Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
natesilver.net
natesilver.net
Blah blah blah 'I mostly agree with ... an October 2020 anti-lockdown statement signed by a large number of scientists and medical professionals. “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal”' blah blah.
I don't have any regrets about the position I took, since it seemed to be based on all the verified information we had at the time. YET, I hope our society will embrace the fact that we were largely wrong to prolong the lockdown measures. Humility doesn't hurt the Left either.
Many, many lives were permanently affected in multiple, very negative ways, with no chance of returning to pre-covid "normal." The resentment and frustration from individual lives being crushed while the entire ordeal seemingly aligned and advanced corporate interests, is only triggered further by the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ attitude.
We should have higher rates of vaccination worldwide, not lower.
I agree that forcing vaccines on people was, at the very least, ethically questionable. OTOH, there was a tremendous amount of misinformation and fear-mongering that would have had an outsized negative effect on the public health response, were vaccines not mandated.
There’s plenty of blame to go around.
"A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else, it cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people." -- Rachel Maddow
"When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health ... in other words, you become a dead end to the virus." -- Fauci
"If you have had COVID-19 before, please still get vaccinated" -- Rochelle Walensky
You believe they were not real?
Sometimes I would love to see how corona would have ripped through your country and killed even more faster without any look down...
This is a non-sequitur.
It’s possible to believe Covid really did kill a lot of people and simultaneously believe that the lockdowns did not prevent enough deaths to be worth their negative effects.
I think it's valid and was one of the few indications we had.
Additionally to Italy.
It also correlates with the long and huge problem of ICU beds in germany
As for myself though, you can see from an April 2020 comment that I'm a bit of an anomaly. Even though I felt more aligned with "the other side" I was maybe closer to the middle:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22929971
I'm pretty sure I've always, for instance, opposed tech censorship on the subject. Especially during the mid-year riots the way they demonized the anti-lockdown protests by comparison was insane and I recognized it as such then. I could pull up some old tweets if you want.
I was at home and isolating while looking at the hospital stats.
I waited for a vaccine and didn't get alpha.
When I did get COVID I already had a shot.
I was wearing an easy to wear mask and washing my hands (as I did before and still do).
The most frustrating thing to me is and was that we still live in a society were we can afford a lockdown but can't make it work.
It's the capitalism who can't handle a pandemic reasonable.
For example, asserting that the government was enforcing strict lockdown measures in October 2020, if ever. This is despite obvious evidence that people preferred staying home, such as the still historically low rate of people working from offices.
I wasn't wrong once, from the first videos from China in January 2020. it's been amusing to watch people overthink and moralize and become very rabid over side alley of side alleys of 3 simple facts a high schooler knows: "very contagious respiratory disease bad, vaxx's don't prevent infection or transmission, people like working from home"
- masks: clearly they worked for the medical professionals that were treating patients during the first waves, as they were directly exposed and didn't get sick, why didn't they work for the population at large? Did we not wear them correctly, consistently?
- schools: It seems obvious that schools could be a huge vector of transmission, kids largely were asymptomatic and when they got sick, they would still spread it, both inside the school and to their vulnerable relatives. Were the school shutdowns a mistake? Should they have been done differently?
* If you think they're an effective measure for the public in general (which is probably closest to my position), then the variation in studies seems like it should still give you pause because it seems like the way mandates and messaging are implemented could undermine the usefulness. * If you think they're effective in individual cases when people do it diligently, it still seems like you should be worried about the possibility that a lot of people who think they're diligently and correctly masking aren't, including some medical professionals who are regularly exposed to the disease. * Honestly, even if you don't think they work at all, it still seems like learning why masks don't work would expand our knowledge of the disease.
Of course, we do know about plenty of factors that undermine mask effectiveness: people avoiding them altogether, people wearing ones that don't fit, people not covering their nose, etc. And of course researchers can skew the results with their methodological choices. But there seems to be enough variability in these studies that unknown or underappreciated factors could be significant.
If we're talking cloth masks as most people are, the viruses are actually way smaller.
Test 1, spray from 2 feet. Of course the paper was soaked.
Test 2, a cloth mask placed on the paper. It gets damp, especially if left in place.
Test 3, a cloth mask over the spray bottle. The mask blocks almost all of the spray.
We did not bother with test 4 (2 masks) after the 3rd, but I think they understood the point.
We did retry 3 with a medical mask, with 0 spray through.
My attitude pretty much the whole pandemic was 80/20 rule. Everybody seemed to be fighting for the extremes which gave us less optimal results. I didn't see anybody suggesting masking kids indoors especially during deep winter, but then giving them extra time for outdoor play with no restrictions (distancing etc). The transmission outdoors might not be zero but it would be much less, so it would be a much reduced vector. That seems like a good tradeoff for their mental health. Or if not this exactly, something like this. Or what about class outdoors, or open windows and fans instead of masks. I don't recall there even being a discussion like this; granted I'm not a parent.
(caveat: This all assumes masks work and that kids are actually a big vector. I've heard contrary views on both.)
RE: schools, they have been and continue to be a reservoir for COVID and other nasties. Even this September, like clockwork, COVID is ticking back up in the waste treatment tests. I'm still waiting for society to have a conversation about what role schools should fill and how we ensure schools operate the way that people think they should. Additionally, schools should be able to turn away students who are sick--right now it's all honor based and kids with fevers have to be accommodated.
1) The US didn’t have enough N-95 masks. In Asia where masks in public were more common people used masks from their home supply. I think some segments of the population were resentful that the US didn’t have access to the best masks and Asia did. 2) We had only a general idea of who was high risk. 3) We had only a general idea of the long term impacts of the virus. There was some initial concern that the virus could be like the Zitka virus where mortality rates dramatically increase with the second exposure. If that were the case the second waves could have killed off half the population with wide transmission. 4) Households aren’t homogeneous and it is near impossible to prevent transmission from a possibly asymptomatic child to a high risk adult when they share the same home.
Unfortunately given the lack of consistent messaging about masks in the US one segment of the populations believed that the masks were to protect themselves and the other segment believed it was to protect others. Those that were low risk and believed it was to protect themselves resented the masks and those that saw the masks as a way to protect others resented those that resented the masks. I think those polarized views still persist today.
I observed this sentiment in particular about return to school, and not just about masks. A sizable portion of the population would seemingly do anything to avoid accidentally helping someone else.
Likewise, however I should also add that in my case there's no risk component — not only because I get free FFP2 masks at my workplace, but also because it appears that one of the many ways that I'm unusual is that masks (and I mean this literally) cause me less issues than does my underwear.
Even if I wear a mask for a 31 km walk, it's the socks and underpants that pinch or restrict first, not the mask.
In a large meta-analysis[2] the Cochrane Collaboration did not find convincing evidence that masks work. Here is a single sentence taken from the author's conclusions:
"The pooled results of RCTs [Randomly Controlled Trials] did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks."
This gives me pause; I was one of the dedicated mask wearers during the pandemic, but now I realize that we don't know that they did any good. Please note that I am saying we don't know if the masks worked; I'm not saying that the masks didn't work, just that we don't know that they did.
I've included above just a single sentence from the the Cochrane review titled Do physical measures such as hand-washing or wearing masks stop or slow down the spread of respiratory viruses?, the review is available online and is easy to read. I encourage those that think they know that masks either work or don't work to read the entire review for themselves.
[2] https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-s...
Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them?
I’m guessing it’s hard to quantify and compare. A lot of things like general depression, isolation, kids missing half a year of school, etc. can’t really be evaluated against people dying. And on its surface it seems obvious: uh, people dying is much worse than any of those things.
But if I said that everything we did was to save one life, people probably would generally agree it wasn’t worth it (obviously so: people don’t seem too interested in preventing all kinds of deaths at all costs). What about ten lives? One thousand? Ten thousand? There’s some subjective level where it starts to feel obvious to more and more of us, until a majority of us agree.
But do we have any general sense what that number is? How do we decide how much to care? It might seem ghoulish to decide how many dollars is worth a life, but we do it every day.
With the data we have now, I imagine we can somewhat quantify this given enough sample jurisdictions with different rules? “Masking saves x lives per 1000.” “Closing schools saves y lives per 1000” etc. And perhaps then we’re able to decide “is x lives worth the qualitative harm done?” Probably. “What about y?” Maybe not.
My works HR department got sick of having people use "logic" and "evidence" to argue against their policies. After kicking a few people out the door and generally saying you can't talk about this at work anymore, nobody talks about it.
Luckily my workplace was mature enough to decide to leave those topics for the pub and social media so we didn’t have to be told that.
Many times when folks who tell me they're presenting "logic" and "evidence" in a debate they're personally invested in there's grave flaws in both their logic and evidence presented. The freedom to intellectually debate HR's policies in a company is rightly limited, you can call it "censorship" but endless uninvited earnest debate about policies isn't really wanted or needed in the workplace.
At the end of the day, you can always choose not to play.
edit: I dont want to name the policy as it may identify the company. It was a particularly idiotic one though.
"Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates."
Fascinating how natural it comes to us: “my experience must be everyone’s experience.”
https://videos.elmundo.es/v/0_djmhws8v-la-policia-baja-a-bus...
https://www.levante-emv.com/safor/2020/04/13/helicoptero-pol...
I live in Paris, and at the height of "stay at home" mandates, it was a ghost town. I had an actual reason to get out a few times, and let me tell you there were less people outside in broad daylight than there currently is in the middle of the night, which was really eerie.
There was enforcement too, since the police had pretty much nothing else to do there during the full mandates (not the latter weaker ones).
W.Australia's COVID-19 vaccine roll-out began 22 February 2021.
The state remained isolated from 24th March 2020 until 3rd March 2022, by which time essentially every person in the state had been double vaccinated.
For the most part people continued life as before, now and again the capital city would have portions "locked down" when there was an active case in order to contain spread and test potential carriers.
The first active case was the 21st February 2020, contained. The first COVID death was 1st Mar 2020. Active case numbers stayed low until There was no real increase in active cases until February 2022. There was no significant increase in deaths due to COVID until March 2022.
"Shelter in state until vaccinations rolled out" for a state that was already largely independant and isolated worked just fine - the deaths started once the borders opened, but at rates greatly below those seen elsewhere in the world thanks to a vaccination buffering.
W.Australian cases Jan 2020 - now: https://covidlive.com.au/report/daily-cases/wa#2020
W.Australian deaths Jan 2020 - now: https://covidlive.com.au/report/daily-deaths/wa#2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Western_A...
It is an extremely rare situation though, and would not have been possible if it were not the most isolated capital city in the world.
A lot of emphasis was placed on preventable deaths. That is; situations where we’re turning away a patient that we could’ve saved, because we don’t have a bed available for them.
I thought this was a solid, intuitive approach. Preventable deaths are really, really unfortunate.
But if after every hockey game 20 hospital beds get used up, that's as risky for the health system as allowing a restaurant to serve uncooked chicken for an evening.
Do we need to call in military hospital ships? Maybe we do stuff that reduces communication of disease, reduces driving to reduce road accidents, etc.
Where I live it was communicated more than once, “avoid doing riskier things this holiday season because the emergency services you expect to be available may not be.”
Here in Ontario, the McKinsey-driven "Science Table" frequently referenced hospital capacity in their reports, but their modelling often ended up being off by orders of magnitude.
While I concur that preventable deaths are unfortunate, I don't think there's evidence to suggest that most - all? - of the restrictions put in place had any noticeable impact on preventable deaths from Covid.
If anything, those restrictions very much enabled other deaths - from mental health challenges, isolation, depression, substance abuse, delayed medical screening - that very much were preventable.
While we don't have a full picture yet, it's telling that excess mortality remains heavily elevated even though most of the population has had Covid and been vaccinated.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19&oldid=94...
This is ironic in a comment otherwise concerned with death rates.
The risk of disablement is much higher, as is the risk of sequelae.
There is no scenarios where the collapse of the medical system is a viable outcome for policymakers that is also compatible with a functioning economy. A collapse of the medical system means non-covid fatalities also increase. Heart attacks, car accidents and childbirth all become mortality contributors. The most likely outcome of a medical system collapse would be martial law, mass graves, economic collapse and potential collapse of essential systems like food distribution.
The idea that policymakers were primarily constrained by the thought of grandpa dying a few years early and weighing it against the grandkids social isolation needs to die.
It's very easy to make decisions in retrospect when you have all the information that could be useful. It's very hard to make decisions in the present when that information doesn't exist yet.
The argument I am criticizing never mentions rearward metrics as a problem.
The assumption that friends and family will calmly watch a family member’s untended death from covid when ICUs are over capacity and that essential workers will continue to show up for work knowing there is no hope for care if they fall ill is unrealistic in my opinion.
Are 200,000 lives meaningful enough?
Silver's regression model shows that for each 1% increase in the vote share for the blue candidate, the covid death rate in that state (statistically) would fall by 15.5 per million population.
In areas where the blue candidate received 20% of the vote, and the red candidate received 80%, the model predicts 1,793 deaths per million.
And in areas where blue got 80% and red got 20%, the model predicts 864 deaths per million.
A 300% greater death rate [1] is a startlingly high penalty to pay for an ideology. This is at least 200,000 deaths [2] attributed to political ideology. Not to mention the tremendous excess suffering that did not result in death.
And, no, it's not because red areas are older than blue areas. It's because red ideologues got the vaccine in far lower numbers.
[1] Coefficients show that blue at 0% would have a death rate of 2,103 per million, and blue at 100% would have a death rate of 554 per million.
[2] 2,103 - 554 = 1,549 excess deaths per million for red, multiplied by 45% of the US population is roughly 230,000.
Pretty sure it was something like 60% vs 70%. That doesn't seems like anywhere near different enough to explain those numbers.
Vaccine refusal played a part, certainly, in connection with the fact that conservatives are older. In many instances, a lot older. In other instances, not really that much older. The trend is unidirectional but the degree varies by state, as you'll find when you start comparing West Virginia and Florida to Maine and Vermont.
But the truth is inescapable: the older someone was, the more they needed to get vaccinated and boosted... and the less likely they did.
*The differences in state death rates are very likely because of differences in vaccine uptake*
Just to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that COVID is intrinsically more likely to target Republicans or anything like that. Rather, my claim is that COVID is considerably more deadly in people who haven’t been vaccinated, and since Republicans are less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats, state partisanship serves as a proxy for this.
Indeed, we can look at vaccination directly.
... age and vaccination rates alone explain more than half of the variation in COVID death rates between states since Feb. 2021.
Right-wing media figures consistently fed their audience a diet of vaccine skepticism, conspiracy theories, and promotion of useless alternative treatments; e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/us/politics/coronavirus-v... . Because their audience skews older, this messaging had unusually-deadly consequences.
Why there's anything controversial about any of this, I have no clue. How does it make sense for him to write "I don't mean to say that COVID targets Republicans," followed by a paragraph that states exactly why it does?
The point of that statement is, the virus doesn't target someone because they're a Republican, but Republicans have been more likely to die from it because they're more likely to be unvaccinated.
The at home treatment option was to watch the patient drown in their own fluids. There are few people in that scenario that would have the emotional capacity to calmly give support to a close family member or friend when there was no ICU capacity. Their more realistic scenario would be people loading the patient into the car and driving to the nearest hospital. Some percentage of that population will likely turn violent.
The public's frustration is that these prolonged, seemingly arbitrary measures outlasted their initial justification.
Regional programs were put into place to shift patients during a local surge and to mobilize hallways and other non-traditional capacity. In California once capacity dropped below 10% health orders went into effect.
At the beginning of 2023 and well after widespread vaccination the California statewide capacity was at 24% availability with 7% of beds being taken by Covid patients.
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/Reg...
https://gothamist.com/news/fema-begin-strategic-drawdown-lar...
And everyone working at those hospitals didn't see any light for month/years
Hospital protocols also improved over time to reduce the need for respirators and the disease moderated but there was no magic protocol that really reduced disease progression or duration. Out of my social circle there were anti-vaxers that contracted covid late in the pandemic and spent weeks in the hospital (four total, two deaths) even with late stage protocols.
No it’s not. You are dramatically overestimating how many people need life-saving medical services. If we had no emergency healthcare system at all and everyone who needed to go to the hospital just died instead, yes it would suck and yes we would have lower life expectancy but civilization would largely continue.
There were multiple countries where the medical system came close to collapse. India in 2021 is a case study of a medical system pushed beyond its limits (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/world/asia/india-coronavi...) and civilization largely continued.
But there is a lot of latitude between normal and survived.
Let’s assume that US policymakers considered taking no-action and let the ICUs collapse. Could policymakers in that scenario reasonably expect that teachers would continue to teach? Would the school system function if 20% of school teachers decided to not risk death and opted out?
That answer was easy to get and the answer was that schools would be shutting down.
How many essential workers would opt-out? How many need to drop-out to care for children? How many because they are sick? For how long? How does that impact fuel and food distribution?
Can we expect crowds would gather at hospitals? How many in that case become violent? How do we control crowds? Do we call in the national guard?
I’m not sure I can see any scenario that a policymaker could consider where reducing spread wasn’t the only viable option.
The controversy occurred when people found out that they were definitely negatively affected by all the lockdown policies when they still hadn’t had COVID.
Today, most countries are not going to do lockdowns for Covid due to the data. That was temporary for a highly infectious airborne virus that we didn’t know much about at the time, which was overwhelming our hospitals.
Today, no one is closing anything since we know much more about the virus, and it’s becoming less lethal. All people are asking today is for everyone to either regularly vaccinate, wear good masks indoors (no need for this outdoors), or both. That isn’t going to result in either isolation or depression.
I had this same thought during COVID, but like you said, it's not something others want to talk about. COVID was serious, but the American reaction to it was so strange. The whole approach to masking at restaurants has to be one of the most bizzare moments of American history.
I am familiar with the case of Spain, but I’m sure in other countries the situation was similar.
In the grand scheme of things, all those who died purely from COVID were going to die anyway.
A more important question is what has happened as a result of societies responses to this pandemic, especially in light of how marginal this virus' lethality was (this was no plague).
It has set precedent that in the case of relatively minor social distress, the government can take unlimited power, and the populace will just knod their heads.
It has also set precedent that the old can parasitize the young even further. Saving a few boomers a few years is worth masking up young school kids, affecting their communicative and social development.
The only silver lining to this has been the resulting explosion of remote work, which of course the boomers are now trying to undo. Fortunately, that's a cat-out-of-the-bag.
It's unfortunate that the boomers didn't learn an important lesson from their parents, who fought WW2 - sometimes dying is the right and proud thing to do.
In Australia there is huge pushback politically about holding an inquiry to determine what could be done better, a lot of politicians hid behind faceless "health advice" for their actions that wouldn't last a minute when the public servants involved face an inquiry.
Current estimates of the jobkeeper program put it at $110,000 per job saved, in comparison to the median wage of $52,338. Basically all of it went into the pockets of big companies rather than paid directly to people. That was just one of many programs at the time, debt blew out by hundreds of billions which the populace on both sides strangely cheered on.
> On all Reed lab computers, Stata is located in the Applications folder.
> Stata can be found in the Applications folder of any school machine. On a PC, it is most likely located in Program Files.
Does that imply it's neither open source nor even commercially available? Seems rather odd, surely it is either of those two
> So my aim is generally to focus on stylized facts that are true and robust. And to keep repeating them. I like simple (or simple-seeming) claims that — and I can’t emphasize this last part enough — I expect will hold up to scrutiny.
As somebody who presents results of analyses and models for a living, I couldn’t agree more. Present the simplest possible finding that gets the point across and move on. Maybe mention “and this holds up when accounting for x, y, z”, or just keep those analyses in the backup slides in case you have a feisty audience member. Nobody cares how complex your model is, just that it works.
I'm not questioning the results, just that accounting for age when analyzing COVID is definitely a reasonable question to ask for any conclusion.
edit: Which is to say: The Great Barrington Declaration was wrong directionally as well. We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much as possible to have a hope of a return to normality. Death is not the only issue with COVID. Too fucking late now, but anyone who supported that is a quack and should have been stripped of their license.
1. In 2020 especially, and even now, the specifics of long covid and other side effects, as compared to other downsides of lockdowns on mental health/delayed treatments are hard to predict? We don't have the counterfactual of what would have been the 3-5-10 year implications of a multi-year lockdown.
2. Does the general directionality of that change in a world where it's obvious that global lockdown/elimination of covid wasn't feasible because there isn't some global government to impose it? As long as a large enough population wasn't going along with the elimination strategy, it makes it less viable and more costly for everyone else. If the "2 week lockdown and it all goes away" had happened, then absolutely that would have been right. If all of, say, Europe doesn't lock down and everywhere else does, then how long of a lockdown do you need in order to have it do anything, and at that length, what other major problems emerge?
At least personally, the point I somewhat gave up on elimination was when the first variants started emerging from South Africa and Europe. It seems like that's generally borne out too - I'd be curious what the infection/long covid rates in the more successfully locked down countries like New Zealand or Japan are at this point.
There were endless people who had to work, just to keep water, power, food flowing. And those people needed transportation.
And past 2 weeks, transportation means parts for vehicles, maintenance, gas, oil, and food means transportation and food processors and....
It was a good idea at the time, but doomed to fail.
> many if not most mammalian ACE-2 receptors are susceptible
> the virus has gone from humans to the animals and back again to human
> found signs of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in significant percentages of six urban wildlife species
> found signs of the pathogen infecting 17 percent of New York City sewer rats tested
> Exposure could also occur following interactions with pets such as cats and dogs
Lockdowns were never going to be able to eliminate the virus.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...
Lockdowns could do a lot to reduce spread and protect people from infection in large population centers, but certain areas are basically breeding grounds for disease and even before covid they were a risk for things like antibiotic resistant bacteria. Ignoring them was always going to be a problem.
The fact that covid can move between animal and human populations would seem to mean that lockdowns for the purpose of elimination will not work. Eventually humans would be reinfected from animals - mice, rats, pets, etc.
This has perhaps already happened. There is dna evidence that omicron evolved in mice and then jumped back into humans [0].
On the idea of lockdowns to eliminate the virus:
> The coronavirus’ ability to infect so many different animals, and to spread within some of those populations, is worrying news: It means there’s virtually no chance the world will ever be rid of this particularly destructive coronavirus, scientists said [1].
It would be a bummer to be locked down for months or years in an effort to eliminate the virus, and have to deal with the negative repercussions of lockdowns during and afterwards, only for everyone to become reinfected again from animals, and the whole thing start up again.
My apologies if I misunderstood your reply. You did seem to have a different angle than the original post. I just don't get it when people mention lockdowns to eliminate covid, when such a thing isn't possible.
I'm not sure what to say about your concern that animals can evolve a more dangerous virus. That seems like it can go either way. Animal evolved variants can also be less dangerous, like omicron, which is a good thing. Also locked down humans could be more vulnerable to more dangerous variants, their immune systems not having any prior exposure. How can anyone be so sure lockdowns always help?
[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-did-omicr...
[1] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-06-09/coronavirus...
Blaming people with the knowledge of hindsight is just plain wrong.
Later lockdowns? Now that's a different conversation.
As far as I understand this was mostly a factor of our public hospital systems being absolutely over capacity and the government doing whatever it could to keep up.
Needless to say I’ve since moved away to a region with a more functional health care system and that allows families to gather together as desired.
The GBD is easy to find and a short read (https://gbdeclaration.org/), it does not refer to any elimination strategy - instead it discusses the costs of "Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available".
I don't see any quackery in the GBD. (Which is not to say that they were right.)
It's hard to say the GBD was wrong when Sweden didn't lock down and they weren't exactly seeing bodies pile up in the street.
Covid is now here to stay, ranking somewhere in severity between the common cold, flu or pneumonia.
We know this stuff can fuck you up pretty bad both mentally and physically. Depressive symptoms and a steep decline in physical fitness is very much the expected outcome from that.
His resting heart rate is up 20bpm, and it can take 10-15 minutes after exerting himself for it to return to that new normal. He's almost certainly at risk for a stroke due to whatever caused the change, and it left him more susceptible to being sick- he's gotten COVID 3 times despite the vaccines, while the rest of his family has only had it once or twice, on top of the usual flu and colds going around that his kids bring home from school.
Edit: noting the sibling comment, he also had no confounding factors, aside from being slightly overweight. Even our elderly parents have gotten COVID with no lingering symptoms.
People also get post viral fatigue from other virii.
I have no doubt long covid exists and will need significant funding in research and targeted health care. It won't need as much as, or return as much as the spend on paediatrics or obstetrics, per capita.
I've seen no evidence on this thread that proves it's super-common so apart from funding my own research project, what do you suggest?
Given the number of people who have been infected, that's a very large number of people with potentially permanent side effects.
There are certainly post viral complications like ards but we already have names for those things.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8321431/
(I should get bonus points for this being a Swedish study as well, since every COVID denier loves to wave around their flag.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8870488/#:~:tex....
I know it’s ideologically motivated, but it’s surprising people just bold-faced lie about the impact of COVID, when the stats are there for everyone to see. In the US, COVID is on track to kill ~200K people this year:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker
The cold and flu will not kill anywhere near this number, pneumonia is a consequence of respiratory illness, not a disease in itself, and before COVID, this would be considered an absolutely insane amount of deaths.
Looking at CDC data for excess deaths from Jan through July 2023*, excess deaths have averaged around 1.7%. Deaths reported as being due to COVID are running at 2.7%.
Annualizing and turning the data back to excess deaths, that means of the ~200K people that "COVID is on track to kill", only about 53.4K total excess deaths are expected, projecting from Jan-Jul, or projecting mid-Jan-Jul, excess would be only 31.5K.
Perhaps COVID is saving 146K-169K lives and then killing 200K this year?
* This is to avoid the recent data incompleteness. If I include more recent data records, my argument becomes stronger, not weaker. Setting aside the first two weeks in January, the average drops to 1.0% excess deaths overall.
If that's the case, it seems reasonable to compare that claim to the total excess deaths in the country. Nothing to do with red or blue states.
Where are you seeing this? I'm eyeballing cumulative deaths in the linked data tracker, it's about 50k through September 23.[1]
[1]: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths...
Now, I know that when the next crisis happens, half of the country is going to whine and complain, deny, protest, defy, and belligerently do everything in their power to deliberately make it worse. I've totally lost faith in humanity.
Masks were mandated on the subway in New York until September 2022. I'd consider this to not be "normality".
I returned this past week for work and the city certainly did not seem back to normal. The areas around Broad Street and the intersection of Baker and Peachtree are usually bustling during lunchtime, it was a ghost town.
If your definition of normal is not lockdowns or mask requires then yes we're back to normal, but in large cities it's a new normal and certainly not a pre-pandemic normal.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2023-112338
Most any serious viral infection can potentially cause post-viral syndrome, but there is nothing particularly dangerous about SARS-CoV-2. And there is no realistic possibility of eliminating that virus. There is no sterilizing vaccine. It is now endemic worldwide through humans and multiple animal species. It's time to move on.
The notion of punishing people for exercising their freedom of expression is horrifying. That is unacceptable in a modern liberal society.
Another link questioning the process behind the entire study itself: https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-an-ana...
In other words, if I'm right, this is an opinion piece.
So by then the cost/benefit analysis made it clear that reopening, while bringing more sickness, would ultimately cost less than not.
The isolation caused some havoc in our economy that we're still recovering from, but large amounts of excess deaths brings its own economic impacts that would likely have been far worse.
In what sense? I'm in a deep red state, and I haven't noticed much "devastation" in my community due to COVID. Seems like you can work yourself up about anything. Doomscroll enough Type 2 diabetes articles and you'll convince yourself that COVID is the absolute least of USA's public health problems compared to the complications resulting from that.
I love doom more than the average person, by what I would say is a quite significant margin... but I don't see this at all.
I've had covid at least twice, including some awful symptoms a month after recovery that had me convinced I had long covid as well... a few months later (now years) not so much.
While I do know many people of who have lost loved ones from Covid, I don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone who has any serious "long-covid" symptoms.
To be clear, I'm not doubting that long-covid exists. But I'm very skeptical, based on my own observations, that "we are so, so fucked" and covid of all things is the source of that "fucking". Personally I think a lot of the post-covid strangeness is because, for a variety of other reasons (not the least of which is rapidly progressing climate change), people are under tremendous stress and at the same time can't quite articulate what that stress is, nor find relief from it.
A lot of people (not me) did believe there was going to be a return to normal post-covid, and the increasingly obvious impossibility of this is causing people to have tremendous mental health problems. But long-covid itself being the source is something that I just don't see anywhere.
And, as I said, I'm not afraid of being labeled a "doomer", so if you have some good sources to read up on, I'm all ears (er, eyes).
You are fortunate. I know several who have those symptoms (ranging in age from my own - mid-30's - to my parents' - early 60's), and have had several friends relate their own observations of loved-ones. If Long Covid isn't real, there's an astonishingly-coincidental prevalence of fatigue and impaired cognition from some other source, which is correlated with those who (from my own observations) took less precautions regarding Covid and/or who caught it more often.
I recognize the irony of responding to your anecdata with my own. No, I don't have any hard data to provide - though given the partisanship observed in the reporting of COVID _itself_, I have somewhat lost faith in the availability of trustworthy data about public health.
I'm not arguing that long covid isn't real (in fact I explicitly state "To be clear, I'm not doubting that long-covid exists"), just that I'm not convinced that we are "we are so, so fucked" (to quote parent).
Your anecdata is appreciated since I share your lost faith in data about public health.
> prevalence of fatigue and impaired cognition from some other source
I personally think anxiety and unspoken stress regarding climate collapse and other forms of society degradation we're experiencing and seeing accelerate are responsible for a good deal of this. Everyone I know certainly seems more tired, more stressed out, and with fuzzier thinking, but I don't think that is a byproduct of long covid. People can't even openly talk about this seriously, even though nearly everyone is clearly feeling it. There are also plenty of people in aggressive denial about this which makes it even harder to discuss.
That's a fair point.
I remember reading a lot of old stories as a kid where someone would get the flu or a generic fever and take multiple months to recover. Industrial society made that economically infeasible but our biology didn't change.
I don't think it should be surprising to anyone that having a massive population of a virus in your lungs and elsewhere has long term effects.
What is not normal in your opinion at this point? Covid still exists as another illness that goes around, but from my point of view everything else has been back to normal for quite a while.
It's unclear (to me) how real or unusual any of these things are, or whether they were caused by the pandemic or were already baked in somehow, but from an intuitive point of view, I do find myself frequently thinking "why isn't stuff working right?" more often than I think I was four years ago.
Some fraction of us are fucked, but surely not “we” as a whole. The vast majority of people I know have had Covid (many multiple times), and the vast majority are now perfectly fine.
> We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much as possible
This was already impossible by Feb. 2020 when it was spreading like wildfire in China, Iran, and Italy.
> to have a hope of a return to normality.
We have already returned to normality, so reality doesn’t back up your assertion.
SARS-CoV-2 is certainly with us to stay, so in that sense it's not over. But beyond that, I don't see how "we are so, so fucked" as you say. Covid is no doubt taking a small nibble out of life expectency, and yes there is some long Covid still taking its own nibble out of productivity and life satisfaction ... but it's not that big a part of the big picture. Covid is killing less than half as many people in the US at this point as lung cancer, and those deaths are overwhelmingly amongst the elderly. I don't want to be overtly callous, but knocking a few years of life off people well into retirement is hardly going to bring the country to its knees. There are essentially no Covid deaths among people under age 18, and among the working age population, cases requiring hospitalization or leading to long term debilitization are rare.
Those who suffer, of course, suffer. We shouldn't be unsupportive of them in their trials. But Covid as a public health crisis is largely over.
The reason why life expectancy is going down is because middle age people are dying. People dying in their 80s has almost no impact on life expectancy calculations
You pretend that it's not a big deal, but those numbers are going to pile up into a giant ball of health issues for a lot of people as the years progress. And for many of them, those issues are happening far outside "old age." Go get something that fucks you up for life in your 30s and then get back to us about how it's no big deal.
THAT's the point.
You're right by way of the literature available to evaluate this claim. (Even jobs numbers are starting to note that some amount of the worker shortage is likely related to long COVID) Most of the "oh i got it [a few times] and i'm fine" posts are ignoring the long tail risks here.
Unfortunately, it will take 5-20 years for many of the worst long tail consequences of mass spread of sars-cov-2 to become imminently clear. (Enjoy access to your medical specialists while you can! There's not enough slack in the system for doubled-or-worse hazard ratios for most serious conditions, lol!) Decision makers broadly prioritized public dining over prudence. For this choice, we get at least an entire generation picking up sars-cov-2, likely yearly, and our reward will be a horrifying number of early deaths and disability.
This tragedy is so senseless and so avoidable. Zero COVID was and still is the rational strategy; "Let-er-rip" (and the GBD by extension) is anything but rational.
Poz rates in NY state have been sitting near 60ish percent, don't forget your well fitted respirator, usps is doing another round of free test distribution (RATs but better than nothing), and good luck out there. solidarity.
How? The vaccines are mediocre at best and are nowhere near good enough to get R < 1 (except maybe in a population where most people already had COVID, and that’s a big maybe). Masks might be effective enough if everyone wears a good one correctly, but good luck — even if you convinced people, people like eating indoors. And seeing each other’s faces, etc. And the antigen tests are not terrible sensitive.
That statement is beyond ridiculous. Zero COVID was a pipe dream (as in: flat out impossible to achieve by any realistically implementable policy) by the time Omicron appeared, which really means: by the time it was spreading in Africa and India.
And to your point, it is about everyone else who couldn't get the care they needed because COVID overwhelmed our infrastructure.
Lockdowns did make sense initially, especially during the dominance of the Wuhan strain. But some countries like Taiwan and SK with experience dealing with respiratory virus pandemics opened up way sooner, smartly, and did not suffer tremendously for it.
If the outcome lands on people who choose to take risks, there is no need for the police to step in.
Humans used to be "so, so fucked" when...
- the volcano on the island erupted,
- the harvest failed for the third year in a row
- the neighbouring tribe learned to ride horses and started a campaign for domination
- some strange curse fell upon the land killing ⅓ of the population which left the fields unworked and the land barren
We're still the same species with the same instincts for survival, the same alarm mechanisms for detecting impending catastrophic situations and the same urge to act upon impending disasters. Modern society has - especially since the introduction of antibiotics - largely done away with those traditional doom scenarios. We're no longer starving, no longer dying in droves from infectious diseases, no longer totally at the mercy of nature... but our alarm mechanisms are still in place although they are differently tuned in different people. In some people - you seem to be one of those - these mechanisms are so finely tuned that they pick up minute signals which are amplified until they trigger the 'impending catastrophic situation' alarm (we're so, so fucked) where those same signals do not even register for others. The same is true for other triggers like 'climate change', 'migration', 'systemic ...-ism' and others where some people are completely taken over by their alarms going off where others don't even hear a single bell. Many of these triggers - 'systemic ...-ism' and to a lesser extent 'migration' being prime examples - are intentionally amplified because those who do the amplification stand to gain power (and money) by doing so, others - 'climate change' - are being used by third parties for monetary gain ('greenwashing' and the multitude of 'green' scams like 'carbon offsets'/'carbon credits') or political power.
Are we 'fucked'? That depends on who you ask. Ask me and I'll say "only if we want to be". Is SARS-2 going to be with us for the foreseeable future? Yes, most likely. Is that a big problem? No, not really since it has rapidly mutated to become 'yet another Corona-related upper airway infection' while our species has developed a form of natural immunity which has taken the edge off the disease. Upper airway diseases are annoying and lead to a loss in productivity, sure, but they tend not to mail or kill. What remains is the long tail of the initial pandemic and even more of the (over)reaction to it, especially in those countries which had strict lockdown regimes. Recovering from the damage caused by those measures will take a lot of time and money and it can only be hoped that a lesson will be learned from this experience.
As to returning to 'normality' I can safely state that we have done so quite a while ago here in Sweden [1].
[1] https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-...
Coincidence? Do they have a climate conducive to these sorts of viruses combined with a large enough population to make it likely they get infected first or is this my selection bias in noticing when it says "started in China" versus any other country?
Spillover is a great book to read about zoonotic diseases.
Personally I think this was an easy article for him to write because he already had the data and he wants more subscribers (please take this take as neutral opinion and not a dis to Silver)
It would be less egregious if it has been a bunch of random people. It was someone who really should have known better. Instead, it provides more evidence that Kulldorff is seeking to confirm an ideological position and tossing his medical and biostatistical accomplishments aside to do it.
Nobody is immune to this. It’s just more frustrating when their ideological position is opposed to yours.
Especially since he happens to be in the thick of a position that is easily accused of being anti science. One would think that makes it doubly incumbent not to make such trivial errors.
So, Twitter folk may not care about what he showed in this post, but FWIW I certainly appreciated it.
I would not be surprised if this "nudging" of on the ground reports over the course of the pandemic has rendered the data around covid deaths unreliable.
As early as June of 2020, the "public health" authority in Canada's most-populous city (4th highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious:
"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...
By mid-2021, there were news reports like the following ("LTC" stands for "long-term care"):
"Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili...
After stuff like that and everything else that went on from 2020 through 2022, I can't trust "public health" officials at all at this point.
As a Western Canadian resident, I don't think it's fair or reasonable to extrapolate about all of Canada from a single tweet from a TO health authority, and an article with a disclaimer about it's own accuracy.
There well may be problems, but please keep in mind that while 50% of Canadians live between Montreal and Toronto, 50% of Canadians don't, and many of us live lifestyles that have absolutely nothing to do with that region and it's governance.
Alberta was using a dubious death-counting approach, as described in this April 2021 article:
"According to Dr. Deena Hinshaw, any death that has been flagged where COVID-19 is a possible cause is included in the initial count, even if the official cause of death remains unknown."
https://globalnews.ca/news/7814731/alberta-determine-covid-1...
BC was using a dubious counting approach as of April 2022:
"Fewer than half of COVID-19 deaths reported since B.C. changed counting methods were caused by the disease"
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/fewer-than-half-of-covid-19-deaths-rep...
Quebec's counting of deaths as of May 2022 (and apparently before that) was also dubious:
"Quebec’s interim public health director, Dr. Luc Boileau, has acknowledged that the province has seen a “huge” number of deaths linked to COVID-19. Quebec’s high death toll, he said last Thursday, is explained by the fact the province counts a COVID-19 death as any death involving someone who has the disease.
He said a government study from January indicated that around 30 per cent of the official COVID-19 deaths in the province’s hospitals involved people who tested positive for COVID-19 but whose principle cause of death was not the disease. He said about 40 per cent to 50 per cent of official COVID-19 deaths in the province involve people who had the disease but who died of other causes."
https://globalnews.ca/news/8801205/quebec-still-reporting-do...
Does the method chosen differ from other countries and diseases?
Strictly speaking, no one does of HIV virus, they die of opportunistic infections made possible by AIDS.
For COVID, the disease can kill you, as well as make it easier for other things to kill you. If you die of a heart attack while COVID positive, on a ventilator, with super low blood O2 readings, did you die of a heart attack, or did you die of COVID? Is there any reason why your death must be limited to a single disease for statistical purposes?
You say that counting COVID deaths this way is dubious, but is it out of line with regular epidemiological practice?
On top of that there was also monetary incentive for hospitals to add covid as a cause of death for anyone who died.
At this stage, I’m willing to take the claims at face value.
Even if the letter of the guidance was honest and impartial, I’m absolutely certain second order effects would come to bear.
If I recall right, there was even an attempt to have /all/ deaths during lockdown attributed to COVID on the misguided assumption that the only possible response was tight lockdown, and so any collateral was attributable to the cause of that lockdown, i.e., COVID. (Lots of groupthink there…) So even though we didn’t get that written into the guidance, I’m sure there would have been a strong bias to being very conservative when attributing cause to anything other than COVID.
Point is that I don’t think we even need to go as far as malicious intent to render the figures highly questionable. But then if you want to also layer nefariousness on top, the numbers become almost unbearably meaningless.
From the CDC [1], 2020 total covid deaths by state: West Virginia 1318, Florida 21546, Maine 344, Vermont 134.
The corresponding April 2020 census populations [2] for these four states are: West Virginia 1793716, Florida 21538187, Maine 1362359, Vermont 643077.
Thus, before the vaccines for covid were available the deaths per 100,000 persons for these four states are: West Virginia 73, Florida 100, Vermont 21, Maine 25.
Someone should probably check my math, but it looks like voting for Trump causes over three times as many deaths even before vaccinations were available. In other words, the analysis in the original article may be affected by unaccounted for confounding factors. For example, COPD is a significant medical risk factor for serious covid complications according to the CDC. COPD affects over 13.6% of the population of West Virginia (the worst rate in the country) but affects only 5.9% of the population of Vermont [3].
Personally, I chose to get vaccinated and boosted at the earliest possible dates. I also caught covid during the initial big wave of omicron cases in my state.
[1] https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/99750
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
[3] https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/copd-tr...
Those differences in behavior would carry over to vaccination rates, since that's also responding to public health recommendations. It's hard to believe Silver didn't do the analysis on pre-vax death rates, but he didn't mention it so I don't know.
If COPD and similar conditions were the major difference, I would expect the difference in death rates to be closer to 2.3x (13.6%/5.9%) than 2.9x (73/25 per 100k). Those are very different ratios. And I don't know about any other complicating conditions with larger relative rates than 2.3x for those two states. Obesity is only 1.3x higher in West Virginia. So this gets back to Silver's point: you can almost always find other contributors, but that doesn't necessarily prove something else didn't contribute. You have to do that analysis all together. But complicating health conditions don't seem to be able to account for the differences, even before a regression test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet
Always visualize your data.
- how well did official policies map to actual behavior? I expect a lot of people still masked and distanced, regardless of what their particular state's policies were
- what specific behaviors actually made a difference? (Well, maybe it's really just a question of how much difference masking made -- I'd expect it's pretty clear that avoiding other people was pretty effective)
So for me, a more interesting and, I'd argue, practical question, is really about how effective _policy_ is. There were definitely a lot of costs, as it helped politicize things (who would have guess masks would become a partisan issue?).
I think of the case of Sweden, for example, where IIUC behavior was pretty cautious although policy was pretty loose.
I'd like to see a real scientific debate with adversarial inquiry so we could know if numbers are being fudged and which ones they are.
I trust science, but not greed driven capitalists corporations. Having a measure of distrust for pharmaceutical companies given their historical record is prudent.
No amount of money in the world could pay to do that and keep it secret.
Any company that’s capable of pulling off a global operation like that with absolutely zero exposure, is already running the world and doesn’t need to bother with piddly $40 billion scams.
Sticks their neck out against whom? Against the Afro-Chinese/Euroamerican consortium that took kickbacks from the "medical companies" in order to keep the COVID theatre going? Those poor honest doctors around the world - if only they could speak up! If only one doctor would tell the truth!
Had a non-vaccine treatment for covid been discovered via clinical practice it would have destroyed the EUA for the covid vaccine, i.e. that's how they were able to issue an experimental vaccine widely to the public. An effective covid treatment would have cost the corporations billions of dollars in the present, and the ongoing subscription income of annual covid vaccinations for hundreds of millions of people.
When you've got billions of income it's easy to spread it around to politicians, media, and scientists who are willing to carry the story. You just pay them well and make them sign NDAs: no one will talk. This forms a ready alliance to silence anyone who dares question the corporate narrative.
My favorite part is how the western pharmaceutical companies were able to convince the CCP to suppress non-vaccine treatments. But that's as far as they could go. They weren't able to convince China to allow them to actually sell their vaccines there.
A myriad of psychological experiments, e.g. Milgram, show that people are easily influenced to do unethical things if the incentives are set right and an acceptable rationalization is provided.
This fact is incidentally how I proved that moon landing was faked and that 911 was a hoax designed by the Bush administration. Very encouraging to see great ideas being recycled.
As it turns out, they all failed, plus his own papers proved bogus.
Bad science, on the other hand, is how you lose your reputation and your research grants.
Also buying the emergency approval process in the first place would have required an epically massive conspiracy.
Legislator votes for the right bills and her niece gets a cushy job somewhere in exchange. You can't prove anything wrong happened.
It's a big club, and you ain't in it. - George Carlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyvxt1svxso
This isn't in any way comparable, because thousands of doctors and dozens of medical groups have been pointing out that it's not effective for years. There was no effort to "silence" any of them, and no requirement to pay off or even convince regulators and law makers to do anything in order to get it approved. It just took time for the wheels of regulatory momentum to do anything about it.
If anything it shows what happens when a bad drug is approved or starts being sold. Thousands of doctors and dozens of reputable medical groups start speaking up--no global Pharma conspiracy can keep them from doing so.
For example have RFK and Fauci put together teams of MDs and PhDs to debate in a live event.
That is not to say that live debate has no place, or is worthless. I'm just not sure I'd come even close to agreeing that it's the ideal way to come to the truth.
When Fauci went in front of the media and dodged and weaved he didn't build trust, he made people question.
If you're ever in a situation where a leader is dodging hard questions that's a big tell. Take note of it.
Your stance that covid numbers are all lies and vaccines are a conspiracy is wrong, but it's not entirely your fault. Politicians, scientists, doctors, and media have a responsibility to continuously prove that they can and should be trusted, but they haven't been willing to do that and until they do we'll see more and more people like you who feel like they just can't trust anything anymore. At a certain point it's just self-defense to be distrustful.
The point of vaccines is to extend human lifespan and reduce illness. It should be a relatively easy matter for them to show that taking more vaccines does those things, right? Assuming similar infrastructure and income (rough) between countries there should be some correlation between vaccine rates and healthcare outcome statistics.
We could even rate individual vaccines on how much illness and expense they alleviate. Perhaps some are more effective than others?
But to even questions anything about a vaccine somehow makes one an "antivaxxer" - someone who irrationally hates vaccines. There would probably be a lot fewer "antivaxxers" if the media and medical corporations did not respond like jerks when people had honest questions about vaccines, like they would when choosing any other product.
The COVID numbers also come from scientists in public health and statistics organisations. Why don't you trust those scientists they made no profit.
The first vaccine to be approved the AstraZenica one approved in the UK was sold at cost so that should show that it was needed.
Why do you not trust those scientists I show above.
Which scientists do you accept? and why are they different?
It did have issues in that for under 30 it had a slightly higher risk of embolisms (which is one reason that it is not use much now) and in its first tests did not have enough over 60 year olds in the trial. This latter was picked up by several things US did not approve it - how much was NIH it got nad press possibly because the not over 60s tests meant that European politicians misinterpreted so say it was unsafe and that view was not changed when it had the full tests, its PR was messed up saying things like it passed all tersts then had to backtrack making AZ look shady. Being the fitst some people pressing for patyent free vaccines criticised it from day one even thopugh much cheaper for all than other vaccines.
So everyone was critising it even though it worked.
How much of this was driven by other pharma companies lobbying because of the at cost price vs their with profit price. The AZ president has said that they would not do things at cost again as it is just not worth the issues.
These are the claims he makes and arguably the data shows these to be true. The rest looks like whining where he objects to failures like “ice cream causes drowning” then eventually comes around to show the most applicable categorical statement is “states with higher vaccination rates had lower death rates. Sure. There’s a political divide that causes differences in behavior and outcomes. I don’t know. I spent the time reading but I can’t find any value in that post. Seems like venting to me.
Was it the cost benefit of less people dying or our entire health system collapsing and causing massive more deaths.
It is intended to shame Republicans. What other possible reason is there to tie death rates to political party? So yes it was a hot take. You planted a lightning rod. Making something like vaccination a political issue does everyone a disservice.
That said, certain Republicans should very much feel shame about the fear mongering behind the vaccine. It isn’t automatically a hot take or a lightning rod to use statistical analyses to suggest that systemic fear mongering against a vaccine that has a powerful effect would lead to excess death.
The vaccine long ago became a political issue, but the real world need for people to take it doesn’t go away because of that.
Then you aren't paying attention to what the Republican party stands for. Moral relativism has limits, and the Republican party now regularly acts with malice.
You can pin a lot on nate silver, but vaccination as a political issue is a thing he's studying, not a thing he caused.
> The more complications you introduce into an analysis, the more confounding variables that you attempt to control for, the more you expand researcher degrees of freedom — in other words, decision points by the analyst about how to run the numbers.
> I don’t think it’s quite right to say these decisions are arbitrary. Ideally they’ll reflect a statistician’s judgment, experience and familiarity with the subject matter.
But, according to the sentence immediately following the one I highlighted, it absolutely is quite right to say those decisions are arbitrary!
They are arbitrary inasmuch as they are arbitrated by the statistician's educated judgement and experience. That these decisions are arbitrary does not intrinsically strip away their value. Rather, it subordinates their value to the presumed ability of their arbiter — in this case the statistician, whom we presuppose is well trained and capable.
I feel that in common parlance the word "arbitrary" is undergoing the opposite process of the term "literally". Where one word is losing its meaning by arbitrarily narrowing it down too much, the other is literally losing its meaning by making it too broad. It figuratively grinds my gears.
My professors in grad school explicitly discouraged use of that word anywhere in technical writing, as they felt it would immediately give the reader the impression that the actions taken in the research were not thought through. Example: “This new technique enables arbitrary manipulations of data” should instead be replaced by something like “this technique enables a wide range of manipulations of data”.
That's shocking, I use it to mean "the result of a judgement or decision" about a dozen times a day, such as "it's not random, it's arbitrary". I had no clue people had an alternative definition for it. I'm even more surprised that otherwise ostensibly-educated people have no clue about the traditional definition.
Etymonline cites a 1640s dictionary with the present-day definition: https://www.etymonline.com/word/arbitrary
sure, https://www.wordnik.com/words/arbitrary: "Based on or subject to individual judgment or preference." is the second definition on the page. You clearly didn't even bother googling.
Regardless, I'd argue that arbitrary as distinct from "random" only has one definition—the one where judgement, choice, or preference is exercised. This is the useful way to use the word, hence my shock. Especially in a technical context where the connotation of petty abuse of judgement makes no sense.
Finally, there are cases where it's indistinguishable from arbitrary. For instance, if you're defining a pure computation on some integer, the distinction between arbitrary and random is meaningless.
Throwing the word away (as I interpret your sentiment to argue for) seems like the worst possible interpretation and just as likely to lead to confusion.
"The judge is giving out random sentences" means the judge is rolling a die or something, literally randomizing each sentence.
"The judge is giving out arbitrary sentences" means the judge is sentencing based on how they feel in morning, or the opinion of the last person they talked to. The decisions are not random, but they aren't based on any coherent set of rules or logical framework. The judge could have made a different decision and it would have made just as much (or just as little) sense.
Another common usage is calling something an "arbitrary distinction". For example, skyscrapers are often defined as buildings that are at least 100 meters tall. That is an arbitrary distinction, in that there is no significant difference between a 99 meter and 101 meter building. It's obviously not random, it was picked because 100 is a nice round number, but when we say it's arbitrary that means we could have drawn the line at any other number and it would have worked fine. In fact, some people define skyscrapers as being at least 150 meters tall, and there is no logical reason that either of these number are better. They are both arbitrary, and saying that "your 23-story building is a high-rise but my 24-story building is a skyscraper" is making an arbitrary distinction.
So back to Nate Silver's quote:
> I don’t think it’s quite right to say these decisions are arbitrary. Ideally they’ll reflect a statistician’s judgment, experience and familiarity with the subject matter.
If these decisions were arbitrary, that would mean the statistician isn't making educated choices. They're thinking "I just saw a cool article on this regression technique, let me try that", or "my favorite programming language is good at X technique", or "I've been wanting to practice Y technique". When asked why they made a particular decision, the statistician might not have a logical explanation.
If the decisions are not arbitrary, that would mean that other statisticians are likely to agree with the decision, or at least understand the logic behind it.
> arbitrary (adjective)
> based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.
> ex: “his mealtimes were entirely arbitrary"
Natural language is imprecise, so there are many definitions, but that fits with how I interpret the word. I wouldn’t think of something like “the well researched opinion of an expert”, which certainly is the result of a judgement, as being “arbitrary”.
I was documenting a configuration file, and noted that one particular value was chosen "arbitrarily". What I meant by that (and what I am reasonably confident that my audience would understand) is that my choice of that value was not influenced by any other concerns - I did not have to make sure it matched some other value in the file (or in another configuration value), or that it conformed to some enumeration of permitted or significant values.
So - yes, I was technically stating that the value was "the result of a judgement or choice", but _much more strongly_ I was stressing the fact that (personal) judgement was the _only_ factor in the selection, not conformance to other prior values, rules, or restrictions. So - not purely random, but in some sense "closer" to random than to pre-determined.
I agree with you here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37731820) that entirely throwing away the meaning of the word "arbitrary" and making it a synonym for "random" would not be useful - but I don't think that's what's proposed. Arbitrary is (and, I believe, always has been) a word which stresses the importance of choice and judgement - but sometimes that means "strongly considered judgement was applied here to select the optimal option", and other times it can mean "any selection which you choose is probably satisfactory here - there are no hidden constraints, rules, or requirements".
It can have good or bad connotations: "Emacs's configurability means you can extend it in arbitrary ways" is good; "Russia is known for arbitrary detention of political dissidents" is bad.