E-ZPass is a way to collect tolls without each car having to slow down at a toll booth. That reduces traffic congestion and thereby air pollution - which might kill children. Or does kill children as the authors argue.
This paper is from 2011 and appeared in the journal Applied Economics, but that is behind a paywall.
The only downside (from the drivers perspective at least) with the newer high-speed tolling is that there are new tolls appearing all up and down the east coast of the US that didn't exist before due to the cost/complexity of building toll plazas, whereas now it just needs a gantry over the highway with some scanners/cameras.
In the DELMARVA area in particular there are now "express lanes" on I-95 that you can pay a little extra to use the lane, the tolls seem to be variable too (presumably depending on traffic).
Economically speaking, increasing prices on a scarce resource (travel lanes) where demand exceeds supply totally makes sense. Helps get the road users to pay more of their fair share, too (rather than taking it out of all of our income taxes equally).
Any toll expensive enough to effect usage are an affront to the entire point of publicly funded infrastructure. The janitor has just as much right to waste his time in gridlock as the tech bro does.
So then why don't we make public transit (buses, trains, etc.) free? These are publicly-funded infrastructure, and the fares exist primarily to limit usage, in addition to help fund the system.
The fact that motorists expect to get free roads while public transit users have to pay is an affront to the entire point of publicly-funded infrastructure.
Those are mostly HOT lanes - High Occupancy Toll. If you have the correct EZPass they are free with 3+ occupants. The toll is for drivers with less than 3 occupants who are willing to pay the premium, which scales with traffic and has a "soft limit" of $1.50/mile last I saw.
Coming from Central Europe where toll booths are not a thing: I thought it should maybe read "reduced infant mortality to numbers in cities/countries without toll booths" ...
They have been moving toward a model where there are no more toll booths, no one slows down. If you have EZ Pass, you are scammed and your account billed. If you don't, they take a picture of your license plate and mail you a bill. Much of the NY/NJ area now operates on this model.
Correct. Typically they give a small discount if you do EZPass otherwise it's toll by plate. E470 around Denver has been like this for...decades maybe.
Since this has gone into place I have been sent at least 3 bills for trips on E-470 I never took. One time it was sent to collections because I would not pay. They turned out to be false matches of my license plate number with their automated camera system.
Sounds like I-66 near Washington D.C. It used to just be regular congested highway, now it's EZ-pass only, every GPS navigation app sends you through it, and there are only a few non-conspicuous signs warning you. If you're in the area it's fine you just know, but I imagine at least hundreds of tourists get bamboozled every day there.
The most interesting thing here isn't really comparing having tolls vs not having tolls (although if you live near toll booths that would be interesting, I suppose). It's having a way to directly see the health effects after a change that reduces local exposure to emissions from cars idling in a given location.
There has been other research that shows a correlation between certain health outcomes and proximity to highways, but there may be confounding factors in that type of study, whereas this is almost more like an interventional study even though the change obviously wasn't actually made for the purposes of the study.
This is very strong evidence that many of the negative health effects that have been shown to be correlated with proximity to highways are indeed caused by car emissions.
I thought it should maybe read "reduced infant
mortality to numbers in cities/countries without
toll booths"
It wouldn't be a useful comparison because there are so many other variables at play in one country vs. another.
Check the paper; it's very readable. Alternatively, know the following:
The reason they chose their approach was because it gives them a "natural experiment" - by comparing the exact same area before and after EZPass, you get a fairly valid experiment with only a minimal number of variables to wrangle.
I used to live in front of a traffic light intersection in a street with lots of traffic. The noise and even the smell was awful. Avoiding that situation was a top priority when I moved to my current place.
My city only approves high-rise and medium density developments next to major streets, leaving the insides of major blocks entirely to single family homes and occasional townhouses. Just your typical NIMBY asshole land.
There's a recently built 9 storey building at one of the busiest intersections in the city. If you look at the rental ads, it's all luxury finish, shiny appliances, modern kitchens with marble this and oak that. Personally, I'd much rather live in a dated or even run down apartment in a quiet street than in this "luxury" where I can't open the windows and can hear traffic even with them closed.
When I used to work in the office (pre-COVID), there was a 5-story apartment building built in what I can only describe the worst location possible.
Side 1 - The busiest Firefighting station of the town on a road named the most dangerous road of the town by a local news source
Side 2 - Qdoba & Chinese food restaurants, followed closely by the busiest artery of the town
Side 3 - Shopping Plaza parking lot with at least 500 car capacity
Side 4 - our office building & post office
I struggled to imagine the kind of person who willingly decides to live in a place surrounded by car traffic, (thus air pollution and noise) at least 12 hours a day.
The complex didn't even have any kind of greenery around it, except for a few shrubs. Also, if you lived on the bottom 2 floors, you had a view of the concrete car garage of the complex and nothing else (garage was immediately adjacent to the shopping plaza)
Fascinating - I always had a hunch that the Covid lockdowns would save more lives from reductions in pollution than covid itself, I hope studies (like this one) can explore that topic.
Are you saying that you believe more lives were saved due to reduced pollution than were saved due to keeping the pandemic restrained? I find that very hard to believe, considering the massive excess deaths that would result from overloaded hospitals, if the pandemic were allowed to rage on unstopped.
Assuming they were making mention of Swedens recommendations only approach, it’s still not a good argument because there are plenty of countries that tried similar methods and failed miserably (e.g. Brazil).
There are a lot of confounding factors not controlled for or properly studied.
I have, but when people argue in bad faith like the "Sweden" comment or other hyperbolic ones in this thread, I only have so much patience. I'm not going to go read 15 news articles and wiki pages to find out the most charitable interpretation of namedropping Sweden. If the person wanted to make an argument they should actually provide one. Instead I think it's perfectly reasonable to call out their bad faith argument, because it's not like they're gonna provide a serious response if I make one anyway.
Edit: I want to add something here. Had they replied to my sarcasm with a more cogent reply, I would thank them for it and reply accordingly. I may have a bit of a temper and impulsivity at times, leading to snark. But if you look at most of my comments I'm here to share interesting ideas and conversations with people, and I try my best to discuss in good faith and to be humble when I make mistakes. But at some point arguing like that with someone who is never gonna reciprocate is just being a doormat, and a waste of time.
Agree completely. There's no possible "assume best intentions" attitude that can be taken toward a zero effort comment like that.
Although, we can probably also agree it would have been best to ignore that "Sweden" comment entirely since such comments tend to be downvoted swiftly.
Now, you may be wondering: do I reliably follow my own advice and avoid responding to trollish replies like that? No. No I do not.
My general rule of thumb is one snarky response per trollish reply at most. Don't keep engaging with them if they do, because then it's just a pissing contest.
Sweden had the exact same prioritization in the health care system, with a very similar patient backlog from non-covid cases. The work-at-home mandate was similar to other nations, with a similar reduction in seasonal respiratory illnesses.
Sweden had different approaches mostly in terms of no mask mandates, they did not close down schools, and early in the pandemic there were not as strong border lockdowns (not that it mattered much when all the neighboring countries locked their borders). In term of traffic congestion there seems to have been similar reductions during covid as in other countries, through by default Swedish roads are not as congested more populated countries.
Instead what happened (at least where I live - UK), is that hospitals stopped treating many other conditions for ~2 years, creating a huge patient backlog, and set "Covid Safety" policies that continue to make diagnosis and treatment slower than normal, causing the backlog to continue to grow at a record-breaking rate.
To give you an idea of what that looks like, I currently have two options to get healthcare. I can try to get a GP appointment. The only way is to phone, and the phone system of my local surgery is overloaded as soon as it opens at 8am. You have to ring repeatedly until you can even get a place in the phone queue, then you stay on hold until you get through to a very stressed receptionist who will see if there are any appointments left. They run out quick, and if there aren't any, you have to try again tomorrow at 8am when the next batch are released.
The other option is to go to A+E. Calling an ambulance is out of the question, because there's a good chance you'll die before one turns up (if you actually have a life-threatening emergency).
Good job we saved the NHS, eh? Covid won't kill granny, good ol' neglect will.
So you're saying NHS was overloaded due to the pandemic. Not sure how you're disagreeing with me, unless you're claiming that letting the pandemic run wild would somehow lead to less overload, which on the face of it seems absurd.
No, I'm saying that the NHS stopped treating other conditions.
Whether it was actually overloaded from March 2020 onwards is another question - the publicly-available patient data shows that the total patient occupancy was at about 70% of normal levels during the Covid years. It was also found (and relatively quickly) that Covid patients didn't need complex care - bed rest and low-flow oxygen was the best treatment, for those who didn't need forced ventilation (and there's a whole lot of discussion about how much damage that may to do a Covid patient anyway).
The argument that follows is that "we couldn't treat other conditions because that would have caused Covid to spread more widely", with the assumption that it's better to have this many untreated patients than for Covid to have spread more rapidly.
Time will tell, but I strongly believe that it will show that, like many other aspects of our response to Covid, the cure will be much worse than the disease.
I don't know enough about the UK response to make a well-reasoned reply, except it sounds like a very strange decision to me.
I suppose it could have been a form of pre-emptive triage to avoid hospital overload?
It's always been my view that lockdown was the only response sufficiently effective to actually stop the spread in its tracks, and that's been proven in countries that locked down earlier, like Norway(at least in the first wave). The problem is that stopping the pandemic globally would more or less require a globally coordinated lockdown, which was never going to happen because we're just not at that level of internation cooperation in general, and it only takes one reckless government like Trump's or Bolsonaro's so ruin it for everyone. And it would probably be untenable for economic reasons as well.
>it sounds like a very strange decision to me. I suppose it could have been a form of pre-emptive triage to avoid hospital overload?
Yes, it is very strange. In March 2020, we were promised a global pandemic the like of which had never been seen before, with the young and old alike dropping dead in the street. Despite it very quickly becoming apparent that this was not the case, the general response, public messaging, and state of mind for many continues as if that were true.
>would more or less require a globally coordinated lockdown
It would also require borders to be sealed shut to allcomers, which is not something that most Western countries are used to enforcing.
Nurse (and respiratory care, and physical/occupational therapy, and everyone else):patient ratios. 1:4 is usual; 1:6 is rough, 1:8 is almost undoable. Low-complexity patients ease the per-patient workload, allowing the same number of nurses to cover more patients. In ICU/ITU, typical nursing ratio is 1:2, but some flexed to 1:3 and even 1:4, which is getting into danger territory.
Many hospitals in the US closed wards during COVID because they didn't have the staff, not because they physically lacked space.
"The number of beds in the hospital" is short-hand for the number of attended beds. The actual limit here is doctors and nurses, not the physical number of beds. It's easy to get more beds in an emergency (go to Ikea; I'm not joking). Not so easy to get more trained medical staff.
You did save the NHS. Barely. What you're missing is that without the lockdown it would be much, MUCH worse. They stopped treating other conditions BECAUSE of Covid.
I was in the hospital (not UK, my own country) for a very dangerous, non-covid, pneumonia in December 2020 during the height of cases. I needed intensive care, but it took 4 days for them to find me a bed and a ventilator.
Why? Because the hospital was full of covid patients. There just wasn't any room for me.
Covid may kill granny, as it almost killed me. Just not the covid in our systems but the covid in the systems of other people. If I died of my PCP pneumonia I would have been a victim of covid, even tho covid never entered my system.
You had a condition that directly competed for scarce resources with another respiratory disease.
Routine cardiac, cancer, and other diagnostic screenings do not exhibit the same resource conflict and yet were also stopped or sharply curtailed in many places.
I have a very different opinion. I believe that, like many other aspects of life and culture, our response to Covid ripped open any cracks and accelerated ongoing problems. I think we are currently seeing an accelerated and terminal decline of fully-public healthcare in the UK.
It's hard to call it "saved", when people going into cardiac arrest are literally dying waiting hours for ambulances, and routine care is largely unavailable.
How much of this would you say was preexisting issues with the NHS due to a decade of Tory rule?
Not gonna take a political stance other than pointing out that conservatives are not known for bolstering social services.
Actually my only real political stance in general is that any party being in power for too long is a bad thing regardless of their politics. Tories have been in power for 12 years now, which is very unusual in general since discontent with current government tends to grow with how long they've been in office.
>any party being in power for too long is a bad thing regardless of their politics
Indeed. I live in Wales, which has only ever been led by Welsh Labour. Since having our own devolved parliament in the late 90's, it's been Labour in charge.
As we've been talking about the state of healthcare, conditions here in Wales are much worse than the UK as a whole. This also happens to be true of practically every other form of governmental function.
It's been my observation in Norway that with a leftist government social services will become better at first, then at some point will become increasingly bloated and bureaucratic. Whereas with a conservative government they will go in and trim the fat, which is helpful at first, but eventually they'll trim so much fat there's nothing left at all.
The only thing that seems to actually work is switching between them often enough that you get mostly the initial improvement, with some regression that is corrected by switching sides, and then rinse and repeat. A lot this applies to things like taxes and financial regulation too, I've found.
If you're curious, this observation only became clear to me when I started thinking about politics in a (very loose, hand-wavey) cultural evolutionary framework. I'm sure there's serious theoretical work on this, but I'm not hugely read up on the social sciences.
The general idea is that representative democracy can be seen as a sort of evolutionary algorithm, evolving a set of laws and regulations.
Think of elections as your fitness test. Whatever things feed into the election results, like debates and media storms can be seen as selective pressures.
For a democracy to function you need a healthy multi-party system, healthy independent media, political parties with strong grassroots control internally, a reasonably educated populace, and minimal corruption. All of these make the total selective pressures more aligned with what's best for everyone. If one party gets power for too long, we're essentially overprioritising selective pressures from one subset of society, causing an effective power imbalance that starts to cause more and more problems.
I might blog about it since it's a bit complicated to explain years of private, abstract thought like this, but hopefully that was an interesting read anyway.
Are people truly dying because they cannot get an ambulance for hours?
I'm not saying I don't believe you, I want to take everyone at their word... the problem is it seems like you can talk to different people and the experience is like night and day.
You're not the first person to bring up that their healthcare is awful, I see it often. I also see people saying its the best thing since sliced bread since its free and how thankful they are for it.
Its so hard to tell what is the truth because I could see both being true at the same time.
I try not to pry but personally, I do have a friend in Canada that their dad needs a life saving operation but just can't get one. I really don't know what that means. They say the appointment is too far out and it costs too much to get it done in the US or that they can't get approved or something. To me that just seems insane to the point where I must not be understanding correctly... but on the flip side, I see the same thing.
For instance, I had a European tell me they were thankful their general check up didn't cost $1k "like it does in the US" and for whatever reason they were adamant that a routine checkup costs $1k. It's just not true at all. I feel we all may just be extrapolating headlines lol.
>I try not to pry but personally, I do have a friend in Canada that their dad needs a life saving operation but just can't get one. I really don't know what that means. They say the appointment is too far out and it costs too much to get it done in the US or that they can't get approved or something.
Here's something to help you understand the state of Canadian healthcare: Right now, it is impossible—let me repeat, impossible—for people in Atlantic Canada (the easternmost four provinces) without a family doctor to get one. <https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/nova-scotia-still-struggling-to-...> The waitlist has been years long for years. This is not something occurring only in rural areas; this is true in big cities like Halifax.
Of course it extended some specific lives. It also shortened others. The question is what the net effect was and I don’t think we’ll ever have reliable data on the net effect of the lockdowns in China.
You say that as if the only measure of a government is the net number of lives saved at the end of that government. I would argue that's largely irrelevant.
Whether extremely strict lockdowns like those seen in China and Singapore save lives or not is completely irrelevant as they are wrong, at the most basic level. Whether other countries went too far or didn't go far enough can be debated, but having police lock people inside their own homes isn't really something you can argue that good government does.
Yes, that's an impressive list, and useless without quantitative data, and comparisons to the effects of not locking down soon enough, which got pretty gnarly in places like Italy early on, for instance
And bullshit there's no evidence. You're clearly just not interested in considering it. Which is why you make hyperbolic statements like "there is no single scientific evidence". Give me break.
Here's some. It's a report commissioned by the government where I live, on the school attendance rates post-Covid. Even allowing for direct Covid-related absences, attendance rates continue to fall. Take a look at Table 3 in the report - attendance among disadvantaged groups has dropped in the medium double digit range.
The spell of universal school attendance has been broken. Many kids and families will be permanently left behind - this lines up with what teacher friends have told me.
Thank you for being constructive. This is a very sad effect indeed.
I'm not sure it could be seen as intrinsic to lockdown though, but could be more of an issue with the implementation of it. Closing schools and online teaching was a a controversial topic in the discourse here in Norway.
This study[1] from Norway surveyed teachers about the attendance of students with pre-existing School Attendance Problems(SAP) during online homeschooling:
>Teachers rated their experiences of their students’ participation in homeschooling compared to regular school attendance. The findings indicate that teachers very slightly perceived better/much better participation during homeschooling (35 percent) than worse/much worse participation (31 percent) (Table 5). There were no significant gender differences; however, teachers reported that more boys than girls participated better/much better during homeschooling (42 percent boys and 27 percent girls).
So in this case there was a slight overall improvement, it seems.
That's a very mixed response, for a student that was attending - it ignores those who were not attending. The paper you linked also states that:
"A total of 79.8 percent of the students participated during homeschooling, while 20.2 percent (50 students) did not. The number of students not participating in homeschooling increased gradually from 5th to 10th grade (0.4 percent in 5th grade and 7.3 percent in 10th grade). Regarding the number of students in each grade level, 8 percent did not participate in 5th grade, 13 percent in 6th grade, 13 percent in 7th grade, 17 percent in 8th grade, 23 percent in 9th grade and 29 percent in 10th grade."
Tables 6 and 7 also have some interesting results, showing that teachers felt that students' quality of life was worse under these circumstances.
All of this paints a pretty clear picture - the general response to Covid had huge side-effects, and the already disadvantaged will feel them harder.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother. As a member of the priviledged (relatively) elite, my life is doing pretty darn good right now. Maybe I should embrace this new dismissal of the disadvantaged.
Edit: You talk about "implementation problems" - well the implementation of School Covid policies was set here in Wales by our ever-benevolent Welsh Labour party. Think how much worse it would be under the Tories, eh?
Yeah, it's not ideal. And 20% dropped attendance is pretty extreme for Norway.
However, we did also try to leave schools open while having everyone else WFH during subsequent waves, and that led to a host of other problems. Preventative measure were constantly being micromanaged, leading to student and teacher confusion, teacher and student abscence due to Covid skyrocketed and students were stuck with increasingly poor substitute teachers, etc. I'm not aware of any detailed comission on the tradeoffs between the two approaches yet, but both seem to have had severe problems.
Of course there was also the giant elephant in the room: the assumption that letting school children be massively infected couldn't have any long term health effects. There was no evidence that it could at the time, but also that evidence wouldn't have had time to exist yet, and so it's essentially just a gamble. Time will tell I suppose, fingers crossed...
Everyone caught Covid anyway, despite all the measures (and masks, vaccines, etc). If Covid really is some long-term horror, we were doomed from the start. If it isn't, then we screwed up our kids for nothing.
I don't think it's controversial any more to say that Covid was a lab-generated virus. I have a personal theory that it was supposed to be much worse than it turned out to be, and even then it quickly mutated to more mild strains. If certain cultures are not allowed to admit a loss of face, it would explain why one country in particular is still acting like Covid is the worst....
It's going to take decades, if not longer, for many of these effects to play out. Both the positive and negative ones.
The most optimistic take I saw here was somebody wondering -- certainly not claiming, but wondering -- if the positive benefits such as pollution might outweigh the negative effects in the long run.
I wasn't detailed in what I said - it would not surprise me if more years of life were preserved from the pollution reductions. But pollution is usually, but not always, a gradual killer so I wouldn't necessarily expect a rapid drop in deaths.
It's a good hunch. Another good hunch is that delayed diagnostic testing will take more lives in the coming years because cancers and heart ailments went uncured.
These hunches are usually not proven or disproven until much later when the initial dust-up has settled and more excess mortality data is available.
If we were getting a commensurate or greater decrease in pollution deaths, this number would be negative, so I think we can pretty confidently dismiss this hypothesis.
You’re probably correct, but going forward, since remote work seems to have become more generally accepted, we might start getting these benefits in the coming years, once the noise from these shorter term causes settles down.
Anecdotally, remote work must be a pretty small slice. Rush hour (and general overall) traffic in the Boston area anyway seems to be at pretty much pre-pandemic levels.
My expectation is that we'll probably see a bit more flexibility for office jobs overall going forward. But it's not going to be the sea change that some expected/hoped for.
That's another topic meriting study - in cities, car miles traveled generally increase until they reach congestion (induced demand), so is this traffic just people going back to work or other people taking advantage of emptier roads?
I'm talking about normal morning rush hour, which is to say starting in around 6:30am or so (to avoid the very worst of it). It still can take almost two hours for a drive that takes about an hour in light traffic. I don't think that's significantly contributed to by people taking advantage of emptier roads.
I will say that the couple of times I've taken the train or subway over the past six months, they've seemed relatively underutilized compared to pre-pandemic. So there may be some degree of switching to cars from transit options.
We can only confidently dismiss this hypothesis if we would expect that lives saved due to a decrease in pollution would be noticeable over a two and a half year span. This seems unrealistic because air pollution tends to cause injury over a longer period of time (for example, contributing to heart disease or various cancers in adult life if the individual was exposed to pollutants as a child).
Just the deaths might not be a good characteristic to measure overall impact. I'd count loss or gain of life opportunity ( e.g. -deaths*life expectancy + births*life expectancy + still_alive*delta(life_expectancy) )
The whole point of this paper is that it's not just showing a correlation between proximity to toll booths and infant mortality, it's showing that adding E-ZPass reduced infant mortality, which makes the method essentially the same as an interventional study even though E-ZPass system wasn't installed for the study.
Being in a separate lane from the majority of traffic makes traffic deaths far less likely. 3+ HOV lanes (mother, child, father) are quite worthwhile. Driving in California I know I'd rather pay the toll than be in traffic with unpredictable vehicles.
3+ HOV lanes aren’t oriented at families, it’s just coincidence that two parents and one kid reach that threshold. Where I live 2+ carpools are the norm which are great when I’m out with my son.
But no, no one designed carpools to make families safer.
Toronto has some special purpose lanes that "green" vehicles* are allowed to use, in addition to buses and HOVs. But I'm pretty sure the new HOV lanes on the 400 don't include green vehicles, and at some point I expect "green" vehicles to lose this special privilege.
* You can apply to get a green licence plate if your car meets certain emissions standards.
There is one bridge where it is 3+ here, and that’s really just because the traffic is much heavier. Carpool lanes aren’t designed for families at all, rather they are designed to discourage single occupancy commuters. That families get to use them is just a consequence that families drive in cars with multiple passengers.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadThis paper is from 2011 and appeared in the journal Applied Economics, but that is behind a paywall.
In the DELMARVA area in particular there are now "express lanes" on I-95 that you can pay a little extra to use the lane, the tolls seem to be variable too (presumably depending on traffic).
The fact that motorists expect to get free roads while public transit users have to pay is an affront to the entire point of publicly-funded infrastructure.
I imagine they have a few ways of checking if there's actually 3+ ppl but not sure if there's an "official" answer.
Colorado isn't even in the EZ Pass network.
edit: Correcting myself here, it's EZ-Pass-only at certain times of day: http://66expresslanes.org/e-zpass/default.asp which I find even more confusing.
There has been other research that shows a correlation between certain health outcomes and proximity to highways, but there may be confounding factors in that type of study, whereas this is almost more like an interventional study even though the change obviously wasn't actually made for the purposes of the study.
This is very strong evidence that many of the negative health effects that have been shown to be correlated with proximity to highways are indeed caused by car emissions.
Check the paper; it's very readable. Alternatively, know the following:
The reason they chose their approach was because it gives them a "natural experiment" - by comparing the exact same area before and after EZPass, you get a fairly valid experiment with only a minimal number of variables to wrangle.
There's a recently built 9 storey building at one of the busiest intersections in the city. If you look at the rental ads, it's all luxury finish, shiny appliances, modern kitchens with marble this and oak that. Personally, I'd much rather live in a dated or even run down apartment in a quiet street than in this "luxury" where I can't open the windows and can hear traffic even with them closed.
Side 1 - The busiest Firefighting station of the town on a road named the most dangerous road of the town by a local news source
Side 2 - Qdoba & Chinese food restaurants, followed closely by the busiest artery of the town
Side 3 - Shopping Plaza parking lot with at least 500 car capacity
Side 4 - our office building & post office
I struggled to imagine the kind of person who willingly decides to live in a place surrounded by car traffic, (thus air pollution and noise) at least 12 hours a day.
The complex didn't even have any kind of greenery around it, except for a few shrubs. Also, if you lived on the bottom 2 floors, you had a view of the concrete car garage of the complex and nothing else (garage was immediately adjacent to the shopping plaza)
Assuming they were making mention of Swedens recommendations only approach, it’s still not a good argument because there are plenty of countries that tried similar methods and failed miserably (e.g. Brazil).
There are a lot of confounding factors not controlled for or properly studied.
Edit: I want to add something here. Had they replied to my sarcasm with a more cogent reply, I would thank them for it and reply accordingly. I may have a bit of a temper and impulsivity at times, leading to snark. But if you look at most of my comments I'm here to share interesting ideas and conversations with people, and I try my best to discuss in good faith and to be humble when I make mistakes. But at some point arguing like that with someone who is never gonna reciprocate is just being a doormat, and a waste of time.
Although, we can probably also agree it would have been best to ignore that "Sweden" comment entirely since such comments tend to be downvoted swiftly.
Now, you may be wondering: do I reliably follow my own advice and avoid responding to trollish replies like that? No. No I do not.
Sweden had different approaches mostly in terms of no mask mandates, they did not close down schools, and early in the pandemic there were not as strong border lockdowns (not that it mattered much when all the neighboring countries locked their borders). In term of traffic congestion there seems to have been similar reductions during covid as in other countries, through by default Swedish roads are not as congested more populated countries.
To give you an idea of what that looks like, I currently have two options to get healthcare. I can try to get a GP appointment. The only way is to phone, and the phone system of my local surgery is overloaded as soon as it opens at 8am. You have to ring repeatedly until you can even get a place in the phone queue, then you stay on hold until you get through to a very stressed receptionist who will see if there are any appointments left. They run out quick, and if there aren't any, you have to try again tomorrow at 8am when the next batch are released.
The other option is to go to A+E. Calling an ambulance is out of the question, because there's a good chance you'll die before one turns up (if you actually have a life-threatening emergency).
Good job we saved the NHS, eh? Covid won't kill granny, good ol' neglect will.
Whether it was actually overloaded from March 2020 onwards is another question - the publicly-available patient data shows that the total patient occupancy was at about 70% of normal levels during the Covid years. It was also found (and relatively quickly) that Covid patients didn't need complex care - bed rest and low-flow oxygen was the best treatment, for those who didn't need forced ventilation (and there's a whole lot of discussion about how much damage that may to do a Covid patient anyway).
The argument that follows is that "we couldn't treat other conditions because that would have caused Covid to spread more widely", with the assumption that it's better to have this many untreated patients than for Covid to have spread more rapidly.
Time will tell, but I strongly believe that it will show that, like many other aspects of our response to Covid, the cure will be much worse than the disease.
I don't know enough about the UK response to make a well-reasoned reply, except it sounds like a very strange decision to me.
I suppose it could have been a form of pre-emptive triage to avoid hospital overload?
It's always been my view that lockdown was the only response sufficiently effective to actually stop the spread in its tracks, and that's been proven in countries that locked down earlier, like Norway(at least in the first wave). The problem is that stopping the pandemic globally would more or less require a globally coordinated lockdown, which was never going to happen because we're just not at that level of internation cooperation in general, and it only takes one reckless government like Trump's or Bolsonaro's so ruin it for everyone. And it would probably be untenable for economic reasons as well.
Yes, it is very strange. In March 2020, we were promised a global pandemic the like of which had never been seen before, with the young and old alike dropping dead in the street. Despite it very quickly becoming apparent that this was not the case, the general response, public messaging, and state of mind for many continues as if that were true.
>would more or less require a globally coordinated lockdown
It would also require borders to be sealed shut to allcomers, which is not something that most Western countries are used to enforcing.
Many hospitals in the US closed wards during COVID because they didn't have the staff, not because they physically lacked space.
I was in the hospital (not UK, my own country) for a very dangerous, non-covid, pneumonia in December 2020 during the height of cases. I needed intensive care, but it took 4 days for them to find me a bed and a ventilator.
Why? Because the hospital was full of covid patients. There just wasn't any room for me.
Covid may kill granny, as it almost killed me. Just not the covid in our systems but the covid in the systems of other people. If I died of my PCP pneumonia I would have been a victim of covid, even tho covid never entered my system.
Routine cardiac, cancer, and other diagnostic screenings do not exhibit the same resource conflict and yet were also stopped or sharply curtailed in many places.
I have a very different opinion. I believe that, like many other aspects of life and culture, our response to Covid ripped open any cracks and accelerated ongoing problems. I think we are currently seeing an accelerated and terminal decline of fully-public healthcare in the UK.
It's hard to call it "saved", when people going into cardiac arrest are literally dying waiting hours for ambulances, and routine care is largely unavailable.
Not gonna take a political stance other than pointing out that conservatives are not known for bolstering social services.
Actually my only real political stance in general is that any party being in power for too long is a bad thing regardless of their politics. Tories have been in power for 12 years now, which is very unusual in general since discontent with current government tends to grow with how long they've been in office.
Indeed. I live in Wales, which has only ever been led by Welsh Labour. Since having our own devolved parliament in the late 90's, it's been Labour in charge.
As we've been talking about the state of healthcare, conditions here in Wales are much worse than the UK as a whole. This also happens to be true of practically every other form of governmental function.
The only thing that seems to actually work is switching between them often enough that you get mostly the initial improvement, with some regression that is corrected by switching sides, and then rinse and repeat. A lot this applies to things like taxes and financial regulation too, I've found.
The general idea is that representative democracy can be seen as a sort of evolutionary algorithm, evolving a set of laws and regulations.
Think of elections as your fitness test. Whatever things feed into the election results, like debates and media storms can be seen as selective pressures.
For a democracy to function you need a healthy multi-party system, healthy independent media, political parties with strong grassroots control internally, a reasonably educated populace, and minimal corruption. All of these make the total selective pressures more aligned with what's best for everyone. If one party gets power for too long, we're essentially overprioritising selective pressures from one subset of society, causing an effective power imbalance that starts to cause more and more problems.
I might blog about it since it's a bit complicated to explain years of private, abstract thought like this, but hopefully that was an interesting read anyway.
I'm not saying I don't believe you, I want to take everyone at their word... the problem is it seems like you can talk to different people and the experience is like night and day.
You're not the first person to bring up that their healthcare is awful, I see it often. I also see people saying its the best thing since sliced bread since its free and how thankful they are for it.
Its so hard to tell what is the truth because I could see both being true at the same time.
I try not to pry but personally, I do have a friend in Canada that their dad needs a life saving operation but just can't get one. I really don't know what that means. They say the appointment is too far out and it costs too much to get it done in the US or that they can't get approved or something. To me that just seems insane to the point where I must not be understanding correctly... but on the flip side, I see the same thing.
For instance, I had a European tell me they were thankful their general check up didn't cost $1k "like it does in the US" and for whatever reason they were adamant that a routine checkup costs $1k. It's just not true at all. I feel we all may just be extrapolating headlines lol.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bbc%20news%20dying%20w...
Here's something to help you understand the state of Canadian healthcare: Right now, it is impossible—let me repeat, impossible—for people in Atlantic Canada (the easternmost four provinces) without a family doctor to get one. <https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/nova-scotia-still-struggling-to-...> The waitlist has been years long for years. This is not something occurring only in rural areas; this is true in big cities like Halifax.
I am hearing that the same is true in Vancouver.
That makes a lot of sense...
Instead, they increase:
educational gaps
domestic abuse
unemployment
alcohol & drug abuse
suicides & self-harm
depression & anxiety
cardiac & cancer deaths
I'm all for science, but are you implying China's strict COVID lockdown strategy didn't save any lives?
Whether extremely strict lockdowns like those seen in China and Singapore save lives or not is completely irrelevant as they are wrong, at the most basic level. Whether other countries went too far or didn't go far enough can be debated, but having police lock people inside their own homes isn't really something you can argue that good government does.
And bullshit there's no evidence. You're clearly just not interested in considering it. Which is why you make hyperbolic statements like "there is no single scientific evidence". Give me break.
Here's some. It's a report commissioned by the government where I live, on the school attendance rates post-Covid. Even allowing for direct Covid-related absences, attendance rates continue to fall. Take a look at Table 3 in the report - attendance among disadvantaged groups has dropped in the medium double digit range.
The spell of universal school attendance has been broken. Many kids and families will be permanently left behind - this lines up with what teacher friends have told me.
https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2022-04/a...
I'm not sure it could be seen as intrinsic to lockdown though, but could be more of an issue with the implementation of it. Closing schools and online teaching was a a controversial topic in the discourse here in Norway.
This study[1] from Norway surveyed teachers about the attendance of students with pre-existing School Attendance Problems(SAP) during online homeschooling:
>Teachers rated their experiences of their students’ participation in homeschooling compared to regular school attendance. The findings indicate that teachers very slightly perceived better/much better participation during homeschooling (35 percent) than worse/much worse participation (31 percent) (Table 5). There were no significant gender differences; however, teachers reported that more boys than girls participated better/much better during homeschooling (42 percent boys and 27 percent girls).
So in this case there was a slight overall improvement, it seems.
[0]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.7200...
"A total of 79.8 percent of the students participated during homeschooling, while 20.2 percent (50 students) did not. The number of students not participating in homeschooling increased gradually from 5th to 10th grade (0.4 percent in 5th grade and 7.3 percent in 10th grade). Regarding the number of students in each grade level, 8 percent did not participate in 5th grade, 13 percent in 6th grade, 13 percent in 7th grade, 17 percent in 8th grade, 23 percent in 9th grade and 29 percent in 10th grade."
Tables 6 and 7 also have some interesting results, showing that teachers felt that students' quality of life was worse under these circumstances.
All of this paints a pretty clear picture - the general response to Covid had huge side-effects, and the already disadvantaged will feel them harder.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother. As a member of the priviledged (relatively) elite, my life is doing pretty darn good right now. Maybe I should embrace this new dismissal of the disadvantaged.
Edit: You talk about "implementation problems" - well the implementation of School Covid policies was set here in Wales by our ever-benevolent Welsh Labour party. Think how much worse it would be under the Tories, eh?
However, we did also try to leave schools open while having everyone else WFH during subsequent waves, and that led to a host of other problems. Preventative measure were constantly being micromanaged, leading to student and teacher confusion, teacher and student abscence due to Covid skyrocketed and students were stuck with increasingly poor substitute teachers, etc. I'm not aware of any detailed comission on the tradeoffs between the two approaches yet, but both seem to have had severe problems.
Of course there was also the giant elephant in the room: the assumption that letting school children be massively infected couldn't have any long term health effects. There was no evidence that it could at the time, but also that evidence wouldn't have had time to exist yet, and so it's essentially just a gamble. Time will tell I suppose, fingers crossed...
I don't think it's controversial any more to say that Covid was a lab-generated virus. I have a personal theory that it was supposed to be much worse than it turned out to be, and even then it quickly mutated to more mild strains. If certain cultures are not allowed to admit a loss of face, it would explain why one country in particular is still acting like Covid is the worst....
It's going to take decades, if not longer, for many of these effects to play out. Both the positive and negative ones.
The most optimistic take I saw here was somebody wondering -- certainly not claiming, but wondering -- if the positive benefits such as pollution might outweigh the negative effects in the long run.
These hunches are usually not proven or disproven until much later when the initial dust-up has settled and more excess mortality data is available.
If we were getting a commensurate or greater decrease in pollution deaths, this number would be negative, so I think we can pretty confidently dismiss this hypothesis.
My expectation is that we'll probably see a bit more flexibility for office jobs overall going forward. But it's not going to be the sea change that some expected/hoped for.
I will say that the couple of times I've taken the train or subway over the past six months, they've seemed relatively underutilized compared to pre-pandemic. So there may be some degree of switching to cars from transit options.
By contrast, COVID can kill within weeks.
I've got a nice bridge to sell the author...
1. let’s make families safer
2. 3+ HOV lanes to select for families
3. Single parents of one don’t apply
But no, no one designed carpools to make families safer.
I’m more speaking to the above good-faith idea.
* You can apply to get a green licence plate if your car meets certain emissions standards.