What are you pushing for? There are places we can look to where covid ran free, it isn’t pretty.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
Assess your actual chances of catching and suffering from covid. Then balance it against the risk of a rushed experimental gene therapy still in initial trials.
Edit: Remember that none of the media and government published figures show recovery rates - this is hugely important.
But if you are really sick, you'd be at home, in your bed taking it easy anyway especially if your symptoms are as severe as some of the COVID reports suggest.
And it's not balanced reporting I want either, it's accurate reporting with facts that can be challenged or verified: most articles are incredibly vague when it comes to COVID and some have incredibly low numbers that, at first glance, look damning but are still tiny numbers.
Edit: deleted the 100,000 sentece - In response to that number, yes it may be a large number but there is no breakdown of the cases. For all you know, they were all 90+ years old with previous underlying conditions. All the figures we see have very little behind them that can substantiate the measures taken, while at the same time trigger responses in all of us that make them hard to argue against without coming across as callous but the numbers are not there to justify the lockdowns.
You can't link to the exact thing, but choose "Coronavirus Risk Perceptions" and split by age.
People under 40 believe that their risk of dying from the virus is over 10% on average. The actual risk for that age group is somewhere around 0.02%, which means they're overestimating their risk of dying by a factor of 500.
Five hundred! It's mindboggling how wrong people are.
But once you see those numbers, it becomes clear why there is such widespread support for strict lockdowns.
However, even with the accurate numbers, I would still say the case for the mRNA vaccines is strong. I think you are exaggerating the risks of the mRNA vaccines, in the same way that regular people are exaggerating the risks of the virus.
What specific policy are you suggesting? The more <40 year olds that get the virus, the more virus there is. The more virus there is, the more people who are spreading the virus, the more people who can get the virus, including people at very high risk of dying or being disabled from it.
As far as I'm aware no place has let the virus spread uncontrollably, think everything was fine, and not lock down at some point. The policy clearly has to be somewhere in between fully locked down and fully opened up, and I'm not sure discriminating by age and health is going to be some magical solution.
I think the biggest problem is the hyper-focus on a single cause of death. People look at the covid-19 death numbers, and have no idea how many people actually die in a normal year.
And this causes people to focus on ensuring nobody dies of covid-19 to the exclusion of everything else. Yes, it absolutely sucks that a lot of vulnerable people in elder care facilities have died of it, but it's equally tragic that a lot of them have died of cognitive decline due to not being allowed to see their family and friends, or not being allowed to see each other.
Or that people are dying or going to die because hospitals and patients alike are postponing care and checkups and routine surgeries, because they're afraid of hospitals being overrun with covid-19 patients, or because they're afraid hospitals will increase spread.
I belong to the privileged class of people who can work from home, I've done it for years, and I live far away from friends and family, so I've been doing weekly video calls for years. The effect for me, personally, is pretty much zero. A lot of people who drive policy are like me, and therefore think lockdowns are no big deal.
But lockdowns are absolutely miserable for a large amount of people. There's a very good reason that we're seeing violent anti-lockdown protests in several countries, because a lot of people are completely fed up with the restrictions.
So, in terms of specific policy, I want governments to encourage and enable people to isolate and distance and keep themselves safe, but I don't want them to enforce it. People have to be allowed to make their own choices, their own risk analysis, and live with the consequences. As we already do for a lot of things.
One example of encouragement is to have good sickpay policies in place, so that no-one feels they "have to" get to work even though they're sick or possibly infected, either out of social obligation or financial necessity.
> and I'm not sure discriminating by age and health is going to be some magical solution.
It's too hard to lock down and isolate a fraction of the population, therefore the solution is to lock down the entire population, except "essential" workers? This argument doesn't make sense to me.
I think that first sentence sounds like a great strategy, and it's perfectly in line with what I suggested. Coincidentally, that's exactly what Sweden did as part of its strategy. So I'm not so sure how Sweden is an example of the opposite?
> guess what, it turns out people don't want to go out and risk dying.
If people are voluntarily doing that, what's the point of having the government enforce the lockdown?
> So if your economy is doing to have mass unemployment, you may as well do that and avoid the death and injury.
Again, lockdowns aren't 100% free. They also cause death, injury, and misery. Suicides are up, domestic violence is up, cancer screenings are down, drug overdoses are up, alcoholism is up, depression is way up. Poor kids in the US who relied on school lunches as their only decent meal of the day are suffering nutritionally, and will lose years of their life because of malnutrition now.
I have a friend who was sick with covid for months, and she's got a long way to recovery. I have a friend who just got out of the ICU after having been there a couple of weeks, he's in shit shape, but alive. That sucks. But I also have friends who were close to suicide because they were unemployed, isolated, and really depressed. That also sucks.
There are no easy choices in this mess, and yet lockdowns are sold as an easy choice by people for whom it is easy, and failure to lock down is portrayed as some sort of moral failing, which is horrifying to me.
In NZ the suicide rate dropped, despite a lockdown that was considerably more severe than done in many places. Possibly making this misleading, NZs suicide rate is atrocious to begin with.
Yes, there was a hell of a lot of grim news and poor stats - but the below seems a little hard to to believe. They will lose years of life?
> Poor kids in the US who relied on school lunches as their only decent meal of the day are suffering nutritionally, and will lose years of their life because of malnutrition
https://www.mentalhealth.org.nz/assets/Suicide/Chief-Coroner...
A forecast, but with data up to November 2020, which means it's probably not gonna change substantially when we have the full year data:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102546/coronavirus-euro...
So, Sweden is third least affected country in that list. It's missing Norway and Finland, though, but a quick google shows Norway at -3.5% and Finland at -4.0%, both worse than Sweden.
At the same time, the covid-19 deaths in Sweden is pretty close to the EU average, now, after the winter surge:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
The obvious conclusion of that data is that lockdowns destroy your economy, but don't actually save lives.
This is how covid has been eradicated in NZ and Australia. Locking down part of the population doesn’t work - isolating the vulnerable from those that are less likely to die isn’t possible.
> People have to be allowed to make their own choices, their own risk analysis, and live with the consequences.
And where has this worked? A portion of people refuse to listen to advice, refuse to wear masks and refuse to isolate. People go out while sick, they congregate in groups. Why should the vulnerable have to be exposed to this? If everyone follows the rules, you get back to normal faster.
An approach based on evidence is the way to get results.