A note for anyone comparing to any other country: the UK is rather fast to get excess deaths up to date. So they show this metric earlier than others do.
50,000 deaths is awful. But be wary of comparisons to countries that haven’t updated yet. I’m in Quebec, and I don’t believe we even have March numbers yet. Govt here is pretty bad at data transparency overall.
It will be interesting to see how this finally plays out. Initially the BBC were downplaying the body count and there was little acknowledgement of the fatalities in care homes. Only the Sunday Times (?) was reporting a total, based on their own research, that was significantly higher than other media outlets. Now all the newspapers seem onboard with the idea that the final total will be much, much higher than officially reported. The BBC was somewhat late in arriving at this position.
The BBC's headline on their top story on the day after we (UK) became the highest official death toll in Europe was "Coronavirus: Italy death toll tops 30,000, highest in EU" [1]
They've been a propaganda machine for the tories since the day Laura Kuenssberg took over as political editor, and as long as she's in charge they should be considered among the least trustworthy news sources in the UK.
So, the BBC's top story when the UK became the highest death toll in Europe was about Italy being the highest death toll in the EU, and you think that's non-partisan news? I wish I was as blissfully credulous.
This 50k number is derived from expected deaths vs actual deaths. Italy's 30k is their reported deaths, which is still smaller than the UK's reported deaths, but I think you might be missing the tiny qualifier in the BBC headline, "highest in the EU" vs "highest in Europe".
Since Sweden is acting as a control group we know that the lock downs have very little meaningful effect; if they do, they are certainly not worth the cost. So we need to protect the most vulnerable by isolating them (the old and sick) and the rest of us need to get back to work. The total death toll will be whatever the total death toll will be at this point. Focusing on it doesn't help anything right now.
I can’t stress this enough: Sweden is not acting as a control group. Every nation on Earth is restricting freedoms in some way, on a continuum, including Sweden.
Even if Sweden is used in a future study, we wouldn’t know the cost benefit outcome of a lockdown for years anyway.
A true control group would enact no policy changes and be a size and composition that matches the country you’re interested in.
So...what you are saying is that we don't know if the lock down is working...so then, if science is our guide, why are we doing it? Also - no matter, who will die from this will die. Our hospitals are not overwhelmed so those needing help will get it. We should take our wallops up front instead of this way - it will be cheaper in the long run in every way (this includes preventing the depression related suicides that will inevitable come from a full on economic depression).
Why are we doing it? The same reason we don’t try to eat a year’s worth of meals in one day: we simply couldn’t handle it. The modelling and current experience indicate that hospitals would be overwhelmed relatively quickly. The only real argument against that is if natural herd immunity has already been achieved; seems unlikely at this stage, but we’ll know either way once credible seroprevalence studies are completed.
A “lockdown” is a Fabian (or “rope-a-dope”) strategy: we avoid getting our assess kicked until the balance of power shifts in our favor, at which point we stage a massively devastating counterattack. In the context of COVID-19, that means safe and effective treatments, and/or universal vaccination.
“Getting our wallops” upfront would likely involve a severe economic contraction, as millions of people are removed from economic activity by illness, death, and ultimately fear of the two. Even Sweden is projected to suffer a severe economic contraction, partly due to the global trading conditions and the openness of their economy, but also partly because fear of COVID-19 is sapping domestic demand.
You act as if risk is the same for all groups and we know for a fact that it is not. Covid-19 by in large kills the already sick and the old. They are the ones at risk and their death, though unfortunate, would not as a whole impact the economy in a negative way since most of them are currently not producing anything anyway. And waiting for a vaccine is ridiculous - there has not been a single Covid-19 vaccine ever developed; it is has been too hard to do. Maybe with all the current efforts there might be some breakthrough but relying on that nebulous hope in making our policy decisions seems foolish.
I’m afraid I have to disagree with all your points in the strongest possible terms :)
The idea that “the sick and the old” would not as a whole impact the economy if they went missing because “most of them are not currently producing anything” is nonsense. The sick and the old are not some economically inert material that we can just dispense with; they are workers, business owners, investors, and consumers.
Many people in good health are also laid low by the virus (either through a bad bout at home, a hospital stay, or death) for reasons we don’t yet understand. It’s not like the “young and healthy” portion of the economy would get through the pandemic free of impact.
Waiting for a vaccine is not ridiculous, but nor does the entire strategy hinge upon it. Of course there’s no vaccine for COVID-19 yet because the disease only emerged at the end of 2019; that’s nothing to do with difficulty. The economic incentives for a safe and effective vaccine are now astronomical, and many candidates are now in development. We are also doing clinical trials for potential treatments that are already approved for medical use, so that could change the dynamics in our favour relatively quickly.
The policy moves to keep r0 below 1 are a bridge to a better world; they are an entirely rational strategy if you care about people and the economy they create together.
As for the claim that recessions cause an upturn in deaths, this is not supported by research of previous recessions. It sounds plausible, but it’s not true: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00210-0 There are many reasons for us to want to avoid recessions, but mortality is not one of them.
Let me clarify some things. I meant to say there are NO COVID class vaccines. The common cold is caused by the Covid virus - no vaccines for it...no vaccines for any of the Covid viruses because their nature makes it difficult to create an effective one. If we manage to produce one it is a long shot and at this point should not even be really considered as a short or medium term solution.
The current stats surely indicate that the sick and old are the ones impacted. see here:
https://tinyurl.com/ybtbqxsn
Basically the ones in nursing homes or the ones that are so unhealthy that they are not producing much. This is also a fact that can not be contested. Sure you see on the news, adnauseam, the middle aged man that got sick and died and left a family - but they are the minority. Now just because I say that does not mean that the old and sick have NO economic benefit for somebody; sure nursing homes are a business and people make money from it - what I mean to clarify is that in terms of wealth generation, they produce very little in terms of net because usually people of this class are not working because they are old and sick.
I do certainly care about people - I am just saying our hospitals are not overwhelmed right now at all. The ones that will get sick we have capacity for, and the ones that are going to die from this will die. So we should move forward and suffer their loss now instead of cripple the economy and suffer their loss over time. Because what does a crippled economy leave us? More vulnerable in every way to every other threat - natural and man made.
Also, by your reasoning, we should quarantine everybody with AIDS, Tuberculosis and a host of other diseases...so why don't we? Why are the Covid-19 deaths the only ones that matter here?
> So we need to protect … the old and sick … and the rest of us need to get back to work.
Since you are quoting Sweden as a benchmark for wherever you may be, allow me to add another: in Africa (well South Africa at least) 40% of the fatalities are under 60.
Taiwan has had 7 deaths in comparison (0.3 per million) vs UK (482 per million). Of course they did things as soon as it appeared. UK and US waited weeks and months.
Note that politics in the UK are VERY polarised at the moment, therefore the quality of the discussion here will inevitably be one-sided and of low-value.
That's the nature of "I told you so" discussions. There's really not much more that can be said here besides, "they/we should have listened to the experts who said this would happen unless a lockdown was imposed."
The situation is far more nuanced than that. The UK government were not ignoring experts, they took advice from their own scientists. For instance Sweden too remained fully open.
The phrase "sick man of Europe" never seemed so apt. Our government has totally failed - hilariously late in imposing lockdown, never closed the borders, failed to reach their own testing targets, and mass deaths in care homes (which weren't even included in the official statistics until last week). Really is shameful.
I still can't believe the prime minister said he would not stop shaking hands as all medical experts in the greatest global and UK health crisis in a century say it's literally step number one... and then he actually gets infected, takes up hospital space that'd otherwise go to other patients (with many treatments such as a cancer treatment delayed due to the corona crisis), leaving the country without its prime leader as the crisis goes through its worst moments leaving tens of thousands dead, literally more than 8 months of London Blitz WWII bombing by nazis and a quarter million (and likely truly a few million) infected, many of them having permanent organ damage that cuts years of their life expectancy and quality of life in the decades to come.
And that's for a country that got hit substantially later than Asia, and substantially later than the rest of Europe and sits on an island with a few roads to shut off, and is substantially richer than say an Italy or Spain. Yet it has surpassed Italy's crisis and has not yet shown any signs of a strong trend of improvement. It's absolutely insane how they mismanaged this. Yet it seems he and his administration fair not much worse criticism than any other leadership in other countries at the moment.
Look at the FT or NYT international comparative excess death studies. Excess death is definitely in the top 3 and looks to be nr 1 in all of Europe's 30-50 countries.
And this is despite having one of the best positions as one of its richest, relatively few tourists per capita compared to many other countries like Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Netherlands etc, the vast majority of visitors arriving by air which was relatively easy and uncontroversial to shut down compared to shutting down land borders in Europe (particularly for landlocked countries).
And lastly, it was hit later than much of Europe let alone Asia, which is massively important. When you have early-outbreak doubling times of 2 days, getting hit 4 days later can mean a 4x difference in the infection/death numbers. It had absolutely no excuse, particularly compared to other countries, to erroneously downplay this pandemic.
Unfortunately whereas many other countries like Spain or Italy are seeing far fewer infection numbers than weeks ago, the UK is seeing just as many as weeks ago. It's slowly improving, but it's nowhere near the home-stretch as other countries are, yet it's relaxing conditions. Finally, it's not even testing as much as other countries, with tests at a rate of 29k per million, whereas Italy/Spain are at respectively 44k and 52k.
This has mismanagement written all over it. Indeed if I came across as implying the UK is 10x worse than everywhere else, no it's nowhere near that disproportional. But it clearly seems to have had one of the best starting positions and worst outcomes, and one of the furthest away from significant improvements.
It's the country with the highest absolute number of excess death, and the 2nd highest (61%) after Belgium (66%) of relative excess death.
And that's while lagging behind Belgium, which had a daily number of infection reported the past few days of about 20% of the peak figure. For the UK they're only at about 60% of the peak figure.
You're comparing two countries at different points in their lockdown-cycle. And this is very relevant in an exponentially developing health crisis where total-infected (correlated with total-deaths) see doubling times measured in days, meaning that comparing two countries 1-2 weeks apart can mean you're undercounting by 50% or even 75%. The UK's figures are worsening far faster than Belgium the next weeks.
And Belgium, by the way, is testing at a rate of 1.75x that of the UK on a per capita basis. If the UK ramped up testing as much, they'd likely fare even worse in these comparisons.
In other words, it looks like it literally is the worst managed country in Europe.
I don't know about you guys but being 'part of an outlier out of control problem group' is not 'proportionate for Europe' to me, and winning the prize for worst hit of that group, definitely isn't.
Yes agreed, UK is a problem group. Unfortunately the thrust of the arguments above yours is that the UK is uniquely terrible. This is not because of the data, but because many people strongly despise the current rightwing government. This is why the quality of discussion here will be limited.
I added some extra details and nuance if you're interested.
Very unfortunate to see you imply I'm presenting the facts about the UK because of my political leaning and why my contribution to the discussion must thereby be biased, and limited. I don't despise the government at all, I don't live in the UK and frankly prior to the Covid-19 crisis I'd probably have picked the UK (including its government) to come out of this crisis best. But the facts turned out different.
The fact that UK's number are much worse than France and worse than Italy is shameful.
I'm not talking about belgium, the governement there is a joke since 2010, only redeeming thing are Belgians.
The US as the best population density except in a few area, few train line and major road (and a lot of toll roads too), as well as early cases with limited infection spread. I think US numbers are OK for now but getting higher than ~30% excess mortality with their advantages would be a pretty bad look for their government.
I think that lockdowns are there in order to get time to put systems for managing an outbreak in place. So one would hope that effective track and trace, isolation and public space management protocols and construction of overflow treatment capacity would be priorities when a lockdown is underway, as lockdown is unsustainable over medium term and up.
You can try to bring the rate of new infections down to a level where they can be traced, and newly infected can be isolated early. This allows society to go more or less back to normal. That's what some Asian countries did successfully and what others are now seeking to replicate.
Lock down kills the exponential growth. In California at the current infection rate it would take 130 years to infect another 5% of the population.
Buys time:
That allows epidemiologists to understand exactly what the risk factors are. So governments and businesses can begin to fine tune suppression measures.
Gives the biotech industry time to develop cheap and fast tests. Which you need to do contact tracing. Hopefully they can develop immunotherapy agents to prevent exposed people from developing the disease.
Time for public health officials to raise a small army to do contact tracing.
Allows doctors time to understand how best to treat the disease. For a disease with a serious mortality morbidity rate even partly effective treatments are important.
Allows sane people to grok what they need to do to keep themselves safe. And allows society to begin to reign in careless people, loons and deniers. Also give again sane people the opportunity to stay safe by not allowing businessmen like Musk to force them into unsafe working conditions.
This is a disease of governments and health systems.
As an individual the odds aren't too worrying in isolation.
Everything functioning well, few people get sick and those are treatable and death rates are low.
But it's exponential growth.
So cases can swamp any realistic health system left unchecked. At this stage the low fatalities (0.5%) goes out of the window and start looking at just under 10%.
So a good strategy seems to be to slow the spread to managable rates at which level actual disease impacts are quite low.
Imagine, in the limit, theoretically, you could keep everyone seperate and expose a batch size you could treat, lead them through and then take the next batch.
You could have death rates under 0.5%.
The only other realistic objectives I see are tactical: ramping up treatment ability and postponing cases until a cure/preventative measure is available and when disease progression and treatment are better understood.
> At this stage the low fatalities (0.5%) goes out of the window and start looking at just under 10%.
A lot of people are throwing out numbers somewhat randomly here. If we had no hospitals at all, the worst possible case would be everyone requiring hospitalization dies. Right now among the elderly it's about 40% of those who require hospitalization end up dying. Thus the worst case would be 100% or a 2.5x increase. Among the middle aged, hospitalization survival rates are about 10%, so a 10x increase in death rates worst case. Neither of these worst case scenarios are especially realistic because hospitals are pretty good at surging; and if people need to be triaged, you triage the people who are most likely to die anyway (thereby changing the actual death rate very little). Thirdly, a good chunk of people who get hospitalized would just survive on their own anyway. There is the non trivial problem that other healthcare concerns (like unrelated heart attacks) are harder to treat.
That doesn't mean it's negligible. A 1 percentage point increase in mortality is a lot of people. But a 20x increase from 0.5% to 10% is preposterous and apocalyptic.
Admittedly I'm in "consider a cow to be a sphere"-territory here.
For clarity's sake:
I'm comparing (roughly) stats like Italy and UKs deaths/known_cases ratios (which are closer to 10% than 1%)
and
Like a new New Zealand which is between 1% and 0.1%.
But looking quickly at the data one order of magnitude is totally justified.
"Hospitals are pretty good at surging" must break down against exponential growth at some stage. I doubt whether exponentially increasing your treatment capability would be possible in most cases.
Deaths / known case is mostly useless though, and the differences between two countries doesn't say anything about the relevance of hospital overruns because nobody has really suffered from that. Even lombardy likely didn't lose that many extra people due to hospital capacity. Age distribution and health distribution is the main driver of differences between areas.
If I understand your reasoning, the difference between hospice care and staying at home with bedrest & fluids is a 9.5% death rate. Is that actually the model you work with? My understanding is that most COVID patients sick enough to get a ventilator die anyway.
I don't know this is not more widespread, but you have 3 type of care. Non-intrusive ventilators or oxygen masks (or the nasal oxygen stuff), instrusive ventilator and the last one is artificial blood oxygenation, i will count this as intrusive ventilation as it is often used with intrusive ventilation.
Around 10% of known cases needs hospitalisation. Among them, 70% to 80% of cases only needs oxygen and not respiratory help. So you can't give them oxygen, they'll either die or have permanent right heart or brain damage. Those will likely be fine after a dozen day at the hospital.
If your oxygen levels are really, really low, you will need an intrusive ventilator. And yes, the death rate in those cases is absurdly high (between 60 and 90%).
Note: 10% of known cases is NOT 10% of cases.
Note 2: IMO this 10% number should be way higher as hypoxemia is far more widespread than previously thought, even for people with mild symptoms, even for kids (i only have anecdotal data on this so don't use it as an argument until papers are written and consensus is made). Still, if you have covid with only mild symptoms, please go to the hospital to take your oxygen saturation level.
This is mostly bullshit. Using ventilators was fairly standard care for the set of symptoms. It has come to light that alternate treatments are probably better in some circumstances. But you're writing this as if the disease is treatable. It's still not treatable. Most people who end up ventilators are, in fact, sick enough that they're likely to die.
The parent said nothing that lacked compassion for human life. Accusing doctors who are risking their lives trying to save patients with the best of their knowledge mass murderers is magnitudes more heartless.
Lockdowns, like quarantines, are primarily aimed at stopping the spread of infectious diseases. Hopefully keeping the number of hospital patients under control is a side effect.
Possibly slowing transmission enough to buy yourself some time to develop treatment and vaccine. The problem epidimiologists were looking at was that with no immunity, treatment, or vaccine, there was nothing to stop the spread to a large percentage of the population very quickly, potentially leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US, at least. And yeah, the medical system would have collapsed under that load, as happened in parts of Italy.
The other problem doctors are worried about is people with life-threatening conditions--heart attack, stroke, etc. not going to hospital out of fear.
Well, yes... Assuming the mortality figure of 1-2% is correct, no lockdowns would lead to a few billion infections worldwide, which would lead to 50-100 million dead. This is roughly what world war II caused in the span of 5 years or so of planetary warfare.
Second to that, hundreds of millions more would need to be hospitalised. You'd essentially see any other healthcare be completely overwhelmed, e.g. cancer treatment or conceiving a child in the hospital. You'd see tons of excess mortality from these second hand effects as well.
Third, in general, and in particular without proper care, you'd see many people suffer permanent organ damage. We see this to be true for many who have recovered from Corona, but with permanently damaged lung or liver capacity.
Not to mention the trauma and PTSD for hundreds of millions even those who survive, who'll have experienced what it's like to (nearly) suffocate for weeks. Experiences like these would occur in every community and would likely completely shatter certain individuals, families even communities, their religious beliefs, their sense of security etc. The notion we'd let something like this happen in the 21st century. It'd be a paradigm change in our thinking for many of us who believed our live, societies, governments etc were stable and provided order. Situations like these would be ripe for abuse by political or religious extremists, violence, scape-goating etc.
It should be a lot lower, give that Sweden’s biggest city has roughly 1.5 million inhabitants (vs 8.9 million in the UK), and Sweden’s population density is 24 people per km2 (vs 281 per km2 in the UK).
This is a bit misleading. The urban population of sweden sits at 85%, the UK at 83%. Yes there's lots of space in Sweden, and it's also true that barely anyone lives there.
I'm still hoping some researcher will publish a dataset of 'median lived density', rather than a simple density average. That is to say, a weighted density calculation. In other words, if 100 people live in one building in a vast desert the size of Texas, their 'lived/experienced density' or 'weighted density' is far greater than if 100 people live spread out in an area the size of a few football fields. Then we could have a more sophisticated discussion around density, as this issue aaaalways pops up when doing comparisons at the national level. (at the city level it's not as big of a problem, although even there some weird zoning differences can sometimes throw figures off.)
You might be interested in this article about lived population density vs rate of spread of COVID-19.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01167
Although I do not have enough statistical knowledge to really tell if the author's assessment is correct.
Sure, now that the borders are closed, let's send everyone back to work and see how the works out! Maybe some political rethoric will keep people safe from contagion. If it doesn't work we can always blame EU or China. I guess that was the plan from the begining anyway.
Not now, I meant in your hypothetical 'lock down early before you have it (or much of it)' scenario. Without also fully closing the borders or staying locked down, that doesn't work.
Well the borders are pretty much closed at the moment. Anyway, if the lockdown is strict then the few people coming in are not going to infect anyone. There's also the possibility to enforce a strict quarantine on arrival.
The key issue, I think is that the lockdown has been lax. Just look at the curve in the UK vs. France/Italy/Spain.
It translates to short because community outbreaks are limited or nonexistent. New Zealand is coming out of lockdown tomorrow after 6 weeks. Borders will remain more or less closed. This is a shorter lockdown than most have needed.
I am not convinced the lockdown is the issue, but the general health of the people. When you see news like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetl... "Long queues force Elgin Burger King to close as police called in", then I can't help but think being fit correlates with the bodycount.
Never to have joined seems rather different from having joined and then, some decades later, drunkenly staggered out again, bouncing off both doorposts on the way.
I'm well aware. But considering that Turkey, the modern successor state of the Ottoman Empire, is negotiating its way into the EU, while the UK has just finished making a dog's breakfast of negotiating its way out of it...
Technically, they are still negotiating, though negotiations stalled in 2016[1].
I can't ever see it happening; there is so much opposition. Human rights seems to be biggest sticking point, and is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.
If you remember they had explicitly stated at the time in the daily press conference that lockdown should not be imposed too early but that we should wait until the exact right time to flatten the curve: Basically, let the virus spread and wait since we were not in a position to do anything else for lack of preparation.
It sounded nonsensical at the time. It has been proven that it was.
I am made sad by the knowledge that the people who are now gloating about this place being bad and having lots of old people die, while another place is just dandy and hasn't had a problem because of it's greater moral character have called things really early. The next wave of lockdowns will not be as successful as this wave, indeed it's really doubtful that many places will be able to impose them
Most of what the government had said and done in the beginning (and perhaps still now) was factually nonsensical and had attracted widespread criticism from experts. It isn't "gloating" to try remind people of what had been said and to hold the government to account.
The UK government has made some mistakes, but to describe them as having “totally failed” is just needless hyperbole.
Edited to add: “total failure” would have been to just do nothing, allow the health service to be overrun, let hundreds of thousands die, let millions be hospitalised, and let the economy tank with no support for business or workers. None of which is true of the UK government response.
You may not like the UK government, but stating something that is so obviously wrong just undermines the rest of your legitimate criticism.
Does anyone think differently of the UK right now?
Like from my perspective it seems like an isolated island of hooligans, distinct from a civilized society.
Even when it comes to the language, continental Europe speaks a more easily understood version of English.
With their self isolation and general dysfunction, it really seems have handicapped the point of the UK, like as a financial center or place to consider for anything.
I definitely think differently then you. I dont see the whole UK in such derisive way, despite me disagreeing with decision to leave EU and me thinking the country handled covid badly.
I'm not married to the indoctrination of a perfect royal family, or the global Crown/Commonwealth concept, so maybe that helps me see it without any cognitive dissonance.
It's shameful that any country put practically their entire citizenry under house arrest.
If someone is scared of catching something, they should stay home. If they want, they can live their life in a full-body condom, covered in bubble-wrap, soaking their hands in chlorhexidine, sipping O2 from a tank. Nobody is or should be putting a gun to their head to come out.
The UK government, and governments around the world, have indeed failed. They've failed to protect the liberty of the people, and in fact have become tyrannical.
You and your friends can totally agree to do a knife fight. However as soon as someone dies you can’t get out of the jail free saying you all agreed.
You and others can’t make a pact to get infected with a deadly virus. If you do and someone dies others should be ready to go to prison!
As long as you understand that, it’s cool. Mostly people expect heath care workers to take deadly risk of getting infected themselves and working without PPE that’s no lockdown is basically a ruse from entitled people who want others to risk their life and liberty for them.
Reserving freedom of association for "essential workers" shows the flaw in your thinking. The reason for the carve-out in the lockdown is so they can do their "essential" job. Well, every job is an essential job, to the person who depends on it for their livelihood and well-being.
The mental state of a person attacking another person with a knife, or a virus, is not at all comparable to a person going to bake sweets, cut hair, or any of the other productive employments people engage in.
The problem is only a small fraction of society can have "freedom of association" without R_0 getting out of control. We have decided to allocate fraction to essential workers, which is probably not the worst possible decision.
For people without underlying risk factors, the illness is generally quite minor. Those at risk should stay home, and avoid contact with the potentially infected. For those who share accommodations, mixed risk factor domestic populations, perhaps systemic help could aid in sorting that out.
I decided to post here only to demonstrate that people exist with other views. I'm satisfied that anyone reading this will understand that these views are not unheard of.
> For people without underlying risk factors, the illness is generally quite minor.
1. Kawasaki disease increase for children is not yet tied to a risk factor other than covid19
2. Pulmonary fibrosis occurs also with patients with no risk factors. Although most of those patient spent time in ICU tied with an intrusive ventilator, this is not the case everytime (not enough data yet to know how many have minor lung scarring though).
3. Hypoxemia caused by covid19, even with very mild symptoms is dangerous for the longterm heart and brain health. If you do sleep apnea AND you have covid19, please do not hesitate to go to a hospital (22 millions americans are suffering from sleep apnea and 80% are undiagnosticed according to this [0]). Hypoxemia also have impact on mental health.
I agree that other view exists and should be allowed to be heard. But you probably don't have family in a hotspot, and if you have, it's probably in a major city where the effect are not that visible, especially with lockdown (and overall a few percentage is hit). I have family in a low-density hotspot (around Colmar, France) and they are medical workers. Everyone was hit around them. Around 300% excess mortality in the area (still less than Bergame, so lucky them), at least three parents died, as well as a long-time friends and two colleagues. He told us that not going in self-lockdown was criminal and begged us to ask to work from home if we could (this was 5 day before government-enforced lockdown).
Your reasoned response and respectful tone are truly appreciated. Thank you! As a matter of fact, I do have family in NYC, Queens, and CT. It's perhaps the hottest "hotspot" in the world. In general, children below 5 and older adults don't have immunocompetence comparable to older children or younger adults. So caution is certainly called for for those age groups.
At the same time, for me personally, after spending years in biotech and healthcare (doing academic mathematical research on hand hygiene, including published peer-reviewed study of compliance rates of doctors to their own hygiene protocols, working within and analyzing clinical trials, doing pharmacokinetics, publishing epidemiological studies, mathematics of mass decontamination, etc.) I've realized a few things.
One is that doctors in particular are always calibrating their behaviour to what butters their bread. In the same way American police write "to serve and protect" on their cars, when it really it should say "to serve and protect [THE STATE]", doctors believe they should "do no harm [TO MY CAREER]". Meaning, the treatments and recommendations for patients are totally different than the standards they apply to themselves and their own children. It's safer, and garners more power, to prescribe a lockdown, than to risk getting caught out on the off-chance this is another Black Death.
You'll see the same repetitious behaviour with respect to things like dietary supplements, lockdowns, and masks: do as I say, not as I do. And what I say is always going to be coming from a cover-my-arse perspective. It's the outrageous hypocrisy that drives me mad. No doctors that I know or work with personally believe the hype, yet the peer pressure to conform in public and lick boots is overwhelming.
The impact of the deaths from delayed non-covid-19 medical treatments, mental issues, depression, hunger, economic distress, and so on is going to be enormous. There is no accountability in this scenario, because of the mass hysteria. All the damage gets ascribed to the virus, and none to the policy makers, similar to how iatrogenic deaths get swept under the rug.
The only positive that I see is that the mask has slipped and the possibility exists that soon, some proportion of the people will see what maniacal control-freak lunatic weirdos the people in charge of the state have become. Never shake hands again? Guess what, if strangers never touch each other, it will be the end of the human race in just 50 years. God help us.
Okay, i understand your point of view, and i agree on some points, but this still is not an argument against lockdowns.
My opinion is that lockdowns if you can't stop the spread should be locals, way more local than a state in the US, and i agree that global lockdowns are bad if you can't completely stop the epidemics.
a point for future argumentation: the food situation is okay in western europe (notwithstanding sever cut in animal protein consumption) , troubling in eastern europe (but this is not caused by the lockdown and can be offset by less animal feed), my company is hosting FNSEA/INSERM project doing food previsions so i'm well aware of this. No data on other countries sadly.
Also to nitpick:
>The impact of the deaths from delayed non-covid-19 medical treatments, mental issues, depression, hunger, economic distress, and so on is going to be enormous.
Yes, again, i have family working in hospital at Colmar, my cousin is the SMUR chief and his wife is an addiction doctor so i'm well aware of this, but during the height of the epidemic, almost no care were given to emergencies because they had to focus on patient. Since two weeks ago they can now take care of people suffering addiction, they did not redirect emergency operation to hospitals in Lyon (no free helicopter trips anymore). Also the diminution of road accident was also a really nice side-effect for them.
> No doctors that I know or work with personally believe the hype
They should have come to Colmar France or Bergame Italy and helped then.
The global response is not the best, but really you should talk to doctors in community with 300%+ excess death, their point of view might be a bit different.
Your liberty doesn’t give you the right to make other people sick. Equating quarantine with tyranny is a hilariously hot take and is only something that the lunatic fringe would actually believe.
No one is advocating the right to break into homes to make others sick. Anyone who wants to stay home alone, absolutely should. I am advocating freedom of movement and freedom of association.
Quarantine is for the sick, not the healthy. I'm equating lockdowns with tyranny, yes.
Shutting down the global economy has resulted in hundreds of millions of people experiencing food insecurity. It will result in an enormous cost in terms of deaths, morbidity, and impaired mental well-being, for people in the UK and around the world.
Your freedoms are not unlimited. Just as you have no right to unlimited freedom of speech by shouting fire in a crowded theater, you have no right to unlimited freedom of association by visiting your grandma in a nursing home during a pandemic and killing scores of people.
>Shutting down the global economy
This implies that the global economy would not have taken a hit had we not enforced more stringent quarantine policies. Do you really think that people were going to be flying, eating out at restaurants, or going to their local movie theater or mall while their local community is dropping like flies around them?
>hundreds of millions of people experiencing food insecurity
Citation needed. And, by the way, this is not an argument against quarantine policies, this is an argument for better social services from the government.
>It will result in an enormous cost in terms of deaths, morbidity, and impaired mental well-being, for people in the UK and around the world.
Citation needed. Are you going to just continue to throw around unsubstantiated claims?
> COVID-19 will double the number of people suffering from a food crisis, pushing it to 265 million, estimates the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).
You can read the report to see the effects of policy versus the effects of the burden of disease.
I don't need to cite anything regarding the other claims. The people who have assaulted human dignity by putting half of humanity under house arrest are the ones who need to prove that this draconian intervention will result in a net benefit, vis a vis the concerns I've pointed out. Cite your sources that it will -- I'm sure to hear crickets chirping on that one.
Note how your quote says "COVID-19 will double", not "Draconian lockdowns will double"? There would be a food crisis, with or without lockdown policies in place. You are conflating the consequences of the pandemic to the consequences of policies in response to the pandemic.
It's a simple mistake, yet you continue to make it throughout this thread.
Are you sure? The HRW report that the UN report references is quite clear. I don't have time to track down all the recent news, but the keywords "food insecurity lockdown" put into Dogpile, Bing, or Yippy should help you get started on the relevant popular literature.
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Coronavirus: Food insecurity fallout from Nigeria's lockdownwww.theafricareport.com › coronavirus-food-insecurity...
By Oluwatosin Adeshokan, in Ogun. Posted on Monday, 11 May 2020 17:47. Virus Outbreak Nigeria Food In this photo taken on Friday, April 17, 2020, people ...
'Instead of Coronavirus, the Hunger Will Kill Us.' A Global Foodwww.nytimes.com › 2020/04/22 › world › africa › coron...
Apr 22, 2020 - It could double the number of people facing acute hunger to 265 million by ... Coronavirus lockdowns have caused many more to go hungry. ... safety net face a future where hunger is a more immediate threat than the virus.
Millions in Lebanon risk food insecurity over virus lockdown ...www.france24.com › Return to homepage › Live news
Apr 8, 2020 - "The lockdown... has compounded the poverty and economic hardship rampant in Lebanon before the virus arrived," said HRW senior ...
Coronavirus Lockdowns Are Choking Africa's Food Supply ...time.com › World › COVID-19
Apr 15, 2020 - Lockdowns have blocked farmers from getting food to markets and ... Bank said the virus could create “a severe food security crisis in Africa.”.
Coronavirus crisis could double number of people suffering ...www.theguardian.com › world › apr › global-hunger-c...
Apr 21, 2020 - Lockdowns and global economic recession have already decimated their nest eggs. ... Global hunger could become the next big impact of the pandemic, ... save people stricken by the virus only for them to fall prey to hunger.
Severe hunger threatens Africa during COVID-19 lockdowns ...www.dw.com › severe-hunger-threatens-africa-during-...
Apr 22, 2020 - The government imposed a nighttime curfew and shut businesses down in early March to slow the spread of the virus. To help with food ...
Coronavirus: Your one-stop blog for food industry updateswww.foodnavigator.com › Article › 2020/03/23 › Coro...
2 hours ago - Coronavirus: Betting on aeroponics to increase food security ... the UK's national lockdown, according to a John Lewis and Waitrose Report. ... hands, take supplements: Researchers urge leaders to extend virus advice .
Coronavirus: Fighting food poverty in a lockdown - BBC Newswww.bbc.com › uk-england-manchester-52228080
Apr 13, 2020 - Coronavirus: Fighting food poverty in a lockdown ... Volunteers at FareShare risk their health to help feed those in need during the virus crisis.
The majority of people in the UK have not been exposed, even potentially. Therefore, this is not a traditional quarantine, by the standard definition. Prior to the lockdown, quarantine was already in effect for foreign travellers and so on. This is a novel policy. Some definitions below.
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From the Cambridge English Dictionary:
lockdown noun [ C or U ] mainly US UK /ˈlɒk.daʊn/ US /ˈlɑːk.daʊn/ a situation in which people are not allowed to enter or leave a building or area freely because of an emergency.
From the Oxford dictionary:
quarantine noun /ˈkwɔrənˌtin/ , /ˈkwɑrənˌtin/ [uncountable] a period of time when an animal or a person that has or may have a disease is kept away from others in order to prevent the disease from spreading
From the American CDC:
"Isolation" separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick.
"Quarantine" separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.
> If someone is scared of catching something, they should stay home
Implicit in this description of your “rights” trumping public health authority is that you believe you have a right to infect anyone who is unfortunate enough to touch some surface you’ve previously contaminated, or breath air you’ve breathed while infectious.
What principle, moral, or ethic tells you this is your right?
Your "implicit" statement is a false inference. The public health authority's decision is the very thing that I'm objecting to.
Secondly, since that unfortunate soul is locked in their home, how are they touching anything I've touched, and how are they breathing the air I breathe?
Lastly, why did you decide to make this about me personally?
Yes, you object to the public health authority’s action, on what principle, moral, or ethical basis?
And am I to assume that you do not assert that contrary to accepted public health science, you have a right to simply go about as you please regardless, so that others may be forced to seek shelter from your infectiousness?
What is it about the science of public health epidemiological abatement measures that you object to, and on what principle?
I object on the basis that (a) the given data doesn't support the policy conclusion, (b) the policy of lockdowns causes extreme harm, and (c) this policy severely impinges on human liberty.
The lack of intellectual integrity here is astonishing. The OP, the BBC claiming these "excess deaths" are automatically COVID-19 deaths, is just more evidence of this. If any person locks another person up, it is legally recognized as a harm done to the victim. The government is the party that needs to justify itself. The constant shifting of policy, predictions, and rationale of the government's policy itself is an indication of the shaky basis of this action.
Specifically, the justification of not overwhelming the health care system, which is chronically overwhelmed anyway, is not compelling. The policy came first, with aspirational goals rather than scientific thinking, which was then back-filled. The government has put itself into a win-win situation: if lots of people die, that provides the justification for the action; and if few people do (which won't be known for a year or more), then the credit for "saving the people" goes to the policy makers. I happen to see it the other way around: if many people die, it shows these measures are useless; and if few do, then the government has caused the people massive harm for no just cause.
The veneration of the health care workers is also disgusting, this ridiculous clapping and so on. These people aren't slaves, they go of their own free will, and there are many jobs ("essential" jobs) that are far more dangerous. The purpose of life is living, not being safe. More mind-programming for the masses.
Regarding your assumption, you didn't respond to my point at all. Nobody needs to seek shelter from me, if they've already decided to barricade themselves in their home.
(a) Why would you think that? Compare Sweden to Norway exess mortality here [0]
and reformulate your argument. Similar country, similar population density. Similar population in metropolitan area. Please explain to me what are the differences between those countries. I won't even talk about how Australia and NZ support the lockdown policies as those countries are island.
(b) Citation needed. Again [0], why doesn't countries under lockdowns such as israel and norway do not have excess death if lockdowns causes extrem harm? And before the "rich country" argument, why South africa does not have any excess death and even way less death than expected? Those three countries are under sever lockdown. Unless you think it will cause longterm damage to those countries and more time is needed. I guarantee you i had once an asthma strong enough to cause moderate hypoxemia, i will remember this all my life even if it did not last more than a day. I think the lockdown is really easy if im honest. And i know for a fact that at least in France, most cooks and chef de partie are pretty happy with the lockdown too even if they will be the most impacted by the lockdown (75% pay for learning new tricks and doing homestay culinary contests might be the reason why)
(c) Good argument.
> The lack of... shaky basis of this action
[0]. Explain (a) and (b) then
> Specifically, .... which was then back-filled.
Untrue for France [1] (might need google translate for that)
> The government has put itself into a win-win situation.
Yes, agreed but i don't understand why does this matters.
> The veneration of the health care workers is also disgusting, this ridiculous clapping and so on.
Yes, but this is a personnal opinion (i REALLY agree with) and no argument at all.
> More mind-programming for the masses.
Just wanted to point it out: if you read this sentence in a text you don't agree with (like a 9/11 or moonlanding conspiracy theory), what would you think of the person writing this?
If you really care about being rationnal, the question you should always ask is "why do i think this". Why would you think this is programming for the masses and not just herd-like comportment that also happens to fulfill a psychological need?
Re (a) the comparison doesn't hold much weight because despite their close geography and culture, there are major differences between Norway and Sweden. The most significant is that the elder care homes in Sweden are much higher density than in Norway. A huge portion of the reported deaths are from elder care facilities in most countries. No citation -- my knowledge comes from a study I worked on 7 years back. Anyone interested can easily verify on their own.
Re (b) No citation is needed. I answered this elsewhere, that depriving a human of their liberties, putting people under house arrest, is in itself a harm. Forcing your neighbour to stay in a box is an assault, and to commit that violence against another person requires the highest level of justification. As for the physical health and other measurable harms, those will be recognized over time. I'm quite sure that "deaths of despair" issue will eventually be covered in mainstream programming, if not already.
Lastly, the "rational" mind (which I never claimed to be) has to acknowledge the response of humans to fear-inducing stimulus, and other mechanisms that lead to Stockholm Syndrome type behaviours. By enforcing this "prayer" to the NHS, the state has induced the public to see their captor as their liberator. It is totally perverse, but is the air we breathe these days.
50,000 may even be an underestimate as the reduced commuting from lots of work from home and reduced employment leads to fewer traffic fatalities and this hasn't been accounted for. These things are really hard to measure well.
The UK has a about 150 road deaths a month which is a rounding error compared to the 25,000 excess deaths/month. (Also I assure you that traffic deaths have not fallen to zero as enough idiots take empty streets as an invitation to do 90 in a 30 zone.)
Bit of a misleading headline, as the 50,000 excess deaths are almost certainly not all caused by SARS-CoV-2. Nowhere in the headline or the article is that claim made.
The article makes it pretty clear that the majority are due to covid.
> About three-quarters of this excess can be accounted for by deaths that mention Covid-19 on the death certificate - that total was just over 36,000.
The remaining 14,000 are up for debate, and even if they didn’t have covid it isn’t simple. If someone dies because they can’t get treated due to healthcare systems breaking due to covid, is covid the cause of death?
That’s not quite accurate - the ONS data does not attempt to attribute COVID-19 causality in that way; death certificates that mention COVID-19 are not quite the same thing as deaths we know were caused by COVID-19. To balance that somewhat there are probably missed cases hiding in the other 14,000 excess deaths as well, as you say.
The NHS is open to treat all emergency patients, so in theory there should be no excess deaths due to the healthcare system breaking; however, it may be the case that people have avoided treatment due to not wanting to burden the system, or out of the fear of contracting SARS-CoV-2.
50,000 deaths is awful. But be wary of comparisons to countries that haven’t updated yet. I’m in Quebec, and I don’t believe we even have March numbers yet. Govt here is pretty bad at data transparency overall.
Edit: yup, quebec is still stuck at February: https://www.stat.gouv.qc.ca/statistiques/population-demograp...