Mortality isn't the only negative outcome.
I'm curious how those studies would disentangle the effect of "COVID damages your health, and severe COVID damages your health more so you're more likely to die in the next year" from the effect of "if you are in worse general health, a COVID infection is more likely to be severe, and also you are more likely to die in the next year". Even if you try to control for factors like age, sex, smoker vs nonsmoker, BMI, etc etc you're likely to miss something. But maybe they did something clever with their control group that serves as a good proxy for "people who would have had severe covid and survived, but didn't get infected".
I'm interested to see which study you're referring to.
However if you think about it logically from a health perspective - if your respiratory system goes under severe stress that will likely exacerbate any respiratory issues that were in your system beforehand. It is surprising that the risk is so great for the following year, but not shocking considering how taxing this disease is on peoples health.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/severe-c...
Their methodology doesn't look super sketchy when it comes to COVID vs no COVID, but I am not sure what they're trying to do by comparing mild with severe COVID without even controlling for counfounding factors.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.77843...
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/778434/fmed-08-77...
Even if I use your position that people were to die without being infected due to their health already being somewhat compromised (which isn't the case here but I will suppose it for your trollish statements) - the point is that COVID-19 has serious and significant impacts on the cardiovascular system beyond your immediate infection and more so than we previously thought.
Naw. Masks need to go away.
Masks reduce the amount of aerosols a person emits, thereby reducing the distance and amount of viral particles an infected person can spread in any given situation.
As a side benefit some masks protect the wearer to an extent, particularly N95s, but the main purpose is to reduce spread from infected people in the first place.
Vaccines, similarly, are not a magic shield that protect you from even getting COVID. Instead, they dramatically reduce your likelihood of getting severely ill and being hospitalised and reduce the duration of disease therefore also reducing transmission. But that only works if enough people are vaccinated that the cumulative effect of that reduced transmission can meaningfully bring down the R0 value.
This pandemic has exposed how few people are able to consider issues or questions at a broader community level versus merely how it affects them directly.
There are no very good choices. But the high cost of lockdowns should dictate that they only be used when the alternative is extremely large numbers of people dying (at least in the UK, this was probably met at some point last year but hasn't been met for the majority of the Covid period).
* COVID itself
* its funding and delivery model making it vulnerable to politicians acting in bad faith
far more than restrictions on gatherings.
By the way, an "elective" surgery is one that can be scheduled in advance. Most elective surgeries are not optional. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t...
My comment about electives was for the US audience. The US does a huge amount of quality-of-life, elective surgeries that don't happen in the UK (i.e. giving an 85-year old a knee replacement). So when you write something like: the waiting list is long, people from the US might not understand that the mix of surgeries in the UK is very different from there, and it largely represents people who need prompt care (for example, I have a relative who is a high bowel cancer risk and needs a regular screen, in the US this would likely happen annually but hasn't happened for about three years now because they were overdue in early 2020 and then everything stopped).
Or to put it another way: Would you be okay to go, while we keep everything open? How about your parent, or grand-parent?
If you were old and had little time left, and had a compromised immune system that made any slight infection possibly lethal, and you had the choice to close down society to lower your risk of infection, would you do it?
My own country alone has seen nearly 300 000 excess deaths compared to the annual average, with the waves of excess deaths neatly tracking those of known COVID infection waves.
"The temperature outside is 2 degrees higher than average". Ok what conclusions can you draw from that? Very little. Just because you make a big scary number without reference, doesn't allow you to jump to a conclusion out of fear, it's just manipulative misleading misinterpretation to make it look as scary as possible, to disable people's critical thinking and support a point that actually doesn't have any basis.
That is, not just the number of people who died, but the number calculated to have died over and above the normal seasonal average.
If those excess death calculations are perfectly acceptable to calculate the effect of bad flu seasons and other mortality-affecting events, why are they suddenly not okay now?
Why not just show standard deviation, median, average, percentile. Show the standard deviation in the graph.
For that, each country maintains an official group that has access to death certificates and other records when preparing statistics. The figure I quoted, for instance, is from the South African Medical Research Council, who publish their methodology. There's also EuroMOMO and many others.
Did you really think that statisticians and scientists have just magically forgotten about how to do basic statistics, for decades, when preparing these reports?
Instead of using the normal measures of mean, average, standard deviation and percentiles, we just used "formula" and voila, here is answer. Ok I'm going to continue to be sceptical of such results..
I'm now convinced you just want to be a contrarian, rather than learning about a system you don't understand.
Excess death tracking is hardly a new thing, most countries have been doing it for decades to measure the effect of things like flu outbreaks. Therefore when those same statistics being done using the same approach suddenly show huge climbs in 2020 and 2021 it means something.
Stop trying to minimise the pandemic. If your arguments about how to deal with it are rational they should stand up to the reality of how serious it really is, rather than a pretend reality where people haven't been dying in large numbers and filling up hospitals for two years.
Another example from the media (now I am shifting goal posts, but defending my point of proving that it's exaggerated and manipulative): Why are they reporting running totals of number of deahts? And making big headlines of when they reach "new grim milestones"? How is that not a completely irrelevant manipulative misinterpretation? A running total of deaths, really? When will that ever go down? And using that to support a case that "things are getting worse" somehow.
I'd recommend you spend some more time learning how the scientists and statisticians calculating these figures actually work, and maybe speak to a few, before commenting further.
It isn't reported because it takes more explanation than the media likes to give, and direct COVID-19 death counts are less complicated, not because “there is none” which is just false:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Again, as stated in GP (with supporting data) in neither Germany (the context of the article) nor the US (the context and source of much of the political debate in the thread) is it true that actual deaths are not higher than expected from pre-pandemic experience.
Yes, no issues at all. I support lockdowns and have had relatives who became very ill because of lockdowns (delayed/ineffective hospital treatment, I am actually not well myself either for the same reason). I think trying to argue that someone should only support/oppose something because they have something to gain personally is the reason why politics in some countries is totally fucked (the UK is probably the worst for this, somewhere around 2017/18 most of the media became tabloids and every politics story contained some hyperbolic bullshit from some random person claiming their life would be destroyed by X minor policy change...it is just a waste of time and energy for all involved).
Summer of this year was close to normal again, though it is of course easy to imagine it wouldn't have been in a zero-restrictions scenario.
It expects death rate to be constant over the year, which is wrong.
You need to take the total number of deaths per capita, for 2020, and compare that to the same number for 2019, 2018, 2017 etc. And look at the standard deviation.
You can clearly see bumps due to flu season in previous years, but because flu season happens every year since before 2013, this becomes a regular seasonal effect and don't show up as 'excess' except in late 2018. We also happen to know that flu was greatly suppressed by anti-Covid measures these last two years.
But I'm still not sure what I'm looking at, overlaying a single year over an average is always going to look "excessive". I want to see previous years as well, why not just extend the graph? That's the one single most important number that you never get so see. Here they have buried it in a complex algorithm which looks honestly suspicious at first glance, upper bound for excessive death is basically the same as average. Is standard deviation really that low?
EDIT: I just want to see how many people died per capita in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and so forth, why is that not shown anywhere?
Because that statistic makes the whole thing seem very mellow. Same thing as average life expectancy by year; the change from 2019 to 2020/21 is very slight.
In other words, Is the emperor actually naked, or are you simply fishing for the conclusion you want to hear?