The Blind Spot
thegauntlet.substack.com
thegauntlet.substack.com
There was a thriving coffee shop here in my neighbourhood and after the owner (42 y/o) had died of covid it's close to collapsing now.
We'll need much more to recover from this than we had hoped.
COVID killed older and more vulnerable people disproportionately. I’m curious how much this cannibalized the typical mortality rates (categories?) for these groups. That is, what percentage of these individuals would have died over those two years anyways? I imagine this has been studied but I can’t find any sources (and the internet is full of conspiracy junk on this topic.)
Is it statistically significant at all? Or is it truly an extra 1000 deaths per day?
(I’m not implying it would be so significant as to change the point being made… I’m intuiting maybe a few percent)
On average, a 50 year old is going to live another 30 years. Even a 74 year old is going to live an average of another 12 years.
People tend to think that average lifespan works like "take average lifespan, subtract your age, and that is how long you can expect to live" This isn't true, however, as you approach the expected lifespan of the population as a whole. Most people alive will keep living for a while, even if you are pretty old.
Even an 80 year old is likely to live another 8 years on average.
So yes, increased mortality for old people kills people who would be alive for many more years on average.
Though, again, I reassert that I’m not expecting it to be a big number. Just curious if it’s even measurable.
> IFR of COVID-19 among non-elderly populations in the pre-vaccination era is substantially lower than previously calculated (4-8,59), especially in the younger age strata. Median IFRs show a clear age-gradient with approximately 3-4-fold increase for each decade but it starts from as low as 0.0003% among children and adolescents and it reaches 0.5% in the 60-69 years old age group.
This seems to be the thesis. What I don't see is a link to anything demonstrating that masks played a material role in controlling the pandemic.
By now, it's very common for people to know of others who have contracted covid despite multiple vaccinations.
Where are the clinical data showing efficacy of current vaccines against contracting and spreading covid?