A. Lockdowns have costs. Deficits that will take decades to pay off. Lives lost to alcohol and depression. Economic hardship. A lost education year. Etc.
B. The pandemic has vastly different risk profiles for different age groups. At an extreme, under 20s have 1/1000 fatality risk compared to over 70s. It is fundamentally faulty to design a blanket one size fits all policy under such circumstances.
I went to a local mall a few days ago, and the amount of stores that went out of business because of the lockdowns is rediculous. I wouldn't be suprised if the whole mall has to close down soon, there's no way it's profitable to keep it running with 2-3 snack vendors and a couple of barber shops / nail salons being the major businesses left.
That said, measures like GP described were/are in play in many cities. Seniors time was a fixture in the first few months of the pandemic, especially in smaller areas that did not experience a large caseload.
That's another point too: I think a lot of HN commenters are unaware of just how fragmented and regional the Canadian healthcare system is. No two provinces implemented the same restrictions or policies at the same time, and only a couple put in strict stay-at-home style lockdowns. Note how the article mentions large increases in both Ontario (lax policies, then sudden strict lockdowns) with Alberta (very few restrictions). Even in Ontario, walking outside the biggest few cities would result in an immediate drop of most of the strict measures present in, say, the GTA. I know it's hard to capture this nuance discussing with strangers on some random online forum, but it's essential if we are to properly discuss cause and effect.
Neither of your points A or B are at all discussed in this data, nor are they responsive to my comment. I'd classify them as largely off topic and I'm not going to respond past pointing that out. The data at hand does not discuss financial costs of either lockdowns or letting people get sick. Does not compare risks between different age groups (apart from giving number of deaths under 65). Does not discuss policy ideas. Etc.
I'd say stopping at number of deaths is a better metric.
You can see the difference clear enough to make inferences.
There were a lot of people in the scientific community, Perhaps the majority, suggested Sweden’s method was superior to what many other countries were doing.
The fact is, people are effectively believing what they want. There wouldn’t be a need for censorship if the truth was clear.
Sweden is apparently much more dense in the cities, has larger cities, bigger migrant population etc so apparently making comparisons across Scandinavia isn’t as helpful as you would expect.
I think one day you might be able to get a good definitiveish answer. For instance, you can assume that everyone gets covid in the "no measures" case, and extrapolate death rates using serosurveillance to get the portion of the population infected in reality. Once Covid is "over" you can see the number of people who died in reality.
There will always be all sorts of errors in such an estimate. From bad data, to things like death rate depending on your assumptions about variants, vaccines, and the make up of the population. But once we get the "how we did in the end numbers" it's plausible that we can make some sort of comparison to "how we could have done".
Another way to do it would he to compare only the under 65 per capita infection rate in a similar country (could also be Netherlands) that had no lockdown and use the mortality rate for that demographic in the first country (which would be Canada in this case) and determine roughly how many lives were saved.
The delta variant in India is much more infectious, but also much less deadly to the population there. Exactly the change you expect a virus to make overtime, since killing the host tends to end the viruses ability to spread. Its turning into cold, or mild flue.
This virus was only ever a real threat to the elderly, who still control most of the wealth, and vote in large numbers. What you're seeing is politics of self preservation of the eldest generation on the way out, at the expense the younger generations. Much like hoarding resources, they continue to quench to life. At some point younger people will rebel if this continues.
The real threat is return to authoritarianism. It has killed tens of millions in the last century.
We can’t compare the costs to the deaths we’ve had from terrorism since (zero) we need to compare it to all the terrorism deaths that were prevented.
See why that’s a bad argument?