I don't want to minimise the pandemic- I don't think there is any other way to manage it than the one every sensible government is taking. But- a but was coming- the count of the deaths is a really rough way to estimate its damage. A better one would be the total number of years of life expectancy lost. This epidemic is very dangerous for everyone but it's mostly killing people who were towards the end of their life. It is still tragic but it's different from deaths of random people in every age bracket.
I'm not sure we can actually calculate that - especially given the permanent damage left to lungs, heart and kidneys - we don't actually know how many years this is going to take off survivors.
If you survive covid at 20 and die at 50 of complications, do we count this as -30 years life expectancy, or disregard it from your numbers completely?
Deaths is a very rough metric, and we're struggling to get even that right. I've no problems coming up with any other metric you prefer, as long as we can make it more accurate, not less.
> especially given the permanent damage left to lungs, heart and kidneys - we don't actually know how many years this is going to take off survivors
I don't think this is fearmongering per se, but I'm a bit fed up with this line of thinking.
We're playing with fire by surmising there's hidden harms (who's quantifying? is there even evidence this is happening to many survivors? I don't care if there's evidence it's happened to one person, we need demonstrable proof of very widespread damage, but I just don't see that being passed around as a possibility) and outright ruining people's livelihoods.
I honestly don’t think we know yet. I think most resources are being pumped into things that are actionable.
I’m not trying to fear-monger. But if people want to come up with “alternative” statistics, I think they need to be justifiable. There’s been a lot of debate around cases vs deaths, and our margin of error on each.
IMHO unless they can make “potential years lost” at least as accurate as any of our working figures, all they’re presenting is “it doesn’t matter, they’re just old people” masquerading as intelligence.
That we can’t properly quantify this is precisely my problem.
(To be clear, I don’t think any of these metrics should be linked to lockdown. Personally, my entirely uneducated, armchair opinion is that the primary metric for this should be the percentage capacity of medical facilities. All I ask is that we figure out how best to make solid numbers actionable, rather than how to reinvent the numbers to suit our cause.)
