I don't know if I would say I preferred my life under lockdowns overall - I'm very social - but I did get a big and persistent boost from how much it encouraged the availability of remote work.
Once a company realizes everyone remote is a just a face on a screen, you now have to compete with everyone in the world who is also a face on a screen.
I'm also probably gonna ride this all out to retirement but I do believe that standardizing remote work is doom for the prospects of the next generation. I learned so much from physical proximity to coworkers in my early career, and when applying for jobs it wasn't spamming thousands of resumes across the country to jobs getting tens of thousands of applications from all over the country.
I have South American coworkers. Their English varies but is often just as good as a native. Their technical skills are excellent. "Just be better" is hard when I cost 2x to 3x what they do. I've got seniority and experience and a track record so I'm not in incredible danger. And even a halving of my salary today would just mean I have to work all the way to Social Security. So not that terrible for me, but for all the others ...?
I won't be so confident as to say you're definitely wrong, but I have some doubts:
1. I've worked some places that actively studied remote work and they've generally found it works about as well as in-person work on various dimensions. This includes "team cohesion" IF you put in the effort to get people together regularly - you just need to deliberately create opportunities in a way you wouldn't in-person. I expect people will get better that this over time to some degree.
2. Two of my three highest-trust teams (out of ~10-12 overall) were/are remote teams. (The third, in-person one also had the advantage of having three people who lived in the same house.)
3. Re: outsourcing, as much as people like to think otherwise, people in the US *are* very competitive. There's a reason US devs pull crazy salaries when you COULD just hire people in other countries for a fraction of the cost. Now, I agree that there are really talented people all over - but a lot of them are already getting sucked into US tech companies anyway. There's not enough people like that in South America to staff Google and Microsoft and so forth, and the really competitive ones will probably tend to move to the US over time anyway.
> I'm also probably gonna ride this all out to retirement but I do believe that standardizing remote work is doom for the prospects of the next generation.
Just the opposite! Thanks to remote work more of the new generation has a chance to actually get a good job, instead of just the ones who happen to be born in the right place to get the right passport.
those of us who do jobs that needed in-person presence were laid off for months. my own job never recovered: im still here but we are still pretty much the same staff and hours we were after the lockdown ended and we tentatively opened.
i literally had insomnia from
all the stress that luckily i resolved. i nearly lost my job permanently because the person above me decided not to come back-had they, id not be here.
For sure, not trying to suggest that they/you didn't and I would 100% have vastly preferred that none of this ever happened. "This worked out for me personally" is not an endorsement of anything. (The 2008 financial crisis worked out great for me, too - bought a really cheap house in 2012. Still terrible!)
thanks. it probably wont. i have two co workers out of four who are nearing 65, and no transition plans seem in place leading me to believe they plan to shut the place down when the lease is up in a few years.
they generally leave us alone now, no attempts to change inefficient stopgaps we relied on after barely surviving a forced lease cancel pre-covid. no refresh for an aging location.
the remote work thing annoys me because its great for some, but would have killed so many support jobs and many could never do it at all.
and the fact "essential workers" were risking reinfection grates me.
I used the time during lockdown to lose a shitload of weight. I lost something on the order of 30lbs, enough that coworkers were surprised when they saw me again.
I also lost some weight during that time, probably due to the ability to stick to routines better because there were fewer interruptions. The time itself was quite memorable for me (COVID and all), because my stainless steel pasta strainer (or rather general-purpose colander) broke, and it was a really beautiful one I got at a small shop in Italy. It took me weeks to find something appropriate for a replacement, and it behooved me to do so quickly, which caused a fair amount of stress, wherefore I am not fond of thinking about this time again, at least in an emotional manner. My lesson of this time is to reduce unnecessary interruptions for healthy routines and to set aside some time to have backup plans for the replacement of household utilities.
I have to ask - how did you manage to break a colander? Did you drop it and the handle broke off? I ask because I've always had cheap metal colanders which I've dropped on the floor more times than I can count, and they survived just fine.
Yeah. I most certainly did not. The most positive testimonials I've heard from people I know are about certain things in their lives going better during *but not because of* the lockdowns, or some particular thing going better because of the lockdowns ("I was able to focus more on my research" or "my wife and I grew closer because of the isolation") but not necessarily amounting to a net beneficial effect of the lockdowns.
I am another datapoint here. I had a commute of 2+ hours each way, and the pandemic gave me a year of not needing to do that; which made it crystal clear just how much of my life was being sapped away and how little my job actually relied on me physically being in the office, and when the call to start commuting again came resulted in me reshaping my life accordingly instead to keep the win.
I didn't mind parts of it (I'm pretty introverted) and some good things came of it (remote work, schedule flexibility). But to your point I also remember really bad depression during the winter months in particular caused mostly by the social isolation and lack of stimulation outside of work/TV/video games that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Though I suppose I also discovered ACX around then so all in all kind of a wash.
I know a few people; some predictors of enjoying lockdown off the top of my head:
1) They lived in a big, pleasant house with beautiful accessible nature;
2) They had a positive switch to remote work (or were just able to take a few months off work - I had one friend who basically had a paid 3 month holiday);
3) They previously had anxiety issues related to other people, or were just incredibly introverted; (probably the biggest predictor, actually)
4) They were very germ-phobic, and felt far more comfortable under lockdown than when they had to get into contact with people;
5) They were happy to get the chance to spend more time with immediate family (and didn't live with annoying/abusive family members)
1 is actually the exact opposite for me, one of the best parts is that I was able to go months without ever stepping outside, nature is gross and smelly.
The other four points are, I concede, although I hold a rather extreme position with things that are at least tangentially related to 4
I got very, very lucky in terms of timing. When Covid hit, I had recently accepted a much worse commute (which I did three days a week with two WFH days) in return for moving to another town where I could afford a much larger house (4 bedrooms, ~1500 square feet -> 6 bedrooms, ~3200 square feet) with a larger yard and a swimming pool, in a nicer and quieter community. Going full-remote (which stuck after covid) was a pure win for me, and being cooped up at home went much, much smoother than it would have at our old house.
Even so, it was stressful and pretty much killed what little of my social life had survived the demands of new parenthood. We also lost childcare for a couple of months because our daughter's preschool got shut down as part of the lockdowns.
Haha, Americans have big houses. I was in a <500 sq feet apartment with my wife and a housemate who liked to throw raves every week, and I felt like one of the luckiest people in our circles.
I think the other piece of this is that definitions of "lockdowns" varied a lot: what they entailed, how much they were followed (I'm not aware of anywhere in North America that did much enforcement), etc. For Canada and the US there really wasn't actually that much locking down- businesses were mostly still open through most of the pandemic (sometimes with reduced capacity/increased IPAC measures), international travel got cheaper and less crowded (thus more desirable), and as mentioned elsewhere remote work increased in prevalence.
I know a lot of people who actually increased the amount they were going out, travelling, etc. during the "lockdowns". I was one of the more Covid conscious people in my life; and I barely modified my day-to-day activities at all- a few larger events got cancelled during major waves and I didn't do some international travel that I otherwise would have; but otherwise I just wore a mask more and social activities more often involved outdoor activities and patios.
This is the biggest part of it I expect, at least for the people that were not dealing with a job loss or worrying about a job loss. We had a few weeks of actual lockdown, but between the data showing who was actually dying in Italy becoming available, and it also being clear that we weren't really going to avoid getting COVID, we did not have to stick to anything for long.
So we had two or maybe three weeks where we actually were negatively impacting our lives for no purpose, but even that was a chance to basically focus on our immediate family, which included young kids. Lots of outside time and more attention than when we both were at work. Cooked great meals.
Then after that it was a good while where the government and some organizations kept going through the motions, but all the individuals pretty much knew it was a farce and everybody got to enjoy some less hectic time without so many scheduled activities but lots of outdoor time and laid back social activities.
No, it wasn't a farce. The data indicates that lockdowns did reduce transmission, and thus reduced hospitalizations and deaths — at leat during the first phase of the pandemic.
It's worth setting the record straight because a whole bunch of righwing thinktanks have been diligently trying to obscure the record. I posted this in an earlier thread, but I've rewritten it a bit...
> Being a data-driven person, at the outset of the pandemic, I started charting cases and deaths in nine counties of the SF Bay Area (where I live), the Seattle area, and NY City. Dr. Sara Cody of Santa Clara County persuaded the health officers of the nine counties in the SF Bay Area to push for work-from-home policies, restrictions on public venues, masking, and social distancing.
> Likewise, the public health officers in the Seattle area urged the same NPI programs. These were recommended the last week of February 2020. My employer and most of the other tech companies in the Bay Area had workers work from home. Mayor London Breed of San Francisco announced a shelter-in-place policy on March 16th, but the freeways and cities of the Bay Area were already ghost towns by the first week of March.
AFAICT, Cody used the guidelines taken from the ones published by the National Health Commission of China. For social distancing, Cody translated meters into feet. Having some facility with Chinese I went over to check them out when my local health authorities imposed the lockdowns.
> OTOH, Mayor de Blasio of NY City followed the initial CDC and WHO guidance, which was wash your hands frequently and go about your business normally. From March through April, NYC's cases and deaths climbed quickly. In NYC. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Refrigerator morgues were trucked in, and the dead were carted off to mass burials.
> While in SF Bay Area and Seattle, cases and deaths climbed at a much slower rate. Emergency rooms and critical care facilities were stressed, but we didn't require refrigerator morgues and mass burials. Gavin Newsom was persuaded a couple of weeks into March to apply Sara Cody's NPI recommendations to all of California. By that time, cases and deaths in LA were starting to climb, and compared to SF, their healthcare system was overwhelmed. A few days later, Governor Cuomo of NY ordered lockdowns statewide, including NYC (over de Blasio's objections). Too bad I can't post the graph I created in this substack comments. The difference between Seattle and SF and NY City was pretty stark.
The data shows that counties that enforced stricter NPIs fared better than those that didn't. Of course, when Omicron emerged in December 2021, it was more infectious than any of the previous strains. NPIs were being loosened, and people were being vaccinated. Post Omicron the death toll became more evenly distributed (per capita) across the country.
Here's a study that supports this hypothesis...
IS THE CURE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE? COUNTY-LEVEL EVIDENCE FROM THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN THE UNITED STATES, by Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes et al
"Our estimates suggest that advancing the date of NPI adoption by one day lowers the COVID-19 death rate by 2.4 percent. This finding proves robust to alternative measures of NPI adoption speed, model specifications that control for testing and mobility, and across various samples: national, restricted to the Northeast region, excluding New York, and excluding the Northeast region. We also find that the adoption speed of NPIs is associated with lower infections, as well as lower non-COVID mortality, suggesting that these measures slowed contagion and the pace at which the healthcare system might have been overburdened by the pandemic. Finally, NPI adoption speed appears to have been less relevant in Republican counties, suggesting that political ideology might have compromised their efficiency."
And red states that valued personal freedom over public health fared worse than blue states...
So I don't say this to imply the "lockdowns" were useless/signaling/theatre; or that they weren't necessary. Just that despite a vocal minority, they were a relatively light touch, that had very limited impact on most people's daily lives. I think those small restrictions- wearing masks, lower capacity venues, more stuff outdoors- probably did help on the margins.
But the part of my life that got much worse from Covid was work; since I was working in-person, in hospitals. So I was also seeing firsthand exactly how bad the pandemic was, in a way that was not being captured by the media/zeitgeist/superficial data. A lot of people- including young people- got really sick and would have died without heroic levels of effort and suffering from healthcare workers- both providers and people working behind the scenes to do things like coordinating helicopter flights to transport critically ill kids to other cities when PICUs filled up. Stricter lockdowns likely would have been a better approach.
But the reason people didn't take a big hedonic hit from North American "lockdowns" is because North America didn't really lockdown.
Oh, I agree North America mostly didn't lock down. But it was very much location specific. "We" really did arrest people for going to the beach or skate parks in some places, even if those places had exceptions for politically favored activities, they were still pretty restricted in a lot of ways.
Even in places with lax enforcement, lots of people did more or less voluntarily tank their quality of life. Hell, you see it even after any semblance of lockdown ended. It's really depressing to see people on the beach, and not crowded beaches, wearing cloth masks. Lots of neurotic people were apparently pushed to a point of no return, or at least no return without some effective intervention.
As far as locking down being good for the healthcare system, that probably would have been possible for better managed lockdowns. The only time the area I lived in was effectively locked down the hospitals were empty. The hospitals all got crushed financially because the lucrative "optional" treatments were prohibited while they were empty, and all of the public patience for lockdowns was ended when it really would have been helpful to reduce transmission. I would say our local hospital systems are just now recovering financially, but people are probably still receiving worse care because they lost so many employees they couldn't afford to pay. They mostly kept nursing staff, but they are still having issues with coordination because anybody that could change fields did when they were getting hit with 20% inflation while their wages weren't going up and benefits were being cut.
" Just that despite a vocal minority, they were a relatively light touch, that had very limited impact on most people's daily lives. "
I hope you will take the opportunity to review the rest of this thread, including the experiences of people who lived in different places and under different circumstances than you, and come to an understanding that "relatively light touch" and "limited impact" are things that you should *not* toss around as broad unsubstantiated assertions.
I will be honest that reviewing the thread /mostly/ has the opposite effect. There are a lot of commenters doing a very poor job making the case that "lockdowns" were extremely restrictive or damaging; to the point where I have to be careful not to let it bias me into believing that there aren't also cases where Covid restrictions caused harm in and of themselves.
And certainly I can acknowledge that there are subgroups that had larger quality of life reductions from Covid restrictions... though these restrictions may not have been "lockdowns" and may not have been government imposed nor functionally avoidable. Most notably elderly people in congregate living settings; like retirement homes and long term care homes (SNFs in American parlance) who had major restrictions on family visiting, social activities, etc. (Though this group was also the most at risk of Covid death which does complicate things).
PSE students certainly had to deal with institutional policies that led to a reduction in officially sanctioned large gathering social activities; which could be considered irreplaceable life experiences (many people view their time in college as the best time of their life, which should be given some weight). While many prisoners were released during the early days of the pandemic (arguably the most damaging affirmative Covid policy depending on your views of how much this contributed to increases in crime), but the prisoners who were not released spent more of their sentences in lockdown.
I could have put more caveats in the quoted post besides just "most"; but I already have a tendency to make posts on this subject too long as it is.
The resulting inflation (and the other policies), bad enough on its own, gave Trump another term. I still can't buy a house because of the interest rates and the debt incurred hasn't exactly been paid back. We are still paying for covid policies and we probably haven't even seen the worst of it. It's just baked in to life now so nobody blames the COVID response.
There is a difference between "inflation/economic harms caused by Covid-19" and "inflation/economic harms caused by Covid-19 restrictions". Like ignoring that many of the economic impacts came from supply chain disruptions things happening in Asian manufacturing hubs (which unlike North America, DID often have lockdowns), there would still be economic impacts domestically from a pandemic that the government just didn't respond to? Like large waves of illness still cause disruption if people get sick, and individuals would change their behaviour in response to a pandemic even without government mandate (like what we saw in Sweden, where people limited their mobility more than "locked down" Americans).
I could just as easily argue that the economic damage came mostly from overly-Covid skeptical policy approaches that prolonged the pandemic.
Do you believe deliberately causing illness through Public Health Policies is a relatively small thing? Surgical or cotton masks cause a form of brown lung, when worn for extended periods of time. I do not feel like this is a "relatively small thing" -- it erodes trust in our public institutions, and for what, really? It's not like "masks" do a damn thing to stop an airborne illness (yes, yes, the P100 respirators do, as do taping a plastic bag on your head, the latter of which will kill you.)
Like I said to above thread- "There are a lot of commenters doing a very poor job making the case that 'lockdowns' were extremely restrictive or damaging; to the point where I have to be careful not to let it bias me into believing that there aren't also cases where Covid restrictions caused harm in and of themselves."
An argument that surgical masks cause "a form of brown lung" would be a good example of that statement. But if you have a legitimate source talking about the scourge of brown lung among surgeons and dentists I'll happily read it.
I wouldn’t say I loved it, but it didn’t bother me as much as most people. A group of us in Yascha Mounk’ Persuasion community started doing twice monthly Zoom meetups to discuss salient political and cultural issues. Five years later and we still do it. I would *hate* to lose that group.
At first, it was claustrophobic, but working from home was great! I never had to return to the office after the lockdowns. Commuting was such a waste of time, and I was definitely less efficient in the office with all the social distractions. My director was an anal-retentive micro-manager. He kept telling us how eager he was to get us working as a team back in the office. Bleh! Luckily, management didn't renew the lease on the office space where I worked, so he never got us back to the office.
Definitely getting away from the micro-management was a huge plus. My boss is a micro-manager, God bless her, and it really puts me under stress at times when literally every ten minutes it's "did you do the thing yet? is the thing done? are you doing the thing?" and of course I can't reply (out loud) "well I *would* be doing the thing if you weren't interrupting me every ten minutes".
(She's not a bad boss, just tends to be anxious and that shows up as micro-managing).
Best months of my life. Granted I escaped Los Angeles immediately and extricated myself from a lease. Bought an old adobe in Taos NM and fixed it up. Hunkered down and made bread and went hiking and fishing daily. Yea I was privileged to have a remote job but before the pandemic I couldn’t afford a house (I would want to live in) in the cities where I could secure work (and wanted to live). It was a game changer and my relationship and work life balance had never been better. No kids helped too.
I lived in a group house where I was able to get lots of social interaction with other people in the group house, and we could regularly schedule events because people weren't doing things outside of the house. I'm not sure I prefer it overall--conferences and so on happening again is nice--but it was pretty close.
I did. First, I'm less sociable than a rock, so "can't go out, can't travel, can't meet people, pubs and restaurants are shut" affected me not at all. Second, I got to work from home! No more getting up an hour earlier than I needed to be at work since that was how my travel schedule worked out, instead it was "roll out of bed about ten minutes before I need to officially clock on" (as it were).
I still miss that now I've had to go back to the office. It helped that the majority of my work is done via email, phone calls, and online, and that I usually work tucked away in a little out of the way office not interacting much with other colleagues anyway. So being at home versus being in the work building wasn't that vital a difference.
I enjoyed the lockdown. I started working 100% remotely. My children had remote school so we could spend more time together, sometimes we were going for a walk to woods etc during their school time - they could attend the remote school on a phone as well. I was biking around and generally had a good time.
Same here! It was also the best year for streaming VR so you could always hang out with people who shared the same interest. I felt like both my fitness and social life blossomed.
I am the King Of All Introverts, and I couldn't work from home. Could not get anything done, other cats were constantly bugging me, getting into fights, stupid drama, stupid stuff.
Perhaps that's because you didn't miss visiting your dying mother in the hospital because they weren't allowing visitors. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
As someone who this also happened to: I'm so sorry. :( It's been a while, and maybe this response is both trite and too late, but I hope you were able to find some emotional closure despite the situation.
It was pretty bad for me. I had constant earworms lasting up to 2 weeks each. Try having, like, Shattered by the Rolling Stones on a constant loop in your head followed by one particular part of Deacon Blues by Steely Dan, followed by....for months. It was awful.
At a tangent, my personal surefire cure for earworms is to find a catchy song that you like, and whenever you find yourself suffering an earworm, start humming the song you like to yourself. The new song commandeers the part of your brain that slips into the earworm. With a little practice, it just slips into the song you like instead.
(If -that- song becomes your new earworm due to familiarity, find yet another one, and so on. Eventually you can loop back to the first.)
You're a lucky one. I've tried this, and it turns out that annoying earworms can only be supplemented by other, equally annoying earworms. It's like biting your lip to distract from the pain of smashing your toe into a doorframe.
Are you sure that's the case for you? I know lots of catchy songs that I enjoy - once I start playing them in my head, it's easy to keep playing them. And like I said, they just crowd them out.
Are there songs you like? What are they? What happens when you hum them to yourself?
I'm a huge music fan. If I'm not listening to music at a given point there's about a 50% chance I'm playing music in my head. (Present head-track: You Can Call Me Al by Paul Simon).
So I'm the same as you until you get to "crowd them out". If I think of a catchy song I like, it'll get stuck in my head, UNLESS I'm trying to drown out an annoying earworm, in which case the sodding earworm wins. The only thing that works is substituting a different, slightly less annoying earworm. I'm not going to be able to replace it with Sultans of Swing or All Along the Watchtower, sadly.
Yeah, 2020 was one of the best years of my life. Got a new job, bought a house, started remote socializing with friends who live in other states... it was really fantastic
It really, really, depends on what your job/income source during lockdown was. Programmer working from home? Living your best life. Out of work because your business is shut down? You're spending the entire lockdown fretting about how long you can afford to stay home.
It's weird: on the one hand, I kind of agree, I had a decent experience of lockdown, and I certainly don't remember it bitterly or anything.
On the other hand, if I think a little harder I recall that I had to reschedule my wedding, and decisions about if and when to go through with it a year later were extremely stressful; and I still remember how grateful I was the first time I went to a movie again, and to a concert again.
I think part of it is, some of my distress wasn't really caused by "lockdown" in the sense of government dictates, but rather by the lockdown-like behaviour that many people exhibited regardless. Even when the wedding happened, the concern wasn't necessarily "will the government shut this down", it was "will people come?", or "will this kill my grandmother?"--so I attribute this to COVID itself, rather than to lockdown. There's no counterfactual in which lockdown didn't happen, but my decisions were any easier.
Perhaps I should feel bad about this, but the truth is my lockdown year was one of the best times in my life. My wife and I had a newborn, and there was no pressure to take him around to see relatives, drive to holidays, etc. We both worked remotely anyway, and had recently moved into a house with a nice backyard. There’s a pond near our house, heavily forested but with a slight path around it, and every day I’d strap the baby on my chest and take my three-year-old daughter, inevitably costumed as Wonder Woman, for two circuits around the pond—those are some of my fondest memories—and then we’d go home and read comic books in the backyard until it was time to hand the kids over to my wife and go to work. My friends would set up zooms (or the equivalent) to chat or play D&D, and the rest of the time I just hung out with my family, read and write. I had a pull list at the comic book store, and a credit card on file, and every week I’d go knock on the door and a hand would pass a bag of comics through the crack. My local library started a program where you could check out books on their website and a librarian would leave them on a table outside, rubberbanded with your name. I read 268 books in 202, including David Copperfield, À rebours, Le Morte D’Arthur, and Human, All Too Human. I had a blast.
I’m aware that circumstance conspired to give me a good time, and if I had been at a different period of life—when I lived alone in a studio apartment in the middle of a city, for example, with my only source of income a job that would be closed—lockdown would have been harder to bear. But I’ll take a good hand when it was dealt to me.
You remind me of the joke where, upon hearing that everyone has to stay at home avoid social contact, a computer nerd declares "Yes! I have prepared for this moment for years!"
I had a great lockdown, but mostly because I was in a place where I basically didn't have to be locked down at all, so it was just an unexpected vacation where the government also gives you money and I could work on some side projects.
My social life blossomed under lockdown. I loved that everyone was scheduling quality time together virtually, whereas in real life you kind of just had to run into people, and scheduling something was a big ask
It was both good and bad for me. Good parts: work from home, more time with my family. Bad parts: less meeting my friends, less babysitting from grandmothers.
All the debating, delegating to states, etc also meant that we’ve never had any official end to Covid. No parade, no nationwide lifting of lockdown, no real unifying way to acknowledge deaths or that the crisis has mostly ended. I think it would have been a smart move by Biden, some sort of national day or public ritual that acknowledges the toll and but also says, hey, we’re done, and looks forward.
I feel like Biden actually did try to do that in early summer 2021 once vaccines become widely available, but then the variants started coming and people freaked out again, followed shortly after by the bad inflation. After that, there was enough uncertainty where I don't think anyone was (rightly) looking to do another "Mission Accomplished" event.
Right, Biden made a celebratory speech on July 4, 2021, but almost immediately the Delta variant showed up from India in Missouri and then covid got bad again.
Fortunately, Omnicron mutated to be somewhat less lethal while being highly contagious, so, in hindsight, the worst was over by early 2022.
Yeah, basically my interpretation as well. Though unfortunately the timing made any attempt at a "victory" essentially impossible after omicron, even if it was obviously substantially weaker than earlier strains (a virus has to survive after all, amiright?). It just led to a continuous decline in the acceptable level of risk for anybody on Team Covid Bad, and an insurmountable increase for Team Covid NotAProblem, while everyone else just wanted to have a reasonable threshold to accept so they could resume their normal lives (where people live with a significant risk of illness/death with regularity).
I’ve noticed a rather large number of people never wanted COVID to end. Some because they understandably loved WFH. Others were fearful of going back out (maybe still are). These voices were powerful in a variety of “the groups” and especially among teachers (who had a bit of trouble coming to terms with the fact that many of their members were going too far with keeping school remote in my opinion)
This is all to say many in the Democratic coalition did not and still don’t want to move on from COVID.
Isolated, introverted, anxious people got to see the rest of the world change to conform to their outlook. It felt good to them. Unsurprisingly, those sorts of people had an amplified voice on social media. They were dismayed to see the world return to pre-Covid norms, and fought tooth and nail until the rest of the world simply moved on.
Speaking for myself, I gave those ideas the benefit of the doubt for too long. I was “too nice” in my opinion. I didn’t realize how irrational some/many of the voices in my cohort were and they’d never “come around” and willingly agree to stop being shut down.
Teachers regularly bring home every sickness their students have, it's a valid concern for them above what most people deal with (daycares and hospitals being some of the few places where it's significantly worse).
For COVID specifically, it may have made more sense to allow older teachers, especially above age 60, to take an early retirement. That's what my kid's school did. Most of the teachers seemed fine to return, and of those that didn't, I think most were old enough it was a real concern.
Some kids have suboptimal hygiene in my opinion. They sometimes bring lice and everything else into the building (I remember the lice checks). That never wasn’t part of the job in my opinion.
All people’s feeling are valid, but concessions didn’t work. Instead the teachers slow walked authorities in my opinion.
It took a long time for Democratic elected officials to come around and force teachers back.
I suspect many and maybe even most teachers wanted reopening long before it happened, but they were bullied into silence by the vocal minority. A group of bullies who accused them of wanting people to die. Or worse accused them of being Republican.
I’ve never before seen teachers get so far out of step from public opinion as they did during Covid.
The fact that teachers lobbied hard (successfully) to get first in line for the vaccines… and then refused to go back to work anyway, was a major blow to what little faith I had left in teachers’ unions
Yes, that was not a good look for teachers as a whole. Maybe it wasn't the same individual teachers, but it was definitely the same unions and leadership.
Teachers’ union when it’s time to vote on new property taxes: “Children are our future, we do the most important job on earth!” Teachers’ unions during COVID: “Grocery clerks are essential workers, not us! No biggie if the kiddos take a couple years off”
Do they mask up because of Covid, general disease-related reasons, or something else? Masks didn't really help against Covid except for signalling, and N95 masks used correctly, or equivalent.
I still see people using cloth masks today, and think, "that's probably not effective against what you think you're protecting yourself from" and stay silent, for whatever comfort they derive from it is not mine to attempt to remove.
I often don't have an appropriate moment to ask, so I just act like they're legitimately immuno-compromised and try to behave naturally otherwise.
Trouble is, it's a lot of people, more than this would explain, especially when they're doing things like attending parties or talking like they aren't sick.
Japan has been traumatized, too. This is causing brown lung in formerly healthy individuals (I believe moronic doctors are labeling it "long covid" because everything is labeled long covid -- we have postviral syndrome, it existed long before covid, and I'm steamed that nobody, nobody wanted to use the preexisting term).
It's a lost cause, telling these people that they are hurting themselves. We are deliberately hurting our service workers, with demands that they continue to wear masks, when not creating droplet contamination. (Note: masks in that case are more or less "sneeze here and get a new one" devices).
FWIW I think this varied greatly by location and community. I think more lefty social and professional groups (like teachers) suffered from this more. Someone in my network actually had a kid who needed to start going to school during COVID but the kid's parents had gotten so scared about going back into society that they needed encouragement and help from other parents to send the kid to school. At first the parents were so scared to go outside their house that they needed friends to come and walk with them (socially distanced and masked) to send the kid to school.
I have a friend who completely stopped socializing outside. They vaguely cite the ethical impacts of potentially spreading disease in larger group chats but in smaller group chats they've said simply that their social anxiety has become so bad that they have a hard time coming to terms with the idea of ever going outside again.
African-Americans got hammered hard by covid in the first half of 2020. Covid is spread mostly by people talking face to face indoors, and blacks tend to work in service jobs and they tend to enjoy socializing during their off hours. Over the course of 2020, they made an impressive effort to reduce their vulnerability to covid because of the high number of black deaths in the first wave. One aspect of this effort was that black parents became staunch supporters on average of remote schooling and resisted efforts to reopen schools.
All this sound not unreasonable to me, even if the consequences were on the whole unfortunate.
Hahaha. No, no they didn't. 2020 featured some rather dramatic black street parties in NYC, right at the same time that the cops were pulling Jews off the corner for having a wedding.
(AfricanAmericans did get hammered hard by covid19, it's a blood disease, and folks with sickle cell genes -- among other issues AA have with blood... tend to have issues with anything causing your red blood cells to not work right)
I saw it on the news. I talked about it with a lot of people. The modal reaction was "wait, it was still an emergency?" People were done caring about Covid by April 2023, right or wrong.
I think Biden wasn't in a good position to do this because of negative polarization. Then again, an Official End to the Pandemic in blue America while Red America says there was never a pandemic in the first place isn't the worst outcome I guess.
When you wind up murdering an entire population of minks, and then creating zombie minks, it's a freaking pandemic. It may not be a very dangerous pandemic (this one wasn't, believe it or not)...
Not sure what it's like elsewhere but here in the Philippines there's still lots of signs about wearing a face mask still in windows and posted around the place.
No one even notices them anymore, certainly no enforcement, except in hospitals.
To me, what is interesting is how COVID and the wildly shifting narratives (official and otherwise) surrounding it did much to destroy expert credibility.
Wasn't that long ago, when anti-vaxxers were strictly Nut Fringe. Now, they are everywhere.
You thinking of masks and lab leak, or something else? I hear this often, but I'm having trouble thinking of examples - the experts stood pretty firm on things like vaccines, lockdowns, etc.
Lab leak is one example, until it became politically convenient to blame China, even the idea of a COVID vaccine (sponsored by Trump) was questioned at first by democrats.
Lockdowns are another interesting example. Necessary, until the George Floyd protests, when suddenly they were not. The Canadian Trucker protests were another - the Canadian authorities did Whatever It Took to shut those protests down, then lockdowns were quietly dropped shortly thereafter.
Yeah, agreed. This was a political scandal, about politicians being hypocrites, a recognizable problem as old as human society, and which was widely denounced and resulted (at least indirectly) in the downfall of Boris Johnson. (At least that's my vague understanding of events -- I don't live in the UK, and I may be wrong.)
That's correct. It wasn't the immediate cause of his downfall, but it was the highest profile of the various scandals that caused his colleagues to turn on him eventually.
Wasn't just the UK, we had a mini Partygate scandal (several, in fact) here in Ireland ourselves, and of course in California it was Newsom and the French Laundry.
What it had to do with experts was the politicians solemnly telling the rest of the country "all the experts agree you can't go visit your dying granny in hospital, don't be selfish", and then they were found blatantly ignoring all that Expert Advice themselves. It wasn't just hypocrisy, it was "so are you lying about the expert advice? and if you don't believe it, why should we?"
Reason had a decent article on a similar scandal for London Breed (mayor of San Francisco), which noted that she 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 [Reason's opinion] defended herself on the grounds that her lockdown orders were stupid and pointless.
Why would the mayor of San Francisco issue orders she never believed in?
The causality here doesn't run like:
1. Politicians receive expert advice and issue a matching pronouncement.
2. The public goes along with it because they trust the politicians.
It's the reverse:
1. The public demands a certain set of policies. No experts are involved in determining what those policies are.
2. Politicians attempt to supply the policies that voters demand. When those policies look outrageous, they muster some experts to provide a nominal justification.
If London Breed had stood on principle and refused to issue orders that didn't make any sense, that would have been a scandal too, likely more politically damaging to her than the scandal she actually had.
I mean this is a public benefit versus private benefit thing.
Many people will agree that littering is a bad thing and it would be a lot better if other people didn't litter, and yet litter. It doesn't mean that they don't honestly believe that littering is bad, it just means that they're jerks.
"Lab leak is one example, even the idea of a COVID vaccine was question at first by democrats. "
I believe that the vaccine was questioned by Democratic *politicians* rather than by the medical establishment. Once Trump lost in November 2020 the vaccines were okay by those politicians.
Example from CNN:
"Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris said that President Donald Trump’s word alone on any potential coronavirus vaccine is not enough.
Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash in a clip released Saturday whether she would get a vaccine that was approved and distributed before the election, Harris replied, “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,' she continued in the clip from an exclusive interview airing Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union' at 9 a.m. ET. 'I will not take his word for it.'"
As if Trump, rather than Pfizer or Moderna or whoever would be making the call on safety and efficacy.
But I don't think any medical establishment people were taking this position.
You may well be correct, but the average frustrated citizen doesn't really see the difference between the "Trust The Science!" political party and the actual scientists.
Yea, while agreeing with Mark R's overall point I dunno if that is actually the best example. In that specific slip Harris stuck pretty well to an obvious truth, that no sensible person should take Trump's word about any such topic.
Conveniently omitting the obvious counterpoint: that no sensible person should be taking Harris' word about any such topic either.
An awful lot of politicians on both sides of the aisle really needed to sit down and shut up, instead of trying to "lead", and did an awful lot of damage, even before the obvious public hypocrises occurred.
But it was an election year, so that was never on the table.
Kamala's response in the vice presidential debate was:
“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.”
So it's 100% clear that she is deferring to medical authorities, not to Trump's judgment.
Perhaps the whole thing was an irresponsible or pointless dig at Trump, based on a hypothetical situation that wouldn't happen.
But it's worth remembering that he did take hydroxychloroquine, when that was not recommended by other authorities.
That statement is disturbingly ambiguous as to what Kamala Harris would have done, or advocated others do, if *both* the medical authorities *and* Donald Trump say that we should take the vaccine.
I know this is beside your point, but I think that's kind of revisionist - they did everything other than actually arresting people: they made around 300 arrests, which is minuscule compared both to the amount of people there - there were over 1000 arrests at the 2010 G20 protests, for example. Arresting people is the usual thing you do when you want them to stop doing something. The public controversy was mostly about the lack of government response to them. (Honestly, I think the lack of arrests kind of did them a disservice - part of the point of protesting is proving you care enough about something to be fine with getting arrested. They didn't get to prove that.)
IIRC, they tried arrests, but the cops and protesters wouldn't play along. They tried towing trucks, but the towing companies and protesters wouldn't play along.
Yeah. It's pretty damning that the cops didn't want to make arrests, even though they had plenty of reason to. But yeah, the federal government tried lots of things, they just didn't make arrests happen, despite that they wanted to.
Non-violent political protests at the seat of government are typically not considered a reason for arrests in Canada, and for that matter neither are parking violations...
I think these are good examples of some specific triggers, but I have felt for a while like a lot of the breakdown was caused by a mix of fear of the disease and psychological pressure from lockdowns while people observed leaders/experts just kind of floundering during a crisis that hit closer to home than anything (in the US) since maybe 9/11. It demonstrated a lot of the issues people are talking more about now re state capacity (or lack thereof) that the expert class repeatedly attempted to influence public opinion through dictate, while there was obviously so much uncertainty that made it hard to do so. And it certainly didn't help when politicians broke their own rules, which obviously feels like a violation of the public's trust, not to mention how it all became so politicized more broadly.
"And it certainly didn't help when politicians broke their own rules, which obviously feels like a violation of the public's trust, not to mention how it all became so politicized more broadly."
As someone else put it - it also shows that the politicians didn't believe it themselves.
Canadian authorities took a light hand with the truckers. Canadians are a very law and rules-abiding bunch, and sympathy for groups occupying public spaces evaporates quickly. Most Canadians - especially residents of Ottawa - were frustrated with the authorities for not doing enough to break up the occupation sooner.
One issue that came up with the vaccines (I think the first round, in early 2021) was whether or not they prevented passing COVID to someone else. They were initially touted as effective in preventing the spread of COVID, but within a few months the experts were conceding that their functionality was solely in making one's own case of COVID much milder. This was cited afterwards as an example of experts not being trustworthy, trying to sell us something under a promise they had to walk back later. (I suspect in reality, the experts were both sincere and correct in initially stating that the vaccines would prevent contagion, but soon afterwards new variants came out for which the vaccines didn't have this effect.)
Are you saying it's not? What sets up a phone line for reporting COVID and staffs it with people spreading lies? Even if that did happen, it would be on the heads of the people staffing the line!
They kinda painted themselves into a corner on that. My recollection is that the actual numbers presented BY Pfizer at launch were about reduction of severity and death. And presumably, the reduction in symptom severity should substantially reduce the chance of spreading the illness along the most common vectors. However, for various public messaging reasons, they didn't want the public connecting symptoms to spread, they wanted people thinking and acting as if proximity to anybody later discovered to have covid probably means you have it and will spread it asymptomatically just by being in the room with them so you better isolate yourself for 10 days just in case!
I think your recollection on the Pfizer numbers is in error -- that paper shouldn't be hard to look up, but as I recall due to the low death rate from covid (particularly in the cohort that would be likely to participate in a vaccine trial), the number of deaths (single digit, I think) in the sample population was far too small to use as an endpoint.
The efficacy numbers reported (90+%) were as pertains to "symptomatic covid-19-like illness" -- there was an assumption made that this would result in a corresponding decline in "likelihood of transmission"; when this turned out to be false, authorities leaned into the severity reduction piece, but this relied on observational studies as the initial trials weren't really powered to detect severity reduction either.
I was in Italy at the time. There the official narrative was that we should vaccinate to flatten the curve, by pushing the R0 down, so we could phase out the various restrictions on movement, mask mandates, etc. Then, as it became clear that this wasn’t working (or at least it wasn’t working enough), the blame was shifted to antivaxxers, and the vaccine was seen just as a way to mitigate the severity of the disease. The experts appeared to always side with whatever narrative the government was pushing, even when it was rapidly shifting. Ultimately the notion that science should inform policy got discredited. This kind of damage is hard to quantify but it feels substantial.
I lived in southern Missouri for most of COVID and vaccine hesitancy definitely made the Delta wave worse than it would have been. The Springfield hospitals were overwhelmed and they had to bring in hundreds of personnel from out of state. By contrast, during the initial wave a number of Springfield personnel went to assist in New York.
During that same period my local state rep was posting antivax crap on Facebook.
My point is that the vaccine was first promoted as a dependable way to curb transmission, promising sterilizing immunity much like the measles shot. When it became clear this wasn’t so, the official message shifted. Instead of shaming the unvaccinated for thwarting efforts to push R0 below 1, authorities began shaming them for supposedly risking hospital overload by contracting more severe illness. The pivot was smooth and applied to people of all ages who refused to vaccinate for any reason, even as AstraZeneca, initially approved nationwide, was pulled after a relatively young woman died from an adverse reaction.
"authorities began shaming them for supposedly risking hospital overload"
That's literally what happened! The Delta wave hit my area really hard. My area had a low vaccination rate. Ergo the hospitals were overwhelmed and a lot of people died. There is no "supposedly" about it.
During that same period, THREE antivax conservative radio hosts died from COVID in the course of a month.
Instead of attacking "experts," maybe you should attack radio hosts like that? They literally make money from lying.
Or perhaps you can attack my local state representative? He literally gets elected for lying.
Don't pretend this all happened in a vacuum. There were bad actors polluting the information space, some for profit, some for votes, and they absolutely should be shamed for it.
I am not in the business of publicly attacking individuals for their behavior, not at this stage in my life. There is plenty of naming and shaming going on at all times on social media, we don’t need more. What I am pointing at is a systemic problem. The official narrative changed repeatedly, as if the officials were working backwards from a policy decision to find a way to motivate it based on “science”. This ultimately hurt the credibility of science and expert opinion.
Yeah, of course there were bad actors polluting the information space. Not All of them were NonGovernmental. You tell me you'd get a vaccine if one of the first people vaccinated on television Dies On Camera??!? Nah, you wouldn't. You'd at least think twice, right?? Now, take that person away. Voila! You're happy to get the "safe and effective" vaccine, right?
This is an actual datapoint (although I do want to ask, "how many nurses and doctors were fired for refusing to get vaccinated?" as the "overwhelmed" might not have existed in a time/place where nurses and doctors were allowed to exist as conscientious objectors). Most datapoints about "ICU overwhelmed" are NOT actual datapoints -- a hospital needs more ICU beds like they need a hole in the head (in short, there's never enough in an emergency) -- and covid19 patients didn't generally need an ICU bed anyway (they needed a negative pressure environment like tuberculosis patients get -- that's 3 days of competent facilities management to build an entire ward.)
There was a brief fight about whether it was safe to release the Covid vaccines shortly before the first Trump/Biden election or whether safety required that they not be released until shortly after the election. I don't know that it was a shift, but I personally wish we had released it sooner.
Was there a single orthodox Expert anywhere of any kind anywhere who had a single thing to say about the "no gathering anywhere with anyone for any reason at any cost, there is no sacrifice you must not make for this" -> elite-sanctioned riots transition?
IIRC at the time there *were* orthodox experts saying that outdoor gatherings wre much less likely to spread COVID, thanks to the much better air circulation. And indeed, there doesn't seem to have been a spike in COVID cases around the date of the protests in May-June 2020.
"no gathering anywhere with anyone for any reason at any cost, there is no sacrifice you must not make for this"
This was never official policy, or if it was it was only in a few states for a short time (I recall reading that California had particularly restrictive policies). In my state, the full-on stay-at-home lockdown (which still had some exceptions for family gatherings and outdoor activities) lasted about 2 months, then shifted to "we are carefully re-opening with social distancing and masks." Ohio was reopening its businesses almost a month before George Floyd was killed.
(Also note that a lot of people *voluntarily* avoided gathering even if it would have been technically allowed under their state's lockdown rules. People were scared of the mystery virus!)
It would have been nice if those orthodox experts had fed more into the orthodoxy and a consistent "don't breath other people's air" policy was what the world was trying to innovate around.
"And indeed, there doesn't seem to have been a spike in COVID cases around the date of the protests in May-June 2020."
Not a "spike", a wave. What pretty much every source describes as a "second wave" of COVID, clearly visible in any plot of cases or fatalities, washed over the United States in June through August of 2020. And killed rather more people than the first wave, though less than the third.
The same thing happened in Europe, so it's more than just Black Lives Mattering. But I did look closely at the numbers at the time, and the inflection point marking the start of the second wave in almost every US state I could find number for, started 10-12 days after the first deployment of the National Guard to counter #BLM protests in that state. Which is to say, about the usual incubation period plus reporting delay.
This has to have been more than just infected protesters, and it almost certainly would have happened regardless. But in the United States, it sure looks like the #BLM protests, and the official tolerance and almost endorsement of such, was treated by everyone *else* as the signpost for "lwe're not *really* doing lockdowns any more, whatever is important to you it's OK to get together en masse to do it" and then lots of backyard BBQs, etc, etc. Which millions of stir-crazy people were ready for, and likely to do soon enough in any event.
As far as official policy, I'm pretty sure any public protest in California in May or June of 2020 would have been absolutely lock-your-ass-in-jail illegal under Governor Newsom's "shelter in place" order, and yet there was a conspicuous absence of #BLM protesters being arrested by California policemen for public-health reasons.
So we got about the same outcome as e.g. Western Europe, we just burned an extra dose of public trust getting there.
When people discuss the potential for spread at BLM protests they tend to focus on the outdoor gathering part. And they ignore the millions (~20 million participated) of people travelling between cities, crashing on friends couches, going out to dinner, drinking and socializing in people's houses before and after. All the free mixing of otherwise fairly isolated social graphs.
I know I'm a little late, but seriously, if you want to attack anyone else for their credibility and be taken remotely seriously, this sort of phrasing is not your friend. Lots of people who might otherwise agree with you about the dissonant messaging *will not fail to notice* this dishonest and spin-heavy framing.
School closures, while directly impacting fewer people, were probably the single biggest failure of the expert class, in my opinion. We knew, basically by the fall of 2020, that kids weren't seriously impacted, and we knew not that long after that, that schools being open didn't significantly affect community spread. And yet schools in some places stayed closed or partially closed for another year plus in some places.
No, they didn’t. Child welfare and education experts warned of the terrible cost to learning and mental health that children would suffer from prolonged school closures. They implored authorities to keep schools open at all costs. But anxious parents, pandering politicians, and teachers unions got their way.
School closures were an example of experts NOT being listened to.
Parents? I'm sure there were neurotic parents that wanted schools closed, but surely it was a small minority. It's not like there were rules against homeschooling or virtual schooling, so there wasn't much of an incentive for parents to push for closed schools, unless they thought it gave them an excuse to work from home when their employer otherwise would push back against it.
I don't know of a single parent that wanted schools closed longer. Definitely not a representative group, but surely by fall of 2020 the school closures were almost exclusively pushed by teachers wanting additional time off, not parents?
Fair enough - it wasn’t many parents. But some were caught up in the whole cultural tug-of-war where any relaxation of restrictions was coded as populist, anti-vax right. And some invariably side with teachers and teachers unions as political allies.
> Child welfare and education experts warned of the terrible cost to learning and mental health that children would suffer from prolonged school closures.
And then the major effect on mental health was a big drop in suicides. This was not a warning based on facts.
Because you need privacy to attempt suicide. But research shows mental health among children worsened significantly.
“Social isolation as a result of lockdowns and other societal changes during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant increase in mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, resulting in higher outpatient and emergency department mental health–related visits for youths.”
When George Floyd got writ up as a covid19 death, I'm not going to guarantee that "actual suicides" weren't getting written up as covid19 deaths.
Given the substantial comorbidity between Metabolic Syndrome and Depression/Suicide, I'm not saying they're wrong, either, until you're ready to start laying down some data saying that suicides are NOT actually caused by covid19 (I'm just opening the question, not advocating either side). It's pretty easy to say that "longterm cancer" was not caused by covid19... it's much harder to say that about a suicide.
Despite my misreading, it depends on who you consider "experts" and how widely you draw the managerial class line. Media and politicians failed the hardest for not communicating the information that was already known, and in my opinion, even the experts who were correct failed for not trying harder to communicate the truth that they knew, probably because it was politically inconvenient and counter-narrative to do so.
We knew even earlier than that. Studies from Europe and S Korea in the spring of 2020 showed that children were extremely unlikely to contract covid, and schools for younger grades were not responsible for community spread. And yet all you heard in 2020 and 2021 is how anyone who taught school or raised kids knew they were filthy germ factories. It was the most remarkable example I can remember of educated, intelligent people flat-out ignoring any research that ran contrary to their preferred narrative.
I agree completely. I was on a school board in 2020, and my personal experience was that the evidence was pretty clear by June 2020 that, at the very least, elementary school students should be in school in person in the fall. Kids were not themselves at great risk, and kids weren't even infecting adults, to a large extent. The danger to adults came from other adults, not from kids. If the adults stayed away from each other, then elementary classrooms of kids were not a significant Covid risk. This was reasonably obvious early in the summer of 2020.
> And yet all you heard in 2020 and 2021 is how anyone who taught school or raised kids knew they were filthy germ factories.
Yes, and as anyone in childcare can tell you, the meaning of that phrase is that children are huge *vectors* for disease to adults. Closing schools wasn't ever about protecting kids[1], it was always about preventing spread to their much older caretakers.
[1] Though I'm certain that many non-experts said otherwise, through ignorance or dishonesty, because Think Of The Children™️ sells
But those early strains of covid weren’t huge vectors for spread to adults, because covid didn’t behave like the common cold or flu. Kids didn’t get covid, but they didn’t spread it either. In parts of the world where schools stayed open, they were not sources of community transmission. Research showed the lessons of colds and flus did not apply. But that research was ignored.
We knew by June that kids "weren't seriously impacted" -- NO ORPHANAGES GOT BUILT (Yes, around the time when Italy sent kids home and there was that superspreader event, we were worried about kids spreading the 'vid). Erm, yes, that's also saying they weren't hurting their parents, in any significant way.
I'm a big institutionalist but I can definitely feel a lot of places in which people may have suffered whiplash as the dominant narrative changed - travel restrictions, masks, flattening the curve, mass gatherings, lockdowns, remote learning, airborne or not, lab leak, vaccines vs transmissibility, boosters, etc, etc. If you dropped in to check how we were doing under COVID every six months, what people were talking about would have been quite different every time!
Most of this didn't offend me at all since I could sort of see why the narrative had changed as people learned more about COVID, and I'm happy to chalk up the rest to the fuckups that happen from time to time. But I think people less charitable could easily conclude that the whole thing was a crock of shit, not least because the way that these narratives were sold to the public was not through patient scientific explanation, but by repeatedly shouting at them to FOLLOW THE SCIENCE and TRUST THE EXPERTS and if you questioned anything you were a chud crank racist who wanted grandma to die, even if what the experts was telling you had changed or god forbid you were right and the experts were wrong the first time around.
Two days later (after the gays traced how many vaccinated people were spreading illness), everyone wears a mask anyway!
And you say this vaccine is supposed to "stop the spread"?
Now, imagine if you got hurt because of the vaccine... that was "safe and effective" despite causing blood clots and plane crashes. Whoops! We can't have plane crashes! Destroy the Press! (yes, this happened. trade publication was destroyed).
Who said it caused plane crashes? The vaccine reduced mortality (and hospitalization), so you'd expect pilots to be safer vaccinated than unvaccinated.
Trade Publication that was listing obituaries for pilots (this can be used as a proxy for how much the vaccine was causing bloodclots and other issues that are exacerbated by pressurization and depressurization). The dramatic increase in deaths was the issue, and why the trade publication needed to be removed from public consumption.
Vinay Prasad has done a good job of documenting these. For an example of a shifting narrative, see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoUlnkd8nOs, where CDC says that if you get the vax you'll never need another (speaking as an immunologist this is a questionable statement to make about a novel vaccine to a coronavirus), then having that person go back and say, "you need another booster" and eventually "you need a yearly booster." Plus there was the claim that you wouldn't spread it to others if you got the vaccine, which was an evidence-free claim when it was made.
Then there was "2-weeks to slow the spread" (an arguably valid policy if it had remained at that), which morphed into various unending lockdowns with no clear objective, then finally into zero-COVID policies that never should have been considered serious policy objectives by any sane scientist.
Masking toddlers except at nap time. Closing down outdoor events. Insisting children were at major risk of hospitalization and death from COVID - unless they stay home from school and later unless they get vaccinated. Rejecting the idea that myocarditis was a serious safety signal, and then following that up with the baseless claim that the risk of myocarditis from COVID was greater than that of the vaccine.
This is not an exhaustive list, but given many of these claims were directly tied to vaccines there's a reason people are skeptical - and specifically of official pronouncements made by CDC/FDA that were later proved to be speculation, wrong, or known falsehoods at the time they were made.
Add to that the evidence that FDA delayed vaccine approval by changing the statistical analysis, all so the vaccine wouldn't be approved until after the election. Suddenly it was apparent that 'expert' government organizations were politically motivated. So Red Team had to join one side and Blue Team had to join the other side. This was an own-goal by people who should have known better. They didn't actually 'follow the science', the government officials at CDC and FDA injected politics into the discussion. The American people followed their lead.
Remember when they wiped the wikipedia article? The coronavirus article used to reference the similarities to dengue virus, where the vaccine was actually withdrawn for causing more harm than good...
You can find good science being done by good scientists. Increasingly, science communication from government agencies is more politics than science. You can tell the difference by whether someone uses the right tools:
Have you seen what "cage free chickens" get up to? (Broken bones, that are left unset, and much more cruelty than you'd get otherwise).
Yes, you can find good science being done by good scientists. Its rare, but it's still out there. Eventually, science is going to start looking at "vaccine injuries and deaths" -- until then, you can talk to the term life insurance folks, who are busy doing a Very Big Population Study called "Can We Stay In Business?"
In summer 2020 the American Pediatric Association put out a very strong statement in support of reopening schools. Then shortly thereafter they put out a very watered down joint statement with the NEA that walked back much of that support - science succumbing to teacher's unions. Then Trump started pushing to reopen schools which perversely fueled the opposition to reopening. Only the first statement was based on science, the rest was political theatre.
Another example was masking, the official and scientific advice oscillated wildly in 2020, though the actual evidence didn't change (and still hasn't - universal masking doesn't do much).
Yeah, I agree that the official expert consensus was pretty solid for 95+% of COVID-related things, especially in the published science. But there were some genuine expert-led policy slip-ups (EU/UK/US not emphasising ventilation like they did in Japan), some genuinely weird scientists (I recall a British scientist suggesting a permanent lockdown), some "woke science" (suggesting using race/ethnicity to prioritise vaccines), and expert hypocrisy (gov advisors breaking lockdown rules).
I recognise that it was statistically inevitable that some stuff like this would happen, but sadly, other people's only experience with medical experts in media or policymaking was limited to these negative examples. Alternative media/podcast grifters blew these examples out of proportion, generalised these cases to an entire corrupt expert class, and successfully destroyed (perceived) expert credibility.
Your link does not support the claim you make about a lack of survivors. In another comment I linked on pre-COVID studies showing mRNA vaccines were safe.
Your "they're safe" studies weren't done five years later, now were they? We're talking "seven years later" for some of these studies. (Again, it wouldn't be remarkable to see most of the patients dead, but all of them?)
"Safe and effective" is something that one should measure based on the type of virus, and the dengue vaccine got pulled how many years into its run? After passing the basic "does this work" tests? (Covid19, and SARS in general is very much like dengue).
"in 2015, if you and a few of your weird friends beat the experts, it was new and exciting. You would prance around, singing "We beat the experts! We beat the experts!" In 2021 it's just depressing. Are the experts okay? Do they need help? Blink once for yes, twice for no...
I can't tell you how many times over the past year all the experts, the CDC, the WHO, the New York Times, et cetera, have said something (or been silent about something in a suggestive way), and then some blogger I trusted said the opposite, and the blogger turned out to be right."
You wrote this in Feb 2021, I think. First thing I thought of when reading the parent comment.
I think it's easy to forget how much some of us trusted experts before the pandemic.
It was not always a direct lie, but because of covid I had to begin to view all experts in the way you describe in the "Bounded Distrust" post. The example foremost in my mind is that the public health establishment very much did not want people to believe past infection provided any immunity, because they assumed (not without reason) that the public would be bad at understanding both whether they'd actually had an infection and what immunity means. So they showed up on TV everywhere making statements that were obviously silly, but may have worded them in "no evidence that..." phrasing, like ok David Hume if you apply this isolated demand for rigor then there's no evidence Aaron Judge's flyball heading out of Yankee Stadium is going to land and there's "no evidence" covid-19 infection provides any level of immunity, despite the fact that every previous baseball has landed and that even O.G. SARS infections from ten years ago were showing signs of reducing covid-19 severity. And they kept saying things like this, or "we just don't know", even after quality evidence did appear, such as the Israeli study showing past infection nearly equal to vaccination in efficacy at reducing hospitalizations.
Or they pull the trick of letting the interviewer say the outrageously stupid thing and then respond with a true and affirmative statement without negating the stupid thing. "Professor, isn't it true that the public needs to be protected from Italians, who as a race are known to be universally bloodthirsty gangsters?" "Gangsters are a problem Jake, and there are steps we could take to mitigate that..." OK that's not a lie, but you gave the *impression* you agreed with something you know is stupid, and when you do that because you think people will take desirable actions if they believe Dumb Wrong Thing then you blew your credibility with anyone smart enough to spot it.
If I have to treat the CDC like I treat Infowars or Pravda, or like one of those self-promoting quacks hustling products to "flush" "toxins", then I've lost something here.
The letter from public health experts stating that George Floyd protests were more important than social distancing.
Promoting the vaccine to people who weren't at risk from COVID, including young children who could technically face higher risk from the vaccine itself.
Telling healthy people who didn't want to take the vaccine that they were killing people, banning them from public places, and firing them, even after it was known that the vaccine offered minimal reduction in transmission.
Various racist COVID healthcare policies recommended by officials: denying healthy white people access to therapeutics, giving minority zip codes priority access during vaccine rollout, recommending a vaccine release schedule that would increase overall deaths for the sake of "equity".
In many cases they would be honest in technical venues, but then communicate something very different to the public.
Yes, shifting stories about masks and lab leaks were bad, but more than specific issues, learning how experts thought about problems when confronted with policy choices was massively damaging.
For example, their frequent unwillingness to reckon costs and benefits was very damaging in my eyes. In certain narrow cases it made sense: sometimes, a given expert was merely one input into policy decisions, and politicians were all-too-happy to use the expert as cover. But in the majority of other cases I paid attention to, the loudest and most visible voices were tendentious and reductive.
But the most damaging of all was the excessive concern for managing narratives, when otherwise-useful information conflicted with political priorities. The lab leak emails between Andersen, Fauci, et. al. were the best example of this, but I saw it repeatedly. There was a real sense among many experts that it would be a mistake to communicate the magnitude of the biggest risk factors, because young and fit people might realize they were not in danger (statistically speaking - I personally knew someone young and fit that died early on). And that's all before spreading out into COVID-era topics (who are the perpetrators of all this anti-Chinese racism?) or the surge of open partisanship in scientific journals.
Agreed about the shifting masks advice. Lab leak was kind-of weird: I heard all of the shouting about it, but, once the virus had spread, I think of it as pretty much moot (with the exception of "Should we _do_ gain of function experiments any more?").
I think a big third one was that the vaccines, though greatly ameliorating morbidity and mortality in the vaccine recipient, turned out to have no (or very small?) effects on _transmission_. So the whole argument for vaccine _mandates_, based on the risk of transmission to _other_ people, falls apart.
Are you sure about the ameliorating morbidity and mortality in the vaccine recipient? Term Health Life Insurance is going into a tailspin because of the vaccine related injuries.
Many Thanks! I'm never sure, in the sense of 100% probability. The preponderance of the evidence seems to show that the vaccine substantially reduces morbidity and mortality. There turned out to be a natural experiment here in 2021. At one point, about half the people in this area (Greenville County, South Carolina) had been vaccinated. And hospital admissions tracked who was vaccinated or not. Hospital admissions for Covid were running about 10:1 unvaccinated:vaccinated.
Now, this was during the first wave of Covid. I've seen reports that the effectiveness of the vaccines has dropped in later waves (with more mutations). But it still seems to be a net positive.
Thanks for the URL. It looks interesting, though one caution is that some of the statistics presented lack important context e.g. the data on hospital admissions vs. number of doses doesn't seem to show what fractions of the general population had what number of vaccine doses, which we'd need to see relative risk. Anyway, Many Thanks!
Dengue and SARS (the original) are other, similar viruses that cause Antibody dependent enhancement. It is quite possible (even if my allegation that the vaccine never worked is false), that you are currently experiencing worse bouts of covid19 than the unvaccinated. (Think of this from a public health perspective -- if you lose worktime based on getting sick, that could counterbalance someone very old who dies of covid19 instead of influenza).
>As of 27 January 2022, there have been no observed incidents [of antibody dependent enhancement] with vaccines for COVID-19 in trials with nonhuman primates, in clinical trials with humans, or following the widespread use of approved vaccines.
You realize the Navy classically does cold showers? They wouldn't do that if it killed sailors.
Is it more likely that "experts just figured out that a standard practice in the US MIlitary" is now deadly? Or is it more likely that vaccine induced blood & heart related injuries are the root cause of heart attacks precipitated by a cold shower?
Just one example, mind. And someone got paid to put advertisements up about this -- paid by the government.
That doesn't say anything about insurance, and explicitly says the study didn't look into whether anyone was vaccinated. Nor does it say anything about deaths being concentrated in time after vaccines were made available to young adults, rather than earlier when COVID was transmitting among everyone.
Did they really stand pretty firm on lockdowns? The moment Fauci et al remained silent in the face of "epidemic of anti-black violence is more important than COVID, go out and protest" rhetoric from the SJ-minded medicine-adjacent people, their reputation took a huge hit
Ok, let me restate this a bit. They didn't remain completely silent, But compare this to the mobilization against the Great Barrington declaration or lab leak theory and "expression of concern" rings very hollow
I want to be careful here, I'm not trying to argue contrarily but:
Quick Googles turn up no public statements from Fauci about the lab leak, until his testimony before the House last year; and one dismissal of GBD in response to a direct question in October 2020.
I know "mobilization" might mean more than just public statements, and I certainly don't claim that my half-assed Googling turned up all instances of Fauci commenting on those things, but...I think it would be helpful if people were more explicit about what, exactly, they object to in how officials communicated about all these things. There's often a sense of, everyone just knows what is being referred to, but I am not actually certain that's true.
Which officials said what, and when is actually important in evaluating how trustworthy or how hypocritical people were, and I've seen very little effort to actually identify which experts and which statements were particularly egregious.
If people were serious about lockdowns, they could have easily organized a "scientific" letter saying "yes, BLM is very important, but think about the grandma"
Not just the wildly shifting narratives. We also got the Neil Ferguson girlfriend booty-call issue where folks busy trying to figure out how bad things were or would get were treating the lock downs as optional. Gavin Newsom's French Laundry dinner was another.
Whether it is fair and right or not, one lasting narrative is that (some) of the folks in charge were not behaving quite as if they believed their own stories. That credibility took a big hit, too, I think
I think a lot of the problem here is the politicized redefinition of the term vaccine.
If, in 2018, you had given a description of the Covid vaccine, detailing its effects, effectiveness, and side-effects, to a group of objective, disinterested medical researchers and asked them "is this a valid vaccine that should be approved by the FDA and administered to the general public?", they would have laughed you out of the room.
But now we have something that does not deserve to be called a vaccine being pushed as one, and when people look at this and say "that's a garbage vaccine, I don't want that!", people use the term anti-vaxxer to smear them even if they have no objection to real vaccines.
Well, certainly the speed at which Operation Warp Speed took place and the pressure to produce positive results, any kind of positive results, would have made me nervous if I were human.
That said, I was thinking of stuff like people insisting that the MMR vaccine causes autism, not necessarily the COVID vaccine. Although one does have the example of the Russian Sputnik COVID vaccine, which we were assured cannot work (in spite of the evidence suggesting that it is the most effective) and besides was stolen.
OWS should be the norm, it's the status quo blockage of vaccines creating an Invisible Graveyard that is the problem. Humans are "nervous" because they're dumb.
Yes, I am sure. Your linked paper contains this quote:
"It is apparent that the original Wuhan strain and early variants of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 were more pathogenic than later variants. This is consistent with typical viral adaptive evolution to more infectious but less pathogenic strains, a natural phenomenon that is fortunate for humanity."
There are no footnotes or citations for the claim that such viral evolution is "typical", and that flies in the face of smallpox remaining deadly so that it devastated Amerindians after the Columbian exchange. They follow that up with "Fortunately, the virus mutated", but the mutations were to be more transmissible. Fatality rates declined as people acquired immunity (whether through infections or vaccines) and we got better at treating cases. They go on and on about how the novel mRNA and adenovirus DNA vaccines are bad, but then they also say Novavax (the traditional technology vaccine for COVID available in the US) is bad, with the only ones they think are reliable being ones from India & China where I personally doubt we can trust the data as much (and where, at any rate, a deactivated virus would still contain the spike protein they think is such a problem).
More from Greg Cochran on how selection affected lethality in COVID:
Q. "Isn’t there also selection for reduced lethality? The two together make sense."
A. "Not with Covid: the deaths happened well after the period of infectivity."
"If you have a disease that kills lots of its victims, especially if it does so in a way that interferes with transmission, sure, there can be selection for lower morbidity and lower lethality. I think there's some evidence that this happened with the Black Death.. but not quite to the point of it becoming harmless, obviously."
I'm sort of in TGGP's boat when it comes to OWS. My perspective is similar to any libertarian's: if I'm facing risk from not getting a treatment soon enough, I might be willing to assume the risk of a treatment that hasn't gone through testing. Or I might be willing to assume the risk of a treatment that's been tested on 1000 people, but not yet on 10000. Et cetera.
I should be permitted to decide how much risk I assume for myself. I have the right to seek information about that risk. No one should have the right to deny me that information merely because they fear I wouldn't understand it, or wouldn't respond the way they would prefer. (I don't have the right to force someone to discover that information for me; I just have the right to go discover it myself, possibly by asking someone who's willing to share, without being hounded for doing so.) If I want to try Mugsy's Mira-chloroquine Cure-all two weeks after I get COVID, and Mugsy is willing to sell, that's on us.
The question of whether I have the right to risk everyone around me by rejecting a vaccine is not as trivial - although it apparently became moot once everyone knew the mRNA treatment didn't block spread.
You risk NO ONE by rejecting a vaccine, provided you sit your ass at home and manage your own risk (Okay, so I do have a low clean room grade air purifier at home.)
My recollection is that vaccines reduced transmission by half in the months following vaccination. Lots of people didn't have the option of remaining at home. I was working remotely at the time, but even I needed to go out to get groceries.
> "If, in 2018, you had given a description of the Covid vaccine, detailing its effects, effectiveness, and side-effects, to a group of objective, disinterested medical researchers and asked them "is this a valid vaccine that should be approved by the FDA and administered to the general public?", they would have laughed you out of the room."
Can you explain this further? Is it just that it's MRNA instead of polysaccharides or attenuated viruses or whatever, or something else?
There are two basic things that a vaccine is supposed to do, and to be considered even marginally valid it needs to do at least one of the two.
1) Confer long-lasting immunity. If the time until you need a booster shot is measured in months rather than years, (or better still, decades,) this vaccine does not do a good job.
2) Confer sterilizing immunity. If the vaccine protects you, individually, but doesn't keep you from shedding viruses, it does not do a good job.
And until 2020, it was a well-understood, completely non-controversial principle that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you ever deploy a non-sterilizing vaccine in a population currently affected by the disease in question, because it screws with selection pressure in very bad ways and you end up with a population full of Typhoid Marys breeding even worse variants of the disease. But that understanding went right out the window with the Covid "vaccine."
Is your argument that it doesn't work, or that it has too high a tail-risk of breeding vaccine-resistant strains?
IIRC there are lots of studies showing it did work in terms of lowering COVID death rate. I don't think it bred the resistant strains but I'd be open to hearing that it did or that the tail-risk didn't happen but it was bad in expectation.
Do you have any links to discussion about this at the time?
Close. Saying that "it lowers death rate" may be technically true, but we're talking about something with an exceptionally low death rate anyway, so I don't find that argument particularly relevant even if it's correct. What I'm saying is that doesn't do what a valid vaccine is supposed to do: provide long-lasting and/or sterilizing immunity.
> or that it has too high a tail-risk of breeding vaccine-resistant strains?
Again, not quite. The problem with screwing with the selection pressure isn't vaccine resistant strains. It's like this:
It's (relatively) common knowledge that an infectious disease, left to itself, (ie. in the absence of vaccines, antibiotics, etc.,) naturally becomes less dangerous over time. If a highly lethal mutation arises, it will burn itself out quickly by killing the infected before it can be transmitted. Meanwhile, a less-lethal mutation gets transmitted to more people and continues to reproduce.
Non-sterilizing immunity turns the selective pressure equation on its head. It allows lethal mutations to arise without killing their hosts, and to thrive. This is why we only administer non-sterilizing vaccines to populations where the disease in question is no longer a real issue, such as polio.
> It's (relatively) common knowledge that an infectious disease, left to itself, (ie. in the absence of vaccines, antibiotics, etc.,) naturally becomes less dangerous over time. If a highly lethal mutation arises, it will burn itself out quickly by killing the infected before it can be transmitted. Meanwhile, a less-lethal mutation gets transmitted to more people and continues to reproduce.
Didn't smallpox have such a high and consistent fatality rate, allt the way until it was eliminated, that ancient outbreaks can be identified by descriptions of how many sick people died?
It's not just "technically" true, it causes a LOT fewer deaths. And the death rate wasn't that low, we see it jump out in excess deaths stats!
You don't know what "a valid vaccine is supposed to do". You are engaging in the nirvana fallacy and indicting the vaccine for not being perfect. You might as well bemoan that it only protects against strains of COVID-19 rather than every strain of coronavirus, which include a decent fraction of common-cold infections.
> It's (relatively) common knowledge that an infectious disease, left to itself, (ie. in the absence of vaccines, antibiotics, etc.,) naturally becomes less dangerous over time.
Absolutely wrong. Smallpox didn't do that. Greg Cochran has to make this point over and over again.
> If a highly lethal mutation arises, it will burn itself out quickly by killing the infected before it can be transmitted. Meanwhile, a less-lethal mutation gets transmitted to more people and continues to reproduce.
That depends on the details of HOW the disease is transmitted. COVID is a respiratory infection, so it transmits easily* and can maintain a high mortality rate.
> "It's (relatively) common knowledge that an infectious disease, left to itself, (ie. in the absence of vaccines, antibiotics, etc.,) naturally becomes less dangerous over time."
I think "exceptionally low death rate" is a red herring. There were 1.2 million US deaths from COVID already; if the vaccines prevented 50% more, that saved 600,000 lives. I don't think COVID had already "burned itself out" by the time vaccines became available, because neither I nor my parents had had it at that point,
> Is your argument that it doesn't work, or that it has too high a tail-risk of breeding vaccine-resistant strains?
Scott, is your argument that all vaccines are perfect, or that killing people is morally desirable?
This is the worst form of strawmanning. If you don't understand the commenter's point then you should ask for clarification, not try to force it into one of two boxes both of which are convenient for your argument.
I'm trying to understand Bob's point. Bob understood it that way and gave me a helpful answer that made me understand his position better. If he thought it was neither of those two categories, then he could explain which other category it was in. I don't think it's evil to mention the specific hypotheses I'm considering as a guide to how I'm confused. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/06/socratic-grilling/
These sound like Geert Vanden Bossche talking points, you can probably look him up and find articles on the risks of deploying a vaccine "during a pandemic".
It's such a silly argument... when is the pandemic over? When does it become safe to deploy the vaccines? After everyone in the world has already caught the virus once?
Or, is using vaccines then still dangerous, because there are new variants that the vaccines will somehow enhance? Why don't these arguments apply to flu shots, which don't give long lasting immunity? Why is vaccine induced immunity any different than immunity through infection, which also doesn't give long lasting immunity to Covid?
No, this is just wrong. I'm pretty sure no such principles are widely accepted. Easy counterexamples:
1. Influenza vaccines do not confer long-lasting immunity, but we've had them for decades.
2. The inactivated polio vaccine doesn't confer sterilizing immunity to polio, it just prevents paralysis. We have been using it for decades, because it's safer than the older live-virus vaccine that (IIRC) does prevent transmission of polio.
If this last principle were universally accepted, it would forbid both flu shots and polio shots.
> No, this is just wrong. I'm pretty sure no such principles are widely accepted. Easy counterexamples:
I think the grandparent poster suggested that a vaccine should satisfy either criterion, not that it has to satisfy both. The polio vaccine would pass muster, for example, as would the normal mess of childhood vaccines. I'm much less certain about the flu shot, since I don't think that consistently confers sterilizing immunity.
"Influenza vaccines do not confer long-lasting immunity, but we've had them for decades."
I think this is a terminology problem between the professionals and 'normal' people.
Most people I know think of the annual flu shot as different from a childhood vaccine. And use different terminology to express this difference: shot vs vaccine.
The Covid vaccine wound up behaving a LOT more like a flu shot than it did like a measles vaccine. But it was named like a measles vaccine. Thus leading to, "Why did you mislead me????"
This terminology mismatch between professionals in a field and common folks outside it is common. But rarely good. Tesla's use of "autopilot" is an another example of this. Most non-pilots think an autopilot can drive the plane/car. It can't.
Seems to me these terms are used interchangeably, except perhaps that "shot" is more informal so it's often used for flu vaccines which lots of people get every year, while "vaccine" is more formal so it's often used for the measles vaccine which only babies get so only new parents and health experts talk about, the latter group preferring the more formal term.
This would be very strange to me if true. I'm perhaps a bit biased by being in a bubble of people who are healthcare professionals or have post-secondary education, but do you really think if you asked 100 native English speakers "is the annual flu shot a vaccine?" more than 5 would say no? (Maybe with a disclaimer of: "this is not a trick question" added?)
I do think that expectations- often set by politicians attempting to reassure the public- were such that once you had your 2 shots of the Covid vaccine it would mean the pandemic was "over"; while more people in the field assumed it wouldn't be that simple. "Just hold out until you get a vaccine" probably wasn't an optimal strategy to put all our eggs in that basket, and it backfired to do so.
Speaking of terminology, where the hell did "jab" come from? I had never heard that word used to describe a vaccine before Covid. Is it a Britishism that crossed the pond?
> Most people I know think of the annual flu shot as different from a childhood vaccine. And use different terminology to express this difference: shot vs vaccine.
That isn't different terminology. Those words are fully interchangeable.
Yea, and there are additional examples on each point. Reframing vaccines' requirements in that manner is what would get laughed out of that imaginary 2018 room of group of objective, disinterested medical researchers.
(I am quoting here my father-in-law, a Trump-voting endocrinologist and former Army doctor who made damn sure that every member of his household promptly got the COVID vaccine when it became available.)
> 1) Confer long-lasting immunity. If the time until you need a booster shot is measured in months rather than years, (or better still, decades,) this vaccine does not do a good job.
> 2) Confer sterilizing immunity. If the vaccine protects you, individually, but doesn't keep you from shedding viruses, it does not do a good job.
Doesn't the flu vaccine also fail by both these standards?
Flu shots are updated annually, but nobody argues that makes it not a vaccine.
> until 2020, it was a well-understood, completely non-controversial principle that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you ever deploy a non-sterilizing vaccine in a population currently affected by the disease in question, because it screws with selection pressure in very bad ways and you end up with a population full of Typhoid Marys breeding even worse variants of the disease
No. Vaccines prepare the immune system to fight off the infection, they don't convert people from non-carriers to carriers. Failure to vaccinate would mean the virus replicates even more, creating "even worse variants". Unvaccinated people spread the virus while sick & hospitalized, although admittedly they stopped producing more virus particles when they died.
> Flu shots are updated annually, but nobody argues that makes it not a vaccine.
Terminology confusion. It's a different flu strain every year. Just because they call it "the flu shot" doesn't mean it's the same vaccine.
> No. Vaccines prepare the immune system to fight off the infection, they don't convert people from non-carriers to carriers. Failure to vaccinate would mean the virus replicates even more, creating "even worse variants". Unvaccinated people spread the virus while sick & hospitalized, although admittedly they stopped producing more virus particles when they died.
This is completely incorrect. See my reply to Scott.
You don't know what's "completely incorrect" on this subject. You stated that viruses evolve to be less lethal, which was 100% wrong in the case of diseases like smallpox (hence Amerindians being devastated by exposure to it).
The covid vaccine didn't do much good against spreading covid--the numbers I saw suggested that it cut transmission in half for a few months after the shot. The reason to get a covid shot is that it makes the disease a lot less serious.
Vaccines whose whole purpose is to prevent disease instead of transmission are pretty common--along with inactivated polio vaccine, you also have stuff like tetanus and rabies where there's no real concern about transmission, just about getting very ill or dying.
Cutting transmission in half for a few months is a whole lot better than nothing. But, yes, you are right that the main benefit was avoiding hospitalization/death.
I’m sorry but having recently travelled to the tropics, I know first hand there are plenty of infectious diseases that have very imperfect vaccines that are still better than nothing in some populations. Vaccine development is hard!
I don’t think your criteria are actually used in public health. You could make an argument that the world should have waited for a better COVID vaccine than what we got, but we might still be waiting at this point.
As I said elsewhere, this is a matter of terminology confusion. They may call them all "flu vaccine," but they're for a different disease every year, targeting a different strain of the flu.
Interestingly enough, this may not be the case for much longer. I was reading last year about new vaccine-development technology in the works in this area. I'm paraphrasing here, but the general idea was:
"There are two basic parts of the flu virus. Let's call them the head and the tail, for simplicity's sake. The head mutates a lot, and creates different strains, which we keep chasing after with different vaccines. Meanwhile, the tail is remarkably stable. So we're looking at a way to produce a vaccine that trains the immune system to target the tail, instead of the head. Successfully bringing this to market would mean you'd get one flu vaccine and be done with it, and never need yearly flu shots again."
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd love to see this turned into a reality.
Call it whatever the fuck you want: the Covid vaccine was a great thing and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Period. The evidence is so astonishingly overwhelming that one has to be seriously deluded to even doubt it. People can make points all they want as to whether young, healthy people needed to take it, but the vaccine was amazing. And amazingly effective at saving lives.
Mild warning about this - although I agree with you on this, I think this is just asserting that Bob is wrong, and isn't useful absent some kind of argument.
Surely, "X is good because it saved lives" is indeed an argument, as is "the label is irrelevant; what matters is the outcome." It is hardly a mere assertion that Bob is wrong.
Fair enough, but in some ways, the counter-argument is 'he's missing the point.' People saying it's a 'garbage vaccine' are/were wrong. So whether anti-vaxxer is the right pejorative seems immaterial.
Fair enough. I'm waiting to see exactly what his argument is (see thread above), but I've generally seen enough intelligent stuff from him that I don't think he's making any of the usual stupid mistakes (though I am always prepared to be disappointed).
EDIT: Wait, no, that was Bob Jacobs, a totally different person! I have not previously seen anything from this Bob, but still await hearing his argument.
There was no redefinition. You just didn't know what the definition of "vaccine" was prior to COVID. The COVID vaccines saved lives, so of course they should have been approved, and used more widely than they actually were. https://www.natesilver.net/p/fine-ill-run-a-regression-analysis
How exactly is one to respond to someone who unironically makes a claim precisely equivalent to "this is not redefining, it's just redefining" and doesn't seem to realize it?
Lack of knowledge of the professional definition of a word is a deficiency on your part, not a flaw of the profession.
Many vaccines require boosters and don't provide complete "you can't be infected" level immunity. I'm not sure how you could have failed to notice this, or did you think your annual flu vaccine promised you wouldn't get so much as a sniffle for the rest of the season?
Like it or not, order of magnitude differences in mortality and morbidity rates always count for a lot when the disease is so prolific that the entire population will encounter it, even when the base rate is already low.
From Wikipedia, in 2019: "A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular disease." (To be clear, "acquired immunity" means "your immune system now has tools to fight this off," not "you can in no way get this disease.")
If you had described it to me in 2018 I would have said "that sounds exactly like the flu vaccine, and it's probably a good idea for old people to get it."
It would appear that you're not working from an accurate description.
Something that you need boosters for every few months does not sound exactly like an annual vaccine.
Something with widely-reported severe side effects does not sound exactly like the flu shot, which is generally understood to be mostly harmless.
A regimen of boosters that end up stimulating IgG4 production (accommodative antibodies, the same response produced by allergy shots to make your immune system stop reacting to the allergens) does not sound *anything at all like* a vaccine that should be deployed against a deadly disease.
"The first human clinical trial using ex vivo dendritic cells transfected with mRNA encoding tumor antigens (therapeutic cancer mRNA vaccine) was started in 2001. Four years later, the successful use of modified nucleosides as a method to transport mRNA inside cells without setting off the body's defense system was reported. Clinical trial results of an mRNA vaccine directly injected into the body against cancer cells were reported in 2008."
"One of the easiest, most versatile and theoretically safest technologies relies on the direct injection of naked messenger RNA (mRNA) that code for tumor antigens. [...] We used this protocol to vaccinate 15 melanoma patients. [...] We demonstrate here that such treatment is feasible and safe (phase 1 criteria)."
To that I could also add the last paragraph of that Wikipedia section:
"The first human clinical trials using an mRNA vaccine against an infectious agent (rabies) began in 2013. Over the next few years, clinical trials of mRNA vaccines for a number of other viruses were started. mRNA vaccines for human use were studied for infectious agents such as influenza, Zika virus, cytomegalovirus, and Chikungunya virus."
I’d take that to the meta-level and suggest that *existence of the narrative* has itself become a narrative. People who would never endorse religious or “vaccines cause autism!” arguments jumped on antivaxxing once it could be used to signal sophistication.
In the early 2010s, maybe that meant sudden attacks of principled libertarianism. On today’s memetically-saturated Internet, though, it means insisting that one’s tribe has its own institutions. Better ones, staffed by brave iconoclasts who only publish through social media. Only they can be trusted to report the truth!
Yup, It's starts with, "huh, so they were lying about that." and before you know it you are questioning everything and finding out they've been lying about at least half the stuff. So who do you trust?
A good question. We often hear much hand-wringing pearl-clutching complaints about how Authorities Are No Longer Trusted. Maybe they should try acting more in a way that they are worthy of trust, or maybe just not being so self-serving.
A large number of people died from one of two causes in 1914-1920, we have - to this day - an annual day of remembrance for the one that killed fewer people (World War One), but nothing for the Spanish Flu that killed more people.
Pandemics and epidemics do seem to get forgotten a lot.
Not sure I have anything to say, but an annual day to remember all those that died of infectious disease wouldn't be a bad idea.
WWI was a preventable and extremely violent disaster, even though many historians say that it was "inevitable". It makes sense to remember preventable and extremely violent disasters.
Also, one could say that unlike most epidemics, WWI changed the society thoroughly. The previous concepts of Western civilization as a light unto the nations, though naive, went out of the window and was replaced by a mix of shock and various radical ideologies (communism, fascism, nationalism). We are thus also remembering the end of our "civilizational optimism".
It might have been. My mother was born in 1922, and I asked her one day if people had talked a lot in her childhood about all the deaths from the Spanish flu, and she said no. She said she never heard people talking about it at all. She agreed with me that it was odd. Now that's after 1923, but still, we're talking 1920s and early 1930s.
The Spanish Flu is almost completely absent from the film and literature of the 1920s, as well as the personal correspondence from that era that I've seen (both family records and archival research I've done for unrelated reasons). It seems to me like people were all too happy to simply forget it ever happened.
Thats because one event was extremely geopolitically important, and the other was not.
This is a more general phenomenon. We also don't commemorate any of the Chinese/Indian/Russian famines that periodically killed millions of people, because they generally didn't have any large and lasting political impact.
The difference is that people have wills and consciences, while viruses don't. A war feels more tragic because the people who started it could have chosen not to. Natural evil v. moral evil. I'm not saying we shouldn't have remembrances of pandemics, but surely that has to be the psychological root.
I think it has something to do with whether or not the event that killed all those people was within our control. An epidemic is not like a war. Commemorating a war is supposed to, on some level, caution us against doing stupid things in the future.
Just to add: The Spanish flu evolved to be more deadly - esp. to younger men - in the trenches and field-hospitals of WWI. So, a WWI thing. The most deadly result - oh, but then WWI is also where Lenin and Hitler came from.
I was born with breathing issues / asthma. Covid especially the first strain killed those who like my friend was a cancer survivor and didn’t take precautions working as a veterinary. We didn’t need a lockdown. The lockdown was a test to see how people would comply. People could care less about others and their health. You can see and hear people that are sick go out in the public, see their hygiene habits, they will drag their sick children to events, stores etc Zero regard for others.
Do you have kids? It is literally not possible to live a life with kids and not take them places when sick. They are sick an inordinate amount of the time (my child has been various levels of sick for literally the past month straight).
I believe that people should minimize the risk to others when sick to the greatest extent possible, but the "greatest extent possible" is not the same as "present zero risk to others". You see people out and about while sick, but you do not know what precautions they have already taken, what trips/activities they have cancelled. For many people, locking themselves in their home and being a hermit while ill is just not possible. I get your frustration, but I think it's important to remember that everyone is living under constraints. Yes, some people really are just inconsiderate. But not everyone is, and thinking that everyone you meet is an inconsiderate asshole is both a) untrue, b) unhelpful and c) probably makes your own liife worse.
I have kids and agree with the sentiment you're expressing. But at the same time, we'd all be healthier if, at the margin, most of us sequestered our sick kids more often than we currently do.
Absolutely, I don't disagree that a lot of people are probably going out while sick (or bringing kids who are sick) in cases where not doing so would merely be a mild inconvenience. But I think that even if everyone was stricter about it, people like Renee are probably underestimating how many sick people they would still encounter in day-to-day life.
Demanding that all kids be sequestered when they get a cold is probably unreasonable, but what if you knew they had a more serious illness, or one that could be more serious if transmitted to others? You yourself would probably have to go out for supply runs, but you could still wear some kind of barrier to reduce risk of spreading your child's illness if you had already contracted it. That's not zero risk of spreading it, but it is a significant reduction at low personal cost.
My kid has just had chickenpox, I did not enjoy keeping him at home, but I did not take him anywhere. Yes it was inconvenient, but I would not go out with my kid while he is dangerous to immune-compromised people.
I think it's a good analogy with COVID at it's height.
My impression is that locking-down our societies worked like "charm" - in the short term: common flu was way down, stomach-bugs were way down. But then this long time of low exposure led to widespread low-resistance to viruses of all kinds - resulting in 20% more getting sick compared to the years before covid. (At least here in Germany: https://www.kbv.de/html/1150_73099.php ) So, be careful what you ask for. Non-exposure is not a viable solution for all of us. On an individual level: sure, retreat as much as you consider reasonable for your preferences. Society: Hardly a kid without some neurodermitis nowadays, due to lack of dirt, bacteria, parasites, viruses.
During Covid I saw a lot of comparisons with the civil war, but per capita it's still a literal order of magnitude deadlier than Covid.
2,419 deaths/100k because of the civil war vs 363 deaths/100k because of Covid
And surely everyone agrees that hundreds of thousands of young men in their twenties getting shot to pieces, having their legs amputated in field hospitals without morphine or even disinfectant, then dying ANYWAY is just intuitively "worse" than the modal death from Covid.
I have to agree with Collisteru here - the correct fix was to remove the claim, not make it explicit that you're making an uninteresting claim. What's significant about the absolute value?
"Car crashes, both passengers die" is a 100% mortality rate event. Still not really a hugely important event, in the grand scheme of things.
By which I mean that, obviously (to me) both the absolute and the relative values are important. We often not care about events with a high mortality rate if the absolute number is still pretty small. Or vice-versa.
And Covid got both. Not a low enough relative mortality to be discarded (unless you consider "just one order of magnitude lower than an actual war" to be low), and having done huge absolute numbers. Literally the largest numbers any single event has ever done in the country's history. I think that's really interesting.
Well, I mean, it's true for roughly steady statistics. Car deaths don't fluctuate wildly year to year, so a measure in absolute numbers does tend to increase each year, in step with a growing population.
But for singular events, it's evidently not true. 9/11 wasn't the most casualties from a terrorist attack in the US in 2001 just because it was the most recent one. It far surpassed anything that had come before, and indeed more than 20 years later it still holds that position, even though you have some 50 million people more now, and several attacks have occured since.
Such outlier events tend to keep their status as the largest ever for a great long while, and are thus notable. Of course, a growing population still has an effect in making it easier for those events to be surpassed eventually. But if it takes 100+ years for that to happen (instead of it happening steadily year after year), then by definition that event was on outlier.
I'm still not convinced that number can be directly linked to Covid. Yes, I'm talking about the old cliché "died with Covid" instead of "died of Covid". Shouldn't we talk about excess deaths only?
Not even all excess deaths were directly caused by Covid as a disease. Some were caused by the extra strain in the healthcare system.
A fairly famous Czech musician Dušan Vančura died of a tooth abscess because he was afraid to go to the doctor. Granted, he was 82, so a) his fear was understandable and b) he would likely have died between 2020 and today anyway, but still.
"Flatten the curve" was the initial impetus to lockdown, and its justification rested largely on this point: system strain would (and did) kill people. And while it's hard to disentangle everything -- policy, virus mutation, medical knowledge/therapies, etc. -- this was a major cause of the early deaths -- think when NYC had its worse phase.
Not disagreeing with you, but things indirectly caused are still caused. I.e., in a counterfactual world without covid, those deaths wouldn't have happened. And the policy solutions to "don't get covid" and "don't die due to hospital strain after getting covid" are basically the same: change your behaviors not to get covid.
> And while it's hard to disentangle everything -- policy, virus mutation, medical knowledge/therapies, etc. -- this was a major cause of the early deaths -- think when NYC had its worse phase.
Elaine Ou wrote a piece on her blog noting that, at the same time NYC news was breathlessly covering the lack of space in local hospitals, her brother, working as a doctor in a hospital in New York City, completely failed to experience any strain. This was apparently something that happened only to specific hospitals, which isn't really compatible with the concept of straining the system. If the system itself is under strain, one of the first things you'd do is use more of the hospitals you already have.
(I looked for the piece briefly, but she hasn't written in a while and the blog is not in a state of good repair.)
They were overwhelmingly caused by Covid as a disease rather than extra strain on the healthcare system. Deaths from tooth abscesses just weren't that numerous.
I wasn’t suggested medical delay accounted for 1 million excess deaths. I was pointing out that some of those 1 million excess deaths were not from covid itself.
Canadian medical authorities were the ones who raised the alarm over delayed cancer screening. 2020 saw 40 per cent (950k) fewer cancer screenings in Ontario alone. And health authorities in 2021 reported much higher rates of patients presenting with advanced cancer than pre-covid.
"Patients who were treated after the COVID-19 pandemic began were significantly more likely to present emergently to hospital. This means that they were more likely to present with bowel perforation, or severe bowel obstruction, requiring immediate life-saving surgery," said the study's lead author, Dr. Catherine Forse, in a call with CBC News.
"In addition, we found that patients were more likely to have large tumours."
Excess death rates closely track with lag COVID infection rates as measured both by reported testing and wastewater data. This is strong evidence that COVID is the cause of those deaths and not missed routine medical treatment, which wouldn't neatly rise and fall with infection rates. People don't die of missed cancer screenings when COVID infections happen to be high and stop doing so when they fall.
Someone who died as a result of fear of going to the doctor would be better regarded as dying from the political response to covid rather than indirectly from covid.
I went to an emergency room in my Canadian city in early June 2020 and there was not a soul there, when typically there will be 20-30 people and a 4-5 hour wait. A doctor saw me immediately, and while he was treating me said he and his colleagues were worried about the consequences of so many people avoiding seeking medical care, and blamed the media for what he called ‘fearmongering.’
It’s difficult to calculate the exact number of deaths from millions of people avoiding seeking medical care for months. But it’s probably statistically significant.
Interesting subject for research, I'd say. Which ER treatments that were avoided during the pandemic had not measurable impacts on patient health outcomes? I imagine there's a lot of medicine that's not making an impact.
"I'm still not convinced that number can be directly linked to Covid. Yes, I'm talking about the old cliché 'died with Covid' instead of 'died of Covid'. Shouldn't we talk about excess deaths only?"
For what it is worth, I looked into this for California in early 2022.
Excess deaths show that the official figures UNDERESTIMATE Covid deaths. Admittedly, this is to a lesser degree in functional first-world countries like the US.
Excess deaths probably includes a large number of deaths only indirectly related to "covid, the disease." Or perhaps not related at all. For example, automobile fatalities spiked during covid despite people driving less, because when the roads are empty you can speed easily and speed is one of the biggest risk factors for death in a vehicular crash (food for thought for people who want to build more roads to reduce congestion).
The spikes in excess deaths match up to the spikes in the number of COVID cases pretty well, so I don't think this is a very strong effect. E.g., I don't think that there was a spike in "how empty the roads are" during the Omicron wave in 2022.
That's what I would have assumed, but in that case then it seems like it doesn't make a difference whether you use official covid deaths or excess deaths, and the official death numbers are pretty close.
The CDC's count of excess deaths from 2020-2024 comes out to 1.3 million people, so it seems like it doesn't make much difference. The people who "died with Covid" are still dying earlier than they otherwise would have, which will show up in the excess death count.
You make it sound like half of the people who died "with" COVID-19 were dying in car accidents or because someone dropped a piano on them.
Sure, COVID-19 did not kill a lot of healthy 20 year olds, so technically, you could argue that what really killed the victims was not being a healthy 20 year old (a chronic condition which has about 100% mortality over the span of a century), and COVID was just speeding along the process.
I will grant you that if you take a terminal cancer patient with a life expectancy of three months and give him a common cold, his chances are pretty good to die while still testing positive, and we should probably not sensationalize this as "THE COMMON COLD CLAIMS ANOTHER LIFE!", and it would not be very different for COVID.
Still, my best guess is that the median COVID death robbed a person of multiple QALYs.
Another metric is to simply look at excess deaths, bypassing the verdict of "how much was COVID a factor in this death?" entirely. This has other methodical issues (e.g. the lockdowns likely cut down deaths from drunk driving, but could possibly have driven up suicides, or social distancing might have caused the flu killed fewer people during COVID). The nice thing about the metric is that you get to assign a fractional blame for COVID as a cause of death. If you have 100 very old people of whom 30 would die in a normal year, and they get COVID and 80 of them die, the excess mortality metric would count that as 50 COVID deaths.
From my understanding, the excess deaths and the deaths from COVID for the pandemic years roughly agree, so I am inclined to believe that most of the excess deaths were effectively caused by COVID.
Excess death measures are worse than pure COVID count statistics because those tend to be conservative in counting people dying during the acute phase with medical attention and COVID killed some people due to acquired vulnerabilities and w/o adequate testing. It takes a few years to do the more nuanced estimates, and now we have federal statistical agencies captured by people who have poor truth-telling skills, so it might be awhile before we get a credible estimate.
Right. The other concern I have is how many deaths were caused by our treatment. How many died because they were stuck onto a ventilator that then lead to death. How many 'own goals'?
Excess deaths don't work perfectly either, because of the massive interventions taking place simultaneously with Covid. Causality is hard to tease out when the government response massively upended society and medical care.
Edit: Excess deaths is also a bit of a football - within some bounds, the assumptions chosen by the assessor affect the outcome.
As you’ve written before, modern healthcare is very good at shielding people from the messy realities of life and death. No one who works in an ICU has forgotten the deaths or has recast Covid as just a mild flu we overreacted to, I’ll tell you that much
I think you missed a word here: "And indeed, most lockdown-type measures look marginal on a purely <MISSING WORD> analysis, and utterly fail one that includes hedonic costs"
> But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single deadliest event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%.
This is a statistically questionable claim, given the relative population sizes involved.
The Civil War killed over 2% of the US population. Covid killed about 0.35% of the US population.
I wouldn't call it "statistically questionable", but I agree with your main point that it is percent of population dead that determines emotional salience of a tragedy.
I suspect there's a mild systemic bias against reporting on/bringing up awful things that happen to people, probably as a result of market forces (no one likes bad news that makes them sad, even if they like bad news that makes them angry). That sounds weird given the media seems to be constant screaming about awful things, but those are all awful things which someone benefits from talking about, so there's a stronger force cancelling out the systemic bias (eg. because they can be blamed on someone, or because someone can gain sympathy or political capital from them).
Imagine a world where COVID struck under Biden, Trump spent the first few months jumping up and down about how US borders needed to be closed, then 1.2 million people died. There'd be Republicans with t-shirts with "remember the 1.2 million" and "open borders kills" on them, and Voxsplainers about how actually that's a really low number of QALYs and you should do cost-benefit analysis. It's harder to twist it so the Democrats get annoyed, but if all the ineffective covid measures hadn't happened (eg. schools stayed open, more restrictive lockdowns), it could have happened in reverse.
Thanks for writing about this. It’s important. Do you think some kind of national memorial might help people at least *remember*? Or maybe a Day of Remembrance?
Cue the truthers. When I mention to the COVID-skeptical that the disease killed a lot of people I either get a) the vaccine is the thing that killed most of those people and/or b) most of those deaths were accounting fraud- i.e. sick people that died that happened to have COVID were marked as COVID deaths instead of heart attacks, strokes, etc.
Yep. The death toll of Covid is not discussed because we don't have any kind of shared, objective reality for that discussion to happen in. The number would come from "the authorities", and they are so mistrusted by many that there is literally nothing they can say and no argument they can make now that will be believed. There's literally no way to have a discussion.
Yes. Covid revealed that most 'news' is about the narrative (story) that the 'news authorities' is pushing. Whatever the 'truth' is we have a hard time finding out. Covid broke a lot of trust we use to have.
I'm willing to believe that COVID killed a lot of people. I'm not willing to take the number 1.2 million at face value after being lied to about virtually every relevant fact related to the pandemic.
I heard from a nurse that in her hospital they were in fact marking every patient possible as a COVID patient. From what I've read, the CARES act gave hospitals a 20% bump in Medicare reimbursement for inpatient care if they coded the patient as a COVID patient. So the number could be dramatically inflated if we are going off of something like medical billing. It doesn't take a grand conspiracy; they're going to code for the highest value legally possible.
This chart lists North Korea as having 1 confirmed case and 6 deaths. Do you believe those are accurate numbers? It’s pretty clear to me that these numbers are based on whatever official data they were able to collect.
It looks like the US information is mostly from the WHO and CDC, which are not trustworthy enough to believe without further details on exactly how the data was gathered.
North Korea does not share any numbers with the outside world. No GDP, unemployment, health, nothing. It is a closed society. Most of the rest of the world is not quite so extreme. Most first world countries have robust data gathering and reporting, and these are decentralized and audited.
This is a general tenet of self-government. You can lie to yourself, but you will only harm yourself not anyone else. Each state has a number or private as well as municipal hospitals, various primary health centers, a department of health, etc. Numbers get collected and aggregated. There is no one around to orchestrate a grand conspiracy across 50 states, let alone 180 countries to co-ordinate on numbers.
The WHO and CDC might be more trustworthy than North Korea, but they are certainly not reliable enough to trust blindly. I’m not making an assertion about what the real numbers are, I’m saying we need to know how they are generated. We shouldn’t just trust a number because someone put it in a chart.
Not impossible. If we see excess deaths surge prior to lockdowns, then we can logically conclude those weren't caused by the lockdowns themselves. If we see them vary with vaccinations, then we can reasonably infer the cause is related (vaccines can prevent COVID deaths, but not other deaths).
The little step where you show that the choices are COVID and the lockdown is vital to your argument, and yet you omit it.
Also that we didn't see them vary with the vaccinations in the manner prescribed, so that's not evidence. Witness the continual decrease in the claims for the vaccination.
COVID is a choice? I don't understand your first sentence.
Deaths soared in 2020 before vaccines were available (in December, for some people, after the election). And after vaccines were available there were differences in deaths as vaccination rates differed https://www.natesilver.net/p/fine-ill-run-a-regression-analysis
There are, of course, obvious answers to both those claims: 1) Covid waves were accompanied by many excess deaths; if it were "accounting fraud" there would not have been excess deaths. 2) The excess deaths coincided with covid prevalence, not with the time of vaccination.
The accounting fraud -- for both deaths and cases -- is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, though the extent is immensely arguable.
If there were another cause, the fraud made it impossible to ferret it out -- and provided conspiracy theorists a wide-open field where claims can not be refuted because the evidence is bad.
I don't understand this. Are you saying, there is another explaination for the excess deaths besides "covid" and "strain on the healthcare system"? like maybe "death due to vaccianes"?
It's not impossible to understand, it's just stupid and nihilistic. It is completely ridiculous to assert that 1 in 300 Americans can die in a short period of time and yet no plausible cause of that can be ferreted out.
The idea that this mystery cause coincided with the rise and fall of a novel respiratory illness, killed a proportion of people similar to that killed by the respiratory disease in other countries and consistent with the IFR of the disease, but is something else entirely that leaves no other clues to its identity other than its 1M+ death toll is an *extraordinary* claim, and if your only response to people's completely justified skepticism at this is to shrug your shoulders, you should not expect people to take this seriously at all.
It is pretty crazy that you have people complaining that the COVID precautions we implemented were too strict when the reality is that we lost countless lives due to not doing enough to lock down and get people vaccinated.
The Johns Hopkins meta-analysis estimated that lockdowns prevented about 0.2% of Covid deaths.
Even extremely strict China-style lockdowns were ineffective at preventing the spread of Covid, as plainly demonstrated by the fact that China was still implementing them in mid-2022, after well over 90% of the country had been vaccinated.
That's rubbish. Strict (not that strict, just sufficiently long) lockdowns were able to eradicate the original-strain virus in many places.
New Zealand gets a lot of credit but the actual world covid champion was Western Australia. Lockdowns started on March 15 2020, and started getting lifted on May 18 and were fully lifted by June 23. Life then went on basically as normal in the state (albeit with closed borders and the occasional quick extra lockdown) for the next couple of years, until eventually they decided to deliberately allow interstate travel in Feb 2022 after 95%+ of the population was vaccinated. By the end of 2023 (the most up to date numbers I could find) virtually everyone in the state had had covid, but only 1241 cases (0.09%) had died.
This approach minimised deaths _and_ total time spent in lockdown, they sensibly invested in a two month lockdown to begin with to eradicate the virus. Lockdowns without eradication are idiotic.
Yeah, it was lockdowns that did that. The fact that both countries are geographically isolated island nations with no land borders was just a complete coincidence.
Funny how the two examples people invariably bring up as evidence for how well lockdowns work are geographically isolated island nations with no land borders. And how they invariably attribute these two countries' low Covid rates to their lockdown policies alone, even though there are dozens of countries with policies just as strict if not stricter.
Well China also eradicated it (I don't like to give them credit because they also created it) and they have more land border than any other country in the world.
To reiterate: even after vaccinating well over 90% of their population, China was still locking down entire cities in the middle of 2022. Not just "stay-at-home orders", but cities of millions of people literally forcibly locked inside their apartment buildings with their food delivered by drones. In the middle of 2022. Does that sound like "eradication" to you? If China-style lockdowns worked, why was this necessary more than two years into the pandemic?
I don't know what was going on in China in 2022. I do know what happened in Australia.
All Australian states, plus New Zealand, successfully eradicated covid. Some of them just had more success than others in keeping it out. But when it did come back it always came in from a traceable foreign source (because idiots designed the quarantine system) and not from failure to eradicate in the first place nor from animal reservoirs.
Oh no. Not this. No, China did not eradicate Covid. They don't claim they did, and they did not. There were always cases. Eventually it spun out of control and they gave up. Shanghai kept locking down because they had so many eruptions.
From WP, Australia had a handful of COVID cases and managed to stop them out with a lockdown. Then they instituted a strict quarantine, and did more lockdowns when a case slipped through the quarantine.
For Americans and Europeans, this is very much not a central example of a lockdown. A central example, from what I recall, is a region having 100k COVID cases, then going into a mild lockdown for a month, and emerging with 20k COVID cases, which will increase as soon as the lockdown is lifted.
Right, that's a dumb lockdown. I certainly wouldn't argue in favour of that. Lockdowns are only worth the cost if you can actually eradicate the virus and keep your borders closed.
The US could certainly use some practice at keeping its borders closed.
I lived through an extremely strict China-style lockdown in China. In my city (subtropical, out of the way of major infection routes), the lockdowns were very effective. No-one got covid until the lockdowns ended in 2022 (I mean, very few people got it; no-one in our social circle). Then, when the lockdowns ended, we all got it within a few days.
That doesn't sound like the "eradication" Melvin claimed. If everyone gets it as soon as the lockdown's over, that sounds like lockdown is just kicking the can down the road.
Sure. Though it helped that by then, we were all vaccinated, and the prevalent strains were milder.
I don't have any evidence to suggest whether the Chinese lockdowns were the right strategy. I just know that for my city, they were a relatively effective strategy. They did what they said on the tin, for better or for worse.
> Even extremely strict China-style lockdowns were ineffective at preventing the spread of Covid, as plainly demonstrated by
It feels relevant to mention here that, making conversation in 2023 with a man in Shanghai, he asked me how many times I'd had covid, and when I said one, his response was "only one?"
If there is such a number, I don't think any human society has ever found it, What we've done in past plagues and pandemics were to implement *quarantines*. In which people who are reasonably suspected of having been infected (e.g. because they're on a ship with people who are definitely infected) are isolated until it's clear that there is no remaining infection. We can argue about when this is a necessary public health measure and when it is an infringement on civil liberties, and we'll have plenty of precedent to refer to. And sometimes it actually works.
Isolating the entire "nonessential" population, even the ones you know are healthy, to prevent them from possibly becoming infected, I don't know of any precedent for that. And from the one data point we have so for, it really doesn't seem to work except maybe to postpone the inevitable by a few months.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/death-rate doesn't show a big change in 2021-2022. The question I've never really got answered is whether we had 1.2 million *excessive* deaths or whether many of these were co-morbidities only marked as covd for convenience. If the second is more true, the actual deaths solely due to covid will be a lot lower.
Yeah, I'm just using this one to argue that the census graph matches the "COVID specific" numbers given the time course, so they shouldn't be read as conflicting.
The 500k spike is a yoy change. The fact that 2021 data is not negative means that year also had about 500k more than trend. But the the two graphs definitely are not consistent
Yeah, these graphs seem clearly contradictory. 2019 roughly matches, using Wikipedia's population of the US: 2.85 million deaths out of 330 million people is 8.63 per 100,000 (macrotrends says 8.78, which is close), while 3.4 million out of 331 million people in 2020 is 10.27. Where is macrotrends getting its data from?
The CDC's life expectancy report for 2020 has a handy breakdown (Figure 5, on page 5 of the document) on the effects of various causes of death on life expectancy in 2020 relative to 2019. Unsurprisingly, it seems that Covid was the dominant factor reducing life expectancy.
I had been expecting to see lower death rates from "unintentional injuries", since lockdowns seem like they would have reduced opportunities for both motor vehicle collisions and workplace accidents. But that actually seems to have increased (i.e. contributed to reduced life expectancy). The biggest factors pointing the other direction (cancer and chronic respiratory disease) are somewhat surprising to me, unless those are cases where covid accelerated the deaths of people who were already in precarious health.
Confusingly, it looks like Figure 5 scales positive and negative contributions to life expectancy separately, with each adding up to 100% even though overall life expectancy declined.
When I check the Excel file under USA, I see ~500K deaths under 2020, ~500K under 2021, and 1 million for "2020 - 2021", which I think means the "2020 - 2021" period includes both years (yes, I agree that's a stupid way to communicate that).
I just got it off a google search. I'm as surprised as anyone that there is a bipartisan tendency to totally ignore this large number of deaths. The first step is to make sure the numbers are genuine. It helps if to different sources corroborate.
I remember an expert saying VERY early on (paraphrasing): "if we mitigate the death toll through public health measures, they will undeniably *appear* draconian in retrospect."
Has stuck with me all this time, because it seems so obvious. I'd take your point about 'if we knew there'd be 1.2 million deaths' one step further - if we knew what the death toll was without any public health measures, people would be talking about insane we were for doing nothing.
People can't think about Covid logically. Even smart people. And to top it all off, people still absolutely overstate how draconian the measures were. It absolutely was not as 'locked down' as people now recall it.
One plausible argument against lockdowns/NPIs was that they wouldn't work well enough to prevent those extra deaths--we'd get the cost of lockdowns but still have about the same number of people die, just a few months later. The vaccines coming out as early as they did kind-of undermines the argument, but it wasn't at all clear we'd have working vaccines against covid so quickly when we started the lockdowns.
The test case seems to be Sweden, which I think did way less draconian stuff to slow covid. There must be good data comparing their ultimate outcomes to those of comparable countries (other Nordics?) that could inform us about whether the more draconian lockdowns worked at substantially decreasing deaths. Anyone know more?
He's a different source, going to May 2024, which has the same basic picture: Denmark and Australia below 200 excess deaths/100K, Norway and Canada just over 200, Finland and Germany somewhat over, and Sweden looks somewhere between Canada/Norway and Finland/Germany... but still nowhere close to Australia
Yes! Upon reading the post and some of the comments I thought I had memory holed how that period went down, so I looked up what we lived through in NYC (where the initial surge happened, and other places generally had fewer restrictions)
March 22, 2020: "New York State on PAUSE" became fully effective. This mandated 1) 100% closure of non-essential businesses statewide (in-office personnel functions).
2) A ban on all non-essential gatherings of individuals of any size for any reason.
3) Stricter guidance for vulnerable populations (New Yorkers age 70+ and those with compromised immune systems or underlying illnesses) to stay indoors, pre-screen visitors, and wear masks when around others. 4) General social distancing mandates of at least six feet.
June 8, 2020: Phase 1 of reopening starts.
For those of use who could work remotely, work went on as usual even during Mar 22 - June 8. This is 10 weeks in total.
Yes, schools were closed for longer. People with relatives in nursing homes couldn't visit them. And some people really dislike masks (even other people wearing them).
In the annals of "what sacrifices did your generation make to overcome a once in a hundred years pandemic" this is a trifle. No curfews, no military drafts, no rationing of products or price controls, nothing. The whining far outweighs the hardships.
I'm glad you weren't negatively impacted. But I think the people who owned, or worked at, small businesses that were decimated by the lockdowns would disagree with your assertion that they were "whining". Over 1.2 million jobs were permanently destroyed in the second quarter of 2020 according to the Fed.
It's important to not confound the effect of COVID with the effect of lockdowns; surely some proportion of those 1.2 million jobs would have disappeared regardless of lockdowns. Countries like Sweden that avoided lockdown still had big unemployment spikes in early 2020, so you need to figure an effect like that even in your counterfactual.
For example, Sweden didn't mandate movie theaters be shut down, but movie theater owners quickly shut them down in 2020 because nobody was attending and there were no new movies being released.
I believe Sweden's approach was vindicated, at least for Swedes, but suspect life wasn't all that different in Sweden from Denmark since Swedes are extremely social-minded and self-disciplined.
"However, establishment exits also surged, permanently destroying nearly 1.2 million jobs in the second quarter of 2020. Starting in the second half of 2020, however, establishment births surged; this was largely consistent with previously reported BFS data on new business applications, though some differences hint at differing activity between incumbent firms and new entrepreneurial businesses. On net, surging births outnumbered exits"
Yes, I saw that, but the original statement that the authors made was that 1.2 million jobs were "permanently" destroyed meaning that even after firm/establishment births, the number of jobs never returned to pre-lockdown levels (figure 3 of the linked article supports this).
Births are also “permanent.” When COVID hit, some establishments closed temporarily and some closed permanently. New establishments (“births”) more than made up for the establishments that were permanently closed. This is hard to see in the graphs in the paper because they show openings and closings, but there is no graph of the total number of establishments.
The following graph shows private sector employment plunging in April 2020 but hitting a new high in February 2022, which is consistent with the data in the paper you linked: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NPPTTL
So your assertion is that Decker and Haltiwanger are wrong when they say that 1.2 million jobs were “permanently destroyed” in 2020Q2?
I will agree that data shows that the number of jobs increased by at least as much as they decreased from the period in question. And yet Decker and Haltiwanger say that jobs were permanently destroyed. How might both things be true?
If you had a job that was destroyed, either permanently or temporarily, would you want your concerns dismissed as mere “whining”?
We could maybe compare excess deaths across richer countries (with reliable enough census and death records) who handled the situation differently. For example Norway began reopening schools in-person (in a phased approach starting with the youngest) in May of 2020 and had everybody back in-person by the end of June 2020.
That excess death statistic eliminates the variations in testing and whether the death was or was not attributed to Covid on the official records.
But the only thing it shows is that there were excess deaths.
When we know for a fact that deaths were falsely reported as COVID -- in the US, the government actively encouraged it with monetary payments -- the question of what caused them remains open.
Leave aside ANY official cause of death: If you picked a city or state at random (or any country, for that matter), you could graph out historical deaths over any timeframe. When Covid hit, the huge spike in deaths is 'excess' deaths. So, if deaths in St. Louis County, MO spiked by 4,000 deaths over a two year time frame, those are excess deaths. It matters not a bit what any doctor stated the 'cause' was. They are excess deaths. You could see spikes literally anywhere you looked across the world. If the excess deaths were not from Covid, then what are you saying they're from?
Nah, this is bullshit for so many reasons. But the two most important reasons:
1. There is no way doctors would be 100% accurate even if all doctors were 100% acting in good faith.
2. Excess deaths are what they are. And they match up very closely with Covid deaths in most places, but the good news is that even if they didn't, we still know within a relatively small percentage points how many deaths were the result of Covid.
It's intentional obtuseness to pretend we don't. We do. The fact you can't even posit another cause of the extreme amount of excess deaths is telling, of course.
Also, there is positively nothing circular about the argument. We would NEVER know the exact account, and one can completely ignore ANY official count and just meticulously look at excess deaths and be able to give an extremely close estimate. It's actually not that complicated. You make it complicated because you've likely been wrong for years on this topic.
Nah, look at the waves of excess deaths of all columns. They lag shortly behind the famous waves of covid, exactly as if covid was the main driver of the waves of total deaths.
Right. For example, this CDC graph shows that excess deaths from all causes occurred in 2020-2022 in six big waves, which the surges in all deaths happening about 2 or 3 weeks after the surges in new cases of covid and hospitalizations:
It was so comical how early we opened restaurants, as if a populated indoor building where everyone can't mask because they're eating could be made safe by wearing a mask for the fifty foot walk to your table and spacing tables a bit farther apart. But hey, gotta keep that service industry hot!
I was talking to a friend who had school aged kids during covid. It was a rough time for his family, and his kids still have some lingering aftereffects in the form of anxiety, etc. A lot of the "covid reckoning" stuff really boils down to "it would have been better if covid had never happened." Clearly things could have been handled much better, but overall covid was just a really horrible thing and all the various ways of dealing with it had massive downsides in different ways.
I think a lot of the things that were blamed on covid were really trends that would have happened anyway that covid merely accelerated--learning loss, more screen time, loosened social bonds all probably would have stayed on the same general trend line from 2018-2025 even if covid had not happened.
I worked for an Indian tribe when the pandemic started. Their sovereign immunity exempted them from all state health orders. Yet when lockdowns came, they closed up everything anyway and I was laid off. Publicly, this was for public health and out of respect for elders, and that was genuinely a part of it, but I happened to be in the rooms where the primary reason was discussed: their gaming operations, a multimillion dollar array of casinos and one of the largest employers in the state, were seeing patronage in the single digits. This is what I think of whenever people discuss the damage done by government-imposed lockdowns.
But for the imposed closures, *some* restaurants would have been full. The ones that didn't close, and so absorbed most of the traffic from the ones which closed.
People who wanted to eat out and whose risk posture allowed for such a thing would have been able to do so, and people who didn't want to could stay home. Restaurateurs who wanted to keep their businesses alive, and waitresses who wanted to earn big tips, could do so, and those who didn't, wouldn't have been forced to.
This seems to me strictly superior to the one-size-fits-all total closure.
Maybe I'm the odd one out here, but no one I know, who's death I'm aware of, died of COVID. In the past ten years I've had acquaintances and family members OD so that felt real. But the only person I personally knew in the past 5 years to die of respiratory illness didn't have COVID at the end, so 1.25 million feels more like a weird statistical artifact than an obvious disaster. It's like talking about the number of people killed by climate change; surely it made things worse but no specific death was attributable to it
I don't know anyone who died of COVID either (a relative of a patient did, but that's enough degrees of separation that I'm not counting it).
But I also don't know anyone who lost their small business because of COVID, or anyone who feels like their education was held back because of COVID, and I feel like I hear more about those secondhand and through the news.
Same as DJ. I knew people who died of flu (over few decades, three, all YA under 40), and in the COVID era, via suicide, OD and late diagnosed cancer. But I'm assuming that just is an accident of epidemiology (and age, perhaps).
I do recall livelihoods lost to lockdowns, and I LITERALLY don't know as single higher education student I knew in that time who didn't feel that their education wasn't SIGNIFICANTLY affected, and quite a few primary and high school students too (but more variable spread of effects).
I distinctly remember you writing an article about your surprise at how your particular social bubble was spectacularly unrepresentative of the overall American population. That's what's going on here.
I know lots of people who died of covid, but I'm an Orthodox Jew in NYC and our community was hit incredibly hard in early 2020. I think it's been under-discussed just how much people's subjective covid experience depended on where they were
In New York City, which is more or less the nerve center of the world, 15,000 people died of covid in April 2020, or five times 9/11. That had a big impact on how media around the world covered covid.
I think most of the heat in these takes is fueled by "Indigo Blob Bad", but I also think that it's not particularly mysterious to care more about an extraordinary inconvenience (the state taking away your subsidized weekday childcare) than about a statistically high but emotionally distant threat to life (one standard deviation more old people you know died of pneumonia).
I know two people who died, but I'm older than most folks here and so I know more elderly people. I also know a guy (a friend from high school) who was running a successful board game cafe who lost his business due to COVID. My yoga studio almost closed; the owner had to mortgage her house to keep it afloat.
I’m surprised you didn’t hear anything about education. Anyone college aged or under talks about it, and even if you don’t know any young people, all parents of younger children have a story about how school lockdowns affected them.
Those are two pretty big groups to not know anyone from.
I only know one person who died, and that was an old woman I hadn't spoken to in 20 years, but I did know two people who lost their entire sense of taste for over a year from getting unvaxed COVID. In the case of my then-19 yo niece, it was almost three years; near the end she looked almost anorexic because she could barely stand to eat food that was tasteless at best and often tasted rotten.
And to be sure, that's not the end of the world and probably wouldn't be worth closing schools for, but it was certainly a massive hit to her quality of life and its not captured in any statistic save maybe "long COVID" (which is not a statistic anyone trusts, for understandable reasons)
As with all things related to health, there are obvious clustering effects related to wealth. If you live in a wealthy area and only know wealthy people, you are less likely to know people impacted.
My family and I do alright in the US, and I only know of a few people who died from COVID stateside because I happen to have a lot of friends who are doctors. But we have relatives in India who died from COVID. My friends who are Indian *all* have relatives in India who died from COVID. We knew because it's a common thing for everyone in the community to visit the grieving household, and there was a lot of visiting going around.
Thanks for the perspective, but I'm not sure that maps clearly to the situation we're discussing. Taking COVID death numbers at face value (7MM worldwide with 1.25MM in the US), America accounts for something like 20% of all deaths with only 5% of the world population. This seems like it should be apocalyptic, but that wasn't my experience.
To Andrew Stern's point it seems like there were clusters/social circles in the US where things did look apocalyptic, but if you weren't living in one, then it's a far away problem like Ebola in west Africa, and would be weird to radically alter society about.
Just commenting with an anecdotal experience of where it really was apocalyptic. That worldwide deathcount is definitely low because I know that people were not being tracked properly in cities like Delhi. The more general point I was trying to make is that extrapolating from personal experience seems like a good way to end up in a wrong place, because there are tons of biasing factors (like, e.g., wealth disparities mentioned above)
I agree with your point that we can't just extrapolate from personal experience - I guess my point here is that The Discourse seems explainable from my experience, I don't know if this is because The Discourse is doing something strange, or if my experience is typical. I don't have a good idea of how we would assess the median experience of COVID in the west, but if it is close to mine, then the current terms of debate in the west aren't mysterious.
I don't mean to diminish what you're saying but I don't have any reason to believe your experience was more typical of Americans than mine was, Do you think that it is/was? Taking the balance of a diversity of viewpoints doesn't tell us much about the underlying distribution.
It's hard to say which is more typical. I think that our intuitions work against us here -- Chinese Robbers is a hell of a beast, we have algorithmic feeds that essentially only show us what we want to hear, etc. etc. I am in NYC, it was a warzone. I visited Ocala Florida during COVID, nothing was different.
The 'right' thing to do imo is, more or less, what we did -- different regions ended up having different levels of covid regulation that were more or less enforced at the state and muni level, than at the federal level, based on the appetites of the local populace. There were no federally mandated lockdowns, at any point, for e.g. There was an attempted federally mandated mask and vaccine mandate, but that got shut down in court (by nationwide injunction no less).
I find that many people who are really upset tend to be people in NY freaking out about people in Idaho, and people in Idaho freaking out about people in NY.
As Scott says, the number of 7 million worldwide is clearly wrong. (It's underreporting in developing countries.) So I don't think we should use this number to draw any conclusions.
Also, I don't know if you are interested in it, but my grandmother died from COVID. (She was quite old already, however.)
I live in a wealthy first world environment and personally knew four people in first world countries who died of covid (and I'm young, although 3 of the 4 deaths were old people).
I'm sorry, that sucks. It's weird to say that it sucks more because they were in a wealthy first world environment, but it maybe does suck more, just because its even more unexpected.
I know two people that died of COVID. One was >70 and had health issues, while the other was a young single mother who we later found out wasn’t taking very good care of herself. 1.2MM deaths / ~340MM population would mean that we should expect many persons to not personally know a victim, doubly-so those with small, younger social circles. It did not feel like a ‘statistical artifact’ to me. My experience is anecdotal as well of course, but I’m hardly alone.
I saw an article that I can't find anymore working out the math of "how many people need to die for the average person to know someone who died from it" and it was some astoundingly large number, like 5-10% of all Americans. I don't know anyone who has died from kidney disease, diabetes, or liver disease, but those three kill hundreds of thousands of people every single year, and are among the top 10 causes of death overall.
That all tracks for me. I think the standard emotional response for things that kill lots of people every year but which most people are removed by at least two degrees of separation is "that's bad I'm glad doctors are working on it" and then to neither make nor endorse significant changes to society. I'm not making a value judgement on that, but I think it explains the behavior Scott is describing.
I don't know anyone who died, but a young teen-to-twenties coworker had to be hospitalized due to COVID-related breathing problems, and a few (paraphrased) people mentioned it had hit them like a hammer. So that's enough to trigger "we were lucky".
Depends on what you mean by "died of COVID". I don't know anyone who died from infection by SARS-CoV-2, or was even seriously ill from it. But my father died of acute lockdown. Granted, he probably wouldn't have lasted more than another year or so in any event, but you can say that about a lot of the ones felled by the virus. He was still enjoying life, more days than not, until New York State took away everything that made his life worth living and stuck him in a bed in a room alone except for the occasional masked thing that would change his bedpan but didn't have time to care.
How common was deciding to go early due to this horribly demoralizing treatment? This is the kind of thing that we will probably never know, which could easily have skewed the numbers.
I find it weird how so much of our pop culture has the message of 'quality over quantity' in actually living life, and yet locking the elderly away like this became the obviously virtuous path.
My sister told me about a youngish woman at her work at a tech company in Seattle, post vaccines, who refused to go to the cafeteria at work or socialize at all, really, due to fears about COVID. My sister said she could understand, because you never know who might not be vaccinated! Imagine it!
I haven't really seen that much messaging of "quality > quantity of life", in any context where the quantity of life was in any real doubt. As soon as there's any noticeable risk of death, the messaging shifts to "This is *intolerable*! We *must* minimize the risk of death today, and postpone the inevitability of death at all costs!"
Granted, people who want to actually live life have gotten pretty good - I'd suggest maybe too good - at not noticing risks of death that might get in the way of that. But COVID wasn't something anyone could not notice.
Pop culture almost universally celebrates risk takers, especially when risking to save others but not always. Sir Edmund Hilary, Rocky Balboa, Michael Schumacher or medal of honor winners. Even when the risk is not death, common stories involve living a stifled, fearful existence and then overcoming that fear to start a life worth living. Like 40 Year Old Virgin or any coming of age story.
This is not surprising, the fraction of people COVID killed was very small.
However, the same could be said for the terrorist attacks on 2001-9-11, which killed orders of magnitude fewer US citizens than COVID. Yet they were not something which were basically forgotten a few years later.
I think the saddest part is that entrenched ideological struggles mean that we will likely learn little from our mistakes. The next pandemic could be much worse, and it is not clear to me that we will be any better prepared for it than we were in 2019.
I agree. Further, if next week bird flu mutates into something 20x worse than covid, the US public health authorities will have too little credibility and the public will have too little patience for any kind of lockdowns, *even if they are entirely justified*.
US public health authorities forgot that job #0 was "Stay trustworthy to as much of the population as humanly possible." They failed at that, as hard as any institution has ever failed at anything.
I think they were helped along by media and the weird moral-panic aspect of covid that happened, where factual questions about efficacy of masks or relative risks were swamped by moral crusades by media/political types. But also, it seemed like the visible public health authorities were mostly excited about the assistant propaganda minister side of the job, whereas they should have (IMO, but what do I know) been focused on the "sharing my expertise on infectious disease to help people make better decisions about risk/reward tradeoffs" side of the job.
Nobody talks about "1.2 million COVID deaths" because the medical establishment played obvious and ridiculous games with the way it counted "COVID deaths." Any patient with a positive PSR was required to be reported as such, even patients who were in vehicular accidents or suffering from late-stage cancer.
This has been known since the beginning.
Anyone who tries to remind people that "a lot of people died" is likely to be immediately confronted with that fact.
So what would be the point? Other than commemorating the beclowning of the medical establishment, that is. That'd be cool.
Whatever the true excess mortality stats might be, the mere fact of the obvious and ridiculous manipulation of the Big Red Number on various dashboards at the time weakens the argument a lot -- "loss of trust in medical establishment bookkeeping" isn't something that can just be turned around by saying "hey guys, the *real* numbers are in now, and it turns out that they are just as bad as the fake ones we were feeding you to scare you into compliance!"
If the numbers turned out correct, why are you convinced they were fake at the time?
Wouldn't the default explanation be that doctors/coroners' judgments on what percent of deaths were "from" vs. "with" COVID turned out to be pretty good, and the people reporting them were correct to trust those judgments or at least accept them as a first pass?
The habit of public health authorities maximizing covid death counts by using "with covid" style metrics was well documented at the time -- and IIRC even encouraged by the feds in that additional funding was provided based on covid deaths as opposed to regular ones.
Excess mortality doesn't distinguish between deaths caused by covid itself and those caused by various interventions -- so it's not obvious that "excess mortality ~= reported covid mortality" implies that the covid mortality stats were OK.
Excess deaths jumped up right when the virus hit and before there were notable interventions. And explain just how the interventions were causing all those deaths.
I'm not saying that covid-19 didn't cause any excess deaths -- I'm saying that Scott's underlying assumption that it caused all of them is not justified.
As (non-comprehensive) examples, IIRC there were big jumps in violent crime, drug overdoses, and traffic fatalities -- I don't see a mechanism for the virus itself to have caused these?
This was all extensively litigated (on this very forum) years ago -- are you disputing that the US federal government provided hospitals additional funding based on whether or not a patient was reported as dying from covid-19?
Not sure why you want to drag Trump into this -- he's pretty pro-vaccine himself I think? (also somebody who I'm quite ambivalent about, not that it's relevant)
The doubt in this case was sown by people like Fauci openly lying to the public -- to the point of later admitting that they were lying as a tactic to manipulate behaviour. This is not a path to trust.
Trump wanted to be pro-vaccine, mostly to claim credit (not entirely undeserved) for Operation Warp Speed. But his supporters booed him for making pro-vaccine comments, so he backed away from it.
There was no manipulation. This number was published because it was the only number that was available. It was clearly communicated that it was the number of deaths *with* COVID, and the number of deaths *from* COVID did not exist.
And there was no sinister reason why the number of deaths *from* COVID did not exist. It was simply impossible to get. You only know whether someone died *from* COVID by an autopsy, and not all dead people get an autopsy. An autopsy is a lot of work, and it was not feasible to make one for every dead person with COVID.
In the city of Hamburg in Germany, each "death + COVID-positive" got an autopsy in the first months. Results: while a few died from other causes - all real Covid-deaths had serious comorbidities (as you would expect at their age). And of course, those who died from COVID clearly had fatally damaged lungs, indeed.
I won't dispute that all-cause mortality does appear to have been unusual.
Doesn't mean that those people died because of a COVID infection though.
A lot of those deaths were iatrogenic. Fauci et al pushed interventions and treatments that not only didn't work, but almost certainly hastened or even outright caused deaths. Ventilators. Remdesivir. Doesn't matter whether they were facing a serious COVID infection or just had other respiratory symptoms from a completely unrelated condition and happened to have a positive PCR. The treatments and interventions used did far more harm than good, in the aggregate.
And that's not even getting into people who died of other causes that did not receive medical treatment because access to care was restricted. Heart attack victims who didn't call 911. Missed cancer screenings leading to detection only after the disease had advanced significantly. Etc.
The thing is, because the virus was endemic almost immediately, and because PCR tests were calibrated to return positive results on the merest shred of COVID DNA, a huge number of them were counted as "COVID deaths," even though the virus outright killed very few of them. Again, motorcycle accidents, falling off ladders, stage IV colon cancer, all COVID deaths. Not by accident, but by design.
Look, you're an MD. You know that at any given time there are a large number of geriatrics that are going to die the next time they get a really serious cold. Fortunately, even most geriatrics have immune systems so inured to common viruses that their symptoms never get that serious. When a new virus emerges, something their immune systems haven't had a chance to recognize, that's when things get dangerous. They represent dry tinder waiting for a viral spark. But that's still a minority of that 1.2 million figure. The majority were people who died unnecessarily because of harmful medical interventions or restricted access to normal medical care as a result of lockdown policies.
Still, 1.2 million is a big number, so even a small percentage of that is also going to be a big number. But there is no reason to think that if we had simply ignored the virus and kept on keeping on that the number would have been anywhere close to that high. Maybe a few hundred thousand. And even then, we'd just have been compressing the expected deaths into smaller time window. If the medical establishment hadn't lost its bloody mind, that is.
I don't think it's remdesevir because many of these excess deaths were before remdesevir was approved in October 2020. I also don't think there's much difference between PCR tests vs. antigen tests vs. fancier tests.
While I haven't spent the time looking up the statistics that would tell me if all of these people were killed by ventilator malfunctions, I'm curious how you're thinking of burden of proof here. A new virus that's known to cause cardiac and respiratory issues and is similar to past viruses that have killed a lot of old people goes pandemic, there's a lot of excess mortality among old people, and the opinion of the doctors/coroners involved is that it's because of the virus doing exactly the sort of cardiac/respiratory damage it's known to do, in patients who were only brought to the hospital / put on respirators in the first place because they were having severe breathing difficulty. Why would your first assumption be "most of the excess mortality must be iatrogenic"?
"patients who were only brought to the hospital / put on respirators in the first place because they were having severe breathing difficulty"
That's not what I've read. The protocol for COVID was established from on high, and front-line clinicians were not permitted to use their judgment when treating patients with a positive PCR. Respirators were, for a while, basically mandatory.
There is significant difference between PCR and other tests, and there is solid reporting out there that the default setting for running COVID tests was to run a sample through them so many times that the rate of false positives was likely very high.
As to burden of proof, you seem to think that we ought to give the medical establishment the benefit of the doubt and take reported statistics at face value. In the wake of the COVID debacle, one is justified in rejecting both of those premises. I certainly do.
I lived in southern Missouri 2021-2024. 2020 wasn’t too bad, but we had a dramatic spike during the Delta wave because the vaccination rate was low. The Springfield hospital had to bring in hundreds of medical personnel.
If excess COVID deaths were caused primarily by medical interventions that were given to people with respiratory symptoms who tested positive for COVID, as you claim, then all these excess deaths would be counted as COVID deaths. The doctors treating them thought they had COVID and their respiratory symptoms were severe enough to merit these treatments, they died of respiratory symptoms or unclear causes, it's going to get classified as a COVID death even under relatively strict standards.
If, as you also claim, there was rampant counting of deaths by people who happened to be positive with COVID as COVID deaths, that would suggest that there should be dramatically more COVID deaths recorded than excess deaths. Instead I believe it's the other way around - roughly 350,000 recorded COVID deaths in 2020 vs. roughly 535,000 excess deaths.
The only way this works out is if there was some massive number of excess deaths not counted as COVID deaths that outweighs amount of the deaths from pre-existing causes counted as COVID deaths. These couldn't be caused by COVID medical interventions, so they must be the deaths caused by lack of medical treatment that you mention. There must be a very large number of them - can you find evidence of them in the excess death statistics, in the form of deaths from causes that couldn't be COVID going up? My recollection is that these numbers mostly stayed flat.
I think it's gonna be really hard to show iatrogenic explanations for the 8x increase in people being found dead in their homes or on the streets in NYC, April 2020.
Speaking as someone in the medical establishment who was trying to keep that number down, I am going to take a leap and say that you have never read any of the studies that show remdesivir and ventilators are effective, and you are basing your medical opinions off some dude on Twitter.
If you would like to prove me wrong, you can access them here
No. There were about six huge surges in total deaths during 2020-2022 that each immediately followed by a few weeks the six huge surges in covid cases and covid hospitalizations. You can look at the total death trend line and _name_ which variant of covid caused the big waves: Delta, Omicron, etc.
That could all be true and not change my conclusions, which are predicated on a combination of overreaction to various COVID waves and the knock-on effects thereof.
I remember after reading and listening to dozens of things about the Tudors and Bloody Mary specifically over the years, one source mentioning as an aside that 10% of the English population died in a flu epidemic in one year. Before spending 10 times more time to debating how she probably felt about her half sister.
I don't know if that is a reference to the sweating sickness but yes. That's a fascinating topic because it was a disease that we don't know what it was, it was very prevalent, there were waves of it, and it routinely killed lots of people fast (famously, Thomas Cromwell's wife was fine in the morning and dead by evening).
I was referring to the 1557 flu pandemic but sweating sickness like the encephalitis lethargica epidemic of 1920 is absolutely fascinating, a disease emerging, doing immense damage and then disappearing without a trace.
> But there’s no “other side” to 1.2 million deaths.
The other side is: "That number is wrong."
To take an extreme example, if I say, "a billion people are killed by aliens every year", I think it would be quite incorrect to claim that there is "no other side to the story". The other side to that story is that my claim is incorrect, and there need not be any other argument against it beyond that.
Whether that number is correct or not *is* the entire debate. People who believe that 1.2M died *from* COVID correctly believe that 1.2M deaths is a lot and matters. People who believe that 1.2M did not die *from* COVID, may also believe that 1.2M deaths is a lot and matters, but they don't believe that 1.2M died.
Note: I probably won't engage in a debate here about whether the number is correct or not, and I make no claims as to which side I'm on. I'm mainly interested in raising a red flag to saying that "there is no other side to this argument" because I think that is a very incorrect statement, regardless of which side of the argument you are on.
Disagree. Some people have less information (like newcomers) and others tend to be skeptical of bold claims. Bringing up the other side, even if demonstrably incorrect, has a lot of value in establishing credibility, expanding understanding, and the newcomers to such facts aren't blindsided or as persuaded by the incorrect side.
Nowadays 5.64 billion people use the internet. Literally everything has two sides. Enshrining always bringing up both sides as a norm of communication would, apart from being practically untenable, make writing on the internet way too clunky and potentially harmful (people can be convinced by demonstratably incorrect things too!).
If you think a given writing is incorrect on a point, then make an argument! I have no problem with that, even if your position turns out to be demonstratably false at the end. However, this limp-wristed, "I don't make any claims, but I've heard of people who do" serves no-one and is incredibly irritating.
How can we know which side is false if we do not engage and communicate? By pretending the other side doesn't exist, we have no chance of finding out if they have good arguments, or convincing them that our arguments are better.
Ignoring the "other side" may be reasonable if one side has 10 people saying something the other 8B people disagree with, but in this case ~half of the US population (by my estimation) believes it so I think discounting it just because you disagree is an inappropriate course of action.
Even if you think it is the uneducated half of the population that believes a thing (like burning witches works), you should *still* acknowledge the argument and engage with it in a meaningful way. Ignoring the argument or claiming it doesn't exist at best leads to a bigger schism in society and eventually violence is used to determine who is "right".
This is no engaging with people who believe medical professionals across the nation either willfully lied or are too stupid to properly diagnose the reason for a person's death. The reported number of deaths is the only necessary evidence which makes the argument effectively a tautology, and if someone disbelieves a tautology there is no evidentiary way of convincing them they are wrong. Unfortunately in the social media age arguing against plain facts has become common. I honestly don't know how to engage with those people.
But you're not engaging! You literally say, "Note: I probably won't engage in a debate here"
So bringing it up here won't do anything to move us towards the truth. You can't demand that other people have to engage with your arguments at all times, even when you won't present them!
There are lots of people in the comments here and elsewhere on the internet engaging on the topic. I could steel man the point, but it seems better to let those passionate about the subject make their points.
The purpose of my comment here was not to argue the point itself, but instead to highlight to Scott and others that I think it is harmful to the article and community cohesion to pretend half of the population's opinion simply doesn't exist.
If the point is that we need to engage with the best arguments for the purpose of truthseeking, then it's *not* best to let the most passionate make the point if you think you can steelman their argument.
If the point is actually "community cohesion" then I think the rest of us, and most especially Scott, have no obligation to care at all. If certain people are going to stop reading because Scott doesn't bend over backwards to cater to their opinion in every article he writes, so much the worse for them.
>How can we know which side is false if we do not engage and communicate?
That is really remarkable rhetoric for someone who themselves *just said* that they refuse to actually discuss (here) whether the claim is true or not.
Double posting my comment above here since you have the same feedback:
There are lots of people in the comments here and elsewhere on the internet engaging on the topic. I could steel man the point, but it seems better to let those passionate about the subject make their points.
The purpose of my comment here was not to argue the point itself, but instead to highlight to Scott and others that I think it is harmful to the article and community cohesion to pretend half of the population's opinion simply doesn't exist.
I acknowledge that a large percentage of American voters are so upset about the lousy way the Democrats have governed in the past 75 years that those millions were easily scammed by the Liar in Chief.
Agreed. It’s important to have these conversations. It’s also important to back up any argument we personally make with scientific and statistical data. I always try to do that, or else I provide a path for people to check for themselves. I think it’s an important part of debating as well.
I mean, this is a bit like saying there's another side to "the Earth is an oblate spheroid orbiting the Sun, which itself is located in the Milky Way Galaxy, composed of roughly 100-400 billion stars, most of which are Type M stars."
Sure, there are people who would argue with that. But the argument is basically, "ignore literally all evidence to agree with me." It's just not really an argument that has much bite to it. You can just look at the trend line here and do the mental math yourself to conclude that there were ~1.2 million US excess deaths in 2020-2022 : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year?time=earliest..2024&country=~USA
I find that when half of the population believes something different than you, it is worthwhile to engage with them earnestly even if you are extremely confident that you are right. There are a *lot* of times where even a super-majority of the human population is wrong about something, in fact it is quite common I think, but even in those situations if you somehow know with great certainty that you are right and everyone else is wrong, you should *still* engage with them earnestly.
Listen to their points and try to figure out where the root of the disagreement lies. In this case, my best guess is the real disagreement lies in a disagreement in credibility of data sources, not in whether 1.2M people dying is acceptable or not, or even whether or not source X says 1.2M or not. Once you have identified the real disagreement, you can begin to have a more constructive discussion on how to resolve the difference of opinion. Maybe in this case it looks something like trying to come up with better ways of building and maintaining institutional trust, or understanding where the distrust comes from and trying to show that distrust is unwarranted.
Banned for this comment - I'm not against being anti-lockdown, but this is not especially related to the post, and using it as an excuse to go into heated controversial denunciations of a large group.
maybe each hospital should get a plague that says something like "1376 people died here during the 3 worst months of the covid pandemic from Dezember 2020 to March 2021"
I like the broad idea of this kind of commemoration, but that specific plaque could make the hospital seem incompetent. Plaques or scholarships in honour of health care workers who lost their lives seems nice though.
I don't want to trivialize what people suffered from lockdowns, I hated being locked down, but plaques like that would remind people that some suffered a lot worse.
>I think if we’d known at the beginning of COVID that it would kill 1.2 million Americans, people would have thought that whatever warnings they were getting, or panicky responses were being proposed, were - if anything - understated.
The thing is, many of us *did* know at the beginning that it would kill roughly that many Americans. This was based on extrapolating from the case fatality rate and R0. On March 4, 2020, I wrote to my friends, "I do not believe that the market has fully priced in the 0.2 – 2 million deaths, and associated societal disruption, that will likely occur in the United States over the next year." (This was right before the stock market went down by more than 20%, and I ended up making a good profit off the crash.)
This is what I was thinking about while reading Scott's article as well. There /were/ experts predicting this number of deaths. I have a distinct memory of listening to an NPR news broadcast in March of 2020 with an epidemiologist who said that the total number of deaths could reasonably be as high as 2 million. I've been impressed with the accuracy of that guess for five years now and replay it in my head frequently.
I admit my Google-Fu may not be strong enough to find the original NPR broadcast I'm remembering... but here are a couple other early estimates I could find:
* 2.2 Million USA if no control measures are implemented (March 16, 2020)
So all the lockdowns (and vaccines?) actually contribute little? It actually doesn't lower death that much from baseline?I guess there should be other sources that predict way lower and way higher.
My intention with those links was just to show that predictions of death on roughly a million-US-citizen scale were already floating around early spring 2020. If you're asking about how effective the lockdowns were, I'd definitely look for more recent analyses.
I just think it'd be funny if their predictions are weirdly prophetic. Being in the same magnitude as what really happened is not an easy feat especially considering the huge margin on error we have to consider! That's why I think there should be other predictions that are wronger than this, or we're forced to conclude that our herculean efforts only count as "no control measure are implemented"
It was easy. I predicted both roughly correctly – how many people could die and that most of restrictions will not be very effective. It is just numbers – the infection fatality rate from cruise ship Diamond Princess, then our knowledge that it was very infectious. Every data showed this to be the case.
I also predicted that vaccine will arrive within 6 months or later. I was spot on (Sputnik was released in August), Pfizer vaccine took longer but only because they tried to harm Trump.
I didn't know how effective will be vaccine but someone on SSC mentioned that all previous vaccine attempts with coronaviruses failed to make a vaccine that stops infections. It also turned correct.
At every step I encountered abuse with my predictions. I suspect that we have a strong publication bias. A lot of people predicted correctly but they were supressed, marginalized, people simply didn't want to hear. Instead, wrong but more palatable predictions were amplified.
COVID also introduced a larger degree of separation from the death. Many deaths occurred in hospitals with no visitors.
My grandmother died fairly early on in the pandemic. She was in a nursing home in a state where COVID was spreading in nursing homes. I do not know if her death was related to COVID[*], though it seems likely. She was old enough that she had at most a small number of years left, but still, the timing was suspicious. If there was a funeral, I didn't hear anything about it, possibly because it was obvious I wouldn't risk traveling for it. Under normal circumstances I probably would've flown up to see her when she took a turn for the worse, and certainly would've attended the funeral.
[*] The only way I might've found out the cause of death would be pestering my emotionally distraught aunt or uncle for details, which didn't seem worth it.
In the US, the national trauma wasn't all those people dying. It was a realization about values. The priorities that powerful people are unwilling to set aside when it's a matter of life and death are their true values. What are they willing to let their neighbors die for?
There are a lot of conservatives who really do value liberty very highly. When they were tested by having to trade off liberty versus life, we saw what they chose.
And we found out that liberals really do value racial equity very highly. When they were tested by having to trade off racial equity versus life, we saw what they chose.
We also learned a lot about who will lie, and for what.
I don't see how what the left did demonstrates racial equity. The question that kinda dismantles the narrative is how many racial minorities died as a result of people catching COVID during the protests? If the answer is more than 0 then it demonstrates that minorities dying for political causes can be justified. If it's 0 then it demonstrates that there was no point to many lockdown restrictions.
Like if lockdowns were good and useful then having minorities break them would be bad for said minorities.
I took Matthew's comment as referring to the strong consensus that large gatherings were "superspreader events" that ought to be banned... until the George Floyd riots and protests began.
Yes, my point is that if they truly are super spreader events then allowing them to happen isn't equity, because you're literally killing minorities by allowing them to happen
>While state and local health authorities make most of the ultimate decisions, the Centers for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) puts out non-binding guidelines that are expected to sway their work. As early as the summer, it became clear that many of those involved in ACIP were pressing for a social-justice-oriented approach that would elevate race and ethnicity as conscious factors in vaccine allocation.
>>There are a lot of conservatives who really do value liberty very highly. When they were tested by having to trade off liberty versus life, we saw what they chose.
This doesn't track with security/anti-terrorism/drug war policies.
I'm not trying to make a big point, aside from adding to the claim that no side in US politics has a clear and coherent ideology, nor do they even have ideologically consistent sub-planks.
> The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them!
I do want to highlight how this is something that was really blown up deliberately by a lot of people:
The Surgeon General told people to not buy masks on February 29th.
The WHO suggested people should wear masks if they're sick on March 30th.
The CDC officially issued guidance that we should wear masks on April 3rd, 2020. After that there was consistent pro-mask guidance from the government.
Given that for most people COVID became a real thing on March 11, 2020 with the indefinite postponement of the NBA season, that means that we had about three weeks of "don't mask" followed by several years of people repeatedly pointing out that we had several weeks of "don't mask" and it's just so confusing, which is a pretty self-fulfilling claim.
I don't think it requires deliberate ill intention to blow it up. I tried to mask early in the pandemic and got flak over it. I have two or three posts at the old blog talking about how weird this was and trying to reconcile different perspectives.
More controversially, I get the impression that later in the pandemic there was a bit of a retreat to "maybe mask mandates don't do much in practice", though I can't tell how much of that was a couple of contrarian Cochrane reviewers vs. a larger consensus.
I don't think it necessarily *would* require ill intent, but I watched a lot of people - media figures and politicians in particular - very actively signal-boost this a lot. If you're skeptical of this claim, I can put together some examples.
I remember you talking about the looks you got wearing a mask on a bus early on. I kind of followed the recommendations you laid out. I bought a pulse oximeter, had a set of ‘outside clothes’ to change into and out of on going out into the world. I don’t think I ever used them though. Mostly just hunkered down, bought a bag of dried red beans when bread became scarily scarce, did some isopropyl alcohol swabbing of physical mail for a little while.
The thing is we knew the virus was dangerous but didn’t have the means to determine just how dangerous. I think most people in official capacity were acting in good faith. They inevitably made mistakes due to their lack of omniscience.
The fact that this all occurred in the context of our kind of insane culture war with everyone distrusting anyone not on their own team made things much more painful than they had to be.
I like to call this "September 12 Syndrome." I remember the day after 9/11, how much I knew about terrorism and Afghanistan and bin Laden. And I had to keep updating over time. Lots of people rewrite their memories to have always been right so this is hard to notice.
"Wash your hands" was considered the best thing to do, and it led to some early super-spreader events, like that church choir practice, who were very diligent about washing their hands.
My understanding was that the Cochrane review was pretty good, and it basically concluded there's not good evidence either way. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full There's an argument that if you're requiring an intervention you should have evidence to support that intervention. I think there's also a good argument that many people adjusted their risk tolerances because they were wearing masks, such that if the true effect of a mask were modest (say a 15% reduction in disease transmission), they adjusted their behavior to treat wearing an N95 to be equivalent to a 95% reduction in risk of transmission. If you treat a 15% risk reduction as a 95% risk reduction, you're more likely to engage in behaviors that spread risk. But to my knowledge that study hasn't been done.
Personally, I'm more frustrated at how little nuance was allowed into the discussion - and in particular I blame the government officials and gatekeepers who forced this into an all-or-nothing discussion, and aggressively pursued anyone who dissented from the official line. Prior to the pandemic, a major project of epidemiologists was to target airplanes and airports as the most likely places from which the next pandemic would spread. They implemented plans and policies to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses in these settings. When COVID broke out, under both the Trump and Biden administrations these plans appear to have been entirely ignored.
It's not just airport bathrooms (designed to ensure you can do your business without your hands touching a surface) that are designed to reduce infectious spread. Airplanes themselves are designed this way. Air entering the plane from outside comes in from the top of the cabin, directly above the passengers, while the intake ensures air leaves from directly below passengers. Airflow goes from top to bottom, not from side to side, so that when you breathe out respiratory pathogens are mostly headed down to the floor and not to the side at the other passengers in the cabin. The worst thing you could do on an airplane would be to mess up this system of airflow, redirecting passengers' breathing to the sides.
Yet this is exactly what requiring masks on airplanes did. I wear glasses. I know when I put on a mask that the majority of my breath is being redirected to the sides. If I'm in a face-to-face interview, maybe that mask will impede direct transmission from me to the person seated across from me. But if I'm on an airplane, wearing a mask breaks the design of the airflow and almost certainly INCREASES my chance of getting infected from the passengers nearby.
> There's an argument that if you're requiring an intervention you should have evidence to support that intervention.
I respectfully disagree. COVID is a respiratory illness. We know that some respiratory illnesses spread through droplet infection, and COVID was spreading rather quickly. There was a plausible physical mechanism how masks would stop infections.
Yes, one could take the stance that any intervention should only be done after it has conclusively been proven to be effective. After all, it could be that SARS-COV-2 could teleport for up to 100m between lungs of humans and then lockdowns would not stop the spread. If you then also demand RCTs and declare that for ethical reasons, RCTs are out of the question you can justify not do any interventions forever.
Consider: you are driving down a road when suddenly ahead of you, what looks like a truck sized space alien appears on the road. You consider braking. You are aware that for virtually all apparent road obstacles, trying to occupy the same space as them with your car will go badly. But then you realize that you do not know if your Earth physics will apply to a space alien who already seemingly defied them by popping into existence. Perhaps you can pass through him fine, and braking would be a waste of time and fuel. Perhaps you are impervious to getting attacked as long as your relative velocity is high enough, but you will get eaten when you stop your car. Perhaps you are hallucinating, and disbelieving would stop your hallucination.
No. You act on the physics you know and optimize for the best intervention given your uncertain beliefs. You brake / mandate wearing masks. You also closely watch the effects of your intervention, and if it is not what you thought, you loudly say "oops" and do something different.
You're arguing that there's no equipoise for masks as an intervention? I disagree. And the Cochrane review disagrees. The fact that there are multiple clinical trials with negative results is direct evidence that the hypothesis that masks "stop infection" isn't was simple as you're hoping it will be, and that it needs to be studied.
Look, nobody is saying that we need a clinical trial for parachutes. There's no clinical question about whether they're effective. No equipoise. But if you're fooled by bioplausibility, you haven't done enough clinical research. I can tell you how many trials I've done that failed despite clear bioplausibility. "It's a respiratory virus, it spreads through droplets, masks block droplets, therefore masks block spread." Nice. But there are lots of steps there, steps that may not match real-world usage. And besides, I've worn lots of masks (as has everyone at this point) and I know most of my breath isn't going through the little filter but out the sides. What's the dwell time for the droplets with virus? Are the droplets large enough to get caught in the mask, or is it like shooting bbs through a chain link fence?
These are all reasonable questions, plus the real ones we care about, like, "do people wear masks consistently enough that real world use limits transmission?" And most importantly, "how much does mask use reduce the risk of transmission?" Is it 10%, 50%, 75%? I would be willing to bet money that it's not 100%. Yet lots of people run around treating masks like they completely halt transmission. How does that altered behavior itself affect transmission?
Just because behavior is a confounder in the analysis, this doesn't mean masks don't "work". For example, seatbelts clearly work, even though we now know that seatbelt use also changes a driver's risk tolerance to slightly mitigate the benefit from the seatbelt. The reason I still wear a seatbelt is because the lifesaving benefit is greater than the increased risk. But that's an empirical question that doesn't just fall out of the plausibility analysis.
Parachutes work. But if people start dying, and the cause of death is "fell from airplane", and they were all wearing parachutes, you don't say, "parachutes work, that can't be the problem". You start asking questions about the parachutes. Were they wearing the parachutes right? Were the chutes large enough? Is there a persistent manufacturing defect? All valid scientific questions when there's an intervention that's not working as expected.
Look, I'm not saying you can't implement a masking strategy during an emergency based on what you think might work. But the existence of the emergency doesn't shield you from producing evidence for efficacy. If anything, it makes the demand for efficacy research more pressing. It's a clear institutional failure that they didn't mandate cluster randomized trials on a policy they implemented for multiple years based solely on bioplausibility. If we can answer this question but instead we still argue over spotty data years later, we do future generations a disservice when they have the same questions in the next pandemic.
My personal belief (meaning it's not something that can be empirically tested, so I'm not asking anyone to agree) is that the stupid fights over low-evidence solutions like masks, lockdowns, and zero COVID only served to divert public attention away from rational, scientifically driven policies developed before the pandemic by serious researchers, and that fit perfectly into the moment. Epidemiologists have been planning for and warming about a respiratory pandemic, probably driven by an influence-like or SARS-like zoonotic crossover, for decades. Then, ironically, when the moment came people panicked and sidelined the only true experts because they were too busy arguing over masks and 6ft distancing (another policy that was widely implemented without any follow-up studies to test for efficacy; where are the cluster randomized trials on 2m distancing? Is that even the right distance? What's the magnitude of the impact, if any? Who knows! We never did the cluster randomized trials.).
By May 1 2020, we knew which populations were most at risk. A couple billion dollars of free food delivery in Medicare may have saved more lives than lockdowns. Rational cocooning of the elderly with caretakers who had positive antibody tests was an early solution before a vaccine became available. These ideas were on the table since before 2020. Yet public officials argued instead for 'bioplausibile' interventions over proven solutions, didn't go on to test their hypotheses, and tried to claim they were scientists.
The "evidence" and "studies" generated on any NPIs during the pandemic itself were mostly either non-existent or garbage. This is easily explained by the political and funding pressures of the time. Which is why, as you note, it would have made much more sense to assess evidence generated during a non-turbulent time without emergency. People were accused of trusting their own opinion versus the experts. No. It was trusting the consensus expert opinion from years and years prior (which, e.g., found no efficacy for mass masking / mandates, recommended against disruptive NPIs, etc.) versus the obviously-motivated expert opinion generated hastily in the midst of a panic.
Yeah. If I were being generous, I'd restrict my complaint to the fact that they implemented emergency policies with no plan to test their hypotheses later. "We had to do something before we got the evidence in!" Sure, whatever.
What makes me less generous is that they didn't do this in the absence of established theory. Fauci et. al, not only ignored established work. They demonized anyone who questioned what were clearly a slate of ad-hoc 'just be seen doing something' interventions over the ideas of much more well-informed scientists.
It was just the worst time to be an immunologist, hearing people say obviously false things with high confidence. And sure, you're going to hear stupid stuff on Fox News, but I expect that. When bad science is coming from the CDC, with no attempt to correct it and a bunch of us trained scientists screaming at our keyboards that they're straining at a gnat while swallowing the camel, I eventually lost all charity for these people. The reality is that there are true experts in this field whose earned credibility was squandered by people pretending to play scientist on TV. And it's going to be a long slog trying to earn back that credibility.
I think that we do not have a fundamental disagreement.
Masks certainly do not make you invincible. Mandating N95 without recognizing the fact that most people will not wear them correctly seems kind of pointless. (For some reason, nobody thought to educate the general population on how to properly fit N95s, which is likely a skill 80% of adults could learn.)
I think that Scott's post from 2020-03-23 [1] has held up quite well, being carefully optimistic about masks and respirators while also cautioning people not to risk compensate.
The transition from "masks don't work" to "masking should be mandatory" occurred with no acknowledgement that "masks don't work" was an actual position that was held by major institutions whose authoritativeness relies on their credibility.
Maintaining credibility requires that, when you are wrong, you acknowledge the fact that you were wrong and investigate exactly how you ended up being wrong. Credibility requires transparency and accountability, neither of which was a quality demonstrated by any of our major institutions in recent memory.
The complaint about the guidance changing is not about the guidance changing, it's about the we-have-always-been-at-war-with-eurasia institutional amnesia about the guidance having ever been different. People have memories, and notice when authority figures are telling them things that conflict with those memories.
I think it's a little more nuanced than that. My experience at least was that there was a lot of people saying "well, we were trying to save PPE for people who needed it most", especially in the WHO thing I mentioned above that WAS an incremental step.
And, again, I think that a lot of actors deliberately exploited this to make an anti-authority-figure stance. In a more collaborative environment I don't think this would have been nearly as much of a thing.
I'm not sure that it is. Scott himself wrote up a piece pointing out that the initial guidance was fully in line with all previous research and all existing policy documents, and that it therefore most likely reflected what they actually believed.
Much later, in the face of widespread public speculation that they must have been lying to preserve the availability of PPE, they issued some public statements saying "actually, we were lying all along to preserve the availability of PPE".
This is fully explicable in terms of (1) a belief that they see the perception of having been right as more important than the perception of having been honest, and (2) their new theory of what happened having been lifted wholesale from the people they wanted to sell it to.
It would help if you would identify the “major institutions” you are referring to.
The U.S. Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, did exactly what you suggest. He acknowledged that he and others “originally recommended against the general public wearing masks,” although “we have always recommended that symptomatic people wear a mask, because...you could transmit disease to other people.” He then explained that “we now know from recent studies that a significant portion of individuals with coronavirus lack symptoms,” and that “in light of this new evidence, CDC recommends and the task force recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”
He said the recommendation was to wear cloth masks, not surgical masks or N95 respirators, which were “critical supplies that must continue to be reserved for healthcare workers and other medical first responders.”
These things aren't linear. There's a point at which N deaths are worse than N deaths times the cost of one death. There's a second point where everybody dies is much worse than total population times cost of one death.
The couple people I know who were adamantly against lockdowns and masks, and who didn't get the vaccine, simply don't believe that many people died from COVID.
1.2m dead is just not believable. I only know 1 person who died from catching covid (over 80, in a hospital for other reasons, caught it there and got lung damage, fairly late dueing the official pandemic). I have substantive network in Hawaii where lots of people got sick a few weeks before covid officially arrived in the USA. Not a single person I know there died out of hundreds, and that's early infections when it was worse and includes elderly people. I'm sure some people did die from covid, but given how much we now know the statistics were faked, it seems to me most of these covid cases were other conditions that got labeled as it for variety of reasons, or died from the ventilators that were incorrectly prescribed in the early stage of the pandemic.
This doesn't rule out that it was incorrectly-prescribed ventilators, but that doesn't solve the mystery - nobody knows anyone who died of an incorrectly prescribed ventilator either!
I think the answer is something like - even 1 million extra deaths over 3 years is only an increase of about 15% in the death rate over those three years. Do you usually know someone who dies in any given year? No? Then you also probably won't know someone who dies if the death rate is 1.15x higher.
Simply put the margin of error is much larger than reported. Let me explain.
Census Bureau intentionally alters the data with noise for privacy reasons. Nonresponse is likely heavily skewed towards certain populations and since the data doesn't exist its not possible to know which populations nor how much. Certain populations are also known to be over/under counted - most recognized due to their political clout is college students.
But the epistemological problem extends beyond census.gov. I work with Marco data from Fred for economic scenario simulations for papers on tokenomic design. The more I learn about the datasets, how they are collected, modified, and changed over time, the more clear it is that all US government data is suspect. For most people the wakeup was covid where the government statistics and reality were not aligned.
On the one hand, we don't want to become Bermuda triangle believing idiots, so I'm not saying government data should be thrown out wholesale, as I said at the start it's an issue of margins of error, which because of how data is massaged we don't even know what it is. But just heuristically, it's difficult for the data to be too far off or people get suspicious and try to fix it. So let's say the actual margin of error in census data is about +-20% - that's easily enough to hide 1.2m deaths without it being fixed.
But it gets worse. From my conversations and contacts at elite universities, apparently most people trained at top schools are taught that lying is good if it generates positive utility. So now theres abother layer to the error: it's not symmetric, it's biased in a direction that aligns with the moral goods of the institutions and individuals involved.
So the only way to handle data is in cases that are extremely clear, with very strong effects, and even more so in regards to political issues. For instance I will use M2 data from some historical periods but it became politicized during the pandemic and cannot be used from 2020 onwards.
Please use your reading skills. Nowhere do I claim there's a conspiracy of any sort to intentionally fake the number of deaths. Try and actually read the text in front of you instead of some imagined artifact you've created.
Regarding privacy, the noise the census adds is not due to "obssessives" but is for completely legitimate reasons and is an official policy.
> Nonresponse is likely heavily skewed towards certain populations and since the data doesn't exist its not possible to know which populations nor how much. Certain populations are also known to be over/under counted - most recognized due to their political clout is college students...So let's say the actual margin of error in census data is about +-20%
> From my conversations and contacts at elite universities, apparently most people trained at top schools are taught that lying is good if it generates positive utility. So now theres abother layer to the error: it's not symmetric, it's biased in a direction that aligns with the moral goods of the institutions and individuals involved.
This reads like the people who claim there's mountains and mountains of election fraud. "Well you see, from first principles, there must be fraud because ..." and then you proceed to just make things up!
Well, I can see how 'first principles' might get you to believe that the census is wrong, but, like, we have data. There are a *lot* of people who verify census results whenever they are done, in part because there is massive political stakes (census data --> electoral college votes) but also because a lot of people with significant capital have vested interests in making sure that data matches reality (e.g. for things like ad targeting).
Always remember, alex jones and the average flat earther are first principles thinkers too
Data and experience are empirical, not first principles.
But on first principles, I just don't believe general competence and honesty are as wildly held as you do, which is strange since you recognize that incompetent Jones believers, Flat Earthers, etc are extremely common. And regarding honesty, Plato advocated for the noble lie a very long time ago; and thays for the people who aren't some degree of machiavellian. Perhaps consider that your treasure chests are more similar to other people's than you realize, since you're fundamentally the same human animal. And the correct response is to recognize the shabiness of the boxes, not to throw them away.
Your position is that the US population is in reality... +- 66 million people?
I can't claim any real expertise, or, frankly, intelligence, but the Census is a Big Deal. To simply dismiss it and substitute your own incredibly high error margin is astonishing.
The Census does add noise to individual data entries [1] to increase privacy and necessarily reduce accuracy. They also do separate estimates to compare to the Census figures. The differences between these estimates and the Census generally top out at +- 5% for certain groups and areas [2], and the 2020 census as a whole was estimated to be an undercount of about 0.24-0.35%.
I'm really not sure how to argue about this. For someone already convinced of systemic, 'elite' lying, evidence to the contrary is simply more evidence that the 'elites' have corrupted yet another source of evidence, which may be discarded. How do you escape this epistemic trap you've created?
1: I didn't know about this and it was somewhat interesting reading, so thanks for that I suppose.
Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if the population count was off by that much.
Regarding systemic, elite lying- even SlateStarCodex admits to engaging in this, or at least maintaing silence, regarding racial issues. I belive that position is wise but when looking at any data we have to keep in mind that people are going to be either directly lying, suppressing data, or just plain confirmation bias in favor of their moral goods.
No, additional data sources do in fact help. It's just not as much as people claim.
Glad you learned something today, and hopefully you grew your error bars a little bit on census data.
"I used to think that factual disagreements could be resolved relatively easily. If one person says "I believe there are 10,000 people living in Brooklyn" and another person says "I believe there are 100,000 people living in Brooklyn", you both go look at the census and you can figure out the answer. That kind of interaction doesn't happen anymore. The reason we're having so many more factual disagreements these days is because the credentials of the fact finding institutions are in question. If someone thinks the census is fundamentally untrustworthy and ideologically captured, and instead prefers trumps-discount-census.ru, you're kinda fucked! You can't reach any kind of consensus because your epistemologies are fundamentally different. And neither of you have the ability to like, go out and actually do a census yourself — if you can agree on a common definition for what a census even is."
But, damn, reality is stranger than fiction. I guess some people really don't trust the census either.
To use your analogy, one of your treasure chests is a bit rotten and needs some fresh paint. But where I disagree with your article is that a good epistemology should be a tad bayesian. I don't need to believe everything the NYT says to recognize that it's more reliable than my buddies on voice chat.
A quick search indicates the average person knows 600 other people by name. If 1.2 million died the average person has over an 11% chance none of their 600 people dying. I don't think knowing zero or only one person who died should shift one's opinion about the total number of deaths, even if you think you knew an above-average number of people who had it.
(For what it's worth I directly knew one person who died and heard about two others second-hand through my mom)
11% is low enough that I can maintain relative epistemic confidence in my position. I also heard of people who died secondhand but I discount those heavily. People told me about equal numbers of covid and vaccine deaths, depending on whether they were left or right. I'm slightly in favor of covid killing more people than the vaccines did, but that's just because I know one person who died from covid and zero from vaccines. Unfortunately with how untrustworthy data is, anecdote and rolling the dice is the order of our times.
I will counter your anecdote with my own and say that there was a clear and obvious increase in mortality in my area. This number is entirely believable and perhaps a bit low given the deaths from sequelae of infection that were not counted, which tracks with the excess mortality data.
Because of the belief that lying is good if it's for a good cause, your statement is immediately suspect. But, ill take you at your word.
Of course some people did die from covid, and even if the number is 90% less than reported, some people will know multiple people who died. We also had a situation in some hospitals where ventilators killed patients. Most notably 88% patients on ventilators in some new York health networks and 50% in some Seattle hospitals. Thankfully this was qukxly corrected but I would expect many people in those specific regions who were unlucky to get this poor treatment would see noticeable mortality.
What good cause? I just saw a lot of people suffer and die. You would also feel surprised to see so many brush it off and question the reality of you had seen the same.
I'm skeptical of how many COVID deaths were really COVID-driven, or just deaths of people who happened to have COVID. I heard that hospitals had an incentive to run up the numbers, perhaps in a squeaky wheel sense.
I also really hate the term "learning loss", as if school is a great big choreographed song and dance and you can't miss a minute. Mandatory schooling, prisons for kids, should be abolished anyway.
There's more to the world than NYC and the Bay Area! I remember hearing that Italy had it really bad, with bodies piling up in nursing homes. Although my dad would say that it's not unusual for a flu to rip through a home and take out all the residents that aren't moving.
In Italy, that early rip let to many deaths NOT counted as Covid-deaths, as many old sick people died untested at home instead of in a corridor of an even-more-than-usual overcrowded hospital. Excess deaths were higher than official Covid-deaths.
In the very moment of early 2020, those cost-benefit analyses did not and could not exist. What did exist, however, were long lines of army trucks carrying bodies through the streets of Italy[1], so time was of the essence because exponential growth is a beast like that. Which leader in their right mind would want the same images from their own country? So you either put a hard lockdown on the information sphere (China, NKorea) to stop the images, or you do everything that can possibly work to prevent those things from happening in the first place (everyone else). Also, we know that the unspecific measures against COVID (masks, lockdown, distancing etc.) did work in the aggregate[2].
Fighting against COVID was the same as playing the stock market: you are bound for disappointment. You either lose and are blamed that you didn't do enough, or you win and are blamed that you did too much. Personally, I'm grateful that most countries went for "too much", as it were, because everything else can be fixed.
The point here is that it made sense buying when stock market was low because 1.2 million old people dying have no effect on the economy and it was expected to recover quickly. Which it did as soon as any lockdowns were lifted.
Maybe folks don't talk much about COVID-related deaths because people are still dying. COVID isn't just a thing of the past. CDC data shows that roughly 0.5 per 100,000 Americans died of COVID between January and April. And sure, that's only about a tenth of the rates for motor vehicle accidents and smoking, but it's troubling given the FDA's new planned limits on vaccinations.
Nobody likes acknowledging how powerless we are against deadly forces operating at scales too different from our own to properly fathom (capitalism, viruses, global conflict, etc.). It's easier to focus on the micro-level decisions like masks vs no masks where there is at least a plausible veneer of individual agency and control
Also people learn wrong lessons like "masking doesn't help" when it clearly does.
Just because your kid can give you COVID at home because you don't wear masks all the time doesn't mean masking patients and providers in a COVID ward is somehow useless.
Masks used in Covid ward is different tho, and certainly not used alone. Also masks that have to endure outside and most people's desire for convenience certainly doesn't have effectiveness needed to actually move the needle. How many times I have seen someone have their masks only cover their mouth.
It's really that turning the whole public world into a contact measures ward is incredibly impractical. And covering our faces with rags isn't nearly as good as a proper N95 or whatever. There was an element of prophylactic theatre.
Speaking of that, I worked in a library when COVID hit, and when we finally accepted book returns again, we started setting them aside for a week before reshelving them.
And oh god, lockdowns, social distancing... all too much, and all too late!
Yes, mask quality made a difference and non respirator healthcare masks such as plain surgical masks are capable of making a difference. Recommending cloth masks was strange and I still see some people wearing them, which I guess may be a comfort thing.
The difference that mask mandates were capable of making was sucking the joy out of everything, for /what looked like/ no reason. I don't personally know a single person who died of COVID. The people I knew who got COVID generally hardly skipped a beat, and I think a lot were outright asymptomatic. Rule of thumb: only take COVID tests when you want to get out of something.
Wearing cloth masks is actually a very good prophylactic measure against respiratory diseases that are transmitted through droplets. This was learned from SARS and other recent epidemics. COVID, it turned out, was transmitted more through aerosols, so while cloth masks and badly-fitting N95 masks didn't help that much. But it took quite a bit of time for this to be determined.
FWIW, I wear a compact N100 mask in crowded indoor areas. Not because of concern for COVID, but because I discovered during the pandemic that my normal ~semi-annual respiratory infections aggravate my athsmatic cough, and that if I can avoid those infections my cough all but disappears, which makes my life much better!
No one is claiming that cloth masks are as good as proper masks (surgical, KN95, N95 or N100), but they have proved to be effective at reducing the spread of droplet-borne disease.
Part of this is the dying "with COVID" meme combined with the fact that the deaths were concentrated on the already old and sick. I think a lot of people are skeptical of the 1.2 million/250,000 figure, or at least that it actually means that but for COVID those people would have lived long healthy lives. How many of those 250,000 were already suffering from serious illness and had their lives cut short by 1, 3, 5 years?
Are you saying this descriptively, or rhetorically as a way to indicate that *you* aren't convinced?
If the first, that's completely irrelevant; while it's obviously true that a complicated statistical model won't convince the average person, that has no bearing on whether it does a good job of answering the question of how much of the COVID death toll is truly attributable to COVID.
If the second, you should state your disagreements with the model.
I hypothesized that people don't talk about COVID deaths because they question the death numbers and the degree to which lives were cut short.
Seneca linked to a study projecting how many lives were cut short by COVID to rebut my hypothesis.
I responded that I don't think most people would be convinced by the study.
You say you agree with me that people would not be convinced, but that its completely irrelevant to whether the study does a good job of answering the question of how much COVID cut lives short.
But that's not the question *I* am trying to answer. I am trying to answer the question of why people don't talk about COVID deaths.
Ok sorry, I thought your rhetorical questions in your initial comment indicated that *you yourself* were skeptical about the official figures. If you were just paraphrasing what such a skeptic might say, then I misunderstood.
This does give me another hypothesis, though. If COVID deaths were much less concentrated among the laptop classes who do most of the talking online and in media, you would expect the topic to be less salient on those platforms and in those circles.
A problem is we don't know how many people died of covid. It may be easier to answer the question in the US where different states responded differently, and so one might interpolate.
In the UK we decided instead to try different definitions of death from covid, one after the other. The excess death figures didn't agree with the epidemiological figures, first one way and then the other. We know that some deaths were caused as a direct result of countermeasures taken - but not how many. There is even a small number of bizarre cases: e.g. a story in today's Times (yesterday on-line) of a disruptive 92-year-old, treated so robustly that he was admitted to hospital where he contracted covid and died.
My understanding is that the number of deaths directly caused by covid is currently being revised down by significant fractions.
Each death says something vital, but until we can count reliably we'll never hear it. Surely that's the great tragedy of the covid era.
Thanks for reminding us. You're right. There's no way to balance or rationalize a personal response, but being aware of how vast the damage was, the loss of precious lives, is very important. At least it might help us to be more careful and tolerant and cooperative next time we face pandemic, panic, denial, and all the rest on such a scale.
To me, the takeaway is not to be sad, but to continue believing in the necessity of functional institutions and expert-informed policy. The biggest victim of the pandemic was public trust in the kind of institutions and intellectual division of labor that make everything about our luxurious modern lives possible. Yes, some experts screwed up. Others were poorly used (like experts in biology being asked to support policy proposals that should have involved more economic assessments). Yes, we all have many different opinions about what should or should not have been done.
But this was a situation that by its very definition required a collective response. It was also a legimitately difficult situation full of unknowns, which many institutions and governments were asked to navigate with very limited information. We may not have gotten this one exactly right, but we gave it a good shot. The last thing we should take from this experience is that we need to destroy our ability to collectively respond to the next existential crisis.
I think the thing you're missing is that *we have already destroyed our ability to collectively respond to the next crisis.* Our institutions have *already* spent the credibility and goodwill necessary for people to listen to them.
The only way we get this back is to wait for everyone who was alive in 2020 to die off, or for everyone who made bad decisions in 2020 to publicly acknowledge that they did, and preferably, for people to go to prison in proportion to how wrong they were. There needs to be consequences for how badly the pandemic was handled by the people entrusted with handling it, because the public will not trust people who demonstrably face no consequences for being catastrophically wrong.
>Our institutions have _already_ spent the credibility and goodwill necessary for people to listen to them.
Well said! Yup, when the next pandemic hits and public health officials start making public statements, a large chunk of the public is going to think: "Well, we sort-of know what they lied to us about during Covid. What are they lying to us about _this_ time?"
He was pardoned because Trump was truthing about holding military tribunals for his political opponents and terminating the Constitution. The Republican led investigations against Fauci went nowhere like the Biden crime family ones because they are based on lies and delusion and selling media headlines to gullible morons unable to determine fact from fiction from news orgs that are losing defamation lawsuits left and right for knowingly spreading lies about Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines during the 2020 election because they were losing viewers to more extreme right wing news networks broadcasting them.
Let’s not pretend the 1.2 million U.S. COVID death count is a clean, reliable number. From the beginning, the rules for counting COVID deaths were so loose, and the incentives so warped, that the final tally is more propaganda than precision.
First, the definition of a “COVID death” was expanded beyond reason. Many were counted not because COVID was the cause of death, but because it was present at the time. You could die of cancer, heart disease, even trauma — if you tested positive, it was COVID. And yes, “presumed COVID” was enough to count in many cases, no lab confirmation required.
Second, financial incentives drove behavior:
* Hospitals received higher reimbursements for COVID diagnoses and treatments under the CARES Act.
* Ventilator use triggered even bigger payouts — incentivizing aggressive treatment.
* More COVID deaths meant more federal funding.
Add to that PCR testing practices — run at high cycle thresholds capable of detecting trace viral debris — and you have a setup primed to over-diagnose and overcount. And then there's the suspicious disappearance of the flu. The U.S. normally sees 30,000–60,000 flu deaths per year. In 2020–2021? Virtually none. Are we really supposed to believe masks and distancing eliminated the flu... but not COVID? Or is it more likely that many flu or pneumonia cases were swept into the COVID column to simplify reporting — or to maintain the crisis narrative?
No autopsies. No rigorous second looks. Just a massive death toll used to justify emergency powers, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates — with anyone who questioned it painted as anti-science. COVID was real and serious. But pretending the death count wasn’t inflated — by policy, by panic, and by profit — is a denial of logic. The number we got may be 1.2 million on paper, but the true COVID-caused death count? That’s still up for debate — which is exactly what we never got.
Excess mortality statistics confirm. You can find them at Census or CDC, but here's a blog post another commenter wrote that they mentioned above - https://mistybeach.com/mark/Covid.html
Excess mortality numbers and various definitions all paint the same picture.
Anecdotally this number clearly tracks for those with experience in healthcare. There is a very stark difference in how many people we saw dying in a week during the pandemic vs now. It is not subtle.
Many also died from sequelae of the infection (blood clot, secondary bacterial infection, lung fibrosis) that would not be counted by definitions based solely on PCR
PCR definitely lead to more detection of the virus. But it was not subtle! We could nearly always tell who had it clinically. We really don’t see this degree of viral pneumonia currently.
The fact that flu decreased (in fact, one strain, Flu B Yamagata, seems to have been entirely eliminated), speaks to how transmissible COVID was at that time as the changes were enough to substantially affect flu but not COVID in the context of a population with no immunity.
I don't know the US stats (I'm assuming they'd be very similar tho) but I think the fact that eg in England nearly 60% of "COVID deaths -- defined as "with COVID" not "by COVID" -- it'd be even more for the latter I'd surmise, were in VERY OLD people (80+, kinda living on a borrowed sooner or later time anyway) and that about 80% were in people 70+, is key here. The suffering/grief might have been intense at the time, but ultimately, old people die sooner rather than later, the young gave up AN AWFUL LOT to save more of them from dying sooner, and while obviously it would have been better it those deaths happened a few years later in less alienating/inhuman conditions (tho, cancer, anyone?) and COVID never occured at all, the muted cultural response strikes me as, for a change, correct. Sensible and even rational. And yes, some middle aged and occasionally young people died too, but at 10% of the total they likely just didn't register as a culturally significant population level event.
If you are trying to adopt a rational approach to public health issues, using "deaths" as a measure may not be the best approach. First of all, it looks like you take the number of deaths "with COVID" (1.2m) but then treat it as the number of deaths "from COVID". The discrepancy is not very high, the number of US deaths "from COVID" is around 15% lower, but this discrepancy may be higher for the younger cohort.
Secondly, the standard impact measures in public health usually take years of life lost into account. There are many variations of these (life-years, DALY, QALY, etc.). COVID pandemic was rather an exception in that public policy focus was on deaths and not on life-years lost. This is understandable for politicians and media in the middle of pandemic panic, but very weird for a rationalist post-pandemic analysis.
Imagine an illness that strikes only people on their deathbed, infects all of them, and accelerates their death by 1 minute. This illness would cause 100% of deaths, would have 100% mortality rate, and would kill millions of people under 65 each year. One could write a post about that illness that would be almost verbatim the same as your post but with much scarier numbers. Would you consider this illness the greatest public health problem of all times?
This is what I tried to address in the paragraph saying:
> "Maybe it’s because they were mostly old people? Old people have already lived a long life, nobody can get too surprised about them dying. But although only a small fraction of COVID deaths were young people, a small fraction of a large number can still be large: the pandemic killed 250,000 <65-year-old Americans, wiping out enough non-seniors to populate Salt Lake City. More military-age young men died in COVID than in Iraq/Afghanistan. Even the old people were somebody’s spouse or parent or grandparent; many should have had a good 5 - 10 years left."
Yes, you did. But I am not sure this paragraph is very convincing - every single claim you make there would be true about my imaginary deathbed decease but with larger numbers. Since that imaginary decease does not seem to be that much of public health concern, this paragraph does not present a compelling rational argument that COVID was.
I've seen estimates of the amount of life-years lost per COVID death, and my understanding is that it averaged out to about a decade. So very different from your hypothetical loss of a minute each.
Whatever COVID life-years lost actually were, they were certainly orders of magnitude closer to 10y per person than to 1 minute. My (purely imaginary, made-up, and illustrative) deathbed illness is not supposed to resemble COVID. It is made up for the purpose of finding holes in emotional arguments about the number of deaths.
Having said that, 10y sounds pretty high. Generally, the level of scientific discourse on this subject has been abysmal. For example, here is a paper https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.18.20214783v1 from a Harvard Medical School professor giving an even higher estimate as the headline result (over 13 years). It is based on simple actuarial tables that map sex and age to mortality. Thus, it implicitly assumes that COVID mortality is fully uncorrelated to any pre-existing health conditions! We know this to be not the case for many conditions, with hazard ratios in excess of 5.0 for many conditions which have high mortality rates of their own (https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3731).
10 years is an impossible figure. The average age of those who died from covid was higher that the average life expectancy (somewhere around 83-84 y.o.).
Understanding that mortality from covid was exponentially increasing with age, intuitively you can reject 10 years as wrong.
Maybe 1-2 years, that's more likely.
Could be that deaths from despair due to lockdowns lost more in terms of life-years. Firstly, because you have to be more active to actually experience such a strong despair.
The "spouse or parent" part would have been just as true. The "5-10 years" part would have been false but it is also false for the vast majority of COVID deaths of older patients. COVID mortality is strongly correlated to many conditions even after controlling for age. For example, a substantial portion (30%-80% depending on the country) of 2020 COVID deaths were in retirement homes and US retirement homes are very special places (pre-pandemic median survival length 5 months, average 13 months).
>COVID mortality is strongly correlated to many conditions even after controlling for age.
So the people who died of COVID were, on average, not a random sample of people in their age range, but ( _prior_ to getting COVID) particularly ill people of that age. Point taken.
>US retirement homes are very special places (pre-pandemic median survival length 5 months, average 13 months).
It's interesting that in terms of QALY's opioid overdose deaths (not counting other drugs) in the 2020-2024 time frame are on par with COVID. O3 estimates around 12million +- 1 million for each and sanity checking the estimates that doesn't seem crazy on either count (opioid deaths are about 1/4 in number but ~4x each in term of QALYs). I think about COVID deaths more often the opioid epidemic deaths, but I don't think about either tragedy very often.
Perhaps society is still residually inured to death by disease. I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to grow up with relatives that grew up in the pre-vaccine/antibiotic era when large numbers were lost to disease. Or maybe it's a (perhaps wishful) doesn't effect me kind of thing, COVID deaths are mostly old people, overdose deaths are mostly addicts, old people were dying sooner or later anyways, addicts are doing it to themselves.
Where did you get that 15% from? My understanding is that even in the US excess deaths exceed deaths officially attributed to COVID (though by less than other countries).
15% is the excess of (US deaths with COVID mentioned on death certificate) over (US deaths with COVID or suspected COVID as cause of death), per CDC. Excess deaths are a different thing. Some of the may have been caused by non-detected and non-suspected COVID, but others by the general society breakdown caused by lockdowns rather than COVID>
Yes, because "with COVID" means in fact "with COVID mentioned on the death certificate" and being mentioned as the sole cause of death is a special case of that.
Excess deaths prior to lockdowns (and thus prior to widespread testing) are a special case, a vast majority of 1m+ US deaths are post first lockdown.
I am not sure how we "know it". I have not looked at it in detail for the US, but, for example, in the UK, cancer treatment and detection scans were suspended during the lockdowns, with the backlog afterwards stretching to almost two years. Are you claiming that cancer treatments save zero lives?
Given how little we knew about a brand new highly contagious virus that was killing some people, the responsible thing for a govt to do was err on the side of safety. Ofcourse, knowingly lying was not ok. And that happened too, by the CDC, WHO. But I don't think it was incorrect to require masks, distancing, even lockdowns. Allowing some types of gatherings, politicians like Pelosi violating lockdowns for partying / hair coloring - that was terrible. But still, erring on the side of caution is something I can understand.
One thing that I don't see mentioned. All of the friend and acquaintances I lost during the COVID years were due to overdose and suicide, none of them died of COVID, they all died due to the reactions to COVID.
I was working in clinical mental health during the pandemic; and can confirm first hand that at least in the early stages of the pandemic suicidality was way down in the patients we were seeing. I would be very interested in seeing how much of the broader reduction in suicide was linked to school shifting to distance learning; knowing that there's always a strong link between school and youth suicide.
It wouldn't surprise me if there was some subset of the broader population that did have a higher suicide rate from Covid; but big decreases in suicide among higher prevalence school age and severe mentally ill population would swamp that in the data.
Relatedly, I also recall early worries that Covid/lockdowns would increase domestic violence due to people being stuck together with an abuser, but it very quickly became clear that bar closures more than outweighed that and caused a reduction.
I'm part of the GenX cohort. None of my friend circle died of (or with) COVID, meanwhile I lost more friends/acquaintances to suicide/OD since 2020 than all my years before it.
True. But it does ring true among other circles of people at the same age range. Just pointing out another possible reason for anger and resentment over the COVID years.
Once again you wrote the first third of an essay without any follow-through. COVID isn't a topic of the moment. You can sit on this thought for as long as you need to complete it.
The strength of this article is you don’t force conclusions. You articulate claim that’s obvious and under appreciated and let your readers ruminate. Thanks for the respect.
COVID killed as many as 30 million people. What do we do with this number? If another pandemic began tomorrow, what would our experience of COVID have taught us? Would we prevent more deaths, or fewer?
I don't know what your answer to this question would be.
In 2023 the CDC reported deaths due solely to Covid around 6%, 60,000-70,000. There’s a lot of space between that number and 1m deaths with Covid positive at the time of death. We’ll never know how many deaths were caused by Covid that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. But I have a hard time believing it’s as large as a lot of folks here seem to think.
Can you link me to this CDC claim? It's the opposite of claims that I've seen from the CDC, and contradicted by the excess mortality numbers, so I'm wondering if you misread it (eg maybe that was the number for 2023 alone, or the number of COVID with zero comorbidities which is different from wouldn't-have-occurred-otherwise).
I'd like a more detailed breakdown of that 250k <65 Americans, if one is available. IIRC, if someone had covid when they died, it was recorded as a covid death. One of those 250k was a friend of mine who had had lymphoma for about 6 years and who had not been receiving treatment for several. AKA someone substantially sicker than many seniors I know. In other words, a tragedy and a loss for sure, but if we're counting QALYs I'm not sure the loss is greater than that of a typical 70 year old.
I know that there were (seemingly?) healthy young people who died (primarily) due to covid, but I genuinely have no idea how many as a fraction of that 250k number.
Excess deaths show that official figures UNDERCOUNT Covid deaths. But as to the amount of life lost per Covid death, my understanding is that it averaged out to about a decade in the US.
That tracks anecdotally with what we saw in the hospital. Many young people got extremely sick and died, not just older patients although the narrative really focused on that. That’s not counting the young people who survived a long ICU stay and came out permanently damaged in some way.
Deaths of despair during COVID, in terms of life years lost, is a significantly more brutal truth to confront than the co-morbid COVID death toll, which consisted primarily of infirm or already-hospitalized elderly people nearing the end of their lives.
No, I mean deaths of despair, which account for suicides, drug and alcohol overdoses and are officially accounted for, which went up approx 35% each year lockdowns were imposed and account for more deaths in total than Covid in people under 40 during that same period.
If you put in enough caveats (alcoholism, under 40, etc) you can make any statistic tell any story you want. Also, this isn’t Logan’s Run and middle aged people still count for something.
I don't think there's much of a "story" to tell, just different perspectives to acknowledge given the available data. For the vast majority of people who were not already at death's door or at risk of dying from the Flu or Pneumonia, the institutional mismanagement, poor communication, and hysteria surrounding Covid at large caused significantly more short-term and long-term damage than the disease itself.
I was looking at stats that opioid overdose deaths in the US have decreased (Tyler Cowen on MR branded it as a big success). I looked up and they only had returned to pre-covid level. I was disappointed what counts as success.
Suicides are rare, even antidepressant manufactures have problems getting clear trends because of rareness of the event. They are not useful. But deaths from despair are much more meaningful. My dad used to enjoy life, walking around and then he got sick and could only lie in the bed, couldn't even move his limbs. He lost any will to live any longer. He told his doctor, I want to die sooner. And the doctor rejected him, told him not to talk like that. That was really insensitive from the doctor to not recognise that sometimes death is preferable to extreme sufferings.
You don't really need that many caveats, QALY's lost to just opioid overdose deaths 2020-2024 is almost an exact match to QALY's lost to COVID (both ~12 million). It's about 1/4 the deaths, but roughly 4x QALY's lost per death since the overdose deaths skew young while COVID skews old.
Anecdotally I saw a lot more people presenting to hospital with flares of mental illness or drug abuse. It was a hard thing to weigh against the Covid-sick population - I think "how tough to be with lockdowns" is a genuinely challenging problem that has different answers at different times in different populations
Excess death statistics end the debate pretty thoroughly. 1.2 million additional people died during the pandemic, beyond what would normally be expected based on the death rate. What killed them, if not the new virus spreading rapidly at the same time?
> If you ask what you should do differently upon being reminded that 1.2 million Americans died during COVID, I won’t have an answer - there’s no gain from scheduling ten minutes to be sad each morning on Google Calendar.
We can put more resources toward treating Long Covid/post-viral syndrome/chronic fatigue syndrome/ME-CFS. The toll was in more than "just" deaths - too many people have been disabled by covid.
What effect would those resources have? CFS has been around for a long time (it was discussed in Elaine Showalter's "Hystories"), but I don't know of any treatment known to be effective.
We've known about CFS for a long time, but it was very rare and a low research priority. Long covid increased the case load immensely. Afaik there have been some breakthroughs as a result of the increased attention. I don't know the exact details, but I was under the impression that progress was being made as to whether it's an immune response, some kind of viral reserve, maybe mitochondria dysfunction, etc.
It was so well known that the term "fibromyalgia" was introduced prior to "Hystories" to sound more scientific and be dismissed less than CFS. I recall seeing commercials about it prior to COVID.
"It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%"
Considering the rise in US population since the Civil War, that's a little misleading. Figure it by percentages instead? (I'm only passingly curious, so I'm not going to research this, but maybe somebody else would find that fun to do.)
I remember reading about a local burial society, which had been overwhelmed by Covid-deaths, quietly marking the first day without a call since the virus took off. It was calming to read about, at the time.
We don't have much to be proud of, regarding our collective response to the pandemic. Operation Warp Speed went very well, but it was left with no one to celebrate it due to the politics on both sides. Most governments and organizations did badly, but there's no agreed-upon target to blame for the failures, nor clear lessons to be learned. We never even put back the GoF research moratorium. It's just sad.
I hope that someone eventually writes the story in a way that has an uncontroversial moral.
What might be the best thing to come out of covid is our re-understanding of airborne diseases. Due to some very stupid, very stubborn factoids taking root in medicine over the last ~100 years, epidemiology was very reluctant to describe pathogens as "airborne" for a long time. When Germ Theory first took off, doctors shied away from any notions of "miasma" or "bad air" as a way that diseases spread - until covid made it undeniable. (Hence the initial push toward hand washing/surface sanitizing during the early days of covid.) Now we know that a ton of respiratory infections, including colds and flus, are primarily spread through the air instead of on surfaces.
Recent progress with improved indoor ventilation and far-UVC disinfection will do wonders for public health. My favorite quote from Patrick McKenzie is: "We boil our water before we drink it. Our grandchildren will admonish us for not 'boiling' our air before we breathe it."
It's still funny seeing miasma regarded as "debunked" when there are "bad air" everywhere that absolutely carry disease. Whether it's airborne virus or mosquitoes (which sometimes heavily correlates with foul air anyway).
The latest episode of Complex Systems had a guy talking about far-UVC light for disinfecting the air, and he gave a very brief recount of why "airborne" was dismissed for years. The full story is much more ridiculous and stupid.
1.2 million is an all time record but global population is also at an all time record high, the real question is how COVID stacks against other pandemics on a per capital pandemic deaths scale. Some very quick googling tells me that the Spanish Flu killed 2.6% of the world's population, COVID only killed .09%-ish
But the Spanish Flu happened 100 years ago. They didn’t even have supplemental oxygen, much less antibiotics, high flow nasal cannulas, ventilators, or even the concept of the clinical trials used to quickly test the vaccines and steroids among other interventions. If COVID occurred then it could well have been more deadly than the Spanish flu. It’s hard to say.
You think without those technologies the death rate would have been over 30 times higher? I heavily doubt that. I would be shocked if even close to that many people were hospitalized due to covid.
And the highest estimate of the number of saved lives due to the vaccine got to like 25 million which is merely over triple the current number of deaths.
Around 1% were hospitalized in the US. I’d also question the 2.6% estimate. It’s quite possible Spanish flu is more deadly, all else being equal, but my point is that it’s very hard to estimate which is more deadly given that we now have some really fundamental pieces of medical care that were not present then. Spanish flu in 2020 may have resulted in similar mortality to COVID. Population composition is also very different
I doubt that somewhat. The death rates for covid were well below 1% of infected even during the first outbreaks, when there were little testing before people ended up hospitalised, no vaccines, no steroids, in short when experiences in treating those patients were near zero (there were many improvement in how to ventilate etc.). Obviously, antibiotics kill bacteria, not viruses.
The infectious fatality rate for Corona early on was still somewhat slightly below 0.5%.- in a society as over-aged as ours. Less than 1 of 200 hundred infected died, and yes, the old and very frail ones (average age in Hamburg: 80 yrs.). Prof Hendrik Streeck and his early outbreak Heinsberg-study. (That is a lot, still. 0.4% of 300 million would end up in, oops, 1.2 million earlier deaths.) So, did the lockdown reduce the deaths or "just" stretch it over 2 years? - Otoh: the Spanish flu might have had a different fatality rate, not sure the death statistics were that accurate in China and India a century ago. Or anywhere except a dozen major countries.
It’s all apples and oranges. The population is very different now, both in size and number of frail elderly. I really think many of the deaths from Spanish flu in young patients would be avoidable now with modern medicine
Not sure, this comment of mine was about comparing them. Indeed, I doubt the statistics are comparable. - The original claim I have an issue with, seemed to be that Covid could have killed many more than it did without lockdowns. - But to add the Spanish flu: Flu epidemics before and after the Spanish flu did NOT evolve to be more deadly (bad for spreading) - and those who got killed were mainly elderly. But a sick soldier can not "stay home and isolate". And a more brutal virus-variant results in the infected getting put together with many other in a field lazaret, jackpot. WWI worked as a gain-of-function-lab.
No. Covid was massively age-stratified and co-morbidity dependent. The Spanish flu had heavy mortality in otherwise-healthy young people. America was a much younger, thinner country back then. Even without the medical advances, I highly doubt Covid would have even been noticed due to the age profile of its victims.
These are fair criticisms. I think it is unlikely that COVID 1918 would have a mortality >2.6%. Estimates of Spanish flu mortality are difficult though and vary significantly. If there are this many questions about mortality from COVID now, how accurate would we expect estimates from data 100 years ago to be? Looking around it seems estimates range from 0.5 to 6%.
The Russian flu may be an interesting approximation for COVID too. Possibly caused by coronavirus OC43, estimated mortality ranged from 0.2 to 1%.
So I think it is likely the Spanish flu is baseline deadlier, but hard to certain. I also think the Spanish flu would be substantially less deadly in the modern era. We are much better at supporting patients through critical illness and the effect of this is most pronounced in the younger population which also contributed some to the age stratification of COVID outcomes
I would love to read a book, written post-covid, going through the whole thing rigorously. Which policies worked? Which didn't? What are the statistics? Which countries did well? That kind of thing.
It's hard to reckon with as a society for a number of reasons.
- COVID as a phenomenon (and how we responded to it) was massively controversial. How do you have a 'day of remembrances' that instantly becomes (as the comments here have) an airing of grievances? NPI efficacy, vaccine efficacy, death counts, worm drugs, lab leaks, etc. There's no consensus or easy story about any of these things!
- COVID dragged on an ended with a whimper. It ended, but there was never an official 'end.' Biden lost in court about airplane masks and just sorta walked away. This was well after most of the rest of the country had. And at the same time, some folks are still testing before they gather, so for them, it still isn't "over"!
- It's not in anyone's interest to "reckon". Instead, everyone's preference is to play to their base.
All of these factors make it hard to have a coherent national narrative for what COVID was. That lack of narrative makes it difficult to situate a reckoning or remembrance. Before we can remember the story of COVID, we have to agree sufficiently on what that story was.
Since ultimately everyone got Covid anyway, seems those deaths were inevitable? China lost more millions, we don’t even know for sure how many, but they completely memory holed it, that’s far more remarkable to me at least
A lot of discussion of whether lockdown was enjoyable. I'm an extreme introvert, so I didn't mind the loss of in-person socializing, and the rise of Zoom et al, which covid encouraged if not created, has been good, especially for enabling that kind of communication with the physically distant.
But I attend a lot of concerts and shows, and I really missed the ones canceled which were never rescheduled.
Twenty years after world war one, people were still so preoccupied by the human toll that avoiding war dominated foreign policy and public consciousness.
The old and the chronically ill simply don’t count as much as brave, young men at the
pinnacle of their strength and human potential. Like another commenter (almost) said, a chronically ill 55 year old won’t be missed any more than a superficially healthy 80 year old. It’s only when something strikes down young mothers and middle aged bread winners that sympathy flows.
Most people who supported lockdowns were personally terrified of covid. I didn’t go to the gym and avoided indoor dining for a year unless the place was almost empty. I was 43 and didn’t want to spend three weeks bedridden if I didn’t need to.
This is a good point, and fleshes out part of what I was talking about earlier with comparison to the Spanish Flu. That's remembered as THE epidemic of the modern era because it hit children and young people as well as older people rather than mostly older people.
This is the contrarian position I like to take. We actually did a good job in a lot of ways and things could have been much worse.
Supplemental oxygen, antibiotics, steroids, vaccines—and yes, some of the public health precautions, saved millions of lives.
The pandemic was just so massively negative that any take on it is focused on how poorly things went.
Of course, there were absolutely things that could have been done better and we should learn from, but a lot of the backlash and controversy is an inevitable part of such a significant event.
The public and government’s response has been to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to preparedness for the next pandemic. The medical community has not forgotten though. I do think some of the lessons we learned will absolutely be helpful when H5N1 develops human-to-human transmission. Lessons from supportive care, steroid and antibiotic use, and vaccine development should translate fairly well. Hopefully some public messaging lessons as well, although that will still be probably still be properly mixed up by politics.
The courts were fighting about Biden's OSHA vaccine mandate in 2022, around when I was getting daily throat swabs as a condition of going to work.
In fact, a full year after you claim the end of COVID hysteria, I popped a false positive on one of my daily COVID tests, was sent home from work, and several people who had interacted with me recently were sent home from their jobs *without pay*.
Your idea that COVID hysteria had ended by mid-2020 is incredibly out of touch with actual reality.
One of the reasons why i was pro life is that every year from 1973 to 2023, roughly 1.1 million abortion were performed. low of 700k, repeated highs of 1.5 mil. it works out to 44 mil in 50 years.
for comparison, California currently has 39.4 million people in it, so we essentially depopulated a largest state's worth of kids in my lifetime.
people seem weird about large numbers. like people will exaggerate or underestimate due to them not registering.
The problem with that pro-life argument is you could logically extend it to an argument that states "people should always be having sex and women should always be having babies." Hypothetical lost lives from people not having babies at all times would number in the billions over the same time frame you referenced.
no, because this is happening despite contraception losing stigma and being readily available. increased sexual education too.
even granting all those tools, abortion is that prevalent, and is only dropping to 950k in recent years because people now have one kid at 35 or later.
kind of destroys "safe, legal, and rare" as an argument, and my point is more that most people don't get how prevalent abortion is; even as a failure state or last resort.
we abort 1.5 to 2.5x the population of Wyoming every year. people dont grok the total amount very often, like how we lost 1.2 mil as Scott says. enormity in numbers is often imvisible
You didn't attempt to counter my point which is that "number of lost hypothetical existences" is not a statistic to build any argument around. You may as well ban contraception too if that is your argument.
its not hypothetical, its actual at that point. contraception prevents, but abortion is caused to an actual existence. Im not against contraception but to equate the two is silly pro life or pro choice.
if we figure contraception in, we pretty much have explained the demographic crisis, and i'd point out abortion is what caused chinese/indian lopsided sex ratios too; dowry cultures plus ultrasound/abortion led to sex selection.
but my point is more large numbers confuse people and they under or overrate them.
works in reverse too, how many mormons you think are in the usa?
*
its under 7 million, .02% of the population, but even then there are 6 times more of them than Jehovah's witnesses. much smaller than people think
No it literally is hypothetical. Fetuses at the stage of the development of the vast majority of abortions are not conscious lives. They are at that point hypothetical conscious lives.
no, conception is the start of human existence. you can argue first trimester abortions are not morally wrong because you kill the fetus before it can suffer, but if someone induces abortion against the woman's will, no one will say that its lack of consciousness means it is not life.
like currently most people would compromise on first trimester abortion as legal but its not the same as contraception morally.
like if your mom and dad divorced and dropped the idea of having your brother or couldnt, thats potential. if they got pregnant but aborted your brother, its actual.
> and i'd point out abortion is what caused chinese/indian lopsided sex ratios too; dowry cultures plus ultrasound/abortion led to sex selection.
China was absolutely not a dowry culture. They still practice bride-price _today_ in places.
China was a place where your care in old age was expected to be financed by your son. This reversed; daughters are now better providers, though the way they do it is by getting their husband to pay for their parents rather than his.
Was interested in the death toll of the Spanish Flu in the US; was surprised it was only 500k-675K (estimates seem to vary), or ~40-50% of COVID-19. However, the US population was less than a third (100M then vs ~330m now). I knew Spanish Flu famously killed more people in six months than WW1 did in four years, but the US losses seem disproportionately low, all things considered.
Also as a general thought on COVID, I think COVID will definitely be remembered as an epochal marker and an end to an era (even though I think many of the changes that will follow-end of WFH/Telework and many changes in international scene-were already happening due to the end of ZIRP). Similar to how 9/11 "ends" the 90s.
IMO, lost time with parents and grandparents was a huge part of the pandemic's cost. Loss of (quality) time cuts both ways with regard to NPIs, but I think people do seem to understate the impact of having unavoidable tragedy arrive earlier.
People don’t have to be consistent about this. I have seen multiple online folks both talk about how COVID was overblown and also get incredibly angry at the nurses who were taking care of their relative who died of COVID and wouldn’t let them be there at the bedside.
My now ex-boyfriend's elderly father was like 85, with a pacemaker when he and my ex's mom got Covid at the same time. This was after being vaccinated, and when monoclonal antibodies were at peak effectiveness and the universal standard of care.
Their local clinic not only didn't provide them monoclonal antibodies, they insisted on sending both of them home together with pulse ox in the low 90s, with "come back if it gets worse."
Three times.
Well, his mom fully recovered, but his dad fainted from low oxygen, hit his head, and broke a hip as well, if I'm recalling correctly. He went into the hospital, recovered from Covid, but sickened from a number of the other complications of being brain injured and vulnerable in a hospital, developed sepsis, went into a coma, and they had to withdraw life support.
Was that a "covid death?"
THE FUCK IT WAS.
It was a death by the medical malpractice of not providing the standard of care at the time - care which likely would have led to a full recovery.
It was also death by my ex's cowardice about flying across the country to monitor and advocate for his parents in person (or even staying put but confronting their doctors on the phone, or hiring a private service to administer care in their home*).
It was likewise death by my ex's sister's cowardice about driving ten minutes across town to monitor and advocate for his parents in person.
Again, this was well into the time of vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, when open windows and air filters and properly fit and N95s were proven to be good protection.
When it was a statistical impossibility that my healthy, 40-something slender ex would be in any danger from Covid even if he did catch it.
But the death certificate was marked Covid, so...must have been a Covid death, eh?!
And Ex literally blamed his dad's death on Joe Rogan for promoting vaccine hesitancy, and a little on me for occasionally listening to Joe Rogan. After all, if more people had been vaccinated in the area, his vaccinated parents wouldn't have gotten infected at all!
* the private service was indeed an option; I sent him the link to the concierge doctor service in his parents' area when researching contingency plans should my own parents be infected.
20,000 to 50,000 people die of endemic influenza each year. Roughly equivalent to fentanyl. You can say that every year we lose half to a full Vietnam War's worth of Americans to flu. But no one does. Bad years can go higher, north of six figures. Covid was about 400,000 a year (averaged during pandemic) meaning it was basically an 8-20x worse flu season in a world where 3-6x worse flu seasons are normal. That's significant but it's a difference of degree but not kind.
The takeaway I'd take as an EA is that handling tractable small problems likely has hard to calculate benefits when big things happen. If EA had a robust anti-flu infrastructure that had successfully reduced flu deaths this would not only have been successful training for the pandemic but would have given them credibility on the issue and raised the ambient level of alarm at deaths going up again. EA's cultural orientation toward countercultural "well actually" problems and thought experiments puts it in a worse position to deal with black swans. Pandemic preparedness would be better served dealing with the constant low grade pandemics we currently suffer rather than imagining a super-disease.
The other issue, if you want to do some actual self-reflection, is that EA is culturally a liberal, California movement with outposts in other deep blue enclaves like Cambridge. There was intense pressure to conform to the blue consensus which EA did not prove better at resisting than most institutions populated by blues. In many ways it proved worse. A strict utilitarian likely ends up at the Florida or Sweden position since a disease that primarily kills older people has a relatively low effect on quality adjusted life years. But this was (and really is) unthinkable for basically political/cultural reasons.
Yes, and I also remember the intense opprobrium that met any suggestion that Covid was "just the flu, bro." Woodstock music festival happened at the end of three years of pandemic "Hong Kong Flu" that probably killed, proportional to population, about half as many people as Covid. The Asian Flu in 1957 was about the same. My parents lived through both of those and they hardly registered historically. Covid was a very bad flu season for several years but was treated as the Black Death by the same people who will whip out QALYs and per-capita comparisons at any other moment.
The way this is posed suggests that some other policy might have *saved* 1.2 million lives. But I don't think that is the case. The pandemic happened. It started in China. Before we knew too much it was raging through Italy and then the US.
So I think a better question is *how many* of the 1.2 million *could have been saved* by another policy (none that I know of: China locked down hard and still ended up with lots of deaths)? Or: if we had had much looser policies how many *more* than 1.2 million would have died?
Society, education and our economies all took a big hit from Covid. Had we opened schools sooner, would 2.4 million have died? Or 1.3 million? Or the same 1.2 million? Those are the questions to ponder, IMHO.
This is the question I would like to see addressed. A certain amount of deaths were baked in from the moment the pandemic started, a large portion being several years of upcoming deaths due to co-morbidities. Given that, what interventions actually moved the needle in what populations?
I volunteered in a project to get Evusheld to people who could not get the vax because they were so immune-compromised, usually by cancer treatment, that they didn't develop antibodies when vaxed. Evusheld was a little known genius invention developed by mainstream scientists, and nobody disputed its effectiveness. It gave immune-compromised people a supply of long-lasting antibodies. The US govt bought up a bunch of it and distributed it to the health depts of all states with instructions to distribute it to those who qualified. But communication and organization was so bad that most *doctors* didn't even know about the stuff. Some states gave it to beauty spas who sold a few prescriptions on the side. Some just didn't distribute it. some gave it all to a couple of drugstores. Patients who absolutely qualified were told by their doctors they did not. 90% of that Evusheld spoiled on the drugstore shelves.
The policies I think gave, or would have given, most bang for the buck are:
-Delaying the (we now know) inevitable infections of as many as possible, to prevent health care settings from being overwhelmed, and to protect as many as possible from infection before a vaccine is ready. That could be done by social distancing and/or by early and energetic implementation of things I name below.
-Educating the public about masks and aerosol transmission, and making highly protective masks easy to get.
-Educating the public about air purifiers and how well they can protect.
-Installing air purifiers in classrooms and other indoor settings that have a lot of people per cubic foot.
-Educating the public about the high vulnerability of elders.
-Taking steps to increase protection of elderly -- education of elderly, familes with elderly members nursing home staff. Govt. assistance to settings with many vulnerable to help them install air purifiers, give staff and residence good masks, hire extra staff.
-Educating public about vaccines, so there were fewer refusers.
Jesus Christ, I hate that! She's way too close to tenderness and wonder in the way she's touching and looking at the fucking virus. Like it's her beloved alien baby. Covid Madonna and Child
Let me clarify. The NYT can be extremely biased and wrong, yet still be more correct than my buddies. You seem to think that experts should be trusted because they are mostly right. I think it's pretty easy to show the counterfactual through gellman amnesia, not to mention historical records. However even though they are mostly wrong, they are still useful because the alternative is even worse. Personally though I prefer the Economist tho that's likely bevause my work is more aligned with a center right cause than a center left one.
That then makes your anti maga rant fall apart. You falsely categorize 2 camps, the "good smarties" on your side and the "bad stupids" on thr maga side. Probably good for your psychological health but not for facing reality.
“On April 30, 1991 – on that one day – 138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner I mentioned it to my daughter, who was then seven years old, that is was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.
“‘No, it’s easy,’ she said. “‘Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.’”
I was a public health-adjacent state government worker at the start of the pandemic and there is just no acknowledgment anywhere that (1) we had no idea what was happening except that we knew it would be really bad and (2) there were important shortages of medical supplies everywhere. We coordinated warehouses of gloves, masks, swabs, reagent. You name it, there was a shortage of it. I took a long time before we could process 100 COVID tests a day, then 1000 tests per day, then they really started rolling in. But because diagnosis was so limited it looked like the virus was much deadlier than it turned out to be. The epidemiologic models that we were seeing behind the scenes were telling us that something like 10% of our seniors would die of COVID if we didn't do anything.
Can we also accept that there's nothing wrong with the government going "too far" with restrictions when it comes to dealing with a novel deadly virus? I see people criticize the government for, say, banning outdoor gatherings because in hindsight that turned out to be unnecessary. But hindsight is the only reason we know that. Back then we had no idea exactly how the virus spread and how deadly it was. So of course we took those measures before we knew if they would be necessary. The potential risks of not doing so far outweighed the downside of instituting those measures.
For March 2020 this was a reasonable mindset. By June - when it was clear the risk to the under 60s was tiny - much less so. By ~April 2021 — about when everyone who wanted one had a vaccine — egregiously not so.
The absolute latest time there was *any* case for restrictions was when it could be reasonably thought that vaccines might provide lasting sterilizing immunity, in which case getting universal uptake might have completely eradicated the disease. By mid-2021, when the emergence of delta showed this was untenable, that rationale collapsed.
By mid-2021, was there anything that could be called a "lockdown" still in place? Most of the draconian stuff *was* focused around the first few months of the pandemic, in my memory.
Looking things up for my state, the stay-at-home order lasted until the end of April, and the statewide mask mandate appears to have been lifted in June 2021.
The last state mask mandates apparently lasted until March 2022, and the federal mandate for planes only ended (via a court order) in April. I think some areas kept schools closed for the entirety of the 2020-21 school year.
I agree that no area (in the US / western world, at least) had a "lockdown" into 2021, but there absolutely were very substantial restrictions well into that year.
It was certainly *reasonable* to think that an upper respiratory virus would be hard to provide sterilizing immunity against, on the analogy of the flu vaccine’s limited effect and duration. I’m sure you can find credible people in April 2020 or whatever saying as much.
But no coronavirus had had any kind of even attempted vaccine before, so acting like this was certain is using 20-20 hindsight. Also, the initial trials really did show 90%+ reductions in infection rates. Partly this was due to a temporary effect and partly because the original strain was less infectious (although more deadly) than later ones, but if you’re acting like it shouldn’t have at least updated one’s prior toward lasting immunity you’re not reasoning properly.
Checked with GPT to make sure I was remembering right, & I was. The reason to believe Covid the wrong kind of virus isn't just a guess based on the fact that you can't get sterilizing immunity for the flu, its reasoning based on what is known about *why* you can't get sterilizing immunity to the flu.
GPT sez: SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID-19) infect the mucosal surfaces of the nose and throat—areas where immune defenses (like mucosal IgA) are harder to stimulate with injected vaccines. Most COVID-19 vaccines, being intramuscular, mainly induce systemic immunity (e.g., IgG antibodies, T cells), which are excellent at preventing severe disease but not always infection itself. In theory, a nasal vaccine that generates strong mucosal responses might offer sterilizing immunity, and some are in development.
Also, Covid mutates quickly, so even a vax that did create sterilizing immunity to one variant would not for any others around (though it would protect against severe illness).
GPT sez: Sterilizing immunity depends not only on a strong, localized immune response (like mucosal antibodies) but also on the immune system’s ability to recognize the virus quickly and precisely. When the virus mutates—especially in the spike protein, which most vaccines target—it can partially evade recognition by existing antibodies, even in vaccinated or previously infected people.
It is not impossible in theory to make a vax that would give sterilizing immunity, if you can overcome the obstacles mentioned above. But the people making the covid vax knew they were not building in the features that would give sterilizing immunity. The public was not clearly informed of that info, so when it became clear that vaxed people could catch covid people understandably took that as evidence that the vax didn't work.
Can we also accept that there's nothing wrong with the government going "too far" with restrictions when it comes to dealing with a novel terrorist threat?
I think you’re overstating the novelty. It’s a coronavirus, not an alien plague from planet Vulcan. They’ve been extensively studied. “No idea exactly how” is a messy phrase conflating two very different levels of confidence and precision, we clearly had “some idea how” and then a range of possibilities beyond that. It’s reasonable to make inferences based on existing knowledge about similar viruses and to act on them. Start with a plausible estimate of IFR and R0, and then update your priors as the data came in, starting with the cruise ship which we had good data on pretty quickly.
The thing about old people dying that I never hear about is that COVID is a horrible way to die. Slow motion suffocation over a period of weeks. Would anyone want grandma to die like that?
Pneumonia used to be called the "old man's friend", because slow motion suffocation over a week or so (with no ventilators to draw it out) was so much better than so many of the alternatives.
I think the 1.2 million deaths are in the background of some of those other things. The lab leak debate is about assigning blame (for 1.2 million deaths); the guidelines about masks and drugs and vaccines were partly about how best to mitigate deaths (at a final toll of 1.2 million). If COVID had a final death toll of, say, 5, I think its ability to spark discourse would be much muted.
1. Deaths were very concentrated in the elderly - yes some number of younger died, but those were also the people most likely to die with rather than from (with excess deaths likely somewhat filled in by elderly who died undiagnosed). I remember looking in later 2020 pre-Winter wave and like 50% of deaths were nursing home residents. No one is going to have a large day of mourning for nursing home residents who are on their way out anyways. If COVID ended up having a similar impact by age of regular flu and had killed 50x as many kids I think we would remember it very differently.
2. Deaths were also more likely in poor/minorities and the intersection of the 2, so the online commentarii are less likely to have experience with people who died. I don't know anyone who died of COVID, as other commentators have stated.
3. This is just what we do with pandemics. See how Spanish flu has a much lower cultural impact than wars that killed fewer people, or how the flus of the 50s and 60s aren't thought about at all.
4. Toxoplasma of rage - way more interesting to fight about lockdowns and school closures and the summer of Floyd than think about people who died.
Ignoring the mask requirements is one thing, but how many of those deaths occurred because people refused to take the vaccine? I don't know if anyone has collected those numbers, but I'll bet that one reason no one talks about the Covid deaths is because the obvious solution, get vaccines out faster, is politically polarizing. No one wants to talk about it if they have a significant change of being attacked no matter what they say.
b) Maybe 15% of US deaths could have been prevented with more vax uptake, at the high end, especially given that uptake among the most vulnerable elderly people was very high
Not offhand. I’m reasoning from the facts that about half of deaths were before vaccines were available, and that post vaccines deaths were still much higher among the (highly vaccinated) very old.
Apparently upwards of 2.5 million people die in the US each year (closer to 3 million now). Even if COVID was just two years, that's ~600,000 extra deaths a year, or a bit over 20% more than normal.
Around 675,000 people in the US died of Spanish Flu, of a population just over 100,000,000. As a percent, more people died of Spanish Flu (and they were of many ages, not overwhelmingly older). Just flat numbers, more Americans died of Spanish Flu than died in WW I, WW II, Vietnam, and Korea combined.
My guess is that a population that's overwhelmingly older (around 60,000 of the 1.2 million who died of COVID were under the age of 50, with around 80% being 65 or older), that was not a significant change in the trajectory of mortality, doesn't really register with people. More people still died of heart related problems *and* cancer in 2020 and 2021 than died of COVID. COVID is actually far less concerning, because even from the very start we knew it would be temporary. Cancer gets those kinds of numbers year after year after year.
There's also the question of what we could have done differently. As you note, more lockdowns would not have helped and would have made other things worse. Vaccines could have helped to an extent, but necessarily came out late enough that many of the deaths already occurred and still wouldn't have prevented all deaths. I think the proper response is to mourn your own losses, be aware there were others, and move on. No more than we do for cancer, and it should be a lot less.
I was teaching in LA. We went out on short notice in March '20 and didn't get back on campus for a year. The school where I taught was in a middle- / working-class area and included a significant number of multi-generational families. We pivoted to zoom skool fairly quickly. No one liked it or considered it sufficient, but it was the best option under the circumstances at the time. No one knew in the early days what to expect, but it seemed prudent to use our available tech to preserve what we could of what we'd been doing.
We stayed with it until the second half of the following spring semester, after the first waves of COVID had broken and vaxxing gained momentum. A number of smaller districts had gone back to in-person instruction sooner. In LAUSD students had the option of staying home and a large majority did so. Instruction was still essentially 'remote.'
We went back to the regular routine for the fall'21 semester. Everyone had to wear a mask. Other steps were used to check-in for work remotely and also trace infections among students, faculty and staff. I was frequently in very close proximity to students who got sick shortly thereafter, but never got sick myself. My wife and I had gotten the Pfizer vaccine and then a booster in late Dec. We never got any breakthrough infections but all 3 of our (adult) kids did. I had students who told me about their experiences being ill with Covid - some were dreadful though obviously they survived.
Verdict? It was weird, scary and clearly warranted a strong response, whate ER it's origins. Student learning loss was real but not irreparable; crucial social learning also suffered - a factor teachers were uniquely positioned to notice and take the measure of. (The most noticeable impact - tentativeness, timidity, disengagement - showed up in the last couple years and was 'downstrean' among kids who were in early middle or elementary at the time.) Given what we know now, anger over the origins of the virus and outbreak are understandable. It also seems that LAUSD, with about 500,000 students the nation's second largest school district, could have gone back to in-person instruction sooner. But masking would have to have been part of that. Given the fact that it did, in my experience, obstruct more widespread infections, it does seem to have been largely effective. I can't say I liked wearing one, but chances are my risk of getting sick would definitely have been higher if I hadn't.
At this remove the whole mess has been distorted by politicization in a way that can only dissipate with time. Unfortunately it looks like Century 21 America will continue to be infected by a tendency to crack under the distorting strain of our political duopoly, perhaps because its pols are happy to preserve it for their own gain, whatever the cost to the truth.
Likely right. The HS a couple blocks from my house that my kids went to had gone back in fall ‘20. I don’t know what they did to mitigate spread - my kids were long gone - but there were no massive complaints. I think we (LAUSD) could have probably gone back to something resembling our normal MO and schedule by Jan. ‘21. But that’s factoring in the ultimately limited efficacy of vaxxing. When we did finally have to go back in mid-spring ‘21 we didn’t actually have in-person instruction anyway; teachers zoomed from their classrooms while students who were on campus stayed in their homeroom and tuned-in on school-issued laptops; that was an almost-funny half measure that wasn’t very popular - less than 20% of the kids in my school came in for it, the rest just continued from home.
I was surprised to hear that covid out killed things like the spanish flu for americans, turns out this is accurate by raw death count. According to chatgpt the spanish flu killed ~675,000 americans and covid 1.1 million. But (according to chatgpt) in 1918 america had approximately 103 million people. So by percentage it killed more than covid
The US did all those restrictions and still got 1.2 million deaths and somehow you think that's an argument that is favourable for restrictions? Did the 1.2 million that died somehow benefit from the way that strangers were made to suffer through lockdowns, ostensibly on their behalf, but in practice for no benefit.
Some people like to talk about how the number of deaths was highly inflated. I have not gone down that rabbit hole but where did you get your 1.2 million deaths from?
Some old people didn't die of COVID, but had their lives disrupted in ways that were somewhat tragic. I'm thinking of my mom, who was 95 when it hit, and as a result of COVID, couldn't see anyone in her family for more that half of the two years she had left. She started losing clarity in those last couple of years, so we lost the chance at a lot of important final conversations.
I'm not sure why I haven't seen the counterfactual logic spelled out anywhere: what would have happened if there were no lockdowns and no vaccinations? Supposedly, if 1.2 million deaths is substantially less than the number of deaths expected with no intervention, we should be satisfied that we at least did *something* to reduce deaths. I think these are the numbers for Americans: ~330 million Americans X 1.7% mortality rate (see https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-vaccines-44-covid-19-patients-icu-died) = 5,610,000 expected COVID deaths with no interventions. The 1.2 million deaths is mind-boggling and an immense tragedy, but it's only 21% of what would have happened if we did nothing. I'm sure we should have done much more, but maybe our success avoiding the worst-case scenario is a reason to think the 1.2 million number isn't as big as it seems.
One of the lessons is that remarkably few people can or will think in terms of (1) exponential threats (2) counterfactuals.
To add to your counterfactual - I suspect it underestimates mortality due to kinetics and knock on effects: we were looking at a possible alternative of health system collapse / field hospitals / rationing etc in an alternative universe of permissive transmission. The total mortality cost of an event of that nature is hard to estimate.
Great points. The other factor is herd immunity that would emerge eventually, slowing the rate of spreading. It's very difficult to model that sort of thing, especially with the exponential effects you mentioned.
Sterilizing immunity is not possible with covid, because it is the wrong kind of virus. Hence herd immunity is not possible. The best you can get is what we’ve now got: the illness is endemic, but its fatality rate is now lower because almost everyone has some limited immunity, which makes their covid infections milder.
The mainstream figure was .5-1% prior to the vaccines. CDC put out an estimate of .26% at one point. Estimating the % of people who have had exposure or been infected is not easy: seroprevalence will always underestimate, and I believe that was what the .5-1% figure was based around.
The other problem using one number is that because the deaths skewed so much by age that the IFR will be very different depending on your population's age distribution, so the studies I found always stratify the estimates by age and don't give a single number.
Either way, your post assumes that with 'the policies' only 21% of people were exposed, and without them 100% of the population would be exposed. That didn't happen anywhere despite a range of government policies in the US and the world. Realistically the most vulnerable populations (elderly) will isolate and take precautions no matter what rules the government puts in place.
Thanks for those numbers. My point was that all interventions likely led to reduced mortality, not just government interventions. That includes the most vulnerable isolating themselves.
Any ideas on how to keep covid boosters available?
RFK is moving to allow annual covid boosters for those 65+ (and some health complications) on the same basis as the flu shots (updating strains and proving antibody titers).
but for those <65, a new annual booster would be treated like a de novo vaccine, requiring massive, placebo controlled tests and long follow up for illness. It can't be done on an annual basis.
It kills me we developed an incredible vaccine breakthrough and my family (and others) will be excluded from benefiting.
> but for those <65, a new annual booster would be treated like a de novo vaccine, requiring massive, placebo controlled tests and long follow up for illness.
Is this in fact how the new policy shakes out? What I was reading yesterday was that the vaccine would only be recommended for 65+ and people with some preexisting conditions.
There was still confusion about whether health insurance would cover the vaccine for those younger and healthier.
Building on the point about the victims being dead, those who lost loved ones also aren't speaking out. Perhaps a few reasons:
1) It didn't feel like somebody who died of Covid was the fault of those who resisted masks/didn't get vaxxed/etc. It felt like random chance, differently from somebody whose child dies of measles might perceive cause and effect.
2) Those who do blame others are hesitant to do so publicly given how politicized all Covid topics have become
3) For some it was traumatic, and they just don't want to talk about it
The difference between "what matters" and "what people care about" is more than just a misalignment. There's zero reason people should actually care about sports or video games or fiction, or even art. The caring-gap is unfortunately a loadbearing cornerstone of what makes humanity actually interesting.
Regarding the debate about whether the 1.2 million COVID deaths are real, I have a quick thought to share.
I do not know anyone personally who died from COVID or anyone who got seriously ill from it. This makes me skeptical of the 1.2 million deaths.
However, my father, who I argued with about lockdowns back in spring 2020 (I in favor, him in opposition) told me a story about going for a job at a funeral home and there being dead bodies under sheets in a section of the room which had been cordoned off. He accidentally went back there and saw it. I think he saw a foot sticking out from under a sheet and it freaked him out. Where these bodies were being kept was not the usual place, but they clearly had so many they needed to dedicate extra space for them. I texted my dad to confirm I'm remembering this story right and will update if I got anything wrong.
So while I don't know anyone who died, it's clear that lots of people did die and I can't discount that fact simply because it didn't "happen to me" so to speak.
Edit: my dad said that I forgot the extenuating circumstances which were that the largest funeral home in the area had closed for a license issue and so had the cemetery. So I was wrong about the bodies piling up just because of COVID it seems some were COVID deaths but not all. Do with that what you will.
Same—I don’t know a single person who died of COVID or has negative long-term effects. Makes it really hard to accept “1.2 million people died so you should be sad.”
Seems like… life—where 3 million Americans die every year and I’m also not sad, except for the ones I know.
It's the same thing with car accidents. It's a 9/11 every month. Yet, few people talk about Waymo and self-driving cars like they're a heroic endeavor.
I've always been struck by the fact that Joe Biden's entire family was killed by a car crash and he never once tried to do anything about road deaths in fifty years in government.
Or Telsa. Elon Musk has stated many times in the last 5 years that the main focus of Tesla after getting mass manufacturing going is Full Self Driving. Hopefully the Austin launch goes well and FSD is available on all Teslas this year or next. This tech could save a million lives globally and who knows how many injuries + property loss.
> First, dead people can’t complain about their own deaths, so there are no sympathetic victims writing their sob stories for everyone to see
I don't think this is remotely close to true. It's a rule of thumb that for every X deaths, there are 3X people that are crippled (casualties) because of the same event. And there should be a very loud 3.6 million Americans whose lifes are destroyed directly because of the virus (not because of lockdown or other circumstantial things). Cancers and AIDS make tons of sob stories when they were very lethal. So whatever reason this pandemic is under-remembered, it's not because the dead don't talk.
As one of the most significant modern disasters ever, should we not demand a non-partisan global scientific review of what worked and did not worked with recommendations? Seems like one of the most important things we could do for human welfare.
I get the impression everyone is just embarrassed by the entitle affair. At least until the next pandemic. Which is inevitable.
Everyone should at least own a P100 mask and know how to use it. Too bad mask wearing is so politicized now. They cost around $50 so about $150 billion to give every American one (or buy your own).
I'm sorry, are you suggesting that you care less about things that kill *more* people? If COVID had killed 100 people it would have been more worthy of concern than killing 1M+??!!
I assume he knew this would result in a rehash of the comment sections across the internet in 2020-2022. Reading this comment section has been like time traveling.
Early in the pandemic I remember reading about the 1918 flu pandemic and being shocked at how little of a historical spotlight it got -- it killed *50 million people*, made macroscopic impacts on life expectancy and global death rate curves, and yet barely gets any historical coverage (I certainly did not learn about it in school). I had always thought it was because it happened in the middle of World War I, but after COVID I realized that something deeper is going on. Either we accept disease deaths as "more natural" and downweight them, or we are so horrified that we want to ignore and forget about it as soon as possible. Kind of a denial of death sort of thing?
I think that death by infectious disease and pandemics with death rates *way* higher than that of the 1918 flu and COVID were still fresh in the public memory. The 1918 flu was simply a nothingburger compared to recent history of infectious diseases of pre-1900 and some local cases of the early 1900s.
There’s an old article you wrote about how it’s really hard to know how you’re suppose to update or change your views based on certain numbers (ie. say crime was only 10% worse instead of 30%, that’s a lot but what does that change for you?. Or 120,000 Chinese people immigrated to America instead of 70,000, what does that actually change for you. If you found out the amount of black people shot to death in the US by police was a quarter or four times as much as you previously thought, what would that change for you? Etc ). I think Covid death statistics are similar in that we don’t really have any basis for what to make of it. I think it would be a really interesting project to try and consider how we could start building ways to think about and respond to quantities and facts of the world we’re not use to dealing with a making proper commitments to change our world views/policies based on them. Has anyone seriously tried to do that before?
3 million Americans die every year… people don’t complain about that because people care about what they see in front of them.
In any given year you might know one or two or zero people that die. On average, you might have known zero or one person that died of COVID per year.
My question is during the world wars and Vietnam did people know more than zero or one person that died per year? What made people care so much about them?
Maybe it was because there was less of an internalized cost to the non-warfighters, so all they saw was the cost of the deaths they did see. In contract to COVID, where there was every day internalized costs of non-COVID diers, which might have appeared massive compared to the one 70 year old you knew who died of COVID.
I've always been struck by how incredibly well our whole society handled COVID incredibly well - far better than I would have predicted. So much pro-social activity across all of society! Remarkable levels of government support, and partially from Republicans no less! A vaccine development effort that was one of the marvels of modern technology! Obviously some mistakes were made (harms to the socialization of children and young adults was a big one; and the general degeneracy of right wingers into anti-vax hysteria was a very bad indirect consequence). But overall I think it was a remarkable societal accomplishment.
I have never encountered anyone, in real life or on the internet, who shares this perspective.
I share this perspective. I remember everyone coming together during the initial lockdowns. There was bipartisan stimulus, miracle vaccines, a huge shift to remote work.
Before COVID, I thought we had become too divided as a country to handle a major crisis.
"1.2 million Americans died during COVID." Okay, so were those "excess"deaths, above the normal pattern? And while 1.2 million died during Covid, did they die because of Covid? Or did they die with Covid but not necessarily because of Covid? And I am not clear how there were apparently zero deaths due to flu . . . did flu death really take a holiday, or were what would have normally been flu cases wind up being classed as Covid? None of the scary walking dead scenarios or needing emergency morgues or treatment centers on ships or in huge tents, etc., turned out to be true. I just don't think we have yet had true accounting of actually how many died FROM Covid alone.
There was a significant drop in flu deaths for the 2020-2021 season. The number of deaths is usually 12k to 50k, but may have been around 700!
The crazy stat is that pediatric flu deaths normally average around 200 a year, but there was only 1 clild flu death in the US in 2020-2021 season, and 49 the next (when most everyone felt safe because of vaccines). It may be that social distancing and masks were not as effective as we thought against COVID, but against flu, they were pretty spectacular. I feel this was way underreported.
This means of course, COVID mortality was even a little higher than excess deaths would indicate. (Oddly, traffic deaths did not go down during this period, as I was sure they would.)
This suggests at risk people should be taking flu more seriously. Remember there were 80k excess deaths in the 2017-2018 flu season and I never heard about it until I started looking up excess deaths (to get around the complaint in 1/4 of these posts that it was just a diagnosis).
I think weather apps should not only show where radar shows rain is coming from, but also flu strains when they are a danger. (Sorry for prolixity)
"It may be that social distancing and masks were not as effective as we thought against COVID, but against flu, they were pretty spectacular. I feel this was way underreported."
This, 1000%
Imperfectly-applied efforts to reduce transmission of COVID yielded an almost-completely effective reduction in flu transmission.
"Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID."
What? I kept thinking there was going to be some kind of a twist, like maybe the post would go on to talk about an alternate universe where the above claim was true, but there was no twist.
In my experience, people stopped talking about COVID years ago. It's like Game of Thrones - sure, everyone was talking about it back when it was on, but that was then.
I remember there was some mention of COVID on this blog a few months ago, but that's basically all I've heard about it recently - and I follow the news every day. Then again, I don't follow American news unless there's some big thing that's happened over there specifically. Maybe Americans really are still going on about COVID?
Americans are not still going on about COVID. Recently the new government has unsettled people by talking about opening a COVID commission to investigate the handling of the pandemic, and people like Scott are keyed up by that, and of course this post has keyed up a lot of people. This is the first comment I've made, but I've been fighting the urge to join in. Government brought it up, Scott ranted, comments now ranting.
So it's more like, Americans (like probably everyone else) have mostly put COVID behind them, but it's a still a sore subject and we'll rant if it gets brought up unexpectedly.
My take is that those who feel that “we can’t stop talking about Covid” are all hanging out together on a certain part of twitter without realizing that everyone else has moved on.
I am actually a bit stunned by the degree to which we are *not* reflecting on the pandemic. How much fiction can you think of that was set in that time, for example? Now compare to the amount of media we are still creating today about WWII.
Exposing my ignorance: Did anyone in, say, April 2020 oppose lockdowns, social distancing, school closings, masks, etc, and also predict that more that there would be excess deaths in the US greater than 1M? There was lots of "being wrong" going about at the time, and I think we should be humble enough to realize it was really difficult to get things right. For example, flattening the curve at least somewhat seems prudential (doesn't it?). Was there a prominent US figure who did "get things right?" (I think the at-risk people of Sweden voted with their feet to be almost as cautious as their Scandinavian cousins, who were coerced to do so.)
Tegnell got it right. Jay Bhattacharya got it largely right with some mistakes. No, flattening the curve didn't sound reasonable at all. To me it sounded like a fantasy, like grasping to straws.
People at-risk needed to be cautious, no dispute about that.
Re: Bhattacharya, from what I read, predicted something in the order of 20 to 40k deaths. If I promised you 250 an hour for consulting and paid you 6$ an hour instead, you would perhaps object about that. At the time it was hard to accept a lot of what he said because he had been so wrong on that front, but he does not lie about what did happen, and I have to admit his policies in retrospect look good. But my goodness, that is a staggering predictive failure, and one that as a health official has to be considered worse than overcompensating. (Not the JB didn't have at least experimental data for his prediction. His was not a bad faith misestimation. But it was still wrong.) Can you elaborate on Tegnell?
I see: I was trying to limit it to US policymakers. I would be surprised that early on he would have predicted 1.2M excess US deaths (even with mitigation factors and the astonishing delivery of vaccines). Wasn't he trusting in herd immunity?
I am looking at my old comments where I say that expected deaths are 0.85% of the population but they will be mostly elderly people.
And people answer with emotional disdain, some of them blocked me and have never talked to me again. Being honest with predictions made me a pariah. It was a mistake to talk about these things at all, even in rationalist forums.
So, I wouldn't blame any expert who avoided this subject how many deaths he really expects to happen. People are not able to talk about these things. Even Scott is not rational enough.
I have never seen him predicting only 20-40K deaths, to be honest. But overall he predicted that everybody will get covid eventually and understanding that mortality rate from covid originally was 0.5% it just takes a very easy math to predict that about 2 million people would die from covid.
I said that but I didn't emphasise that because the emphasis was that most of those people will be already dying from something else. It is not meaningful to speak about deaths in the same way for someone who is 20 years old and 85 years old. Different expectations and lost QALY. Speaking about the number of deaths don't make sense at all. It is not a meaningful number.
The main idea that Bhattacharya was saying is that covid risk increases exponentially by age, hence children and young people do not have to worry. This was the main issue that the media and everybody else was ignoring. It is still ignored by Scott.
Tegnell on the other was autistically repeating things from public health textbook. He was an expert who was guided by evidence instead of emotions like everybody else. When he didn't have evidence, he said – we don't have evidence. He did the best of all experts at the end.
March 24, 2020 WSJ op-ed: "This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a
far less severe problem than one that kills two million."
I am not disputing that his policies are sensible, but by being so woefully wrong in this prediction (again it was an honest, scientifically derived good faith estimate, but WAY WAY wrong), he does not meet my criteria of "being completely right in April 2020". If he had proposed Great Barrington regulations in April 2020 and said there would be 1.2M excess deaths even if we get a miracle vaccine (without which the 2M "severe problem" would have been reached), but we would have better schooling outcomes and hedonic experiences, I think he would have been dismissed as a kook.
Scott's point, I believe, was that the pandemic had what would have been viewed as tragic loss of life that was unimaginable to most at the time and would have been worth making sacrifices to avoid. But in retrospect, we made it through it and are glad it wasn't worse, and that makes us harsher on those who were unduly cautious at the time.
Apparently Jay Bhattacharya quickly understood that his original prediction was wrong and corrected it. It would have made me to trust him even more. Unfortunately many people have misconceptions and don't like corrections.
My point is that Scott is wrong. Politicians in the US chose the wrong policy but it was just an accident. They could have equally chosen someone like Tegnell and achieved better results.
How quickly did JB adjust his prediction and what did he adjust his prediction to? This matters. People were quoting that article for months. I don't think Scott actually disagrees with you about policy, but I think he is inviting more humility in criticizing those making tough decisions when the problem ended up being far worse than almost anyone imagined. JB clearly thinks 2M deaths is a catastrophe, and without speedy vaccine delivery do you doubt the death toll would have reached 2M?
Brilliant reminder. I really appreciate how you present this with intellectual humility, more to lead us to question ourselves than to lecture. What you say is so true. We sometimes talk about COVID again but not about the millions of deaths. These are deaths that have left no traces. They died normally like everyone else in a hospital bed. Their bodies didn't litter the streets, their blood didn't stain the pavement, they died without screams or commotion, no bomb exploded, no building collapsed, they are invisible and silent deaths, they are abstract statistics. Except of course for the loved ones who saw them die. But they represent a minority in the population. For most people, myself included, these are impersonal statistics. Unfortunately, all our biases contribute to burying the memory of these deaths in a lost corner, a mass grave of our memory. It's good to remind us of the factual reality, even if, as you rightly say, it's difficult to know what conclusions to draw beyond acknowledging our biases. Should we have done more? Done less? Where to place the cursor. There is probably no single answer, hence the continued debates after years.
To be honest, unlike most people, I almost keep a pleasant memory or nostalgia for this heroic period, for completely personal reasons and because I enjoyed extraordinary conditions (this without breaking the law). But the reality was that hospitals were overwhelmed and people were dying. I maintain a certain guilt for having had a good life when others were depressed.
1.2 million American death were attributed to COVID. Quite another matter, especially given that we know for a fact that this included people who actually died in motorcycle accidents and falling from ladders. Also that the death tolls abruptly dropped the instant that COVID deaths stopped behind a cash cow.
Great post. I would like to see more short posts like this that don't necessarily have a clear conclusion. I really have never thought about just how many people died likely because I don't know many old people. 1.2 million deaths in the context of a war is an absolute crap-ton and framing it that way makes it much more real
I think we should stop talking about covid deaths. It is not good for mental health. It just makes certain people unnecessary anxious which forces them to make bad decisions with their life choices and decreases their wellbeing.
The number means nothing because it is less than 0.3% of population. Think in this way, one in 300 people died. That is very insignificant number. Some groups are not even that big, so a lot of people will not know anyone personally who died from covid. And majority, a big majority of those who died were already on their death bed. The average age of dying from covid in the UK was higher than the average life expectancy of 83 years.
My own family had 2 people dying from covid, both on their death beds who suffered immensely and wished their sufferings to end. Around this time 2 other relatives died, one from old age, another – younger person – tragically in a traffic accident. Deaths happen, it was sad. Now it is time to move on and enjoy life again.
Apart from investigations such as who allowed covid to spread, which restrictions actually increased mortality etc., we should not talk about covid deaths.
It reminds me of high infant mortality that used to occur. Lots of cultures cope with... trying to ignore it. Some don't even name their children until certain age. Yeah, if we don't actually know how to reduce some calamity, ignorance is bliss and recommended.
The key here is the margin. 1.2 million Americans died, and the lockdowns didn't stop them from dying. They're not on either side. The pro-lockdown people didn't save them, the anti-lockdown people didn't/wouldn't-have saved them, so nobody gets credit for them in their arguments. They matter. Their deaths were a great tragedy. But the only arguments they help is people arguing it was a lab leak and thus gain of function research is more bad than good.
Pro-lockdown only gets credit for the difference between the actual deaths and the hypothetical deaths with no or fewer restrictions. Anti-lockdown gets credit for all of the economic, social, educational, and hedonic costs of lockdowns and restrictions (not covid directly). If any outcome is the same in both possible worlds, then neither gets credit for it when compared against each other.
It is interesting that Scott says that if we had known that 1.2 million people would die from covid, we would have demanded even stronger measures.
I disagree. We (meaning experts in this field) knew that 1.2 million deaths was a probable number. They just cowardly refused to face the reality and instead sent the wrong message to the public to promote their lockdowns.
Think in this way: why people get convinced to get vaccinated? It is not because you provide statistics that millions of deaths have been saved by vaccine. No, it is because they are (correctly) told that this vaccine will reduce their chances to get disease and/or dying from that disease. There are risks that we don't know how to prevent and people are happy about that too and go on with their lives.
The same with covid – for large majority there was nothing they could do to avoid covid so it didn't make sense for them to take any precautions at all. Some groups (mostly elderly) were vulnerable and could reduce their risks by waiting until vaccine were available.
Now, how effective was vaccine?
When covid started there was a dispute about case fatality rate, some numbers were clearly inflated. But soon it was calculated to be around 0.5%. The belief was that unless vaccine will be invented, everybody will get covid and that was the upper limit. So, the number of deaths I imagined was about 2 million for the US. That is not a significant number. We should have made note of that and communicated to people that they don't have great risk from covid.
Scott's number is that 0.3% of people died. I guess, the difference is due to vaccine. Maybe vaccine saved more but lockdowns killed some more.
At the end, vaccine helped but the difference is not that great.
The places that do not need to continue processing - "arguing" as you call it, are the countries or areas where governments were transparent and made people trust their competence and hence their interventions - or non-interventions in some cases. Here we still have a lot of processing to do!
I absolutely hate this thread, and I have been trying to figure out why. I think of myself as someone who was less deeply affected by Covid than most. I was never deeply, sickeningly scared, and I was also not greatly troubled by the restrictions on life. Masks I experienced as just a nuisance, and I was able to get back to in-person work, which I prefer, pretty early in the pandemic by running a huge air purifier in my office.
And yet most comments here either make me feel like crying or make me feel a huge surge of irritation at the writer. I think it's because I, like everyone else, have had and seen so many savage arguments about Covid -- so much screamo self-righteousness, stinking smirking sarcasm, howls of rage and pain, insults, lies, mind puke. *That* damaged me, and now I have greatly reduced ability to tolerate hearing the views of others on the subject.
Kind of interesting how the post is about hardly anyone remembering the deaths, but everyone debating the lockdowns and narratives - totally borne out by these comments, of which I've read a lot and none refer to the deaths - just people's experiences of the lockdowns and narratives. For the record, I protested Sydney's lockdowns and was issued with $6000 worth of fines (later dismissed by a magistrate), because by August 2021, it was clear that the state government had imposed yet another punitive lockdown simply in response to media hysteria. There were no health issues at stake, but plenty of economic and mental-health hardships involved (as I made my solitary protest past the shuttered windows of a dozen small businesses).
As for the deaths: wasn't it later established in many jurisdictions that the same deaths which in other years would be ascribed to flu, were now ascribed to Covid? For example, in 2014, flu deaths in Australia numbered 2,879; in 2019, 4,124 (I remember it was a bad flu season); but in 2020-2022, 'flu' deaths had collapsed (link below), and by 2023, there were only 607 from 'flu' and 6,187 from 'Covid.' Certainly looks like some cross-over classification. Most flu seasons, we don't take any note of the numbers of cases and deaths - but it was shoved in our faces, along with everything else, during Covid.
It is a fact that, regardless of how any given death was labelled, there were just more of them. A lot more. These increases correspond to times when more COVID infections were reported, when more people were googling for symptoms associated with COVID, and when higher concentrations of COVID were detected in wastewater.
'However any given death was labelled'? Isn't that the issue at stake? Was one factor in increased mortality likely to have been the poorly-tested and arbitrarily imposed vaccines? Are we likely ever to be sure? No, but just labelling them all 'Covid' is a cop-out.
That wouldn't make any sense for 2020. Do you/people really believe that vaccines were the cause of the increase in all-cause mortality?
It's true that neither measure is perfect -- definitely there were some reported COVID deaths where COVID wasn't the primary cause of death, and definitely all-cause mortality reflects deaths other than the virus themself. But I don't think anyone really thinks that flu deaths were counted towards COVID in the US -- COVID deaths generally had COVID tests behind them. The totality of evidence very very very points towards COVID being the cause.
Yeah, there were Covid tests in Australia as well. What do you make of the collapse in 'flu' deaths at the same time?
I didn't say 'the cause,' I asked if it was 'one factor.' Anecdotally, particularly for younger people, there was an increase in poor outcomes from myocarditis after the vaccine. Understandably, though, there's been an official reluctance to have formal investigations.
I answered the first part in my other response -- social distancing worked extremely well against the flu because it was a less naturally contagious virus.
There was this swap plot, see. The covid vax was actually a bolus of live flu virus and killed 1.3.14156 million Merkins and the flu vaccine was some Trump semen with a teeny bit of clorox added and goddam that stuff worked really well. The whole thing was the outcome of an agreement between Biden, Trump and Putin to even out some various scores and compensate for shit Hunter Biden did, plus also some Clinton pubic hair type issues, life is complicated, you know?
If this was the case we would expect vaccination rates to correlate with excess all cause mortality. We would also need to explain all of the deaths in 2020.
(If you look at just mortality (instead of *excess* mortality) you will typically observe higher mortality among vaccinated individuals. This is probably due to high-risk individuals having much higher vaccination rates - the same way you see much higher mortality among people getting any kind of medical treatment versus everyone in the general population not getting that treatment. That's why we look at excess all-cause mortality)
In the second year of the pandemic, when the vaccine was available, vaccination rates were higher in US urban areas than US rural areas. Excess all-cause mortality decreased in urban areas but increased in rural areas: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10289647/
'One major finding of this study is that the number of excess deaths in the second year of the pandemic was not substantially lower than the first year, which is noteworthy as vaccinations were available for much of 2021 and 2022.' Right. So, not particularly effective but we need more of them? Of course! 'Despite the strong efficacy of vaccines, gaps in uptake likely contributed to high excess mortality in 2021 and 2022, which may persist into the future if these vaccination gaps are not closed.'
Yes. Increased excess deaths in low-vaccination-rate populations make up for decreased excess deaths among high-vaccination-rate populations. That's why we observe excess mortality rates diverging among different subpopulations once vaccines become available.
If you introduce a treatment, and population A uses it a lot while population B doesn't use it very much, and you observe similar *overall* all-cause excess mortality rates because fewer people in population A are dying but more people in population B are dying, that indicates that the cause of the mortality gap is one or more things that *used* to be the same in both populations but recently became different, and the treatment is a strong candidate for that thing.
Vaccine uptake in elderly, most vulnerable was close to 95-99% in the UK. Your numbers doesn't match.
The real reason is that (apart from lockdown caused mortality) that during the first year of pandemic only about 20% of population got infected with covid and 80% got infected with covid in the second year. Probably in the elderly group this was even more skewed because they took more precautions during the first year. Could be 10% vs. 90% in the next year.
Vaccines were only 70-80% effective in preventing deaths, so the absolute number of deaths from covid are expected to be roughly about the same in both periods: before vaccination and after.
The seroprevalence of COVID antibodies around Fall of 2021 was still fairly low. Mitigative behavior collectively was keeping infection rates to a fraction of the population. A year later it was drastically up. What happened is as vaccines became available, people dropped mitigative behavior while the viral population was evolving and this led to significantly increased infections with newer variants. This was devastating for the immune naive and also harmful to the vaccinated because while vaccines reduce morbidity after a relatively short window of strong immunity, they do not eliminate it. More infections meant more mortality, even among the vaccinated. Lotta people died.
It's actually true that there were less flu deaths. Possibly because COVID in some way outcompeted flu, but definitely because the flu was less contagious and so social measures meant to almost keep COVID in check really decreased flu transmission.
>Kind of interesting how the post is about hardly anyone remembering the deaths, but everyone debating the lockdowns and narratives - totally borne out by these comments, of which I've read a lot and none refer to the deaths
Must you be loudly inaccurate even about the thread you are posting on? It is not difficult to see how much people have talked about death in these comments, because you can go to the top of the page and type CMD F, then put "death" in the search box. As of this writing the word 'death' has been used 481 times. The word 'lockdown' has been used 169 times.
> Kind of interesting how the post is about hardly anyone remembering the deaths, but everyone debating the lockdowns and narratives - totally borne out by these comments, of which I've read a lot and none refer to the deaths - just people's experiences of the lockdowns and narratives.
If people had deaths to remember, they would do that. (And you can see a few cases in the comments!) The lockdown is the whole experience. What else would you expect people to remember?
If I warned you that tomorrow, 1 in 275 Americans would randomly die, you’d (probably rationally) panic, as those odds are dramatically higher than a typical day’s ~1 in 40,000. But after surviving unscathed, knowing at most a friend-of-a-friend who died, you’d likely downgrade the event to “not that bad.” The Leftovers explored the aftermath of this. The gap between anticipatory dread and retrospective indifference distorts how we process and remember catastrophes. I assume this behavior is adaptive, helping psychologically cope with otherwise overwhelming events.
Probably, people mostly ignore those 1.2 million deaths from COVID for pretty much the same reason they mostly ignore the 14 million deaths from everything else during that same period. (~3 million deaths/year in the US x 5 years from 2020-2025 - ~1 million COVID-related)
No, no, no. As a utilitarian you should be good at this stuff.
How much time did the average person lose in life expectancy? Now consider if they’d give that up to avoid ALL the covid crap, economic and “hedonic”.
Or consider how many lives we could save with much less draconian authoritarianism. Almost anyone would prefer giving up alcohol and drugs instead of all the stuff we gave up during covid. And the lives saved by turning into prohibition era US plus Singapore on hard drugs would quickly exceed lives saved by covid measures, even under aggressive assumptions.
It’s utterly absurd. Rationalist community outperformed on covid predictions, but they performed horribly when it came to recommendations on what to do about it.
You can't just count "hedonic" stuff on one side of the ledger, though: people who weren't COVID victims lost time spent with their loved ones; people who didn't die of COVID suffered from it.
What's more, even without government policy many people would have voluntarily taken a hedonic hit and acted in such a way as to have many of the same economic and hedonic impacts so the comparison isn't avoiding "ALL the crap", it's avoiding the crap that wouldn't have happened in a counterfactual world without lockdowns, which might be only a small proportion of the hedonic and economic crap we suffered.
If your argument isn't just about government policy, but personal behaviour, i.e., people should have been less cautious and more willing to risk COVID to go to restaurants and movies, then the fact that they weren't seems to me to make a pretty decent revealed-preference argument that the hedonic hit of these things *wasn't actually that bad*! If it were so intolerable to give that stuff up, compared to the costs of COVID, people would have... not given that stuff up due to the costs of COVID. But for the most part they did, even in countries where the government didn't force them to.
1) People’s unforced behavior was heavily influenced by government rhetoric and its actions in other areas. It’s no secret that government overreaction can foment personal overreaction.
2) It’s widely acknowledged that people overreact to small risks. Healthy parents in their 30s or 40s with normal kids canceling play dates or avoiding the park was like someone avoiding the beach after watching Jaws.
Yeah, sure, I'm not saying that government policy had no effect, but we can also look at places like Sweden that famously and controversially had no lockdowns and still see plenty of risk aversive behaviour; ideally you would try and use the variation to estimate how much of the economic/hedonic impact still happens even with no government rhetoric.
As to point 2 yeah, for sure: I had a friend come to my outdoor park-hang birthday party and sit in a mask ten feet away from everyone else and, uh, had some doubts about his risk analysis process.
But on the other hand, it's not the government's job to encourage people to act rationally, or to presume to know what counts as an overreaction on the part of its citizens.
If a bunch of young people gave up going to bars for fear of killing grandma, yeah sure maybe there's some sense in which the loss of utils from going getting drunk in da clerb is larger than the gains of keeping grandma alive for another 4.6 years, but if the kids choose to make that trade off, you have to at least consider the possibility that it's because they disagree about the calculation! Maybe they don't actually value the club that much; if they did, they wouldn't have so quickly stopped going! Maybe the utils of spending 4.6 more years with grandma outweigh the utils lost from giving up drinking for a few months.
It would have been even more insane for government rhetoric to tell people, "no you should be out drinking! Forget grandma!"
But Swedes turned on the TV everyday to hear how the entire world thought their leaders were insane, anti-science murderers.
Why would it be insane for the government to advise young people to do that? It’s way more sane than advising them as they did. (More importantly, grandma should have been telling them that.)
Swedes heard that message eventually; did restaurant closures and unemployment spike in Sweden only after discussions about Swedish lockdown became news in other countries? If you seriously think this, I'm happy to try dig up Swedish economic data and try correlate it with news articles about the Swedish model, but I'll register in advance that I'm pretty skeptical. I think what counts is that Swedes heard *about a deadly new virus rampaging through the world* and that was enough to make them shut down voluntarily.
"Why would it be insane for the government to advise young people to do that? It’s way more sane than advising them as they did. (More importantly, grandma should have been telling them that.)"
Who is best placed to decide what the value young people get from a few months of not going out is, compared to a few more years with grandma? *Obviously* not the government. It should be pretty deferential to people's own judgement about what *they themselves* value.
“A few months of going out” makes me think you’re not actually serious. It was, for just one small set of examples, almost two years of cancelled schooling and school functions, kids having to wear masks and being turned into neurotic freaks by their neurotic freak parents.
If I was going to say anything, it would be that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the fact that some charity said something cringe on Twitter doesn't outweigh the lives saved.
> If you ask what you should do differently upon being reminded that 1.2 million Americans died during COVID, I won’t have an answer - there’s no gain from scheduling ten minutes to be sad each morning on Google Calendar.
I don't think we should think in terms of raw number of dead people, but in terms of QALYs lost.
I agree that there's probably not a lot to be gained from scheduling ten minutes to be sad each morning.
And you people who sound like, well, it was a tough situation and jeez, we didn't do so bad, let's put it behind us -- are you were aware the big fat rich USA was 17th worse country in the world in covid deaths per capita?
I'm sure our reporting was better than that of poor, disorbganized countries, or those that are obviously comfortable with flat-out lying. But look at us compared to EU or to other countries that don't fall into either of those categories (Australia . .. Japan . . .)
Hmm well one thing you can do is to assign blame to the people who contributed to those deaths with lies, misinformation, bad policy, bad governance, etc. Then hold them accountable politically and economically.
Like that’s what adults do to clean up messes and prevent their reoccurrence.
Obsessive language-use nitpick: "Deadly" refers to how likely something is to kill someone. Car rides kill more Americans than cobra bites, but we say cobra bites are deadlier than car rides. So you need to divide by the population. The Civil War and the Spanish influenza were deadlier.
As an outsider, 1.2 million deaths seems to me to be a cost of Being American. Lockdowns as a general strategy were never going to work well enough in a place where distrusting the government is a state religion. And distrusting science. I think that some of the US policies might have been ok in the abstract but if they took into account the prevailing belief systems they might have been done differently, more like how to hopefully protect yourself in a crazy world than a let's-all-do-this approach. It was never going to work that well, whatever.
Here in Australia, enough people accepted the science and the personal and social costs for it to work. It still hurt, more for some than others, but there was a broad enough acceptance for the system to basically work. There are other various other influences, but I see this as the big difference. We had like 10% of the US death rate.
I think that the only new thing we learned from pandemic is that not only covid but many other respiratory diseases easily spreads by air (are airborne). It didn't change any conclusions about the effectiveness of masks, lockdowns etc. (i.e., not very effective) but only strengthened them.
"The reasoning is simple: lockdowns prevent the spread, but only for a time."
This doesn't follow at all, if the time they prevent spread is sufficient to create and roll out a vaccine. Obviously that doesn't speak to the empirical evidence, but this reasoning is still obviously badly flawed.
Well, even Scott agrees – lockdowns didn't help and actually harmed.
We had a negative experience this time and yet people believe next time will be different.
Next time will be different indeed but not in a way you imagine. It will not be covid. It will be a bigger problem with completely different issues. The one where lockdowns don't even make sense. And yet I expect a lot of people will be demanding lockdowns because that's all they learned from covid.
Compliance is critical. I guess you are in the US, how good was compliance there? Lockdowns aren't a permanent solution, they were a temporary measure. The two big reasons: (1) Bump up the level of isolation until a vaccine became available and people got vaccinated (2) To limit the number of sick people at any one time to lower the resource impact.
The thing I don't get about you guys is that you seem to be arguing that "up is down". Isolation is a standard mitigation measure in disease control and has been for a long time because it works. Do you seriously dispute that?
There's no doubt the lockdowns could have been done better, like everything else can be done better. In the early days of Covid there was are dearth of information about the disease. You might like to claim that Sweden had no lockdowns but it's a fairly educated, wealthy, middle-class (and healthy) population and people just self-isolated because there was no mandate. Would that work in the US? I'd say a definite no, but as always ymmv. FFS mate, 1.2 million people died, and you apparently don't care. It's trivially easy to criticise, but what's your better solution that avoids those deaths?
If you look at my original post, I put that down to the US religion of individuality and denouncing government. AFAICS you have swallowed that religion, I haven't. Arguing with religion is a bit of a dead end.
I know we've discussed this elsewhere in the comments, but from what I can find this is untrue; Sweden had a considerably higher excess deaths/100K rate than Australia.
According to worldometer stats, deathrates are 0,36% in the US, 0,27% in Sweden, 0,09% in Australia. The most comparable countries to Sweden are Norway and Denmark with 0,12 and 0,15%.
See my link above, i found much lower for Denmark, I think around .06; though also lower for Sweden (.14 if memory serves). But the other numbers look similar
There is one particular lesson we can practically learn from all of this, and we really should. There are also many others which are impractical, and which boil down to "we should have been better" - in particular we should have had a better government and political system, less prone to decision paralysis and culture war. But well, it's not exactly a lesson if we've already known it all along.
No, there is one thing learned in blood which should be remembered here: ethicists should be rounded up and hung by the neck in public squares. I would also (barely) accept doing the same thing symbolically to their profession instead, but that'd be a distant second.
It's rare in the history of humanity for a profession to fail so hard at their stated purpose as to do the very opposite of what they intend to do, consistently for decades, and end up with killing more people than a war.
My apologies to others: but despite the supposed death toll I don’t know anyone who died from COVID. Family, friends, schoolmates/professors at the time…
Kind of sounds like an inflated statistic. ‘Died while covid positive’ classified as a covid death maybe?
Also, what ‘stricter policies’? You all shut down the entire country, went remote, nothing fun or family functions whatsoever. Even stuff outside, though of course you all were dead wrong about the outdoors being riskier
What's weird to me, especially from a rationalist pov, is how seldom 20-30 million deaths being swept under the rug is connected to the probability of 2-7 billion deaths by the end of the century.
The current US and other right-wing governments 'eugenics-in-action' policies are efficiently explained by security states jockeying for position going into the onrushing ecological bottleneck.
I did a ^F for "QALY". The first one I found was in someone's comment. Scott, you know better than this.
You're also using absolute population numbers. Saying that this is the single greatest number of deaths since X fails to account for the lesser population at the time of X. You're also adding in things that have really small numbers (all the mass shootings? Really? And Vietnam didn't actually kill that many Americans. And 9/11 killed a lot of people for a single attack, but not a lot of people for a whole war or other large scale event.) Scott, you know better than this, too.
This is based on death certificate ICD-10 coding, so there may be a bit of time frame shift due to reporting lag. Of note, these are deaths “with” covid confirmed or presumed. I haven’t found a breakdown with a more precise distinction of “dying of covid” rather than “dying with covid”.
1.2 million deaths is about 0.36% of the US population of 330 million in 2020.
So, my new approach is to figure out how many years of lifespan covid cost Americans. Assume the average American is 38.7 years old and would live another 40 years and that there were 330 million people in the US in 2020. So that would imply the population at the beginning of the covid epidemic had 13,200,000,000 more years to live.
The highest estimate I’ve seen for how many Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs discount years spent in comas, dementia, or horrifying pain, although not by all that much) the average covid fatality cost is 12.4 years. For 1.2 million fatalities, that would be 14.9 million years of life lost.
So, that would be 0.12% percent of U.S. lifespans lost due to covid.
"That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%."
Humanity doesn't care about losing 0.1% of its total population. America doesn't care about losing 0.001% of its population when not taking into account the fear, anger, and outsider threat of 9/11.
Using those examples to contrast with COVID deaths is apples and oranges, and you can argue it shouldn't be, but the argument does not matter because it will not connect with the neurotypicals of the species unless you hope to shape culture to enforce your view. And that what I think you hope, but then the conversation needs to be framed entirely differently.
What we should do is obviously to be far more careful about doing things that may plausibly cause a disaster such a a pandemic, and not let groups of researchers put us all at risk.
I think this analysis is wrong, and the main reason is that to a first approximation, interventions had no effect on how many people would get Covid in the long run. Everyone got it anyway, lock downs / masks just delayed it, but at a significant price (in life-years in lock-down!).
China had the harshest lockdown, and I think that was correspondingly the worst reaction a government could have.
For most of the world, where people are poorer and have more vulnerable populations, lockdown means a loss of income and further stress, for very little saving of life. They copied elite countries and enforced it in a top-down way on their populations, causing massive negative utility.
The asterisk is that locking down until the vaccine was in production *did* save lives in Western countries. However, if you remember, before the vaccine was proven, people argued for the lockdown anyway without using the vaccine argument. Government, schools, and many businesses were prepared to lock down indefinitely without even the strategy to wait for vaccines. We narrowly avoided the extended lockdowns of China. Authoritarianism is bad man, stop encouraging it.
It's simultaneously true that Covid was a huge disaster and loss of life, and that government interventions were net-negative basically everywhere, so the best action was no action.
Elites make the same mistakes over and over, where they know what is best for other people and force them to do stuff. And they're wrong. And anyone justifying them is very dangerous. Because it was dangerous: lockdowns caused needless suffering worldwide — ask an enlightened AI in a few years what would have been better, our world, or a world of zero lockdowns.
Remember: decentralized lockdowns *did* happen as Covid awareness began spreading — and those were good as we learned more about the illness in the early days. But all the non-decentralized actions turned out to be net-negative, once again. Closing public parks? No outside dining in CA? Closing schools? Even the authoritarian rules about who's allowed to test for Covid, who can volunteer for challenge trials (no one in the US), what level of evidence is required to allow the public to take the vaccines. No government interventions are helpful; just let people live!
It's not that freedom is a principle we should strive for -- maybe that's true. It's that in pure utilitarian terms, freedom wins again and again. Stop facilitating the communists. Thanks.
How do you think people coped after the Black Death, with 40% of the population dead? I bet they also tried hard to forget the deaths and to get as much normality back into their lives as possible. I see that as part of human resilience: it may not be dreadfully sensitive but it keeps us going.
The true tragedy of lockdowns and over-optimistic pushing of the vaccine will be seen when the next pandemic comes along. It might be a real Captain Trips, and when governments and public health advisors ask for restrictions (quite rightly until the severity is known), most people will ignore them assuming it is government over-reach again. When most of us were subsistence peasants, a 40% loss of population could be survived by the remainder. But since most of us have no idea how to grow food these days, I don't see us managing so well next time.
I don't think it will happen like that. We as a society implement better and better policies based on data and evidence with every iterration.
For example, economy. We used to do strange things like tariffs. Trump discounting, we now better know which policies could be good and which could be bad. The reason why we recovered so quickly from covid pandemic was exactly because economists managed to implements the correct policies.
I am sure, lockdowns will not be introduced again unnecessarily. Lay people may think what they think but experts will have analysed this all and reached the right conclusions. It is just that people don't want to admit mistakes. But behind closed doors right decisions will be made next time.
I admire your optimism. When you say "I am sure, lockdowns will not be introduced again unnecessarily" the weasel word is "unnecessarily." We won't know if they are necessary until the organism shows how deadly it is, and once it has, it is too late to contain it by lockdown. Ideally, we would have a population that agrees to go into lockdown at the start of things, and the lockdown would be lifted as soon as it became plain that it was doing more harm than good (or continued if the disease has a high mortality and high infectivity, until either the threat is over, or we realise it is to late to contain it and there is no further point in lockdowns). I don't think the general populace will agree to a lockdown after the last experience, nor will they accept a vaccine after the same. All this could have been prevented if our masters had been more forthcoming with information as they had it, especially with respect to vaccination, which was sold as being protective against infection and transmission, long after it was clear it simply reduced severity. "Fool me once..." etc makes sense as a defense against being misled, but backfires when you are actually being told the truth the second time.
Couldn’t get through this sanctimonious tripe. Where did all the flu deaths go? Where’s the acknowledgement that excess deaths spiked after the vax roll out? Highly selective emotional arguments are not worth my time. My guess is the author bought into the feel good collectivist bullshit and is nostalgic for the days when we more or less trusted our leadership class. But I don’t know because fuck this. Yes, old people die and it could have been me. But don’t pretend you give a shit when there are (how many) young people with myocarditis from a shot they manifestly didn’t need. FFS.
Regarding your apparent hypocrisy, it isn't really. It would only be hypocritical if the things you were against would actually have been effective at saving those lives, and I believe stricter policies would have saved an insignificant number of lives. I doubt the number would have been zero, which some may claim would have made stricter policies worth it. I do not believe the number would have changed from 1.2 million, as even that isn't an exact number of deaths.
> First, dead people can’t complain about their own deaths, so there are no sympathetic victims writing their sob stories for everyone to see.
I just today got a status update from a youtuber who hasn't put out any content in >2 years because of ME/CFS induced by long covid (Physics Girl), so there are sympathetic victims of this pandemic. And my understanding is that the cause is completely unknown and may as well be random, so there's no sense of superiority, just luck that you weren't the person suffering from this.
We still do not have any well-controlled, long-term RCT trials on mRNA vaccines although it would have been very easy to perform such trials given the vast amounts of money spent during this period on other things such as producing them for and forcing them on healthy people in their college years. A good RCT would have shown that they were safe and effective, or not. Since no such trial was performed, it is reasonable to assume that either they were not safe, or they were not effective, or both. In any event there is no reason to think that they were either absent blind acceptance of statistical legerdemain such as what was emitted by Imperial College.
It is not clear how many people died "from Covid" and how many from the knock-on effects of social hysteria, deep anger, isolation, etc. In any event if US rates had been like Sweden's, with its very mild measures, equivalent excess deaths would have been about 380,000, which is like having three really bad flu seasons in a row, plus say 50%.
So: I don't agree with this. Covid was not that serious. Really gigantic amounts of money and political capital were spent on this tragic waste. But I absolutely do not trust people who told healthy teenagers to use an untested and (for them) indisputably not life-saving medicine. I don't know why anyone else would, either.
Cancer kills over 600k Americans a year. Heart disease, well over 900k. How often do we think of those in terms of Vietnams or US Civil Wars? If we had mitigated COVID to the point where it was surpassed by cancer even in 2020… would we actually feel much differently about COVID? What the hell does it even mean to be an “excess death”? It breaks our brain for thinking about small numbers of deaths, but it’s also an outlier in how we treat large numbers of deaths.
You give it away even in your language, you say “during COVID”, not “by COVID”. We think of it as an event more than as a disease. It’s complicated.
An important reminder that responding to events has to be based on what you know at the time of the event — not what you know years after the event. It should also be borne in mind that many — very likely the vast majority — of the deaths of those under age 65 (or 70) were of lower income people deemed "indispensable" (suddenly, when we're not talking about pay) who were not locked down because they were taking care of sick people, driving trucks, etc.
And so the question isn't whether the lock-down was justified by the 1 million plus deaths but by how many would have died without the lockdown. The extension of "on-line" classes for school children may have been a bit of an over-reaction—but again the question would be not just how many students would have become seriously ill or died, but how many teachers would have become seriously ill, died, or simply left the profession if in-person education had been resumed too early,
In my view, two things can't be emphasized enough. First, we didn't know what we wanted to know in the early months (and that's more than just one or two) of the pandemic. We also knew that we didn't know what we didn't know we needed to know. And 100 years before COVID what we didn't know led to the world-wide influenza pandemic—and that is what we were trying to avoid.
Second, I won't let myself role of the White House in creating noise, information fog, and uncertainty. Instead of informing the public on what was happening, what we knew, what worked to prevent spread and didn't work to prevent spread, the news put on a form of reality-entertainment television in which truth and facts were the last thing that mattered in the he-said-they-said carnival on TV.
One quibble: while the number of deaths attributed to COVID is 50% greater than the number of deaths in the U.S. Civil War, the population of the U.S. in 2020 was 10 times (950%) greater than the population of the U.S. (including slaves) in 1860.
Thank you for writing, I enjoy the prompts for discussion this raises, as there has not been enough of a debrief about what transpired during this time period, in many ways. So much historical emotional trauma in people was revealed through the various ways they reacted during that time period, whether it was screaming at people to wear masks or get vaccines, or others screaming back at them and latching onto any perceived 'evidence' or narrative which seemingly substantiated their predetermined (often by political persuasion, ironically) opinion. It's interesting to note that most people formed VERY fixed stances on what was 'right' or 'wrong' in response to the extraordinarily complex worldwide situation, and how determined they were to convince and shame others for having contrary opinions. When honestly, NO ONE knew anything for sure, and still don't. Where is the compassion and love and respect for one another, for our neighbors, for our family members, for the ability to disagree with each other with the full awareness that our own tightly held opinions are as susceptibility to error and blind spots as anyone else's. Can we come together from this and recognize that we all went pretty much nuts for a few years, or more to the point, revealed the nuttiness that has been fomenting and hiding (barely) inside of each of us for decades, centuries, millennia even? I honestly think the story is much more about how did those of us who lived through it treat each other during that time, how are we still treating each other as a result of the rifts experienced, and how can we mend and repair those divides to come back together again as fellow human beings?
Secondly, I am constantly flabbergasted that 99.999% of the conversation seemed to be about a few particular subjects, such as:
-whether or not masks, social distancing, lockdowns, or vaccines were beneficial or harmful
-what the origin of the virus was to begin with
-who was distributing and distorting what narrative or information, and why
Now granted, those things carry some import, and the conversations were important to have. But the most important conversation of all was almost completely ignored!
Why were some of us, in certain countries, so much more susceptible to this virus than others? Why did this virus seem to ravage some countries and leave others untouched? And what do these questions reveal about our general state of health, well-being, and diet (both food-wise and culturally)?
What if the greatest gift of this time period was the opportunity to examine the correlation between our lifestyles and our susceptibility to a virus such as covid? My friend Eric Edmeades of Wildfit pointed out that in countries where obesity was below a certain point, covid barely registered, well below the impact of the flu. Any country above that line showed a dramatic increase in covid infection and mortality rates, not to mention far higher incidences of the comorbidities such as diabetes, heart disease, and many others, which have their own massive impact on longevity and well-being.
The fact is, and covid merely revealed this in stark detail, that we (in the US, and many other countries as well) are a sick society, we are a sick nation, we are sick and riddled with disease and dis-ease in our homes, our schools, our workplaces, and our communities. This began long before covid, and sadly is still continuing today, despite a massive warning about the consequences of our recklessness. So much of what we consume, on our plates, from our televisions, in our classrooms, in our hospitals, in our conversations, at bars and strip clubs and on porn websites and on social media, is draining our bodies of life and depriving us of the very nourishment we depend on for surviving AND thriving. No wonder millions of people died! A large swatch of humanity's immune systems and natural resiliency to disease are already highly compromised, and our mental health is in an even worse state. Covid didn't kill all those people, our toxic lifestyles and habits did.
Nature offered us a wake-up call, and to be honest, a fairly mild one considering how far we've strayed. Will we listen to it now, or kick the can down the road til the next time, which if we don't change anything may well ring far more loudly..
Lastly, a comment about charities. Yes, they very often are susceptible to either blatant corruption or utter incompetence. They often also make the situations they attempt to address worse that before. Does that mean that we should abandon all efforts to support others and each other? NO! Quite the opposite, in fact. We need each other far more than ever before, especially as a direct result of all the divisive, disconnecting decades of individualism we've been plodding vigilantly through.
What we also need to do, however, is learn HOW to help. If you're interested in diving deeper into this topic, I recommend starting with the books 'Toxic Charity' by Robert Lupton, and 'How Can I Help' by Ram Dass. And doing quite a fair bit of shadow work, to learn about our potential sneaky underlying motives and intentions for trying to "help" others. A statement I often ask myself, if I see another person in pain and I'm inclined to intervene, is "whose pain am I really seeking to relieve?" If it's mine, if I'm somehow uncomfortable with their emotional state, or if I want to see myself in a heroic, positive light, I want to be conscious of that and recognize that I might not be so helpful after all, coming from that hidden, self-serving intention. It all starts with self-awareness, and cleaning up our own house before we go running around trying to tidy up others' for them.
We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. If much of what passes for 'charity' is toxic, drain out the dirty water, wrap the precious baby in a towel, and hold it close to our hearts! We can truly turn our world around, our society around, our communities around, when we return to love, self-responsibility, self-awareness, true kindness, authenticity, vulnerability, empathy, compassion, and curiosity. It's not so much what we're doing that's causing us so much trouble, it's often the 'how' and the 'why' of it. When we begin to explore those layers inside of ourselves, some really meaningful treasure is revealed.
I remember reading at the start of the pandemic that the same phenomenon happened in the case of the Spanish flu. People don't remember or dwell on things that they don't want to. I think it's part of the very human process of adjusting to new circumstances. Some of the pushback against thinking a high number of people died comes from justified skepticism of government claims, but a lot of it is also rationalization of a desire not to think about the lives lost.
The problem is that we ended up well inside the tradeoff frontier of avoided COVID deaths and avoided lockdown harms. Arguments about where to be on that frontier are important ones to have, but the failure to roll out mass DIY testing (even with tests that were not accurate enough to be clinically suitable) as quickly as possible, the failure to push use of the AbCelera/Lilly antibody against the alpha variant, misallocation and delay in getting vaccine doses into as many at-risk people as possible, and other unforced errors meant more deaths for every unit of lockdown intensity.
A couple days late, but thank you for writing this. It often feels very dissonant to me that discussions around COVID--or American politics in general--just pointedly ignore this fact. I'm old enough to remember the *years* of mass hysteria resulting from 9/11. COVID killed 300 times as many people in the U.S. alone, and yet it seems like half the country is still mad about things people did trying to prevent it from being more. Nor do Americans arguing about COVID ever seem much inclined to look outside their borders to gauge if they did well or poorly. Simply mentioning and discussing the death toll in context is very unusual, so again, thank you.
You should make a post claiming that Trump's win in the 2024 election with an incumbent Democrat federal government proves the 2020 election couldn't have been stolen. Half your comments will say "2020 was the first election to not have signature verification," "Mail in ballots were harvested" and of course "2024 was just too big to rig." Hell, make a post mentioning the moon landing and you'll hear about how astronauts can't survive in space because of radiation from the Van Allen belts. This is the bulk of political discourse in the USA, 99% the fault of Republicans, and is why there will be no preparedness for the next pandemic. We're literally deprioritizing and firing people working on tracking the bird flu right now, and vitamin A toxicity reports are up because RFK Jr. is advertising it as a treatment for measles more than the measles vaccine.
The lesson for me is quite clear. Bad things can happen to your country, the way government handles it will never please everyone, some decisions will turn out to be suboptimal, some optimal policies will still displease many people. Overall, everyone should be a bit more tolerant to what happens in a crisis, which is, no one has perfect answers, and people should pull together rather than single out and dwell on their differences. Then again I am writing this from Singapore where none of this sounds as controversial as it does in the US.
My comment uploaded before I was finished with it. The number of deaths blamed on Covid could be mitigated if we take into consideration that Covid was only treated after it became life-threatening. If doctors had been allowed to treat at the onset of the disease, there might’ve been many fewer deaths. My brother was turned away from the hospital 10 days before he almost died from Covid. They knew he had Covid, but they were not allowed to treat him unless he qualified clinically. I blame the catastrophic number of Covid deaths squarely on the health officials who demonized treatments that many prominent doctors found effective.
I've seen the numbers acknowledged in two (contradictory) ways. One side will say, "We did all this stuff and still lost >1 million people! See, it didn't work!" And the other side will say "Over 1 million died (and X number are still dying every month/year)! COVID is really serious, and we should take it more seriously!"
Agree that the more common thing is to ignore it and argue about smaller issues.
I think this is all a symptom of the larger psychological issue with COVID, which is the inability to face that it was a disaster and will continue to kill and seriously harm some people -- but not to the extent that it's reasonable to take drastic measures with the tools available to us.
There's the pseudo-acceptance of "getting over it" and saying it wasn't even that big of a deal at the time, and certainly no one should care about it now (denial).
And there's the pseudo-acceptance of caring about it too much, continuing to mask/isolate and perhaps even demand that others do so, resisting reasonable changes like lifting vaccine recommendations for healthy young people, all in an attempt to control it (essentially, bargaining).
The fact is that COVID caused a lot of pain and is here to stay, it's going to lower average lifespans (by some fairly small amount), it's going to cause long-term disability for some additional people (although not nearly as many as caught it in the early pandemic), and there's not much we can reasonably do except wait/hope for better medical advancements.
You're wrong, with the idea that "we'd have proposed stronger measures" if the death toll was supposed to be higher. Hell, I don't think you can even give a single example of a stronger measure that we could actually afford to do.
Sweden was unable to do a lockdown, because they have so many single mothers. You send all the kids home, and suddenly you don't have a workforce, you have mommies that are dealing with children.
When COVID19 started hitting the airwaves (through the undercurrents of "we got some weird pneumonia showing up in a lotta morgues"), the thought was that we'd lose 20 million Americans.
The American Government has plans to invade Canada (and every other country in the world) -- they absolutely did have plans for 20 million dead Americans. They wrote plans for orphanages to house the suicidal children who brought covid19 home and murdered their parents. (oops! Looks like I know a stronger measure that we -didn't do- because it was unnecessary).
To put a finer point on it: "Ventilate everyone" was a device to save doctors lives, one that was suggested during the timeperiod when 20 million was very much still on the table (and we could expect that doctors would be hit hard, and we'd still need doctors afterwards). So, too, was sending Covid19 patients to nursing homes, while still definitely spreading covid19 -- this is giving up on nursing homes as a viable storage of living people, and instead letting everyone die, because we need the nurses for other people. Cuomo's failure was in sticking to a plan designed for twenty times the death toll we got.
I disagree. the human intuition doesn't work in numbers. it doesn't understand numbers. it work in "how many people i know died?" and "how large the chance i will die, or someone i know will die?". so if the chance is very small, and the relevant group is very large, big scary-sounding numbers are just... fine.
if we was galactic empire with trillion stars, seasonal flu would have killed more people then there are on Earth today. but i don't think it's tragedy, and don't think most people would be wring not thinking it's tragedy.
it's your intuition that big numbers should be scary and important that's wrong, and incoherent. if you drop it, everything else is working just fine.
the "number of people died" is just not tracking what people really value. it's Goodheart Law yet again.
I don't quite get the hedonic, lockdown was the best time I've ever had.
I would say you're in the extreme minority here then. I can't think of a single person I know who preferred their life under the lockdowns.
I don't know if I would say I preferred my life under lockdowns overall - I'm very social - but I did get a big and persistent boost from how much it encouraged the availability of remote work.
Oh I've benefited a lot from this too. But I prefer my post-lockdown remote work life to my lockdown remote work life by a mile.
Once a company realizes everyone remote is a just a face on a screen, you now have to compete with everyone in the world who is also a face on a screen.
Yeah, this is a fair concern - it definitely makes it weirder to apply for jobs when there's a much larger pool of both positions and applicants.
For me it's not a terrible issue because I'm already well into my career and have worked at some big-name places.
I'm also probably gonna ride this all out to retirement but I do believe that standardizing remote work is doom for the prospects of the next generation. I learned so much from physical proximity to coworkers in my early career, and when applying for jobs it wasn't spamming thousands of resumes across the country to jobs getting tens of thousands of applications from all over the country.
I have South American coworkers. Their English varies but is often just as good as a native. Their technical skills are excellent. "Just be better" is hard when I cost 2x to 3x what they do. I've got seniority and experience and a track record so I'm not in incredible danger. And even a halving of my salary today would just mean I have to work all the way to Social Security. So not that terrible for me, but for all the others ...?
I won't be so confident as to say you're definitely wrong, but I have some doubts:
1. I've worked some places that actively studied remote work and they've generally found it works about as well as in-person work on various dimensions. This includes "team cohesion" IF you put in the effort to get people together regularly - you just need to deliberately create opportunities in a way you wouldn't in-person. I expect people will get better that this over time to some degree.
2. Two of my three highest-trust teams (out of ~10-12 overall) were/are remote teams. (The third, in-person one also had the advantage of having three people who lived in the same house.)
3. Re: outsourcing, as much as people like to think otherwise, people in the US *are* very competitive. There's a reason US devs pull crazy salaries when you COULD just hire people in other countries for a fraction of the cost. Now, I agree that there are really talented people all over - but a lot of them are already getting sucked into US tech companies anyway. There's not enough people like that in South America to staff Google and Microsoft and so forth, and the really competitive ones will probably tend to move to the US over time anyway.
> I'm also probably gonna ride this all out to retirement but I do believe that standardizing remote work is doom for the prospects of the next generation.
Just the opposite! Thanks to remote work more of the new generation has a chance to actually get a good job, instead of just the ones who happen to be born in the right place to get the right passport.
How can you even think this is bad?
And that's a good thing!
I am a customer and shareholder of many more companies than I am an employee of. I want them to be efficient.
those of us who do jobs that needed in-person presence were laid off for months. my own job never recovered: im still here but we are still pretty much the same staff and hours we were after the lockdown ended and we tentatively opened.
i literally had insomnia from
all the stress that luckily i resolved. i nearly lost my job permanently because the person above me decided not to come back-had they, id not be here.
non-white collar professionals suffered a lot.
For sure, not trying to suggest that they/you didn't and I would 100% have vastly preferred that none of this ever happened. "This worked out for me personally" is not an endorsement of anything. (The 2008 financial crisis worked out great for me, too - bought a really cheap house in 2012. Still terrible!)
Hope things continue to improve for you.
thanks. it probably wont. i have two co workers out of four who are nearing 65, and no transition plans seem in place leading me to believe they plan to shut the place down when the lease is up in a few years.
they generally leave us alone now, no attempts to change inefficient stopgaps we relied on after barely surviving a forced lease cancel pre-covid. no refresh for an aging location.
the remote work thing annoys me because its great for some, but would have killed so many support jobs and many could never do it at all.
and the fact "essential workers" were risking reinfection grates me.
That's rough, yeah. What line of work are you in, if you don't mind me asking?
There might be a higher proportion of introverted types who were fine with it here than in the population at large.
Good point
I used the time during lockdown to lose a shitload of weight. I lost something on the order of 30lbs, enough that coworkers were surprised when they saw me again.
I also lost some weight during that time, probably due to the ability to stick to routines better because there were fewer interruptions. The time itself was quite memorable for me (COVID and all), because my stainless steel pasta strainer (or rather general-purpose colander) broke, and it was a really beautiful one I got at a small shop in Italy. It took me weeks to find something appropriate for a replacement, and it behooved me to do so quickly, which caused a fair amount of stress, wherefore I am not fond of thinking about this time again, at least in an emotional manner. My lesson of this time is to reduce unnecessary interruptions for healthy routines and to set aside some time to have backup plans for the replacement of household utilities.
I have to ask - how did you manage to break a colander? Did you drop it and the handle broke off? I ask because I've always had cheap metal colanders which I've dropped on the floor more times than I can count, and they survived just fine.
Yeah. I most certainly did not. The most positive testimonials I've heard from people I know are about certain things in their lives going better during *but not because of* the lockdowns, or some particular thing going better because of the lockdowns ("I was able to focus more on my research" or "my wife and I grew closer because of the isolation") but not necessarily amounting to a net beneficial effect of the lockdowns.
I am another datapoint here. I had a commute of 2+ hours each way, and the pandemic gave me a year of not needing to do that; which made it crystal clear just how much of my life was being sapped away and how little my job actually relied on me physically being in the office, and when the call to start commuting again came resulted in me reshaping my life accordingly instead to keep the win.
Why did you put up with such a commute from hell in the first place?
It's effectively a 50% reduction in hourly pay (assuming you work around 8-ish hours).
I didn't mind parts of it (I'm pretty introverted) and some good things came of it (remote work, schedule flexibility). But to your point I also remember really bad depression during the winter months in particular caused mostly by the social isolation and lack of stimulation outside of work/TV/video games that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Though I suppose I also discovered ACX around then so all in all kind of a wash.
I know a few people; some predictors of enjoying lockdown off the top of my head:
1) They lived in a big, pleasant house with beautiful accessible nature;
2) They had a positive switch to remote work (or were just able to take a few months off work - I had one friend who basically had a paid 3 month holiday);
3) They previously had anxiety issues related to other people, or were just incredibly introverted; (probably the biggest predictor, actually)
4) They were very germ-phobic, and felt far more comfortable under lockdown than when they had to get into contact with people;
5) They were happy to get the chance to spend more time with immediate family (and didn't live with annoying/abusive family members)
1 is actually the exact opposite for me, one of the best parts is that I was able to go months without ever stepping outside, nature is gross and smelly.
The other four points are, I concede, although I hold a rather extreme position with things that are at least tangentially related to 4
"(and didn't live with annoying/abusive family members)"
Yea verily; my lockdown was spent trying to keep a one-year old (so annoying AND abusive) from realizing her mother was upstairs the whole time
I got very, very lucky in terms of timing. When Covid hit, I had recently accepted a much worse commute (which I did three days a week with two WFH days) in return for moving to another town where I could afford a much larger house (4 bedrooms, ~1500 square feet -> 6 bedrooms, ~3200 square feet) with a larger yard and a swimming pool, in a nicer and quieter community. Going full-remote (which stuck after covid) was a pure win for me, and being cooped up at home went much, much smoother than it would have at our old house.
Even so, it was stressful and pretty much killed what little of my social life had survived the demands of new parenthood. We also lost childcare for a couple of months because our daughter's preschool got shut down as part of the lockdowns.
Haha, Americans have big houses. I was in a <500 sq feet apartment with my wife and a housemate who liked to throw raves every week, and I felt like one of the luckiest people in our circles.
I think the other piece of this is that definitions of "lockdowns" varied a lot: what they entailed, how much they were followed (I'm not aware of anywhere in North America that did much enforcement), etc. For Canada and the US there really wasn't actually that much locking down- businesses were mostly still open through most of the pandemic (sometimes with reduced capacity/increased IPAC measures), international travel got cheaper and less crowded (thus more desirable), and as mentioned elsewhere remote work increased in prevalence.
I know a lot of people who actually increased the amount they were going out, travelling, etc. during the "lockdowns". I was one of the more Covid conscious people in my life; and I barely modified my day-to-day activities at all- a few larger events got cancelled during major waves and I didn't do some international travel that I otherwise would have; but otherwise I just wore a mask more and social activities more often involved outdoor activities and patios.
This is the biggest part of it I expect, at least for the people that were not dealing with a job loss or worrying about a job loss. We had a few weeks of actual lockdown, but between the data showing who was actually dying in Italy becoming available, and it also being clear that we weren't really going to avoid getting COVID, we did not have to stick to anything for long.
So we had two or maybe three weeks where we actually were negatively impacting our lives for no purpose, but even that was a chance to basically focus on our immediate family, which included young kids. Lots of outside time and more attention than when we both were at work. Cooked great meals.
Then after that it was a good while where the government and some organizations kept going through the motions, but all the individuals pretty much knew it was a farce and everybody got to enjoy some less hectic time without so many scheduled activities but lots of outdoor time and laid back social activities.
No, it wasn't a farce. The data indicates that lockdowns did reduce transmission, and thus reduced hospitalizations and deaths — at leat during the first phase of the pandemic.
It's worth setting the record straight because a whole bunch of righwing thinktanks have been diligently trying to obscure the record. I posted this in an earlier thread, but I've rewritten it a bit...
> Being a data-driven person, at the outset of the pandemic, I started charting cases and deaths in nine counties of the SF Bay Area (where I live), the Seattle area, and NY City. Dr. Sara Cody of Santa Clara County persuaded the health officers of the nine counties in the SF Bay Area to push for work-from-home policies, restrictions on public venues, masking, and social distancing.
> Likewise, the public health officers in the Seattle area urged the same NPI programs. These were recommended the last week of February 2020. My employer and most of the other tech companies in the Bay Area had workers work from home. Mayor London Breed of San Francisco announced a shelter-in-place policy on March 16th, but the freeways and cities of the Bay Area were already ghost towns by the first week of March.
AFAICT, Cody used the guidelines taken from the ones published by the National Health Commission of China. For social distancing, Cody translated meters into feet. Having some facility with Chinese I went over to check them out when my local health authorities imposed the lockdowns.
> OTOH, Mayor de Blasio of NY City followed the initial CDC and WHO guidance, which was wash your hands frequently and go about your business normally. From March through April, NYC's cases and deaths climbed quickly. In NYC. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Refrigerator morgues were trucked in, and the dead were carted off to mass burials.
> While in SF Bay Area and Seattle, cases and deaths climbed at a much slower rate. Emergency rooms and critical care facilities were stressed, but we didn't require refrigerator morgues and mass burials. Gavin Newsom was persuaded a couple of weeks into March to apply Sara Cody's NPI recommendations to all of California. By that time, cases and deaths in LA were starting to climb, and compared to SF, their healthcare system was overwhelmed. A few days later, Governor Cuomo of NY ordered lockdowns statewide, including NYC (over de Blasio's objections). Too bad I can't post the graph I created in this substack comments. The difference between Seattle and SF and NY City was pretty stark.
The data shows that counties that enforced stricter NPIs fared better than those that didn't. Of course, when Omicron emerged in December 2021, it was more infectious than any of the previous strains. NPIs were being loosened, and people were being vaccinated. Post Omicron the death toll became more evenly distributed (per capita) across the country.
Here's a study that supports this hypothesis...
IS THE CURE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE? COUNTY-LEVEL EVIDENCE FROM THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN THE UNITED STATES, by Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes et al
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27759/w27759.pdf
"Our estimates suggest that advancing the date of NPI adoption by one day lowers the COVID-19 death rate by 2.4 percent. This finding proves robust to alternative measures of NPI adoption speed, model specifications that control for testing and mobility, and across various samples: national, restricted to the Northeast region, excluding New York, and excluding the Northeast region. We also find that the adoption speed of NPIs is associated with lower infections, as well as lower non-COVID mortality, suggesting that these measures slowed contagion and the pace at which the healthcare system might have been overburdened by the pandemic. Finally, NPI adoption speed appears to have been less relevant in Republican counties, suggesting that political ideology might have compromised their efficiency."
And red states that valued personal freedom over public health fared worse than blue states...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2807617
So I don't say this to imply the "lockdowns" were useless/signaling/theatre; or that they weren't necessary. Just that despite a vocal minority, they were a relatively light touch, that had very limited impact on most people's daily lives. I think those small restrictions- wearing masks, lower capacity venues, more stuff outdoors- probably did help on the margins.
But the part of my life that got much worse from Covid was work; since I was working in-person, in hospitals. So I was also seeing firsthand exactly how bad the pandemic was, in a way that was not being captured by the media/zeitgeist/superficial data. A lot of people- including young people- got really sick and would have died without heroic levels of effort and suffering from healthcare workers- both providers and people working behind the scenes to do things like coordinating helicopter flights to transport critically ill kids to other cities when PICUs filled up. Stricter lockdowns likely would have been a better approach.
But the reason people didn't take a big hedonic hit from North American "lockdowns" is because North America didn't really lockdown.
Oh, I agree North America mostly didn't lock down. But it was very much location specific. "We" really did arrest people for going to the beach or skate parks in some places, even if those places had exceptions for politically favored activities, they were still pretty restricted in a lot of ways.
Even in places with lax enforcement, lots of people did more or less voluntarily tank their quality of life. Hell, you see it even after any semblance of lockdown ended. It's really depressing to see people on the beach, and not crowded beaches, wearing cloth masks. Lots of neurotic people were apparently pushed to a point of no return, or at least no return without some effective intervention.
As far as locking down being good for the healthcare system, that probably would have been possible for better managed lockdowns. The only time the area I lived in was effectively locked down the hospitals were empty. The hospitals all got crushed financially because the lucrative "optional" treatments were prohibited while they were empty, and all of the public patience for lockdowns was ended when it really would have been helpful to reduce transmission. I would say our local hospital systems are just now recovering financially, but people are probably still receiving worse care because they lost so many employees they couldn't afford to pay. They mostly kept nursing staff, but they are still having issues with coordination because anybody that could change fields did when they were getting hit with 20% inflation while their wages weren't going up and benefits were being cut.
" Just that despite a vocal minority, they were a relatively light touch, that had very limited impact on most people's daily lives. "
I hope you will take the opportunity to review the rest of this thread, including the experiences of people who lived in different places and under different circumstances than you, and come to an understanding that "relatively light touch" and "limited impact" are things that you should *not* toss around as broad unsubstantiated assertions.
I will be honest that reviewing the thread /mostly/ has the opposite effect. There are a lot of commenters doing a very poor job making the case that "lockdowns" were extremely restrictive or damaging; to the point where I have to be careful not to let it bias me into believing that there aren't also cases where Covid restrictions caused harm in and of themselves.
And certainly I can acknowledge that there are subgroups that had larger quality of life reductions from Covid restrictions... though these restrictions may not have been "lockdowns" and may not have been government imposed nor functionally avoidable. Most notably elderly people in congregate living settings; like retirement homes and long term care homes (SNFs in American parlance) who had major restrictions on family visiting, social activities, etc. (Though this group was also the most at risk of Covid death which does complicate things).
PSE students certainly had to deal with institutional policies that led to a reduction in officially sanctioned large gathering social activities; which could be considered irreplaceable life experiences (many people view their time in college as the best time of their life, which should be given some weight). While many prisoners were released during the early days of the pandemic (arguably the most damaging affirmative Covid policy depending on your views of how much this contributed to increases in crime), but the prisoners who were not released spent more of their sentences in lockdown.
I could have put more caveats in the quoted post besides just "most"; but I already have a tendency to make posts on this subject too long as it is.
The resulting inflation (and the other policies), bad enough on its own, gave Trump another term. I still can't buy a house because of the interest rates and the debt incurred hasn't exactly been paid back. We are still paying for covid policies and we probably haven't even seen the worst of it. It's just baked in to life now so nobody blames the COVID response.
There is a difference between "inflation/economic harms caused by Covid-19" and "inflation/economic harms caused by Covid-19 restrictions". Like ignoring that many of the economic impacts came from supply chain disruptions things happening in Asian manufacturing hubs (which unlike North America, DID often have lockdowns), there would still be economic impacts domestically from a pandemic that the government just didn't respond to? Like large waves of illness still cause disruption if people get sick, and individuals would change their behaviour in response to a pandemic even without government mandate (like what we saw in Sweden, where people limited their mobility more than "locked down" Americans).
I could just as easily argue that the economic damage came mostly from overly-Covid skeptical policy approaches that prolonged the pandemic.
Do you believe deliberately causing illness through Public Health Policies is a relatively small thing? Surgical or cotton masks cause a form of brown lung, when worn for extended periods of time. I do not feel like this is a "relatively small thing" -- it erodes trust in our public institutions, and for what, really? It's not like "masks" do a damn thing to stop an airborne illness (yes, yes, the P100 respirators do, as do taping a plastic bag on your head, the latter of which will kill you.)
Like I said to above thread- "There are a lot of commenters doing a very poor job making the case that 'lockdowns' were extremely restrictive or damaging; to the point where I have to be careful not to let it bias me into believing that there aren't also cases where Covid restrictions caused harm in and of themselves."
An argument that surgical masks cause "a form of brown lung" would be a good example of that statement. But if you have a legitimate source talking about the scourge of brown lung among surgeons and dentists I'll happily read it.
I wouldn’t say I loved it, but it didn’t bother me as much as most people. A group of us in Yascha Mounk’ Persuasion community started doing twice monthly Zoom meetups to discuss salient political and cultural issues. Five years later and we still do it. I would *hate* to lose that group.
I think lockdown helped my quality of life as well overall.
At first, it was claustrophobic, but working from home was great! I never had to return to the office after the lockdowns. Commuting was such a waste of time, and I was definitely less efficient in the office with all the social distractions. My director was an anal-retentive micro-manager. He kept telling us how eager he was to get us working as a team back in the office. Bleh! Luckily, management didn't renew the lease on the office space where I worked, so he never got us back to the office.
Definitely getting away from the micro-management was a huge plus. My boss is a micro-manager, God bless her, and it really puts me under stress at times when literally every ten minutes it's "did you do the thing yet? is the thing done? are you doing the thing?" and of course I can't reply (out loud) "well I *would* be doing the thing if you weren't interrupting me every ten minutes".
(She's not a bad boss, just tends to be anxious and that shows up as micro-managing).
Best months of my life. Granted I escaped Los Angeles immediately and extricated myself from a lease. Bought an old adobe in Taos NM and fixed it up. Hunkered down and made bread and went hiking and fishing daily. Yea I was privileged to have a remote job but before the pandemic I couldn’t afford a house (I would want to live in) in the cities where I could secure work (and wanted to live). It was a game changer and my relationship and work life balance had never been better. No kids helped too.
I lived in a group house where I was able to get lots of social interaction with other people in the group house, and we could regularly schedule events because people weren't doing things outside of the house. I'm not sure I prefer it overall--conferences and so on happening again is nice--but it was pretty close.
I am a hermit practically and I still hated lockdowns. They were terrible and didn't save anyone.
I did. First, I'm less sociable than a rock, so "can't go out, can't travel, can't meet people, pubs and restaurants are shut" affected me not at all. Second, I got to work from home! No more getting up an hour earlier than I needed to be at work since that was how my travel schedule worked out, instead it was "roll out of bed about ten minutes before I need to officially clock on" (as it were).
I still miss that now I've had to go back to the office. It helped that the majority of my work is done via email, phone calls, and online, and that I usually work tucked away in a little out of the way office not interacting much with other colleagues anyway. So being at home versus being in the work building wasn't that vital a difference.
I enjoyed the lockdown. I started working 100% remotely. My children had remote school so we could spend more time together, sometimes we were going for a walk to woods etc during their school time - they could attend the remote school on a phone as well. I was biking around and generally had a good time.
I also had a great lockdown, but I don't say it very often.
I got into the best shape of my life (thanks to VR gaming), saved up lots of money, had a lovely time.
We're clearly far from typical in that regard though.
"I got into the best shape of my life (thanks to VR gaming)"
that's a strange statement coming from...[checks username] ah, nevermind.
Same here! It was also the best year for streaming VR so you could always hang out with people who shared the same interest. I felt like both my fitness and social life blossomed.
The thing is, you won't hear as much from the introverts who didn't mind the "lockdown" and social distancing that much.
I am the King Of All Introverts, and I couldn't work from home. Could not get anything done, other cats were constantly bugging me, getting into fights, stupid drama, stupid stuff.
I had to pad out to get anything done.
Perhaps that's because you didn't miss visiting your dying mother in the hospital because they weren't allowing visitors. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
As someone who this also happened to: I'm so sorry. :( It's been a while, and maybe this response is both trite and too late, but I hope you were able to find some emotional closure despite the situation.
Yeah, I lost my grandfather and an uncle in that manner.
Lockdown was still so amazing that net it was one the best times in my life.
It was pretty bad for me. I had constant earworms lasting up to 2 weeks each. Try having, like, Shattered by the Rolling Stones on a constant loop in your head followed by one particular part of Deacon Blues by Steely Dan, followed by....for months. It was awful.
At a tangent, my personal surefire cure for earworms is to find a catchy song that you like, and whenever you find yourself suffering an earworm, start humming the song you like to yourself. The new song commandeers the part of your brain that slips into the earworm. With a little practice, it just slips into the song you like instead.
(If -that- song becomes your new earworm due to familiarity, find yet another one, and so on. Eventually you can loop back to the first.)
You're a lucky one. I've tried this, and it turns out that annoying earworms can only be supplemented by other, equally annoying earworms. It's like biting your lip to distract from the pain of smashing your toe into a doorframe.
Are you sure that's the case for you? I know lots of catchy songs that I enjoy - once I start playing them in my head, it's easy to keep playing them. And like I said, they just crowd them out.
Are there songs you like? What are they? What happens when you hum them to yourself?
I'm a huge music fan. If I'm not listening to music at a given point there's about a 50% chance I'm playing music in my head. (Present head-track: You Can Call Me Al by Paul Simon).
So I'm the same as you until you get to "crowd them out". If I think of a catchy song I like, it'll get stuck in my head, UNLESS I'm trying to drown out an annoying earworm, in which case the sodding earworm wins. The only thing that works is substituting a different, slightly less annoying earworm. I'm not going to be able to replace it with Sultans of Swing or All Along the Watchtower, sadly.
Yeah, 2020 was one of the best years of my life. Got a new job, bought a house, started remote socializing with friends who live in other states... it was really fantastic
It really, really, depends on what your job/income source during lockdown was. Programmer working from home? Living your best life. Out of work because your business is shut down? You're spending the entire lockdown fretting about how long you can afford to stay home.
Also there's a tendency for us forget how bad our past negative experiences were, so that is probably skewing our memories a bit.
It's weird: on the one hand, I kind of agree, I had a decent experience of lockdown, and I certainly don't remember it bitterly or anything.
On the other hand, if I think a little harder I recall that I had to reschedule my wedding, and decisions about if and when to go through with it a year later were extremely stressful; and I still remember how grateful I was the first time I went to a movie again, and to a concert again.
I think part of it is, some of my distress wasn't really caused by "lockdown" in the sense of government dictates, but rather by the lockdown-like behaviour that many people exhibited regardless. Even when the wedding happened, the concern wasn't necessarily "will the government shut this down", it was "will people come?", or "will this kill my grandmother?"--so I attribute this to COVID itself, rather than to lockdown. There's no counterfactual in which lockdown didn't happen, but my decisions were any easier.
Perhaps I should feel bad about this, but the truth is my lockdown year was one of the best times in my life. My wife and I had a newborn, and there was no pressure to take him around to see relatives, drive to holidays, etc. We both worked remotely anyway, and had recently moved into a house with a nice backyard. There’s a pond near our house, heavily forested but with a slight path around it, and every day I’d strap the baby on my chest and take my three-year-old daughter, inevitably costumed as Wonder Woman, for two circuits around the pond—those are some of my fondest memories—and then we’d go home and read comic books in the backyard until it was time to hand the kids over to my wife and go to work. My friends would set up zooms (or the equivalent) to chat or play D&D, and the rest of the time I just hung out with my family, read and write. I had a pull list at the comic book store, and a credit card on file, and every week I’d go knock on the door and a hand would pass a bag of comics through the crack. My local library started a program where you could check out books on their website and a librarian would leave them on a table outside, rubberbanded with your name. I read 268 books in 202, including David Copperfield, À rebours, Le Morte D’Arthur, and Human, All Too Human. I had a blast.
I’m aware that circumstance conspired to give me a good time, and if I had been at a different period of life—when I lived alone in a studio apartment in the middle of a city, for example, with my only source of income a job that would be closed—lockdown would have been harder to bear. But I’ll take a good hand when it was dealt to me.
I'm with ABZB!
I had a great time for the first ~six months, then after that the whole 'death of the in-person social world' thing started to feel pretty terrible.
That was one of the best parts tbh
You remind me of the joke where, upon hearing that everyone has to stay at home avoid social contact, a computer nerd declares "Yes! I have prepared for this moment for years!"
Might be https://xkcd.com/2276/
A bona fide computer nerd friend of mine told me that exact thing.
I had a great lockdown, but mostly because I was in a place where I basically didn't have to be locked down at all, so it was just an unexpected vacation where the government also gives you money and I could work on some side projects.
I had a great time too with my housemates
My social life blossomed under lockdown. I loved that everyone was scheduling quality time together virtually, whereas in real life you kind of just had to run into people, and scheduling something was a big ask
It was both good and bad for me. Good parts: work from home, more time with my family. Bad parts: less meeting my friends, less babysitting from grandmothers.
All the debating, delegating to states, etc also meant that we’ve never had any official end to Covid. No parade, no nationwide lifting of lockdown, no real unifying way to acknowledge deaths or that the crisis has mostly ended. I think it would have been a smart move by Biden, some sort of national day or public ritual that acknowledges the toll and but also says, hey, we’re done, and looks forward.
Perhaps a Presidential speech in front of a large banner that reads "Mission Accomplished".
I wanna say that was his last act as President-Elect.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/biden-covid-victims-memorial/index.html
People forget *a lot* about COVID, willfully or otherwise, and a ton of it is publicly available information.
Yes, this. I watched it live and lit a candle at home. Thanks for posting it.
I feel like Biden actually did try to do that in early summer 2021 once vaccines become widely available, but then the variants started coming and people freaked out again, followed shortly after by the bad inflation. After that, there was enough uncertainty where I don't think anyone was (rightly) looking to do another "Mission Accomplished" event.
Right, Biden made a celebratory speech on July 4, 2021, but almost immediately the Delta variant showed up from India in Missouri and then covid got bad again.
Fortunately, Omnicron mutated to be somewhat less lethal while being highly contagious, so, in hindsight, the worst was over by early 2022.
Yeah, basically my interpretation as well. Though unfortunately the timing made any attempt at a "victory" essentially impossible after omicron, even if it was obviously substantially weaker than earlier strains (a virus has to survive after all, amiright?). It just led to a continuous decline in the acceptable level of risk for anybody on Team Covid Bad, and an insurmountable increase for Team Covid NotAProblem, while everyone else just wanted to have a reasonable threshold to accept so they could resume their normal lives (where people live with a significant risk of illness/death with regularity).
I’ve noticed a rather large number of people never wanted COVID to end. Some because they understandably loved WFH. Others were fearful of going back out (maybe still are). These voices were powerful in a variety of “the groups” and especially among teachers (who had a bit of trouble coming to terms with the fact that many of their members were going too far with keeping school remote in my opinion)
This is all to say many in the Democratic coalition did not and still don’t want to move on from COVID.
Isolated, introverted, anxious people got to see the rest of the world change to conform to their outlook. It felt good to them. Unsurprisingly, those sorts of people had an amplified voice on social media. They were dismayed to see the world return to pre-Covid norms, and fought tooth and nail until the rest of the world simply moved on.
Speaking for myself, I gave those ideas the benefit of the doubt for too long. I was “too nice” in my opinion. I didn’t realize how irrational some/many of the voices in my cohort were and they’d never “come around” and willingly agree to stop being shut down.
Teachers regularly bring home every sickness their students have, it's a valid concern for them above what most people deal with (daycares and hospitals being some of the few places where it's significantly worse).
For COVID specifically, it may have made more sense to allow older teachers, especially above age 60, to take an early retirement. That's what my kid's school did. Most of the teachers seemed fine to return, and of those that didn't, I think most were old enough it was a real concern.
Some kids have suboptimal hygiene in my opinion. They sometimes bring lice and everything else into the building (I remember the lice checks). That never wasn’t part of the job in my opinion.
All people’s feeling are valid, but concessions didn’t work. Instead the teachers slow walked authorities in my opinion.
It took a long time for Democratic elected officials to come around and force teachers back.
I suspect many and maybe even most teachers wanted reopening long before it happened, but they were bullied into silence by the vocal minority. A group of bullies who accused them of wanting people to die. Or worse accused them of being Republican.
I’ve never before seen teachers get so far out of step from public opinion as they did during Covid.
The fact that teachers lobbied hard (successfully) to get first in line for the vaccines… and then refused to go back to work anyway, was a major blow to what little faith I had left in teachers’ unions
Yes, that was not a good look for teachers as a whole. Maybe it wasn't the same individual teachers, but it was definitely the same unions and leadership.
Teachers’ union when it’s time to vote on new property taxes: “Children are our future, we do the most important job on earth!” Teachers’ unions during COVID: “Grocery clerks are essential workers, not us! No biggie if the kiddos take a couple years off”
I have personal acquaintances who still mask up to this day.
Do they mask up because of Covid, general disease-related reasons, or something else? Masks didn't really help against Covid except for signalling, and N95 masks used correctly, or equivalent.
I still see people using cloth masks today, and think, "that's probably not effective against what you think you're protecting yourself from" and stay silent, for whatever comfort they derive from it is not mine to attempt to remove.
I often don't have an appropriate moment to ask, so I just act like they're legitimately immuno-compromised and try to behave naturally otherwise.
Trouble is, it's a lot of people, more than this would explain, especially when they're doing things like attending parties or talking like they aren't sick.
Japan has been traumatized, too. This is causing brown lung in formerly healthy individuals (I believe moronic doctors are labeling it "long covid" because everything is labeled long covid -- we have postviral syndrome, it existed long before covid, and I'm steamed that nobody, nobody wanted to use the preexisting term).
It's a lost cause, telling these people that they are hurting themselves. We are deliberately hurting our service workers, with demands that they continue to wear masks, when not creating droplet contamination. (Note: masks in that case are more or less "sneeze here and get a new one" devices).
FWIW I think this varied greatly by location and community. I think more lefty social and professional groups (like teachers) suffered from this more. Someone in my network actually had a kid who needed to start going to school during COVID but the kid's parents had gotten so scared about going back into society that they needed encouragement and help from other parents to send the kid to school. At first the parents were so scared to go outside their house that they needed friends to come and walk with them (socially distanced and masked) to send the kid to school.
I have a friend who completely stopped socializing outside. They vaguely cite the ethical impacts of potentially spreading disease in larger group chats but in smaller group chats they've said simply that their social anxiety has become so bad that they have a hard time coming to terms with the idea of ever going outside again.
African-Americans got hammered hard by covid in the first half of 2020. Covid is spread mostly by people talking face to face indoors, and blacks tend to work in service jobs and they tend to enjoy socializing during their off hours. Over the course of 2020, they made an impressive effort to reduce their vulnerability to covid because of the high number of black deaths in the first wave. One aspect of this effort was that black parents became staunch supporters on average of remote schooling and resisted efforts to reopen schools.
All this sound not unreasonable to me, even if the consequences were on the whole unfortunate.
Hahaha. No, no they didn't. 2020 featured some rather dramatic black street parties in NYC, right at the same time that the cops were pulling Jews off the corner for having a wedding.
(AfricanAmericans did get hammered hard by covid19, it's a blood disease, and folks with sickle cell genes -- among other issues AA have with blood... tend to have issues with anything causing your red blood cells to not work right)
Except that COVID isn't done? It's still out there causing long-lasting illness to tons and tons of people?
Just like influenza, and all the variants of the common cold. They ain't harmless, either, but people seldom lose sleep over them.
Covid is now endemic.
Your vaccine isn't done, either. 50/50 chance you're still shedding spike protein, which is pathogenic. Seriously, go search pubmed.
What? Biden officially ended the COVID national emergency on 4/10/23. The media just refused to publicize it, just like everything else he did https://www.npr.org/2023/04/11/1169191865/biden-ends-covid-national-emergency
I saw it on the news. I talked about it with a lot of people. The modal reaction was "wait, it was still an emergency?" People were done caring about Covid by April 2023, right or wrong.
I'm pretty sure they publicized Biden's rather disasterous reprioritization of military matters. You know, the withdrawal from Afghanistan?
(Yes, yes, I know, you'd rather blame Dick Cheney's protegee for this, rather than Joe Biden).
I think Biden wasn't in a good position to do this because of negative polarization. Then again, an Official End to the Pandemic in blue America while Red America says there was never a pandemic in the first place isn't the worst outcome I guess.
When you wind up murdering an entire population of minks, and then creating zombie minks, it's a freaking pandemic. It may not be a very dangerous pandemic (this one wasn't, believe it or not)...
I got a strain of Covid 6 months ago, lost my ability to taste sweet and have not recovered it so far.
It's hard to declare it 'over' when strains are still around, less deadly but still causing major damage.
Not sure what it's like elsewhere but here in the Philippines there's still lots of signs about wearing a face mask still in windows and posted around the place.
No one even notices them anymore, certainly no enforcement, except in hospitals.
To me, what is interesting is how COVID and the wildly shifting narratives (official and otherwise) surrounding it did much to destroy expert credibility.
Wasn't that long ago, when anti-vaxxers were strictly Nut Fringe. Now, they are everywhere.
You thinking of masks and lab leak, or something else? I hear this often, but I'm having trouble thinking of examples - the experts stood pretty firm on things like vaccines, lockdowns, etc.
Lab leak is one example, until it became politically convenient to blame China, even the idea of a COVID vaccine (sponsored by Trump) was questioned at first by democrats.
Lockdowns are another interesting example. Necessary, until the George Floyd protests, when suddenly they were not. The Canadian Trucker protests were another - the Canadian authorities did Whatever It Took to shut those protests down, then lockdowns were quietly dropped shortly thereafter.
UK's Partygate is my favorite example.
I was thinking that doesn't have anything to do with expert credibility, but I suppose some people do consider politicians to be experts.
Well, politicians sure love to promote experts. Whenever it's convenient to them.
Yeah, agreed. This was a political scandal, about politicians being hypocrites, a recognizable problem as old as human society, and which was widely denounced and resulted (at least indirectly) in the downfall of Boris Johnson. (At least that's my vague understanding of events -- I don't live in the UK, and I may be wrong.)
That's correct. It wasn't the immediate cause of his downfall, but it was the highest profile of the various scandals that caused his colleagues to turn on him eventually.
Wasn't just the UK, we had a mini Partygate scandal (several, in fact) here in Ireland ourselves, and of course in California it was Newsom and the French Laundry.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10476497/Ireland-hit-Covid-partygate-Minister-Foreign-Affairs-called-answer-questions.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oireachtas_Golf_Society_scandal
https://www.thejournal.ie/zappone-reaction-5515234-Aug2021/
What it had to do with experts was the politicians solemnly telling the rest of the country "all the experts agree you can't go visit your dying granny in hospital, don't be selfish", and then they were found blatantly ignoring all that Expert Advice themselves. It wasn't just hypocrisy, it was "so are you lying about the expert advice? and if you don't believe it, why should we?"
Reason had a decent article on a similar scandal for London Breed (mayor of San Francisco), which noted that she 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 [Reason's opinion] defended herself on the grounds that her lockdown orders were stupid and pointless.
( https://reason.com/2021/09/17/london-breed-san-francisco-mask-covid-hypocrisy/ )
Why would the mayor of San Francisco issue orders she never believed in?
The causality here doesn't run like:
1. Politicians receive expert advice and issue a matching pronouncement.
2. The public goes along with it because they trust the politicians.
It's the reverse:
1. The public demands a certain set of policies. No experts are involved in determining what those policies are.
2. Politicians attempt to supply the policies that voters demand. When those policies look outrageous, they muster some experts to provide a nominal justification.
If London Breed had stood on principle and refused to issue orders that didn't make any sense, that would have been a scandal too, likely more politically damaging to her than the scandal she actually had.
Surely by now, you know that Rules Are For The Little People.
How did Partygate discredit experts?
Surely “Boris Johnson says one thing, does another massively self-indulgent thing” is the least surprising news story in all of Christendom.
"The very people who tout experts don't follow their advice."
I mean this is a public benefit versus private benefit thing.
Many people will agree that littering is a bad thing and it would be a lot better if other people didn't litter, and yet litter. It doesn't mean that they don't honestly believe that littering is bad, it just means that they're jerks.
Especially since BoJo is not exactly a central example of "politician whose whole thing is following expertise".
"Lab leak is one example, even the idea of a COVID vaccine was question at first by democrats. "
I believe that the vaccine was questioned by Democratic *politicians* rather than by the medical establishment. Once Trump lost in November 2020 the vaccines were okay by those politicians.
Example from CNN:
"Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris said that President Donald Trump’s word alone on any potential coronavirus vaccine is not enough.
Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash in a clip released Saturday whether she would get a vaccine that was approved and distributed before the election, Harris replied, “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,' she continued in the clip from an exclusive interview airing Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union' at 9 a.m. ET. 'I will not take his word for it.'"
As if Trump, rather than Pfizer or Moderna or whoever would be making the call on safety and efficacy.
But I don't think any medical establishment people were taking this position.
You may well be correct, but the average frustrated citizen doesn't really see the difference between the "Trust The Science!" political party and the actual scientists.
I agree.
I think the experts *will* be blamed by the public for positions politicians took.
I also think it is important that WE not assign positions to health experts that they did not take. As a matter of common courtesy if nothing else :-)
When the experts break 95-5 for a particular political party...
Yeah, I think I /will/ be holding them accountable for their politicians, thankyouverymuch.
Yea, while agreeing with Mark R's overall point I dunno if that is actually the best example. In that specific slip Harris stuck pretty well to an obvious truth, that no sensible person should take Trump's word about any such topic.
Conveniently omitting the obvious counterpoint: that no sensible person should be taking Harris' word about any such topic either.
An awful lot of politicians on both sides of the aisle really needed to sit down and shut up, instead of trying to "lead", and did an awful lot of damage, even before the obvious public hypocrises occurred.
But it was an election year, so that was never on the table.
Kamala's response in the vice presidential debate was:
“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.”
So it's 100% clear that she is deferring to medical authorities, not to Trump's judgment.
Perhaps the whole thing was an irresponsible or pointless dig at Trump, based on a hypothetical situation that wouldn't happen.
But it's worth remembering that he did take hydroxychloroquine, when that was not recommended by other authorities.
That statement is disturbingly ambiguous as to what Kamala Harris would have done, or advocated others do, if *both* the medical authorities *and* Donald Trump say that we should take the vaccine.
> Whatever It Took to shut those protests down
I know this is beside your point, but I think that's kind of revisionist - they did everything other than actually arresting people: they made around 300 arrests, which is minuscule compared both to the amount of people there - there were over 1000 arrests at the 2010 G20 protests, for example. Arresting people is the usual thing you do when you want them to stop doing something. The public controversy was mostly about the lack of government response to them. (Honestly, I think the lack of arrests kind of did them a disservice - part of the point of protesting is proving you care enough about something to be fine with getting arrested. They didn't get to prove that.)
https://www.cato.org/blog/canadian-court-trudeaus-use-emergency-powers-crush-protests-was-illegal
IIRC, they tried arrests, but the cops and protesters wouldn't play along. They tried towing trucks, but the towing companies and protesters wouldn't play along.
Yeah. It's pretty damning that the cops didn't want to make arrests, even though they had plenty of reason to. But yeah, the federal government tried lots of things, they just didn't make arrests happen, despite that they wanted to.
They... kind of didn't have much reason to?
Non-violent political protests at the seat of government are typically not considered a reason for arrests in Canada, and for that matter neither are parking violations...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/
Oh, it is no secret that much of the rhetoric and policies surrounding COVID depended on one's attitude towards one Trump, Donald.
And once he was safely out of the White House, much of the sense of emergency subsided.
I think these are good examples of some specific triggers, but I have felt for a while like a lot of the breakdown was caused by a mix of fear of the disease and psychological pressure from lockdowns while people observed leaders/experts just kind of floundering during a crisis that hit closer to home than anything (in the US) since maybe 9/11. It demonstrated a lot of the issues people are talking more about now re state capacity (or lack thereof) that the expert class repeatedly attempted to influence public opinion through dictate, while there was obviously so much uncertainty that made it hard to do so. And it certainly didn't help when politicians broke their own rules, which obviously feels like a violation of the public's trust, not to mention how it all became so politicized more broadly.
"And it certainly didn't help when politicians broke their own rules, which obviously feels like a violation of the public's trust, not to mention how it all became so politicized more broadly."
As someone else put it - it also shows that the politicians didn't believe it themselves.
Canadian authorities took a light hand with the truckers. Canadians are a very law and rules-abiding bunch, and sympathy for groups occupying public spaces evaporates quickly. Most Canadians - especially residents of Ottawa - were frustrated with the authorities for not doing enough to break up the occupation sooner.
lab leak evidence that doesn't blame China? The closest sample, Laos Banal-52, was collected by the US military in 2017:
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/21/is-this-the-experiment-that-started-the-pandemic/
Racism is a bigger public health emergency than Covid19.
...
this was what Epidemiologists were saying.
One issue that came up with the vaccines (I think the first round, in early 2021) was whether or not they prevented passing COVID to someone else. They were initially touted as effective in preventing the spread of COVID, but within a few months the experts were conceding that their functionality was solely in making one's own case of COVID much milder. This was cited afterwards as an example of experts not being trustworthy, trying to sell us something under a promise they had to walk back later. (I suspect in reality, the experts were both sincere and correct in initially stating that the vaccines would prevent contagion, but soon afterwards new variants came out for which the vaccines didn't have this effect.)
but within a few months the experts were conceding that their functionality was solely in making one's own case of COVID much milder.
Where did they say that?
That's literally what they told me over the phone when I had to call in to report my COVID infection.
Are you suggesting that what some phone operator told you is a good representation of what experts believed?
Are you saying it's not? What sets up a phone line for reporting COVID and staffs it with people spreading lies? Even if that did happen, it would be on the heads of the people staffing the line!
They kinda painted themselves into a corner on that. My recollection is that the actual numbers presented BY Pfizer at launch were about reduction of severity and death. And presumably, the reduction in symptom severity should substantially reduce the chance of spreading the illness along the most common vectors. However, for various public messaging reasons, they didn't want the public connecting symptoms to spread, they wanted people thinking and acting as if proximity to anybody later discovered to have covid probably means you have it and will spread it asymptomatically just by being in the room with them so you better isolate yourself for 10 days just in case!
I think your recollection on the Pfizer numbers is in error -- that paper shouldn't be hard to look up, but as I recall due to the low death rate from covid (particularly in the cohort that would be likely to participate in a vaccine trial), the number of deaths (single digit, I think) in the sample population was far too small to use as an endpoint.
The efficacy numbers reported (90+%) were as pertains to "symptomatic covid-19-like illness" -- there was an assumption made that this would result in a corresponding decline in "likelihood of transmission"; when this turned out to be false, authorities leaned into the severity reduction piece, but this relied on observational studies as the initial trials weren't really powered to detect severity reduction either.
Yes. Many people will blame experts for changing their minds under circumstances where they should have.
To be fair, the experts were pretty dogmatic, not guarded in their pronouncements.
I was in Italy at the time. There the official narrative was that we should vaccinate to flatten the curve, by pushing the R0 down, so we could phase out the various restrictions on movement, mask mandates, etc. Then, as it became clear that this wasn’t working (or at least it wasn’t working enough), the blame was shifted to antivaxxers, and the vaccine was seen just as a way to mitigate the severity of the disease. The experts appeared to always side with whatever narrative the government was pushing, even when it was rapidly shifting. Ultimately the notion that science should inform policy got discredited. This kind of damage is hard to quantify but it feels substantial.
I lived in southern Missouri for most of COVID and vaccine hesitancy definitely made the Delta wave worse than it would have been. The Springfield hospitals were overwhelmed and they had to bring in hundreds of personnel from out of state. By contrast, during the initial wave a number of Springfield personnel went to assist in New York.
During that same period my local state rep was posting antivax crap on Facebook.
My point is that the vaccine was first promoted as a dependable way to curb transmission, promising sterilizing immunity much like the measles shot. When it became clear this wasn’t so, the official message shifted. Instead of shaming the unvaccinated for thwarting efforts to push R0 below 1, authorities began shaming them for supposedly risking hospital overload by contracting more severe illness. The pivot was smooth and applied to people of all ages who refused to vaccinate for any reason, even as AstraZeneca, initially approved nationwide, was pulled after a relatively young woman died from an adverse reaction.
"authorities began shaming them for supposedly risking hospital overload"
That's literally what happened! The Delta wave hit my area really hard. My area had a low vaccination rate. Ergo the hospitals were overwhelmed and a lot of people died. There is no "supposedly" about it.
During that same period, THREE antivax conservative radio hosts died from COVID in the course of a month.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trio-conservative-radio-hosts-died-covid-will-their-deaths-change-n1278258
Instead of attacking "experts," maybe you should attack radio hosts like that? They literally make money from lying.
Or perhaps you can attack my local state representative? He literally gets elected for lying.
Don't pretend this all happened in a vacuum. There were bad actors polluting the information space, some for profit, some for votes, and they absolutely should be shamed for it.
I am not in the business of publicly attacking individuals for their behavior, not at this stage in my life. There is plenty of naming and shaming going on at all times on social media, we don’t need more. What I am pointing at is a systemic problem. The official narrative changed repeatedly, as if the officials were working backwards from a policy decision to find a way to motivate it based on “science”. This ultimately hurt the credibility of science and expert opinion.
Yeah, of course there were bad actors polluting the information space. Not All of them were NonGovernmental. You tell me you'd get a vaccine if one of the first people vaccinated on television Dies On Camera??!? Nah, you wouldn't. You'd at least think twice, right?? Now, take that person away. Voila! You're happy to get the "safe and effective" vaccine, right?
This is an actual datapoint (although I do want to ask, "how many nurses and doctors were fired for refusing to get vaccinated?" as the "overwhelmed" might not have existed in a time/place where nurses and doctors were allowed to exist as conscientious objectors). Most datapoints about "ICU overwhelmed" are NOT actual datapoints -- a hospital needs more ICU beds like they need a hole in the head (in short, there's never enough in an emergency) -- and covid19 patients didn't generally need an ICU bed anyway (they needed a negative pressure environment like tuberculosis patients get -- that's 3 days of competent facilities management to build an entire ward.)
There was a brief fight about whether it was safe to release the Covid vaccines shortly before the first Trump/Biden election or whether safety required that they not be released until shortly after the election. I don't know that it was a shift, but I personally wish we had released it sooner.
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/former-cdc-director-hails-wh-retreat-on-fdas-more-rigorous-covid-vaccine-protocols-this-means-there-arent-going-to-be-shortcuts-on-safety/
Was there a single orthodox Expert anywhere of any kind anywhere who had a single thing to say about the "no gathering anywhere with anyone for any reason at any cost, there is no sacrifice you must not make for this" -> elite-sanctioned riots transition?
That was certainly the central thing.
Yes, Fauci did!
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/502001-fauci-underscores-concerns-about-protests-spreading-coronavirus/
IIRC at the time there *were* orthodox experts saying that outdoor gatherings wre much less likely to spread COVID, thanks to the much better air circulation. And indeed, there doesn't seem to have been a spike in COVID cases around the date of the protests in May-June 2020.
"no gathering anywhere with anyone for any reason at any cost, there is no sacrifice you must not make for this"
This was never official policy, or if it was it was only in a few states for a short time (I recall reading that California had particularly restrictive policies). In my state, the full-on stay-at-home lockdown (which still had some exceptions for family gatherings and outdoor activities) lasted about 2 months, then shifted to "we are carefully re-opening with social distancing and masks." Ohio was reopening its businesses almost a month before George Floyd was killed.
(Also note that a lot of people *voluntarily* avoided gathering even if it would have been technically allowed under their state's lockdown rules. People were scared of the mystery virus!)
It would have been nice if those orthodox experts had fed more into the orthodoxy and a consistent "don't breath other people's air" policy was what the world was trying to innovate around.
"And indeed, there doesn't seem to have been a spike in COVID cases around the date of the protests in May-June 2020."
Not a "spike", a wave. What pretty much every source describes as a "second wave" of COVID, clearly visible in any plot of cases or fatalities, washed over the United States in June through August of 2020. And killed rather more people than the first wave, though less than the third.
The same thing happened in Europe, so it's more than just Black Lives Mattering. But I did look closely at the numbers at the time, and the inflection point marking the start of the second wave in almost every US state I could find number for, started 10-12 days after the first deployment of the National Guard to counter #BLM protests in that state. Which is to say, about the usual incubation period plus reporting delay.
This has to have been more than just infected protesters, and it almost certainly would have happened regardless. But in the United States, it sure looks like the #BLM protests, and the official tolerance and almost endorsement of such, was treated by everyone *else* as the signpost for "lwe're not *really* doing lockdowns any more, whatever is important to you it's OK to get together en masse to do it" and then lots of backyard BBQs, etc, etc. Which millions of stir-crazy people were ready for, and likely to do soon enough in any event.
As far as official policy, I'm pretty sure any public protest in California in May or June of 2020 would have been absolutely lock-your-ass-in-jail illegal under Governor Newsom's "shelter in place" order, and yet there was a conspicuous absence of #BLM protesters being arrested by California policemen for public-health reasons.
So we got about the same outcome as e.g. Western Europe, we just burned an extra dose of public trust getting there.
When people discuss the potential for spread at BLM protests they tend to focus on the outdoor gathering part. And they ignore the millions (~20 million participated) of people travelling between cities, crashing on friends couches, going out to dinner, drinking and socializing in people's houses before and after. All the free mixing of otherwise fairly isolated social graphs.
"elite-sanctioned riots transition?"
I know I'm a little late, but seriously, if you want to attack anyone else for their credibility and be taken remotely seriously, this sort of phrasing is not your friend. Lots of people who might otherwise agree with you about the dissonant messaging *will not fail to notice* this dishonest and spin-heavy framing.
School closures, while directly impacting fewer people, were probably the single biggest failure of the expert class, in my opinion. We knew, basically by the fall of 2020, that kids weren't seriously impacted, and we knew not that long after that, that schools being open didn't significantly affect community spread. And yet schools in some places stayed closed or partially closed for another year plus in some places.
But did the experts favor them?
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/covid-sentences-to-ponder.html
No, they didn’t. Child welfare and education experts warned of the terrible cost to learning and mental health that children would suffer from prolonged school closures. They implored authorities to keep schools open at all costs. But anxious parents, pandering politicians, and teachers unions got their way.
School closures were an example of experts NOT being listened to.
-deleted- I completely misinterpted a link
Parents? I'm sure there were neurotic parents that wanted schools closed, but surely it was a small minority. It's not like there were rules against homeschooling or virtual schooling, so there wasn't much of an incentive for parents to push for closed schools, unless they thought it gave them an excuse to work from home when their employer otherwise would push back against it.
I don't know of a single parent that wanted schools closed longer. Definitely not a representative group, but surely by fall of 2020 the school closures were almost exclusively pushed by teachers wanting additional time off, not parents?
Fair enough - it wasn’t many parents. But some were caught up in the whole cultural tug-of-war where any relaxation of restrictions was coded as populist, anti-vax right. And some invariably side with teachers and teachers unions as political allies.
> Child welfare and education experts warned of the terrible cost to learning and mental health that children would suffer from prolonged school closures.
And then the major effect on mental health was a big drop in suicides. This was not a warning based on facts.
Because you need privacy to attempt suicide. But research shows mental health among children worsened significantly.
“Social isolation as a result of lockdowns and other societal changes during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant increase in mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, resulting in higher outpatient and emergency department mental health–related visits for youths.”
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publications/health-promotion-chronic-disease-prevention-canada-research-policy-practice/vol-44-no-10-2024/assessing-impact-covid-19-pandemic-mental-health-related-hospitalization-youth-canada-interrupted-time-series-analysis.html
When George Floyd got writ up as a covid19 death, I'm not going to guarantee that "actual suicides" weren't getting written up as covid19 deaths.
Given the substantial comorbidity between Metabolic Syndrome and Depression/Suicide, I'm not saying they're wrong, either, until you're ready to start laying down some data saying that suicides are NOT actually caused by covid19 (I'm just opening the question, not advocating either side). It's pretty easy to say that "longterm cancer" was not caused by covid19... it's much harder to say that about a suicide.
deleted. I completely misinterpreted a link
-edited to add-
Despite my misreading, it depends on who you consider "experts" and how widely you draw the managerial class line. Media and politicians failed the hardest for not communicating the information that was already known, and in my opinion, even the experts who were correct failed for not trying harder to communicate the truth that they knew, probably because it was politically inconvenient and counter-narrative to do so.
We knew even earlier than that. Studies from Europe and S Korea in the spring of 2020 showed that children were extremely unlikely to contract covid, and schools for younger grades were not responsible for community spread. And yet all you heard in 2020 and 2021 is how anyone who taught school or raised kids knew they were filthy germ factories. It was the most remarkable example I can remember of educated, intelligent people flat-out ignoring any research that ran contrary to their preferred narrative.
I agree completely. I was on a school board in 2020, and my personal experience was that the evidence was pretty clear by June 2020 that, at the very least, elementary school students should be in school in person in the fall. Kids were not themselves at great risk, and kids weren't even infecting adults, to a large extent. The danger to adults came from other adults, not from kids. If the adults stayed away from each other, then elementary classrooms of kids were not a significant Covid risk. This was reasonably obvious early in the summer of 2020.
> And yet all you heard in 2020 and 2021 is how anyone who taught school or raised kids knew they were filthy germ factories.
Yes, and as anyone in childcare can tell you, the meaning of that phrase is that children are huge *vectors* for disease to adults. Closing schools wasn't ever about protecting kids[1], it was always about preventing spread to their much older caretakers.
[1] Though I'm certain that many non-experts said otherwise, through ignorance or dishonesty, because Think Of The Children™️ sells
But those early strains of covid weren’t huge vectors for spread to adults, because covid didn’t behave like the common cold or flu. Kids didn’t get covid, but they didn’t spread it either. In parts of the world where schools stayed open, they were not sources of community transmission. Research showed the lessons of colds and flus did not apply. But that research was ignored.
We knew by June that kids "weren't seriously impacted" -- NO ORPHANAGES GOT BUILT (Yes, around the time when Italy sent kids home and there was that superspreader event, we were worried about kids spreading the 'vid). Erm, yes, that's also saying they weren't hurting their parents, in any significant way.
I'm a big institutionalist but I can definitely feel a lot of places in which people may have suffered whiplash as the dominant narrative changed - travel restrictions, masks, flattening the curve, mass gatherings, lockdowns, remote learning, airborne or not, lab leak, vaccines vs transmissibility, boosters, etc, etc. If you dropped in to check how we were doing under COVID every six months, what people were talking about would have been quite different every time!
Most of this didn't offend me at all since I could sort of see why the narrative had changed as people learned more about COVID, and I'm happy to chalk up the rest to the fuckups that happen from time to time. But I think people less charitable could easily conclude that the whole thing was a crock of shit, not least because the way that these narratives were sold to the public was not through patient scientific explanation, but by repeatedly shouting at them to FOLLOW THE SCIENCE and TRUST THE EXPERTS and if you questioned anything you were a chud crank racist who wanted grandma to die, even if what the experts was telling you had changed or god forbid you were right and the experts were wrong the first time around.
Get vaccinated! You can take your mask off!
Somebody gets vaccinated.
Two days later (after the gays traced how many vaccinated people were spreading illness), everyone wears a mask anyway!
And you say this vaccine is supposed to "stop the spread"?
Now, imagine if you got hurt because of the vaccine... that was "safe and effective" despite causing blood clots and plane crashes. Whoops! We can't have plane crashes! Destroy the Press! (yes, this happened. trade publication was destroyed).
Who said it caused plane crashes? The vaccine reduced mortality (and hospitalization), so you'd expect pilots to be safer vaccinated than unvaccinated.
Trade Publication that was listing obituaries for pilots (this can be used as a proxy for how much the vaccine was causing bloodclots and other issues that are exacerbated by pressurization and depressurization). The dramatic increase in deaths was the issue, and why the trade publication needed to be removed from public consumption.
The publishers of that publication claim that deaths were up PRIOR to vaccination:
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.9UV4VV
Vinay Prasad has done a good job of documenting these. For an example of a shifting narrative, see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoUlnkd8nOs, where CDC says that if you get the vax you'll never need another (speaking as an immunologist this is a questionable statement to make about a novel vaccine to a coronavirus), then having that person go back and say, "you need another booster" and eventually "you need a yearly booster." Plus there was the claim that you wouldn't spread it to others if you got the vaccine, which was an evidence-free claim when it was made.
Then there was "2-weeks to slow the spread" (an arguably valid policy if it had remained at that), which morphed into various unending lockdowns with no clear objective, then finally into zero-COVID policies that never should have been considered serious policy objectives by any sane scientist.
Masking toddlers except at nap time. Closing down outdoor events. Insisting children were at major risk of hospitalization and death from COVID - unless they stay home from school and later unless they get vaccinated. Rejecting the idea that myocarditis was a serious safety signal, and then following that up with the baseless claim that the risk of myocarditis from COVID was greater than that of the vaccine.
This is not an exhaustive list, but given many of these claims were directly tied to vaccines there's a reason people are skeptical - and specifically of official pronouncements made by CDC/FDA that were later proved to be speculation, wrong, or known falsehoods at the time they were made.
Add to that the evidence that FDA delayed vaccine approval by changing the statistical analysis, all so the vaccine wouldn't be approved until after the election. Suddenly it was apparent that 'expert' government organizations were politically motivated. So Red Team had to join one side and Blue Team had to join the other side. This was an own-goal by people who should have known better. They didn't actually 'follow the science', the government officials at CDC and FDA injected politics into the discussion. The American people followed their lead.
Remember when they wiped the wikipedia article? The coronavirus article used to reference the similarities to dengue virus, where the vaccine was actually withdrawn for causing more harm than good...
Prior to the vaccination:
https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/2021/SeneffNigh_mRNA_vaccines_IJVTPR.pdf
After the vaccination:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10452662/
I just find science fun, and learning about all of what "we couldn't talk about" has been a blast!
You can find good science being done by good scientists. Increasingly, science communication from government agencies is more politics than science. You can tell the difference by whether someone uses the right tools:
https://xkcd.com/3101/
Have you seen what "cage free chickens" get up to? (Broken bones, that are left unset, and much more cruelty than you'd get otherwise).
Yes, you can find good science being done by good scientists. Its rare, but it's still out there. Eventually, science is going to start looking at "vaccine injuries and deaths" -- until then, you can talk to the term life insurance folks, who are busy doing a Very Big Population Study called "Can We Stay In Business?"
In summer 2020 the American Pediatric Association put out a very strong statement in support of reopening schools. Then shortly thereafter they put out a very watered down joint statement with the NEA that walked back much of that support - science succumbing to teacher's unions. Then Trump started pushing to reopen schools which perversely fueled the opposition to reopening. Only the first statement was based on science, the rest was political theatre.
Another example was masking, the official and scientific advice oscillated wildly in 2020, though the actual evidence didn't change (and still hasn't - universal masking doesn't do much).
Masking wasn't a public health advice until Riot Season. At which point, the "this is idiotic" folks were pulled off OWS and onto other duties...
Yeah, I agree that the official expert consensus was pretty solid for 95+% of COVID-related things, especially in the published science. But there were some genuine expert-led policy slip-ups (EU/UK/US not emphasising ventilation like they did in Japan), some genuinely weird scientists (I recall a British scientist suggesting a permanent lockdown), some "woke science" (suggesting using race/ethnicity to prioritise vaccines), and expert hypocrisy (gov advisors breaking lockdown rules).
I recognise that it was statistically inevitable that some stuff like this would happen, but sadly, other people's only experience with medical experts in media or policymaking was limited to these negative examples. Alternative media/podcast grifters blew these examples out of proportion, generalised these cases to an entire corrupt expert class, and successfully destroyed (perceived) expert credibility.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10452662/
There you go!
"Safe and Effective" is a hell of a thing to tell people, about a methodology that hadn't had a single survivor from 2013-2017.
Your link does not support the claim you make about a lack of survivors. In another comment I linked on pre-COVID studies showing mRNA vaccines were safe.
Your "they're safe" studies weren't done five years later, now were they? We're talking "seven years later" for some of these studies. (Again, it wouldn't be remarkable to see most of the patients dead, but all of them?)
"Safe and effective" is something that one should measure based on the type of virus, and the dengue vaccine got pulled how many years into its run? After passing the basic "does this work" tests? (Covid19, and SARS in general is very much like dengue).
Your link doesn't provide any support to the claim that all vaccinated subjects were dead at any point later.
"in 2015, if you and a few of your weird friends beat the experts, it was new and exciting. You would prance around, singing "We beat the experts! We beat the experts!" In 2021 it's just depressing. Are the experts okay? Do they need help? Blink once for yes, twice for no...
I can't tell you how many times over the past year all the experts, the CDC, the WHO, the New York Times, et cetera, have said something (or been silent about something in a suggestive way), and then some blogger I trusted said the opposite, and the blogger turned out to be right."
You wrote this in Feb 2021, I think. First thing I thought of when reading the parent comment.
I think it's easy to forget how much some of us trusted experts before the pandemic.
It was not always a direct lie, but because of covid I had to begin to view all experts in the way you describe in the "Bounded Distrust" post. The example foremost in my mind is that the public health establishment very much did not want people to believe past infection provided any immunity, because they assumed (not without reason) that the public would be bad at understanding both whether they'd actually had an infection and what immunity means. So they showed up on TV everywhere making statements that were obviously silly, but may have worded them in "no evidence that..." phrasing, like ok David Hume if you apply this isolated demand for rigor then there's no evidence Aaron Judge's flyball heading out of Yankee Stadium is going to land and there's "no evidence" covid-19 infection provides any level of immunity, despite the fact that every previous baseball has landed and that even O.G. SARS infections from ten years ago were showing signs of reducing covid-19 severity. And they kept saying things like this, or "we just don't know", even after quality evidence did appear, such as the Israeli study showing past infection nearly equal to vaccination in efficacy at reducing hospitalizations.
Or they pull the trick of letting the interviewer say the outrageously stupid thing and then respond with a true and affirmative statement without negating the stupid thing. "Professor, isn't it true that the public needs to be protected from Italians, who as a race are known to be universally bloodthirsty gangsters?" "Gangsters are a problem Jake, and there are steps we could take to mitigate that..." OK that's not a lie, but you gave the *impression* you agreed with something you know is stupid, and when you do that because you think people will take desirable actions if they believe Dumb Wrong Thing then you blew your credibility with anyone smart enough to spot it.
If I have to treat the CDC like I treat Infowars or Pravda, or like one of those self-promoting quacks hustling products to "flush" "toxins", then I've lost something here.
The letter from public health experts stating that George Floyd protests were more important than social distancing.
Promoting the vaccine to people who weren't at risk from COVID, including young children who could technically face higher risk from the vaccine itself.
Telling healthy people who didn't want to take the vaccine that they were killing people, banning them from public places, and firing them, even after it was known that the vaccine offered minimal reduction in transmission.
Various racist COVID healthcare policies recommended by officials: denying healthy white people access to therapeutics, giving minority zip codes priority access during vaccine rollout, recommending a vaccine release schedule that would increase overall deaths for the sake of "equity".
In many cases they would be honest in technical venues, but then communicate something very different to the public.
Yes, shifting stories about masks and lab leaks were bad, but more than specific issues, learning how experts thought about problems when confronted with policy choices was massively damaging.
For example, their frequent unwillingness to reckon costs and benefits was very damaging in my eyes. In certain narrow cases it made sense: sometimes, a given expert was merely one input into policy decisions, and politicians were all-too-happy to use the expert as cover. But in the majority of other cases I paid attention to, the loudest and most visible voices were tendentious and reductive.
But the most damaging of all was the excessive concern for managing narratives, when otherwise-useful information conflicted with political priorities. The lab leak emails between Andersen, Fauci, et. al. were the best example of this, but I saw it repeatedly. There was a real sense among many experts that it would be a mistake to communicate the magnitude of the biggest risk factors, because young and fit people might realize they were not in danger (statistically speaking - I personally knew someone young and fit that died early on). And that's all before spreading out into COVID-era topics (who are the perpetrators of all this anti-Chinese racism?) or the surge of open partisanship in scientific journals.
Agreed about the shifting masks advice. Lab leak was kind-of weird: I heard all of the shouting about it, but, once the virus had spread, I think of it as pretty much moot (with the exception of "Should we _do_ gain of function experiments any more?").
I think a big third one was that the vaccines, though greatly ameliorating morbidity and mortality in the vaccine recipient, turned out to have no (or very small?) effects on _transmission_. So the whole argument for vaccine _mandates_, based on the risk of transmission to _other_ people, falls apart.
Are you sure about the ameliorating morbidity and mortality in the vaccine recipient? Term Health Life Insurance is going into a tailspin because of the vaccine related injuries.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10452662/
Israeli data was showing that vaccinated need to get "more and more vaccinations" to continue to be "vaccinated".
Many Thanks! I'm never sure, in the sense of 100% probability. The preponderance of the evidence seems to show that the vaccine substantially reduces morbidity and mortality. There turned out to be a natural experiment here in 2021. At one point, about half the people in this area (Greenville County, South Carolina) had been vaccinated. And hospital admissions tracked who was vaccinated or not. Hospital admissions for Covid were running about 10:1 unvaccinated:vaccinated.
Now, this was during the first wave of Covid. I've seen reports that the effectiveness of the vaccines has dropped in later waves (with more mutations). But it still seems to be a net positive.
Thanks for the URL. It looks interesting, though one caution is that some of the statistics presented lack important context e.g. the data on hospital admissions vs. number of doses doesn't seem to show what fractions of the general population had what number of vaccine doses, which we'd need to see relative risk. Anyway, Many Thanks!
So, if you want to really dig into "why we didn't expect this vaccine to work" here's a good explanation:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32782358/
Dengue and SARS (the original) are other, similar viruses that cause Antibody dependent enhancement. It is quite possible (even if my allegation that the vaccine never worked is false), that you are currently experiencing worse bouts of covid19 than the unvaccinated. (Think of this from a public health perspective -- if you lose worktime based on getting sick, that could counterbalance someone very old who dies of covid19 instead of influenza).
>So, if you want to really dig into "why we didn't expect this vaccine to work" here's a good explanation:
Thank you, but I think I'll pass.
>Antibody dependent enhancement.
I have heard of that effect. AFAIK, that didn't happen with the Covid vaccine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement#COVID-19
>As of 27 January 2022, there have been no observed incidents [of antibody dependent enhancement] with vaccines for COVID-19 in trials with nonhuman primates, in clinical trials with humans, or following the widespread use of approved vaccines.
Your link doesn't provide any support to your claim about Term Health Life Insurance.
Here's one example:
https://www.planet-today.com/2022/08/experts-warn-cold-showers-now-causes.html
You realize the Navy classically does cold showers? They wouldn't do that if it killed sailors.
Is it more likely that "experts just figured out that a standard practice in the US MIlitary" is now deadly? Or is it more likely that vaccine induced blood & heart related injuries are the root cause of heart attacks precipitated by a cold shower?
Just one example, mind. And someone got paid to put advertisements up about this -- paid by the government.
When I try to read your link it immediately goes to a redirect. Searching on DDG, I believe this link contains the same content without a redirect:
https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/experts-warn-cold-showers-now-causes-heart-attacks-in-young-adults/
That doesn't say anything about insurance, and explicitly says the study didn't look into whether anyone was vaccinated. Nor does it say anything about deaths being concentrated in time after vaccines were made available to young adults, rather than earlier when COVID was transmitting among everyone.
Did they really stand pretty firm on lockdowns? The moment Fauci et al remained silent in the face of "epidemic of anti-black violence is more important than COVID, go out and protest" rhetoric from the SJ-minded medicine-adjacent people, their reputation took a huge hit
From elsewhere in the thread: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/502001-fauci-underscores-concerns-about-protests-spreading-coronavirus/
Ok, let me restate this a bit. They didn't remain completely silent, But compare this to the mobilization against the Great Barrington declaration or lab leak theory and "expression of concern" rings very hollow
I want to be careful here, I'm not trying to argue contrarily but:
Quick Googles turn up no public statements from Fauci about the lab leak, until his testimony before the House last year; and one dismissal of GBD in response to a direct question in October 2020.
I know "mobilization" might mean more than just public statements, and I certainly don't claim that my half-assed Googling turned up all instances of Fauci commenting on those things, but...I think it would be helpful if people were more explicit about what, exactly, they object to in how officials communicated about all these things. There's often a sense of, everyone just knows what is being referred to, but I am not actually certain that's true.
Which officials said what, and when is actually important in evaluating how trustworthy or how hypocritical people were, and I've seen very little effort to actually identify which experts and which statements were particularly egregious.
I am not talking about the public statements. I am talking about things like https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/
If people were serious about lockdowns, they could have easily organized a "scientific" letter saying "yes, BLM is very important, but think about the grandma"
Yes.
Not just the wildly shifting narratives. We also got the Neil Ferguson girlfriend booty-call issue where folks busy trying to figure out how bad things were or would get were treating the lock downs as optional. Gavin Newsom's French Laundry dinner was another.
Whether it is fair and right or not, one lasting narrative is that (some) of the folks in charge were not behaving quite as if they believed their own stories. That credibility took a big hit, too, I think
Good point. One might also mention BoJo's parties or the old folks homes in New York State.
Your second paragraph is money, FWIW.
I think a lot of the problem here is the politicized redefinition of the term vaccine.
If, in 2018, you had given a description of the Covid vaccine, detailing its effects, effectiveness, and side-effects, to a group of objective, disinterested medical researchers and asked them "is this a valid vaccine that should be approved by the FDA and administered to the general public?", they would have laughed you out of the room.
But now we have something that does not deserve to be called a vaccine being pushed as one, and when people look at this and say "that's a garbage vaccine, I don't want that!", people use the term anti-vaxxer to smear them even if they have no objection to real vaccines.
Well, certainly the speed at which Operation Warp Speed took place and the pressure to produce positive results, any kind of positive results, would have made me nervous if I were human.
That said, I was thinking of stuff like people insisting that the MMR vaccine causes autism, not necessarily the COVID vaccine. Although one does have the example of the Russian Sputnik COVID vaccine, which we were assured cannot work (in spite of the evidence suggesting that it is the most effective) and besides was stolen.
OWS should be the norm, it's the status quo blockage of vaccines creating an Invisible Graveyard that is the problem. Humans are "nervous" because they're dumb.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10452662/
Are you sure about that?
Yes, I am sure. Your linked paper contains this quote:
"It is apparent that the original Wuhan strain and early variants of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 were more pathogenic than later variants. This is consistent with typical viral adaptive evolution to more infectious but less pathogenic strains, a natural phenomenon that is fortunate for humanity."
There are no footnotes or citations for the claim that such viral evolution is "typical", and that flies in the face of smallpox remaining deadly so that it devastated Amerindians after the Columbian exchange. They follow that up with "Fortunately, the virus mutated", but the mutations were to be more transmissible. Fatality rates declined as people acquired immunity (whether through infections or vaccines) and we got better at treating cases. They go on and on about how the novel mRNA and adenovirus DNA vaccines are bad, but then they also say Novavax (the traditional technology vaccine for COVID available in the US) is bad, with the only ones they think are reliable being ones from India & China where I personally doubt we can trust the data as much (and where, at any rate, a deactivated virus would still contain the spike protein they think is such a problem).
They rely heavily on John Ioannidis' claims that IFR were overstated, but he was wrong https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2020/03/20/john-ioannidis/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/17/some-forecasting-for-covid-19-has-failed-a-discussion-of-taleb-and-ioannidis-et-al/ They claim that mortality rates from early cases in China are unreliable for the west, citing France instead, but Italy was the first big outbreak outside China and death rates there were similarly high.
I trust Nate Silver much more than them https://www.natesilver.net/p/fine-ill-run-a-regression-analysis
More from Greg Cochran on how selection affected lethality in COVID:
Q. "Isn’t there also selection for reduced lethality? The two together make sense."
A. "Not with Covid: the deaths happened well after the period of infectivity."
"If you have a disease that kills lots of its victims, especially if it does so in a way that interferes with transmission, sure, there can be selection for lower morbidity and lower lethality. I think there's some evidence that this happened with the Black Death.. but not quite to the point of it becoming harmless, obviously."
https://x.com/gcochran99/status/1933542383703965737
I'm sort of in TGGP's boat when it comes to OWS. My perspective is similar to any libertarian's: if I'm facing risk from not getting a treatment soon enough, I might be willing to assume the risk of a treatment that hasn't gone through testing. Or I might be willing to assume the risk of a treatment that's been tested on 1000 people, but not yet on 10000. Et cetera.
I should be permitted to decide how much risk I assume for myself. I have the right to seek information about that risk. No one should have the right to deny me that information merely because they fear I wouldn't understand it, or wouldn't respond the way they would prefer. (I don't have the right to force someone to discover that information for me; I just have the right to go discover it myself, possibly by asking someone who's willing to share, without being hounded for doing so.) If I want to try Mugsy's Mira-chloroquine Cure-all two weeks after I get COVID, and Mugsy is willing to sell, that's on us.
The question of whether I have the right to risk everyone around me by rejecting a vaccine is not as trivial - although it apparently became moot once everyone knew the mRNA treatment didn't block spread.
You risk NO ONE by rejecting a vaccine, provided you sit your ass at home and manage your own risk (Okay, so I do have a low clean room grade air purifier at home.)
My recollection is that vaccines reduced transmission by half in the months following vaccination. Lots of people didn't have the option of remaining at home. I was working remotely at the time, but even I needed to go out to get groceries.
> "If, in 2018, you had given a description of the Covid vaccine, detailing its effects, effectiveness, and side-effects, to a group of objective, disinterested medical researchers and asked them "is this a valid vaccine that should be approved by the FDA and administered to the general public?", they would have laughed you out of the room."
Can you explain this further? Is it just that it's MRNA instead of polysaccharides or attenuated viruses or whatever, or something else?
It's the basic fact that *it doesn't work.*
There are two basic things that a vaccine is supposed to do, and to be considered even marginally valid it needs to do at least one of the two.
1) Confer long-lasting immunity. If the time until you need a booster shot is measured in months rather than years, (or better still, decades,) this vaccine does not do a good job.
2) Confer sterilizing immunity. If the vaccine protects you, individually, but doesn't keep you from shedding viruses, it does not do a good job.
And until 2020, it was a well-understood, completely non-controversial principle that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you ever deploy a non-sterilizing vaccine in a population currently affected by the disease in question, because it screws with selection pressure in very bad ways and you end up with a population full of Typhoid Marys breeding even worse variants of the disease. But that understanding went right out the window with the Covid "vaccine."
Is your argument that it doesn't work, or that it has too high a tail-risk of breeding vaccine-resistant strains?
IIRC there are lots of studies showing it did work in terms of lowering COVID death rate. I don't think it bred the resistant strains but I'd be open to hearing that it did or that the tail-risk didn't happen but it was bad in expectation.
Do you have any links to discussion about this at the time?
> Is your argument that it doesn't work
Close. Saying that "it lowers death rate" may be technically true, but we're talking about something with an exceptionally low death rate anyway, so I don't find that argument particularly relevant even if it's correct. What I'm saying is that doesn't do what a valid vaccine is supposed to do: provide long-lasting and/or sterilizing immunity.
> or that it has too high a tail-risk of breeding vaccine-resistant strains?
Again, not quite. The problem with screwing with the selection pressure isn't vaccine resistant strains. It's like this:
It's (relatively) common knowledge that an infectious disease, left to itself, (ie. in the absence of vaccines, antibiotics, etc.,) naturally becomes less dangerous over time. If a highly lethal mutation arises, it will burn itself out quickly by killing the infected before it can be transmitted. Meanwhile, a less-lethal mutation gets transmitted to more people and continues to reproduce.
Non-sterilizing immunity turns the selective pressure equation on its head. It allows lethal mutations to arise without killing their hosts, and to thrive. This is why we only administer non-sterilizing vaccines to populations where the disease in question is no longer a real issue, such as polio.
> It's (relatively) common knowledge that an infectious disease, left to itself, (ie. in the absence of vaccines, antibiotics, etc.,) naturally becomes less dangerous over time. If a highly lethal mutation arises, it will burn itself out quickly by killing the infected before it can be transmitted. Meanwhile, a less-lethal mutation gets transmitted to more people and continues to reproduce.
Didn't smallpox have such a high and consistent fatality rate, allt the way until it was eliminated, that ancient outbreaks can be identified by descriptions of how many sick people died?
It's not just "technically" true, it causes a LOT fewer deaths. And the death rate wasn't that low, we see it jump out in excess deaths stats!
You don't know what "a valid vaccine is supposed to do". You are engaging in the nirvana fallacy and indicting the vaccine for not being perfect. You might as well bemoan that it only protects against strains of COVID-19 rather than every strain of coronavirus, which include a decent fraction of common-cold infections.
> It's (relatively) common knowledge that an infectious disease, left to itself, (ie. in the absence of vaccines, antibiotics, etc.,) naturally becomes less dangerous over time.
Absolutely wrong. Smallpox didn't do that. Greg Cochran has to make this point over and over again.
> If a highly lethal mutation arises, it will burn itself out quickly by killing the infected before it can be transmitted. Meanwhile, a less-lethal mutation gets transmitted to more people and continues to reproduce.
That depends on the details of HOW the disease is transmitted. COVID is a respiratory infection, so it transmits easily* and can maintain a high mortality rate.
*Increasingly easily over time, which surprised virologists who didn't know much about natural selection. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/a-random-walk-on-scientists/
>exceptionally low death rate anyway
this post is literally discussing 1.2M deaths in US. how is this a low death rate? how is this, especially, "exceptionally low death rate"?
> "It's (relatively) common knowledge that an infectious disease, left to itself, (ie. in the absence of vaccines, antibiotics, etc.,) naturally becomes less dangerous over time."
I'd thought that too, but it doesn't seem to be conventional wisdom anymore. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10066022/ , https://abcnews.go.com/Health/debunking-idea-viruses-evolve-virulent/story?id=82052581 , https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19/do-bad-viruses-always-become-good-guys-end , etc.
I think "exceptionally low death rate" is a red herring. There were 1.2 million US deaths from COVID already; if the vaccines prevented 50% more, that saved 600,000 lives. I don't think COVID had already "burned itself out" by the time vaccines became available, because neither I nor my parents had had it at that point,
> Is your argument that it doesn't work, or that it has too high a tail-risk of breeding vaccine-resistant strains?
Scott, is your argument that all vaccines are perfect, or that killing people is morally desirable?
This is the worst form of strawmanning. If you don't understand the commenter's point then you should ask for clarification, not try to force it into one of two boxes both of which are convenient for your argument.
I'm trying to understand Bob's point. Bob understood it that way and gave me a helpful answer that made me understand his position better. If he thought it was neither of those two categories, then he could explain which other category it was in. I don't think it's evil to mention the specific hypotheses I'm considering as a guide to how I'm confused. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/06/socratic-grilling/
These sound like Geert Vanden Bossche talking points, you can probably look him up and find articles on the risks of deploying a vaccine "during a pandemic".
It's such a silly argument... when is the pandemic over? When does it become safe to deploy the vaccines? After everyone in the world has already caught the virus once?
Or, is using vaccines then still dangerous, because there are new variants that the vaccines will somehow enhance? Why don't these arguments apply to flu shots, which don't give long lasting immunity? Why is vaccine induced immunity any different than immunity through infection, which also doesn't give long lasting immunity to Covid?
No, this is just wrong. I'm pretty sure no such principles are widely accepted. Easy counterexamples:
1. Influenza vaccines do not confer long-lasting immunity, but we've had them for decades.
2. The inactivated polio vaccine doesn't confer sterilizing immunity to polio, it just prevents paralysis. We have been using it for decades, because it's safer than the older live-virus vaccine that (IIRC) does prevent transmission of polio.
If this last principle were universally accepted, it would forbid both flu shots and polio shots.
> No, this is just wrong. I'm pretty sure no such principles are widely accepted. Easy counterexamples:
I think the grandparent poster suggested that a vaccine should satisfy either criterion, not that it has to satisfy both. The polio vaccine would pass muster, for example, as would the normal mess of childhood vaccines. I'm much less certain about the flu shot, since I don't think that consistently confers sterilizing immunity.
> I think the grandparent poster suggested that a vaccine should satisfy either criterion, not that it has to satisfy both.
This is correct; that is what I meant. Thank you.
"Influenza vaccines do not confer long-lasting immunity, but we've had them for decades."
I think this is a terminology problem between the professionals and 'normal' people.
Most people I know think of the annual flu shot as different from a childhood vaccine. And use different terminology to express this difference: shot vs vaccine.
The Covid vaccine wound up behaving a LOT more like a flu shot than it did like a measles vaccine. But it was named like a measles vaccine. Thus leading to, "Why did you mislead me????"
This terminology mismatch between professionals in a field and common folks outside it is common. But rarely good. Tesla's use of "autopilot" is an another example of this. Most non-pilots think an autopilot can drive the plane/car. It can't.
"Influenza vaccine"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine
"Measles shot"
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22measles+shot%22
Seems to me these terms are used interchangeably, except perhaps that "shot" is more informal so it's often used for flu vaccines which lots of people get every year, while "vaccine" is more formal so it's often used for the measles vaccine which only babies get so only new parents and health experts talk about, the latter group preferring the more formal term.
This would be very strange to me if true. I'm perhaps a bit biased by being in a bubble of people who are healthcare professionals or have post-secondary education, but do you really think if you asked 100 native English speakers "is the annual flu shot a vaccine?" more than 5 would say no? (Maybe with a disclaimer of: "this is not a trick question" added?)
I do think that expectations- often set by politicians attempting to reassure the public- were such that once you had your 2 shots of the Covid vaccine it would mean the pandemic was "over"; while more people in the field assumed it wouldn't be that simple. "Just hold out until you get a vaccine" probably wasn't an optimal strategy to put all our eggs in that basket, and it backfired to do so.
Speaking of terminology, where the hell did "jab" come from? I had never heard that word used to describe a vaccine before Covid. Is it a Britishism that crossed the pond?
> Most people I know think of the annual flu shot as different from a childhood vaccine. And use different terminology to express this difference: shot vs vaccine.
That isn't different terminology. Those words are fully interchangeable.
Yea, and there are additional examples on each point. Reframing vaccines' requirements in that manner is what would get laughed out of that imaginary 2018 room of group of objective, disinterested medical researchers.
(I am quoting here my father-in-law, a Trump-voting endocrinologist and former Army doctor who made damn sure that every member of his household promptly got the COVID vaccine when it became available.)
> 1) Confer long-lasting immunity. If the time until you need a booster shot is measured in months rather than years, (or better still, decades,) this vaccine does not do a good job.
> 2) Confer sterilizing immunity. If the vaccine protects you, individually, but doesn't keep you from shedding viruses, it does not do a good job.
Doesn't the flu vaccine also fail by both these standards?
Flu shots are updated annually, but nobody argues that makes it not a vaccine.
> until 2020, it was a well-understood, completely non-controversial principle that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you ever deploy a non-sterilizing vaccine in a population currently affected by the disease in question, because it screws with selection pressure in very bad ways and you end up with a population full of Typhoid Marys breeding even worse variants of the disease
No. Vaccines prepare the immune system to fight off the infection, they don't convert people from non-carriers to carriers. Failure to vaccinate would mean the virus replicates even more, creating "even worse variants". Unvaccinated people spread the virus while sick & hospitalized, although admittedly they stopped producing more virus particles when they died.
> Flu shots are updated annually, but nobody argues that makes it not a vaccine.
Terminology confusion. It's a different flu strain every year. Just because they call it "the flu shot" doesn't mean it's the same vaccine.
> No. Vaccines prepare the immune system to fight off the infection, they don't convert people from non-carriers to carriers. Failure to vaccinate would mean the virus replicates even more, creating "even worse variants". Unvaccinated people spread the virus while sick & hospitalized, although admittedly they stopped producing more virus particles when they died.
This is completely incorrect. See my reply to Scott.
COVID-19 strains also keep changing. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/a-random-walk-on-scientists/
You don't know what's "completely incorrect" on this subject. You stated that viruses evolve to be less lethal, which was 100% wrong in the case of diseases like smallpox (hence Amerindians being devastated by exposure to it).
The covid vaccine didn't do much good against spreading covid--the numbers I saw suggested that it cut transmission in half for a few months after the shot. The reason to get a covid shot is that it makes the disease a lot less serious.
Vaccines whose whole purpose is to prevent disease instead of transmission are pretty common--along with inactivated polio vaccine, you also have stuff like tetanus and rabies where there's no real concern about transmission, just about getting very ill or dying.
Cutting transmission in half for a few months is a whole lot better than nothing. But, yes, you are right that the main benefit was avoiding hospitalization/death.
I’m sorry but having recently travelled to the tropics, I know first hand there are plenty of infectious diseases that have very imperfect vaccines that are still better than nothing in some populations. Vaccine development is hard!
I don’t think your criteria are actually used in public health. You could make an argument that the world should have waited for a better COVID vaccine than what we got, but we might still be waiting at this point.
There's a new flu vaccine every year. Is that satisfying point (1) or point (2)?
As I said elsewhere, this is a matter of terminology confusion. They may call them all "flu vaccine," but they're for a different disease every year, targeting a different strain of the flu.
Interestingly enough, this may not be the case for much longer. I was reading last year about new vaccine-development technology in the works in this area. I'm paraphrasing here, but the general idea was:
"There are two basic parts of the flu virus. Let's call them the head and the tail, for simplicity's sake. The head mutates a lot, and creates different strains, which we keep chasing after with different vaccines. Meanwhile, the tail is remarkably stable. So we're looking at a way to produce a vaccine that trains the immune system to target the tail, instead of the head. Successfully bringing this to market would mean you'd get one flu vaccine and be done with it, and never need yearly flu shots again."
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd love to see this turned into a reality.
Call it whatever the fuck you want: the Covid vaccine was a great thing and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Period. The evidence is so astonishingly overwhelming that one has to be seriously deluded to even doubt it. People can make points all they want as to whether young, healthy people needed to take it, but the vaccine was amazing. And amazingly effective at saving lives.
Mild warning about this - although I agree with you on this, I think this is just asserting that Bob is wrong, and isn't useful absent some kind of argument.
Surely, "X is good because it saved lives" is indeed an argument, as is "the label is irrelevant; what matters is the outcome." It is hardly a mere assertion that Bob is wrong.
Fair enough, but in some ways, the counter-argument is 'he's missing the point.' People saying it's a 'garbage vaccine' are/were wrong. So whether anti-vaxxer is the right pejorative seems immaterial.
Fair enough. I'm waiting to see exactly what his argument is (see thread above), but I've generally seen enough intelligent stuff from him that I don't think he's making any of the usual stupid mistakes (though I am always prepared to be disappointed).
EDIT: Wait, no, that was Bob Jacobs, a totally different person! I have not previously seen anything from this Bob, but still await hearing his argument.
Do you mean the argument that vaccination saved lives so it isn't a "garbage vaccine?" I'm not aware of any credible modeling effort that puts lives saved by them under millions. e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(24)00179-6/fulltext
There was no redefinition. You just didn't know what the definition of "vaccine" was prior to COVID. The COVID vaccines saved lives, so of course they should have been approved, and used more widely than they actually were. https://www.natesilver.net/p/fine-ill-run-a-regression-analysis
> There was no redefinition. You just didn't know what the definition of "vaccine" was prior to COVID.
Wow. Just... wow.
Am I Steve Sailer that you are reduced to pointing and sputtering rather than making an argument?
How exactly is one to respond to someone who unironically makes a claim precisely equivalent to "this is not redefining, it's just redefining" and doesn't seem to realize it?
Lack of knowledge of the professional definition of a word is a deficiency on your part, not a flaw of the profession.
Many vaccines require boosters and don't provide complete "you can't be infected" level immunity. I'm not sure how you could have failed to notice this, or did you think your annual flu vaccine promised you wouldn't get so much as a sniffle for the rest of the season?
Like it or not, order of magnitude differences in mortality and morbidity rates always count for a lot when the disease is so prolific that the entire population will encounter it, even when the base rate is already low.
From Wikipedia, in 2019: "A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular disease." (To be clear, "acquired immunity" means "your immune system now has tools to fight this off," not "you can in no way get this disease.")
It's not equivalent at all. Your ignorance is not a defect on my part.
If you had described it to me in 2018 I would have said "that sounds exactly like the flu vaccine, and it's probably a good idea for old people to get it."
It would appear that you're not working from an accurate description.
Something that you need boosters for every few months does not sound exactly like an annual vaccine.
Something with widely-reported severe side effects does not sound exactly like the flu shot, which is generally understood to be mostly harmless.
A regimen of boosters that end up stimulating IgG4 production (accommodative antibodies, the same response produced by allergy shots to make your immune system stop reacting to the allergens) does not sound *anything at all like* a vaccine that should be deployed against a deadly disease.
In 2018, we didn't have a single survivor of the mRNA vaccine process, despite years of trying.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10452662/
"The first human clinical trial using ex vivo dendritic cells transfected with mRNA encoding tumor antigens (therapeutic cancer mRNA vaccine) was started in 2001. Four years later, the successful use of modified nucleosides as a method to transport mRNA inside cells without setting off the body's defense system was reported. Clinical trial results of an mRNA vaccine directly injected into the body against cancer cells were reported in 2008."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine#Development
The last citation there goes to https://journals.lww.com/immunotherapy-journal/abstract/2008/02000/results_of_the_first_phase_i_ii_clinical.7.aspx which contains this in the abstract:
"One of the easiest, most versatile and theoretically safest technologies relies on the direct injection of naked messenger RNA (mRNA) that code for tumor antigens. [...] We used this protocol to vaccinate 15 melanoma patients. [...] We demonstrate here that such treatment is feasible and safe (phase 1 criteria)."
To that I could also add the last paragraph of that Wikipedia section:
"The first human clinical trials using an mRNA vaccine against an infectious agent (rabies) began in 2013. Over the next few years, clinical trials of mRNA vaccines for a number of other viruses were started. mRNA vaccines for human use were studied for infectious agents such as influenza, Zika virus, cytomegalovirus, and Chikungunya virus."
I’d take that to the meta-level and suggest that *existence of the narrative* has itself become a narrative. People who would never endorse religious or “vaccines cause autism!” arguments jumped on antivaxxing once it could be used to signal sophistication.
In the early 2010s, maybe that meant sudden attacks of principled libertarianism. On today’s memetically-saturated Internet, though, it means insisting that one’s tribe has its own institutions. Better ones, staffed by brave iconoclasts who only publish through social media. Only they can be trusted to report the truth!
Yup, It's starts with, "huh, so they were lying about that." and before you know it you are questioning everything and finding out they've been lying about at least half the stuff. So who do you trust?
A good question. We often hear much hand-wringing pearl-clutching complaints about how Authorities Are No Longer Trusted. Maybe they should try acting more in a way that they are worthy of trust, or maybe just not being so self-serving.
I know, that's crazy talk.
A large number of people died from one of two causes in 1914-1920, we have - to this day - an annual day of remembrance for the one that killed fewer people (World War One), but nothing for the Spanish Flu that killed more people.
Pandemics and epidemics do seem to get forgotten a lot.
Not sure I have anything to say, but an annual day to remember all those that died of infectious disease wouldn't be a bad idea.
WWI was a preventable and extremely violent disaster, even though many historians say that it was "inevitable". It makes sense to remember preventable and extremely violent disasters.
Also, one could say that unlike most epidemics, WWI changed the society thoroughly. The previous concepts of Western civilization as a light unto the nations, though naive, went out of the window and was replaced by a mix of shock and various radical ideologies (communism, fascism, nationalism). We are thus also remembering the end of our "civilizational optimism".
The Spanish flu got even less attention until COVID.
Was this true in 1923? It was certainly a big deal in 1918!
It might have been. My mother was born in 1922, and I asked her one day if people had talked a lot in her childhood about all the deaths from the Spanish flu, and she said no. She said she never heard people talking about it at all. She agreed with me that it was odd. Now that's after 1923, but still, we're talking 1920s and early 1930s.
The Spanish Flu is almost completely absent from the film and literature of the 1920s, as well as the personal correspondence from that era that I've seen (both family records and archival research I've done for unrelated reasons). It seems to me like people were all too happy to simply forget it ever happened.
There was a TV movie whose subtitle references that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Flu:_The_Forgotten_Fallen
I read an article about this in 2020: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-1918-flu-faded-in-our-collective-memory-we-might-forget-the-coronavirus-too/
Thats because one event was extremely geopolitically important, and the other was not.
This is a more general phenomenon. We also don't commemorate any of the Chinese/Indian/Russian famines that periodically killed millions of people, because they generally didn't have any large and lasting political impact.
The difference is that people have wills and consciences, while viruses don't. A war feels more tragic because the people who started it could have chosen not to. Natural evil v. moral evil. I'm not saying we shouldn't have remembrances of pandemics, but surely that has to be the psychological root.
I think it has something to do with whether or not the event that killed all those people was within our control. An epidemic is not like a war. Commemorating a war is supposed to, on some level, caution us against doing stupid things in the future.
Just to add: The Spanish flu evolved to be more deadly - esp. to younger men - in the trenches and field-hospitals of WWI. So, a WWI thing. The most deadly result - oh, but then WWI is also where Lenin and Hitler came from.
I was born with breathing issues / asthma. Covid especially the first strain killed those who like my friend was a cancer survivor and didn’t take precautions working as a veterinary. We didn’t need a lockdown. The lockdown was a test to see how people would comply. People could care less about others and their health. You can see and hear people that are sick go out in the public, see their hygiene habits, they will drag their sick children to events, stores etc Zero regard for others.
Do you have kids? It is literally not possible to live a life with kids and not take them places when sick. They are sick an inordinate amount of the time (my child has been various levels of sick for literally the past month straight).
I believe that people should minimize the risk to others when sick to the greatest extent possible, but the "greatest extent possible" is not the same as "present zero risk to others". You see people out and about while sick, but you do not know what precautions they have already taken, what trips/activities they have cancelled. For many people, locking themselves in their home and being a hermit while ill is just not possible. I get your frustration, but I think it's important to remember that everyone is living under constraints. Yes, some people really are just inconsiderate. But not everyone is, and thinking that everyone you meet is an inconsiderate asshole is both a) untrue, b) unhelpful and c) probably makes your own liife worse.
I have kids and agree with the sentiment you're expressing. But at the same time, we'd all be healthier if, at the margin, most of us sequestered our sick kids more often than we currently do.
Absolutely, I don't disagree that a lot of people are probably going out while sick (or bringing kids who are sick) in cases where not doing so would merely be a mild inconvenience. But I think that even if everyone was stricter about it, people like Renee are probably underestimating how many sick people they would still encounter in day-to-day life.
Demanding that all kids be sequestered when they get a cold is probably unreasonable, but what if you knew they had a more serious illness, or one that could be more serious if transmitted to others? You yourself would probably have to go out for supply runs, but you could still wear some kind of barrier to reduce risk of spreading your child's illness if you had already contracted it. That's not zero risk of spreading it, but it is a significant reduction at low personal cost.
Yes, this.
My kid has just had chickenpox, I did not enjoy keeping him at home, but I did not take him anywhere. Yes it was inconvenient, but I would not go out with my kid while he is dangerous to immune-compromised people.
I think it's a good analogy with COVID at it's height.
I do wonder how much it's self perpetuating though. Maybe kids wouldn't be sick much at all if everyone was unreasonably cautious.
My impression is that locking-down our societies worked like "charm" - in the short term: common flu was way down, stomach-bugs were way down. But then this long time of low exposure led to widespread low-resistance to viruses of all kinds - resulting in 20% more getting sick compared to the years before covid. (At least here in Germany: https://www.kbv.de/html/1150_73099.php ) So, be careful what you ask for. Non-exposure is not a viable solution for all of us. On an individual level: sure, retreat as much as you consider reasonable for your preferences. Society: Hardly a kid without some neurodermitis nowadays, due to lack of dirt, bacteria, parasites, viruses.
During Covid I saw a lot of comparisons with the civil war, but per capita it's still a literal order of magnitude deadlier than Covid.
2,419 deaths/100k because of the civil war vs 363 deaths/100k because of Covid
And surely everyone agrees that hundreds of thousands of young men in their twenties getting shot to pieces, having their legs amputated in field hospitals without morphine or even disinfectant, then dying ANYWAY is just intuitively "worse" than the modal death from Covid.
Came here to look for this. Thank you. Population statistics are only relevant relative to the size of the population
"Came here to look for this"
Me too.
As a share of population, Spanish Flu killed approx 2-3 times as many; and the American Civil War was 10x covid.
I've changed it from "deadliest" to "highest-fatality" to make sure everyone knows I mean absolute rather than per capita.
I have to agree with Collisteru here - the correct fix was to remove the claim, not make it explicit that you're making an uninteresting claim. What's significant about the absolute value?
"Car crashes, both passengers die" is a 100% mortality rate event. Still not really a hugely important event, in the grand scheme of things.
By which I mean that, obviously (to me) both the absolute and the relative values are important. We often not care about events with a high mortality rate if the absolute number is still pretty small. Or vice-versa.
And Covid got both. Not a low enough relative mortality to be discarded (unless you consider "just one order of magnitude lower than an actual war" to be low), and having done huge absolute numbers. Literally the largest numbers any single event has ever done in the country's history. I think that's really interesting.
>> If you don't [use per capita measurements] you're just saying "this event happened later."
Most things are the largest numbers in history. We keep having more people than before.
That's... Just patently untrue?
Well, I mean, it's true for roughly steady statistics. Car deaths don't fluctuate wildly year to year, so a measure in absolute numbers does tend to increase each year, in step with a growing population.
But for singular events, it's evidently not true. 9/11 wasn't the most casualties from a terrorist attack in the US in 2001 just because it was the most recent one. It far surpassed anything that had come before, and indeed more than 20 years later it still holds that position, even though you have some 50 million people more now, and several attacks have occured since.
Such outlier events tend to keep their status as the largest ever for a great long while, and are thus notable. Of course, a growing population still has an effect in making it easier for those events to be surpassed eventually. But if it takes 100+ years for that to happen (instead of it happening steadily year after year), then by definition that event was on outlier.
Per capita measurements are just so important. Please us them. Please. If you don't you're just saying "this event happened later."
I'm still not convinced that number can be directly linked to Covid. Yes, I'm talking about the old cliché "died with Covid" instead of "died of Covid". Shouldn't we talk about excess deaths only?
+1
That was a little over a million people only counting 2020 and 2021. CDC reported 583k in 2020, 480k in 2021.
Not even all excess deaths were directly caused by Covid as a disease. Some were caused by the extra strain in the healthcare system.
A fairly famous Czech musician Dušan Vančura died of a tooth abscess because he was afraid to go to the doctor. Granted, he was 82, so a) his fear was understandable and b) he would likely have died between 2020 and today anyway, but still.
"Flatten the curve" was the initial impetus to lockdown, and its justification rested largely on this point: system strain would (and did) kill people. And while it's hard to disentangle everything -- policy, virus mutation, medical knowledge/therapies, etc. -- this was a major cause of the early deaths -- think when NYC had its worse phase.
Not disagreeing with you, but things indirectly caused are still caused. I.e., in a counterfactual world without covid, those deaths wouldn't have happened. And the policy solutions to "don't get covid" and "don't die due to hospital strain after getting covid" are basically the same: change your behaviors not to get covid.
> And while it's hard to disentangle everything -- policy, virus mutation, medical knowledge/therapies, etc. -- this was a major cause of the early deaths -- think when NYC had its worse phase.
Elaine Ou wrote a piece on her blog noting that, at the same time NYC news was breathlessly covering the lack of space in local hospitals, her brother, working as a doctor in a hospital in New York City, completely failed to experience any strain. This was apparently something that happened only to specific hospitals, which isn't really compatible with the concept of straining the system. If the system itself is under strain, one of the first things you'd do is use more of the hospitals you already have.
(I looked for the piece briefly, but she hasn't written in a while and the blog is not in a state of good repair.)
They were overwhelmingly caused by Covid as a disease rather than extra strain on the healthcare system. Deaths from tooth abscesses just weren't that numerous.
What about avoiding or delaying seeking treatment for chest pains or cancer symptoms?
Also can't explain nearly that many deaths. People overestimate how much our medical system reduces mortality https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical Vaccines are one of the things that does work, but having a lot more cancer tests in the US vs elsewhere doesn't actually increase survival that much. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/beware-cancer-screenshtml
I wasn’t suggested medical delay accounted for 1 million excess deaths. I was pointing out that some of those 1 million excess deaths were not from covid itself.
Canadian medical authorities were the ones who raised the alarm over delayed cancer screening. 2020 saw 40 per cent (950k) fewer cancer screenings in Ontario alone. And health authorities in 2021 reported much higher rates of patients presenting with advanced cancer than pre-covid.
"Patients who were treated after the COVID-19 pandemic began were significantly more likely to present emergently to hospital. This means that they were more likely to present with bowel perforation, or severe bowel obstruction, requiring immediate life-saving surgery," said the study's lead author, Dr. Catherine Forse, in a call with CBC News.
"In addition, we found that patients were more likely to have large tumours."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-late-stage-cancer-1.6466823
Not merely would they not account for 1 million excess deaths, they wouldn't for a significant fraction of 1 million excess deaths.
Excess death rates closely track with lag COVID infection rates as measured both by reported testing and wastewater data. This is strong evidence that COVID is the cause of those deaths and not missed routine medical treatment, which wouldn't neatly rise and fall with infection rates. People don't die of missed cancer screenings when COVID infections happen to be high and stop doing so when they fall.
Someone who died as a result of fear of going to the doctor would be better regarded as dying from the political response to covid rather than indirectly from covid.
I went to an emergency room in my Canadian city in early June 2020 and there was not a soul there, when typically there will be 20-30 people and a 4-5 hour wait. A doctor saw me immediately, and while he was treating me said he and his colleagues were worried about the consequences of so many people avoiding seeking medical care, and blamed the media for what he called ‘fearmongering.’
It’s difficult to calculate the exact number of deaths from millions of people avoiding seeking medical care for months. But it’s probably statistically significant.
Interesting subject for research, I'd say. Which ER treatments that were avoided during the pandemic had not measurable impacts on patient health outcomes? I imagine there's a lot of medicine that's not making an impact.
Then what is that number?
He is talking about excess deaths.
"I'm still not convinced that number can be directly linked to Covid. Yes, I'm talking about the old cliché 'died with Covid' instead of 'died of Covid'. Shouldn't we talk about excess deaths only?"
For what it is worth, I looked into this for California in early 2022.
I wrote up what I found here:
https://mistybeach.com/mark/Covid.html
At the time, the reported Covid deaths fairly well matched the "excess" deaths without worrying about cause.
Excess deaths show that the official figures UNDERESTIMATE Covid deaths. Admittedly, this is to a lesser degree in functional first-world countries like the US.
> Shouldn't we talk about excess deaths only?
Excess deaths probably includes a large number of deaths only indirectly related to "covid, the disease." Or perhaps not related at all. For example, automobile fatalities spiked during covid despite people driving less, because when the roads are empty you can speed easily and speed is one of the biggest risk factors for death in a vehicular crash (food for thought for people who want to build more roads to reduce congestion).
On the flip side, you could have covid responses that reduced unrelated deaths. For example, masking and distancing seems to have wiped out an entire flu strain: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/18/nx-s1-5155997/influenza-strains-disappearance-attributed-to-covid-protocols-alters-2024-flu-shot
So "excess deaths" isn't necessarily a good measure of how deadly covid is either.
The spikes in excess deaths match up to the spikes in the number of COVID cases pretty well, so I don't think this is a very strong effect. E.g., I don't think that there was a spike in "how empty the roads are" during the Omicron wave in 2022.
That's what I would have assumed, but in that case then it seems like it doesn't make a difference whether you use official covid deaths or excess deaths, and the official death numbers are pretty close.
The CDC's count of excess deaths from 2020-2024 comes out to 1.3 million people, so it seems like it doesn't make much difference. The people who "died with Covid" are still dying earlier than they otherwise would have, which will show up in the excess death count.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard
You make it sound like half of the people who died "with" COVID-19 were dying in car accidents or because someone dropped a piano on them.
Sure, COVID-19 did not kill a lot of healthy 20 year olds, so technically, you could argue that what really killed the victims was not being a healthy 20 year old (a chronic condition which has about 100% mortality over the span of a century), and COVID was just speeding along the process.
I will grant you that if you take a terminal cancer patient with a life expectancy of three months and give him a common cold, his chances are pretty good to die while still testing positive, and we should probably not sensationalize this as "THE COMMON COLD CLAIMS ANOTHER LIFE!", and it would not be very different for COVID.
Still, my best guess is that the median COVID death robbed a person of multiple QALYs.
Another metric is to simply look at excess deaths, bypassing the verdict of "how much was COVID a factor in this death?" entirely. This has other methodical issues (e.g. the lockdowns likely cut down deaths from drunk driving, but could possibly have driven up suicides, or social distancing might have caused the flu killed fewer people during COVID). The nice thing about the metric is that you get to assign a fractional blame for COVID as a cause of death. If you have 100 very old people of whom 30 would die in a normal year, and they get COVID and 80 of them die, the excess mortality metric would count that as 50 COVID deaths.
From my understanding, the excess deaths and the deaths from COVID for the pandemic years roughly agree, so I am inclined to believe that most of the excess deaths were effectively caused by COVID.
Excess death measures are worse than pure COVID count statistics because those tend to be conservative in counting people dying during the acute phase with medical attention and COVID killed some people due to acquired vulnerabilities and w/o adequate testing. It takes a few years to do the more nuanced estimates, and now we have federal statistical agencies captured by people who have poor truth-telling skills, so it might be awhile before we get a credible estimate.
Right. The other concern I have is how many deaths were caused by our treatment. How many died because they were stuck onto a ventilator that then lead to death. How many 'own goals'?
Excess deaths don't work perfectly either, because of the massive interventions taking place simultaneously with Covid. Causality is hard to tease out when the government response massively upended society and medical care.
Edit: Excess deaths is also a bit of a football - within some bounds, the assumptions chosen by the assessor affect the outcome.
"purely analysis" - forgot to decide on a word in between? 😂
As you’ve written before, modern healthcare is very good at shielding people from the messy realities of life and death. No one who works in an ICU has forgotten the deaths or has recast Covid as just a mild flu we overreacted to, I’ll tell you that much
+1
I think you missed a word here: "And indeed, most lockdown-type measures look marginal on a purely <MISSING WORD> analysis, and utterly fail one that includes hedonic costs"
> But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single deadliest event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%.
This is a statistically questionable claim, given the relative population sizes involved.
The Civil War killed over 2% of the US population. Covid killed about 0.35% of the US population.
I wouldn't call it "statistically questionable", but I agree with your main point that it is percent of population dead that determines emotional salience of a tragedy.
I suspect there's a mild systemic bias against reporting on/bringing up awful things that happen to people, probably as a result of market forces (no one likes bad news that makes them sad, even if they like bad news that makes them angry). That sounds weird given the media seems to be constant screaming about awful things, but those are all awful things which someone benefits from talking about, so there's a stronger force cancelling out the systemic bias (eg. because they can be blamed on someone, or because someone can gain sympathy or political capital from them).
Imagine a world where COVID struck under Biden, Trump spent the first few months jumping up and down about how US borders needed to be closed, then 1.2 million people died. There'd be Republicans with t-shirts with "remember the 1.2 million" and "open borders kills" on them, and Voxsplainers about how actually that's a really low number of QALYs and you should do cost-benefit analysis. It's harder to twist it so the Democrats get annoyed, but if all the ineffective covid measures hadn't happened (eg. schools stayed open, more restrictive lockdowns), it could have happened in reverse.
Thanks for writing about this. It’s important. Do you think some kind of national memorial might help people at least *remember*? Or maybe a Day of Remembrance?
Cue the truthers. When I mention to the COVID-skeptical that the disease killed a lot of people I either get a) the vaccine is the thing that killed most of those people and/or b) most of those deaths were accounting fraud- i.e. sick people that died that happened to have COVID were marked as COVID deaths instead of heart attacks, strokes, etc.
Yep. The death toll of Covid is not discussed because we don't have any kind of shared, objective reality for that discussion to happen in. The number would come from "the authorities", and they are so mistrusted by many that there is literally nothing they can say and no argument they can make now that will be believed. There's literally no way to have a discussion.
Yes. Covid revealed that most 'news' is about the narrative (story) that the 'news authorities' is pushing. Whatever the 'truth' is we have a hard time finding out. Covid broke a lot of trust we use to have.
The fact that statistical methodologies were changed during Covid to make such an accounting more difficult, adds to the distrust.
I'm willing to believe that COVID killed a lot of people. I'm not willing to take the number 1.2 million at face value after being lied to about virtually every relevant fact related to the pandemic.
I heard from a nurse that in her hospital they were in fact marking every patient possible as a COVID patient. From what I've read, the CARES act gave hospitals a 20% bump in Medicare reimbursement for inpatient care if they coded the patient as a COVID patient. So the number could be dramatically inflated if we are going off of something like medical billing. It doesn't take a grand conspiracy; they're going to code for the highest value legally possible.
Official classification is irrelevant, because it can't change excess deaths.
Exactly!
Also did all countries suitably exaggerate/fiddle with numbers?
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
The "experts" in the US somehow caused per-capita deaths in Peru, Brazil, Ukraine to be so high?
Or influence lock down policies in all other countries in the world somehow?
This chart lists North Korea as having 1 confirmed case and 6 deaths. Do you believe those are accurate numbers? It’s pretty clear to me that these numbers are based on whatever official data they were able to collect.
It looks like the US information is mostly from the WHO and CDC, which are not trustworthy enough to believe without further details on exactly how the data was gathered.
North Korea does not share any numbers with the outside world. No GDP, unemployment, health, nothing. It is a closed society. Most of the rest of the world is not quite so extreme. Most first world countries have robust data gathering and reporting, and these are decentralized and audited.
This is a general tenet of self-government. You can lie to yourself, but you will only harm yourself not anyone else. Each state has a number or private as well as municipal hospitals, various primary health centers, a department of health, etc. Numbers get collected and aggregated. There is no one around to orchestrate a grand conspiracy across 50 states, let alone 180 countries to co-ordinate on numbers.
The WHO and CDC might be more trustworthy than North Korea, but they are certainly not reliable enough to trust blindly. I’m not making an assertion about what the real numbers are, I’m saying we need to know how they are generated. We shouldn’t just trust a number because someone put it in a chart.
I’m much more willing to believe a number based on excess deaths, assuming it calculated with integrity.
The excess deaths number is slightly larger than the official COVID death toll.
It can make it impossible to determine the actual reasons for excess deaths, though.
Not impossible. If we see excess deaths surge prior to lockdowns, then we can logically conclude those weren't caused by the lockdowns themselves. If we see them vary with vaccinations, then we can reasonably infer the cause is related (vaccines can prevent COVID deaths, but not other deaths).
The little step where you show that the choices are COVID and the lockdown is vital to your argument, and yet you omit it.
Also that we didn't see them vary with the vaccinations in the manner prescribed, so that's not evidence. Witness the continual decrease in the claims for the vaccination.
COVID is a choice? I don't understand your first sentence.
Deaths soared in 2020 before vaccines were available (in December, for some people, after the election). And after vaccines were available there were differences in deaths as vaccination rates differed https://www.natesilver.net/p/fine-ill-run-a-regression-analysis
There are, of course, obvious answers to both those claims: 1) Covid waves were accompanied by many excess deaths; if it were "accounting fraud" there would not have been excess deaths. 2) The excess deaths coincided with covid prevalence, not with the time of vaccination.
All that excess deaths prove is excess deaths.
The accounting fraud -- for both deaths and cases -- is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, though the extent is immensely arguable.
If there were another cause, the fraud made it impossible to ferret it out -- and provided conspiracy theorists a wide-open field where claims can not be refuted because the evidence is bad.
I don't understand this. Are you saying, there is another explaination for the excess deaths besides "covid" and "strain on the healthcare system"? like maybe "death due to vaccianes"?
Is it "impossible to ferret it out" the part that you don't understand?
It's not impossible to understand, it's just stupid and nihilistic. It is completely ridiculous to assert that 1 in 300 Americans can die in a short period of time and yet no plausible cause of that can be ferreted out.
The idea that this mystery cause coincided with the rise and fall of a novel respiratory illness, killed a proportion of people similar to that killed by the respiratory disease in other countries and consistent with the IFR of the disease, but is something else entirely that leaves no other clues to its identity other than its 1M+ death toll is an *extraordinary* claim, and if your only response to people's completely justified skepticism at this is to shrug your shoulders, you should not expect people to take this seriously at all.
It is completely ridiculous to assert that we CAN ferret out the cause when we know for a fact that the data about causes was falsified.
Indeed, monkey brains aren't capable of seeing "appropriate" amount of significance in large numbers of dead people.
It is pretty crazy that you have people complaining that the COVID precautions we implemented were too strict when the reality is that we lost countless lives due to not doing enough to lock down and get people vaccinated.
The Johns Hopkins meta-analysis estimated that lockdowns prevented about 0.2% of Covid deaths.
Even extremely strict China-style lockdowns were ineffective at preventing the spread of Covid, as plainly demonstrated by the fact that China was still implementing them in mid-2022, after well over 90% of the country had been vaccinated.
Can you link the meta-analysis? I've been looking for a clear source willing to give a specific number like this.
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf
Thanks for linking, seems like a great source.
"Lockdowns in Europe and the United States only
reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average. SIPOs were also ineffective, only reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.9% on average."
2.9% mortality spared by shelter in place orders = ~35k lives. Not a huge effect, but not nothing either.
Seems really poorly done. Garbage in, garbage out
That's not a criticism. It's just a dismissal without any substance, and it's very obnoxious.
That's rubbish. Strict (not that strict, just sufficiently long) lockdowns were able to eradicate the original-strain virus in many places.
New Zealand gets a lot of credit but the actual world covid champion was Western Australia. Lockdowns started on March 15 2020, and started getting lifted on May 18 and were fully lifted by June 23. Life then went on basically as normal in the state (albeit with closed borders and the occasional quick extra lockdown) for the next couple of years, until eventually they decided to deliberately allow interstate travel in Feb 2022 after 95%+ of the population was vaccinated. By the end of 2023 (the most up to date numbers I could find) virtually everyone in the state had had covid, but only 1241 cases (0.09%) had died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Western_Australia
This approach minimised deaths _and_ total time spent in lockdown, they sensibly invested in a two month lockdown to begin with to eradicate the virus. Lockdowns without eradication are idiotic.
Yeah, it was lockdowns that did that. The fact that both countries are geographically isolated island nations with no land borders was just a complete coincidence.
Funny how the two examples people invariably bring up as evidence for how well lockdowns work are geographically isolated island nations with no land borders. And how they invariably attribute these two countries' low Covid rates to their lockdown policies alone, even though there are dozens of countries with policies just as strict if not stricter.
Well China also eradicated it (I don't like to give them credit because they also created it) and they have more land border than any other country in the world.
To reiterate: even after vaccinating well over 90% of their population, China was still locking down entire cities in the middle of 2022. Not just "stay-at-home orders", but cities of millions of people literally forcibly locked inside their apartment buildings with their food delivered by drones. In the middle of 2022. Does that sound like "eradication" to you? If China-style lockdowns worked, why was this necessary more than two years into the pandemic?
I don't know what was going on in China in 2022. I do know what happened in Australia.
All Australian states, plus New Zealand, successfully eradicated covid. Some of them just had more success than others in keeping it out. But when it did come back it always came in from a traceable foreign source (because idiots designed the quarantine system) and not from failure to eradicate in the first place nor from animal reservoirs.
Oh no. Not this. No, China did not eradicate Covid. They don't claim they did, and they did not. There were always cases. Eventually it spun out of control and they gave up. Shanghai kept locking down because they had so many eruptions.
From WP, Australia had a handful of COVID cases and managed to stop them out with a lockdown. Then they instituted a strict quarantine, and did more lockdowns when a case slipped through the quarantine.
For Americans and Europeans, this is very much not a central example of a lockdown. A central example, from what I recall, is a region having 100k COVID cases, then going into a mild lockdown for a month, and emerging with 20k COVID cases, which will increase as soon as the lockdown is lifted.
Right, that's a dumb lockdown. I certainly wouldn't argue in favour of that. Lockdowns are only worth the cost if you can actually eradicate the virus and keep your borders closed.
The US could certainly use some practice at keeping its borders closed.
I lived through an extremely strict China-style lockdown in China. In my city (subtropical, out of the way of major infection routes), the lockdowns were very effective. No-one got covid until the lockdowns ended in 2022 (I mean, very few people got it; no-one in our social circle). Then, when the lockdowns ended, we all got it within a few days.
For us, in this one city, the lockdowns worked.
That doesn't sound like the "eradication" Melvin claimed. If everyone gets it as soon as the lockdown's over, that sounds like lockdown is just kicking the can down the road.
Correct. But that doesn't matter, because the fantasy is the opposite.
Sure. Though it helped that by then, we were all vaccinated, and the prevalent strains were milder.
I don't have any evidence to suggest whether the Chinese lockdowns were the right strategy. I just know that for my city, they were a relatively effective strategy. They did what they said on the tin, for better or for worse.
> Even extremely strict China-style lockdowns were ineffective at preventing the spread of Covid, as plainly demonstrated by
It feels relevant to mention here that, making conversation in 2023 with a man in Shanghai, he asked me how many times I'd had covid, and when I said one, his response was "only one?"
I mean, not countless. About 1.2 million.
Is it crazy? At what countable number should a liberal society accept or not accept a strict lockdown?
If there is such a number, I don't think any human society has ever found it, What we've done in past plagues and pandemics were to implement *quarantines*. In which people who are reasonably suspected of having been infected (e.g. because they're on a ship with people who are definitely infected) are isolated until it's clear that there is no remaining infection. We can argue about when this is a necessary public health measure and when it is an infringement on civil liberties, and we'll have plenty of precedent to refer to. And sometimes it actually works.
Isolating the entire "nonessential" population, even the ones you know are healthy, to prevent them from possibly becoming infected, I don't know of any precedent for that. And from the one data point we have so for, it really doesn't seem to work except maybe to postpone the inevitable by a few months.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/death-rate doesn't show a big change in 2021-2022. The question I've never really got answered is whether we had 1.2 million *excessive* deaths or whether many of these were co-morbidities only marked as covd for convenience. If the second is more true, the actual deaths solely due to covid will be a lot lower.
Or more's the point, people who, if not for Covid, would have died during flu season in 2020 or 2021.
Huh, I wonder why that graph looks so different from https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/03/united-states-deaths-spiked-as-covid-19-continued.html .
That's interesting. Your graph shows two things.
1. Yoy increase consistent with the aging of the country.
2. At most a 500K spike and not a 1.2 million spike.
Also what happened after 2021? Did things drop a lot in the next 2 years?
I too am surprised at the lack of attention here. It can't just be partisan because no one is looking at this right now.
I think the 500K vs. 1.2 million might be because the graph only shows 2020 and maybe the very beginning of 2021, and then it was 500K, and since it's become 1.2M. See https://www.statista.com/chart/26397/cumulative-covid-19-deaths-in-the-us/
I like the census graph better because it corroborates the excess deaths rather than just talking about covid deaths.
Yeah, I'm just using this one to argue that the census graph matches the "COVID specific" numbers given the time course, so they shouldn't be read as conflicting.
The CDC has a website for excess deaths during the pandemic:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Their dashboard currently has it at 1,366,642 excess deaths.
Those aren't all Covid deaths, but Covid is by far the largest source. I tried to break it down by category for some previous years.
2022: https://medium.com/p/b614947af5ca
2021: https://medium.com/p/5ca1386e108c
2020: https://medium.com/p/97e1c40f5d74
The 500k spike is a yoy change. The fact that 2021 data is not negative means that year also had about 500k more than trend. But the the two graphs definitely are not consistent
I read it as closer to a million as both 2020 and 21 are half million above baseline.
Yeah, these graphs seem clearly contradictory. 2019 roughly matches, using Wikipedia's population of the US: 2.85 million deaths out of 330 million people is 8.63 per 100,000 (macrotrends says 8.78, which is close), while 3.4 million out of 331 million people in 2020 is 10.27. Where is macrotrends getting its data from?
The CDC's life expectancy report for 2020 has a handy breakdown (Figure 5, on page 5 of the document) on the effects of various causes of death on life expectancy in 2020 relative to 2019. Unsurprisingly, it seems that Covid was the dominant factor reducing life expectancy.
I had been expecting to see lower death rates from "unintentional injuries", since lockdowns seem like they would have reduced opportunities for both motor vehicle collisions and workplace accidents. But that actually seems to have increased (i.e. contributed to reduced life expectancy). The biggest factors pointing the other direction (cancer and chronic respiratory disease) are somewhat surprising to me, unless those are cases where covid accelerated the deaths of people who were already in precarious health.
Confusingly, it looks like Figure 5 scales positive and negative contributions to life expectancy separately, with each adding up to 100% even though overall life expectancy declined.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR015-508.pdf
Mary Pat Campbell (she's an actuary) did some pretty good posts on the topic as part of her ongoing discussion series about mortality: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/how-many-covid-deaths-have-there
+1
WHO claims about 1 mil excess deaths for 2020-2021.
https://www.who.int/data/sets/global-excess-deaths-associated-with-covid-19-modelled-estimates
When I check the Excel file under USA, I see ~500K deaths under 2020, ~500K under 2021, and 1 million for "2020 - 2021", which I think means the "2020 - 2021" period includes both years (yes, I agree that's a stupid way to communicate that).
Another good source you could use is https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-economist-single-entity?country=~USA
Where do they get their data? If there's a citation on the page, I don't see it.
Macrotrends data on life expectancy at birth also shows no dip from Covid, while CDC data shows a fairly sharp one.
http://cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr031.pdf
I just got it off a google search. I'm as surprised as anyone that there is a bipartisan tendency to totally ignore this large number of deaths. The first step is to make sure the numbers are genuine. It helps if to different sources corroborate.
I remember an expert saying VERY early on (paraphrasing): "if we mitigate the death toll through public health measures, they will undeniably *appear* draconian in retrospect."
Has stuck with me all this time, because it seems so obvious. I'd take your point about 'if we knew there'd be 1.2 million deaths' one step further - if we knew what the death toll was without any public health measures, people would be talking about insane we were for doing nothing.
People can't think about Covid logically. Even smart people. And to top it all off, people still absolutely overstate how draconian the measures were. It absolutely was not as 'locked down' as people now recall it.
One plausible argument against lockdowns/NPIs was that they wouldn't work well enough to prevent those extra deaths--we'd get the cost of lockdowns but still have about the same number of people die, just a few months later. The vaccines coming out as early as they did kind-of undermines the argument, but it wasn't at all clear we'd have working vaccines against covid so quickly when we started the lockdowns.
The test case seems to be Sweden, which I think did way less draconian stuff to slow covid. There must be good data comparing their ultimate outcomes to those of comparable countries (other Nordics?) that could inform us about whether the more draconian lockdowns worked at substantially decreasing deaths. Anyone know more?
Sweden has the lowest excess mortality and about the same as for Australia.
Someone posted a link to excess deaths for western countries elsewhere in the thread: https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q1229/rr
I do not see Sweden doing as well as Australia; Denmark does, but Sweden is slightly worse than Norway and slightly better than Finland.
This is cherry picked data. Look for the whole period 2020-2024.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/covid?tab=chart&uniformYAxis=0&Metric=Excess+mortality+%28estimates%29&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+population=true&country=DEU~SWE~NOR~DNK~CAN~FIN~AUS~USA
He's a different source, going to May 2024, which has the same basic picture: Denmark and Australia below 200 excess deaths/100K, Norway and Canada just over 200, Finland and Germany somewhat over, and Sweden looks somewhere between Canada/Norway and Finland/Germany... but still nowhere close to Australia
I have seen different more trustable sources that gives Australia about the same as Sweden.
As for excess deaths, the biggest uncertainty here is what do you take as a baseline?
If you take year 2019 then Sweden happened to have a very low mortality in 2019. Dry tinder effect.
If you take the average of previous 5-10 years, the difference between Australia and Sweden disappears.
Yes! Upon reading the post and some of the comments I thought I had memory holed how that period went down, so I looked up what we lived through in NYC (where the initial surge happened, and other places generally had fewer restrictions)
March 22, 2020: "New York State on PAUSE" became fully effective. This mandated 1) 100% closure of non-essential businesses statewide (in-office personnel functions).
2) A ban on all non-essential gatherings of individuals of any size for any reason.
3) Stricter guidance for vulnerable populations (New Yorkers age 70+ and those with compromised immune systems or underlying illnesses) to stay indoors, pre-screen visitors, and wear masks when around others. 4) General social distancing mandates of at least six feet.
June 8, 2020: Phase 1 of reopening starts.
For those of use who could work remotely, work went on as usual even during Mar 22 - June 8. This is 10 weeks in total.
Yes, schools were closed for longer. People with relatives in nursing homes couldn't visit them. And some people really dislike masks (even other people wearing them).
In the annals of "what sacrifices did your generation make to overcome a once in a hundred years pandemic" this is a trifle. No curfews, no military drafts, no rationing of products or price controls, nothing. The whining far outweighs the hardships.
I'm glad you weren't negatively impacted. But I think the people who owned, or worked at, small businesses that were decimated by the lockdowns would disagree with your assertion that they were "whining". Over 1.2 million jobs were permanently destroyed in the second quarter of 2020 according to the Fed.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/business-entry-and-exit-in-the-covid-19-pandemic-a-preliminary-look-at-official-data-20220506.html
It's important to not confound the effect of COVID with the effect of lockdowns; surely some proportion of those 1.2 million jobs would have disappeared regardless of lockdowns. Countries like Sweden that avoided lockdown still had big unemployment spikes in early 2020, so you need to figure an effect like that even in your counterfactual.
This is such an important point and is nearly always lost in these discussions.
For example, Sweden didn't mandate movie theaters be shut down, but movie theater owners quickly shut them down in 2020 because nobody was attending and there were no new movies being released.
I believe Sweden's approach was vindicated, at least for Swedes, but suspect life wasn't all that different in Sweden from Denmark since Swedes are extremely social-minded and self-disciplined.
That is definitely a disruption, but please see:
"However, establishment exits also surged, permanently destroying nearly 1.2 million jobs in the second quarter of 2020. Starting in the second half of 2020, however, establishment births surged; this was largely consistent with previously reported BFS data on new business applications, though some differences hint at differing activity between incumbent firms and new entrepreneurial businesses. On net, surging births outnumbered exits"
Yes, I saw that, but the original statement that the authors made was that 1.2 million jobs were "permanently" destroyed meaning that even after firm/establishment births, the number of jobs never returned to pre-lockdown levels (figure 3 of the linked article supports this).
Births are also “permanent.” When COVID hit, some establishments closed temporarily and some closed permanently. New establishments (“births”) more than made up for the establishments that were permanently closed. This is hard to see in the graphs in the paper because they show openings and closings, but there is no graph of the total number of establishments.
The following graph shows private sector employment plunging in April 2020 but hitting a new high in February 2022, which is consistent with the data in the paper you linked: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NPPTTL
So your assertion is that Decker and Haltiwanger are wrong when they say that 1.2 million jobs were “permanently destroyed” in 2020Q2?
I will agree that data shows that the number of jobs increased by at least as much as they decreased from the period in question. And yet Decker and Haltiwanger say that jobs were permanently destroyed. How might both things be true?
If you had a job that was destroyed, either permanently or temporarily, would you want your concerns dismissed as mere “whining”?
Nixon can't have won the election--nobody I knew voted for him!
We could maybe compare excess deaths across richer countries (with reliable enough census and death records) who handled the situation differently. For example Norway began reopening schools in-person (in a phased approach starting with the youngest) in May of 2020 and had everybody back in-person by the end of June 2020.
That excess death statistic eliminates the variations in testing and whether the death was or was not attributed to Covid on the official records.
But the only thing it shows is that there were excess deaths.
When we know for a fact that deaths were falsely reported as COVID -- in the US, the government actively encouraged it with monetary payments -- the question of what caused them remains open.
Leave aside ANY official cause of death: If you picked a city or state at random (or any country, for that matter), you could graph out historical deaths over any timeframe. When Covid hit, the huge spike in deaths is 'excess' deaths. So, if deaths in St. Louis County, MO spiked by 4,000 deaths over a two year time frame, those are excess deaths. It matters not a bit what any doctor stated the 'cause' was. They are excess deaths. You could see spikes literally anywhere you looked across the world. If the excess deaths were not from Covid, then what are you saying they're from?
Nice circular argument.
We don't know. We can't know. The data that would enable us to know was deliberately falsified.
Nice for conspiracy theorists, not so nice for the rest of us, but a fact.
Nah, this is bullshit for so many reasons. But the two most important reasons:
1. There is no way doctors would be 100% accurate even if all doctors were 100% acting in good faith.
2. Excess deaths are what they are. And they match up very closely with Covid deaths in most places, but the good news is that even if they didn't, we still know within a relatively small percentage points how many deaths were the result of Covid.
It's intentional obtuseness to pretend we don't. We do. The fact you can't even posit another cause of the extreme amount of excess deaths is telling, of course.
Also, there is positively nothing circular about the argument. We would NEVER know the exact account, and one can completely ignore ANY official count and just meticulously look at excess deaths and be able to give an extremely close estimate. It's actually not that complicated. You make it complicated because you've likely been wrong for years on this topic.
Repeating your circular argument in a longer form does not change that it is circular. This is very basic logic.
Nah, look at the waves of excess deaths of all columns. They lag shortly behind the famous waves of covid, exactly as if covid was the main driver of the waves of total deaths.
Are you just saying the excess deaths have unknown causes? Or are you implying the excess deaths were not connected to Covid?
Right. For example, this CDC graph shows that excess deaths from all causes occurred in 2020-2022 in six big waves, which the surges in all deaths happening about 2 or 3 weeks after the surges in new cases of covid and hospitalizations:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
💯% corrrect
It was so comical how early we opened restaurants, as if a populated indoor building where everyone can't mask because they're eating could be made safe by wearing a mask for the fifty foot walk to your table and spacing tables a bit farther apart. But hey, gotta keep that service industry hot!
I was talking to a friend who had school aged kids during covid. It was a rough time for his family, and his kids still have some lingering aftereffects in the form of anxiety, etc. A lot of the "covid reckoning" stuff really boils down to "it would have been better if covid had never happened." Clearly things could have been handled much better, but overall covid was just a really horrible thing and all the various ways of dealing with it had massive downsides in different ways.
I think a lot of the things that were blamed on covid were really trends that would have happened anyway that covid merely accelerated--learning loss, more screen time, loosened social bonds all probably would have stayed on the same general trend line from 2018-2025 even if covid had not happened.
I worked for an Indian tribe when the pandemic started. Their sovereign immunity exempted them from all state health orders. Yet when lockdowns came, they closed up everything anyway and I was laid off. Publicly, this was for public health and out of respect for elders, and that was genuinely a part of it, but I happened to be in the rooms where the primary reason was discussed: their gaming operations, a multimillion dollar array of casinos and one of the largest employers in the state, were seeing patronage in the single digits. This is what I think of whenever people discuss the damage done by government-imposed lockdowns.
Yes, the claim that but for imposed closures the restaurants would have been full is implausible.
But for the imposed closures, *some* restaurants would have been full. The ones that didn't close, and so absorbed most of the traffic from the ones which closed.
People who wanted to eat out and whose risk posture allowed for such a thing would have been able to do so, and people who didn't want to could stay home. Restaurateurs who wanted to keep their businesses alive, and waitresses who wanted to earn big tips, could do so, and those who didn't, wouldn't have been forced to.
This seems to me strictly superior to the one-size-fits-all total closure.
Maybe I'm the odd one out here, but no one I know, who's death I'm aware of, died of COVID. In the past ten years I've had acquaintances and family members OD so that felt real. But the only person I personally knew in the past 5 years to die of respiratory illness didn't have COVID at the end, so 1.25 million feels more like a weird statistical artifact than an obvious disaster. It's like talking about the number of people killed by climate change; surely it made things worse but no specific death was attributable to it
I don't know anyone who died of COVID either (a relative of a patient did, but that's enough degrees of separation that I'm not counting it).
But I also don't know anyone who lost their small business because of COVID, or anyone who feels like their education was held back because of COVID, and I feel like I hear more about those secondhand and through the news.
Same as DJ. I knew people who died of flu (over few decades, three, all YA under 40), and in the COVID era, via suicide, OD and late diagnosed cancer. But I'm assuming that just is an accident of epidemiology (and age, perhaps).
I do recall livelihoods lost to lockdowns, and I LITERALLY don't know as single higher education student I knew in that time who didn't feel that their education wasn't SIGNIFICANTLY affected, and quite a few primary and high school students too (but more variable spread of effects).
I distinctly remember you writing an article about your surprise at how your particular social bubble was spectacularly unrepresentative of the overall American population. That's what's going on here.
The San Francisco Bay Area was not hit very hard by covid.
I know plenty of people whose education was held back. For that matter, teachers talk about this pretty regularly.
I know lots of people who died of covid, but I'm an Orthodox Jew in NYC and our community was hit incredibly hard in early 2020. I think it's been under-discussed just how much people's subjective covid experience depended on where they were
In New York City, which is more or less the nerve center of the world, 15,000 people died of covid in April 2020, or five times 9/11. That had a big impact on how media around the world covered covid.
I think most of the heat in these takes is fueled by "Indigo Blob Bad", but I also think that it's not particularly mysterious to care more about an extraordinary inconvenience (the state taking away your subsidized weekday childcare) than about a statistically high but emotionally distant threat to life (one standard deviation more old people you know died of pneumonia).
I know two people who died, but I'm older than most folks here and so I know more elderly people. I also know a guy (a friend from high school) who was running a successful board game cafe who lost his business due to COVID. My yoga studio almost closed; the owner had to mortgage her house to keep it afloat.
I’m surprised you didn’t hear anything about education. Anyone college aged or under talks about it, and even if you don’t know any young people, all parents of younger children have a story about how school lockdowns affected them.
Those are two pretty big groups to not know anyone from.
I only know one person who died, and that was an old woman I hadn't spoken to in 20 years, but I did know two people who lost their entire sense of taste for over a year from getting unvaxed COVID. In the case of my then-19 yo niece, it was almost three years; near the end she looked almost anorexic because she could barely stand to eat food that was tasteless at best and often tasted rotten.
And to be sure, that's not the end of the world and probably wouldn't be worth closing schools for, but it was certainly a massive hit to her quality of life and its not captured in any statistic save maybe "long COVID" (which is not a statistic anyone trusts, for understandable reasons)
As with all things related to health, there are obvious clustering effects related to wealth. If you live in a wealthy area and only know wealthy people, you are less likely to know people impacted.
My family and I do alright in the US, and I only know of a few people who died from COVID stateside because I happen to have a lot of friends who are doctors. But we have relatives in India who died from COVID. My friends who are Indian *all* have relatives in India who died from COVID. We knew because it's a common thing for everyone in the community to visit the grieving household, and there was a lot of visiting going around.
Thanks for the perspective, but I'm not sure that maps clearly to the situation we're discussing. Taking COVID death numbers at face value (7MM worldwide with 1.25MM in the US), America accounts for something like 20% of all deaths with only 5% of the world population. This seems like it should be apocalyptic, but that wasn't my experience.
To Andrew Stern's point it seems like there were clusters/social circles in the US where things did look apocalyptic, but if you weren't living in one, then it's a far away problem like Ebola in west Africa, and would be weird to radically alter society about.
Just commenting with an anecdotal experience of where it really was apocalyptic. That worldwide deathcount is definitely low because I know that people were not being tracked properly in cities like Delhi. The more general point I was trying to make is that extrapolating from personal experience seems like a good way to end up in a wrong place, because there are tons of biasing factors (like, e.g., wealth disparities mentioned above)
I agree with your point that we can't just extrapolate from personal experience - I guess my point here is that The Discourse seems explainable from my experience, I don't know if this is because The Discourse is doing something strange, or if my experience is typical. I don't have a good idea of how we would assess the median experience of COVID in the west, but if it is close to mine, then the current terms of debate in the west aren't mysterious.
I don't mean to diminish what you're saying but I don't have any reason to believe your experience was more typical of Americans than mine was, Do you think that it is/was? Taking the balance of a diversity of viewpoints doesn't tell us much about the underlying distribution.
It's hard to say which is more typical. I think that our intuitions work against us here -- Chinese Robbers is a hell of a beast, we have algorithmic feeds that essentially only show us what we want to hear, etc. etc. I am in NYC, it was a warzone. I visited Ocala Florida during COVID, nothing was different.
The 'right' thing to do imo is, more or less, what we did -- different regions ended up having different levels of covid regulation that were more or less enforced at the state and muni level, than at the federal level, based on the appetites of the local populace. There were no federally mandated lockdowns, at any point, for e.g. There was an attempted federally mandated mask and vaccine mandate, but that got shut down in court (by nationwide injunction no less).
I find that many people who are really upset tend to be people in NY freaking out about people in Idaho, and people in Idaho freaking out about people in NY.
As Scott says, the number of 7 million worldwide is clearly wrong. (It's underreporting in developing countries.) So I don't think we should use this number to draw any conclusions.
Also, I don't know if you are interested in it, but my grandmother died from COVID. (She was quite old already, however.)
I live in a wealthy first world environment and personally knew four people in first world countries who died of covid (and I'm young, although 3 of the 4 deaths were old people).
Of course, this too is anecdotal.
I'm sorry, that sucks. It's weird to say that it sucks more because they were in a wealthy first world environment, but it maybe does suck more, just because its even more unexpected.
I know two people that died of COVID. One was >70 and had health issues, while the other was a young single mother who we later found out wasn’t taking very good care of herself. 1.2MM deaths / ~340MM population would mean that we should expect many persons to not personally know a victim, doubly-so those with small, younger social circles. It did not feel like a ‘statistical artifact’ to me. My experience is anecdotal as well of course, but I’m hardly alone.
I'm sorry to you and others who have lost people to the pandemic. I didn't mean to come off as dismissive.
No apologies necessary. Different people have different lived experience and all that. Cheers.
I saw an article that I can't find anymore working out the math of "how many people need to die for the average person to know someone who died from it" and it was some astoundingly large number, like 5-10% of all Americans. I don't know anyone who has died from kidney disease, diabetes, or liver disease, but those three kill hundreds of thousands of people every single year, and are among the top 10 causes of death overall.
That all tracks for me. I think the standard emotional response for things that kill lots of people every year but which most people are removed by at least two degrees of separation is "that's bad I'm glad doctors are working on it" and then to neither make nor endorse significant changes to society. I'm not making a value judgement on that, but I think it explains the behavior Scott is describing.
I don't know anyone who died, but a young teen-to-twenties coworker had to be hospitalized due to COVID-related breathing problems, and a few (paraphrased) people mentioned it had hit them like a hammer. So that's enough to trigger "we were lucky".
Depends on what you mean by "died of COVID". I don't know anyone who died from infection by SARS-CoV-2, or was even seriously ill from it. But my father died of acute lockdown. Granted, he probably wouldn't have lasted more than another year or so in any event, but you can say that about a lot of the ones felled by the virus. He was still enjoying life, more days than not, until New York State took away everything that made his life worth living and stuck him in a bed in a room alone except for the occasional masked thing that would change his bedpan but didn't have time to care.
He lasted about two weeks.
How common was deciding to go early due to this horribly demoralizing treatment? This is the kind of thing that we will probably never know, which could easily have skewed the numbers.
I find it weird how so much of our pop culture has the message of 'quality over quantity' in actually living life, and yet locking the elderly away like this became the obviously virtuous path.
My sister told me about a youngish woman at her work at a tech company in Seattle, post vaccines, who refused to go to the cafeteria at work or socialize at all, really, due to fears about COVID. My sister said she could understand, because you never know who might not be vaccinated! Imagine it!
I haven't really seen that much messaging of "quality > quantity of life", in any context where the quantity of life was in any real doubt. As soon as there's any noticeable risk of death, the messaging shifts to "This is *intolerable*! We *must* minimize the risk of death today, and postpone the inevitability of death at all costs!"
Granted, people who want to actually live life have gotten pretty good - I'd suggest maybe too good - at not noticing risks of death that might get in the way of that. But COVID wasn't something anyone could not notice.
Pop culture almost universally celebrates risk takers, especially when risking to save others but not always. Sir Edmund Hilary, Rocky Balboa, Michael Schumacher or medal of honor winners. Even when the risk is not death, common stories involve living a stifled, fearful existence and then overcoming that fear to start a life worth living. Like 40 Year Old Virgin or any coming of age story.
This is not surprising, the fraction of people COVID killed was very small.
However, the same could be said for the terrorist attacks on 2001-9-11, which killed orders of magnitude fewer US citizens than COVID. Yet they were not something which were basically forgotten a few years later.
I think the saddest part is that entrenched ideological struggles mean that we will likely learn little from our mistakes. The next pandemic could be much worse, and it is not clear to me that we will be any better prepared for it than we were in 2019.
I agree. Further, if next week bird flu mutates into something 20x worse than covid, the US public health authorities will have too little credibility and the public will have too little patience for any kind of lockdowns, *even if they are entirely justified*.
US public health authorities forgot that job #0 was "Stay trustworthy to as much of the population as humanly possible." They failed at that, as hard as any institution has ever failed at anything.
I think they were helped along by media and the weird moral-panic aspect of covid that happened, where factual questions about efficacy of masks or relative risks were swamped by moral crusades by media/political types. But also, it seemed like the visible public health authorities were mostly excited about the assistant propaganda minister side of the job, whereas they should have (IMO, but what do I know) been focused on the "sharing my expertise on infectious disease to help people make better decisions about risk/reward tradeoffs" side of the job.
Part of it is that death in a hospital is undramatic. There' are no obvious people to blame the way there is in a war.
It's not weird in the slightest.
Nobody talks about "1.2 million COVID deaths" because the medical establishment played obvious and ridiculous games with the way it counted "COVID deaths." Any patient with a positive PSR was required to be reported as such, even patients who were in vehicular accidents or suffering from late-stage cancer.
This has been known since the beginning.
Anyone who tries to remind people that "a lot of people died" is likely to be immediately confronted with that fact.
So what would be the point? Other than commemorating the beclowning of the medical establishment, that is. That'd be cool.
See https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/03/united-states-deaths-spiked-as-covid-19-continued.html . These (from all-cause mortality) match the official numbers up to that point, and can't be biased by misclassifying deaths, so I think your explanation is wrong.
Whatever the true excess mortality stats might be, the mere fact of the obvious and ridiculous manipulation of the Big Red Number on various dashboards at the time weakens the argument a lot -- "loss of trust in medical establishment bookkeeping" isn't something that can just be turned around by saying "hey guys, the *real* numbers are in now, and it turns out that they are just as bad as the fake ones we were feeding you to scare you into compliance!"
If the numbers turned out correct, why are you convinced they were fake at the time?
Wouldn't the default explanation be that doctors/coroners' judgments on what percent of deaths were "from" vs. "with" COVID turned out to be pretty good, and the people reporting them were correct to trust those judgments or at least accept them as a first pass?
The habit of public health authorities maximizing covid death counts by using "with covid" style metrics was well documented at the time -- and IIRC even encouraged by the feds in that additional funding was provided based on covid deaths as opposed to regular ones.
Excess mortality doesn't distinguish between deaths caused by covid itself and those caused by various interventions -- so it's not obvious that "excess mortality ~= reported covid mortality" implies that the covid mortality stats were OK.
Excess deaths jumped up right when the virus hit and before there were notable interventions. And explain just how the interventions were causing all those deaths.
I'm not saying that covid-19 didn't cause any excess deaths -- I'm saying that Scott's underlying assumption that it caused all of them is not justified.
As (non-comprehensive) examples, IIRC there were big jumps in violent crime, drug overdoses, and traffic fatalities -- I don't see a mechanism for the virus itself to have caused these?
You have failed to provide a single piece of evidence for any one of these claims, which kind of tells on itself don't you think?
This was all extensively litigated (on this very forum) years ago -- are you disputing that the US federal government provided hospitals additional funding based on whether or not a patient was reported as dying from covid-19?
It’s not our fault or medical establishment’s that you put faith in grifters like Trump. They sow doubt to get power.
Warning about this comment, it seems to be content-free insult.
Not sure why you want to drag Trump into this -- he's pretty pro-vaccine himself I think? (also somebody who I'm quite ambivalent about, not that it's relevant)
The doubt in this case was sown by people like Fauci openly lying to the public -- to the point of later admitting that they were lying as a tactic to manipulate behaviour. This is not a path to trust.
Trump wanted to be pro-vaccine, mostly to claim credit (not entirely undeserved) for Operation Warp Speed. But his supporters booed him for making pro-vaccine comments, so he backed away from it.
There was no manipulation. This number was published because it was the only number that was available. It was clearly communicated that it was the number of deaths *with* COVID, and the number of deaths *from* COVID did not exist.
And there was no sinister reason why the number of deaths *from* COVID did not exist. It was simply impossible to get. You only know whether someone died *from* COVID by an autopsy, and not all dead people get an autopsy. An autopsy is a lot of work, and it was not feasible to make one for every dead person with COVID.
In the city of Hamburg in Germany, each "death + COVID-positive" got an autopsy in the first months. Results: while a few died from other causes - all real Covid-deaths had serious comorbidities (as you would expect at their age). And of course, those who died from COVID clearly had fatally damaged lungs, indeed.
I won't dispute that all-cause mortality does appear to have been unusual.
Doesn't mean that those people died because of a COVID infection though.
A lot of those deaths were iatrogenic. Fauci et al pushed interventions and treatments that not only didn't work, but almost certainly hastened or even outright caused deaths. Ventilators. Remdesivir. Doesn't matter whether they were facing a serious COVID infection or just had other respiratory symptoms from a completely unrelated condition and happened to have a positive PCR. The treatments and interventions used did far more harm than good, in the aggregate.
And that's not even getting into people who died of other causes that did not receive medical treatment because access to care was restricted. Heart attack victims who didn't call 911. Missed cancer screenings leading to detection only after the disease had advanced significantly. Etc.
The thing is, because the virus was endemic almost immediately, and because PCR tests were calibrated to return positive results on the merest shred of COVID DNA, a huge number of them were counted as "COVID deaths," even though the virus outright killed very few of them. Again, motorcycle accidents, falling off ladders, stage IV colon cancer, all COVID deaths. Not by accident, but by design.
Look, you're an MD. You know that at any given time there are a large number of geriatrics that are going to die the next time they get a really serious cold. Fortunately, even most geriatrics have immune systems so inured to common viruses that their symptoms never get that serious. When a new virus emerges, something their immune systems haven't had a chance to recognize, that's when things get dangerous. They represent dry tinder waiting for a viral spark. But that's still a minority of that 1.2 million figure. The majority were people who died unnecessarily because of harmful medical interventions or restricted access to normal medical care as a result of lockdown policies.
Still, 1.2 million is a big number, so even a small percentage of that is also going to be a big number. But there is no reason to think that if we had simply ignored the virus and kept on keeping on that the number would have been anywhere close to that high. Maybe a few hundred thousand. And even then, we'd just have been compressing the expected deaths into smaller time window. If the medical establishment hadn't lost its bloody mind, that is.
I don't think it's remdesevir because many of these excess deaths were before remdesevir was approved in October 2020. I also don't think there's much difference between PCR tests vs. antigen tests vs. fancier tests.
While I haven't spent the time looking up the statistics that would tell me if all of these people were killed by ventilator malfunctions, I'm curious how you're thinking of burden of proof here. A new virus that's known to cause cardiac and respiratory issues and is similar to past viruses that have killed a lot of old people goes pandemic, there's a lot of excess mortality among old people, and the opinion of the doctors/coroners involved is that it's because of the virus doing exactly the sort of cardiac/respiratory damage it's known to do, in patients who were only brought to the hospital / put on respirators in the first place because they were having severe breathing difficulty. Why would your first assumption be "most of the excess mortality must be iatrogenic"?
"patients who were only brought to the hospital / put on respirators in the first place because they were having severe breathing difficulty"
That's not what I've read. The protocol for COVID was established from on high, and front-line clinicians were not permitted to use their judgment when treating patients with a positive PCR. Respirators were, for a while, basically mandatory.
There is significant difference between PCR and other tests, and there is solid reporting out there that the default setting for running COVID tests was to run a sample through them so many times that the rate of false positives was likely very high.
As to burden of proof, you seem to think that we ought to give the medical establishment the benefit of the doubt and take reported statistics at face value. In the wake of the COVID debacle, one is justified in rejecting both of those premises. I certainly do.
I lived in southern Missouri 2021-2024. 2020 wasn’t too bad, but we had a dramatic spike during the Delta wave because the vaccination rate was low. The Springfield hospital had to bring in hundreds of medical personnel.
If excess COVID deaths were caused primarily by medical interventions that were given to people with respiratory symptoms who tested positive for COVID, as you claim, then all these excess deaths would be counted as COVID deaths. The doctors treating them thought they had COVID and their respiratory symptoms were severe enough to merit these treatments, they died of respiratory symptoms or unclear causes, it's going to get classified as a COVID death even under relatively strict standards.
If, as you also claim, there was rampant counting of deaths by people who happened to be positive with COVID as COVID deaths, that would suggest that there should be dramatically more COVID deaths recorded than excess deaths. Instead I believe it's the other way around - roughly 350,000 recorded COVID deaths in 2020 vs. roughly 535,000 excess deaths.
The only way this works out is if there was some massive number of excess deaths not counted as COVID deaths that outweighs amount of the deaths from pre-existing causes counted as COVID deaths. These couldn't be caused by COVID medical interventions, so they must be the deaths caused by lack of medical treatment that you mention. There must be a very large number of them - can you find evidence of them in the excess death statistics, in the form of deaths from causes that couldn't be COVID going up? My recollection is that these numbers mostly stayed flat.
I think it's gonna be really hard to show iatrogenic explanations for the 8x increase in people being found dead in their homes or on the streets in NYC, April 2020.
https://archive.is/zoGMX
Speaking as someone in the medical establishment who was trying to keep that number down, I am going to take a leap and say that you have never read any of the studies that show remdesivir and ventilators are effective, and you are basing your medical opinions off some dude on Twitter.
If you would like to prove me wrong, you can access them here
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007764
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8667647/
and please include in your reply detailed descriptions of why you feel the authors of these papers reached the wrong conclusions. Thanks
No. There were about six huge surges in total deaths during 2020-2022 that each immediately followed by a few weeks the six huge surges in covid cases and covid hospitalizations. You can look at the total death trend line and _name_ which variant of covid caused the big waves: Delta, Omicron, etc.
That could all be true and not change my conclusions, which are predicated on a combination of overreaction to various COVID waves and the knock-on effects thereof.
I remember after reading and listening to dozens of things about the Tudors and Bloody Mary specifically over the years, one source mentioning as an aside that 10% of the English population died in a flu epidemic in one year. Before spending 10 times more time to debating how she probably felt about her half sister.
I don't know if that is a reference to the sweating sickness but yes. That's a fascinating topic because it was a disease that we don't know what it was, it was very prevalent, there were waves of it, and it routinely killed lots of people fast (famously, Thomas Cromwell's wife was fine in the morning and dead by evening).
And then it vanished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness
I was referring to the 1557 flu pandemic but sweating sickness like the encephalitis lethargica epidemic of 1920 is absolutely fascinating, a disease emerging, doing immense damage and then disappearing without a trace.
> But there’s no “other side” to 1.2 million deaths.
The other side is: "That number is wrong."
To take an extreme example, if I say, "a billion people are killed by aliens every year", I think it would be quite incorrect to claim that there is "no other side to the story". The other side to that story is that my claim is incorrect, and there need not be any other argument against it beyond that.
Whether that number is correct or not *is* the entire debate. People who believe that 1.2M died *from* COVID correctly believe that 1.2M deaths is a lot and matters. People who believe that 1.2M did not die *from* COVID, may also believe that 1.2M deaths is a lot and matters, but they don't believe that 1.2M died.
Note: I probably won't engage in a debate here about whether the number is correct or not, and I make no claims as to which side I'm on. I'm mainly interested in raising a red flag to saying that "there is no other side to this argument" because I think that is a very incorrect statement, regardless of which side of the argument you are on.
I disagree with your meta-argument then. If one side is false, there is no value of bringing it up when someone refers to the true side.
Disagree. Some people have less information (like newcomers) and others tend to be skeptical of bold claims. Bringing up the other side, even if demonstrably incorrect, has a lot of value in establishing credibility, expanding understanding, and the newcomers to such facts aren't blindsided or as persuaded by the incorrect side.
Nowadays 5.64 billion people use the internet. Literally everything has two sides. Enshrining always bringing up both sides as a norm of communication would, apart from being practically untenable, make writing on the internet way too clunky and potentially harmful (people can be convinced by demonstratably incorrect things too!).
If you think a given writing is incorrect on a point, then make an argument! I have no problem with that, even if your position turns out to be demonstratably false at the end. However, this limp-wristed, "I don't make any claims, but I've heard of people who do" serves no-one and is incredibly irritating.
On huge topics it is generally a good idea. Especially polarizing topics. Should we do this on everything? Of course not.
How can we know which side is false if we do not engage and communicate? By pretending the other side doesn't exist, we have no chance of finding out if they have good arguments, or convincing them that our arguments are better.
Ignoring the "other side" may be reasonable if one side has 10 people saying something the other 8B people disagree with, but in this case ~half of the US population (by my estimation) believes it so I think discounting it just because you disagree is an inappropriate course of action.
Even if you think it is the uneducated half of the population that believes a thing (like burning witches works), you should *still* acknowledge the argument and engage with it in a meaningful way. Ignoring the argument or claiming it doesn't exist at best leads to a bigger schism in society and eventually violence is used to determine who is "right".
This is no engaging with people who believe medical professionals across the nation either willfully lied or are too stupid to properly diagnose the reason for a person's death. The reported number of deaths is the only necessary evidence which makes the argument effectively a tautology, and if someone disbelieves a tautology there is no evidentiary way of convincing them they are wrong. Unfortunately in the social media age arguing against plain facts has become common. I honestly don't know how to engage with those people.
But you're not engaging! You literally say, "Note: I probably won't engage in a debate here"
So bringing it up here won't do anything to move us towards the truth. You can't demand that other people have to engage with your arguments at all times, even when you won't present them!
There are lots of people in the comments here and elsewhere on the internet engaging on the topic. I could steel man the point, but it seems better to let those passionate about the subject make their points.
The purpose of my comment here was not to argue the point itself, but instead to highlight to Scott and others that I think it is harmful to the article and community cohesion to pretend half of the population's opinion simply doesn't exist.
If the point is that we need to engage with the best arguments for the purpose of truthseeking, then it's *not* best to let the most passionate make the point if you think you can steelman their argument.
If the point is actually "community cohesion" then I think the rest of us, and most especially Scott, have no obligation to care at all. If certain people are going to stop reading because Scott doesn't bend over backwards to cater to their opinion in every article he writes, so much the worse for them.
>How can we know which side is false if we do not engage and communicate?
That is really remarkable rhetoric for someone who themselves *just said* that they refuse to actually discuss (here) whether the claim is true or not.
Double posting my comment above here since you have the same feedback:
There are lots of people in the comments here and elsewhere on the internet engaging on the topic. I could steel man the point, but it seems better to let those passionate about the subject make their points.
The purpose of my comment here was not to argue the point itself, but instead to highlight to Scott and others that I think it is harmful to the article and community cohesion to pretend half of the population's opinion simply doesn't exist.
I acknowledge that a large percentage of American voters are so upset about the lousy way the Democrats have governed in the past 75 years that those millions were easily scammed by the Liar in Chief.
Agreed. It’s important to have these conversations. It’s also important to back up any argument we personally make with scientific and statistical data. I always try to do that, or else I provide a path for people to check for themselves. I think it’s an important part of debating as well.
I mean, this is a bit like saying there's another side to "the Earth is an oblate spheroid orbiting the Sun, which itself is located in the Milky Way Galaxy, composed of roughly 100-400 billion stars, most of which are Type M stars."
Sure, there are people who would argue with that. But the argument is basically, "ignore literally all evidence to agree with me." It's just not really an argument that has much bite to it. You can just look at the trend line here and do the mental math yourself to conclude that there were ~1.2 million US excess deaths in 2020-2022 : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year?time=earliest..2024&country=~USA
I find that when half of the population believes something different than you, it is worthwhile to engage with them earnestly even if you are extremely confident that you are right. There are a *lot* of times where even a super-majority of the human population is wrong about something, in fact it is quite common I think, but even in those situations if you somehow know with great certainty that you are right and everyone else is wrong, you should *still* engage with them earnestly.
Listen to their points and try to figure out where the root of the disagreement lies. In this case, my best guess is the real disagreement lies in a disagreement in credibility of data sources, not in whether 1.2M people dying is acceptable or not, or even whether or not source X says 1.2M or not. Once you have identified the real disagreement, you can begin to have a more constructive discussion on how to resolve the difference of opinion. Maybe in this case it looks something like trying to come up with better ways of building and maintaining institutional trust, or understanding where the distrust comes from and trying to show that distrust is unwarranted.
Banned for this comment - I'm not against being anti-lockdown, but this is not especially related to the post, and using it as an excuse to go into heated controversial denunciations of a large group.
maybe there should be memorials to covid victims?
maybe each hospital should get a plague that says something like "1376 people died here during the 3 worst months of the covid pandemic from Dezember 2020 to March 2021"
Darkly funny how you misspelled "plaque".
I like the broad idea of this kind of commemoration, but that specific plaque could make the hospital seem incompetent. Plaques or scholarships in honour of health care workers who lost their lives seems nice though.
I don't want to trivialize what people suffered from lockdowns, I hated being locked down, but plaques like that would remind people that some suffered a lot worse.
There is a memorial kind of thing on the bank of the Thames!
www.nationalcovidmemorialwall.org
the sheer size of it did have an emotional impact on me when I accidentally came across it on a stroll :(
I walk past this monument quite often: https://timesofmalta.com/article/sliema-monument-elderly-covid-victims-unveiled.968794
>I think if we’d known at the beginning of COVID that it would kill 1.2 million Americans, people would have thought that whatever warnings they were getting, or panicky responses were being proposed, were - if anything - understated.
The thing is, many of us *did* know at the beginning that it would kill roughly that many Americans. This was based on extrapolating from the case fatality rate and R0. On March 4, 2020, I wrote to my friends, "I do not believe that the market has fully priced in the 0.2 – 2 million deaths, and associated societal disruption, that will likely occur in the United States over the next year." (This was right before the stock market went down by more than 20%, and I ended up making a good profit off the crash.)
Yeah, sorry, I meant "we'd known" in the sense of common knowledge where nobody could deny it.
This is what I was thinking about while reading Scott's article as well. There /were/ experts predicting this number of deaths. I have a distinct memory of listening to an NPR news broadcast in March of 2020 with an epidemiologist who said that the total number of deaths could reasonably be as high as 2 million. I've been impressed with the accuracy of that guess for five years now and replay it in my head frequently.
I admit my Google-Fu may not be strong enough to find the original NPR broadcast I'm remembering... but here are a couple other early estimates I could find:
* 2.2 Million USA if no control measures are implemented (March 16, 2020)
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
* 0.2 - 1.7 Million USA, no control measures (note that they also seem to predict a shorter pandemic) (March 13th 2020)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-estimate.html
On March 16 I told some friends in a group chat, "we could easily see a million deaths in the US".
> if no control measure are implemented
So all the lockdowns (and vaccines?) actually contribute little? It actually doesn't lower death that much from baseline?I guess there should be other sources that predict way lower and way higher.
My intention with those links was just to show that predictions of death on roughly a million-US-citizen scale were already floating around early spring 2020. If you're asking about how effective the lockdowns were, I'd definitely look for more recent analyses.
I just think it'd be funny if their predictions are weirdly prophetic. Being in the same magnitude as what really happened is not an easy feat especially considering the huge margin on error we have to consider! That's why I think there should be other predictions that are wronger than this, or we're forced to conclude that our herculean efforts only count as "no control measure are implemented"
It was easy. I predicted both roughly correctly – how many people could die and that most of restrictions will not be very effective. It is just numbers – the infection fatality rate from cruise ship Diamond Princess, then our knowledge that it was very infectious. Every data showed this to be the case.
I also predicted that vaccine will arrive within 6 months or later. I was spot on (Sputnik was released in August), Pfizer vaccine took longer but only because they tried to harm Trump.
I didn't know how effective will be vaccine but someone on SSC mentioned that all previous vaccine attempts with coronaviruses failed to make a vaccine that stops infections. It also turned correct.
At every step I encountered abuse with my predictions. I suspect that we have a strong publication bias. A lot of people predicted correctly but they were supressed, marginalized, people simply didn't want to hear. Instead, wrong but more palatable predictions were amplified.
I visited here recently. I think it’s effective: https://www.nationalcovidmemorialwall.org/
COVID also introduced a larger degree of separation from the death. Many deaths occurred in hospitals with no visitors.
My grandmother died fairly early on in the pandemic. She was in a nursing home in a state where COVID was spreading in nursing homes. I do not know if her death was related to COVID[*], though it seems likely. She was old enough that she had at most a small number of years left, but still, the timing was suspicious. If there was a funeral, I didn't hear anything about it, possibly because it was obvious I wouldn't risk traveling for it. Under normal circumstances I probably would've flown up to see her when she took a turn for the worse, and certainly would've attended the funeral.
[*] The only way I might've found out the cause of death would be pestering my emotionally distraught aunt or uncle for details, which didn't seem worth it.
In the US, the national trauma wasn't all those people dying. It was a realization about values. The priorities that powerful people are unwilling to set aside when it's a matter of life and death are their true values. What are they willing to let their neighbors die for?
There are a lot of conservatives who really do value liberty very highly. When they were tested by having to trade off liberty versus life, we saw what they chose.
And we found out that liberals really do value racial equity very highly. When they were tested by having to trade off racial equity versus life, we saw what they chose.
We also learned a lot about who will lie, and for what.
A most instructive comment. What we have seen is how self-serving our rulers are, even unto full-blown sociopathy.
I don't see how what the left did demonstrates racial equity. The question that kinda dismantles the narrative is how many racial minorities died as a result of people catching COVID during the protests? If the answer is more than 0 then it demonstrates that minorities dying for political causes can be justified. If it's 0 then it demonstrates that there was no point to many lockdown restrictions.
Like if lockdowns were good and useful then having minorities break them would be bad for said minorities.
I took Matthew's comment as referring to the strong consensus that large gatherings were "superspreader events" that ought to be banned... until the George Floyd riots and protests began.
Yes, my point is that if they truly are super spreader events then allowing them to happen isn't equity, because you're literally killing minorities by allowing them to happen
I don’t believe I can ever recover how I previously framed the world when that 180 happened. I’m confident in saying it fundamentally changed me.
There was also https://www.cato.org/commentary/why-racial-priority-covid-19-vaccine-distribution-poses-problems#
>While state and local health authorities make most of the ultimate decisions, the Centers for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) puts out non-binding guidelines that are expected to sway their work. As early as the summer, it became clear that many of those involved in ACIP were pressing for a social-justice-oriented approach that would elevate race and ethnicity as conscious factors in vaccine allocation.
>>There are a lot of conservatives who really do value liberty very highly. When they were tested by having to trade off liberty versus life, we saw what they chose.
This doesn't track with security/anti-terrorism/drug war policies.
I'm not trying to make a big point, aside from adding to the claim that no side in US politics has a clear and coherent ideology, nor do they even have ideologically consistent sub-planks.
> The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them!
I do want to highlight how this is something that was really blown up deliberately by a lot of people:
The Surgeon General told people to not buy masks on February 29th.
The WHO suggested people should wear masks if they're sick on March 30th.
The CDC officially issued guidance that we should wear masks on April 3rd, 2020. After that there was consistent pro-mask guidance from the government.
Given that for most people COVID became a real thing on March 11, 2020 with the indefinite postponement of the NBA season, that means that we had about three weeks of "don't mask" followed by several years of people repeatedly pointing out that we had several weeks of "don't mask" and it's just so confusing, which is a pretty self-fulfilling claim.
I don't think it requires deliberate ill intention to blow it up. I tried to mask early in the pandemic and got flak over it. I have two or three posts at the old blog talking about how weird this was and trying to reconcile different perspectives.
More controversially, I get the impression that later in the pandemic there was a bit of a retreat to "maybe mask mandates don't do much in practice", though I can't tell how much of that was a couple of contrarian Cochrane reviewers vs. a larger consensus.
I don't think it necessarily *would* require ill intent, but I watched a lot of people - media figures and politicians in particular - very actively signal-boost this a lot. If you're skeptical of this claim, I can put together some examples.
I remember you talking about the looks you got wearing a mask on a bus early on. I kind of followed the recommendations you laid out. I bought a pulse oximeter, had a set of ‘outside clothes’ to change into and out of on going out into the world. I don’t think I ever used them though. Mostly just hunkered down, bought a bag of dried red beans when bread became scarily scarce, did some isopropyl alcohol swabbing of physical mail for a little while.
The thing is we knew the virus was dangerous but didn’t have the means to determine just how dangerous. I think most people in official capacity were acting in good faith. They inevitably made mistakes due to their lack of omniscience.
The fact that this all occurred in the context of our kind of insane culture war with everyone distrusting anyone not on their own team made things much more painful than they had to be.
I like to call this "September 12 Syndrome." I remember the day after 9/11, how much I knew about terrorism and Afghanistan and bin Laden. And I had to keep updating over time. Lots of people rewrite their memories to have always been right so this is hard to notice.
"Wash your hands" was considered the best thing to do, and it led to some early super-spreader events, like that church choir practice, who were very diligent about washing their hands.
Oh yeah, fomites. I also carried latex gloves for fueling my car
My understanding was that the Cochrane review was pretty good, and it basically concluded there's not good evidence either way. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full There's an argument that if you're requiring an intervention you should have evidence to support that intervention. I think there's also a good argument that many people adjusted their risk tolerances because they were wearing masks, such that if the true effect of a mask were modest (say a 15% reduction in disease transmission), they adjusted their behavior to treat wearing an N95 to be equivalent to a 95% reduction in risk of transmission. If you treat a 15% risk reduction as a 95% risk reduction, you're more likely to engage in behaviors that spread risk. But to my knowledge that study hasn't been done.
Personally, I'm more frustrated at how little nuance was allowed into the discussion - and in particular I blame the government officials and gatekeepers who forced this into an all-or-nothing discussion, and aggressively pursued anyone who dissented from the official line. Prior to the pandemic, a major project of epidemiologists was to target airplanes and airports as the most likely places from which the next pandemic would spread. They implemented plans and policies to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses in these settings. When COVID broke out, under both the Trump and Biden administrations these plans appear to have been entirely ignored.
It's not just airport bathrooms (designed to ensure you can do your business without your hands touching a surface) that are designed to reduce infectious spread. Airplanes themselves are designed this way. Air entering the plane from outside comes in from the top of the cabin, directly above the passengers, while the intake ensures air leaves from directly below passengers. Airflow goes from top to bottom, not from side to side, so that when you breathe out respiratory pathogens are mostly headed down to the floor and not to the side at the other passengers in the cabin. The worst thing you could do on an airplane would be to mess up this system of airflow, redirecting passengers' breathing to the sides.
Yet this is exactly what requiring masks on airplanes did. I wear glasses. I know when I put on a mask that the majority of my breath is being redirected to the sides. If I'm in a face-to-face interview, maybe that mask will impede direct transmission from me to the person seated across from me. But if I'm on an airplane, wearing a mask breaks the design of the airflow and almost certainly INCREASES my chance of getting infected from the passengers nearby.
> There's an argument that if you're requiring an intervention you should have evidence to support that intervention.
I respectfully disagree. COVID is a respiratory illness. We know that some respiratory illnesses spread through droplet infection, and COVID was spreading rather quickly. There was a plausible physical mechanism how masks would stop infections.
Yes, one could take the stance that any intervention should only be done after it has conclusively been proven to be effective. After all, it could be that SARS-COV-2 could teleport for up to 100m between lungs of humans and then lockdowns would not stop the spread. If you then also demand RCTs and declare that for ethical reasons, RCTs are out of the question you can justify not do any interventions forever.
Consider: you are driving down a road when suddenly ahead of you, what looks like a truck sized space alien appears on the road. You consider braking. You are aware that for virtually all apparent road obstacles, trying to occupy the same space as them with your car will go badly. But then you realize that you do not know if your Earth physics will apply to a space alien who already seemingly defied them by popping into existence. Perhaps you can pass through him fine, and braking would be a waste of time and fuel. Perhaps you are impervious to getting attacked as long as your relative velocity is high enough, but you will get eaten when you stop your car. Perhaps you are hallucinating, and disbelieving would stop your hallucination.
No. You act on the physics you know and optimize for the best intervention given your uncertain beliefs. You brake / mandate wearing masks. You also closely watch the effects of your intervention, and if it is not what you thought, you loudly say "oops" and do something different.
You're arguing that there's no equipoise for masks as an intervention? I disagree. And the Cochrane review disagrees. The fact that there are multiple clinical trials with negative results is direct evidence that the hypothesis that masks "stop infection" isn't was simple as you're hoping it will be, and that it needs to be studied.
Look, nobody is saying that we need a clinical trial for parachutes. There's no clinical question about whether they're effective. No equipoise. But if you're fooled by bioplausibility, you haven't done enough clinical research. I can tell you how many trials I've done that failed despite clear bioplausibility. "It's a respiratory virus, it spreads through droplets, masks block droplets, therefore masks block spread." Nice. But there are lots of steps there, steps that may not match real-world usage. And besides, I've worn lots of masks (as has everyone at this point) and I know most of my breath isn't going through the little filter but out the sides. What's the dwell time for the droplets with virus? Are the droplets large enough to get caught in the mask, or is it like shooting bbs through a chain link fence?
These are all reasonable questions, plus the real ones we care about, like, "do people wear masks consistently enough that real world use limits transmission?" And most importantly, "how much does mask use reduce the risk of transmission?" Is it 10%, 50%, 75%? I would be willing to bet money that it's not 100%. Yet lots of people run around treating masks like they completely halt transmission. How does that altered behavior itself affect transmission?
Just because behavior is a confounder in the analysis, this doesn't mean masks don't "work". For example, seatbelts clearly work, even though we now know that seatbelt use also changes a driver's risk tolerance to slightly mitigate the benefit from the seatbelt. The reason I still wear a seatbelt is because the lifesaving benefit is greater than the increased risk. But that's an empirical question that doesn't just fall out of the plausibility analysis.
Parachutes work. But if people start dying, and the cause of death is "fell from airplane", and they were all wearing parachutes, you don't say, "parachutes work, that can't be the problem". You start asking questions about the parachutes. Were they wearing the parachutes right? Were the chutes large enough? Is there a persistent manufacturing defect? All valid scientific questions when there's an intervention that's not working as expected.
Look, I'm not saying you can't implement a masking strategy during an emergency based on what you think might work. But the existence of the emergency doesn't shield you from producing evidence for efficacy. If anything, it makes the demand for efficacy research more pressing. It's a clear institutional failure that they didn't mandate cluster randomized trials on a policy they implemented for multiple years based solely on bioplausibility. If we can answer this question but instead we still argue over spotty data years later, we do future generations a disservice when they have the same questions in the next pandemic.
My personal belief (meaning it's not something that can be empirically tested, so I'm not asking anyone to agree) is that the stupid fights over low-evidence solutions like masks, lockdowns, and zero COVID only served to divert public attention away from rational, scientifically driven policies developed before the pandemic by serious researchers, and that fit perfectly into the moment. Epidemiologists have been planning for and warming about a respiratory pandemic, probably driven by an influence-like or SARS-like zoonotic crossover, for decades. Then, ironically, when the moment came people panicked and sidelined the only true experts because they were too busy arguing over masks and 6ft distancing (another policy that was widely implemented without any follow-up studies to test for efficacy; where are the cluster randomized trials on 2m distancing? Is that even the right distance? What's the magnitude of the impact, if any? Who knows! We never did the cluster randomized trials.).
By May 1 2020, we knew which populations were most at risk. A couple billion dollars of free food delivery in Medicare may have saved more lives than lockdowns. Rational cocooning of the elderly with caretakers who had positive antibody tests was an early solution before a vaccine became available. These ideas were on the table since before 2020. Yet public officials argued instead for 'bioplausibile' interventions over proven solutions, didn't go on to test their hypotheses, and tried to claim they were scientists.
The "evidence" and "studies" generated on any NPIs during the pandemic itself were mostly either non-existent or garbage. This is easily explained by the political and funding pressures of the time. Which is why, as you note, it would have made much more sense to assess evidence generated during a non-turbulent time without emergency. People were accused of trusting their own opinion versus the experts. No. It was trusting the consensus expert opinion from years and years prior (which, e.g., found no efficacy for mass masking / mandates, recommended against disruptive NPIs, etc.) versus the obviously-motivated expert opinion generated hastily in the midst of a panic.
Yeah. If I were being generous, I'd restrict my complaint to the fact that they implemented emergency policies with no plan to test their hypotheses later. "We had to do something before we got the evidence in!" Sure, whatever.
What makes me less generous is that they didn't do this in the absence of established theory. Fauci et. al, not only ignored established work. They demonized anyone who questioned what were clearly a slate of ad-hoc 'just be seen doing something' interventions over the ideas of much more well-informed scientists.
It was just the worst time to be an immunologist, hearing people say obviously false things with high confidence. And sure, you're going to hear stupid stuff on Fox News, but I expect that. When bad science is coming from the CDC, with no attempt to correct it and a bunch of us trained scientists screaming at our keyboards that they're straining at a gnat while swallowing the camel, I eventually lost all charity for these people. The reality is that there are true experts in this field whose earned credibility was squandered by people pretending to play scientist on TV. And it's going to be a long slog trying to earn back that credibility.
I think that we do not have a fundamental disagreement.
Masks certainly do not make you invincible. Mandating N95 without recognizing the fact that most people will not wear them correctly seems kind of pointless. (For some reason, nobody thought to educate the general population on how to properly fit N95s, which is likely a skill 80% of adults could learn.)
I think that Scott's post from 2020-03-23 [1] has held up quite well, being carefully optimistic about masks and respirators while also cautioning people not to risk compensate.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
Here's the problem:
The transition from "masks don't work" to "masking should be mandatory" occurred with no acknowledgement that "masks don't work" was an actual position that was held by major institutions whose authoritativeness relies on their credibility.
Maintaining credibility requires that, when you are wrong, you acknowledge the fact that you were wrong and investigate exactly how you ended up being wrong. Credibility requires transparency and accountability, neither of which was a quality demonstrated by any of our major institutions in recent memory.
The complaint about the guidance changing is not about the guidance changing, it's about the we-have-always-been-at-war-with-eurasia institutional amnesia about the guidance having ever been different. People have memories, and notice when authority figures are telling them things that conflict with those memories.
I think it's a little more nuanced than that. My experience at least was that there was a lot of people saying "well, we were trying to save PPE for people who needed it most", especially in the WHO thing I mentioned above that WAS an incremental step.
And, again, I think that a lot of actors deliberately exploited this to make an anti-authority-figure stance. In a more collaborative environment I don't think this would have been nearly as much of a thing.
You do realize that "the guidance changed because we were intentionally lying the first time" is worse, right?
+1
That's a maximally negative way to take that, especially in an environment where there was a lot of uncertainty.
I'm not sure that it is. Scott himself wrote up a piece pointing out that the initial guidance was fully in line with all previous research and all existing policy documents, and that it therefore most likely reflected what they actually believed.
Much later, in the face of widespread public speculation that they must have been lying to preserve the availability of PPE, they issued some public statements saying "actually, we were lying all along to preserve the availability of PPE".
This is fully explicable in terms of (1) a belief that they see the perception of having been right as more important than the perception of having been honest, and (2) their new theory of what happened having been lifted wholesale from the people they wanted to sell it to.
It would help if you would identify the “major institutions” you are referring to.
The U.S. Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, did exactly what you suggest. He acknowledged that he and others “originally recommended against the general public wearing masks,” although “we have always recommended that symptomatic people wear a mask, because...you could transmit disease to other people.” He then explained that “we now know from recent studies that a significant portion of individuals with coronavirus lack symptoms,” and that “in light of this new evidence, CDC recommends and the task force recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”
He said the recommendation was to wear cloth masks, not surgical masks or N95 respirators, which were “critical supplies that must continue to be reserved for healthcare workers and other medical first responders.”
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-18/
I really don’t see how the Surgeon General could have been any more transparent.
Do you imply we haven't always been at war with Eurasia?
What kind of badspeak is this?
These things aren't linear. There's a point at which N deaths are worse than N deaths times the cost of one death. There's a second point where everybody dies is much worse than total population times cost of one death.
The couple people I know who were adamantly against lockdowns and masks, and who didn't get the vaccine, simply don't believe that many people died from COVID.
Case in point ^^^^
1.2m dead is just not believable. I only know 1 person who died from catching covid (over 80, in a hospital for other reasons, caught it there and got lung damage, fairly late dueing the official pandemic). I have substantive network in Hawaii where lots of people got sick a few weeks before covid officially arrived in the USA. Not a single person I know there died out of hundreds, and that's early infections when it was worse and includes elderly people. I'm sure some people did die from covid, but given how much we now know the statistics were faked, it seems to me most of these covid cases were other conditions that got labeled as it for variety of reasons, or died from the ventilators that were incorrectly prescribed in the early stage of the pandemic.
The "other conditions" hypothesis has been investigated through excess mortality data, which confirms the official COVID count, see https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/03/united-states-deaths-spiked-as-covid-19-continued.html .
This doesn't rule out that it was incorrectly-prescribed ventilators, but that doesn't solve the mystery - nobody knows anyone who died of an incorrectly prescribed ventilator either!
I think the answer is something like - even 1 million extra deaths over 3 years is only an increase of about 15% in the death rate over those three years. Do you usually know someone who dies in any given year? No? Then you also probably won't know someone who dies if the death rate is 1.15x higher.
Sorry but census.gov is not a reliable source, as we all know now.
Can't tell if you're joking or not - if not, what's your argument?
Simply put the margin of error is much larger than reported. Let me explain.
Census Bureau intentionally alters the data with noise for privacy reasons. Nonresponse is likely heavily skewed towards certain populations and since the data doesn't exist its not possible to know which populations nor how much. Certain populations are also known to be over/under counted - most recognized due to their political clout is college students.
But the epistemological problem extends beyond census.gov. I work with Marco data from Fred for economic scenario simulations for papers on tokenomic design. The more I learn about the datasets, how they are collected, modified, and changed over time, the more clear it is that all US government data is suspect. For most people the wakeup was covid where the government statistics and reality were not aligned.
On the one hand, we don't want to become Bermuda triangle believing idiots, so I'm not saying government data should be thrown out wholesale, as I said at the start it's an issue of margins of error, which because of how data is massaged we don't even know what it is. But just heuristically, it's difficult for the data to be too far off or people get suspicious and try to fix it. So let's say the actual margin of error in census data is about +-20% - that's easily enough to hide 1.2m deaths without it being fixed.
But it gets worse. From my conversations and contacts at elite universities, apparently most people trained at top schools are taught that lying is good if it generates positive utility. So now theres abother layer to the error: it's not symmetric, it's biased in a direction that aligns with the moral goods of the institutions and individuals involved.
So the only way to handle data is in cases that are extremely clear, with very strong effects, and even more so in regards to political issues. For instance I will use M2 data from some historical periods but it became politicized during the pandemic and cannot be used from 2020 onwards.
The privacy obsessives are not causing the census to fake the number of deaths.
Please use your reading skills. Nowhere do I claim there's a conspiracy of any sort to intentionally fake the number of deaths. Try and actually read the text in front of you instead of some imagined artifact you've created.
Regarding privacy, the noise the census adds is not due to "obssessives" but is for completely legitimate reasons and is an official policy.
> Nonresponse is likely heavily skewed towards certain populations and since the data doesn't exist its not possible to know which populations nor how much. Certain populations are also known to be over/under counted - most recognized due to their political clout is college students...So let's say the actual margin of error in census data is about +-20%
> From my conversations and contacts at elite universities, apparently most people trained at top schools are taught that lying is good if it generates positive utility. So now theres abother layer to the error: it's not symmetric, it's biased in a direction that aligns with the moral goods of the institutions and individuals involved.
This reads like the people who claim there's mountains and mountains of election fraud. "Well you see, from first principles, there must be fraud because ..." and then you proceed to just make things up!
Well, I can see how 'first principles' might get you to believe that the census is wrong, but, like, we have data. There are a *lot* of people who verify census results whenever they are done, in part because there is massive political stakes (census data --> electoral college votes) but also because a lot of people with significant capital have vested interests in making sure that data matches reality (e.g. for things like ad targeting).
Always remember, alex jones and the average flat earther are first principles thinkers too
Data and experience are empirical, not first principles.
But on first principles, I just don't believe general competence and honesty are as wildly held as you do, which is strange since you recognize that incompetent Jones believers, Flat Earthers, etc are extremely common. And regarding honesty, Plato advocated for the noble lie a very long time ago; and thays for the people who aren't some degree of machiavellian. Perhaps consider that your treasure chests are more similar to other people's than you realize, since you're fundamentally the same human animal. And the correct response is to recognize the shabiness of the boxes, not to throw them away.
Your position is that the US population is in reality... +- 66 million people?
I can't claim any real expertise, or, frankly, intelligence, but the Census is a Big Deal. To simply dismiss it and substitute your own incredibly high error margin is astonishing.
The Census does add noise to individual data entries [1] to increase privacy and necessarily reduce accuracy. They also do separate estimates to compare to the Census figures. The differences between these estimates and the Census generally top out at +- 5% for certain groups and areas [2], and the 2020 census as a whole was estimated to be an undercount of about 0.24-0.35%.
I'm really not sure how to argue about this. For someone already convinced of systemic, 'elite' lying, evidence to the contrary is simply more evidence that the 'elites' have corrupted yet another source of evidence, which may be discarded. How do you escape this epistemic trap you've created?
1: I didn't know about this and it was somewhat interesting reading, so thanks for that I suppose.
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2020/2020-census-disclosure-avoidance-handbook.pdf
2: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/08/key-facts-about-the-quality-of-the-2020-census/
Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if the population count was off by that much.
Regarding systemic, elite lying- even SlateStarCodex admits to engaging in this, or at least maintaing silence, regarding racial issues. I belive that position is wise but when looking at any data we have to keep in mind that people are going to be either directly lying, suppressing data, or just plain confirmation bias in favor of their moral goods.
No, additional data sources do in fact help. It's just not as much as people claim.
Glad you learned something today, and hopefully you grew your error bars a little bit on census data.
> Sorry but census.gov is not a reliable source, as we all know now.
I'll admit, when I originally wrote https://theahura.substack.com/p/right-wing-epistemology-and-the-problem?utm_source=publication-search, I used the census as a joke, because I couldn't fathom someone actually believing that the census was incorrect. It was an off the wall example meant to illustrate the point.
From the article:
"I used to think that factual disagreements could be resolved relatively easily. If one person says "I believe there are 10,000 people living in Brooklyn" and another person says "I believe there are 100,000 people living in Brooklyn", you both go look at the census and you can figure out the answer. That kind of interaction doesn't happen anymore. The reason we're having so many more factual disagreements these days is because the credentials of the fact finding institutions are in question. If someone thinks the census is fundamentally untrustworthy and ideologically captured, and instead prefers trumps-discount-census.ru, you're kinda fucked! You can't reach any kind of consensus because your epistemologies are fundamentally different. And neither of you have the ability to like, go out and actually do a census yourself — if you can agree on a common definition for what a census even is."
But, damn, reality is stranger than fiction. I guess some people really don't trust the census either.
Forgot to switch accounts?
What on earth are you talking about
Never mind, brain fart. Apologies, carry on.
To use your analogy, one of your treasure chests is a bit rotten and needs some fresh paint. But where I disagree with your article is that a good epistemology should be a tad bayesian. I don't need to believe everything the NYT says to recognize that it's more reliable than my buddies on voice chat.
> But where I disagree with your article is that a good epistemology should be a tad bayesian
I don't think I disagree with that, or suggest otherwise in my article
Experts can be both mostly wrong and useful. Simply because any kind of solid knowledge is rare and hard to come by.
A quick search indicates the average person knows 600 other people by name. If 1.2 million died the average person has over an 11% chance none of their 600 people dying. I don't think knowing zero or only one person who died should shift one's opinion about the total number of deaths, even if you think you knew an above-average number of people who had it.
(For what it's worth I directly knew one person who died and heard about two others second-hand through my mom)
11% is low enough that I can maintain relative epistemic confidence in my position. I also heard of people who died secondhand but I discount those heavily. People told me about equal numbers of covid and vaccine deaths, depending on whether they were left or right. I'm slightly in favor of covid killing more people than the vaccines did, but that's just because I know one person who died from covid and zero from vaccines. Unfortunately with how untrustworthy data is, anecdote and rolling the dice is the order of our times.
I will counter your anecdote with my own and say that there was a clear and obvious increase in mortality in my area. This number is entirely believable and perhaps a bit low given the deaths from sequelae of infection that were not counted, which tracks with the excess mortality data.
Because of the belief that lying is good if it's for a good cause, your statement is immediately suspect. But, ill take you at your word.
Of course some people did die from covid, and even if the number is 90% less than reported, some people will know multiple people who died. We also had a situation in some hospitals where ventilators killed patients. Most notably 88% patients on ventilators in some new York health networks and 50% in some Seattle hospitals. Thankfully this was qukxly corrected but I would expect many people in those specific regions who were unlucky to get this poor treatment would see noticeable mortality.
What good cause? I just saw a lot of people suffer and die. You would also feel surprised to see so many brush it off and question the reality of you had seen the same.
I'm skeptical of how many COVID deaths were really COVID-driven, or just deaths of people who happened to have COVID. I heard that hospitals had an incentive to run up the numbers, perhaps in a squeaky wheel sense.
I also really hate the term "learning loss", as if school is a great big choreographed song and dance and you can't miss a minute. Mandatory schooling, prisons for kids, should be abolished anyway.
If you were in NYC during the peak you would not be asking these questions
There's more to the world than NYC and the Bay Area! I remember hearing that Italy had it really bad, with bodies piling up in nursing homes. Although my dad would say that it's not unusual for a flu to rip through a home and take out all the residents that aren't moving.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-italian-army-called-in-to-carry-away-corpses-as-citys-crematorium-is-overwhelmed-11959994
You do not need a fleet of army trucks to carry the victims of an ordinary flu. That is, by definition, an extraordinary event.
In Italy, that early rip let to many deaths NOT counted as Covid-deaths, as many old sick people died untested at home instead of in a corridor of an even-more-than-usual overcrowded hospital. Excess deaths were higher than official Covid-deaths.
Irrelevant, see excess deaths.
Anecdotally these numbers track
I hate that term too 😆
In the very moment of early 2020, those cost-benefit analyses did not and could not exist. What did exist, however, were long lines of army trucks carrying bodies through the streets of Italy[1], so time was of the essence because exponential growth is a beast like that. Which leader in their right mind would want the same images from their own country? So you either put a hard lockdown on the information sphere (China, NKorea) to stop the images, or you do everything that can possibly work to prevent those things from happening in the first place (everyone else). Also, we know that the unspecific measures against COVID (masks, lockdown, distancing etc.) did work in the aggregate[2].
Fighting against COVID was the same as playing the stock market: you are bound for disappointment. You either lose and are blamed that you didn't do enough, or you win and are blamed that you did too much. Personally, I'm grateful that most countries went for "too much", as it were, because everything else can be fixed.
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-italian-army-called-in-to-carry-away-corpses-as-citys-crematorium-is-overwhelmed-11959994
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/2020-2021.html
The point here is that it made sense buying when stock market was low because 1.2 million old people dying have no effect on the economy and it was expected to recover quickly. Which it did as soon as any lockdowns were lifted.
Maybe folks don't talk much about COVID-related deaths because people are still dying. COVID isn't just a thing of the past. CDC data shows that roughly 0.5 per 100,000 Americans died of COVID between January and April. And sure, that's only about a tenth of the rates for motor vehicle accidents and smoking, but it's troubling given the FDA's new planned limits on vaccinations.
Sorry, I meant that maybe folks don't keep citing the 1.2 million death statistic that Scott emphasized because it's a continually growing number.
Nobody likes acknowledging how powerless we are against deadly forces operating at scales too different from our own to properly fathom (capitalism, viruses, global conflict, etc.). It's easier to focus on the micro-level decisions like masks vs no masks where there is at least a plausible veneer of individual agency and control
Compared to COVID, more people (per capita) died as a result of infectious diseases every single year before ~1945, for all of human history.
So it was a bit like going back in time to before we started getting a handle on deadly infectious diseases.
Also people learn wrong lessons like "masking doesn't help" when it clearly does.
Just because your kid can give you COVID at home because you don't wear masks all the time doesn't mean masking patients and providers in a COVID ward is somehow useless.
Masks used in Covid ward is different tho, and certainly not used alone. Also masks that have to endure outside and most people's desire for convenience certainly doesn't have effectiveness needed to actually move the needle. How many times I have seen someone have their masks only cover their mouth.
It's really that turning the whole public world into a contact measures ward is incredibly impractical. And covering our faces with rags isn't nearly as good as a proper N95 or whatever. There was an element of prophylactic theatre.
Speaking of that, I worked in a library when COVID hit, and when we finally accepted book returns again, we started setting them aside for a week before reshelving them.
And oh god, lockdowns, social distancing... all too much, and all too late!
Yes, mask quality made a difference and non respirator healthcare masks such as plain surgical masks are capable of making a difference. Recommending cloth masks was strange and I still see some people wearing them, which I guess may be a comfort thing.
The difference that mask mandates were capable of making was sucking the joy out of everything, for /what looked like/ no reason. I don't personally know a single person who died of COVID. The people I knew who got COVID generally hardly skipped a beat, and I think a lot were outright asymptomatic. Rule of thumb: only take COVID tests when you want to get out of something.
Wearing cloth masks is actually a very good prophylactic measure against respiratory diseases that are transmitted through droplets. This was learned from SARS and other recent epidemics. COVID, it turned out, was transmitted more through aerosols, so while cloth masks and badly-fitting N95 masks didn't help that much. But it took quite a bit of time for this to be determined.
FWIW, I wear a compact N100 mask in crowded indoor areas. Not because of concern for COVID, but because I discovered during the pandemic that my normal ~semi-annual respiratory infections aggravate my athsmatic cough, and that if I can avoid those infections my cough all but disappears, which makes my life much better!
Eh, cloth masks badly underperformed surgical masks in this study of providers treating patients in hospital.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4420971/
No one is claiming that cloth masks are as good as proper masks (surgical, KN95, N95 or N100), but they have proved to be effective at reducing the spread of droplet-borne disease.
Part of this is the dying "with COVID" meme combined with the fact that the deaths were concentrated on the already old and sick. I think a lot of people are skeptical of the 1.2 million/250,000 figure, or at least that it actually means that but for COVID those people would have lived long healthy lives. How many of those 250,000 were already suffering from serious illness and had their lives cut short by 1, 3, 5 years?
13.5 Million Years of Life Lost During the COVID Pandemic
https://schaeffer.usc.edu/research/the-burden-of-1-million-excess-deaths-13-5-million-years-of-life-lost-during-the-covid-pandemic/
I just don't think projections from a dynamic simulation model will convince many.
Are you saying this descriptively, or rhetorically as a way to indicate that *you* aren't convinced?
If the first, that's completely irrelevant; while it's obviously true that a complicated statistical model won't convince the average person, that has no bearing on whether it does a good job of answering the question of how much of the COVID death toll is truly attributable to COVID.
If the second, you should state your disagreements with the model.
I hypothesized that people don't talk about COVID deaths because they question the death numbers and the degree to which lives were cut short.
Seneca linked to a study projecting how many lives were cut short by COVID to rebut my hypothesis.
I responded that I don't think most people would be convinced by the study.
You say you agree with me that people would not be convinced, but that its completely irrelevant to whether the study does a good job of answering the question of how much COVID cut lives short.
But that's not the question *I* am trying to answer. I am trying to answer the question of why people don't talk about COVID deaths.
Ok sorry, I thought your rhetorical questions in your initial comment indicated that *you yourself* were skeptical about the official figures. If you were just paraphrasing what such a skeptic might say, then I misunderstood.
Sorry about that.
No worries!
This does give me another hypothesis, though. If COVID deaths were much less concentrated among the laptop classes who do most of the talking online and in media, you would expect the topic to be less salient on those platforms and in those circles.
If they were people who were going to die soon anyway, there would be a move down from trend in 2023 when the main deaths finished. Trendline looks normal: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year?time=earliest..2024&country=~USA
> If they were people who were going to die soon anyway, there would be a move down from trend in 2023 when the main deaths finished.
That is true.
But everyone is a person who's going to die soon anyway; any event that moves deaths above trend must later be balanced by a move down from trend.
When do we expect to see this move? If we never see it, what do we think?
A problem is we don't know how many people died of covid. It may be easier to answer the question in the US where different states responded differently, and so one might interpolate.
In the UK we decided instead to try different definitions of death from covid, one after the other. The excess death figures didn't agree with the epidemiological figures, first one way and then the other. We know that some deaths were caused as a direct result of countermeasures taken - but not how many. There is even a small number of bizarre cases: e.g. a story in today's Times (yesterday on-line) of a disruptive 92-year-old, treated so robustly that he was admitted to hospital where he contracted covid and died.
My understanding is that the number of deaths directly caused by covid is currently being revised down by significant fractions.
Each death says something vital, but until we can count reliably we'll never hear it. Surely that's the great tragedy of the covid era.
Thanks for reminding us. You're right. There's no way to balance or rationalize a personal response, but being aware of how vast the damage was, the loss of precious lives, is very important. At least it might help us to be more careful and tolerant and cooperative next time we face pandemic, panic, denial, and all the rest on such a scale.
To me, the takeaway is not to be sad, but to continue believing in the necessity of functional institutions and expert-informed policy. The biggest victim of the pandemic was public trust in the kind of institutions and intellectual division of labor that make everything about our luxurious modern lives possible. Yes, some experts screwed up. Others were poorly used (like experts in biology being asked to support policy proposals that should have involved more economic assessments). Yes, we all have many different opinions about what should or should not have been done.
But this was a situation that by its very definition required a collective response. It was also a legimitately difficult situation full of unknowns, which many institutions and governments were asked to navigate with very limited information. We may not have gotten this one exactly right, but we gave it a good shot. The last thing we should take from this experience is that we need to destroy our ability to collectively respond to the next existential crisis.
I think the thing you're missing is that *we have already destroyed our ability to collectively respond to the next crisis.* Our institutions have *already* spent the credibility and goodwill necessary for people to listen to them.
The only way we get this back is to wait for everyone who was alive in 2020 to die off, or for everyone who made bad decisions in 2020 to publicly acknowledge that they did, and preferably, for people to go to prison in proportion to how wrong they were. There needs to be consequences for how badly the pandemic was handled by the people entrusted with handling it, because the public will not trust people who demonstrably face no consequences for being catastrophically wrong.
>Our institutions have _already_ spent the credibility and goodwill necessary for people to listen to them.
Well said! Yup, when the next pandemic hits and public health officials start making public statements, a large chunk of the public is going to think: "Well, we sort-of know what they lied to us about during Covid. What are they lying to us about _this_ time?"
No worries Biden pardoned Fauci 👍
He was pardoned because Trump was truthing about holding military tribunals for his political opponents and terminating the Constitution. The Republican led investigations against Fauci went nowhere like the Biden crime family ones because they are based on lies and delusion and selling media headlines to gullible morons unable to determine fact from fiction from news orgs that are losing defamation lawsuits left and right for knowingly spreading lies about Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines during the 2020 election because they were losing viewers to more extreme right wing news networks broadcasting them.
Let’s not pretend the 1.2 million U.S. COVID death count is a clean, reliable number. From the beginning, the rules for counting COVID deaths were so loose, and the incentives so warped, that the final tally is more propaganda than precision.
First, the definition of a “COVID death” was expanded beyond reason. Many were counted not because COVID was the cause of death, but because it was present at the time. You could die of cancer, heart disease, even trauma — if you tested positive, it was COVID. And yes, “presumed COVID” was enough to count in many cases, no lab confirmation required.
Second, financial incentives drove behavior:
* Hospitals received higher reimbursements for COVID diagnoses and treatments under the CARES Act.
* Ventilator use triggered even bigger payouts — incentivizing aggressive treatment.
* More COVID deaths meant more federal funding.
Add to that PCR testing practices — run at high cycle thresholds capable of detecting trace viral debris — and you have a setup primed to over-diagnose and overcount. And then there's the suspicious disappearance of the flu. The U.S. normally sees 30,000–60,000 flu deaths per year. In 2020–2021? Virtually none. Are we really supposed to believe masks and distancing eliminated the flu... but not COVID? Or is it more likely that many flu or pneumonia cases were swept into the COVID column to simplify reporting — or to maintain the crisis narrative?
No autopsies. No rigorous second looks. Just a massive death toll used to justify emergency powers, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates — with anyone who questioned it painted as anti-science. COVID was real and serious. But pretending the death count wasn’t inflated — by policy, by panic, and by profit — is a denial of logic. The number we got may be 1.2 million on paper, but the true COVID-caused death count? That’s still up for debate — which is exactly what we never got.
Excess mortality statistics confirm. You can find them at Census or CDC, but here's a blog post another commenter wrote that they mentioned above - https://mistybeach.com/mark/Covid.html
Excess mortality numbers and various definitions all paint the same picture.
Anecdotally this number clearly tracks for those with experience in healthcare. There is a very stark difference in how many people we saw dying in a week during the pandemic vs now. It is not subtle.
Many also died from sequelae of the infection (blood clot, secondary bacterial infection, lung fibrosis) that would not be counted by definitions based solely on PCR
PCR definitely lead to more detection of the virus. But it was not subtle! We could nearly always tell who had it clinically. We really don’t see this degree of viral pneumonia currently.
The fact that flu decreased (in fact, one strain, Flu B Yamagata, seems to have been entirely eliminated), speaks to how transmissible COVID was at that time as the changes were enough to substantially affect flu but not COVID in the context of a population with no immunity.
I don't know the US stats (I'm assuming they'd be very similar tho) but I think the fact that eg in England nearly 60% of "COVID deaths -- defined as "with COVID" not "by COVID" -- it'd be even more for the latter I'd surmise, were in VERY OLD people (80+, kinda living on a borrowed sooner or later time anyway) and that about 80% were in people 70+, is key here. The suffering/grief might have been intense at the time, but ultimately, old people die sooner rather than later, the young gave up AN AWFUL LOT to save more of them from dying sooner, and while obviously it would have been better it those deaths happened a few years later in less alienating/inhuman conditions (tho, cancer, anyone?) and COVID never occured at all, the muted cultural response strikes me as, for a change, correct. Sensible and even rational. And yes, some middle aged and occasionally young people died too, but at 10% of the total they likely just didn't register as a culturally significant population level event.
If you are trying to adopt a rational approach to public health issues, using "deaths" as a measure may not be the best approach. First of all, it looks like you take the number of deaths "with COVID" (1.2m) but then treat it as the number of deaths "from COVID". The discrepancy is not very high, the number of US deaths "from COVID" is around 15% lower, but this discrepancy may be higher for the younger cohort.
Secondly, the standard impact measures in public health usually take years of life lost into account. There are many variations of these (life-years, DALY, QALY, etc.). COVID pandemic was rather an exception in that public policy focus was on deaths and not on life-years lost. This is understandable for politicians and media in the middle of pandemic panic, but very weird for a rationalist post-pandemic analysis.
Imagine an illness that strikes only people on their deathbed, infects all of them, and accelerates their death by 1 minute. This illness would cause 100% of deaths, would have 100% mortality rate, and would kill millions of people under 65 each year. One could write a post about that illness that would be almost verbatim the same as your post but with much scarier numbers. Would you consider this illness the greatest public health problem of all times?
This is what I tried to address in the paragraph saying:
> "Maybe it’s because they were mostly old people? Old people have already lived a long life, nobody can get too surprised about them dying. But although only a small fraction of COVID deaths were young people, a small fraction of a large number can still be large: the pandemic killed 250,000 <65-year-old Americans, wiping out enough non-seniors to populate Salt Lake City. More military-age young men died in COVID than in Iraq/Afghanistan. Even the old people were somebody’s spouse or parent or grandparent; many should have had a good 5 - 10 years left."
Yes, you did. But I am not sure this paragraph is very convincing - every single claim you make there would be true about my imaginary deathbed decease but with larger numbers. Since that imaginary decease does not seem to be that much of public health concern, this paragraph does not present a compelling rational argument that COVID was.
I've seen estimates of the amount of life-years lost per COVID death, and my understanding is that it averaged out to about a decade. So very different from your hypothetical loss of a minute each.
Whatever COVID life-years lost actually were, they were certainly orders of magnitude closer to 10y per person than to 1 minute. My (purely imaginary, made-up, and illustrative) deathbed illness is not supposed to resemble COVID. It is made up for the purpose of finding holes in emotional arguments about the number of deaths.
Having said that, 10y sounds pretty high. Generally, the level of scientific discourse on this subject has been abysmal. For example, here is a paper https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.18.20214783v1 from a Harvard Medical School professor giving an even higher estimate as the headline result (over 13 years). It is based on simple actuarial tables that map sex and age to mortality. Thus, it implicitly assumes that COVID mortality is fully uncorrelated to any pre-existing health conditions! We know this to be not the case for many conditions, with hazard ratios in excess of 5.0 for many conditions which have high mortality rates of their own (https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3731).
Age is itself correlated with "pre-existing health conditions".
It certainly is and that hazard ratio table is sex and age adjusted
10 years is an impossible figure. The average age of those who died from covid was higher that the average life expectancy (somewhere around 83-84 y.o.).
Understanding that mortality from covid was exponentially increasing with age, intuitively you can reject 10 years as wrong.
Maybe 1-2 years, that's more likely.
Could be that deaths from despair due to lockdowns lost more in terms of life-years. Firstly, because you have to be more active to actually experience such a strong despair.
>would be true about my imaginary deathbed decease but with larger numbers
and
>Imagine an illness that strikes only people on their deathbed, infects all of them, and accelerates their death by 1 minute.
is _not_ consistent with
>Even the old people were somebody’s spouse or parent or grandparent; _many should have had a good 5 - 10 years left._
[emphasis added]
The "spouse or parent" part would have been just as true. The "5-10 years" part would have been false but it is also false for the vast majority of COVID deaths of older patients. COVID mortality is strongly correlated to many conditions even after controlling for age. For example, a substantial portion (30%-80% depending on the country) of 2020 COVID deaths were in retirement homes and US retirement homes are very special places (pre-pandemic median survival length 5 months, average 13 months).
Many Thanks! Ok, yes
>COVID mortality is strongly correlated to many conditions even after controlling for age.
So the people who died of COVID were, on average, not a random sample of people in their age range, but ( _prior_ to getting COVID) particularly ill people of that age. Point taken.
>US retirement homes are very special places (pre-pandemic median survival length 5 months, average 13 months).
Ye gods that's grim.
It's interesting that in terms of QALY's opioid overdose deaths (not counting other drugs) in the 2020-2024 time frame are on par with COVID. O3 estimates around 12million +- 1 million for each and sanity checking the estimates that doesn't seem crazy on either count (opioid deaths are about 1/4 in number but ~4x each in term of QALYs). I think about COVID deaths more often the opioid epidemic deaths, but I don't think about either tragedy very often.
Perhaps society is still residually inured to death by disease. I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to grow up with relatives that grew up in the pre-vaccine/antibiotic era when large numbers were lost to disease. Or maybe it's a (perhaps wishful) doesn't effect me kind of thing, COVID deaths are mostly old people, overdose deaths are mostly addicts, old people were dying sooner or later anyways, addicts are doing it to themselves.
Where did you get that 15% from? My understanding is that even in the US excess deaths exceed deaths officially attributed to COVID (though by less than other countries).
15% is the excess of (US deaths with COVID mentioned on death certificate) over (US deaths with COVID or suspected COVID as cause of death), per CDC. Excess deaths are a different thing. Some of the may have been caused by non-detected and non-suspected COVID, but others by the general society breakdown caused by lockdowns rather than COVID>
So you're saying that they were officially classifying more people as "with COVID" than "of COVID"?
Excess deaths shot up prior to lockdowns.
Yes, because "with COVID" means in fact "with COVID mentioned on the death certificate" and being mentioned as the sole cause of death is a special case of that.
Excess deaths prior to lockdowns (and thus prior to widespread testing) are a special case, a vast majority of 1m+ US deaths are post first lockdown.
They're special in that we know lockdowns weren't the cause. That gives us info with which to reason during the later period after lockdowns.
I am not sure how we "know it". I have not looked at it in detail for the US, but, for example, in the UK, cancer treatment and detection scans were suspended during the lockdowns, with the backlog afterwards stretching to almost two years. Are you claiming that cancer treatments save zero lives?
Given how little we knew about a brand new highly contagious virus that was killing some people, the responsible thing for a govt to do was err on the side of safety. Ofcourse, knowingly lying was not ok. And that happened too, by the CDC, WHO. But I don't think it was incorrect to require masks, distancing, even lockdowns. Allowing some types of gatherings, politicians like Pelosi violating lockdowns for partying / hair coloring - that was terrible. But still, erring on the side of caution is something I can understand.
What are people doing about avoiding getting covid too many times? Is that a worthwhile goal? Why or why not?
One thing that I don't see mentioned. All of the friend and acquaintances I lost during the COVID years were due to overdose and suicide, none of them died of COVID, they all died due to the reactions to COVID.
My understanding is that suicides DECREASED during Covid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_on_suicide_rates
I was working in clinical mental health during the pandemic; and can confirm first hand that at least in the early stages of the pandemic suicidality was way down in the patients we were seeing. I would be very interested in seeing how much of the broader reduction in suicide was linked to school shifting to distance learning; knowing that there's always a strong link between school and youth suicide.
It wouldn't surprise me if there was some subset of the broader population that did have a higher suicide rate from Covid; but big decreases in suicide among higher prevalence school age and severe mentally ill population would swamp that in the data.
Relatedly, I also recall early worries that Covid/lockdowns would increase domestic violence due to people being stuck together with an abuser, but it very quickly became clear that bar closures more than outweighed that and caused a reduction.
That may be the case in the overall population.
I'm part of the GenX cohort. None of my friend circle died of (or with) COVID, meanwhile I lost more friends/acquaintances to suicide/OD since 2020 than all my years before it.
A hazard from generalizing from your own anecdotal knowledge.
True. But it does ring true among other circles of people at the same age range. Just pointing out another possible reason for anger and resentment over the COVID years.
An estimated 675,000 Americans died in the 1918 flu epidemic. That was largely forgotten as well.
Once again you wrote the first third of an essay without any follow-through. COVID isn't a topic of the moment. You can sit on this thought for as long as you need to complete it.
What do you think is missing?
The strength of this article is you don’t force conclusions. You articulate claim that’s obvious and under appreciated and let your readers ruminate. Thanks for the respect.
A "so what" or a "what now".
COVID killed as many as 30 million people. What do we do with this number? If another pandemic began tomorrow, what would our experience of COVID have taught us? Would we prevent more deaths, or fewer?
I don't know what your answer to this question would be.
In 2023 the CDC reported deaths due solely to Covid around 6%, 60,000-70,000. There’s a lot of space between that number and 1m deaths with Covid positive at the time of death. We’ll never know how many deaths were caused by Covid that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. But I have a hard time believing it’s as large as a lot of folks here seem to think.
Can you link me to this CDC claim? It's the opposite of claims that I've seen from the CDC, and contradicted by the excess mortality numbers, so I'm wondering if you misread it (eg maybe that was the number for 2023 alone, or the number of COVID with zero comorbidities which is different from wouldn't-have-occurred-otherwise).
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/health_policy/covid19-comorbidity-expanded-12092020-508.pdf
This is the 2020 report.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/covid-19-mortality-data-files.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com
2021.
There’s more on the cdc site.
After releasing this data they gave a 5.5% “sole cause of death” for all COVID deaths 2020-2022, in 2023.
I'd like a more detailed breakdown of that 250k <65 Americans, if one is available. IIRC, if someone had covid when they died, it was recorded as a covid death. One of those 250k was a friend of mine who had had lymphoma for about 6 years and who had not been receiving treatment for several. AKA someone substantially sicker than many seniors I know. In other words, a tragedy and a loss for sure, but if we're counting QALYs I'm not sure the loss is greater than that of a typical 70 year old.
I know that there were (seemingly?) healthy young people who died (primarily) due to covid, but I genuinely have no idea how many as a fraction of that 250k number.
Excess deaths show that official figures UNDERCOUNT Covid deaths. But as to the amount of life lost per Covid death, my understanding is that it averaged out to about a decade in the US.
Likely true, in the sense that a lot of people probably got covid, never got tested, and then died, when they otherwise would have lived longer.
That tracks anecdotally with what we saw in the hospital. Many young people got extremely sick and died, not just older patients although the narrative really focused on that. That’s not counting the young people who survived a long ICU stay and came out permanently damaged in some way.
Deaths of despair during COVID, in terms of life years lost, is a significantly more brutal truth to confront than the co-morbid COVID death toll, which consisted primarily of infirm or already-hospitalized elderly people nearing the end of their lives.
Do you mean suicides? Because those went down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_on_suicide_rates
No, I mean deaths of despair, which account for suicides, drug and alcohol overdoses and are officially accounted for, which went up approx 35% each year lockdowns were imposed and account for more deaths in total than Covid in people under 40 during that same period.
Overdoses went up (but not suicides)... because the government started handing out money people could blow on drugs.
So the government response drove deaths.
The FDA's delay of the vaccine drove lots of deaths, although of course the "invisible graveyard" was overflowing before COVID too.
If you put in enough caveats (alcoholism, under 40, etc) you can make any statistic tell any story you want. Also, this isn’t Logan’s Run and middle aged people still count for something.
I don't think there's much of a "story" to tell, just different perspectives to acknowledge given the available data. For the vast majority of people who were not already at death's door or at risk of dying from the Flu or Pneumonia, the institutional mismanagement, poor communication, and hysteria surrounding Covid at large caused significantly more short-term and long-term damage than the disease itself.
I was looking at stats that opioid overdose deaths in the US have decreased (Tyler Cowen on MR branded it as a big success). I looked up and they only had returned to pre-covid level. I was disappointed what counts as success.
Suicides are rare, even antidepressant manufactures have problems getting clear trends because of rareness of the event. They are not useful. But deaths from despair are much more meaningful. My dad used to enjoy life, walking around and then he got sick and could only lie in the bed, couldn't even move his limbs. He lost any will to live any longer. He told his doctor, I want to die sooner. And the doctor rejected him, told him not to talk like that. That was really insensitive from the doctor to not recognise that sometimes death is preferable to extreme sufferings.
You don't really need that many caveats, QALY's lost to just opioid overdose deaths 2020-2024 is almost an exact match to QALY's lost to COVID (both ~12 million). It's about 1/4 the deaths, but roughly 4x QALY's lost per death since the overdose deaths skew young while COVID skews old.
Anecdotally I saw a lot more people presenting to hospital with flares of mental illness or drug abuse. It was a hard thing to weigh against the Covid-sick population - I think "how tough to be with lockdowns" is a genuinely challenging problem that has different answers at different times in different populations
*1.2M deaths occurring 6 weeks before or after detection of even a single virion in nasal swab
let's keep the debate going!
Do you have a source for the claim that covid deaths were counted so frivolously?
I get all of my covid info from Leana Wen
Excess death statistics end the debate pretty thoroughly. 1.2 million additional people died during the pandemic, beyond what would normally be expected based on the death rate. What killed them, if not the new virus spreading rapidly at the same time?
> If you ask what you should do differently upon being reminded that 1.2 million Americans died during COVID, I won’t have an answer - there’s no gain from scheduling ten minutes to be sad each morning on Google Calendar.
We can put more resources toward treating Long Covid/post-viral syndrome/chronic fatigue syndrome/ME-CFS. The toll was in more than "just" deaths - too many people have been disabled by covid.
What effect would those resources have? CFS has been around for a long time (it was discussed in Elaine Showalter's "Hystories"), but I don't know of any treatment known to be effective.
We've known about CFS for a long time, but it was very rare and a low research priority. Long covid increased the case load immensely. Afaik there have been some breakthroughs as a result of the increased attention. I don't know the exact details, but I was under the impression that progress was being made as to whether it's an immune response, some kind of viral reserve, maybe mitochondria dysfunction, etc.
It was so well known that the term "fibromyalgia" was introduced prior to "Hystories" to sound more scientific and be dismissed less than CFS. I recall seeing commercials about it prior to COVID.
"It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%"
Considering the rise in US population since the Civil War, that's a little misleading. Figure it by percentages instead? (I'm only passingly curious, so I'm not going to research this, but maybe somebody else would find that fun to do.)
too lazy to ask chat gpt but not too lazy to post?
too lazy to ask chat gpt but not too lazy to post?
I remember reading about a local burial society, which had been overwhelmed by Covid-deaths, quietly marking the first day without a call since the virus took off. It was calming to read about, at the time.
We don't have much to be proud of, regarding our collective response to the pandemic. Operation Warp Speed went very well, but it was left with no one to celebrate it due to the politics on both sides. Most governments and organizations did badly, but there's no agreed-upon target to blame for the failures, nor clear lessons to be learned. We never even put back the GoF research moratorium. It's just sad.
I hope that someone eventually writes the story in a way that has an uncontroversial moral.
>nor clear lessons to be learned.
What might be the best thing to come out of covid is our re-understanding of airborne diseases. Due to some very stupid, very stubborn factoids taking root in medicine over the last ~100 years, epidemiology was very reluctant to describe pathogens as "airborne" for a long time. When Germ Theory first took off, doctors shied away from any notions of "miasma" or "bad air" as a way that diseases spread - until covid made it undeniable. (Hence the initial push toward hand washing/surface sanitizing during the early days of covid.) Now we know that a ton of respiratory infections, including colds and flus, are primarily spread through the air instead of on surfaces.
Recent progress with improved indoor ventilation and far-UVC disinfection will do wonders for public health. My favorite quote from Patrick McKenzie is: "We boil our water before we drink it. Our grandchildren will admonish us for not 'boiling' our air before we breathe it."
It's still funny seeing miasma regarded as "debunked" when there are "bad air" everywhere that absolutely carry disease. Whether it's airborne virus or mosquitoes (which sometimes heavily correlates with foul air anyway).
This Wired article from the summer of 2021 radicalized me back when it first came out.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/
The latest episode of Complex Systems had a guy talking about far-UVC light for disinfecting the air, and he gave a very brief recount of why "airborne" was dismissed for years. The full story is much more ridiculous and stupid.
1.2 million is an all time record but global population is also at an all time record high, the real question is how COVID stacks against other pandemics on a per capital pandemic deaths scale. Some very quick googling tells me that the Spanish Flu killed 2.6% of the world's population, COVID only killed .09%-ish
But the Spanish Flu happened 100 years ago. They didn’t even have supplemental oxygen, much less antibiotics, high flow nasal cannulas, ventilators, or even the concept of the clinical trials used to quickly test the vaccines and steroids among other interventions. If COVID occurred then it could well have been more deadly than the Spanish flu. It’s hard to say.
You think without those technologies the death rate would have been over 30 times higher? I heavily doubt that. I would be shocked if even close to that many people were hospitalized due to covid.
And the highest estimate of the number of saved lives due to the vaccine got to like 25 million which is merely over triple the current number of deaths.
Around 1% were hospitalized in the US. I’d also question the 2.6% estimate. It’s quite possible Spanish flu is more deadly, all else being equal, but my point is that it’s very hard to estimate which is more deadly given that we now have some really fundamental pieces of medical care that were not present then. Spanish flu in 2020 may have resulted in similar mortality to COVID. Population composition is also very different
I doubt that somewhat. The death rates for covid were well below 1% of infected even during the first outbreaks, when there were little testing before people ended up hospitalised, no vaccines, no steroids, in short when experiences in treating those patients were near zero (there were many improvement in how to ventilate etc.). Obviously, antibiotics kill bacteria, not viruses.
The infectious fatality rate for Corona early on was still somewhat slightly below 0.5%.- in a society as over-aged as ours. Less than 1 of 200 hundred infected died, and yes, the old and very frail ones (average age in Hamburg: 80 yrs.). Prof Hendrik Streeck and his early outbreak Heinsberg-study. (That is a lot, still. 0.4% of 300 million would end up in, oops, 1.2 million earlier deaths.) So, did the lockdown reduce the deaths or "just" stretch it over 2 years? - Otoh: the Spanish flu might have had a different fatality rate, not sure the death statistics were that accurate in China and India a century ago. Or anywhere except a dozen major countries.
It’s all apples and oranges. The population is very different now, both in size and number of frail elderly. I really think many of the deaths from Spanish flu in young patients would be avoidable now with modern medicine
Antibiotics treat bacterial pneumonia secondary to the viral infection
They do.
Not sure, this comment of mine was about comparing them. Indeed, I doubt the statistics are comparable. - The original claim I have an issue with, seemed to be that Covid could have killed many more than it did without lockdowns. - But to add the Spanish flu: Flu epidemics before and after the Spanish flu did NOT evolve to be more deadly (bad for spreading) - and those who got killed were mainly elderly. But a sick soldier can not "stay home and isolate". And a more brutal virus-variant results in the infected getting put together with many other in a field lazaret, jackpot. WWI worked as a gain-of-function-lab.
No. Covid was massively age-stratified and co-morbidity dependent. The Spanish flu had heavy mortality in otherwise-healthy young people. America was a much younger, thinner country back then. Even without the medical advances, I highly doubt Covid would have even been noticed due to the age profile of its victims.
These are fair criticisms. I think it is unlikely that COVID 1918 would have a mortality >2.6%. Estimates of Spanish flu mortality are difficult though and vary significantly. If there are this many questions about mortality from COVID now, how accurate would we expect estimates from data 100 years ago to be? Looking around it seems estimates range from 0.5 to 6%.
The Russian flu may be an interesting approximation for COVID too. Possibly caused by coronavirus OC43, estimated mortality ranged from 0.2 to 1%.
So I think it is likely the Spanish flu is baseline deadlier, but hard to certain. I also think the Spanish flu would be substantially less deadly in the modern era. We are much better at supporting patients through critical illness and the effect of this is most pronounced in the younger population which also contributed some to the age stratification of COVID outcomes
I would love to read a book, written post-covid, going through the whole thing rigorously. Which policies worked? Which didn't? What are the statistics? Which countries did well? That kind of thing.
Does anyone have a recommendation?
I haven't read either yet but I've heard good things about In COVID's Wake (https://www.amazon.com/Covids-Wake-How-Politics-Failed/dp/0691267138/) and Abundance of Caution (https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Caution-American-Schools-Decisions/dp/0262549158) which is focused on American schools specifically.
This podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-we-got-wrong-during-the-pandemic-with-stephen/id1507832825?i=1000698906224) with the authors of In COVID's Wake was good and could be a nice sample before deciding if you want to look for the book.
Read In Covid’s Wake by Princeton professors Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee.
It's hard to reckon with as a society for a number of reasons.
- COVID as a phenomenon (and how we responded to it) was massively controversial. How do you have a 'day of remembrances' that instantly becomes (as the comments here have) an airing of grievances? NPI efficacy, vaccine efficacy, death counts, worm drugs, lab leaks, etc. There's no consensus or easy story about any of these things!
- COVID dragged on an ended with a whimper. It ended, but there was never an official 'end.' Biden lost in court about airplane masks and just sorta walked away. This was well after most of the rest of the country had. And at the same time, some folks are still testing before they gather, so for them, it still isn't "over"!
- It's not in anyone's interest to "reckon". Instead, everyone's preference is to play to their base.
All of these factors make it hard to have a coherent national narrative for what COVID was. That lack of narrative makes it difficult to situate a reckoning or remembrance. Before we can remember the story of COVID, we have to agree sufficiently on what that story was.
Since ultimately everyone got Covid anyway, seems those deaths were inevitable? China lost more millions, we don’t even know for sure how many, but they completely memory holed it, that’s far more remarkable to me at least
We got vaccines, and that reduced the number of deaths. https://www.natesilver.net/p/fine-ill-run-a-regression-analysis
Reduced but not eliminated. Many died anyway regardless
Perfection is a high bar.
A lot of discussion of whether lockdown was enjoyable. I'm an extreme introvert, so I didn't mind the loss of in-person socializing, and the rise of Zoom et al, which covid encouraged if not created, has been good, especially for enabling that kind of communication with the physically distant.
But I attend a lot of concerts and shows, and I really missed the ones canceled which were never rescheduled.
Twenty years after world war one, people were still so preoccupied by the human toll that avoiding war dominated foreign policy and public consciousness.
The old and the chronically ill simply don’t count as much as brave, young men at the
pinnacle of their strength and human potential. Like another commenter (almost) said, a chronically ill 55 year old won’t be missed any more than a superficially healthy 80 year old. It’s only when something strikes down young mothers and middle aged bread winners that sympathy flows.
Most people who supported lockdowns were personally terrified of covid. I didn’t go to the gym and avoided indoor dining for a year unless the place was almost empty. I was 43 and didn’t want to spend three weeks bedridden if I didn’t need to.
This is a good point, and fleshes out part of what I was talking about earlier with comparison to the Spanish Flu. That's remembered as THE epidemic of the modern era because it hit children and young people as well as older people rather than mostly older people.
But this is about stuff like recommending n95 masks for everyone no? I don’t think they intentionally lied about case numbers.
Was there ever a case where there was a general agreement that a pandemic had been handled properly?
This is the contrarian position I like to take. We actually did a good job in a lot of ways and things could have been much worse.
Supplemental oxygen, antibiotics, steroids, vaccines—and yes, some of the public health precautions, saved millions of lives.
The pandemic was just so massively negative that any take on it is focused on how poorly things went.
Of course, there were absolutely things that could have been done better and we should learn from, but a lot of the backlash and controversy is an inevitable part of such a significant event.
The public and government’s response has been to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to preparedness for the next pandemic. The medical community has not forgotten though. I do think some of the lessons we learned will absolutely be helpful when H5N1 develops human-to-human transmission. Lessons from supportive care, steroid and antibiotic use, and vaccine development should translate fairly well. Hopefully some public messaging lessons as well, although that will still be probably still be properly mixed up by politics.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/an-abundance-of-caution-and-in-covids-wake-failing-the-pandemic-test-d6b88ca7
The courts were fighting about Biden's OSHA vaccine mandate in 2022, around when I was getting daily throat swabs as a condition of going to work.
In fact, a full year after you claim the end of COVID hysteria, I popped a false positive on one of my daily COVID tests, was sent home from work, and several people who had interacted with me recently were sent home from their jobs *without pay*.
Your idea that COVID hysteria had ended by mid-2020 is incredibly out of touch with actual reality.
One of the reasons why i was pro life is that every year from 1973 to 2023, roughly 1.1 million abortion were performed. low of 700k, repeated highs of 1.5 mil. it works out to 44 mil in 50 years.
for comparison, California currently has 39.4 million people in it, so we essentially depopulated a largest state's worth of kids in my lifetime.
people seem weird about large numbers. like people will exaggerate or underestimate due to them not registering.
The problem with that pro-life argument is you could logically extend it to an argument that states "people should always be having sex and women should always be having babies." Hypothetical lost lives from people not having babies at all times would number in the billions over the same time frame you referenced.
+1
no, because this is happening despite contraception losing stigma and being readily available. increased sexual education too.
even granting all those tools, abortion is that prevalent, and is only dropping to 950k in recent years because people now have one kid at 35 or later.
kind of destroys "safe, legal, and rare" as an argument, and my point is more that most people don't get how prevalent abortion is; even as a failure state or last resort.
we abort 1.5 to 2.5x the population of Wyoming every year. people dont grok the total amount very often, like how we lost 1.2 mil as Scott says. enormity in numbers is often imvisible
You didn't attempt to counter my point which is that "number of lost hypothetical existences" is not a statistic to build any argument around. You may as well ban contraception too if that is your argument.
its not hypothetical, its actual at that point. contraception prevents, but abortion is caused to an actual existence. Im not against contraception but to equate the two is silly pro life or pro choice.
if we figure contraception in, we pretty much have explained the demographic crisis, and i'd point out abortion is what caused chinese/indian lopsided sex ratios too; dowry cultures plus ultrasound/abortion led to sex selection.
but my point is more large numbers confuse people and they under or overrate them.
works in reverse too, how many mormons you think are in the usa?
*
its under 7 million, .02% of the population, but even then there are 6 times more of them than Jehovah's witnesses. much smaller than people think
No it literally is hypothetical. Fetuses at the stage of the development of the vast majority of abortions are not conscious lives. They are at that point hypothetical conscious lives.
no, conception is the start of human existence. you can argue first trimester abortions are not morally wrong because you kill the fetus before it can suffer, but if someone induces abortion against the woman's will, no one will say that its lack of consciousness means it is not life.
like currently most people would compromise on first trimester abortion as legal but its not the same as contraception morally.
like if your mom and dad divorced and dropped the idea of having your brother or couldnt, thats potential. if they got pregnant but aborted your brother, its actual.
>its under 7 million, .02% of the population, but even then there are 6 times more of
7 million / 330 million = 0.021 or 2.1%
> and i'd point out abortion is what caused chinese/indian lopsided sex ratios too; dowry cultures plus ultrasound/abortion led to sex selection.
China was absolutely not a dowry culture. They still practice bride-price _today_ in places.
China was a place where your care in old age was expected to be financed by your son. This reversed; daughters are now better providers, though the way they do it is by getting their husband to pay for their parents rather than his.
Was interested in the death toll of the Spanish Flu in the US; was surprised it was only 500k-675K (estimates seem to vary), or ~40-50% of COVID-19. However, the US population was less than a third (100M then vs ~330m now). I knew Spanish Flu famously killed more people in six months than WW1 did in four years, but the US losses seem disproportionately low, all things considered.
Also as a general thought on COVID, I think COVID will definitely be remembered as an epochal marker and an end to an era (even though I think many of the changes that will follow-end of WFH/Telework and many changes in international scene-were already happening due to the end of ZIRP). Similar to how 9/11 "ends" the 90s.
Spanish Flu and COVID are apples and oranges. The majority of deaths from Spanish Flu could have been prevented with modern medicine.
The average remaining life expectancy for COVID fatalities was about a decade: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2006392117
IMO, lost time with parents and grandparents was a huge part of the pandemic's cost. Loss of (quality) time cuts both ways with regard to NPIs, but I think people do seem to understate the impact of having unavoidable tragedy arrive earlier.
People don’t have to be consistent about this. I have seen multiple online folks both talk about how COVID was overblown and also get incredibly angry at the nurses who were taking care of their relative who died of COVID and wouldn’t let them be there at the bedside.
Those 2 arguments seem consistent, are they not?
My now ex-boyfriend's elderly father was like 85, with a pacemaker when he and my ex's mom got Covid at the same time. This was after being vaccinated, and when monoclonal antibodies were at peak effectiveness and the universal standard of care.
Their local clinic not only didn't provide them monoclonal antibodies, they insisted on sending both of them home together with pulse ox in the low 90s, with "come back if it gets worse."
Three times.
Well, his mom fully recovered, but his dad fainted from low oxygen, hit his head, and broke a hip as well, if I'm recalling correctly. He went into the hospital, recovered from Covid, but sickened from a number of the other complications of being brain injured and vulnerable in a hospital, developed sepsis, went into a coma, and they had to withdraw life support.
Was that a "covid death?"
THE FUCK IT WAS.
It was a death by the medical malpractice of not providing the standard of care at the time - care which likely would have led to a full recovery.
It was also death by my ex's cowardice about flying across the country to monitor and advocate for his parents in person (or even staying put but confronting their doctors on the phone, or hiring a private service to administer care in their home*).
It was likewise death by my ex's sister's cowardice about driving ten minutes across town to monitor and advocate for his parents in person.
Again, this was well into the time of vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, when open windows and air filters and properly fit and N95s were proven to be good protection.
When it was a statistical impossibility that my healthy, 40-something slender ex would be in any danger from Covid even if he did catch it.
But the death certificate was marked Covid, so...must have been a Covid death, eh?!
And Ex literally blamed his dad's death on Joe Rogan for promoting vaccine hesitancy, and a little on me for occasionally listening to Joe Rogan. After all, if more people had been vaccinated in the area, his vaccinated parents wouldn't have gotten infected at all!
* the private service was indeed an option; I sent him the link to the concierge doctor service in his parents' area when researching contingency plans should my own parents be infected.
20,000 to 50,000 people die of endemic influenza each year. Roughly equivalent to fentanyl. You can say that every year we lose half to a full Vietnam War's worth of Americans to flu. But no one does. Bad years can go higher, north of six figures. Covid was about 400,000 a year (averaged during pandemic) meaning it was basically an 8-20x worse flu season in a world where 3-6x worse flu seasons are normal. That's significant but it's a difference of degree but not kind.
The takeaway I'd take as an EA is that handling tractable small problems likely has hard to calculate benefits when big things happen. If EA had a robust anti-flu infrastructure that had successfully reduced flu deaths this would not only have been successful training for the pandemic but would have given them credibility on the issue and raised the ambient level of alarm at deaths going up again. EA's cultural orientation toward countercultural "well actually" problems and thought experiments puts it in a worse position to deal with black swans. Pandemic preparedness would be better served dealing with the constant low grade pandemics we currently suffer rather than imagining a super-disease.
The other issue, if you want to do some actual self-reflection, is that EA is culturally a liberal, California movement with outposts in other deep blue enclaves like Cambridge. There was intense pressure to conform to the blue consensus which EA did not prove better at resisting than most institutions populated by blues. In many ways it proved worse. A strict utilitarian likely ends up at the Florida or Sweden position since a disease that primarily kills older people has a relatively low effect on quality adjusted life years. But this was (and really is) unthinkable for basically political/cultural reasons.
Yes, and I also remember the intense opprobrium that met any suggestion that Covid was "just the flu, bro." Woodstock music festival happened at the end of three years of pandemic "Hong Kong Flu" that probably killed, proportional to population, about half as many people as Covid. The Asian Flu in 1957 was about the same. My parents lived through both of those and they hardly registered historically. Covid was a very bad flu season for several years but was treated as the Black Death by the same people who will whip out QALYs and per-capita comparisons at any other moment.
The way this is posed suggests that some other policy might have *saved* 1.2 million lives. But I don't think that is the case. The pandemic happened. It started in China. Before we knew too much it was raging through Italy and then the US.
So I think a better question is *how many* of the 1.2 million *could have been saved* by another policy (none that I know of: China locked down hard and still ended up with lots of deaths)? Or: if we had had much looser policies how many *more* than 1.2 million would have died?
Society, education and our economies all took a big hit from Covid. Had we opened schools sooner, would 2.4 million have died? Or 1.3 million? Or the same 1.2 million? Those are the questions to ponder, IMHO.
This is the question I would like to see addressed. A certain amount of deaths were baked in from the moment the pandemic started, a large portion being several years of upcoming deaths due to co-morbidities. Given that, what interventions actually moved the needle in what populations?
The US response sucked. We are 17th from the top of a list of 200+ countries in Covid deaths per capita. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country
We fucking sucked.
I volunteered in a project to get Evusheld to people who could not get the vax because they were so immune-compromised, usually by cancer treatment, that they didn't develop antibodies when vaxed. Evusheld was a little known genius invention developed by mainstream scientists, and nobody disputed its effectiveness. It gave immune-compromised people a supply of long-lasting antibodies. The US govt bought up a bunch of it and distributed it to the health depts of all states with instructions to distribute it to those who qualified. But communication and organization was so bad that most *doctors* didn't even know about the stuff. Some states gave it to beauty spas who sold a few prescriptions on the side. Some just didn't distribute it. some gave it all to a couple of drugstores. Patients who absolutely qualified were told by their doctors they did not. 90% of that Evusheld spoiled on the drugstore shelves.
We motherfucking sucked.
The U.S. looks bad in these lists due to our substantial testing and reporting efforts. If you look at excess deaths the picture is quite different.
I could not find a ranking of excess deaths for all countries during the covid years. Can you send me to one?
The policies I think gave, or would have given, most bang for the buck are:
-Delaying the (we now know) inevitable infections of as many as possible, to prevent health care settings from being overwhelmed, and to protect as many as possible from infection before a vaccine is ready. That could be done by social distancing and/or by early and energetic implementation of things I name below.
-Educating the public about masks and aerosol transmission, and making highly protective masks easy to get.
-Educating the public about air purifiers and how well they can protect.
-Installing air purifiers in classrooms and other indoor settings that have a lot of people per cubic foot.
-Educating the public about the high vulnerability of elders.
-Taking steps to increase protection of elderly -- education of elderly, familes with elderly members nursing home staff. Govt. assistance to settings with many vulnerable to help them install air purifiers, give staff and residence good masks, hire extra staff.
-Educating public about vaccines, so there were fewer refusers.
I asked ChatGPT to create a memorial to COVID-19 victims, link to image:
https://imgur.com/a/e15qCXU
Jesus Christ, I hate that! She's way too close to tenderness and wonder in the way she's touching and looking at the fucking virus. Like it's her beloved alien baby. Covid Madonna and Child
I have to agree with you - that looks like a memorial to Covid, not the victims.
Let me clarify. The NYT can be extremely biased and wrong, yet still be more correct than my buddies. You seem to think that experts should be trusted because they are mostly right. I think it's pretty easy to show the counterfactual through gellman amnesia, not to mention historical records. However even though they are mostly wrong, they are still useful because the alternative is even worse. Personally though I prefer the Economist tho that's likely bevause my work is more aligned with a center right cause than a center left one.
That then makes your anti maga rant fall apart. You falsely categorize 2 camps, the "good smarties" on your side and the "bad stupids" on thr maga side. Probably good for your psychological health but not for facing reality.
“On April 30, 1991 – on that one day – 138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner I mentioned it to my daughter, who was then seven years old, that is was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.
“‘No, it’s easy,’ she said. “‘Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.’”
Annie Dillard, “The Wreck of Time”
I was a public health-adjacent state government worker at the start of the pandemic and there is just no acknowledgment anywhere that (1) we had no idea what was happening except that we knew it would be really bad and (2) there were important shortages of medical supplies everywhere. We coordinated warehouses of gloves, masks, swabs, reagent. You name it, there was a shortage of it. I took a long time before we could process 100 COVID tests a day, then 1000 tests per day, then they really started rolling in. But because diagnosis was so limited it looked like the virus was much deadlier than it turned out to be. The epidemiologic models that we were seeing behind the scenes were telling us that something like 10% of our seniors would die of COVID if we didn't do anything.
Can we also accept that there's nothing wrong with the government going "too far" with restrictions when it comes to dealing with a novel deadly virus? I see people criticize the government for, say, banning outdoor gatherings because in hindsight that turned out to be unnecessary. But hindsight is the only reason we know that. Back then we had no idea exactly how the virus spread and how deadly it was. So of course we took those measures before we knew if they would be necessary. The potential risks of not doing so far outweighed the downside of instituting those measures.
For March 2020 this was a reasonable mindset. By June - when it was clear the risk to the under 60s was tiny - much less so. By ~April 2021 — about when everyone who wanted one had a vaccine — egregiously not so.
The absolute latest time there was *any* case for restrictions was when it could be reasonably thought that vaccines might provide lasting sterilizing immunity, in which case getting universal uptake might have completely eradicated the disease. By mid-2021, when the emergence of delta showed this was untenable, that rationale collapsed.
By mid-2021, was there anything that could be called a "lockdown" still in place? Most of the draconian stuff *was* focused around the first few months of the pandemic, in my memory.
Looking things up for my state, the stay-at-home order lasted until the end of April, and the statewide mask mandate appears to have been lifted in June 2021.
The last state mask mandates apparently lasted until March 2022, and the federal mandate for planes only ended (via a court order) in April. I think some areas kept schools closed for the entirety of the 2020-21 school year.
I agree that no area (in the US / western world, at least) had a "lockdown" into 2021, but there absolutely were very substantial restrictions well into that year.
It was clear to the professionals from the beginning that a vaccine could not give sterilizing immunity to Covid. It’s the wrong kind of virus.
I don’t think so.
It was certainly *reasonable* to think that an upper respiratory virus would be hard to provide sterilizing immunity against, on the analogy of the flu vaccine’s limited effect and duration. I’m sure you can find credible people in April 2020 or whatever saying as much.
But no coronavirus had had any kind of even attempted vaccine before, so acting like this was certain is using 20-20 hindsight. Also, the initial trials really did show 90%+ reductions in infection rates. Partly this was due to a temporary effect and partly because the original strain was less infectious (although more deadly) than later ones, but if you’re acting like it shouldn’t have at least updated one’s prior toward lasting immunity you’re not reasoning properly.
Checked with GPT to make sure I was remembering right, & I was. The reason to believe Covid the wrong kind of virus isn't just a guess based on the fact that you can't get sterilizing immunity for the flu, its reasoning based on what is known about *why* you can't get sterilizing immunity to the flu.
GPT sez: SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID-19) infect the mucosal surfaces of the nose and throat—areas where immune defenses (like mucosal IgA) are harder to stimulate with injected vaccines. Most COVID-19 vaccines, being intramuscular, mainly induce systemic immunity (e.g., IgG antibodies, T cells), which are excellent at preventing severe disease but not always infection itself. In theory, a nasal vaccine that generates strong mucosal responses might offer sterilizing immunity, and some are in development.
Also, Covid mutates quickly, so even a vax that did create sterilizing immunity to one variant would not for any others around (though it would protect against severe illness).
GPT sez: Sterilizing immunity depends not only on a strong, localized immune response (like mucosal antibodies) but also on the immune system’s ability to recognize the virus quickly and precisely. When the virus mutates—especially in the spike protein, which most vaccines target—it can partially evade recognition by existing antibodies, even in vaccinated or previously infected people.
It is not impossible in theory to make a vax that would give sterilizing immunity, if you can overcome the obstacles mentioned above. But the people making the covid vax knew they were not building in the features that would give sterilizing immunity. The public was not clearly informed of that info, so when it became clear that vaxed people could catch covid people understandably took that as evidence that the vax didn't work.
Can we also accept that there's nothing wrong with the government going "too far" with restrictions when it comes to dealing with a novel terrorist threat?
No such thing as a "novel terrorist threat"
I think you’re overstating the novelty. It’s a coronavirus, not an alien plague from planet Vulcan. They’ve been extensively studied. “No idea exactly how” is a messy phrase conflating two very different levels of confidence and precision, we clearly had “some idea how” and then a range of possibilities beyond that. It’s reasonable to make inferences based on existing knowledge about similar viruses and to act on them. Start with a plausible estimate of IFR and R0, and then update your priors as the data came in, starting with the cruise ship which we had good data on pretty quickly.
The thing about old people dying that I never hear about is that COVID is a horrible way to die. Slow motion suffocation over a period of weeks. Would anyone want grandma to die like that?
As opposed to, what exactly?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
Pneumonia used to be called the "old man's friend", because slow motion suffocation over a week or so (with no ventilators to draw it out) was so much better than so many of the alternatives.
Hospitals often give morphine to people whose shortness of breath is causing them distress. It kills oxygen hunger and sedates them.
https://satwcomic.com/off-to-the-rave , obviously.
I think the 1.2 million deaths are in the background of some of those other things. The lab leak debate is about assigning blame (for 1.2 million deaths); the guidelines about masks and drugs and vaccines were partly about how best to mitigate deaths (at a final toll of 1.2 million). If COVID had a final death toll of, say, 5, I think its ability to spark discourse would be much muted.
Just hearing 1 million American COVID deaths is crazy but less crazy when you realize on average 3 million Americans die every year
I think a large part of it is:
1. Deaths were very concentrated in the elderly - yes some number of younger died, but those were also the people most likely to die with rather than from (with excess deaths likely somewhat filled in by elderly who died undiagnosed). I remember looking in later 2020 pre-Winter wave and like 50% of deaths were nursing home residents. No one is going to have a large day of mourning for nursing home residents who are on their way out anyways. If COVID ended up having a similar impact by age of regular flu and had killed 50x as many kids I think we would remember it very differently.
2. Deaths were also more likely in poor/minorities and the intersection of the 2, so the online commentarii are less likely to have experience with people who died. I don't know anyone who died of COVID, as other commentators have stated.
3. This is just what we do with pandemics. See how Spanish flu has a much lower cultural impact than wars that killed fewer people, or how the flus of the 50s and 60s aren't thought about at all.
4. Toxoplasma of rage - way more interesting to fight about lockdowns and school closures and the summer of Floyd than think about people who died.
Ignoring the mask requirements is one thing, but how many of those deaths occurred because people refused to take the vaccine? I don't know if anyone has collected those numbers, but I'll bet that one reason no one talks about the Covid deaths is because the obvious solution, get vaccines out faster, is politically polarizing. No one wants to talk about it if they have a significant change of being attacked no matter what they say.
Both of these are true:
a) Anti-vaxers are idiots
b) Maybe 15% of US deaths could have been prevented with more vax uptake, at the high end, especially given that uptake among the most vulnerable elderly people was very high
a) ...Who kill people.
b) Do you have a cite for that figure? Interesting if true.
Not offhand. I’m reasoning from the facts that about half of deaths were before vaccines were available, and that post vaccines deaths were still much higher among the (highly vaccinated) very old.
The real tests is vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated holding all else equal (or as close as the data allows).
Apparently upwards of 2.5 million people die in the US each year (closer to 3 million now). Even if COVID was just two years, that's ~600,000 extra deaths a year, or a bit over 20% more than normal.
Around 675,000 people in the US died of Spanish Flu, of a population just over 100,000,000. As a percent, more people died of Spanish Flu (and they were of many ages, not overwhelmingly older). Just flat numbers, more Americans died of Spanish Flu than died in WW I, WW II, Vietnam, and Korea combined.
My guess is that a population that's overwhelmingly older (around 60,000 of the 1.2 million who died of COVID were under the age of 50, with around 80% being 65 or older), that was not a significant change in the trajectory of mortality, doesn't really register with people. More people still died of heart related problems *and* cancer in 2020 and 2021 than died of COVID. COVID is actually far less concerning, because even from the very start we knew it would be temporary. Cancer gets those kinds of numbers year after year after year.
There's also the question of what we could have done differently. As you note, more lockdowns would not have helped and would have made other things worse. Vaccines could have helped to an extent, but necessarily came out late enough that many of the deaths already occurred and still wouldn't have prevented all deaths. I think the proper response is to mourn your own losses, be aware there were others, and move on. No more than we do for cancer, and it should be a lot less.
I was teaching in LA. We went out on short notice in March '20 and didn't get back on campus for a year. The school where I taught was in a middle- / working-class area and included a significant number of multi-generational families. We pivoted to zoom skool fairly quickly. No one liked it or considered it sufficient, but it was the best option under the circumstances at the time. No one knew in the early days what to expect, but it seemed prudent to use our available tech to preserve what we could of what we'd been doing.
We stayed with it until the second half of the following spring semester, after the first waves of COVID had broken and vaxxing gained momentum. A number of smaller districts had gone back to in-person instruction sooner. In LAUSD students had the option of staying home and a large majority did so. Instruction was still essentially 'remote.'
We went back to the regular routine for the fall'21 semester. Everyone had to wear a mask. Other steps were used to check-in for work remotely and also trace infections among students, faculty and staff. I was frequently in very close proximity to students who got sick shortly thereafter, but never got sick myself. My wife and I had gotten the Pfizer vaccine and then a booster in late Dec. We never got any breakthrough infections but all 3 of our (adult) kids did. I had students who told me about their experiences being ill with Covid - some were dreadful though obviously they survived.
Verdict? It was weird, scary and clearly warranted a strong response, whate ER it's origins. Student learning loss was real but not irreparable; crucial social learning also suffered - a factor teachers were uniquely positioned to notice and take the measure of. (The most noticeable impact - tentativeness, timidity, disengagement - showed up in the last couple years and was 'downstrean' among kids who were in early middle or elementary at the time.) Given what we know now, anger over the origins of the virus and outbreak are understandable. It also seems that LAUSD, with about 500,000 students the nation's second largest school district, could have gone back to in-person instruction sooner. But masking would have to have been part of that. Given the fact that it did, in my experience, obstruct more widespread infections, it does seem to have been largely effective. I can't say I liked wearing one, but chances are my risk of getting sick would definitely have been higher if I hadn't.
At this remove the whole mess has been distorted by politicization in a way that can only dissipate with time. Unfortunately it looks like Century 21 America will continue to be infected by a tendency to crack under the distorting strain of our political duopoly, perhaps because its pols are happy to preserve it for their own gain, whatever the cost to the truth.
Closing the schools for such a long time was a clear mistake
Likely right. The HS a couple blocks from my house that my kids went to had gone back in fall ‘20. I don’t know what they did to mitigate spread - my kids were long gone - but there were no massive complaints. I think we (LAUSD) could have probably gone back to something resembling our normal MO and schedule by Jan. ‘21. But that’s factoring in the ultimately limited efficacy of vaxxing. When we did finally have to go back in mid-spring ‘21 we didn’t actually have in-person instruction anyway; teachers zoomed from their classrooms while students who were on campus stayed in their homeroom and tuned-in on school-issued laptops; that was an almost-funny half measure that wasn’t very popular - less than 20% of the kids in my school came in for it, the rest just continued from home.
I was surprised to hear that covid out killed things like the spanish flu for americans, turns out this is accurate by raw death count. According to chatgpt the spanish flu killed ~675,000 americans and covid 1.1 million. But (according to chatgpt) in 1918 america had approximately 103 million people. So by percentage it killed more than covid
Also most victims of the 1918 flu were young.
The US did all those restrictions and still got 1.2 million deaths and somehow you think that's an argument that is favourable for restrictions? Did the 1.2 million that died somehow benefit from the way that strangers were made to suffer through lockdowns, ostensibly on their behalf, but in practice for no benefit.
Some people like to talk about how the number of deaths was highly inflated. I have not gone down that rabbit hole but where did you get your 1.2 million deaths from?
Some old people didn't die of COVID, but had their lives disrupted in ways that were somewhat tragic. I'm thinking of my mom, who was 95 when it hit, and as a result of COVID, couldn't see anyone in her family for more that half of the two years she had left. She started losing clarity in those last couple of years, so we lost the chance at a lot of important final conversations.
I'm not sure why I haven't seen the counterfactual logic spelled out anywhere: what would have happened if there were no lockdowns and no vaccinations? Supposedly, if 1.2 million deaths is substantially less than the number of deaths expected with no intervention, we should be satisfied that we at least did *something* to reduce deaths. I think these are the numbers for Americans: ~330 million Americans X 1.7% mortality rate (see https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-vaccines-44-covid-19-patients-icu-died) = 5,610,000 expected COVID deaths with no interventions. The 1.2 million deaths is mind-boggling and an immense tragedy, but it's only 21% of what would have happened if we did nothing. I'm sure we should have done much more, but maybe our success avoiding the worst-case scenario is a reason to think the 1.2 million number isn't as big as it seems.
One of the lessons is that remarkably few people can or will think in terms of (1) exponential threats (2) counterfactuals.
To add to your counterfactual - I suspect it underestimates mortality due to kinetics and knock on effects: we were looking at a possible alternative of health system collapse / field hospitals / rationing etc in an alternative universe of permissive transmission. The total mortality cost of an event of that nature is hard to estimate.
Great points. The other factor is herd immunity that would emerge eventually, slowing the rate of spreading. It's very difficult to model that sort of thing, especially with the exponential effects you mentioned.
Sterilizing immunity is not possible with covid, because it is the wrong kind of virus. Hence herd immunity is not possible. The best you can get is what we’ve now got: the illness is endemic, but its fatality rate is now lower because almost everyone has some limited immunity, which makes their covid infections milder.
There is no way the IFR was 1.7%. No state or country got close to even half that.
Here's a better source than I included above, which shows that some countries had much higher case-mortality ratios: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
Your link shows 1.1% for the US, not 1.7%, and that's CFR, not IFR
Okay. The same overall logic still applies with somewhat lower numbers. What do you think the IFR was before vaccines?
The mainstream figure was .5-1% prior to the vaccines. CDC put out an estimate of .26% at one point. Estimating the % of people who have had exposure or been infected is not easy: seroprevalence will always underestimate, and I believe that was what the .5-1% figure was based around.
The other problem using one number is that because the deaths skewed so much by age that the IFR will be very different depending on your population's age distribution, so the studies I found always stratify the estimates by age and don't give a single number.
Either way, your post assumes that with 'the policies' only 21% of people were exposed, and without them 100% of the population would be exposed. That didn't happen anywhere despite a range of government policies in the US and the world. Realistically the most vulnerable populations (elderly) will isolate and take precautions no matter what rules the government puts in place.
Thanks for those numbers. My point was that all interventions likely led to reduced mortality, not just government interventions. That includes the most vulnerable isolating themselves.
Any ideas on how to keep covid boosters available?
RFK is moving to allow annual covid boosters for those 65+ (and some health complications) on the same basis as the flu shots (updating strains and proving antibody titers).
but for those <65, a new annual booster would be treated like a de novo vaccine, requiring massive, placebo controlled tests and long follow up for illness. It can't be done on an annual basis.
It kills me we developed an incredible vaccine breakthrough and my family (and others) will be excluded from benefiting.
> but for those <65, a new annual booster would be treated like a de novo vaccine, requiring massive, placebo controlled tests and long follow up for illness.
Is this in fact how the new policy shakes out? What I was reading yesterday was that the vaccine would only be recommended for 65+ and people with some preexisting conditions.
There was still confusion about whether health insurance would cover the vaccine for those younger and healthier.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/05/notes-on-pandemic-responses-a-human-pathogen-that-eats-the-plastic-of-medical-devices-and-the-secretary-of-health-and-human-services-speaks-out.html
Building on the point about the victims being dead, those who lost loved ones also aren't speaking out. Perhaps a few reasons:
1) It didn't feel like somebody who died of Covid was the fault of those who resisted masks/didn't get vaxxed/etc. It felt like random chance, differently from somebody whose child dies of measles might perceive cause and effect.
2) Those who do blame others are hesitant to do so publicly given how politicized all Covid topics have become
3) For some it was traumatic, and they just don't want to talk about it
The difference between "what matters" and "what people care about" is more than just a misalignment. There's zero reason people should actually care about sports or video games or fiction, or even art. The caring-gap is unfortunately a loadbearing cornerstone of what makes humanity actually interesting.
Maybe it would be more salient if people had stronger community ties and more acquaintances.
Regarding the debate about whether the 1.2 million COVID deaths are real, I have a quick thought to share.
I do not know anyone personally who died from COVID or anyone who got seriously ill from it. This makes me skeptical of the 1.2 million deaths.
However, my father, who I argued with about lockdowns back in spring 2020 (I in favor, him in opposition) told me a story about going for a job at a funeral home and there being dead bodies under sheets in a section of the room which had been cordoned off. He accidentally went back there and saw it. I think he saw a foot sticking out from under a sheet and it freaked him out. Where these bodies were being kept was not the usual place, but they clearly had so many they needed to dedicate extra space for them. I texted my dad to confirm I'm remembering this story right and will update if I got anything wrong.
So while I don't know anyone who died, it's clear that lots of people did die and I can't discount that fact simply because it didn't "happen to me" so to speak.
Edit: my dad said that I forgot the extenuating circumstances which were that the largest funeral home in the area had closed for a license issue and so had the cemetery. So I was wrong about the bodies piling up just because of COVID it seems some were COVID deaths but not all. Do with that what you will.
Same—I don’t know a single person who died of COVID or has negative long-term effects. Makes it really hard to accept “1.2 million people died so you should be sad.”
Seems like… life—where 3 million Americans die every year and I’m also not sad, except for the ones I know.
It's the same thing with car accidents. It's a 9/11 every month. Yet, few people talk about Waymo and self-driving cars like they're a heroic endeavor.
I've always been struck by the fact that Joe Biden's entire family was killed by a car crash and he never once tried to do anything about road deaths in fifty years in government.
(compare to e.g. his son dying of brain cancer, after which he did push for cancer research funding)
He liked to ride Amtrak?
Or Telsa. Elon Musk has stated many times in the last 5 years that the main focus of Tesla after getting mass manufacturing going is Full Self Driving. Hopefully the Austin launch goes well and FSD is available on all Teslas this year or next. This tech could save a million lives globally and who knows how many injuries + property loss.
> First, dead people can’t complain about their own deaths, so there are no sympathetic victims writing their sob stories for everyone to see
I don't think this is remotely close to true. It's a rule of thumb that for every X deaths, there are 3X people that are crippled (casualties) because of the same event. And there should be a very loud 3.6 million Americans whose lifes are destroyed directly because of the virus (not because of lockdown or other circumstantial things). Cancers and AIDS make tons of sob stories when they were very lethal. So whatever reason this pandemic is under-remembered, it's not because the dead don't talk.
1.2 million is a lot of dead people, sure, but did you see that George Floyd video?
Did we see a spike in COVID cases during the George Floyd protests?
It doesn't matter. The police kill way more black people than Covid ever did.
As one of the most significant modern disasters ever, should we not demand a non-partisan global scientific review of what worked and did not worked with recommendations? Seems like one of the most important things we could do for human welfare.
I get the impression everyone is just embarrassed by the entitle affair. At least until the next pandemic. Which is inevitable.
Everyone should at least own a P100 mask and know how to use it. Too bad mask wearing is so politicized now. They cost around $50 so about $150 billion to give every American one (or buy your own).
Actually no I wouldn't want stricter policies. 1.2 million is a statistic; beyond Dunbar's Number. I'm sick of being held emotionally hostage over it.
I'm sorry, are you suggesting that you care less about things that kill *more* people? If COVID had killed 100 people it would have been more worthy of concern than killing 1M+??!!
Scott, I honestly don't know how you thought this comment section was going to go.
I think we may still be in the "don't mention the war" phase of history, here.
I assume he knew this would result in a rehash of the comment sections across the internet in 2020-2022. Reading this comment section has been like time traveling.
There is an excess deaths statistic on most Western countries in https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q1229/rr
Look at the table, it shows roughly 15% excess deaths in the US, a lot more than Canada (4%) but in line with the UK and Switzerland (12%)
Early in the pandemic I remember reading about the 1918 flu pandemic and being shocked at how little of a historical spotlight it got -- it killed *50 million people*, made macroscopic impacts on life expectancy and global death rate curves, and yet barely gets any historical coverage (I certainly did not learn about it in school). I had always thought it was because it happened in the middle of World War I, but after COVID I realized that something deeper is going on. Either we accept disease deaths as "more natural" and downweight them, or we are so horrified that we want to ignore and forget about it as soon as possible. Kind of a denial of death sort of thing?
I think that death by infectious disease and pandemics with death rates *way* higher than that of the 1918 flu and COVID were still fresh in the public memory. The 1918 flu was simply a nothingburger compared to recent history of infectious diseases of pre-1900 and some local cases of the early 1900s.
There’s an old article you wrote about how it’s really hard to know how you’re suppose to update or change your views based on certain numbers (ie. say crime was only 10% worse instead of 30%, that’s a lot but what does that change for you?. Or 120,000 Chinese people immigrated to America instead of 70,000, what does that actually change for you. If you found out the amount of black people shot to death in the US by police was a quarter or four times as much as you previously thought, what would that change for you? Etc ). I think Covid death statistics are similar in that we don’t really have any basis for what to make of it. I think it would be a really interesting project to try and consider how we could start building ways to think about and respond to quantities and facts of the world we’re not use to dealing with a making proper commitments to change our world views/policies based on them. Has anyone seriously tried to do that before?
3 million Americans die every year… people don’t complain about that because people care about what they see in front of them.
In any given year you might know one or two or zero people that die. On average, you might have known zero or one person that died of COVID per year.
My question is during the world wars and Vietnam did people know more than zero or one person that died per year? What made people care so much about them?
Maybe it was because there was less of an internalized cost to the non-warfighters, so all they saw was the cost of the deaths they did see. In contract to COVID, where there was every day internalized costs of non-COVID diers, which might have appeared massive compared to the one 70 year old you knew who died of COVID.
Well, Vietnam imposed large costs on all young males because of the draft. Obviously people would care deeply.
I've always been struck by how incredibly well our whole society handled COVID incredibly well - far better than I would have predicted. So much pro-social activity across all of society! Remarkable levels of government support, and partially from Republicans no less! A vaccine development effort that was one of the marvels of modern technology! Obviously some mistakes were made (harms to the socialization of children and young adults was a big one; and the general degeneracy of right wingers into anti-vax hysteria was a very bad indirect consequence). But overall I think it was a remarkable societal accomplishment.
I have never encountered anyone, in real life or on the internet, who shares this perspective.
I share this perspective. I remember everyone coming together during the initial lockdowns. There was bipartisan stimulus, miracle vaccines, a huge shift to remote work.
Before COVID, I thought we had become too divided as a country to handle a major crisis.
"1.2 million Americans died during COVID." Okay, so were those "excess"deaths, above the normal pattern? And while 1.2 million died during Covid, did they die because of Covid? Or did they die with Covid but not necessarily because of Covid? And I am not clear how there were apparently zero deaths due to flu . . . did flu death really take a holiday, or were what would have normally been flu cases wind up being classed as Covid? None of the scary walking dead scenarios or needing emergency morgues or treatment centers on ships or in huge tents, etc., turned out to be true. I just don't think we have yet had true accounting of actually how many died FROM Covid alone.
There was a significant drop in flu deaths for the 2020-2021 season. The number of deaths is usually 12k to 50k, but may have been around 700!
The crazy stat is that pediatric flu deaths normally average around 200 a year, but there was only 1 clild flu death in the US in 2020-2021 season, and 49 the next (when most everyone felt safe because of vaccines). It may be that social distancing and masks were not as effective as we thought against COVID, but against flu, they were pretty spectacular. I feel this was way underreported.
This means of course, COVID mortality was even a little higher than excess deaths would indicate. (Oddly, traffic deaths did not go down during this period, as I was sure they would.)
This suggests at risk people should be taking flu more seriously. Remember there were 80k excess deaths in the 2017-2018 flu season and I never heard about it until I started looking up excess deaths (to get around the complaint in 1/4 of these posts that it was just a diagnosis).
I think weather apps should not only show where radar shows rain is coming from, but also flu strains when they are a danger. (Sorry for prolixity)
"It may be that social distancing and masks were not as effective as we thought against COVID, but against flu, they were pretty spectacular. I feel this was way underreported."
This, 1000%
Imperfectly-applied efforts to reduce transmission of COVID yielded an almost-completely effective reduction in flu transmission.
I think Vermont and Japan stopped giving out flu vaccines that winter. Not enough cases to justify it.
Also that about 45K died of COVID last year, more than all car accidents.
It’s returned to being a normal cause of death and not a economic disaster 😎
1.2 million died "with" Covid.
https://brownstone.org/articles/is-this-the-man-who-created-covid-19-in-faucis-us-lab/
"Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID."
What? I kept thinking there was going to be some kind of a twist, like maybe the post would go on to talk about an alternate universe where the above claim was true, but there was no twist.
In my experience, people stopped talking about COVID years ago. It's like Game of Thrones - sure, everyone was talking about it back when it was on, but that was then.
I remember there was some mention of COVID on this blog a few months ago, but that's basically all I've heard about it recently - and I follow the news every day. Then again, I don't follow American news unless there's some big thing that's happened over there specifically. Maybe Americans really are still going on about COVID?
Americans are not still going on about COVID. Recently the new government has unsettled people by talking about opening a COVID commission to investigate the handling of the pandemic, and people like Scott are keyed up by that, and of course this post has keyed up a lot of people. This is the first comment I've made, but I've been fighting the urge to join in. Government brought it up, Scott ranted, comments now ranting.
So it's more like, Americans (like probably everyone else) have mostly put COVID behind them, but it's a still a sore subject and we'll rant if it gets brought up unexpectedly.
No one is really talking about it but I think the five year anniversary triggered some retrospectives like this one!
Uh, did you accidentally hit “Reply” before writing the rest of your rebuttal?
yes, thanks!
My take is that those who feel that “we can’t stop talking about Covid” are all hanging out together on a certain part of twitter without realizing that everyone else has moved on.
I am actually a bit stunned by the degree to which we are *not* reflecting on the pandemic. How much fiction can you think of that was set in that time, for example? Now compare to the amount of media we are still creating today about WWII.
Exposing my ignorance: Did anyone in, say, April 2020 oppose lockdowns, social distancing, school closings, masks, etc, and also predict that more that there would be excess deaths in the US greater than 1M? There was lots of "being wrong" going about at the time, and I think we should be humble enough to realize it was really difficult to get things right. For example, flattening the curve at least somewhat seems prudential (doesn't it?). Was there a prominent US figure who did "get things right?" (I think the at-risk people of Sweden voted with their feet to be almost as cautious as their Scandinavian cousins, who were coerced to do so.)
Tegnell got it right. Jay Bhattacharya got it largely right with some mistakes. No, flattening the curve didn't sound reasonable at all. To me it sounded like a fantasy, like grasping to straws.
People at-risk needed to be cautious, no dispute about that.
Re: Bhattacharya, from what I read, predicted something in the order of 20 to 40k deaths. If I promised you 250 an hour for consulting and paid you 6$ an hour instead, you would perhaps object about that. At the time it was hard to accept a lot of what he said because he had been so wrong on that front, but he does not lie about what did happen, and I have to admit his policies in retrospect look good. But my goodness, that is a staggering predictive failure, and one that as a health official has to be considered worse than overcompensating. (Not the JB didn't have at least experimental data for his prediction. His was not a bad faith misestimation. But it was still wrong.) Can you elaborate on Tegnell?
I see: I was trying to limit it to US policymakers. I would be surprised that early on he would have predicted 1.2M excess US deaths (even with mitigation factors and the astonishing delivery of vaccines). Wasn't he trusting in herd immunity?
I am looking at my old comments where I say that expected deaths are 0.85% of the population but they will be mostly elderly people.
And people answer with emotional disdain, some of them blocked me and have never talked to me again. Being honest with predictions made me a pariah. It was a mistake to talk about these things at all, even in rationalist forums.
So, I wouldn't blame any expert who avoided this subject how many deaths he really expects to happen. People are not able to talk about these things. Even Scott is not rational enough.
I have never seen him predicting only 20-40K deaths, to be honest. But overall he predicted that everybody will get covid eventually and understanding that mortality rate from covid originally was 0.5% it just takes a very easy math to predict that about 2 million people would die from covid.
I said that but I didn't emphasise that because the emphasis was that most of those people will be already dying from something else. It is not meaningful to speak about deaths in the same way for someone who is 20 years old and 85 years old. Different expectations and lost QALY. Speaking about the number of deaths don't make sense at all. It is not a meaningful number.
The main idea that Bhattacharya was saying is that covid risk increases exponentially by age, hence children and young people do not have to worry. This was the main issue that the media and everybody else was ignoring. It is still ignored by Scott.
Tegnell on the other was autistically repeating things from public health textbook. He was an expert who was guided by evidence instead of emotions like everybody else. When he didn't have evidence, he said – we don't have evidence. He did the best of all experts at the end.
March 24, 2020 WSJ op-ed: "This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a
far less severe problem than one that kills two million."
I am not disputing that his policies are sensible, but by being so woefully wrong in this prediction (again it was an honest, scientifically derived good faith estimate, but WAY WAY wrong), he does not meet my criteria of "being completely right in April 2020". If he had proposed Great Barrington regulations in April 2020 and said there would be 1.2M excess deaths even if we get a miracle vaccine (without which the 2M "severe problem" would have been reached), but we would have better schooling outcomes and hedonic experiences, I think he would have been dismissed as a kook.
Scott's point, I believe, was that the pandemic had what would have been viewed as tragic loss of life that was unimaginable to most at the time and would have been worth making sacrifices to avoid. But in retrospect, we made it through it and are glad it wasn't worse, and that makes us harsher on those who were unduly cautious at the time.
Apparently Jay Bhattacharya quickly understood that his original prediction was wrong and corrected it. It would have made me to trust him even more. Unfortunately many people have misconceptions and don't like corrections.
My point is that Scott is wrong. Politicians in the US chose the wrong policy but it was just an accident. They could have equally chosen someone like Tegnell and achieved better results.
How quickly did JB adjust his prediction and what did he adjust his prediction to? This matters. People were quoting that article for months. I don't think Scott actually disagrees with you about policy, but I think he is inviting more humility in criticizing those making tough decisions when the problem ended up being far worse than almost anyone imagined. JB clearly thinks 2M deaths is a catastrophe, and without speedy vaccine delivery do you doubt the death toll would have reached 2M?
Brilliant reminder. I really appreciate how you present this with intellectual humility, more to lead us to question ourselves than to lecture. What you say is so true. We sometimes talk about COVID again but not about the millions of deaths. These are deaths that have left no traces. They died normally like everyone else in a hospital bed. Their bodies didn't litter the streets, their blood didn't stain the pavement, they died without screams or commotion, no bomb exploded, no building collapsed, they are invisible and silent deaths, they are abstract statistics. Except of course for the loved ones who saw them die. But they represent a minority in the population. For most people, myself included, these are impersonal statistics. Unfortunately, all our biases contribute to burying the memory of these deaths in a lost corner, a mass grave of our memory. It's good to remind us of the factual reality, even if, as you rightly say, it's difficult to know what conclusions to draw beyond acknowledging our biases. Should we have done more? Done less? Where to place the cursor. There is probably no single answer, hence the continued debates after years.
To be honest, unlike most people, I almost keep a pleasant memory or nostalgia for this heroic period, for completely personal reasons and because I enjoyed extraordinary conditions (this without breaking the law). But the reality was that hospitals were overwhelmed and people were dying. I maintain a certain guilt for having had a good life when others were depressed.
No.
1.2 million American death were attributed to COVID. Quite another matter, especially given that we know for a fact that this included people who actually died in motorcycle accidents and falling from ladders. Also that the death tolls abruptly dropped the instant that COVID deaths stopped behind a cash cow.
.Always nasty to stop behind cash cows
https://imgur.com/a/XeYZhOx
Great post. I would like to see more short posts like this that don't necessarily have a clear conclusion. I really have never thought about just how many people died likely because I don't know many old people. 1.2 million deaths in the context of a war is an absolute crap-ton and framing it that way makes it much more real
I think we should stop talking about covid deaths. It is not good for mental health. It just makes certain people unnecessary anxious which forces them to make bad decisions with their life choices and decreases their wellbeing.
The number means nothing because it is less than 0.3% of population. Think in this way, one in 300 people died. That is very insignificant number. Some groups are not even that big, so a lot of people will not know anyone personally who died from covid. And majority, a big majority of those who died were already on their death bed. The average age of dying from covid in the UK was higher than the average life expectancy of 83 years.
My own family had 2 people dying from covid, both on their death beds who suffered immensely and wished their sufferings to end. Around this time 2 other relatives died, one from old age, another – younger person – tragically in a traffic accident. Deaths happen, it was sad. Now it is time to move on and enjoy life again.
Apart from investigations such as who allowed covid to spread, which restrictions actually increased mortality etc., we should not talk about covid deaths.
It reminds me of high infant mortality that used to occur. Lots of cultures cope with... trying to ignore it. Some don't even name their children until certain age. Yeah, if we don't actually know how to reduce some calamity, ignorance is bliss and recommended.
The key here is the margin. 1.2 million Americans died, and the lockdowns didn't stop them from dying. They're not on either side. The pro-lockdown people didn't save them, the anti-lockdown people didn't/wouldn't-have saved them, so nobody gets credit for them in their arguments. They matter. Their deaths were a great tragedy. But the only arguments they help is people arguing it was a lab leak and thus gain of function research is more bad than good.
Pro-lockdown only gets credit for the difference between the actual deaths and the hypothetical deaths with no or fewer restrictions. Anti-lockdown gets credit for all of the economic, social, educational, and hedonic costs of lockdowns and restrictions (not covid directly). If any outcome is the same in both possible worlds, then neither gets credit for it when compared against each other.
It is interesting that Scott says that if we had known that 1.2 million people would die from covid, we would have demanded even stronger measures.
I disagree. We (meaning experts in this field) knew that 1.2 million deaths was a probable number. They just cowardly refused to face the reality and instead sent the wrong message to the public to promote their lockdowns.
Think in this way: why people get convinced to get vaccinated? It is not because you provide statistics that millions of deaths have been saved by vaccine. No, it is because they are (correctly) told that this vaccine will reduce their chances to get disease and/or dying from that disease. There are risks that we don't know how to prevent and people are happy about that too and go on with their lives.
The same with covid – for large majority there was nothing they could do to avoid covid so it didn't make sense for them to take any precautions at all. Some groups (mostly elderly) were vulnerable and could reduce their risks by waiting until vaccine were available.
Now, how effective was vaccine?
When covid started there was a dispute about case fatality rate, some numbers were clearly inflated. But soon it was calculated to be around 0.5%. The belief was that unless vaccine will be invented, everybody will get covid and that was the upper limit. So, the number of deaths I imagined was about 2 million for the US. That is not a significant number. We should have made note of that and communicated to people that they don't have great risk from covid.
Scott's number is that 0.3% of people died. I guess, the difference is due to vaccine. Maybe vaccine saved more but lockdowns killed some more.
At the end, vaccine helped but the difference is not that great.
The places that do not need to continue processing - "arguing" as you call it, are the countries or areas where governments were transparent and made people trust their competence and hence their interventions - or non-interventions in some cases. Here we still have a lot of processing to do!
Spot on!
Put a reminder for your 75th birthday to re-read that footnote.
Thank you for writing this and remembering what happened.
I absolutely hate this thread, and I have been trying to figure out why. I think of myself as someone who was less deeply affected by Covid than most. I was never deeply, sickeningly scared, and I was also not greatly troubled by the restrictions on life. Masks I experienced as just a nuisance, and I was able to get back to in-person work, which I prefer, pretty early in the pandemic by running a huge air purifier in my office.
And yet most comments here either make me feel like crying or make me feel a huge surge of irritation at the writer. I think it's because I, like everyone else, have had and seen so many savage arguments about Covid -- so much screamo self-righteousness, stinking smirking sarcasm, howls of rage and pain, insults, lies, mind puke. *That* damaged me, and now I have greatly reduced ability to tolerate hearing the views of others on the subject.
Kind of interesting how the post is about hardly anyone remembering the deaths, but everyone debating the lockdowns and narratives - totally borne out by these comments, of which I've read a lot and none refer to the deaths - just people's experiences of the lockdowns and narratives. For the record, I protested Sydney's lockdowns and was issued with $6000 worth of fines (later dismissed by a magistrate), because by August 2021, it was clear that the state government had imposed yet another punitive lockdown simply in response to media hysteria. There were no health issues at stake, but plenty of economic and mental-health hardships involved (as I made my solitary protest past the shuttered windows of a dozen small businesses).
As for the deaths: wasn't it later established in many jurisdictions that the same deaths which in other years would be ascribed to flu, were now ascribed to Covid? For example, in 2014, flu deaths in Australia numbered 2,879; in 2019, 4,124 (I remember it was a bad flu season); but in 2020-2022, 'flu' deaths had collapsed (link below), and by 2023, there were only 607 from 'flu' and 6,187 from 'Covid.' Certainly looks like some cross-over classification. Most flu seasons, we don't take any note of the numbers of cases and deaths - but it was shoved in our faces, along with everything else, during Covid.
https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/deaths-due-covid-19-influenza-and-rsv-australia-2022-july-2024
There was a significant increase in all-cause mortality between 2020 and 2022: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
It is a fact that, regardless of how any given death was labelled, there were just more of them. A lot more. These increases correspond to times when more COVID infections were reported, when more people were googling for symptoms associated with COVID, and when higher concentrations of COVID were detected in wastewater.
'However any given death was labelled'? Isn't that the issue at stake? Was one factor in increased mortality likely to have been the poorly-tested and arbitrarily imposed vaccines? Are we likely ever to be sure? No, but just labelling them all 'Covid' is a cop-out.
That wouldn't make any sense for 2020. Do you/people really believe that vaccines were the cause of the increase in all-cause mortality?
It's true that neither measure is perfect -- definitely there were some reported COVID deaths where COVID wasn't the primary cause of death, and definitely all-cause mortality reflects deaths other than the virus themself. But I don't think anyone really thinks that flu deaths were counted towards COVID in the US -- COVID deaths generally had COVID tests behind them. The totality of evidence very very very points towards COVID being the cause.
Yeah, there were Covid tests in Australia as well. What do you make of the collapse in 'flu' deaths at the same time?
I didn't say 'the cause,' I asked if it was 'one factor.' Anecdotally, particularly for younger people, there was an increase in poor outcomes from myocarditis after the vaccine. Understandably, though, there's been an official reluctance to have formal investigations.
I answered the first part in my other response -- social distancing worked extremely well against the flu because it was a less naturally contagious virus.
There was this swap plot, see. The covid vax was actually a bolus of live flu virus and killed 1.3.14156 million Merkins and the flu vaccine was some Trump semen with a teeny bit of clorox added and goddam that stuff worked really well. The whole thing was the outcome of an agreement between Biden, Trump and Putin to even out some various scores and compensate for shit Hunter Biden did, plus also some Clinton pubic hair type issues, life is complicated, you know?
If this was the case we would expect vaccination rates to correlate with excess all cause mortality. We would also need to explain all of the deaths in 2020.
(If you look at just mortality (instead of *excess* mortality) you will typically observe higher mortality among vaccinated individuals. This is probably due to high-risk individuals having much higher vaccination rates - the same way you see much higher mortality among people getting any kind of medical treatment versus everyone in the general population not getting that treatment. That's why we look at excess all-cause mortality)
In the second year of the pandemic, when the vaccine was available, vaccination rates were higher in US urban areas than US rural areas. Excess all-cause mortality decreased in urban areas but increased in rural areas: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10289647/
'One major finding of this study is that the number of excess deaths in the second year of the pandemic was not substantially lower than the first year, which is noteworthy as vaccinations were available for much of 2021 and 2022.' Right. So, not particularly effective but we need more of them? Of course! 'Despite the strong efficacy of vaccines, gaps in uptake likely contributed to high excess mortality in 2021 and 2022, which may persist into the future if these vaccination gaps are not closed.'
Yes. Increased excess deaths in low-vaccination-rate populations make up for decreased excess deaths among high-vaccination-rate populations. That's why we observe excess mortality rates diverging among different subpopulations once vaccines become available.
If you introduce a treatment, and population A uses it a lot while population B doesn't use it very much, and you observe similar *overall* all-cause excess mortality rates because fewer people in population A are dying but more people in population B are dying, that indicates that the cause of the mortality gap is one or more things that *used* to be the same in both populations but recently became different, and the treatment is a strong candidate for that thing.
That is wrong.
Vaccine uptake in elderly, most vulnerable was close to 95-99% in the UK. Your numbers doesn't match.
The real reason is that (apart from lockdown caused mortality) that during the first year of pandemic only about 20% of population got infected with covid and 80% got infected with covid in the second year. Probably in the elderly group this was even more skewed because they took more precautions during the first year. Could be 10% vs. 90% in the next year.
Vaccines were only 70-80% effective in preventing deaths, so the absolute number of deaths from covid are expected to be roughly about the same in both periods: before vaccination and after.
The seroprevalence of COVID antibodies around Fall of 2021 was still fairly low. Mitigative behavior collectively was keeping infection rates to a fraction of the population. A year later it was drastically up. What happened is as vaccines became available, people dropped mitigative behavior while the viral population was evolving and this led to significantly increased infections with newer variants. This was devastating for the immune naive and also harmful to the vaccinated because while vaccines reduce morbidity after a relatively short window of strong immunity, they do not eliminate it. More infections meant more mortality, even among the vaccinated. Lotta people died.
It's actually true that there were less flu deaths. Possibly because COVID in some way outcompeted flu, but definitely because the flu was less contagious and so social measures meant to almost keep COVID in check really decreased flu transmission.
Random googled links supporting: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9862942/ and https://www.factcheck.org/2023/04/scicheck-fewer-cases-of-flu-due-to-pandemic-precautions-contrary-to-viral-claim/
Flu was a casualty of everyone washing their hands and masking and standing two metres apart
>Kind of interesting how the post is about hardly anyone remembering the deaths, but everyone debating the lockdowns and narratives - totally borne out by these comments, of which I've read a lot and none refer to the deaths
Must you be loudly inaccurate even about the thread you are posting on? It is not difficult to see how much people have talked about death in these comments, because you can go to the top of the page and type CMD F, then put "death" in the search box. As of this writing the word 'death' has been used 481 times. The word 'lockdown' has been used 169 times.
Yick.
My impression is that Australia did quite well handling the pandemic. Congrats to you
> Kind of interesting how the post is about hardly anyone remembering the deaths, but everyone debating the lockdowns and narratives - totally borne out by these comments, of which I've read a lot and none refer to the deaths - just people's experiences of the lockdowns and narratives.
If people had deaths to remember, they would do that. (And you can see a few cases in the comments!) The lockdown is the whole experience. What else would you expect people to remember?
We won't, forget
You can't say it didn't happen, that's called hate speech law
And guess you're the fool
With you're face under the mask and you're locked at home
I don't wanna stay at home
But you don't wanna let me out
You only want another lockdown baby
You can kill six gorillion more
Wear another mask, just to stop the disease
You can say it's just the only way
Make a new excuse, you fucking stupid goyim
Gorillion (gorillion), gorillion, (gorillion)
You can't stop the world just to stop corona
Gorillion (gorillion), gorillion, (gorillion)
You can't stop the world just to stop corona
It's cliché, who cares?
I demand reparations for the lockdownocaust
And I cry, muh lockdown
I just need a little payin', I just need my shekels
I don't wanna stay at home
Even if you call the cops
I just wanna put my foot down and say "never"
You can kill six gorillion more
Wear another mask, just to stop the disease
You can say it's just the only way
Make a new excuse, you fucking stupid goyim
Gorillion (gorillion), gorillion, (gorillion)
You can't stop the world just to stop corona
Gorillion (gorillion), gorillion, (gorillion)
You can't stop the world just to stop corona
When you wake up locked down in the middle of the night
With your head in your hands, you're nothing more than a serf
And when you think about me, all of those years ago
You're standing face to face with "I told you so"
You know I love to say, "I told you so"
You know I love to say, and, I told you so
You can kill six gorillion more
Wear another mask, just to stop the disease
You can say it's just the only way
Make a new excuse, you fucking stupid goyim
Gorillion (gorillion), gorillion, (gorillion)
You can't stop the world just to stop corona
Gorillion (gorillion), gorillion, (gorillion)
You can't stop the world just to stop corona
You can't stop the world just to stop corona
You can't stop the world just to stop corona
You can't stop the world just to stop corona
Suckstack sucks for formatting song lyrics.
And in most other ways.
If I warned you that tomorrow, 1 in 275 Americans would randomly die, you’d (probably rationally) panic, as those odds are dramatically higher than a typical day’s ~1 in 40,000. But after surviving unscathed, knowing at most a friend-of-a-friend who died, you’d likely downgrade the event to “not that bad.” The Leftovers explored the aftermath of this. The gap between anticipatory dread and retrospective indifference distorts how we process and remember catastrophes. I assume this behavior is adaptive, helping psychologically cope with otherwise overwhelming events.
🧟
"The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths."
People shouldn't talk about deaths. They should talk about DALYs (disability-adjusted life years) lost.
And that number is much less than for the U.S. in the Civil War (where a great many of the deaths were healthy young men).
That’s a better statistic to track.
Probably, people mostly ignore those 1.2 million deaths from COVID for pretty much the same reason they mostly ignore the 14 million deaths from everything else during that same period. (~3 million deaths/year in the US x 5 years from 2020-2025 - ~1 million COVID-related)
Vast majority of 65+ had 3 or more comorbidities.
It brought things to a prompt conclusion sadly.
Under 65. Intubation, lack of optional treatment and forced practices...killed the rest.
Now. What about post vaccine injuries. Go do your homework on that and check back in. It's a fucking nightmare.
No, no, no. As a utilitarian you should be good at this stuff.
How much time did the average person lose in life expectancy? Now consider if they’d give that up to avoid ALL the covid crap, economic and “hedonic”.
Or consider how many lives we could save with much less draconian authoritarianism. Almost anyone would prefer giving up alcohol and drugs instead of all the stuff we gave up during covid. And the lives saved by turning into prohibition era US plus Singapore on hard drugs would quickly exceed lives saved by covid measures, even under aggressive assumptions.
It’s utterly absurd. Rationalist community outperformed on covid predictions, but they performed horribly when it came to recommendations on what to do about it.
You can't just count "hedonic" stuff on one side of the ledger, though: people who weren't COVID victims lost time spent with their loved ones; people who didn't die of COVID suffered from it.
What's more, even without government policy many people would have voluntarily taken a hedonic hit and acted in such a way as to have many of the same economic and hedonic impacts so the comparison isn't avoiding "ALL the crap", it's avoiding the crap that wouldn't have happened in a counterfactual world without lockdowns, which might be only a small proportion of the hedonic and economic crap we suffered.
If your argument isn't just about government policy, but personal behaviour, i.e., people should have been less cautious and more willing to risk COVID to go to restaurants and movies, then the fact that they weren't seems to me to make a pretty decent revealed-preference argument that the hedonic hit of these things *wasn't actually that bad*! If it were so intolerable to give that stuff up, compared to the costs of COVID, people would have... not given that stuff up due to the costs of COVID. But for the most part they did, even in countries where the government didn't force them to.
1) People’s unforced behavior was heavily influenced by government rhetoric and its actions in other areas. It’s no secret that government overreaction can foment personal overreaction.
2) It’s widely acknowledged that people overreact to small risks. Healthy parents in their 30s or 40s with normal kids canceling play dates or avoiding the park was like someone avoiding the beach after watching Jaws.
Yeah, sure, I'm not saying that government policy had no effect, but we can also look at places like Sweden that famously and controversially had no lockdowns and still see plenty of risk aversive behaviour; ideally you would try and use the variation to estimate how much of the economic/hedonic impact still happens even with no government rhetoric.
As to point 2 yeah, for sure: I had a friend come to my outdoor park-hang birthday party and sit in a mask ten feet away from everyone else and, uh, had some doubts about his risk analysis process.
But on the other hand, it's not the government's job to encourage people to act rationally, or to presume to know what counts as an overreaction on the part of its citizens.
If a bunch of young people gave up going to bars for fear of killing grandma, yeah sure maybe there's some sense in which the loss of utils from going getting drunk in da clerb is larger than the gains of keeping grandma alive for another 4.6 years, but if the kids choose to make that trade off, you have to at least consider the possibility that it's because they disagree about the calculation! Maybe they don't actually value the club that much; if they did, they wouldn't have so quickly stopped going! Maybe the utils of spending 4.6 more years with grandma outweigh the utils lost from giving up drinking for a few months.
It would have been even more insane for government rhetoric to tell people, "no you should be out drinking! Forget grandma!"
But Swedes turned on the TV everyday to hear how the entire world thought their leaders were insane, anti-science murderers.
Why would it be insane for the government to advise young people to do that? It’s way more sane than advising them as they did. (More importantly, grandma should have been telling them that.)
Swedes heard that message eventually; did restaurant closures and unemployment spike in Sweden only after discussions about Swedish lockdown became news in other countries? If you seriously think this, I'm happy to try dig up Swedish economic data and try correlate it with news articles about the Swedish model, but I'll register in advance that I'm pretty skeptical. I think what counts is that Swedes heard *about a deadly new virus rampaging through the world* and that was enough to make them shut down voluntarily.
"Why would it be insane for the government to advise young people to do that? It’s way more sane than advising them as they did. (More importantly, grandma should have been telling them that.)"
Who is best placed to decide what the value young people get from a few months of not going out is, compared to a few more years with grandma? *Obviously* not the government. It should be pretty deferential to people's own judgement about what *they themselves* value.
“A few months of going out” makes me think you’re not actually serious. It was, for just one small set of examples, almost two years of cancelled schooling and school functions, kids having to wear masks and being turned into neurotic freaks by their neurotic freak parents.
If I was going to say anything, it would be that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the fact that some charity said something cringe on Twitter doesn't outweigh the lives saved.
Are you still siding with the countermeasures saving lives or being more realistic that they heavily contributed to the 20 to 30M deaths?
The real issue here is:
- the research in the first instance
- it got out
- in many instances people were forced to partake in medical tyranny
- 20 to 30M deaths
- hundreds of millions injured
- social media manipulation and silence of other opinions
> If you ask what you should do differently upon being reminded that 1.2 million Americans died during COVID, I won’t have an answer - there’s no gain from scheduling ten minutes to be sad each morning on Google Calendar.
I don't think we should think in terms of raw number of dead people, but in terms of QALYs lost.
I agree that there's probably not a lot to be gained from scheduling ten minutes to be sad each morning.
Why was the US 17th worst country in the world ((out of 200+) for covid deaths per capita? We are in the bottom 10%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country
And you people who sound like, well, it was a tough situation and jeez, we didn't do so bad, let's put it behind us -- are you were aware the big fat rich USA was 17th worse country in the world in covid deaths per capita?
WHY IS THAT? Anybody got ideas?
"Big fat rich USA"
Exactly. Because we're fat. And pretty old.
Isn’t this just that we had better testing and reporting than most countries?
I'm sure our reporting was better than that of poor, disorbganized countries, or those that are obviously comfortable with flat-out lying. But look at us compared to EU or to other countries that don't fall into either of those categories (Australia . .. Japan . . .)
Hmm well one thing you can do is to assign blame to the people who contributed to those deaths with lies, misinformation, bad policy, bad governance, etc. Then hold them accountable politically and economically.
Like that’s what adults do to clean up messes and prevent their reoccurrence.
Is this remotely novel or controversial?
Obsessive language-use nitpick: "Deadly" refers to how likely something is to kill someone. Car rides kill more Americans than cobra bites, but we say cobra bites are deadlier than car rides. So you need to divide by the population. The Civil War and the Spanish influenza were deadlier.
As an outsider, 1.2 million deaths seems to me to be a cost of Being American. Lockdowns as a general strategy were never going to work well enough in a place where distrusting the government is a state religion. And distrusting science. I think that some of the US policies might have been ok in the abstract but if they took into account the prevailing belief systems they might have been done differently, more like how to hopefully protect yourself in a crazy world than a let's-all-do-this approach. It was never going to work that well, whatever.
Here in Australia, enough people accepted the science and the personal and social costs for it to work. It still hurt, more for some than others, but there was a broad enough acceptance for the system to basically work. There are other various other influences, but I see this as the big difference. We had like 10% of the US death rate.
Australia with all the strict lockdowns had the same (even higher) excess death rates than Sweden with very lax restrictions.
Australia didn't follow the science at all.
Does that follow?
Yes, the lockdowns were ineffective and anti-scientific.
Yup, the science is that lockdowns are not effective (0.2% effect on morality) https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf
If you asked experts before Covid, they would have said the same thing. The reasoning is simple: lockdowns prevent the spread, but only for a time.
I think that the only new thing we learned from pandemic is that not only covid but many other respiratory diseases easily spreads by air (are airborne). It didn't change any conclusions about the effectiveness of masks, lockdowns etc. (i.e., not very effective) but only strengthened them.
"The reasoning is simple: lockdowns prevent the spread, but only for a time."
This doesn't follow at all, if the time they prevent spread is sufficient to create and roll out a vaccine. Obviously that doesn't speak to the empirical evidence, but this reasoning is still obviously badly flawed.
Well, even Scott agrees – lockdowns didn't help and actually harmed.
We had a negative experience this time and yet people believe next time will be different.
Next time will be different indeed but not in a way you imagine. It will not be covid. It will be a bigger problem with completely different issues. The one where lockdowns don't even make sense. And yet I expect a lot of people will be demanding lockdowns because that's all they learned from covid.
Compliance is critical. I guess you are in the US, how good was compliance there? Lockdowns aren't a permanent solution, they were a temporary measure. The two big reasons: (1) Bump up the level of isolation until a vaccine became available and people got vaccinated (2) To limit the number of sick people at any one time to lower the resource impact.
The thing I don't get about you guys is that you seem to be arguing that "up is down". Isolation is a standard mitigation measure in disease control and has been for a long time because it works. Do you seriously dispute that?
There's no doubt the lockdowns could have been done better, like everything else can be done better. In the early days of Covid there was are dearth of information about the disease. You might like to claim that Sweden had no lockdowns but it's a fairly educated, wealthy, middle-class (and healthy) population and people just self-isolated because there was no mandate. Would that work in the US? I'd say a definite no, but as always ymmv. FFS mate, 1.2 million people died, and you apparently don't care. It's trivially easy to criticise, but what's your better solution that avoids those deaths?
If you look at my original post, I put that down to the US religion of individuality and denouncing government. AFAICS you have swallowed that religion, I haven't. Arguing with religion is a bit of a dead end.
I know we've discussed this elsewhere in the comments, but from what I can find this is untrue; Sweden had a considerably higher excess deaths/100K rate than Australia.
According to worldometer stats, deathrates are 0,36% in the US, 0,27% in Sweden, 0,09% in Australia. The most comparable countries to Sweden are Norway and Denmark with 0,12 and 0,15%.
See my link above, i found much lower for Denmark, I think around .06; though also lower for Sweden (.14 if memory serves). But the other numbers look similar
Do you have a source for the excess deaths please?
And a big ass moat surrounding your country 😎
There is one particular lesson we can practically learn from all of this, and we really should. There are also many others which are impractical, and which boil down to "we should have been better" - in particular we should have had a better government and political system, less prone to decision paralysis and culture war. But well, it's not exactly a lesson if we've already known it all along.
No, there is one thing learned in blood which should be remembered here: ethicists should be rounded up and hung by the neck in public squares. I would also (barely) accept doing the same thing symbolically to their profession instead, but that'd be a distant second.
It's rare in the history of humanity for a profession to fail so hard at their stated purpose as to do the very opposite of what they intend to do, consistently for decades, and end up with killing more people than a war.
Well, I have a feeling that most people are going to view that as rather, ahem, unethical. Maybe everyone is just getting what they deserve.
My apologies to others: but despite the supposed death toll I don’t know anyone who died from COVID. Family, friends, schoolmates/professors at the time…
Kind of sounds like an inflated statistic. ‘Died while covid positive’ classified as a covid death maybe?
Also, what ‘stricter policies’? You all shut down the entire country, went remote, nothing fun or family functions whatsoever. Even stuff outside, though of course you all were dead wrong about the outdoors being riskier
What's weird to me, especially from a rationalist pov, is how seldom 20-30 million deaths being swept under the rug is connected to the probability of 2-7 billion deaths by the end of the century.
The current US and other right-wing governments 'eugenics-in-action' policies are efficiently explained by security states jockeying for position going into the onrushing ecological bottleneck.
I did a ^F for "QALY". The first one I found was in someone's comment. Scott, you know better than this.
You're also using absolute population numbers. Saying that this is the single greatest number of deaths since X fails to account for the lesser population at the time of X. You're also adding in things that have really small numbers (all the mass shootings? Really? And Vietnam didn't actually kill that many Americans. And 9/11 killed a lot of people for a single attack, but not a lot of people for a whole war or other large scale event.) Scott, you know better than this, too.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/
This is based on death certificate ICD-10 coding, so there may be a bit of time frame shift due to reporting lag. Of note, these are deaths “with” covid confirmed or presumed. I haven’t found a breakdown with a more precise distinction of “dying of covid” rather than “dying with covid”.
1.2 million deaths is about 0.36% of the US population of 330 million in 2020.
So, my new approach is to figure out how many years of lifespan covid cost Americans. Assume the average American is 38.7 years old and would live another 40 years and that there were 330 million people in the US in 2020. So that would imply the population at the beginning of the covid epidemic had 13,200,000,000 more years to live.
The highest estimate I’ve seen for how many Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs discount years spent in comas, dementia, or horrifying pain, although not by all that much) the average covid fatality cost is 12.4 years. For 1.2 million fatalities, that would be 14.9 million years of life lost.
So, that would be 0.12% percent of U.S. lifespans lost due to covid.
I haven’t seen that calculation before.
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/what-of-us-lifespans-were-lost-to
"That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%."
Humanity doesn't care about losing 0.1% of its total population. America doesn't care about losing 0.001% of its population when not taking into account the fear, anger, and outsider threat of 9/11.
Using those examples to contrast with COVID deaths is apples and oranges, and you can argue it shouldn't be, but the argument does not matter because it will not connect with the neurotypicals of the species unless you hope to shape culture to enforce your view. And that what I think you hope, but then the conversation needs to be framed entirely differently.
What we should do is obviously to be far more careful about doing things that may plausibly cause a disaster such a a pandemic, and not let groups of researchers put us all at risk.
I think this analysis is wrong, and the main reason is that to a first approximation, interventions had no effect on how many people would get Covid in the long run. Everyone got it anyway, lock downs / masks just delayed it, but at a significant price (in life-years in lock-down!).
China had the harshest lockdown, and I think that was correspondingly the worst reaction a government could have.
For most of the world, where people are poorer and have more vulnerable populations, lockdown means a loss of income and further stress, for very little saving of life. They copied elite countries and enforced it in a top-down way on their populations, causing massive negative utility.
The asterisk is that locking down until the vaccine was in production *did* save lives in Western countries. However, if you remember, before the vaccine was proven, people argued for the lockdown anyway without using the vaccine argument. Government, schools, and many businesses were prepared to lock down indefinitely without even the strategy to wait for vaccines. We narrowly avoided the extended lockdowns of China. Authoritarianism is bad man, stop encouraging it.
It's simultaneously true that Covid was a huge disaster and loss of life, and that government interventions were net-negative basically everywhere, so the best action was no action.
Elites make the same mistakes over and over, where they know what is best for other people and force them to do stuff. And they're wrong. And anyone justifying them is very dangerous. Because it was dangerous: lockdowns caused needless suffering worldwide — ask an enlightened AI in a few years what would have been better, our world, or a world of zero lockdowns.
Remember: decentralized lockdowns *did* happen as Covid awareness began spreading — and those were good as we learned more about the illness in the early days. But all the non-decentralized actions turned out to be net-negative, once again. Closing public parks? No outside dining in CA? Closing schools? Even the authoritarian rules about who's allowed to test for Covid, who can volunteer for challenge trials (no one in the US), what level of evidence is required to allow the public to take the vaccines. No government interventions are helpful; just let people live!
It's not that freedom is a principle we should strive for -- maybe that's true. It's that in pure utilitarian terms, freedom wins again and again. Stop facilitating the communists. Thanks.
Thanks for writing this. I wholeheartedly agree.
How do you think people coped after the Black Death, with 40% of the population dead? I bet they also tried hard to forget the deaths and to get as much normality back into their lives as possible. I see that as part of human resilience: it may not be dreadfully sensitive but it keeps us going.
The true tragedy of lockdowns and over-optimistic pushing of the vaccine will be seen when the next pandemic comes along. It might be a real Captain Trips, and when governments and public health advisors ask for restrictions (quite rightly until the severity is known), most people will ignore them assuming it is government over-reach again. When most of us were subsistence peasants, a 40% loss of population could be survived by the remainder. But since most of us have no idea how to grow food these days, I don't see us managing so well next time.
I don't think it will happen like that. We as a society implement better and better policies based on data and evidence with every iterration.
For example, economy. We used to do strange things like tariffs. Trump discounting, we now better know which policies could be good and which could be bad. The reason why we recovered so quickly from covid pandemic was exactly because economists managed to implements the correct policies.
I am sure, lockdowns will not be introduced again unnecessarily. Lay people may think what they think but experts will have analysed this all and reached the right conclusions. It is just that people don't want to admit mistakes. But behind closed doors right decisions will be made next time.
Unless Trump like figure again overrides experts.
I admire your optimism. When you say "I am sure, lockdowns will not be introduced again unnecessarily" the weasel word is "unnecessarily." We won't know if they are necessary until the organism shows how deadly it is, and once it has, it is too late to contain it by lockdown. Ideally, we would have a population that agrees to go into lockdown at the start of things, and the lockdown would be lifted as soon as it became plain that it was doing more harm than good (or continued if the disease has a high mortality and high infectivity, until either the threat is over, or we realise it is to late to contain it and there is no further point in lockdowns). I don't think the general populace will agree to a lockdown after the last experience, nor will they accept a vaccine after the same. All this could have been prevented if our masters had been more forthcoming with information as they had it, especially with respect to vaccination, which was sold as being protective against infection and transmission, long after it was clear it simply reduced severity. "Fool me once..." etc makes sense as a defense against being misled, but backfires when you are actually being told the truth the second time.
Couldn’t get through this sanctimonious tripe. Where did all the flu deaths go? Where’s the acknowledgement that excess deaths spiked after the vax roll out? Highly selective emotional arguments are not worth my time. My guess is the author bought into the feel good collectivist bullshit and is nostalgic for the days when we more or less trusted our leadership class. But I don’t know because fuck this. Yes, old people die and it could have been me. But don’t pretend you give a shit when there are (how many) young people with myocarditis from a shot they manifestly didn’t need. FFS.
Holy ironic projection
Regarding your apparent hypocrisy, it isn't really. It would only be hypocritical if the things you were against would actually have been effective at saving those lives, and I believe stricter policies would have saved an insignificant number of lives. I doubt the number would have been zero, which some may claim would have made stricter policies worth it. I do not believe the number would have changed from 1.2 million, as even that isn't an exact number of deaths.
> First, dead people can’t complain about their own deaths, so there are no sympathetic victims writing their sob stories for everyone to see.
I just today got a status update from a youtuber who hasn't put out any content in >2 years because of ME/CFS induced by long covid (Physics Girl), so there are sympathetic victims of this pandemic. And my understanding is that the cause is completely unknown and may as well be random, so there's no sense of superiority, just luck that you weren't the person suffering from this.
We still do not have any well-controlled, long-term RCT trials on mRNA vaccines although it would have been very easy to perform such trials given the vast amounts of money spent during this period on other things such as producing them for and forcing them on healthy people in their college years. A good RCT would have shown that they were safe and effective, or not. Since no such trial was performed, it is reasonable to assume that either they were not safe, or they were not effective, or both. In any event there is no reason to think that they were either absent blind acceptance of statistical legerdemain such as what was emitted by Imperial College.
It is not clear how many people died "from Covid" and how many from the knock-on effects of social hysteria, deep anger, isolation, etc. In any event if US rates had been like Sweden's, with its very mild measures, equivalent excess deaths would have been about 380,000, which is like having three really bad flu seasons in a row, plus say 50%.
So: I don't agree with this. Covid was not that serious. Really gigantic amounts of money and political capital were spent on this tragic waste. But I absolutely do not trust people who told healthy teenagers to use an untested and (for them) indisputably not life-saving medicine. I don't know why anyone else would, either.
Cancer kills over 600k Americans a year. Heart disease, well over 900k. How often do we think of those in terms of Vietnams or US Civil Wars? If we had mitigated COVID to the point where it was surpassed by cancer even in 2020… would we actually feel much differently about COVID? What the hell does it even mean to be an “excess death”? It breaks our brain for thinking about small numbers of deaths, but it’s also an outlier in how we treat large numbers of deaths.
You give it away even in your language, you say “during COVID”, not “by COVID”. We think of it as an event more than as a disease. It’s complicated.
An important reminder that responding to events has to be based on what you know at the time of the event — not what you know years after the event. It should also be borne in mind that many — very likely the vast majority — of the deaths of those under age 65 (or 70) were of lower income people deemed "indispensable" (suddenly, when we're not talking about pay) who were not locked down because they were taking care of sick people, driving trucks, etc.
And so the question isn't whether the lock-down was justified by the 1 million plus deaths but by how many would have died without the lockdown. The extension of "on-line" classes for school children may have been a bit of an over-reaction—but again the question would be not just how many students would have become seriously ill or died, but how many teachers would have become seriously ill, died, or simply left the profession if in-person education had been resumed too early,
In my view, two things can't be emphasized enough. First, we didn't know what we wanted to know in the early months (and that's more than just one or two) of the pandemic. We also knew that we didn't know what we didn't know we needed to know. And 100 years before COVID what we didn't know led to the world-wide influenza pandemic—and that is what we were trying to avoid.
Second, I won't let myself role of the White House in creating noise, information fog, and uncertainty. Instead of informing the public on what was happening, what we knew, what worked to prevent spread and didn't work to prevent spread, the news put on a form of reality-entertainment television in which truth and facts were the last thing that mattered in the he-said-they-said carnival on TV.
One quibble: while the number of deaths attributed to COVID is 50% greater than the number of deaths in the U.S. Civil War, the population of the U.S. in 2020 was 10 times (950%) greater than the population of the U.S. (including slaves) in 1860.
Thank you for writing, I enjoy the prompts for discussion this raises, as there has not been enough of a debrief about what transpired during this time period, in many ways. So much historical emotional trauma in people was revealed through the various ways they reacted during that time period, whether it was screaming at people to wear masks or get vaccines, or others screaming back at them and latching onto any perceived 'evidence' or narrative which seemingly substantiated their predetermined (often by political persuasion, ironically) opinion. It's interesting to note that most people formed VERY fixed stances on what was 'right' or 'wrong' in response to the extraordinarily complex worldwide situation, and how determined they were to convince and shame others for having contrary opinions. When honestly, NO ONE knew anything for sure, and still don't. Where is the compassion and love and respect for one another, for our neighbors, for our family members, for the ability to disagree with each other with the full awareness that our own tightly held opinions are as susceptibility to error and blind spots as anyone else's. Can we come together from this and recognize that we all went pretty much nuts for a few years, or more to the point, revealed the nuttiness that has been fomenting and hiding (barely) inside of each of us for decades, centuries, millennia even? I honestly think the story is much more about how did those of us who lived through it treat each other during that time, how are we still treating each other as a result of the rifts experienced, and how can we mend and repair those divides to come back together again as fellow human beings?
Secondly, I am constantly flabbergasted that 99.999% of the conversation seemed to be about a few particular subjects, such as:
-whether or not masks, social distancing, lockdowns, or vaccines were beneficial or harmful
-what the origin of the virus was to begin with
-who was distributing and distorting what narrative or information, and why
Now granted, those things carry some import, and the conversations were important to have. But the most important conversation of all was almost completely ignored!
Why were some of us, in certain countries, so much more susceptible to this virus than others? Why did this virus seem to ravage some countries and leave others untouched? And what do these questions reveal about our general state of health, well-being, and diet (both food-wise and culturally)?
What if the greatest gift of this time period was the opportunity to examine the correlation between our lifestyles and our susceptibility to a virus such as covid? My friend Eric Edmeades of Wildfit pointed out that in countries where obesity was below a certain point, covid barely registered, well below the impact of the flu. Any country above that line showed a dramatic increase in covid infection and mortality rates, not to mention far higher incidences of the comorbidities such as diabetes, heart disease, and many others, which have their own massive impact on longevity and well-being.
The fact is, and covid merely revealed this in stark detail, that we (in the US, and many other countries as well) are a sick society, we are a sick nation, we are sick and riddled with disease and dis-ease in our homes, our schools, our workplaces, and our communities. This began long before covid, and sadly is still continuing today, despite a massive warning about the consequences of our recklessness. So much of what we consume, on our plates, from our televisions, in our classrooms, in our hospitals, in our conversations, at bars and strip clubs and on porn websites and on social media, is draining our bodies of life and depriving us of the very nourishment we depend on for surviving AND thriving. No wonder millions of people died! A large swatch of humanity's immune systems and natural resiliency to disease are already highly compromised, and our mental health is in an even worse state. Covid didn't kill all those people, our toxic lifestyles and habits did.
Nature offered us a wake-up call, and to be honest, a fairly mild one considering how far we've strayed. Will we listen to it now, or kick the can down the road til the next time, which if we don't change anything may well ring far more loudly..
True. And as with most wake-up calls, it was not warmly welcomed.
Lastly, a comment about charities. Yes, they very often are susceptible to either blatant corruption or utter incompetence. They often also make the situations they attempt to address worse that before. Does that mean that we should abandon all efforts to support others and each other? NO! Quite the opposite, in fact. We need each other far more than ever before, especially as a direct result of all the divisive, disconnecting decades of individualism we've been plodding vigilantly through.
What we also need to do, however, is learn HOW to help. If you're interested in diving deeper into this topic, I recommend starting with the books 'Toxic Charity' by Robert Lupton, and 'How Can I Help' by Ram Dass. And doing quite a fair bit of shadow work, to learn about our potential sneaky underlying motives and intentions for trying to "help" others. A statement I often ask myself, if I see another person in pain and I'm inclined to intervene, is "whose pain am I really seeking to relieve?" If it's mine, if I'm somehow uncomfortable with their emotional state, or if I want to see myself in a heroic, positive light, I want to be conscious of that and recognize that I might not be so helpful after all, coming from that hidden, self-serving intention. It all starts with self-awareness, and cleaning up our own house before we go running around trying to tidy up others' for them.
We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. If much of what passes for 'charity' is toxic, drain out the dirty water, wrap the precious baby in a towel, and hold it close to our hearts! We can truly turn our world around, our society around, our communities around, when we return to love, self-responsibility, self-awareness, true kindness, authenticity, vulnerability, empathy, compassion, and curiosity. It's not so much what we're doing that's causing us so much trouble, it's often the 'how' and the 'why' of it. When we begin to explore those layers inside of ourselves, some really meaningful treasure is revealed.
Let me remind you of the Justinian plagues, and the differential Christian/pagan mortality for them.
This clearly shows that the response to plagues can be lethal in itself, on a distinct scale. (And that turned on food and water.)
Yeah, no.
I remember reading at the start of the pandemic that the same phenomenon happened in the case of the Spanish flu. People don't remember or dwell on things that they don't want to. I think it's part of the very human process of adjusting to new circumstances. Some of the pushback against thinking a high number of people died comes from justified skepticism of government claims, but a lot of it is also rationalization of a desire not to think about the lives lost.
>That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot.
Yeah, never mind the rest of the world. America! Fuck yeah!
The problem is that we ended up well inside the tradeoff frontier of avoided COVID deaths and avoided lockdown harms. Arguments about where to be on that frontier are important ones to have, but the failure to roll out mass DIY testing (even with tests that were not accurate enough to be clinically suitable) as quickly as possible, the failure to push use of the AbCelera/Lilly antibody against the alpha variant, misallocation and delay in getting vaccine doses into as many at-risk people as possible, and other unforced errors meant more deaths for every unit of lockdown intensity.
CVD kills within a spitting distance of that number every year. We don't talk much about those numbers either.
A couple days late, but thank you for writing this. It often feels very dissonant to me that discussions around COVID--or American politics in general--just pointedly ignore this fact. I'm old enough to remember the *years* of mass hysteria resulting from 9/11. COVID killed 300 times as many people in the U.S. alone, and yet it seems like half the country is still mad about things people did trying to prevent it from being more. Nor do Americans arguing about COVID ever seem much inclined to look outside their borders to gauge if they did well or poorly. Simply mentioning and discussing the death toll in context is very unusual, so again, thank you.
I recognize in this perspective the parent's new visceral appreciation for how much effort and value is tied up in each life.
You should make a post claiming that Trump's win in the 2024 election with an incumbent Democrat federal government proves the 2020 election couldn't have been stolen. Half your comments will say "2020 was the first election to not have signature verification," "Mail in ballots were harvested" and of course "2024 was just too big to rig." Hell, make a post mentioning the moon landing and you'll hear about how astronauts can't survive in space because of radiation from the Van Allen belts. This is the bulk of political discourse in the USA, 99% the fault of Republicans, and is why there will be no preparedness for the next pandemic. We're literally deprioritizing and firing people working on tracking the bird flu right now, and vitamin A toxicity reports are up because RFK Jr. is advertising it as a treatment for measles more than the measles vaccine.
The lesson for me is quite clear. Bad things can happen to your country, the way government handles it will never please everyone, some decisions will turn out to be suboptimal, some optimal policies will still displease many people. Overall, everyone should be a bit more tolerant to what happens in a crisis, which is, no one has perfect answers, and people should pull together rather than single out and dwell on their differences. Then again I am writing this from Singapore where none of this sounds as controversial as it does in the US.
I don’t see you taking into consideration the fact that Covid at the onset could’ve mitigated the death tolls considerably.
My comment uploaded before I was finished with it. The number of deaths blamed on Covid could be mitigated if we take into consideration that Covid was only treated after it became life-threatening. If doctors had been allowed to treat at the onset of the disease, there might’ve been many fewer deaths. My brother was turned away from the hospital 10 days before he almost died from Covid. They knew he had Covid, but they were not allowed to treat him unless he qualified clinically. I blame the catastrophic number of Covid deaths squarely on the health officials who demonized treatments that many prominent doctors found effective.
I've seen the numbers acknowledged in two (contradictory) ways. One side will say, "We did all this stuff and still lost >1 million people! See, it didn't work!" And the other side will say "Over 1 million died (and X number are still dying every month/year)! COVID is really serious, and we should take it more seriously!"
Agree that the more common thing is to ignore it and argue about smaller issues.
I think this is all a symptom of the larger psychological issue with COVID, which is the inability to face that it was a disaster and will continue to kill and seriously harm some people -- but not to the extent that it's reasonable to take drastic measures with the tools available to us.
There's the pseudo-acceptance of "getting over it" and saying it wasn't even that big of a deal at the time, and certainly no one should care about it now (denial).
And there's the pseudo-acceptance of caring about it too much, continuing to mask/isolate and perhaps even demand that others do so, resisting reasonable changes like lifting vaccine recommendations for healthy young people, all in an attempt to control it (essentially, bargaining).
The fact is that COVID caused a lot of pain and is here to stay, it's going to lower average lifespans (by some fairly small amount), it's going to cause long-term disability for some additional people (although not nearly as many as caught it in the early pandemic), and there's not much we can reasonably do except wait/hope for better medical advancements.
You're wrong, with the idea that "we'd have proposed stronger measures" if the death toll was supposed to be higher. Hell, I don't think you can even give a single example of a stronger measure that we could actually afford to do.
Sweden was unable to do a lockdown, because they have so many single mothers. You send all the kids home, and suddenly you don't have a workforce, you have mommies that are dealing with children.
When COVID19 started hitting the airwaves (through the undercurrents of "we got some weird pneumonia showing up in a lotta morgues"), the thought was that we'd lose 20 million Americans.
The American Government has plans to invade Canada (and every other country in the world) -- they absolutely did have plans for 20 million dead Americans. They wrote plans for orphanages to house the suicidal children who brought covid19 home and murdered their parents. (oops! Looks like I know a stronger measure that we -didn't do- because it was unnecessary).
To put a finer point on it: "Ventilate everyone" was a device to save doctors lives, one that was suggested during the timeperiod when 20 million was very much still on the table (and we could expect that doctors would be hit hard, and we'd still need doctors afterwards). So, too, was sending Covid19 patients to nursing homes, while still definitely spreading covid19 -- this is giving up on nursing homes as a viable storage of living people, and instead letting everyone die, because we need the nurses for other people. Cuomo's failure was in sticking to a plan designed for twenty times the death toll we got.
I disagree. the human intuition doesn't work in numbers. it doesn't understand numbers. it work in "how many people i know died?" and "how large the chance i will die, or someone i know will die?". so if the chance is very small, and the relevant group is very large, big scary-sounding numbers are just... fine.
if we was galactic empire with trillion stars, seasonal flu would have killed more people then there are on Earth today. but i don't think it's tragedy, and don't think most people would be wring not thinking it's tragedy.
it's your intuition that big numbers should be scary and important that's wrong, and incoherent. if you drop it, everything else is working just fine.
the "number of people died" is just not tracking what people really value. it's Goodheart Law yet again.