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Comment by awestroke | Hacker News Reader

Fourth leading cause of death. Wow. But we decided as a society that, enough is enough, economic output is more important

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There is no conclusion that all of those deaths were due to COVID, and the article is irresponsible for implying as much even after repeatedly saying that attributing all the excess deaths to COVID is jumping to conclusions.

Some other things that have happened since before COVID which would cause an increase in pre-COVID forecasts include a war between the world's two global superpowers, a global recession and disruption of the supply chain, a massive shortage of healthcare workers in many countries, and an enormous spike in usage of fentanyl in the developed world.

COVID plus any or all of those factors are contributing to excess deaths.

Your points of a global recession, disruption of the supply chain and shortage of healthcare workers could quite easily be attributed to covid because excess deaths during the initial outbreak contributed to massive burnout and a loss of workforce.

As much as hospital administrators love to blame COVID for underpaying and overworking healthcare professionals, a person dying because they got a late cancer diagnosis because they couldn't see a family doctor for 6 months because of a shortage caused by burnout is too far removed to attribute to COVID in good faith.

From everything we know the opposite is true in that deaths directly due to COVID are undercounted, not overcounted. Multiple states in the US were directly seen undercooking the numbers so that it looked better. See here [1]

Also even in the scenario you post as a semi-gotcha moment wouldn't be counted as COVID-related, but I would hope it would be obvious to you that certain fast growing cancers have significantly better prognosis if caught early.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236613

Yup. Anyone in power has an incentive to say “we’ve got this under control, trust us everything’s fine.”

This is true at every level. From downplaying mistakes in nursing homes in NY, to fudging numbers in FL, to Trump wishing we’d stop testing, to Biden proclaiming victory upon the vaccine rollout, it’s all the same incentive.

Why?

I don't see it as being far removed.

And it wasn't just medium-long term issues like cancer diagnosis that was impacted but very time sensitive medical emergencies also, like heart attacks. The pandemic increased ambulance response times, time to emergency room beds, stretching of healthcare resources over emergency departments, even things like the added PPE requirements slowed everything down.

The direct losses between the war and fentanyl won't account for much.

100k of those are drug overdoses in the US (the place with by far the highest rate of fentanyl use). There is a similar number of killed in the first year of the Ukraine war. The economist is pointing out the estimates are off by 3M lives, so those two directly account for less than 10%.

> a war between the world's two global superpowers

Yeah I don't think Russia qualifies as a superpower anymore...

Pretty sure Ukraine isn't either.

Ukraine is definitely not a world superpower, no.

Economic output is also what keeps people fed and the lights on, it's not really something people are going to tolerate turning down indefinitely.

Governments can just keep printing money forever, no one has to work. /s

I mean how many more years should we have been locked down?

Kind of surprised that society was able to make the decision. It seems reasonable, right?

Is it worth a 50% gdp hit to reduce cases by 10%?

How many deaths are caused by reduced economic output?

> Is it worth a 50% gdp hit to reduce cases by 10%?

It is not. Fortunately those numbers aren't remotely close to reality.

Let's assume that eradicating covid (if somehow possible) via lockdowns and distancing would cost a 25% quality of life decrease for 2 years. That's equivalent losing 1% of all current human life.

Or perhaps we would not eradicate COVID, but we'd avoid dying from it, and we'd have reduced quality of life forever.

I feel very torn on this topic. I still wear a mask in situations like a crowded airplane and likely always will. I was for much tighter lockdowns and am vehemently pro-vaccine and even people I highly respect cannot really convince me that school shutdowns were a mistake. I'm also really worried about long COVID and am worried what might happen with repeated infections. Yet I personally lost three loved ones during the pandemic. One person was my grandma. She was in her late nineties, had advanced dementia and died of a COVID infection. The other two were friends who died from causes related to mental health and I think there is a good chance they'd still be around right now if it wasn't for the pandemic and the isolation that came with it.

But lockdowns don't solve it. Just delay it. Unless you're going to implement global lockdown (including all the developing countries), which will, almost guaranteed, cause more death than any natural disaster.

And the vaccines didn’t stop the spread of the virus. So there never was a exit strategy other than basically what we did. I’m quite confused what the COVID forever die-hards would have us do

I'd recommend looking into the "swiss cheese" model of risk reduction. The idea being that each method of prevention has holes in different locations, but combining some or all will be better at stopping infection than each on their own.

https://www.coxhealth.com/newsroom/preventing-covid-19-using...

as a forever covid die-hard, in my ideal world I'd like to see:

better mask education - the US did an absolutely awful job at recognizing that all masks are not created equal, specifically that cloth and surgical masks are not as effective as KN95 or N95 masks

free mask distribution - not everyone can afford to purchase new, high quality masks for regular use.

free covid testing - if we're not giving people free access to testing, then how can anyone make a proper risk assessment of current covid levels?

mask mandates - this does not have to be legally enforced by any means, but a mandate would show folks that masks are encouraged and needed at this time. Some people wearing masks is better than no one.

indoor air testing/filtration improvement - for everyone who can't or won't wear masks, having minimum air quality levels for large indoor spaces/events would also help cut down on transmission.

there's probably some more here i'm forgetting, but my point being is that an individual doesn't have to do everything here for us to decrease transmission of covid, nor do we have to shut down society to have that same effect.

That's not so unreasonable given significantly reduced economic output for long enough would inevitably result in a significant number of deaths that wouldn't have otherwise occurred (and yes, this would also be an argument for not being overly hasty in winding down fossil fuel usage, but given there's almost no indication any country in last 20 or 30 years has been willing to do so at a "hasty" rate, I don't think it needs to be made). Plus measures to prevent Covid spreading had a lot more downsides than just being a brake on economic growth. Ultimately you could see it as some sort of balance between aiming for "quantity" vs "quality" of life, though of course many have had the quality of their lives significantly disrupted by becoming ill with COVID.

I don't think you intended economic output as a strawman, but it seems like everyone replying to you turned it into one.

There are an awful lot of public health measures not being taken that would have little to no impact on economic output, yet, society still can't seem to be bothered.

Or, living is more important

Yes, now return to office. /s

At this point, the only people dying are the ones who refuse to get vaccinated.

absolute rubbish. your hate is blinding you.

quite wrong! as of august 2022, the majority of deaths, at least in the US, were among the vaccinated

https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/why-do-vaccinated-people-re...

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