Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says
reuters.com
reuters.com
Is this a moral fatigue problem? People are fed up of hearing that common action X "causes" Y, regardless of how true it is?
Are we going to go back to smoking, leaded petrol, and polio? After all, the evidence against those was only statistical.
(There may also be diminishing returns / age effects; after all, I'm only 40, and just about remember what a smoke-filled room smells like, or the tang of leaded petrol. For the dominant 60-and-up group of voters, the air is cleaner than in their childhood, so what's all this talk of "air quality crisis?")
Eg. if a person dies of lung cancer, then we roll a dice and say "theres a 1 in 6 chance that was due to pm2.5 emissions". If the dice rolls a 1, then we look around the town for sources of pm2.5, and we find that 1/6 comes from a candle factory. We roll another dice, and if that comes out with a 1, then we say "This factory emitted air pollution that killed this person".
Then we treat it in law exactly the same as if the person had walked by the factory and been decapitated by a piece of roof falling off. Ie. we let the family sue. We send inspectors to see if there is negligence involved, etc.
Having a small chance of a knock on my door and someone saying "Excuse me, but you killed grandpa, plz pay for his funeral" probably would make me change.
It will be interesting to see where the "end" really is.
There are finite number of countries and they eventually focus on pollution after people build a lot of factories in the country. Even China is starting to focus on air pollution because they don’t have a choice.
Anyone worth a crap uses some sort of time based metric for loss of life. Wheezing into the grave at 80 instead of 81 is very different than dropping dead a 20 and these sorts of metrics are meant to reflect that.
But those metrics don't get you big numbers with lots of digits in front of the decimal that get your article publishes, posted on HN and then clicked on in droves.
The people doing the primary research often are aiming for accuracy but they are done a disservice by shortsighted people optimizing for a few extra cents of add revenue or a few more upvotes.
* Years of Life Lost (YLL) * Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY) * Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY)
They are calculated in an interesting way that is open for arguing and interpretation, but it provides a good baseline for the ability to compare them.
As for the double counting, this is in fact a real problem, as a lot of health problems are interlinked, and having multiple health problems have a multiplying affect on health in general.
Leadership has handled all quite poorly it seems
Balancing harms like those against other outcomes is why we have politics.
Like everything from firearms to nuclear weapons to face recognition, the questions should focus on who is using the power, for what purposes, how they are held accountable, and so on.
Yes, the anti-COVID measures are social engineering. They're trying to engineer people into not getting COVID.
2. What's your way of deciding that someone in power is good enough for defining how you have to behave?
I'm pretty sure it has always been the case: ""Lies, damned lies, and statistics" can be traced back at least as far as 188x.
Besides, the chain of lies is super long. Sample selection. Data collection. Data analysis. Reporting. Publishing. At each steps, so many things can go wrong: errors, agenda, corruption, bias...
In the case of Covid, we already have plenty of terrible communication from the entities at play, so at this point, it's kinda hard to have an informed opinion.
As you fix the high confidence problems, you get into lower and lower confidence ones, until you are in the region where each study gets a completely different answer because of really small changes in methodology.
If we can kill all the disease causing mosquitoes as well, then we will remove another huge cause of human disease.
What are you referring to?
(The west has also collapsed bird populations in the service of agriculture, just over a longer period and combined with crashing the insect population as well)
For example, smoking probably causes more deaths than Covid. So, while it may be perfectly true that things like smoking and pollution are bigger public health issues than Covid, we never spoke of a "smoking crisis", and justifiably so.
The thing that makes a crisis into a crisis is that it's highly discrete in time and there is a temporally very limited window of opportunity to take action. This is true of Covid, but it's not true of smoking or pollution.
A politican speaking of a climate "crisis" is engaging in the same psychological manipulation tactic as a radio commercial telling you to "act now on this limited-time offer", or a used-car salesman telling you that you have to buy that car right now, because this other guy definitely just called and is now on his way to the lot, and will likely buy the car you're interested in as soon as you leave the lot.
Things like permafrost melting and releasing more methane?
That is your definition, but not necessarily the one meant by others. From Merriam-Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crisis):
"Essential Meaning of crisis : a difficult or dangerous situation that needs serious attention"
[...] Definition 3b: "a situation that has reached a critical phase // the environmental crisis"
Besides: The definition is a really bad one, as it's circular.
And now after the Covid clickbait non-sense people are actually discussing it.
Just leave the decision to individuals.
France 2011 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering
Denmark 2018 https://www.dw.com/en/denmark-bans-full-face-veils-in-public...
Austria 2017 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41457427
etc
When exactly do you think 'Muslims appeared' in Europe?
(No idea if this was accurate or a colossal misunderstanding of how things work, but the claim was made).
But their pollution is a lot higher than ours. Pollution here in Barcelona is not high enough that I'd consider wearing a mask for it. And the upcoming bans of old diesels and two stroke scooters will make things even better.
I'll never get used to masks anyway. They'll always be an extreme annoyance. I wear them because it's mandatory and I agree right now they make sense. But as the pandemic turns endemic they have to stop. I'd rather live 10 years less than have to wear them for the rest of my life. Especially outside.
Who wears masks outside? That's never been required in the UK.
I have on most occasions throughout the pandemic, except last summer right after the second jab when I thought everything was finally over (and even then continued to wear them in crowded places).
IIRC I only forgot 2 or 3 times even for solitary walks, and some of those were 5 hours long.
To my ongoing confusion, me talking here about my intention to continue wearing masks beyond the point of it being needed resulted in someone going to my blog and posting a few abusive messages on an unrelated entry: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2021/06/14/why-do-some...
Ties though, I really don’t like wearing ties.
I'm definitely in this category, I can't stand the things and haven't worn one since the mandate in England ended. Something about blocking my mouth and nose is just a really unpleasant sensation, it's not the type of mask or the fit rather the essential nature of having something stuck to my face. I think a lot of people really downplayed just how unpleasant mask-wearing actually is for many, charitably this was for the greater good but now I think we have to be open about the downsides too. The pollution from plastic masks is a big issue too, lots of very long-lived litter that's pretty gross in the streets and bad for the marine environment where they eventually wash up into as well.
I too would accept the greater risk of death than wear them for the rest of my days. I'm glad that in my country at least we're not letting this turn into the same kind of ritualistic safety theatre we've seen at airports for the last two decades.
Unfortunately I live in Spain where they have been really relaxed this wave but here they just love their masks. It's like virtue signaling and a feeling of safety for them I guess. They were even mandatory on the streets again and still are in shops and public transport, and work all day long. About 50% of people still wear them on the street.
I really hope that they will relax it soon because I'm ready to find another country again. Too bad because until 2019 I was really happy here.
It seems to be working totally fine in other countries which have stopped them completely and sometimes even have lower vaccination rates. I wouldn't care if they locked down 3 months a year but this masking is just so difficult :(
It's completely unnatural.
But I’m endlessly curious about how minds work:
Is “unnatural is the same as bad” a foundational position for you, or is it that you dislike masks and this argument is a metaphorical soldier you’re sending out to do memetic battle for you to support that dislike?
Or is it something else entirely? Like I said, I never “got” this type of appeal. The unnatural is too commonplace and too useful.
You can also see this in the difference between Eastern and Western emoticons, the former may use :) as smileys while the latter uses ^_^
im not sure i follow, we do read faces daily, even in voice/video chat we do. Body and facial language matter.
Cutting off 50% of that as sibling comment points out... even if it doesnt totally prevent us from reading peoples face via the the eyes, that only highlights how important reading faces is, when we cant see the entire face we exclusively look for cues in the eyes.
We have seen this with COVID, using the justification of "saving lives" now we are seeing the foundations laid for transforming constitutional republics in to Dystopian "forever in emergency" Technocracy of "Trust the Experts" dictatorships
Now if the focus was upon air and water quality and addressing that, all the things that would need to happen just so happen to be those that tackle all environmental aspects of the climate and we would have more people on the same page addressing the issue over endless debate about it.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/42218/if-leaded-fuel-is-so-bad...
Then move onto Texas. Where there are knowingly, purposely, toxic pollution zones right in the population because "reasons".
This is exactly what institutes of religion do, scaremongering with something invisible and evil..
It’s perfectly reasonable the much scarier stuff we aren’t panicking about.
A year of life is worth far more when you’re 20 than when you’re 80. If the people saved by lockdowns were primarily old people with a few years left to live it would be pretty clear that the lockdowns were a net negative.
Nowhere in the world was equipped to deal with the incredibly high amount of deaths that happened, nor with the incredibly high amount of sick people.
> does not mean that the lockdowns saved more quality adjusted life years than they cost.
Yes, because the death of loved ones, the sickness and long-term effects of COVID, the collapse of healthcare, the sick leaves of work and the self-imposed quarantines would not have had any effect in quality-adjusted life years.
It's incredibly naive to think that life would have continued as usual without lockdowns. I mean, most people were going to go on lockdown regardless. We all knew people getting sick, going to hospitals and not being able to receive care, family members and friends dying... It wasn't fear-mongering, it was a genuinely scary experience. I don't know if you lived in places that suffered the worst of the pandemic or not, but it definitely doesn't sound like it.
> A year of life is worth far more when you’re 20 than when you’re 80.
A month of lockdown is worse than an 80 year old (who otherwise might live some years) suffocating to death alone in a hospital?
What a truly bizarre strawman.
> A month of lockdown is worse than an 80 year old (who otherwise might live some years) suffocating to death alone in a hospital?
You are very lucky if you got away with just a month of lockdowns.
It might not seem that way, but this is actually a simple mathematical problem. How many young healthy people traded in a month of the best years of their life in order to extend the life of that 80yo?
The lockdowns either had a positive or negative impact on total QALYs, this is quantifiable.
And even if the outcome was truly positive, was it truly worth the financial cost? Current research seems to indicate that we vastly overpaid in terms of $ per QALY.
That’s the quid here. What you think would have happened without lockdowns and letting a highly contagious, severe disease run without control.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7499782/#CIT001...
These studies do consider the alternative of “no lockdowns”.
Things they do not take into account:
- The effect of a saturated healthcare system on the treatment of other diseases and accidents.
- Non-linearity of the death rate. The more people are sick in the hospital, the less resources there are and death rate skyrockets.
- The effect on the economy of thousands of people unable to work at the same time, due to being sick or having to care for sick people
- The mental health effects on people surrounded by sickness.
- Self-imposed quarantines and lockdowns.
- Possible public order breakdown with the combination of stressful situation plus reduced government strength due to COVID.
I mean this with no offense, but thinking that the only "bad" outcome of not having lockdowns is "a few more people die but that's it" is stupid. You should think seriously about it. There was no pretty way to come out of the initial wave of COVID. Lockdowns were awful but I really prefer them to the alternative. In fact, I would have preferred them to start earlier. If the lockdown had started seven days earlier we probably could have shortened by a month.
When people are sick, they'll stay home, not work and isolate, lockdown or no lockdown.
I think you are imagining an argument that nobody here is making.
> I’ve seen anti-vaxxers and freedom convoy members make this mistake quite often recently.
Ah, yep.
What possible good could come out of you bringing up these groups? Why would you bring up discredited extremist points of view in this conversation?
Are you trying to attack my character by implying that I might be associated with those idiots?
Vaccines are good, vaccine mandates I don’t care about as long as the vaccines are readily available.
Why are you trying to project these extremist points of view onto me?
Even with those worst case scenarios, there was still significant pushback to taking immediate global actions. And this is no where near the same scale of a threat.
If hospitals collapsed and treatments hadn't been found, a not inconceivable 2-3% fatality rate would get us to "hundreds of millions".
(This estimate is unrealistic in other ways though, e.g. communities would begin imposing their own and hoc lockdowns if hospitals were overwhelmed, and global spread might have been slowed.)
Also, take into account the amount of diseases that are getting late treatments due to healthcare saturation. I don't know of any formal studies but you only need to talk with any doctor to see that they're consistently seeing diseases in later stages and therefore harder to cure.
/s
We don’t want more lockdowns but we need to fix society so we don’t have to travel so much on a daily basis.
A lot of people don’t seem to know that a lot of tube journeys can be done in a few minutes on foot.
While I spent the pandemic in Berlin and didn’t notice much change here, 20 years ago I was in the UK and the daily walk past the A27 was radically improved by the truckers blockading the entire UK petrol supply in protest against fuel taxes.
Of course, alarmism is excellent at driving engagement and ad revenue so I might as well have asked for someone to write a program that solves the halting problem. I don't know how inventives can be put in place so that the news industry is an asset to society rather than a liability but I wish I did.
Also: the 'New' page has a 'more' link at the bottom, this really should be used more often, the new pages moves ever faster as more stuff gets submitted to HN so plenty of good items scroll off the new page before they catch enough upvotes to make it to the homepage, so you can have a disproportionally high impact by voting for something that is at 3 or 4 upvotes on page 2 or 3. (The 'new' page only gets a fraction of the traffic that the homepage gets.)
Other than that you are right, it is news about garbage, but that does not make it garbage news.
The fact that air pollution kills massively is not 'new'. Should we stop reporting on it? Should we continue, but use other headlines?
Because the solution can't be "keep chugging along as if nothing were".
I'm heading up infosec in our company, and it's a similar "inconvenient truth" type of situation. My approach so far is to appeal to "coherence". You can pretend that disk encryption isn't necessary, but only if we all agree that leaking data is not an existential threat.
That's what this type of article does: put in context the number of Covid deaths, and ask "is that coherent?"
If COVID crisis has been any indication, common gut feeling has proven right on many occasions such as mask, airborne, lab leak etc. It was very clear early on masks might help, until health experts chimed in with their poor messaging saying masks don’t work. The virus being aerosolized and spreading airborne was also quite clear given how common symptoms tended to be to flu, yet there was hyper focus on hand washing etc instead of cleaning air or ventilation.
You don’t need to be an expert to understand air pollution is bad. Common sense and symptoms tell you it is. If anything this is an excuse for experts to collude with policy makers to pass on whatever the agendas they are working on.
I share the mindset with OP that experts as they exist today in the form of soulless gatekeepers feeding their egos with peer reviews can’t be trusted.
> It was very clear early on masks might help, until health experts chimed in with their poor messaging saying masks don’t work.
The administrations (not just the 45th, we had this shit worldwide) suddenly realized that they had no stockpile of masks and other PPE, and instead of communicating to the people and admitting fault for about three decades of globalization gone bad, they just went ahead and claimed against better knowledge that masks were not needed - at best, some asked the population to leave masks to the hospitals and help themselves with woven-cloth selfmade masks.
> The virus being aerosolized and spreading airborne was also quite clear given how common symptoms tended to be to flu, yet there was hyper focus on hand washing etc instead of cleaning air or ventilation.
I would only classify this as a partial communication failure. All the hygienic measures introduced worldwide drastically brought down the numbers of virtually all infectious diseases, which meant that hospitals now had more capacity to deal with COVID cases. On the other side, while a lot of German public offices (most notably, parliaments) have air filtering systems installed, the rollout of these devices in schools is ... underwhelming (and that's putting it mildly), with courts denying lawsuits asking for their installation with the simple excuse "if ventilating by opening the windows every twenty minutes makes you cold, use better clothes" [1].
Given that ridiculousness, it is definitely legitimate to claim that there is a significant interest of the governments to save money at the expense of parts of the populations that don't have political representation.
[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/muenster-schueler-au...
How is that the fault of globalisation, and how is globalisation the fault of current governments? For reference, France had mask and PPE stockpiles for the swine/bird/whatever flu, but the last administration let them expire because they were considered a waste of money. (Decades into globalisation)
Specifically for Germany, the last 16 years had seen a Conservative-led government under Merkel which had done virtually nothing to react to a number of analyses and warnings (e.g. after the OG SARS/MERS pandemics) that the pandemic and other crisis preparation was inadequate - after the German reunification, the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia and the subsequent end of the Cold War, a lot of the stockpiles that Germany held had been torn down and sold off.
As for other governments: Sometimes one has to admit as a politician, that the country has failed, even if the blame actually lies on a previous administration, and promise that at least the current administration will learn from the failure and make things better.
I predict that is what the solution will be. The path to reduction in total consumption worldwide (a proxy for pollution) will only come about from reduced population.
Similar to how any other organisms reach the boundary conditions of their environment, and then experience population loss until they are within survivable parameters again.
A laundry list of institutions lost functionally all of their credibility in the eyes of the public during covid. Speaking on behalf of the government, a prestigious university or having a blue check, none of those things mean squat anymore. Sure they make you credible than some Youtube talking head but that's a low bar. Rebuilding that credibility (or building replacement institutions) will take time or it will take force.
So yes, "just ignore it and keep chugging along" is an option and IMO it's probably the better one.
I think increasingly that will be the solution. The rational approach to threats is exhausting. People are going to go back to "ignore" and "panic" as the two outcomes, neither of which will be well grounded in actual risk measurement.
That somebody with expertise in the field published a report?