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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

#91

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?

Idk about UBI, but I think we can conclude that better social support for the working class has a positive impact on mental health. The support doesn't have to be UBI, but any form of financial empowerment and stability for the working class. Universal healthcare would help, universal childcare, better unemployment benefits, more affordable housing, etc.

You could even go so far as to say that people would be happier under socialism than capitalism :)

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

#92
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because of the potential aerosol transmission, I'd say we should wear masks when indoors regardless of whether anyone is nearby in the moment. People may occupy the same area later.

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

#93
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rebound didn't go all the way back up to how it was before.

Considering the attendant economic devastation and ongoing uncertainty about the health situation, would you expect it to? Nobody’s arguing that there’s no adverse consequences.

People were at least heavily implying average sentiment went back to normal due to hedonic adaptation.

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

#94
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…

> I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely.

This sounds like partisan pseudoscience.

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

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is when data is disregarded without any analysis just because it doesn't match arbitrary expectations.

Fair enough

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

#96
post #20

Headline is not complete. "After a rise in negative emotions at the start of the pandemic, wellbeing improved once lockdowns began – but not for everyone." That's the understatement of the year. Suicides, drug abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and food insecurity have risen sharply since the lockdown. Deaths of despair have already claimed more lives than COVID, even with the bogus death tallies. Yet we'r…

"Deaths of despair have already claimed more lives than COVID..." is a pretty strong statement. I mostly agree that the headline seems highly questionable, but I'm wondering if you have a source for the "deaths of despair" totals?

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

#97
post #82
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this many times but I don't understand the thinking behind it. How could a lockdown shorten the duration of a pandemic? AFAIK there's only three ways a pandemic ends: (1) eradication: we control the spread so effectively through testing, tracing, and isolation that no more new people are infected (2) herd immunity: enough people get infected that the potential pool of new hosts causes the transmission rate…

A metaphor, if I may: think by analogy to the other famously exponential process, nuclear fission. When neutron flux gets too frisky, you have to throttle the reaction or face a catastrophe. You don’t need to disassemble the reactor to shut it down, it suffices to slam in the control rods and mop up those neutrons so they don’t trigger further fissions. Social Distancing is the “explosive dissassembly” of epidemiolog…

Sure, I've actually used that analogy before myself, so I can't judge your use of it :)

My point was that in this case, people are expecting lockdown to stop the reaction entirely, when in fact the control rods are only intended to slow it down. The post I replied to seemed to believe that lockdown was intended to shorten the duration of the pandemic, when in fact it has the opposite effect (for the purpose of getting good side effects like keeping ICU beds available).

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

#98
post #20

Headline is not complete. "After a rise in negative emotions at the start of the pandemic, wellbeing improved once lockdowns began – but not for everyone." That's the understatement of the year. Suicides, drug abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and food insecurity have risen sharply since the lockdown. Deaths of despair have already claimed more lives than COVID, even with the bogus death tallies. Yet we'r…

"Deaths of despair have already claimed more lives than COVID..." is a pretty strong statement. I mostly agree that the headline seems highly questionable, but I'm wondering if you have a source for the "deaths of despair" totals?

I said this because I heard it referenced on one of my favorite morning shows. I looked for the source and found the CDC director's webinar.

"We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose that are above excess that we had as background than we are seeing the deaths from COVID." [0]

I can't tell from his wording whether he's talking about just young people or all age groups, but the context suggests he's talking about young people.

Unfortunately, neither the CDC nor any other agency has published the nationwide suicide totals for 2020 yet so I can't cross-reference the CDC director's statement.

Searching for anything related to "deaths" on Google or DuckDuckGo within the past month (which I am increasingly seeing as a front for Google) only returns COVID-19 death information.

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[0] https://www.buckinstitute.org/covid-webinar-series-transcrip...

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