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Comment by emerged | Hacker News Reader

Well you clearly didn’t read the article because the entire thing is talking about all of the sorts of causes you listed.

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I disagree. The thesis reads "but the full impact of the pandemic’s collateral damage is still being tallied". The point above was regarding the response to the pandemic being considered as equal or greater contributors to the rise in alcoholic deaths.

The failure and successes of the response should be distinctly studied to determine a better course of action for the next pandemic.

I do worry that public health has a measurement problem where they only focus on things they can measure/estimate and things that they do cannot estimate they ignore instead of putting in an unscientific guess.

Who ever said the response to the pandemic was supposed to be without painful consequences? If the response to cancer is chemotherapy, that can be way more painful and inconvenient than the cancer itself, at least in the short run...the hope is to solve the problem so it doesn't end up killing you.

Bringing this back to tech and software development, it seems to be a standard human failure that discussing "which of these option is least bad" is really hard to do.

People want to argue for a course of action which is all sunshine and rainbows and against one that is evil and wrong. Even something totally boring like what DB to use can flare up because no one likes "in the big picture they're all a bit crappy, this one has a small chance of being better but may turn out to be a hindrance but it's not that important let's just pick one".

Once you get to the level of human health, the economy and politics there's very little chance to discuss things objectively.

You can check the study yourself (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2790491). They simply looked at alcohol-related mortality across the entire US in 2019, 2020, and provisional data from the first half of 2021. There is no basis on which to make a statement comparing localities that implemented strict lockdowns versus those implemented less strict lockdowns. The only event that definitely affected the entire country equally is "the pandemic" broadly. They can't draw conclusions the data don't support just to make it more palatable to you.

Saying this should definitely be studied doesn't mean every single paper that gets published needs to only study this. It's not even clear it's really possible to get the data. How do you measure the strictness of different responses? Do municipalities publish alcohol mortality individually or is only the aggregate data available?

> The failure and successes of the response should be distinctly studied to determine a better course of action for the next pandemic.

For sure. I bet the authors agree. But wouldn't one necessarily need to answer "Did X meaningfully change during the pandemic?" before answering "How much of that change is attributable to which specific causes?"

This is a finding answers the first question and makes it a lot easier to fund research into the second. Every political strategist, economist, sociologist, historian, epidemiologist, and public health official wants answers to the same questions as you -- even while some anticipate a different answer than you might.

It just takes a minute to get there and there's some preliminary research to publish along the way.

I think psychlops suggests seeing the pandemic as a catalyst rather than the cause.

So introducing a catalyst to a stable reaction and then not attributing the increased reaction rates to the catalyst...

You’re coming across like you’re trying to miss the point. The entire article is attributing increased reaction rates to the pandemic.

>You’re coming across like you’re trying to miss the point.

My response needs to be read as a response to nautilius's attempt to interpret psychlops' root comment.

Yeah, that still doesn't change that impression, though.

I don't understand. My comment is to show that a catalyst can be a cause. How is everyone else reading it?

Please avoid shallow dismissals of other commentors. Everyone here is a real person who has feelings.

I'd argue the parent commenter committed this very sin; shallowly dismissing the article's conclusion to push their preferred narrative (ie, pandemic restrictions == bad).

Remember the human.

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