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Comment by skeeter2020 | Hacker News Reader

skeeter2020

Even then it's not an issue-free baseline. How many people died because they couldn't use the roads, either directly (get to help) or indirectly (delivery of inputs that prevented a death)?

Covid is even harder to measure. One Example: You shut down elementary schools to prevent kids from getting infected; how many were pushed back into broken homes from the only safe space they had? How many will have long-term pain from learning , nutrition, physical abuse, mental health?

Most policy can be reduced to "Better safe than sorry" which completely ignores the direct and indirect costs of any action.

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It’s surprising how many people think about lockdowns as some kind of a 1h drill.

Kids, and many people for that matter, cannot just stay in lockdown for months like domestic cats without triggering mental health issues.

And going out of lockdown you get things like a spiking of RSV infections (in turn apparently enough to noticeably fill up children's hospitals in some countries) because kids are now "catching up" in one go with all the infections they normally would have had spread out over the course of the last year or two.

> How many will have long-term pain from learning , nutrition, physical abuse, mental health?

We know that. Not exact numbers, but at least there are rough estimates. It's been an active area of research for quite some time, so there's a lot of data. Statistically speaking, we know how childhood poverty or a missed school year means for average lifespan.

It's been theoreticized that a reason for the differences in pandemic response when it comes to Sweden are down to the fact that they recently unified all their people health issues, that is not only medical issues but also social ones, under one government agency. That broader mandate is generally more data driven and needs to take longer term effects of missing school into account.

> Most policy can be reduced to "Better safe than sorry"

That's not all there is to it. Strictly following that reasoning would emphasize known risks against unknown risks. That does not explain the policy making that dominated during the pandemic.

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