Axios-Ipsos poll: Most Americans say Covid is no longer a crisis
axios.com
axios.com
There's no way a collective can stay on alert for years.
My reaction was "well deaths are way down" but then I looked and we recently had a spike of deaths as big or larger than the initial wave.
So I think - if I'm being honest - it's as much a crisis as it ever was, we're just finding a way to live with it, no pun intended.
Part of the "crisis" feeling of the first wave was the unknown (and likely much higher) death count that could arrive if we didn't take action.
Now, though, you can have had up to four shots of vaccine and years of learning various mitigation efforts (masks, distancing, etc).
The risk profiles are totally different because of greater tools and information.
I remember when the only N95s you could get were counterfeit masks selling for $50 a mask.
1) Improved immunity (vax and/or recovery)
2) Improved treatment
3) Virus evolution
What else could it be (not rhetorical)?
As of a month ago, about 99% of their population has Covid antibodies. I doubt things are very different here.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Maybe. To me 800-1,000/day was in itself a crisis and pretty frightening. The fact that we didn't get to 2,000+/day is ... better? but in the moment of April 2020 there was plenty of imminent fear versus fear of worsening.
In fact, per the CDC Feb 1, 2022 was the deadliest single day, but if you went out into the world that day versus Feb 1, 2021, you'd experience two vastly different things.
The point isn’t to argue about who’s counter-factual is right or wrong, it’s impossible to say.
At this point everyone has taken a position as to whether the “mitigations” were ethical, legal, effective, or not. There’s no point discussing it anymore unless or until people in power try to re-impose them.
For USA though the excess deaths number is 17% so that model doesn't make sense at all. How many young people are dying from Covid in USA?
A significant proportion of people in the USA have problems with their blood sugar levels. North Americans eat too much, eat the wrong foods and don't exercise. They tend to suffer from blood-sugar disorders (which then cause cancer and, well, everything).
Blood-sugar disorders are so varied in their symptoms as to exhaust listing here. People so affected are best described metaphorically as "human shipwrecks". New York Times had an excellent series on diabetes years ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial5...
Skip to the section "Shortages and Shipwrecks", read it and weep: this was years before Covid and we had an epidemic that nobody was paying attention to. Covid is leaving and we still have a diabetes epidemic.
https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospital...
I'm not even making a claim re: death rate, I'm taking GP's word for it.
I’m outside the DC halo, so I’m not sure what it’s like in MoCo. But here in Biden/Hogan country COVID is over. Even in the most progressive-leaning spaces which had been extremely careful with masking throughout the pandemic (school, church).
I think you're right. The phrase new normal has been batted around a lot since the pandemic began. Often it was used by people thinking masking and social distancing were going to be the new standard for being in public but now it's about living with the disease and accepting that hundreds of deaths every day is now normal.
I read somewhere that the definition of a pandemic being over is not when it's not dangerous anymore, it's when it stops being unpredictable.
Your initial reaction was correct, national deaths (and hospitalizations) are way down (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home). There may be localities that are near crisis, but this is a national poll.
The peak in February was the second worst in three Feb/Mar of the pandemic and had the highest single-day death count.
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
One thing we need to step away from is this framing that there are "sides" to be on. Allowing for there to be these separate "sides" just invites conflict and allows people the opportunity to create an identity around something they have no business having an identity about. There are people who are anti-vax now (and weren't before) for example, but that's not a "side" anymore than being for or against bandaids would make sense to have "sides". Framing this as though there are sides also has the effect of legitimizing indefensible things, like being anti-vax.
As an example, are there two sides to the flat earth debate? If you say yes, then you're admitting that people who think the earth is flat have an equal standing with someone who knows that the earth is round. But these do not have equal standing, so it shouldn't be legitimized as a "debate" where there are "sides". Something like private versus public (to oversimplify) healthcare is worthy of two sides and a debate. Broadly speaking there are two defensible and respectable opinions.
No, that's not true. One can acknowledge the existence of two sides while still maintaining that one of those two sides is entirely without merit.
And in fact it is essential to do this because history shows that simply denying the existence of people with crazy points of view does not make them go away, and in fact often increases their power and influence, ironically, because the denial of their existence is actually evidence that their conspiracy theories are correct, that they are in fact the victims of prejudice.
Flat earth is an interesting case in point. It is actually quite challenging to show that the earth is round in a way that does not require you to take anyone's word for anything.
There's a Netflix documentary called Behind the Curve (2018). There's a guy who keeps running these experiments to prove the earth is flat. But keeps inadvertently proving that its round!
Perhaps if you live nowhere near an ocean and have no trees from which to hang a pendulum and can't afford a rangefinder for lining up two boards with holes in them.
I think you will also be surprised how hard it is to fill in the details of the experiments you are alluding to.
Also, ships do not always sink below the horizon. The right atmospheric conditions can refract the light in a way that causes them to be visible at a much greater distance than the straight geometry would allow. But this explanation can be inverted to claim that it is the vanishing that is due to atmospheric effects and that the non-vanishing ship is the accurate reflection of the geometry. Falsifying that hypothesis is, again, not so easy.
(Presumably this is also true at sunrise, so the day is longer than it "should" be from purely geometric considerations.)
Two sides/devil's advocate is the basis of philosophy, thought, learning, etc. To claim otherwise is to demand blind obedience to authority.
> As an example, are there two sides to the flat earth debate? If you say yes, then you're admitting that people who think the earth is flat have an equal standing with someone who knows that the earth is round.
Nobody is saying they are on equal footing. They have a right to their opinions. But the facts are what matters.
800 years ago, you'd be demanding everyone believe the earth is the center of the universe and that anyone who says otherwise is a heretic. You'd be saying we shouldn't legitimize indefensible things like heliocentrism. In my opinion, the side that is trying to stifle debate/opinions/etc is the wrong side. If someone says they are a flat earther, just show them a video of the earth.
Do you realize that just a few decades ago, the idea of vaccination was viewed as indefensible and anti-science? Much of the scientific community viewed vaccine advocates as charlatans. After all, you'd have to be a lunatic to infect yourself with disease right? Almost everything you hold dear and absolutely true today were once "indefensible things". Including almost everything medical and scientific.
Instead of trying to stifle debate, just bring facts with you and you'll be fine. Nothing is gained by zealotry.
You have a right to an opinion. I have a right to dismiss that opinion off-hand like I would dismiss someone saying the earth is flat. Would you host a debate with someone at a university about whether or not the earth is flat? If I went to a Python conference and have a lecture on how strings in Python work which were completely contrary to how the language operates would you suggest that this is a matter of two sides, or that it's the basis of philosophy and learning? I don't think so.
Everything you deem to be wrong? " Allowing for there to be these separate "sides"... "
> It's settled science.
Everything is "settled science" until it isn't. Like the earth being the center of the universe. Like newtonian physics. Like einsteinian physics. Etc. It was settle science that Lamarckianism was scientific charlatanism until epigenetics.
> You have a right to an opinion. I have a right to dismiss that opinion off-hand
We are agreed. Except you don't want to even allow others their opinions.
> If I went to a Python conference
Someone once compared python to a tricycle.
> or that it's the basis of philosophy and learning? I don't think so.
Then you don't know philosophy, science and most importantly the history of science/philosophy. Why is it that the people with the least knowledge/wisdom/etc are the most sure about things they know nothing about?
As I said, if you run into a flat earther, just show them a video of the earth. Or don't waste your time with them. Who do you think you are to say whether they should be "allowed or not" to have their opinion or say?
You sound like you care very much. I've known many zealots who want everyone to adopt their orthodoxy.
> I care when they have a megaphone and they're convincing other people of their reality and that leads those people to their own early death.
Every preacher, pope, cult leader and zealot of all kinds says the same thing. They want "heresy" silenced in order to save souls. How noble and virtuous. Ever consider that people have their own agency? Ever consider whether you are in the wrong?
What happens if someone says the earth is flat on a megaphone? They get laughed at. As long as you have the facts and data, what are you so afraid of?
It never works because it's not symmetric, you want your enemies to shut up but not you, this is because you see yourself as the correct side, which might be either true or false, but the sure thing is that your enemies beg to disagree. The only thing that will make it work is brute force, but other than that it's just another way to say to your enemies "Just admit you're wrong and go to your room".
Let me put it another way. What if you had a family member who had cancer and I wrote a bunch of stuff and ran Facebook ads that they read that convinced them to not get very likely life-saving treatment with no downsides to them. All good then yea? You won't be mad or suggest maybe I stop doing that?
This assertion encodes a worldview within it, one that is not shared among a lot (most ?) of religious people, especially in the Middle East. Religious people often assign very high weights to the fact that their religion isn't respected/believed in, and the resulting moral value can be compared with, and often exceeds, material damage to lives and property in their eyes. So the very act of saying "What one does in one's bedroom is none of your business" is itself a topic of intense disagreements. I say this as a closeted atheist in said society who have tried a number of times to play "Devil's Advocate" to atheism and gay rights in my social circles : if only it was as easy as saying "but they don't harm anyone!" and getting people to agree on that.
There are actually analogs to this in western societies (and in every other society I have heard of). Ironically, it's usually the dual to what happens in my soceity : very high sensitivity to anti-lgbt opinions, although the same applies, being anti-lgbt in the abstract doesn't actually harm anyone. Another example is holocaust denial, how does it actually harm anyone ? I don't see an obvious way, a popular stance goes something like "If we allowed people to deny the holocaust, people would percieve it as less serious and it might happen again", but this is overly simplistic and selective, people deny and underplay countless historical atrocities (e.g. the 20th anti- and pro- communism conflicts in Asia,Africa,and South America) and that doesn't automatically make them more likely to happen.
So every society has certain taboos and red lines that you are not allowed to speak against in public (although doing so wouldn't concretely harm anyone), and problems happen when 2 social groups who have different ideas of what should be taboo interact together.
>that convinced them to not get very likely life-saving treatment with no downsides to them
I have several comments on this:
- Cancer and Covid are not comparable in damage, Cancer is uniformly deadly, Covid only so for very specific subsets of the population.
- Cancer is not viral, so whatever happens in the end it will only affect that specific family member and my family, but with Covid you have to balance people's freedom with the threat they pose to the rest of the populations.
Overall, I agree in the abstract that free speech should be restricted in critical expertise-related subject matters, like medical and engineering matters, but the particular case of Covid discourse is such a disaster. Governments and public institutions consistently lied or made up things out of thin air, authoritarians hid behind "The Science^TM" to advance authoritarian solutions to what could be equally solved with voluntary incentive-setting, and overall "The Science^TM" camp just consistently shout louder and assume bad faith more than the reverse. The actual factual subject matter itself is far from settled and much much blurrier than - say - the question of "Does vaccines cause autism", the virus constantly mutates and wipes the floor with the efficiency of the vaccines, lockdown measures are often disastrous and impact far more people negatively than the virus. But there is a certain type of people who will treat the virus as an ultimate demon, to be exorcised at all costs, and they ridicule anyone disagreeing with them as "Science Deniers^TM", and this just becomes exhausting after a while.
There is a ton we don't know about it.
This is despite spending decades and hundreds of billions of dollars on public health.
You remember the public health folk. When they ask for money, they say how it's needed so we're ready for the next spanish flu.
Indications of covid being airborne were available very early on, particularly as its genetic predecessor "OG Covid" / SARS-CoV-1 was also known to be airborne.
The problem was politicians who feared a run on masks and thus refused to follow science. On the other hand, the increased hygienic measures - particularly regular hand washing and disinfection - contributed to the eradication of at least one flu strain and prevented the spread of countless other infectious agents, leading to a reduction of load on the hospital systems, so it was not entirely pointless (and in fact should be kept even when the pandemic condition ends).
There is a reason we don't approve vaccines on an ad hoc basis in normal times. It's an emergency so you gotta take some risks. But trying to shut down dissent with THE SCIENCE IS SETTTLED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is bullshit.
What is the exact scientific criteria where it'll be settled enough for you to take a vaccine?
Physical motion is fundamentally relative and there is nothing in the laws of physics that says you can’t construct a frame of reference in which everything else moves relative to the Earth. Heliocentrism is certainly easier to reason about and much simpler, but it’s no more true in any fundamental sense.
You'll in fact find that it is not Vax/Anti-Vax but: 1. a group that needs the comforting reassurance of authority for security vs. 2. a group who regard their autonomy as paramount and see no need to have arbitrary rules forced on them.
Also, you apparently have no idea what "arbitrary" means.
Ah, right. They were just highly intelligent people "following the science". Not at all obsessed with stoking fear so they could seize control and consolidate power:
And I assume you say this when someone is getting surgery, buys ibuprofen, or gets a splint as well?
> a group who regard their autonomy as paramount and see no need to have arbitrary rules forced on them
In the specific context of vaccines at least in America, nobody is forcing anyone to take a vaccine so the position wouldn't make any sense. Maybe you want to clarify what you mean here?
As an aside, this idea of autonomy here is a psychological reflex to control something about a situation that you have absolutely no control over. But it's really just an illusion. They're not more autonomous than anyone else is. A vaccine wouldn't make a difference in your autonomy, and in a really bad pandemic ala The Stand (Stephen King novel) you'd be forced at gunpoint to take a vaccine and you'd happily comply. It's all just lifestyle and cosplay at this point.
Employers, en masse, are forcing it as a condition of employment.
I do agree with some of these employer mandates, e.g. airlines, because they increase connectivity and thus spread. Not so much with some others, e.g. clerical stay at home workers.
It may be difficult for some to accept, but we as individuals have essentially total control over our own health and COVID was no exception.
Essentially all serious COVID cases had multiple LIFESTYLE-casued comorbidities. The most prevalent: obesity.
Comorbidities increase your risk or "serious COVID", just like being unvaccinated does. But that still doesn't satisfy anything. Comorbidities increase your risk, getting vaccinated decreases your risk substantially, so if you want to blame this "well only fat people get it", well sure. Most people are fat, therefore they should get the vaccine since you can do that in a very short period of time whereas weight loss takes a while and you may have other comorbidities that you can't actually control or change at all.
But aside from these asinine "fat positive" movements (which are very similar in pathology IMO to COVID deniers) nobody is out there advocating for people to ignore their weight and that drinking milkshakes just might not be bad for your heart. Next thing you know of course drinking milkshakes and eating burgers are ok. The government just wants to control what you eat!1!
It's the exact same kind of nonsense.
I think it's easy to confuse the two major covid conflicts as one. The first, more obvious and dumber conflict is the "covid is fake/nothing!" idiots. That's the conflict you're mainly addressing. The second, less one-sided conflict is whether our anti-covid measures have a good return-on-investment vs less-stringent measures. Covid deaths and government anti-covid efforts seem to be less closely coupled than is intuitive. For example, comparing Sweden, a country with very lax covid mandates, to countries with stronger mandates. They came off much worse than Finland, but better than the UK, comparable to Germany, and much better than the United States.
I agree completely that there is further study to be done on lockdowns and other efforts that were undertaken. For example, I'm monitoring this and we'll see, but perhaps China's COVID 0 lockdown strategy wasn't the right one compared, to, say, the US strategy. There's much to say about how historic human efforts to contain disease (we've always done lockdowns) may be or may not be effective with 8 billion globalized people.
But even in this case I don't think we need "sides". We need analysis. Sides create tribalism and suboptimal outcomes I think in this case.
In all honesty your attitude creates a lot of the problems you describe.
It’s a free country if people don’t want to be vaxxed they can take their chances with the 99.9% survival rate for those under 50. Or the lower survival rate if they are over 50.
Can you name a single person in America who has been held down against their will and administered a vaccine? Can you name multiple, coordinated instances of this happening? Can you point to a lawsuit?
If not, you should stop repeating this.
> In all honesty your attitude creates a lot of the problems you describe.
I used to think that too but ultimately what you have is a group that cannot be reasoned with ala flat-earth proponents and no amount of information, debate, or reason would change their mind because the point isn't to understand, it's to create a lifestyle and culture. It's like a religion. The only thing that's left to be important here is to combat disinformation by bad actors and prevent further corrosion of civilization.
You aren't arguing in good faith. "No, we aren't banning gay marriage, we just implemented a federal regulation that forces employers to fire anyone who is gay married. It's their choice!"
I'm not even against vaccine mandates (at least I did when the vaccines worked), but come on, admit what you are actually supporting here.
I can definitely be reasoned with and reason with the unvaccinated all the time.
I opened my home in contravention of the mandates to throw parties and have unvaccinated people a place to socialize and people found my point of view to be in line with theirs. Namely that vaccines work but for them they would prefer the risk of getting Covid to getting vaccinated.
It may surprise you but many people can be talked to and turn out to have points of view vastly different than what you read on the news / see on social media.
I was reluctant to even respond to your comment, lest I legitimize sophistry. There aren't really two sides to it, you're openly calling for playing language games.
I can't even...
Most people I think just want to return to "normal". We live in a new normal, but we can't live in crisis forever. I don't think that is necessarily apathy it is adapting.
It has been longer than two years. Prior to the pandemic we were subject to a wave of blatantly divisive rhetoric that seemed intent on driving us to civil war. The 'post-truth' era hit us hard for years before COVID-19 showed up and became just another weapon toward that end.
Yeah, we're tired of it. It is difficult to care anymore, honestly. A lot of Americans are going to die, a lot of them are going to be economically ruined, everything that made this country worth anything is going to be dismantled by fascism and plutocracy, and you know what? I think we've earned it.
more like 8 years aka. the ramping up of identity politics and other cultural marxist shenanigans
The measures were always driven by polling numbers and political sentiment alone. Many of the measures had absolutely no basis in science (wearing a mask in a restaurant then sitting down and taking it off is pure political ideology with zero basis in scientific reality).
What’s utterly astonishing is what’s going on in Shanghai in spite of this.
And ironically, with the case numbers vs. deaths we see there, it seems to strongly support the stance that the crisis is over. 7 deaths for 12k infected is ridiculous. They just cannot change course from zero covid without losing face, this is why they push through with this nonsense.
This seems to be the norm with Omicron. If Shanghai is just Omicron too, I'd be surprised if a wave of deaths will follow.
What seems to be somewhat different in China is that between an up-til-now successful zero-covid policy (facilitated by lockdowns) and the less effective Sinovac vaccine, immunity levels are much lower. And I've seen a lot of people suggesting that the milder cases from Omicron are mostly down to existing immunity (either from vaccines or past infection) rather than Omicron being inherently milder (tentative consensus seems to be that it is a bit milder, but not so much as the reduced severity of infections would suggest in absence of other factors).
It's _probably_ true here in Canada, too; but in our province, if not nationally, they've given up nearly entirely on PCR testing and case tracking. Schools aren't mandated to report absences unless they reach some very high threshold. As a consequence, there aren't any really good ways for an individual to judge their risk.
Zero covid was successful up until Omicron, evidently. While Christmas markets had to close early in Germany because Delta was so bad, you had huge overcrowded markets in Shanghai, with many people not wearing a mask. If anything, we probably have the most statistically significant numbers about infectiousness and ratio of symptomatic:asymptomatic cases because of the totally over the top testing of every possible contact they did whenever even a single case popped up anywhere.
If anything, with the current draconian lockdown if they had any incentive to lie, they would have to make it look worse than it actually is to justify it.
Look harder.
April 19th, 2020.
Look at the reported deaths before and after; skyrocking, then straight to zero.
Then look at the arrests (on that same day) of activists who had been reporting the coverups and censorship that had been happening since the very beginning.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
https://qz.com/1846277/china-arrests-users-behind-github-cor...
If you dare to know how deep it goes, look at those activists Github page. Use google translate in Chrome.
For all the tiresome arguments of the cure being worse than the disease, just this once I’ll have bite and say yeah, this cure is WAY worse than the disease.
The boosters work but then efficacy seems to drop faster after them.
You can get more information on the spectrum of COVID symptoms here https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/overview/clin...
While 50% isn't useless it does seem significantly worse than the other vaccines. And frankly if I were Chinese I'd be questioning why China didn't license one of the other vaccines rather than continuing with their less effective homegrown version.
My understanding is also that regardless of vaccine used, the Chinese government is still trying to blame outbreaks on foreigners, and as such has prioritised vaccinating people like dock workers and airline staff over their elderly which seems rather questionable at this point. Australia and New Zealand also attempted a zero-covid strategy, which worked well enough until Omicron. But they have both now abandoned this strategy, and I feel like China is going to have to do the same at some point.
So pretending and acting as if the virus is some sort of foreign threat that can be curbed by 0-covid strategies (which failed even for hermetically sealed countries) is all part of that face saving campaign. They want to look like the country that had Covid under control—at all costs.
A sizeable part of the Brazilian population got vaccinated with only Coronavac when omicron got here, but there wasn't enough difference on the death ratio to decide if it was less effective. So I imagine it isn't much worse than the Pfizer one on preventing death.
And that's before taking into account the fact that this will be an underestimation since deaths tend to trail the infection count by something like 2 weeks.
Still more alarming than ridiculous in my books.
People die all the time. Every day. Shanghai has 25M people. Let's assume the US's annual death rate of 8.8 per 1000. That's 220k deaths per year, or 4230 deaths per week.
Statistically with the current numbers, getting everybody infected would result in less deaths than having no covid at all :o) Sure, we'll only see real deaths with a delay of a few weeks, so that's witless, but as stated in my sibling comment in this thread, Omicron seems not to deliver on this from my personal experiences at all.
Having a total lock-down over it seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
But I am worried about the effectiveness of their vaccines and the rate at which the disease will eventually spread.
Within six months, the risk of a vaccinated individual approaches the risk of an unvaccinated one. That’s before considering new variants with potentially high immune escape.
China didn’t have that and what’s happening is what trying to control with lockdowns will look like periodically forever.
Many mitigation measures are only effective as delay instead of prevention.
Curious what metrics from those apps did you use to confirm your hypothesis.
We were mass producing ventilators when we should've been mass producing tests or masks, we were going maskless based on trailing data instead of the current spikes etc. It was like a shitty game of telephone where people died because the messaging became so delayed and distorted.
On the plus side, producing vaccines by end of 2020 was nothing short of stunning IMO, with all the skepticism at that time on the timeline. Bid kudos to the pharmas of course, but a lot of credit should also go to the Trump administration, whatever you may think of the president.
(Lots of cited examples at https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/jlockdowns/)
But that wouldn't support the anti-government narrative that seems to be so popular among Americans in general and techies in particular.
I am not trying to change anyones view on this -- just expressing my point of view.
However, I have far more trust in these government organs at doing something effective than leaving it to "the market" which will just always be distracted by money instead of "taking one for the team" and focusing on the hard problems "just in case".
The cultural rot that prevents iterating on effective government runs deep, and has little to do with exhaustion. In _Spring 2020_, i was shocked by the strong reaction I got from my friends at even passing mentions of the FDA/CDC's significant and severe early failures.
In the usual reductive framing, I'm a pretty "big govt" guy. While govt is horrendously incompetent, as a baseline, it allows us to choose from a wider array of goals, more precisely than the market does. But I learned that even my nominally-intelligent friends are too simple-minded to understand this, and that their support is rooted in religious belief in an omnicompetent govt that provides flawless protection from the world's dangers.
An environment that can't even see failures is not one that's going to improve upon them. Already, the excuses have been lined up: every single failure was due in some way to Trump, and now that he's gone (hopefully), the gov't can go back to its usual, hyper-efficient mode of function (lol)
I've always said, the federal government is only good at killing people (referring to the military)...I'm starting to think it applies to a lot more than that.
- mask, lock down, hide from others etc
[1] Or 'with Covid' if you believe those people just happen to be dying of something else while having Covid.
This obvious inconsistency is relevant to the discussion.
In the case of things like car crashes, there's a significant benefit of using cars that means we choose to tolerate deaths as part of the cost of having easy access to transport. The same is true of many things that kill people. The utility of the cause of the deaths means the cost is accepted.
I don't think there's a strong argument in favor of the usefulness of Covid.
There is even an argument in favor of not requiring masks. It's a much weaker one, but the benefits are not large either because masks on the general population are not very effective against omicron.
The strong argument is in favor of not living life as though we were amid a crisis, locked down and paranoid.
There is definitely a strong argument in favour of not shutting down an economy because of it.
I ask because 7452 people die per day in the US on average, meaning 6.7% of the people who die now have Covid (using your 500/day figure).
Clearly some die from and some happen to die with Covid. The difference could be estimated simplistically based on the percent of the population that currently has Covid. If 0.5% have Covid and 6.7% of the people who die have it, there is a correlation. If 5% have Covid and 6.7% of the people who die have it, there's not much correlation. (Of course, in the correlation case, it still doesn't prove causation, as the weakened immune systems of those who are dying may be unable to fight off Covid at the end.)
I think the best way to evaluate is to look at excess deaths. But even there you've got data contamination from the measures that were taken (drinking deaths, suicides up, flu down, etc.) and no way to figure out exactly how many of the various increases and decreases are directly attributable to the Covid measures.
> If the decedent tested positive for COVID, the virus also gets placed on the death certificate. Many of these people likely died with COVID, not from COVID, Grannis said.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/opinion/...
Here's an article about Australia, too:
> Indeed, distinguishing between dying with and dying from COVID-19 may require a more complex investigation into the cause of a death, beyond citing a positive SARS-CoV-2 test that was completed prior to the person’s death.
https://theconversation.com/died-from-or-died-with-covid-19-...
Colleague's grandpa passed away in Scandinavia. As it was summertime, all the extended family is on vacation, abroad and etc. they put the body in the freezer and schedule funeral at some time when everybody's back.
On the other hand I have read about Japanese (might be any other Far East country) culture where passing away of father requires something like a year of mourning. Culture doesn't allow you to go to work for a year as you would look insensitive. However not showing up at work for a year is also a big nono. So it becomes a huge strain on all the family.
And we can imagine how these two cultures can have very different approaches to crisis like that, crisis itself is of a very different scope because of culture.
Putting 1/700 a year death from covid into context of our overall mortality rate: 1,027.0 deaths per 100,000 population [0]
I know more under 40 that have died from overdose in the past two years than I know that have died from covid (which is 0)
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...
https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/04/29/fact-check-did-...
Covid skewed old.
No amount of screeching will change the fact that people are far more mentally prepared for grandma to keel over with little warning than they are to lose a random uncle or coworker.
That depends. If a coworker dies because they did drugs, you might say to yourself "I'm safe from that mode of death as long as I don't do drugs".
If a random coworker dies because of Covid that they caught on the job, you might say to yourself "I'm next", the result being existential dread and anxiety.
It's true covid skewed old, but people quote the stats of dead young people in the last 2 years as if people were mentally prepared for that. Overdoses don't kill young families in a matter of weeks, but Covid did. Overdoses don't bring down 43 teachers in a school system over the course of a few months, whose average age was 46, but Covid did that. Covid brought all kinds of unique and deep tragedies that aren't reflected in the stats, and people are still dealing with the emotional fallout.
Again I understand that covid skewed old, but grandma is already dead and has been since before Covid. Now my parents are "old" at 65, but I'm not mentally prepared for them to die at all. If their parents are any indication I still have a good 20 years left with them, and so I get really upset when people try to discount their lives as if they wouldn't be missed if they were to die from Covid, or if somehow that's just nature taking its course. Really this shouldn't be a contest of whose death counts more to society.
But public health policy doesn't need to be structured around these gut feelings of whose life is more or less valuable or whose death is more or less expected.
To the larger dialogue about protective measures, I understand the claim that "I'm young, my risk of severe disease or death is low. So I need no precautions." But unless you live in isolation, your infection increases my risk of infection. My protective measures reduce that risk but do not implement. And I have elderly parents, in their 90's. They're vaccinated and reasonably cautious. They're also mostly independent and functional. But they aren't particularly ready to die. So despite the relaxation in required protective measures, I wear an N95 in indoor spaces outside my house so that I don't inadvertently infect them. I've also had encounters where I've been yelled at by random strangers for doing so. Apparently for some, the right to choose is not reciprocal - "I would like to choose not to do [x] but I'd also like to compel you do likewise."
Further apples to apples comparison is tough because kids 0-5 die of COVID but the US does not record any death below age 5 as a suicide.
A related comparison: more school age children died of COVID during the pandemic than have ever across all history died from school shootings.
That is, I'm sympathetic to the idea that a lot of what we did was probably not super helpful. I'm less inclined to believe that a counterfactual world had fewer deaths. Seems more likely that, while we could have protected nursing homes better, most everything else was likely to look very similar to how it did.
I mean, I get the butterfly flapping a wing argument. But in general, large things moving in a direction tend to arrive where they are headed.
It is possible for something to both be a crisis and not be something that is handled well by the heavy hand of government.
If we’re trading anecdotes I don’t personally know anyone who has died or even been hospitalized with COVID. I know people who know people who did, but that is a small number and the majority were not likely to live long due to other causes (I do know one of one family member of a friend who was in seemingly good health and was hospitalized).
For my personal health and the health of most people I would say there wasn’t ever a crisis, though the delta wave got closest to being so that also coincided with the vaccine availability which removed any crisis that would have come otherwise. For others who are prone to severe illness it has been a crisis and continues to be. Aside from the political banter that is what has made this so divisive, the real risk and experiences of people can vary wildly.
We can debate what the appropriate responses to this crisis should have been but it was unarguably a crisis. Pretending otherwise is simply delusional.
But yes, I agree a hospital overloading is a crisis for those providing or seeking to receive care at said hospital. The cause and remediation of said crises are I think likely significantly more involved than just attributing it to COVID. In other words, the crisis of a particular overloaded hospital is not likely strictly a COVID crisis, but rather an issue with how care is prepared for and distributed in general.
There was a crisis. It had many aspects (medical, economic, social, political) and there were many different methods of alleviating those different aspects.
Claiming "there was no crisis" is simply, factually wrong.
In any case it does not appear as though you are open to reasonable discourse. You have decided on your "facts" and any opposing, or merely appearing opposing even if it isn't, viewpoint is catalogued as "delusional," even though you've offered virtually nothing in the way of an actual argument. So, I guess, you win?
https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
Those two aren't really comparable, though the former really should have clued us in to how big a risk the latter was.
In other words, I doubt your latter scenario at the more extreme end of overloading was widely the case (in the first world), perhaps you have some analysis backing it up?
Then vaccines appeared, and things became more manageable, but up through delta, getting covid was really bad if you ended upon ventilator. The game changed with omicron although even that can affect naive populations. Politicians and pundits trotted out “sacrifice grandma for the economy” but it didn’t really fly. Hope people remember enough from covid to improve aged care and end of life housing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/nyregion/new-jersey-famil...
...I wondered if the problem in the U.S. is really an obesity "epidemic" and not a COVID epidemic. The statistics for non-elderly deaths seem to bear this out. (Of course, the NY Times neglected to comment on the elephant in the room.)
I was never a COVID skeptic -- I got vaccinated, and I wore N-95 masks, fitted as best I could, when indoors in crowds. I rarely ate in restaurants so giving that up wasn't a big lifestyle change for me. (I was fortunate to have a decent supply of N-95 and N-99 masks pre-pandemic because I often visit places where things are fabricated, and dust and particles are around.)
But I was skeptical about mask mandates for one simple fact -- whenever I was out in public, I'd observe that only about 30% of people were wearing masks in a way that could possibly do anything -- covering the nose and mouth, and not taking it on and off continuously / not touching the face. So we'll never really know if masks work on population studies.
There was a lot of "theatre" -- (I fly a lot for work, and still flew during the pandemic to Europe and the mid-east quite often. I have multiple passports so I could get into places even during times when tourism was banned). Airplanes never banned CPAP use in flight, even though study after study from previous airborne viruses showed CPAP to aersolize a person's exhalate and spread disease. (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7298691/ ). United Airlines claimed that they were following the guidelines of the "Cleveland Clinic" for their covid mitigation, and yet that clinic warns about CPAP machines. (The reality is, the airlines didn't want to battle the ADA rules, so they put the public at risk.)
Sorry, but, until something changes in the world of polls dramatically I have to underweight their importance.
That... seems to confirm the idea that it's no longer a crisis?
Again, the crisis is in the hospital systems. Flattening the curve was all about controlling infection rates in order to ensure the systems continue to function. COVID zero and crushing the curve was never a public health goal in North America.
If you accept that, then the reality is COVID is here to stay. That much is a given.
So if we've reached the point of mostly decoupling hospital/ICU/death rates from case rates (or at least dramatically lowering the frequency with which a COVID case escalates to hospitalization/ICU/death) through a mix of vaccines, antivirals, and other measures, then it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude that the crisis has past.
And I say all that as someone who still compulsively wears a mask in a lot of circumstances.
Is there something in that analysis that I'm missing?
Restrictions mostly gone / loosening without any disastrous results.
Sounds about right for now.
I worry about COVID, but I also worry about wearing out people / society / side effects. If there's space to loosen restrictions I'm all for it.
Let the scientists keep a lookout, let the citizens relax.
Has been down in the prior month-ish.. Although numbers are looking to trend upward right now. Watching how Omicron unfolded in Europe and December, and had a resurgence a month ago.. I would say that we may be in for a nasty wave.
Also, S Korea, dropped their covid restrictions and that's a bloodbath now.
We merely replaced one common pandemic with another only last time the government decided to try at some draconian public policy.
What happens a bit down the road when the election cycle passes, Ukraine (hopefully) gets resolved, and it's flu season again and the hysteria starts getting good ratings again? Are the highly malleable crowd going to be reprogrammed to go back into "Wear the Mask" and "No Jab, No Job" mode?