Comment by salmon30salmon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by salmon30salmon | Hacker News Reader

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I do not think the numbers are cooked. I think you are interpreting them incorrectly, or disingenuously.

We have had 399,857 deaths over the average expectation, and 328k over the upper bound. Are you saying that every single one of those excess deaths are from COVID infections? How many of those are from deaths of despair, lack of preventative healthcare due to closures, abuse, murders, aggravation of Alzheimer's etc.

The simple fact, that I would love to hear a reasonable refutation of, is that a majority of the people who have died from COVID would have died this year from another cause. However, those who have died from the impact of our response would NOT have died this year.

All in all, we reduced the number of life years due to our response. That is the problem.

Edit: Lets look at state data.

Florida has been widely criticized for their lax restrictions, while California has been widely celebrated for their lockdown. So which performed better?

Florida has 18,000 excess deaths and a population of 21.48 million.

California has had 37,000 excess deaths and a population of 39 millions.

So about the fucking same. Notice also that a lot of the excess deaths in California came throughout the Summer, where there wasn't as big a spike as there is now.

How do the many countries with more severe, briefer lockdowns and far lower excess fatality rates than the USA figure into your analysis?

Also, doesn't the conclusion in your edit (strong vs weak lockdowns are "the fucking same") refute your original claim ("those who have died from the impact of our response would NOT have died this year")?

Also, do you believe that lockdown in general induces severe long-term health complications in survivors on par with the effects of COVID?

Also, do you reject the idea that the effects of COVID scale superlinearly with concurrent infections, due to exhaustion of medical resources (i.e. do you think "flattening the curve" is a myth)?

I believe that we don't know the effects of a long term lockdown because we've never done it before. I do believe the number of people impacted by poverty, food insecurity and job loss is far higher than the number of people impacted by COVID long term.

I do not believe flattening the curve is a myth. I believe that without an exit strategy flattening the curve is unsustainable. I believe that keeping ICUs from being full is a very good goal. I also believe we generally locked down out of panic way before ICU capacity was at risk (See SFO in March) and thus consumed the will, resources etc to withstand flattening the curve. Now we have ICU issues but we've lost the will .

How do you explain countries that have had stricter, longer lockdowns than the USA having a hire mortality rate? It is almost as if lockdowns do fuckall

Which countries would those be?

Belgium, Italy, UK, Slovenia

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Take a look at the "daily new deaths" graphs for each of those countries on the site you linked. All four of those countries fall to near zero over the summer. Their first-wave lockdowns worked, eventually. The USA's did not; people just kept getting infected all summer long.

The second wave has hit hard, but deaths in Slovenia, Belgium, and Italy are at this point all trending back downward. USA's are not. Extend those graphs out and we'll be well ahead in deaths before long. The UK isn't trending down either, but their leadership is suffering from a lot of the same problems as the USA's with not taking this seriously.

Also note that all four of those countries are reporting fewer infections than the USA - their deaths per capita come from higher case fatality rates. This suggests that the death rate has more to do with their hospital systems being worse-positioned to handle the influx of patients than how the spread was managed.

Hospital beds are full. ICU beds are full. They are full of covid patients.

That's the simplest I can put it. You're arguing against reality.

ICUs are always full. Literally. ICUs and ERs are on divert more often than not. At least in the USA, hospitals have a fiduciary responsibility to keep beds filled. We will just take the sicker ones now.

They absolutely are not. Our typical occupancy this time of year would be around 50% (of pre-covid capacity) which is high because it's flu season. It's currently 140% which we can only accommodate because we've expanded the capacity specifically for covid.

You don't know what you're talking about.

I can only speak for my home state. Maybe we have shit hospitals

Where did you hear that ICUs are always full? I keep hearing that from people, and I don't know if it's bullshit or not.

Do you have any sort of a source that ICUs and ERs are on divert more often than not?

You can't evaluate the counterfactual without a controlled experiment.

And we don't have that.

We have a year of guesswork, and learning, and trying to stop thousands and thousands of loved ones and neighbors from dying.

Perhaps so many lives were saved due to decreases in traffic accidents, that it totally outweighed the lives lost to murder and suicide? Nobody knows right now.

We're just doing the best we can to leg it out until people can get the vaccine. There has been no cohesive federal anything, so the states are hanging in there as best they can.

Be patient. We've made it a year. We're in the home stretch.

Edit: Compare the size of the largest city in California with the largest city in Florida. It's a whole different ballgame. 900k vs 4 million. Florida's playing little-league compared to CA. They're not working with LA sprawl and urban density.

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