[pjc50]

Yes, it's terrible. Even those of us who are "coping" aren't coping terribly well. But ironically the disconnection has made the costs of the disease invisible as well. The zoom funerals. I personally know a couple of people who are now effectively long-term disabled with respiratory issues - well enough to leave hospital, but their previous lifestyle can't come back.

The death toll dwarfs every single "disaster" in UK modern cultural history. Aberfan, Lockerbie, Dunblane, Piper Alpha, Grenfell, Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough, Herald of Free Enterprise, Marchioness, Titanic, Lusitania, Harold Shipman: COVID exceeds all of those put together. Invisibly. Any given one of those is dwarfed by the daily COVID death toll.

A rate that starts to rival wartime deaths. At the recent peak the death toll for 19 January was almost one HMS Hood per day.

[Clewza313]

But those mostly killed people still the prime of their lives, while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different.

Cynical thought: COVID lockdowns are extreme largely because unlike most public health problems it affects the rich too, and the decision-makers behind them fall into the high-risk categories.

Sobering thought: if you think COVID-19 is bad now, wait until there's a pandemic of something like the Spanish Flu that does target and kill the young and healthy too.

[robocat]

> while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway.

The average years lost is 10 years of life in the US and 16 world wide[1] - and I think you need to reconsider how callous your comment comes across (to me at least, and I would guess others too). [edited: added detail]

I also feel your comment entirely disregards the point made by the parent comment: “I personally know a couple of people who are now effectively long-term disabled with respiratory issues - well enough to leave hospital, but their previous lifestyle can't come back.”

https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=years+lost+covid

[ravenstine]

That's not how anyone should assess risk. You can't take an average and assume that it applies to everyone. The elderly hare far more likely of losing 10 years off their lives than young people who are very unlikely to lose 40+ years off their lives. For instance, the chance that I will die from COVID at my age and health are, for all intents and purposes, 0%, according to the CDC. It would be ridiculous for me to take a statistic that is more apt for the sick and the elderly and use that to determine the course of my life.

By the way, the truth can be very callous. I don't think it's particularly useful for you to point out how callous someone sounds on the internet unless the other person has some demonstrable intent of cruelty. We all know that we have the potential to sound like bad people through text online.

[rcpt]

The metric you're looking for is QALY "quality adjusted life year". It's studied a lot in health economics but generally disregarded wrt covid because we don't have 2060's actuarial tables yet.

Yes there is evidence that 10-30% of covid infections have not resolved at 6 months

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v...

which is roughly what SARS 1 looks like (and those people are still sick). But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making.

[robocat]

“A study published in the Journal of Public Health finds that for each person in the U.S. who died after contracting COVID-19, an average of nearly 10 years of life had been lost.” - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200923124557.h...

> But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making.

That isn’t relevant to the 10 year statistic although it is an interesting point - you are saying the final result for years of life lost due to Covid could be a higher number than 10 years (after we get to finally tally the numbers in the decades to come as people die). Depends on how you paint your statistics I guess. [para edited to add clarity]

[robocat]

The point I made is that an average of 10+ years lost is strikingly different from the canonical “nearly dead elderly don’t matter” argument that I see far too many people use (and which my comment replied to). Obviously averages are very poor indicators when a distribution is wonky, and it is preferably to deep dive into the data.

Note I am all for people doing whatever they want with their own lives - if you want to go to a Covid party I would love to support that. I love taking certain risks myself.

However, when the choices of one age group can kill my mum, dad or friends, I would hope we agree to serious restrictions to help prevent that. With engineering balance to the compromises, given that prevention techniques cause significant human costs.

I am from New Zealand, so I can resoundingly support everyone acting together in concert to protect everyone else (as most kiwis did, with a good outcome for us).

[Clewza313]

I'm sorry if it comes off as callous, but we're comparing incidents of mass death here and disability-adjusted life years is how insurance companies and demographers do it. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good thing that 500k people have died from COVID in the US, but simply that having same number of young, healthy people getting gunned down in the Battle of the Somme is almost any measure objectively worse.

[solosoyokaze]

Do you really not know any young people who have been permanently damaged by COVID? I know multiple people in their 20s and 30s that spent weeks in the ER and will never be the same. I'm always surprised to find people who think the lockdown is excessive. COVID is absolutely no joke even if you're young, it's not the flu. Not even close, you don't want it.

[AndrewUnmuted]

My anecdotal experience is the opposite of yours - everyone I know in their 20s and 30s who had a positive COVID-19 test got through it within a week and it was about the same as the flu.

If my anecdata is irrelevant, then so is yours.

The only people I know who have had permanent damage from COVID-19 in this age range, have all had their trauma caused by excessive lockdown policies.

You know what's even less of a joke than COVID-19? Our histrionic, insane, and completely violent overreaction to it.

[solosoyokaze]

> You know what's even less of a joke than COVID-19? Our histrionic, insane, and completely violent overreaction to it.

Quick question: how would you propose dealing with a global pandemic? Social isolation seems like the most common sense solution, since in 2021 we know how disease is transmitted and how to deal with that.

[kelnos]

Not the parent poster, but I still think a bunch of people getting killed in a war is worse than dying from COVID, even if they are literally the same people dying in both cases.

The latter is just nature being nature, and while we can respond in some ways to reduce deaths, it will never be perfect. I get that in some ways that feels worse, because there's a feeling of powerlessness. But the former is humans being shitty and murdering each other in the name of nationalism, land, resources, religion, whatever.

[solosoyokaze]

It's "natural" for humans to fight too, it doesn't make it pleasant. I don't know that war and disease need to be ranked. Both are horrible and humanity has a long history suffering with both.

We now know enough about the nature of disease that we can be somewhat effective dealing with it. If people embrace the science that is.

[selectodude]

I know zero people that have been permanently damaged by COVID. I don't think my social circle is all that small, either.

[rcpt]

Here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v...

[solosoyokaze]

Consider yourself lucky. Would your opinion change if you knew a few people your age that almost didn't make it?

It's anecdotal for sure, but once you see it with your own eyes it definitely makes you take it seriously.

[graeme]

> If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different.

I think you missed this part of their comment. They were arguing the deaths weren’t the same kind of deaths as in past catastrophes, but the long term ailments are bad and real.

Though I agree the years lost is bigger than people think.

[Kluny]

> the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different.

It's a hell of a thing for someone who only had a few short and precious years left, to have those ripped away from them as well.

I'm hard of hearing - people joke that there's no point in wearing ear protection since I'm already deaf. No, the opposite. Because I have only a little hearing left, it's so much more precious to me than normal hearing is for most people. I protect it jealously.

I get your point, but I can't forget the human part of that equation.

[gregmac]

> COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway

What a disgusting attitude.

How is this different from "Why bother treating cancer patients? Most are going to die early anyway"? Do you think old and sick people simply provide no value to society?

I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but it's really not necessary to rank lives against each other in this way.

This attitude seems to be what's largely made this pandemic so bad: it was viewed as "just the flu" and "only affects people with pre-existing conditions" and so rather than fast, decisive action (reducing burden on healthcare system, preventing deaths, reducing the need for lockdowns and shortening the time they take), many countries instead delayed and did half-measures, causing an exponential increase in cases, which causes everything to be worse. The completely obvious outcome of willing to let old and sick people die to "save the economy" was an economy that's in turmoil as well as a massive death toll.

[Mediterraneo10]

At some point the exuberance of the young and their ability to determine their own lives has to take priority over the comfort of the old. I am nearing middle age myself and I might be in a risk group, but I want restrictions lifted. People in their teens and twenties need to have their big social coming-of-age and courtship rituals. I see restrictions as an approach to COVID, as the greatest betrayal of young people since May ’68.

> rather than fast, decisive action

It is worth noting that even if there had been the "fast, decisive action" that epidemologist advisers wanted, that would have still imposed border closures in perpetuity. Life might have gone on "like normal" within a country, but people could not interact with their neighbors.

We see already some Australians advocating for hotel quarantine to be obligatory even after COVID, because a year of closed borders has made them regard outsiders as dirty. How long before border closures awaken old nationalist conflicts that freedom of movement and actually getting to know the other side had largely put to rest?

[rcpt]

But that's real far off from how the US does things. 30% of Medicare is spent on people who die within a year for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_rationing_in_the_Un...

And global warming might as well not exist as far as lawmakers are concerned. The comfort of the old is our nation's top priority.

[kelnos]

Treating elderly cancer patients does not negatively affect the lives of other people.

Locking down the near-entirety of life has long-term physical and mental health implications that we probably don't fully understand. There have already been suicides directly attributable to COVID-imposed isolation.

It's possible -- and even likely -- that the lockdowns are the right move overall, but the lockdowns themselves have destroyed lives too. Taking measures to protect against something that overwhelmingly affects one segment of the population has a big negative effect on everyone else as well.

[jdminhbg]

> How is this different from "Why bother treating cancer patients? Most are going to die early anyway"?

You do realize that every day we decline to treat cancer patients because they are close to dying anyway, right?

[derefr]

> I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but it's really not necessary to rank lives against each other in this way.

No, the GP is pointing out the well-established social-psychology theory that people already implicitly rank things this way, and that this is why the death toll doesn’t have more of a mental impact on people in changing their decisions, even when they hear about it.

It’s the same reason that news like “baby of suburban WASP nuclear family gets kidnapped” turns into a whole-community man-hunt with special ribbons that gets remembered for years, while news like “baby of urban black single mother gets kidnapped” never even gets acknowledged by the community.

When people who are high-status to society go away, the whole of society mourns. When people who are low-status to society go away, only those directly affected mourn.

Any death-toll number, in the mind of most human beings (or rather, of any human being who’s only engaging with the problem using System 1 thinking), isn’t interpreted as “raw numbers” of lives lost, or even QALYs lost — instead, it’s felt as an aggregate of social-status lost, subjective to the listener’s personal social-status ranking function.

For the same reason that people don’t tend to worry much about disasters half-way across the world (the aggregate social-status weight computed through their status ranking function still sums low), people won’t tend to worry much about the impact of a local disaster if it’s only directly hurting local low-status people. Even if it’s indirectly impacting high-status people by taking away people they care directly about, that still doesn’t generate the sort of performative shame for not having acted that comes when high-status individuals are taken†.

And since that very performative shame is what policy-makers rely on as a group impetus to for getting changes pushed through on a society-wide level, a lack of it means that nothing can really change, even when there are clear rational reasons to implement change.

——————

† Evo-psych just-so hypothesis (i.e. take this with 50 grains of salt): people are expected to sacrifice to protect high-status people; people who do so are rewarded by the high-status people; and so, over generations, it became a eusocial instinct to feel an urge toward performative shame when you “fail to protect” a high-status person in your community—even one you never personally knew.

But people aren’t expected to sacrifice for low-status affiliations of high-status people (since it’d “only” be the high-status person, and not the rest of the community, enforcing the norm on you), so a similar eusocial instinct toward performative shame for failing to protect those people never arose.

[Damogran6]

More to the point, I think these statement show a lack of empathy on the part of the person making them.

'at least they're old'

This has wiped out FAMILES. 2.4M worldwide and nearly 500k in the US. And it flies past people due to fatigue and habituation.

[pb7]

2.4M people is 0.03% of the global population. Heart disease alone kills 0.23% of the global population per year.

[Uberphallus]

> 2.4M people is 0.03% of the global population. Heart disease alone kills 0.23% of the global population per year.

One would have thought that by now we wouldn't be comparing fatality rates of a disease that propagates exponentially when left unchecked, with a more or less stable family of diseases that isn't contagious, but here we are, apple pies to orange sorbets.

[pb7]

Masks and social distancing alone would have sufficed. South Korea is proof of that.

[kelnos]

If we're talking about South Korea, you need to add widespread testing, mandatory quarantine for confirmed cases, and isolation for people possibly exposed.

Regardless, areas of the US that have mask and social distancing mandates still have high case rates. It seems like the driver of surges in those areas are mainly due to people violating other restrictions, like having indoor gatherings.

[iancmceachern]

Boo! Life is life, who are we to judge who's is more or less valuable?

[rebuilder]

We are doing so now, by choosing to take the suicides and mental health problems lockdowns will result in over the deaths the pandemic would cause without lockdown. I mean, I'm not opposed to the lockdowns generally, but you can't pretend we aren't making choices about who suffers.

Mostly we're choosing to take our chances on the unknown long-term consequences over the fairly well-understood risks we face now. The people who pay the cost will be different.

[kelnos]

Yup, and I wish more people would recognize/admit this. The lockdown decisions may be the best decisions, but let's not pretend we're not trading some deaths for others.

[iancmceachern]

That's fair, I agree.

[_uwiz]

The problem of course being that after extreme isolation and/or social breakdown, even those of us that know full well how large those numbers are start to snap.

Approximately 0.2-0.3% of the UK population has died due to coronavirus.

But my personal risk of psychosis as a result of lockdown is far higher than that, it's starting to approach 1, and when it happens, it doesn't matter if those figures are 10%.

Maybe it's just me, but I really doubt it is. Social unrest is coming if we do this for much longer, I can't see any other way.

I can't live in a world that doesn't allow me to have a friend over for a cup of tea indefinitely; compromise really needs to happen soon.

[willyt]

The death toll in Britain so far is about 3 times the number of British civilians killed in WW2.

[skocznymroczny]

The death toll is greatly exaggerated. Remember the "shocking" scenes from China? People dying on the streets, running out of coffins. Now we are in theory in multiplies of those infection rates and we don't see that anymore. What happened?

[pjc50]

The media chose to stop covering it?

Or maybe not even that. The 6pm BBC radio news just read out the latest 500+ dead and apparent R number. It's just ... not important to the discourse somehow?