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The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness

economist.com

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Re: The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness

#41

Post by logicchains »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #26
tobasq wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really imagine a USA that didn't lock down doing as well as South Korea and Taiwan? Look at our numbers with the lockdowns. The Asian countries were only able to do what they did because they were prepared, culturally and logistically, for a viral epidemic before one arrived.

It certainly DOES appear that when lockdowns go in place in a state or country, the new cases start to go down - usually dramatically. At this point, we probably have well over 100 examples of this. I'm interested if there are any counter examples. Are there? But on the same hand, there's not any controlled experiments going on. Has this actually been statistically proven? For example, major populations centers in Fl…

There have already been studies that found lockdowns don't help with mortality (which is what matters, not cases), like https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... and https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...

Re: The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness

#42

Post by clairity »

nl wrote: post #27
clairity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't give up. there's plenty of us who actually have assessed the risks and weighed them apropriately, using our own brains rather than relying on others to assuage our fears. almost none of the publicly pronounced mitigations have much mitigative effect. the most reasonable mitigation is sensible distancing when you're going to spend extended time with non-household members in tight quarters, but that's not big eno…

Lockdowns work, but they have to be hard and you can't stop until you have suppressed the virus. Victoria, Australia was a great example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54654646 Opening up before suppression without strong contact tracing (or vaccine) just seems like the worst of both worlds: you have the horrible effects of a lockdown, and the knowledge it's just going to come back.

there’s no concrete evidence that lockdowns themselves were the principle mitigative effect, because so many different mitigations were thrown at it in hopes at least one of them worked. more likely is the general reduction in social contact brought on by uncertainty and amorphous (and media-fueled) fear and anxiety, i.e., social distancing.

perhaps in an ideal world, your scenario may have proven effective, but we don’t live in that world. this pandemic wasn’t severe enough to warrant such drastic measures in our imperfect world (as opposed to something akin to the bubonic plague, where nearly everyone would have voluntarily locked down).

Re: The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness

#43

Post by oliv__ »

Phrodo_00 wrote: post #19

> It is as though Latin American countries had the wrong kind of happiness before 2020, says Mr Helliwell—a happiness sustained by people’s close social connections, not by high levels of social trust. Why is high social trust the 'correct' kind of happiness? I'm willing to give leeway and interpret this as the wrong kind of happiness for the situation, though.

God forbid people have close social connections. Trust in the government and experts is all you need to be happy!

Re: The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness

#44

Post by zozbot234 »

Phrodo_00 wrote: post #19

> It is as though Latin American countries had the wrong kind of happiness before 2020, says Mr Helliwell—a happiness sustained by people’s close social connections, not by high levels of social trust. Why is high social trust the 'correct' kind of happiness? I'm willing to give leeway and interpret this as the wrong kind of happiness for the situation, though.

In a well-functioning society, lots of close social connections should build and engender high social trust. When this fails to occur, it implies that people are getting socially marginalized in some way and it's important to understand why.

Re: The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness

#45

Post by chii »

tjs8rj wrote: post #33
chii wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> didn't really have any substantive effect it did, but the effort was not sustained, nor done consistently enough in the USA to have had return on the investment/cost. I would argue that a bigger, more stringent lockdown, for at least 1-2 months, would have produced vastly better results. It's not like you can half-mitigate the pandemic with a half-lockdown.

I mean, that’s life? Sure, doubling my money in every investment is great, but unrealistic. Plenty of strategies work as long as every does it and everything works perfectly. The problem is finding a strategy that works in the real world. Lockdowns failed because they weren’t the right solution, because reality is what it is and they weren’t calibrated for the reality that locking down everyone’s lives for a month si…

> let people make their own risk calculations based on the available evidence and their own situation

and there-in lies the heart of the issue - the assumption that most people are able to make a good assessment, and that the assessment takes into account the impact on a societal level, rather than an individual level.

This simply does not happen. People are selfish. People only look out for themselves. Therefore, it is required that in a pandemic, authoritarian rules and strict adherence to public safety be applied. Even if some individuals believe they can remain safe, even if they can take precautions. Unfortunately, this mindset does not exist in america - not everyone would follow this sort of authoritarian rule. And thus, the lockdown is half-assed and ineffective.

And not to mention that there's been misinformation being spread, leading to people to believe that they shouldn't be locked down or wear masks.

Re: The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness

#46

Post by rhino369 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #26
tobasq wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really imagine a USA that didn't lock down doing as well as South Korea and Taiwan? Look at our numbers with the lockdowns. The Asian countries were only able to do what they did because they were prepared, culturally and logistically, for a viral epidemic before one arrived.

It certainly DOES appear that when lockdowns go in place in a state or country, the new cases start to go down - usually dramatically. At this point, we probably have well over 100 examples of this. I'm interested if there are any counter examples. Are there? But on the same hand, there's not any controlled experiments going on. Has this actually been statistically proven? For example, major populations centers in Fl…

I don't think you need much evidence to believe that lockdowns are temporarily effective. But I'd be curious to see evidence on whether they are effective at reducing overall infections over a longer period.

Because it seems like they just delay (for only a matter of weeks) what is going to happen anyway.

Most of the United States really had two significant waves. NY and other early hotspots never had the summer peak. The summer peak states never had a huge outbreak in spring because they locked down two months.

The states that managed to not have several outbreaks until fall (California and the Planes states) all got hit much worse.

It all seemed to even out.

Re: The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness

#47

Post by siquick »

nl wrote: post #30
ilikehurdles wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taiwan has temperature checks to get anywhere and very effective contact tracing to segregate all potentially infectious individuals in quarantine. Coughs and fever, even if unrelated to covid, result in the individual having to spend some time in a hospital room. Its borders are almost fully closed to outsiders. Not only that, a culture of mask wearing has been normalized throughout east Asia for ages. Do you honest…

> Do you honestly, honestly believe that Americans or Europeans at any level would have been able to transition to and adhere to such strict restrictions? Australia adhered to much stronger restrictions. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54654646

It's also much easier to close both country borders and interstate borders here. That's the main reason we've been successful along with people's general willingness to follow rules here.

Re: The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness

#48

Post by irrational »

JSavageOne wrote: post #4

The most annoying thing to me is that when one critiques lockdown policy (which by the way is unique to the west, Korea for example never had a lockdown [1]), one is labeled as selfish, anti-science, and lumped into the Trump-supporting right wing camp. It feels like having an honest discussion isn't even possible without being downvote bombed to the point where your comment gets censored (especially on extremely one…

> life has become a miserable shadow of what it once was

Eh, I think it depends on your personality. As an introvert, I’ve never been as happy as this past year. It has been fantastic and I am dreading having to work in an office again, social distancing going away, perhaps masks going away. I try not to think about the end of the pandemic since it just makes me depressed.

Re: The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness

#49

Post by throwitaway1235 »

Anyone else surprised with how effective American media has been in burying the large anti-lockdown protests throughout Europe?

If you're an average American discouraged by some of the more draconian health measures here, you'd feel pretty isolated and hopeless, not knowing how much solidarity exists throughout the world.

Re: The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness

#50

Post by rhino369 »

chii wrote: post #21
clairity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't give up. there's plenty of us who actually have assessed the risks and weighed them apropriately, using our own brains rather than relying on others to assuage our fears. almost none of the publicly pronounced mitigations have much mitigative effect. the most reasonable mitigation is sensible distancing when you're going to spend extended time with non-household members in tight quarters, but that's not big eno…

> didn't really have any substantive effect it did, but the effort was not sustained, nor done consistently enough in the USA to have had return on the investment/cost. I would argue that a bigger, more stringent lockdown, for at least 1-2 months, would have produced vastly better results. It's not like you can half-mitigate the pandemic with a half-lockdown.

Lockdowns will only work long term if they are used to reduce the level of infection to a level that can be controlled by other means (testing, tracking, quarantine, and social distancing).

US and European public health agencies don't seem up to that task. You could lockdown until US numbers are literally 0 and we'd just grow exponentially again after we got the first case from incoming visitor.

And I don't think a 2 month stringent lockdown would be enough to totally eliminate the virus once its in every county in all 50 states. There aren't enough federal agents in the world to weld rural Kentuckians into their houses like was done in Wuhan.

Other than Wuhan, have lockdowns ever really stopped--over the long run--a large outbreak?

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