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I find this behavior quite disgusting and sadly seen it on many sites.
From what I have seen in poorer countries, in some cases the worst things have just started. I was dating a Colombian girl who got a 200% APR loan from a city near her during the lockdown to be able to pay her rent without a job, and hadn't even realized that it's 200% APR (15%/month didn't sound that bad to her). People are on the streets because the government wants to increase taxes, and they are already in huge debt. Now the government started to kill its own people in the daylight to stop the revolution.
When your only options are (1) a loan at 15% while you’re unemployed but you get another 30-60 days of a roof over your head or (2) immediate homelessness then the high-interest loan is the rational choice.
Definitely, for the consumer. I think the idea that "rational market participant emerges when you get the average of a lot of people (ie. the firm) together to make a decision" still remains alive and well. There is sort of a Darwinian argument there, that in the long-run only the rational market participant remains in business and functioning as a firm.
The import of behavioral econ. definitely remains understated today. I am also interested in philosophical thinkers, like Elizabeth Anderson or Michael Sandel, that take questions like these and explore the implications that they might have for how we ought to structure society.
Has it occurred to you that people taking payday loans don’t have a lot of options?
This isn’t someone deciding between 15% monthly and a nice 4% annual personal loan. This is someone deciding between 15% monthly and homelessness. Choosing the interest rate is rational.
Because it's that hard to find a job during COVID.
If she's not able to pay back the loan, she will be killed and her family is responsible for paying it back. The amount of undocumented suffering in the poor world right now is huge.
This reads like a standard payday loan, to be honest. Which is to say, it's absolutely taking advantage of people who already can't afford it, but it's also not a new phenomenon.
A standard payday loan might be 10% on a $100 advance, repaid after 2 weeks (when your next paycheck comes in). That translates to a 260% APR, even without considering compounding.
The earth’s population is 7.9b, so the excess deaths are 0.1% of the population. COVID’s mortality rate is about 0.5%, so roughly 1/5 of the population has has had it (or died of other related things, like starvation in developing countries due to the lockdown stopping food harvests in California).
Currently, 1.45b doses of a vaccine have been administered, so about as many people have had the vaccine (partially, at least), as have had COVID.
Hopefully the vaccine will make to the rest of the population soon. If not, we’re about 20% done with COVID, world-wide.
I’m pretty jaded at this point. My guess is that the vaccine rollout stalls out in poorer countries and COVID falls out of the news cycle before the majority of deaths.
Recent research claimed that the excess mortality rate among people who had COVID but didn't die from it immediately was elevated 6 months after their recovery, with 8 excess deaths per thousand patients. So the real mortality rate may be a little higher than people estimate.
It's disheartening seeing people in the US mad at the 30% vaccine hesitant there, while 6B+ at the gates have no vaccines available at all.
The US isn't an island, and the borders are nowhere near closed. The variants that grow in the other 96% of humans that aren't americans will doubtlessly end up there, and will be end up tending toward vaccine resistance due to selection pressure.
I think this is going to get much worse before it gets better. The disunity of nationalistic selfishness has struck our species once again.
You're getting downvoted but I do believe you're correct. I'm a healthy 21 year old, please govt., give my vaccine to other countries. I will take it if offered, but I'd prefer to give it to those who really need it all things considered. Let me get the vaccine when others are safe.
Your altruism is laudable but don't think this can't hurt you. I know a healthy, athletic 25 year old who has needed an inhaler every day for the last year because of her moderate, non-hospitalized Covid case. Her lung damage will probably not heal any further at this point.
I would get vaccinated ASAP. You're as deserving as anyone else. You don't want to risk spending the rest of your life with impaired breathing.
I know a guy that caught it bad, he was less than 50 years old. Almost died, like really, he would have died but they brought him back. He is doing better, but is far from completely recovered.
I know other people who treat this like some kind of joke. You just don't know how bad you might react to it.
I am most worried about the long term effects. If you die, that's one thing, but having lingering after-effects would really suck.
It’s not going to happen. That’s not the way that distribution works at scale.
Just like the “kids are starving in $country/continent” lines that were often said when I was a kid, it’s horrible and I wish it wasn’t true but whether I clean my plate or not has little to do to help their situation.
Whether you personally take a vaccine dose or a tax credit or whatever that you quality for, it has been allocated and will not be given to anyone else.
Your being vaccinated is important for protecting those who can’t be vaccinated. Plus, what’s most likely to drive governments to exports of vaccines is hitting/exceeding their own vaccination targets. The most effective way to lobby for exports is to get vaccinated.
Well said. Getting vaccinated when you're technically low risk may seem selfish, but it still benefits others. It would be politically untenable for the US to give away its remaining doses until a substantial portion of its own population is vaccinated. Whether that's right or wrong, the faster we get there, the better.
Exactly. I have a friend whose kids all share a condition where vaccines don't work well on them. For them to be safe, we need herd immunity. Successful elimination of the disease here makes it easier to turn toward helping others.
Far more people in poorer countries will die from the economic consequences of lockdowns and travel restrictions than the disease. Decisions that were neither inevitable nor necessary will lower the opportunities for people to double their incomes from $1-$5/day for at least the next decade.
I am confident that HN crowd has heard about graph theory. We try to deactivate a network, we care firstly for the nodes of high connectivity to kill the virus transmission network.
Vaccinating a grandpa helps the grandpa. Vaccinating a super social young person helps everybody else.
I'm not allowed to be super social by law. I've seen about five people in a year. If I'm going to be forced into depression then it might as well be for a good reason.
> The disunity of nationalistic selfishness has struck our species once again.
Let's unpack that.
Is what you describe a species specific phenomenon i.e. biological in origin? I'm not sure how you'd determine that question, if what you are talking about is "attitude to vaccine inoculation to stave off pandemic spread", since that behaviour is limited to one species, and is fairly recent.
Is what you describe a species wide phenomenon i.e. biological in origin? What does the data from different nationalities tell us? Does the phenomenon occur similarly in all nationalities, or only some?
Is the phenomenon biological in nature, or might it be cultural? Is it even widely held amongst individuals, or might it originate from some other level of organisation e.g. government, media? How would you investigate these questions?
This might be a blindspot among the US citizens. I know the European countries have united to supply vaccines to the developing world with their Covax program. But I don't think the US is doing anything similar. I'm not even sure how the US would go about doing that. Would it have to be a Presidentially-ordered/led initiative?
As a private citizen, I'd be 100% for the US helping to vaccinate the world. It's an obvious benefit to the US to not have variants arising outside its shores and coming into the country.
> It's an obvious benefit to the US to not have variants arising outside its shores and coming into the country.
I hope you meant this as a way to sell it, because this view is a terrible, terrible way to approach the world, as it lives outside of the US are only to be preserved insofar as doing so protects USians.
I think our experience over the last year and a half has proven that, for many, it is not sufficient reason. Self-interest is a far stronger motivator.
If your expectations of people are too high you will always be disappointed. If other people's goals are aligned with yours for the wrong reason, that's better than them not being aligned with your goals at all. See the book "The Wisdom of Psychopaths." Your surgeon might be motivated by profit or might be motivated by altruism, in the end what matters for your survival is that he's the best at his job.
Neither mortality rate nor vaccine administration rate are uniform. The mortality rate is much lower than 0.5% in e.g. people under 60 years old, and people who are in high-risk groups are mostly already vaccinated. The effective mortality rate today is probably at least an order of magnitude lower, maybe two.
Edit: To whoever is downvoting this - you are not only wrong, but hilariously directionally wrong, and in a very obvious way. Nothing about my comment should be contentious if you have any idea what's going on.
It's pretty funny that you object to something that is clearly true as "just your opinion" and "misinformation" when you're doing exactly that yourself.
I love how the term misinformation is now used to say "I don't like what you are saying and it doesn't adhere to my worldview, therefore it is misinformation".
Can someone help me understand why the above, well-sourced post is getting downvoted into oblivion while the nasty one-line response with no supporting citations is getting upvoted?
One error is that the citations only support the claim within the US, while the context of the original story and the parent comment are the world. That makes rather a large difference.
I have no idea what was going on in this thread earlier, but once the comment veers into complaining about getting downvoted, it's breaking the site guidelines and you needn't look further for an explanation.
I wasn’t complaining about getting downvoted - I could not care less about the opinion of the median voting user on this site. I was simply explaining why anyone who disagreed with my straightforward statement of fact was impossibly far off the mark, with citations.
It’s not reasonable that commenters should be prevented from engaging with people who vote on their comment. If anything, this just disincentivizes people from actually explaining why they disagree with something.
> If not, we’re about 20% done with COVID, world-wide.
For exponential processes think of the % done on a log scale. So population of USA is 320M, and ~100M had COVID, or we were 94% (8/8.5) done with it before vaccine was introduced.
Just to tack on to this - the growth of the virus can be exponential. Seychelles (small island country) was at a high vaccination count but is currently experiencing an outbreak of covid. On the one hand, their case counts are up which sounds bad. On the other hand, they're not seeing the exponential growth in hospitalizations nor deaths - i.e. the vaccines are doing their jobs.
Edit-But the effects of the vaccine aren't exponential. You really need to get a good population coverage to axe the thing. And outbreaks can still occur (though less deadly) when/if outsiders come in from populations less vaccinated.
For an exponential process it takes roughly the same amount of time to go from 10 to 100 as it does to go from 100,000 to 1M, 10M to 100M, et cetera. So if you had a progress bar of an exponential progress, you'd want the % to be of the log, not the absolute number. Because even if you were at 100M/1B, in terms of time you would not be 10%, but rather 90%. Of course, this situation is dynamic, and there are more variables at play, but a baseline for thought for progress bar of exponential processes is to do log of the numbers.
It's R_t < 1 for sustained amounts of time. Where the effective reproduction number depends on the basic reproduction number, and the number of susceptible people, which depends on the number of people who have had coronavirus infections / vaccinations & the durability of immunity.
So some amount < 100% of people infected / vaccinated will create enough spreading "distance" between that coronavirus won't be able to effectively reproduce, because the (limited) vulnerable hosts will be too "far" apart.
I'm inclined to think that infection by a non-human host would be a different virus with different circumstances (SARS-CoV-1 is considered different from SARS-CoV-2).
Unless, you mean that our reaction to the pandemic globally has allowed a bunch of new non-human reservoirs to form.
Remember when they kill all those minks in Europe last year? They also say that some pets can get covid as well. So it's possible that non-human hosts could prevent eradication. Although it is possible that we get to the point of stuff like plague or hantavirus today - rodents are hosts but only a few people are infected each year and it fails to spread. But who knows.
Unfortunately it looks like this virus will be endemic indefinitely. It has spread to animal and human reservoirs we can't reach. Likely it'll end up being another one of those colds that children develop partial immunity against and most everybody catches another mutant of it a few times through their life.
We had the chance to eradicate it 16 months ago. But we weren't all ready. Now we'll have to live with it. And as it stands, if another one of those develops, we'll just blow it again. On a positive note: it looks like we got quick vaccination figured out.
With "we" I mean humanity.
One thing I do wonder is whether we will see permanent "Covid-free" zones such as Australia. Or whether they'll drop their guard after vaccinating.
The majority of people who died from covid were counted, the vast majority of people who got covid were never tested. You can't use this number as an estimate of your odds of dying if you get covid, it's not that simple.
Thanks for summing up the relevant numbers, it's helpful in putting all this in context.
.1% isn't nothing, but it isn't really a disaster either. The Black Death was 30-50% of the population in Europe. The "Spanish" Flu of 1918 killed about .64% of the US population. Things could still get worse of course. But barring that, and considering the absolute disaster that Covid has revealed our political system and interlocking health and government bureaucracies to be, I think we got off lucky. If this had been a "real" plague, of the kind humanity has faced repeatedly in the past (and has been expected for some time now), we would have been totally and utterly screwed.
Will this serve as a wake-up call? For the most part, probably not. The best we can hope for is that some of the new thinking and systems created for this situation will still be around when the other shoe drops and we really, really need them.
I feel like the more logical take is that our healthcare technology, policy, etc prevented the deaths from being on a scale closer to previous plagues. It may have been closer to 1918 but we stopped that from happening.
> If this had been a "real" plague, of the kind humanity has faced repeatedly in the past (and has been expected for some time now), we would have been totally and utterly screwed.
Not necessarily. Part of the reason there was so much pushback against public health mandates was because covid was so tame. You are being forced, by the government, to wear a mask, isolate from others, and stop going to work for an entire year for a disease that, for the vast majority who get it, just makes it so you can't taste or smell anything for a few days along with fatigue and flu-like symptoms. If it were like black death and 50% of people who got it were dying you better believe there would be bi-partisan support for mask usage and lockdowns.
Agreed. But now the bar is set. Hyperbole and data abuse have longer term consequences. Eventually, we'll face something more deadly. But plenty of citizens will be sceptical, as they should be. That's the problem.
Some call this a test run. I'm not so sure crying wolf qualifies.
I can accept that the initial worst case mortality claims turned out to be too high. But I can’t accept this claim:
> a disease that, for the vast majority who get it, just makes it so you can't taste or smell anything for a few days along with fatigue and flu-like symptoms
People who’ve been sick and survived, even with minimal symptoms, are experiencing long term health issues. It’s one thing to recognize that the early estimates overstated mortality. It’s another thing to minimize what people who’ve survived infection are experiencing.
I didn’t object to the quantification, I objected to minimizing the impact and characterizing it as temporary. I don’t know the distribution of long term impact (and as far as I can tell no one does, unless we have time travelers about), but it’s pretty well known that there’s more than mortality rate at stake.
"(and as far as I can tell no one does, unless we have time travelers about)"
The CDC and others have looked at at long term effects, which is where I got those estimates. If you mean it's too early to tell because not enough time has gone by, then we could say the same about the vaccine (which is somewhat valid for both sides, but lacking evidence relegates it more to a belief than fact-based opinion).
The comment wasn't minimizing the impact. They were simply stating that people didn't take it as seriously as they would have if covid was more impactful. I think this is a valid point. We see similar issues in attitudes for other infections that can carry longterm impact (even lack of education and protective measures around stuff like hepatitis and HIV).
> just makes it so you can't taste or smell anything for a few days along with fatigue and flu-like symptoms
Maybe for the “vast majority” that’s true, I can’t speak to the distribution of ongoing impact people are experiencing or will over time. But there are a lot of people who have been infected, have survived, and have ongoing complications that go well beyond this description.
It's about 20-35% for non-hospitalized cases according to the CDC.
"Maybe for the “vast majority” that’s true"
That's why they qualified it as such. Even the flu has long term impacts in 10% of patients. So yeah, long term impacts are a concern, but the attitudes of many people (the commenter's point) are based on the fact that the majority of people are fine. For example, have you ever considered that you have a 10% chance of long flu effects? I would guess that like most people, you have not, because the vast majority of people are not affected by it.
That’s a lot of cases! And not counting hospitalized cases. Yes I understand why they characterized it that way, but it’s still minimizing a very large problem.
In very small minority of cases. I know a lot (at least 20) people that got the virus, and all of them are fine today, as they were before catching the virus. Of course people that got really sick and went to the hospital, it's different. But most of them were either old or already had some illness.
In the end we are making all this effort to stop a virus, while we sell (with profit) cigarettes that makes each years an only slightly smaller number of deaths. So to me, if we care about public health so much, just stop selling tobacco and we reduce the mortality. But do we care? In the end, we need people to die, at one point.
This arguing from anecdote when there are stats available is just bizarre. And you talk like we as a society haven't been working to limit tobacco addition for decades. People care about that and people care about epidemic deaths.
If you don't think death is a big deal, you are welcome to live your life courting it. But I don't get the performative lack of empathy for those dead, those deeply sick, and the living who have to deal with both the rest of their lives.
I think that's exactly why the COVID pandemic has been so bad. The outcomes aren't as terrifying as say, ebola. If COVID had been ebola but with incredibly high transmission rate, people would have shut down hard. Everyone. Everywhere. With an extreme abundance of caution. I bet we would have stopped that early.
Instead, you have this insidious disease that is so easy for people to compare to the flu and common cold, and it preys mostly on the oldest and most frail, so many people went with a "I'll be fine" attitude. And most of those folks did survive. And the virus just continued to spread, steadily doing its thing, killing millions of people worldwide.
It s so easy to compare with common cold because both are coronavirii...
Look I wore the mask like everyone in HK since the first day, but you have to admit you talk of it like it could kill you. It wouldn't, deaths are rare.
Millions of people are not a big relative number... There are things that must kill way more that you consider absolute necessity, like coca cola, whisky or cigarets.
This line of argument is so tiresome. If death is not a big deal to you, you're welcome to give it a swing and see what you think. Or to take as much personal risk as you want. But people get to choose. If a recreational skydiver gets pancreatic cancer, that's still bad and I refuse to pretend otherwise.
That’s the point that all people challenging the lock downs and mask are trying to make. It just kinda ignores the whole “this can cause it to be more likely to be encountered by a person who will handle it poorly” thing.
That's exactly my point. I got COVID. It was a mild case and I survived it with no issues. My case did feel like a common cold, as did so many others. I also know someone who died of COVID. That's the sneaky thing. It's almost as if the virus plays eeny, meeny, miny, moe - a bunch of us get a sore throat, and one person gets absolutely ravaged. It's very tempting not to put your life on hold when there's a really good chance you'll beat it. Of course, when vast numbers think that way, the virus spreads widely and many die.
As to your "millions of people are not a big relative number" point - at the peak of the pandemic in the USA, COVID became the leading cause of death.[0] That seems fairly major in a relative sense.
Another way to look at this is that if the Black Death had broken out in 2019, we’d have expected the excess mortality to be pretty close to zero (in truth some remote regions with poor access to antibiotics still experience it, but it’s essentially a non-issue in the modern world).
Which is to say, comparing deaths across centuries is hard. It’s hard to say how many people COVID would have killed without oxygen and intubation in the time period of the Black Plague. That it killed as many as it did even given our medical advances may indicate that it is in some absolute sense much worse, not better.
It matters because a million people dying is worse than ten people dying, even if those ten people were 50% of some population and the million were only 10% of another population.
Hong Kong flu killed (100,000 people) 0.05% of US population in 1969. Would be around 160,000 people today. Although as a whole we were much more healthier back then. Lower weight etc. It's no inconceivable that if the same exactly Hong Kong flu hit the United states today there would be more deaths than Covid, due to the much poorer health of the nation.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v... estimates it at 0.68% (0.53-0.82%). Boiling it down to one number is tricky though, as it is hugely correlated with age, so looking at any particular demographic is likely to give you pretty different numbers.
In Peru, we already had 0.5% of the population die in excess of normal. Even if most people in Peru have been infected, that puts IFR above 0.5%. (The US has a bigger proportion of elderly and obese, but better ICU care, so that might skew numbes up or down.)
The mortality is 0.5% WITH functional healthcare. Thankfully we do not have data of mortality from places where healthcare collapsed, although India might provide us with a glimpse of what Covid looks like in its unmitigated form.
Staples tend to be low-value exports, so they don’t show up in top-10-by-value lists when we also export truly enormous amounts of cash crops. But,e.g., California alone would be a top-10 rice exporter with about 1 million metric tons of annual exports.
The current best estimate of infection fatality rate is not 0.5%. It's actually half that at 0.23%. However the error bars are pretty wide on that number.
Take anything from Ioannidis with a huge grain of salt. His first californian seroprevalence study was flawed. NYC or Czech Republic had higher share of population die of covid so the cfr is probably higher.
You have to understand limitation of this study. This is not a best estimate for CFR or IFR. This is an estimate based on a review of seroprevalence studies. Some of them are complete crap (IFR 0.0%!), a lot of them are biased towards taking samples from people who went through an influenza like illness recently. And even if done perfectly about 5% of people had some antibodies against coronaviruses even way before the pandemic so there is some background level that should be subtracted from the seroprevalence but almost never is.
I read the study and understand the limitations. So far it's the best estimate of worldwide IFR. If you have something better then please provide a citation.
Excess deaths in Peru are at around 0.5% of the population already, and there's a dozen other European and LatAm countries above 0.3% [1] - and not everyone has been infected yet. So 0.23% is certainly wrong in those regions.
0.23% IFR might be correct or even too high for India or African countries where maybe 2-3% of the population are pension-aged. In western countries with 18-20% pensioners, IFR is definitely above 0.5%.
If I did the math right, that's (at most) .17% of the population. In a normal year I'd guess we lose 1% of the population. I guess this seems lower than I'd expect?
This is excess mortality, as in “above what would be expected in a normal year based on demographics”.
So, if looking at historical trends and the current demographics as compared with those trends we had a prior expectation of your 1%, then what we we actually observed is 1.17%.
Yeah, I get that. I guess I just mean that the worst pandemic of the last 100 years and (so far) it's maybe 17% deaths over the baseline. That feels kinda low.
17% excess mortality (and that’s assuming this 1% baseline we pulled out of the air, remember) doesn’t mean that the pandemic is only responsible for those excess deaths – a bunch of people who might have otherwise been expected to get hit by a car worked from home all year, or died from COVID instead, etc.
So the pandemic is responsible for the 17% (in this scenario) uplift above baseline plus an unknown portion of that baseline itself.
To be honest one cause, which changed a lot of behaviour that rolls into the baseline, pushing the global baseline up that much seems pretty impressive to me.
Would be also interesting to consider distribution of that excess and how China fared in the excess mortality department. After the early days they seemed to keep it tightly under control, and they contain an enormous portion of the world’s population. That might suggest that excess mortality elsewhere was even further above baseline and the excess mortality only looks this good because 1.2 billion people mostly stuck to baseline?
> Apparently suicides and deaths from starvation were also up significantly
Out of curiosity, do you have any sources on that?
I’ve been interested in this topic after observing, locally, a number of politicians who had previously pushed hard to cut funding for mental health and who were ideologically opposed to the concept of lockdowns suddenly and vocally expressing a great deal of concern about mental health & a supposed uptick in suicides that was (they claimed) going to be worse than COVID itself.
Whoever told you that was almost certainly lying. This was a very common claim amongst anti-lockdown protestors where I live, turns out when the yearly national suicide prevention report was published suicides had gone down significantly.
Remarkable yes - but society stopped for a year, how remarkable is that ? This is full on war state for a year or so. From what I can see in 2021 death rates in the US came to 1980s levels.
It will also be interesting to see how death rates behave in the following years post covid, since it did affect elderly population disproportionately.
It's only 17% due to the lockdowns. If not the deaths would be way higher, not just because of the higher numbers of people infected, but also because of overburdened hospitals unable to provide critical care and oxygen.
Also, deaths are not the end-all be-all to be assessed. Many more people have survived it but many have near crippling after effects from it, and even more, if not suffering now, have had a terrible and painful experience going through it.
Holy cow. This does massively underline how important the work of things like COVAX are in getting equitable global access to vaccines.
We still need billions more doses manufactured, distributed and administered - it could take years and cost a fortune - and we should not lose our urgency or our focus.
Plus Pfizer is one of about a dozen vaccine makers at or near approval. Pfizer, Moderna, AZ, Sputnik, Sinovac, Sinopharm, J&J, Novavax, and many more. If we have 10 Pfizers, we have a billion doses every few months.
It's pretty sobering how quickly large numbers just become yet another statistic and just something that gets accepted by many. Here in Germany numbers way exceeding the high points of the first wave just went as "meh, let's not do anything rash that could make businesses or people unhappy" this year (although of course quite a few people are also made unhappy by people dying... I'm really curious to see how this will shake out over the next few years).
I found the counting approach to Covid so far to be rather fascinating. With the flu in the US they guess and present that number, but we're supposed to attach some meaningful value to the Covid positive counts as though that actually represents anywhere near the real number of Covid cases since the outbreak began. It's bullshit, I'm just not sure why the establishment (media, government, censors, etc) stick so tightly to the line on the bogus official counts. They act like those counts actually represent the outbreak properly. Perhaps in their pathological quest for control (a central theme of most politicians) they need a number to lean on as authoritative, to prop up their weak credibility. If they can't even give you accurate outbreak counts, what else can be believed (masks, no masks; 6 feet, 20 feet, no feet; fear the surfaces, don't fear the surfaces; vaccines take years (nope: 1957 Asian flu); it has been a total clown show the entire pandemic).
India had been seeing near 400,000 cases per day. That's an entirely bogus number of course. And it's near universally agreed upon that it's bogus. The question is whether it's a million, two million, five million, whatever. What's actually closer to the truth? That's where everybody abandons ship, I never see the news media go deep into that part of it (and yet they happily report the made-up flu numbers every year).
Part of the comedy of it, is that the supposed truth enforcers are enforcing a fraud, because none of these official counts are anywhere close to real, no matter which country you pick as the topic.
Is India seeing 4,000 deaths per day, or 10,000, or 15,000? It's a dramatic difference across a month of time. The best you'll get out of the media is a little edge statement of: but it's suspected to be under-reported. Yeah, no kidding.
The US has seen 33 million cases of Covid - that's the reported media line in every story. Everyone knows it's bogus and doesn't represent anywhere close to the number of actual infections in the US and yet it's reported on as properly representing the scale of the pandemic in the US. There has been so much intellectual fraud in this pandemic.
So the obvious question: if they very widely report the made-up / guess-work flu counts every single year, year after year, across all media, why haven't they been doing exactly the same thing with Covid? That's what I want an answer to. Everyone avoids throwing out flu-like guesses on the real scale of the pandemic - the CDC doesn't want to do it, the media doesn't want to do it, the government broadly doesn't want to do it. Why aren't they reporting that it's more likely that there have been 60, 90, 120 million (etc) cases of Covid?
edit: and the downvotes on this are fascinating too, given what I'm talking about is rooted in obvious reality not propaganda or conspiracy theory. I've noticed reality - objectivity, facts, logic - has been particularly unpopular during the pandemic, people have been letting their emotions control their reactions to everything. I don't believe there are very many people ignorant enough to think the official positive Covid counts actually represent the pandemic properly; I do think there are a lot of people desperate to hide from reality for one reason or another, however.
I think those daily numbers are very helpful, because they show the relative change in infections.
And thats a helpful (if not the only one) indicator on whether there will be enough ICU beds one month from now. If not, we should consider lockdowning.
What strikes me is Asia. If I'm reading this right they have relatively low official Covid deaths, but off the charts excess deaths. What's up with that?
Florida didn't lock down (EDIT: except a few weeks at the beginning), and their death numbers are middle-of-the-pack[1], just marginally worse than California, which did heavy lockdowns.
We should probably assume that, in addition to not following some practices we should have, we also did a lot that we didn't have to.
This or that state government's mandate or lack thereof really can't stand in for actual behaviors.
For one thing, regardless of state mandates, you can bet your buttons that a huge number of residential/nursing facilities for seniors in Florida did lock down, and thereby protected those most likely to increase Florida's numbers.
If you want to see the effects of policy, don't compare states (especially big diverse ones like California). Compare, for example, San Francisco (with peak 7-day-average new cases of 363, total cases 36.7k, and population of 874k) and Miami (peak 7-day-average new cases of 3240, total cases 494k, and population of 2710k). Per capita, Miami was about four times worse.
California is huge and had numerous places actively(purposefully) flout public health measures like quarantine, lockdowns and restrictions on gatherings. It's hard to compare the two.
The post I responded to said "imagine if nobody did anything". I gave Florida as an example. Saying that California also flouted restrictions does not really refute that.
The question is how much less death will there be in the years to come.
Especially the older people who died earlier because of covid. We should see a decline in death from all kinds of diseases that these people had and would have died from/with.
This assumes that there are no long-term mortality effects from having COVID and not dying from it, which seems not proven at this stage. I mean, yes, we'll see fewer very old people dying of the flu next year, but idk whether we'll see a bunch of late middle age or 'not very old' people dying from long COVID.
But day/weeks/month/years of life lost is not the same as what we understand if we say lives lost. Also we stooped helping people survives in the name of covid. Life extending treatments and surgery where paused to have resource for dying people.
Whos gonna count the days/weeks/months/years these people lost?
In the end everything just shifts number because we all die.
I just think this virus mostly hit the people at risk of dying which should have been made it morally easier to let them die, rather than hurt others trying to keep them alive. But that's exactly what the western world did.
I would understand it if children where affected. We would morally justify that someone with cancer dies a bit earlier if we can safe the life of someone who still has many years to come.
very low in a sense that since we discovered antibiotics, the global mortality rate went down by a factor of 10. compared to that we are still in a relatively "good" position.
Relative to what, again? The old days, before antibiotics?
I mean, if you go back far enough, 1 out of 5 people died by homocide. That still wouldn't make it reasonable to say that we're "relatively good" if only 10 million Americans a year are getting murdered.
Death, and specifically premature death, is still a very unfortunate reality. Playing it down as if "well it happened more often in the old days" is, frankly, a bit bizarre.
Really... not many. In my city of about 14k people last year died 19 people, that is like 3/4 more than the norm, but with these numbers, we are well inside statistical error.
Also we must evaluate the increase in mortality in a longer period. I can as well being that most of the people that died of COVID were either old people or people with other health issues that would have died anyway in a year or two.
The problem with COVID to me seems that everyone just remembered that people will die. In the old days death was normal, there were wars, there were al sort of illnesses and infections that caused death, it was common to see people die even at young ages. And I don't talk about centuries ago, it was like that till the end of WW2.
Nowadays we are used to people that lives till 90 years, we no longer have wars, we are able to cure practically every illness, so a virus that kills slightly more people that we are used to see terrifies us. But in reality, it's nature, we will all die one day, COVID or not, so there is no real reason to fear it to me. In fact, we will live worse life because of the fear of this virus, and all the restrictions that we had put in place to avoid that (without so much success, in the end).
Well I guess I'll stop making my kid wear a helmet when she skateboards. No need to fear her premature death, it's just nature and everyone dies anyway.
Are you sure you thought this whole thing through?
I'm not quite sure what your point is. The absolute number is the number, and zooming in to make it a relative number for dramatic effect doesn't change that.
It's kind of like zooming in to a stock market graph so the spikes look bigger.
The OP's point is focusing on that absolute number is not a good measure, only because when compared to the world population it gives the 0.1-0.2% of population effected result, which is obviously way off.
Because numbers and how people interpret data is hugely important (there was a great article years ago how data visualization tricks can completely make a person misinterpret the presented information)
People can read and shout - I WAS RIGHT!! Only 0.1% people die of covid, lockdowns were unnecessary, masks don’t help, everyone’s a sheep for believing covid is anything more serious than a flu. Now they want to vaccinate us for this, what a joke. Wake up people!!
This is how people can misunderstand and spread misinformation because they don’t have the experience reading and interpreting such data and make conclusions.
Per [1] United States’ current covid deaths is 912k. That is twice the amount USA lost during WW2.
So on one side of the spectrum we have “wake up people, 0.1%, this is a hoax” and on another side we have that more people died from covid in a single year than the sum of all war and terrorist casualties USA had in the last 150 years.
What's the age distribution of that 0.1%? I guess it's mostly old people. When a war takes down a big chunk of young males, it's a problem. When a pandemic takes down 2x more but only old people, the nation may as well not notice that. This coronavirus is surprisingly courteous in this regard for it doesn't touch the young folks.
But it is 0.1%. That's a fact. You keep saying things like "misunderstand", and straw manning people who think 0.1% is a relatively small proportion of the population as people who are claiming the virus is a hoax.
It's true that fewer lives were lost to wars in the past 150 years and terrorist attacks. But that's also a somewhat misleading data comparison. Terrorism is basically nothing for Americans but is implied to be relevant. The 150 years mark is carefully chosen to avoid including the civil war, which comes close to matching covid numbers on its own, nominally, and is hugely higher on a percentage level (it was ~2%).
Context matters. Normalized to population size, you would need 20 COVID 19 pandemics to match the scale of the civil war. The proportional rates for other countries besides the US which tended to do quite well in WWII were obviously much more slanted towards the effects of war. Some light googling suggests Germany lost about 10% of its population during wwII. The overall world lost about 3% of its population (~80 million people).
Covid was not a hoax, but you're pushing a fair heaping of bias while implying to take any other view would be misunderstanding or spreading misinformation
Helping people interpret data and providing context is good.
You seem to be taking it a step further to create a messaging strategy around these numbers that will cause the reaction you think is best for everyone. While the intent is noble and may work in practice to some extent, I don't think that's a good thing. That leads to a lot of distrust of experts because people can sense it.
Not only that, but the covid restrictions have meant that the normal death rate is lower. Because people aren't traveling and commuting the road toll is down, because people are at home and social distancing workplace deaths are down. So excess mortality is up and the base deathrate is down meaning excess mortality is actually higher than shown.
On the other hand, people have been avoiding going to the doctor, so diagnosis and treatment of all sorts of preventable/treatable diseases (like cancer) is down, leading to excess death, disability, and suffering.
Most of those diseases have a long tail so we won't see the death rate from them for 2020 probably. They'll increase the death rate in a year or two unfortunately.
Early in the pandemic, when most everything was shut down, I had to run an errand and ended up driving down some streets I’ve driven many times before. The percentage of cars driving erratically on the road was much higher than usual.
I figure one of these might explain it:
1. People are stressed / distracted, and driving poorly because of it
2. Most drivers are well-meaning and conscientious, but most of those conscientious people were staying at home as public health officials directed, so the few people left on the road were more disproportionately less conscientious
3. Fewer cars on the road meant I noticed the bad drivers more readily
There was fewer pull overs by law enforcement on the roads because of risk of covid spread, at least initially.
Drug and alcohol use is up, due to lack of entertainment outside the home, and that affects driving as well. More speeding or racing for thrill seeking as a result of boredom.
Many new drivers for Amazon Prime, Uber Eats, Fedex/USPS etc. who are under time pressure to deliver fast, which they're not used to.
There was another article posted recently which explained that suburban traffic patterns changed so there was a lot more traffic congestion in the afternoons in suburban areas, while roads such as interstates and highways had lower than normal peak traffic. Having more traffic concentrated in areas not designed for heavy traffic could explain it.
Early on in the initial outbreak, I also noticed what sometimes felt like lawless driving in comparison to before.
For example, people treating a red light as a four way stop, or just slowing down and running through it.
It didn't last very long as far as I observed, but it definitely was a thing in Portland.
At the time I thought it was because there were so few cars on the road. Your point, 2. seems like a solid explanation to me.
In some cases it wasn't just that drivers were "not as conscientious," but more actively taking advantage of a lower amount of vehicles and LE patrol.
There is some evidence of this from the multiple record-breaking Cannonball Run challenges performed in May and June 2020 with no new records recorded since. [1]
Another explanation is that well-meaning drivers were treating urban driving the way folks do out in rural areas, where stop signs are sort of followed "as appropriate" by locals.
There was a global 24% spike in roadway deaths? I find that hard to believe. Please provide evidence. In my country we saw a 10% reduction in road deaths through 2020.
GP means in the US, where there was a 24% spike in roadway deaths per miles driven. Here's some more details:
"The nonprofit National Safety Council estimates in a report issued Thursday that 42,060 people died in vehicle crashes in 2020, an 8% increase over 2019 and the first jump in four years.
Plus, the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven spiked 24%, the largest annual percentage increase since the council began collecting data in 1923."
"Motor vehicle fatality estimates are subject to slight increases and decreases as data mature. The National Safety Council uses data from the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the CDC, so that deaths occurring within 100 days of the crash and on both public and private roadways – such as parking lots and driveways – are included in the Council’s estimates."
It's hard to figure out exactly how to credit this—perhaps the overall excess COVID deaths are being counted as part of the "100 days"? But the USA Today article quotes lots anecdotal data from state highway officials that back up this claim, including an increase in speeding tickets and an increase in crashes that involve intoxication over the same time period: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2021/03/05/pandemi.... The 8-9% number they quote is also backed up by Minnesota's own statistics, which I would imagine are more limited in what they consider a traffic death.
It makes sense. Cops were more reluctant to pull people over for covid safety reasons so drivers felt more emboldened speeding. The roads have been emptier so people have been going faster than norma, whether above or below the speed limit. Lack of other social entertainment may have caused thrill seeking in the form or speeding or racing, especially since drug and alcohol use seems to have gone up as well for the same reasons.
"Cops were more reluctant to pull people over for covid safety reasons so drivers felt more emboldened speeding"
Is this true? The rest of the possible explanations you cite make sense, but the USA Today article I cited earlier contains a quote from the Minnesota traffic safety department saying that the number of speeding tickets handed out went up in 2020, almost 100% (from 500 tickets in 2019 to 1,068 in 2020).
Remember, the 24% number is "deaths per miles driven", so it has 2 (potentially related) trends driving it: much fewer miles driven and more accidents overall.
Just a reminder to people: That is enough to kill the entire population of Denmark... Twice.
When we talk about people, percentages just doesn't make sense to use.
FWIW, the FT article appears to be calling out the difference in peak rates “for the same dates”, not for the full year.
While the excess deaths are awful, it’s also important to keep the number in context. The death rate has been decreasing for over a century, and in absolute terms, the death rate of 2020 looks like the year 2000 [1].
As someone who believes the pandemic was real, that lockdowns early on were a good idea, that mask wearing is trivial and probably helpful, that social distancing was also easy to do and a reasonable idea, and that vaccinations are safe and effective. My gut reaction is still that the number of deaths was relatively small.
About a third of US deaths were in nursing homes, and that doesn't include people who probably could / should have been in nursing homes from a health and self-sufficiency perspective. 85% were 65 or older (65 isn't especially old that's just the lowest data threshold I could find). I am fortunate enough to not know anybody who died from COVID.
Concerns about long lasting effects might be true. We might see this having substantial long term effects and that could be bad. It could be worse than the impact of the deaths.
That aside however, I just don't think a one time 20% increase in annual mortality is that terrible, but that does not mean that the virus was trivial.
If I'm understanding this chart correctly, forecasted 2021 death rate per 1,000 people (not covid adjusted) plus 20% is less than the 1970s... and the next 50 years as well.
(EDIT: Sorry idiot math. The 2021 rate + 20% is above any historical rate since 1970, and is on par with expectations 2050 onward)
This includes all sorts of demographic assumptions about age, but so does COVID, I would argue, in the least convincing demographic groupings possible.
Maybe COVID was a genuine threat but on a whole we did a pretty good job and it wasn't that bad in total effect as a result?
> Please don’t look at 7m-13m number and compare it to 7 billion population and say oh it’s only 0.1-0.2%.
Using the entire human population also skews things because the deaths were concentrated in North America, South America and Europe. To over generalize, Asian countries did a much better job at managing the pandemic and have a population of 4.5 billion people. Most of the deaths were concentrated in the remaining 2.5 billion.
If you're talking about a 7 billion population, the deaths of which will vary from year to year, this seems like a number in the noise range which would be very hard to distinguish from background variation.
If everyone of the 7b people lived 100 years, we would expect about 70 million deaths a year, and we know they don't live 100 years on average. Any reasonable range of assumptions puts this in the range of too-small-to-detect. Which doesn't mean it doesn't matter or isn't important, but it does mean that this is not a good method for estimating it.
You make a strong claim with no supporting evidence or analysis. On the other hand, we have roughly 3.3M (Econimist) or 3.4M (Financial, Times [1]) confirmed COVID-19 deaths. Is it so surprising that only 25-50% of actual deaths due to COVID-19 were confirmed? Why do you try to downplay that COVID-19 is the second most deadly pandemic in a century, after HIV/AIDS? [2]
This has me a bit confused: I look at the stats on cases and deaths per capita across various U.S. states, including California (which was very locked down, at least in theory) and Florida (which was flippant towards risks of contagion), and many states in between. The per capita cases+deaths are nearly identical across many states with very different approaches. This left me really wondering which measures were and weren't necessary. Anyone seen good studies or analysis on this?
Legitimate question, please no political commentary.
I don’t have anything to add except that California is huge and very unevenly applied “lockdown” - there are many towns a where businesses remained open or reopened frequently, but the big cities did have large shelter in place efforts. It would be interesting to compare on the municipal level if the data was that granular.
San Francisco had some of the heaviest lockdowns in the country, yet 100 miles east in Modesto the mayor actively defied the statewide lockdowns. California is a big state.
The community I grew up in in California purposefully threw rallies and went out of their way to rebel against every single restriction. I keep this in mind when people say California's restrictions didn't work.
Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.
Just in case anyone thinks this was confined to rural areas it was not.
I had to go do business in LA specifically around Manhattan Beach and Inglewood, and the folks that live there were taking me to strip malls where all the businesses looked closed but we're all actually open.
They just had their windows covered. I'm talking about an MMA gym next to a hair salon next to an Ethiopian restaurant.
Except these surrounding towns act as virus reservoirs for the large cities. That limits the effectiveness of restrictions. The “become COVID-19 carriers to own the libs” strategy kinda worked.
The vast majority of cases will basically always be in big cities because that's where the most people live. We'd need per-capita data for it to be a useful comparison.
Of course SF has a good hospital coverage, displaced a lot of poorer residents. Thus fewer people working high-risk jobs in SF actually end up counted in SF's stats.
But I don't think that SF's 62 deaths/100k (compared to e.g. 240 for LA and 232 for Miami) is solely explained by that, and that the tighter (and more adhered to) restrictions did play a role.
Without the poorly considered relaxations in Oct/Nov, despite clear indicators for a worsening situation, it'd have ended up better...
Assymptomatic carriers have been observed to carry the virus and spread it to those around them for periods that range between a few weeks up to a couple of months.
All it takes is a single spreader moving from outside of the metro area to negate the effect of the lockdown, specially if a considerable portion of the population is quite militant in their refusal to follow even the most basic health and safety precautions.
No SF had stronger restrictions with high adherence and had much lower per capita case and death rates. It’s hard to say how much of that is causal though (SF has temperate humid weather and a large white collar workforce that could afford to stay home that could have helped independent of lockdown).
The restrictions were almost never enforced, and only occasionally against businesses. Individuals only got arrested when they did something dumb like refusing to leave a business when refusing to wear a mask. The “lockdown” was a joke: people either chose to follow it or did not. People traveled a hundred miles or so to get haircuts in less restrictive counties of California. So it’s not really fair to compare counties when regions were crossed so often.
> Still, the vast majority of cases in California have been in the metropolitan areas that have also had the strongest restrictions.
So are the vast majority of people, and greater population density makes it harder to control the spread of communicable disease. So you’d expect, all other things being equal, not only thr vast majority of cases but the highest per capita cases to be in the metro areas.
But, actually, the highest per capita infections (both total and current) were mostly in rural, not metropolitan, counties.
>the highest per capita infections (both total and current) were mostly in rural, not metropolitan, counties.
Can you please cite your sources for this claim?
I just did the math using the numbers of infections[0] and the county populations[1] and it doesn't really seem to match up with your claim at all.
There are 58 counties in California.
San Bernardino, LA, and Riverside counties are numbers 4, 5, 6 respectively for highest cases per capita and all have populations above 2.2 million.
Of the bottom 10 counties in cases per capita, only 2 have a population larger than 100k (SF, Humboldt)
The closing of schools in California (vs open in Florida since last fall) was a very distinct difference in both policy and actual behavior. It seems not to have had a dramatic effect on outcomes.
At least in hindsight, the closing of schools might have been a huge mistake.
You just contradicted the website you linked, I'm confused.
> Hospitalization rates in children are significantly lower than hospitalization rates in adults with COVID-19, suggesting that children may have less severe illness from COVID-19 compared to adults.
Less severe response to it, not "less chance of getting it." And then just two lines later:
> Recent evidence suggests that compared to adults, children likely have similar viral loads in their nasopharynx,7 similar secondary infections rates, and can spread the virus to others
I don't know how you arrived at your opinion here.
Sincerely, I don't know. Almost all of the at risk population here has had at least a first shot. But the situation in Ontario has been pretty bad the past few weeks.
But I don't follow the science closely enough. I hope they're making the right call, because it's really hard on the kids. I'm just glad my own little guy is not of school age yet, and in fact is young enough to be mostly oblivious to the whole thing.
Conveniently skipping over the occupied ICUs. How do you not know that our medical system was overwhelmed or that the rise in cases only reversed after we shut down schools both times in the last 4 months?
Surely that wasn’t the only tightened restriction or change in behavior during the case surge, though?
There are a lot of confounding variables in these analyses. It’s going to take years to tease them apart, and we may never truly know for certain in some cases.
Perhaps, but do you lock everything down mid-spike when you know the current rate will lead to extreme triage measures within two weeks, or do you wait two weeks to act and start rejecting patients as they continue to flood in?
"the rise in cases only reversed after we shut down schools both times" implies a causal relationship, though, while ignoring the other mitigations that went into effect.
The point is not "is it wise to take precautions"; that's obvious. The point is we don't necessarily have great data on which precautions work better than others because they're largely all being put into effect at the same time.
> point is we don't necessarily have great data on which precautions work better than others
We actually do, though, and it's preventing close contact of non-household members and preventing sharing enclosed spaces with non-household members for long periods of time.
People spread the virus before they even know they're sick, and a subset of sick people either need to go to work despite being sick, or they just don't care.
I just haven't been following the news that closely, especially for Ontario (I'm not in ON). No intent to "conveniently" hide information, though thanks for clarifying.
I don’t know why no one is saying this, but Ontario’s ICU numbers skyrocketed to 900 at the peak just a few weeks ago. We’re only down to 700 occupied beds now and normal medical procedures are still paused because of the enormous ICU load.
It wasn’t until we closed schools that the trend reversed.
People are so quick to blame fear without actually looking at the data
I don't know if we can conclusively say what specific action needs to be taken other than halt contact. We were on an extremely bad path, and I don't know what else could have been done since we had little vaccine supply at that time.
Who knows. The alternative was not closing schools while cases were increasing exponentially. Is that a theory we should be testing when we've already paused elective medical procedures due to the wave of COVID patients?
I said "in hindsight", meaning that we don't fault the decisions at the time. I think now is when we begin (without blame) to start evaluating what worked and what didn't.
Unfortunately, some of the things done were disruptive, and if they were also ineffective, that will lead to blame. But our mission should be honesty first, and have faith that reasonable people can accept that the best decisions were taken with the information available at the time.
The alternative was not closing schools while cases and incoming patients were increasing exponentially. Is that a theory we should be testing when we've already paused elective medical procedures due to the already high numbers of people in the hospital?
> Regardless, school is being done online. Kids that needed laptops got them.
Right, I forgot University of Phoenix regularly matches their in-person counterparts in terms of quality. Keep telling yourself that teachers who were never trained to do remote teaching are anywhere near the same effectiveness as before. You ever dissect something virtually? Somethings can simply not be learned through a screen. Physical education, dealing when your crush looks at you in the eye, literally anything "hands-on" like swinging a hammer at a nail, the of useful skills that can only be developed in the presence of another human are tremendous. Funnily, most of the useful things learned at school for most people are not the curriculum and it is these things that are missing.
We can have this discussion if the situation carries on through this year. I agree a lot of places have had suboptimal schooling, some better than others, but I'd rather save lives and hold off on dissecting animals for a year.
Low income / essential workers & overcrowded homes are a far more significant factor that often go unmentioned when people try to compare the outcomes between state & municipal public health interventions. This was observed well before the winter surge.
https://calmatters.org/projects/overcrowded-housing-californ...
How do you isolate when there's more members than actual rooms in the home & only one one restroom?
COVID went wild basically everywhere. There were a few strong exceptions: China (apparently), Australia, New Zealand and some others. What these had in common was very strict police enforcement, which led to some dramatic scenes like people getting welded into their houses in China, or houses in Australia getting broken into by police on suspicion of too many people gathering.
In my _opinion_, lockdowns didn't work elsewhere because most cases are not from casual public transmission in places like stores, restaurants etc. Rather, events like kickbacks, dinner parties, and practices like in-home workers (nannies, cleaners etc) continued throughout the pandemic, or resumed shortly after the original March 2020 shockwave. While strident police enforcement of physical distancing could eliminate cases, and seemed to in a few places, the half measures used by most of the world did little-to-nothing positive while being an economic and cultural disaster.
Personally, I never caught COVID and rarely socialized during the pandemic. All the cases I heard of stemmed from the kind of thing I mention above: private dinner parties, nannies and so forth, rather than casual public transmission.
You, or any individual may have taken social distancing seriously but it's clear many or most did not, including people on both political "sides", up to and including governors, members of congress etc.
The strictness of the enforcement in China has been overstated in the media. Strict, but not that strict. Source: here during the Chinese lockdown, have compared notes with those in other cities.
Here in Japan they've never really had lockdown. Restaurants have remained open the entire time, just asked to close at 8pm. I could/can walk by them at 7pm and see them full of people talking and eating without masks. I was invited by Japanese friends the entire time (didn't go) and would see them posting pictures of their restaurant dinner gatherings on Facebook.
Further, as a comparison, Tokyo Metro has 38 million people, California has 38 million people. Tokyo Metro has ~6500 people per square mile, California has 240 per square mile. Tokyo Metro had and still has people commuting in very crowded trains every weekday. California mostly people drive cars. California closed restaurants. Tokyo Metro never closed restaurants.
Yes, Tokyo is going through a "spike" right now but compared to California it's still tiny. Compare Tokyo Metro's current "spike" (~2k people per day) with any of California's spikes at 40k per day, 20x more.
Some people will claim testing but that doesn't fit the facts either. Deaths from COVID in Tokyo Metro. California 62k death, Tokyo Metro, 2k dead. And, if you believe the attribution of death by COVID is bad then all you have to do is look at the death rate from all causes and see that Japan is doing much better than the USA
I have no idea what Japan did right or got lucky with. Various speculations abound. Japanese don't shake hands, hug and kiss friends. Japanese may be commonly taking some medicine for unrelated things that happens to provide protection. Japanese might have more people with genetic immunity. Japanese mask compliance might be higher. Japanese aren't obese (I'm sure there's some other non-obese country they can be compared to). Japanese have a different diet (not sure what other countries have similar diets)
I recognize that even with restaurants open it's possible just the various other factors are/were enough to keep R low enough.... I really have no clue. Personally I mostly stayed locked up. I live alone. Saw less than 1 person a month in person, usually an outdoor walk with masks on.
On the other hand Japan has an older median age than most other countries. We know that age is a crucial risk factor for COVID-19 so on that basis they should have had a higher death toll, but didn't.
My guess is that the low obesity rate is the critical factor, but that remains somewhat speculative.
This is super interesting. My entirely unqualified gut reaction is that this is cultural- that Japanese people take infectious disease seriously and test+quarantine after experiencing symptoms or traveling at all, having already handled SARS outbreaks before, and many Americans are still debating whether the pandemic is real, and that behavioral difference is enough. I don’t know how to test that.
But it could also just be as simple as Americans being less healthy.
What you're saying is consistent with my hypothesis. Ie that casual public transmission on subways and in restaurants is low. Rather, it's "behind closed doors", at extended private gatherings, via domestic workers and so on. Those are the only such cases I have direct knowledge of (California USA). It could be that Japanese don't gather as much, or have chosen to skip it during pandemic.
You might be right. I don't think that fits with seeing restaurants open and unmasked (since you need it off to eat and drink) but maybe the sum total of meeting in person is still much lower than "behind closed doors". The news (when I used to watch it) certainly highlighted that going to hostess club had a few spreader events like where 80% of the people in the club got COVID. I don't know how common that was, I just know it was in the news last may/june (don't watch the news much)
People discuss the range of social <-> lockdown techniques as if they're generically effective or not, when really I think think the effectiveness of the same strategies varies vs how high the current community state of infection is, as well as a hysteresis of what level of infection you're coming from.
If you can act earlier, maintain a external boundary, and maintain a low enough level to trace then I think you can stay in a very good state with minimal inconveniences. But once the infection rate has passed a certain level, more stringent strategies are needed to get back to the same low state.
In the UK (which has pretty good test capacity) the infection rate slightly lags the lockdown restrictions as you would expect from a working policy, so I think it can be successful.
I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist, and there absolutely will be decades spend unravelling this.
To address the parent question - one thing to keep in mind is that states are extremely heterogeneous, and "Did or did not lock down/mask mandate/etc." isn't actually a binary variable, but a very difficult to measure continuous response of both policy and compliance.
To really understand it you’d need to look at cultural, geographic, climate, demographic, etc differences that apply to transmission rates. I’d be curious to see it though, and a similar one for other illnesses.
It's almost perfectly urban vs. rural. Urban areas in "red" states are generally blue, and vice versa. "Blue states" are just those with mostly urban populations.
It became more extreme during the Trump era with many historically red suburbs around cities turning blue and some rural areas turning more red.
You would need to look at everything from ages to whether the lockdowns where enforced to how people lived (high or low density) to how deaths were counted. It would be an interesting study.
I think it’s still hard because deaths for almost everything else go down when people aren’t out getting in car crashes, picking the regular flu, etc etc.
Also, locking down everyone (and its economic consequences) probably had / will have an effect on number of suicides (not sure if negative - I can't stand it, I'll kill myself - or positive - I can't stand it but life will be better after covid)
"Widespread assumptions that suicide rates would increase during the pandemic are not supported by the growing amount of evidence coming out of Canadian provinces and other jurisdictions around the world, say experts who study the topic."
Not really. Excess deaths certainly are not entirely caused by the virus, so you still need to try to subdivide them somehow, which is once again a ripe opportunity for "gaming" / creative statistics.
But if you assume the main thing special about this year was the virus and strategies aimed at mitigating it, you can still compare overall outcomes between jurisdictions. If tight lockdowns decrease COVID deaths but increase other deaths enough to compensate then they didn’t achieve anything. It would be valuable to know the exact breakdown but you don’t have to.
Right, but my point is that it's hard to separate those things if your idea is just "excess deaths tell us the cost". So if lockdowns slow COVID but increase suicides... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I know it’s easy to be a bit cynical once we take an abstract view.
Please let’s remember it is not a simple lever.
Let’s remember the overflowing ICUs and morgues and the very very limited menu of possible immediate actions - all this amongst unprecedented scrutiny, politicization and division.
We’re human. We’re doing the best we can. Lockdowns do flatten the curve.
Even if true, that doesn't suggest that the overall numbers are artificially low. That represents a reporting time gap, the deaths were still presumably counted correctly.
I think we need something much stronger before we enter into evidence such a powerful allegation.
EDIT: http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess... seems to suggest California covid deaths were underreported to a greater degree than Florida. That would be even stronger evidence that Florida had better outcomes compared with the disruption.
Only Rebekah Jones, who left her last three jobs with criminal charges, has claimed that. None of her claims have ever been substantiated by a single legit source.
Only followers of fringe left wing Twitter believe any of that.
Somewhat related, on the opposite point. Elon Musk among others said the counting of deaths was manipulated upwards, with comorbidity being counted as a COVID death even when the patient had 2 or more serious health conditions already. I think there is a desire to overcount which must not be glossed over either.
>I think there is a desire to overcount which must not be glossed over either
So there was overcounting, but somehow excess mortality in 2020-2021 is higher than in normal years? How?
>with comorbidity being counted as a COVID death even when the patient had 2 or more serious health conditions already
A high percentage of people in the US have "serious health conditions" like diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure etc. If Covid accelerated their deaths then it should be counted as a covid death because they would likely be otherwise alive now. If you want to get pedantic there's a measure called QALY(quality adjusted life years).
Musk said there would be zero cases in the US by April 2020 among other dumb predictions, so I don't think he's the best person to go to for Covid related information since his domain is technology and not epidemiology. https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/03/13/elon-musks-...
> So there was overcounting, but somehow excess mortality in 2020-2021 is higher than in normal years? How?
People dying of heart attacks because they didn’t seek timely care because of fear of going to the hospital. Medical screenings postponed. Undetected cancers. Suicides. There is a direct correlation between unemployment rates and disease. My annual physical, due in July 2020 was cancelled. How many other people’s were as well? Also one also should note increases in deaths of despair. That’s a real thing.
Excess deaths can’t be called “covid,” without proof that they were. How would else know Covid was the cause and not the flu? Are we just assuming excess deaths were Covid? The uncomfortable truth is that lockdown proponents don’t want to admit that their policies may have caused more damage than the disease from which they were claiming to protect us.
I don’t know the answer. My point is that excess deaths aren’t necessarily Covid deaths. That’s an assumption, not a fact.
Most of these will show up at a later time. And some of them were caused by hospital overcrowding, doctors trying to save themselves etc. not lockdown.
>Suicides.
Suicides are down.
>My annual physical, due in July 2020 was cancelled. How many other people’s were as well?
How many people die within a year due to something that's caught in a physical? I'd say barely any. If you're counting them then you should also count the lives saved by reduced pollution due to the lockdowns.
>Also one also should note increases in deaths of despair. That’s a real thing.
Suicides are down.
>Excess deaths can’t be called “covid,” without proof that they were. How would else know Covid was the cause and not the flu?
Because flu deaths are included in normal rate of deaths. If you're saying there are multiple times the number flu deaths than during a normal year with no measures to contain it, and it doesn't show up on the yearly disease surveillance, then you're arguing in bad faith.
>The uncomfortable truth is that lockdown proponents don’t want to admit that their policies may have caused more damage than the disease from which they were claiming to protect us.
The uncomfortable truth that pro-covid(and anti-vax people) don't want to admit is that their attitude of calling covid just a flu or something less harmful has caused death, disease, hospital overcrowding, increased number of lockdowns due to increased cases/deaths, and damage from the lockdowns.
Compare the economies of countries that strict lockdowns but were able to open up sooner like Australia, New Zealand, China etc.
Do you think people will keep participating in the economy and crowded events etc. at the same rate if there are scenes like this at hospitals? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Y1YakG60s
Now that things are opening back up, if there is hospital overcrowding and more covid deaths and cases due to the pro-covid and anti-vaccine people, then who is to blame for the economic damage and death from ensuing lockdowns?
Please stop spreading misinformation. Rebekah Jones was not fired for reporting data manipulation. She is simply a liar. All of her key claims have been debunked.
Please stop spreading misinformation. Rebekah Jones wasn't a data scientist and was never asked to falsify any numbers. She is simply a liar.
Claiming that on the back of an opinion piece in a partisan publication which seems not at all interested in neutral fact finding but revels in partisanship and plays this up as a political issue does not bolster your argument's credibility. Indeed it weakens it. I say that as a non-American who doesn't have a horse in the race.
I think the flaw in this premise is believing that the regulations promulgated at the state level had any real impact on the public response. It's not the "lockdown" that keeps people at home, it's the disease. In some states they did not order restaurants to close, but that doesn't imply that attendance at restaurants in those places was normal.
I’ve asked myself this question. I have no hard data to back this up, but wonder If it’s related to outside time and vitamin D absorption, which seems to have an affect on covid. Ex: did NYC have a tougher time than Florida as a result of this, and even with all the protocols in NYC, they could do only as well as Florida with no rules.
NYC has a combined sewer system [0] [1] that overflows when it rains more than .... ~1/10 of an inch per hour (iirc). The fecal-> aerosol transmission route is certainly very important: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27156256
"Who do you share a bathroom with" is very important for tracking transmission. In NYC, everyone shares a bathroom.
I've always thought the main driver of spread was probably not the political football issues like masks in public and businesses being open or closed, but what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this.
exactly. the measures were always about keeping us simultaneously busy and anxious and not about their actual effectiveness. it’s been so frustrating to see discussion after discussion about the minutiae of masking when they’re so minor to the overall picture. what mattered above all was indoor, familiar social proximity (where we’d be most likely to be exchanging spit for prolonged periods), exactly where our strong social norms dictate the least amount of vigilance.
I think the intentions were good, but it's also probably true that public health officials have been reluctant to admit when there just wasn't much they could do about the situation that would make a major difference, save for employing totalitarian enforcement measures that no one wanted.
Masks in public are not all that burdensome, so imo the mandates were reasonable regardless of the actual impact, but I wish they would have re-evaluated closing businesses a lot sooner, since that did a ton of economic damage, and the benefit there seems very questionable. I doubt the CA statistics would have been any different if they had never banned outdoor dining, for instance, or even just kept most businesses running normally but with an indoor mask requirement.
Comparing CA to TX and FL, it's also pretty hard now to argue that closing playgrounds and schools made much difference either, and that has had a severely negative impact on kids. I understand doing it in the first place when everything was unknown, but they should have been quicker to revise in response to new information.
outside of the totalitarian choices, which were entirely untenable in the US, we really had no good options to slow, much less stop, the pandemic. nearly all of it was theater.
the best mitigation would have been to get people to generally distance around familiars indoors and don a mask if you’re going to spend time in close proximity or face-to-face for a while. that would have required families to treat each other as threats rather than safeties, which is why that was not tenable. it’s so much easier to treat strangers as threats.
this best mitigation would have led us to violate a visceral belief about the world, creating significant cognitive dissonance, and that’s why we instead focused so much on ineffective measures to protect ourselves from strangers with masks and lockdowns that didn’t tackle the core infection vector through familiars. it’s really not that difficult to unravel what was happening, even at the beginning. watching us dance around this elephant in the room as if it didn’t exist has been no less than maddening.
> wasn't much they could do about the situation that would make a major difference, save for employing totalitarian enforcement measures that no one wanted.
Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US. There are countries (SK, Japan) with tiny numbers of cases.
There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better.
One key area I think the US did really badly on was messaging - basically, having Trump drawing the whole thing into his orbit made everybody feel like it's just business as usual. It's hard to take something really seriously when the nation's highest elected official talking nonsense about it on Twitter, so obviously people don't follow rules. Public health messaging is really easy to get right, and the nations that have done really badly (Britain, the USA, Brazil) all had heads of state who did the worst possible kind of messaging.
I agree about Trump and federal messaging being terrible, but CA’s messaging was strong from the beginning. Empirically, it doesn’t appear to have made a significant difference compared to other states.
Real hard to take it seriously when the democrats are acting like a BLM protest is perfectly fine, or indeed any of their other pet causes, but you can't keep your gym open. Please don't pretend trump was the only one off message here. Democrats have PLENTY of blame
Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US .... There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better.
The latter part doesn't follow logically from the first. It can be that performance is essentially random, or determined by geographical factors, or by the pre-existing health of the population, and so on. The assumption that governments can control respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 is at the heart of all of this but needs very strong evidential support, given how strong the evidence against this belief is by now.
If you look at the data then there are no obvious explanations for why some countries did better than others. It's far from insane to observe this. There are a lot of plausible sounding explanations but they all fall apart due to exceptions, e.g. Japan did very little for a long time and yet has hardly been affected. In fact Asia in general has not been strongly affected (Taiwan is another example) despite a wide variety of response severities, which raises the question of whether Australia/New Zealand's relatively good performance is due to location rather than behaviour. Meanwhile Latin America was very hard hit despite some truly totalitarian responses by the authorities.
Your own explanation is especially weak because it appears to be based on a cartoon New York Times interpretation of what happened outside the USA. The British government's messaging was the polar opposite of Trump's. The PM appeared next to two chief scientists every single day, and the government was basically replaced by SAGE, the scientific advisory board. The SAGE scientists took total control of the messaging including designing large scale ad campaigns specifically designed by behavioral psychologists to provoke as much fear as possible in the population. The UK also has by far the highest vaccine uptake in the world. The whole thing had a singular focus, the messaging was very well organized to an extent that evokes people's worst fears of competent totalitarianism and so the idea that the UK was somehow doing the same things as Trump just has no basis in reality.
Yet, in the end, it didn't seem to matter. Sweden has had lower excess deaths despite consistent year-long messaging of chill, relax, it's no big deal. Hence, politics can be pretty conclusively eliminated as the source of any differences.
"I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few, there were actually a few coronavirus patients, and I shook hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands,"
- Boris Johnson
Anybody who thinks the UK represents competent totalitarianism needs to really think about where they are getting their news from. The UK's response was objectively worse than similar countries, in that more people died per capita, and this was because of two late lockdowns, both late because top politicians ignored scientific advice.
The success of the vaccine rollout is arguably the result of the government's procurement efforts, but also deserving of credit are the UK population (overwhelmingly non-skeptical), and the NHS, which allows for a highly organized and centralized rollout.
it’s ironic that you use the phrase “overwhelmingly non-skeptical” to negate a totalitarian supposition, when totalitarianism, or more narrowly authoritarianism, requires, and in fact subjugates their populace to being (via propaganda), a docile and unquestioning public. “skeptical yet willing” would be more deserving of credit than “obliviously following”. the public should absolutely question and challenge ‘experts’ (i take issue with this framing itself but that’s a discussion for another time), because not only are experts often wrong but not doing so sets a dangerous sociopolitical precedent.
Firstly, I don't think skepticism is the inverse of docility, or even necessarily aligned with being questioning. Skepticism is traditionally characterized by an attack on the methods of knowledge-production, and as such, can engender docility and make questioning incoherent.
Vaccine skepticism isn't based on a question or challenge towards experts - questions or challenges exist within a specific framework, a specific body of knowledge. Rather, it is based on a challenge to the value and nature of expertise itself. As such, it's absolutely compatible with docility, totalitarianism, and antipathy towards questioning. In fact, since experts are experts by virtue of their existence within a specific body of knowledge, they are always by their very nature open to questions and challenges. Attacking the idea of expertise can as such be a way of attacking these areas of open questioning and challenge.
A good example of this is how authoritarian governments are typically hostile to academic institutions.
skepticism is an “attack” on certainty, particularly unjustified uncertainty, for which blindly trusting (esp. only government-sanctioned) experts plainly qualifies. only by shedding our false veils of certainty do we inch ever closer to seeing the world as it truly is.
there are a plethora of open questions in vaccine science and epidemiological policy that naturally allow for skepticism. it’s not only political or partisan. you can strip away the political and still be left with plenty valid skepticism.
and yes, skepticism challenges the notion of expertise itself. it suggests humility is undervalued, that an ‘expert’ knows so little against the backdrop of the world’s knowledge (much less the world itself), especially when the ego becomes intertwined with the ideological. experts over time trend toward surety rather than openness and inquiry, especially as stature rises in a field. it’s so common that the out-of-touch know-it-all is a storytelling caricature.
while it’s not always a valid line of attack, questioning the basis of “expertise” can certainly unveil erroneous assumptions, poor methodology/data, and faulty reasoning. the raison d'être of skepticism is to push knowledge forward, not hold it back, and this sort of challenge is just as valid as any other in this regard.
finally, authoritarian governments are hostile toward academic institutions due to concerns over its power and legitimacy as embodied by... skepticism (of the state and its propaganda).
No it wasn't. I will keep repeating this fact on HN until my fingers fall off - lockdowns do not work. They. Do. Not. Work. The data is in and the data is unambiguous, lockdowns have no effect at all. The UK having worse outcomes than some other regions that had far less strict measures should be enough to kill this idea off completely, yet you cite that very fact even though it clearly disproves the notion that lockdown timing had anything to do with the UK's results.
As for your cited quote, would you like me to cite the thousands of other things government leaders have said over the course of the year that support my point? Yes, the PM is a naturally optimistic guy. None of the people around him are, and they've all been ramping the fear factor to 11 continuously, and in particular they controlled the public messaging not the PM. With the result that there is now a serious problem in the UK with people who are afraid to leave their own homes.
... The UK lockdown was very strict, but it was also very late. Lockdowns work fine, they just don't work when you call them after everybody already has it.
Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics.
Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the middle of one of the UK waves was about as dangerous as regularly riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
They don't work regardless of when deployed. The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong. If they worked places that stopped doing lockdowns would have seen huge surges and higher death rates than places that kept them, but that didn't happen and there are by now many such examples. Lockdowns don't work because (a) COVID doesn't seem to care about them and (b) COVID is nowhere near deadly enough to justify them, as demonstrated by the counter-example states and countries that rejected them and saw far less than the predicted mortality.
> The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong.
You seem frankly a bit divorced from reality. If you go to a chart of the daily incidence rate before either the first or the second wave, then mark on it when the lockdowns occurred, it's clearly visible that they occurred too late.
I had to discourage my at-risk mother from going to a choral Christmas concert last year, at a time when they were clocking 40,000 new cases every day and that number was doubling every few days. That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was, and at the time, conservative ministers were still going on TV and talking about a five day christmas.
If you go to the deaths graph, you can see that as a result of this awful mistake, tens of thousands of people died. This is plainly visible in the statistics. Whatever political axe you have to grind is frankly irrelevant, and to be honest, facetious.
You seem to be trying to identify causation from a single graph. That's not how data analysis needs to be done. You have to compare different datasets that vary in the control variable. In the case of Europe the UK vs Sweden is a good comparison because they are similar in most ways that should affect viral propagation except for lockdowns. Sweden has seen significantly better death rates than the UK, despite the theory saying they should have done much worse, meaning the theory is wrong. Because the theory is wrong you can't derive anything by looking at UK curves in isolation and comparing them to a theoretical counterfactual.
You can also look at the different performance of US states (none) despite very different measures.
That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was
In other words you were terrified and forced that fear on your family, based on a mis-understanding of how to use data to draw scientific conclusions. And now you're accusing anyone who points out the truth to you of political axe grinding, although it's you who just threw in a random mention of "conservative ministers" implying their politics is responsible for lots of deaths. That's a political talking point!
> what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this.
At least here in the UK, lockdown meant not seeing friends or family (unless you lived with them). Was that not the case in the US? Of course if people flout the rules then they won't have any effect.
It varied from state to state. I live in Maryland, and there was maybe a 2 week period last spring where you weren't allowed to drive anywhere except to get groceries and medicine, or if you were an essential employee for a business that was allowed to stay open. Outside of that two week period, the only travel restriction I know of was a mandatory quarantine period for people traveling in from other states.
Ah, for comparison we had a 6-week period of similar restrictions last spring. Followed by another 4-week period in September, and a 3 month period at the start of this year.
Outside of those times there were restrictions on meeting indoors (at times max 6 people, at other no meeting indoors at all) pretty much continuously since last April.
I remember a period last spring and early summer when parties and gatherings were getting "busted", but I don't think the enforcement of restrictions on private gatherings has been meaningful for the majority of the pandemic.
I think most of the US had much less strict "lockdowns". I think the most restrictive it ever got in my area was that gatherings of 10 or more people were not allowed, and to actually get it enforced, you probably had to go way over 10.
Also, in the USA there were a lot of things that were on paper "not allowed" but it didn't matter because it wasn't enforced at all. Mask wearing, social distancing, stay-at-home orders, did people actually get cited for violating? I know, at the height of the pandemic, I could easily drive out of my region, eat at a restaurant indoors, gather somewhere unmasked, and there was zero chance I'd be fined. Even for things like mass-gatherings, usually it was just the business owner who got fined, and the 1,000 people caught gathering got off scott free.
There was a study released not long ago that came to that same conclusion regarding schools. It found that most students who were infected didn't catch it at school, but from family members and friends after hours.
IMHO if you want to understand what an effective response looks like - don't look at North America or Europe. Think Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Africa, all of which had vastly better outcomes.
Of course, I'm not an epidemiologist or public health expert, so while I have some guesses I'm not sure what exactly they did that was more effective - but there's no question that it was more effective. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what to do next time, I'd start there. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what not to do next time, well...
It doesn't account for Africa, but many of best-performing countries have been island countries (Australia, NZ, Taiwan, Iceland, etc.). Islands have some fairly obvious advantages in fighting a pandemic, and it shows in the statistics. I believe Hawaii has also done much better than other US states. I'm not sure whether that's what the comment was referring to though.
None of Thailand, Vietnam and Mongolia are islands and their handling of covid is world class compared to parts of Europe and the US.
These countries are also far poorer and in the case of Thailand especially that has been a major contributing factor, as they've been less able to afford closing their country to tourism.
Both Thailand and Vietnam have been devastated economically, and even with various levels of lockdown both country is currently experiencing the highest number of cases since the beginning of the pandemic.
Also, the vaccinated population in either country is at low single digit percentage, so no end in sight for the harsh measures. Compare that to the US or Europe where 50% of population is (partially) vaccinated and, as the result, gradually reopen.
> even with various levels of lockdown both country is currently experiencing the highest number of cases since the beginning of the pandemic.
"highest number of cases" here meaning between 1 and 2 cases per million people per day.
For context, the United States is currently at its lowest daily case count since June last year, which is slightly above 100 cases per million people per day.
"Even with various levels of lockdown both countries have 1-2% of the case count of countries that didn't treat this seriously" isn't quite as dramatic of a statement though I guess.
(all figures using the typical 7 day rolling average and data available from Mackuba)
Yes, also South Korea is for all intents and purposes an island. It's surrounded by water, except on the North which is the most heavily militarized border in the world.
If the US had in reality on the order of 100 cases, there could be a credible effort to get rid of all of them and reopen. You wouldn't have to lock down hardcore for as long. In Australia from what I've seen fly across Twitter, they had the luxury of periodically locking down a city when they saw a single case, to make sure it didn't escape into the population.
I agree that there could be a way for this to work in the US but it would be a long slog. South Korea seems like they could pull it off. So I'll grant you them for sure as being superior.
It started in China, a country with 1.4 billion people and 20 million pop cities and even if you 100x their official number they did better than the US or Europe. There's few excuses for our mismanagement.
That is an even less fair comparison. The Chinese government has a tremendous amount of power over the daily life of its citizens in a way that isn't replicable most other places. There were stories of China literally welding doors to apartment buildings shut and forcibly dragging people away to quarantine facilities as soon as they tested positive.
FWIW from a brief search months ago it seemed that the welding stories are hearsay. Iirc you can find reference to them in the news but it didn't sound concrete.
I recall seeing various grainy creepy videos (not just about this) supposedly of China posted on Twitter. I started to wonder who was really pushing these videos. I'd have to see a video corroborated by a reasonably trusted news source.
Eg News sources of the BBC had conflicts of interest about reporting on this ( since they have/had a division in China).
What would even be framed in the media when these were really user videos without journalists. Journalists couldn't report live, so i don't think there's something else than opinion pieces.
I did some searching and it looks like you are right that there isn't anyone credible officially reporting it. However multiple credible news sources do mention welding doors shut as part of opinion pieces, including this one from Ai Weiwei[1] who presumably has more info about the situation and isn't going to simply speak on Western hearsay.
For me "countries that did really well" is mainly places like Singapore and Taiwan and South Korea, which got the virus earlier than USA and Europe but took it seriously from the very start.
They've had fewer than 1700 cases, and that's including a recent massive outbreak. They peaked on March 26th 7-day average with 21 cases a day. Granted, the US took maybe a couple more weeks to ramp up to its first plateau, so maybe if it was caught here a few weeks earlier it would have made all the difference. But it feels a lot more like Taiwan just didn't have a lot of travel to and from Wuhan?
Taiwan resident here. Just wanted to include that “massive outbreak” so far means a few hundred cases nationally.
That’s bad, it might get a lot worse, and we’re all nervous — but just wanted to add the context because “massive” can mean a lot of things with orders of magnitude difference.
Rapid and strict incoming travel restrictions were a key part of "taking it seriously from the very start" with a big impact on future outcome.
There are all kinds of effective measures (e.g. contact tracing, quarantining of unconfirmed suspect cases) that work when you have 20 cases a day and don't work when you have 2000 cases a day, so going all-in while you still have just a few cases works, because by the time you have many cases, it's too late.
If you travel to Taiwan, even as a Taiwanese citizen, you must stay in an official quarantine hotel for 14 days. You are not asked to do this - you are taken to the hotel by an official quarantine taxi driver and there are records of all this. You are not allowed to leave the hotel for any reason - food is delivered to your door 3x per day, and you can ask for certain things. My sister in law did this. That is just one of over 100 strategies employed by Taiwan to reduce virus spread.
The current Vice President of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te, has a Master's degree in Public Health from Harvard. The previous VP, Chen Chien-jen, has a Master's degree in Public Health from National Taiwan University. Taiwan takes public health seriously, especially after the original SARS experience.
Nobody in Taiwan thinks the virus is a "scam" or that masks are a "tool of oppression." Even before the pandemic masks were totally common. There is complete public buy-in on masks without even having to be asked. Some of my friends work in a clinic in Taipei so I hear updates. I was also in Taiwan last year for a month. The difference in attitude between the US and Taiwan is startling. If the US had acted like Taiwan, instead of acting in a way that was indistinguishable from sabotage, we'd have a lot fewer deaths and would have avoided a recession.
Mainland Chinese citizens are not allowed to travel to Taiwan as individual tourists since July 2019. This was interpreted as an attempt to hurt tourism and so the economy at the time. May have been a factor.
I'd wait to draw any serious conclusions until after the pandemic is "over" in both countries you're comparing. It sure seems like this virus doesn't need much of a foothold to take off, and just because an island has been able to deny that so far doesn't mean they'll be able to deny the virus until they are fully vaccinated and out of the woods.
I'm not sure it's fair to compare an authoritarian country to a western country that's nominally free.
What western government could pull off welding doors shut the way they did in China? Even if the government had emergency powers that "allowed" it, would they have had willing workers to do it?
>What western government could pull off welding doors shut the way they did in China?
Western governments have pulled all kinds of restrictions themselves, from curfews, closed borders, and "let's close all retail businesses" restrictions, to mandatory movement monitoring.
Heck, Italy might not have welded doors, but had the Army patrol to enforce strict lockdown, and citizens in northerns cities stay inside.
Sometimes this even meant closing them in-house with the corpses of their dead (from covid) relatives for several days. There were several such reported cases, e.g.:
Announcing restrictions and enforcing them are two separate animals.
There are not enough police in most of the US to actually enforce closing businesses, let alone confining people to their homes. Especially not when half the populace sees it as a political infringement of their rights.
I'm not sure about there not being "enough police in most of the US to actually enforce closing businesses".
There's not enough police to enforce no traffic violations at all either (what would that be, a traffic cop for every street or car?). That's not how laws work, you just need to make a law/rule and collect fines from the businesses that violated it. If there wasn't the political will to do so in the states, that's another thing.
But in at least a couple of countries in the EU I know of, all businesses were closed (by government decree) except explicitly whitelisted "necessary" shopping (like groceries, drugstores, and such) for months on end.
You say that's not how laws work and then you basically say he's rihght.
You say you "just need to... collect fines". And that is the OP's point.
Without enforcement you do not get relevant levels of compliance. Just upping the fines seems easy but if your enforcement percentage is 0 (or close enough to 0 as felt by citizens) you will not get compliance.
Theres a balance if you ask me. If it costs $5000 to be caught after curfew but police go home when curfew hits too instead of patrolling the streets, you will likely have no compliance. If you get caught at least 50% of the time then $5000 probably isn't even necessary and say $1000 will be 'enough' for most people.
I believe in those instances they welded backdoors while the front door was monitored by the community enforcement people to make sure each family only sent one member to the grocery store a week, etc. It was also at the outbreak, so you would hope we would have some strong measures at the very beginning when there is highest risk and greatest benefit to the rest of the country and world from strict quarantine.
I don't know that we would have done anything similar for this one if we were ground zero, but hopefully we would have for something like aerosolized Ebola with a contagious yet symptom-free incubation time.
We did come close to doing some similar things to welding to the Grand Princess cruise ship early on.
It should be noted that this is the same CCP that until recently have been simultaneously accusing Spain and Italy and the US of being the origin of the pandemic outbreak, instead of Wuhan.
I don't think you have to trust their numbers, but could they hide extensive outbreaks like the OP is talking about (all numbers being roughly the same and measures having little observable effect)? It would be something like 4 million+ excess deaths.
There are a large number of Western people in China for business reasons, and major Western countries have diplomatic offices throughout China. The US has a Consulate General post in Wuhan itself.
That gives the West an independent source of information about what is going on in China. China can still fudge the numbers, but those independent observations place a limit on how far China can fudge without getting caught.
I don't think thinking of these places as "islands" really makes sense. The USA could do the same for all people flying or driving in. It just has chosen not to. The US could close its boarders if it wanted to.
Just because we have two neighboring countries on north and south borders doesn't mean we couldn't lockdown people from coming in...
> Just because we have two neighboring countries on north and south borders doesn't mean we couldn't lockdown people from coming in...
If there was one thing Trump was all in on, it was closing the southern border. His motivations were obviously not COVID for most of that, but the fact is he was nowhere near able to control that border (let alone close it) despite his best efforts.
Before you downvote me, I'm not saying I agree with Trump's policy on the matter, just pointing out that he did try.
> If there was one thing Trump was all in on, it was closing the southern border.
Is there any source that even suggests that the US's "southern border" played a remotely relevant role in the US's pandemic?
I mean, COVID spread like wildfire in the US throughout a timespan where the US's central government was quite militant in either denying or downplaying it's gravity. Even today we see states and cities taking militant stances in refusing to implement basic public health precautions. Why is the US's "southern border" suddenly relevant regarding covid-19?
The average age in many African countries is in the mid teens, and we know that age is one of the strongest risk gradients. So Africa is not at all comparable with the aging West. Australia and NZ have the huge advantage of no land borders. Everything and everyone comes through a few ports and airports, which already had the infrastructure established to tightly control and monitor everything. Meanwhile most European or North American countries can't close their sprawling land borders without starving their populations. (And the U.S. couldn't close its land borders even if it wanted to.)
> And the U.S. couldn't close its land borders even if it wanted to
Maybe not perfectly, but surely the vast majority of traffic across land borders is at managed border crossings. The US could shut those down, put the army on any unmanaged roads/routes (don’t know if this is a thing) and stop 95% or more of land border traffic?
Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference to Covid - I don’t know about that, but I do question the impossibility claim.
The border is already closed (at least around here) to "non-essential travel". So, no crossing the border for vacationing. But "full" closure would mean blocking "essential" trade (food, oil/fuel, ...), and blocking "essential" workers that commute across the border. It could technically be done, but it'd be incredibly disruptive.
Even with full legal closure, the borders are porous enough for a border wall to have been a talking point in some previous election debates. Build a mile-tall wall out of mithril, and you'd still be left with a ton of unsecured coastline, connected by some rather convenient oceans...
>>And the U.S. couldn't close its land borders even if it wanted to.
Given that until recently the US was quite militant in refusing to act upon the outbreak, and it's a country comprised of hundreds of million of people among which about a third showed themselves to be quite defiant towards even the most trivial emergency public health policies, I don't think it's fair to refer to border control as a relevant factor in the US's death toll.
> Given that until recently the US was quite militant in refusing to act upon the outbreak
Factually untrue. The US was the first country to shut down China travel. And we got called Xenophobic for it. The mayor of Florence even held a “hug a Chinese” day in response.
The US never shut down travel from China, it banned people not from the US from traveling from China to the US. US citizens and some other groups were still allowed to travel.
Singapore started severely restrict travel and quarantining arriving citizens a couple days before the US ban.
Factually true. Shutting down travel from China (at least for Chinese nationals, but not for Americans) after the virus was already openly spreading inside the country, and NOT shutting down travel from Europe, which was having a massive outbreak of its own, was xenophobic theater at best.
> Australia and NZ have the huge advantage of no land borders.
Australia had a major outbreak in Victoria in July last year. Victoria has a 2,550km land border with other states, including with South Australia, which peaked at 10 active cases over the same time period.
The evidence shows that strict quarantining and early lockdowns prevent spread even when there's an outbreak on the other side of a land border, and it also shows that being an island doesn't help at all if you don't do this (see also: the United Kingdom). I don't know why people constantly act like Australia and New Zealand only succeeded because they're islands when they were locking cities down at single digit case counts while the United States and India were packing stadiums full of people when they were getting tens of thousands of new infections a day.
It’s hard to appreciate just how strict the lockdown measures in places like New Zealand and Taiwan have been. People are driven from the airport directly to a hotel, then someone comes and checks on them and they monitor the front door. Even in Hawaii, the arrival quarantine was just in whatever resort you were staying in, and was almost entirely self-imposed.
On the other side of the coin, as someone in Australia I couldn't believe it when I heard that in many other countries you can "quarantine" in a house with other people who are free to go about their day! Of course that's not going to work...
An important bit of information is Victoria indebted itself heavily to contain its outbreaks. The state is in $150B worth of debt and already increasing its taxes and fines to compensate.
It also had the largest exodus of people ever seen. About 11,000 leaving per quarter.
The fallout from businesses isn't know yet either, that'll become apparent after EOFY.
Being an island might make it easier to close borders, but the point is that closing them was likely hugely significant. I'd argue that borders remained open in many countries areas largely due to a lack of will. You could certainly close borders to most tourists and business travelers in any country that does immigration control, like Australia did. You can also close interstate land borders, like Australia did. You can even close borders to major cities, like Australia did. You don't need to close borders to food deliveries, just budget for the logistical headaches. You do have to pay the political and economic cost though. Australia was watching with both envy and horror when we started seeing stories of British people able to go on holidays to Europe again.
I am here in Vietnam (and was in California a few months ago) and the difference is day and night. Lockdown is super strict here. Everyone wears mask (even when it is only a few cases out of millions). It is a 21 day mandatory quarantine (if you get approved to get in). The results speak for itself.
Africa: Hot climate, poor testing, data likely not accurate
Australia: Island, hot climate, pretty heavy travel/quarantine restrictions
New Zealand: Island, rural with very dispersed population, heavily restricted international travel
People may argue that the UK is also an island but fared much worse. To that I would say 1) Much colder climate 2) did not heavily restrict travel like AUS and NZ did.
This is from earlier:
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/excess-mortality-across-countr...
Interestingly Sweden that got famous for defying lockdowns saw an uptick of 1.5% excess mortality per 100K people compared to 12.9% for the US that was relatively more locked down. I'm not sure what to make of it, but it sure is an interesting data point.
Indeed, and Sweden also had the benefit of the lockdowns in the rest of Europe. I don't think you can compare Sweden to the entirety of the US. A single state maybe.
Would you typify the US as more Locked Down than Sweden? Because their numbers are better. If their approach was worse why are their numbers not worse?
I've heard it suggested that there was a lot of voluntary distancing and othet measures taken in sweden. It wouldn't suprise me if there was more actual distancing in "not locked down" sweden than in "locked down" US. But perhaps the protests etc I've seen on TV wetrre exagerated?
the US was not mostly locked down, and indeed made noncompliance with safety measures a major partisan identity issue for the faction controlling the federal executive, the upper federal legislative house, most state governments, and much of law enforcement even in the other states. It mostly had modest, inconsistent, uncoordinated, and largely unenforced restrictions. A few jurisdictions did at least nominal lockdowns for fairly brief periods (California did twice, though virtually every county sheriff had publicly announced that they either would not enforce orders at all or would do so only by education around compliance by the time of the second one near the end of 2020.)
Can we then talk about the economic disruption felt by each respectively compared to the 0.4% difference in death rate? I don’t have insights into either county.
The more cases you have, the more overwhelm your testing system is. The difference in death rate is most probably due to the fact that Finland was testing more positive cases (relatively) to Sweden.
Note it death rate of infected, if you have less infected the death rate should be unaffected as long as you have enough resources to treat everyone equally well.
That data is either wrong or severely outdated. The Economist website [1] has Sweden's excess deaths per 100k at 102 (not 13).
While better than the US -- which was also not really locked down as other commenters state -- it is 5x worse than neighboring Finland, and infinitely worse than neighboring Norway and Denmark (which had negative excess deaths during the pandemic).
You would likely need to look at county by county data. Austin TX is probably closer to Albany NY behaviorally, than it is to Kent County TX. Schoharie County NY is probably closer to your average TX county. America isn't red state vs blue state, it's rural vs urban.
What is more likely is that the name of the interventions had very little correlation with the features that actually matter. Just because 2 places declare a "lockdown", it doesn't mean that they are doing any similar policy.
One aspect is that IIRC California got a much earlier spread than Florida, so any measures taken in Florida to reduce the spread (including by people on their own initiative) effectively happened at an earlier stage.
It seemed like a lot of the states that did well despite opening early were southern states where it isn't really winter when it's winter.
Also I've heard the claim that (to be as apolitical as I can here) in Florida they secured the elderly population more quickly and carefully than in New York. You may want to look into that claim.
I'd say "Florida secured their elderly population more quickly and carefully than in New York" misses the fact that New York ACTIVELY put its elderly in harms way by requiring nursing homes take patients.
If New York ONLY ignored the problem that'd be one thing... but they actively made decisions that led to a large number of deaths - and more importantly those decisions were AGAINST the CDC guidelines.
Heh, well there you go. I wanted to avoid that point to avoid politics (per the OP's request), but yes. Also I think I heard NY wasn't the only state that did this.
>If New York ONLY ignored the problem that'd be one thing
So where would recovered nursing home residents go? Keep staying in the hospital which would mean active covid patients would die in the streets? Or the streets?
I think this is a fair question. I don't think it was anybody's intention to deliberately kill people. Even assuming the worst about people's nature, it's just not great for political careers. I imagine there was a reason for the decision however ill considered.
In hindsight to one of the many unused field hospitals? But at the time we didn’t know how effective the mitigations were going to be and fully expected the field hospitals to be full
From experience in another state, they go first to the hospital, secondly back into nursing home but into isolated quarantined floors with specially trained fully covered ppe'd staff until several times testing negative, then into warm floor, then back to normal resident floor.
Not as I believe initially was case in NY from hospital directly into regular resident floor.
"More than 9,000 recovering coronavirus patients in New York state were released from hospitals into nursing homes early in the pandemic under a controversial directive that was scrapped amid criticism it accelerated outbreaks, according to new records obtained by The Associated Press."
Notice: Not "9000 NH patients sent back from the hospital". 9000 individuals NOT nursing home patients sent to NHs
New York, AGAINST CDC guidelines, forced NHs to house sick people that weren't prepared to handle them - and THOUSANDS of old people died because they then got sick from the influx of COVID patients.
You have some seriously confused notion of what happened in New York (and, I think, similar happened in Texas - I may be wrong on that).
To the big floaty hospital ship the Orange Man sent to NY harbor? That would be a good start. They also converted Javits Center into an emergency hospital that was barely utilized too.
And on top of that, the actively hid deaths of nursing home residents that happened in hospitals to further downplay the impact of COVID to the nursing homes.
If you only watch the main stream media it's no wonder you haven't heard any of this :p
Nursing homes had the biggest outbreaks. Perhaps only prolonged exposure in confined spaces between elderly people was the only pathway that mattered. In some ways I think of it like a fire spreading. There will be spots that burn easily and quickly. But once they burn out, the fire has nowhere else to go that burns as well.
Either you lock people downs and those would reject it will go out nonetheless. Or you don't and people who are at risk will lock themselves down.
There's no particular benefit to one or the other so states do what match their current constituents. And that's exactly what you'd expect in a democracy.
No state had an optimal viral mitigation strategy. The optimal strategy being impractical or even impossible.
Densely populated places that would have acted flippantly would have been much worse.
Densely populated places with mixed unit housing had hurt themselves with the strategy they chose.
So basically California and New York could just barely keep numbers as close to Florida numbers by locking down hard. The methods California and New York chose could have been even more optimized, but not possible for a US government to do.
Where I live, the restrictions have explicitly been tuned so as to not overwhelm hospital facilities. Minimizing deaths was not a stated goal. They measured new cases and how many hospital bed were available, then adjusted restrictions accordingly per County. So for example, you might see no indoor dining in one County, but indoor dining allowed at 25% capacity the next County over. They seem to have done a pretty good job given the stated goal.
California was an early hotspot for the virus, and had a huge amount of cases early on when treatments weren’t great. There was also a big surge over the holidays.
The places hit hardest were very dense cities... viruses spread very well in big cities, regardless of mitigation steps.
Some of the States with the strictest measures were the ones that got hit hard early before much was known about the virus (NJ, NY, CA) so their death tolls could be expected to be higher. Additionally many States that were more relaxed also are more rural so one would expect some differences from that too. Hoping there will be a retrospective on all of this.
I agree. These numbers and methodology are highly suspect to me, particularly given the large self granted estimate range. Obviously lots of room for error. Not very useful analysis imo.
I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist here, but Florida has seemed like a pretty untrustworthy source of info on their covid numbers. There is even an ongoing battle with a data scientist who was fired, according to her, for refusing to fake the covid numbers. Just at a glance, Florida's reported covid numbers seem to be so anomalous compared to the rest of the country, even though when you think of Florida you think of groups at high risk from covid. I can't say they're actually lying about their numbers, but it's enough of an outlier to reasonably remove it from the data set.
The information that a former Florida state data science employee was fired and alleges it’s because she refused to falsify data is not misinformation. She may be lying, it the information I stated was 100% true. Also, don’t come at people with far right propaganda networks as your source of knowledge.
At least one study was done in Florida comparing counties that had mask mandates vs those that did not. The general conclusion matches your observation, mask mandates did not appear to have a material effect on any covid related metrics (infections, hospitalizations, deaths, ect.)
This is a bit nuanced because lots of people wore masks without a mandate, but it is also true that many people are pretty anti mask and definitely won't wear one if not forced to.
From my perspective it is pretty clear that masks did not have a large enough protective effect to show up in aggregate data.
As far as lockdowns go, they work until you end them, at which point you have just delayed the inevitable.
If you want to look at the data yourself, I would highly recommend the following site run by a prof at University of Illinois (use the population normalized graphs): http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Having a hard time finding the primary study I mentioned but I have provided links with some (population normalized) data below.
As far as lockdowns go, they work until you end them, at which point you have just delayed the inevitable.
Where in the data can you see this? Lockdowns don't appear to work. If they did, then places that didn't use them or cancelled them very early would have had drastically higher numbers than other places that kept them and the curves would be clearly moved around. But that isn't visible in the data.
That said, I'm glad you posted those links and agree with you on the lack of effectiveness of mask mandates. I've been posting links like those and various other studies for the past year because it was clear within weeks that these measures weren't having any impact. Sometimes those posts got upvoted but mostly, down down down. Very interesting that the top comment on this thread is one pointing out that lockdowns and mask mandates don't work: it used to be quite the taboo to point that out in this forum. And just recently there were the threads about the WIV, where again, many posts that a year ago would have been sitting at -4 and near-unreadably gray were sitting near the top. It's good to see that some rationality is returning to these discussions, because the data is public and easy to browse. It's not hard to flip through a bunch of countries and observe that you can't figure out when lockdowns/mask mandates started/ended with any reliability by looking at the data, even though affecting the data is the only justification for those measures' existence.
I think there is some evidence that lockdowns at least offered partial mitigation, but my memory is fuzzy on that. They certainly didn't stop transmission but they may have blunted the rate a bit.
I also looked into the mask literature when the pandemic first started and agree there is no evidence to support their effectiveness (unless they are N95s). Even the meta-analysis published by the WHO stated there was no evidence for their effectiveness but tentatively recommend their use as the cost of mask usage was low.
I will add that most of the studies had healthcare workers wearing masks, and did not test the combination of both parties wearing masks. It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective". In this case it's less about being actually protected (N95) and more about lowering the probability of transmission events, which our common leaky/crappy masks may be able to accomplish under the aforementioned conditions.
I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.
I think there is some evidence that lockdowns at least offered partial mitigation, but my memory is fuzzy on that.
If you remember, please do post so I can take a look. Because, the evidence I've seen is all completely unambiguous and resolves the question completely in favour of "lockdowns do not work and have no effect". And actually there are now many simple examples of that, of places where restrictions were not applied, or were applied much less strictly, or were lifted, and no differences were observed in outcomes (e.g. Sweden, Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Belarus, Japan etc).
It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective".
If that were the case then sudden behavioural changes caused by mask mandates should reliably cause graphs to drop or obviously inflect to a lower growth rate. That should happen everywhere mask mandates come in and are well enforced (which they are, this has been measured). But we don't see that. Of course you can cherry pick a few graphs where there seem to be such inflections, but when you look at lots of them it becomes clear there's no correlation with anything.
I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.
I see people wearing masks outside all the time, as well as in empty cars. Health 'experts' say nothing about any of this. So, I'm pretty sure lots of people do believe that unfortunately :(
How strong is anti vaccine / anti mask movement in the US?
As I see there's very little of it "on the american side of the internet", meanwhile "here" they tend to cause a lot of disruption and shitton of missinformation
Strong and unevenly distributed. The more rural the area, the less vaccinations are occurring, and also less mask compliance. So the ~33% anti-vaxxers aren't evenly distributed, they are probably <10% in some and >50% in others. As of May 16, there is about 45% vaccinated in New England but <30% in the deep south.
This means there will likely be covid hotspots and reservoirs for a long time.
I think reflexively labeling every eligible but unvaccinated person as an anti-vaxxer is a mistake (not that you specifically did this here, but many are quick to shame). Many people are on-the-fence for a variety of reasons, and alienating them makes it more likely that they stay unvaccinated. Here are are two examples:
Just last night I met a guy that lives in my building—a gregarious blue-collar type guy. At one point he got kind of hushed and asked me if I had gotten the vaccine (yes) and what my experience was. He divulged he was hesitant (but “not like that”), citing concerns about possible unknowns or side effects. I just tried to convey my honest (very positive/no side effects) experience, some spare stats about vaccine protectiveness, perks (“you can go to Greece!”), and warmly encouraged him to go for it. I like to think I passed my CHA check, since he nodded his approval and said he was going to keep his appointment.
My sister and her husband (a private school teacher earning ~$40k a year in San Diego) recently lost their insurance, only have internet via the library, etc. She is not an anti-vaxxer by any stretch, but is often (understandably overwhelmed by interacting with the healthcare system. In her case, she just needed some reassurance about access/costs and some help scheduling.
Anyways, there are many others out there like them. What seems like a no-brainer to many of us can often be more complex decision/task for many everyday people. And many of them are right there...just one non-judgmental conversation or helping ha f away from being nudged in the right direction.
I would not conflate "anti-vaccine people" with "anti-mask people".
I live in the state of Maryland and yesterday our governor lifted the mask requirement for vaccinated people. I am a fiscal conservative and am vaccinated (got it as soon as I could, because science and common sense informed me that I should). I have relatives, including my own mother, who are far right wing and will not get vaccinated because they believe COVID is a conspiracy and/or "fake" (... I know). As far as I'm concerned, folks who refuse to get vaccinated are on their own and all of the remaining vaccine doses should get sent to people and countries who actually want and need it most. I realize that's cold. I also realise that's a logistical nightmare, but I have zero empathy for people who refuse to get vaccinated and then contract COVID.
So, I am for vaccines, but in regions where vaccines have been fully offered to every single citizen that wants one, I am against forcing the wearing of masks. I still carry a mask in case I'm in a situation that warrants, but I will not inconvenience myself any longer for someone who refuses to do the bare minimum to protect themselves from COVID.
I am not in exactly the same place, but respect your comment as being at least logically self-consistent. It reminds me of Jody Lanard's thread[1] about how the new CDC guidelines are "adultifying" in that they transfer the decision back to individuals rather than paternalistic guidelines. The way I think about it is that until recently, the risk calculus was analogous to drunk driving, but is now more similar to riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
> The way I think about it is that until recently, the risk calculus was analogous to drunk driving, but is now more similar to riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
Appreciate the link and I fully concur with your analogy. It may boil down to some psychological primitive (perhaps some deep-rooted defense mechanism that developed in my youth), but within this analogy I also say "let people wear or not wear helmets on bikes, the risk and evidence have been clearly presented for decades".
I know, in my heart of hearts that this is a cold stance. Perhaps because you can't possibly assume to know the circumstances that led a person not to wear a helmet on a bike (or get a vaccine). Maybe they're a young teen revelling from their parents or were extremely sheltered in some way from the evidence that would have changed their mind. There are a lot of "if's" here. At some point, in my value set, you have to draw the line and look out for yourself and loved ones first.
I went out today without a mask and it was amazing (it felt better than I expected). That said, based on your comment, I will give more consideration to wearing masks in public as general practice for the next month or so. However, I can't live like that forever. There will be a turning point.
Covid makes your country worse. It’s like having endemic malaria. No one wants endemic malaria in their country, and costly government intervention was required to rid the developed world of it.
Similarly, it’s disheartening to see so many people — especially on partisan lines — promulgate the talking point that we just need to “learn to live with it”. This is insanity. Annual mRNA booster vaccines ad infinitum, with continuous vaccine passports is a wholly inadequate vision for the future. Melbourne, Oz — a diverse, international city of 5M — demonstrates it’s very possible to eradicate Covid with international, interregional and interstate border closures, with hard lockdowns plus federal financial support. Four months later, zero covid.
You literally can't close the American brder. As a strict lower bound (based on CBP encounters) 3000 people walk through the desert or jump the fence every day, and statistically many of them have Covid. This is a constant source term to the growth equation that precludes a Melbourne solution, even if the borders were officially closed and optimal lockdowns.
> You literally can't close the American brder. As a strict lower bound (based on CBP encounters) 3000 people walk through the desert or jump the fence every day, and statistically many of them have Covid. This is a constant source term to the growth equation that precludes a Melbourne solution, even if the borders were officially closed and optimal lockdowns.
That doesn’t sound like a long-term problem given the imminent rise of drone patrols, and is likely short term correctable by bolstering security along the US southern border. Like many aspects of the US’ abject failure in managing the pandemic, this seems like a “lack of political will” problem more than anything else.
It's mostly a cost thing, in reality. Closing the Southern border -- "building a wall" if you will -- is an absolutely gargantuan task. The border is huge, many parts it extremely harsh and remote terrain unfriendly to construction projects. Trump made it a huge part of his platform, had a majority, and in four years got a pitiful amount of wall actually built.
A related angle I haven't seen much investigation on is to what degree we'll see negative excess deaths (surely there's a better term, but I'm at a loss) in the coming years due to how much covid impacted older folks.
Searching for what excess mortality looks like in a "normal" (non-pandemic) year, I found this interesting statistic:
> By the year 2017, the United States was already suffering more excess deaths and more life years lost each year than those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020
488 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 89.2 ms ] threadYou might try https://outline.com/PYEgK3 which should fix both problems.
https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-e...
https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-e...
https://infographics.economist.com/2021/20210515_FBC103/inde...
I find this behavior quite disgusting and sadly seen it on many sites.
This is why when economists talk about consumers acting as rational market participants I just laugh and shake my head.
Have they met people?
The import of behavioral econ. definitely remains understated today. I am also interested in philosophical thinkers, like Elizabeth Anderson or Michael Sandel, that take questions like these and explore the implications that they might have for how we ought to structure society.
This isn’t someone deciding between 15% monthly and a nice 4% annual personal loan. This is someone deciding between 15% monthly and homelessness. Choosing the interest rate is rational.
If she's not able to pay back the loan, she will be killed and her family is responsible for paying it back. The amount of undocumented suffering in the poor world right now is huge.
A standard payday loan might be 10% on a $100 advance, repaid after 2 weeks (when your next paycheck comes in). That translates to a 260% APR, even without considering compounding.
Currently, 1.45b doses of a vaccine have been administered, so about as many people have had the vaccine (partially, at least), as have had COVID.
Hopefully the vaccine will make to the rest of the population soon. If not, we’re about 20% done with COVID, world-wide.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina...
I’m pretty jaded at this point. My guess is that the vaccine rollout stalls out in poorer countries and COVID falls out of the news cycle before the majority of deaths.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210422123603.h...
The US isn't an island, and the borders are nowhere near closed. The variants that grow in the other 96% of humans that aren't americans will doubtlessly end up there, and will be end up tending toward vaccine resistance due to selection pressure.
I think this is going to get much worse before it gets better. The disunity of nationalistic selfishness has struck our species once again.
I would get vaccinated ASAP. You're as deserving as anyone else. You don't want to risk spending the rest of your life with impaired breathing.
I know other people who treat this like some kind of joke. You just don't know how bad you might react to it.
I am most worried about the long term effects. If you die, that's one thing, but having lingering after-effects would really suck.
The point was that 100% of the USA could be vaccinated today, and the USA will not be done with covid.
Vaccinating a grandpa helps the grandpa. Vaccinating a super social young person helps everybody else.
Let's unpack that.
Is what you describe a species specific phenomenon i.e. biological in origin? I'm not sure how you'd determine that question, if what you are talking about is "attitude to vaccine inoculation to stave off pandemic spread", since that behaviour is limited to one species, and is fairly recent.
Is what you describe a species wide phenomenon i.e. biological in origin? What does the data from different nationalities tell us? Does the phenomenon occur similarly in all nationalities, or only some?
Is the phenomenon biological in nature, or might it be cultural? Is it even widely held amongst individuals, or might it originate from some other level of organisation e.g. government, media? How would you investigate these questions?
As a private citizen, I'd be 100% for the US helping to vaccinate the world. It's an obvious benefit to the US to not have variants arising outside its shores and coming into the country.
I hope you meant this as a way to sell it, because this view is a terrible, terrible way to approach the world, as it lives outside of the US are only to be preserved insofar as doing so protects USians.
Saving human lives is sufficient reason itself.
I think our experience over the last year and a half has proven that, for many, it is not sufficient reason. Self-interest is a far stronger motivator.
Not just that but it's economically beneficial as well. There are a lot of US jobs that are dependent on exports and tourism from those countries.
(Everyone that can should get vaccinated anyway.)
Edit: To whoever is downvoting this - you are not only wrong, but hilariously directionally wrong, and in a very obvious way. Nothing about my comment should be contentious if you have any idea what's going on.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccination-demogr...
https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccination-demogr...
https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
It's pretty funny that you object to something that is clearly true as "just your opinion" and "misinformation" when you're doing exactly that yourself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It’s not reasonable that commenters should be prevented from engaging with people who vote on their comment. If anything, this just disincentivizes people from actually explaining why they disagree with something.
For exponential processes think of the % done on a log scale. So population of USA is 320M, and ~100M had COVID, or we were 94% (8/8.5) done with it before vaccine was introduced.
Edit-But the effects of the vaccine aren't exponential. You really need to get a good population coverage to axe the thing. And outbreaks can still occur (though less deadly) when/if outsiders come in from populations less vaccinated.
It's R_t < 1 for sustained amounts of time. Where the effective reproduction number depends on the basic reproduction number, and the number of susceptible people, which depends on the number of people who have had coronavirus infections / vaccinations & the durability of immunity.
So some amount < 100% of people infected / vaccinated will create enough spreading "distance" between that coronavirus won't be able to effectively reproduce, because the (limited) vulnerable hosts will be too "far" apart.
But your 'less than 100% infected/vaccinated' is an assumption, not a guarantee. There's an ongoing possibility of immune escape.
Which might not be possible due to many factors, including non-human hosts.
I'm inclined to think that infection by a non-human host would be a different virus with different circumstances (SARS-CoV-1 is considered different from SARS-CoV-2).
Unless, you mean that our reaction to the pandemic globally has allowed a bunch of new non-human reservoirs to form.
We had the chance to eradicate it 16 months ago. But we weren't all ready. Now we'll have to live with it. And as it stands, if another one of those develops, we'll just blow it again. On a positive note: it looks like we got quick vaccination figured out.
With "we" I mean humanity.
One thing I do wonder is whether we will see permanent "Covid-free" zones such as Australia. Or whether they'll drop their guard after vaccinating.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
.1% isn't nothing, but it isn't really a disaster either. The Black Death was 30-50% of the population in Europe. The "Spanish" Flu of 1918 killed about .64% of the US population. Things could still get worse of course. But barring that, and considering the absolute disaster that Covid has revealed our political system and interlocking health and government bureaucracies to be, I think we got off lucky. If this had been a "real" plague, of the kind humanity has faced repeatedly in the past (and has been expected for some time now), we would have been totally and utterly screwed.
Will this serve as a wake-up call? For the most part, probably not. The best we can hope for is that some of the new thinking and systems created for this situation will still be around when the other shoe drops and we really, really need them.
Not necessarily. Part of the reason there was so much pushback against public health mandates was because covid was so tame. You are being forced, by the government, to wear a mask, isolate from others, and stop going to work for an entire year for a disease that, for the vast majority who get it, just makes it so you can't taste or smell anything for a few days along with fatigue and flu-like symptoms. If it were like black death and 50% of people who got it were dying you better believe there would be bi-partisan support for mask usage and lockdowns.
Some call this a test run. I'm not so sure crying wolf qualifies.
> a disease that, for the vast majority who get it, just makes it so you can't taste or smell anything for a few days along with fatigue and flu-like symptoms
People who’ve been sick and survived, even with minimal symptoms, are experiencing long term health issues. It’s one thing to recognize that the early estimates overstated mortality. It’s another thing to minimize what people who’ve survived infection are experiencing.
I would say 65-80% of non-hospitalized people being fine is consistent with the prior comment's use of "vast majority".
The CDC and others have looked at at long term effects, which is where I got those estimates. If you mean it's too early to tell because not enough time has gone by, then we could say the same about the vaccine (which is somewhat valid for both sides, but lacking evidence relegates it more to a belief than fact-based opinion).
The comment wasn't minimizing the impact. They were simply stating that people didn't take it as seriously as they would have if covid was more impactful. I think this is a valid point. We see similar issues in attitudes for other infections that can carry longterm impact (even lack of education and protective measures around stuff like hepatitis and HIV).
> just makes it so you can't taste or smell anything for a few days along with fatigue and flu-like symptoms
Maybe for the “vast majority” that’s true, I can’t speak to the distribution of ongoing impact people are experiencing or will over time. But there are a lot of people who have been infected, have survived, and have ongoing complications that go well beyond this description.
"Maybe for the “vast majority” that’s true"
That's why they qualified it as such. Even the flu has long term impacts in 10% of patients. So yeah, long term impacts are a concern, but the attitudes of many people (the commenter's point) are based on the fact that the majority of people are fine. For example, have you ever considered that you have a 10% chance of long flu effects? I would guess that like most people, you have not, because the vast majority of people are not affected by it.
In the end we are making all this effort to stop a virus, while we sell (with profit) cigarettes that makes each years an only slightly smaller number of deaths. So to me, if we care about public health so much, just stop selling tobacco and we reduce the mortality. But do we care? In the end, we need people to die, at one point.
If you don't think death is a big deal, you are welcome to live your life courting it. But I don't get the performative lack of empathy for those dead, those deeply sick, and the living who have to deal with both the rest of their lives.
Instead, you have this insidious disease that is so easy for people to compare to the flu and common cold, and it preys mostly on the oldest and most frail, so many people went with a "I'll be fine" attitude. And most of those folks did survive. And the virus just continued to spread, steadily doing its thing, killing millions of people worldwide.
Look I wore the mask like everyone in HK since the first day, but you have to admit you talk of it like it could kill you. It wouldn't, deaths are rare.
Millions of people are not a big relative number... There are things that must kill way more that you consider absolute necessity, like coca cola, whisky or cigarets.
That’s the point that all people challenging the lock downs and mask are trying to make. It just kinda ignores the whole “this can cause it to be more likely to be encountered by a person who will handle it poorly” thing.
As to your "millions of people are not a big relative number" point - at the peak of the pandemic in the USA, COVID became the leading cause of death.[0] That seems fairly major in a relative sense.
[0] https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/slide/covid-19-now-...
Which is to say, comparing deaths across centuries is hard. It’s hard to say how many people COVID would have killed without oxygen and intubation in the time period of the Black Plague. That it killed as many as it did even given our medical advances may indicate that it is in some absolute sense much worse, not better.
The populations were much lower back then. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, so there are probably many more deaths to come.
As a percentage of the population, why would this matter?
Other than for population density which you would generally expect to cause an increased rate of infection, not less.
Conservative estimated deaths: Coronavirus - 3M Black death - 75M (in ten years) Spanish flu - 35M
California doesn't export much in the way of staples, so that's probably quite a stretch: https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331/
In general arguing that a particular authors contributions in an area have been less than stellar is not an ad hominem attack.
0.23% IFR might be correct or even too high for India or African countries where maybe 2-3% of the population are pension-aged. In western countries with 18-20% pensioners, IFR is definitely above 0.5%.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... Look at the second table
So, if looking at historical trends and the current demographics as compared with those trends we had a prior expectation of your 1%, then what we we actually observed is 1.17%.
So the pandemic is responsible for the 17% (in this scenario) uplift above baseline plus an unknown portion of that baseline itself.
To be honest one cause, which changed a lot of behaviour that rolls into the baseline, pushing the global baseline up that much seems pretty impressive to me.
Would be also interesting to consider distribution of that excess and how China fared in the excess mortality department. After the early days they seemed to keep it tightly under control, and they contain an enormous portion of the world’s population. That might suggest that excess mortality elsewhere was even further above baseline and the excess mortality only looks this good because 1.2 billion people mostly stuck to baseline?
It will indeed be interesting to see how the distribution of deaths plays out.
Out of curiosity, do you have any sources on that?
I’ve been interested in this topic after observing, locally, a number of politicians who had previously pushed hard to cut funding for mental health and who were ideologically opposed to the concept of lockdowns suddenly and vocally expressing a great deal of concern about mental health & a supposed uptick in suicides that was (they claimed) going to be worse than COVID itself.
When all was said and done, though, suicide rates in my locality were significantly lower than average: https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/suicide-deaths-in-alberta-in-2020...
Where are you getting your information from.
If plane crashes increased 17% in a single year, it would be bit. If cancer deaths increased 17% in a year, it would be pretty remarkable.
It will also be interesting to see how death rates behave in the following years post covid, since it did affect elderly population disproportionately.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...
It will take years still at that rate, but they also have been doing a reasonable job of meeting and then increasing their projections.
Seeing 600 a day is something I hope we never see again.
India had been seeing near 400,000 cases per day. That's an entirely bogus number of course. And it's near universally agreed upon that it's bogus. The question is whether it's a million, two million, five million, whatever. What's actually closer to the truth? That's where everybody abandons ship, I never see the news media go deep into that part of it (and yet they happily report the made-up flu numbers every year).
Part of the comedy of it, is that the supposed truth enforcers are enforcing a fraud, because none of these official counts are anywhere close to real, no matter which country you pick as the topic.
Is India seeing 4,000 deaths per day, or 10,000, or 15,000? It's a dramatic difference across a month of time. The best you'll get out of the media is a little edge statement of: but it's suspected to be under-reported. Yeah, no kidding.
The US has seen 33 million cases of Covid - that's the reported media line in every story. Everyone knows it's bogus and doesn't represent anywhere close to the number of actual infections in the US and yet it's reported on as properly representing the scale of the pandemic in the US. There has been so much intellectual fraud in this pandemic.
So the obvious question: if they very widely report the made-up / guess-work flu counts every single year, year after year, across all media, why haven't they been doing exactly the same thing with Covid? That's what I want an answer to. Everyone avoids throwing out flu-like guesses on the real scale of the pandemic - the CDC doesn't want to do it, the media doesn't want to do it, the government broadly doesn't want to do it. Why aren't they reporting that it's more likely that there have been 60, 90, 120 million (etc) cases of Covid?
edit: and the downvotes on this are fascinating too, given what I'm talking about is rooted in obvious reality not propaganda or conspiracy theory. I've noticed reality - objectivity, facts, logic - has been particularly unpopular during the pandemic, people have been letting their emotions control their reactions to everything. I don't believe there are very many people ignorant enough to think the official positive Covid counts actually represent the pandemic properly; I do think there are a lot of people desperate to hide from reality for one reason or another, however.
And thats a helpful (if not the only one) indicator on whether there will be enough ICU beds one month from now. If not, we should consider lockdowning.
We should probably assume that, in addition to not following some practices we should have, we also did a lot that we didn't have to.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html list the states by "of all time" and "deaths" which shows FL with 168 deaths per 100k and CA with 159, only two slots apart.
For one thing, regardless of state mandates, you can bet your buttons that a huge number of residential/nursing facilities for seniors in Florida did lock down, and thereby protected those most likely to increase Florida's numbers.
If you want to see the effects of policy, don't compare states (especially big diverse ones like California). Compare, for example, San Francisco (with peak 7-day-average new cases of 363, total cases 36.7k, and population of 874k) and Miami (peak 7-day-average new cases of 3240, total cases 494k, and population of 2710k). Per capita, Miami was about four times worse.
SF: https://www.google.com/search?q=san+francisco+covid+numbers
Miami: https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+covid+numbers
Also, case numbers are a bad thing to measure. Death numbers are more reliable.
EDIT: also, it appears state policy exacerbated the nursing home problems in California:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/06/editorial-newsom-falt...
Those years of life are still lost.
It’s true they would have died eventually anyway. But that’s true of everyone.
In the end everything just shifts number because we all die. I just think this virus mostly hit the people at risk of dying which should have been made it morally easier to let them die, rather than hurt others trying to keep them alive. But that's exactly what the western world did. I would understand it if children where affected. We would morally justify that someone with cancer dies a bit earlier if we can safe the life of someone who still has many years to come.
Pretty much ever country has seen a 15-20% increase in excess mortality rates (20% more people dying than averages in the past), this is huge.
This is one of the best up to date visualizations on this topic, scroll down and see breakdowns by country - https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...
I mean, if you go back far enough, 1 out of 5 people died by homocide. That still wouldn't make it reasonable to say that we're "relatively good" if only 10 million Americans a year are getting murdered.
Death, and specifically premature death, is still a very unfortunate reality. Playing it down as if "well it happened more often in the old days" is, frankly, a bit bizarre.
Also we must evaluate the increase in mortality in a longer period. I can as well being that most of the people that died of COVID were either old people or people with other health issues that would have died anyway in a year or two.
The problem with COVID to me seems that everyone just remembered that people will die. In the old days death was normal, there were wars, there were al sort of illnesses and infections that caused death, it was common to see people die even at young ages. And I don't talk about centuries ago, it was like that till the end of WW2.
Nowadays we are used to people that lives till 90 years, we no longer have wars, we are able to cure practically every illness, so a virus that kills slightly more people that we are used to see terrifies us. But in reality, it's nature, we will all die one day, COVID or not, so there is no real reason to fear it to me. In fact, we will live worse life because of the fear of this virus, and all the restrictions that we had put in place to avoid that (without so much success, in the end).
Are you sure you thought this whole thing through?
It's kind of like zooming in to a stock market graph so the spikes look bigger.
People can read and shout - I WAS RIGHT!! Only 0.1% people die of covid, lockdowns were unnecessary, masks don’t help, everyone’s a sheep for believing covid is anything more serious than a flu. Now they want to vaccinate us for this, what a joke. Wake up people!!
This is how people can misunderstand and spread misinformation because they don’t have the experience reading and interpreting such data and make conclusions.
Per [1] United States’ current covid deaths is 912k. That is twice the amount USA lost during WW2.
So on one side of the spectrum we have “wake up people, 0.1%, this is a hoax” and on another side we have that more people died from covid in a single year than the sum of all war and terrorist casualties USA had in the last 150 years.
Context matters.
[1] - http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess...
It's true that fewer lives were lost to wars in the past 150 years and terrorist attacks. But that's also a somewhat misleading data comparison. Terrorism is basically nothing for Americans but is implied to be relevant. The 150 years mark is carefully chosen to avoid including the civil war, which comes close to matching covid numbers on its own, nominally, and is hugely higher on a percentage level (it was ~2%).
Context matters. Normalized to population size, you would need 20 COVID 19 pandemics to match the scale of the civil war. The proportional rates for other countries besides the US which tended to do quite well in WWII were obviously much more slanted towards the effects of war. Some light googling suggests Germany lost about 10% of its population during wwII. The overall world lost about 3% of its population (~80 million people).
Covid was not a hoax, but you're pushing a fair heaping of bias while implying to take any other view would be misunderstanding or spreading misinformation
You seem to be taking it a step further to create a messaging strategy around these numbers that will cause the reaction you think is best for everyone. While the intent is noble and may work in practice to some extent, I don't think that's a good thing. That leads to a lot of distrust of experts because people can sense it.
Early in the pandemic, when most everything was shut down, I had to run an errand and ended up driving down some streets I’ve driven many times before. The percentage of cars driving erratically on the road was much higher than usual.
I figure one of these might explain it:
1. People are stressed / distracted, and driving poorly because of it 2. Most drivers are well-meaning and conscientious, but most of those conscientious people were staying at home as public health officials directed, so the few people left on the road were more disproportionately less conscientious 3. Fewer cars on the road meant I noticed the bad drivers more readily
Other hypotheses?
Drug and alcohol use is up, due to lack of entertainment outside the home, and that affects driving as well. More speeding or racing for thrill seeking as a result of boredom.
Many new drivers for Amazon Prime, Uber Eats, Fedex/USPS etc. who are under time pressure to deliver fast, which they're not used to.
For example, people treating a red light as a four way stop, or just slowing down and running through it.
It didn't last very long as far as I observed, but it definitely was a thing in Portland.
At the time I thought it was because there were so few cars on the road. Your point, 2. seems like a solid explanation to me.
In some cases it wasn't just that drivers were "not as conscientious," but more actively taking advantage of a lower amount of vehicles and LE patrol.
There is some evidence of this from the multiple record-breaking Cannonball Run challenges performed in May and June 2020 with no new records recorded since. [1]
Another explanation is that well-meaning drivers were treating urban driving the way folks do out in rural areas, where stop signs are sort of followed "as appropriate" by locals.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Run_challenge#Durin...
"The nonprofit National Safety Council estimates in a report issued Thursday that 42,060 people died in vehicle crashes in 2020, an 8% increase over 2019 and the first jump in four years.
Plus, the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven spiked 24%, the largest annual percentage increase since the council began collecting data in 1923."
"Motor vehicle fatality estimates are subject to slight increases and decreases as data mature. The National Safety Council uses data from the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the CDC, so that deaths occurring within 100 days of the crash and on both public and private roadways – such as parking lots and driveways – are included in the Council’s estimates."
It's hard to figure out exactly how to credit this—perhaps the overall excess COVID deaths are being counted as part of the "100 days"? But the USA Today article quotes lots anecdotal data from state highway officials that back up this claim, including an increase in speeding tickets and an increase in crashes that involve intoxication over the same time period: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2021/03/05/pandemi.... The 8-9% number they quote is also backed up by Minnesota's own statistics, which I would imagine are more limited in what they consider a traffic death.
Is this true? The rest of the possible explanations you cite make sense, but the USA Today article I cited earlier contains a quote from the Minnesota traffic safety department saying that the number of speeding tickets handed out went up in 2020, almost 100% (from 500 tickets in 2019 to 1,068 in 2020).
A 24% spike in the US is absolutely insane.
While the excess deaths are awful, it’s also important to keep the number in context. The death rate has been decreasing for over a century, and in absolute terms, the death rate of 2020 looks like the year 2000 [1].
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/25/is-it-real...
About a third of US deaths were in nursing homes, and that doesn't include people who probably could / should have been in nursing homes from a health and self-sufficiency perspective. 85% were 65 or older (65 isn't especially old that's just the lowest data threshold I could find). I am fortunate enough to not know anybody who died from COVID.
Concerns about long lasting effects might be true. We might see this having substantial long term effects and that could be bad. It could be worse than the impact of the deaths.
That aside however, I just don't think a one time 20% increase in annual mortality is that terrible, but that does not mean that the virus was trivial.
If I'm understanding this chart correctly, forecasted 2021 death rate per 1,000 people (not covid adjusted) plus 20% is less than the 1970s... and the next 50 years as well.
(EDIT: Sorry idiot math. The 2021 rate + 20% is above any historical rate since 1970, and is on par with expectations 2050 onward)
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...
This includes all sorts of demographic assumptions about age, but so does COVID, I would argue, in the least convincing demographic groupings possible.
Maybe COVID was a genuine threat but on a whole we did a pretty good job and it wasn't that bad in total effect as a result?
Using the entire human population also skews things because the deaths were concentrated in North America, South America and Europe. To over generalize, Asian countries did a much better job at managing the pandemic and have a population of 4.5 billion people. Most of the deaths were concentrated in the remaining 2.5 billion.
If everyone of the 7b people lived 100 years, we would expect about 70 million deaths a year, and we know they don't live 100 years on average. Any reasonable range of assumptions puts this in the range of too-small-to-detect. Which doesn't mean it doesn't matter or isn't important, but it does mean that this is not a good method for estimating it.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-deaths-b...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7866842/
Legitimate question, please no political commentary.
Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.
I had to go do business in LA specifically around Manhattan Beach and Inglewood, and the folks that live there were taking me to strip malls where all the businesses looked closed but we're all actually open.
They just had their windows covered. I'm talking about an MMA gym next to a hair salon next to an Ethiopian restaurant.
Their man lost so it kinda didn't.
But I don't think that SF's 62 deaths/100k (compared to e.g. 240 for LA and 232 for Miami) is solely explained by that, and that the tighter (and more adhered to) restrictions did play a role.
Without the poorly considered relaxations in Oct/Nov, despite clear indicators for a worsening situation, it'd have ended up better...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
All it takes is a single spreader moving from outside of the metro area to negate the effect of the lockdown, specially if a considerable portion of the population is quite militant in their refusal to follow even the most basic health and safety precautions.
So are the vast majority of people, and greater population density makes it harder to control the spread of communicable disease. So you’d expect, all other things being equal, not only thr vast majority of cases but the highest per capita cases to be in the metro areas.
But, actually, the highest per capita infections (both total and current) were mostly in rural, not metropolitan, counties.
Can you please cite your sources for this claim? I just did the math using the numbers of infections[0] and the county populations[1] and it doesn't really seem to match up with your claim at all.
There are 58 counties in California.
San Bernardino, LA, and Riverside counties are numbers 4, 5, 6 respectively for highest cases per capita and all have populations above 2.2 million.
Of the bottom 10 counties in cases per capita, only 2 have a population larger than 100k (SF, Humboldt)
[0] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-counties/states/ca
At least in hindsight, the closing of schools might have been a huge mistake.
In Nov-Feb, I was losing 40-60 employees a week to infection or quarantine. Mostly people in essential IT support positions
My sons school was open most of the year, but shutdown for a month due to teacher quarantines.
> Hospitalization rates in children are significantly lower than hospitalization rates in adults with COVID-19, suggesting that children may have less severe illness from COVID-19 compared to adults.
Less severe response to it, not "less chance of getting it." And then just two lines later:
> Recent evidence suggests that compared to adults, children likely have similar viral loads in their nasopharynx,7 similar secondary infections rates, and can spread the virus to others
I don't know how you arrived at your opinion here.
But I don't follow the science closely enough. I hope they're making the right call, because it's really hard on the kids. I'm just glad my own little guy is not of school age yet, and in fact is young enough to be mostly oblivious to the whole thing.
There are a lot of confounding variables in these analyses. It’s going to take years to tease them apart, and we may never truly know for certain in some cases.
The point is not "is it wise to take precautions"; that's obvious. The point is we don't necessarily have great data on which precautions work better than others because they're largely all being put into effect at the same time.
We actually do, though, and it's preventing close contact of non-household members and preventing sharing enclosed spaces with non-household members for long periods of time.
People spread the virus before they even know they're sick, and a subset of sick people either need to go to work despite being sick, or they just don't care.
It's going to take time and years of research to tease out things like "did closing schools specifically help".
It wasn’t until we closed schools that the trend reversed.
People are so quick to blame fear without actually looking at the data
The other way to think about it is that it wasn’t until things got bad that people got cautious.
Kind of how people take homeopathic drugs when they are sickest.
Unfortunately, some of the things done were disruptive, and if they were also ineffective, that will lead to blame. But our mission should be honesty first, and have faith that reasonable people can accept that the best decisions were taken with the information available at the time.
Regardless, school is being done online. Kids that needed laptops got them.
Right, I forgot University of Phoenix regularly matches their in-person counterparts in terms of quality. Keep telling yourself that teachers who were never trained to do remote teaching are anywhere near the same effectiveness as before. You ever dissect something virtually? Somethings can simply not be learned through a screen. Physical education, dealing when your crush looks at you in the eye, literally anything "hands-on" like swinging a hammer at a nail, the of useful skills that can only be developed in the presence of another human are tremendous. Funnily, most of the useful things learned at school for most people are not the curriculum and it is these things that are missing.
How do you isolate when there's more members than actual rooms in the home & only one one restroom?
Another study in Eur J Clin Inv had similar findings comparing countries: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484
COVID went wild basically everywhere. There were a few strong exceptions: China (apparently), Australia, New Zealand and some others. What these had in common was very strict police enforcement, which led to some dramatic scenes like people getting welded into their houses in China, or houses in Australia getting broken into by police on suspicion of too many people gathering.
In my _opinion_, lockdowns didn't work elsewhere because most cases are not from casual public transmission in places like stores, restaurants etc. Rather, events like kickbacks, dinner parties, and practices like in-home workers (nannies, cleaners etc) continued throughout the pandemic, or resumed shortly after the original March 2020 shockwave. While strident police enforcement of physical distancing could eliminate cases, and seemed to in a few places, the half measures used by most of the world did little-to-nothing positive while being an economic and cultural disaster.
Personally, I never caught COVID and rarely socialized during the pandemic. All the cases I heard of stemmed from the kind of thing I mention above: private dinner parties, nannies and so forth, rather than casual public transmission.
You, or any individual may have taken social distancing seriously but it's clear many or most did not, including people on both political "sides", up to and including governors, members of congress etc.
Further, as a comparison, Tokyo Metro has 38 million people, California has 38 million people. Tokyo Metro has ~6500 people per square mile, California has 240 per square mile. Tokyo Metro had and still has people commuting in very crowded trains every weekday. California mostly people drive cars. California closed restaurants. Tokyo Metro never closed restaurants.
Yes, Tokyo is going through a "spike" right now but compared to California it's still tiny. Compare Tokyo Metro's current "spike" (~2k people per day) with any of California's spikes at 40k per day, 20x more.
Some people will claim testing but that doesn't fit the facts either. Deaths from COVID in Tokyo Metro. California 62k death, Tokyo Metro, 2k dead. And, if you believe the attribution of death by COVID is bad then all you have to do is look at the death rate from all causes and see that Japan is doing much better than the USA
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
I have no idea what Japan did right or got lucky with. Various speculations abound. Japanese don't shake hands, hug and kiss friends. Japanese may be commonly taking some medicine for unrelated things that happens to provide protection. Japanese might have more people with genetic immunity. Japanese mask compliance might be higher. Japanese aren't obese (I'm sure there's some other non-obese country they can be compared to). Japanese have a different diet (not sure what other countries have similar diets)
I recognize that even with restaurants open it's possible just the various other factors are/were enough to keep R low enough.... I really have no clue. Personally I mostly stayed locked up. I live alone. Saw less than 1 person a month in person, usually an outdoor walk with masks on.
My guess is that the low obesity rate is the critical factor, but that remains somewhat speculative.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7430889/
A) Japan has a more temperate climate
B) Japan is an island and was pretty strict about locking down travel and forcing everyone entering the country to quarantine for 14 days
C) Japanese culture seems to promote very rigid adherence to rules and proper social etiquette.
If you can act earlier, maintain a external boundary, and maintain a low enough level to trace then I think you can stay in a very good state with minimal inconveniences. But once the infection rate has passed a certain level, more stringent strategies are needed to get back to the same low state.
To address the parent question - one thing to keep in mind is that states are extremely heterogeneous, and "Did or did not lock down/mask mandate/etc." isn't actually a binary variable, but a very difficult to measure continuous response of both policy and compliance.
It became more extreme during the Trump era with many historically red suburbs around cities turning blue and some rural areas turning more red.
Not sure how possible it is to get accurate info in this environment.
"Widespread assumptions that suicide rates would increase during the pandemic are not supported by the growing amount of evidence coming out of Canadian provinces and other jurisdictions around the world, say experts who study the topic."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/suicides-alberta-bc-s...
Please let’s remember it is not a simple lever.
Let’s remember the overflowing ICUs and morgues and the very very limited menu of possible immediate actions - all this amongst unprecedented scrutiny, politicization and division.
We’re human. We’re doing the best we can. Lockdowns do flatten the curve.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-ss-prem-covid...
I think we need something much stronger before we enter into evidence such a powerful allegation.
EDIT: http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess... seems to suggest California covid deaths were underreported to a greater degree than Florida. That would be even stronger evidence that Florida had better outcomes compared with the disruption.
Only followers of fringe left wing Twitter believe any of that.
So there was overcounting, but somehow excess mortality in 2020-2021 is higher than in normal years? How?
>with comorbidity being counted as a COVID death even when the patient had 2 or more serious health conditions already
A high percentage of people in the US have "serious health conditions" like diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure etc. If Covid accelerated their deaths then it should be counted as a covid death because they would likely be otherwise alive now. If you want to get pedantic there's a measure called QALY(quality adjusted life years).
Musk said there would be zero cases in the US by April 2020 among other dumb predictions, so I don't think he's the best person to go to for Covid related information since his domain is technology and not epidemiology. https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/03/13/elon-musks-...
People dying of heart attacks because they didn’t seek timely care because of fear of going to the hospital. Medical screenings postponed. Undetected cancers. Suicides. There is a direct correlation between unemployment rates and disease. My annual physical, due in July 2020 was cancelled. How many other people’s were as well? Also one also should note increases in deaths of despair. That’s a real thing.
Excess deaths can’t be called “covid,” without proof that they were. How would else know Covid was the cause and not the flu? Are we just assuming excess deaths were Covid? The uncomfortable truth is that lockdown proponents don’t want to admit that their policies may have caused more damage than the disease from which they were claiming to protect us.
I don’t know the answer. My point is that excess deaths aren’t necessarily Covid deaths. That’s an assumption, not a fact.
Most of these will show up at a later time. And some of them were caused by hospital overcrowding, doctors trying to save themselves etc. not lockdown.
>Suicides.
Suicides are down.
>My annual physical, due in July 2020 was cancelled. How many other people’s were as well?
How many people die within a year due to something that's caught in a physical? I'd say barely any. If you're counting them then you should also count the lives saved by reduced pollution due to the lockdowns.
>Also one also should note increases in deaths of despair. That’s a real thing.
Suicides are down.
>Excess deaths can’t be called “covid,” without proof that they were. How would else know Covid was the cause and not the flu?
Because flu deaths are included in normal rate of deaths. If you're saying there are multiple times the number flu deaths than during a normal year with no measures to contain it, and it doesn't show up on the yearly disease surveillance, then you're arguing in bad faith.
>The uncomfortable truth is that lockdown proponents don’t want to admit that their policies may have caused more damage than the disease from which they were claiming to protect us.
The uncomfortable truth that pro-covid(and anti-vax people) don't want to admit is that their attitude of calling covid just a flu or something less harmful has caused death, disease, hospital overcrowding, increased number of lockdowns due to increased cases/deaths, and damage from the lockdowns. Compare the economies of countries that strict lockdowns but were able to open up sooner like Australia, New Zealand, China etc.
Do you think people will keep participating in the economy and crowded events etc. at the same rate if there are scenes like this at hospitals? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Y1YakG60s
Now that things are opening back up, if there is hospital overcrowding and more covid deaths and cases due to the pro-covid and anti-vaccine people, then who is to blame for the economic damage and death from ensuing lockdowns?
The jury’s still out in my case.
https://tallahasseereports.com/2020/05/20/rebekah-jones-firi...
Please stop spreading misinformation. Rebekah Jones wasn't a data scientist and was never asked to falsify any numbers. She is simply a liar.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-cov...
"Who do you share a bathroom with" is very important for tracking transmission. In NYC, everyone shares a bathroom.
[0] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dep/water/combined-sewer-overflows...
[1] https://www.riverkeeper.org/campaigns/stop-polluters/sewage-...
Masks in public are not all that burdensome, so imo the mandates were reasonable regardless of the actual impact, but I wish they would have re-evaluated closing businesses a lot sooner, since that did a ton of economic damage, and the benefit there seems very questionable. I doubt the CA statistics would have been any different if they had never banned outdoor dining, for instance, or even just kept most businesses running normally but with an indoor mask requirement.
Comparing CA to TX and FL, it's also pretty hard now to argue that closing playgrounds and schools made much difference either, and that has had a severely negative impact on kids. I understand doing it in the first place when everything was unknown, but they should have been quicker to revise in response to new information.
the best mitigation would have been to get people to generally distance around familiars indoors and don a mask if you’re going to spend time in close proximity or face-to-face for a while. that would have required families to treat each other as threats rather than safeties, which is why that was not tenable. it’s so much easier to treat strangers as threats.
this best mitigation would have led us to violate a visceral belief about the world, creating significant cognitive dissonance, and that’s why we instead focused so much on ineffective measures to protect ourselves from strangers with masks and lockdowns that didn’t tackle the core infection vector through familiars. it’s really not that difficult to unravel what was happening, even at the beginning. watching us dance around this elephant in the room as if it didn’t exist has been no less than maddening.
Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US. There are countries (SK, Japan) with tiny numbers of cases.
There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better.
One key area I think the US did really badly on was messaging - basically, having Trump drawing the whole thing into his orbit made everybody feel like it's just business as usual. It's hard to take something really seriously when the nation's highest elected official talking nonsense about it on Twitter, so obviously people don't follow rules. Public health messaging is really easy to get right, and the nations that have done really badly (Britain, the USA, Brazil) all had heads of state who did the worst possible kind of messaging.
The latter part doesn't follow logically from the first. It can be that performance is essentially random, or determined by geographical factors, or by the pre-existing health of the population, and so on. The assumption that governments can control respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 is at the heart of all of this but needs very strong evidential support, given how strong the evidence against this belief is by now.
If you look at the data then there are no obvious explanations for why some countries did better than others. It's far from insane to observe this. There are a lot of plausible sounding explanations but they all fall apart due to exceptions, e.g. Japan did very little for a long time and yet has hardly been affected. In fact Asia in general has not been strongly affected (Taiwan is another example) despite a wide variety of response severities, which raises the question of whether Australia/New Zealand's relatively good performance is due to location rather than behaviour. Meanwhile Latin America was very hard hit despite some truly totalitarian responses by the authorities.
Your own explanation is especially weak because it appears to be based on a cartoon New York Times interpretation of what happened outside the USA. The British government's messaging was the polar opposite of Trump's. The PM appeared next to two chief scientists every single day, and the government was basically replaced by SAGE, the scientific advisory board. The SAGE scientists took total control of the messaging including designing large scale ad campaigns specifically designed by behavioral psychologists to provoke as much fear as possible in the population. The UK also has by far the highest vaccine uptake in the world. The whole thing had a singular focus, the messaging was very well organized to an extent that evokes people's worst fears of competent totalitarianism and so the idea that the UK was somehow doing the same things as Trump just has no basis in reality.
Yet, in the end, it didn't seem to matter. Sweden has had lower excess deaths despite consistent year-long messaging of chill, relax, it's no big deal. Hence, politics can be pretty conclusively eliminated as the source of any differences.
Anybody who thinks the UK represents competent totalitarianism needs to really think about where they are getting their news from. The UK's response was objectively worse than similar countries, in that more people died per capita, and this was because of two late lockdowns, both late because top politicians ignored scientific advice.
The success of the vaccine rollout is arguably the result of the government's procurement efforts, but also deserving of credit are the UK population (overwhelmingly non-skeptical), and the NHS, which allows for a highly organized and centralized rollout.
Vaccine skepticism isn't based on a question or challenge towards experts - questions or challenges exist within a specific framework, a specific body of knowledge. Rather, it is based on a challenge to the value and nature of expertise itself. As such, it's absolutely compatible with docility, totalitarianism, and antipathy towards questioning. In fact, since experts are experts by virtue of their existence within a specific body of knowledge, they are always by their very nature open to questions and challenges. Attacking the idea of expertise can as such be a way of attacking these areas of open questioning and challenge.
A good example of this is how authoritarian governments are typically hostile to academic institutions.
there are a plethora of open questions in vaccine science and epidemiological policy that naturally allow for skepticism. it’s not only political or partisan. you can strip away the political and still be left with plenty valid skepticism.
and yes, skepticism challenges the notion of expertise itself. it suggests humility is undervalued, that an ‘expert’ knows so little against the backdrop of the world’s knowledge (much less the world itself), especially when the ego becomes intertwined with the ideological. experts over time trend toward surety rather than openness and inquiry, especially as stature rises in a field. it’s so common that the out-of-touch know-it-all is a storytelling caricature.
while it’s not always a valid line of attack, questioning the basis of “expertise” can certainly unveil erroneous assumptions, poor methodology/data, and faulty reasoning. the raison d'être of skepticism is to push knowledge forward, not hold it back, and this sort of challenge is just as valid as any other in this regard.
finally, authoritarian governments are hostile toward academic institutions due to concerns over its power and legitimacy as embodied by... skepticism (of the state and its propaganda).
As for your cited quote, would you like me to cite the thousands of other things government leaders have said over the course of the year that support my point? Yes, the PM is a naturally optimistic guy. None of the people around him are, and they've all been ramping the fear factor to 11 continuously, and in particular they controlled the public messaging not the PM. With the result that there is now a serious problem in the UK with people who are afraid to leave their own homes.
Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics.
Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the middle of one of the UK waves was about as dangerous as regularly riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
You seem frankly a bit divorced from reality. If you go to a chart of the daily incidence rate before either the first or the second wave, then mark on it when the lockdowns occurred, it's clearly visible that they occurred too late.
I had to discourage my at-risk mother from going to a choral Christmas concert last year, at a time when they were clocking 40,000 new cases every day and that number was doubling every few days. That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was, and at the time, conservative ministers were still going on TV and talking about a five day christmas.
If you go to the deaths graph, you can see that as a result of this awful mistake, tens of thousands of people died. This is plainly visible in the statistics. Whatever political axe you have to grind is frankly irrelevant, and to be honest, facetious.
You can also look at the different performance of US states (none) despite very different measures.
That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was
In other words you were terrified and forced that fear on your family, based on a mis-understanding of how to use data to draw scientific conclusions. And now you're accusing anyone who points out the truth to you of political axe grinding, although it's you who just threw in a random mention of "conservative ministers" implying their politics is responsible for lots of deaths. That's a political talking point!
At least here in the UK, lockdown meant not seeing friends or family (unless you lived with them). Was that not the case in the US? Of course if people flout the rules then they won't have any effect.
Outside of those times there were restrictions on meeting indoors (at times max 6 people, at other no meeting indoors at all) pretty much continuously since last April.
Of course, I'm not an epidemiologist or public health expert, so while I have some guesses I'm not sure what exactly they did that was more effective - but there's no question that it was more effective. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what to do next time, I'd start there. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what not to do next time, well...
and no geographer either apparently :D
These countries are also far poorer and in the case of Thailand especially that has been a major contributing factor, as they've been less able to afford closing their country to tourism.
Also, the vaccinated population in either country is at low single digit percentage, so no end in sight for the harsh measures. Compare that to the US or Europe where 50% of population is (partially) vaccinated and, as the result, gradually reopen.
"highest number of cases" here meaning between 1 and 2 cases per million people per day.
For context, the United States is currently at its lowest daily case count since June last year, which is slightly above 100 cases per million people per day.
"Even with various levels of lockdown both countries have 1-2% of the case count of countries that didn't treat this seriously" isn't quite as dramatic of a statement though I guess.
(all figures using the typical 7 day rolling average and data available from Mackuba)
I agree that there could be a way for this to work in the US but it would be a long slog. South Korea seems like they could pull it off. So I'll grant you them for sure as being superior.
What would even be framed in the media when these were really user videos without journalists. Journalists couldn't report live, so i don't think there's something else than opinion pieces.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/08/china-...
However... at least for Taiwan that doesn't feel like it adds up:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan
They've had fewer than 1700 cases, and that's including a recent massive outbreak. They peaked on March 26th 7-day average with 21 cases a day. Granted, the US took maybe a couple more weeks to ramp up to its first plateau, so maybe if it was caught here a few weeks earlier it would have made all the difference. But it feels a lot more like Taiwan just didn't have a lot of travel to and from Wuhan?
That’s bad, it might get a lot worse, and we’re all nervous — but just wanted to add the context because “massive” can mean a lot of things with orders of magnitude difference.
BTW is there a vaccination drive over there? That's got to calm things down somewhat right?
There are all kinds of effective measures (e.g. contact tracing, quarantining of unconfirmed suspect cases) that work when you have 20 cases a day and don't work when you have 2000 cases a day, so going all-in while you still have just a few cases works, because by the time you have many cases, it's too late.
The current Vice President of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te, has a Master's degree in Public Health from Harvard. The previous VP, Chen Chien-jen, has a Master's degree in Public Health from National Taiwan University. Taiwan takes public health seriously, especially after the original SARS experience.
Nobody in Taiwan thinks the virus is a "scam" or that masks are a "tool of oppression." Even before the pandemic masks were totally common. There is complete public buy-in on masks without even having to be asked. Some of my friends work in a clinic in Taipei so I hear updates. I was also in Taiwan last year for a month. The difference in attitude between the US and Taiwan is startling. If the US had acted like Taiwan, instead of acting in a way that was indistinguishable from sabotage, we'd have a lot fewer deaths and would have avoided a recession.
What western government could pull off welding doors shut the way they did in China? Even if the government had emergency powers that "allowed" it, would they have had willing workers to do it?
Western governments have pulled all kinds of restrictions themselves, from curfews, closed borders, and "let's close all retail businesses" restrictions, to mandatory movement monitoring.
Heck, Italy might not have welded doors, but had the Army patrol to enforce strict lockdown, and citizens in northerns cities stay inside.
Sometimes this even meant closing them in-house with the corpses of their dead (from covid) relatives for several days. There were several such reported cases, e.g.:
https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-...
https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-...
There are not enough police in most of the US to actually enforce closing businesses, let alone confining people to their homes. Especially not when half the populace sees it as a political infringement of their rights.
There's not enough police to enforce no traffic violations at all either (what would that be, a traffic cop for every street or car?). That's not how laws work, you just need to make a law/rule and collect fines from the businesses that violated it. If there wasn't the political will to do so in the states, that's another thing.
But in at least a couple of countries in the EU I know of, all businesses were closed (by government decree) except explicitly whitelisted "necessary" shopping (like groceries, drugstores, and such) for months on end.
You say you "just need to... collect fines". And that is the OP's point.
Without enforcement you do not get relevant levels of compliance. Just upping the fines seems easy but if your enforcement percentage is 0 (or close enough to 0 as felt by citizens) you will not get compliance.
Theres a balance if you ask me. If it costs $5000 to be caught after curfew but police go home when curfew hits too instead of patrolling the streets, you will likely have no compliance. If you get caught at least 50% of the time then $5000 probably isn't even necessary and say $1000 will be 'enough' for most people.
I don't know that we would have done anything similar for this one if we were ground zero, but hopefully we would have for something like aerosolized Ebola with a contagious yet symptom-free incubation time.
We did come close to doing some similar things to welding to the Grand Princess cruise ship early on.
That gives the West an independent source of information about what is going on in China. China can still fudge the numbers, but those independent observations place a limit on how far China can fudge without getting caught.
Just because we have two neighboring countries on north and south borders doesn't mean we couldn't lockdown people from coming in...
Literally do not get this argument.
If there was one thing Trump was all in on, it was closing the southern border. His motivations were obviously not COVID for most of that, but the fact is he was nowhere near able to control that border (let alone close it) despite his best efforts.
Before you downvote me, I'm not saying I agree with Trump's policy on the matter, just pointing out that he did try.
Is there any source that even suggests that the US's "southern border" played a remotely relevant role in the US's pandemic?
I mean, COVID spread like wildfire in the US throughout a timespan where the US's central government was quite militant in either denying or downplaying it's gravity. Even today we see states and cities taking militant stances in refusing to implement basic public health precautions. Why is the US's "southern border" suddenly relevant regarding covid-19?
Maybe not perfectly, but surely the vast majority of traffic across land borders is at managed border crossings. The US could shut those down, put the army on any unmanaged roads/routes (don’t know if this is a thing) and stop 95% or more of land border traffic?
Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference to Covid - I don’t know about that, but I do question the impossibility claim.
Even with full legal closure, the borders are porous enough for a border wall to have been a talking point in some previous election debates. Build a mile-tall wall out of mithril, and you'd still be left with a ton of unsecured coastline, connected by some rather convenient oceans...
Given that until recently the US was quite militant in refusing to act upon the outbreak, and it's a country comprised of hundreds of million of people among which about a third showed themselves to be quite defiant towards even the most trivial emergency public health policies, I don't think it's fair to refer to border control as a relevant factor in the US's death toll.
Factually untrue. The US was the first country to shut down China travel. And we got called Xenophobic for it. The mayor of Florence even held a “hug a Chinese” day in response.
https://rmx.news/article/article/fears-of-being-called-racis...
Singapore started severely restrict travel and quarantining arriving citizens a couple days before the US ban.
https://www.gov.sg/article/how-is-singapore-limiting-the-spr...
A faster travel ban for Italy and other EU countries would have done the US more good.
Australia had a major outbreak in Victoria in July last year. Victoria has a 2,550km land border with other states, including with South Australia, which peaked at 10 active cases over the same time period.
The evidence shows that strict quarantining and early lockdowns prevent spread even when there's an outbreak on the other side of a land border, and it also shows that being an island doesn't help at all if you don't do this (see also: the United Kingdom). I don't know why people constantly act like Australia and New Zealand only succeeded because they're islands when they were locking cities down at single digit case counts while the United States and India were packing stadiums full of people when they were getting tens of thousands of new infections a day.
(Despite not being an island, AK is still highly comparable to OZ.)
It also had the largest exodus of people ever seen. About 11,000 leaving per quarter.
The fallout from businesses isn't know yet either, that'll become apparent after EOFY.
Canada did greatly restrict the border!
Australia: Island, hot climate, pretty heavy travel/quarantine restrictions
New Zealand: Island, rural with very dispersed population, heavily restricted international travel
People may argue that the UK is also an island but fared much worse. To that I would say 1) Much colder climate 2) did not heavily restrict travel like AUS and NZ did.
the US was not mostly locked down, and indeed made noncompliance with safety measures a major partisan identity issue for the faction controlling the federal executive, the upper federal legislative house, most state governments, and much of law enforcement even in the other states. It mostly had modest, inconsistent, uncoordinated, and largely unenforced restrictions. A few jurisdictions did at least nominal lockdowns for fairly brief periods (California did twice, though virtually every county sheriff had publicly announced that they either would not enforce orders at all or would do so only by education around compliance by the time of the second one near the end of 2020.)
They failed to actually achieve 'herd immunity' and did not avoid the eventual virus death toll:
https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/sweden-cris...
By comparison Finland, it's neighbor took a much stricter approach and never reached the same level of death.
Finland: 931 deaths at 168 per million with a 1.0% death rate.
https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/finland
Sweden: 14275 deaths at 1406 per million with a 1.4% death rate.
https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/sweden
Sweden: https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/gdp-growth-annual
Finland: https://tradingeconomics.com/finland/gdp-growth-annual
Looking at those charts they show very similar economic outcomes for the two countries.
Of the last 4 COVID effected quarters Finland won two and Sweden won two.
And Sweden actually felt the highest quarterly contraction at -7.7% compare to the -6.1% for Finland.
That 0.4% difference suggests Finland's health system was better than Sweden's at handling the virus, as your chances of dying were much less.
When it comes to actual deaths Finland was doing over 830% better (i.e. 168 per million compared to 1406 per million) than Sweden.
Edit: Fixed my bad math. My 90% better figure was out by a factor close to 100.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
Also I've heard the claim that (to be as apolitical as I can here) in Florida they secured the elderly population more quickly and carefully than in New York. You may want to look into that claim.
If New York ONLY ignored the problem that'd be one thing... but they actively made decisions that led to a large number of deaths - and more importantly those decisions were AGAINST the CDC guidelines.
WHY they made the decisions is a rabbit hole... but the facts are simple.
So where would recovered nursing home residents go? Keep staying in the hospital which would mean active covid patients would die in the streets? Or the streets?
Pretty shitty. That people are willing to gaslight around it over politics is shittier still.
Not as I believe initially was case in NY from hospital directly into regular resident floor.
https://www.wxyz.com/news/region/detroit/20-year-old-beating...
And Cuomo has the balls to write a book patting himself on the back for doing such a good job? Utterly disgusting!
This ain't "grandma went to the hospital and got sent back to the nursing home" and it was never about that.
Hospitals were over stressed so they sent sick people to nursing homes.
https://apnews.com/article/new-york-andrew-cuomo-us-news-cor...
"More than 9,000 recovering coronavirus patients in New York state were released from hospitals into nursing homes early in the pandemic under a controversial directive that was scrapped amid criticism it accelerated outbreaks, according to new records obtained by The Associated Press."
Notice: Not "9000 NH patients sent back from the hospital". 9000 individuals NOT nursing home patients sent to NHs
New York, AGAINST CDC guidelines, forced NHs to house sick people that weren't prepared to handle them - and THOUSANDS of old people died because they then got sick from the influx of COVID patients.
You have some seriously confused notion of what happened in New York (and, I think, similar happened in Texas - I may be wrong on that).
And on top of that, the actively hid deaths of nursing home residents that happened in hospitals to further downplay the impact of COVID to the nursing homes.
If you only watch the main stream media it's no wonder you haven't heard any of this :p
There's no particular benefit to one or the other so states do what match their current constituents. And that's exactly what you'd expect in a democracy.
Densely populated places that would have acted flippantly would have been much worse.
Densely populated places with mixed unit housing had hurt themselves with the strategy they chose.
So basically California and New York could just barely keep numbers as close to Florida numbers by locking down hard. The methods California and New York chose could have been even more optimized, but not possible for a US government to do.
During the first wave New York and New Jersey got hit really hard. Basically, it was too late to do anything.
You could be less restrictive in a rural area, while the same policies would have been very harmful in cities.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7313247/
The places hit hardest were very dense cities... viruses spread very well in big cities, regardless of mitigation steps.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-cov...
This is a bit nuanced because lots of people wore masks without a mandate, but it is also true that many people are pretty anti mask and definitely won't wear one if not forced to.
From my perspective it is pretty clear that masks did not have a large enough protective effect to show up in aggregate data.
As far as lockdowns go, they work until you end them, at which point you have just delayed the inevitable.
If you want to look at the data yourself, I would highly recommend the following site run by a prof at University of Illinois (use the population normalized graphs): http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Having a hard time finding the primary study I mentioned but I have provided links with some (population normalized) data below.
Florida counties (scroll down to second graph near the bottom for the start of the discussion): https://rationalground.com/after-nine-months-we-still-know-m...
Various graphs showing infection rate pre and post mask mandate: https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/
More mask graphs, mostly US states: https://rationalground.com/post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-sti...
Where in the data can you see this? Lockdowns don't appear to work. If they did, then places that didn't use them or cancelled them very early would have had drastically higher numbers than other places that kept them and the curves would be clearly moved around. But that isn't visible in the data.
That said, I'm glad you posted those links and agree with you on the lack of effectiveness of mask mandates. I've been posting links like those and various other studies for the past year because it was clear within weeks that these measures weren't having any impact. Sometimes those posts got upvoted but mostly, down down down. Very interesting that the top comment on this thread is one pointing out that lockdowns and mask mandates don't work: it used to be quite the taboo to point that out in this forum. And just recently there were the threads about the WIV, where again, many posts that a year ago would have been sitting at -4 and near-unreadably gray were sitting near the top. It's good to see that some rationality is returning to these discussions, because the data is public and easy to browse. It's not hard to flip through a bunch of countries and observe that you can't figure out when lockdowns/mask mandates started/ended with any reliability by looking at the data, even though affecting the data is the only justification for those measures' existence.
I also looked into the mask literature when the pandemic first started and agree there is no evidence to support their effectiveness (unless they are N95s). Even the meta-analysis published by the WHO stated there was no evidence for their effectiveness but tentatively recommend their use as the cost of mask usage was low.
I will add that most of the studies had healthcare workers wearing masks, and did not test the combination of both parties wearing masks. It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective". In this case it's less about being actually protected (N95) and more about lowering the probability of transmission events, which our common leaky/crappy masks may be able to accomplish under the aforementioned conditions.
I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.
If you remember, please do post so I can take a look. Because, the evidence I've seen is all completely unambiguous and resolves the question completely in favour of "lockdowns do not work and have no effect". And actually there are now many simple examples of that, of places where restrictions were not applied, or were applied much less strictly, or were lifted, and no differences were observed in outcomes (e.g. Sweden, Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Belarus, Japan etc).
It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective".
If that were the case then sudden behavioural changes caused by mask mandates should reliably cause graphs to drop or obviously inflect to a lower growth rate. That should happen everywhere mask mandates come in and are well enforced (which they are, this has been measured). But we don't see that. Of course you can cherry pick a few graphs where there seem to be such inflections, but when you look at lots of them it becomes clear there's no correlation with anything.
I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.
I see people wearing masks outside all the time, as well as in empty cars. Health 'experts' say nothing about any of this. So, I'm pretty sure lots of people do believe that unfortunately :(
As I see there's very little of it "on the american side of the internet", meanwhile "here" they tend to cause a lot of disruption and shitton of missinformation
This means there will likely be covid hotspots and reservoirs for a long time.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/states-r...
Just last night I met a guy that lives in my building—a gregarious blue-collar type guy. At one point he got kind of hushed and asked me if I had gotten the vaccine (yes) and what my experience was. He divulged he was hesitant (but “not like that”), citing concerns about possible unknowns or side effects. I just tried to convey my honest (very positive/no side effects) experience, some spare stats about vaccine protectiveness, perks (“you can go to Greece!”), and warmly encouraged him to go for it. I like to think I passed my CHA check, since he nodded his approval and said he was going to keep his appointment.
My sister and her husband (a private school teacher earning ~$40k a year in San Diego) recently lost their insurance, only have internet via the library, etc. She is not an anti-vaxxer by any stretch, but is often (understandably overwhelmed by interacting with the healthcare system. In her case, she just needed some reassurance about access/costs and some help scheduling.
Anyways, there are many others out there like them. What seems like a no-brainer to many of us can often be more complex decision/task for many everyday people. And many of them are right there...just one non-judgmental conversation or helping ha f away from being nudged in the right direction.
I live in the state of Maryland and yesterday our governor lifted the mask requirement for vaccinated people. I am a fiscal conservative and am vaccinated (got it as soon as I could, because science and common sense informed me that I should). I have relatives, including my own mother, who are far right wing and will not get vaccinated because they believe COVID is a conspiracy and/or "fake" (... I know). As far as I'm concerned, folks who refuse to get vaccinated are on their own and all of the remaining vaccine doses should get sent to people and countries who actually want and need it most. I realize that's cold. I also realise that's a logistical nightmare, but I have zero empathy for people who refuse to get vaccinated and then contract COVID.
So, I am for vaccines, but in regions where vaccines have been fully offered to every single citizen that wants one, I am against forcing the wearing of masks. I still carry a mask in case I'm in a situation that warrants, but I will not inconvenience myself any longer for someone who refuses to do the bare minimum to protect themselves from COVID.
[1]: https://twitter.com/EIDGeek/status/1393987801260204034
Appreciate the link and I fully concur with your analogy. It may boil down to some psychological primitive (perhaps some deep-rooted defense mechanism that developed in my youth), but within this analogy I also say "let people wear or not wear helmets on bikes, the risk and evidence have been clearly presented for decades".
I know, in my heart of hearts that this is a cold stance. Perhaps because you can't possibly assume to know the circumstances that led a person not to wear a helmet on a bike (or get a vaccine). Maybe they're a young teen revelling from their parents or were extremely sheltered in some way from the evidence that would have changed their mind. There are a lot of "if's" here. At some point, in my value set, you have to draw the line and look out for yourself and loved ones first.
I went out today without a mask and it was amazing (it felt better than I expected). That said, based on your comment, I will give more consideration to wearing masks in public as general practice for the next month or so. However, I can't live like that forever. There will be a turning point.
Similarly, it’s disheartening to see so many people — especially on partisan lines — promulgate the talking point that we just need to “learn to live with it”. This is insanity. Annual mRNA booster vaccines ad infinitum, with continuous vaccine passports is a wholly inadequate vision for the future. Melbourne, Oz — a diverse, international city of 5M — demonstrates it’s very possible to eradicate Covid with international, interregional and interstate border closures, with hard lockdowns plus federal financial support. Four months later, zero covid.
That doesn’t sound like a long-term problem given the imminent rise of drone patrols, and is likely short term correctable by bolstering security along the US southern border. Like many aspects of the US’ abject failure in managing the pandemic, this seems like a “lack of political will” problem more than anything else.
> By the year 2017, the United States was already suffering more excess deaths and more life years lost each year than those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/United-States-COVID-19-was-...