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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

That's a strange article. They seemed to have started with a conclusion and looked for supporting data.

They don't seem to have controlled for reduced physical activity. They even seem to claim obesity is a result of reduced social contact. That's a stretch.

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That doesn't seem like the correct reading to me. The health consequences of isolation appears to have its own body of research. The article summarizes and cites these, but doesn't appear to be intended to engage with the question of what the health consequences of isolation are, since those are argued or established elsewhere.

So the question is how bad were lock downs for health, not if they were bad.

And anyway, reduced physical activity is one such consequence and it's not clear why you would control for it.

As an individual, your social isolation and your physical activity are both independently under your control. So it's useful to know their relative impacts on mental health.

Suppose it turned out that, when controlling for physical activity, isolation had no effect on health. Then, in the next pandemic, you should mostly focus on exercise. Or if isolation is more important, then you should focus on that.

Agreed. Over a million dead and zero processing time to grieve, and morgues overflowing such that temporary freezers are used to store the dead.

[sarc] Not sure what about that could cause anxiety or depression in anyone, they just needed to hang out more. [/sarc]

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