I read the entire thing and it’s fine imo.
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Question for you guys as I feel this place has a lot of good info and you folks know a lot more about COVID than I do - so I wanted to ask.
We had an argument at work last week about how deadly COVID is for young healthy adults and the general consensus is that it’s possible to die but very unlikely - that math is pretty clear cut on that issue. From what I’m gathering, it appears you have around 80,000 more deaths compared 2019 in drug, alcohol and suicides alone - mostly younger people and those numbers seem likely to grow as addiction rates have rocketed this year.
Do we feel that we are giving those deaths the right amount of attention compared to the scope of COVID concerning what the lockdowns and financial hardship has and what it may continue to do beyond COVID?
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You need to also factor in the long haulers who are still messed up months later and may have problems for life.
Also how do you propose to not have lockdowns and not have the hospitals overloaded with old/comorbid people? CA has had partial lockdown for a long time and the hospitals are bursting. What’s the plan if we open bars and restaurants again? Field hospitals? Die at home?
80,000 total deaths or 80,000 deaths more than average? I have yet to see any statistics that death in young people from the sources you cite are meaningfully up. I am sure the RW media would be shouting from the mountaintops if they were.
I am seeing around 250Kish total deaths as far as drugs, alcohol, and suicide and it being up around 60% from last year. If I am wrong on this then my position would change accordingly.
Can you cite your source so I can see it?
I also think very few places had any restrictions for any meaningful amount of time. The part that gets missed in blaming the lockdowns for those deaths is that we didn’t really lock down. People are drinking and abusing drugs more because the country has become a scary place where the selfishness and uncaring for fellow humans is on full display daily. No one is killing themselves because they couldn’t go to Chili’s for a couple weeks.
I’ve said it all along but the way you avoid those deaths is to get the virus under control. No amount of pretending it doesn’t exist is going to make things normal. The way we get back to normal is to limit the virus. We all know someone who has died or healthcare workers who have been destroyed by this or both. There is no magical world where we just close our eyes and ignore it and it goes away on it’s own. These arguments surrounding additional deaths from alcohol drugs and suicide seem to ignore the fact they are a result of the virus being out of control rather than being a result of some government restriction.
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My cousin’s husbands dad is on a vent and his mom is very sick too. Closest to home this has hit. They’re not RWNJs either. I think they live in Orange County.
USA is attempting the bare minimum of restrictions needed to not completely collapse the healthcare system and jury still out on the success at even getting over that bar.
I’m skeptical of those death numbers from other causes, but even if they were real they are products of some combination of the virus and our response. We almost literally can not do less.
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Yeah, I completely agree that removing lockdowns and mask policies would be a disaster.
I was just a bit shocked at the numbers I saw.
If I was some COVID denier I would have spoke up about it before now.
citation needed
Would also be super hard to link these to covid, as these have been increasing for the past several years before.
Didn’t mean to imply that you were one, just that I don’t think those issues are necessarily not getting attention, it is just that even if they are exacerbated by restrictions we can’t prevent that right now. We could support people in other ways to help mitigate but, you know, lol USA
Leaving everything else out of it: no, we continue to not pay enough attention to helping those suffering from mental health disorders and addiction. I don’t doubt at all that COVID has made the situation much worse, but that’s multi-faceted and not solely attributable to lockdowns or financial insecurity. I’d rather not say “But whatabout these suicides and overdoses, why aren’t we comparing that cost to the people dying directly from COVID” and instead say “The problems that our society already wasn’t doing enough about are getting worse, let’s dedicate some resources to addressing them.” A lot of people still refuse to think of addiction as anything other than a moral issue. Look at how most people view the homeless!
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There are no easy answers and pain and heartache are unavoidable. Our failing though is the lack of a plan and a stunning lack of leadership. Trump had a chance to unify the country in a war against the virus. At least then we’d have the solace of being on the same side.
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The fuck? Where is the word test?
I skimmed a market watch article that came out today but cant access it because it’s behind a paywall now. I probably read it wrong as folks here seem surprised about the numbers but they stated they are up 60% and last year there were 164k suicide, drug a alcohol deaths?
‘Deaths of despair’ during COVID-19 rose by up to 60% in 2020, new research says - MarketWatch
Again, I’m not trying to make some point, I really was honestly curious.
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I think there are a few issues getting conflated in the discussion.
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Are “deaths of despair” (drugs, alcohol, suicide, etc.) up in the past year? Without looking at stats, my feels say that they probably were. It was a really rough year in many ways, and I’m sure that had lots of negative repercussions on mental health.
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Are we doing enough to help people? Almost certainly not. Mental health services and substance abuse treatments were already pretty bad, and I can’t see how they would have gotten better in a world where face to face interactions have become more difficult and social isolation has increased.
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Are these problems the result of “lockdowns.” In other words, can people who don’t like that the government forced businesses to close point to these deaths as the flip side of the ledger (“well, even if your lockdowns saved a hundred thousand old folks, you killed 80,000 young people by taking away their jobs and their social lives and drove them to suicide, so you didn’t really gain much by locking down”)? I think this is a much harder argument to evaluate because most of the harms attributed to “the lockdowns” probably would have happened even if the government hadn’t responded to Covid at all (but Covid still existed). Even in the absence of formal laws, when people started getting sick and hospitals started getting overrun, some % of people were going to socially distance and a lot of businesses were going to see their revenue decline to the point where the business wasn’t sustainable.
I don’t want to downplay the mental health consequences of the past 9 months, but I guess I see the individuals you discussed as additional victims of the pandemic rather than unique victims of “the lockdown.”
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Always check your sources. Here is the author of the “study” an economist who thinks that welfare disincentives people from work.
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Let’s just say I’m pretty happy Wichita asked over and over for the source. Suicide study guy is a big time Trumper
https://twitter.com/caseybmulligan/status/1345869142314934272?s=20
https://twitter.com/caseybmulligan/status/1344641214000279552?s=20
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Oh yeah, he also says workers shouldnt get sick days.
I’m not taking the word of someone who is so blatantly anti-worker when it comes to the impact of shutdowns.
In 2012, Mulligan published The Redistribution Recession which argued that social welfare programs such as food stamps and unemployment benefits during the Great Recession disincentivized work and thus prolonged the recession.[9][10] Mulligan has argued that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) disincentivizes work.[11][12] Mulligan opposes paid sick days, arguing that they lead workers to take sick days even when they are not sick.[13][14]
“10% to 60% increase”
so yeah
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