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Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

Especially in India, it's likely that a good chunk of those deaths are the result of attempts to aggressively stop the virus without thinking about the costs of doing so. They're really not in a good place to attempt any kind of lockdown given how their economy and food supply chains are, and yet they ended up attempting it anyway with ugly results.

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Can you estimate a percentage? Even if say 50% of deaths were due to lockdowns, do you really think that free movement would have not contributed to an equal or greater increase?

As a further counterpoint, I'll use Norway and Sweden as examples. Sweden did not implement a lockdown, yet had a 10x worse per capita death count than Norway. If anything, this suggests that you'd need around 70-90% of the excess deaths to be attributed to something other than COVID, which feels like a heavy bar to clear.

Other things besides lockdown is obviously at play considering Sweden being smack in the middle of the statistics. Ahead and behind countries with law mandated lockdowns.

Many pieces to this puzzle - generational living, skin tone and diet for example.

Honestly, I'm not sure how you'd even be able to measure that. India doesn't seem to be doing so great at recording the cause of death, given that only a tenth of these were counted as Covid deaths and it's unlikely to be that low, plus you'd expect a lot of starvation-related deaths to show up as people dying from diseases that shouldn't otherwise be fatal...

>Sweden did not implement a lockdown, yet had a 10x worse per capita death count than Norway.

the situation is much more complicated. Looking at excess deaths

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/excess-mortality-across-countr...

one can see that in Sweden despite high rate of death, the excess rate is very low compare to countries with comparable Covid death rates. The Norway and Finland are among the few exceptional countries who had negative excess rates.

This is my perception aswell. India doesn't have the infrastructure and social well-fare systems needed to support a population in lockdown. Because of quarantine restrictions many householders were not able to provide food for their families.

How many died from starvation? Or is it something you feel happened.

I've based my comment on observations from relatives living in Maharashtra. Getting estimates seems impossible to me, because India doesn't record cause of death very well (if deceased person itself is even recorded)

I think it was more of a half baked lock down that caused the economy to get worse, and yet hardly see any improvement at curbing the pandemic.

Countries like Vietnam were very protective, and took very immediate actions. They faced both the first two waves quickly, and recovered fairly well for the region.

What lock down related mechanisms do you propose could be responsible for 4 million deaths? Working with more concrete examples might help determine how likely this scenario is.

Do you have evidence for your claim?

yeah, here comes the anti-BJP brigade

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