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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

> Something to consider if you see anyone trying to downplay this.

It's invalid reasoning to use this study to "upplay" the pandemic.

It includes deaths due to depressions and delayed medical interventions, which you could argue isn't the result of COVID directly, but the result of lockdowns.

So when people use this study to claim "see, this many lives were lost, we were right to institute lockdowns" - that's circular reasoning, part of the reason so many lives were lost is because of lockdowns.

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Number saved due to lockdown

Number died due to lock down

Personally I lost access to badly needed medical care due to lockdown. Was quite scary.

Eventually got Covid. Sucked but nothing compared to what else I’ve been through. So initially was dismissive.

However definitely some lasting changes to my clotting levels.

I have to be perfect with blood thinners these days, we’re before covid I could fudge with them.

"Personally I lost access to badly needed medical care due to lockdown. Was quite scary."

My nearly 70 year old mother is in the same boat. She recently dealt with breast cancer treatments (a rare form) and thankfully was given the all clear before covid. She still needed to do follow up visits, more testing etc. but due to covid was told to stay away. Even though she was more comfortable with the risk of getting covid vs. ensuring her cancer is in remission they wouldn't see her.

If there had been no mitigation efforts the death toll would have skyrocketed as our healthcare systems collapsed.

I doubt that. People would naturally follow social distancing protocols (out of fear for their own lives). They would still hang out, but less and more in the open, and still go to the doctor, but less and only for the necessary issues. Literally the only place where "healthcare systems collapsed" (in the West) was Italy, which was caught completely unprepared.

There's a sensible middle ground between life-as-normal and enforced lockdowns.

We only know what happened with radical mitigation efforts. What happened was, ICUs repeatedly got near capacity and occasionally exceeded it in the US. What would happen without those radical mitigation efforts? ICUs would have had even more people with life-threatening illnesses and healthcare would have been rationed, resulting in more deaths.

And know that...how? Because "correlation = causation" is a legitimate scientific hypothesis now? Any legitimate scientific study has things like control groups to verify that the studied action wouldn't have happened otherwise, something I learned if high school biology in the first week. Your statement has none of that. And, any time you do look at places with NPIs vs non NPIs (Jutland in Denmark, or compare FL and TX vs Ny and CA, you see that your assumption is completely invalid.

If hospitals are full, not all people who need care can get care. It's not a complicated concept. ICUs in many parts of the country hit capacity during the pandemic, and that was with radical efforts to limit the spread of the virus.

Ventilators weren't as needed as originally thought. USA even killed a lot of patients by being over eager putting them into ventilators. If you put a healthy person in a ventilator there are a few percent chance of giving them pneumonia which typically kills them. When you blast air into their lungs it is really easy to accidentally blast bacteria all over them as well.

The articles about "we now know better how to treat patients" was mostly this, don't put them on ventilators unless it gets super critical, most patients got better without one. Also I haven't seen data on this but I strongly suspect the main reason USA lost so many young people to covid compared to other countries is that USA is way more eager to put people on treatment like ventilators, basically blasting bacteria into the lungs of young otherwise mostly healthy people killing them. Those young lives would have been saved if they weren't diagnosed in the first place.

> When you blast air into their lungs it is really easy to accidentally blast bacteria all over them as well

You might consider yourself lucky if they blast air into your lungs. Italian healthcare was using pure oxygen, which, used at prolonged periods of time basically burns your lungs. Some government officials recently admitted that this caused a lot of "COVID" deaths.

There are tons of places where you can directly observe the effects of lockdown measures.

You say that, and they said it (only 90s kids will remember "fifteen days to slow the spread") but as of right now, it's a truism. Maybe the lockdown worked to ease the stress on the medical system. Maybe only the first 15 days of lockdown did that, or 30. I highly doubt that the entire year of lockdowns saved the medical system, and I would be willing to bet the effectiveness of the lockdowns in preventing a collapse of the medical system ended within the first 3 months. So suppose that's true, 3/4ths of the lockdown and all the mental health and depression related deaths associated with it were unnecessary. I don't know when the lockdowns stopped being effective in protecting the medical system, but I know it wasn't this morning. Some amount of those deaths are attributed to lockdowns that were unnecessary.

Also, you can't quantify the hypothetical death toll in that scenario in any real numbers, to say "would have skyrocketed" is unfounded. I could understand "would've been higher" that sounds reasonable.

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