Individual Choices, Not Lockdowns | Hacker News Reader

Individual Choices, Not Lockdowns

city-journal.org

15 pointsmrfusion13 comments

>Florida and Texas registered lower deaths per 100,000 than states with stringent, long-term restrictions like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts

This often-touted talking point makes little actual sense. The tri-state area (NY,NJ,CT) was the first outbreak in the US. We didn’t yet know how to treat Covid properly, and had zero therapeutics, so naturally deaths were higher than in states who experienced much later outbreaks.

My impression was that Washington (the state) was the first outbreak and they immediately took action in early march. NY was heavy handed but they also played a ton of games with it, that's why the authoritarian approach to most things fails.

That is accurate and that they chose to ignore how successful Washington state's mandates have been is very cherry-picking

And Florida and Texas coincidentally have a much larger share of warm days in which people are more likely to socialise outdoors anyway (where it's proven that transmission is far less likely).

Not sure it matters, but also not sure it doesn't, so my point is that looking at a single factor is very much dishonest.

Here's a graph of cumulative COVID deaths per 100k for the top 10 states (with New York highlighted), Texas, Florida, and Washington [1] that illustrates that.

New York is high today (#2) because they got a large number of deaths in the first 100 days. After 100 days of COVID it was (all numbers are per 100k):

  164 New York
   17 Washington
   16 Florida
    8 Texas

Where it stands now is:

  276 New York
  186 Texas
  185 Florida
   81 Washington

That's a growth over the last 400 days of:

  112 New York
  178 Texas
  168 Florida
   73 Washington

New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts curves are similar to New York's.

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...

I don’t think anyone thinks American handled this pandemic well. We royally screwed it up no matter what your political opinion.

IMO our biggest error was conflicting information and guidance. Had everyone, from Trump down, set out clear, consistent, and simple guidelines for people to follow, we could have avoided lockdowns and had fewer deaths, not to mention far less political and personal contention.

I'd disagree. I think most of the states have handled it better than say Canada or Australia.

Let's take deaths as an indicator of "pandemic handling". Australia had sub-1K total confirmed deaths which is a very very low value for a nation that large. Canada had 26,635; USA had 615,326.

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

Even single state figures are quite high: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103688/coronavirus-covi...

Depends what your definition of "better" is. If better = "killed more people", then sure...

The US state with the lowest death rate is Hawaii with 38 deaths / 100,000 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...).

Compare that with Australia - 3.7 (https://covidlive.com.au/report/deaths-per-population) - Canada - 0.27 (https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...) - and countries with even stricter and longer-lasting lockdowns like Singapore - 0.00042 (https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...).

Does that include suicides and drug related deaths? At least in the US those went up by an order of magnitude last year and I would be shocked if those countries did better.

Be shocked then.

That doesn't seem objectively true. It seems like the only working alternative to what we did was far stricter lockdowns (See AU). But even those places are still dealing with the pandemic. In fact, it looks to me like we have two choices - get in lockdown, close all borders and remain that way indefinitely, or open up and move on with our lives.

We can say this much - whatever we've been doing so far has not worked. We should try something else.

This is like vaccinations. The key to avoiding mandatory vaccination (or de facto mandatory as it would be when required in schools, workplaces, public transport) is that people do it voluntarily. The same applies to maintaining restrictions and distancing.

It might seem like a contradiction to be forced to volunteer, but, as the saying goes, it is what it is. The choice isn’t between observing the precautions or not, or taking the vaccine or not.

The choice is between doing something voluntarily or being forced to.

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