[Zanneth]

That is not true at all. The greatest burden on the economy was the lockdowns and extreme countermeasures. People choosing not to get vaccinated may have caused unnecessary burden on the healthcare system, but to blame them for the struggling economy is just wrong.

[epgui]

I am a life scientist, and with respect, you're flatly incorrect. The first-order costs of public health measures scale linearly, and the first-order costs of infectious diseases scale exponentially. Higher-order costs are at least comparable between the two, and I would argue much higher in the case of covid than in the case of lockdowns.

(This being said, very few governments did lockdowns properly, and therefore almost every half-measure taken was ineffective and wasteful.)

[vorpalhex]

As a heads up, your bio still says you are a software engineer at CircleCI.

[epgui]

That I am, but I have 12 years of post secondary education (and research experience) in life science, mostly in biochem.

[Zanneth]

A vast majority of people who contract COVID recover without any treatment. Are you arguing that the minority who don't impose higher costs than locking down the entire country?

[greycol]

Lets assume that the only cost associated with covid is lost work. So lets weight death rate by age group and years to retirement i.e. if you're in the 50-59 age group you have a 1.3 percent death rate and we'll say 10 years till retirement, 20-29 0.2% and 40 years (we'll exclude people from 60 up as they obviously contribute nothing to society and their deaths are meaningless especially in a economic sense /s). We'll ignore age distribution as we're talking about Canada which has a population pyramid which is pretty much square accross ages 10-60 (similiar to US FYI).

So as a napkin calculation how many normalised years of lost labour do we have from the deaths... 0.13 years from the 50-59 year olds, 40-49 0.08, 30-39 0.06, 20-29 0.08, 10-19 0.1, for a total of 0.45 years of lost labour from deaths if the whole country caught covid.

In a world were all economic activity can be turned on and off like a lightswitch it would make economic sense for Canada to flick that switch and leave it off for up to 5 months (of absolutely zero economic activity which is not the actual level of lockdown as essentials still run) to irradicate covid, from the impact of deaths on work produced alone.

So yes as a general rule I would argue that locking down entire countries can make great economic sense if you can lower your death rate (say by using the time where covid spread is reduced by rolling out a vacine that would reduce the lost time to 0.0045 years if everyone got it). Though of course you'd need to get into the nitty gritty of stunted business growth and if killing off 8% of people over 60 is a good way to reduce taxes needed to support them to have a definitive answer.

NB: I'll add that I'm replying to your question on the economic sense. Personally I find reducing the pandemic to this view deplorable but as some do argue it I thought I'd argue the countercase along those lines. I.E. Even if you're a heartless bastard only interested in money you should still be enforcing strict controls until your population is aproaching as vaccinated as it's going to get.

[epgui]

This is obviously a gross oversimplification, but it's exactly the kind of napkin maths that people need to make before they pass judgment based on no more than gut-feeling and misguided suggestions from the internet.

Add to that that the true cost of Covid-19 in survivors (including asymptomatic and mild cases) remains to be seen in terms of DALYs/QALYs, and is known to be significantly greater than zero. [1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00403-0

[mastersummoner]

Over 900k dead in the US alone from covid. Sure, that's a minority, but can you really shrug your shoulders at that number and say it's just a minority, no big deal?

[Zanneth]

Did I say that it wasn’t a big deal? Nobody is denying that. I cringe at the number of people who die every year due to smoking, car accidents, etc. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend mandating anything that gets in the way of people taking those risks if they choose to.

[davidgay]

> Did I say that it wasn’t a big deal? Nobody is denying that. I cringe at the number of people who die every year due to smoking, car accidents, etc.

Car accidents are 30-40k/year in the US, so 10% of covid. And the number of measures taken to reduce car accidents is extraordinary - age limits, compulsory driver's licenses, city design rules (roads, pedestrian crossings, etc, etc), speed limits, car construction regulations, compulsory insurance, and more. Given that, what's the appropriate level of regulation you suggest for covid?

[Zanneth]

I take the blame for originally mentioning car accidents, but this is not really something you can compare to COVID especially when you are talking about government mandates. A serious car accident is deadly for anyone, including teenagers or young working-aged adults. A COVID infection is not even close to as deadly for those age groups.

[epgui]

Like seatbelt mandates, taxes on tobacco products, food safety regulation (preventing the importation of certain hazardous foods), environmental regulation, or any other sort of coercive action (either against individuals, against corporations, or against government itself) taken by government to protect people?

It’s obviously a rhetorical question. I’d suggest that in all cases whether such mandates are appropriate depends on their proportionality relative to the harms they prevent.

[epgui]

I can only guess what your question is (sorry, bad grammar), but I’d rather not guess. What exactly is the question?

[YZF]

What extreme countermeasures were done in BC? Closing Yoga studios for 4 weeks? Our economy has done pretty well during the pandemic. Is it all fun and games, nope.

As a vaccinated person I flat out blame the people that didn't get vaccinated for making the last year much worse than it'd had to be. If we had better vaccine coverage we wouldn't need the restrictions that we had to put in place. They don't only put burden on the healthcare system (which they do), preventing people that need care from getting it (which they do), but they also mean the rest of us have to do more because they're not willing to do their share. I guess the bright side is that this is a tiny minority around these parts.

[epgui]

For my part, while I do blame the unvaccinated at least in part, I place even greater blame on all the anti-mask and anti-social-distancing insanity we’ve seen in both Canada and the US. (In many cases these are the same groups of people, it seems... But I believe in being specific in my accusations.)

While we developed vaccines at an impressive speed, governments royally screwed up the rollouts and logistics. Had we all done real proper lockdowns and taken public health recommendations seriously for a few weeks, and had governments been properly supportive (ie.: enabling) of that, our current vaccination uptake might have been enough to eradicate covid-19.

[nathanaldensr]

You can't possibly know these hypothetical would-have-been futures would have actually happened. You're not omnipotent.

[epgui]

You really don’t need to be omnipotent to know it. For months, Canada was hovering at an Rt just above 1.0. Very little more would have been required to tip the balance.

[Zanneth]

Canada would also have to be okay with completely closed borders for the rest of its existence. Either that or come up with some way to unilaterally enforce COVID countermeasures in every country on Earth simultaneously until it is completely eradicated. I'm sure it was a nice thought when infection rates were low enough, but after thinking long-term about the problem it becomes clear that government mandates can only do much for so long.

[_3u10]

Exactly. In Canada, $40,000 per person was spent on lockdowns most of which went to large companies posting record profits. Zilch on making an ICU room for every Canadian which is what that money could have bought should it have been spent responsibly.

[bearjaws]

You understand that you can't just throw money and magically create doctors, ICU nurses, pharmacists, etc?

[JamisonM]

It is wild to me that people don't understand that with infinite funds spent the day the first wave hit the first fully qualified nurses that would be hitting the hospitals would just be arriving now at the earliest. And those wouldn't have spent a day on a ward or in an ICU yet... and you would be years away from more doctors. Not to mention physical infrastructure.. all the while the virus scales exponentially!

[_3u10]

That’s kind of exactly how it works. Why do you think people are dropping out of law school for coding boot camp?

Why do you think our hospitals are understaffed? It’s not because of the great pay of the Canadian system

[epgui]

I am prepared to believe this number, but I think a citation would be very helpful here. In any case, have you bothered to also look up the economic burden of disease of covid-19 in Canada, in terms of QALYs and/or DALYs?

[JamisonM]

The poster's assertion that none of the pandemic money was spent on increasing ICU capacity is false, capacities were increased in every province, in mine by about 35-40%.

That said you can't healthcare-capacity your way out of a pandemic, the USA has managed to overwhelm its capacity in numerous jurisdictions despite having much higher baseline capacity than any Canadian jurisdiction. It is not an honest argument worth engaging with.

[_3u10]

I said $40k per person was enough to build an ICU bed for everyone in Canada. My assertion is honest. And you’ve provided no data / argument to refute it.

Not sure what province you are in but using the Canadian average and a 40% increase in beds, that’s roughly $50 million per bed. That is quite frankly a colossal waste of money. Do you feel that this is money well spent?

[JamisonM]

If you think that increasing hospital capacity scales infinitely with the money spent then I think your model of the healthcare system is incorrect and as such the premise of your question is incorrect.

Likewise if you think that the healthcare system capacity was the only limiting factor with respect to COVID-19 public health measures that reduced transmission your model of the epidemiology of SARS-Cov-2 is incorrect.

"I said $40k per person was enough to build an ICU bed for everyone in Canada."

You didn't say that in the comment I replied to, maybe you said it elsewhere?

$40k per person in Canada is 37 million X 40,000 - that's 1.5 trillion CAD, right? Is my math correct on that? That's 2 years of the entire federal budget where did you get that number from?

[_3u10]

Not familiar with either of those acronyms.

It’s mentioned in Pierre Poliveres speech in parliament, here’s a link: https://youtu.be/cGbnjF3OdNQ

[shakna]

QALYs and DALYs are how you measure the burden of health.

Quality-Adjusted Life Years, and Disability Affected Life Years, respectively. Without an understanding of them, you can't actually have an objective conversation about measuring the impact of any kind of illness.

[_3u10]

It’s pretty easy. Mandating people get vaccinated for diseases they already had is the height of dumb. That’s what this protest is about, does the govt have the right to force your employer to fire you if you don’t get vaccinated for a disease you already have.

[epgui]

> Mandating people get vaccinated for diseases they already had is the height of dumb.

Why do you believe this? Do you assume there is no benefit to doing so? Or do you assume that the harms outweigh the benefits?

You'd be wrong on both counts. [1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01676-0

[shakna]

Attempting to have a conversation about long distances whilst not learning the terms for either miles or kilometers is also dumb. You need to be able to talk in something more than allegory at some point.

The health impacts of vaccinated, and unvaccinated, have been measured according to current models. And in current models, getting the disease does not offer as much protection as also getting the vaccine - and thus protecting the wider population is best done with a mandate. A minuscule number of individuals is posing a threat to the rest of the population. The freedoms of the individual end where society begins. One doesn't get to walk down the street threatening to punch everyone they meet, even if they never throw a punch.

[epgui]

Without QALYs and DALYs, any comparison or weighing of dollars and health outcomes are meaningless. Wiki has enough to point you in the right general direction!