How many calculators has Essien given in West London?
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
Close down and open up costs a fortune each time. Throwing stock away and restocking again for open up alone is hugely expensive.
And in some countries suicide rates are better than usual. Not that mental health issues in general are in any way irrelevant.
Oh absolutely, there's plenty of legitimate mental health concerns. The suicide comments just always left me very uneasy because they were being used as a justification for someone's position on the lockdown / public health measures, which is a bit grim if you give it any thought. It was just said so casually, of course suicides will increase, and in this case they'll sky-rocket. For there to be more sucides than covid deaths you'd need to have 30x as many suicides as 2020, and 2020 was already the highest year on record.
There was no acknowledgement that actually, suicides are quite complicated, the idea that more unhappy people for a temporary period = more suicides is so simplistic that it's almost offensive to the people they're supposedly trying to protect - and the fact they're using them as a political football in the process makes it a bit dark. You were being cruel if you weren't considering this obvious impact of the lockdowns, how could you be so callous as to ignore these young, otherwise healthy people being pushed over the edge...and it was never acknowledged that this might be entirely fictional, an argument created to give moral justification for their own position.
Suicide wouldn’t be the only barometer of mental health, to be fair. Looks as though people with eating disorders have done very badly during the pandemic. Just one study but it showed a 66% increase in admissions between 2019 and 2020.
Note that I said “during the pandemic” and not “during lockdown”. Lockdown critics like to pretend that the only negative consequences are due to lockdown while the pandemic itself (relatives getting sick or dying, fear of the virus etc) will also cause huge stress and anxiety.
Aye, that's what I was saying in the first sentence. There were plenty of legitimate mental health concerns so there was no need to jump to the extremes of suicide and proclaim them as a foregone conclusion. It was done simply for its moral impact, to match up lives against lives, and moreover to value one life over another. It wasn't just about how many more suicides there would be, but who they would affect.
Not surprised about that. The whole thing has been propaganda to force govs to allow businesses to reopen. It beggars belief that people were trying to argue more people would die from suicides than from a fecking pandemic. And this was despite the mortality rate reaching 11% in Italy. It's shocking how delusional human beings can be. And how selfish and greedy.
I totally agree.
Just clicked this and everyone I saw was wearing a mask.
The stream is behind.
Wasn’t sure about posting this. Partly because @lynchie told me that yer man is a known drama queen, partly because I think/hope we’ll never see scenes like this in Ireland/UK. I do think it’s worth sharing, though, to give an idea of how dark things can get when a health service gets overwhelmed. And that’s what happens without the sort of lockdowns we’ve had to ensure to keep the caseload manageable.
This is also mismanagement though. Rio, where these reports are from, currently has fewer ICU beds than it did 10 months ago. This latest wave of covid has been more transmissible, and possibly more deadly, but it will always be impossible to dissociate the effects from the virus' mutation from the worsening hospital situation.
This is Brazil though, where the government's ability to deliver good outcomes for its citizens in several areas has arguably gotten worse in general over the past 10-15 years.
What he’s describing is 100% down to the worsening hospital situation. But it’s something that gets glossed over whenever we talk about “letting it rip”. The idea that life could get back to normal if we were to double our number of ICU beds. Even if you magic hundreds of ICU beds out of thin air (along with magical pixies to staff them) they’re still no good to you if you run out of the drugs you need to use them. I know for a fact there’s been hospitals in Ireland scenario planning about running out of oxygen!
And shortages like these becomes more and more inevitable the more countries end up as deep in the weeds as Brazil is right now.
For sure I understand that true ICU capacity is personnel + equipment + supplies, and any of those going missing means your capacity is phony.
I guess the summary of my point is that the latest wave in Rio in particular has actually had fewer daily cases of acute respiratory issues than last time, to the tune of a peak of 1,000 daily in April/May 2020, 600 in December 2020, and this time around the peak was 500-550 (I'm getting these from the chart the mayor's office presented last week at their weekly update). So fewer cases but the system now seems potentially more strained than a year ago.
Oh wow. That’s interesting. I didn’t realise that. Infuriating mismanagement if that’s the case.
Just one positive test in sunny Preston yesterday. Less than a month ago it was 100 plus. And it is sunny too, amazingly so.
Surely this is a premature statement? Premature death including suicide as a result of destitution, depression and poverty are going to be spread across a lifetime of misery.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/newseu...-19-official-report-Xxme9YSnPq/share_amp.html
44,000 due to emergency-care problems, such as reduced capacity and patient reluctance to visit hospital. The report estimates a further 130,000 years of life lost due to what it calls adult social care, defined as including "early hospital discharge, non-COVID-19 medical emergencies, impacts of quality of primary care in care homes, patient safety impacts or patients not wanting to transfer to hospitals."
Despite its terrible toll, there have been health benefits from COVID-19, or rather from the resultant restrictions. Between March and December 2020, the report estimates 46,700 years of life gained from reduced tobacco-related illness, 42,900 years gained from lower pollution and 12,700 from fewer road accidents.
However, even these ancillary benefits of lockdown have been outweighed by the negatives, including an estimated 17,800 years of life lost through alcohol abuse, 19,200 through home accidents and 19,700 to adult self-harm.
Looking over the long-term effects, the report estimates another 4,900 years of life could be lost over the next 50 years through pandemic-caused delays to cancer diagnoses. However, a far greater loss of life – 590,000 years – is estimated from "pandemic-induced recession through increased unemployment, reduced income and wealth and increased uncertainty."
I do agree though the short term numbers are surprising. I suppose the whole population being miserable means there's less of a disparity in the short term (although the amount of money a lot of people have saved compared with the amount of money other groups have lost means that comradely wil be short lived).
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Sure, there will be a lot of long-term negative health consequences as a result of the pandemic. Which is what those experts you’re citing weighed up when implementing the measures they recommended, with the intention of minimising the total effects, considering all the scenarios, and recognising the limitations of their estimates. Teasing apart cause and effect in that will involve quite a bit of speculation even years afterwards. Attributing suicides to single events many years earlier isn’t normal, in any case. It’s not usually how suicides are understood.
I’m not now predicting how many suicides will come about as a result of the pandemic, or the lockdown, or the tangled web of events that surround both. I’m not saying look, here’s proof there is no increased suicide risk from these choices. It seems a little foolish to do so if you spend any time thinking about the complex nature of suicides. There are a lot of paradoxes in that particular problem. Which is what made it odd how easily some people found it proclaim months ago how it would certainly lead to x, y and z. And stranger still how they all seemed to share motivations more aligned with their own self interests. Given the subject matter, it might even seem a little callous.
I think the overriding point that hundreds of thousands of years of life have been lost as a result of the practical and financial affects we've seen is still an obvious and important one.
I think arguing the semantics of what the specific cause of hundreds of thousands of years of lost life is somewhat academic. Suicide over the next 50 years was an example of this; but alcohol abuse, undiagnosed illness and reduced life expectancy (amount dozens of others) due to poverty are all other examples. That's before even discussing affects that result in misery but not years of death.
I think if you read other posts at the time you'd get the context; albeit that wouldn't have the same "got ya" affect.
Those practical and financial effects are - as per your report - “pandemic-induced”. We know that some of the measures taken during lockdown directly contributed to them, but we don’t know whether doing something entirely different would have exacerbated those. The delayed treatments for example are primarily linked to the pandemic, not the lockdown, as numerous members of that committee have said repeatedly. Delaying the spread of the virus was intended to limit that. That is true for many cases, but there are lots of complicated situations.
Suicides were supposed to be one of the less complicated situations. The virus doesn’t cause suicidal tendencies, it’s the social isolation, the economic devastation, and they are only caused by the lockdown, that’s plain to see. Supposedly. So if that simple attribution of cause and effect is already looking tenuous, what about the more complicated ones? Somehow the way the evidence develops doesn’t lead to any questions of those assumptions.
Once a specific example is picked and assessed, it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t fit the narrative, there’s many more examples we can speculate about. It’s easy to fill them with our own ideas of how the world works, without needing any evidence to support it, nor having to justify it when things later don’t pan out that way. It’s a bit of a theme.
Completely agree. It shows our lack of understanding about the complex nature of suicide and what factors lead to it, which will hopefully be an important lesson learned.
The report I posted stated 19,700 years lost as a result of adult self harm. Is that not the exact point that was being made?
This was of course one of many examples of not only life but quality of life lost. So was alcohol abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse, loss of education, self harm, delays in court proceedings meaning children who would be adopted instead have a childhood in foster homes, delays in court proceedings meaning innocent people are imprisoned without trial for years, deaths due to cancer going undiagnosed, heart disease, businesses bankrupted, dementia, loss of life due to children that would have been born that haven't and won't as a direct result of lockdown. The list is nearly endless.
I don't think it's even slightly controversial to state that the global measures introduced to combat Covid will cost tens of millions of years of life; which was the point being made.
Almost. It also included the clause that it was a result of the lockdown, not the pandemic. That isn't what the report states.
Specfically what they say about Category D impacts - including mental health and economic impacts - is...
https://assets.publishing.service.g...aths-morbidity-sage-december-update-final.pdf
Because actual experts on complicated subjects don't just make big claims and wave their hands. They don't just see social isolation = depression = suicides go up, without considering effects going the other way. Pogue has already given one example, that report provides others. And as you've now noted, perhaps the environment people are in - however glibly you want to describe it - doesn't exacerbate suicidal tendencies, because it depends a lot on the social context. And the social cues that contribute to suicide aren't quite that simple. For example, that simple link between economic harm and self-harm...they don't think it's simple.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5839093/
That general principle applies to all these things you happily list, with no examination, no expertise, and no sense of responsibility for their veracity. They just enable you to feel the way you want to feel, to fit into the ideology you couldn't possibly second-guess.
Totally! I have had a couple of experiences with suicide, one when I was quite young and another which I mostly experienced at a distance, through a friend, and so in both cases I wasn't left with that sense of guilt that people talk of. But it was unavoidably clear in others who were more mature, or closer, and the complicated feelings still kind of haunt me. I can't claim to understand what those people went through, but on some level I could feel the depth of it, and I found the casual way it was talked about here painfully direspectful to the people it purported to represent. I don't have the stomach to read through something like this but I'm sure this covers it in detail.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3384446/
So if this helps us be a bit more thoughtful about the subject, that'd be great!
Yeah but it's Preston
I think that because we've been well over the national average rate for so long that we've reached the stage when most people have had it, or been vaccinated.
The case of Japan in 2020
- Stable number of suicides for male
- Increasing number for female rising
- 2020 is relatively low if we look at the last 13 years
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55837160
- Stable number of suicides for male
- Increasing number for female rising
- 2020 is relatively low if we look at the last 13 years
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55837160
The original post you quoted literally said "there should have to be ironclad and irrefutable evidence that a lockdown is going to save a substantial amount of years of life." I did not say "there is ironclad and irrefutable evidence that lockdowns do cost more years of life than they save".
My point was that if a government says they're going to strip citizens of their most basic of rights then the onus is on them to prove the measures they propose have a benefit that clearly and significantly outweigh the drawbacks.
Did the government prove this prior to implementing Covid restrictions? Has the government provided that irrefutable evidence a year later? Have they provided ongoing clear evidence regarding each restriction imposed. Have they for example proven that the negatives of schools being closed are outweighed by the positives? Have they proven that the resulting poverty is justifiable? Have they provided the cost benefit analysis dependant on transmission and fatality levels, so that we can judge whether the decisions are merely political or go far deeper?
The answer is no and that was the whole point. If government said tomorrow that we're locking down indefinitely due to knife crime it would be obvious that the benefits are outweighed by the drawbacks. Likewise if the government said we're going to lockdown for 4 months every year as the benefits are clear (less road accidents, less deaths from pollution, less influenza deaths).
Covid is obviously less clear cut than these examples as the death rate far exceeds flu or knife crime but the evidential burden should still be the same.
https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2021/0415/1209980-covid-19-quarantine/
piss off! Freedom of movement, don’t they realise there is a pandemic on?
piss off! Freedom of movement, don’t they realise there is a pandemic on?
My brother works as a subway train driver and those environments are the paradise for this germ. Ever since the pandemic started I knew we were destined to get it sooner or later and we were lucky not to have gotten it sooner. However he got infected March 7th and I got infected by him March 9th. We were both lucky to get relatively mild symptoms but let me tell you this is the most absurd illness I've ever gotten.
It started of with an exploding headache and the fever only lasted 3 days for me which is not much but it still affected me pretty bad since I havn't had a fever since I was maybe 6 or something but it was tolerable with insane amount of fluid and pills. However I got other symptoms and some of them I still have today. First few days I had severe testicle pain. Electrical buzzing sensations all over my body and severe muscle and joint pain everywhere.
Some days even today while walking around it feels as if every bone in my feet is broken and I limp as if I've gotten shot. I still have problems with annoying headaches which has never been an issue for me prior to this. I also run out of breath much faster than I used to. This is some bizarre shit and I can totally see why the virus have gotten the better of so many fragile people and even some fully healthy people. I fear for what may happen if I get reinfected now with so many different mutations around.
Stay safe people, wear masks and be really careful around your older loved ones.
It started of with an exploding headache and the fever only lasted 3 days for me which is not much but it still affected me pretty bad since I havn't had a fever since I was maybe 6 or something but it was tolerable with insane amount of fluid and pills. However I got other symptoms and some of them I still have today. First few days I had severe testicle pain. Electrical buzzing sensations all over my body and severe muscle and joint pain everywhere.
Some days even today while walking around it feels as if every bone in my feet is broken and I limp as if I've gotten shot. I still have problems with annoying headaches which has never been an issue for me prior to this. I also run out of breath much faster than I used to. This is some bizarre shit and I can totally see why the virus have gotten the better of so many fragile people and even some fully healthy people. I fear for what may happen if I get reinfected now with so many different mutations around.
Stay safe people, wear masks and be really careful around your older loved ones.
So true. I'm told I must have had it March 2020 (makes sense as I was in airports 6 times in that period), the symptoms I experienced being loss of smell (not one at the time) and fatigue for a few days.
For the following 12 months my sense of taste and smell have been all over the place (cow manure smells like metal and popcorn tastes awful). That's subsided slightly but still off now.
I've also had a weird "burning tongue" ever since. Any time I eat spicy food or drink lots of carbonated drinks my tongue starts to feel like it's touched lava. All very bizarre.
“Yeah but it’s just the flu”
Anyone think it’s going to be weird at first when (if all goes to plan) all social distancing is removed on 22 June?
Yep when everyone heads to Wales for a jolly
How do you feel now?Entire city has been quarantined.
One of my colleagues just came back from China and another is on their way.
Ha, Wales will still be in lockdown with two households able to meet outdoors! In England, though, being able to walk into a packed pub to watch a game, not having to stick to tables, etc...can’t wait!
My mum had it a similar time and she said onions now taste like metal
https://news.sky.com/story/risk-of-...her-than-after-astrazeneca-jab-study-12276088
Very interesting article in Sky News.
Puts the concern over the AZ Vaccine into perspective doesn't it.
Very interesting article in Sky News.
Puts the concern over the AZ Vaccine into perspective doesn't it.
I was just reading about the huge disparity in Covid testing prices around the world. I paid 20 euros to get my Antigen test at Florence airport and 70 for the PCR test at a Florence lab.
Although you can still get Covid after having the vaccine can’t you?