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Comment by marsovo | Hacker News Reader

It's not clear what you're saying. That COVID was overblown because of how we tested for it?

Let's pretend COVID didn't exist. Yet, let's also look at all-cause mortality (CDC data). Death rates approached twice normal. Certainly looks like "something" was happening!

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/figures/mm7150a3-F2.g...

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Those elevated death rates were only for about two months. Also the better metric would be years-of-life-lost from a societal perspective. It'd be unfortunate but much less impactful on society if the excess deaths were 76 year olds with only a year or two of life left than if 20 year olds were dying at that rate.

Also there were a few surveys by the BBC and other news organizations during that time which showed that a majority of people thought the death rates were 1/10.

The age adjusted death rates show the 2021 rates were about the same as the year 2006 [1].

1: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7326a3.htm

"didn't"? "was"?

For our biologists tracking evolution:

* https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global/6m

For our data scientists, wastewater data (note: often backfills the last 2 weeks):

* https://data.wastewaterscan.org/tracker?charts=Cp4MEAA4AUgAU...

For our "trust the science" folks, daily info about covid research:

* https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/search?keywords=covid

For the capitalists, from the Society of Actuaries:

* https://www.soa.org/4af998/globalassets/assets/files/resourc...

Can anyone offer me a evidenced based reason to be past-tense about this? Because it is not looking good.

At the start the media flat out lied about covid mortality rates to scare people into compliance, using the case fatality rate instead of the infection fatality rate (the former is much higher because only more serious cases end up in hospital, so there's a selection bias, especially when many cases are asymptomatic). It also ignored the age-stratified nature of risk, which the data showed really early on, quoting the mortality rate for 80 year olds as if it applied to everyone, when in fact the mortality rate decreased roughly 10x for every 10 years of age below 80.

The global IFR is around 0.6%. And a complex mix of persistent COVID sequelae - including cognitive decline, heart disease, severe chronic fatigue, and reduced immunity - are happening in around 10% of those infected, at all ages.

The big problem with bird flu - actually any flu - is that even if people don't die they can be off sick for a couple of weeks.

And if you have tens of millions off sick for a couple of weeks at the same time, everything stops working.

The global IFR was claimed to be around 3% and CFR around 10% in early 2020 because of how the tests were restricted, artificially reducing the denominator. I think serious side-effects were claimed around 40-50% as well, but not sure I'm remembering that one right. It was never actually that high, but most people had no idea what was actually going on and it caused all sorts of panic which led to the lockdowns.

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