Our model suggests that global deaths remain 5% above pre-Covid forecasts
economist.com
economist.com
Edit: to those who brought up ways that the inconvenience was greater than disrupting their preferred daily routines (missed funerals - same happened to me, loneliness, other tragedies). First, I had my share as well and I empathize and mine were fairly horrific with profound impact on me and my family I still struggle with. That comment wasn’t meant for you, but there are many who just simply didn’t like the inconveniences. The rest was for you. It was a global disaster. Disasters are tragedies, heaped upon tragedies. We made good decisions, bad decisions, ineffectual decisions, but ultimately nothing would have made it good, ok, or anything but a disaster of monumental proportion. I’m sorry it was hard for you, it was for me too. It was hard for everyone. I’m down with healing together. I’m down with learning and evaluating. I’m down with building a better society from our pain.
One policy failing in this instance, was our reduction of stockpiled PPE several years earlier.
Since COVID, there has been no discusion or suggestion of how to prepare better for next time
>This seems very inconsistent with what I remember.
Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all saying they won't trust any Trump vaccine <https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...>
>There was a brief period of time I heard "I wouldn't take a trump vaccine", but that was about a month or two before the election.
Ah, this is you doing some searching, realizing that TechBro8615 is right, and trying to justify what you had already written.
Personally, I read the study data for it (and for some of the other 150+ vaccines that had been attempted), and figured I'd go for it when it was available. Which took forever.
"Well, I think that's going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump. And it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about. I will not take his word for it. He wants us to inject bleach. I — no, I will not take his word."
"If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it. Absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it."
GP certainly exaggerated by labelling the situation as minor inconvenience. It was a major upheaval to all our lives. There is no arguing though that curfews can and did help - at least where conducted properly and with support of the populace (there's little hope if people are not even trying to cooperate though); the first "lockdown" (it was called like that but actually there were only curfews here) in Germany comes to mind - things went only downhill here after the first partially re-opened summer when different states and politicians discovered the situation as a way to compete with each other.
This is hindsight though. In the beginning there was no reliable information on transmission vectors or infectiousness and the lack of tests, drugs, vaccines and treatments (even simple things like positioning patients prone to make breathing easier) or simply protection equipment left imo little choice than to treat the situation as severe as possible (better save than sorry).
All in all I think that most of it was unavoidable, although I absolutely agree that this was in every way a situation that was hard to deal with for all of us.
I absolutely argue that they did not “help”. COVID is still here. Everybody will still get it at some point in their lives and it’s no less deadly than it was when the curfews started. They delayed some cases of COVID but did t prevent anything. At enormous cost, any way you measure it.
In a situation where we did not have any lockdowns or curfews or measures in place, there would've been far more deaths because of limited hospital capacity being entirely consumed.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
It was clear lockdowns would end this way almost immediately. The diamond princess cruise ship proved that SARS-CoV-2 spread through aerosols, like a gas. It can spread through air ducts between locked rooms. The moment you accept that, the failure of lockdowns becomes entirely foreseeable. Nor was this unexpected. SARS-1 could spread the same way, as proven by outbreak investigations at the time.
And yes, there were people pointing this out in early 2020. The idea that nothing was known so the most extreme response possible was justified is:
1. Wrong
2. Illogical anyway! There are always unknowns, if you always overreact any time you're in s new situation we diagnose you with an anxiety disorder. It's not normal or healthy.
Neither approach worked. The NZ approach merely delayed the inevitable and was horrific for citizens who wanted to return home and were unable to do so. One NZ citizen had to rely on the kindness of the Taliban because nowhere else would take her. Incidents like that are nothing to be proud of.
Meanwhile, good luck implementing such controls in places where it's easier to get to!
History will record that the country that ignored the hysteria came out with some of the best results in Europe, revealing the truth that expert advice was damaging and futile. Something that was already clear in 2020 to anyone who cared to look.
Anyway, death rates are garbage data during COVID. They were classifying murders by shooting as COVID deaths. They were classifying people who died at 95 as COVID deaths. Where lockdowns were implemented they wanted the measured death rates to be as high as possible to justify what was being done, so classification criteria were as loose as possible. In NZ the political narrative relied on border closures being effective so they needed deaths to be as low as possible. Public health is so corrupt and malign that you can never really know what's going on if you listen to them.
> All the political parties in NZ were unanimous in stating that the elimination strategy was the right choice
Then they are idiots because COVID wasn't eliminated, was it? As you said yourself, their strategy was at best one of delaying the inevitable.
It works when (or rather almost entirely because) you’re in a geographically isolated island.
Maybe the Netherlands could have pulled this of if they really wanted to, like them time they flooded half of the country to keep out the French but it’s not applicable to any other country in Europe
One perspective to consider is resource limitation as how it affected individuals and their families.
There are folks who would have died in the peaks due to resource limitations and public policy smoothed this out. Even post vaccine, I know someone close to me who ended up in ICU with COVID.
They would have died if it was earlier because there was not enough resources. Even if there wasn't formal triaging that just meant it was dumped on care providers without the support of policy.
To you and the others here: look, I'm sorry you missed a funeral or your parents missed the birth of a grandchild or whatever, but please appreciate that for every one of you out there there is someone out that is thankful their spouse or mother didn't die. The lack of empathy has made me lose faith in a big part of society.
I presume you benefit from living in a society. There are trade offs and costs to this benefit. Even if you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, have a business, self made man whatever you benefit regardless of your feelings on others and their entitlements from the infrastructure. It gives you access to whatever it is that you make you living doing.
You are welcome to go live on the trap line and ignore all this and thus abstain but please, please be consistent and don't show up to clog a hospital bed when you get sick from the consequences of you actions.
As an aside certainly some have died from aggressive dog breeds. I personally agree with the bans that exist in some municipalities on them to prevent a toddler from getting mauled. But I can see how some don't and that is a valid perspective.
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
What? Why'd we implement them then? Plenty of people were criticizing the policies, but they were generally overruled in favor of vague goals which were "sold as good," like "flattening the curve."
Relatedly, one of my pet peeves is when people talk about the harms of lockdowns but frame it as "the damage that covid did to children's education." It wasn't the virus that did that damage. It was the policies.
Because they were, as the post you're replying to makes pretty clear, still in the realm of less bad, or at least very probably less bad. The point GP is making is that there were zero "good" options. In a global pandemic, every choice has only bad options, and you try to pick the least bad.
Or in other words, they're saying that the "correct" decision was still ultimately a bad one. And you're trying to frame that statement as though the decisions made were incorrect. That's pretty rhetorically unkind of you.
And even without the policies, things were going to happen.
The initial economic impacts preceded any of the policies by weeks, for instance, and the social changes (including WFH) started rolling out before any formal policies did. The tech companies started to do it weeks ahead of public policy on the matter for instance, because they didn’t have any better alternatives, and it would have been worse otherwise.
Oh how we forget!
I had a business acquaintance in Florida that went from 'COVID is all liberal propaganda', to literally almost dead in the hospital (they had to induce a Coma in him for 2 weeks), to 'I almost died, holy fuck, it's real' all in the space of a month last year.
And an in-law that almost died of it a year and a half ago in Spain, requiring a week in the ICU. He kept insisting it wasn't COVID even after his family had all tested positive (and he refused being tested) until he woke up in the middle of the night and realized he was dying (his words).
Luckily they had figured out the anti-inflammatory treatment at that point, or he likely would have been dead.
The problem is that most COVID cases in hospitals were of people who were infected in hospital itself. They weren't admitted for it. Just looking at "covid cases in hospitals" would therefore be misleading. That was never highlighted by the media or government officials because it was embarrassing but sometimes dashboards would reveal it.
As an example look at Switzerland's data. It's useful because it was still being updated as recently as May.
https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total?hospCapZ...
As you can see, it made no difference whatsoever and actually at the start of the dataset the hospitals are way under utilized.
Some countries have worse hospital systems than Switzerland, and regularly experience shortages of care even in normal times. But this example shows that for a good healthcare system COVID could be handled easily without even coming close to running out of capacity.
Ireland (where I live) have one of the worst, and I followed the numbers religiously for most of Covid. Without the lockdown/other measures to reduce spread, the health care system would have collapsed multiple times (hence why we had some of the longest lockdowns in the world).
Like, my mother had cancer and suffered massively due to the lockdowns (I firmly believe it was a large contributor to her death last year) but that doesn't mean that they weren't necessary, at least in Ireland.
> the health care system would have collapsed
You were told that but the Swiss were told that too. In fact they were told the hospitals were collapsing, even as their own dashboard said the exact opposite.
Governments lied about COVID, all the time. Lockdowns had no impact on spread, and there's a ton of studies showing that by now, just go searching for them on Google Scholar. But you don't even need studies. Just eyeball the graphs of various countries and try to spot the impact on case numbers of these supposedly mandatory interventions. There isn't any. SARS-CoV-2 like all coronaviruses spreads like a gas and these viral clouds can hang around and travel long distances in the air. Lockdowns are meaningless given such a modality of spread.
Which logically I agree with, although I still think that post CDC study on statistically negligible outdoor transmission, any government that didn't allow people to socialize and gather outside was not listening to science and picking worse over bad.
I think we could have done a lot better, even with the available evidence at that time, in finding ways to socialize that wouldn't cause so much mental and economic harm.
The problem was anyone trying to say this, no matter how much evidence they had, was censored and ignored. Called an idiot. Asked "why they wanted to kill grandma". So on and so forth.
"Worse" was treated as "good" for years in spite of the science.
I think the argument would be more convincing if there were a group of people who are still alive that could say they would have been dead without the policies. Obviously this is impossible for anyone to say with certainty, but given that it's the corollary of the "if dead people could talk" argument, perhaps that indicates that both arguments are unfalsifiable and thus ineffective.
This is used to keep things in perspective when talking about such emotional subjects, not be a final word, I believe
My personal pandemic experience was luckier than many . 3 wilderness years of lost time only; of no growth. no loss of business, work , home etc. more importantly I’m alive and so is everyone I love
No teachers died, and there was very little in school transmission. Our provincial health officer in charge made the choice based on the data available. BC has a very low overall COVID death rate compared to other jurisdictions. You can go look up the data on deaths and satisfy yourself that closing schools as long as many jurisdictions did was a stupid idea. The idea that we didn't know that at the time is also suspect, since data driven decision makers like the one in BC opened schools back up once the risk of transmission between children was determined.
Why does every school need to figure out sourcing their own worksheets for teaching kids about oxbow lakes or copper sulphate or whatever? Half the time they look like a teacher made them in 1993 using Windows NT clipart program, a typewriter and a photocopier, the other half of the time they are sloppily and half-heartedly cobbled together by some educational company.
The BBC does do quite a bit of this with BiteSize, bit it still seems limited compared to what I would really hope for.
Attending schools is about 50% education, 50% social development.
Many students don't have strong family structures at home and fall behind academically and socially if not attending in person.
Kids can catch up. I think people perceive the less than 2 years of remote school that these kids are irreversibly behind in some huge proportion.
The good benefit of not dying easily outweighs the bad effect of a slightly less optimal education for a brief period of time.
It's only close to true for those kids that would have done reasonably anyway.
For those kids that don't have the kind of family environment that will allow them to catch up, it's gonna be a long haul. And they may never get there. That weighs on them for the rest of their time — on the education system, while they're still in it. And it weighs on us, in terms of the resources they take away from other children in education, and then on wider society later in life.
Since the lockdowns, there seems to have been a change in the mindset of some groups — skipping school has been made acceptable. There's a whole bunch of kids that might never return to education as a normal routine. It's likely the hangover will be long and painful for some groups.
Schools aren't the solution to the problem you're describing (children with bad homes) and was a problem before COVID.
Bigger picture is that it is better to keep a larger portion of the population from dying or developing long term complications than slightly (very) protect a few children that are already being abused.
If you're really going to stand by your position then I suggest a reasonable compromise and that is expanding access to licensed professional social workers and community health programs that are there to help parents and children succeed in life.
Plenty of students do. The percentage of parents that does is indeed small, but not trivial either.
Re: governmental open source - the government is typically bad at such things. It’ll be private sector, educator, and contributor sourced as with all great things in the space of tech, for better or worse.
One of my friend's daughter was 6 years old in the middle of the mess. He simply could NOT get her to "mode switch"--if she was home and daddy was home it's "vacation time" and anything else was a miserable fight.
He and couple of other families finally got together to pay a teacher and have a "pod" of 4 other children in their local housing development. That way the daughter went to "school" for some number of hours a day and her father didn't have to fight the "mode switch" any more.
All four of those students are now WAY ahead of all their classmates.
But the story (s)he tells is extremely interesting and is useful to others.
Neither individual home tutors nor parental tutoring nor online schooling seemed to be able to solve the problem. The solution required an in-person mode switch of the teacher and environment.
Now, this could obviously be different for, say, college age or adult learners. Young children don't have the same general understanding of conditions that adults do. On the other hand, "mode switch" is a thing even for adults as we talk about "flow" all the time.
The ones I know about were mostly elementary school math teachers, so it was like you had online lessons covering grade 5-9 math, almost overnight. Of course it made me think: "How much work would it take to systematically cover everything?" At least, everything on the elementary and high school level -- perhaps universities are a special case, but for every elementary or high school lessons, you have hundreds of teachers that teach it every year, so a few of them should be capable and willing to do a solid work in front of the camera.
And it would be so incredibly easy! Not in the sense that I would underestimate the work of a good teacher required to make a good lesson... but in the sense that the teachers are already preparing those lessons anyway -- it is their everyday work. The only thing that is needed is for them to repeat the lesson once again, in an empty room in front of the camera.
The greatest actual obstacle is probably that many don't think about it, or don't want the extra work of learning to use the camera, buying the right camera, cutting the video, making and maintaining an online account, etc. Which is why this would benefit from some division of labor. How about letting the teacher prepare and do the lessons, and have someone else operate the camera and cut the videos? The advantage is that the camera person can be the same for many different subjects. More teachers would probably be willing to join the project this way.
Now imagine the easiest possible implementation: very simply edit the videos (just remove the mistakes, or maybe the parts where the teacher took a break, speed up 3x the erasing of the blackboard, etc.), upload those videos to YouTube (to the teachers' accounts if they have some, or to a project's common account if they don't), and then create a simple web catalogue of all the videos. So that the person would visit the homepage, choose the subject, choose the grade, choose the topic, and then see a list of videos from different teachers teaching that topic.
I think the "minimum viable product" should cover at least one subject in one grade completely, so that it is a reliable resource that the user can keep visiting during the entire year, knowing that they will always find what they are looking for. Otherwise, there is really not much advantage over using Google. Expand from there to cover more grades and more subjects. Basically, always provide an equivalent of a textbook for the entire grade, not just a video here and a video there and a disappointment everywhere else. -- But of course, once you have the entire grade of a subject covered, you can keep adding more videos from other teachers even if they do not cover the entire grade. If you have 1 video for one topic, and 3 different videos for another topic, that is perfectly okay. The important thing is that all topics (in given subject and grade) are covered at least by 1 video. Alternative videos are good, because if you don't get it after watching a video, it might help to hear another person explain it differently.
I think you could do all this relatively quickly and cheaply. I mean, if you find teachers willing to do this for free (and I believe you could, considering the fact that a few of them already did it alone), and if the schools provide the empty classrooms in the evening, you basically just need to pay someone with the camera to record the videos, someone to cut the videos, and someone to make the web front end. That would be like, three people's salary, and in return you get hundreds of videos each year.
Providing all those videos for free could dramatically change the experience of education. Anytime a child didn't understand the lesson at school, or was sick, they could watch the lessons at home. This would be an awesome resource for homeschoolers, or for talented kids who want to learn the knowledge of higher grades. Adults could refresh their knowledge, whether out of sheer curiosity, or because they want to help their kids.
And because the contents of school education do not change so fast (except maybe for computer science lessons), the content once produced could be used for decades. And once it is there, it can still be further improved -- like, if you think that some teacher did not explain a certain topic properly, make a better video yourself. If certain knowledge becomes obsolete, or something is added to the curriculum, just record that one lesson.
You could also dub those lessons to the languages of minorities (by different people, again the division of labor), etc.
*
In before "but isn't Khan Academy doing exactly this?" -- yes and no. Yes, Khan Academy provides awesome online education, a strong alternative to schools. And it does much more than I propose here; such as automatically evaluated exercises, tracking of student progress, etc. But the cost is that preparing all this takes a lot of time. Also, the barriers to contributing are high; a random teacher cannot just record their lessons and add them.
I would like to see a system where contributing is simple for teachers, and therefore we could reasonably expect to have the elementary and high school education covered systematically; to have alternative explanations for the same topic, to keep getting new and improved videos for the existing topics, etc. (And there is nothing wrong with having Khan Academy as an alternative to this; the more options, the better.)
But they deliberately chose the least _good_ policies, when it was very obvious that the choices they were making were by far the worst.
What lesson did I learn from this?
I learned that toddlers will throw an epic hissy fit if they don't get what they want, even if what they want is impossible, impractical, or goes against either their own personal interest or the interests of their family. They'll insist on doing things that have a very decent chance of killing them on the spot.
"I want it!" followed by 120 decibel screeching is the behaviour of a toddler.
We're teaching him better, of course. We're teaching about sharing. About saying sorry. Telling him when to say "thank you" and "please". I'm also teaching him not to poke metal utensils into power sockets or to sneeze in my face.
Apparently not all parents bothered with this. Their children grew up to be big children, unable the grasp these simple concepts despite having adult bodies.
Yes, the speed limit on the highway is inconvenient for you if you're late for a meeting. No, nobody cares about you and your stupid appointment, we care about the family of four you might kill for your own convenience if we let you drive as fast as you possibly can.
This is the crux of it. Some people think being allowed to drive as fast as they can is freedom, and any curtailment of that freedom is oppression.
What's truly sad about all of this is not the political polarisation over the type of health policy that goes back centuries[1]. No, it's that Katalin Karikó, the woman who spent here entire life toiling away in obscurity, never got a proper "Thank you!" from the world that she saved.
She should be more famous than Beyoncé and richer than Bill Gates, and instead she's a little-known scientist with a few pats on the back from jealous colleagues mumbling "I could have invented that" under their breath.
[1] Go look up how old the word "quarantine" is and where it originated from.
It’s not even a little bit about being inconvenienced, and anyone who says that is either a straw man or an idiot. It’s about the basic principle of the individual and their rights versus the group.
Of course it was a chaotic natural disaster. The question is, in the face of a natural disaster, do you or do you not want the ability to make your own decisions.
I’m no anarchist or libertarian, but if we can’t understand why those folks are really pissed off and why it has nothing to do with whatever the R-naught actually was, we’ll never make progress.
The fact that people don't see this means they've grown too comfortable with modern society and how far we've become in preventing disease spread. Maybe it'll take a Black Death 2.0 for people to understand this.
So it wasn’t. We knew it was mild, certainly worse than flu, but still mostly killing the elderly above life expectancy.
- We knew newspapers were grossly exaggerating information to the point of saying obvious bait (“the vaccine enlarges the penis” — yup they said it),
- We knew newspapers were under gag order to publish misinformation.
- We knew that most governments declared the law of exception and state of emergency, so from that point, no information could be trusted.
We knew it was mild because everyone was in a state of hysteria, from “SO YOU WANT TO KILL ALL GRANDMOTHERS” to “IN NYC THEY USE GIANT DUMPSTER TRUCKS TO CARRY THE DEADS TO THE MORGUE, SO WHY ARE YOU AGAINST LOCKDOWNS”. We knew it was all a gross exaggeration.
What if Covid had a 50% mortality rate? Would that not have justified a lockdown?
No, not even a 100% mortality rate justifies a lockdown
Movement of individuals (as long as he/she is not moving into your home/territory etc.) is IMO a sacred 'right' that one must offer one's fellow humans. It's a slippery slope if a dire situation however real is used as a justification for a lockdown.
I disagree with the concept that individual freedoms trumps the safety of other's, as does society at large, which deems some level of negligence to be criminal.
I hope the next pandemic has a short incubation period and ultra-high mortality.
1. https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/05/fugitive-with-untreat...
See, you’re using the fallacy, right here. We can still do both.
I was hoping you'd explain in more detail, so I wont have to assume what your reasoning. By "do both", were you perhaps referring to measures like masks mandates while allowing people move freely? Unsurprisingly, some people felt mandates violated the sanctity of their individual rights too.
sangnoir, Think really hard and you will be able to come up with something (where 'both' can be done).
If you cannot come up with anything then I'd say that even having a discourse with someone who can potentially come up with something is pointless because of the wide chasm.
At least as far as COVID is concerned, and that's because COVID isn't a realistic concern for most children.
There are people (children, but also others) for whom it is a marked concern, and appropriate risk mitigation strategies should be taking. Working with the gung-ho assumption that all spaces are essentially risk free would represent a fail in your duty of care.
Some of us are more afraid of an all powerful state using any excuse to further their own interests.
No, certainly not. I want people to make their own informed choices. It can be heart-wrenching for oneself to observe people make (what you think) an obvious wrong choice, but if you had any any life experiences of substance, you will realize that all you can do is give people the most accurate information that you have, but you should never, ever impose your decision (even if it's for the person's good) if the person does not consent to it. One could probably make an exception for very young kids.
Like they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Side note: who exactly decides what is good for the individual?
These are two contradictory sentences. Wanting people to make their own informed choices unimpinged by government action while a virus with the transmissibility of COVID and a 100% fatality rate exists is definitionally being okay with the death of 99% of the human population. Like, that is the outcome so by definition if you're in favour of only dealing with pandemics through personal responsibility and you're saying that would be the case even with a virus with the transmissibility of COVID and a 100% fatality rate, then you are saying that the death of 99% of people in existence is an acceptable outcome. What I am asking is why you believe that.
>I am asking why you are okay with the outcome where 99% of people are dead.
Do you have any real life experiences? this happens all the time, why the fuck do you keep repeating that I actually _want_ people to die? Really evil things happen, when you try and help people even if it is for their own good without their consent. Often _more_ than 99% people will die if you do that. Let me repeat: you do not have enough life experiences. Let me also say another thing: you do not read enough history especially of the 'extermination' kind. There is also a good possibility, that you are a nerd/sociopath if you do not understand the concept of live, and let live.
*I've looked for this over and over since then and haven't been able to find it, I get the feeling it might have been taken offline.
Perfect eradication has to be the objective, not simply stopping it in its tracks. Otherwise, whenever you open up, you start spreading again.
It's also a rather offensive appeal to human superiority in as much as it totally ignores the various animal reservoirs.
I'd never mock the perspective, the situation is too serious.
When there was an active fire threatening my town a couple years, emergency issued an evacuation order and arrested people who came into the area. When I worked as a teacher in the 1990s, I had to get various vaccines as a condition for having a job. When I traveled in 2012, I also had to get some vaccines to visit various countries. Health departments have for a long time required restaurants to control the behavior of their customers including preventing them from, say coughing on the salad bar.
Covid involved the state using it's existing powers on a larger scale, no doubt. And how well it did that can certainly be debated. But all the powers the state used existed already.
So the arguments that try to put paint this situation as fundamentally new and wrong are incorrect. That they were accompanied by efforts to also falsify the nature of the illness itself reinforces the perspective that they were disingenuous. But I recognize people can convince themselves of a lot when it suits them.
if we can’t understand why those folks are really pissed off
As far as I can tell, the anger about state actions against and claims that it was some new are part of the generally polarized state of American politics. So, I think I understand. People are map 'cause they're convinced themselves of self-serving baloney. That's not an unusual source of anger for humans. But this doesn't make me "understanding" as you can imagine. Indeed, those people sure aren't the only angry ones and shouldn't be treat as special for their anger.
If you want something more related in 1948 or some such there was a small outbreak of smallpox in New York. And they vaccinated 80% of the city in a couple of months.
Speaks to me that while the state has and always had had these powers it's become loath to use them.
I think you’ll just have a natural disaster and a man-made disaster as people start shooting over toilet paper.
Look how they acted over haircuts. Look how 3 years later people are shooting folks who use their driveway to turn around.
Americans have a huge credibility issue, and act like god damn chimps flinging shit in the best of times.
You and too many others are afflicted with the idea you live in a vacuum. Your mind palace doesn’t exist to me.
Like outbreaks of:
- Smallpox
- Ebola
- Weaponized Anthrax
- Some other novel bug with high fatality rates.
You don't have to go very far back to figure out WHY the laws being used were put in place. Even in the 60's-70's, if someone had Measles they'd be in enforced quarantine in their house along with the rest of their family until it cleared. Because not doing that kills people. Innocent people. Often a lot more innocent people than the original infected, all because someone got selfish and couldn't control what they were doing.
Look at the number of people killed by Typhoid Mary [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/]
That people are angry is very true. But frankly they'd be angry regardless. It doesn't stop the very real reason why society needs to protect itself.
Then the discussion comes down to 'when is the societally acceptable threshold for measures to be taken'.
I think it's hard to define the "greater good" and even harder to tell who represents it. If you want to have the kind of cooperation you're talking about, it first requires trust. The data confirms trust makes a difference when you compare vaccine uptake in countries like Japan vs. Russia.
There's certainly much to be fed up about, but we can at least derive some practical questions from this experience.
* What was the source of distrust during the pandemic? Was it legitimate or illegitimate?
* Have our institutions earned trust since then so we can do better next time around?
It would be a horrific dystopia as everyone who tried to implement that has found. Competitive and free socialists always outcompete "radically cooperative" societies because the latter is always implemented through violence and coercion. There's no such thing as "radically cooperative" and also kind, the two are incompatible.
No offense, but from the first part of your comment, it is clear you were part of the problem, not the solution, on this front.
We did all the things you suggest after the last pandemic. The findings strongly cautioned against attempting another lockdown. For covid, that advice was ignored, and now we are seeing excess deaths comparable to the “isolate just the most vulnerable, and get it over with in a month or two” approach, along with huge economic and societal costs from the lockdowns.
It was perhaps the single greatest tragedy in America since WWII and we basically said “think of the economy!” and happily sent everyone back after a very limited period of time.
We learned nothing.
Oh hell no. I did not live through an "inconvenience". I and my kids now inhabit a world that will deal with the societal and economic damage for many years.
And no, I'm not just going to let slide a historically unprecedented, in scope and scale, change in citizen/government dynamics, and for a disease where you couldn't even begin to question the official narrative without being branded an evil anti-vaxxer.
We absolutely need to analyse what was done, and sort the panicked, fear-driven polices from what was useful.
>what are you still complaining about? you won, no one likes a sore winner.
"Won" means that we are all allowed out of our houses?
I'm complaining about the damage that has been done.
weird, this headline doesn't say lockdowns costing workers up to £1.5bn in lost income. But i'm sure you're very concerned about that damage too.
https://www.platinumaccounting.com.au/blog/melbourne-lockdow...
It fit the logistics curve to <0.1%, except for super spreader events, which afterwards, it still was very close.
All the policies, were designed around herd immunity which maximizes deaths, except for the WHO which fallowed Fauchi.
An acquaintance of mine, M, lost 19 family members to the pandemic. My family, mostly very well educated, went super paranoid, and we only had two late Omichron infections.
I am sorry it was hard for everyone, I wish we followed proticalls.
You are a commenter, for whom I read ever post.
It’s talked about in terms of Long COVID and whether or not it’s psychosomatic, the policies made during the lockdowns, and so forth, but always with so much emotion, and sometimes for good reason. I don’t want to dismiss that or trivialize it. Those are important topics to discuss for how we’ll handle future pandemics.
But the evidence is accumulating that COVID does seem to impact CD8+ T cells, causing T cell exhaustion and reduced effector response. One running hypothesis is that the impaired immune response is caused by a persistent viral reservoir infection, particularly in the gut (although not all people show signs of a spike protein months after the initial infection) causing your CD8+ T cells to express more inhibitory receptors (similar to what happens in HIV or cancer with excessive and prolonged exposure to cancer cells).
Another hypothesis that is lesser known but I find particularly compelling is gut dysbiosis following a COVID infection causing a persistent immune activation that leads to T cell exhaustion or impaired T cell functionality especially through persistent activation of the dendritic cells (which are important for presenting antigens to the adaptive immune systems (i.e. T cells, B cells, etc)).
I think a researcher put it best when they said COVID is roughly halfway between HIV and the common cold in terms of the impact it has on the immune system. It may also not be accurate. We have to find out.
For context, think about how long it took to realize the Epstein Barr virus was a causal factor in multiple sclerosis. It took years of evidence collecting and data analysis to eliminate other confounding variables.
We shouldn’t rush to judgement or a narrative, but remain calm and dispassionate here and examine what’s going on, both for the virus, the vaccine, and the actions taken during the pandemic. It’s important we get it right.
I really want to echo this. We are talking about millions of lives a year right now, and basically every human has been infected. We need a solid answer for why some people have long term health impacts and others do not. There are many brilliant people working on this problem. Let's accept that this might actually be a complicated long term problem.
A majority, maybe. Certainly not "basically every human".
It’s pretty statistically unlikely at this point.
Pretty sure that's not true!
It's possible some significant percentage of people had it, but don't know they had it due to lack of symptoms and no positive test, I'll give you that.
I doubt the percentage of people who has never had it at all is over 1% though, I'd guess closer to 0.01-0.1%
Let's try not to be lazy with language: If they had no symptoms, then they didn't have COVID-19, the disease defined by a combination of its cause and symptoms.
Because I suspect for every asymptomatic person who only know they had it due to a positive test (maybe they were being cautious following a possible exposure), there are more asymptomatic people who never thought to get tested, and therefore don't know they had it.
I've poked at it on and off for years, but it does really annoy me how people mean the first when they say the second. It's been so bad for so long that few people actually understood Pfizer's press release for their vaccine back in 2020, which did distinguish between the two terms. Ended up in pretty regular arguments with people claiming "Pfizer said..." when Pfizer said no such thing, they just didn't understand what Pfizer did say. This includes media and politicians (not that I was arguing with them, but that they were also wrong and people were using them as sources).
I live in Canada, where pharmacies have been giving out free "COVID-19 antigen" tests, which initially were required to take for people who either had symptoms of COVID-19 or had been in contact with other people who had tested positive, even if they didn't have symptoms.
I took a look at the test kit right now, and it doesn't make this distinction; whether or not you're symptomatic, the test tells you whether you have likely been infected with COVID-19 if you test positive for COVID-19 antigens. Let me read you some of what's on the box:
> If you do not have symptoms of COVID-19, you will need at least two tests per person.
> COVID-19 Antigen self-test for infection detection
> in-vitro diagnostics for detection and/or diagnosis of COVID-19
From the instruction booklet included:
> If your first or second test is positive, then proteins from the virus that causes COVID-19 have been found in your specimen and you likely have COVID-19
It does insinuate that there's a possibility you could test positive and still not have COVID-19, but there's no indication that this is related to whether or not you're symptomatic. Everything about the packaging and instructions indicates to me that if you test positive, you likely have COVID-19, even if you're asymptomatic
I would say half of my social circle never got COVID. A decent chunk of which had to test frequently throughout the whole thing due to the circumstances of their work. I never had it.
Also, how did you manage to not get infected?
In particular:
- "COVID does seem to impact CD8+ T cells": the adjustment I'd make here is that evidence exists that COVID *can* influence T cells, not that it always does.
- "causing T cell exhaustion and reduced effector response.": a quick google suggests there is some conflicting evidence on this point, and most of the studies are done on t cell responses to vaccines delivered after infections, which is a very particular thing.
It seems like you're drawing very heavily from Anthony Leonardi, who, while definitely a scientist and likely right about some things, isn't exactly someone with median (or emotionless) opinions on long covid. The HIV comparison in particular is really out there and unnecessary.
Which goes to say that many of the people who would have died now, so to speak, have in fact died one or two years prior, during the pandemic. Can't find the link, but a similar effect was noticed in Netherlands after their great famine of 1944-1945, which was followed by about a decade of bellow average death numbers.
For those interested the Excel with the official data is in here [1], it's in Romanian but relatively easy enough to understand the data in there.
[1] https://insse.ro/cms/sites/default/files/com_presa/anexa_dat...
I resent the fact that statements like this have become political and that I now have to explain myself. Nevertheless, here we go: I have no vested interested in this being true. I've had two doses of the stuff, I want it not to be true. However, there are legitimate questions here that have not been satisfactorily addressed. I'm raising this because reading the article and the other comments I can see nobody else has.
I would encourage people to look at the link and scrutinise the evidence presented themselves before deciding whether or not there might be an issue here that needs looking at.
[0]: https://www.hartgroup.org/what-are-people-not-dying-of/
I was so tired for two weeks, I literally spent a good hour watching a shadow moving across the wall, hyping myself up thinking "when that bit of shadow hits that spot, I will have the energy to get up from this chair"
It was no joke, and with young kids, I caught my fair share of other bugs over the last 6 years. I'm not surprised at all that this pushes some people over the edge, like influenza.
I wonder how this trend plays out in the long run. I.e. how many of the 0.3% were due to die in the next few years because of existing health conditions?
It's interesting how people reacted during the pandemic.
While I sympathise with anyone that has a loved one that is vulnerable to disease (I certainly have some!), one could make the case that many lives could be saved by banning sugar and forcing mandatory gym memberships. You could argue that one is within our control vs the other - but you could also argue that many are not in control of their addictions (food for example) as well.
The scariest part of it all for me was the way government quickly attempts to rewrite the rules and gain control. Being in Melbourne where the gov tried pushing through a bill to give them seemingly unlimited power during "emergencies" (as defined by them) was really crazy.
“They were going to die anyways!” was always a common argument one among the “muh freedoms!” crowd. When someone dies in a car crash, we don’t just shrug it off if the victim was terminally ill. Why is this different? A preventable death is still a preventable death and their life still has value whether it’s for another 20 years or 20 days.
This is avoiding the question by being emotive and vague. Would you trade the life of somebody who had 30 years more to live for the life of someone who had 30 seconds to live? Why or why not?
Just like your follow up question, which is similarly irrelevant, since changing behaviours to save lives isn’t at all the same as trading lives.
What I'm asking is what the percentage difference is, of those that are not vulnerable - which is still a valid question to be asking.
Assuming the cause is covid and it matches the past three years, like 80-90% of them. The average age of covid deaths has always been above the average life expectancy.
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/USA-CASU...
I think the term you're thinking of is "has wreaked" which is the present perfect tense of "wreak" which means to inflict or avenge.
You are statistically more likely to die if you took a Covid vaccine.
https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-devils-advocat...
We said the vaxx would cause more heart attacks, blood clots and cancers, and few people listened. Those things happened, deaths skyrocketed starting in mid-2021, and everyone is still in denial.
If you don’t believe me, go to this website, filter by 25-44 and set the time range from Jan 2020-2023.
https://www.usmortality.com/deaths/weekly
The big jump in deaths for young people happened in the middle of 2021… do people think Covid only started killing young people mid-2021? That the virus waited over a year before killing in this age group?
Overall - young people don’t die of Covid. Look at this table: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
About 45k people died of Covid in the age group we’re talking about during entire pandemic. Every week of 2021 thousands of excess deaths occurred in that age group. So Covid deaths come nowhere close to covering young people’s excess deaths. It’s the stupid vaccine - Covid doesn’t even cause myocarditis, see this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/
All studies funded by CDC that say “Covid causes more myocarditis than vaxx” were damage control. They fabricate data and the science is fraudulent. If you do country by country comparisons by vaccination rate as in the first link it becomes very obvious.
Also where do you live? I'm curious what your experience was.
Be careful to equate correlation, i.e. fewer deaths due to stringent lockdowns to causation
Or just contrast what you said with what at the time came known as the "Swedish Experiment". You know, letting kids and teenagers go to school.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-...
Population wise we're small but not tiny. We're 2.5X Sweden population, we're more populous than all of Scandinavia. Land wise we're around the size of the continental USA.
"shielded itself from the rest of humanity for two years"
We also did ok stopping it spreading within the nation also.
(Eyeballing it side-by-side with the vaccination map here: https://fortune.com/2021/06/30/covid-vaccines-global-vaccina... )
You can sometimes even see this effect in one country, if all the old people are vaccinated and none of the young people are, you'll still probably get more COVID deaths per old person. If you just look at mortality by vaccination status you'll see lots more COVID deaths in the vaccinated cohort, but that's because the vaccinated cohort is just old.
East has low vaccination rates and high excess mortality, north has high vaccination rate and low excess deaths.
Africa and South America could be different effects. I don't know how thoroughly they do, can or want to track excess deaths.
It’s just that buying a fake vaccination was(still is?) a thing. I don’t know the extent of this, but you could just bribe a doctor to issue a vaccination certificate and throw the vaccine in the thrash. The whole affair was very disappointing.
I wonder how many deaths could have been avoided were it not for vaccine skepticism.
[1] https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2022/3/17/22979105/covid...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trooper-co...
https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1632003510274347010
Here the vaccination rate
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1196071/covid-19-vaccina...
1. How bad Covid was, like was it a big deal or not.
2. The effectiveness of the means we had at our disposal to do anything about it.
At least in the US everyone’s responses are highly correlated.
For example: if you think Covid is a big deal you think we should have taken all the measures we took and that relaxing restrictions was a mistake.
If you’re on the other team you feel like we shouldn’t have done the interventions and lockdowns because you think Covid is not that big a deal and is overhyped.
I feel most attracted to the group that agrees that Covid is a pretty big deal and very deadly and an incredible tragedy.
I also think that except for the vaccines we’ve never had much control over it at all, and that for the most part the various lockdowns and mandates were pretty pointless after the first few months had passed and we knew what we were dealing with.
Not much of a constituency for this point of view in the narrative, though I feel like it might be commonly held.
For example, closing public beaches was an overreaction. It was pointless and had no positive effect at all. Noticing that doesn’t prove that we did enough.
It’s still possible that we didn’t manufacture vaccines or staff hospitals fast enough for example.
We didn’t know at the time that closing beaches was useless. Once we found out, those bans started to be reversed.
That is why the ‘slogan’.
If you take proactive precautions based on what might help, you’ll always look like you were overreacting afterwards because not all of them will be true.
On the flip side, if you wait for solid evidence of what is actually effective or not, you’ll definitely end up with much larger spread and more damage, because it takes a lot of time for that data to be gathered, confounding variables to be identified, etc.
In the face of an unknown pathogen, (like an unknown enemy in a war), it’s important to defend against apparent threats, not just wait to see which ones are real - as by then it’s too late.
Health authorities should have been better prepared for a respiratory pandemic, period. We spend too much money on public health for the response we got.
I assume that at least one health authority on this planet would've been prepared and know exactly how to respond, according to your expertise.
Knowing things doesn't magically grant you power over the spread of the virus.
The reality is that nobody had that power and no amount of expertise was going to fix that.
The vaccine does reduce deaths dramatically in sensitive populations.
Based on the European data and NYC data, that legitimately did save likely millions of lives in the US.
[https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/sars/estimates-sars-death-rates-r...]
During the first year of the pandemic, figuring out much of anything except that bodies were piling up faster than they could be managed in all the cities was extremely difficult, and there was a lot of clear political manipulation of the numbers everywhere, so trust was... thin. To put it mildly.
COVID was clearly not as bad as SARS, but it was also clearly not the Flu.
So what was the correct policy exactly?
Here's one easy one: Don't use medical jargon in news/media. For example, they shouldn't have called it a "novel coronavirus". It means something specific and totally different in a medical context as it does to the layperson, and I expect it was a huge part of the overreaction.
Unless the CDC gave everyone talking points they had to stick to (and somehow enforced it, aka China) it’s also not in the gov’ts power to tell the press how they should present things.
There were a lot of mistakes, but that we can see them instead of being shot for noticing them is a pretty big plus - and definitely better than how a lot of places handled it!
"Novel coronavirus" to the layperson means "this is a totally new virus and we don't know anything about how it's going to act", so all previous knowledge about coronaviruses was thrown out and relearned over the past three years.
I thought it was based in the “China created it” vs. “came from bats” arguments, i.e., man made (and this novel; of at least partial descent that our immune system had never before encountered), versus natural.
Wow. Learn something new each day.
Is that really people’s understanding?
Governments the world over made it their business to control what what put out — through the MSM, and many other channels.
Many outlets were cautious of breaching the rules. In many cases, control was hands off — through peer pressure, if you will — but there were many well-publicised cases of direct intervention (for example, but it’s only one example, see the Twitter Files).
In other places, yes the gov't sends the press what they are allowed to say and if they deviate they'll be shot.
No one (even the US) ignores the press entirely, especially when foreign actors are actively trying to manipulate the press. It's the degree of independent that matters though.
In other words, they didn't have much of a handle on what subclinical SARS-coronavirus case fatality rate was. I'm not sure if hospitalized COVID-19 patients recovered better or worse than SARS.
With COVID, it could spread asymptomatically (and did), and it was never clearly fatal enough that EVERYONE took it seriously, which allowed it to spread easier.
Another huge part of it IMO was it took awhile to develop reliable tests. The PCR test had up to 50% false negative rate for infections depending on when during the infection the samples were taken, and took awhile to get results back.
Antibody tests didn't happen for a long time, so even retroactive knowledge was spotty, and antigen tests were a year+ out, and also had a relatively high false negative rate but at least were faster and more reliable (fewer false positives).
Since it was clearly infectious without major symptoms, and the symptoms were often so vague (cold and flu like unless it got really bad) it was really hard to figure out what was actually going on.
In my crappy eastern europe home country, there was curfew after 8pm long after most of western europe abandoned any restrictions. I like to clear my head by long evening walks. I simply couldn't when being home, it felt I came to North Korea since cops back there are overzealous and often enjoy flexing their powers on common folks.
Many policies were good and at least somewhat effective, some were outright restrictive or punitive bullshit with 0 positive effect, just fucking up people mentally more than they already were. That I think was the main point of critique - policy makers looked hard on numbers alone, not on psychological impacts of pushing too far. Its like chasing everything that kills people, you soon end up banning all cars since numbers alone are pretty horrible.
We have generation of kids who are subtly (or not) fucked up, more than they should have been. Maybe 50 million affected? Many grandmas would gladly increase their risks a bit if they could see more freedom to their grandchildren, you have different (often better) priorities when older.
But most old folks I know were explicitly NOT visiting folks, not because of policies, but because they didn't want to die.
And some I know that did anyway did in fact die - and their family has to deal with knowing they infected them and caused them to die. Which also causes some serious head fucking up.
Year after year we’re treated to idiotic policy decisions with obvious consequence like invading middle eastern countries for no reason, allowing obviously illegal and harmful market consolidation and mergers, mass delivery of opiates to literally everyone, and so forth.
All the while people who gain massive amounts of power and money from the system tell us we’re just not “serious” when we predict the consequences. We’re told to trust the experts but then the self apointed expert class is not held accountable whatsoever when they come true.
Fuck that, if people want to be entrusted with policy power they should get things right. And if they get it wrong, fine, but let’s hold them accountable and notice who was right the whole time.
A lot of the Covid policy decisions were idiotic and symbolic and wildly inconsistent, and many were based on lies or conflict of interest. It’s fine to notice that this is a problem.
Those things you're talking about don't seem to have anything to do with the topic at hand though?
I agree re: many of the Covid policy decisions you mention at the end, but frankly given the options they had available I'm not sure I (or anyone) could have done anything different given the circumstances.
And not you obviously, but my point is that "nobody could have predicted" is such an overused response by people with authority it should be banned.
In every relevant instance of major policy failure people actually did predict it, but the people in charge were corrupted by the wrong incentives, made predictable mistakes, and don't feel like being held accountable for it.
Who exactly should be held accountable how, anyway?
Near as I can tell, none of them were meaningfully violating any laws. If anything, they were being extremely cautious not to. The public health acts give them a LOT more power than they were using.
In aggregate, other interventions probably did some good at the margins? Especially early on? But it's easy to look at the policies in some countries and declare success--so long as you look at the right time window.
Some other things that have happened since before COVID which would cause an increase in pre-COVID forecasts include a war between the world's two global superpowers, a global recession and disruption of the supply chain, a massive shortage of healthcare workers in many countries, and an enormous spike in usage of fentanyl in the developed world.
COVID plus any or all of those factors are contributing to excess deaths.
Also even in the scenario you post as a semi-gotcha moment wouldn't be counted as COVID-related, but I would hope it would be obvious to you that certain fast growing cancers have significantly better prognosis if caught early.
This is true at every level. From downplaying mistakes in nursing homes in NY, to fudging numbers in FL, to Trump wishing we’d stop testing, to Biden proclaiming victory upon the vaccine rollout, it’s all the same incentive.
And it wasn't just medium-long term issues like cancer diagnosis that was impacted but very time sensitive medical emergencies also, like heart attacks. The pandemic increased ambulance response times, time to emergency room beds, stretching of healthcare resources over emergency departments, even things like the added PPE requirements slowed everything down.
100k of those are drug overdoses in the US (the place with by far the highest rate of fentanyl use). There is a similar number of killed in the first year of the Ukraine war. The economist is pointing out the estimates are off by 3M lives, so those two directly account for less than 10%.
Yeah I don't think Russia qualifies as a superpower anymore...
Is it worth a 50% gdp hit to reduce cases by 10%?
How many deaths are caused by reduced economic output?
It is not. Fortunately those numbers aren't remotely close to reality.
Or perhaps we would not eradicate COVID, but we'd avoid dying from it, and we'd have reduced quality of life forever.
https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/why-do-vaccinated-people-re...
There are an awful lot of public health measures not being taken that would have little to no impact on economic output, yet, society still can't seem to be bothered.
https://www.coxhealth.com/newsroom/preventing-covid-19-using...
as a forever covid die-hard, in my ideal world I'd like to see:
better mask education - the US did an absolutely awful job at recognizing that all masks are not created equal, specifically that cloth and surgical masks are not as effective as KN95 or N95 masks
free mask distribution - not everyone can afford to purchase new, high quality masks for regular use.
free covid testing - if we're not giving people free access to testing, then how can anyone make a proper risk assessment of current covid levels?
mask mandates - this does not have to be legally enforced by any means, but a mandate would show folks that masks are encouraged and needed at this time. Some people wearing masks is better than no one.
indoor air testing/filtration improvement - for everyone who can't or won't wear masks, having minimum air quality levels for large indoor spaces/events would also help cut down on transmission.
there's probably some more here i'm forgetting, but my point being is that an individual doesn't have to do everything here for us to decrease transmission of covid, nor do we have to shut down society to have that same effect.
Radio Yerevan was asked: "Why does Russia have high excess deaths, is it because of the what the government has deemed as special military operation?"
Radio Yerevan answered: "No, it's because of Covid."
Radio Yerevan was further asked: "Is the government mishandling the Covid-crisis?"
Radio Yerevan answered: "The government has successfully managed the pandemic and ended Covid."
https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-globa...
Also, 5% less demand for cattle and resources or so.