Yeah, it’s overconfident to claim that lockdowns are “almost certainly net negative”. This stuff is complicated.
But it’s also not certain that lockdowns were “definitely a huge net positive” for older people. For example, for my 90 year old grandmother the life-saving benefits are much larger than for younger people. But the costs of a couple years in lockdown has also been huge for her. She’s been persistently depressed, and her health has deteriorated a lot. Presumably from not moving around much any more. She’s felt really bad about life since the pandemic started.
Especially given that her statistical risk of dying per year is something like 50% pre-covid, it’s not obvious whether this is a good trade-off. It all comes down to details about just how big the mental health costs are and the specific number for mortality reduction from covid.
Yeah, I wanted to make much the same point. My grandma died in 2015, but I’ve talked about it with my family members and we’re all pretty certain she would have chosen to die of COVID rather than go into lockdown. In the last years of her life (especially after being widowed in 2008), she was very realistic about the fact that she didn’t have much longer to live, and her whole life revolved around her community — she lived alone, but she was an important community fixture in her small town, and had been for decades. Not socializing would have removed her only source of meaning, and there’s no way she would have thought that it was worth locking down to buy herself two additional years of life in isolation.
Yeah, it’s overconfident to claim that lockdowns are “almost certainly net negative”. This stuff is complicated.
But it’s also not certain that lockdowns were “definitely a huge net positive” for older people. For example, for my 90 year old grandmother the life-saving benefits are much larger than for younger people. But the costs of a couple years in lockdown has also been huge for her. She’s been persistently depressed, and her health has deteriorated a lot. Presumably from not moving around much any more. She’s felt really bad about life since the pandemic started.
Especially given that her statistical risk of dying per year is something like 50% pre-covid, it’s not obvious whether this is a good trade-off. It all comes down to details about just how big the mental health costs are and the specific number for mortality reduction from covid.
Yeah, I wanted to make much the same point. My grandma died in 2015, but I’ve talked about it with my family members and we’re all pretty certain she would have chosen to die of COVID rather than go into lockdown. In the last years of her life (especially after being widowed in 2008), she was very realistic about the fact that she didn’t have much longer to live, and her whole life revolved around her community — she lived alone, but she was an important community fixture in her small town, and had been for decades. Not socializing would have removed her only source of meaning, and there’s no way she would have thought that it was worth locking down to buy herself two additional years of life in isolation.