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Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

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Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#71

Post by partyboat1586 »

chaostheory wrote: post #24
eric_b wrote: post #9

Lockdowns are terrible for human mental health. We're not meant to live that way. I mean, we put people in prison as punishment because it sucks. I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely. We know a lot about COVID now - who's most vulnerable, how likely people are to die, etc. What staggers me is that huge groups of people are…

Yeah, let's throw out all the data just because it disagrees with our personal beliefs

If I do a sum and it comes out as something I don't expect I let my intuition guide me to check the sum to ensure no mistakes were made, I don't just accept the answer.

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#72

Post by throwaway0a5e »

zhoujianfu wrote: post #5

I wonder if this can be treated as a little bit of an unscientific UBI study? Can we conclude from this that well-being levels would overall improve with a UBI as well?

You can treat it that way you want but it's not going to wind up with UBI looking good.

On the economic side:

Huge sectors of the economy being shut down or running at reduced efficiency for possibly a year or more are basically the apocalypse for UBI because any UBI that is more than temporary fundamentally relies on the surplus generated by the working to support the non-working. UBI needs money going in to balance the money going out and the pandemic severely constrained the in-flow.

On the social side:

Almost nobody is going back to school, pursing the arts or any of the other good things they're supposed to start doing at scale when relieved (in full or part) of the need to work because of the pandemic. What they are doing more is drinking silver bullets after an exhausting day of setting off fireworks (a form of recreation I fully endorse). That's not exactly the vision of what people will do in their free time most UBI proponents seem to have.

Normal times with the occasional financial panic or bust in select industry are a much better argument for UBI than the current pandemic.

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#73

Post by UncleOxidant »

cookingrobot wrote: post #55
zaroth wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the lockdowns just lengthen the duration of the pandemic and the ultimate endpoints are nearly identical? Some amount of lengthening is essential to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, of course. In many lockdown environments, the target case numbers are much lower than necessary for that goal, if not zero.

That would be true if there was no vaccine coming and everyone was going to get it eventually. But if we expect a vaccine sometime in the next year or so, we can try to minimize the number of cases and deaths until then. So far about 1.5% of the US has tested positive for it, so maybe 2-10% have been exposed. If we can keep that under 20%, that will be a lot fewer deaths than if we let it run free to herd immunity le…

Exactly. And given that many who have had covid-19 have permanent damage and/or longterm ongoing symptoms it's best to try to minimize the number of people who get it before a vaccine becomes available. A significant number of people with longterm disability caused by covid-19 would also damage the economy.

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#74

Post by qubex »

bitbuilder wrote: post #52
qubex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lockdowns are terrible for human mental health That’s exactly what this study is disproving. At the very least, this data is showing something that is well-known in behavioural circles: that once the threshold of a radical change is overcome, people begin to habituate to it and regress towards the mean. > we put people in prison as punishment Lockdown with family in one’s dwelling isn’t prison. Imprisonments is abo…

>Lockdown with family in one’s dwelling isn’t prison. You seem to be forgetting about the sizable percentage of the population that lives alone in their small dwelling. I know a lot of these people and my own anecdata indicates a lot of them are having mental health issues. >Imprisonments is about much more than a loss of mobility. Well sure, but I think it would be hard to argue that confinement and the resulting la…

I appreciate your nuanced reply, and I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of your observations. I am not propounding the view that lockdowns are or would be beneficial, nor even dismissing claims that they might be mentally challenging. I’m just rankled by the dismissive tone of OP and maybe I’ve become hypersensitive to some of the crazy conspiracy-theory-level stuff that’s been going around.

I’m from Italy, though I was in Malta during the time of the latter’s lockdown, so I had it easy while also being intimately exposed to the consequences of one of the West’s harshest and earliest clampdowns. It’s not an experience I would wish on anybody and it’s something I really really hope won’t happen again.

But by analogy to another famously exponential process, when the neutron flux gets frisky you have to damn the consequences to the the power grid and scram in the control rods into the reactor while you still have time to do so. People will suffer mentally, but at least they shall mostly live to tell the tale...

I have not forgotten that house arrest exists and that it is a form of punishment. Restricting mobility most definitely is literally restrictive and the trade-off of public health and rights & freedoms should not be taken lightly. Governments literally ‘grounded’ their citizenry for months on end. It’s not quite as unprecedented as we think (the same policy was widely used during the Spanish Flu pandemic, once it was publicly admitted to be an issue after the War ended).

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#75

Post by [deleted] »

eric_b wrote: post #9

Lockdowns are terrible for human mental health. We're not meant to live that way. I mean, we put people in prison as punishment because it sucks. I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely. We know a lot about COVID now - who's most vulnerable, how likely people are to die, etc. What staggers me is that huge groups of people are…

[deleted]

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#76

Post by Johnjonjoan »

qubex wrote: post #21
bluntfang wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We're not meant to live that way. I mean, to abstract this a little bit...were we meant to spend 8+ hours a day, 5 days a week, making money for other people simply because they already had money? Were we meant to live in densely populated cities in apartment buildings that house 10s to 100s of families on a city block? Were we meant to spend most of our time with our young children and teach them about the world in…

> this begs the question: how were we meant to live? In the savanna in social groups of about fifty or less related individuals leading a hunger-gatherer lifestyle. I doubt the OP is going to argue that we all head back to that state, though, so I’m going politely disregard their absolutist and ex cattedra remarks.

Why not also tropical rainforest? (I'm assuming you're saying we are meant to live how we did at our inception)

IMO using the word meant implies a purpose and I don't think there is one here.

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#77

Post by UncleOxidant »

adventured wrote: post #35
aminozuur wrote: post #8

In Denmark, prematurely born babies went down 90% due to lockdowns (source below). Researchers said the most plausible reason was due to reduced stress levels in pregnant women. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/health/coronavirus-premat...

That happened elsewhere also. It's because they stopped doing as many early / preventative C-sections, not primarily due to reduced stress. It points to the developed world likely doing too many unnecessary C-sections (for example they may do 9 that are unnecessary for every 1 that actually turns out to be required to save a life, however they'll take that trade-off in non-Covid times rather than risk additional deat…

Cause or effect, though? Were there less C-Sections because pregnant women had less stress?

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#78

Post by clairity »

xapata wrote: post #62
vorpalhex wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we'd taken it seriously earlier like virtually every other modern civilization, we'd be living in much more normal circumstances today. That's a line I hear repeated but it doesn't seem to align to reality. Even places that have taken this deadly seriously have seen reoccurent outbreaks including Hong Kong[^1] and Tokyo[^2]. Likewise some areas that had very loose restrictions initially.. never had it that bad.…

Yeah, lockdowns could probably have been avoided in most of the world if decent surgical masks had been shipped to each citizen, and they complied with wearing them.

the principle mitigation is distancing. lockdowns are wholly unnecessary if distancing adequately, because they add no marginal benefit on top of distancing (ignoring the obvious political dimension of benefits).

also, use a mask when distancing (indoors with strangers) isn't possible, but understand that masks are inferior to distancing for a host of reasons, including the non-transivity of controlled tests to the wider world and its astonishing variety. masks also add little marginal benefit on top of distancing for most folks, particularly if not meticulously adhering to a long list of proper usage rules.

distance, it does a body good (in these covid times).

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#79

Post by the_gastropod »

vorpalhex wrote: post #46
the_gastropod wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We know a lot about COVID now - who's most vulnerable, how likely people are to die I find this sentiment as funny as I do frustrating. This thing has been around ~8 months. We know some about this virus. We are still completely ignorant about the long-term effects. And we're continuously finding troubling signs about it. It's looking like even mild cases can result in long-term brain, heart, and lung damage [1]. T…

> If we'd taken it seriously earlier like virtually every other modern civilization, we'd be living in much more normal circumstances today. That's a line I hear repeated but it doesn't seem to align to reality. Even places that have taken this deadly seriously have seen reoccurent outbreaks including Hong Kong[^1] and Tokyo[^2]. Likewise some areas that had very loose restrictions initially.. never had it that bad.…

> Even places that have taken this deadly seriously have seen reoccurent outbreaks including Hong Kong[^1] and Tokyo[^2]

Japan has had ~1,000 covid deaths. And Hong Kong has had something like 25 deaths. The US is about to hit 170,000.

> Part of freedom means the freedom to disagree. Sure, you can disagree with them as well and they may be entirely wrong - and that's still OK. That isn't a failure of freedom, it's a success story and I'd much rather have some idiots shouting loudly than black bag them by secret police or have "Winnie the Pooh" start getting censored in private messages.

There's a middle between these poles you've created. This is the ol' libertarian dilemma: when one person's freedom encroaches on another. People's "freedom" to not wear a mask encroaches on my freedom to not get sick. Freedom requires some modicum of social responsibility. Without it, freedom can't exist.

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#80

Post by qubex »

the_gastropod wrote: post #38
cirgue wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 100% ok grunting through a lockdown if it shortens the duration of this awful fucking pandemic. The current soft restrictions with no clear endgame is 1000 times more shitty than having to hole up in your apartment knowing that it will end all the other restrictions sooner.

+1 million. I find it so frustrating the myopic nature of how so many people look at this. We could (and should) have treated this with some respect, worn masks, and stayed mostly inside for ~6 weeks. If we'd done that, we'd still have to practice some precaution, but it would likely be a significantly better reality than we're in today, and will be for the foreseeable future thanks to that fantastic individualism th…

I’m from Italy and though I was abroad when the pandemic hit and the lockdown was declared, I’m pretty proud of the European response in general. The rolling crisis and half-measures that please nobody and solve nothing that we see going on in the United States is just a recipe for never-ending crisis and constant death-count.
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