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Comment by chronofar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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