
Policymakers must consider the harms of pandemic policies, not just benefits - lilrhody
https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/john-p-ioannidis-totality-evidence
======
DennisP
While the US debates whether we should continue our ill-conceived pandemic
policies or just give up and take the hit, multiple other countries have
managed to fight the virus effectively and are now opening their economies
safely.

Based on their experience, what we should have been doing is:

\- Lock down enough to really get the numbers down, with the understanding
that it's temporary, because:

\- While locked down, really beef up the test and trace infrastructure. After
the numbers are reasonable, this lets you open up but find and isolate
individual cases.

\- Encourage/require mask wearing by anyone in public. Studies have shown that
80% mask wearing reduces the virus by over 90%.[1]

\- Instead of putting money into unemployment, pay businesses to keep people
on salary while they're not working. That way the jobs are still there when we
open back up. European countries have done this, kept unemployment low, and in
some cases spent less per GDP than the US.[2]

The earlier you start, the easier and more effective all this is. If you start
early enough and already have good systems in place, you can even skip the
lockdown step, aside from localized outbreaks.

[1] [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/masks-
covid-19-infec...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/masks-
covid-19-infections-would-plummet-new-study-says)

[2]
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/opinion/sunday/coronaviru...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-
economic-response.html)

~~~
zzleeper
It is indeed quite silly that people are thinking about policies as
"quarantine for everyone" vs "let people roam the streets while coughing".

Wearing masks has zero cost in terms of GDP and unemployment. Why the heck
aren't we mandating those?? Even in 1918 people were not allowed to step on a
tram/metro without a mask.

~~~
karatestomp
Judging from people's reaction to the "end of the lockdown" here, I think
Costco's leading the charge and making it OK for other businesses to require
masks and enforce distancing has been, effectively, better public health
policy than what we're getting out of our state government. Outside those
places there's a clear "well guess the danger's over, let's all get really
close and spit on each other and all touch the same stuff" attitude and
pattern of behavior. It's insane—now's the time to be _more_ cautious when out
and about, than during the lockdown! Especially seeing how people are acting,
it's gonna get worse before it gets better. I reckon my odds of catching it in
a given store outing now are _significantly_ higher than during the lockdown,
but people aren't acting that way.

~~~
bargl
Part of what was so effective about changing american minds about smoking were
the public ads that decried it.

If we want to change peoples minds about wearing a mask we need to campaign to
change minds which goes all over. It's not about losing your freedom it's
about being safe. I don't think legal requirements will do it. It'll just stir
up the anti-government people. Whereas if we make it about looking dumb if you
don't wear a mask then we'll be better off.

Also as a side benefit, making masks more acceptable in public may help us
thwart facial recognition software in stores which I'm game for.

~~~
taylodl
I don't buy the freedom argument. I can't wander around outside naked nor can
I wander around with an open container of alcohol (some communities allow this
- most don't and mine is in the most category) - yet few people are seriously
complaining about that yet those behaviors have far less of an impact on my
health than people wandering around without face masks. No, there's a
belligerence at play here and there's a certain high-ranking federal officer
encouraging that belligerence in part by famously _refusing_ to wear a face
mask. Face mask wearing has now become a gang sign: if you're wearing a face
mask then you're one of _them._ That's how insane things have become in the
United States and we're suffering badly as a result.

~~~
bargl
I'm not making the freedom argument. I'm suggest we sidestep the freedom
argument by working to convince people it's a good idea to wear masks rather
than telling them they have to wear masks.

Also, all legal requirements are backed up by some sort of punishment. A
regulation put in place to wear a mask might affect different groups more than
others. If you can't afford to get a mask because the supply is low, then you
get fined or go to jail. I don't like regulation where I think a campaign
would be much more effective.

------
glofish
Ioannidis was celebrated in the past when he called out how scientists
published nonsense in prior peer-reviewed papers

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False John P. A. Ioannidis

[https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)

Now that he calls out the ongoing groupthink that leads to counterproductive
recommendations and practices he is ... shall we say ... less than positively
looked upon.

it will take ten years for us to say, I guess Ioannidis was right after all

people always say you have to think outside the box, what they don't tell you
that there may be a big price to pay for that.

~~~
kspacewalk2
>it will take ten years for us to say, I guess Ioannidis was right after all

Sadly I doubt that more and more. Locking down is a win-win if what you care
about is not admitting a costly mistake. Its principal claim that it will save
far more lives than it costs is essentially unfalsifiable to people who aren't
willing to trust statistics, because lives lost to COVID are immediate and
easily countable^, whereas someone dying of cancer in May 2021 because they
did not get a diagnostic test in April 2020 but instead had to wait till July
can just as easily be spun as being "death due to the virus" as "death due to
the lockdown".

Pointy-headed epidemiologists will publish some papers a few years from now
and tease out whether the lockdown made sense (or rather, where it made sense
and for how long) using mortality statistics and measures like Disability
Adjusted Life Years (which make impressionable people uncomfortable due to the
implicit suggestion that we should weigh a lost life by how many years of life
were left to live). Will politicians admit failure as a result, if the studies
suggest they locked down far too aggressively and for far too long? Never
gonna happen.

^ or so the media thinks, i.e. is death with COVID = death from COVID?

------
keiferski
I don't have a firm opinion on whether the lockdowns were good or bad, but: it
bothers me more that no one seemed to even _consider_ alternative options,
opportunity costs, or second-and-third-order consequences.

It feels like the powers that be are playing whack-a-mole, incapable of seeing
beyond the immediate problem. It doesn't bode well for a potential future
(hopefully avoidable) pandemic that has far higher death rates. The Black
Death, for example, is 'estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's
population.'

~~~
dan_quixote
I'd venture to say that our initial reaction to lock down early-on was
prudent. The scant evidence available at the time indicated the possibility of
a _much_ worse outcome than we have now.

I think the problem is a lack of constant re-evaluation. Politics has
solidified the desire of many people to make the "correct" decision and stick
to it. Why can't we be comfortable with making a decision with partial
information and treating it like a ship that needs occasional course-
correction?

~~~
riskneutral
The problem is that we cannot agree with which way we should sail the ship.
Our navigator showed us a map that said "there be dragons" and told us to
steer far off course putting us into a perilous situation of being adrift and
lost at sea. Now we cannot agree which direction looks less stormy and whether
we should try to head back to land or continue to starve at sea.

~~~
dan_quixote
Most definitely. To further the analogy...picking the heading is a democratic
election. The remaining 3/4 years of an election cycle are spent undermining
the choice of heading.

------
jawns
There are both good and bad arguments for ending the lockdown.

The better arguments tend to focus, as this one does, on the fact that a
lockdown does not come without its own harmful ramifications: delaying health
interventions, increases in spousal/child abuse, increase in
depression/suicide, loss of income/insurance, loss of financial stability,
etc. I'm not necessarily saying that these arguments are or are not
persuasive, but they're looking at the right things.

The worse arguments tend to focus on the lockdowns depriving Americans of
their God-given freedom to attend pool parties and political conventions,
regardless of the epidemiological data.

Unfortunately, many of the people who are really motivated by the latter tend
to use the former as cover. (This doesn't just pertain to COVID-19, but to a
lot of controversial issues.)

Generally, when you can reasonable predict that your argument may invite some
unwanted bedfellows, it's nice to toss out a disclaimer -- something like,
"Now I know some people will seize on my argument to advance X, which I
reject, so let's talk about the limits and bounds of what I'm arguing." That
way you can make it clear that you're not willing to let your remarks be used
in ways that you don't intend.

~~~
kspacewalk2
The arguments made should stand on their own, regardless of motivations. If
I'm a selfish prick who wants to attend pool parties but I'm giving valid
reasons for ending the lockdown, it does not follow in any way that the
lockdown is justified. So, who cares what my motivations are?

The bedfellows argument can be made about both sides of the equation and we
can just go ahead and consider it implied, to dispense with legaleze-like
formalities and focus on what truly matters, which, to put it crudely is: will
the lockdown save more people than will die as its consequence? The answer is
far from obvious to me.

~~~
MereInterest
Suppose you are the world's best rhetorician, and can create convincing
arguments to support any conclusion. To exercise this skill, each day you pick
a topic, roll a die to determine what position to support, and argue for that
position. These arguments are clear, concise, self-consistent, grounded in
concrete observations, and emotionally persuasive. However, you could have
created similarly effective arguments for another side of the debate, had the
die roll gone a different way this morning.

Examining somebody's motives is a way of having a meta-debate. The quantity
and quality of arguments on different sides of a topic is a function not only
of the correctness of one side, but also of the time invested into coming up
with those arguments. If somebody has an ulterior motive to their arguments,
then they may be arguing in bad faith, attempting to persuade with arguments
they know to be false, in order to gain support.

------
tinyhouse
Lockdowns have to be executed differently next time. It's fine to require
people to work from home if they can and close schools. But you cannot decide
that only food is essential and shut down everything else. That leads to a lot
of problems. They key is not having many people gathering in one place. There
are many ways to ensure that without shutting down everything.

~~~
ed25519FUUU
Why should we even allow our government to tell us ever again what products
are “essential” and what are not? Not only was that distinction pointless, but
it was actively harmful.

Another example, a ban on plant nursery right at the time people should be
planting their own food.

Large stores, allowed to stay open, will be gobbling up smaller, closed
competitors for pennies on the dollar. Private practice hospitals will never
be the same again.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2020/04/27/michigan...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2020/04/27/michigan-
reverses-ban-lets-garden-centers-greenhouses-reopen/#236c18e358f3)

~~~
nucleardog
> Why should we even allow our government to tell us ever again what products
> are “essential” and what are not?

Because, on average, the calculation for each individual does not line up with
the calculation for society as a whole and people are going to make decisions
that harm others.

Yes, _you_ going to your dentist is not likely to make a difference.
_Everyone_ going to their dentist, hair dresser, etc as if it's business as
usual will, and the negative impacts of your actions will not only be felt by
you.

If government's role is to protect us from each other, then this is well in
line with what they should be doing.

I'd agree that specifically how they've done it in the US is... not good. But
I don't see the general concept as being without merit.

~~~
ed25519FUUU
> _Because, on average, the calculation for each individual does not line up
> with the calculation for society as a whole and people are going to make
> decisions that harm others._

Absolutely. But that's the problem with these thoughts. They're aren't wrong,
but using them as a foundation for limiting a population can have an outsized
negative impact worse than the thing they're trying to prevent.

In this case with hindsight we can now say it wasn't wise, as some states
dramatically limited what items a person could buy, and some didn't. In some
place you had "critical personnel" driving across state lines just to buy work
boots.

------
pmarsh
The lock-down has never been about saving lives. It's about preventing the
chaos that would occur if we did nothing and let the health care system crash.

People in charge get this, sure saving lives is nice, but it's about
maintaining the order of things.

You really think if this went out of control people would not pull a gun in a
hospital to get their relative help? Or groups of people would not be
targeted, even more than they are now, as scapegoats?

Even now it's acknowledged that many more are going to get it, many more will
die, but at least things will not spiral out of control and we will be able to
manage the hospitalization rates.

------
acqq
Moderators, the title on HN is editorialized (i.e. wrong as per HN practice)
at the moment. The actual is "The Totality of the Evidence."

Also, independently of that, per Wikipedia

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis)

" _The neutrality of the authors and Ioannidis ' overall stance on the
pandemic was further called into question_ given that the often-cited study he
co-authored in April 2020 was preceded by his op-eds in March, calling the
pandemic a fiasco. It was also later reported that said _study was financed by
JetBlue 's Founder;[30] presenting a serious conflict of interest_ authors had
failed to disclose."

30)
[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/stanford-...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/stanford-
coronavirus-neeleman-ioannidis-whistleblower)

\-----

Edit: RE title:

Note: at the moment I wrote that it was not the current one. It already
changed more than once, at the moment it's at least the third I see, and it is
probably at least the third one the one wyattpeak refers to.

~~~
wyattpeak
The title is a pretty neutral and accurate description of the article. The
actual title is uninformative, and changing uninformative titles is standard
practice.

------
standardUser
There's several arguments to be made in favor of fewer restrictions. This
article makes the worst ones...

\- The projections were wrong

\- The fatality rate is lower than feared

\- Other diseases kill people too

\- This isn't as bad as the Spanish Flu

\- Lockdowns can harm people too

The only good argument I've heard against lockdowns is that we have mounting
evidence that less onerous restrictions are sufficient to keep the
transmission rate low. This article doesn't touch on that at all.

~~~
Uhuhreally
\- The projections were wrong

\+ some of the projections were correct

\- The fatality rate is lower than feared

\+ higher in some countries

\- Other diseases kill people too

\+ like smallpox and ebola

\- This isn't as bad as the Spanish Flu

\+ it's only just started

\- Lockdowns can harm people too

\+ less than killing and permanently injuring people

~~~
jtbayly
“ + less than killing and permanently injuring people”

False. That is one of the effects of lockdown. We need to try compare the
level, but people _are_ being injured and dying because of the lockdown.

------
ergothus
The article assumes that the policymakers (and public) AREN'T considering the
drawbacks. I disagree with that.

Many non-US countries have acted to minimize those drawbacks, so it is
misleading to act as if those drawbacks are unavoidable and the lockdown is
illogical.

------
clairity
let's not get sidelined on the same minutiae over and over again. lockdowns
could have, and should have, been replaced with 2 simple rules:

1\. either physically distance _or_ wear a mask around groups of strangers,
particularly inside.

2\. if you get sick, self-quarantine (and go see a doctor).

that would have been 99.9% of the reduction in transmission risk for 0.1% of
the cost of lockdown, with a bonus of providing time for medical workers and
epidemiologists to provide care, mitigations, and develop containment
strategies (like tracing).

the reasons we haven't boil down to news-fueled panic/anxiety crossed with
political calculation, with a bonus of shifting the losses to the
disadvantaged.

~~~
apatters
Exactly this. These are _facts_ that have _never changed_ and were known from
_day one:_

1\. Because the virus is spread mainly through droplets, the risk goes down if
you keep your distance from other people.

2\. Because the virus is spread mainly through droplets, the risk goes down
even more if everyone (especially those with symptoms) wears a mask.

Since day one, since before the disease had even left China, the WHO was clear
on all these points, the CDC followed shortly after, with one partial
exception, which was the mask recommendation. (On masks, the WHO said from day
one that anyone who was _potentially infected_ should wear a mask; they
initially advised against population-wide mask wearing _due to supply._ )

Masks and distancing could have and should have been rolled out the day the
first COVID-19 case washed up on American shores. Both could have been
enforced through stiff penalties on noncompliant businesses (no masks, no
distancing, you get shut down for 30 days). They were already in use in South
Korea which did a great job of getting the disease under control.

The Korean strategy worked better than the American strategy. Less death, less
economic damage. Why did America screw up so badly? Pure hubris and
incompetence on the part of Americans, starting with American leaders on both
sides of the aisle. The war on COVID-19 was being waged and it was being
beaten on the other side of the world, but myopic Americans were too
preoccupied with themselves to watch and learn. It's as simple as that. Poor
leadership, panic and nationwide myopia.

------
charlescearl
> Besides massacring nursing homes, and having the potential to infect many
> vulnerable patients and providers in hospitals, it painfully emerges as yet
> another disease of inequality

------
ed25519FUUU
It’s very sad to me to see us destroying ourselves over covid19 without asking
ourselves critically and honestly “are these steps and precautions worth it?”

I can see shelter-at-home related suicide, which disproportionately affects
the young, overtaking covid19 deaths in some places. Not to mention the
dramatic and permanent change to our way of life. Here’s a commonly
circulating story about doctors saying they’re seeing more suicide and suicide
attempts in 4 weeks than they usually see in a year[1]. When will it stop with
25% on unemployment?

How many people right now are quietly becoming alcoholics alone in their own
homes?

Unfortunately the stay-at-home order has become yet another flashpoint in the
modern day culture wars, with people using an opinion on it to signal tribe
membership and so on. This blinds us from our duty to think critically on the
steps we’re taking.

[https://abc7news.com/suicide-covid-19-coronavirus-rates-
duri...](https://abc7news.com/suicide-covid-19-coronavirus-rates-during-
pandemic-death-by/6201962/)

~~~
commandlinefan
> are these steps and precautions worth it?

What I find most concerning is that, even if you allow that the answer might
be yes, just asking the question in the first place ends up in immediate
dismissal.

~~~
myk9001
I noticed this too.

People in favor of lockdowns keep saying they're following science. But once
someone dares to ask questions, so many act as if their religious feelings
were insulted.

To be fair, from what I've seen on HN, the community here is quite open to
reasonable discussion.

~~~
gnusty_gnurc
Lockdown is a draconian political mandate justified and defended on the basis
of virtue. It really hasn't been a matter of science because so far it
couldn't be: there's far too many unknowns and inaccuracies in the
measurements we're making, they're changing all the time.

From the beginning, authorities have been scrambling to appear competent and
failing catastrophically.

There are major political ramifications of lockdown and other actions of
leaders. They will not readily admit failure and neither will those convinced
of the virtue of these measures - it's a matter of political identity now.

------
buboard
Ioannidis is willing to take a temporary hit to his personal reputation by
making pointed remarks. The data is slowly erring towards his (low) estimates
, but this is going to be a tortuous progress. The bigger issue here is that
all this science has been politicized, especially in US & UK where leaders
appeared alongside seasoned scientists as if they know their shit - they don't
(and have proved it).

Plenty of other countries took a cautious approach, admitting that they are
venturing into the unknown, and many of them are now cautiously opening up or
planning to open. Uniquely in US and UK people are doubling down on any
scientific evidence as if it's political, and this becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Now even molecules are partisan. What's more bizarre is that the
citizens at large are siding with these "displays of leadership" from either
side and often scoring politics points sems to take precedence to science. And
then, after displaying such despotic devotion to their politics, they are also
accusing asian governments (which have been largely successful) for
despoticism. We 're probably witnessing a globalization of values in a
disappointing way

~~~
cfmcdonald
> The data is slowly erring towards his (low) estimates

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Two months ago he estimated[1] that the
total death count in the U.S. would be 10,000, and we're already 10x that.

[1]: [https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-
making-a...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-
the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-
data/)

~~~
buboard
that is a thought experiment not an estimate:

> If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-
> CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond
> Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about
> 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.

his own estimate is

> reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S.
> population vary from 0.05% to 1%.

The Gamgelt study for example estimates IFR at 0.28%. he has recently
published a meta review of those studies
[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v1)

~~~
cfmcdonald
Though he doesn't come out and say it, it's clearly framed as a reasonable
estimate of the ultimate death count: 'This sounds like a huge number, but it
is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like
illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked
individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like
illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually
noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media
coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most
indifferent teams.'

None of that commentary makes sense except under the assumption that the
author thinks the U.S. death total will be 10,000ish, and would have been
unnoticeable without the availability of PCR testing.

~~~
nkurz
It's probably too late to be noticed, but I feel compelled to say that I think
you are wrong here. I've read enough of Ioannidis' work (and that of other
statisticians) to know that this is just an example of how the math would work
out if those assumptions were true. Later in the piece, he uses the different
numbers of 60% infection with a 1% death rate. Neither is a projection, or a
claim that the assumptions are true.

His actual belief, which he states several times in the piece is that we don't
yet know how many people are going to be infected or what the death rate is,
and that our priority should be gathering more information: "The most valuable
piece of information for answering those questions would be to know the
current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to
repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of
new infections. Sadly, that’s information we don’t have."

Different people have different styles of argument. From what you say,
presumably if you used the example that Ioannidis did, this would imply that
you believed this estimate was correct. Others have different styles, and you
should not assume that they are making an assumption just because they happen
to use numbers for an example.

------
karmakaze
No mention of A/B testing on randomized regions. When you lack data make some.
The problem with policies are people. They don't behave the way the policy
expected. I'm not saying all out extreme A/B but finding the right pparameter
values in parallel rather in multiple-week series'.

------
ironman1478
I don't know if I necessarily buy some of this articles arguments. It mentions
the effects of stay at home, such as increases in deaths of despair. Wouldn't
that also have gone up because many of those might've been caregivers or
breadwinners of a family? And for the domestic abuse (which imo is the worst),
a lot of those victims were already undergoing mental abuse since that's
largely a precursor to physical and these reports already should've been
happening because imo mental abuse is equal to physical, it's just that people
are less likely to report this behavior. It just has such long lasting
effects. I can't back up either of those claims, so maybe I'm being dumb, but
those two takes seem a bit strange. The stats on cancer or heart related
treatment seems to be backed up though, so I can't comment on that.

The real issue with all of this is that the Trump administration is
incompetent and American government in general is reactionary and only
promotes policies that are selfish. Its been known for years that people have
no safety net, just put on NPR and like once a week this comes up, and it's
always been known that small businesses really aren't racking in the cash to
stay afloat for a long time without money. The government just needs to step
up and support people, with health care for all, with long term financial
assistance, and they need to increase taxes to do this. They are sort of doing
it now with checks, but that's going to go away once the pandemic is over and
everybody who is not in tech or generally upper middle class will go back to
being on edge because one disaster will eff to their lives.

You also can't blame this on epidimiologists. They provide their assessment
and policy makers have to weigh those options with all the other ones and come
up with a strategy. That'd be like be like blaming the person who came up with
the hail marry when it is a coach's decision to use it every play.

------
jdkee
As Taleb recently put it, better to over-react and have to ease off than to
under-react and have to play catch-up. See New York.

------
carapace
> We know that prolonged lockdown of the entire population has delayed cancer
> treatments and has made people with serious disease like heart attacks avoid
> going to the hospital. It is leading hospital systems to furlough and lay
> off personnel, it is devastating mental health, it is increasing domestic
> violence and child abuse, and it has added at least 36.5 million new people
> to the ranks of the unemployed in the United States alone. Many of these
> people will lose health insurance, putting them at further risk of declining
> health and economic distress. Prolonged unemployment is estimated to lead to
> an extra 75,000 deaths of despair in the United States alone over the coming
> decade. At a global level, disruption has increased the number of people at
> risk of starvation to more than a billion, suspension of mass vaccination
> campaigns is posing a threat of resurgence of infectious diseases that kill
> children, modeling suggests an excess of 1.4 million deaths from
> tuberculosis by 2025, and a doubling of the death toll from malaria in 2020
> is expected compared with 2018.

I am not an expert, but it seems to me that most of those problems would have
occurred _without_ the lockdown, due to the effects of the virus spreading
unchecked.

In other words, economies were always going to take a massive hit one way or
another, but with the lockdown we get some control over the form it takes.

------
roflulz
ironically, the people in the US against universal health care because of a
fear of death panels are the same ones demanding a death panel now.

~~~
LanceH
Ironically, abstinence is now be advocated by the other group of people.

------
fortran77
One hospital is reporting from that they've been seeing more deaths from
suicide than COVID-19, and in increase in deaths from suicide.

See: [https://abc7news.com/health/suicides-on-the-rise-amid-
stay-a...](https://abc7news.com/health/suicides-on-the-rise-amid-stay-at-home-
order-bay-area-doctors-say/6201962/)

~~~
boomboomsubban
That's one report from one hospital, in a county with 33 deaths from
coronavirus as of a couple days ago.

