Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 159 posts

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#101

Post by gjulianm »

oneoff786 wrote: post #98
Robin_Message wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CFR was something like 1% early on, and higher in Wuhan where there was a partial collapse of health systems. World population is >7 billion, so 1% gets you 70 millions deaths. If hospitals collapsed and treatments hadn't been found, a not inconceivable 2-3% fatality rate would get us to "hundreds of millions". (This estimate is unrealistic in other ways though, e.g. communities would begin imposing their own and hoc…

No it wasn’t. The samples just weren’t random samples.

Non-random samples get you to up to 10% fatality rate. I have the data for my region and in march-april 2020 the IFR was 10-15%. Of course, that was due because there weren't enough tests and only the ones that were really sick entered the statistics. But for the original strain, IFR was around 1% and that number was pretty consistent among a broad number of studies.

Also, take into account the amount of diseases that are getting late treatments due to healthcare saturation. I don't know of any formal studies but you only need to talk with any doctor to see that they're consistently seeing diseases in later stages and therefore harder to cure.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#102

Post by rosndo »

gjulianm wrote: post #91
gyulai wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will never know since we can't measure the magnitude of an outcome that never happened. Adverse effects from fearmongering, however, did happen.

But we know what happened even with actions taken. In my city all hospitals were saturated, there were so many dead people that the army had to help and move corpses to an old ice rink. And that was stopped only by a full lockdown. I don't need to measure the exact magnitude to know that without taking any measures, it would have been terrible.

Just because your city isn’t equipped to deal with an unusually high amount of deaths in a pretty way does not mean that the lockdowns saved more quality adjusted life years than they cost.

A year of life is worth far more when you’re 20 than when you’re 80. If the people saved by lockdowns were primarily old people with a few years left to live it would be pretty clear that the lockdowns were a net negative.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#103

Post by ben_w »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #31
tazjin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that! No places that dropped mask mandates have made a law against wearing masks. Just leave the decision to individuals.

A few countries in Europe ban face coverings in public. Mainly driven by fear of people wearing burkas.

At the start of this, I saw a claim that New York failed to repeal their no-face-coverings requirement when making the new masks-are-mandatory requirement.

(No idea if this was accurate or a colossal misunderstanding of how things work, but the claim was made).

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#104

Post by Retric »

jillvs34 wrote: post #62
londons_explore wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose a system where deaths are statistically assigned to causes. Eg. if a person dies of lung cancer, then we roll a dice and say "theres a 1 in 6 chance that was due to pm2.5 emissions". If the dice rolls a 1, then we look around the town for sources of pm2.5, and we find that 1/6 comes from a candle factory. We roll another dice, and if that comes out with a 1, then we say "This factory emitted air pollution t…

Then, the candle production was moved to China. The end.

In the US we don’t think of pollution as that bad specifically because we dealt with so much of it. In an unregulated country you get events like the Great Smog of 1952 in London which killed 4,000+ people and made another 100,000 sick, and then boom Clean Air Act 1956.

There are finite number of countries and they eventually focus on pollution after people build a lot of factories in the country. Even China is starting to focus on air pollution because they don’t have a choice.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#105

Post by BiteCode_dev »

pjc50 wrote: post #39

Meta-discussion, but I think "statistical deaths" - deaths where the causation has to be inferred, rather than being completely obviously monocausal - have been a big feature of quality of life improvement in the 19th and 20th century, but are now running into an informational problem. Namely that you have to believe the statistics in order for the process to work, but it's increasingly common to lie with statistics.…

> it's increasingly common to lie with statistics.

I'm pretty sure it has always been the case: ""Lies, damned lies, and statistics" can be traced back at least as far as 188x.

Besides, the chain of lies is super long. Sample selection. Data collection. Data analysis. Reporting. Publishing. At each steps, so many things can go wrong: errors, agenda, corruption, bias...

In the case of Covid, we already have plenty of terrible communication from the entities at play, so at this point, it's kinda hard to have an informed opinion.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#106

Post by gjulianm »

rosndo wrote: post #102
gjulianm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we know what happened even with actions taken. In my city all hospitals were saturated, there were so many dead people that the army had to help and move corpses to an old ice rink. And that was stopped only by a full lockdown. I don't need to measure the exact magnitude to know that without taking any measures, it would have been terrible.

Just because your city isn’t equipped to deal with an unusually high amount of deaths in a pretty way does not mean that the lockdowns saved more quality adjusted life years than they cost. A year of life is worth far more when you’re 20 than when you’re 80. If the people saved by lockdowns were primarily old people with a few years left to live it would be pretty clear that the lockdowns were a net negative.

> Just because your city isn’t equipped to deal with an unusually high amount of deaths

Nowhere in the world was equipped to deal with the incredibly high amount of deaths that happened, nor with the incredibly high amount of sick people.

> does not mean that the lockdowns saved more quality adjusted life years than they cost.

Yes, because the death of loved ones, the sickness and long-term effects of COVID, the collapse of healthcare, the sick leaves of work and the self-imposed quarantines would not have had any effect in quality-adjusted life years.

It's incredibly naive to think that life would have continued as usual without lockdowns. I mean, most people were going to go on lockdown regardless. We all knew people getting sick, going to hospitals and not being able to receive care, family members and friends dying... It wasn't fear-mongering, it was a genuinely scary experience. I don't know if you lived in places that suffered the worst of the pandemic or not, but it definitely doesn't sound like it.

> A year of life is worth far more when you’re 20 than when you’re 80.

A month of lockdown is worse than an 80 year old (who otherwise might live some years) suffocating to death alone in a hospital?

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#107

Post by tim333 »

hughrr wrote: post #5
ElectronShak wrote: post #2

Another lockdown possibly ? /s

Lockdown was bliss for pollution here in London. Air smelled totally different. We don’t want more lockdowns but we need to fix society so we don’t have to travel so much on a daily basis.

While I'm skeptical of the UK govts 2030 ban on selling combustion engine vehicles, I think going electric may the answer to London air quality.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#108

Post by syshum »

So let me guess, the "Climate Crisis" is now going to be used as a justification for draconian authoritarian government policy, regulation, and laws. or worse we will new see heads of State, governors etc, just declare "states of emergency" to implement "action" based on the "climate crisis" with no legislative involvement at all.

We have seen this with COVID, using the justification of "saving lives" now we are seeing the foundations laid for transforming constitutional republics in to Dystopian "forever in emergency" Technocracy of "Trust the Experts" dictatorships

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#109

Post by ben_w »

severino wrote: post #87
penjelly wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

our brains are wired to read faces because weve been doing that since we were apes, theres no way masks dont have a negative psychological and social impact on our lives when used longterm

That's interesting. However, it's not like we're not reading faces all the time anyway, even if we use masks like we've been doing lately. Family, friends, internet, videocalls, remote meetings... I suppose the impact could be greater for kids in school ages, but I wonder what effects could the long term use of masks of those last 2 years produce in our lives.

I doubt masks are even all that important with regard to ability to read faces, because eye muscles are at least as important as mouth muscles in displays of emotional affect.

You can also see this in the difference between Eastern and Western emoticons, the former may use :) as smileys while the latter uses ^_^

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#110

Post by MattRix »

peakaboo wrote: post #37
severino wrote: post #10

Maybe we can keep using masks? Now that we already got used to them, we may reduce the effects of pollution with good filtering masks. Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't address what's causing the pollution in the first place.

Not all of us are used to them. I think they are absurd, and I'm never going to live my life wearing a mask. It's completely unnatural.

All clothing is completely unnatural.
Post reply on HN