A good number of people also died from being in person during the height of COVID. IIRC line cooks had the highest mortality rate of any profession and deaths were more heavily concentrated in lower wage, in-person work.
I’m really tired of this narrative. Older people died by orders of magnitude more than younger or working class people. Orders of magnitude. Don’t try and say “hindsight is 20/20” because this was known from the start. Ask any nursing home.
This comment is NOT meant to at ALL be political. Fuck Covid. Fuck making masks a political issue. Fuck all the Covid deniers. Fuck the anti-vax people.
Covid killed old people and those with co-morbidity. If we took all the money given out and gave it ONLY to those people such that they were mandated stay home and survive, however that needed to happen to ensure they avoided infection, imagine how different the would world be right now. /rant
Unpopular opinion on this site and I expect I’ll see that reflected here.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7218a4.htm#T1_down
Edit: typo
I don’t think the would should have shut down instead of tackling that problem.
I'm similarly angry that we don't put substantial sums of money toward teaching people to use GPG encryption for confidential emails, however that needs to happen to ensure privacy. :)
You don't just stop being working class when you grow old.
Additionally, imagine the optics of “anyone fat can stay home while the rest of you have to go in to work.” How would that work in practice?
And finally, populations did not fully isolate. How much more quickly would things have soread (and overwhelmed the healthcare system) if folks just went about their business? How likely is it that the “not at risk” population (now with higher likelihood of having covid do to freer movement) would stay away from those at risk?
I’m not disagreeing with some of the ideas you put forth, but your comment comes across as absolutely certain. The world doesn’t work with that kind of certainty - we can’t all even agree on what did happen/work. Heck - lots of people don’t think the vaccine itself is necessary!
I can tell this subject frustrates you. One way to help yourself be less frustrated (and more correct!) would be to think more probabilistically and accept that all of the options are bad ones, and your preferred intervention might have been better but it also might have been worse. The world is dynamic and we don’t have any counterfactuals that we can use as comps.
Thank you for your rational response to my not-so-rational post.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=log%28868831%29+-+log%2...
The risk obviously trends upward as you get closer to 65, but quite a lot of people under that aged died with what you might think of as people having taken excess precaution. This also excludes other forms of harm short of death, such as the increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and developing of diabetes that have been shown to occur post COVID. As the parent pointed out, we have no idea how this would’ve have played out with even less caution, but I think it’s difficult to argue that things would’ve necessarily been better given these statistics.
Take care.
Even ignoring my personal bias on biases, a pandemic is by nature transient, whereas the working conditions cited prior were (presumably) typical conditions that could be expected.
All that to say that your comparison strikes (hah) me as at best immaterial to the comment you replied to.
Just look at all-cause mortality, and assume that the observed excess mortality is because of covid.
I was quite a bit more rigorous than I usually am when trying to formulate my position on the matter, and even still the only conclusion I could come to was that (for me at least) the information I could gather was simply not trustworthy without specific expertise that I lack. To this day, I simply let the scope and impact of COVID remain an 'unsolved mystery' in my broader world views.
To add on to the start of my response, correlation does not imply causation. I can postulate numerous circumstances that, to a layman such as myself, could plausibly explain why there was an increase in all-cause mortality. Things such as an increased scrutiny on data collection pertaining to this specific circumstance could feasibly result in a change in data gathering practices favoring over-reporting, or even an improvement in report accuracy.
This depends on what you mean by "because of covid".
If you just mean "the primary cause of death was covid", this is not a valid methodology.
But if you mean "the primary cause of death was something that wouldn't have happened without the covid pandemic and the responses to it that were mandated by governments", then yes, this is probably a valid methodology--but then you can't lay all those deaths at the door of covid itself, you have to also hold governments responsible for their incompetent handling of the pandemic.
(Btw, all cause mortality in countries that did mass vaccinations with mRNA vaccines is still above the pre-pandemic baseline, even though covid deaths in those countries are minimal. So there's another item that would need to be taken into account when looking at the overall all cause mortality numbers.)