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Comment by jlangenauer | Hacker News Reader

One thing to note is that this article quotes one doctor and one nurse at a single hospital. They have obviously seen more suicide attempts than usual, but we must remember this is a single data point and could just be a statistical anomaly.

It would be interesting to know if this phenomenon is repeated elsewhere in California or the US, but without knowing that, we can't draw too many conclusions from this article.

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We can't draw too many conclusions from the article, but a rise in the rate of suicide would not be a surprise. We know that economic uncertainty, isolation, or lack of access to support all increase deaths by suicide.

Yep, it's interesting we're absorbing costs in known areas to unknown costs in unknown areas. I'd say focus on the known, and get more skeptical about the worst case scenarios we're comparing against. As always the "compared to what" question is sometimes not even an entity in reality for comparison but a hypothetical, maybe driven by fear.

Arguably, we know even less about by how much exactly "economic uncertainty, isolation, or lack of access to support" increases suicide rates than we know about how deadly the virus is.

I don't know about uncertainty per se or on isolation but I know at least with respect to economic downturns, recessions, and slumps and all the relation has been quantified to some extent by economists or social scientists from what I understand. Not sure how much the increase goes but it's considered a measurable thing apparently and has enough history to sketch out some kind of correlation from what I understand. Known territory in otherwords.

"Quantified to some extent," yes, but not as rigorously as the effects of SARS-Cov-2. Basic epidemiological models tell us that we at least 60% or so of the population to be immune in order to reach herd immunity. Based on an infection fatality rate of 0.5% and a US population of about 328M, you multiply that out to get an order of magnitude estimate of ~1M dead, whereas during the Great Depression (probably our closest comparison point to what's going on now), as well as the recessions of 1921 and 1938, life expectancy actually increased; the only cause of death that increased was suicide [0].

There are things we don't know about this virus, such as what exactly the residual effects are on survivors, whether and for how long infection can provide immunity, what the role of vitamin D is, and many other things, but those uncertainties largely don't matter to epidemiological models at this point. We can simply run best and worst case type scenarios to get an idea what we're dealing with if we're thinking solely about the death rate. And, even if we underestimate the death rate, if there are severe and long-lasting aftereffects, that only compounds the need to do something to stop the virus.

IMO, the "knowns" surrounding economic correlations with decreased life expectancy are far, far more unknown than those surrounding a very contagious virus that kills people.

And, as I have said before, to much controversy, if a science-based, public health response to a public health crisis cripples the economy, that's a sign that our economic system is broken, not that we're overreacting to save lives, just to doom people to economic misery.

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[0]: https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290

I guess that's the thing with me and epidemiological models. I think for the bulk of Americans, maybe even people around the world, these models haven't really entered into everyday life with the ramifications of their accuracy. It's more convincing to know that economics have looked retroactively at past events and ran correlations to partly explain lived experiences. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance as the saying goes, and I"m not sure who actively tracks the next economic declines to continue to test whatever correlation models people have come up with to predict negative side effects on people's lives, but presumably they've landed roughly well enough patterns to predict something reliably, maybe not though.

But the more urgent predictions at this point come from epidemiologists. And I wonder have epidemiologists had a good track record at predicting previous outbreaks accurately, say SARS, ebola, whatever, 20th and 21st century stuff? As of today we're two orders of magnitude off from those worst case scenario of millions of deaths in the US I thought were surely coming. I guess another question is how long were these millions of deaths expected to arrive, in 12 months, 18 months?

That's a good point, how fragile or robust should an economy be expected to be to wait things out. The fact that lots of companies operate off debt probably doesn't bode well for them weathering any significant storm. Can't build a house on sand and expect it to stand as the saying goes.

> As of today we're two orders of magnitude off from those worst case scenario of millions of deaths in the US I thought were surely coming

Epidemiologists gave a range of outcomes, taking into account what they know at the time, and what measures are or could be in place.

The millions of death outcome is if no lockdown measures are put in place and people don't social distance.

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