[hamaluik]

I can get onboard with most of this.. until the end. COVID deaths don’t just mean everyone losing 15 days of life. To me it meant multiple family members dying. It means my respiratory system has been absolutely wrecked, hopefully not forever but for at least several months now. It means my infant son is gasping for breath on my lap as I write this and there’s nothing we can do for him. Statistics in white towers are so decoupled from humanity they are worse than useless; these selfish attitudes cause real harm.

[geiser]

That's exactly what I thought. We have to learn to live in a community, and that means sacrificing personal liberty for the benefit of others.

[btilly]

And if we fail to be able to cope, what then?

As https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... and many other sources will attest, COVID and COVID lockdowns was TERRIBLE for mental health among teenagers. And yes, poor mental health is a communicable disease within a family.

This is personal. 3/4 of my teenage children are receiving psychiatric care. Including a daughter who was temporarily institutionalized for being suicidal.

Do you REALLY wish to repeat your position and explain why my children need to sacrifice their personal liberty, no matter the cost to their mental health, for the benefit of others? Or is it POSSIBLE that there is a tradeoff where my children's mental health is one of the benefits that society needs to consider in deciding what policies to follow?

I've spent a lot of hours of my daughter explaining very calmly why we should stop caring about her so she can die in peace. I see this as a result of denying liberty. And so I put a very different value my family's liberty than you do.

(This post revised for various reasons, such as avoiding swearing.)

[mijoharas]

This was my thinking. From the way the author writes, they seem to say, "I would skip lockdowns, in exchange for giving up my 15 extra days of life". If that were the thing on offer, I think a lot of people would say "forget the extra 15 days, I'll not have a lockdown".

That's not what it is though. The question is, would you go into lockdown to give everyone in the country 15 extra days of life. That's what you're trading. Personal inconvenience for strong positive externalities, you can't just think about the part of it that comes back to you. It's a general societal good that you're doing.

[azinman2]

As the GP points out, long Covid isn’t factored into this, let alone the cruelty of averaging lifespans with death when we know it’s an inaccurate way to understand the effects.