https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-ho...
Looking back on that, it's interesting to think about how that should have been a major warning sign of things to come for the rest of the world.
Her country was on the safe (no isolation) list when her plane landed in China, and she then boarded a long distance, overnight train.
Her country then announced their first positive case.
When she left the train, two men with hazmat suits and a van were on the platform to meet her. They took her to an isolation hotel room with an alarmed door. (Not an actual lock, as I understand, so she could leave if there were a fire. But an alarmed door.)
We built multiple temporary hospitals in the UK too. And albeit not so widely reported, temporary morgues.
To be honest I assumed a whole bunch of countries were doing this...
However, it’s really difficult to be proactive here as avoiding an issues means people assume it isn’t a problem. Shutdowns likely saved millions of lives in America but as people are only aware of the downsides they see not the horrors that where avoided.
I'm not sure the UK emergency Nightingale hospitals were actually _used_, since (obviously) you can repurpose a building but you can't just find a few thousand healthcare staff at short notice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56327214
I’m not one to show much support for the current government but the negative (media) reaction to these hospitals not actually being needed was pretty short sighted.
We should be thankful that the hospitals were there and even more thankful that they weren’t needed.
There were more obvious things for which to hold the government to account.
Samples of sick people were recovered for researching that strain of influenza by locating large graves which had been created where it remained cold enough to preserve the bodies. Until I'd heard that and lived through last year, the gravity of it all totally eluded me. It takes a lot before people start burying the dead in trenches; it's perhaps second to the worst case in which we can't even manage that. A scenario common to war but nothing else I can think of.
I've been so isolated from these kinds of circumstances for all of the pandemic, but I try to remind myself that it's exactly why lock downs and masks and all the hassle are actually completely reasonable. The alternative is incredibly dark, evidently.
Both went virtually unused.
[In NYC]
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/nyregion/ny-coronavirus-u...
> On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the Navy is also refusing to treat a host of other conditions. Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.
> Ambulances cannot take patients directly to the Comfort; they must first deliver patients to a city hospital for a lengthy evaluation — including a test for the virus — and then pick them up again for transport to the ship.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nycs-largest-emergency-h...
> But much to the frustration of healthcare workers, since that announcement, Javits has taken in nowhere near its capacity. As of April 7, the convention center had admitted only 66 patients. This was due in large part to the strict admission requirements. At first, a patient could only be transferred to Javits if they were convalescing, or in the recovery period. The fear was that Javits didn't have the ICU beds, operating rooms, or equipment necessary to handle patients who might relapse or need surgery because of an underlying condition.
Three weeks later we had 4 cases from Italian tourists - it all went pear shaped from there - 2.91M infected and 87,819 deaths.
I am still not completely convinced that the choice of blanket lockdowns instead of focused protection of risky groups didn't make things worse by prolonging the pandemic, a.k.a. "flattening the curve".
Old people are not very mobile by nature, and had we kept the economy working, but with government assistance, we would probably be able to improve the social distancing of the elder and the obese for as much as we needed. The rest of the population could live their life as usual, with minimal consequence, and the virus would peter out when it find it difficult to find new host without immunity.
Instead we lockdown indiscriminately, and opened up indiscriminately and probably sooner then the ideal, because you simply can't keep thing lockdown for the whole society for long: Your resources are going to exhaust some day.
No, the lockdowns were the cause not the pandemic. We didn't have to do lockdowns--they weren't on anybody's pandemic plans until March of 2020. Lockdowns and our reaction to Covid was entirely upon humans.
> It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with people dropping like flies in the hospitals. China especially was hit so incredibly badly in that first wave
Were they really though? Or was the hysteria in March off the charts?
The lockdowns were the actual proximate cause for most business disruptions.
> It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with people dropping like flies in the hospitals.
People who are employed are usually younger than 65 and therefore were never at significant demographic health risk from coronavirus.
You could infer that if we hadn't acted the way we did, then what I described would have actually happened and things would be a lot worse. You could also infer that long-term and large-scale control of an airbourne respiratory virus through social means is ineffectual, and things would have been about the same anyway (from a death and disease standpoint).
I guess the potential nuance is, blaming it on "lock downs" gets vaguely political whereas blaming it on the root cause, the pandemic, puts emphasis on the wider point that any actual pandemic of this magnitude is of course going to disrupt the worlds supply chain one way or another.
Thank you for phrasing so perfectly the exact point I was making. It feels disingenuous when people solely blame the reactions to a worldwide pandemic while ignoring that the worldwide pandemic was still gonna be happening regardless.
As I also pointed out, we will also never know how much good we actually did. You can tell me it's "obvious" that it did, but there's no evidence to back that up.
And they should've just made vaccines mandatory, none of this bullshit soft encouragement while people can't cross borders.
People weren't "dropping like flies", either, especially not those of working age. Less than 0.1% dead worldwide, the vast majority of which were over 65.
Reminds me of that Reddit thread on psychosomatic death where people were sad their relatives suddenly died. Their 80-90 year old relatives. I mean, fuck me, that's a good life lived right there. Another year or two doesn't make much of a difference. But that's unrelated to Covid, it's just the same type of weird fearful thinking.
Many of those same politicians later benefitted to tune of millions of dollars from advance knowledge of federal bank intervention in markets. If there was no lockdown, this opportunity would not have occurred. There was a clear conflict of interest.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fed-vice-chair-traded-stocks-1527...
Its the same for individuals who bought into MRNA startups eg. BioNTech in 2019 - there's a clear financial motivation to promote disruptive lockdown, in order to position vaccines as the cure.
https://trialsitenews.com/gates-earns-10x-on-biontech-in-jus...
Its likely that lockdowns worsen COVID, because of the reduction in health from lower Vitamin D (staying inside), poorer diets, increased stress, and reduction of exposure of younger people (school cancellations, nightclub closures etc.) who usually form the bulk of the herd immunity population for seasonal respiratory viruses.
Sweden had less formal lockdowns, but recommendations that was largely followed . Also limited opening hours for restaurants and closed events with live audience. Most workers stayed at home, traveling went down A LOT and people could not visit care homes etc. If you compare the effect on society it was largely the same as the rest of Scandinavia that did have slightly more formal lockdowns.
Lots of companies (restaurants, cultural events like concerts, theatre etc.) had real economical issues and a lot of people became unemployed. Could be worse, but still it is misleading to say life continued as normal. A quick google show that unemployment in Sweden doubled during the pandemic and that is largely attributed to the measures that took place as a response to the pandemic.
Exactly. Last year I watched (over the internet) Sanna Nielsen sing Stockholm in my heart to an empty field where there should have been an audience of thousands. Useful to have a bit of an awareness of foreign media to see what's actually happening, not what's reported by delusionists on the internet.
It was never true that there were no restrictions in Sweden, just less restrictions.
First, herd immunity does not benefit from more bodies per se. You are portraying it as some sort of wall, where taking members out of the wall reduces the effectiveness. It is not like that at all. The proportion of previously exposed individuals required for herd immunity effects goes down as the frequency of potential spreading interactions goes down.
Second, there is no correlation between lockdown and lower vitamin D.
Third, we have clear data showing a profound reduction in the spread of other respiratory viruses (RSV, rhino, influenza). So, we have had many fewer deaths during lockdown that in previous years. A win, and yet you characterize it as a loss. Odd.
There were many months where PCR tests were not available to hospitals and the CARES act gave hospitals extra money for covid cases, so hospitals obviously set the policy of “anyone with some covid symptoms is to be considered a covid case”.
> The CDC guidance says that officials should report deaths in which the patient tested positive for COVID-19 — or, if a test isn’t available, “if the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty.” It further indicates that if a “definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed.'”
What else were they supposed to do in that scenario?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/01/11/amid-c...
> The drop occurred despite a sixfold increase in testing at public health labs, most of which checked for influenza A and B along with the coronavirus.
> Clinical lab testing was slightly lower during the last quarter of 2020 as physicians ordered fewer flu tests because less of the illness was circulating.
Please stop spreading conspiracy theories as fact. It is literally killing people.
Your own statement "conspiracy theories are killing people" is also a bit of a non fact.
While the result of believing in conspiracy theories have no doubt lead to someones death, somewhere; presenting it as a serious problem whose root effect is "Death" is incredibly silly.
It also used to attract far fewer idiots. Unfortunately, those days are long past. Now that HN actually has some (small) measureable influence in the industry we get brigading sock puppets, politically motivated nuts, and the dumpster-fire that is "weekend HN". Just consider the fact that a discussion that should be around the current nature of the supply chain and sourcing components is primarily composed of people arguing over lockdown.
Edit: by the time I clicked submit, multiple people had also responded to this, which makes me feel better about HN today.
Sweden had the best requisites to come out of the pandemic largely unscathed, like its neighbour Norway. Instead they decided to just let people get sick and die.
edit: The nonsense about Vitamin D at the end is almost hilarious. We're talking about Sweden, right? The country on the Arctic Circle?
Moreover Stats Canada found that in 2020 lockdowns led to more excess deaths in under 65s than covid, largely due to increased substance abuse: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210712/dq210.... "Based on the newly updated provisional dataset released today from the Canadian Vital Statistics Death Database, from the end of March 2020 to the beginning of April 2021, an estimated 62,203 deaths were reported among Canadians aged 0 to 64. This represents 5,535 more deaths than expected were there no pandemic, after accounting for changes in the population such as aging. Over the same period, 1,380 COVID-19 deaths have been attributed to the same age group (those younger than 65), suggesting that the excess mortality is, in large part, related to other factors such as increases in the number deaths attributed to causes associated with substance use and misuse, including unintentional (accidental) poisonings and diseases and conditions related to alcohol consumption."
Similarly, England saw 4635 non-covid excess deaths since July 2nd (compared to 4981 covid deaths): https://www.yahoo.com/news/analysis-thousands-more-usual-dyi....
Your cited example is from before the WHO even declared a pandemic, and 1 day after the first case of community spread was reported in the US.
> Life continued as normal in Sweden, Russia, Belarus... If there is surge of deaths in nursing homes (typically 50% of COVID deaths), it has no impact on the rest of the economy.
Sweden GDP: -8.6% Q2 2020. Russia: -9.6 Q2 2020. Those are massive shifts to say "no impact".
Lastly: lockdowns have mostly exempted industrial production like Intel and only required operational changes.