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In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

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Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#121

Post by refurb »

shapenamer wrote: post #84
Tagbert wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There already was a chip on the shoulder of a large number of American and that has been fed and grown by certain media and social channels specifically to undermine trust in institutions and checks on power. The lockdown (that wasn't locked down) was just more fuel on that well-feed fire.

Always blows my mind when people suggest the only reason someone wouldn't trust the US government is because they've fallen for some misinformation. The US government does a great job of destroying trust all by itself.

It's really odd seeing comments on HN upvoted like:

US government overthrew Iran democratic government -> "I know the US is so evil!"

US government secretly injecting US citizens with radioactive material -> "My gosh, what's wrong with these people?"

US government lies about reasons for Iraq War -> "One of the great crimes of the century"

Then someone suggests, that just maybe, the lockdowns weren't based on science and that we should be concerned about the government overstepping and the comments are suddenly -> "Wow, did you forget your tinfoil hat?" or "Why don't you believe in science?" or "Think of the children"

It's really weird. The US gets rightfully condemned for wrongdoings, but then suddenly any suggestion that they did it again is met with violent opposition.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#122

Post by nocoiner »

jklinger410 wrote: post #5

> The American Institute for Economic Research educates people on the value of personal freedom, free enterprise, property rights, limited government, and sound money Saved some of you a click hopefully

Plus the topic category for this piece is “AIER >> Daily Economy >> History >> Authoritarianism”

Lmfao, overreaction much? I suspect Mr. Tucker has never had the misfortune to live in an actually authoritarian society.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#123

Post by heyjamesknight »

somewhat_drunk wrote: post #101
RansomStark wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are comparing those numbers directly, but that's not how you compare those numbers. First the population size, as per the article, was half what it is now. So you can either double the asian flu deaths or half the covid deaths to account for this. That still leaves a huge gap, but this is where demographic analysis comes in. Usually you see this as age adjusted deaths. In this case, the population of the US has b…

>if you take population size, age distribution, and obesity rates into account, I could see the adjusted numbers being close. Those are confounding factors, but I think it's quite a stretch to believe they would provide a 5x adjustment (after accounting for 2x population), especially if you also adjust for the drastically improved quality of and access to healthcare, which would skew the adjustment in the other direc…

Obesity rate is 4X what it was back then. So 2X for population, 4X for obesity, and then however you want to calculate the additional increase for an aging population. 10X ain't that crazy.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#124

Post by less_less »

guimplen wrote: post #10
jklinger410 wrote: post #5

> The American Institute for Economic Research educates people on the value of personal freedom, free enterprise, property rights, limited government, and sound money Saved some of you a click hopefully

Are any of those things bad by themself or in combination?

Property rights are bad.

Not in an absolute sense: property rights are obviously very important to how society functions. But "the US needs stronger property rights" is in general a harmful position. US limitations on property rights are largely to tax the ultra-rich and to limit exploitation and concentration of wealth. For example, tenants' rights are pretty much directly opposed to the landlord's property rights, and tenants' rights do not (IMHO) need weakening in most places in the US, but instead need strengthening.

The same holds to some extent for the other values, but maybe only in context. (Personal freedom to do what? Not to get an abortion...)

Also, we're talking about a website with a front-page article arguing that reparations for slavery + Jim Crow + other racist discrimination are bad, because slavery is "like winning the lottery" for modern American black people. After all, without the system that kidnapped and enslaved their ancestors and then discriminated against their grandparents and parents and still discriminates against them today -- such that they have less income, less savings, worse life expectancy, triple maternal mortality etc -- they probably would have been born in Africa!

You don't need to be defending these guys.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#125

Post by Kbelicius »

Manuel_D wrote: post #43
somewhat_drunk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you believe that 90% of the excess deaths were not directly related to COVID, your implied point falls flat. Edit: There were 1.1 million COVID deaths in the USA alone. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Over the span of 3 years. To put this in perspective a typical flu year claims ~40K people each year. So Covid over this time span killed about 10X as many people as a typical flu year. If you told people "hey, this year the flu is going to be very bad, probably killing 10 times as many people" would the average response be to close schools and many businesses for over a year? Or would the response be to limit lockdo…

So what you are saying is that it was known how many people will be killed by covid-19 before any measures have been put in to affect and that those measures had no influence on the number of those who died? If not, what is the point of your post?

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#126

Post by weberer »

orwin wrote: post #80
Manuel_D wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Ebola virus is not as deadly as COVID because fewer people have died from it? "Deadlier" can mean a whole host of things: infection fatality rate of a disease can be far higher even if the total deatg toll is lower, if fewer people contract the disease.

> So Ebola virus is not as deadly as COVID because fewer people have died from it? Yes? That's the definition, no? Cows are deadlier than sharks, cars are deadlier than planes, even though you're more likely to survive a cow attack or a car crash?

>Yes? That's the definition, no?

No, it pretty much always refers to the case fatality rate.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#127

Post by CalRobert »

mabbo wrote: post #111

> Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity The point of the lockdown was not to entirely stop the spread- that was obviously not happening. It was to slow the spread to avoid overwhelming hospitals. It allowed us to reduce the lethality of COVID-19 by having more resources per sick person.

It also was to increase the number of people who got covid after being vaccinated, instead of before.

Edit - to elaborate, I just mean that it made sense to try to keep infections down and give companies time to develop a vaccine. Not sure why this struck a nerve.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#128

Post by unethical_ban »

gizmo wrote: post #113
rewmie wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can probably extend that to your family, maybe a bit further, but at a certain scale it just becomes impossible (and undesirable) because of individual variations in occupation, lifestyle, risk and infinitely many other factors. And because someone has keep the wheels of society turning. There was no lockdown for supermarket cashiers. I don't understand what point you tried to make. There were naturally essenti…

Lockdowns were sold to the people as something that would stop the spread. If you can get every infected person to infect less than one other person on average, you can stop the spread of an infectious disease completely. At least in theory. There are two variables here. How infectious the disease is and which percentage of the population can isolate themselves at home without society breaking down. If everybody stay…

Your very first sentence is wrong.

It was to slow the spread. It was as the parent comment said - to slow the rate of hospitalization so the medical system wouldn't collapse and have needless excess death from lack of capacity.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#129

Post by saiya-jin »

mabbo wrote: post #111

> Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity The point of the lockdown was not to entirely stop the spread- that was obviously not happening. It was to slow the spread to avoid overwhelming hospitals. It allowed us to reduce the lethality of COVID-19 by having more resources per sick person.

Yeah but there were and are nasty side effects to this, covering literally hundreds of millions or rather billions of people in some form. Missed social interaction is super important for child development, but how do you want to measure that, how many harm points do you assign to this versus some old or frail person dying. And look at ie India, delaying the height of infection didn't help them at all, estimated numbers of dead there are what, 5 millions? Let's not focus on just few wealthy nations, human life is human life regardless of origin.

Also psychical stress from prolonged withdrawal from most if not all social interactions. We fucked up economy pretty badly and still seeing the results of it, made millions of financially very vulnerable people lose their job or family business overnight. And so on and on. Typical HN crowd is probably the least impacted so we are not a good sample to discuss this objectively.

In number of deaths alone yes it was without question the best course of action. The bigger picture, I am not so sure. And cases like Sweden show that restrictions were mostly stupid flexing of control powers by politicians who were generally during crisis clueless as fuck, and the harder they went the more they polarized non-trivial part of society. Again we still see the effects and they are not going anywhere, ever.

If I would be and old and frail person in high risk category, I personally would take all effin' risks and don't screw up childhood (and conversely rest of life) of my grandkids. But that's just me.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#130

Post by xadhominemx »

heyjamesknight wrote: post #123
somewhat_drunk wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if you take population size, age distribution, and obesity rates into account, I could see the adjusted numbers being close. Those are confounding factors, but I think it's quite a stretch to believe they would provide a 5x adjustment (after accounting for 2x population), especially if you also adjust for the drastically improved quality of and access to healthcare, which would skew the adjustment in the other direc…

Obesity rate is 4X what it was back then. So 2X for population, 4X for obesity, and then however you want to calculate the additional increase for an aging population. 10X ain't that crazy.

Why does it matter? When crafting the policy response, what matters is how many people will actually die, not some theoretical obesity-adjusted cfr
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