Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC director says

But imagine the "extreme" case where excess mortality is zero - that is, even with covid19, about the same number of people die every day.

That would mean, presumably, that since covid19 causes some deaths that would not have happened historically (it doesn't matter what you think that number is) it would have to be balanced by some decrease in "more normal" deaths.

Obviously, one could propose all kinds of mechanisms that might lead to this. One could suggest that because people are either disgusted by or rallying around Trump, death rates are different. One could suggest that the impending conjuction of Saturn & Jupiter on Dec 21st has reduced death rates from non-covid19 causes. And to be sure, at present, there doesn't seem to be a particularly good way to establish this.

But it also seems rather reasonable to say that since the biggest change in human behavior at this point has been driven by attempts to contain covid19, that it is likely these changes that have caused the "balancing" decrease in non-covid19 deaths.

One obvious rebuttal is that the graph does NOT show no excess mortality. This is certainly true. But the magnitude of the it is smaller than would be expected from even the most, ahem, conservative estimates of covid19 deaths. Ergo, there is some reduction in non-covid19 deaths, and occam's razor would put changes due to anti-covid measures near the top of the list of likely causes for that.

My whole point is your analogy is flawed and you shouldn't use it for this purpose because it trivializes significant components of the issue at hand. You said:

> Once all the old/vulnerable wood is burned up, it's much more difficult for another forest fire of the same magnitude to happen ...

Which is demonstrably wrong when you liken _people_ to the dry brush, which is exactly what you did. We aren't optimizing to minimize deaths in individual years (or else we'd just kill everyone right now and the death rate would spike and then drop to zero), we're optimizing for general well-being of the population.

Your analogy is flat wrong, which is why I'm poking holes in it. It also belies a shocking lack of empathy for your fellow humans, which I frankly find alarming.

> Where do you draw the line?

I have no idea, and I don't think this is the venue to argue it, but I definitely don't think we're at it yet, and I would much rather err on the side of trying too hard to protect people's lives than not trying hard enough.

For example, when death numbers from COVID were first being released, people compared them to car fatalities, going "Why are we so worried? Car crashes kill 100x as many people in the same timeframe." The point is not "we should not worry about COVID because other things are more deadly" but "there is an alarming new source of deaths, and we should be working to reduce death as much as we can in the interests of maximizing the population's happiness."

EDIT: I mean, consider, the sitting US president called COVID "a hoax" for a good two months, then kept downplaying it for another two ("it'll be gone after November, you'll see"), and overall completely failed to make a plan at the federal level to, I dunno, provide more sick leave for people so they could actually avoid spreading it to their co-workers, or rent assistance for those out-of-work because we shut down the industries with high levels of communication, or support just wearing a mask when you go outside. We are so far and away from even a reasonable level of response to this it seems wholly disingenuous to pose the "but where do we _stop_ intervening?" argument.

The other side of the problem is that lawmakers have no incentive to set aside money/time/resources for pandemic preparedness.

A quote from HHS Secretary under Bush, Mark Leavitt sums up part of the problem nicely:

> “In advance of a pandemic, anything you say sounds alarmist. After a pandemic starts, everything you’ve done is inadequate.”

Another example of lawmakers having no incentive to think about the future:

>The Public Health Emergency Preparedness program’s funding has gone from about a billion dollars in 2003 to $675 million this year, while the Hospital Preparedness program has gone from more than $500 million at its peak in 2004 to less than $300 million today.

No, I'm implying what I said explicitly: some people have taken to deceptive tactics to try and argue mask mandates work, like truncating graphs to create apparent correlations where none really exist.

We don't know if people were actually following the mandate or not, how frequently they were taking their masks off, whether they were engaging in other behavior which would put them at risk for COVID exposure, etc

We do know this because the Delphi project has been tracking mask compliance, at least among Americans. It's extremely high, like above 90%. If mask mandates don't work with such high levels of compliance it means they don't work at all. And if masks 'worked' but had no observable effect due to other factors, that's logically the same as having no effect, isn't it?

How do you know they didn't have an impact on incidence graphs? It's entirely possible that the spikes in those charts would have been even more severe without a mask mandate

Even when controlling for increase in testing, the second wave in some places with mask mandates introduced after the first is equal in size to the first. If they worked that shouldn't be possible.

For something to be scientific you have to start with the null hypothesis. Believing in something despite evidence that it has no effect places us firmly in tiger-protecting rock territory - it's fundamentally a religious impulse rather than scientific. I could just as easily argue that the second waves would have been much smaller if we hadn't been wearing masks: I'd have no proof of that so I doubt you'd accept it, but it's no more valid than what you're arguing here. Yet maskers insist they are being scientific.

So far every piece of "evidence" for masks I've seen boils down to a correlation/causation fallacy. A few places where mask mandates were introduced as incidence was falling anyway are used to argue for them, and all the places where incidence went up or did nothing are ignored. The existence of second waves and second lockdowns despite masks is ignored. The studies pre-dating 2020 that showed masks don't seem to have any impact are ignored. The completely unstudied and hitherto-fore never proposed hypothesis that masks are meant to stop people infecting other people rather than stop people getting infected is taken as "scientific", even though it appears to have been made up on the spot for political reasons.

But don't listen to me, I'm not an expert either. Listen to the people who do this kind of thing for a living and who know what they're talking about. They know more than we do about their chosen field.

No, they don't. 2020 has made it abundantly clear that public health expertise is a massive fraud. These people systematically have no clue what they're talking about. Their predictions are always wrong, they constantly ignore evidence they're wrong, they lie all the time and their credibility is zero. As for random people on Twitter, do you really think I was making an appeal to their authority? Twitter is irrelevant, it just happened to be a place where the graphics are hosted. It's the data that matters to my argument, not who's making it.

Remember these 'experts' changed their positions on masks 180 degrees almost overnight. Now they claim they were previously lying en-masse. I don't think that's true, I think they were summarising the literature up to that point (which said masks don't really work) and then changed their views for political reasons. But even if you believe it was the other way around, it's impossible at this point to not believe in a massive coordinated conspiracy. Either they were all lying before or they were all lying now: it's not possible for it to be neither. There's really no point in making appeals to the authority of these people.

here[7] is an explanation of how masks work, specifically how they help filter and trap particles which carry COVID

I'm aware of how they are meant to work, it's obvious, nobody needs the New York Times to tell them that masks are meant to filter particles. Yet mask mandates (which is what we're talking about here) clearly don't work for any meaningful definition of work. If they did we wouldn't be seeing second waves larger than the first and being put into a wave of second lockdowns, would we?

Whether it's due to air going around the masks, most transmission being in-home, viruses being too small for masks to block them, people not wearing them right, masks being ineffective for viruses in general or whatever, doesn't actually interest me that much. That might be an interesting topic for mask manufacturers or doctors to investigate. But there's really no need to debate this: mask mandates are frequently followed by dramatic climbs in incidence, or falls, or no change at all. Meanwhile every claim that masks work is simply picking cases where the natural end of the first wave happens to roughly line up with when masks were introduced, ignoring the cases where they don't line up. Why should anyone be convinced by this?

It's abundantly clear that the entire GOP coordinates with Fox News and other sources (reddit, FB, etc) to deliver consistent messages that are curated and on-brand. So when I say politicians, I really mean this entire machination.

If the entire Conservative Messaging Platform decided to tackle this problem and encourage mask wearing, we could get a critical mass of people to do so. They could have Laura Ingram, Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell, and a bunch of lesser known pundits/politicians harping on this day-in and day-out. While having facebook and r/conservative bots posting pro-mask memes.

We know this is an effective way of influencing behavior, because we've seen it work numerous times throughout the past decade. Too bad it's never used for anything good.