Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobyjsullivan | Hacker News Reader

The 3% is people who have had both doses. If you live in Canada, then you know that almost nobody has had both doses. That's not our priority - maximizing collective protection is the short-term goal.

Personally, I'll measure Canada's performance throughout this pandemic by the final number of per-capita deaths. We're hardly best in the world but doing a lot better than the US so far (1,783/M vs 643/M at the moment[0]).

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Edit to add: Canada could easily take the lead over US in deaths/M if US get's vaccinated faster/better. I'm not so naive to believe that's impossible. It does seem Canada has a strategy to avoid that. Otherwise, it simply seems too early to call either way.

View on HN

>Personally, I'll measure Canada's performance throughout this pandemic by the final number of per-capita deaths.

That doesn't seem like a good measure. At the extreme, enforcing a stay-at-home order would make this number 0, but a lot of people would argue this wasn't "good performance."

Australia has 9 doses per 100 compared to Canada's ~30. Based on your metric, Australia would be a failure.

Australia was a clear success case.

Number of deaths per capita should absolutely be the primary metric we are using to judge pandemic success.

>Australia has 9 doses per 100 compared to Canada's ~30.

I'm not sure what you are saying, doses of vaccines?

Number of deaths per capita don't take QoL into account over the period you analyze and the response's effect in the future.

Doses of vaccine, yes.

I'm curious, what QoL increase makes up for 400k additional deaths over Canada's number?

>Doses of vaccine, yes.

I have not claimed doses of vaccine to be a good metric.

>I'm curious, what QoL increase makes up for 400k additional deaths over Canada's number?

Who has 400k more?

You also have to take into account that policy differences do not solely explain the difference in death toll. Saying 400k more death over canada = canada good response is a reductionist view when there are other factors in play.

Okay, so what does explain the difference in death toll? I certainly don't think it is only policy diffferences.

> Who has 400k more?

If we had Canada's per capita rate, 400k fewer people would have died.

I am not familiar with Australia's response enough to give a conjecture on how good its policy is. Although I am familiar with Canada's response and (independently of death toll) think it was very suboptimal.

>I certainly don't think it is only policy diffferences.

And I agree with you, which is why I think using death toll as a single metric is a bad idea.

EDIT:

>If we had Canada's per capita rate, 400k fewer people would have died.

Even with the same policy as Canada, it is unlikely that the death toll would just transpose (it's a bad assumption, because policy doesn't define the death toll - it affects it)

With the vast majority of people who died in first world counties already being close to deaths door I don't think that's a good stat maybe something more like total estimated years of life lost.

Estimates for average life lost per covid death is around ~15 years. Sure, it killed plenty of old people, but it also killed plenty of middle aged/older middle aged people that had plenty of time left.

But I'll cede to you that YLL is also a good metric. When comparing two developed nations like Canada and US, most of the difference there will probably be explained by per capita deaths though.

>Estimates for average life lost per covid death is around ~15 years

Source?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3

I also saw a US specific article but can't find it off the top of my head.

As someone getting up there in age, it's kind of shocking how cavalier a few people seem to be about old people dying from COVID. "Close to death's door?" Years of Life Lost as a measurement? Really? It's like we're living in Logan's Run. My parents are elderly but they might just live for 25 more years--who knows? If they or someone else's grandparents were to die of COVID it would be no less tragic than if a 30 year old died of it.

I don't think we should be cavalier about the deaths of elderly and I generally agree with you about the rhetoric, but I can't say I really agree about the "no less tragic" comment.

I think the point is we have up to 80,000 flu deaths each year in the US. If Covid never happened and 80,000 people died of the flu nobody would bat an eye.

You talk like the big ongoing campaign to increase flu vaccination rates is some sort of accident.

Yes, because we knew how to deal with 80k. Suddenly we had to deal with 400k, which is a much larger number.

Not only are you 100% correct, but anyone thinking otherwise has the luxury of not being born poor or a minority based on how deaths are working out in first world countries.

It's certainly not the only measure. But I'd argue it's one of the best I have available. (Wishing we had metrics or data which we don't actually have doesn't count for much)

If you don't have a good metric to measure something with, relying on a bad one is arguably harmful as it gives a false sense of authority/trust.

The metric can still be used in extensive studies (that take nuance into account), but using it as a metric on its own is fallacious imo.

"At the extreme, enforcing a stay-at-home order would make this number 0" I don't think this is true.

>Personally, I'll measure Canada's performance throughout this pandemic by the final number of per-capita deaths.

How about in relation to the cost & externalities of this per-capita death figure? Financially, socially etc.

It's as though there's no adults in the room willing to speak to tradeoffs - the pernicious, long-term 2nd+ order consequences to be considered.

There are plenty of adults in the room willing to discuss tradeoffs. But you need numbers, and many of the people who don't like lockdowns prefer to make nebulous references to tradeoffs rather than discussing direct harm.

There's extensive evidence suggesting that many of the economic effects of the early pandemic were entirely independent of whether a choice was made to lockdown. Individual people aren't stupid and they're not going to keep going out and consuming while a deadly pandemic is raging.

>There's extensive evidence suggesting that many of the economic effects of the early pandemic were entirely independent of whether a choice was made to lockdown.

Remove choice from business owners & watch effected industries move elsewhere (texas, flordia).

>"Individual people aren't stupid and they're not going to keep going out and consuming while a deadly pandemic is raging."

Covid is 'deadly' to the overweight & immunocompromised.

affected* florida*

And yeah, I'll wait and see.

> Covid is 'deadly' to the overweight & immunocompromised.

Oh and what percent of our population is overweight again?

Not going to continue this conversation, enough of the usual covid canards that I can tell it wouldn't be worth it.

>affected* florida*

Did these typos affect your ability to parse my comment? :)

>Oh and what percent of our population is overweight again?

What's your point?

It's hard to talk about numbers like that, especially before they happened.

I know in Philadelphia, the murder rate is up about 40%. When I was looking at deaths data from the CDC, I found that deaths were up (from 2% on average increase) substantially. I dont remember the % increase, but I do remember 40% of the deaths were not directly from covid-19. if those numbers remained consistent, about 400k extra people died this year from other causes.

that 400k, its hard to tell where 'they would have died as a direct result of covis19' and 'lockdowns caused it' begins and ends, but that is not a nebulous number, and its not a small one.

And honestly, I dont care about how many would have died vs this and that, back off our freedoms. No one, for any reason, should be able to tell us we can't go outside, can't have family gatherings, can't run a business, etc. No one, for any reason even if the death rate was 100%. And HIV is 100% fatal, yet no one ever required showing someone their HIV status on an app before having sex.

So 50 additional murders in Philly, and uh 3500 covid deaths. Yeah, wonder where the cost-benefit analysis lies on that one.

Moreover, I'm not convinced the economy wouldn't have declined if we hadn't locked down - consumers changed their behavior even in places that didn't lock down. The economic decline is likely behind the increase in murders (along with school closures).

> if those numbers remained consistent, about 400k extra people died this year from other causes.

I'd love to see a source, as I haven't seen a single bit of evidence suggesting anything like that.

you are focusing on the 50 and not the 400,000. so now that you established yourself as a troll, I really dont care to convince you of anything.

> "I'm not convinced the economy wouldn't have declined if we hadn't locked down"

I didnt say the economic decline is solely linked to the lock downs, I dont think anyone ever has. however, no one with half a brain would ever argue the lockdowns were so much worse.

> "The economic decline is likely behind the increase in murders"

Not likely, the last severe economic decline (great recession) didnt see such large spikes in violence. school closures are part of the lock-down.

> "I'd love to see a source, as I haven't seen a single bit of evidence suggesting anything like that."

That data is freely available from cdc.gov

If a tornado comes through town and hits my house and doesn't hit yours, it doesn't mean your preparation is what saved you. Canada did nothing exceptional or faster in the 1st quarter of 2020 that would merit such a pat on the back.

I'm not sure how to respond to this other than to say it is patently untrue.

Not least, Canada had a government that admitted the virus existed and might be a problem. Following that, we had a coordinated national effort to combat it rather than a laissez-faire approach of letting every state do as they please (which often meant nothing at all in many states).

Canada's approach was hardly bullet-proof but claiming the countries' responses were identical could not be further from the truth.

This isn’t accurate at all. Each province was pretty much doing their own thing. BC didn’t even have a mask mandate until late last year.

The federal govt requires a quarantine when arriving by plane but thousands have said “no” (how is that possible) and been threatened with a fine that costs the same or slightly more than quarantine.

It’s been a major cock up.

>Following that, we had a coordinated national effort to combat it rather than a laissez-faire approach of letting every state do as they please (which often meant nothing at all in many states).

As refurb said, this is completely wrong. Canada is decentralized (yes, including its healthcare system) like the US. Ottawa didn't mandate the Atlantic Bubble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Bubble), for example; the Atlantic provinces set it up on their own. Ontario's recent lockdown—far stricter than occurred anywhere in the US, as I understand it—is just that, in Ontario.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com