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by _RPL5_ 1618 days ago
Next you'll be asking whether lockdowns caused more harm than good. Oh-oh. I think we are 10 years too early for that particular discussion.

This is a fascinating topic, though, and I can't help myself. I have two competing perspectives on this:

1. Covid is deadly, but not that deadly, certainly not to children and younger (<60 y.o.) adults. The initial decision to hunker down was warranted, but as the stresses of the various lockdowns begin to pile up, it's no longer obvious that the lockdowns and strict health regimes are worth it. The "stresses" would include suicides, drug overdoses, domestic violence, depression, and general depravity due to lost income.

2. Covid is deadly, and if not for the lockdowns, it would have killed a lot more people than it did. The number of lives saved by shutting down the economy far outweigh the cost of the lockdowns. If we didn't shut down and later push people to vaccinate, millions would have died in the US instead of hundreds of thousands.

Anyone with an educated opinion wanna weigh in? Which perspective is correct?

1 comments

I think you're missing a piece. Lockdowns are mostly triggered to control the impact of COVID on hospitals.

If hospitals become overwhelmed by COVID cases, the impact is far beyond any additional COVID cases that can't then get treatment - it then spreads the impact to people with heart attacks, strokes, and many otheer acute life-threatening conditions. It also likely impacts care of people with cancer... and people with appointments for important elective surgery. And so on.

This seems to be a fundamental schism: between people who understand/acknowledge that our collective behaviour impacts many other people in direct and indirect ways, and people who are more focussed on individual autonomy and freedom - who maybe don't see (or care less about?) the subsequent impact of their actions on others.

This is how people choosing not to be vaccinated harms everyone else, and risks measures like lockdowns. Because there's a inverse correlation between vaccination and severity of COVID infections, it therefore follows that not being vaccinated (on a wider scale) increases the risk of hospitals being overwhelmed - and so increases the risk of lockdowns being necessary, and 'innocent' people with other conditions requiring hospital care being caught in the middle.