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Comment by valeness | Hacker News Reader

This is almost impossible to quantify because we can't determine how the pandemic would have played out without lockdowns. It could have gone from 600,000 dead in the United States, to 2 million. (Again, we don't know, it could very well have been less than that, or more. :shrug:)

I would say losing parents or grandparents (any primary caretakers really) to COVID would be far more impactful on a child's development than missing a year of school.

I will gladly concede that lockdowns did cause harm, but "more harm than good" is something I'm still not seeing as true.

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If it had been 2 million dead in the same period, it would still have been a fairly tame global pandemic, by the standards of deadly global pandemics.

It was pretty clear after the first few weeks that Covid was not the horrible killer that leaves people literally dropping dead in the streets, yet the response continued as if it were. Given the incredible disruption our response to it has caused, that I predict will continue for years and decades, the fact that we can't even say (and probably never will be able to) whether it was worth it, is damning enough.

Most kids lose a grandparent at a young age (I did). I really disagree that it was worse than losing a year of school, and being shut in the house for a considerable period of that. If anything, we have forgotten the lessons that death teaches us, and have lost touch with the cycle of life and death. The incredible aversion to a relatively harmless (for most) disease shows this is the case.

Moreso, I sincerely believe the fear exacerbated by the ridiculous measures and the social isolation especially of the vulnerable and sick (no visits etc.) caused a substantial proportion of the deaths. We are not isolated organisms.

Fear causes stress. Chronic fear causes chronic stress. Chronic stress causes chronic cortisol. Chronic cortisol causes immunosupression.

At least where I am (UK, and in particular, Wales), it seems our healthcare system is in the process of failing. It was already doing badly, and our response to Covid has tipped it over the edge. That alone will cause a significant amount of suffering and death.

Indeed. And to flesh out in more detail, we caused:

- lack of sleep/exercise (which destroys the body's immunoregulatory capacities, leading to either a sort of acute immunosenescence like you said wrt fear, or alternatively leading to an overreactive immune system that kills via cytokine storm)

- decline in social interaction

- more time spent inside (which apart from the other correlates, very obviously leads to less sunlight). sunlight => vitamin d + nitric oxide; vitamin d is critical for respiratory pathology specifically, as well as just general health, and nitric oxide is very important as an immunoregulatory compound and as a preventer of strokes

- the general environment of fear/stress/anxiety (again, going to screw up the immunoregulatory balance of the body)

I think this is being too light on the impact of covid. In places like NYC, where they had refrigerated trucks full of bodies because their morgues were full, or India where the oxygen shortage killed many many people from Delta infection...

I would argue the severe aversion in reaction to the news coming out of NYC wasn't unreasonable, even if it was an overreaction.

> where they had refrigerated trucks full of bodies because their morgues were full

Is that really true though? Because what the headlines of these kinds of stories say vs. what the article itself says usually never match.

It’s kind of true. These refrigerated trucks were on standby anyway because they are needed every time there’s a bad flu season.

And that is what I found for almost all articles of that type. If you read into the article it was never “this is happening” but “we are getting prepared”.

While the overall death rate isn't up that much, I've heard that it's clustering a lot more, which means various systems are overwhelmed: We can process X bodies per day but we have a couple weeks where we're getting 1.5X bodies, and so for a while we have a few bodies in refrigerated trucks or other overflow systems.

So... it's sort of true, but it's more of a congestion issue (like rush hour traffic), not a sign of systemic collapse.

Heard from where? Got any numbers for this "clustering"?

I mean it kinda makes sense. Since the beginning we’ve lumped entire continents as a group to compare to another group. When instead this stuff is incredibly hyper localized. I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard “the experts” say this.

I live in NYC and have a friend in the funeral business. This was absolutely true in the beginning of the pandemic, although perhaps not at every hospital in the city as some were hit harder with patients than others. There was also a backlog in the ability to process bodies (e.g. Getting death certificates, funerals, burial sites or cremations).

Hospitals and related services are optimized for efficiency, not flexibility. They don't like having empty beds that aren't being used, or idle workforces. So when something out of the ordinary happens they can't deal with it while maintaining their normal level of service. As a society we don't seem to want to pay for idle capacity. Human nature, I guess. We could have been building more hospitals over the last year, training more nurses, etc. But that doesn't appear to have happened.

I too saw the widely-circulated picture of the "open graves" in NYC. Somehow they forgot to mention it was just a regular picture of a pauper's graveyard. Funny what fear can be provoked by context-free visual imagery.

> the fact that we can't even say (and probably never will be able to) whether it was worth it, is damning enough.

Exactly. I assert that for any of these non pharmaceutical interventions to have been worthwhile their effect on “the charts” should be plain and dramatic. You should be able to pull anybody off the street and show them a lockdown state vs a non-lockdown state and have them see plain as day the profound difference.

If you need grad student level statistics to tease apart differences it means even if these things worked, their impact was so minor that the extreme social costs made them not worthwhile at all.

> You should be able to pull anybody off the street and show them a lockdown state vs a non-lockdown state

Keep in mind that the constitution protects free travel between states, so such an analysis only shows what results a mixed response gives.

If you compare Australia to the US, you can see that lockdowns very clearly do work: 1K vs 600K deaths. Even accounting for relative size, that suggests lockdowns produced a 50x effect.

(of course, if the question is "should California be draconian" then this is still very useful information! I'm just saying the answer changes depending on whether California is doing this while still being forced to have open borders with states that aren't locking down, or if the entire country coordinate a federal lockdown)

You cannot simply compare Australia's deaths to US deaths, "account for relative size" and then proclaim that lockdowns are responsible for a 99.99% decrease in deaths. There are countless other factors that have to be considered.

Please read the comment before replying. I said it suggests a difference, which is very different from proclaiming that there's definitely one. And I said 98%, not 99.99%.

The 50x difference is a starting point, not a declaration that there's no other factors.

Comparing Australia to anywhere else is a pretty weak argument. I mean for all you know their case count is way, way underreported. After all who wants to be “that guy” that shuts down an entire city? Who would ever get tested or be the doctor that recommends it?

And besides, look what they’ve done to their citizens basic human rights. Even if it works, is it worth it?

> I mean for all you know their case count is way, way underreported.

I work professionally with numerous cities in Australia, along with having friends and family there, so I don't have any particular reason to believe that under-reporting would produce a meaningful effect (keeping in mind that even if they were under-reporting by 10x, you'd still have a 5x result towards "yes, lockdowns work.")

I also follow a few scientists that track things like "rise in natural cause deaths" to look for under-reporting, and none of them has flagged Australia as a major concern.

> Even if it works, is it worth it?

That's a question we can only really ask after we've answered "does it work", but I agree it's an important one.

The thing is, "is it worth it" really depends on what the effect size is. If we can get that entire 50x reduction in deaths, that's amazing and I'd be hard-pressed to argue that the price they paid was too high for that.

But if we can get that 50x without such draconian restrictions, that's even better. And it's possible that over here we can't get anywhere close to that 50x because we can't do things like "completely close our borders" the way Australia can.

> If it had been 2 million dead in the same period, it would still have been a fairly tame global pandemic

Untrue, at least for all of US history [1]. I honestly think this downplaying of the deadliness of COVID belies an agenda. If it was 3x more deadly...

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/20/covid-19-set-to-overtake...

So according to that article, Covid so far has been 1/3rd as deadly as the Spanish Flu, yet any comparison drawn to the flu would elicit the response of "ITS NOTHING LIKE THE FLU, IDIOT!" ??

Interesting. I'm not downplaying the deadliness of Covid. The numbers speak for themselves.

Spanish Flu had a mortality rate of between 2% and 10%, and mostly killed healthy young adults. Estimates for Covid put its IFR somewhere aruond 0.4%, and it killed almost entirely elderly people.

The burden of proof is on those who promote the lockdowns as an effective strategy to show how they help. This is because without that proof, so many other issues arise from legal, ethical, and practical perspectives that make supporting it not just non-scientific, but also highly irrational.

Legally, what right do our nations have to shutter businesses as they did? Where in the legal frameworks do they legitimately yield such enormous & violent authority over us? Did they do enough to protect & compenate us all against these violations of our rights?

Ethically, is this even a moral way to conduct statecraft during a pandemic? Is scapegoating appropriate at a time like this, and were we right to erode so much of our monetary base to provide the benefits that states did to their citizenry, necessitated by the lockdowns in the first place?

And practically, how many people have been harmed or killed by the conditions of lockdowns? How many people committed suicide who otherwise wouldn't? How much industrial output was sacrificed and how did this impact the deaths of despair that rose considerably over the last 1.5 years? How many people didn't get their cancer detected early enough to survive it? How many people didn't get their emergency medical care due to the chaos caused by lockdowns and perished as a result? Did these figures remain low enough to make the actual policies of lockdown worth it?

Again, people just downvote this stuff. What gives? It is a good faith argument being made here and the poster has valid points.

Is it really that impossible that well meaning, intelligent people can completely disagree with how society handled covid?

I just want to say it out loud. spookthesunset, __blockcipher__, AndrewUnmuted and everyone who shares the same sentiment and did speak up here - thank you all so much! You, folks, are the last straw I'm clinging onto, as the world goes down in a fiery mess. I would upvote all your posts, if I could. Keep speaking, you are saving lives! The amount of lies and outright hostility from everyone in any kind of power since the beginning of "pandemic" is absolutely unbearable now.

My family is under much-lauded, short-and-sharp, snap lockdown of over 230 days in Victoria, Australia. With 9pm curfew and 5km chain leash. Homeschooling three kids, oldest in y12 and youngest in kindy. We are being asked by the premier not to worry, the beautifully effective tools of lockdowns and curfews will be with us even after 80% of fully-vaxed. Masks will be mandatory for years to come. Contact tracing too. Riot police is as enthusiastic about enforcing 100% vaxx, as they were about zero-covid. By beautiful logic, because zero-covid is not attainable anymore, the "health advice" changed overnight and all the restrictions must ... stay the same! Until 100% vaxx, perhaps. Take no prisoners! And invitation-only "journalists" only ask "why not locking down earlier and harder"? I had a good friend confronting me with "you must be wanting to kill ten percent of 60+" and "feeling conspiratorial" when I said I do not support most of the actions taken.

I, personally, did step out of house only a handful of times during the last two years. Wearing facemask gives me acute psychosis. Seeing people wearing them makes me cry. I'm scared that I will start throwing punches if I see police or anyone enforcing this madness. There was no moment in the last two years when I did not feel anger, despair or complete apathy. I defy the curfew and walk my dog at midnight, in the middle of nowhere. If stopped, I plan on claiming "providing care", as it is one of the "allowed" reasons to break the curfew. If asked to whom, the answer will be "myself". I flip the police chopper when I see it loitering. Daily.

I gained 20 kilos, got myself a proper diabetes (I never even had elevated blood sugar before this), losing my eyesight, having chest pains and all that. My wife has been cut from minuscule support for a life-long medical condition, under premise that she is not successful enough in mitigating the symptoms of that condition. Apparently, the support is a reward now. We lost all trust in governments, police, doctors and all sorts of public service orgs. I absolutely not going to any medical place for checkup or vax until mandates are lifted. Which may be never or too late, so realistically I'm looking to meet my end long before my youngest reaches 18. By diabetes, covid, or by my own hand. There is no light. There is no escape. There is no place on Earth where we, realistically, could move. Heck, we cannot look at houses to buy in Vic, yet alone in another state. Cannot visit parents overseas, cannot invite them here. Cannot even send a parcel! There is no advice I could give to my sons. There is only regret that we chose Victoria, that we chose Australia, that we chose to have kids, that we were born at all. We've gone from normal, relatively positive and healthy people to complete wrecks in less than a year. So, however "worthwile" it was for the world, I guess my family will be dismissed as collateral damage.

I'm done for. My capacity to fight is gone. To those utilitarians, who are lockdown enthusiasts and covid evangelists - you may rejoice in knowing the world will be better without people like me. After all, it will raise the vaxxed percentage by decreasing the denominator. This is what we hear from all sides. The feeling that you killed a bunch of people to improve overall mortality statistics must be delightful. I wish you all to live forever with this feeling, cannot think of anything more horrible.

End of story.

And the crazy part is we are right. Our positions are well grounded in data and plain common sense. In ordinary times a common person would completely agree with us. None of our stuff would be subject to so much, well, incredibly awful responses.

Why so many people, even the smartest most grounded people I know, flipped a bit and ignored both common sense and easily accessible data is really beyond me. I truly don’t understand how so many people can ignore what their own eyes and brains tell them.

This whole thing is really something else. It’s gonna piss people off to say it but… this is really the first true mass hysteria of the internet age and while it sucks to be a skeptic it is truly both an amazing and frightening aspect of human behavior to witness.

"Mass hysteria" is exactly what this is, and probably one of the greatest ones in history. I recently read "The Delusions of Crowds", written by E. Bernstein and published in 2021. Bernstein frequently notes that the author of the very well known "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", published in 1841 by Mackay and during the height of the British Railway Bubble, almost completely ignores that now well-known popular delusion.

Ironically, Bernstein had nothing to say about our response to Covid, and only occasionally parroted the accepted platitudes about the pandemic.

As someone who is pretty well read in Le Bon and crowd psychology I still think there are several key differences between traditional mass hysteria and the COVID response in certain countries.

Like?

The formation of large blocs of people who will not tolerate any dissent to the current state of Covid thought, and the scapegoating of those who question or do not fall in line, and a corresponding decline in the social, moral, and economic health of a country, certainly bear striking similarities.

I really feel for you. What kind of pandemic has turned huge numbers of formerly healthy people into overweight, demoralized, and socially isolated individuals? A pandemic of the mind, perhaps.

> This is almost impossible to quantify because we can't determine how the pandemic would have played out without lockdowns.

There is a wide spread of pandemic responses from different countries and regions, so yes, we can make pretty good guesses as to what the effect would have been.

All the various lockdown-supporting studies compare lockdowns to a do-nothing base scenario, where people are essentially assumed to be rolling around naked in a big heap, licking everything and everyone. This is completely false, because people everywhere acted on their own to protect themselves from spread.

And when you compare the effects of the decreased mobility due to ordered lockdowns vs. what people voluntarily achieve anyway, the effect is zero. No benefit, all harm.

Isn't that decreased mobility largely impossible without lockdowns though? I can't imagine more than 20% of workers would realistically have been able to stay home if their employers didn't have to lock down.

Absolutely not, because you could measure a substantial decrease in mobility before any region instituted a lockdown.

You can support working-from-home and furloughing without forcing it. And that's enough.

Last autumn in Sweden, cases started rising, still no lockdown, and people voluntarily decreased their mobility. Everyone I talked to decreased their social activity, skipped out on things, stayed home more. Without being told to. Without being ordered around. It's enough.

>Absolutely not, because you could measure a substantial decrease in mobility before any region instituted a lockdown.

Source?

https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/

That isn't historical data

This is https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/changes-visitors-covid?ti...

Shows the trend becomes clear on March 12th, which is 7 days before the first lockdowns in New York. Are you suggesting that the one week delay when everyone bought out all the toilet paper because they thought the world was ending is evidence that the lockdowns weren't needed to affect mobility?

Only in those useless models. I recall one interview on Unherd with one of the British modelers, if more people understood what kind of "science" this was hinged on there would be outrage.

I do understand, and I am outraged. The stastical modellers have given science, and particularly the public perception of science, a terrible blow, as well as the actual outcomes of blindly swallowing their predictions. I'm planning to put together a list of all of the predictions made since March 2020, and what actually happened.

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