FL 104.7

CA 72

PA 134.1

NY 201.1

highest:

ND 176

Lowest:

OH 80.9

Our schools opened in the fall and have been able to stay open. Everything I've heard about "remote learning" points to that being a huge blessing for the families in our state.

I am thankful every day that our state and local government has had the backbone to let people live their lives.

My 98 year old grandma was the first person in my family to catch the coronavirus. Since then I've an aunt and uncle both catch it. All three have recovered just fine, as have my five or six neighbors who also caught it, and nearly everyone in my broader community who has caught it.

But yes, me and my cold dead heart killing old people. I'd personally much rather that than the reality of my grandma being locked in her nursing home without visitors for the past nine months and the whole place still caught the virus. Maybe now with the vaccine coming out she can finally have some comfort in her life instead of sobbing and threatening to run away every day.

You say shutting down the economy so casually, as if it has no impact on an infectious disease spreading during a pandemic.

If there hadn't been any shutdown, it would lead to a tenfold increase in infections and an even higher than tenfold increase in death as hospitals will be completely overwhelmed and unable to provide normal healthcare.

But if you think a 20x death rate from the nr 1 cause of death (heart disease), preventable by a lockdown for a few more months as a vaccine is rolled out, is no big deal, then there really is no arguing with you.

That’s based on taking the IFR and working backwards from reported deaths at different ages.

I've worked in Nightingale (London) and am on standby for Nightingale North West if needed. Luckily I didn't have to deal with any patients there and I hope we don't again.

Literally from the link.

And then cases started spiking in September, I suppose due to some combination of back-to-school, lockdown fatigue, increased indoor gatherings, etc. At that point I became extremely unhappy as it became apparent how little the Provincial gov't in particular had taken advantage of the long summer of low cases to build up test and hospital bed capacity, and to make plans for vaccine distribution. The second wave hit and it felt like basically just rewinding to March. This was apparent to everyone and I think it probably became a positive feedback loop as more and more people gave up and had in-person Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533457/

What evidence would you accept?

And I think there's a direct line between this suppression and the behavior of many people.

Yet there are some people who still say that it's no worse than flu, and that it only kills old people.

Of course that begs the question, why did they use open instead of unoccupied?

If open is meant to mean bed that can be utilized, then we don't have a true number of beds or a reason why a bed would be closed.

Either way it's confusing but generally the term open as the opposite of occupied for filled. For example, open positions in a company aren't employees, they're vacancies.

I am not making the argument that it's "just a flu", but I will make the argument that it's "just death". Death is. Only a sheltered person is emotionally distraught because of this; and in turn, only a person who cannot handle this perspective would deem it logical to permanently damage society in order to reduce this number.

I am all for protecting older folks, even at great expense. We should have isolated every old folks' home and done everything possible to keep them COVID-free and well stocked with everything they need. These folks have served their time in society and deserve to be cared for with a higher standard than others. It's highly unfortunate that the exact opposite thing happened; I hope that we learn a lesson from this.

However, when we're talking about the non-elderly, it seems that the vast majority of people who are dying are simply in bad shape / vitamin deficient / etc. Sorry, I don't see any reason I should care about their death any more than I would care about it if they died from heart disease, which is almost certainly going to get most of the people in that demographic eventually anyway, if they don't get hit by a car first. It's sad for their families, and for us it's just a warning to get some sunshine and exercise ever so often, which is literally all it takes to put yourself in the group of people who have a massively high survival rate. In fact, we've all had a whole year with literally nothing else to do for amusement to have gotten in good shape during. At this point, anyone who is still ignoring that has made their choice.

It's about putting things in perspective. 50-100k people die from the flu every year in America for the past decade and nobody cared before and nobody will care about that 10 years from now either unless it's a really slow news day.

> there really is no arguing with you

There's plenty of arguing with me. Convince me why I should care about people who die of one disease when I already didn't care about all the people dying of a different one. That's fundamentally what this comes down to: blowing that level of care out of proportion while denying people the right to make their own decisions about what level of personal risk they are comfortable with.

I think the evidence is clear that it's endemic to the world (like Tuberculosis still is, with most ppl carrying a latent infection). Things are deadly in the world. As far as pandemics go, this one is about as bad as the modern world can handle...ok, some govts can handle. If economies/governments fall apart, it will run it's course as well. The bet that the entire world will lock down their borders and get vaccines every 6 mo for the rest of our lifetimes, is silly. Will corona basically be gone this year? Next year? The year after that?

It's all hand wringing theater at this point. I think there's plenty of evidence that govts are taking advantage of the situation, but that's not the same as it being a grand conspiracy to release a virus for transhumanistic purposes (to get ppl used to getting govt injection). That's also nonsense.

That is, a country that has a large WFH-capable population would feel less economic pain than another otherwise similar country?

And thus, maybe a swift and harsh lockdown is the best move for one country, but the cons for another would outweigh the pros? That is another country would enter an economic decline that overall costs more lives than would have been saved?

We don't know the answers to these questions, but I think we shouldn't dismiss these considerations.

Then there is China, whose numbers can't be trusted. And some remote island states seem to have done well. Most interesting case perhaps Taiwan (which incidentally also belongs to China).

Takes 3 weeks from catching it to hospital - that’s still a few days away

"London saw wild scenes of a weekend mass exodus before the start of a Christmas lockdown and travel ban sparked by a new, more infectious mutation of COVID-19."

It is absolutely the government’s job to enact policy to slow the spread of deadly disease. It is also the job of governing leaders to encourage and educate citizens on how and why they should comply with these policies. This is where the USA is failing miserably.

We could discuss the tradeoffs and the details, that’s fair, but it’s totally irresponsible of you to say that this massive spike in cases was ‘inevitable’.

https://twitter.com/KulganofCrydee/status/833654730849136641

>Just to flesh this out, the NHS could use more money, but it's worth saying that it's the only European healthcare system I'm aware of so fragile.

You've fallen for the very "NHS is more fragile than systems in other countries" mantra that the Private Eye piece mocks. COVID19 has overwhelmed the French, Belgian, and Italian systems too.

>If you ask a lot of British people they seem to think that the only alternative is the wild west found in the US, rather than the other healthcare systems in Europe.

The NHS is unique in being so unified. I'm not sure there's another European country in which one government entity runs insurance, billing, and delivery. Because the UK is the foreign country Americans are most exposed to (Canada doesn't count), this results in both Americans and Britons thinking that all healthcare plans outside the US are like the NHS, when actually the norm is something closer to that of France, Germany, or the Netherlands.

Government running every aspect of healthcare means that every aspect of healthcare is a political issue. The consequent level of weaponization of the NHS in British political rhetoric is flabbergasting. It's said that Social Security (the US version of UK National Insurance) is the "third rail" of American politics—any politician that touches it gets electrocuted—but there is no comparison. I, for one, have no desire whatsoever to ever experience the US equivalent of how in the UK the NHS is always, Always, ALWAYS the #1 or #2 topic of every single election, with every candidate competing to outdo the others in promising that the NHS will "always be free" and that he is the only candidate who can make sure that the local GP's surgery hours will widen and that the A&E will no longer be "the worst in England" or "the second-worst in Yorkshire". The Private Eye piece is the result of the above.

(Canada, also with a single-payer system, sensibly divorces billing from providers. As in the US private entities deliver most healthcare, and in both countries if one's doctor has inconvenient hours or if the local hospital has substandard care, one simply goes to another as opposed to having this being something politicians are expected to fix.)

It has money.

Source: Being in London during Christmas.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-55380644

Also from the article:

"London saw wild scenes of a weekend mass exodus before the start of a Christmas lockdown and travel ban sparked by a new, more infectious mutation of COVID-19."

Source: living in (what was at the time) a tier 4 area

The issue is the new strain, clearly. Cases were growing even during the November lockdown.

We're hearing this:

A: "I'm dying inside because of lockdown. I can't work and I'm this close to the end of my rope."

Should the response be this?

B: "People are dying outside because of COVID. I don't care about your pain. You are an idiot."

A: [storms capitol]

Or this?

B: "This sucks all around for sure. Your pain is real, and I feel it too. The tradeoffs made by society as a whole based on available data are X Y and Z, but here's a list of things you can do for now to help make ends meet and keep it together...."

A: "Thanks, I'm glad we're able to help one another out."

It is crazy how people opinion like mine is fully ignored in Europe. today we tolerate flu deaths so that people can live freely, why shouldn't we tolerate covid deaths to live freely?

And you or nobody else knows what the natural end would be for this virus.

A fast spreading variant could overall reduce deaths over the next 5 years.

To the other points: yes, things will be hard. We can quantify how hard each approach will be.

In the case of a lockdown, there will be orders of magnitude fewer deaths.

A tally is being kept—all the numbers were run before a lockdown was even considered. The only reason this debate continues is because so many ignore the hard work medical administrations, public health departments, virologists, economists, and policy makers have already done.

Mutation is not primarily a function of time but of infections. So mutation is higher when there are more hosts. Letting the virus infect people leads to more mutations.

Now we're probably not talking about the same thing when we say mutations. I mean the sum-total of mutations. You mean successful mutations. But here comes the connection: The virus is more likely to evolve into infecting vaccinated people when it is more widespread. Because there are more mutations and consequently more chances for one of them to evade the immune response of vaccinated people.

I of course agree with that. Just stating lives lost in isolation is misleading. It simply much easier to use for back-of-envelope math, and generally back of the envelope math indicating a course of action would lead to millions of excess deaths is enough to conclude that probably it won't be a great idea.

> which indicates that on average those people would probably live <10 years

This is plausible, but it may not be much less than 10 years either. The life expectancy of someone who reaches average UK life expectancy is close to another 10 years. And we'd probably both prefer neither ourselves nor any elderly relatives or friends to suffocate 10 years before their or our time.

> There have been a significant amount of excess deaths that are not attributable to COVID [2].

So this sounds initially plausible (lockdown stress/economic hardship leading to an increase in suicides) but I believe it's bullshit and that these deaths are in fact due to covid. Since we were talking about the UK, let's go back to look at that: the baseline figure of suicides is pretty low (~6k in the UK for 2019, which is 1e-4 per individual per year). The number of excess deaths in 2020 is at least 12 times higher than that. So the suicide rate would have had to at least double to account for a significant part of that. And nationwide suicide rates are quite stable, year-on-year, including, crucially, during times of severe economic hardship.

What about all the nurses who die in the line of duty treating all these new infections? Should they be allowed to opt-out of infection risk?

I understand the desire to keep things going, but so long as there is community spread the lockdown can never end, and the virus would never go away.

What makes you think so? Did you look at the life-expectancy impact of severe economic downturns and compare them to likely excess fatality figures due to your proposed policy? I suspect not, because last I looked for it I didn't seem to find much evidence for silently killing economic stress.

> This will not stop the ICU beds from filling up obviously,

That's a bit of a problem, because those ICU beds are also known to be useful for people suffering from urgent non-covid related problems. Even if you managed to turn away all the non-lockdowners (how would you even check? Police patrols tattooing people spotted on the street during voluntary lockdown?), you might still find that just the "legitimate" cases are enough to really mess up urgent health care for a lot of other people.

What’s more, do you have any reasonable figures to suggest why letting a percentage or more of the population die unnecessarily, consigning even larger numbers to long-term health problems and so forth is somehow a good choice?

Have you considered that of 100 friends, family and acquaintances you’d see two die and 10 would have a painful and difficult future?

No, you sacrifice an uncertain percentage of the population (but probably larger than you suggest because healthcare systems would be quickly overwhelmed by a massive spike in cases) to both death and long-term sickness and disability, but for what? Lockdown causes people to lose their jobs, children to miss school, and others to suffer problems with mental health (although to use your phrasing, this would just be "a few percent" of the population) but it saves people's lives and health.

I'm also really disappointed that people don't get the idea that people dying and having long-term health issues doesn't screw the economy too.

- Advocating for the death of a million people when it's avoidable is abhorrent

- It would be more than that, due to the collapse of health services, causing people who would currently survive to die instead

- It would be more again due to the increased likelihood of viral mutations when left to run rampant

- Also due to the collapse of health services, most deaths would be outside hospitals, i.e. at home, slowly suffocating to death

- Some would survive with brain damage due to lack of oxygen at home

- While dying, people at home would know if they could get a hospital place they'd probably survive, and avoid brain damage, but they can't get one

- It wouldn't even boost the economy, because a million deaths is actually quite a drag on the economy, especially when most of them are dying at home with their families staying at home to look after them due to collapse of the health services

- It would be horrendously traumatic; a lot of people would struggle to work afterwards after watching their family members, friends, neighbours and people they know die at home slowly from an avoidable cause

- It would cause tremendous social division, as many of the traumatised people having watched their family members (& friends, etc) die, avoidably, would know it was caused by the actions of their own neighbours & local community, along with national decision-making to "sacrifice" those million

- That's just deaths; survivors with long Covid would also be a large drag on the economy, struggling or unable to work, requiring support, and potentially expensive for the healthcare services and their familiies in later life if it's long-term organ damage as some fear. The numbers with long Covid would exceed the current number of official unemployed

- Advocating for serious life-long disability for another several million people when it's avoidable is abhorrent too

[ EDIT: the number I originally used for "requiring hospitalization" were way off. I've edited to reflect data from September provided by the CDC. The 20% -> ICU figure comes from the NYC experience in May, but seems roughly correct from other global hotspots ]

Roughly 0.4% of those who catch COVID19 will require hospitalization. Of those, 20% will require ICU treatment.

In the end, the entire human race will be exposed to SARS-COV-2. If that happens all on the same day, or week, or month or probably even year, no health care system in the world can possibly deal with the case load.

Some of those who might have survived COVID19 with hospital care will die.

But (and this is the important part) those with other medical conditions that timely and effective health care could have treated will also die. Trauma (e.g. car or tool accidents). Infectious disease. Cancer. Chronic health conditions.

And in killing all these people, you've made nothing better for those who survive, because if you think the economy has gone to hell under current attempts to deal with it, you clearly cannot imagine it as the entire health care system melts down.

COVID19 is not a personal health crisis. Most people will not die of it (even though hundreds of thousands will, which is not going to be much comfort to their families, friends, colleagues and neighbors. It is a public health crisis that threatens to overwhelm our health care systems and thus have far worse effects than just the disease itself.

I’d guess so, based on what I read so far, but not sure.

The evolution of viruses like this is they tend to mutate into milder strains as they become endemic. At that point the milder version may still cause excess deaths (like flu does, and unfortunately it would be in addition to flu deaths), but not at the same virulence.

But an endemic virus does not necessarily mean every human will be exposed to it. There are diseases which are almost but not quite eradicated by widespread vaccination, and keep going in clusters, surviving in pockets here and there.

What you have said is that people will suffer under lockdown - but you haven’t really tried to quantify that. You’ve decided that’s a lost cause and have moved onto “lockdown causes death” ! Amazing.