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Comment by kylecazar | Hacker News Reader

COVID really messed up the improvements made to NYC's FiDi over the past decade.

I think it's important to distinguish between Covid and the absolutely irrational public policy response to Covid, because the latter is what really threw downtowns off. Pandemics will happen again; lockdowns don't need to, if we learn.

We won't learn. On the contrary, we have actually become stupider about handling disease: Hospitals are even more understaffed now than they were before the pandemic, and anti-vaccine hysteria has gone mainstream.

If we get hit with another major pandemic in the relatively near future, we will be even less prepared for it now than we were with Covid, and I predict our lockdowns will be even worse because of it.

Our lockdowns simply can’t be worse in the future, at least not in living memory. The people who have lived through them simply won’t stand for them.

If people behaved rationally and with empathy we wouldn't need to lock down. But because we have a bunch of selfish pricks we'll always need lock downs. People cannot be trusted to do what it is good for the whole if it even slightly inconveniences the individual. In western culture(The United States in particular), I don't see that changing any time soon.

Large swaths of the U.S. never had lockdowns or had minimal lockdowns and it was the correct choice not to. The idea that you can hide from or wait out a disease as viral as the common cold is laughable.

To be clear, it was never to hide out or wait for COVID to leave. It was mostly to slow the spread, limit demand on our medical resources, and to ramp up time to ensure we tackled it with robust medical science. Unfortunately, most states in the country don't actually "believe" in science because Yahweh bro.

With 20/20 hindsight, what proved to be the tradeoffs between lockdowns and not?

With the power of hindsight, we can rely on all-cause excess mortality data since 2020 to see how effective the lockdowns were, and whether the extreme disruption to daily life was worth it. See this study[0] that showcases Sweden, whose public health policy around Covid was basically a big shrug, with the idea that it was pointless to try and control the spread of a highly transmissible respiratory virus. It has fewer cumulative excess deaths compared to its neighbors Norway, Finland, and Denmark; all highly developed countries with similar demographics and cultures as Sweden, but with much stricter restrictions.

Within the US, a recent Lancet study[1] showed that when adjusted for a variety of health factors (age, rates of diabetes, etc.) -- that is, if every state had the same distribution of health profiles within its population -- then Florida, which had no restrictions on everyday life since later in 2020, had a lower cumulative death rate than California, which had some levels of mandatory masking even earlier in 2023 as well as a higher overall vaccination rate[2].

Looking at all-cause excess mortality is useful, since it avoids the question of who really died "of" Covid vs. "with" Covid, and takes into account the ways that lockdowns were harmful to health (e.g. drug overdose deaths from loneliness and despair).

The available data indicates that the biggest determinant of how susceptible a population was to Covid is its age and overall health (which the US fares quite poorly against many other countries, being both older and more unhealthy on average), and that lockdowns were more or less ineffective in saving lives. And that's even without thinking of the generation of children who grew up during those lockdowns, whose schooling is several years behind and will carry that burden for the rest of their lives.

[0]: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-...

[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[2]: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...

> The people who have lived through them simply won’t stand for them.

If another disease like the first COVID wave comes along I'll damn well vote out any politician who doesn't support lockdowns.

When there is a super virulent disease spreading rapidly that we don't know the long term effects of (and we still don't years later!) a lockdown is the logical response until we have some idea wtf is going on.

And I’ll do the opposite.

The thing is, we relied on the novelty of something like covid to enforce lockdowns in the first place. Without that overblown fear, voluntary compliance simply won’t be there.

And any government that wants to impose lockdowns will be forced to implement a military response, akin to what China did during covid. That kind of response + hindsight to how useless it is won’t go well.

> Hospitals are even more understaffed now than they were before the pandemic

BLS doesn't agree with you[0]. After a big drop with Covid, when a bunch of older hospital workers decided it would be a good time to retire, the employment number matched pre-Covid figures by late 2022, and exceeds it now.

> anti-vaccine hysteria has gone mainstream

Rates of typical childhood vaccination (like MMR, DTaP, etc.) dipped only a little, from 95% pre-pandemic to 93% in 2023[1], so there's no evidence to suggest that anti-vaccine hysteria is "mainstream". And I would wager that the 2% difference can be largely attributed to, again, the poor public health policy choices surrounding Covid.

[0]: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES6562200001?amp%253bdata_t...

[1]: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/headed-...

> > Hospitals are even more understaffed now than they were before the pandemic

> BLS doesn't agree with you[0]. After a big drop with Covid, when a bunch of older hospital workers decided it would be a good time to retire, the employment number matched pre-Covid figures by late 2022, and exceeds it now.

If demand is higher for care, they could have more total employment and still be more understaffed.

Good point. I wonder if there is data for that. Maybe the number of insurance claims?

The "work from home" class were going to lock themselves down whether it was mandated by the government or not.

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