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Comment by oliv__ | Hacker News Reader

So Sweden had proportionately 5 times more deaths for not locking down with a death / population ratio of 0.00145? I don't think it's ridiculous to consider not locking down with those stats.

Locking down has tremendous costs whether mental or economic, you just can't compute and make a nice graph of it.

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> Locking down has tremendous costs whether mental or economic, you just can't compute and make a nice graph of it

The gorilla in the room that no one’s wants to acknowledge…we locked down to allow people who were likely to die within the next 3-5 years to maybe survive a couple of those years. The price of the lockdowns economically, physical health, mental health, and in education will be paid by folks who were probably never in much danger from this virus for decades.

I fully believe that historians will look back at this time and talk of the lopsided cost/benefit.

Harm the young to help the old... why are we doing this to ourselves?

The old are more reliable voters, while the youngest aren't even permitted to vote (even though they have more at stake, since they will have to live with the consequences longer.)

Are you going to tell those 12000 people: sorry, but you need to die for my exceptionally limited view of economy?

Yes.

How many people die in car accidents each year?

Will it increase exponentially if not cared about?

Yes, car deaths have decreased by multiple orders of magnitude in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

You can’t infer that from the graph. Yeah, they will go back to pre-pandemic levels, but they won’t increase exponentially from then on - which is not the case for COVID with no restrictions, which will only plateau at ridiculously high amount of infected (and dead).

> COVID with no restrictions, which will only plateau at ridiculously high amount of infected (and dead).

I'm curious what you think of Florida, which has had almost no restrictions for a majority of the pandemic and yet is actually doing better than some other states. Seems to disprove your assertion?

Airborne transmission being heavily climate-dependent? We can’t make everything into Florida (and that would be a much bigger problem than any virus in itself :D)

I'd imagine we'd have studies on this by now if that were actually the case though, right? It's been almost 2 years... so it seems like there's something else going on.

No, the fatality rate has. Unhappily, every safety advance seems to lead to an increase in crashes IIRC. Which sounds about like how we in the US approach COVID too.

Of course. Most deaths prevented by strong safety laws.

This kind of logic is, more or less, why Trump lost -- people (rightly so) don't like being told they have to sacrifice themselves for the economy

And that's why I'm unironically for banning cars in the long term. They're a terrible mode of transport, trains and bikes are all we need.

Hmmm, I take it you live in a city? You may not need anything other than a train or bike but other people have different needs.

So I actually live in a small town of 800 people somewhere in Europe. I can take the train if i need to get anywhere further than is comfortable by bike.

I understand that's not currently the case in a lot of the world, which is why I think cars need to be banned eventually, not right now.

That's fair, although instead of banning them I'd prefer to just have better alternatives that people naturally transition to. Cars are certainly not a very efficient mode of transport.

An order of magnitude less than the covid deaths in a year. And yet automobile engineering and usage are heavily regulated in order to improve safety and reduce fatalities.

In Sweden? ~300 [1], so about 40 years worth of traffic accidents.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/438009/number-of-road-de...

Why'd you leave out his mention of the impact on mental health?

No, I would tell: since you are at-risk, use the means provided to stay safe and take precautions to reduce the risk of getting infected.

What consequences do the lockdowns have on birth rates? In some western countries it has been shown that births have decreased by more than 10%. What are you going to tell those thousands of people who will remain childless because of these policies?

The problem with this line of argument - "if only the state didn't impose a lockdown, we could trade lives for life as it was before" - aside it from being kind of despicable, is that you can't get people to just continue previously normal activities once they know the danger. When Covid appeared in Seattle, the first US city, all the bars and restaurants downtown went out of the business before any restrictions went into place. Sweden had a lot of people working at home even with the supposed "no restrictions" policy. Indeed, see the list of policies that were, in fact, restrictive; https://sweden.se/life/society/sweden-and-corona-in-brief

There's no problem with people imposing their own restrictions on their movement and association. That's the whole point, and is what Swedish policy was predicated upon, that the people could largely be trusted with taking appropriate measures without the state imposed lockdowns.

There's no problem with people imposing their own restrictions on their movement and association.

Which implies you have some problem with the ordinary state lockdowns. These were certainly poorly executed and yet we can Sweden with nearly ten times the casualties-per-capita of an equivalent nation (Norway). Where my actual point about people taking their own measures is that life was sucky in Sweden as well as the rest of the world.

So what you effectively saying is: "I don't care if things were not that different in practice, for my principle of freedom, I'll 10K deaths without quality of life that different."

Edit:

"the people could largely be trusted with taking appropriate measures"

Trust is a pretty disingenuous term here. What's actually happened is that the people who took risks were the people who economically forced. Ironically, that include workers who took care of the elderly; poorly paid in Sweden and elsewhere, they then took their infections to the elderly concentrated in homes. Stopping this would have required more measures than any of the nations were will to do.

Strikes me how such a heartless comment comes from someone running a "community" business. Really sad.

Let's not get personal and connect his business and your expected social norms into some shaming activity.

I disagree with him but I wouldn't want to silence him. He needs to feel free to express his viewpoint and we should feel free to attack those views with other views and maybe throw in some facts to strength our case.

OP might have meant it as a personal attack and shaming, but it does point out a bias. The first benefit on the business's homepage is "Unlock the value of your community" and it's centered around jobs. Lockdowns (at least in the US) was tied with quite the wave of unemployment and continues to have lasting impact on that segment.

Of course, someone can also say everyone has bias what with it being a global pandemic, but it's still useful to be cognizant of said biases.

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