Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!
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@topspin you're still depending on the app catching a high-enough percentage of contacts. If it doesn't (and it doesn't even if it works perfectly as advertised because of the uncertainties in our knowledge of contagion), then for large enough number of cases you're still left with a large enough number of non-identified contacts (i.e. possibly infected) persons running around. Which is enough to keep the virus spreading, and thus means you still have to have all other protection measures in place, exactly like if you did not have app working.
My point is that when there are too many cases around, you'll never be able to isolate each and all of them and thus have to resort to other, more disruptive methods (as can be evidenced pretty much everywhere). It's only when you have a low number of cases that you can hope to keep them under control by using mostly contact tracing.
Of course if you can make contact tracing "for free" (i.e. apps working as they're supposed to and widely accepted) then why not combine it with the rest, if it helps even a little it's better than what it costs (if it doesn't cost anything it doesn't have to help a lot for the balance to be positive!). But 1) apps are not "for free", that was my original point about trust in IT being irremediably broken and 2) "regular" contact tracing is even further from free. So contact tracing has a cost, and thus should not IMO be done when its benefit is too low in comparison, which is when it let too many possible contaminations slip through. And this is more or less what I can see in practice: since cases have spiked again (since summer, roughly), there is very little focus on tracing and what focus there is in e.g. newspapers mostly mentions how swamped they are and not very effective overall (i.e. no measurable impact on the spread of the virus).
So I stand by my point that contact tracing is, in practice, useless when there are large number of cases.
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@remi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@topspin you're still depending on the app catching a high-enough percentage of contacts. If it doesn't (and it doesn't even if it works perfectly as advertised because of the uncertainties in our knowledge of contagion), then for large enough number of cases you're still left with a large enough number of non-identified contacts (i.e. possibly infected) persons running around. Which is enough to keep the virus spreading, and thus means you still have to have all other protection measures in place, exactly like if you did not have app working.
That's pretty irrelevant, as you realized in your later paragraphs. It doesn't have to be a silver bullet, it only needs to help somewhat. Of course, if either nobody uses it or the BT technology doesn't actually work, then it doesn't help.
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@topspin I'd say that even if it was actually working, it would be pretty useless at the moment because of the number of cases. Not entirely useless, but it wouldn't really help until we get back to low cases number.
Or, turning it around, it's currently pretty pointless (and will fail anyway because of the systemic lack of trust that won't be solved by short-term efforts) to try and convince people to install the app since it would do little to help at the moment.
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Other than Google/Apple saying "it works", I've not seen anything convincing that it does.
Google and (especially) Apple saying something works is not at all convincing to me; just the opposite.
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@Gurth said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
It looks like the first night was genuine protests against the COVID measures that got out of hand, but everything since then seems to be mostly people egging each other on to go and riot.
I have an odd feeling of déjà vu.
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@HardwareGeek said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Other than Google/Apple saying "it works", I've not seen anything convincing that it does.
Google and (especially) Apple saying something works is not at all convincing to me; just the opposite.
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@remi abbr’d in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
does BT work at that distance
https://tenor.com/view/thumbs-up-bt7274-titanfall-gif-14796563
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@remi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
you'll never be able to isolate each and all of them
Unless you go commie style
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@Gurth said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
In the Netherlands, a 21:00–04:30 curfew is causing riots:
Covid: Dutch curfew riots rage for third night
Police describe it as the worst unrest in the Netherlands for decades, with more than 180 arrests.
It looks like the first night was genuine protests against the COVID measures that got out of hand, but everything since then seems to be mostly people egging each other on to go and riot.
Push a population far enough, they will snap and that particular genie can be hard to put back in it's bottle. Western governments have this strange idea of the power balance between them and the population, because western populations have largely been happy with life for decades.
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@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Gurth said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
In the Netherlands, a 21:00–04:30 curfew is causing riots:
Covid: Dutch curfew riots rage for third night
Police describe it as the worst unrest in the Netherlands for decades, with more than 180 arrests.
It looks like the first night was genuine protests against the COVID measures that got out of hand, but everything since then seems to be mostly people egging each other on to go and riot.
Push a population far enough, they will snap and that particular genie can be hard to put back in it's bottle. Western governments have this strange idea of the power balance between them and the population, because western populations have largely been happy with life for decades.
In our case, I think the real reason is (young) people are bored. I get the impression that for some people going out and being a hooligan for an evening (possibly followed by spending the night in a police cell) is part of what keeps them sane the rest of the time. They haven't had that opportunity for over 10 months now. Everyone continuously gets encouraged to, basically, be an introvert. But I am an introvert normally and even I am getting stir-crazy.
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@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Push a population far enough, they will snap and that particular genie can be hard to put back in it's bottle. Western governments have this strange idea of the power balance between them and the population, because western populations have largely been happy with life for decades.
That's a pretty weird notion, as western countries are the ones where governments can't just do whatever they please. Other countries are pushing their population far harder, in general. What China is doing would bring people here to actually revolt, but they have no qualms suppressing their population.
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Push a population far enough, they will snap and that particular genie can be hard to put back in it's bottle. Western governments have this strange idea of the power balance between them and the population, because western populations have largely been happy with life for decades.
That's a pretty weird notion, as western countries are the ones where governments can't just do whatever they please. Other countries are pushing their population far harder, in general. What China is doing would bring people here to actually revolt, but they have no qualms suppressing their population.
Maybe it's partly cultural; push a population for long enough, and crack down hard enough when they rise up, and they'll get out of the habit of rising up.
And maybe it's partly practical: China's got a lot of practice in suppressing riots, and then going after the leaders afterward. Those who would riot are, at least in part, already in jail.
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Push a population far enough, they will snap and that particular genie can be hard to put back in it's bottle. Western governments have this strange idea of the power balance between them and the population, because western populations have largely been happy with life for decades.
That's a pretty weird notion, as western countries are the ones where governments can't just do whatever they please. Other countries are pushing their population far harder, in general. What China is doing would bring people here to actually revolt, but they have no qualms suppressing their population.
Except that they've been doing some really outrageous things since last March and are now shocked that people are pushing back. I think the point @Carnage was trying to make was that they didn't expect the pushback because they think what they've been doing was a legitimate exercise of their powers.
People's initial fears made them think, at first, that the restrictions were reasonable, even if not legitimate exercises of power. Now that the restrictions are recognized as egregious, though...
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
People's initial fears made them think, at first, that the restrictions were reasonable, even if not legitimate exercises of power. Now that the restrictions are recognized as egregious, though...
Two points I feel worth adding: first, the initial restrictions were supposed to be only temporary ("two weeks to flatten the curve") and therefore much easier to swallow, both conceptually (emergencies require extraordinary measures) and practically (a two-week shutdown of your business or employer will hurt, but - like as not - you'll survive). Today, it is becoming abundantly clear that there exists no exit strategy. Governments worldwide seem ready and content to keep up the restrictions indefinitely. I believe that even those in the "once we get a vaccine, it'll all go back to normal" camp have been disabused of their illusions. For all we can tell, what we have now is the new normal and will remain so, if unchallenged.
Secondly, it's not at all clear that all the restrictions are actually achieving anything. It's one thing to go through hardships if you can see some greater good coming from this, and another thing entirely to do so if it appears futile. I've not checked every single location in the entire world, but from a cursory examination, it appears that the only way the restrictions can be reasonably justified is through an appeal to a counterfactual reality where things are even worse.
Putting it all together, I don't think any of this would stand up to strict scrutiny (which I believe to be the appropriate standard, given the rights being curtailed) in a court that took its job seriously. Has the matter actually been examined by US courts in any extent? In Poland, the courts have generally been unsympathetic to government arguments. Unfortunately, this has - to the best of my knowledge - been restricted to striking down individual attempts at enforcement.
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@PleegWat said in [Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!]
Everyone continuously gets encouraged to, basically, be an introvert. But I am an introvert normally and even I am getting stir-crazy.
I have absolutely no problems with any of these corona-related measures, but of course, I spent most of my time at home anyway even before all that. However, I am getting a bit fed up with all these people complaining about how they can’t go out — or actually, with news reports about that, which probably exist partly because people complaining about
$subjectare more interesting than people saying they have no problem with it, and partly because the journalists making them feel like that too. Get a hobby you can do by yourself, indoors, dammit!
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Except that they've been doing some really outrageous things since last March
Not in the Netherlands, really. Objectively, we’ve been having one of the more relaxed lockdowns around — unless your point of reference is a country like Sweden.
I think the point @Carnage was trying to make was that they didn't expect the pushback because they think what they've been doing was a legitimate exercise of their powers.
Probably, but definitely coupled to the fact that Dutch people aren’t used to real restrictions of any kind, and are generally quick to object to any that affect them personally. (At the same time, they don’t usually care as much about things that don’t.)
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@Gurth said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Except that they've been doing some really outrageous things since last March
Not in the Netherlands, really. Objectively, we’ve been having one of the more relaxed lockdowns around — unless your point of reference is a country like Sweden.
I would compare Florida to California or Michigan. Here in the US most of the stuff has been done at the state level.
I think the point @Carnage was trying to make was that they didn't expect the pushback because they think what they've been doing was a legitimate exercise of their powers.
Probably, but definitely coupled to the fact that Dutch people aren’t used to real restrictions of any kind, and are generally quick to object to any that affect them personally. (At the same time, they don’t usually care as much about things that don’t.)
As well they should.
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Probably, but definitely coupled to the fact that Dutch people aren’t used to real restrictions of any kind, and are generally quick to object to any that affect them personally. (At the same time, they don’t usually care as much about things that don’t.)
As well they should.
I forgot to add that these rioters appear to be mostly teenagers and low-20-somethings, that is, a generation that (I have the impression) isn’t used to being told “No, you can’t” about anything. They have been raised with unrealistic expectations of how the world works, and many don’t appear to deal with disappointment well.
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@Gurth said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Probably, but definitely coupled to the fact that Dutch people aren’t used to real restrictions of any kind, and are generally quick to object to any that affect them personally. (At the same time, they don’t usually care as much about things that don’t.)
As well they should.
I forgot to add that these rioters appear to be mostly teenagers and low-20-somethings, that is, a generation that (I have the impression) isn’t used to being told “No, you can’t” about anything. They have been raised with unrealistic expectations of how the world works, and many don’t appear to deal with disappointment well.
teens and low tweens are historically the ones to throw hissy fits and riot, it's not particularly new.
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@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
first, the initial restrictions were supposed to be only temporary ("two weeks to flatten the curve")
[…]
Secondly, it's not at all clear that all the restrictions are actually achieving anything.These two things are, of course, strongly related. If the restrictions had strong effect, they wouldn't need to last long. But the effect clearly isn't strong, if there is any at all, which makes the restrictions last longer. Still, the governments seem to be even more hanging on to the restrictions now that it's known they are not very efficient, likely because they have no idea what else to do and they have to do “something”.
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@Bulb Personally, I think it's even simpler: a combination of inertia and getting high on your own supply.
Essentially, what happened was that, in order to lower resistance to the initial measures, there were two main information thrusts:
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COVID-19 is extraordinarily dangerous (so we must take extraordinarily strong measures to fight it),
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Our extraordinary measures are working.
Given that the disease looks to be seasonal (like many other influenza-like illnesses) and that it reached the West in Spring, the second claim didn't seem terribly detached from reality at first. We should also never forget that any evidence-based policy will quickly obtain tons of evidence supporting it, because that's the way research incentives are structured and nobody reads scientific papers anyway.
The first claim was harder to uphold once disease prevalence passed a certain threshold. It's easy to be alarmed when all your information about something comes from sources interested in pushing an alarmist narrative; much less so if your immediate experience contradicts the narrative (as when you have had the virus yourself, or someone you know well did).
This is a tricky needle to thread - not unintentionally, as far as the powers-that-be are concerned - because the disease actually is somewhat dangerous. Just not extraordinarily so. A handy metaphor I've seen goes something like: COVID-19 is, maybe, six times more dangerous than the 'flu. Logically, we should therefore devote six times the effort to fighting the disease as we do to the 'flu. In practice, we're acting as if it wasn't several times more dangerous, but thousands or even millions more. We really don't do very much about the 'flu at all.
Regardless, the story everyone settled on is "COVID-19 is, like, really dangerous", "masks and lockdowns work", and - not really stated outright, but heavily implied - "nothing else matters".
At no point during this entire affair was the question of "what is a proportional response to the problem?" on the table. The narrative intended to justify the first moves when the disease was new and scary had completely taken over by the time we were in position to start answering it.
Another question nobody even thinks to ask: "when does the cure become worse than the disease?" At what point do we start doing more damage through misguided response to a crisis, than would happen if we did absolutely nothing and let things run their course?
I'm pretty sure that the decision makers have sincerely bought into the notion that no sacrifice is too great to fight COVID-19, that everything they're doing is working, and that they're not really causing a lot of hardship at all (if people are losing their livelihoods and their minds, that's the result of the disease right? and has totally nothing to do with the fact that we forbade them to work and socialise).
I can't even blame them, really. I mean: everyone's saying the same thing (pay no attention to the fact that saying something different will get you dogpiled and called a granny-killer). It's not like the press, say, or even the opposition is getting in their face, asking: "What the fuck is wrong with you, you feckless muppet? Don't you realise you can't just lock people in their houses and shut down large portions of the economy for years and expect it's gonna work out... somehow? How many lives do you intend to fuck up doing shit that isn't getting us fewer infections or deaths? Have you looked at the graphs pre- and post-intervention?"
So everyone just sort of ambles along and after a while it's just easier to keep doing tomorrow what you did yesterday. Doing something different could well be a bold, or - dare I say it - courageous political move...
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@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
This is a tricky needle to thread - not unintentionally, as far as the powers-that-be are concerned - because the disease actually is somewhat dangerous. Just not extraordinarily so. A handy metaphor I've seen goes something like: COVID-19 is, maybe, six times more dangerous than the 'flu. Logically, we should therefore devote six times the effort to fighting the disease as we do to the 'flu. In practice, we're acting as if it wasn't several times more dangerous, but thousands or even millions more. We really don't do very much about the 'flu at all.
Except that we know that occasionally 'flu is very dangerous. It just hasn't been for the past few decades. We've good reason (from understanding the biology of the 'flu virus) to believe that that's not a permanent state of affairs.
COVID-19 is a tricky disease:
- it's highly contagious (very high natural basic reproduction rate),
- it has quite a delay from becoming infected to getting noticeable symptoms,
- it is more lethal than most other common diseases (with the death toll falling overwhelmingly on the elderly, though not exclusively so), and
- there's the horrible long-covid syndrome that is economically debilitating for those people unlucky enough to get it (and that's very much not restricted to just the old).
The combination is pretty bad: people who get it often don't realise that they're a problem (it's very rare that people can actually handle the idea of something two weeks ago having an effect on what's going on now, alas) and spread it to others, and those people can end up dying or being effectively rendered disabled for a long time afterwards. Masks and lockdowns and so on are about trying to knock down the reproduction rate of the disease so it does less damage while the vaccinations are being sorted out (they're now coming on-stream). There's also been a lot more learned about how to treat the disease; the likelihood of death has been decreased (I've not seen figures for long covid).
But some people are sufficiently selfish that they both refuse to isolate and refuse to wear a mask when not isolating. There are many excuses for this, but the core idea seems to be that rules are for other people. I feel sorry for people in such marginal financial situations that masks are an expense too far and (usually) for whom isolating is impossible. I don't feel at all sorry for people who can afford to take proper care but choose not to.
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@dkf said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
But some people are sufficiently selfish that they both refuse to isolate and refuse to wear a mask when not isolating.
If only they'd put their three masks on like sane people.
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@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
This is a tricky needle to thread - not unintentionally, as far as the powers-that-be are concerned - because the disease actually is somewhat dangerous. Just not extraordinarily so. A handy metaphor I've seen goes something like: COVID-19 is, maybe, six times more dangerous than the 'flu. Logically, we should therefore devote six times the effort to fighting the disease as we do to the 'flu. In practice, we're acting as if it wasn't several times more dangerous, but thousands or even millions more. We really don't do very much about the 'flu at all.
Flu kills 30k usians in a year. Covid killed 400k if I googled correcly, with the effort that was made against it. I wouldn't want to test what would happen if the effort wasn't there.
That is more than a hundred times more dead people than the 9/11 terrorist attack that people went to war for. How is that not worth the current effort?
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@sockpuppet7 said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
This is a tricky needle to thread - not unintentionally, as far as the powers-that-be are concerned - because the disease actually is somewhat dangerous. Just not extraordinarily so. A handy metaphor I've seen goes something like: COVID-19 is, maybe, six times more dangerous than the 'flu. Logically, we should therefore devote six times the effort to fighting the disease as we do to the 'flu. In practice, we're acting as if it wasn't several times more dangerous, but thousands or even millions more. We really don't do very much about the 'flu at all.
Flu kills 30k usians in a year. Covid killed 400k if I googled correcly, with the effort that was made against it. I wouldn't want to test what would happen if the effort wasn't there.
That is more than a hundred times more dead people than the 9/11 terrorist attack that people went to war for. How is that not worth the current effort?
It's definitely worse than normal flu, but the reporting is vastly different. People have been logged as COVID deaths from car crashes (because they'd had a recent positive COVID test). Flu deaths are largely an exercise in statistics due in part to the fact that testing is very different.
And if you're very old, it's much much much worse than flu, of course.
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@sockpuppet7 Except that we don't know that it killed 400k. Because the statistics are messed up.
Someone, somewhere, had the bright idea to order that anyone who died COVID-positive should be marked as having died of COVID. So now we have people marked as dying of COVID in a motorcycle accident.
And now, until some agency puts in the effort to sift through all the autopsy reports, there is no way to know the real number.
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@dkf That's all very well, but you're essentially providing an object illustration of how we got here.
The combination is pretty bad: people who get it often don't realise that they're a problem (it's very rare that people can actually handle the idea of something two weeks ago having an effect on what's going on now, alas) and spread it to others, and those people can end up dying or being effectively rendered disabled for a long time afterwards.
You're starting with the premise that - in a number of cases (we now know to be a minority) - the disease can (conditional) have some pretty bad effects.
From there you conclude that we will (non-conditional) impose hardships on everyone in order to prevent the aforementioned.
The first is true for any infectious disease. People die of the 'flu. My grandmother died of the 'flu.
The second is only justified if the aggregate harm of the disease is greater than the aggregate harm of mitigation and here your position becomes poor.
The harms of mitigation are certain. The harms of the disease are uncertain. When the government makes it illegal for me to be outside without a good excuse (as was the case last spring) the harm is immediate - I am being made a prisoner in my own home.
On the other hand, getting from "I am outside without a mask" to "somebody dies of Covid" requires a chain of conditionals that makes the chance of me actually causing any particular death so small as to be negligible.
And that's assuming that mask mandates work and I believe they're bullshit.
@sockpuppet7 said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
This is a tricky needle to thread - not unintentionally, as far as the powers-that-be are concerned - because the disease actually is somewhat dangerous. Just not extraordinarily so. A handy metaphor I've seen goes something like: COVID-19 is, maybe, six times more dangerous than the 'flu. Logically, we should therefore devote six times the effort to fighting the disease as we do to the 'flu. In practice, we're acting as if it wasn't several times more dangerous, but thousands or even millions more. We really don't do very much about the 'flu at all.
Flu kills 30k usians in a year.
That we know of. We didn't really track 'flu deaths before and we still don't.
Covid killed 400k if I googled correcly, with the effort that was made against it.
That we claim. Remember, "had Covid a while back" is enough to get your death recorded as Covid in some places, even if you got hit by a bus. This is by design.
I wouldn't want to test what would happen if the effort wasn't there.
I would. At least we'd have a comparison.
That is more than a hundred times more dead people than the 9/11 terrorist attack that people went to war for. How is that not worth the current effort?
People die. It really is that simple. Most of my closest family is dead, for example - died over the years from all sorts of causes, some natural, some not. Coming to terms with mortality - your own and your loved ones' - is a developmental milestone, or should be.
I don't believe the current effort is helping reduce mortality. Indeed, I think they may be contributing to the excess mortality we've seen last year (because we've disrupted healthcare provision as well).
Even if they did, however, saving lives is not an ultimate end that justifies any means whatsoever. That line has been crossed.
Make no mistake: these interventions will end soon or they will end in bloodshed the likes of which you have not seen since the Bolsheviks. Don't go down that path, mate.
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@acrow said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
And now, until some agency puts in the effort to sift through all the autopsy reports, there is no way to know the real number.
Even then. Still, we can look at excess deaths.
Of course, you can see that we had relatively mild winters the previous two years, which means more frail old people for COVID. Obviously the excess is more than that, but still, important context.
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@boomzilla The excess deaths are indeed important context, but some agency still needs to put in the effort to distinguish the deaths due to actual covid infections, and deaths due to the panic. And then it will still be a question what would different style of countermeasures result in, because few countries went any different way.
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
People have been logged as COVID deaths from car crashes (because they'd had a recent positive COVID test).
At 2019, in the city of Manaus, they buried on average 28 people a day. They are burying between 100 and 200 people a day now. The only new variable this year there was covid. So, I think the cases of misreporting are not meaningful on this statistics.
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@acrow said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
And now, until some agency puts in the effort to sift through all the autopsy reports, there is no way to know the real number.
Even then. Still, we can look at excess deaths.
Of course, you can see that we had relatively mild winters the previous two years, which means more frail old people for COVID. Obviously the excess is more than that, but still, important context.
Now look at the same kind of graph for Brazil:
source (portuguese): http://www.conass.org.br/indicadores-de-obitos-por-causas-naturais/
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@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I don't believe the current effort is helping reduce mortality. Indeed, I think they may be contributing to the excess mortality we've seen last year
Not to mention the significant increase in the number of suicides due to the government-imposed social isolation.
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@lolwhat said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I don't believe the current effort is helping reduce mortality. Indeed, I think they may be contributing to the excess mortality we've seen last year
Not to mention the significant increase in the the number of suicides due to the government-imposed social isolation.
What is the order of magnitude of those?
Are they even relevant compared to six digit number of covid deaths?
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@lolwhat said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I don't believe the current effort is helping reduce mortality. Indeed, I think they may be contributing to the excess mortality we've seen last year
Not to mention the significant increase in the the number of suicides due to the government-imposed social isolation.
What is the order of magnitude of those?
Are they even relevant compared to six digit number of covid deaths?Depends on what you mean by relevant. Surely much lower but still should be very relevant to policy makers. Plus the longer term effects of increased poverty and delayed medical care.
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
six digit number of covid deaths
Once again, as others have stated, were those deaths purely due to COVID, or did they happen to have COVID at the time (according to tests that have a high false positive rate if you turn up the cycle count high enough), or did they get counted as COVID even if they didn't have it (since medical firms could get several thousand dollars from the feds if a given person in their charge tested positive for COVID)?
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@lolwhat and what is the number of suicide deaths?
If you’re saying that there are a high number of reported covid deaths but you don’t believe them, you should back your assertion of “significant increase” in suicide deaths with at least the order of magnitude they are.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/11/23/covid-pandemic-rise-suicides/
America’s system for monitoring suicides is so broken and slow that experts won’t know until roughly two years after the pandemic whether suicides have risen nationally. But coroners and medical examiners are already seeing troubling signs.
In Arizona’s Pima County, officials have sent two health bulletins alerting doctors and hospitals to spikes in suicides. In Oregon’s Columbia County, the number of suicides by summer had already surpassed last year’s total. In the sprawling Chicago suburbs, DuPage County has reported a 23 percent rise compared with last year. And in the city itself, the number of suicides among African Americans has far surpassed the total for 2019, even as officials struggle to understand whether the deaths are being driven by the pandemic, racial unrest or both. What has shocked medical examiners in Chicago is the age range — from a 57-year-old deputy police chief to a 9-year-old child.
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It's more evident for some specific states. This is what happened where people took too long to shut down everything here:
Amazonas:
Maranhão:
Then there is Rio Grande do Sul that did shut everything down for most of the year:
I don't think you can point the difference to things like car crashes
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@sockpuppet7 said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I don't think you can point the difference to things like car crashes
But it might make several percentage points of difference!!!
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Quick Google: New York State. Suicides in 2014 (newest data I could find on short notice): slightly less than 1400, but lets round to that (source). Peak was at 2012, so no clear trend. But let's round up to 2000, because why not. Let's then interpret a significant increase as "doubling", i.e. ~4000 suicides. Deaths attributed to COVID: 42434.
If someone can find the number of excess deaths for NY, I'd be interested in that. Enough googling death for one day for me.
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@GOG said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
All People die. It really is that simple.
FTFR
I don't believe the current effort is helping reduce mortality.
Not at all. Overall mortality is 100.0000000000000000000000000000000000% and always will be.
Even if they did, however, saving lives is not an ultimate end that justifies any means whatsoever.
At best, any lifesaving effort is merely postponing the inevitable and changing the cause from disease/accident A to disease/accident B. Is it worth $trillions to postpone one death by a few minutes? Obviously not. Should we spend nothing to prevent preventable diseases because everyone is going to die anyway? Obviously not that extreme, either. Somewhere in the middle, there's a region in which the cost/benefit ratio is reasonable.
We need to have a civil discussion on where that region is, because we don't all agree on it. Some people see the cost rising steeply for little additional benefit and say "too much". Others see the small benefit and say it's worth spending more to get more benefit. Some see those who think the cost is too high are being selfish. Some on both sides vilify those on the other side (more on one side than the other, I think, but this isn't the Garage, so I won't say anything more about that).
Currently, it is very difficult to have that civil discussion, for several reasons. We don't have accurate values, nor even good estimates, for the real costs of various preventative measures. We don't have accurate values, nor even good estimates, for the benefits of various measures. We don't even have accurate values for the size of the problem we're trying to solve, because of mis-classification of deaths, changing definitions of what constitutes a "case", etc. It is difficult to have the discussion because people approach the problem with fundamentally different worldviews (how much government should be allowed to impinge upon personal liberties "for a good cause"). And keeping the discussion civil has become almost impossible due to the way it has been politicized for partisan advantage.
I don't have any answers. We really need to lower the partisan rhetoric by orders of magnitude before we can even have a reasonable discussion, but unfortunately, that seems very unlikely in any useful time-frame.
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@HardwareGeek said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
We really need to lower the partisan rhetoric by orders of magnitude before we can even have a reasonable discussion
+∞
Certain users here can start by not calling everyone who disagrees with them selfish.
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@HardwareGeek said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
We need to have a civil discussion
I have strong suspicion that we've totally forgotten how to do that. And I mean basically all people everywhere, nothing specific to America. Those that ever new it in the first place, which I am not sure how many actually is.
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@antiquarian said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@HardwareGeek said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
We really need to lower the partisan rhetoric by orders of magnitude before we can even have a reasonable discussion
+∞
Certain users here can start by not calling everyone who disagrees with them selfish.
I meant "we" as a society, not "we" TDWTF, but yeah, that's a start.
I have a (perhaps) unusual perspective on this whole thing. One one hand, I tend to have a somewhat libertarian attitude toward the lockdowns. Government intervention should be kept to the minimum necessary, and people should take a high degree of responsibility for their own well-being. Protect the vulnerable, and let the rest of society get on with their lives.
OTOH, I'm one of the vulnerable that needs to be protected. Protecting me means either forcing me into near-total isolation or forcing society into stronger protective measures than they would otherwise need. Right now, I'm tending toward the former (and not liking it), but when I do go out for essential activities like grocery shopping, it really irks me when other people are not properly following the mandatory measures intended to protect one another. (That those measures are of highly questionable effectiveness is another issue, but if the law says you have to wear a mask in a grocery store, wear the *&$##**$ mask, and wear it properly. It's not about you; it's about the people around you.)
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@HardwareGeek said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
if the law says you have to wear a mask in a grocery store
Except that in most cases, at least here in the States, these "laws" didn't start out as bills that were then duly debated and passed by legislative bodies, signed into actual law by executives, etc. No, they are public health orders, unilaterally enacted and extended for almost a year now by executive fiat, since there's an "emergency."
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@lolwhat said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
executive fiat
True, and that is a problem, depending on the laws that were enacted by the legislature. In some cases, the legislative branch has authorized the executive to promulgate specific regulations to implement a general law, and those regulations have the force of the law that authorized them. And that's fine, although it's probably a good idea for the legislature to review the regulations every so often to make sure they're following the intent of the framework and adjust the framework if necessary. And often one of the regulations that the legislature (and/or constitution, depending on the jurisdiction) allows is that the executive has broad authority to implement stuff in case of an emergency. The problem is that the emergency power should be strictly limited to the time necessary for the legislature to convene (if they're not already), debate, and act on the issue, and that's what we're seeing the lack of here. The executive (at all levels of government) is using (or abusing) its lawful (or not) authority to enact measures far beyond the time in which the legislature should be taking over its proper role to create appropriate laws.
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@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
teens and low tweens are historically the ones to throw hissy fits and riot, it's not particularly new.
Maybe where you’re from, but in this country, riots this serious haven’t happened for decades.
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@Gurth said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
teens and low tweens are historically the ones to throw hissy fits and riot, it's not particularly new.
Maybe where you’re from, but in this country, riots this serious haven’t happened for decades.
It's been that way all the way back to the Roman empire. And probably further.
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@HardwareGeek said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
We don't have accurate values, nor even good estimates, for the benefits of various measures.
There is also the psychological fact that the more measures are efficient, the less they will seem to be efficient... because the whole disease looks less terrifying when there are less deaths!
Imagine if e.g. masks were 100% effective. A place where mask wearing is mandatory will have no cases at all. Great for them, right? Except that, humans being humans, you can be almost certain that the reaction of many people in that place will not be "phew, let's keep being protected" but rather "if we don't have any cases why do we have to wear those annoying masks!!!" And before you say so, yes, this will happen even if neighbour places have tons of cases. People (at least some... but enough to fill 24/7 news who always need to fuel any dumpster fire that will get them ratings) will just find some other reason for why it is so.
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@remi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@HardwareGeek said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
We don't have accurate values, nor even good estimates, for the benefits of various measures.
There is also the psychological fact that the more measures are efficient, the less they will seem to be efficient... because the whole disease looks less terrifying when there are less deaths!
Imagine if e.g. masks were 100% effective. A place where mask wearing is mandatory will have no cases at all. Great for them, right? Except that, humans being humans, you can be almost certain that the reaction of many people in that place will not be "phew, let's keep being protected" but rather "if we don't have any cases why do we have to wear those annoying masks!!!" And before you say so, yes, this will happen even if neighbour places have tons of cases. People (at least some... but enough to fill 24/7 news who always need to fuel any dumpster fire that will get them ratings) will just find some other reason for why it is so.
Yeah...But OTOH, you wouldn't see those measures go into effect before you get the big spikes as we've seen with lockdowns and masks in some areas. So the situation you're describing is clearly not what's happening.
