Comment by xxxxxxx12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xxxxxxx12 | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, an economist published this paper recently estimating "the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282":

> Generally speaking, the ineffectiveness of lockdown stems from voluntary changes in behavior. Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns. The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries. Using a cost/benefit method proposed by Professor Bryan Caplan, and using two extreme assumptions of lockdown effectiveness, the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.

http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf

I thought that the purpose of lockdown (in the UK at least) was to prevent health care from being overwhelmed, at which point deaths would drastically increase.

So we don't really know how many people would have died without lockdown to make a comparison, but it would have been a lot higher.

If the health service is completely overloaded it means people would start dying from all sorts of other things too.

Am I missing the point?

> I thought that the purpose of lockdown (in the UK at least) was to prevent health care from being overwhelmed

Which never really pans out (field hospitals, hospital ship sent to NYC, etc.) - they got strained and perhaps local spots overwhelmed, but never doomsday scenarios we hear bandied about without any evidence. His point is that lockdown doesn't really change behavior and places that don't have strong mandates end up largely practicing safer behavior anyway.

I think there's also a strong argument that lockdown ends up decreasing the time spent outdoors, which promotes spread.

If you're looking for a doomsday scenario, what's happening in India right now is probably the worst we've seen since the pandemic started. Essentially every hospital in every major city is full and there are patients dying outside.

Was also looking real bad in Brazil a few weeks ago.

Still is. I expect Brazil to exceed the US death toll in about 100 days.

They've got a fundamentally different society and lockdown is a luxury policy that only rich nations (and people) can afford.

> They've got a fundamentally different society

You have to say more than this.

Didn't India also aggressively lock down in the beginning as well? Not sure what point the Op was trying to make here.

Yup. Having insufficient bed space and medical supplies will kill people that might otherwise have survived a Covid-19 infection.

Anything and everything must be done in each country to prevent the hospitals from filling up.

> Which never really pans out (field hospitals, hospital ship sent to NYC, etc.) - they got strained and perhaps local spots overwhelmed, but never doomsday scenarios we hear bandied about without any evidence.

"The thing you were trying to prevent didn't happen, therefore you didn't need to try to prevent it" is really curious reasoning. "It didn't happen, therefore it was because we did this things" is also a weak claim, but the reverse seems far sillier. Especially if you look at the hot spots where things got worst, like Italy or India. Instead of being glad we avoided that, we're whining that we had to do anything at all.

> His point is that lockdown doesn't really change behavior and places that don't have strong mandates end up largely practicing safer behavior anyway.

Again, this is a curious claim. If lockdown doesn't really change behavior, how can lockdown be responsible for the things it's being blamed for like isolation and economic impact? That is then the fault of the pandemic, and the natural behavior changes that resulted, instead!

Note how toilet paper was gone from grocery stores BEFORE any official action was taken.

I guess the point is that if lockdowns are ineffective, you are going to reach the overload point regardless. The fact that it did not happen means that I would not have happened anyway.

That's quite a bit of stretch to say. There are thousands scenarios where medical system would collapse completely and people would either make it on their own or die. With secondary effect of everybody else with life-threatening condition dying too.

Would it be end of humankind? Nope, but I sure as hell don't want to be part of such selfish civilization just that cashflow is maintained

> but I sure as hell don't want to be part of such selfish civilization just that cashflow is maintained

so where does pharma with no liability, running their own trials and effectively being handed blank checks during the pandemic fit into this?

You’re treating healthcare overload as a binary condition when it is not. It matters how much your healthcare system is overloaded. If the system is 10% over capacity, then 1 out of 11 people aren’t getting proper treatment and run an increased risk of dying. If your system is 50% over capacity then only 2 out of 3 people are getting proper treatment. Neither is great, but they’re objectively not the same levels of risk or outcome.

Even if lockdowns are ineffective at preventing overload, it doesn’t follow that they can’t reduce the severity of that overload, or that the outcome would be the same either way.

In the UK at least, you can see really clearly where lockdowns start and cases & hospital admissions drop dramatically from their peak to really low. Deaths went from >1000 to <50 per day. And when lockdowns ended they went right back up again.

That’s exactly the kind of paper you get when economists are publishing outside their specialty. Most interesting example was he excluded any data that was counter to his theory and used highly overfit data. “Whether Atkeson (February 2021) has correctly modeled the Covid-19 virus is not at issue.”

They can’t exactly do cost benefit analysis without models to compare, but their cherry picking models to support their assumptions and then happy that their assumptions where validated by their models.

The point he's making in that section is that by accounting for voluntary changes in human behavior (or failing to account for it as many models did) will drastically affect the results of any model that attempts to predict the rate of spread.

Human behavior is also influenced by messaging. You can’t assume economically rational actors in the real world when modeling actual behavior as people don’t know actual risks etc.

In a non lockdown world where schools are open and attendance is mandatory... well it’s clear to the average person the government doesn’t think people need to stay home. Sure, old people are dying in hospitals but I am 40 so it’s nothing to worry about etc.

However, shut everything down and people get the message that this is serious irrespective of the actual dangers they personally face.

> shut everything down and people get the message that this is serious

the Pajama Class say this and then wonder why their "messaging" doesn't go over well with anyone who's not able to log into zoom and chat it up with their comfortable, salaried, urban-elitist compatriots

I am sorry that reality doesn’t line up with your preconceived notions so you feel the need to lash out with name calling etc.

Consider sitting, back taking a deep breath, and then stepping away from the computer to do something you enjoy.

> reality doesn’t line up with your preconceived notions

I'm claiming this precise thing, that you're arrogantly presuming that everyone can just hole up in their house like the elite class of people who do nothing but berate the (almost always) lower class people who do not have the privilege to stay home.

> that you're arrogantly presuming that everyone

Gp didn't claim that. You're putting words in their mouth and lashing out for things they never said.

A reasonable interpretation of their claims is that even if not everyone can hole up, government policies that are intense encourage everyone to hole up as much as they can.

It's also worth mentioning that many, many working class people did not enjoy the fact that they had to take on risk in order to survive. Pretending everything is fine simply offloads even more risk onto those people.

You do realize that normative claims like "they ought", "government should", etc. are precisely the faculty-lounge, haughty idealism, that's worth absolutely nothing to people as they are, spoken from a position of privilege, condescension and fake expertise?

Notice how teachers act as though they're above everyone else? Refusing to work, whereas normal people that aren't of means largely kept working, and didn't act like paranoid agoraphobes exaggerating their actual risk?

It's no secret that most people overestimate their risk by an order(if not multiple) of magnitude.

This has nothing to do with what I or the other poster said. I'll reiterate that many people who were forced to work were not happy about that fact.

You're somewhere between pretending those people don't exist and claiming that those lower class people who didn't want to work but had to are also morally bankrupt. It's neither coherent nor respectful of those you claim to be defending.

Per your bio, you work at Google. You're divorced from the experience of struggling people.

That is an extremely presumptuous statement to make. You know nothing of their background, upbringing, path to where they are today. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish in this thread anymore, but it certainly is not constructive.

> That is an extremely presumptuous statement to make.

No, especially in the context of the pandemic, it's easy to start talking about pandemic policy as though "everyone should just do X" where X is something extremely convenient, profitable, even pleasant for tech workers and other white collar jobs.

You say that yet his statements directly line up with what a friend working in a grocery store said. I don’t know if you’ve ever actually talked with anyone working in Amazon’s warehouse, but I can tell you it’s a very hard job that’s better paying than most people working there can get elsewhere. Some felt it was important, many of others actually quit over COVID.

On the other hand pointlessly attacking people just makes you seem foolish.

I'm reiterating the experiences of my friends who work in the service industry and whom in some cases have been unable to pay rent reliably the past year.

Having to make the choice between going to work at a job where you have health concerns and losing your home is not a fun situation. You're correct that this is not a choice I've personally had to face, but it is a choice that many people have had to deal with. The issue, that you keep ignoring, is that people who "kept working" did so in many cases not by choice, but by necessity. Yes, the privilege that some (including myself!) had to continue working safely is nice. But you shouldn't use that to discount the opinions of people who had to continue working unsafely, but did not want to.

And you are continuing to ignore those people. Anecdotally, those people make up the majority of those in service industries that I know. They weren't happy to have to continue working. They were scared. Were it economically feasible, most of them would have preferred to stay home and not work. But that option wasn't available to them, because not working would mean losing their homes too.

And it is ridiculous for you to try and weaponize my privilege to ignore those people's opinions.

> and then happy that their assumptions where validated by their models

This was done in the pro-lockdown measures camp all the time, epidemiologists, etc. love using models based on assumptions that are used to show scenarios as evidence of the original assumptions.

They're arguing simultaneously "lockdowns had no impact on people's behavior and therefore had no benefit" and "lockdowns had massive negative costs". Lo and behold that is the exact mistake the paper is making! It's basing the cost analysis off the following question:

>Suppose you could either live a year of life in the COVID era, or X months under normal conditions. What’s the value of X that makes the AVERAGE American indifferent?

Yet you'll notice this is not about lockdown versus non-lockdown this is "normal" versus COVID. Moreover, the number they use for X is just made-up. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black - this is the exact mistake the author goes on and on about for the other side of the cost/benefit equation.

This paper is super sketchy in other ways - it's clearly a personal diatribe, not an attempt to be accurate. Like:

> Lockdown is a formal,state-mandated “one size fits all” version of the social norm “keep your distancefrom people who are sick."

Is the author unaware of asymptomatic transmission? If all we had to do was keep away from sick people, then this would have been a SARS-1 outcome.

> As a result, the ICL model made some dire predictions ... For instance: “In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour ... In total,in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US...”

The US has achieved 1/4 of those deaths with behavioral changes (from lockdowns or not), so 2 million without any behavioral changes seems like a good estimate from early data.

Fig 2B is clearly over-fit on past data. I doubt it will hold up well.

> "lockdowns had no impact on people's behavior and therefore had no benefit" and "lockdowns had massive negative costs"

I think you're overlooking the idea that "lockdowns", as we know them, do little other than impose massive costs and anxieties on society, while failing to achieve their main objective i.e. complete immobilization and eradication.

So you end up with all the costs of the policy with little upside because the dynamics of spread seem very heterogeneous, mass-spread seems to happen in relatively few people in very particular scenarios (crowded indoor areas - notice that lockdown ends up pushing the entire society, especially the least healthy and most vulnerable, indoors).

It depends some on how lockdowns are implemented. Where I live, for instance, they outlaw indoor dining but still allow outdoor dining, which seems to me to be exactly what they should do.

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