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.
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.