A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
We'll be counting the costs of this hysteria for decades to come, when the lives of those "saved" are long over.
Have you considered the millions of bereft "young" people who lost a parent, for instance? Or how many orphans it has created[1]? The pandemic has been an unfathomable disaster on all fronts, for everyone. - A bereft "young" man.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/covid-19-...
The question is whether the measures deployed to combat it caused more harm, overall, than good.
In the UK, children died during lockdown, who may have lived had they been in regular contact with school who could have noticed abuse.
Cancer patients found their cancer could have been caught earlier.
Mental health conditions have surged amongst young people, including those such as anorexia.
There was never a public debate on the full picture. It was either support every, often illogical, policy, or you're labelled as an "antivaxxer" or "granny killer".
I'd like to push back on your framing of this.
Whether you think everything was "hysteria" or not, whether you think the measures taken in the wake of Covid were net-good or not...
Either way you look at it, the ground truth is that there was a pandemic, which would inflict some amount of damage no matter what. You might think that a less "hysterical" approach would've caused less overall damage, but damage would've been done either way.
When a tornado strikes a city (for example), the government response can be better or worse, but at its base, it's an act of nature that causes some amount of damage no matter what.
Press X to doubt (the point being argued).
Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40. And not to forget long covid's disastrous effects on all ages.
I agree that the entire situation could have been better managed (for example it took till December 2020 for the Dutch gov to mandate masks in public areas, the night curfew timings were odd), but I disagree that a proper thorough response wasn't required.
After 27 months, I know of literally no one younger than 40 who was even hospitalized due to Covid-19. I know a total of 5 people who were briefly hospitalized from it, all older than 60. I know of (very elderly family members of acquaintances) 4 people who died from it.
I live in an area where there are 3M people within a radius of 50 miles. We had no mask mandates, no lockdowns.
I keep hearing how much Covid has affected/dangerous for the younger populace (necessity for vaccination, tele-education, school masking, etc…) but from my own experience, I didn’t see it.
And by remotely and possibly dangerous, I mean more of a risk of death than any other possible event or disease that can happen to healthy people in that age group.
But you can’t, because that data does not exist. Covid was simply not dangerous for healthy people under 40.
[0] "And for those ages 15 to 24 and 25 to 34, COVID-19 wasn't in the top five in 2020 but ranked as the fourth leading cause of death in both age groups in 2021." - https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/covid-was-the-leadin...
I don't know what qualifies technically as a hysteria, but locking people in their homes for months for fear of something less dangerous than a typical daily activity sounds like a promising candidate.
The important number is what percentage of all deaths in the <40 age group was Covid 19. Just saying it was fourth, well, that’s just trying to ascribe significance over what might be an insignificant number…just for the purpose of creating alarm to justify an unpopular and frankly damaging mitigation strategy.
[0] Study https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[1] Table (long link!) https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/intem...
>> Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40
Which as a editorial on this comment from the commenter above them:
>>> A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
If you don’t like how I framed the question, perhaps do this instead—provide the statistics that tell us where Covid sits on the danger and mortality scale for healthy people under 40. Then tell us why you think that rate of danger warrant those “protective” measures that adversely affected the young.
I don’t think Covid was a threat that warranted the sacrifice of the young to protect the old and I think the stats prove that out.
Liver disease kills more 35-44 year olds according to the amac.us source.
https://freopp.org/comparing-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19...
https://amac.us/estimating-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19-v...
I expect the number of younger people dying from missed cancer screenings etc. from Covid policies is higher.
The rate of mental health referrals amongst young people also surged.
https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/the-pandemic-has-...
If that were true, it would have happened everywhere. If we steelman the COVID policy case by looking at Sweden, which should theoretically be the worst hit place, what we see is that there was no excess death for under 75s in 2020.
There have been many claims that COVID kills the young. But these claims must be exaggerated because it doesn't show up in the data, at least not for Europe. If we look at Euromomo, so incorporating countries with far harsher restrictions and worse healthcare systems, then we also cannot see any mortality under 40:
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
The first age range where mortality is seen is 45-64 years. But even there, we are talking about a change from ~9k deaths a week (normal) to ~11k deaths a week in each wave, which for a place the size of Europe is hardly a crisis level change.
COVID killed pretty much NONE people under 40 unless they had other serious health issues, which were really cause of their death.
Official Czech (11M population) gov stats for ALL people who were COVID POSITIVE when they died (it just means they died positive in those 2+ years, not that COVID caused their death):
age group - total number
0–14 - 9
15–24 - 10
25–34 - 82
35–44 - 278
https://onemocneni-aktualne.mzcr.cz/covid-19/prehledy-khs
So massive number of deaths - 379 people younger than 44 in two years in 11M country who died while tested positive including (mostly) terminally ill patients, car accidents etc. You better don't wanna know how many people under 44 died from other causes in last two years.
never mind that fact that covid policies made those peoples lives a living hell anyway. Absolutely crushing loneliness because visitors werent allowed and they werent even allowed to see their families as they were dying. Unfathomably cruel, and for what purpose?
That's not what happened. What actually happened is that we sacrificed everyone's future for some short term "freedoms".
Unless we find a proper vaccine, today's children will live their whole life with this disease. Spending an extra week sick each year, accumulating organ damage and maybe dying at the age of 50 after their twentieth bout of covid.
The COVID-19 pandemic has so far followed a similar trajectory to the 1889 "Russian Flu", which some believe may have been the emergence of human coronavirus OC43 (now one of a number of endemic common-cold-causing coronaviruses).
I can see why people worry about this stuff given the deluge of fear-based messaging we’ve been subjected to, but suspect that the reality is far more boring.
2020: "It's no more severe than a cold"
2021: "Coronaviruses do not mutate" and "You won't catch it more than once"
2022: "Viruses become less deadly over time... so if we just bear with it a bit longer..."
> 2022: "Viruses become less deadly over time... so if we just bear with it a bit longer..."
I can't remember anyone saying that viruses don't mutate.
And nobody is currently saying "bear with it a bit longer". The media has just moved onto Ukraine as the next crisis fit for news saturation.
As long as healthcare systems are not being overwhelmed, there is no rationale for any further restrictions.
We just accept it as part of this risk of living, like using motorways, which are one of the biggest killers amongst younger cohorts.
In 2020-21 there were plenty of articles claiming stuff like:
"The coronavirus is not mutating significantly as it circulates through the human population, according to scientists who are closely studying the novel pathogen’s genetic code. "
You can google the phrase for the source.
That phrase quickly "mutated" into "Coronaviruses don't mutate" on social media. I have examples, but I don't know how to link them while maintaining privacy.
Risk is a fact of life. And arguably your wish for everyone to wear masks and have compulsory vaccinations focuses disproportionately on one particular, small, risk, in comparisons to other much larger risks, such as travelling on public roads.
Road traffic accidents are a bigger killer of young people, and yet no-one is calling for the speed limit to be drastically reduced.
I think the preoccupation with COVID comes from particular human fear of viruses (invisible, lack of control), rather than an actual measured response assessing all the risks we deal with everyday living normally.
Actually they have been, and fairly successfully - speed limits have been gradually and significantly reduced over the last few decades in built-up areas in many parts of the world. And I totally agree we need to do more to contain the risks of driving.
However, infectious diseases ARE qualitatively different from risks from traffic accidents, as the latter can't spread exponentially.
As far as there being "no reason" for any restrictions goes, the reality is there's no way to be sure the healthcare system won't reach a point where healthcare workers are constantly overworked just in order to be able to provide the extra care required for infected patients. If cases are not steadily decreasing (or at steady but negligible levels), that risk always exists. All restrictions/regulations have some balance of pros vs cons, and it's the job of governments to determine for which of them the balance is sufficiently on the "pro" side to enact and enforce them.
> However, infectious diseases ARE qualitatively different from risks from traffic accidents, as the latter can't spread exponentially.
Which is no longer the case for COVID, hence there no longer being a rationale for restrictions.
> there's no way to be sure the healthcare system won't reach a point where healthcare workers are constantly overworked just in order to be able to provide the extra care required for infected patients.
Then that's a case for increasing resources to a level of care that is deemed appropriate by society.
Not turning society itself into a sick patient.
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/what-to-expect-fro...
Published July 6th.
The only people saying this were vaxx aficionados and Covid certificate promoters who were trying to convince the public by claiming “you only need to get vaccinated once, the certificates will have unlimited validity”
Then all of a sudden “oops actually you need boosters, the virus magically mutated, literally noone could have predicted that!”
Just to take mainland China as an example:
1. Economically, China has outperformed almost every country during the pandemic. It was the only major economy to grow in 2020, and it had solid growth in 2021.
2. We always hear about lockdowns in China, but most of China hasn't experienced a serious lockdown since early 2020. Shanghai went from April 2020 to April 2022 without a lockdown. Then it had one severe lockdown (ironically, triggered by a failed attempt to follow a "living with the virus" approach). Most cities have not had the type of lockdown that Shanghai had. Schools, restaurants, bars, etc. have been open throughout the vast majority of China for most of the pandemic.
There are three approaches to dealing with the virus:
1. Do nothing: 0.5% of your population dies.
2. Mitigation: social distancing, closures or restrictions for certain businesses, mask-wearing. Lots of people die, but hopefully a vaccine comes out before most people are infected. Most rich countries did some variant of this. Notably, after the first wave, the US was much closer to the "do nothing" approach, and lost 0.3% of its population.
3. Zero-CoVID: maximum effort to eliminate the virus, followed by much lower-intensity measures to prevent the virus from regaining a foothold. Long-term, this requires border quarantine for people coming in from abroad, regular testing to catch new outbreaks quickly, and extremely good contact tracing and localized lockdowns to nip new outbreaks in the bud. This policy has to be continued at least until there are vaccines or effective therapeutics.
> A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
From an East Asian perspective, this is an incredibly immoral thing to say. Old people built the world that young people live in, and they deserve respect and care. That might be why most of East Asia followed either a zero-CoVID policy or a much more rigorous mitigation policy than the West.
> By the end of May [2022] pupils in 13 countries were still enduring some restrictions on face-to-face learning—among them China, Iraq and Russia.
Your suggested approaches aren't reflective of current circumstances. We have vaccines; yet, lockdowns affecting early education are still in effect.
What fraction of Chinese students are currently doing in-person learning?
This information is available - there are regular updates from every Chinese city about CoVID measures.
The Economist is just too lazy to actually go tabulate the data, so what we get instead is a vague statement about "enduring restrictions," which affect some unspecified number of students. Are we talking about 10% of students, 1% of students, 0.1% of students? Hint: it's probably nearest to the final figure.
It's not just The Economist that is lazy when it comes to reporting about China. Most Western outlets are. The standard of reporting is incredibly low, and it is colored by some massive biases. For people who actually know something about the country, it's incredibly frustrating.
I don't have the figures. You're right.
But, I'm betting against your gut feeling that the impact to the CN school population is a rounding error when mega-cities in CN are shutting down their schools due to CV19.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-shanghai-shuts-sc...
But to put this in context, Shanghai makes up 2% of China's population.
China reopened schools very early in the pandemic, all the way back in March-April 2020. That's because it ended (as in, zero new infections) its initial outbreak very quickly. Schools have been open in the vast majority of the country for the vast majority of the time since.
Acknowledging the impact as absolute and sizeable (millions of kids in Shanghai, CN alone) undermines any argument that the impacts are muted and immaterial (See your percentage basis rationale.) Tracing to the original thread, you're acknowledging the significance (and claims by the Economist) , which you opposed earlier.
> That's because it ended (as in, zero new infections) its initial outbreak very quickly.
I don't know man. That "zero new infections" might be true, but it's hard to take China's self-reported figures credibly. See this study showing how CN advertised a death/infection rate ONLY of 1 per 100,000 [0] when all peers are orders of magnitude higher. CN's claims are statistical anomolies.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
That being said, I am not sure why are school still closed there. In other countries in the SEA region, they are being reopened?
Also why medicare is the US makes no sense to me.
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-covid-19-more-de...
Many mistakes were made with COVID response.
Part of the problem is that humans are short-sighted, and humans of modern technological society have an even shorter attention span, hence it's not obvious that the actions of today lead to problems of tomorrow. It might seem inconsequential to be obese today, but problems of varying degree are almost inevitable down the road. Maybe it's cardiovascular disease, or wear on joints, or cancer, or sleep apnea, or diabetes, or whatever. These things aren't trivial, but humans are mentally adaptable and can get used to anything, whether it's enslavement or the disrepair of their own bodies.
It's been distressing to me when some individuals I know who have bought into fat-positivity have suggested that there's actually nothing wrong with being fat and that it's a "sliding-scale", as if obesity can only possibly be a bad thing at the point of immobility. In reality, any amount of obesity can be a sign of dysfunction. But to suggest this is now considered offensive by some, such to the point that the media won't touch it with a 10-foot pole and even many doctors have stopped taking the weight of their patients.
If people are going to play the "if it just saves one life" card when it comes to measures against COVID, then they'd better fucking stop living in a fantasy land and consider whether the lack of health of the population is causing excess early death.
Or, you can work to turn the us into a place similar to the rest of the world where there is less profit made from people’s health. I would think it useful to be a startup that didn’t have to worry about providing health insurance or for workers to know they don’t face disaster when laid off.
My grandpa got taxpayer funded dialysis at 95+ while I was offered defrosted cardboard pizza for lunch everyday, and would have had to pay for it.
As someone currently on the line between young and old, I get that.
Just would like to point out that older people tend to vote much more than younger folks.