What is needed is effective prophylactics (beyond mRNA vaccines) and effective treatment. But the effort spent on that is, sadly, minimal.
A tiny, tiny fraction. And this would benefit us for way more than just Covid.
UV bulbs are expensive (and invisible unless you get to poke around a buildings mechanical room.), they need to be replaced typically ~annually (they won't be). If they get dust on them, they don't work as well. Etc. etc.
And here's the issue: To actually deal with high concentration infectious aerosols you need to get that air out of the room ASAP. (i.e. negative pressure rooms) If you can sterilize the return air that's great, but frankly I suspect dilution and air movement is going to be the dominant effect in reducing infection chains.
I was in a gym that required everyone to wear a mask (yes, while working out / on a treadmill / etc), but all the large windows were shut, and nobody seemed to care or notice. No staff, no patrons, nobody. So I walked around and opened all the windows. And this wasn't March 2020. This was like end of 2021.
I'm not claiming to be some pandemic savant, nor getting into a mask debate, but what shocked me was the "group psychosis" on masking at the expense of proven and incredibly easy mitigation efforts like opening windows!
Even as it is, the medical staff have been overworked and extremely stressed. They've been quitting the medical field in very high numbers:
https://morningconsult.com/2021/10/04/health-care-workers-se...
Yes, because of the lockdown, we have paid a high price, but don't just dismiss the higher price we would have paid if no mitigations had been attempted.
Otherwise if anyone else gives a counterexample you can easily move goalposts on them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
Sweden deaths per million: 1834
U.S. deaths per million: 3043
However you can also choose various European countries that avoided masking children and minimized school disruption. France and UK for starters, but also all the Nordic countries. Sweden being quite different from the other Nordic countries, but all of them being consistent in avoiding school disruption or masking children.
Most of Europe does not recommend vaccinating young children either.
France deaths per million: 2242
Denmark deaths per million: 1122
Paris proper is 2mln people squeezed into a 100km^2 city. Greater Paris is 10mln at a definitely urban density. It's no wonder they had larger death rates and this is a apples to oranges comparison.
[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19...
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
Lockdowns have devasted education:
https://www.economist.com/international/2022/07/07/covid-lea...
The cost to lifetime earnings is estimated to be $17 trillion:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/12/06/l...
Which will massively exacerbate poverty and all of its associated illnesses.
The education losses have been worst for the poor:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/remote-learni...
Social distancing and other COVID control measures, which became mandatory with lockdowns, have been associated with a surge in childhood obesity:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...
And a decline in children's IQ:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34401887/
97 million more people are estimated to be poverty due to the social reaction to COVID, the most drastic and disruptive of which were lockdowns:
https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impac...
It turns out following the lead of an authoritarian communist state on the COVID response, by totally abrogating civil liberties with community quarantines, i.e. lockdowns, wasn't a great idea.
As for voluntary social distancing, it has been found to impose more measurable costs for 89% of the population than it reduces through mitigating risks of contracting COVID.
Truly the "it is what it is" method of governance.
How much more? And how would that increase compare to the drug overdoses and other mental health related deaths that lockdowns caused?
What's the control group you're using to make your claim?
California and Florida couldn't have been further from each other in terms of policy and response, yet the age-adjusted mortalities weren't that far apart [1].
[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...
Ahem.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/politics/donald-trump-testing...
https://floridaphoenix.com/2022/01/06/desantis-admits-roughl...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/19/rebekah-jon...
By the way, despite the rhetoric, states were getting money from the federal government for reporting a COVID death. There was literally a per-death payment. If that is not an incentive to over-report (despite the usual bloviating from Republicans), I don't know what is.
https://www.cms.gov/files/document/se20015.pdf
> Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) Hospitals - Section 3710 of the CARES Act directs the Secretary to increase the weighting factor of the assigned Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) by 20 percent for an individual diagnosed with COVID-19 discharged during the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) period.
Hospitals get to charge Medicare/Medicaid a 20% surcharge for COVID patients and COVID deaths.
Note that this is deaths and patients who test positive for COVID while at the hospital, not deaths/patients whose reason for being in the hospital is COVID. At one point, those were all counted as "COVID hospitalizations/deaths" respectively by the CDC.
Given that COVID tests are tuned to have high sensitivity and (comparatively) low specificity, all a hospital needs to do to get their hands on that money is just give out a lot of COVID tests, and avoid re-testing the false positives. COVID tests are cheap, and to patients, it looks like the hospital being extra careful about keeping them safe from COVID.
I don't expect anyone who has swallowed the pandemic conspiracy theories to change their mind. Perhaps someone who is reading along will gain insights into how misinformation starts and is spread.
It sounds a lot like you were presented with evidence that people, particularly hospital administrators, were incentivized to pump the numbers of COVID cases in the US, and dismissed it as a "conspiracy theory."
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The fact of the matter is that people respond to incentives. Whether consciously or not. When you pay people to hand out COVID diagnoses, you are going to get a lot of COVID diagnoses. Particularly, you are going to get people who accept false positives as true positives.
Note that this doesn't mean that they over-counted cases in total: the US likely still under-counted cases due to all the people who never took a test when they were sick. They just under-counted a lot less than many other countries, thanks in part to the incentives being in favor of producing positive test results. Past epidemics have had reporting rates well under 10% in countries with good surveillance.
In China, the incentives are different. Chinese administrators are heavily incentivized to have fewer COVID diagnoses. This means much more draconian lockdown policies (which reduce the number of true positives for COVID), but it also means that they will accept negative test results (true and false negatives) without much question and try very hard to eliminate false positives.
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IMO the most likely story ("conspiracy theory") is:
1. The US and Western Europe, which had similar disease management policies and similar levels of contact between people, likely had very similar true positive rates of cases.
2. China probably had a lower true positive rate due to using more serious procedures to reduce R.
3. Due to co-morbidities (Americans being fat), cases in the US were on average more serious than cases in the EU, meaning more infected people going to the hospital and more people taking tests. On its own, this raised the reporting rate in the US.
4. Hospital systems and doctors in the US followed their incentives and over-reported cases (still under-counting the actual number of total cases by a factor of at least 2). What could have been "you have a mild cold, go home and get some rest" turned into "better take a COVID test just to be safe," and if that test was positive, it was reported as a case.
5. Hospital systems and doctors in China followed their incentives and under-reported cases (under-counting total cases by a factor of 50+). Things that could be COVID cases, but were unlikely, would get swept under the rug without a test.
6. Hospital systems in the EU ended up somewhere in between the US and China in terms of their surveillance rate.
This logically explains the variance in the reported case numbers between countries that did the same things, and also explains why a rational person could be skeptical of official numbers in certain countries. But sure, offering a narrative that lines up better with reality than the official narrative is a "conspiracy theory." As we all know, the official narrative is always correct, even when it is "there are WMDs in Iraq" or "smoking has no adverse heath effects."
Upon challenge, dialed back to "over-reported cases" or even "under-counted a lot less than many other countries" or "[didn't] try very hard to eliminate false positives" (which is a very strange accusation for different reasons?), still sounds like you have an ideological axe to grind here.
New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday. Australia 1500. The vaccines didn't keep people from dying, they postponed them to the next flu season.
The old and sick will catch covid and die. There is nothing you can do about it. Putting your head in the sand and hoping for a magic bullet to save us - vaccines, masks, lockdowns - just means that the rest of the health system will collapse too. We need to be realistic and prepare for a world in which life expectancy is 10 years lower and we need a lot more hospital beds.
+ New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday.
+ Australia 1500
+ The vaccines didn't keep people from dying
Were wrong? Because a 100% false rate is a pretty high bar, especially since you already admitted 3 was true.
The covid vaccines are shit and don't work.
End of story.
The mental gymnastics needed to claim they do fall apart when you compare them to vaccines for any other deadly disease. We don't still have small pox running rampant in countries with 90%+ vaccination rates. No one walks around telling you that having only your face paralyzed by polio is a great out come and a reason why we should vaccinate toddlers. If you get the MMR vaccine you're not told to be happy that you only got one of the three.
We need to move people's minds to the real world where everyone gets covid during flu season, rename it covid season while we're at it, and build a hospital system to solve that problem.
The vaccines are unreasonably effective given how radically the virus has mutated.
The argument that things had to go this way, that we should just lay down our arms from the outset, throw immunocompromised, children and old folks under the bus, and treat it like "flu season" (which has a vaccine for f's sake!) has bequeathed our massive world-wide (or at least west-wide) gain-of-function laboratory that is bringing powerful new mutations to a geo near you.
Track-and-trace and countless bog-standard public health responses (like requiring masks on planes for f's sake), and yes the occasional lockdown, PLUS the fact that we got lucky on how fast we got vaccines delivering measurable improvement in outcomes, would have been a powerful combo. But it wouldn't have made any money.
When we tried the same thing a second time it didn't work, but that was due to people not following the rules.
It's your fault for not following orders, not our fault.
So if I understand correctly NZ had a short hard lockdown to reduce cases to zero and then maintained it by severely restricting and controlling arrivals from abroad. I live in a Central European country that simply cannot seal itself off from the world like NZ did, we have open borders within the EU via Schengen (a good thing IMO) but there's very little chance of every country in the Schengen area agreeing to follow this model. This means virus carriers would inevitably enter the country, cause an outbreak of cases, necessitating repeated lockdowns and the public would quickly rebel against the measures.
If you could just lock everybody in the world for a month you could basically get rid of all the infectious diseases. However you can't. So lock down only helps to win time.
After you win your time you really need to know what to do with it - e.g. effective vaccine is created in this time.
Otherwise you just delay inevitable and that is it.