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Comment by ketzu | Hacker News Reader

Was "lockdowns are free" a serious position held by a relevant number of people?

No, but no one could truly quantify the cost.

The same was true for Covid at the beginning, no one could quantify how bad it actually would be with wild figures in the 5%+ mortality rate. So we screamed for shutdown.

Problem though is that now it's very much clear that Covid was nowhere near that level of mortality, still bad but not the doomsday scenario. Now we we'll have to see what the cost of maintaining the reaction to the initial Covid doomsday estimation; with lockdowns and short term shoring of the economy through fiat currency production.

I've not heard any British politicians say that lockdowns are free but I have heard the Chancellor say that any borrowing at the moment is cheap due to low interest rates.

That is literally true though: https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bon...

Thirty year rates at 1.28%!

Shame I can't get a 30 year mortgage at 1.28%

Lives over stock market was a big thing on the media.

I’m sure these 13.5 million people in the US, who now can’t afford food anymore, wouldn’t have been such enthusiastic lockdown supporters had they realized they would pay the price themselves.

The most enthusiastic lockdown supporters are unlikely to be the ones that can't afford food now. Much more likely to be people reading HN or writing for the NYT.

The mainstream masses were supporters, definitely not limited to niches like you mention.

Lockdowns aren't free, but neither would ignoring the pandemic be. There's no way to avoid the cost

Looking back at the Spanish Flu, https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-covi... showed that lockdowns ended up being cheaper than no lockdowns

Unfortunately the ruling class will always find a way to trickle down costs, so it's no surprise that the poorer you are the more impacted you are. With or without lockdown

"I am once again asking for your financial support" meme for tax payers bailing out megacorp bonuses yet again

Great statistics on a disease 5 times as fatal that raged a century ago in a world that no longer exists.

The costs of ignoring the pandemic are very country-dependent. In countries whose economies are based on extraction of natural resources, only a fairly small amount of people are needed to run the extraction and export sector. All the other tens of millions of people living in that country have bluntly been called things like "superfluous population" by thinktanks. That small workforce maintaining the economy is little affected by a disease like COVID with its median death age of ~80.

Also, it was believed that COVID presented a threat to the broader economy because it could overwhelm the healthcare system, preventing the broader workforce from accessing treatment. However, one approach is to triage COVID victims, denying them hospital beds so that those beds remain available for the broader population. Liability or elected officials’ sensitivity to accusations of "letting grandma die" prevented some countries from implementing this triaging, but other countries could.

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