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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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.

> […] 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.

The necroplutarchy demands its due.

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