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Emotional Bucket
comics.movim.eu / CatsCafe · Tuesday, 27 April, 2021 - 02:00
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Diary Entry
comics.movim.eu / CatsCafe · Monday, 19 April, 2021 - 14:00
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Kaiju
comics.movim.eu / CatsCafe · Friday, 26 March, 2021 - 14:01
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A look at the psychological burdens of COVID lockdowns
John Timmer · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 13 November, 2020 - 11:45 · 1 minute
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Grim new analyses show US COVID death rates remain shamefully high
Beth Mole · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 12 October, 2020 - 22:09 · 1 minute
Diary Entry
Kaiju
With the dramatic rise in infections in the United States, there's increasing discussion of whether states need to go back to severe social restrictions or even lockdowns, in which only essential workers are allowed to leave their homes. But many people aren't happy about the idea of re-entering lockdowns because lockdowns exact both an economic and an emotional cost.
While we're likely to get lots of hard data on economic costs eventually, some researchers in New Zealand decided to look at the emotional toll. They performed a detailed survey at the height of lockdown and found that, as expected, the restrictions had an impact on people trapped in their houses for weeks. But the impact was more pronounced on the young and those who had experienced psychological distress previously.
Lockdown NZ
The public health officials who advocate for lockdowns in response to soaring infection rates recognize that lockdowns exact an emotional toll on people who have to stay in their homes. The trade-off for this toll is the avoidance of death, severe illness, overloading of healthcare systems, etc. And the lockdowns are meant to be temporary; once infection rates drop sufficiently, then less draconian control measures (like social distancing, limiting gatherings, and mask use) can keep the infection rates low.
A grim series of articles published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association makes clear just how hard the United States has failed at controlling the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic—from the country’s horrifying death toll to its inability to drag down its shamefully high death rates.
It was already clear that the US has tallied more deaths from the coronavirus than any other country and has one of the highest death rates per capita in the world. But, according to one article in the series, the US is also failing to lower COVID-19 death rates—even as harder-hit countries have managed to learn from early disease peaks and bring their rates down substantially.
For the analysis , researchers Alyssa Bilinski of Harvard and Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania compared the shifting COVID-19 death rates of 18 high-income countries during three time windows. The idea was to see how death rates changed as countries adopted different public health interventions, especially if they had seen surges in cases early on that boosted their overall death rate during the pandemic. Specifically, Bilinski and Emanuel looked at COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people starting from February 13, May 10, and June 7, with all three windows ending on September 19.