Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

> It does come with one major caveat: Because it counts ALL deaths, it cannot on its own disentangle deaths caused by Covid itself, impacts from the lockdowns themselves, impacts from vaccines, or unrelated death trends.

Especially as time goes on, and we see the effects of missed cancer screenings, economic destruction, increased obesity, etc, excess mortality will be almost entirely a measure of side effects of the pandemic response.

My understanding was that actually for people in NZ they were better off than we were in the UK. Yes they had very strong border control so international travel is difficult/impossible, but once it was clear they had it under control the internal restrictions were fairly light. I remember seeing a photo of tens of thousands of people at a rugby game at the same time as fairly serious Covid restrictions in the UK.

I think he's asking the wrong question - if you ask me "am I willing to not leave my country for two years (but have little other restriction)" for 10-15 days of extra life, then yes that sounds fine. I like international travel but can live without it for a while.

I think half hearted Covid restrictions are the problem. The UK has to me the least forgivable Covid situation. We are an island with easily controllable borders (like Japan, NZ, Aus) but we never did. There is a lot of evidence of getting Covid under control and then being re-infected from abroad so it doesn't matter that we got it early - we could have kept it under much better control.

I feel like the common view by people who thought numbers were being artificially inflated was that they were counting people who died while having tested positive for covid being attributed to covid and not just 'the lockdowns'

Fairly distinctly remember a million memes of like a car accident or something else tragic and a caption of "sorry to tell you mam, your son died of covid" or something to that ends.

Also remember hearing attribution to FEMA and other world health organizations offering relief and funding based on a death being covid related or not and so the thought was it was easier to check that box and receive relief to your hospital and get the family's funeral expenses paid for.

Source: ONS

Not only did lockdowns fail, they were unnecessary and cruel and tyrannical. I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was.

The problem with a new disease is that we don't know the long-term impact. Polio led to post-polio syndrome. Tick diseases have impacts decades out. Rabies does nothing for 6 months, and then causes insanity and certain death. Syphilis led to insanity decades later. AIDS has minimal short-term impacts too; death is caused by follow-up diseases.

We know more about the long-term impact of COVID in 2022 than we did in 2020, but we still don't fully understand it. We still don't really understand the impact of multiple, serial COVID infections, as everyone seems to be getting.

When a new disease comes out, I'd like to exterminate it, please. I'm happy to have a month-long full lockdown everywhere it's found, like China did, while the disease dies off. If we can't do that, I'd like to lock down until we have a vaccine, and ideally, until we understand the long-term impact.

I'd take no lock-down over losing 15 days of my life (or a 1-3% chance of death, for that matter). I would take a lock-down over long-term impacts of a disease of the type we've seen with COVID and other diseases. To me, it's a numbers game on long-term health impacts, not on death. Do those happen to 1% of people? To 100% of people? Do they last weeks? Months? Years? The rest of your life? When do they start?

I'd like good answers to those questions on whatever disease comes out next before relaxing.

With travel and population growth, we will see more and more interesting disease. We need a strategy to deal with them. I'm profoundly disappointed COVID didn't lead to us even developing one.

Excess deaths and correcting for reporting reliability is how influenza deaths have been counted since about forever. The conclusion to draw is not that "COVID wasn't so bad" but rather that infectious disease prevention should always be taken more seriously. Policies like WFH, mask use, and limiting exposure to situations where super-spreading can take place should become part of the toolkit for fighting influenza and other infectious diseases.

So it is interesting that not one big popular protest happened because 5 million or more people died because of either covid, or covid containment related reasons like the decline of the economy or unavailable of other services like surgeries. Not only this, in the many important elections that have been held in India, compensation for covid related losses is not a major election issue in any one of those.

So in my opinion, this article‘s conclusion on India is hilariously off the mark. Even most of the liberal media in India which is opposed to Modi and his government and sends people out into the countryside for investigation has said that though there is evidence of economic destruction because of the lockdown and fear there is no evidence of large scale death.

Some BJP supporters will look at articles like these and claim that this is all a vast conspiracy to defame Modi and India. I don’t put much value in such claims. I think the conclusions are because of bad application of statistical reasoning. One size fits all application of some statistical tool on a global scale clearly shows the writer’s lack of understanding and their immaturity. Whatever figures they are using are clearly missing context specific to each country and this makes these results useless.

I went for the first time to Ukraine in the fall and got a fairly heavy case of COVID. My girlfriend is 29 and she was vaccinated with two Moderna shots 2 months prior and also got a heavy case of covid. We took a two-hour bus into another city. The bus was hermetically sealed because the driver bent the aluminum windows railings such that windows don't open to prevent drafts, so that people don't get colds. This was November and nobody was wearing a mask in the bus. By the end of the journey the windows were covered with condensate from 40 people breathing. When we got out of the bus we felt dizzy from lack of oxygen. I think both of us got extremely high doses of the virus and the vaccines were never really tested with those doses: this is why despite the age and recent Moderna vaccinations we both got fairly serious cases.

Our neighbors (Slovakia) count covid deaths after autopsy where covid was main reason of death.

So... Data was collected differently. Conclusions based on those data are relative.

I ask many people about how many people dead because of covid they personally know. For today, I know only one. That lead me for conclusion that I cannot trust my gonverment any more.

I live in Australia and I absolutely hated our policy of mandatory vaccination, but I’m glad our lockdowns saved lives. Don’t reply telling me they weren’t mandatory either. For most people quitting work or study is not an option, so bugger off.

I'm glad to see someone getting into the details. Finally. But I still think the inequities of the pandemic - at least in the USA - are lost when using a national average. We need to drill down further still. We need to ask, what if the poor fared as well as the middle and up? But also, flip it so we understand a true worst case scenario.

"Western" world is OK/Great

Scandinavia is awesome

Eastern Europe and Asia always bad, except for a few "west"-centric states, which are good/ok.

And the more I see this pattern, the more I come to a conclusion that it could not possibly be a representation of any possible data slice, but rather a sign of some systemic bias.

(I enjoyed the article but the lack of scales is killing me)

I'll explain.

Excess Mortality from draconian government responses that caused job loss, depression, excess alcohol and drug deaths, suicides, mixed with adverse events, are just put into the wash, along with actual deaths, and deaths from incorrect medical interventions, as well as propensity towards bad outcomes from unhealthy populations

There is no story of nuance in this, and that is why this is over-averaged dog doo.

are all these countries corrupt or is it WHO that’s corrupt?