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Comment by __blockcipher__ | Hacker News Reader

Every year, ~647,000 Americans die from heart disease alone. Even if the COVID death numbers aren't over-inflated, I guarantee you that if I were to time-travel to 2019 and ask you if you think that it would be worth precipitating a global supply chain disruption, missed schooling and medical appointments for children around the globe, both first and third world, and the greatest erosion in civil liberties in Western society since at least WW2 (since we've already eclipsed 9/11 in loss of liberty, shockingly)...all over 4 million and change deaths globally, you would think that was crazy

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600k deaths after huge mitigations. Without any mitigation’s is it 3 million in the US dead?

Exactly. People who complain about the NSA spying on Americans don’t appreciate how many terrorist incidents were stopped. It would be way worse otherwise.

Compare states - Florida with almost no mitigation, vs New York, New Jersey, or California with extreme mitigation.

Go ahead and check the pre-vaccine data - there is no indication that the extreme mitigations did anything.

Have you actually looked at the data? Take a look at this study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261286v...

And you do realize that in the past month Florida has 3x as many deaths as California, while being a much smaller state.

This is an unfalsifiable claim. Sweden used but a fraction of the mitigations Israel did, yet the former is better off now.

How can you prove the mitigations worked? The only controls out there (Sweden, some US states, etc.) aren’t very robust (nor in favor of mitigation efforts).

There are 50 states in the US, all of which had different responses and mitigations in place last year. There is no compelling evidence that they made much difference, let alone a 5x one.

All you have to do is look at a deaths/infections curve before and after mitigations.

it's been looked at several times, and a vast majority of the convincing evidence seems to fall in favor of the camp that overall mitigations do nearly nothing compared to control samples of places with no/fewer restrictions

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-wh...

That article is more than a year old. A far newer, more complete assessment shows that mitigations do you have an impact in reducing deaths and infections:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261286v...

Yes, but you need a control to compare it against. How do you get one?

Just look at the trend line? You might also want to look at the excess statistically significant deaths numbers.

https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac8...

You need controls to account for confounding factors. Looking at a trend line does not account for confounding factors.

Ok, what would be a confounding factor?

There's no convincing evidence the mitigations made a real difference, especially in the long-run. I'd expect to see bodies in the streets in Sweden given that they largely avoided the ritualistic behavior that the rest of the western world engaged in.

Unfortunately, people have it so drilled into their heads that the lockdowns and masks worked, that I don't know what I could possibly say to convince someone otherwise.

I can’t tell if this is a serious comment. Surely you know heart disease isn’t contagious.

The contagiousness is irrelevant (I’ve heard the “it’s not exponential” talking point a million times in the last year, and boy am I tired of it), but you should know that all social behaviors are contagious, and social behaviors correlate with health outcomes like cardiac disease. If you smoke your friends are likely to start too. If you sit on a couch all day your friends are more likely to, etc.

My point was just about putting a contextless “600k omg” in perspective

If anything Covid deaths are significantly undercounted. How much is hard to tell but it's probably over a million and was likely 900k during March based on excess death estimates

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...

Dramatically false. In fact over the past few months many places have reduced their Covid death counts by ~25%, as they took off the ‘died from X but had COVID’ people. Alameda county, Santa Clara county and others…

I, for one, wouldn't think that was crazy, no. Not when the preventability of those deaths is proportional to how well people stick to pandemic mitigation protocol. Very, very few people are willing to just shrug and say "600,000 preventable deaths is acceptable" in this context.

The pandemic creates challenges that are uniquely tuned to impact the American "rugged individualism" approach to problem solving that works well in most circumstances. Pandemic mitigation is a serious collective action problem (at the limit, it wouldn't take more than total isolation for four weeks to completely burn the virus out... And that's never going to happen in the United States, nor should anyone expect it to).

> "rugged individualism" approach to problem solving that works well in most circumstances.

I would love a source for this, because "rugged individualism" is the reason why US has the worst healthcare and homelessness of developed nations.

> and homelessness of developed nations

That's false by a large margin. The US rate of homelessness has been massively reduced over the past 20-30 years and is comparable to Austria.

The US homelessness rate is far below Sweden, France, Britain, Australia, Canada. It's also below the Netherlands.

The housing first program by the US worked exceptionally well.

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

People travel from all around the world to obtain US healthcare. Say what you will about affordability (I would contend that the main problem is that we don't have a free market for healthcare, we have an unholy crony capitalist hybrid system), but the quality of the healthcare itself is unparalleled anywhere in the world.

If you're at serious risk of death you want to be in a US hospital. I hate the trend of conflating "access to affordable healthcare" with the actual healthcare itself.

Agreed. Those are two more circumstances that it doesn't work well for.

It does seem to do a decent job of encouraging and rewarding entrepreneurism.

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