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Comment by lumb63 | Hacker News Reader

It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this. I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health. However, to propose that forcing (or, at the least, very strongly encouraging) an entire populace into self-isolation would not have negative impacts for a group in one of the most social and formative times of life, is absurd.

Imagine you spent half the time you were in high school, alone. I cannot imagine any rational person is capable of believing this to not be a major factor to their mental health.

Anecdotally, I am a reasonably strong introvert, and I switched teams at my job during the pandemic after nine months of work from home because it did not feel healthy to my mental state to not have interacted with anyone in so long. I felt that my social abilities had atrophied, and that I had lost sight of a lot of the important things in life that derive from social interaction. I can only imagine that the impact is far greater to someone who can't choose to change their life to obtain the social interaction they are missing, and who (I am generalizing a bit here) probably requires mental/emotional guidance and support from their peers, elders, etc.

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There was a discussion on here, about how the Covid pandemic may have been one of the, or even the biggest transfers of wealth from "the poor" to "the rich" in the history of our civilization. Somebody remarked, that it has also been the biggest transfer of lifetime from the young to the old, as the lockdowns were mostly to protect the old. The measures taken against the pandemic undoubtedly had a huge impact on young people's mental health, but the effects of it will only really unfold in the coming years, and are probably not measurable. People who deny this must be willfully ignorant.

From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity. While this might disproportionally benefited older folks, hospitals are a service anyone could need at any time for a wide range of reasons.

> From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity

And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. We should have relaxed our approach to all this when cities across the country were closing their unused field hospitals. Instead of celebrating the fact that covid wasn't nearly as lethal as the earliest models predicted, governors across the country doubled down on their covid restrictions. Two years later, they are finally almost gone.

Did any of these restrictions provide enough benefit to justify their immense social cost? It will probably take much cooler heads to find out. It troubles me that we went into this mess with little understanding if the measures even worked. In effect, we took millions and millions of people and had them partake in a massive uncontrolled experiment without anybody's consent.

there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk

I know several people who had to delay surgeries and other medical procedures because of hospital capacity due to COVID.

A person in my family had to delay a major procedure too, but the excuse was that it "wasn't safe" like they were being done a favor :/

I had to delay and miss many appointments because everything was shutdown due to pandemic. Nearly died from it. Many others did die because they stopped getting routine care.

Covid didn’t shut down that stuff. The government did. And it was a bad call…

Nope. It was due to hospitals being on edge and delaying elective surgery "just in case". COVID didn't cause capacity issues at hospitals, humans reaction to covid did.

Do you have a source on that?

I know multiple nurses and doctors who were re-assigned to help with COVID patients, or came out of retirement to help with staffing shortages.

There won’t be a source. It will take a decade of research to show my hypotheses as valid or invalid. No way can it be measured now… too many hot heads.

But I’d wager a lot of money that I’m right and most of the hospital issues were self-created problems caused by testing everything with a pulse. That’s my hypothesis and I’m sticking to it!

I know multiple nurses and doctors who had their hours drastically cut for months. They weren't re-assigned to help with COVID patients.

AFAIK, this happened, but was consistently due to proactive closures in expectation of overcrowding that nearly never came to pass. Although a lot of ink was spilled on the potential for hospitals being overrun, there were vanishingly few cases in which it actually happened.

> And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk.

What? Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with some having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their parking structures. Many U.S. hospitals had to put off essential procedures and ran out of practically _everything_ (syringes, saline products, blood, etc.) during the last wave.

> Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with some having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their parking structures. Many U.S. hospitals had to put off essential procedures and ran out of practically _everything_ (syringes, saline products, blood, etc.) during the last wave.

I don't recall this happening. Can you provide a source for this?

They can't. You'll just get links to some NYT article whose main content suggests "we are preparing for a surge" or something of that nature.

I've yet to see any kind of actual study that compares hospital capacity during these "surges" vs hospital capacity in the "before times". Also I strongly suspect future research will show that most of the hospital issues were self-inflicted wounds. We tested everybody who came into the hospital and invoked crazy high-overhead processes for positive results irregardless of symptoms.

The entire two years of this I've been waiting for a single instance of an overflowing hospital with stretchers of people out the door... never seen one yet. There has never been a real issue of hospital capacity--at least in the US anyway.

My father was taken to a hospital for a broken hip in December. There were no beds available. He had a procedure and was sent home. I have no news article to provide, only this anecdotal account. This is something that I can't imagine happening prior to 2020 unless a natural disaster (hurricane, flood, tornado) had occurred.

It happens all the time in flu season. You even get articles that read very much like the ones people link to with Covid. Funny nobody gave a shit about all those…

It's almost as if people respond differently to a newly unknown threat with unknown capabilities.

> The entire two years of this I've been waiting for a single instance of an overflowing hospital with stretchers of people out the door... never seen one yet.

I mean, I don't know about you but I certainly do not consider this normal: https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/01/13/er_slammed-getty...

Image caption is: "A nurse walks inside a temporary emergency room, built into a parking garage at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in Tarzana, Calif., on Jan. 3, 2021. Since Thanksgiving, cases have risen to the point where 80% of the hospital is filled with patients with COVID-19 and 90% of the ICU is filled with COVID-19."

Taken from: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/13/1072902...

> Since Thanksgiving, cases have risen to the point where 80% of the hospital is filled with patients with COVID-19 and 90% of the ICU is filled with COVID-19."

The confounding factor here is that this includes patients hospitalized for reasons other than COVID. A patient that had a positive test might not be in the hospital because of COVID, but good luck to anyone trying to tease out that data.

Were those people in there with Covid or from Covid? Cause nobody ever seems to capture that important fact.

You seem to imply that it is a normal occurrence that hospitals have to set up temporary emergency rooms in their parking structures?

Happens all the time in flu season:

https://amp.providencejournal.com/amp/16579156007

https://www.wpri.com/news/er-diversions-skyrocket-in-ri-foll...

Your links mention nothing about patients receiving their care in temporary emergency rooms within the parking structure of the respective hospital, though?

Covid was the cause of the largest mass casualty death event in US history.

It's embarrassing people keep pretending like every doctor in nurse in the USA who has said their hospitals have been overrun with death for over a year now and is the worst they ever have seen are just lying.

I'm guessing this is just some kind of coping mechanism because it's too terrible to comprehend and don't want it to be true, but it is fact.

> The entire two years of this I've been waiting for a single instance of an overflowing hospital with stretchers of people out the door... never seen one yet.

Your following sentence refers to the U.S., but as for this one- this is exactly what's happening in Hong Kong right now:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/09/hong-kong-co...

The man with a heart attack who died because all ICU beds in Alabama were occupied with Covid cases made headlines: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...

What parallel world do you even live in?

Yes I remember a few similar stories that made front-page news on various establishment sites. Most of them were very similar:

- older person has some sort of non-covid related serious illness or injury

- can't get ICU bed in the "top" hospital in their area due to ICU overflows.

- Thus, patient sent to less renowned hospital where he eventually succumbs to disease or injury.

- Media blames Covid / unvaxxed for his death.

A couple points that they never mention:

- ICUs, by design, are usually at 90% full, so these scenarios happened before Covid due to just random odds of a few extra people needing ICU beds at some particular hospital in some particular week.

- If the media has to trot out stories of 70 year olds with chronic heart failure who may have been saved had they been able to get a bed in the nation's top cardiology department instead of merely some average hospital, then does it really represent a legitimate issue the rest of us should be concerned about?

It reminds me of how the media kept demanding we accept the narrative that Covid was super deadly to children, when by all accounts it's less dangerous than the flu, swimming pools, etc even BEFORE the CDC quietly revised their own numbers* downward. So they'd push some article about a 22 year old died of Covid. "Look - this virus will kill your kids toooooo."

And you'd actually read the article, and then realize it was some chronically sick kid who weighed 400 lbs and had suffered from severe respiratory and immune issues all their life. And you'd know - if this was the best example they could find to scare us - then you shouldn't really be scared.

* https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

2020 was the year context was thrown out the window. Imagine if these articles provided context in their headlines…

The average ICU occupancy is actually ~ 70 %, to have some slack in it during the annual flu season. If patients have to be turned away because everywhere is full, then there's a problem. Also, under normal circumstances, people tend to spend only a few days in ICU, then they are either better or dead, but serious Covid cases require weeks of artificial respiration, even a few cases tie up a lot of hospital resources.

And what's with the focus on Covid deaths - Covid sequelae are a thing and can significantly affect quality of life. My colleague is in his mid-20's, in good health - he had a mild case last Fall and still hasn't got his sense of smell back. When you can't smell methacrylic ester you know there's a problem.

Post viral crap happens with all other sorts of respiratory viruses. Covid is far from unique when it comes to that.

Part of the issue may be that there are cohorts of people who will go to the hospital as a matter of course even with mild COVID symptoms.

They will overrun the ICU's with mild Covid symptoms? That was the problem during last year's big waves - overflowing ICU's combined with hospital staff out sick.

It is highly plausible they were out because they tested positive. If the test didn’t exist they’d go into work and be fine.

…it’s a self created problem. All this testing caused people to loose their rational thinking.

Look, it's a communicable disease. There's no need for healthcare staff to spread Covid to each and any patient that comes to see them. The phenomenon of asymptomatic/presymptomatic spread is well known with Covid.

"My Tinder date told me she has chlamydia, but she's asymptomatic. All good!"

Then why not test for every other respiratory virus too? Why just Covid?

Because such would imply mandatory unlimited paid sick leave, unthinkable in the current political environment. OSHA only recommends flu testing and leave for healthcare personnel, but they are a joke.

You can go to a hospital, and will be sent home if you don't need to stay in hospital, especially if the hospital has more urgent patients to attend to.

You don't run an ICU with stretchers out the door, because that's not how you can provide ICU treatment. Overflowing ICU means "queue of ambulances out front waiting if someone dies or doctors decide someone can be pushed to lower intensity care" or "patients being driven further away in the hope to reach available capacity elsewhere". And if you need an ICU, 10 mins, 30 mins or 2 hour ambulance driving time makes a lot of difference (and means the ambulance is blocked longer of course as well, again hurting other patients needing one).

And re general capacity: Someone I know spent a day waiting to be seen in an emergency room and then got sent home from the hospital with a (non-covid) lung infection with "you really should be kept under supervision, but we need the space for people who probably will die tonight if they are not here". He did make it (with help from family and some emergency intervention by a local doctor), but certainly had a higher risk than if he'd been kept in a normally-operating hospital.

>> (January 13th) "We are being absolutely crushed," says Dr. Gabor Kelen, chair of emergency medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland.

https://knpr.org/npr/2022-01/ers-are-overwhelmed-omicron-con...

Thanks. This supports that there were some hospitals that ran out of beds but not that any ran out of supplies.

Story on supply shortages

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/public-global-health/5...

This isn't really a source for what I was looking for. This article is from February 2021 and therefore has nothing to do with Omicron.

>I don't recall this happening. Can you provide a source for this?

https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/USA/2020/1119/O...

Here you go:

> Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with some having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their parking structures.

ERs are overwhelmed as omicron continues to flood them with patients: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/13/1072902...

Why omicron is crushing hospitals — even though cases are often milder than delta: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/29/1075871...

> Many U.S. hospitals had to put off essential procedures and ran out of practically _everything_ (syringes, saline products, blood, etc.) during the last wave.

Americans get sicker as omicron stalls everything from heart surgeries to cancer care: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/02/04/1078029...

US hospitals struggle as Omicron Covid surge delays other treatments: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/22/us-hospitals-o...

Npr is a governmental new source and thie government has been pushing scare tactics to make people get vaccinated so unfortunately I rate this as zero credibility unless you show me actual data.

Parking lot hospital: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mississippi-hospital-puts-b...

I haven't seen anything considered "essential" being delayed, but anything that was not "immediately, medically" necessary in Texas was delayed on order of the Governor: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/09/texas-coronavirus-ho... My mother is a cancer patient and frequently had to delay (what I would consider essential) treatments by request of her provider.

Anecdotally, as someone married to an RN, supplies were absolutely running low throughout the pandemic. For the first year they were limited to 1 N95 mask per week, they frequently ran out of specific types/gauges of needles and had to make do with what was available, certain medications were hard to come by, etc. She doesn't work a COVID floor but still more often than not had a double patient load compared to pre-pandemic levels, both due to more patients and less staff. It was also incredibly common seeing people in neighborhood groups trying to find available beds for their family members during our surges, as most people were told there was a wait list expected to last at least 24 hours before something would be available.

> Parking lot hospital: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mississippi-hospital-puts-b...

I was referring specifically to Omicron, so both of your links aren't really what I was looking for—thanks anyways.

My main surprise was OP's assertion that medically necessary supplies such as blood had run out during the last surge, but so far this seems unsubstantiated. As you mentioned, I was aware masks have been in short supply at points throughout the pandemic, but blood and masks aren't quite equivalent.

> My main surprise was OP's assertion that medically necessary supplies such as blood had run out during the last surge, but so far this seems unsubstantiated.

https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-rele...

> In effect, we took millions and millions of people and had them partake in a massive uncontrolled experiment without anybody's consent.

But then… doesn’t this cover all government decisions and legislation?

If presented with this hypothetical situation in advance, perhaps we’d have preferred our governments did X, Y and Z differently.

But the ‘consent’ was given when our generation, or our parents’ or grandparents’, voted in the governments which passed the laws to allow for this.

With hindsight, I suspect many will not vote for the same governments again. But some will. Perhaps even the majority will.

In fact, during the pandemic, many governments who enacted what you call ‘experiments’ were re-elected in landslides.

In that case, I’d say that many people have given consent.

That said, I agree with your suggestion that we should try to figure out the cost/benefit of these measures. I think that’s a critical step over the next few years.

> In fact, during the pandemic, many governments who enacted what you call ‘experiments’ were re-elected in landslides.

the governments had the media in their pockets from day 1 so of course the prevailing opinion would be they did well and would be reelected. just like Putin having great ratings in Russia.

The problem is that democracy is the tyranny of the majority on the minority.

I think we need to move to a more decentralised society where power is spread across the population and it sits as close as possible to the individual affected by the rules, the ultimate form being personal responsibility.

> And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk

Are you suggesting that this story is inaccurate? Your claim is baffling in the face of… well, all the stories I’ve been reading the past two years.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-coronavirus...

Korea is currently rationing hospital care in the middle of an Omicron wave. Covid-related patient care (previously unlimited, with a small fraction of patients hospitalized for four to six weeks) is now provided on NHS for only seven days, after which point the patient must pay out-of-pocket and/or find their own hospital bed. When this policy was introduced (the limit used to be two weeks), there was a minor uproar, with doctors accusing the government of killing patients.

> And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk.

My parents' friend had to delay a surgery after a heart attack in Minneapolis this winter because so many places were booked. I heard similar issues in New Hampshire. Nobody seemed to talk about it at that point, maybe because it's hard to quantify "strain" or exactly how many people died or otherwise suffered as a result.

I’m guessing you don’t know a lot of ICU nurses?

> And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk.

Interesting take. My healthcare friends (doctors and nurses) literally 100% of them have either already bounced from the field, or have plans to immediately once they pay off medical debt.

Fully and entirely due to the way they were treated during covid by hospital administration and the collapse-like conditions they were forced to work through.

The bill coming due for our healthcare system hasn't even started installment payments yet.

If we didn't do the lockdowns then we would have seen a huge increase in mortality over all age groups as hospitals where overwhelmed.

Also, Long Covid is very much a thing.

I get it though: teenagers are growing up during a once in a century pandemic in the middle of an existential climate crisis which the old leaders (all 70+ in the US!) are not addressing.

> once in a century pandemic

That's pretty optimistic. I hope you're right.

We will have another one within 10 years.

> If we didn't do the lockdowns then we would have seen a huge increase in mortality over all age groups as hospitals where overwhelmed.

This is just wishful thinking. There is no real way to know if lockdowns had any material impact on hospital capacity. And besides, we had field hospitals set up in the early days... though they were all closed because they didn't get used. Hmmmmm....

Canada had field hospitals. And they were used.

Here’s an example. Sunnybrook hospital in toronto. One of the leading trauma hospital in the country. They also brought military to help.

https://beta.ctvnews.ca/local/toronto/2021/4/30/1_5409214.ht...

Just one example among many.

"That happened on Monday when the first patient arrived. There are now six patients there and another two are expected by the end of Friday."

In a province with 14.7 million people... Society has to grind to a halt for a few hundred people... how does that make any sense?

> as hospitals where overwhelmed.

Nobody seemed to mind very much during all those other years:

https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle:hospitals+intitle:ov...

https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle:hospitals+intitle:%2...

The percentage of young people who needed to be hospitalised for covid is still very small.

A lot of the symptoms of long covid seems to be fatigue / depression related.

The climate crisis is the last of our concerns, technology is well on its way to improve the situation and paving the way for renewables. Now, if the governments of the world would stop messing up (eg. by removing nuclear power, or waging wars against each other), that'd be great.

It's certainly a difficult cost/benefit analysis, preserving the lives of the elderly, at the expense of quality of life for a younger generation, versus the opposite. The effects are, as you said, probably not measurable, and so the calculus is near-impossible. However, the answer has seemingly been to not even try, and to "stop covid" at all costs, laying waste to any holistic arguments that perhaps prioritizing societal wellbeing was a better route than declaring war against a virus.

In my opinion, the vast majority of the world lost its cool in the pandemic, and in our panic, we may have made mistakes. Or maybe not. The long term results remain to be seen. Certainly, however, we as a society did not act with a level head and think things through rationally before acting.

When you try to mix human morbidity and mortality with market economics, basically you just piss everyone off. I mean, if I want to be crass about it, I could ask you who's life you value more - your father or your son, your aunt or your niece? And how much money are you willing to pay to extend the life of any of these people. We are hesitant to ask these questions for good reason.

The government already has these answers. There is a value assigned to life per year it could be extended. For some reason that was thrown out the window for covid.

Where do they publish the numbers? I'm curious what I'm worth.

In the UK, this might be a good place to start: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/valuation-of-risk...

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/valuation-of-risk...

tl;dr, if memory serves correctly, it's about 60k GBP per full health year left. So 2 years at 50% health is 1 full health year, with formulas to tell you what 50% health means exactly.

I don't know of other countries that make this calculation so explicitly.

Google for SVM statistical value of human life. If I recall correctly.

As the song goes, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice". The fact that we've steadfastly refused to verbalize the implicit choices that have been made doesn't change anything about what was actually done.

This also applies to the workplace. Good management involves understanding that even the lack of a choice is a choice.

The NHS in the UK - whose low, low costs certain US political activists point to as proof public healthcare is not just better but cheaper - literally does this. There's a fixed amount they're willing to spend per expected year of healthy life saved, adjusted for quality of life during that time, and treatments that are expected to cost more than that aren't available on the NHS. This is surprisingly uncontroversial, possibly because the NHS as an institution is basically beyond questioning. However, the same reasoning was not applied in the UK over Covid; the mainstream consensus was that anyone who prioritised the economy over stopping Covid was an evil murderer, and every single Covid death that happened was caused by our government not stopping it.

Yes, any public healthcare system will obviously make these calculations. Private insurers also do this in the US however they are more limited in what they can do to control costs.

I suspect that because there is one universal system, people accept that they're all more or less bound by the same rules (I'm aware there is private care in the UK too), whereas in the US it can be pretty arbitrary as to who gets healthcare; obviously money helps but there are multiple single payer systems (lol) that some belong to also.

This is the way. Hand waving morality and preciousness of life leads to a very few getting all the treatment. (The first part)

We could easily afford preserving as many people's lives as possible in this situation.

> preciousness of life

Let's not belittle it; it is indeed extremely precious.

> the mainstream consensus was that anyone who prioritised the economy over stopping Covid was an evil murderer, and every single Covid death that happened was caused by our government not stopping it.

This poses a false dichotomy between strict lockdowns and economic growth. The UK had both bad death rates and a bad economic hit compared to other countries in europe. I think the conservatives tried to balance the short-term interests of the economy against case numbers, and ultimately ended up muddling about in the middle, which was why they ended up with the worst of both worlds.

The countries that did really well in the pandemic (east asian countries) typically went for what seemed like drastic measures in the early stages. As time went on, it's become apparent that their liberties, economies, and also case numbers were all far less impacted by the pandemic compared to western countries that had to go into emergency lockdowns as case counts soared out of control. Even in the limited context of western europe, one of the reasons why the UK had so many days in lockdown (more than France or Germany, often with more stringent rules, iirc) was because they prevaricated so much about bringing in lockdowns, then had to make them much tighter to compensate.

> The countries that did really well in the pandemic (east asian countries) typically went for what seemed like drastic measures in the early stages. As time went on, it's become apparent that their liberties, economies, and also case numbers were all far less impacted by the pandemic compared to western countries that had to go into emergency lockdowns as case counts soared out of control. Even in the limited context of western europe, one of the reasons why the UK had so many days in lockdown (more than France or Germany, often with more stringent rules, iirc) was because they prevaricated so much about bringing in lockdowns, then had to make them much tighter to compensate.

This raises an interesting point I hadn't considered; assuming that there will still be some transfer of the virus during lockdown (although presumably more limited) due to people still needing to go out to get food (or have food delivered, which still requires someone else going out), getting medical care, etc., the amount of time needed to stay in lockdown to lower the number of cases below a given threshold seem like it would grow in relation to the number of cases at the time lockdown was initiated. To make up some numbers, if the goal is to get the number of cases below 1% of the population, it's much easier to get there if you start the lockdown with only 2% of the country infected versus 5%. I don't have anywhere near the expertise to do even the most naive of calculations of how many extra days that would translate into in the real world, but given that I imagine the virus spreads faster than it goes away, it sounds like delaying by a certain amount of time would lead to _more_ than that amount of time needed to stay in lockdown. I wonder if the US had gone into lockdown at the beginning of March or even earlier, then the lockdown might have been shortened by months.

I imagine 'reluctant lockdowns' also create unclear messaging, so the general public is less likely to know or follow lockdown rules, making them less effective.

As I understand it, lockdowns were generally put in place to stop the hospital system from collapsing under the case load - so I imagine the higher the case count (which typically increases during the first weeks of the lockdown due to lead time) the more time you'd need to resupply, reorganize, process the patients coming through the system, etc.

Could a down voter provide a rebuttal?

I didn't downvote, but the UK was middle of the pack amongst European countries in terms of Covid deaths and economic damage. It's just our media focused on anything that'd make us look worse, like comparing total deaths without adjusting for population size or cherry-picking specific time periods to yell about. Also, pretty much the whole of Europe pursued very similar policies so that comparison isn't going to tell you much anyway.

You can't seriously claim that countries which imposed serious, long-lasting restrictions on the basic human right of freedom of assembly did "really well" in the pandemic. That's revisionist history.

Saving lives is not a valid justification. If you think it is, then why not impose a permanent police state? We could probably save some lives by giving police the power to search anywhere without a warrant.

That's the point. If you consider hours spent in lockdown per-capita, even a country like China, an authoritarian police state, did less harm to the liberties of their citizens than countries like the UK, France or Germany with their pandemic response.

That's without bring up countries like Japan, South Korea, or Australia, all of which are liberal democracies.

Well now you're just making things up. UK, France, and Germany did harm to civil liberties but nowhere near as bad as China. They still have entire cities under strict lockdowns right now!

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/frustration-mounts-as-c...

Same problem occurs when it comes to socialized healthcare, or just healthcare in general.

>I mean, if I want to be crass about it, I could ask you who's life you value more - your father or your son, your aunt or your niece?

That's an incredibly easy one, if I had kids it would be my kids over my parents, and I'm certain my parents would agree and be willing to sacrifice themselves to save their grandkids if it truly came to that. The fact that this apparently isn't the default moral calculus for most people (as shown by the pandemic response) is deeply troubling to me.

Also an extremely easy answer for me to choose the future over the past. There was no reason my grandpa should have been getting dialysis paid for by taxpayers at the age of 93. For years. Give him access to assisted suicide and invest that money into the nation’s children.

And while it is probably easier to talk the talk than walk the walk, I do not want a dime spent on me once I am chronically unable to do simple tasks myself. If I need 24/7 care, then I like to think I will opt to take myself out.

See this is where the hypotheticals go. Let's say your grandpa doesn't want to do the assisted suicide thing. Are you willing to "withdraw care" (the medical term for when doctors kill people on purpose) or even take more active measures? I know the arithmetic is pretty obvious but as you say walking the walk is something different entirely.

If the question is would I want a significant share of society’s resources to not go towards extending the life of a 93 year old, then my answer is no.

Of course, I would not want society to force anyone to accept assisted suicide (which would not really be suicide).

Ok, what if we tell the grandparent that we'll take half of their expected costs for care and give that to their grandchildren's college funds if they go through with the suicide? Is that an acceptable compromise or horrible dystopian bargain? Basically it's the trolley problem in that there are endless hypotheticals you can construct to determine your values, but as I said it can get pretty distasteful.

I do not think it would be useful for a society to specifically allocate the resources saved by not extending a 90 year old’s life specifically to their grandkids.

Society already triages resources for various populations. It is not like the government throws unlimited money at old people to get all the gold plated healthcare they need. It is allocated roughly based on how rich you are, with poor people getting less care via reduced Medicaid reimbursements and a million other ways to price discriminate recipients.

If anything, this opaque maze of who does and does not get a share of society’s resources is worse than a transparent policy.

So your grandfather lived for years after the age of 93 with the help of basic, modern medicine. Yet you feel that his medical care was a significant share of society's resources. Dialysis costs between $30K and $90K per year (in the US) depending on type of treatment.

In 2019, the Federal budget outlays were $4.4 Trillion dollars. State expenditures were another $2.3T. Total US wealth was roughly $96T.

I think we can afford to give dialysis to anyone who needs it.

Sure, but let’s do that after all the kids have access to doctors and dentists and nutritious food at school.

Although, I have read a very significant portion of the federal budget goes towards the last few days/months/years of very elderly people’s lives.

It's part of the societal contract, though: Why would I rip myself a new one for a country that hands out suicide pills or lets me die in agony because some kid on the other side of the country doesn't get free healthy food from their school, if the resources for universal healthcare are there, but are not distributed equally?

Old people vote. Kids by definition don't (and parents of kids that can't afford healthcare are also less likely to vote).

Yea, but that isn’t rhe choice. It’s about quality of life, not life itself. Ask your teenager if they are willing to let grandma choke to death or spend two years with just family, and rhe answer will be different.

>> However, the answer has seemingly been to not even try, and to "stop covid" at all costs, laying waste to any holistic arguments that perhaps prioritizing societal wellbeing was a better route than declaring war against a virus.

Stop Covid at all costs is what they said, but not what they did. HCQ was shot down without investigation even as doctors were reporting success. Most things were simply shot down as "not an FDA approved treatment for covid19" even though there were no such treatments for the first year. I had covid so my immunity is better than the vaccinated, but I was still supposed to get vaxed because it helps a bit more and we needed to do everything possible. OK vitamins D was thought to help and has since been proven to help, so why are there not ads pushing that? It's never been about doing (certainly not trying) everything possible. Its always been "do as I say" from the government.

I have to agree. As I walked around a local strip mall with closed gyms, closed stores, but open nail salons I realized the whole precautions nature was doomed.

Sure seems like an attempt to maximize theater and sell vaccines

This bullshit, again? Far too much was wasted on studies to mollify the HC@ crowd. For vitamin d, there’s no definite answer, but it helps either not at all or too little to be worth it: https://inews.co.uk/news/vitamin-d-supplements-do-not-stop-y...

There is a very clear correlation between hypovitaminosis D and severe COVID-19 symptoms. Recommend you read all of the studies indexed on the page.

https://vitamin-d-covid.shotwell.ca/

Correct. Vitamin D deficiency makes one more likely to get COVID-19 and more likely to have a severe case if you do get it. There really is a lot of evidence to support this, including studies from the NIH. Also, most people in the US are deficient in the winter and having a bit extra is considered harmless, so not suggesting it was always stupid.

There is also a traditional vaccine now that is completely ignored in the US. The ONLY acceptable response to COVID according to our government (and unfortunately one political side for reasons I don't understand) is one of the MRNA vaccines. Nothing else is acceptable even as an adjunct to those vaccines.

https://health.ucdavis.edu/news/headlines/what-is-the-link-b...

What has been shown in other studies is that giving hospitalized COVID patients vitamin D has no effect on outcomes. We could do studies that show the same lack of effectiveness for a lot of treatments including the vaccines. Once you're hospitalized it's too late for a lot of things.

> HCQ was shot down without investigation even as doctors were reporting success

This narrative was and continues to be pushed by the same people who refused to mask up, isolate, stay home, and otherwise exercise non-pharmaceutical intervention techniques.

Interesting.

>> This narrative was and continues to be pushed by the same people

No, it's been replaced by Ivermectin (spelling?) which I have no idea why that became a thing. The HCQ was still shot down without trial when doctors were claiming it worked, and had a hypothesis as to why it might.

There was an early study back in April 2020 (right after the lockdowns started) which showed that ivermectin could inhibit SARS-CoV-2 replication in vitro. Some irresponsible people (including a few physicians) took that and ran with it even though there was never any high quality evidence for it as a clinical treatment.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787

It will be interesting to see the results from the ACTIV-6 clinical study. Hopefully that will finally settle the issue one way or another.

https://activ6study.org/

We absolutely made mistakes - but it'll take decades before there's any consensus on what exactly they were. On a more personal level I can confidently say that the pandemic has caused many (although still a minority) to go insane - in the literal sense of disconnected from reality. This ranges from treating the pandemic as if it's still incredibly deadly to completely denying there was ever a problem. The consequences of that I'll be dealing with personally for a long, long time.

> It's certainly a difficult cost/benefit analysis, preserving the lives of the elderly ...

Human beings have rights, including and especially to life, regardless of the costs to you. The question is, how do we preserve as many lives as possible, and then at the least possible cost.

No that's not how it works. There is no such thing as a right to life. Others are not required to keep your alive.

If there is no right to life then there are no rights whatsoever. Last I checked most countries uphold a right to life for their citizens.

You might check out the various voter-approved lists of rights

Hopefully history remembers that there actually were people who acted with a cool head, among them: Sweden, Japan, Africa, and large swaths of the USA. Now we have a pretty good control group to assess the effectiveness of measures like school closures, social isolation, cloth masks, and lockdowns.

I suspect that some people are in for a bit of cognitive dissonance, if it does come to light that said measures were not actually based in science and had an overall negative impact on society.

Sweden? This Sweden? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01097-5#Sec3

"During 2020, however, Sweden had ten times higher COVID-19 death rates compared with neighbouring Norway. In this report, we try to understand why, using a narrative approach to evaluate the Swedish COVID-19 policy and the role of scientific evidence and integrity. We argue that that scientific methodology was not followed by the major figures in the acting authorities—or the responsible politicians—with alternative narratives being considered as valid, resulting in arbitrary policy decisions."

"Many elderly people were administered morphine instead of oxygen despite available supplies, effectively ending their lives."

> "stop covid" at all costs

Hardly anywhere seriously tried this. New Zealand probably came closest.

It seems that far too many people in this thread are arguing that the total number of COVID deaths - 980k in the US - is effectively too low? As a result of excessive caution? Are you sure about that?

China? Japan? As in two countries who together make up almost a quarter of the world’s population?

Many of the protocols mandated had minor or no impact on the spread of the disease, but inflicted horrendous pain and suffering on people. Policies that locked down nursing homes, for example, preventing family from attending to their loved ones in their last moments of life, or allowing nurses to attend covid positive patients and the vulnerable uninfected simultaneously, and many other practices by the dodgier health care facilities made the lockdowns a nasty and dehumanizing exercise of power with no basis in rationality. Shutting down small businesses, allowing oil companies to take in obscene profits and increasing their subsidies because you can sell a "people are driving less" narrative, and toying with a ludicrously dangerous profit incentive for public health by making the vaccines legal without liability or recourse for injury. It turned out relatively OK, but almost everything done in the name of public health had ulterior motives behind it, or a mad scramble to cover up incompetence or graft.

There are lots of lessons to be learned.

> […] but the effects of it will only really unfold in the coming years[…]

I believe that we'll see studies for the rest of our lives on the effects of the pandemic / lockdown among different age groups. Young people will likely be the most affected longterm. This will be the new "lead paint" for a generation.

>that it has also been the biggest transfer of lifetime from the young to the old, as the lockdowns were mostly to protect the old

Holy crap, never thought about it that way. Add to the equation that it was the generation that gave us climate abuse, debt and pretty much loaned themselves out of our future (I'm in my 30s ...) and I don't think that's fair, at all.

Few major effects. Young people mostly work service or part time jobs which were completely destroyed. Very few were able to work from home. Property values across the planet exploded, further benefiting those who already had them. Cost of living and inflation exploded without any bump to wages on these low end jobs.

If you don't work in tech, are an exec, or own significant assets, your life has been ruined by covid restrictions.

Absolutely agree, I am lucky enough to own an apartment, have plenty of disposable income, and I was working from home already, so COVID was meh for me. But, I am not indifferent to my peers and

>life has been ruined by covid restrictions

this is completely true for a large swath of people, and it wasn't fair for them.

The necroplutarchy demands its due.

You're absolutely right, and I've heard firsthand accounts of this.

My sister-in-law is a middle school counselor at a large midwest US public school system and her stories about kids dealing with the pandemic are heartbreaking, the mental health support system in some US schools is completely falling apart due to the workload.

She's never seen a mental health crisis on this scale in schools in her entire career. She remarks that kids really weren't able to learn much during the pandemic due to remote learning and in many cases are now playing catch-up to get back on track. The school system she works for basically didn't hold anyone back for a year because they had no real way of knowing who progressed as her school district cancelled standardized testing.

Anyone who believes that the pandemic wasn't a serious setback for many kids developmentally is woefully out of touch with reality.

> they had no real way of knowing who progressed as her school district cancelled standardized testing.

The schools want to remove all evidence that would contradict their claims of doing a great job.

...or they lacked the resources and infrastructure to accurately assess students as nobody had been prepared to move the entire public education system online for an extended period of time.

The drive to eliminate all standardized testing has been going on for many years.

That's true, but what does that have to do with automatically passing every student during the pandemic? It's just one cynical take after another with you.

It's tragic to see someone so intelligent being so bitter about a thankless job like working in public education.

Bitter? Not at all. There are some good teachers deserving of thanks. Some I was fortunate to have as a teacher. But I am cynical of an industry that demands 6 figure salaries along with no accountability. Where teachers are rewarded for length of service and educational attainment, not success in educating the students.

Want to improve education for the kids?

Give teachers a base salary, plus $X for every student of theirs that meets grade standards at the end of the school year.

----

A long time ago, the company I was working for hired a team of 6 or 7 older contractors to do a special job for IBM. They completed it on time, under budget, and IBM was completely satisfied. They also each received a $10,000 bonus for meeting those conditions (a lot of money in those days). I asked them if the bonus had any relationship with meeting that goal, and they were offended, saying they were professionals and gave it their best regardless.

Haha, I didn't buy that. Do you?

Remember that earthquake in LA where a freeway interchange collapsed? They offered the contractor $1,000,000 for each day ahead of schedule the reconstruction was finished. I don't recall the exact details, but they finished it months ahead of schedule.

Money talks. Want results? Pay for results.

Are talking about software or teaching? My accountability is quite low compared to teachers and i make significantly more. I do believe those IBM contractors because it wouldnt motivate me. I'm already doing quite well so you have to get to 1/3 my yearly salary to actually change my behavior but Im a professional so i already give it my all. I do think teachers should make more and software devs should make less but it is not the world we live apparently.

> software or teaching?

Any profession.

> it wouldnt motivate me

You're a unicorn, then. Pay for results is a big reason why the free market works so well. Socialism relies on altruistic self-sacrifice, and we both know how well that works.

> Give teachers a base salary, plus $X for every student of theirs that meets grade standards at the end of the school year.

Wouldn't this cause misaligned incentives leading to teachers going out of their way to game the grade standards, similar to what has happened with No Child Left Behind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act#Gamin...

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/gaming-the-nclb-syste...

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-educator-ch...

Not that there probably shouldn't be experimentation with compensation to create incentives, but $X per head is overly simplistic and is the sort of thing that gets gamed all of the time.

I know it doesn't boil down to a sentence. Actually implementing it would be more complex.

Will it be gamed? People will surely try. People try to game the SATs all the time, with some small success. But the SATs are still very useful and effective.

The bottom line is, will better results be achieved with this method? Almost certainly.

P.S. Much of the cheating from on the NCLB system was the people who were affected by the test results were the ones administering the test. Of course that won't work. An independent organization has to administer the tests.

> The bottom line is, will better results be achieved with this method? Almost certainly.

That's a tautology, though. It seems like this is a hypothesis that should be put to the test.

It gets put to the test every day in the free market.

Because it's being directly tied to funding. Do well, more funds. Tests are low, less funds. It's completely ass backwards. Teachers aren't afraid of being graded, the issue is what's being done with that information.

How about a gymnastics coach? The ones who get results from their students get paid a lot more than the ones who don't.

Isn't that how it should be?

The result you want from gymnastic coaching is well aligned with what the test measures because, well, the test and the desired result are the same thing.

This is not the case with standardized testing in education, is it? It's a lot like these tech interviews people keep complaining about that test a knowledge bunch of bullshit you have to cram for but have nothing to do with the actual job.

Are you suggesting that it is not possible to test students on things like reading, riting, and rithmetic?

   7 + 3 = ?

is a bullshit question?

Are you suggesting that the only thing worth learning in school is reading, writing, and arithmetic?

Not just the isolation, there are so many crazy covidian rules that some schools have pushed on the kids to uphold the safety theatre.

In California, it was absolutely forbidden for anyone to be indoors without a mask for more than 15 minutes, but you still have to serve school lunch to kids.

Some schools solved this by moving lunch outside. No matter the temperature.

Some schools solved this by giving the kids a 14 minute lunch break.

No talking, no socializing, no enjoying the meal together in peace. This is how you give kids eating disorders.

Of course, while these rules were in place, any schoolkid could go to a restaurant with their parents and enjoy a meal together in peace for hours if they so wished.

No rhyme, no reason.

Yeah it's weird that a place that has 1000s of people in it at once has different rules than a place with 50.

We may never know why that is. Truly, a mystery. An enigma for the ages. Scholars will be working on this for 1000s of years. Who could know the answer to such a question?

Puzzling indeed.

believe it or not there is more to life than a myopic obsessive fixation on Covid to the literal sacrifice of everything else. It is complete BS that restaurants were open but schools closed. There is more to the world than just Covid you know…

All the lockdown people thought mattered was Covid. They completely ignored every other problem and mocked people who pointed it out.

> It is complete BS that restaurants were open but schools closed.

Completely different environments with different requirements.

> to the literal sacrifice of everything else.

Except for, you know...public health and disease control. Not minimizing covid would maximize long covid which would be a whole other public health nightmare we'd have to deal with for decades to come.

Also, you know, it just kind of made sense to mount some kind of response to a pandemic. I realize you see it as an all-or-nothing proposition, so at least be glad it was only a mixed response and I'll remain content that the experts, in some jurisdictions at least are out there being put in charge of things like this.

> All the lockdown people thought mattered was Covid. They completely ignored every other problem and mocked people who pointed it out.

Except in the US at least where we've seen some of the most organized nationwide protests organized and attended by a mostly mask wearing populace. Another bit of fabricated wisdom from your keyboard to the bin.

> In California, it was absolutely forbidden for anyone to be indoors without a mask for more than 15 minutes

False. There was no such directive.

We were one of the first schools in California to reopen, too.

I think you may be referring to what was initially considered a close contact under the CDPH guidance: unmasked and close for more than 15 minutes.

> Some schools solved this by moving lunch outside. No matter the temperature.

This is our normal procedure at our school on non-rainy days, COVID or not.

There were 2 or 3 rainy days (yay drought!). Kids ate indoors, spread out, with the doors open. It was a stricter lunch environment than they're used to for those few days.

Our biggest change was cohorting for those in elementary. You really only could play with your own class.

> It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this. I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health. However, to propose that forcing (or, at the least, very strongly encouraging) an entire populace into self-isolation would not have negative impacts for a group in one of the most social and formative times of life, is absurd.

It shouldn't be so astonishing. People who wanted to take a laissez faire approach to COVID (especially pre-vaccine) would often incoherently throw literally every idea they could think of against all the mitigation measures, including various mental health arguments. Of course, that approach didn't change a thing except 1) lead to more polarization, 2) harden people against those arguments forever.

COVID was a serious problem, and it's rare that serious problems can be addressed without cost.

COVID was a serious problem, but that doesn't mean any of the mitigation measures were helpful or justified. That's a total non sequitur. Many of the areas which took a more laissez faire approach came through fine.

> COVID was a serious problem

It's still killing >4000 per week just in the USA.

People may rationalize these things because the alternative is to admit that one may have been wrong and/or caused harm to others in the process. People would rather downplay the harms caused by the pandemic to avoid guilt.

I've used that argument and the counter is: depression due to lockdown can heal once lockdown is over. People dying because hospitals filled up and cases climbed is permanent.

Suicidal ideation among kids in the US is up 100%, suicide attempts are up 50%, actual suicides are up 20%.

Dead kids are also pretty &¤#&%#!" permanent.

And this is the thing that's been missing for the past two years: A sensible cost/benefit discussion. Hell, we haven't even acknowledged that every single pandemic rule and restriction and measure has a cost in human life. Instead, we've been getting shitty platitudes about how "kids are resilient", or "it's just two weeks", or "your surgery is non-essential and therefore postponed".

>> [Column A] People dying because hospitals filled up and cases climbed is permanent.

> [Column B] Dead kids are also pretty &¤#&%#!" permanent.

> And this is the thing that's been missing for the past two years: A sensible cost/benefit discussion.

So, which is higher: Column A or Column B? I haven't checked the numbers, but I'd be astounded if there wasn't at least and order of magnitude more COVID deaths during this pandemic than total number of teen suicides (i.e. all of them, not just the increase due to the pandemic).

These children will never fully recover their formative years. Also, what impact, if any, did the treatment of young people have on the ultimate death toll from this virus? We will never know, but I am afraid if we could, we would not like the answer.

Closig schools has been the core of the US pandemic influenza control strategy since the second Bush administration. There were detailed simulations showing that shutting schools is the only single intervention that can significantly affect R: schools are the best place for spreading influenza due to the very small spacing between seats in classrooms, the number of students who pack into schoolbusses daily, etc. (However, the studies were done before masking everyone was a possibility.)

Most parents with k-8 children should know this first-hand. Memory is fading but as I recall, two weeks after school year started we could pretty much expect a bug to come home. (continuing through out the winter months of the school year)

Sweden mostly kept primary schools open, and didn't even impose mask mandates on students, and they came through fine.

Acknowledging the damage done by isolation doesn't mean you have to believe it was the wrong choice. In my country a million people have died of covid even with the isolations.

Was it "worth it"? I don't fucking know and I don't believe anyone else does either. Would it have been better to just let it rip and hope for the best? How many more would have died that way, and would our mental health be better for it? If it was, could we even live with that? If there was a button that would cure my depression and kill a stranger, I wouldn't push it.

EDIT: ok yeah I get it consensus is we should have pushed the button you can stop telling me now.

Would they have died anyway, or did they die with Covid? It’s the repeated question, together with “Didn’t the flu cause as many deaths”, and even if it was actual death, it’s a transfer of years of life from the young to the elderly.

Curiously the elderly seem to feel the most robbed. In my family, the young locked down while the elderly went about as normal.

Discussing this today, the predominant feeling amongst the over 70 cohort was that they had at best a few more years of health with everyone and didn’t want to spend that in lockdown.

In the beginning, it was widely accepted that the virus would spread and ultimately infect most people. Yet, two weeks to flatten the curve somehow turned into two years of flailing about aimlessly with ineffective measures.

> Yet, two weeks to flatten the curve somehow turned into two years of flailing about aimlessly with ineffective measures.

1) Whenever someone mentions "flatten the curve" in that way, the implication always seems to be the CDC et. al should have had this novel disease figured out from day one, but that's an unreasonable expectation.

2) A big reason those measures were as not as effective as they could have been was that people were actively undermining them pretty much from day one.

> people were actively undermining them pretty much from day one.

As they should. I didn't sign up for two years of this nonsense. We didn't know any of it would work but we knew it could cause serious harm to society yet we choose to it anyway. I'm not some lab-rat who is forced into participating in an uncontrolled experiment performed by a few cherry picked "experts" and their political backers.

Most people are absolutely not at risk of serious covid issues. We knew this even in the first month or two of this adventure but it was taboo to discuss. You'd actively be shamed, mocked and humiliated if you ever discussed actual public data showing covid isn't the monster the media and self-appointed "experts" made it out to be.

It scares the crap out of me how many people willingly played along for two years. Do people not question anything?

>> people were actively undermining them pretty much from day one.

> As they should.

And we can thank those people for giving us one of the worse outcomes.

> I didn't sign up for two years of this nonsense.

Hate to break it to you, but that's just not how the world works. You don't get to chose if you participate or not.

> And we can thank those people for giving us one of the worse outcomes.

It takes a lot of hubris to suggest these mitigations did a damn thing. And it takes a lot of mental gymnastics and rationalization to completely ignore their very significant costs to society. We fucked kids, fucked small business owners, fucked hospitals, fucked the poor and working class, enriched the wealthy and old while stealing from the poor and young.

Life is too short to obey the orders of a handful of unelected, cherry-picked "experts". None of them could ever say the crap they had us do would work. We still can't say any of it worked in a meaningful way.

People flushed two years of their short fucking lives down the toilet to participate in an uncontrolled experiment... naw... I'll opt out, thanks.

No they are right, you can't opt out. You can only act. And others are free to label your actions selfish, cruel, or evil as they judge them.

And I can label their actions as selfish too. Expecting society to shut down for years because they are afraid. I could also label people who kept kids out of school as incredibly cruel.

Also arrogant and naïve… thinking humans could somehow control or conquer a highly contagious respiratory virus outside of a vaccine. All these NPI’s are nothing more than modern rain dances. Humans tricking themselves into believing they can control Mother Nature… that they even have a right to try…

> And I can label their actions as selfish too. Expecting society to shut down for years because they are afraid

And if you base your labels on BS like your second sentence, people should probably put little stock in your judgement. You don't have any idea what you're talking about.

Oh really? Because that was what was expected by all these “experts”. We were told to focus on Covid spread to the exclusion of literally everything else. And yes, lots of people were afraid. The only reason to support these measures are fear and a blind trust in authority (and a very narrow and cheery picked band of authority, mind you). Every argument for lockdowns and restrictions are ultimately based on one or the other.

Dismiss my argument all you want. I’m arguing from good faith. It is very possible to see what happened in the last two years and disagree with every bit of it. The idea everybody was supposed to just fall in line and agree with “the narrative” is wishful thinking. People should disagree and you should listen to them…

Maybe you are the one who is wrong.

> The only reason to support these measures are fear and a blind trust in authority...

Nope.

> Maybe you are the one who is wrong.

No, not if you believe the kind of stuff I quoted above.

Do you also feel life is too short to wash your hands now and then?

There is a pretty big difference between washing your hands and having the government shut down your means of earning a living, or not being able to take your kid to a playground for more than a year…

It's no joke, I know people in their early-mid thirties ( they were somewhat late bloomers from career growth being stunted from the recession) who decided just to not have kids all together as a result of the lockdown/drama it's kind of sad

> It scares the crap out of me how many people willingly played along for two years. Do people not question anything?

As one person that played along, my understanding was that by playing along, all of that would end earlier and we could go back to normal faster. This didn't happen, so I have learned my lesson for the next time.

> As one person that played along, my understanding was that by playing along, all of that would end earlier and we could go back to normal faster. This didn't happen, so I have learned my lesson for the next time.

If that's the lesson, it should be formulated: we can't have nice things because those will fuck it up, so I might as well join the assholes and let the fabric of society get a little more tattered.

That is indeed another way to see things. What would be your suggestion instead, keep being exploited by assholes all my life? Unfortunately I can't run solely on moral high ground, so this is not really possible for me.

I am not implying that. The expectation was that there would be a pandemic and that, unfortunately, a lot of people would die. The idea was to avoid preventable deaths stemming from an overwhelmed healthcare system. It then somehow turned into full blown moral panic, attempting to minimize deaths from infections at almost any cost - something that we never did, and still do not do, with any other disease.

> attempting to minimize deaths from infections at almost any cost - something that we never did, and still do not do, with any other disease.

So first off no, not "at almost any cost." The largest, most effective mitigations were never on the table: wind down the entire global economy into "safe mode" and focus only on life-making activities; send all workers home except the truly necessary. Instead we sent home office workers while labeling as essential the food, delivery, and retail workers we forced to continue to serve them.

Second, "we never did, and still do not do, with any other disease" well we fucking should. Every single preventable death is a tragedy of cosmic magnitude, and much disruption is justified in avoiding even one.

> Every single preventable death is a tragedy of cosmic magnitude, and much disruption is justified in avoiding even one.

Couldn’t disagree more. Death is inevitable, and most death is preventable. There is absolutely nothing cosmically tragic about death.

Government imposed disruption is only justified to a very measured extend. Think “seatbelt laws” and environmental and product safety regulations.

We are endowed by our creator with inalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Most choices a human makes along that path will involve a measure of risk of shortened lifespan.

The purpose of life for most people is not to live as long as possible. Certainly a government has no right or moral authority dictating that to anyone.

And the most glaring point is that even if the goal is altruistic (i.e. extend lifespans) the implementation was a ineffective totalitarian shit show than could actually in net total cost more quality adjusted life-years than it saved.

> people were actively undermining them pretty much from day one.

This is what actually fucked the US and led to the million deaths there. I live in Ecuador and we had a bad go in the first few months of the pandemic, with near total lockdown and many deaths. Afterwards though, we went very hard with masks and reasonable restrictions on numbers of people in buildings at once and the cases/deaths have been very steady and controlled since then. Yes, masks really do work, if everyone actually wears them, our numbers have proven this. The biggest restriction has been that schools have shut or gone remote during the entire pandemic and only recently have in-person classes started back up. The US seems to have had it much much worse and it seems to be entirely self inflicted. I personally don't understand why the US didn't just give up after a few months once it was obvious that people wouldn't really do what it takes for success. It looks like the US has stayed on a path that everyone hates, but keeps getting no benefit from.

Ecuador had a much higher death rate than other countries which took less extreme measures. Sweden, for example, never shut down primary schools and never had much in the way of mask mandates yet they came through much better.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

I don't think you'd want to compare sweden to all other countries, just ones with similar resources and cultural trust in authority.

Doesn't seem that great in that light actually. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01097-5

> Many elderly people were administered morphine instead of oxygen despite available supplies, effectively ending their lives.

Seems like sweden took some pretty extreme measures just not in the direction of preserving life.

Sweden had fewer per capita deaths than many other EU member states. You haven't provided any evidence that extensive pandemic control measures actually helped.

Pointing to EC as "the" way to handle this is not my point. The fact is, there were many paths available to the US that could have helped keep that million people from dying. We proved that masks work if people use them, that is a fact. Other strategies also can work. My point is, if the US could have gotten its people on the same page and actually done something rather than self sabotaging itself, it would be a completely different story. As it stands, it failed at this, and it has kept its ineffectual policies in place, to the detriment of social cohesion, but sadly not the virus.

> Whenever someone mentions "flatten the curve" in that way, the implication always seems to be the CDC et. al should have had this novel disease figured out from day one, but that's an unreasonable expectation.

Then they shouldn't act like they have all the answers if they have no idea what is going on. This is exactly what all the "conspiracy theorists" expected, and it's exactly how it played out.

The CDC has seriously destroyed public faith in the government generally by pushing "two weeks to flatten the curve" and "100% effective vaccines" when, in reality, they did not have a handle on the situation.

Health authorities pretty much everywhere have been quite clear about data and conclusions constantly evolving, but people just don't read or process that far. Or only read the "CDC recommends XYZ" headline and then complain that nobody told them that this isn't 100% valid-forever fundamental laws. It's been staggering to see how many people will claim "but they never said this might change" while you can just go back and look at what actually was written at the time and see that it was of course said that things can and will be adjusted as the situation changes.

We all know the conclusions are constantly evolving. That's why all "health authorities" are useless. Being an authority in general doesn't help in a novel situation that they're unable to understand correctly.

> We all know the conclusions are constantly evolving. That's why all "health authorities" are useless.

That doesn't follow. Evolving conclusions are what you get and almost want (even better would be someone who guesses everything correctly beforehand, but ... that's not how it works) in a changing situation. That doesn't mean people drawing the conclusions are useless, nor do their conclusions have to be perfect to be useful - as long as they are better than the ones the people who'd have to draw them instead would. And at least around here, given the choice between politicians deciding with or without the health authorities involved, yeah, it's pretty obvious which one I want.

And besides, that wasn't even the point of the comment chain, but rather people claiming that conclusions are constantly evolving was somehow hidden.

They didn't need to have it figured it out, just recognized that they didn't know what they're doing, were unable of being any help, and stayed quiet instead of blindly making things up.

> They didn't need to have it figured it out, just recognized that they didn't know what they're doing, were unable of being any help, and stayed quiet instead of blindly making things up.

You're basically advocating that they stop doing their jobs, and let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Think of it this way: Imagine you're a general in a war. It would be the most reckless kind of incompetence to refrain from giving any orders until you worked out a surefire plan to defeat the enemy, since that kind of inaction is literally a recipe for defeat. In the real world, to actually solve real problems, it's pretty much a requirement for responsible people to take action based on incomplete information and imperfect understanding.

That is not a useful analogy. Dealing with a public health crisis is not at all like fighting a war. Doing nothing is always an option, and is often a better option than acting on guesswork.

> A big reason those measures were as not as effective as they could have been was that people were actively undermining them pretty much from day one.

Communism is a wonderful thing, if only everyone and their dog were on the same page, we'd all live enlightened lives with every need fulfilled. It truly is great, on paper. "Scientific communism" has proven it, being an academic discipline for decades.

A big reason it has not happened as it could was that some people were actively undermining them pretty much from day one. They didn't want to see the light. So the implementors were forced to isolate, expulse or exterminate those people. Just 0.1% of population. And then another 0.5%. And then a few. And then some more.

So in reality, we have to deal with "just a few more bad apples" forever, having Gulags and Holodomors, and the communism itself "just around the corner" permanently.

For me the parallels between that and covid measures are crystal-clear. If something only works with 100% uptake and participation - the in reality it doesn't work. And all the "unintended" negative outcomes are on the conscience of those who pushed for these measures.

> People would rather downplay the harms caused by the pandemic to avoid guilt.

The pandemic had nothing to do with keeping kids out of school for more than a year. That was all humans doing. The virus didn't wake up some morning and tell us to shut down down schools.

Lockdowns and government caused virtually all of the lasting side-effects from the last two years.

It is my strong opinion that history will not look kindly to almost every single thing humanity did the last two years. They were humans at their absolute worst... Making knee jerk decisions based on fear and panic never end up well...

My state in Australia had a lockdown where for a while it was not permitted to go outside for fitness by yourself. I can't imagine the physical and mental health damage this caused.

Had those in Canada too. There seemed to be the medical based rules (distancing, limited occupancy, washing hands) which made sense. And then there were the "me too, more must be better" types. For example, closing down provincial parks seemed odd. These parks are not rabbit warrens; but no, you can't. Going for a walk down a trail in an urban woodland park where distancing is not an issue - nope. What is/was sorely lacking was a common (medical) sense approach to the rules and I think that's what tipped the scale for some (many?) folks that there was overreach with the lockdown rules.

What state was that? I don't think we had that in NSW, or at least I never took notice of it and always just went out by myself for a walk even during the hard lock down days.

South Australia. It was actually only for a few days but they had planned to do it for much longer before they worked out the whole lockdown was based on a lie from one of the cases.

>Lockdowns and government caused virtually all of the lasting side-effects from the last two years.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/

>Fatigue, cough, chest tightness, breathlessness, palpitations, myalgia and difficulty to focus are symptoms reported in long COVID. It could be related to organ damage, post viral syndrome, post-critical care syndrome and others.

I agree with you, except, generally, when we say the pandemic caused something, we are referring to both the spread of the virus and the human and social response to it, including lockdowns. The lockdowns absolutely were avoidable and more harmful than helpful.

What a load of crock. My elderly father, terminal illness, was hit by the lockdown days before coming to visit us. He DOES NOT CARE about covid. He is dying anyways.

Then they wouldn't let our young son go play with friends or play on beach. This is lifetime impact stuff at 2-3.

When I wore an N95 mask I was told over and over it didn't help. Hello, it's an airborne disease, why wouldn't my mask help?

So we can't wear an N95, we CAN go to crowded grocery stores, we CAN'T go outside to the beach (huge volume of onshore fresh air and sunshine) and school is remote only (for a 2 year old this is TERRIBLE).

Worst of all, despite the talk of being "science driven" they have not been releasing age banded fatality rates by variant and a timely basis so folks can make informed decisions.

We got fed so much BS that the hit is going to be very long lasting in terms of credibility of the "establishment".

My father has a phd in a hard science. My wife has a phd in a hard science. If you are losing these folks, you are losing LOTS of folks.

That makes me wonder, what IS the fatality rate for 5 year olds. Seriously give me a table. Is it lower than just random accidents per 100?

Finally, why can't I wear a mask (N95 with ventilator) that is comfortable so easier to wear and protects me. ANd others can make their own decisions. Instead we spent huge amounts of effort trying to force people who may not have believed in mask wearing to wear masks, but these masks (cloth / surgical) were I suspect largely ineffective.

How do masks work on the flu virus but not on COVID

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4

It sounds like you have been dealing with a lot of ineffective health theater. That is unfortunate. But that's a very different thing from "cloth/surgical masks are largely ineffective".

Sure.

We are told that an N95 with a vent is "ineffective" and prohibited, but someone wearing a bandana is OK. That at least was the guidance for a long time.

So based on this, the cloth masks, bandana's, gators etc need to BEAT an N95 with an exhalation valve to be considered effective.

Of course, it turns out that an N95 with an exhalation valve is VERY good at protecting the wearer, and AS GOOD as all these others at protecting others.

"The findings in this report are based on tests of 13 FFR models from 10 different manufacturers. These findings show that FFRs with an exhalation valve provide respiratory protection to the wearer and can also reduce particle emissions to levels similar to or better than those provided by surgical masks, procedure masks, or cloth face coverings."

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2021-107/default.html

"An N95 filtering facepiece respirator will protect you and provide source control to protect others. A NIOSH-approved N95 filtering facepiece respirator with an exhalation valve offers the same protection to the wearer as one that does not have a valve. As source control, findings from NIOSH research suggest that, even without covering the valve, N95 respirators with exhalation valves provide the same or better source control than surgical masks, procedure masks, cloth masks, or fabric coverings."

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirator-use...

So, my elderly parents trying to fly United Airlines are BANNED from wearing a comfortable N95 with an exhalation valve that would do a GREAT job protecting them. Instead they are told to wear a surgical mask (which does relatively little by comparison to a well fit N95) especially on INHALATION, where a surgical mask often passes air long the sides. And they sit next to folks barely wearing a light cloth mask that may no almost nothing.

Again, why not let folks make their own decisions? Concerned? At high risk? Let my elderly parents wear an N95 with exhalation valve, they can wear that comfortably for 3-4 hours if needed. Instead it is this theatre just as you describe, but based on so little actual research (and so unwilling to change with new research) that it is crazy.

As you can see, there is no more discussion possible with people that caught the mental version of Covid, much to my dismay

I literally cite the CDC on masks with exhalation valves, and this is the "mental version of COVID".

I get it, I've been lectured to by folks like you repeatedly. And this is where public health credibility goes to die.

There seems to be a crazy desire of public health folks to preach and be surprior, put down others, even though their advice has been so wrong, and many of them are wrong on the actual science, the risks, the tradeoffs.

you misread me, or I wasnt clear. I think we just lived through 2 years of collective madness.

And this doesnt bode well for us if we ever get a real pandemic going (black plague style).

As I understand it, masks with exhalation valves only exist because that design works fine for masks intended to protect the wearer from spray-paint (and similar industrial hazards). That design was never meant for use in a respiratory pandemic.

There's no shortage of normal (no valve) N95/N99 masks.

> based on this, the cloth masks, bandana's, gators etc need to BEAT an N95 with an exhalation valve to be considered effective

A good point, but it's not the only perspective on this.

If we consider that only some proportion of the population will be wearing N95/N99 masks, it benefits everyone to insist that those masks not have valves. Of course, if people aren't fully aware of the rules ahead of time, this is undermined.

Or a less utilitarian angle: to deliberately build (or buy) a mask with an exhalation valve is to deliberately introduce a feature which increases risk to other people, for no appreciable upside. There should be real push-back against these designs.

Seems to me the airlines/airports would do well to offer a vending machine of non-valve N95/N99 masks at reasonable prices. Do any of them do that?

And this is the issue. Folks like you are fighting a (losing) battle to force people to wear uncomfortable N99 masks on flights.

Heads up, plenty of folks have masks off their nose, off their mouth while eating, are wearing surgical masks, cloth masks, bandanas and other stuff that does nearly nothing.

"it benefits everyone to insist that those masks not have valves."

False. I can wear an N95 with a valve for hours. As a cited, the risk to OTHERS is as low as any of the allowed alternatives. More importantly, compliance is much easier.

And N95 with valves despite your claim that it doesn't work against things like covid DOES in fact do a fantastic job protecting wearer. That is why the CDC itself had to do a total uturn here and now both recommends them and specifically suggests they should not be blocked.

There should be real push back against this totally backwards approach in public health which by the way is not working, which is to try and force places folks in places like Florida and Texas to comply with absolutely over the top requirements (hint, they wont) while at the same not allowing folks like myself who want to wear a high protection comfortable mask (N95 with exhalation) to do so.

The public health folks and scientists truly lost their minds on this. I can go into a resteraunt TODAY and see people with NO MASKS AT ALL. And yet my N95 with an exhalation valve is considered some high crime, despite no actual real science saying it doesn't work or that it increases others risks.

And the upside is comfort, which is real. Why do folks NOT want to wear masks? Public health folks don't stop to ask this. One major reason if you would stop and ask is COMFORT!

Cloth / surgical masks are largely ineffective. I recommend you listen to the explanations by infectious disease experts Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Michael Osterholm.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=F...

Thanks. Hospitals are still requiring you take off N95 masks and put on surgical masks.

It's very annoying (having been in them a bit recently for elderly relatives, new baby etc).

Does it make sense to specifically focus on Covid response here? By which I mean, is this not really just the same problem of an overbearing system continuing to turn the screws, and now the system input contains the additional stressor of Covid? Some of the response is seemingly necessary, and ignoring the issue is certainly not the answer. But administrators craft obtuse top-down policies, announce "Mission Accomplished", and don't particularly examine their effectiveness from the perspective of those on the receiving end of their blunt tools.

It's the same exact dynamic as how the media scares everyone with sensationalized school shootings, and then schools respond by making kids go through metal detectors and draconian zero tolerance policies and the like (also horrible for kids' mental health). We've built this no-win bureaucracy where the primary dynamic is avoiding any blame. Because if the blame does come, it will itself be merciless and unempathetic, despite how reasonable or well-intentioned an administrator's motive was.

Imagine you spent half the time you were in high school, alone.

I don’t speak for anyone but myself, and I am an extreme outlier. But I would have been delighted. Alone, I could spend my time how I want, learn what I want, and associate with who I wish. There is also a much larger pool of love interests online than offline, especially in small town Missouri.

People just feel differently.

I’m a loner. I’m happy alone with a PC and internet, when it’s my choice.

During the pandemic, I live alone and have had minimal contact with family. Going months on end, lack of sun in northern climate, not seeing human faces in real life… the government said we had stay at home. Nope, I’m going out for a bike ride.

Choosing to be a basement dweller is one thing but this has been close to prison.

It also astonishes me that people put all blame of the pandemic's effects on the counter-measures and none on the pandemic itself. Having seen the situation in Wuhan or Bergamo, fearing about loved ones also puts a lot of stress on kids.

I agree with you: fundamentally a bad thing happened. Mitigating the harm may have been possible to some degree but perhaps a more significant degree of freedom was simply choosing which form the negative consequences would take: more deaths or more isolation / economic problems. Since they are in different units, I’d say it’s subjective how to decide what’s optimal there.

>It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this.

The CDC study was specifically in relation to covid lockdowns. Virtually everyone pointed out how this would happen and that this unprecedented move to lockdown the healthy vs the standard for thousands of years of quarantining the sick. The cost is far worse than the healthcare system melting down. Then again you look at Quebec nurses... they literally went to the United Nations to say they are slaves. Provincial government is doing it to them. Federal government is tyrannical. They had to go to the UN. Insanity how bad our healthcare system is collapsing.

> I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health.

So something that north america doesnt seem to have that most of the world does have... imagine you are poland or somewhere in the middle east. You fear war every single day. People who live there think about having to escape every day.

North America doesn't have that. Nobody fears a surprise war because thousands of nukes will launch out of fear wiping out whoever is attacking. Flipside, Russia's new threat of imminent nuclear war means North American teens will now have to worry about their impending doom.

This return of the cold war will make things worse; not measured in this study.

Lock-downs didn't just have effect on social life.

Young people's education during lockdown have been pretty much written off as a casualty of pandemic. Suspending state testing or admission requirements was just a band-aid solution. Now young people are left to fend for themselves, to try to plug holes in education they received. No wonder their stress levels are high.

Wasn't there a reduction in suicides? Not that that's the only factor when it comes to mental health, but it's probably something to take into account when you talk about the mental health toll of the past 2 years

Total suicides went down, but child and teen suicides are way up, and "deaths of despair", i.e. people drinking or drugging themselves to death are up considerably. So while it's true that total suicides went down, it's masking the reality of the situation.

I agree with your high notes, but also imagine the adults in your life sending you to a place that is unsafe every day. There’s a double edged sword effect of the pandemic here.

Where were children sent that was unsafe? I don't understand your point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895642

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