151–159 of 159 posts
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Because the adverse effects came from the pandemic, and lockdowns were merely a mitigating tactic with similar adverse effects. When people are sick, they'll stay home, not work and isolate, lockdown or no lockdown.
So they didn’t suffer the same adverse effects.
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You can’t seriously tell me that I’m making a bizarre strawman argument and then proceed to repeat the exact thing I’m criticizing. It’s not “simple math”. Lockdowns weren’t just to “extend life of a few 80 yo”, even though I personally think it was a worthy “trade”. What do you think would have happened without lockdowns? How many months of “the best years of their lives” would young healthy people have lost to self…
Why do you think that this does not come down to simple math? The lockdowns either had a positive or negative impact on total QALYs, this is quantifiable. And even if the outcome was truly positive, was it truly worth the financial cost? Current research seems to indicate that we vastly overpaid in terms of $ per QALY.
That’s the quid here. What you think would have happened without lockdowns and letting a highly contagious, severe disease run without control.
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Both accurately describe the situation.
Obviously I disagree, and I find it strange that you tried so hard to distance yourself from anti-vaxxers and freedom convoy members in your earlier comment when it seems clear that you agree with them.
Vaccines are good, vaccine mandates I don’t care about as long as the vaccines are readily available.
Why are you trying to project these extremist points of view onto me?
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This would have been a useful comment two years ago as well. Perhaps that it is not consistently used or applied is a problem?
It seems to be a constant truism, and yes it's not consistently applied, (e.g war on drugs), but what are you suggesting here? Fairly sure by any reasonable measure of QUALY, COVID has been a bigger problem than any other public health crisis since AIDS.
Leadership has handled all quite poorly it seems
Wow 9 million a year die prematurely. The environmental crisis is manifold: we have the destruction of species and habitats, the global warming problem, and now also just trash - overuse of plastics is a huge problem, air pollution is pretty terrible.
I really don't think we should call the "environmental crisis" a "crisis". For example, smoking probably causes more deaths than Covid. So, while it may be perfectly true that things like smoking and pollution are bigger public health issues than Covid, we never spoke of a "smoking crisis", and justifiably so. The thing that makes a crisis into a crisis is that it's highly discrete in time and there is a temporally v…
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For the COVID stuff... the worst thing was the communication failures and outright lies all around. > It was very clear early on masks might help, until health experts chimed in with their poor messaging saying masks don’t work. The administrations (not just the 45th, we had this shit worldwide ) suddenly realized that they had no stockpile of masks and other PPE, and instead of communicating to the people and admitt…
> The administrations (not just the 45th, we had this shit worldwide) suddenly realized that they had no stockpile of masks and other PPE, and instead of communicating to the people and admitting fault for about three decades of globalization gone bad How is that the fault of globalisation, and how is globalisation the fault of current governments? For reference, France had mask and PPE stockpiles for the swine/bird/…
Specifically for Germany, the last 16 years had seen a Conservative-led government under Merkel which had done virtually nothing to react to a number of analyses and warnings (e.g. after the OG SARS/MERS pandemics) that the pandemic and other crisis preparation was inadequate - after the German reunification, the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia and the subsequent end of the Cold War, a lot of the stockpiles that Germany held had been torn down and sold off.
As for other governments: Sometimes one has to admit as a politician, that the country has failed, even if the blame actually lies on a previous administration, and promise that at least the current administration will learn from the failure and make things better.
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Why do you think that this does not come down to simple math? The lockdowns either had a positive or negative impact on total QALYs, this is quantifiable. And even if the outcome was truly positive, was it truly worth the financial cost? Current research seems to indicate that we vastly overpaid in terms of $ per QALY.
Again, the question is “What do you think would have happened without lockdowns?”. Most of the research you mention, from what I’ve seen, doesn’t take into account the amount of damage that no lockdowns would have caused, not only on “life of old people” but on everyone, and not only from direct effects of the disease. That’s the quid here. What you think would have happened without lockdowns and letting a highly con…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7499782/#CIT001...
These studies do consider the alternative of “no lockdowns”.
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Again, the question is “What do you think would have happened without lockdowns?”. Most of the research you mention, from what I’ve seen, doesn’t take into account the amount of damage that no lockdowns would have caused, not only on “life of old people” but on everyone, and not only from direct effects of the disease. That’s the quid here. What you think would have happened without lockdowns and letting a highly con…
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ijcp.13674 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7499782/#CIT001... These studies do consider the alternative of “no lockdowns”.
Things they do not take into account:
- The effect of a saturated healthcare system on the treatment of other diseases and accidents.
- Non-linearity of the death rate. The more people are sick in the hospital, the less resources there are and death rate skyrockets.
- The effect on the economy of thousands of people unable to work at the same time, due to being sick or having to care for sick people
- The mental health effects on people surrounded by sickness.
- Self-imposed quarantines and lockdowns.
- Possible public order breakdown with the combination of stressful situation plus reduced government strength due to COVID.
I mean this with no offense, but thinking that the only "bad" outcome of not having lockdowns is "a few more people die but that's it" is stupid. You should think seriously about it. There was no pretty way to come out of the initial wave of COVID. Lockdowns were awful but I really prefer them to the alternative. In fact, I would have preferred them to start earlier. If the lockdown had started seven days earlier we probably could have shortened by a month.
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Might seem meta but by bringing this up you nailed it. This uncovers the pattern in use. The favorite trick for population behavior design. If social engineers exists, then this is the technique they are advising the ones in power to use the most.
I mean, there are real things that are harmful where the impact can pretty much only be demonstrated in a statistical sense. Balancing harms like those against other outcomes is why we have politics.