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https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=22961835&goto=threads%...

See my previous comment here, that is a good starting point for my position. Happy to answer any questions. (BTW I made a statement in that post that covid is an order of magnitude less deadly than the flu for those under 30, I no longer stand by that statement because it’s been hard to get age-stratified influenza IFR data as well as the uncertainty of covid-related mortality data. I still think the statement is true for <18 due to the varying risk distributions that I explained in that post)

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Incidentally, I should have listened to my gut and not posted in this thread originally since I fear I might be derailing this discussion. So, I’m sorry for that. But for now I don’t think deleting my comment in this thread is a good idea at this point since we might end up having a useful discussion.

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I must admit, this was a much more cogent and well-reasoned argument than I expected to receive - and, in fact, the only argument more coherent than "but muh freedoms/portfolio!" that I've heard in favour of ending quarantine orders. Thank you for that - and I apologise for prejudging you.

If I could summarize your argument, it appears to be that "a large segment of the population are at low-risk from infection, and unemployment (which quarantine often causes) and isolation have a larger negative impact on mental health"? That certainly hangs together.

The filthy European socialist in me naturally responds "Great, so have the government actually do its job and provide UBI or some other form of financial support, and permit going outside so long as safe distances are maintained, and you've solved a large chunk of the latter problems while still minimizing infections" - but I know that that's sadly unlikely.

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> The filthy European socialist in me naturally responds "Great, so have the government actually do its job and provide UBI or some other form of financial support, and permit going outside so long as safe distances are maintained, and you've solved a large chunk of the latter problems while still minimizing infections" - but I know that that's sadly unlikely.

Haha, exactly that. I have issues with the ethics of the government "manufacturing" a problem and then riding in to solve it, even though I personally support UBI, so I'm against rolling it out under these conditions. But more broadly, echoing what you said, we know at least in the US that the government would completely fuck it up.

> If I could summarize your argument, it appears to be that "a large segment of the population are at low-risk from infection, and unemployment (which quarantine often causes) and isolation have a larger negative impact on mental health"? That certainly hangs together.

Exactly that. In particular I've been talking a lot about suicides and overdoses but the next thread for me to pull on is the mortality due to social isolation itself. We know that social isolation is heavily correlated with worsened outcomes for pretty much every disease, but it's probably hard to find research putting a number on it.

But anyway, I really do think the important point to decide on is basically: "Is containment feasible?". If it is, then theoretically lockdown _could_ be worth it, although I oppose it on constitutional and ethical grounds to such an extent that I would never support it for anything short of the zombie apocalypse.

If containment is not feasible, which I think in the US is a totally foregone conclusion, then nothing we're doing is decreasing covid mortality at all. So all we're doing is introducing a net new category of lockdown-related mortality , which as I've said previously is actually nnot a big overlap with the covid mortality since a huge chunk of those dying from covid aren't in the workforce or will only be in the workforce for a few more years anyway.

BTW, not sure if you've seen the Dr Erickson / Dr Massihi video floating around (the one that Youtube has just censored), but I think it's really worth watching. They absolutely butchered the statistics, making a ton of imprecise and/or outright wrong statements, yet everything else they say about immunology and social isolation is entirely valid. And it's really that whole philosophy that we need people to understand: hiding inside, preventing exposure to pathogens, these are things that decrease our ability to defeat infection.