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Comment by ezrast | Hacker News Reader

How do the many countries with more severe, briefer lockdowns and far lower excess fatality rates than the USA figure into your analysis?

Also, doesn't the conclusion in your edit (strong vs weak lockdowns are "the fucking same") refute your original claim ("those who have died from the impact of our response would NOT have died this year")?

Also, do you believe that lockdown in general induces severe long-term health complications in survivors on par with the effects of COVID?

Also, do you reject the idea that the effects of COVID scale superlinearly with concurrent infections, due to exhaustion of medical resources (i.e. do you think "flattening the curve" is a myth)?

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I believe that we don't know the effects of a long term lockdown because we've never done it before. I do believe the number of people impacted by poverty, food insecurity and job loss is far higher than the number of people impacted by COVID long term.

I do not believe flattening the curve is a myth. I believe that without an exit strategy flattening the curve is unsustainable. I believe that keeping ICUs from being full is a very good goal. I also believe we generally locked down out of panic way before ICU capacity was at risk (See SFO in March) and thus consumed the will, resources etc to withstand flattening the curve. Now we have ICU issues but we've lost the will .

How do you explain countries that have had stricter, longer lockdowns than the USA having a hire mortality rate? It is almost as if lockdowns do fuckall

Which countries would those be?

Belgium, Italy, UK, Slovenia

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Take a look at the "daily new deaths" graphs for each of those countries on the site you linked. All four of those countries fall to near zero over the summer. Their first-wave lockdowns worked, eventually. The USA's did not; people just kept getting infected all summer long.

The second wave has hit hard, but deaths in Slovenia, Belgium, and Italy are at this point all trending back downward. USA's are not. Extend those graphs out and we'll be well ahead in deaths before long. The UK isn't trending down either, but their leadership is suffering from a lot of the same problems as the USA's with not taking this seriously.

Also note that all four of those countries are reporting fewer infections than the USA - their deaths per capita come from higher case fatality rates. This suggests that the death rate has more to do with their hospital systems being worse-positioned to handle the influx of patients than how the spread was managed.

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