This logic is so clearly flawed. It’s much too easy to say we overreacted to Covid while pointing at death numbers that are much lower precisely because of the “fearmongering” measures that were taken. I’ve seen anti-vaxxers and freedom convoy members make this mistake quite often recently.
Obviously I disagree, and I find it strange that you tried so hard to distance yourself from anti-vaxxers and freedom convoy members in your earlier comment when it seems clear that you agree with them.
But we know what happened even with actions taken. In my city all hospitals were saturated, there were so many dead people that the army had to help and move corpses to an old ice rink. And that was stopped only by a full lockdown. I don't need to measure the exact magnitude to know that without taking any measures, it would have been terrible.
Just because your city isn’t equipped to deal with an unusually high amount of deaths in a pretty way does not mean that the lockdowns saved more quality adjusted life years than they cost.
A year of life is worth far more when you’re 20 than when you’re 80. If the people saved by lockdowns were primarily old people with a few years left to live it would be pretty clear that the lockdowns were a net negative.
> Just because your city isn’t equipped to deal with an unusually high amount of deaths
Nowhere in the world was equipped to deal with the incredibly high amount of deaths that happened, nor with the incredibly high amount of sick people.
> does not mean that the lockdowns saved more quality adjusted life years than they cost.
Yes, because the death of loved ones, the sickness and long-term effects of COVID, the collapse of healthcare, the sick leaves of work and the self-imposed quarantines would not have had any effect in quality-adjusted life years.
It's incredibly naive to think that life would have continued as usual without lockdowns. I mean, most people were going to go on lockdown regardless. We all knew people getting sick, going to hospitals and not being able to receive care, family members and friends dying... It wasn't fear-mongering, it was a genuinely scary experience. I don't know if you lived in places that suffered the worst of the pandemic or not, but it definitely doesn't sound like it.
> A year of life is worth far more when you’re 20 than when you’re 80.
A month of lockdown is worse than an 80 year old (who otherwise might live some years) suffocating to death alone in a hospital?
> It's incredibly naive to think that life would have continued as usual without lockdowns.
What a truly bizarre strawman.
> A month of lockdown is worse than an 80 year old (who otherwise might live some years) suffocating to death alone in a hospital?
You are very lucky if you got away with just a month of lockdowns.
It might not seem that way, but this is actually a simple mathematical problem. How many young healthy people traded in a month of the best years of their life in order to extend the life of that 80yo?
You can’t seriously tell me that I’m making a bizarre strawman argument and then proceed to repeat the exact thing I’m criticizing. It’s not “simple math”. Lockdowns weren’t just to “extend life of a few 80 yo”, even though I personally think it was a worthy “trade”. What do you think would have happened without lockdowns? How many months of “the best years of their lives” would young healthy people have lost to self-imposed isolation, sickness and loss?
Why do you think that this does not come down to simple math?
The lockdowns either had a positive or negative impact on total QALYs, this is quantifiable.
And even if the outcome was truly positive, was it truly worth the financial cost? Current research seems to indicate that we vastly overpaid in terms of $ per QALY.
Again, the question is “What do you think would have happened without lockdowns?”. Most of the research you mention, from what I’ve seen, doesn’t take into account the amount of damage that no lockdowns would have caused, not only on “life of old people” but on everyone, and not only from direct effects of the disease.
That’s the quid here. What you think would have happened without lockdowns and letting a highly contagious, severe disease run without control.
They do not consider it seriously. Both assume no economic cost from the no-lockdown scenario. Of course in that situation lockdowns cost, but it is an incredibly naive way to look at it. The assessments of those papers can only be done from a place of willful blindness and ignorance.
Things they do not take into account:
- The effect of a saturated healthcare system on the treatment of other diseases and accidents.
- Non-linearity of the death rate. The more people are sick in the hospital, the less resources there are and death rate skyrockets.
- The effect on the economy of thousands of people unable to work at the same time, due to being sick or having to care for sick people
- The mental health effects on people surrounded by sickness.
- Self-imposed quarantines and lockdowns.
- Possible public order breakdown with the combination of stressful situation plus reduced government strength due to COVID.
I mean this with no offense, but thinking that the only "bad" outcome of not having lockdowns is "a few more people die but that's it" is stupid. You should think seriously about it. There was no pretty way to come out of the initial wave of COVID. Lockdowns were awful but I really prefer them to the alternative. In fact, I would have preferred them to start earlier. If the lockdown had started seven days earlier we probably could have shortened by a month.
They did. Economic downturn, massive amounts of people being stuck at home ( either in isolation due to being sick or old/immunocompromised/etc. afraid of going out).
It’s perfectly reasonable the much scarier stuff we aren’t panicking about.