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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

> Mass death

Covid has killed a lot of people and created a lot of heart-break, and it would be heartless to try and minimise that or to view it in purely economic times in this moment.

However, I think that in 100 years, future historians will describe the effect of the deaths itself as being pretty negligable: maybe 10% over the expected rate without Covid in 2020 and 2021, maybe 5m people in each year total, against an expected death rate of 50-60m. Many of these deaths were people outside of the primary workforce, unlike say WW2 which killed off many of the young able-bodied men the mid 1900s economies primarily relied on.

I guess all I'm really trying to say is that when the story of Covid is written in 100 years time, "mass death" probably won't get much of a look-in vs economical and mental-health costs of lockdown, disruption to business, and so on.

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Also, I’m not sure exactly how you meant it, so I won’t direct this at you, just generally...

I can’t get over the techbro straw man of the “lockdown” I’ve seen thrown around a lot. First, compared to most of Asia that actually got this virus under control, we have never really had much of a true lockdown here. Second, it’s not the lockdown, its the pandemic. In most areas economic activity dropped off well before any lockdowns and has remained subdued regardless of lockdown duration as long as the virus remains active.

That is - the economic activity drop is more correlated with level of virus outbreak than with any government orders.

In NYC, everyone I know got sent home a week or more before any city/state lockdowns started.

The only time offices were mandated to be closed in NYC was about 8 weeks when we had refrigerated trucks parked outside hospitals acting as mobile morgues, and the National Guard picking up 100s of bodies per day of those who died at home.

For the most part companies have kept people WFH because they can get close to 100% productivity with close to 0% absences due to disease & death.

The mental health angle of more time spent at home, I still think is a wash. For every extrovert craving lording over a conference room of coworkers, there’s an introvert enjoying reduction in forced social interactions. Lots of people actually like their family & enjoy spending more time with them.

Can't speak to the US lockdown, but Melbourne, Victoria, Australia had restrictive lockdowns (1 hour outdoor exercise with up to 2 people together, 1 daily trip to the supermarket per household, couldn't travel more than 5km from your house, police roadblocks out of the city and out of the state, non-essential industries shut down and some essential ones operating at significantly reduced capacity, 8pm-5am curfew) and was accompanied by a 22% spike in calls to the largest suicide hotline.

Even introverts can miss going outside or seeing their family.

> was accompanied by a 22% spike in calls to the largest suicide hotline

A counterfactual: how many people would be affected if their spouse/parent died without the lockdown? These tragedies are unfolding in many countries, and by this misfortune we'll be able to see, in retrospect, the impact of government interventions vs outcomes in a pandemic.

I'm 100% in support of the lockdown, and Australia hasn't had a locally acquired case for well over a week, but supporting something doesn't mean being blind to the downsides.

Even when NYC was at 500% daily death rate, there was nothing resembling that level of lockdown. I cannot stress enough how much the US lockdowns resembled nothing like what some of the countries that got the virus under control did.

Groceries restricted number of simultaneous customers, but I could go anytime and as many times as I wished. Restaurants were open for takeout. Parks were open, and capacity was not enforced. Transit was operational. I could get in my car and drive wherever, Uber was running, etc. I’m fairly certain flights were running through this. So people were socializing indoors with friends&family obviously.

Many singles in their 20s I knew went back home to mom&dad, especially if they lived alone.

No curfew. In fact the only curfew we had was a few days during BLM rallies.

However, despite a spike in calls, the actual number of suicides in Victoria was lower in 2020 than previous years [1]

[1] https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/suicides-in-vict...

And yet those stricter lockdowns in Australia (stricter than in the US) paid off. There are very few cases at this point and little if any community spread.

> we have never really had much of a true lockdown here.

And parts of europe had more of a lockdown than the US and the population fatality rate is worse. I wonder if covid just doesn't care about lockdowns; the countries that haven't gotten hit badly are 1) an island. 2) an isolated continent. 3) an island 4) a country that sits on a peninsula that has a hugely militarized impermeable border. and 5) a group of islands. Even within the US, the state that has the lowest per capita covid rate... Is an island. Even at the micro level, the city in the bay area that is one of the least affected... Is an island.

On the other hand the UK has a higher CFR and a higher per population mortality than the US, so...

Covid doesn't care about half-assed, poorly enforced lockdowns. China managed to control the virus pretty well it seems (after completely botching their early handling).

Lockdowns seemed to work in my country early in the pandemic. But in my country many covid measures are reliant on goodwill and voluntary compliance, so if morale drops (as you'd expect with extended lockdown), you expect lockdown effectiveness to drop as well.

It's also bad pretty much everywhere in Europe as well. During the first wave, everyone pointed to the Czech Republic as a country that'd done well. They currently have about the same Covid mortality rate as the UK in per-capita terms, last I saw, which had one of the deadlier outbreaks. (Also, the UK isn't much like an island in terms of connectivity to the rest of Europe, and that probably matters more than physical geography.)

I think to say lockdowns didn’t work raises the question - why did NYC cases & deaths peak only after all white collar workers stayed WFH for 4-6 weeks and the city looked like a ghost town?

It’s clear to me that keeping us out of offices and trains stopped the spread. Unfortunately it had been in the city for 2+ months prior and then ravaged the elderly & medical&front line workers who were out there dealing with it while we got to WFH.

Close, especially indoor contact, without masks, in cooler dry weather appears to be the recipe for disaster here.. ‘ We are seeing it play out in Wave 2 (or 3?) here as people have all gotten very sloppy, even if they are WFH.

From March-October in my social/family circle I knew 0 people with COVID. We were all at home, and people got scared straight pretty quick. Come summer things opened and cases dropped..

From early November to Christmas I knew 30+ people with COVID. Where did they get it? Kids came home from college with it. They went to bars indoors for hours. They dined indoors at restaurants.

> On the other hand the UK has a higher CFR and a higher per population mortality than the US, so...

B.1.1.7 variant. Coming (already in) the US.

It also correlates well with countries that habitually wear masks and avoid close personal contact when feeling unwell, which fits the data better as it removes the UK outlier.

So you are saying asymptomatic infections are not an issue?

> compared to most of Asia that actually got this virus under control

Japan and South Korea had relatively big late December/early January waves. Not US-big, but enough that I wouldn't call it "under control."

China is controlling it, but with another round of strict lockdowns.

Taiwan is doing well. So is Singapore. I'm sure their policies are part of the reason, but I suspect the climate helps, too.

> Lots of people actually like their family & enjoy spending more time with them.

Let's not forget that there are a lot of people who don't live with families or in couple. For them (I am in this case too), most of social interactions are with colleagues during the day and friends in evenings or weekends. Both of these options are at minimum severely hindered.

I think the opposite; as society continues to get better at responding to disease and preventing death, the social allowance for "expected" deaths declines.

The U.S. Civil War 150 years ago is a good benchmark. We look back now at the level of death with horror, especially deaths among those receiving what passed for medical treatment back then. But of course back then, that was how medicine worked and it was not remarkable that so many people died after surgery.

Or if you want to look back closer to 100 years, look back on the level of death and disease related to World War I or the Spanish Flu.

The benchmark for evaluating our response to COVID-19 will not be some percentage over the death rate we expect today, but the optimum that people 100 years from now think we could have achieved with a competent response. Historians will be in a better position to judge the details than we are (for example, by having full access to the collected archives of various national governments of today).

But it's clear even now that the U.S. could have had far fewer deaths than we did, with a better response. Look at how well we did against SARS and MERS, or how well some other nations did against COVID-19.

The trouble is that people's expectations for what a "competent response" should be able to achieve don't actually seem to have any basis in reality. Pandemic response plans just fundamentally aren't designed to stop a respiratory pandemic like this one, at best they try to mitigate a little of the damage and even a lot of that is experimental and untested. (We don't even know something as basic as how effective school closures are against flu pandemics!) SARS and MERS had very different characteristics which made contact tracing a lot more effective against them; the UK, US and most other countries tried using the same approach that worked against them and it failed (and started a bazillion conspiracy theories about why the UK abandoned it). People's expectations seem to have more to do with cynical partisan political attempts to exploit the pandemic than reality.

Modern pandemic response planning in the U.S. got its start in the Bush 43 administration, focused initially on the emergence of a deadlier-than-normal flu strain, which is of course a respiratory disease. The Obama administration continued this work and applied it to outbreaks of SARS, MERS, and Ebola.

The Trump administration failed to staff, fund, and prioritize that work at the same level.

There is tremendous leverage at the beginning of a pandemic, but it dissipates quickly. That’s why continuous planning and preparation are so important.

By the time the Trump administration got serious about the response, it was too late, they had lost most of that leverage. Most of the things people argue about now—lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, etc.—happened well after that point.

I hope people 100 years from now have better things to do than judge or condemn their great great grandparents response to a pandemic.

Arguably 10% may turn out to be the direct-attributable number if you zoom out far enough nationally or globally, but locally & temporally theres been significantly higher numbers. Also remember there’s a lot of death not captured in that number of people who died at home / were never tested / etc that gets captured in the “excess mortality” stat.

In NY State and NYC in particular its closer to 30%. Counting total “excess mortality” in NYC is closer to 60% on the year. Note that we’ve annualized here and ~90% of the death in NY took place in about an 8 week period, where the daily death ratepeaked closer to 500-1000% of normal for a week or two. So yes, there was mass death.

There are many similar stories in areas of California, Italy, England, etc.

Death is not and should not be judged purely based on some headcount, but in relation to the degree to which it was preventable, and the errors that were made to achieve exactly that. And on that front Covid may very well be the worst, most easily preventable pandemic mass death in this century.

The sheer incompetence, misinformation, petty squabbling within and between countries is going to make it to the history books. Disruption to business won't even be a footnote.

The upcoming COVID story is more likely to be about the other 99% who are living and simply listed as "positive case" or "recovered", and the estimated 800% more that are thought to have not been tested.

Encephalitis lethargica killed 500,000 people and overlapped with the influenza of 1918, as it preceeded and continued afterwards and disappeared as quickly as it came. Subsequently many of the Encephalitis Lethargica patients developed coma-like states in the decades to come, and stayed that way for the rest of the century until they died.

We already know COVID is a neurological disease too, which is why taste and smell get disrupted. So we'll see as time goes on.

Right, I've personally suffered very little and I wanted to be careful to not minimize the tragedy and suffering of those who have.

This has been a terrible and tragic event for millions of people. The worst is it was completely avoidable if some of our governments had only valued proper planning for such a predictable event

The goal of all these lockdown measures is exactly to limit the number of additional deaths.

It will have an effect on our population to have an additional 0.15% of Americans die in a year, especially in an event that affects countries more or less the same way

Not a localized famine or war, but a global thing.

What can it compare to? The number of dead is remarkable.

With the growing antivax movement making herd immunity less certain...this will surely be known for the number of our dead

Doubt it. If current rates of progress continue, in 100 years five million deaths will be considered immensely tragic

Ww2 death was much more spread out due to disease, famine, genocides in Asia and total war perpetrated by Stalin and Hitler. Most WWII deaths were not soldiers. Only the US and lessor UK proper concentrated in young men.

Now WW1 with Spanish flu killed high percentage of prime of age people.

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