This isn't a contrived example though. Thousands of people are dying every day. That's why we care about this one and not your contrived example. When yours is killing a 9/11 every day then we care about it.
Yes, but my position is that the following externalities are equally or indeed more important to be mindful of:
- worsened COVID-19 outcomes due to social isolation
- worsened COVID-19 outcomes due to fear of going to a hospital (this is a real effect)
- worsened all-cause mortality due to social isolation and a culture of widespread fear
- worsened mortality attributable to mass unemployment (note that some small portion of unemployment would have happened without lockdown but the vast majority of damage is self-inflicted and thus directly attributable to lockdown)
- worsened quality of life (the missing link that lockdown proponents tend not to address) amidst the entire population
- externalities that occur when suspending in-person
education, such as the widening inequality gap between students whose parents can afford to buy them personal computers/laptops/tablets and those whose parents cannot.
- shifting to a global perspective, the impending global food shortage is predicted to make COVID-19's mortality look like a drop in the bucket
Finally, I'd like to point out that COVID-19 deaths here in the US are dominated by the extremely elderly which implies (but does not prove, of course) that our lockdown policies were ineffective at protecting the at-risk groups that we should have been focusing on the whole time
I think that people are greatly overdoing social isolation point, especially whose who works from home. Seriously, when I was stay at home mom, I was way more isolated for way longer then this. And I am salty about this, because people act after two weeks as if they were on lonely island for ten years. When I had issue with isolation, people (both online and occasionally irl) acted as if I said something offensive for even mentioning it or being affected by that.
This is literally situation in which everyone is in the same situation as you, you can call to people who are in the same situation all the time. If you work from home, then communication from work is almost the same as before. I can see this from someone who is old and can not use tech, but really, this is not what isolation is.
I hope you don't mind if I copy-paste a section from a piece I've already written that goes into this a bit. The TL;DR is that social isolation leads to worse outcomes, regardless of emotional loneliness. Also on the contrary, I think you are "underdoing" the social isolation point and are underestimating the extent to which this has affected everyday citizens. Keep in mind that there are some people here in the US that have literally not left their houses for the last two months except for maybe a weekly grocery store trip.
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Finally, we need to examine the effects of social isolation itself. Beyond the fact that social isolation prevents the natural exchange of microbes that occur between humans engaging in social contact, it should be noted that social isolation is directly thought to lead to increased all-cause mortality due to worsened health outcomes across pretty much every dimension that we can examine. One review (https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/15/5797.full.pdf) of the impacts of social isolation and loneliness in older adults concludes that “mortality was higher among more socially isolated and more lonely participants. However, after adjusting statistically for demographic factors and baseline health, social isolation remained significantly associated with mortality (hazard ratio 1.26, 95% confidence interval, 1.08–1.48 for the top quintile of isolation), but loneliness did not (haz-ard ratio 0.92, 95% confidence interval, 0.78–1.09). The association of social isolation with mortality was unchanged when loneliness was included in the model”.
It’s now popular to refer to what was previously called “social distancing” as “physical distancing” to note the fact physical distancing does not necessarily lead to loneliness; this is because loneliness can (perhaps) be mitigated to a limited extent by usage of social media and videoconferencing. Troublingly, we can see that it is the social isolation itself, and not the emotional feeling of loneliness, that is associated with death, and thus we can surmise, at least in older adults (but almost certainly in the broader population as well), that the widespread recommendations of social isolation (“stay at home”, “social distancing”, etc) will lead to increased all-cause mortality.
Finally, we wish to highlight that a small increase in all-cause mortality amidst the general population due to social isolation could very easily dwarf COVID-19-associated mortality, which as we have discussed is primarily constrained to a very limited subset of the population.
And those are the factors that the epidemiologists and policymakers need to balance when setting the policies. But that's a decision that they should be making, with access to all of the available data. It's not a decision for one hot headed billionaire with a large financial incentive to reopen.
The epidemiologists who have been advocating for lockdown have very explicitly ignored all of those sources of mortality entirely. They have only focused on COVID-19-attributable deaths and that's it.
Now the job of the modellers is to predict COVID-19 mortality under various scenarios, and it's the job of policymakers to counterbalance those predictions against the economic realities, etc. So, it's not necessarily a problem that epidemiologists would focus on predicting just along the dimension of COVID-19 mortality.
But unfortunately our policymakers have completely disregarded that need to weigh both the positives and negatives and instead have talked about "following the science" and basically myopically parroted whatever these highly opinionated epidemiologists (Ferguson, everyone at the IMHE, etc) were saying, without mentioning the negative externalities associated with lockdown, except in passing in a way that implies that economic damage will be constrained to shareholder returns (which is completely false).
>The epidemiologists who have been advocating for lockdown have very explicitly ignored all of those sources of mortality entirely. They have only focused on COVID-19-attributable deaths and that's it.
> We do not consider the ethical or economic implications of either strategy here, except to note that there is no easy policy decision to be made. Suppression, while successful to date in Chinaand South Korea, carries with it enormous social and economic costs which may themselves have significant impact on health and well-being in the short and longer-term. Mitigation will never be able to completely protect those at risk from severe disease or death and the resulting mortality may therefore still be high. Instead we focus on feasibility, with a specific focus on what the likely healthcare system impact of the two approaches would be.
(From Page 4)
Now let's shift to the IHME model. They do make passing reference to the econonic impact, same as Ferguson, but don't go any further:
> The overall financial cost over a short period of time is likely to be enormous, particularly when juxtaposed against the substantial reductions in revenue for many hospitals due to the cancellation of elective procedures and the broader economic consequences of social distancing mandates.
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Now as I said, it's not necessarily their job to forecast the economic harm. But unfortunately we have created this notion that being pro-lockdown means "believing science" and therefore thinking that the lockdown is a bad idea is being "against science". Our politicians use these exact words, and as I said their actions show that they are not holistically evaluating the downside risk. On the contrary it appears to be a very simple game-theory type calculation where their incentive structures are leading them to make irrational decisions. COVID-19 mortality is much more "visible" than the fuzzier and longer-term mortality caused by our (IMO misguided) response to COVID-19.
It is hilarious and sad at the same time that a country which is perhaps uniquely suited to embark on a moon-shot Apollo style program of testing regiment for EVERYONE instead chooses to self inflict all sorts of wounds.
It was in the cards, which makes it even more painful to see.
Testing EVERYBODY would be cheaper than what is happening now and an inspiration to the whole world, inspiring awe and respect.
