Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

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I padded the death count by 50% to account for this in the story (400k people died of covid in the USA in 2020, not 600k).

If you compare covid deaths per capita across various states, you won't find huge differences even though some states had extreme restrictions in place (California) and some states had lax restrictions in place (Utah, Florida, etc).

Say there's a parallel universe where masks and social distancing were encouraged but optional and business were not forced to shut down and people were not ordered to shelter in place. How much higher is the covid death count per year in this fictional parallel universe? More than 50%? 2-3x higher? If you have any real-world examples you could point to to make your case, that would be helpful.

Anyway, all this doesn't really matter though, because you missed the point of the story. The point of the story was that (for Statisticsville, at least) the people were so busy fighting amongst themselves about what actions to take (or not) about an infectious disease that they didn't realize the deadly side effects of that social discord until it was too late.

Will the USA avoid the deadly consequences of its current social discord and become a united people again before it's too late? Stay tuned to find out!

> If you have any real-world examples you could point to to make your case, that would be helpful.

India or Brazil would seem to be the obvious counterfactuals. Unfortunately, their officially reported death rates probably can't be trusted so the best we can do is look at excess deaths, and in India, as an example, it's... pretty ugly:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/07/20/1018438...

That's closer to 3 deaths per thousand, or 50% higher than your estimate.

Putting that in context, assuming 8 deaths per thousand as a baseline, that number going to 11 per thousand is a 40% increase in excess deaths.

And that's ignoring that those deaths will be concentrated in specific cohorts (the elderly, the vulnerable, people in high risk jobs, etc) who don't have the luxury of working from a cozy home office.

> The point of the story was that (for Statisticsville, at least) the people were so busy fighting amongst themselves about what actions to take (or not) about an infectious disease that they didn't realize the deadly side effects of that social discord until it was too late.

This is, unfortunately, a unique problem of the US. While there's certainly been plenty of social discord in other countries as a consequence of Covid policies, they've been nowhere near the level of what's seen in the US.

The solution isn't to compromise public health policy so as to avoid touching off a partisan foodfight. The solution is to address the root problem that has lead to such severe social discord; to heal those fissures that have opened up in US society that have lead to every single issue being politicized and thus polarized to the detriment of the entire population.

India is a very bad counterexample. 1) Think tank estimates of 10-fold higher mortality than official should be taken with a grain of salt. 2) It is a poor country with many problems – corruption (they failed to deliver oxygen cylinders to hospitals just because nobody cared), 3) healthcare issues (untreated TB, infectious diseases etc.), 4) social aspects (housing, slums, overcrowded places). Do you know what is the average life expectancy in Indian slums? The last time I checked it was just about 40 years. They can and will vaccinate against covid but to help slum dwellers they will need much more work and social changes.

In short, it is in no way comparable to any western country.

Brazil mortality however is only <50% higher than the US so it is not even worth to analyse it.

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