadweight at best and toxic at worst. You need to avoid being associated with this at all costs. 100% laser focusing on your engineering qualifications (as opposed to academic qualifications) is a start; burying the academics entirely is the extreme response.
Never mention the specific problems with your PI in the interviews, just keep it general: the work/life balance and comp packages offered by academia are increasingly holding you back from (401k / homeownership / kids / paragliding & mountain climbing) and after tolerating it for 6-8 years you're ready for a change.
Needless to say, don't let anyone in the hiring process see stream-of-conscious style writing. Complete sentences, proper capitalization, spelling, and proof-reading are important signals.
Explicitly mentioning willingness to relocate can help, even if you've already theoretically ticked a box somewhere.
> i wrote and app for a well-known start-up in my area and then they ghosted me.
Hiring is astonishingly dysfunctional and rejections frequently happen for a mind-boggling array of dumb reasons that reflect purely on the company. This is far more true for industry than for grantsmanship, where people usually at least read your proposal and rationalize their choices. There's too much noise to back-propagate into your self-confidence. This is just a matter of figuring out the filters and rolling the dice enough to overcome the intrinsic failure rate.
If an application process is laborious enough that it's hindering you from rolling the dice enough (writing an app might fall into this category), drop it and give them that feedback.
> i just don't want my family to have to go through it....
Times are hard, transitions are tough, and you've just spent 6 years getting your blood sucked by a vampiric system that didn't even let you build up a safety buffer. There's no shame in accepting their support.
> creeping thoughts of uselessness, wasted life
Walking away from a research career tends to leave those, especially when people find that PhDs have a negative value on the entry-level job market. The news gets much better past entry-level, though. Both tech and communication skills translate, and people will believe it when they see it, which works against you now but in short order it will work in your favor. With the prestige of a PhD and the communications skills it develops, you will be the good foot your team puts forward, and ten years down the road, this fact and the letters after your name will give you a serious leg up if you want to keep climbing the ladder.
> ..i think my going to find some open source projects to contribute to...i think that might be a good way of doing things.
Probably not. I think your time is better spent trying to crack the HR filter code, working on self-presentation, and playing the numbers game. I'm missing a lot of information and it's ultimately your call, but self-doubts of the "If I just had one more resume line item" variety are vampiric in the same way that academia is: they'll suck your energy into efforts that nobody else will reward you for and there will always be one more thing to do.
If you're going to do projects, at least keep them minimum-viable and focus on the most in-demand search terms you don't yet have on your resume. My guess is you've maxed your "legit coding" stat and need to focus elsewhere.
2. Why are the crews forced to stay on the ships?
3. If the ships are themselves isolated, why are the crews isolated? If they aren't, why can't the crews leave?
I am strangely reminded of the airline flight that sat parked on the airport (at Chicago?) ramp, full of passengers, for over 24 hours years ago.
What was that? Why on earth would an airline do that? Surely the cost in the tied-up-aircraft alone would be astronomical? How did they get food and water to the flight but were unable to unboard people?
Could it be this one?
"Passengers were not allowed to leave the airplane because the Goose Bay Airport did not have a customs officer on duty during the overnight hours. Saturday bled into Sunday, and still the flight remained grounded."
But I swear the incident I remember was much longer than that, about 24 hours. I think it was Chicago and I think it was United. The plane landed during a snowstorm, but all the airline's gates were in use, so the pilot parked on the ramp and waited. The passengers could see the terminal, with open gates, but the pilot/airline wouldn't use them and wouldn't let passengers off where the plane was due to the storm. Eventually a passenger managed to contact the airline president, who somehow resolved the situation.
They didn't have food or water, and the restrooms' holding tanks were overflowing.
The reason they can't leave is simply the American authorities won't let them leave the ship in order to prevent them from staying in the U.S and potentially finding a way to get a job there (legal or illegal). There wasn't a person on board who couldn't leave the ship because of documentation in normal circumstances, but with the virus happening, Carnival shit their pants and were blocked from having anyone leave for the aforementioned reason.
This is part of mental health awareness.
For the corona crisis, everything was done as basic and cost-saving as possible.
Without the corona situation, god forbid you get fucking sick on the ship. They feed you up with some basic 2 pills they give to whoever is sick of anything. As far as I could notice, those were some stimulants with the end goal to have you back on duty as soon as possible.
Even if you get sick, like legitimately sick and get treated, you end up with a mafia-style talk with your manager about "your recent performance". If you keep yourself off the sick train for the next months, you will get a pat on the back and a good review, where the 'recent performances' one from previously seemingly never happened. Truly disgusting practices.
Cruise ship business was being slowly dragged¹ into the public eye as of last year… and then COVID hit. I imagine things must have gotten only worse in the general chaos of the pandemic.
E.g. you will not find any carribean cruise ship from the big lines that is under a US flag.
According to WaPo’s report last year, the most commonly alleged crime is sexual assault (with a third of the victims being minors), and it is not required to be reported. Considering passengers have to put up with that, I struggle to imagine what many crew members have to deal with.
I believe there are 0 US flagged ships that are part of the cruise industry that in the U.S.
Message to the carnival guys monitoring this: Hey guys, I am not coming back, you can't do shit about this, this isn't Facebook. I know you know who I am already, I just don't care.
(Obligatory: Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
Is that a COVID thing or is that par for the course with cruise ship companies?
I had an uncle who worked for years painting cruise ships (back in the 80s/90s mind you), and he had all kinds of stories about how the blue-collar staff on cruise ships were treated like shit, both by the company and by "management" on the ship itself.
To be honest I'm not sure I believed half his stories even as a kid, but I had no one else to ask. =)
Most of the blue collar workers are indeed treated almost slave-like tbh, I mean you are free to leave, but you will pay your own ticket and stay at the hotel and you will be escorted by a literal bodyguard the whole time to ensure you won't stay in the U.S.
If you obey management and don't get to anyone's bad side, you are allowed to stay and the staying part is actually the shitty one. Almost all of them have no choice though, so they have to sacrifice their mental and physical health, as well as their pride.
I was personally technically an officer on the ship so we get a bit better treatment, such as a housekeeper and we have our uniforms cleaned and ironed. Still, the hours even for us happened to be hell, sometimes on the embarkation days (when guests board the ship) it would go up to 13-14 hours.
The blue collar workers, especially in housekeeping normally worked around that 12 hours a day mark, regularly, for 7-9 months onboard.
The article mentions 8-10 hours, but that is an exception, not a norm.
All in all, CCL likes to aim for a 10/10 treatment for the guests and I guess they consistently hit 8/10 with their core customers. Crew however, a solid 3/10 max.
No he's a white guy from Canada but he lived in Argentina for years.. and he was often, according to him, the only white guy on the paint crew. So you're basically correct..
They painted the engine rooms, and even the outside of the boat, during the actual cruises.. He told me once a story about doing the work "in international waters" so they could avoid taxes or something but that always seemed fishy (no pun intended).
He wasn't exactly an accountant so I suspect perhaps he thought that was true?
In general I see zero evidence that Americans at large would’ve followed a “proper lockdown”, by any definition. If you look at travel rates for each American airport this holiday season it’s pretty much confirmed. A company called StreetLight data put it at about 5% to 20% less.
If anyone has data suggesting otherwise please, by all means, reply and let’s see.
https://apnews.com/article/data-americans-thanksgiving-trave...
The question is how can we change American culture to be more collectivist?
The real question is should we make America more collectivist. Without a convincing answer you'll never get anywhere.
Just look at the countries that did best, it’s pretty clear.
That being said I wouldn’t say collectivism is superior in general, but for Covid it was helpful
A change to the sort of collectivism we're taught to fear would be a vast improvement. From the beginning of the pandemic, it was obvious that the just and effective way to "lockdown" would be to pay everyone to stay home. Give everyone who stays home money, for every week they stay home. That would have been more fair and less distorting to the economy. Unfortunately there are no lobbyists representing "everyone".
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-cares-act-sent-you-a-...
[1] https://time.com/5845116/coronavirus-bailout-rich-richer/
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/14/coronavir...
Find a more collectivist country that has a positive brain drain (meaning it attracts talent) from the US.
You've cherry-picked specifically the numbers for "vehicle travel" which isn't even defined but is differentiated even by that article from air travel -- I'd read that as people driving in their own cars. Which is still concerning, but perhaps less so. Some places have even actively encouraged people w/ cars to get out on a drive as a safe way to get out of the house during lockdowns while minimizing social contacts.
Even your link calls out that the drop in air travel this year was far greater. A quick google turns up some estimates that air travel generally accounts for more than half of normal Thanksgiving travel[1], and that there was ~%50 reduction in air travel this year[2]. So that seems like closer to a 30-40% overall reduction -- still not great, but nothing like 5%.
[1] https://protrav.com/travel-411/thanksgiving-travel-statistic...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/11/30/how-20...
My point is that air travel (along with vehicular) was highest during this thanksgiving despite Covid being the worse during this thanksgiving and people having a good understanding of the risk. This is also shown in your link.
If people are traveling at such numbers (again thanksgiving was highest at any point between now and last March) given what we know now, there’s no way they would follow a lockdown when the effect is unknown like a hypothetical lockdown being done last February.
There’s just no evidence that Americans would’ve obeyed a lockdown at the levels necessary to stop spread.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/27/flights-tsa...
But those numbers aren't about total air travel, they're about air travel at the holiday at that highest point since March was _still_ a 50% reduction (which is pretty minimally impacted by business travel, so not sure why you're bringing that up at all.) Again, from your latest link:
> The number of travelers flying Wednesday was half of what it was on the day before Thanksgiving in 2019, before the coronavirus was a threat in the United States
My point in bringing up business travel is that it still happens during the holiday, almost exclusively by air, but the rate of increased travel from late number until thanksgiving is similar to last year.
Meaning if the rate of change is the same but the amount is offset, that could mean either it’s business travel during the holidays, or that there’s a group of people who were going to travel no matter what (which is my point regarding a lockdown not being followed)
Vehicular travel is also representative because it shows how the behavior people who are within driving distance was hardly affected.
In any case my point was about a lockdown not really being feasible to begin with, which we apparently agree on.
American exceptionalism is so ingrained in the culture that I feel it would take generations..
And, in my opinion, that won't start happening until America is no longer the "world leader" (for better or for worse) that it is today..
It would take humility, selflessness, self-awareness and self-reflection at a very large scale for this kind of transformation to happen.. and we (humans in general - not just Americans) aren't really good at that...
Being stuck in a tiny cabin, quite possibly with no internet access and minimal entertainment, must be awfully grim. We allow violent prisoners more freedom (social contact at meal times, exercise time, and visits), and even prison cells may be more spacious compared to some cruise ship cabins.
Makes me thankful for my relatively comfortable lockdown time - alone in a relatively small apartment, but with plenty of home comforts and able to go outdoors for exercise.
Many leaders have taken Covid-19 as a free "Do whatever they want" card, with little regard to the hidden negative repercussions of their decisions.
this is a test
of code blocsSo 1 case is described, then it is said 'half of dozen' other deaths which might be suspected suicides.
I wonder, did they compare it to a baseline? For sure this is not the first time crew members commit suicide.
I feel there is little 'meat' in the article.
"An October 2019 study on the mental well-being of crew, commissioned by a group affiliated with the International Transport Workers’ Federation, the big maritime trade union, found that even before the pandemic about a fifth of mariners surveyed said they had suicidal thoughts."
I'd be curious how the suicide rates compare to a non-pandemic year..
Regardless though, I feel like the juicy part of this article isn't the ~6 suspected suicides, it's how messed up the cruise ship companies are and how badly they botched communication in an attempt to cover their asses. They seem to be purposefully misinforming families about what happened with their loved ones. Some of these suspected suicides were found in their rooms and there doesn't seem to be closure as to what exactly happened. I can't imagine being in that situation.
Being confined to your room for something like 22 hours/day is a very different issue if you don't have the internet to provide social contact.
If east asia is the model you want the USA to follow I’m afraid of the politics your generation will bring.
I personally don't even use an Android/eyePhone any more to avoid that dystopia.
Neither can I think of many countries where police are more heavily armed, literally militarized [1], while killing people at rates that can only be estimated, as there are no state or federal statistics on that.
Still doesn't stop some US Americans from seeing the "police state" everywhere, except at home.
Even after over ten thousand people were arrested, thousands injured, many maimed, protesting against exactly that police state and its violence that disproportionately affects black people and other minorities.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rights-un-usa-torture-idU...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Support_Office
We don't have good alternatives to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Edit: this isn't entirely true though, and there is a lot of grey area. For example, correctly masking & social distancing is a good alternative, but only in spaces where people can/are willing to do it properly.
If you really dig, you find things like the Flaxman, et. al. paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7) which falls apart if you try to apply it retroactively (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.20160341v...) not to mention the huge issues with the methodology (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.58036...)
On social media, people pass around pre-prints like this (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.24.20248802v...) on the "long COVID" narrative, which uses the mythology of self reporting on online forums.
There is zero science on the effectiveness of lockdowns what so ever. the Great Barrington Declaration is a scientific counter to any pro-lockdown arguments as well.
Everyone is saying "We didn't lockdown long and hard enough" .. which is just fucking insane at this point. Unless you're an island nation like NZ, there is literally no way to stop a virus that has entered our ecosystem at this scale. It took over 160 years between the development of the Jenner/Smallpox vaccine and its elimination, with a huge 20 year push in the 60s/70s. This thing will be with us for at least a decade or more to come, and we can't continue fooling ourselves into thinking we can just turn off society like gears in a machine with little to no consequences.
Humans are not batteries with an on off switch.
The only variations in the effectiveness of a lockdown strategy should be due to - Household size - Compliance levels - Duration
Covered population, and population density should be completely irrelevant.
You also need a seperate and ongoing strategy to prevent re-introduction, and an outbreak management strategy, but those are seperate concerns.
Ideally, if your neighbouring countries/states/whatever were similarly effective, then re-introduction management shouldn't be too difficult (cf 'pacific travel bubble', etc).
Why does that matter? We can be confident that something is true without being sure why. We aren't sure what dark energy is, but just from empirical evidence we've observed, we do know that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. How is this situation different?
How many times were you despaired in 2000 that you still feel the effects of today? And how many of them are on the same level of importance as a temporary lockdown?
I was personally laid off this year due to lockdown bs and changed careers. It pays 1/5th as much but I’m so glad to be out of tech.
My monthly burn is negative. I’m subsidizing my new job from savings.
Not are all so lucky.
This is unfair. For a lot of people, these 10 months of lockdown and counting (and the consequences as a result of them) are the worst thing that's ever happened in their lives, so there's nothing equivalently bad to compare it to.
Granted a sufficiently incompetent government can throw away the advantage being an island provides. Looking at you UK.
In Australia we had islands inside the island, several states with land borders closed them to the rest of the country and have enjoyed normality since May.
Subsequent lockdowns would NOT have been needed if people would have listened to basic fucking things like: wear a mask, try not to go out unless you really need to, and keep some distance. But no, people are just selfish as hell and it's making it worst for the rest of us. Doesn't help that you have some certain politicians who actively made people resist doing basic things to help out.
Janice Dean covers it very well when she reported on how her own family member was killed by Cuomo's orders: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-megyn-kelly-show/i...
A number of people were killed because of overuse of ventilators. Many people under 40 who were put on them would have likely survived had they not been put on high pressure vents (and they're not used very much today for that reason).
The WHO is already telling all nations the lockdowns need to end. There is little to no scientific evidence they've done anything at all! So really, they've likely only done harm and zero good.
I can't find a source for that claim, would you mind sharing one?
> We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Dr. David Nabarro said to The Spectator’s Andrew Neil. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/who-official-urges-...
Honestly, every news organization is continually contradicting themselves at this point. Hell, the New York Times contradicts their own headlines in the same articles!
You seem like a smart person and I'm sure you can get the downsides of things like organized disinformation campaigns, the resulting impact on vaccine hesitancy, and the second-order effects like avoidable increases in measles, eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7590343/
If you could make more of an effort to communicate your ideas in a cooperative rather than an adversarial fashion that'd be great.
The lockdowns are unrelated to the leaders of those two states arbitrarily deciding to using private nursing homes to store patients; homes that didn't have individual rooms or isolation areas. The patients could have literally been sent anywhere else, like the massive emergency shelters in NYC that were totally empty and unused.
(We can’t allow our methods for mitigating covid 19 to be worse than suffering the disease)
EDIT: Nevermind, I see now that "can't" is probably meant as "shouldn't" instead of "is impossible to".
That interpretation is absurd and.far-fetched, as it's based on a couple of suicide cases that happened within a cruise ship whose crew was, for no reason, subjected to solitary confinement for months just because their employer felt no need to repatriate their crew.
And even if we blindly assume those suicides were due to lockdowns, let's put in perspective that those two suicides are dwarfed by the close to two million covid19 deaths so far.
> let's put in perspective that those two suicides are dwarfed by the close to two million covid19 deaths so far
These aren't comparable numbers, so I don't see how it provides perspective.
You're comparing the global number of deaths to the number of suicides within a tiny population.
You have to use actual counterfactuals: you're currently comparing apples to oranges.
You'd need to compare the number of ADDITIONAL deaths if these folks weren't confined to these two deaths by suicide or, more interestingly, the number of additional global deaths we would have seen without lockdowns (not that total!) to the the global spike in suicide, if there was one.
(I didn't address your point about the employer's malfeasance because I don't feel like I have anything useful to say there. With that conceded, I am just responding to the other part of your post.)
I would rather imagine and prefer the world where those who deprive people of their freedom without said people committing some crimes should be fucking jailed themselves.
It actually sounds more like one of the mysterious covid deaths that seem to not get reporting anymore.
On topic, thanks for the article. I had no idea this happened. I didn’t know crew were stuck on the ships. I remember some ships weren’t allowed to dock and unload passengers during the height of the lock downs in March/April. However, I thought that when everyone was allowed off the ships that passengers and crew would be treated equally.
This is very sad.