Places that didn't do social distancing didn't lose much more, there is no evidence that social distancing saved more than I estimated here. My estimate was even very generous in your favour since I estimated death without social distancing to be the worst in the world. But we could estimate to be roughly the death rate in Florida, in which case most of the social distancing did basically nothing.
Right, and that was enough. Forcing kids and people under 60 to stay home and social distance didn't seem to be necessary to avoid disaster. But California still did it for over a year, that is the price you paid. How many years of life did it save in California compared to letting people distance as they themselves deem necessary? Not that many.
Right, I agree with that. But it was only valid for the first few weeks. The healthcare systems weren't critically overrun anywhere in the world. Yes, from time to time not every patient they wanted to put on a ventilator got one, but ventilators doesn't dramatically improve the odds of survival so it wasn't a big deal anyway.
So why did California continue with their measures for a year? They still did among the worst in the world so those measures seems to have had little to no effect at all.
> But it was only valid for the first few weeks. The healthcare systems weren't critically overrun anywhere in the world.
We live in a different planet? I live across the border with North Italy, and it was only 2 weeks what it took for the situation to go from "oops, looks like there's a problem" to "let's mobilize doctors out of retirement and potentially kill them to save people". There have been different levels of restrictions since. Same in France, Spain, Germany, pretty much anywhere in Europe.
> Yes, from time to time not every patient they wanted to put on a ventilator got one, but ventilators doesn't dramatically improve the odds of survival so it wasn't a big deal anyway.
Ventilators were abused at the beginning out of ignorance about the disease, but they're still the best last-resort treatment for critical cases. In my region, during the second wave, most deaths happened to people waiting for a ventilator, or during transfer from oxygen to a ventilator, and those on ventilators generally survived.
That said, now there's a more defined and effective protocol before reaching a ventilator that requires hospitalization nonetheless, and makes you require one if not followed.
> So why did California continue with their measures for a year? They still did among the worst in the world so those measures seems to have had little to no effect at all.
California had terrible numbers despite the fact that measures worked. It's been studied ad nauseam and social restrictions is the among most effective measures to be taken in every study, with a solid interval of confidence. One of my favourite studies is [0] because it shows that some things were done right (lockdowns, closing schools, remote work) but some had little to no effect (surface disinfection).
Is very small compared to the lives saved by those measures. Traffic safety laws saves about 20k young people per year in USA. Assume each had 40 years left to live, that is 0.8 million years, or about 0.002 years per person per year. That is about half a day of life saved per year per person, meaning 12 hours. Putting on a seatbelt takes a few seconds and you do it a few times per day, say 20 seconds per day. Add that up over a year and you get 100 minutes or about 2 hours spent seatbelting to save 12 hours of life.
Traffic lights takes more time, but they also allows for more dense traffic so I don't think that removing them would help at all. I doubt San Francisco traffic would get any better if you removed most traffic lights, likely it would get worse in all the chaos, so unless you prove to me that they actually hurt commute time rather than help I put those savings on the seatbelts.
> Is very small compared to the lives saved by those measures
Don’t get me wrong, I wear a seatbelt and stop at lights.
I was just agreeing with the parent comment. There seems a fairly strong vein that wanted no lockdown and for us to just accept any resulting carnage. I’m not part of that group.
You could make this same argument about anything that causes large amounts of deaths.
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