Calling for benefit–risk evaluations of Covid-19 control measures

In advertising, the effective frequency is the number of times a person must be exposed to an advertising message before a response is made and before exposure is considered wasteful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency

> While children appear to be largely spared the direct mortality impacts of COVID-19, the indirect effects stemming from strained health systems and disruptions to life-saving health services such as immunization and antenatal care, can result in devastating increases in child deaths. The pandemic threatens to reverse decades of progress made around the world toward eliminating preventable child deaths. According to a study covering 118 low- and middle-income countries by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an additional 2 million under-five deaths could occur in just twelve months due to reductions in routine health service coverage levels and an increase in child wasting.

Children are suffering because of strained healthcare systems, which isn’t because of their city being locked down. Reduction in routine healthcare could be caused by lockdown but it’s just as likely that parents are choosing to put off care out of fear (as a personal choice, not mandated) or because they can’t get it because the place they would go to is too busy because of Covid patients.

A year later, to have all those things and follow the same policies implies we either a) nailed it from the start or b) are not applying what we've learned. One of those is unlikely and the other unacceptable.

Terrorism was the excuse last time, and we were told to support the troops. Now it's a viral infection, and we are told to follow the science.

This should not ever be a valid excuse, especially since one doesn't have to be that old to remember the last time these sorts of excuses were made - to justify the West's horrific and brutal Middle East occupations. We knew better, and in the face of those facts this excuse is either made out of ignorance, or to cover up for remarkable amounts of incompetence. Neither should be acceptable justifications to the citizens of those countries who hide behind that excuse.

> Not to mention there is a gray are. You be a supporter of lockdowns but also believe the government did not sufficiently protect people/businesses.

Under what circumstances would a government be able to lock their people down and shutter their businesses, while also sufficiently protecting those people and those businesses? Which governments would have the resources to actually achieve success using these strategies?

Governments have a responsibility to operate within their own laws and any country whose legal code allows for the government to overreach into the movement of individual people as they have over the past year, are at grave risk of morphing into the sorts of evil regimes we haven't had to deal with since the end of the second world war.

EDIT: Programmers should have better social intelligence than this. Most people in this world do not want to live like programmers, locked up in a room looking at screens all day, transporting bits of electricity from one place to another. In fact, I would reckon many would rather die than live like we do. If people want to live this way freely and of their own choosing, fine - but to impose this on others as the only answer to a multi-faceted issue is just cruel to the broader public.

Humans are REALLY bad at responding to "highly unlikely" risk.

With the corona virus, there is a really small chance (~2% depending on factors) that you die after catching the disease. Some people look at this and say "well, I probably won't even get enough viral load to get sick". There are sone people say "wait, I might survive, but then spread it to someone else, with X% probability - and EACH OF THEM might die".

Both groups are EQUALLY INCAPABLE of properly assessing the likelihood of living a healthy life or dying (or something in the middle). BOTH GROUPS are responding out of "gut feelings" and emotion and VERY LITTLE LOGIC.

I say this not to condem you - in fact I have been in both parties. I say this so that we can find common ground and MEET TOGETHER and acknowledge that is IS HARD, and we should try to work TOGETHER AND NOT DIVID.

Except for last week where you were under your third lockdown? I work with people from Melbourne and I feel like a lot of them suffer from at least some mild PTSD. This was re-ignited when the 3rd lockdown was announced with worries that it would last months again (luckily this was not the case!). The mental health aspect/general population wellbeing seems to be largely ignored in Victoria.

> I’m going to a concert with thousands of people this week

Unless there's another leak and you go back into a snap lockdown. There's always uncertainty under such a system! Again, not great for mental health. (and yes, you can argue that there's always uncertainty under a pandemic, but the levels of uncertainty differ between geographies)

I am sure a lot of work from home office people without kids will view these lockdowns rather positively. But I doubt business owners, hospitality workers and artists will appreciate them as much.

The article makes some good points and we really need to look at the wider issues around the disease and its countermeasures.

So then this comes down to a fuzzy tradeoff, which seems more like a values or politics based determination than a mathematical or scientific one.

I expect it'll be obvious in retrospect that human interventions had much less effect than thought, and the largest factors were a mix of demographics like obesity and nutrition, as well as geography (which influences sun exposure, humidity, etc.).