I've replaced the article's title in accordance with the HN guidelines [1], using a representative phrase [2] from the article itself. If anyone can find a better such phrase, we'd be happy to change it again.
Oh good lord the first two paragraphs. Are you really going to "think of the children" this issue while immediately roasting your rhetorical adversary for making decisions based on what they thought at the time was best for the safety of children?
This is sure to be one of many articles that use the benefit of hindsight to paint policymakers and scientists who were being cautious, deferring to the scientific consensus as it was best understood at the time, and operating with very little very messy real life data as deceivers because they didn't magically know everything from the beginning.
Misc comments:
It's not okay to just say that only the old, fat, and vulnerable are at risk of dying so why should everyone else have to take all these precautions? The lack of empathy is staggering.
"Stay at home orders" didn't literally mean stay confined to your house at least around here. You could go outside at literally any time during the past year regardless of orders.
Moving the goalposts and "covering up their failures" has another less-pejorative name "updating your recommendations based on research and data." If you're upset that scientists didn't tell the public "here's our recommendation based on the data we have -- it's probably not perfect so you should just not listen to us and go with your gut" I don't know what to tell you. Everyone was sanitizing everything at the beginning of the pandemic until it came out that transmission was basically entirely airborn then everyone stopped. Those flip-floppers working for Big Purell.
> You could go outside at literally any time during the past year regardless of orders.
If you talk about Europe and parts of Asia, I can tell you from experience that, no, you couldn't go out of the house for long periods of time in certain hourly intervals during the past year.
Here in the UK we technically had a "1 hour of exercise a day" rule at one point, but it wasn't enforced at all (people congregating in groups was, but someone just taking a 4 hour walk instead of a 1 hour walk wasn't). I think it was mostly a case of having to make the rule a bit stricter than it actually needed to be so that the level people actually followed it was at the correct level. I've heard that there were stricter restrictions in France/Italy/Greece at points.
The author is a teacher in the SF Bay Area. I also live there and went on plenty of walks, runs, hikes, and drives all through the early pandemic. I voluntarily restricted my interactions, but there were plenty of people around here acting as if nothing was going on with absolutely no interference from law enforcement or anyone else.
this isn't entire true - actually i don't think there was a single country in europe that made going outside alone an actual fine with law behind it. it was made to appear that way, but i've heard many anecdotal stories that when stopped by the police, the police ended up admiting they couldn't really do anything
> It's not okay to just say that only the old, fat, and vulnerable are at risk of dying so why should everyone else have to take all these precautions? The lack of empathy is staggering.
You're not representing the article fairly. For example, here is the passage where the author mentions obesity:
Vitamin D and exercise have both been linked to better outcomes for COVID-19 patients. In the U.S. 78% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 were overweight or obese. Lockdowns caused Americans to gain an average of two pounds per month and reduce their daily steps by 27%, thereby increasing the likelihood of adverse COVID-19 outcomes.
If you disagree, fine, but at least disagree with what she's actually saying.
While true I could be more charitable to the article I think it would do a disservice to not point out the fact that the author constantly minimizes the impact of the pandemic by highlighting how the death rate is for lower the non-elderly non-vulnerable non-obese and there’s no reason to even being this up unless you’re trying to drive home the subtext.
> thereby increasing the likelihood of adverse COVID-19 outcomes.
Assuming they get the virus! Which the lockdowns were supposed to prevent! If you do the math and the benefit of the lockdowns were small, and the risk from gaining weight was large, then fine, but the pathologic case of this logic looks like: "The government wouldn't let me drive to the store today because of the tornadoes. They say I should go tomorrow, at which point I'll be older, and therefore statistically a worse driver, putting me at an increased risk."
I'm VERY open to critiquing the lockdowns on these kinds of grounds, I'm just getting sick of folks with an agenda bringing a condescending tone and the false appearance of logic to a complex discussion.
> Assuming they get the virus! Which the lockdowns were supposed to prevent!
The key words being "supposed to". COVID killed as many people as it did despite lockdowns that destroyed the economy and ruined everyone's lives for the past 15 months.
Well, presumably it would have killed more without the lockdowns, but it's not clear how many more. It sounds like you're saying not doing lockdowns would have been worth the extra deaths. Which is certainly a justifiable argument if we're being specific, but absent some sort of rough sense for how many extra deaths, it seems like a bold kind of thing to write a blank check for.
Yea. One thing is, to know how many people would have died without lockdowns would require to go into some other dimension or universe where this was the case. Otherwise, its about accurate as me saying what the world would like if world war 2 had not happened. It would require too many assumptions for it to be reliable
There's no need to imagine other dimensions, Sweden and numerous US states which did not lock down allow us to make at least a ballpark guess as to how different the outcome would have been in terms of deaths from Covid. North Dakota vs South Dakota is a particularly apples-for-apples comparison. Even adjusting for the greater population density of some of the lockdown states & countries, it's not a massive difference.
South Dakota has a higher death rate per capita than north dakota. Both are in the top 3 for covid cases for per capita. I would say bad example. Where as California was an extreme compared to either state and per capita death rate is 161/100,000 and South Dakota is 229/100,000. That is a roughly 42% difference between South Dakota and California?
I mean, New York was also an extreme compared to South Dakota, and more comparable in terms of latitude, and it had a 20% higher per-capita death rate. But I don't think either it or CA make for a very good comparison as opposed to ND, whose per-capita Covid death rate was about 10% lower than SD's. This is the upper bound on lives saved by the lockdown policy, from which you have to start subtracting out deaths from the knock-on effects of lockdowns (isolation, delayed medical screenings and treatments, economic impacts, etc).
Which is why I pointed out that the problem is to complex to perceive what the world without the measure looked like with accuracy. To add on to your list, lives lost that would have been prevented if a hospital was not ran over and medical care stretched to thin and rationed. We can both run endless what ifs to show that we have absolutely no clue what a world that managed covid differently would have looked like. Even taking foreign countries into account, countries have different cultures. I've never been to Japan but my dad who has done business there said a person masking up when they had the common cold was considered a general courtesy pre-pandemic. Some countries also manage health differently. Many European countries, like Cuba, put a lot more towards preventative care than we do in America. Economic impact of a sufficient amount of workers being sick at facilities to stop production or slow production. Endless things we could name to tweak what a different reality looked like.
> It's not okay to just say that only the old, fat, and vulnerable are at risk of dying so why should everyone else have to take all these precautions? The lack of empathy is staggering.
Nobody was saying not to protect those people or lacking empathy for them. In fact, the opposite is true. We were saying that we should have focused our measures on protecting just them, rather than treating everyone as equally vulnerable.
There were plenty of instances of state leadership (not sure if you are in the US or not) asking people to stay in their homes and not go out or meet with people. This is message from the Wisconsin governor when he signed the Executive Order for staying at home:
That “order” contains recommendations, encouragements, and suggestions. It doesn’t seem to be legally enforceable.
I think every state had its own variation but ultimately after around April 2020 everyone has been free to get in a car and drive anywhere or get on a plane and fly anywhere within the USA. Some states had compliance regimes where you were supposed to quarantine or be tested after arriving, or be fined, but many did not. I traveled to one state with such an order twice and each time it was essentially voluntary - there was a theoretical fine if I didn’t follow the rules, but no one ever checked up on me to make sure I had a negative test. Unlike overseas governments (Singapore, Australia, China, vietnam, etc) our restrictions were basically on the honor system everywhere.
I believe one major exception is Hawaii where they actually did enforce quarantines somewhat and jailed or expelled tourists, and also had the lowest cumulative per-capita covid death tolls.
Based on the data from Worldometers, Hawaii is running a CFR (ratio of confirmed cases to fatalities) of 1.4% per capita which is low but not as low as say Utah, Nebraska, Wisconsin, others which remain below the US national CFR average of 1.8%. Frankly, that Hawaii did this the way it did is a scary abuse of power in my mind. As an opposite example, the UK which had and still maintains restrictions and lockdowns that are greater than the US maintains a CFR of 2.7%. If you are going to quarantine, quarantine the most vulnerable populations (if they want to be quarantined. Personally, my grandfather refuses to quarantine at all since that reduces his ability to be around his family). It seems inadvisable to quarantine a low risk population, especially as we are starting to see speculation of the negative impact lockdowns have had to the general immune response of the body to other diseases.
Are there things we need to look at? Yes. But if someone doesn’t save your life then you won’t be around to argue about how they could have done it better. It’s also pretty rich to claim the numbers don’t add up and substitute numbers that don’t add up either.
Speaking about the war on reality (original title):
This article claims an infection fatality rate of 0.15%.
Currently we list 604 thousand Americans dead from COVID, that’s 0.18% of the entire population - not the infected population. Brazil is at 0.23%, and rising fast. Worldwide it’s almost 4 million out of 181M reported cases. That’s over 2% IFR.
If one were to assume that everyone in these countries was infected and we are just really awful at reporting, that number is still wrong. But the US is currently reporting a hair over 1:10 people as having been infected, and Brazil has not crossed that threshold yet, so 0.15% is already empirically - to use the technical term - horse shit [1].
Since the quarantine was about firewalling especially vulnerable populations, I won’t hazard a guess as to how this would have scaled, but we do know that if it had scaled, a great many people would have not had or lost access to medical equipment and labor that was in extremely short supply. The argument about how we didn’t actually run out of beds or labor may or may not be true for the rate of exposure we actually experienced but claiming that would not have been affected by a do-nothing policy is arguing both sides.
[1] This article should make you cussing-angry, because this sort of retroactive second-guessing is going to get a lot of people killed the next time around. Most especially old people.
According to the CDC[0] the number is a bit lower but in the same ballpark. Do you think the CDC cannot be trusted or the medical professionals that determine cause of death?
If you look down that page, the CDC provides several estimates of COVID-19 mortality based on different methodologies. The current range is between about 583k and 729k.
You're right, it's most likely too low. IHME did a study and revised their estimate upward, and are saying that there have been an estimated 926,000 Covid-19 deaths in the US as of today[1].
> Are there things we need to look at? Yes. But if someone doesn’t save your life then you won’t be around to argue about how they could have done it better. It’s also pretty rich to claim the numbers don’t add up and substitute numbers that don’t add up either.
Using this argument, we can justify anything that was done in the past on the basis of "well, we're here to argue it over now, so it must have been the right thing".
> Currently we list 604 thousand Americans dead from COVID, that’s 0.18% of the entire population - not the infected population. Brazil is at 0.23%, and rising fast. Worldwide it’s almost 4 million out of 181M reported cases. That’s over 2% IFR.
Regardless of the exact number, isn't it a bit disturbing to you that, per the article, "Americans also estimated that the share of COVID-19 deaths for people between 18 and 24 was 8%"? The fact that we're so misinformed can't be a good thing, can it?
For my money, it's plausible that we massively overreacted (or misreacted) to covid. The opposite is also plausible though. It's a good thing that we're having this conversation and it's mildy creepy that we haven't been able to have it until now.
Finally, there's a question that always comes up with this topic: is it permissible for public employees to lie to the public in order to get them to do the right thing (or whatever they think the right thing is)? A lot of the anger over the government's handling of covid has to do with that. It isn't unreasonable to believe (as I do) that, consequences be damned, the government is obligated to tell the truth and should not lie to get people to act a certain way.
I don’t think it is weird we are talking about it now. The last year was mostly about getting through it, and only now can we start putting data in context.
I can only say what is needed : a medicine is number one. Making society resilient against airborne viruses and we need absolute data on what tools we have to stop a virus in a room with people.
But last but not least it’s also a behavioral problem (which you allude to from a different angle) where people are making decisions that allow the virus to spread. I talked to a red cross doctor and he said that distancing and masks in a hospital setting is pretty much enough to kill transmission. It was his opinion that truly honoring the guidelines would have stopped it.
> Americans also estimated that the share of COVID-19 deaths for people between 18 and 24 was 8%"? The fact that we're so misinformed can't be a good thing, can it?
The correct numbers have been available on the CDC website the entire time, unfortunately a lot of people either don’t care or don’t find it useful to memorize those statistics. Not great to see but I think it track’s with the public usually mangling other statistical numbers as well when surveyed.
> A lot of the anger over the government's handling of covid has to do with that. It isn't unreasonable to believe (as I do) that, consequences be damned, the government is obligated to tell the truth and should not lie to get people to act a certain way.
Agree, the fact that so many government leaders spent a year downplaying the danger of the virus and lying to their followers to try to win an election or for other political reasons should make people angry and upset. It’s always sad seeing the stories of someone who was led astray by those leaders and subsequently even refused the vaccine and died of Covid-19 because they had been convinced it was just a common cold that only killed nursing home patients.
No, dividing the number of reported cases by the number of reported deaths absolutely does not give the infection fatality rate. For example, the UK has one of the most widespread testing programs in the world and also monitors the actual infection rate via sampling, and we're still not detecting most Covid infections and reporting them as cases. I think for a while the government was even publishing estimates of what proportion of infections were being found, and it wasn't much, can't find them off-hand though. Covid-related deaths, though, are pretty well reported since pretty much anyone touching the medical system gets tested. (Some countries have been massively underdetecting deaths but they're making an even worse job of reporting mild cases...)
> Currently we list 604 thousand Americans dead from COVID, that’s 0.18% of the entire population - not the infected population. Brazil is at 0.23%, and rising fast. Worldwide it’s almost 4 million out of 181M reported cases. That’s over 2% IFR.
If one were to assume that everyone in these countries was infected and we are just really awful at reporting, that number is still wrong. But the US is currently reporting a hair over 1:10 people as having been infected, and Brazil has not crossed that threshold yet, so 0.15% is already empirically - to use the technical term - horse shit [1].
Your analysis is severely flawed from the fact that you are equating the number of "confirmed cases" with "number of infections," but many infections are never confirmed with a test (and indeed never even become symptomatic).
The article links to a source to support its 0.15% number, but some others are below:
Did you ignore the GP's first sentence? For 0.15% to be right either the death #s have to be significantly overinflated, or more than 100% of the U.S. population must have been infected with COVID.
0.5 and 0.27 are both larger #s than 0.15, so that supports the GP's point.
The 0.15% IFR estimate is a worldwide number. There is a significant variance between countries. Unfortunately Americans on average are older, sicker, and fatter so they tend to die more.
The articles gets things right as well. Cuomo's decisions were atrocious and clearly wrong without the need for hindsight. School closures in the US are odd, and varied to the point of following no science and in large part being politically driven. And the cost of lockdowns is fairly well known, and deserves critique.
The articles's tone is distinct and specific, and going to rub some people the wrong way, but tone shouldn't be confused with the correctness or incorrectness of an argument.
I'd say unfortunately, because tone is far too prevalent in online media, but the horse seems to have bolted on keeping the tone neutral, and I'd wager a strong tone likely leads to higher "engagement", so people have collectively decided with their actions how they feel about tone.
1)I'm no mathematician or statistician, but as I understand it the IFR also counts an estimate of those presumed to have had an asymptomatic case. A published study earlier this month estimates that the reported number of non-hospitalized cases between February and September of 2020 accounts for 1 out of every 7 cases of reported infection because of reasons like the symptoms weren't typical or didn't appear at all, amongst others. I don't know if that puts the IFR as low as they are saying, but it's still pretty low.
2) The lockdowns have not shown any statistical data to the effect of controlling the transmission of the disease. As an aside, they actually have some support that they may have created a negative impact overall as people were forced to reside with family members who contracted and passed on the disease. There are plenty of anecdotal pieces of evidence on both sides of the argument on the subject of lockdowns. That in and of itself should be an indicator for caution and moderation when calling for unilateral action.
3) Even if one subscribes to the idea that the lockdowns did have a positive effect in controlling the rate of infection, the lockdowns were never billed as protecting the vulnerable. That was masking. The lockdowns were billed as an effort to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. Sure, while there were hotspots and times of higher activity, I have not personally come across data that shows that these hospitals were ever in danger of being over-whelmed. However, I have personally seen examples of people who have lost their jobs in the medical industry because the shift to a laser focus on COVID-19 caused someone to lose their job due to lack of the necessary funding.
I don't know that any numbers are really going to add up for quite some time. I do think that the imposition of unilateral action like lockdowns was a terrible idea and the cost of doing so will continue to show itself over the next several years. Data will continue to change and be updated just like it is for all major medical events. It appears to me that perhaps the best course of action is making recommendations to people and letting them chose their own path. The history of this country and trying to impose something by force is not exactly stellar.
My memory from the time of the initial lockdowns in the US was that we saw hospitals in other countries being overwhelmed, that scared the crap out of our public health experts, and that drove our response. I don’t know how close any areas in the US eventually came to that scenario.
In some ways this is similar to the response to the issues around Y2K. Did we need to spend as much as we did on that? We don’t have an alternate universe to compare with.
You're confusing case fatality rate with infection fatality rate. Due to limited testing actual infection numbers are far higher than case numbers. The current best estimate of worldwide IFR is about 0.15%, with a wide variance between countries.
The figure I most often cite is 0.68% from the study by Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and Lea Merone[1]. That paper is skeptical of serosurveys that show high incidence (see the discussion of reference 61, which is by Ioannidis).
Ioannidis responded with the paper you cited, the preprint of which contained a personal and unprofessional attack against Meyerowitz-Katz, removed from the published version, though a scientific critique remains. Meyerowitz-Katz responded on Twitter[2], mostly to the substantive critiques. There's more drama around this, with a number of prominent virologists taking M-K's side (see the Twitter threads).
Also see the PubPeer reviews for this paper[3], which contain more serious criticism of Ioannidis.
I go into detail here to make a few points. The main one is that, especially when there's legitimate scientific controversy, citing a single paper can really fail to give the whole picture. Another is that "the science" isn't one simple monolithic set of beliefs, even on such a seemingly basic statistical question, but is actually more of a conversation.
If you are calculating the bounds on a ratio, then you use the smallest denominator you have to establish the upper bound, and the largest denominator to set the lower bound. That’s reported cases and the total population respectively.
The article claims that 0.15% have died. Basic math on the published statistics say at least 0.18% have died in the US, and 0.23% in Brazild, which last I heard is still in the grip of it. Sometimes you should put down your citations and look out the window.
The argument of the article is that people fucked up and we should get to the bottom of it. That The IFR of 0.9% was too high, it’s really 1/6th of that, which sounds pretty damning. It is not an accident when you bring up that actuals are multiples of predicted. The discrepancy is your hook, and a small error does not demand action (ie, let it go).
Hooks that lie are called manipulative.
The author is claiming a factor of 6 overestimation, and by the most cynical reading of the death statistics it cannot possibly be greater than 4, and in all likelihood is more like 2. Ie, let it go, and stop attacking disaster science.
For people who are curious about this and want to read further than the original Ioannidis and the Meyerowitz-Katz papers, here are two citations I found enlightening. The first is a frequentist analysis that is age-stratified, so is likely to control for the rather different age structures in different countries[1]. The second is a Bayesian approach[2]. Both seem pretty reasonable to me, and don't display obvious axes to grind.
1. GP is arguing that even assuming that the entire USA had been infected (ie, using the largest possible denominator), there were enough deaths for the IFR to exceed 0.15%.
2. 0.15% is not "the current best estimate", but an estimate by John P. A. Ioannidis who has published some remarkable sophistry at the beginning of the pandemic, which was (while not technically wrong) absurdly misleading IMHO.
I'd say best estimates for the IFR now a) acknowledge that it depends enormously on age (looks like a pretty exponential relationship), thus on the age structure of a country/state, and b) put it, for the US, say, between 0.2% and >1%.
It’s important to remember the public demand for safety.
My child’s school district went remote when I and thousands of other parents told teachers and administrators at individual schools that we were pulling our kids out regardless of their policies.
Same with work: I told my manager in the 3rd week of March I was working remotely starting the following week. So many others did the same thing that my employer closed the office and went remote. My wife’s company also voluntarily went remote the same week.
This was all before state mandated closures and lockdowns, etc. People, in huge numbers, started trying to protect themselves and their families. We had NO IDEA how this virus was going to progress, and what we would learn the hard way.
In retrospect, it’s beneficial to a certain point of view to reframe what happened as some sort of top-down authoritarian dystopia. But the reality at the time was bottom-up and we should not forget that.
> It’s important to remember the public demand for safety.
Let's not pretend that the TSA makes travelers "safer"...admittedly, if you've seen the crap people try to take onboard you might disagree. Regardless, the "public demand for safety" is not that. There is a demand for disclosed risk. The world is not safe, but if A happens when B happens % of the time, people are able to feel like they are making informed choices (even if the choices are misinformed). When this cannot be established or remains largely in dispute, society in the USA starts to crumble. So what the US gets is lots of theater with less and less disclosure of actual numbers until it becomes a stream of random noise.
This pandemic has highlighted the well-known quality about the US public. The US public demands a specific kind of answers, but the media and government continue to play sensationalism and politics, while everyone else scrambled. That's what I won't forget.
Absolutely right about TSA. I know a guy who forgot a prohibited item was in his carry on (and loaded). He realized it mid-flight. So much for the x-ray machine operator making people safer...
The real issue is the populations are different. If the author is talking about at-risk students from low income families, is that the same population that has the option to work from home? It seems the people who participated in the bottom up approach had the means to do so (better jobs, savings, etc)
I would like to agree with this, but given the state of corporate media in the United States its difficult to determine whether even bottom-up movements are organic.
I got a mask early and asked to stop travel as well, but that was from listening to media. Which would invert the pyramid back to top-down.
Those sorts of measures made a lot of sense in March 2020, when there was a lot about the virus we didn't know. They made a lot less sense, e.g., in December 2020.
Do you think it was bottom-up for the at-risk students, or were the bottom-up actions associated with people who had the luxury of telling their boss that they are working from home and watching their kids. There are many jobs where working from home is not an options.
So yeah, in some circles it was bottom-up, but there were also people harmed by "authoritarian" top-down measures. It's important to remember that not everyone's experiences and circumstances are the same as our own.
I know it was bottom-up for at-risk students too in my district because our school district did a good job of surveying families and communicating the results. For example the families of students on free lunch programs supported remote learning at slightly higher rates than those who did not receive food assistance. Support was similar across self-reported race/nationality categories as well.
A lot of at-risk students live in multi-generational homes and it was obvious even early on that older people were at higher risk from COVID. Families did not want to risk their kids bringing home a case and killing grandma.
Our district did a good job of prioritizing assistance for families who needed it, including meal pickup and delivery options, as well as remote schooling rooms before they began general reopening. But at least in my neighborhood, the loudest voices for re-opening schools were among the professional class who were struggling with managing remote schooling while working full-time at home. A lot of lower income families were working less than professionals because we have a big service sector around here which was largely idled. Financial support like UI and eviction moratoriums were bigger issues to them than remote schooling.
Yes, but you were doing that in response to news articles citing academics who - we now know - were assuming COVID was 10x deadlier than it actually was (reported IFRs fell from 1%-2% to 0.1%-0.2% in most places). Which is what the article is about: how did that happen and why did the media and research institutions do such a bad job?
This. I took my child out of daycare a few weeks before the lock-down orders. We were getting sick every few weeks anyways from diseases being passed around the day care. It stood to reason we would get covid that way as well.
At no time was I ever forced to stay home. It's just that everything was closed-- and a lot of things weren't closed but I wouldn't set foot in there (like the gym).
Ironically, we already had had covid and didn't know it.
It was absolutely rational to shut down schools and implement a form of lockdown and etc., in the spring of last year. However by fall of last year we had plenty of data about relative risk, and yet schools stayed shut down for another year. This retrospective is about the usurping of the initial uncertainty to maintain authoritarian and unscientific policies.
Where were you? the 30% who aren't overweight are concentrated near the areas where a traveler would be most likely to visit (e.g. New York City, major California urban areas, ski resorts). In most small/medium towns/cities you will see most people are overweight.
"Overweight" is not a terribly high bar to reach. The CDC defines it as "BMI is 25.0 to <30", which for an individual like myself at 6'1" is just 179 lbs, a weight at which I was rail thin and low-muscle mass.
Agree. The highest "normal" BMI for my height would require 15 lbs of weight loss. I'll say I could stand to loose upto 10 lbs. I've never been in the normal range in my adult life.
I went almost normal (also for the first time in my adult life) and friends and girls (I was unattached at the time) told me I looked like I had a terminal wasting disease. And that was still about 5kg higher than what would be my normal range. So I gave up on that: it is a lot of work and I look like the grim reaper after.
Yeah, in college I dropped to about 190 for a semester (I guess I was 18 at that point, but barely). People would ask me if I was ok or sick or something.
When lockdown started, I was barely not overweight but now I am officially overweight. People still call me skinny. It is crazy how our perception of normal has changed.
> A trove of media darling Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails was recently released to the public. The emails reveal early assertions that asymptomatic transmission is rare, that post-infection immunity is highly likely, and that masks are “not really effective.” However, you wouldn’t know that from the public messaging since the start of the pandemic, in which bureaucrats and journalists upheld lasting misconceptions that asymptomatic cases are dangerous, natural immunity is not a factor in protecting the population, and individuals are responsible for viral spread. These misconceptions fueled countless months of lockdowns, business closures, and job losses
This article is a complete mess in this section. Yes, emails from February 2020 revealed the scientific community still had a lack of understanding of the virus’ ability to spread from a pre-symptomatic host (often confused or merged with “asymptomatic” hosts who seem to typically not transmit due to lower viral load).
That isn’t exactly a scandal, it’s exactly what was being said publicly at the time too. There wasn’t anything surprising in the emails to anyone who followed the news and discussion in March-May 2020. We all saw, for instance, Fauci in the White House insisting 6 feet was enough to protect people because droplets from a cough don’t travel farther (wrong: overseas research and contact tracing showed the virus can be airborne and travel more than 6 feet inside a room), right alongside the early insistence that masks weren’t needed to reduce disease spread. Exactly what was being said in the emails was said publicly on TV.
Meanwhile, the emails seemed to show a lack of understanding of just how dangerous Covid-19 would be. We hit 600,000 deaths while the worst case models being discussed in Spring 2020 (on TV and privately) were just between 60k and 200k deaths. The virus did far more damage than people feared at first when lockdowns went into place.
> Usually, 40%-50% of patients in severe respiratory distress die on ventilators, but in New York City the death rate for COVID-19 patients on ventilators was 88%.
Continued to read through the article and just be aware that a lot of the statistics the author cites are questionable. For instance, the 88% number here leads to an article from April 2020. Even without looking it up, I remember articles from may 2020 debunking this number. A simple Google reveals the real number is probably around 50% and that 88% is an outlier. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33119402/
Polifact has an article on the 88% number https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/apr/28/are-88-covid-... “ The 88% death rate was among patients who either died or recovered. It did not account for the roughly three-quarters of patients involved in the study who were still on a ventilator at the end of the study, leaving in doubt what the eventual mortality rate will be.”
Using that number a year later is extremely irresponsible and it’s obvious to me the author is cherry-picking numbers to support their preconceived position.
Is anyone gonna mention this was the first world wide pandemic of this scale since modern medicine really? There were pandemics, but not of such a world wide scale. Sure 1918, but that wasn't to much past just throwing leeches on a person to filter out the bad blood or demons.
I bring it up because, yea execution was not perfect. I expected this in the beginning. But so many people act like the response should have been perfect. Critique what was wrong with it and learn. However, assuming everyone who made a decision we didn't like as evil isn't going to help us at all. At some point in the future, there will be another world wide pandemic. It could be tomorrow, it could be 20 years from now, it could be 100 years from now. Unless everyone stays within 10 miles within home, it will happen again. And it may be be worst, like Ebola with flu-like transmission, or it may be not as bad. Whatever the case, lessons learned now will influence decisions later.
> But so many people act like the response should have been perfect.
No, no one is demanding "perfect" here, just a media and governmental infrastructure that responds to changing data to accurately inform the public and enact policies which properly balance the risks of the virus with the potential harms of the intervention. Instead what we're getting is constant overhyping of the threat (e.g. emphasizing that the % of children being hospitalized by the Delta variant is higher as a way of downplaying the reduced hospitalizations in the older, vaccinated population) to support various power grabs like restricting freedom of movement and assembly, mandating pharmaceutical interventions, and consolidating the economy into the hands of large, entrenched corporations.
The fact that this pandemic is nowhere near the level of 1918's and yet we are blithely accepting the proposition "we can never go back to normal" should be giving everyone serious pause right now.
I think the execution was unbelievably incredible for most governments - if you take a cynical view that the goal was to manufacture consent to erode personal freedoms of the populace.
With the vaccinations being rolled out, I see no reason to stay in eternal quarantine.
Unless some new vaccine evading hyperdangerous mutant strain emerges, then yes, we have a lasting problem, but I don't see solid data, that this is happening.
Edit: In either case, it is good, that vaccination research and production got a huge boost. But I really want to get rid of the mask as soon as possible.
> the U.S.’s excess mortality in 2017 was greater than its excess mortality in 2020.
Correct me if I'm missing something, but this comment is completely wrong.
The cited paper compares 2017 excess deaths in the US vs. similar aged populations in Europe. The "excess death rates" for 2020, as cited in the linked paper, is estimated COVID-19 death counts for the US (which isn't even what "excess deaths" is).
The cited paper makes an apples-to-oranges comparison. The 2017 figure (~400k) is an estimate of excess deaths in the US compared to age-specific death rates of an average of five European countries. The 2020 number is the CDC estimate of coronavirus deaths (~375k). In any case, this is considerably smaller than the overall excess mortality (from the US baseline, not a comparison to Europe), which is estimated at 522k (and doesn't count the first two months of the year)[1].
In this comment, I only point out verifiable facts. People can come to their own conclusion about the extent to which the original article makes good faith or bad faith arguments based on citations to the literature.
This article misses one critical point - the near collapse of our healthcare system, not just here in the United States but around the world. The problem being the run on emergency services and ICU resources. Look at what’s happening in India at this very moment. All in all, over 600,000 Americans died in confirmed Covid cases and even accounting for that there were an additional 300,000 deaths in excess of the annual average whose cause was not established. Many assume Covid but no posthumous testing was being performed. We’re going to armchair quarterback this for years to come, but we shouldn’t forget the facts of an overloaded healthcare system.
This is an absurd article written by a person with a barely-hidden agenda. A review of their Twitter makes it clear this is not a matter of "renewed concern"; this is a person who has resisted every measure used to fight COVID from the beginning because that "disrupts normalcy" or gives public health officials even a smidge of temporary control over one's life.[1]
I have no patience for works like this, written by people for whom any modification to their existence, even the most minor and most voluntary, is one change too many (and a sign of malign conspiracy to destroy them). Masks? Nah, who knows whether they're effective. Distance? No, it's not a big deal if I just don't. Vaccine to avoid the above? No, it's "too experimental" and I "just don't trust it" no matter whether it's based on decade-old or century-old technology.
The author makes no concrete suggestions about what we should do differently, and I think it's because for them, any change to their behavior whatsoever is one change too many. It's all well and good to try to help people as long as it doesn't require any personal effort or sacrifice after all, and as long as absolutely no mistakes are made and no missteps ever occur. In the mind of the author, anybody who would dare ask them to do anything at all to help their fellow human is a ghoul who must have an ulterior motive. This says much more about the author than it does the people asking.
It's tempting to ask sanctimonious questions, like, how many people would have had to die before this person considered that that loss of life might justify temporarily changing their behavior, or (the horror) listening to the government or working with their fellow man just a little? How bad would something have to be before they'd agree to try, just try, to do something that might help?
What a shame that there are so many selfish and conspiratorial people in American society.
Conversely I think most people who were the most vocal cheerleaders of the anti virus measures were so vocal precisely because it didn't require them to change their life - stay at home introverted shut ins basically.
Whenever I see someone minimizing everything done over the past year as "not a big deal" or "really just the bare minimum you could ask" or (lol) "voluntary," I know that they either have no conception of the vast amounts of harm that was inflicted on people over the past year by NPIs or they just don't care.
What if a disease that is maybe 4x or 5x a bad flu really wasn't worth upending all of civil society (particularly for its youngest) to combat? Wow, it's almost like the Hippocratic Oath says "first, do no harm" for a reason!
The total IFR is essentially an exponential function of the age and health distribution in the population. Without specifying the population further, many numbers can be correct.
When high IFR:s are presented to the public, most people (both old and young) believe it applies to them, it is misguided in both directions.
101 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] thread[1] Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
[2] When changing a title, it's best to use representative language from the article itself https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Great opportunity for one to start a new HN
This is sure to be one of many articles that use the benefit of hindsight to paint policymakers and scientists who were being cautious, deferring to the scientific consensus as it was best understood at the time, and operating with very little very messy real life data as deceivers because they didn't magically know everything from the beginning.
Misc comments:
It's not okay to just say that only the old, fat, and vulnerable are at risk of dying so why should everyone else have to take all these precautions? The lack of empathy is staggering.
"Stay at home orders" didn't literally mean stay confined to your house at least around here. You could go outside at literally any time during the past year regardless of orders.
Moving the goalposts and "covering up their failures" has another less-pejorative name "updating your recommendations based on research and data." If you're upset that scientists didn't tell the public "here's our recommendation based on the data we have -- it's probably not perfect so you should just not listen to us and go with your gut" I don't know what to tell you. Everyone was sanitizing everything at the beginning of the pandemic until it came out that transmission was basically entirely airborn then everyone stopped. Those flip-floppers working for Big Purell.
If you talk about Europe and parts of Asia, I can tell you from experience that, no, you couldn't go out of the house for long periods of time in certain hourly intervals during the past year.
You're not representing the article fairly. For example, here is the passage where the author mentions obesity:
Vitamin D and exercise have both been linked to better outcomes for COVID-19 patients. In the U.S. 78% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 were overweight or obese. Lockdowns caused Americans to gain an average of two pounds per month and reduce their daily steps by 27%, thereby increasing the likelihood of adverse COVID-19 outcomes.
If you disagree, fine, but at least disagree with what she's actually saying.
> thereby increasing the likelihood of adverse COVID-19 outcomes.
Assuming they get the virus! Which the lockdowns were supposed to prevent! If you do the math and the benefit of the lockdowns were small, and the risk from gaining weight was large, then fine, but the pathologic case of this logic looks like: "The government wouldn't let me drive to the store today because of the tornadoes. They say I should go tomorrow, at which point I'll be older, and therefore statistically a worse driver, putting me at an increased risk."
I'm VERY open to critiquing the lockdowns on these kinds of grounds, I'm just getting sick of folks with an agenda bringing a condescending tone and the false appearance of logic to a complex discussion.
The key words being "supposed to". COVID killed as many people as it did despite lockdowns that destroyed the economy and ruined everyone's lives for the past 15 months.
Cuba is in the Caribbean...
Nobody was saying not to protect those people or lacking empathy for them. In fact, the opposite is true. We were saying that we should have focused our measures on protecting just them, rather than treating everyone as equally vulnerable.
https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/articles/governor-tony-...
And here's the actual order https://evers.wi.gov/Documents/COVID19/EO094-COVIDRecommenda...
It actually calls out staying as close to home as possible and not even travelling to a second home if someone owned it.
I think every state had its own variation but ultimately after around April 2020 everyone has been free to get in a car and drive anywhere or get on a plane and fly anywhere within the USA. Some states had compliance regimes where you were supposed to quarantine or be tested after arriving, or be fined, but many did not. I traveled to one state with such an order twice and each time it was essentially voluntary - there was a theoretical fine if I didn’t follow the rules, but no one ever checked up on me to make sure I had a negative test. Unlike overseas governments (Singapore, Australia, China, vietnam, etc) our restrictions were basically on the honor system everywhere.
I believe one major exception is Hawaii where they actually did enforce quarantines somewhat and jailed or expelled tourists, and also had the lowest cumulative per-capita covid death tolls.
Speaking about the war on reality (original title):
This article claims an infection fatality rate of 0.15%.
Currently we list 604 thousand Americans dead from COVID, that’s 0.18% of the entire population - not the infected population. Brazil is at 0.23%, and rising fast. Worldwide it’s almost 4 million out of 181M reported cases. That’s over 2% IFR.
If one were to assume that everyone in these countries was infected and we are just really awful at reporting, that number is still wrong. But the US is currently reporting a hair over 1:10 people as having been infected, and Brazil has not crossed that threshold yet, so 0.15% is already empirically - to use the technical term - horse shit [1].
Since the quarantine was about firewalling especially vulnerable populations, I won’t hazard a guess as to how this would have scaled, but we do know that if it had scaled, a great many people would have not had or lost access to medical equipment and labor that was in extremely short supply. The argument about how we didn’t actually run out of beds or labor may or may not be true for the rate of exposure we actually experienced but claiming that would not have been affected by a do-nothing policy is arguing both sides.
[1] This article should make you cussing-angry, because this sort of retroactive second-guessing is going to get a lot of people killed the next time around. Most especially old people.
You're assuming this number is accurate, which is a very controversial assumption.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm
[1]: https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
Was that meant to be thousands?
Using this argument, we can justify anything that was done in the past on the basis of "well, we're here to argue it over now, so it must have been the right thing".
> Currently we list 604 thousand Americans dead from COVID, that’s 0.18% of the entire population - not the infected population. Brazil is at 0.23%, and rising fast. Worldwide it’s almost 4 million out of 181M reported cases. That’s over 2% IFR.
Regardless of the exact number, isn't it a bit disturbing to you that, per the article, "Americans also estimated that the share of COVID-19 deaths for people between 18 and 24 was 8%"? The fact that we're so misinformed can't be a good thing, can it?
For my money, it's plausible that we massively overreacted (or misreacted) to covid. The opposite is also plausible though. It's a good thing that we're having this conversation and it's mildy creepy that we haven't been able to have it until now.
Finally, there's a question that always comes up with this topic: is it permissible for public employees to lie to the public in order to get them to do the right thing (or whatever they think the right thing is)? A lot of the anger over the government's handling of covid has to do with that. It isn't unreasonable to believe (as I do) that, consequences be damned, the government is obligated to tell the truth and should not lie to get people to act a certain way.
I can only say what is needed : a medicine is number one. Making society resilient against airborne viruses and we need absolute data on what tools we have to stop a virus in a room with people.
But last but not least it’s also a behavioral problem (which you allude to from a different angle) where people are making decisions that allow the virus to spread. I talked to a red cross doctor and he said that distancing and masks in a hospital setting is pretty much enough to kill transmission. It was his opinion that truly honoring the guidelines would have stopped it.
The correct numbers have been available on the CDC website the entire time, unfortunately a lot of people either don’t care or don’t find it useful to memorize those statistics. Not great to see but I think it track’s with the public usually mangling other statistical numbers as well when surveyed.
> A lot of the anger over the government's handling of covid has to do with that. It isn't unreasonable to believe (as I do) that, consequences be damned, the government is obligated to tell the truth and should not lie to get people to act a certain way.
Agree, the fact that so many government leaders spent a year downplaying the danger of the virus and lying to their followers to try to win an election or for other political reasons should make people angry and upset. It’s always sad seeing the stories of someone who was led astray by those leaders and subsequently even refused the vaccine and died of Covid-19 because they had been convinced it was just a common cold that only killed nursing home patients.
If one were to assume that everyone in these countries was infected and we are just really awful at reporting, that number is still wrong. But the US is currently reporting a hair over 1:10 people as having been infected, and Brazil has not crossed that threshold yet, so 0.15% is already empirically - to use the technical term - horse shit [1].
Your analysis is severely flawed from the fact that you are equating the number of "confirmed cases" with "number of infections," but many infections are never confirmed with a test (and indeed never even become symptomatic).
The article links to a source to support its 0.15% number, but some others are below:
Nature, estimates about 0.5% for USA: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0
World Health Organization, median IFR of 0.27% (0.05% for those under 70): https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf
0.5 and 0.27 are both larger #s than 0.15, so that supports the GP's point.
The articles's tone is distinct and specific, and going to rub some people the wrong way, but tone shouldn't be confused with the correctness or incorrectness of an argument.
I'd say unfortunately, because tone is far too prevalent in online media, but the horse seems to have bolted on keeping the tone neutral, and I'd wager a strong tone likely leads to higher "engagement", so people have collectively decided with their actions how they feel about tone.
1)I'm no mathematician or statistician, but as I understand it the IFR also counts an estimate of those presumed to have had an asymptomatic case. A published study earlier this month estimates that the reported number of non-hospitalized cases between February and September of 2020 accounts for 1 out of every 7 cases of reported infection because of reasons like the symptoms weren't typical or didn't appear at all, amongst others. I don't know if that puts the IFR as low as they are saying, but it's still pretty low.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/12/e1010/6000389
2) The lockdowns have not shown any statistical data to the effect of controlling the transmission of the disease. As an aside, they actually have some support that they may have created a negative impact overall as people were forced to reside with family members who contracted and passed on the disease. There are plenty of anecdotal pieces of evidence on both sides of the argument on the subject of lockdowns. That in and of itself should be an indicator for caution and moderation when calling for unilateral action.
3) Even if one subscribes to the idea that the lockdowns did have a positive effect in controlling the rate of infection, the lockdowns were never billed as protecting the vulnerable. That was masking. The lockdowns were billed as an effort to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. Sure, while there were hotspots and times of higher activity, I have not personally come across data that shows that these hospitals were ever in danger of being over-whelmed. However, I have personally seen examples of people who have lost their jobs in the medical industry because the shift to a laser focus on COVID-19 caused someone to lose their job due to lack of the necessary funding.
I don't know that any numbers are really going to add up for quite some time. I do think that the imposition of unilateral action like lockdowns was a terrible idea and the cost of doing so will continue to show itself over the next several years. Data will continue to change and be updated just like it is for all major medical events. It appears to me that perhaps the best course of action is making recommendations to people and letting them chose their own path. The history of this country and trying to impose something by force is not exactly stellar.
In some ways this is similar to the response to the issues around Y2K. Did we need to spend as much as we did on that? We don’t have an alternate universe to compare with.
https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13554
The figure I most often cite is 0.68% from the study by Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and Lea Merone[1]. That paper is skeptical of serosurveys that show high incidence (see the discussion of reference 61, which is by Ioannidis).
Ioannidis responded with the paper you cited, the preprint of which contained a personal and unprofessional attack against Meyerowitz-Katz, removed from the published version, though a scientific critique remains. Meyerowitz-Katz responded on Twitter[2], mostly to the substantive critiques. There's more drama around this, with a number of prominent virologists taking M-K's side (see the Twitter threads).
Also see the PubPeer reviews for this paper[3], which contain more serious criticism of Ioannidis.
I go into detail here to make a few points. The main one is that, especially when there's legitimate scientific controversy, citing a single paper can really fail to give the whole picture. Another is that "the science" isn't one simple monolithic set of beliefs, even on such a seemingly basic statistical question, but is actually more of a conversation.
[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v...
[2]: https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1376304539897237508
[3]: https://pubpeer.com/publications/9FE142DA15F748FA283605C7201...
If you are calculating the bounds on a ratio, then you use the smallest denominator you have to establish the upper bound, and the largest denominator to set the lower bound. That’s reported cases and the total population respectively.
The article claims that 0.15% have died. Basic math on the published statistics say at least 0.18% have died in the US, and 0.23% in Brazild, which last I heard is still in the grip of it. Sometimes you should put down your citations and look out the window.
The argument of the article is that people fucked up and we should get to the bottom of it. That The IFR of 0.9% was too high, it’s really 1/6th of that, which sounds pretty damning. It is not an accident when you bring up that actuals are multiples of predicted. The discrepancy is your hook, and a small error does not demand action (ie, let it go).
Hooks that lie are called manipulative.
The author is claiming a factor of 6 overestimation, and by the most cynical reading of the death statistics it cannot possibly be greater than 4, and in all likelihood is more like 2. Ie, let it go, and stop attacking disaster science.
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33289900/
[2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.12.21256975v...
2. 0.15% is not "the current best estimate", but an estimate by John P. A. Ioannidis who has published some remarkable sophistry at the beginning of the pandemic, which was (while not technically wrong) absurdly misleading IMHO.
I'd say best estimates for the IFR now a) acknowledge that it depends enormously on age (looks like a pretty exponential relationship), thus on the age structure of a country/state, and b) put it, for the US, say, between 0.2% and >1%.
My child’s school district went remote when I and thousands of other parents told teachers and administrators at individual schools that we were pulling our kids out regardless of their policies.
Same with work: I told my manager in the 3rd week of March I was working remotely starting the following week. So many others did the same thing that my employer closed the office and went remote. My wife’s company also voluntarily went remote the same week.
This was all before state mandated closures and lockdowns, etc. People, in huge numbers, started trying to protect themselves and their families. We had NO IDEA how this virus was going to progress, and what we would learn the hard way.
In retrospect, it’s beneficial to a certain point of view to reframe what happened as some sort of top-down authoritarian dystopia. But the reality at the time was bottom-up and we should not forget that.
https://www.vumc.org/health-policy/covid19-model-vanderbilt-...
The rapid decline in travel precedes the statewide order.
Let's not pretend that the TSA makes travelers "safer"...admittedly, if you've seen the crap people try to take onboard you might disagree. Regardless, the "public demand for safety" is not that. There is a demand for disclosed risk. The world is not safe, but if A happens when B happens % of the time, people are able to feel like they are making informed choices (even if the choices are misinformed). When this cannot be established or remains largely in dispute, society in the USA starts to crumble. So what the US gets is lots of theater with less and less disclosure of actual numbers until it becomes a stream of random noise.
This pandemic has highlighted the well-known quality about the US public. The US public demands a specific kind of answers, but the media and government continue to play sensationalism and politics, while everyone else scrambled. That's what I won't forget.
Its a good point, but that ignores that co-opting "useful tragedies" are how authoritarian fanatics grasp power.
There is no reason why it can't be both: A bottom-up response that has morphed into a dystopian power grab.
I got a mask early and asked to stop travel as well, but that was from listening to media. Which would invert the pyramid back to top-down.
So yeah, in some circles it was bottom-up, but there were also people harmed by "authoritarian" top-down measures. It's important to remember that not everyone's experiences and circumstances are the same as our own.
A lot of at-risk students live in multi-generational homes and it was obvious even early on that older people were at higher risk from COVID. Families did not want to risk their kids bringing home a case and killing grandma.
Our district did a good job of prioritizing assistance for families who needed it, including meal pickup and delivery options, as well as remote schooling rooms before they began general reopening. But at least in my neighborhood, the loudest voices for re-opening schools were among the professional class who were struggling with managing remote schooling while working full-time at home. A lot of lower income families were working less than professionals because we have a big service sector around here which was largely idled. Financial support like UI and eviction moratoriums were bigger issues to them than remote schooling.
At no time was I ever forced to stay home. It's just that everything was closed-- and a lot of things weren't closed but I wouldn't set foot in there (like the gym).
Ironically, we already had had covid and didn't know it.
According to [0], 70.2% of US adults are overweight or obese. The base rate seems like an important fact when making this point.
[0]: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
This is really a lot. The last time I was in USA, it did not look like so.
This article is a complete mess in this section. Yes, emails from February 2020 revealed the scientific community still had a lack of understanding of the virus’ ability to spread from a pre-symptomatic host (often confused or merged with “asymptomatic” hosts who seem to typically not transmit due to lower viral load).
That isn’t exactly a scandal, it’s exactly what was being said publicly at the time too. There wasn’t anything surprising in the emails to anyone who followed the news and discussion in March-May 2020. We all saw, for instance, Fauci in the White House insisting 6 feet was enough to protect people because droplets from a cough don’t travel farther (wrong: overseas research and contact tracing showed the virus can be airborne and travel more than 6 feet inside a room), right alongside the early insistence that masks weren’t needed to reduce disease spread. Exactly what was being said in the emails was said publicly on TV.
Meanwhile, the emails seemed to show a lack of understanding of just how dangerous Covid-19 would be. We hit 600,000 deaths while the worst case models being discussed in Spring 2020 (on TV and privately) were just between 60k and 200k deaths. The virus did far more damage than people feared at first when lockdowns went into place.
Not only in this section, but overall.
Continued to read through the article and just be aware that a lot of the statistics the author cites are questionable. For instance, the 88% number here leads to an article from April 2020. Even without looking it up, I remember articles from may 2020 debunking this number. A simple Google reveals the real number is probably around 50% and that 88% is an outlier. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33119402/
Polifact has an article on the 88% number https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/apr/28/are-88-covid-... “ The 88% death rate was among patients who either died or recovered. It did not account for the roughly three-quarters of patients involved in the study who were still on a ventilator at the end of the study, leaving in doubt what the eventual mortality rate will be.”
Using that number a year later is extremely irresponsible and it’s obvious to me the author is cherry-picking numbers to support their preconceived position.
I bring it up because, yea execution was not perfect. I expected this in the beginning. But so many people act like the response should have been perfect. Critique what was wrong with it and learn. However, assuming everyone who made a decision we didn't like as evil isn't going to help us at all. At some point in the future, there will be another world wide pandemic. It could be tomorrow, it could be 20 years from now, it could be 100 years from now. Unless everyone stays within 10 miles within home, it will happen again. And it may be be worst, like Ebola with flu-like transmission, or it may be not as bad. Whatever the case, lessons learned now will influence decisions later.
No, no one is demanding "perfect" here, just a media and governmental infrastructure that responds to changing data to accurately inform the public and enact policies which properly balance the risks of the virus with the potential harms of the intervention. Instead what we're getting is constant overhyping of the threat (e.g. emphasizing that the % of children being hospitalized by the Delta variant is higher as a way of downplaying the reduced hospitalizations in the older, vaccinated population) to support various power grabs like restricting freedom of movement and assembly, mandating pharmaceutical interventions, and consolidating the economy into the hands of large, entrenched corporations.
The fact that this pandemic is nowhere near the level of 1918's and yet we are blithely accepting the proposition "we can never go back to normal" should be giving everyone serious pause right now.
An endless rehash of shoulda, woulda, coulda seems unproductive.
With the vaccinations being rolled out, I see no reason to stay in eternal quarantine.
Unless some new vaccine evading hyperdangerous mutant strain emerges, then yes, we have a lasting problem, but I don't see solid data, that this is happening.
Edit: In either case, it is good, that vaccination research and production got a huge boost. But I really want to get rid of the mask as soon as possible.
Wuhan lab leak? Probably. Long Covid debunked? Not even. Social distancing cost lives because we didn’t achieve herd immunity? Really? Really?
Correct me if I'm missing something, but this comment is completely wrong.
The cited paper compares 2017 excess deaths in the US vs. similar aged populations in Europe. The "excess death rates" for 2020, as cited in the linked paper, is estimated COVID-19 death counts for the US (which isn't even what "excess deaths" is).
The cited paper makes an apples-to-oranges comparison. The 2017 figure (~400k) is an estimate of excess deaths in the US compared to age-specific death rates of an average of five European countries. The 2020 number is the CDC estimate of coronavirus deaths (~375k). In any case, this is considerably smaller than the overall excess mortality (from the US baseline, not a comparison to Europe), which is estimated at 522k (and doesn't count the first two months of the year)[1].
In this comment, I only point out verifiable facts. People can come to their own conclusion about the extent to which the original article makes good faith or bad faith arguments based on citations to the literature.
[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361
* US total COVID-19 deaths: 600.000
* US total population: 328.200.000
= 0.18% COVID-19 deaths of total population. The IFR must be even higher.
I have no patience for works like this, written by people for whom any modification to their existence, even the most minor and most voluntary, is one change too many (and a sign of malign conspiracy to destroy them). Masks? Nah, who knows whether they're effective. Distance? No, it's not a big deal if I just don't. Vaccine to avoid the above? No, it's "too experimental" and I "just don't trust it" no matter whether it's based on decade-old or century-old technology.
The author makes no concrete suggestions about what we should do differently, and I think it's because for them, any change to their behavior whatsoever is one change too many. It's all well and good to try to help people as long as it doesn't require any personal effort or sacrifice after all, and as long as absolutely no mistakes are made and no missteps ever occur. In the mind of the author, anybody who would dare ask them to do anything at all to help their fellow human is a ghoul who must have an ulterior motive. This says much more about the author than it does the people asking.
It's tempting to ask sanctimonious questions, like, how many people would have had to die before this person considered that that loss of life might justify temporarily changing their behavior, or (the horror) listening to the government or working with their fellow man just a little? How bad would something have to be before they'd agree to try, just try, to do something that might help?
What a shame that there are so many selfish and conspiratorial people in American society.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/galexybrane?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogl...
What if a disease that is maybe 4x or 5x a bad flu really wasn't worth upending all of civil society (particularly for its youngest) to combat? Wow, it's almost like the Hippocratic Oath says "first, do no harm" for a reason!
When high IFR:s are presented to the public, most people (both old and young) believe it applies to them, it is misguided in both directions.