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Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

What percentage would say there never WAS a crisis (just political bs)? 10? 25? 40? Remember, wishing doesn’t make it so.

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I’d wager it’s a small number of people who thought it was never a crisis. Approximately 1 in 350 Americans died of COVID in the past two years, so most people know someone who died. Personally, it’s hard not to call it a crisis when it hits that close to home.

The places in the world that reacted the least to covid have excess deaths you can barely even tell there was a potent disease. Not a single country that avoided lockdowns is in the top 30 excess death (per capita). So did many people treat this as a crisis? I would say so. Should we have? That seems to be clearly a no.

People are conflating the ideas of it being crisis and that it required government action, or at least the government actions we got.

It is possible for something to both be a crisis and not be something that is handled well by the heavy hand of government.

This feels a little... Too convenient. Would love to see an analysis that covers all confounders.

That is, I'm sympathetic to the idea that a lot of what we did was probably not super helpful. I'm less inclined to believe that a counterfactual world had fewer deaths. Seems more likely that, while we could have protected nursing homes better, most everything else was likely to look very similar to how it did.

I mean, I get the butterfly flapping a wing argument. But in general, large things moving in a direction tend to arrive where they are headed.

> 1 in 350 Americans died of COVID in the past two years

Putting 1/700 a year death from covid into context of our overall mortality rate: 1,027.0 deaths per 100,000 population [0]

I know more under 40 that have died from overdose in the past two years than I know that have died from covid (which is 0)

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

I actually don't know a single young person who died from Covid over the pandemic but I know a few who committed suicide and a couple more who attempted it.

There have been about 24,000 people under age 40 who died from COVID-19 in the US during the pandemic. Suicide data is not available for 2021/2022 yet, but based the age ratio of past suicides (around 50% of suicides below age 40) and the total number of suicides in 2020 (around 40,000), then the number of suicides is likely to be higher than the number of COVID deaths but in the same qualitative arena.

Further apples to apples comparison is tough because kids 0-5 die of COVID but the US does not record any death below age 5 as a suicide.

A related comparison: more school age children died of COVID during the pandemic than have ever across all history died from school shootings.

Overdose deaths are a public health calamity. COVID topped them by an integer multiple.

I think that depends where. In San Francisco, there were more OD deaths than COVID

https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/04/29/fact-check-did-...

Given ~67k deaths under 50 years old total from COVID [0] and over 100k overdose deaths in 2021 alone [1], I'll wager heavily that is not true for the under 50 crowd.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...

Overdoses kill young and middle aged people.

Covid skewed old.

No amount of screeching will change the fact that people are far more mentally prepared for grandma to keel over with little warning than they are to lose a random uncle or coworker.

> No amount of screeching will change the fact that people are far more mentally prepared for grandma to keel over with little warning than they are to lose a random uncle or coworker.

That depends. If a coworker dies because they did drugs, you might say to yourself "I'm safe from that mode of death as long as I don't do drugs".

If a random coworker dies because of Covid that they caught on the job, you might say to yourself "I'm next", the result being existential dread and anxiety.

It's true covid skewed old, but people quote the stats of dead young people in the last 2 years as if people were mentally prepared for that. Overdoses don't kill young families in a matter of weeks, but Covid did. Overdoses don't bring down 43 teachers in a school system over the course of a few months, whose average age was 46, but Covid did that. Covid brought all kinds of unique and deep tragedies that aren't reflected in the stats, and people are still dealing with the emotional fallout.

Again I understand that covid skewed old, but grandma is already dead and has been since before Covid. Now my parents are "old" at 65, but I'm not mentally prepared for them to die at all. If their parents are any indication I still have a good 20 years left with them, and so I get really upset when people try to discount their lives as if they wouldn't be missed if they were to die from Covid, or if somehow that's just nature taking its course. Really this shouldn't be a contest of whose death counts more to society.

> No amount of screeching will change the fact that people are far more mentally prepared for grandma to keel over with little warning than they are to lose a random uncle or coworker.

But public health policy doesn't need to be structured around these gut feelings of whose life is more or less valuable or whose death is more or less expected.

To the larger dialogue about protective measures, I understand the claim that "I'm young, my risk of severe disease or death is low. So I need no precautions." But unless you live in isolation, your infection increases my risk of infection. My protective measures reduce that risk but do not implement. And I have elderly parents, in their 90's. They're vaccinated and reasonably cautious. They're also mostly independent and functional. But they aren't particularly ready to die. So despite the relaxation in required protective measures, I wear an N95 in indoor spaces outside my house so that I don't inadvertently infect them. I've also had encounters where I've been yelled at by random strangers for doing so. Apparently for some, the right to choose is not reciprocal - "I would like to choose not to do [x] but I'd also like to compel you do likewise."

I don't know anyone under 40 who died, period. But I know four people over 40 (actually over 60) who died of Covid in the past two years. Even though they are older, it still felt like a crisis.

I don’t know, I think it depends on how you qualify crisis, and what you deem as an appropriate response.

If we’re trading anecdotes I don’t personally know anyone who has died or even been hospitalized with COVID. I know people who know people who did, but that is a small number and the majority were not likely to live long due to other causes (I do know one of one family member of a friend who was in seemingly good health and was hospitalized).

For my personal health and the health of most people I would say there wasn’t ever a crisis, though the delta wave got closest to being so that also coincided with the vaccine availability which removed any crisis that would have come otherwise. For others who are prone to severe illness it has been a crisis and continues to be. Aside from the political banter that is what has made this so divisive, the real risk and experiences of people can vary wildly.

I also don't know anyone who died from covid. However, any event that overloads hospitals to the extreme that care has to be rationed is absolutely a crisis. This happened all over the country.

We can debate what the appropriate responses to this crisis should have been but it was unarguably a crisis. Pretending otherwise is simply delusional.

Let's try and refrain from strong language such as "delusional" and "unarguably," we'll likely find more to agree on if we do.

But yes, I agree a hospital overloading is a crisis for those providing or seeking to receive care at said hospital. The cause and remediation of said crises are I think likely significantly more involved than just attributing it to COVID. In other words, the crisis of a particular overloaded hospital is not likely strictly a COVID crisis, but rather an issue with how care is prepared for and distributed in general.

This is BS semantic goalpost shifting.

There was a crisis. It had many aspects (medical, economic, social, political) and there were many different methods of alleviating those different aspects.

Claiming "there was no crisis" is simply, factually wrong.

This is a bizarre reply if intended for a reply to what I said. I'm not sure how what I said could be construed as "semantic goalpost shifting" (as I have neither explored the definitions of words nor given an original goalpost to move).

In any case it does not appear as though you are open to reasonable discourse. You have decided on your "facts" and any opposing, or merely appearing opposing even if it isn't, viewpoint is catalogued as "delusional," even though you've offered virtually nothing in the way of an actual argument. So, I guess, you win?

Hospitals have been routinely overloaded by seasonal flu before COVID-19. We just kind of dealt with it and didn't take drastic measures.

https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

You seem to be conflating "overloaded enough to require overtime and additional temporary space to compensate" with "overloaded so that even with overtime and every other tool in our belt we are unable to compensate and have to ration critical life saving care, directly resulting in unnecessary deaths."

Those two aren't really comparable, though the former really should have clued us in to how big a risk the latter was.

I'm not so sure they're not comparable, they certainly seem to at minimum be a gradient of the same curve. "Unnecessary deaths" is a tricky thing to attempt to claim, and you'll need a bit more than shouting into the void to back such a claim up. Indeed you'd need some pretty detailed analysis to claim an unusual number of deaths directly attributable to a lack of available care at facilities typically able to provide said care, specifically because they simply didn't have the resources to administer the care.

In other words, I doubt your latter scenario at the more extreme end of overloading was widely the case (in the first world), perhaps you have some analysis backing it up?

If each person's Dunbar number is 150, then most Americans do not know someone who died.

Even if it was political bs, it became a crisis. We shut down adequate health care for serious health issues like cancer; in favor of covid policies.

Anytime the words “disease” and “reefer trucks” appear in the same sentence, it’s a crisis. People forget that when covid started there was nothing people could do but ventilate and hope. Like sars, the cytokine storm burned out the lungs and that was somewhat age independent. They found anti inflammatories that worked and adapted work from other inflammation diseases to get some kind of treatment.

Then vaccines appeared, and things became more manageable, but up through delta, getting covid was really bad if you ended upon ventilator. The game changed with omicron although even that can affect naive populations. Politicians and pundits trotted out “sacrifice grandma for the economy” but it didn’t really fly. Hope people remember enough from covid to improve aged care and end of life housing.

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