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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

>The scientific consensus is that countries that took a much more proactive, aggressive approach were far more successful in preventing people from dying

This isn't the consensus at all; the data shows that overwhelmingly lockdowns etc. had no positive effect on overall mortality or even a slightly net negative one. That's why New York had a higher fatality rate than Florida even though Florida had an older (and hence more vulnerable) population. They also had a devastating effect on childhood education/development outcomes.

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> That's why New York had a higher fatality rate than Florida even though Florida had an older (and hence more vulnerable) population.

New York had a higher fatality rate for the first 2 months, when COVID was new and nobody knew how to treat it. After that Florida had a higher rate. The overall fatality rate in Florida passed that of New York about a year ago.

Here is a graph of the overall COVID deaths per 100k for Florida and New York from the start of the pandemic through the first quarter of this year [1]. I've also included a couple of other large population states (California and Texas), and Washington.

I included Washington because I'm in Washington and my cookies make that site default to including Washington in all the graphs and I was too lazy too remove it. :-)

Note the "Show" drop down below the graph. You can use that to add the numbers for regions, top 10 or top 25, bottom 10 or bottom 25, greater or lass than 5 million population, and others, to get a better idea of how various states did.

Use the "Data" drop down to switch to cases instead of deaths, or to show weekly or daily rates instead of cumulative.

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...

It's very common for discussions on this topic to only look at one particular factor and use it to fit some narrative one believes to be correct. Mentioning the difference in population age while ignoring things like population density or different climates is a good example of this.

To this day it seems most people are misinformed about the WHO's statements regarding lockdowns.

The WHO's position was that the total closure of businesses and public areas was a tool that could be effective early on in a wave of infections, but governments should recognize that it came with a terrible cost in terms of increasing poverty and other social problems.

They also repeatedly stated that the half-assed "lockdowns" implemented by most jurisdictions (hey guys let's close the pool but we'll reopen it on Wednesdays and Fridays, also restaurants are delivery only for nine months) were next to useless.

Basically, they said you had to go all-in, do it early on, and make it brief or it wasn't worth it.

Not once have I ever seen the nuance of their position accurately reflected in the media or in statements by politicians and governments. It was all 100% left vs right tribe wars / oh look libs are stealing our freedoms / here's another dunk on Trump / Americans of all stripes hating and blaming each other. Millions are poor or dead because we all failed.

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