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Comment by AIorNot | Hacker News Reader

Well regarding the Western response to COVID and “lockdowns” - Tell this story to doctors and nurses in wards where young people died gasping for breath (so many I personally know of) - of course we needed to lockdown

Insane that a contagious disease directly killed over 50,000 young people (under age 50) in the usa alone and we are still debating if our lockdown response was disproportionate?

It’s simple - people were dying who should not normally be were and the medical community was overwhelmed - we needed to lockdown untill a we knew that an effective vaccine worked or the effective transmission rate declined, or the virus mutated into a safer variant

Wars and terrorism killed far less and the impact was far greater as well

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

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I don't think there is much if a debate. Our lockdown was disproportionate. 50k people died under the age of 50. Some were in lockdown some weren't. How many people committed suicide because of the lockdown? How many were abused because of it? What was the cost of the lockdown? In a single year about 30k people under 50 die due to poisoning(drug overdose or other) and about 20k die from car accidents.

You personally know many young people who died, gasping for breath? I'm so sorry.

However - you can't argue that "we need to lockdown to stop Covid until it mutates". In fact, until recently, the argument I was commonly presented with was "we NEED to vaccinate everyone and keep restrictions so it DOESN'T mutate into a deadlier version!"

Saying that, hard to imagine a deadlier version than the horrible monstrosity that stalked our deserted streets in early 2020.

Omicron and Delta were both more deadly and more contagious than the early 2020 versions of COVID, so you don’t need to imagine.

It was only the prevalence of vaccinations that prevented things from getting much worse. As far as the unvaccinated were concerned, the impact was devastating.

>Omicron and Delta were both more deadly

Just goes to show the difference in public messaging. Where I live, all the headlines said that Omicron and Delta were less deadly (but more contagious). Then again, Delta arrived here just as the vaccination campaign was starting, so where were not many column inches left to discuss the new variant.

>so you don’t need to imagine.

I sure do. I have yet to meet anyone who's had more than flu-like symptoms with any strain of Covid, and I doubt my experience is particularly unique.

To add to this lockdowns saved a lot of vulnerable people from early exposure until vaccines became available. The fact that omicron is now considered mild is because we are facing it while vaccinated.

At least where I live (UK), seems to me that we all sat confined under house arrest while all of the vulnerable old people were discharged from hospitals (presumably, to make space for the tide of sick people that never happened) and gave each other Covid in retirement homes.

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