Kudos for expressing an unpopular opinion.
I'll express another one: I think the whole thing about "ZOMG! Suicide rates through the roof!!!elevelty!1!" is blown out of proportion, largely thanks to pseudo-news web sites trying to grab clicks on the internet.
The school district where I live put out a press release lamenting an 18% increase in student suicide in 2020. Reading to the end, you find out that the actual numeric increase was something like 2. Two dead kids isn't good in any way. But when the number of suicides reaches a meaningful fraction of the number of COVID deaths, then I'll take it seriously.
Having to stay home for a year is nothing — absolutely nothing — compared with what children had to deal with during previous social upheavals (world wars, and the like).
Certain news sites in my state spent 2020 lamenting about how the lockdown is causing overdose deaths to skyrocket. Well, 2021 rolls around and the 2020 overdose death statistics were calculated, and there were about a dozen more overdose deaths in 2020 than in 2019, a change that is statistically insignificant when comparing it to the tens of thousands of overdoses that occurred in the state each year in 2019 and 2020, or to the tens of thousands of people who died from COVID there in 2020.
For whatever reason, the types of people who shared such news in 2020 were not the kind of people who gave two shits about addiction and its effects on others before the pandemic. I say this as a person who has struggled with addiction in the past and has lost numerous people I care about to it. It seems to me that the overdose stats were merely a tool to be used to complain about policy that they disliked.
You’ll find this is common with a lot of political subjects, I could name a few that come up HN seemingly weekly now. Pick up a cause when it's politically convenient, drop it afterwards. I don’t trust anyone or their intentions when it comes to these sort of things.
Do you have a citation for this? All statistics I have seen are the exact opposite, showing wildly worse OD stats for 2020 than 2019 [0]
Now some synthetic opioid OD stats could be affected by availability and popularity having little to do with COVID, so lets look at a more historically available drug...
"Overdose deaths involving cocaine also increased by 26.5 percent" [0].
How do you explain that one? And it's not that clubs and raves are finding some new popularity, they've been shut down absent a recent and limited subset of Florida towns.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death...
Your stats include about a month or two of lock downs at most.
My stats refer to the period between January 2020 and the end of December 2020 in a single state. I'm not about to dox myself, but we can use another state's data to illustrate the same point. In NJ, there were 3,021 overdose deaths in 2019, and in 2020, there were 3,046 overdoses, an increase of only 25 deaths[1], or 0.83%.
> "Overdose deaths involving cocaine also increased by 26.5 percent" [0]. How do you explain that one?
Cocaine and psychostimulants are becoming increasingly popular year-over-year. For example, the CDC reports that psychostimulant overdose deaths increased by 37% in 2017[2], and drug overdose deaths involving cocaine increased by more than 34%.
The CDC reports that from 2009 to 2018, cocaine overdose deaths nearly tripled[3], and between 2014 and 2018, the rate of drug overdose deaths involving cocaine with opioids increased at a faster pace than the rate of cocaine deaths without opioids. If you look at the compiled data[3], between 2015 and 2018, cocaine overdose deaths skyrocketed.
Part of the trend might be related to increasingly adulterated cocaine[4] with fentanyl and designer stimulants over the past few years.
[1] https://whyy.org/articles/n-j-saw-a-slight-uptick-in-drug-ov...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/otherdrugs.html
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db384.htm
[4] https://khn.org/news/not-yesterdays-cocaine-death-toll-risin...
There's been a resurgence in underground raves.
Tacky childish mocking of valid concern over the mental health of children, some of whom are truly not doing well, is a garbage take. There are kids crying on a daily basis because of this Zoom shit and the expectations placed on them. While they will (likely) survive, it’s not good for them. I’ve seen kids test scores decline, parents enduring outright mutiny and violence from their children. I’ve seen single parents trying to work from home while their kids, who were already struggling when they had someone to pay attention to them, are screaming at the top of their lungs and breaking things.
Mental health issues can persist even in privileged circumstances, and deserves our concern. The existence of worse suffering doesn’t make current circumstances magically better. In a way, your take feels like the mental health counterpart to ‘it’s just the flu’ style arguments.
I also believe that, during wartime, a lot of children were able to go outside and play with other children.
Could this be a cultural or geographical thing? Having lived both in Asia and Europe and also visited USA on a number of occasion I find that kids misbehaving in front of parents is more common in EU than Asia.
A proportion of which are directly and indirectly caused by the behaviour of young people.
So yes mental health of children is important but for many people not as important as staggering numbers of people dying.
The "caused by the behaviour of young people" thing is a weird non-sequitur. Are you suggesting 10-year-olds share culpability for spread caused by the spring break behavior of high-school students?
This is incredibly frustrating to read. Among students, the relevance of this topic - mental health issues spiking do to online curriculum - is painfully obvious. And yes, we are balancing this against the realized danger/negative health consequences of the pandemic.
I understand that this is anecdotal, but it seems that large, robust data sets are not convincing for you.
From what perspective are you writing? Do you have children in school? Do you feel that rising suicidality correlates with a broader issue that suggests some amount of increased suffering in the larger population?
> compared to what children had to deal with during previous social upheavals
Are you saying that we can't aspire to manage crises better than some historical bar? Why does this comparison appear here?
I am genuinely curious, and I hope you understand that my questions are genuine. I just rarely come across a comment that so confidently disagrees with things that are extremely obvious to me. Cheers
Governments should have kept covid out but harming children in this way to make up for disastrous decisions and behaviours of adults is unacceptable.
What do you do during school vacations, and summer?
"Mental health consequences of the COVID-19 crisis including suicidal behavior are likely to be present for a long time and peak later than the actual pandemic."
This was a "trolly problem" situation. The least worse option had to be selected.
You also need to know whether children spread the disease.
b) In order to have children at school, you need teachers at school. In order to have teachers at school, you need public transport. Suddenly, you have a significant amount of people moving around spreading the virus.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/we-now-kn...
You do realize you're replying to a Reuters article about mental health results, not predictions.
Quite a hyperbolic and probably politically inclined comment.
I don't think you can be this confident. Young humans deal particularly poorly with social isolation and those previous upheavals didn't have that as the main feature.
Wow what a brave thing to do, arguing with a straw man.
Suicide rates actually dropped during the world wars. People are able to handle war much better than social isolation.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51291.How_to_Lie_with_St... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43722897-the-art-of-stat...
It doesn't - the kids have a better survival rate than they do from the flu, and the people who are at risk are overwhelmingly not getting it from kids.
Do a cost-benefit analysis. Keeping kids in detention fails it every time.
In reality you need to consider probabilities. What if there are thousands of times more kids in the second category than the first?
This is a pattern of thinking that I’ve seen a lot on the pro-lockdown side: reasoning from the axiom that a human being dying has infinite negative utility. While normally a good policy heuristic in practice when all else is equal, it of course can’t be strictly true. If it were, then it would be worth it for everyone in the world to experience unbounded misery if that extended the life of one person by one day.
Clearly that is absurd. So the moral calculus must be more nuanced than “if it saves lives, it must be worth it”.
One option harms every child and potentially saves some parents' lives.
The other harms practically no children and will likely lead to some more parents dying, although the data is unclear (as death rates in states with much more open schools is not consistently higher).
Harm all kids to save a few parents on the margin...potentially? Do the cost-benefit.
Really? You think that a parent dying harms "practically no children"?
For christ's sake, I lost my father at 25 years old (10 years ago) and it still hurts me daily (at 35 now).
Your calculus is just plain fucking cold.
If there needs to be outrage, it should be against monopolies like Comcast which has said it will expand data caps to more markets this year. I for one would support life in prison for the current Comcast CEO as well as dismantling the company and making an example out of it.
"The total number of COVID-19 outbreaks statewide rose this week by 9% over last week to 645. The biggest proportion of outbreaks are tied to the K-12 school setting, Lyon-Callo said.
Children ages 10-19 now have the highest COVID-19 case rate in Michigan, a rate that "is increasing faster than that of other age groups" she said. School-related outbreaks, she explained, aren't all tied to the classroom setting. Many are linked to sports and other gatherings among students."
[1]: Frustratingly, everyone uses different age buckets for reporting. So the state uses ranges like 0-17, 18-50, 50-65 etc. But looking at the individual counties that have a bit more granularity, under 19s appear to be one of the top demographics despite having some of the fewest tests. However I haven't bothered to normalize for population or anything like that
You could say that for all of covid. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogen...
> Kudos for expressing an unpopular opinion.
Here's a real unpopular opinion - "Epstein did nothing wrong"
Here's a popular opinion people hide behind saying it's unpopular - "Epstein didn't kill himself"
"unpopular opinion" <==> "I know I'll be downvoted"
If we're comparing years of life, isn't one 16 year old worth 60-70 85 year olds in nursing homes? Maybe more because one year in the life of an 84 year old who's already experienced a full life is worth a lot less than a 16 year old going on 17. Societally wise, it's much worse to sacrifice a young person for an 80 year old who's essentially a burden on the rest.
This comparison of the value of a life is morbid, but we've been making decisions like this anyway, even if the media has refused to speak of it openly.
And of course this assumes that all these lockdowns, school closings, etc. made any difference. Again, we can debate that and both sides have data to make their case.
So yeah, maybe one or two suicides and the massive increase of unknown mental health issues weren't a good tradeoff for the unknown number of mostly elderly whose lives were extended a year or two.
An 80 year old has a lot of life in them. Some may have a year or two but others will have 20 or 30 years left.
and the 80 yr olds do not contribute to the economy or work, and is indeed a "burden" (sad to say, but they can't really sustain themselves without external resources, as their economic value output is zero). The 16 yr old will likely contribute to society for 40 years at least.
i'm not saying the lockdowns weren't necessary - they were. I'm saying that the costs are high, and society has asked the young to make a sacrifice for the elderly, and yet has not gotten much in return. At least some token appreciation for them is the least that can be done. After all, we praise the servicemen/women for their war efforts, well into their years, and i don't see this as being that different.
I'm not sure the young are making anywhere near same sacrifice compared to the war effort in terms of lives and limbs and post war mental effects.
The really young are the future. Anyone in there late teens and 20s is past that point. The work from home training/conditioning the younger generation received will payoff when they reach 20. While your generation may struggle with the isolation by preparing the next generation those issues will disappear reaping larger economic benefits.
In terms of praise, remember all age groups are staying home. Appreciation should first be given to the soldiers (nurses,people who put themselves in danger) but appreciation should be given to everyone who stayed at home, everyone who convinced someone stop doing something that would spread this and everyone who did all they could to stop the spread.
> While your generation may struggle with the isolation by preparing the next generation those issues will disappear reaping larger economic benefits.
It feels inconsistent that you're dismissing the long term effects of one potential problem (isolation) while using the potential harm of another (undemonstrated, theoretical long term damage to young people from COVID infection) to argue your point.
It's like saying "when you're older, we will treat you like shit" and people going back to society and saying "if you're gonna treat me like shit, I'm not going to be a productive member of society like you want me to"
I hope, that if my "economic output" is zero I don't get ground up into protein so I can have a contribution to society.
A token of appreciation from previous generations is the infrastructure built to benefit from. Like say planting a tree, whose economic output might be zero but you can enjoy it long after the person who planted it died. Not everyone that went before you has mortgaged the future to buy a yacht, maybe show some perspective?
Also, the average length of stay in a nursing home is under a year. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45950714_Length_of_...
And the fact that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are people with very few quality-adjusted life years remaining is almost entirely missed by the media coverage.
And an 8 digit body count would be impossible in the US for a disease with a >99% survival rate. So quit the hyperbole.
If everyone in the US got COVID, and 1% of them died, that would be 3.3 million people dead and over 30 million hospitalized. If the death rate is 3%, 9.85 million would die. I don't think there are 30 million hospital beds in the US, so that figure could reach over 10 million, which is 8 digits.
However, while you're busy focusing on digits, you're missing the overall point.
The worst-case realistic number of deaths for the US is around 1.2 million. With hospital collapses, maybe double that. 10 million is not possible.
If you have been left untouched by it, then good for you, but you shouldn't be assuming that that applies to everyone.
The mortality rate in the US is 1.8%. That is 542k dead out of 29.8 million cases.
That's nearly 30 million cases with all the lockdowns, mask rules, etc.
Even with that minor amount of 9% infected, LA hospitals ran out of capacity, morgues overflowed, etc. Try to imagine if we didn't try to limit the spread - by among other things closing schools.
NZs recent outbreak started from a couple of kids in a school of only 13-1500 students, and with lockdowns that dwarf anything the US did they only just managed to control it, getting to something like 100 positive cases because they didn't want to lock down completely.
Schools in Florida have been open for months and they aren't overwhelmed.
https://www.methodsman.com/blog/case-fatality-rate-vs-infect...
What I can tell you is that the CDC now provides an “infection fatality rate” parameter in it’s planning scenarios. They range the IFR from 0.5% in their best-case scenario to 0.8% in the worst-case scenario.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201030/covid-19-infection-...
A new study conducted by researchers at Imperial College London found the COVID-19 infection fatality ratio is about 1.15% of infected people in high-income nations and 0.23% in low-income nations.
The new study confirms that the coronavirus is deadlier for older people, with the risk of death doubling for every eight years of aging and ranging from 0.1% for people under 40 and 5% among people over 80 years old. The disparity between high and low-income nations is due largely to facts that high-income nations tend to have larger number of elderly in their populations whereas low-income nations’ population tend to skew youngers.
Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) but probably not life-changing.
..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity.
> Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) but probably not life-changing.
And teachers, and looking at how the breakdown of Italian hospitals meant a huge spike in deaths in the 40+ crowd that would have been just fine if they instead had capacity, a ton of dead parents, aunts and uncles to deal with too.
My understanding is that lockdowns didn't really change things significantly, so the "with lockdowns in effect" is not really relevant. See California (extreme lockdowns from the top) vs Florida (a bit of lockdown from the top) and their associated infection rate per 100k, which is nearly the same.
If you don't have such an explanation, and California, with some of the most stringent measures in the US, had similar outcomes to Florida, with a much laxer approach, I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that California's approach was "very good".
Because that is the comment I was responding to, which was itself a response to a comment comparing the outcomes of Florida and California. "Nowhere in the US, and very few western countries, had a sufficient response" is a valid position, and probably accurate (with the caveat that I'm not confident that a sufficient response was even possible in the US), but it wasn't really the point under discussion.
That and yes, FL clearly lied and has fired people for indicating correct numbers. This is not helped by many US states that try to record CV19 deaths as being due to "underlying conditions" instead of covid.
If you go to hospital due to covid, and then die, whatever other conditions you have aren't relevant, covid is what killed you.
I think it is clear we still don’t understand fully the driving risk and safety factors across different regional areas, let alone continents and hemispheres. I don’t know how we ever could at this time or what we could do about it.
Edit: And examining average death rate instead provides a different story as well: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-09/covid-19...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/07/florida-poli...
“Want to buy this vampire repelling rock?”
Lockdowns likely wouldn't affect IFR. It's a measure of fatality, not of infection rate, unless you think lifting the lockdown would cause a dramatic shift in infections to more vulnerable populations.
It's not infections/population.
The IFR isn't a static figure. If the actual incidence goes up to the point hospitals are overwhelmed, so does the IFR, by an enormous amount (so does the fatality rate of unrelated conditions, because resource exhaustion hits all conditions for which the same resources are used, not just COVID.)
From what I recall, I've read some interviews with heads of cancer clinics in Czech republic which is hit pretty hard, and they reported that they don't see many new patients in early stages of cancer anymore, people who come to them are mostly late stage which manifests hard, and they often go straight to palliative care. Is this some peer-reviewed study published in Nature with nice numbers and graphs? Of course not, we'll get to those numbers maybe 10 years after covid is under control, maybe. But its real people dying out there, mostly quietly without much media attention.
Pregnancy is a serious situation with covid, it can lead to many complications, abortion, and in case of serious complications for the mother, doctors at least here in Switzerland either perform abortion / force early delivery depending on age, since mother can't manage to breath on support enough for both of them (my wife is pregnant right now and senior doctor and we both got covid some 2 months ago, so this is something we checked on pretty intensively... luckily so far so good).
There is no win, we all take a heavy mental toll in confinement / job uncertainty or loss. But the risks are real on the other side too and its not so clearly cut for everyone. I don't have a clear answer on this myself.
EDIT: related to original topic - we caught covid from our little son going to kindergarden. In semi/hard lockdown, small kids going to schools is by probably the strongest infection vector. They can't keep the discipline as well as adults can. Heck, most adults can't keep up the discipline 1+ year consistently.
If you actually stop and think about the value of a life in a real sense instead of from an abstract or monetary perspective, you're either absolutely horrified by all of this and your path is clear, or you're a monster.
For the past year I just look at my wife and look at my kid and imagine what it would be like to lose them. I would do _anything_ to protect them. I know what losing other family members to COVID feels like. I've seen first hand what it does to people (friends and family).
Almost every one of those five hundred and fifty thousand people (in the US alone) that have died from COVID meant just as much to someone. I want to afford them the same respect and put in at least a minimal effort to protect their family just the same.
To me, any argument based around what essentially amounts to an inconvenience being too much to ask to prevent those deaths just makes me disgusted. Dressing it up in some rationality by demanding absolute and incontrovertible scientific proof of efficacy is nothing but a flimsy excuse.
Approaching all of this with some empathy makes it easier on yourself and leads to better outcomes for everyone. I'm not stuck at home in the face of statistics and arguments about how I should be able to do whatever I want and damn everyone else paying the consequences. I'm at home because I don't want people to suffer.
It sucks some days, but it's easy to keep going when I know it could be the reason _my own child_ doesn't grown up without a father. It's easy to keep going when it could be the reason someone else doesn't have to go through that either.
So I lost a year of hanging out with friends and had to cut my hair in the utility sink instead of going to the hair dresser. That's such a small fucking price to pay relative to what this could cost someone it's not even a fucking question.
It's essentially the same argument you are trying to make in favor of the lockdowns. Without the lockdowns, families will have to bury their loved ones and grow up without grandma/grandpa around. Other people will have long term health effects from catching this virus. With the lockdowns, some people will have to bury their (usually much younger) loved ones and grow up without brother/sister/son/daughter/friend around. Others will have long term mental health effects.
My cousin overdosed in May 2020. He had battled with addictions for a while before lockdowns but nothing to the point that we thought it would kill him. He went off the rails being forced to isolation and is now dead. His family had to bury him with no one else allowed to be present. In the same way that it's easy to overlook the impact of the virus if it has not severely impacted your family, its easy to overlook the lockdown effects if you and your family have not been severely impacted.
Stopping to think about the value of a life in a real sense should horrify you by all of the deaths and suffering caused by the virus but it should also horrify you to think of the value of the lives taken/affected by these sudden policy implementations. It does not make you a monster to consider both sides.
As for the clear path in terms of policies, both sides of the coin should be considered to the degree of certainty we know the risks to be. Unfortunately, this usually does require you put abstract/monetary/years-of-life-lost statistics in play.
Last June, my aunt in nyc was stacking bodies like cordwood in the back of trailers. They weren’t all 90 year old diabetics with copd.
The short version:
Blood oxygen levels were falling into "should be dead" levels never really seen before (even though they were otherwise alert and fine and had no other hypoxia indicators), which caused doctors to panic about pneumonia and not being able to breathe, and put people on ventilators prematurely. However, it wasn't really having an effect, so the ventilators kept getting turned up to their maximum setting, which puts too much pressure on the lungs and causes additional permanent damage. In most people this caused a turn for the worse instead of recovery.
Their death rate in April was the same as the peak of the second wave in December.
This is kind of my point.
https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
No, they aren't. Your article is talking about the 2017-2018 flu season, which was an anomaly when it came to hospitalizations and deaths. Both hospitalizations and deaths that season were about double what they normally are[1]. About 61k people died in the US during that flu season, where about 20k-35k normally die. There were 810k hospitalizations, while hospitalizations usually fluctuate between 250k-500k.
Prediction: you are quoting the meaningless CFR number rather than reliable estimates of IFR.
Additionally teachers and school staff tilt pretty heavily to high risk groups. Watching so many of the adults die in their life would absolutely give kids depression too.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338
What I have an issue with is people stating crazy stuff like "covid barely spreads through children" even though they have no real data on it.
> Primary schools may be generally less affected than secondary schools (20, 25–28), perhaps partly because children under the age of 12 are less susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 (29).
The study also goes on to state, in a profound bit of self-awareness:
> Our approach cannot distinguish direct effects on transmission in schools and universities from indirect effects, such as the general population behaving more cautiously after school closures signaled the gravity of the pandemic. Additionally, because school and university closures were implemented on the same day or in close succession in most of the countries we studied, our approach cannot distinguish their individual effects
And:
> (iii) Our results cannot be used without qualification to predict the effect of lifting NPIs. For example, closing schools and universities in conjunction seems to have greatly reduced transmission, but this does not mean that reopening them will necessarily cause infections to soar.
Like stated above, this doesn't prove or disprove a negative. If someone comes out with a direct, causative relationship between re-opening schools and increased infections, and that is reproducible, sure, make policy decisions based on that information. But otherwise, if we are blindly making decisions that can affect the health and development of children, we better have data to back up those decisions.
I want it to be true, but it would be pretty incredible if it were. There are probably other factors at play.
Yeah, and that's why it's not really a thing. Large amounts of asymptomatic spread turned out to be an early fear that wasn't true: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asymptomatic-coronavirus-pat...
Surely with so many similar cases the processes could be streamlined?
Should we ask TSMC for 3nm MDs?
Obviously this "8 digit body count" concept is a load of that which makes the grass grow green.
Meanwhile, in SoCal, basically nobody followed the mask mandates and social distancing restrictions. The rules were more like guidelines, and guidelines that were ignored. They also have a lot more problems with overcrowding, with immigrant populations that need to work, etc. So in terms of what people were actually doing, SoCal was actually engaging in significantly riskier behavior than Florida.
If you compare Bay Area, where people largely did follow the mask & social distancing guidelines, with Florida or SoCal, the death rates are not the same. SF and San Mateo counties had approximately 1/3 as many deaths/1M as the U.S. (and Florida) average; Santa Clara had about 1/2 as many.
As a healthy 30-something, my chance of dying from COVID is about 1:3000, about 300x better than an 80-year-old. However, my chance of being hospitalized from COVID is about 3%, which is only about 7x better than the 80-year-old. The hospitals were overwhelmed, here (Bay Area) and in many other cities. Even now (2 months after the Christmas/January surge) Santa Clara County still has 21% of its ICU beds taken up by COVID patients.
U.S. life expectancy dropped by a full year during COVID. We were concerned about the 0.1 year declines in 2016-2018 from the opioid epidemic (which did affect young people), and this was 10x that. It'll be interesting to see how all-cause mortality has varied among different states in 2020-2021.
One thing I'd add is that the loss of education and economic wealth from the lockdown is going to impact life expectancy for years to come, so that also needs to be taken into account.
Huh? I’m from SoCal and almost everyone wears masks here all the time, all shops require masks on entrances, so I’m not sure where this narrative comes from?
The thing SF screwed up worst was opening indoor restaurants/bars for a couple months in the Autumn, which alongside holiday gatherings/winter weather resulted in a more than 10x increase in cases during that time (thankfully starting from a very low baseline). I would guess that mistake is responsible for more than half of all Covid deaths in the city, as both before and after that period (after suitably offsetting the data by a couple weeks to account for delay between action and visible outcomes) case rates were steadily declining.
SF also did a poor job, especially early on, at getting targeted testing and outreach to working class neighborhoods.
Just because they're in the middle doesn't make it a good response.