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Comment by DeusExMachina | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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