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Comment by dadjoker | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how this happens when you shut down the economy because of fear of a virus with a 1% mortality rate, isn't it? Regardless of how many actual "covid deaths" (from COVID or with COVID), the destructive impacts of lockdowns far, far exceed any lives supposedly "saved" by shutting down the economy, whether you measure it in terms of economic losses, mental health, and especially educational destruction.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28304/w283...

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1% mortality isn't a low number, and left to run rampant, you end up with a much higher mortality rate because the hospitals fill up, and you end up with a higher mortality rate for everything else as well because there's no room in hospitals.

It was never about the mortality rate, it as always about protecting our hospital capacity from being overwhelmed, which would have caused significant loss of life and health above and beyond COVID's own death toll (which itself was very significant - even with the insane restrictions it was the 3rd leading cause of death in 2020). It's hard to imagine how anyone at this juncture could not know all of this.

I strongly disagree. Lockdowns are not cost free, but they do save lives. Infection raging out of control also changes behavior and also has economic downsides.

I really would like to see a good numerical analysis of the costs and benefits of lockdown policies - I have yet to see one that's not seriously flawed.

The places which tried to keep things open ended up having to lock down harder and longer, and managed to suffer both worse fatality rates and worse economic impacts.

? In what way Florida and Texas barely did anything and have better or comparable numbers to the rest of the country.

Florida and Texas are #1 and #2 in number of cases over the past 7 days.

https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...

Number of cases is irrelevant to lockdowns, though - what's relevant is whether the hospitals are filling up and having to turn away patients, which we don't see happening.

This is more of an "in spite of" rather than "because of". The openness may be causing more infections, but the medical system can handle the load due to the rate of vaccinations present now that weren't present when Texas disastrously tried to open up last summer.

This is demonstrably false. I'm not saying any state did particularly well, but there is no clear line between "states that tried to stay open" and "suffering both worse fatality rates and worse economic impacts".

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-coronavirus-restrictions/73...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/unemploymen...

https://carsey.unh.edu/COVID-19-Economic-Impact-By-State#:~:...).

This is a global pandemic, and like 95% of humans, I’m not American.

Personally, I’m mainly thinking of Sweden and pre-post-Brexit-transition UK (because post-post-Brexit-transition is a confounding variable), vs New Zealand, the other (non-Swedish) Nordic counties, and China.

America — despite the economic and cultural hegemony and media coverage — is not actually that significant one way or the other in this particular event.

American states are still "places" and each had a different response and thus we can use it to measure effectiveness. Doesn't much matter if you are talking about Illinois or Sweden in this case.

Since you were thinking of Sweden as you specified in another comment... Sweden isn't locked down and has never been locked down during the pandemic. The covid patients in Sweden don't have a higher death rate than other countries [0], its health care system never failed so that would be surprising. Economic impact no idea, the stock market in Sweden is doing great but that doesn't tell us much.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

"These figures translate in more than 0.8 million additional deaths over the next 15 years."

Given the birth rate and the current population, that's roughly 0.2% of the population.

The problem was always what do you do when the hospitals reach capacity? I have still not seen any solution to this? Because if nothing is done to mitigate that eventually hospital staff themselves will quit/burn out and that's assuming they're not down with covid themselves.

> fear of a virus with a 1% mortality rate

You are aware that a 1% mortality rate is very very very high, right? It's like having a fear of a laser-canon-toting space alien ship hovering above your house. Pretty rational.

For an event that can only happen to you once (to a first approximation), the risk is almost negligible. Moreover that or any other IFR number does not reflect an actual risk to any actual person — risk to young healthy individuals is negligible, even though risk to vulnerable persons is decidedly not.

> risk to young healthy individuals is negligible,

No.

https://twitter.com/Samanticka/status/1393188103586816001?s=...

>> Think of a virus where 70% of kids are totally asymptomatic, less than 1% have severe symptoms, and less than 0.05% die. Phew that's no big deal for kids then! Don't worry about them!

>> Oops actually it's polio in the 1950s

This appears to be an appeal to emotion. The risk from polio was also almost negligible, if these numbers are accurate.

Also, if as suggested by the wording these numbers are looking at the risk to kids then it's not a fair comparison anyways, as the 1% number (already hyperbolic) quoted for COVID is across both vulnerable and not-vulnerable populations.

I for one do not find myself needing to display compassion for numbers as I reserve my compassion for actual human beings. To mangle Douglas Adams, being overly concerned about IFRs is to me extremely odd as on the whole, it isn't the ~~small green pieces of paper~~ statistics that are getting sick.

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