Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) but probably not life-changing.
..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity.
> Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) but probably not life-changing.
And teachers, and looking at how the breakdown of Italian hospitals meant a huge spike in deaths in the 40+ crowd that would have been just fine if they instead had capacity, a ton of dead parents, aunts and uncles to deal with too.
My understanding is that lockdowns didn't really change things significantly, so the "with lockdowns in effect" is not really relevant. See California (extreme lockdowns from the top) vs Florida (a bit of lockdown from the top) and their associated infection rate per 100k, which is nearly the same.
“Want to buy this vampire repelling rock?”
Lockdowns likely wouldn't affect IFR. It's a measure of fatality, not of infection rate, unless you think lifting the lockdown would cause a dramatic shift in infections to more vulnerable populations.
It's not infections/population.
The IFR isn't a static figure. If the actual incidence goes up to the point hospitals are overwhelmed, so does the IFR, by an enormous amount (so does the fatality rate of unrelated conditions, because resource exhaustion hits all conditions for which the same resources are used, not just COVID.)
From what I recall, I've read some interviews with heads of cancer clinics in Czech republic which is hit pretty hard, and they reported that they don't see many new patients in early stages of cancer anymore, people who come to them are mostly late stage which manifests hard, and they often go straight to palliative care. Is this some peer-reviewed study published in Nature with nice numbers and graphs? Of course not, we'll get to those numbers maybe 10 years after covid is under control, maybe. But its real people dying out there, mostly quietly without much media attention.
Pregnancy is a serious situation with covid, it can lead to many complications, abortion, and in case of serious complications for the mother, doctors at least here in Switzerland either perform abortion / force early delivery depending on age, since mother can't manage to breath on support enough for both of them (my wife is pregnant right now and senior doctor and we both got covid some 2 months ago, so this is something we checked on pretty intensively... luckily so far so good).
There is no win, we all take a heavy mental toll in confinement / job uncertainty or loss. But the risks are real on the other side too and its not so clearly cut for everyone. I don't have a clear answer on this myself.
EDIT: related to original topic - we caught covid from our little son going to kindergarden. In semi/hard lockdown, small kids going to schools is by probably the strongest infection vector. They can't keep the discipline as well as adults can. Heck, most adults can't keep up the discipline 1+ year consistently.
If you actually stop and think about the value of a life in a real sense instead of from an abstract or monetary perspective, you're either absolutely horrified by all of this and your path is clear, or you're a monster.
For the past year I just look at my wife and look at my kid and imagine what it would be like to lose them. I would do _anything_ to protect them. I know what losing other family members to COVID feels like. I've seen first hand what it does to people (friends and family).
Almost every one of those five hundred and fifty thousand people (in the US alone) that have died from COVID meant just as much to someone. I want to afford them the same respect and put in at least a minimal effort to protect their family just the same.
To me, any argument based around what essentially amounts to an inconvenience being too much to ask to prevent those deaths just makes me disgusted. Dressing it up in some rationality by demanding absolute and incontrovertible scientific proof of efficacy is nothing but a flimsy excuse.
Approaching all of this with some empathy makes it easier on yourself and leads to better outcomes for everyone. I'm not stuck at home in the face of statistics and arguments about how I should be able to do whatever I want and damn everyone else paying the consequences. I'm at home because I don't want people to suffer.
It sucks some days, but it's easy to keep going when I know it could be the reason _my own child_ doesn't grown up without a father. It's easy to keep going when it could be the reason someone else doesn't have to go through that either.
So I lost a year of hanging out with friends and had to cut my hair in the utility sink instead of going to the hair dresser. That's such a small fucking price to pay relative to what this could cost someone it's not even a fucking question.
It's essentially the same argument you are trying to make in favor of the lockdowns. Without the lockdowns, families will have to bury their loved ones and grow up without grandma/grandpa around. Other people will have long term health effects from catching this virus. With the lockdowns, some people will have to bury their (usually much younger) loved ones and grow up without brother/sister/son/daughter/friend around. Others will have long term mental health effects.
My cousin overdosed in May 2020. He had battled with addictions for a while before lockdowns but nothing to the point that we thought it would kill him. He went off the rails being forced to isolation and is now dead. His family had to bury him with no one else allowed to be present. In the same way that it's easy to overlook the impact of the virus if it has not severely impacted your family, its easy to overlook the lockdown effects if you and your family have not been severely impacted.
Stopping to think about the value of a life in a real sense should horrify you by all of the deaths and suffering caused by the virus but it should also horrify you to think of the value of the lives taken/affected by these sudden policy implementations. It does not make you a monster to consider both sides.
As for the clear path in terms of policies, both sides of the coin should be considered to the degree of certainty we know the risks to be. Unfortunately, this usually does require you put abstract/monetary/years-of-life-lost statistics in play.
Last June, my aunt in nyc was stacking bodies like cordwood in the back of trailers. They weren’t all 90 year old diabetics with copd.
