Wait, this suggests that Canada and Australia are highly misreporting, but Russia isn't? I thought it was well established that Russia's count was very, very off. This would imply that this model doesn't work very well.
>Wait, this suggests that Canada and Australia are highly misreporting, but Russia isn't? I thought it was well established that Russia's count was very, very off. This would imply that this model doesn't work very well.
Ontario officially admitted they inflated numbers significantly early in the pandemic because we didn't fit the global trends. The numbers were fudged by over 50%.
We also had the problem of Fauci chastising Ontario for running PCR cycles far too high causing significant false positives. This actually accounts for the significant portion of 'symptomless spreader' having not actually been covid but rather just false positives.
Vaccination numbers were also impossibly high. We had a shortage of vaccines available and it was reported ~80% of the population had 1 shot when nobody under 40 could have the shot without some high risk diseases. The numbers were either false or Ontario is far worse off than official numbers allow in terms of aging population and illness. The assumption is that Ontario also misreported how many people were vaccinated. The actual real numbers seem to be much more in line with the USA, at that time period it was most likely more like 30-40%.
The next problem is the misrpresentation of covid being the problem. How many people go to the hospital for not-covid and get tested but test positive. They aren't there for covid but they are represented as being there for only covid. Which is not right.
> Early on, the justification for lockdowns, was that covid was going to be worse than the spanish flu. Hindsight now shows that was wrong and that lockdowns were significantly more harmful to society.
Certainly the extended lockdowns were harmful, I totally agree. I do think it's important to call out our increasing knowledge over time. Executively imposed lockdowns we're certainly justified under most states' emergency laws.
Firstly, based on what we knew at the time, lockdowns in March and April were absolutely warranted. Beyond that, many states started building frameworks to manage public health, relying on indicators and public data. Mostly those frameworks stopped adapting in summer/fall 2020 despite radically increasing knowledge. That's when it all became politicized.
Metrics should have been updated over time and they largely didn't. We started hearing whispers of hospital utilization and some metrics like bed count started showing up but then it became clear Those were misleading numbers anyway. We never got any sense of the medical staff burnout crisis which should have been critical.
Those emergency laws were badly abused though and many legislatures simply allowed the executive to usurp power instead of jealously guarding it (as they should) and taking up debate on its own. Emergency laws have expiration dates to prevent executive overreach and few states complained when the executive just started declaring the same emergency over and over again, a clear corruption of the purpose of the statute.
>Certainly the extended lockdowns were harmful, I totally agree. I do think it's important to call out our increasing knowledge over time. Executively imposed lockdowns we're certainly justified under most states' emergency laws.
It's always a 20/20 hindsight thing. I think I would have also locked down for 2 weeks and shutdown the borders.
>Firstly, based on what we knew at the time, lockdowns in March and April were absolutely warranted. Beyond that, many states started building frameworks to manage public health, relying on indicators and public data. Mostly those frameworks stopped adapting in summer/fall 2020 despite radically increasing knowledge. That's when it all became politicized.
Yep, this.
>Metrics should have been updated over time and they largely didn't. We started hearing whispers of hospital utilization and some metrics like bed count started showing up but then it became clear Those were misleading numbers anyway. We never got any sense of the medical staff burnout crisis which should have been critical.
100% of ICU beds are occupied! Oh wait.. that's true literally all the time.
>Those emergency laws were badly abused though and many legislatures simply allowed the executive to usurp power instead of jealously guarding it (as they should) and taking up debate on its own. Emergency laws have expiration dates to prevent executive overreach and few states complained when the executive just started declaring the same emergency over and over again, a clear corruption of the purpose of the statute.
Now imagine another virus escapes a lab. One that is actually far worse than the spanish flu. Will kill 50% of the world population.
What is also interesting is the period with zero flu cases reported, and the correlative spike in covid cases. On its own this does not prove they're related, however it is worth noting and does lead to some interesting hypotheses: were we isolating enough to curb the flu? If yes, why did isolation benefit flu numbers while increasing covid numbers. Also, were flu cases mislabeled as covid cases? If yes, why didn't these drop in relation to PCR, rapid, and other tests emerging?
Allow me to twiddle the brim of my shiny aluminum hat here and ask objectively one more nagging question, was there any possible benefit to misreporting this data? What resources and opportunities did that afford at the time?
> Allow me to twiddle the brim of my shiny aluminum hat here and ask objectively one more nagging question, was there any possible benefit to misreporting this data? What resources and opportunities did that afford at the time?
Hospitals were/still are getting subsidies for every covid patient treated. There is a financial incentive to inflating the covid numbers. Couple that with COVID resembling the regular old flu in many cases and you get inflated numbers.
IMO the idea peddled around last year that the regular flu just took a year off while covid was emerging will go down as one of the more egregious examples of
cherry picking data in the covid era.
the flu going to zero , without a significant task force or public initiative to determine root cause, was one of the major moments undermining public trust. it’s so outlandish and yet was embraced on face value as “see lockdowns work” . if an accountant has an account go to zero one day, he’ll get to the bottom of where the funds went
even if the hypothesis was true , the lack of any meaningful evidence or due process itself should worry people . and the hypothesis is preposterous
Seems to me "the flu disappeared" is misinformation that confirms the "if we stop testing, the pandemic ends" conspiracy:
> The State and Territorial Epidemiologists Report, a weekly estimate of the geographic spread of influenza activity in each jurisdiction, was suspended for the 2020-21 influenza season due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic which impacted the data systems used to generate the estimates.
The basic reproduction number of COVID-19 in an immunologically naive population is much higher than that of Influenza. Most countries stopped the first COVID wave using non-pharmaceutical interventions that should work against all respiratory diseases. I find it not at all surprising that this has completely crushed seasonal Influenza rates.
As far as I know, in the beginning of the pandemic, western countries generally relied on rtPCR for confirming COVID-19 cases. This makes it extremely unlikely that Influenza cases were mislabeled.
I'm a bit puzzled by the analysis:
"Note that Australia and New Zealand have high MADs. This can be attributed to the fact that these two countries had a low number of active COVID19 cases due to the highly restrictive government measures.".
From the table, Australia has 9.59, which is comparable to Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg and Switzerland, but also Nicaragua, Thailand, Tajikistan, Haiti.
Why is Australia a special case here, why does the same reasoning not apply to China (which has/had, to say the least, "highly restrictive government measures"), and why is it not weird that all these countries, regardless of their autoritarian status, have a "high MAD"?
Benford's law is not without critics, but the deviations measured and represented on the map would seem to directionally match the severity of policies that remove individual freedoms, and anecdotal reports about the severity of enforcement and ensuing controversy. I'm definitely seeing what I want to see in the data, and will readily admit the Benford technique is more of an investigative heuristic than a law in this case. However, I think the difference is while my opinions are absolutely influenced by the logic of some underlying beliefs, they're necessary heuristics that facilitate risk hedging.
In my own case, personally, I am pretty sure Canada's response policies are leveraging the pandemic as a pretext to impose a digital identity system designed to have the effect of reducing every person to a political minority of one, as a means to neutralize resistance to ever more radical non-consensual transformations of our society. Sure, get shots, take care of yourself, wear a mask if you think you are a source of risk. Rolling political compliance checks at every public gathering and turning principled people into an outgroup and a new underclass? No thanks. Even if it's a small probability, the impact is so huge that it's reasonable to index on mitigating it. There are reasonable and thoughtful people who are ready to draw a line. Data like this is pretty good, but even when it supports my particular flavour of ideology, I'd still treat it as an interesting anecdote, and not evidence.
Simply, the Charter treats the individual, and not a group, as the basic legal unit of society, so a group cannot have rights distinct from those of the individuals it comprises without compromising the principle of equality before the law. We have tons of exceptions already (children, women, peace officers, protected classes, lawyers, refugees, etc.), but these bend and decorate that principle and are inconsistent with it in places, but we muddle though.
There are no short answers, but since you've asked - Essentially, the rule of law has no business in the lives of a "community," and while the freedoms of speech, movement, and association allow a community to pursue their collective interests, those interests and rights are limited by the equality of the individuals that make up the whole society. It's an imperfect dynamic, but the alternatives are 20th century history.
Remember that freedom is different from a right, in that a freedom represents the limit on an external human/state power, where a right is something given and enforced by one. A right is just permission, which reinforces the power of the grantor. You don't have rights to freedoms, you have freedoms that the rights of others balance. (to say you can be free from hunger or forces of nature, is essentially a misuse of the term because there is no other person involved) In this taxonomy, taking liberty is the act of exercising both rights and freedom.
In this sense, communities are not, and cannot be free because they are not individuals, and to limit the power of a nation state to impose rules on a community (to free a communuty), creates a an unequal class just as privileged as one given special rights. A community can be granted rights, but very sparingly, because every single one has to be weighed against the necessary compromise it creates against the principle of legal equality. (The notion of "human rights," is its own issue because it implies a universal earthly grantor and enforcer, which you can appreciate the complexity of. Originally they were called "human dignity," which was more practical, but again, different can of worms.)
If the communities I live around want to collude to restrict my nationally guaranteed Charter rights of movement, association, and making a living using an internal compliance passport, it's illegal, but there is still a legal mechanism if they want to push it, and it requires passing legislation with specific prescribed legal tests, which this govt has not done. Instead, this govt (federally, and provincially) has abused "temporary" emergency powers to normalize abhorrent 20th century internal passport systems that violate Charter rights, and stepped out of their mandates into attacking freedom - which means overstepping its authority and voiding the entire social contract.
This idea that science (and not, say, math) overrides our Charter, legal system and social contract is necessarily absurd because science is how we discover and organize knowledge (or lately, produce narratives), and at it's base level, law is how we agree not to hunt each other for sport. They can enlighten each other, but they can have no power over each other that reconciles to truth.
Using this medical emergency to contrive exception after exception to unmoor our society from these limits on state power so as to be able to privilege the "communities" that prop it up at the expense of the rights and freedoms of all individuals has been a clever application of a specific theory, but they've broken the rules.
Hence, I'd say the question of balancing freedoms of individuals against those of communities while preserving the integrity of the principle of equality is a false dichotomy, and is a begged question for the legal legitimacy of a community as a thing at all. So, get shots, wear masks, stay home if you want to, don't invite wrongists to your house, but otherwise, we're equals, so farewell and good luck!
> Simply, the Charter treats the individual, and not a group, as the basic legal unit of society, so a group cannot have rights distinct from those of the individuals
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide treats peoples (identity communities), as such, as having rights, and is recognized as embodying peremptory norms of customary international law, thus any Charter or other international or national decree or declaration which purports to deny—or conflicts with the idea—that communities, as such, have distinct rights is, to the extent it does so, invalid.
Not sure the UN gets to invalidate national charters, but judging by what's going on in Canada politically, we may have the opportunity to invite them to try. I look forward to their strongly worded letter.
25 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 49.4 ms ] threadOntario officially admitted they inflated numbers significantly early in the pandemic because we didn't fit the global trends. The numbers were fudged by over 50%.
We also had the problem of Fauci chastising Ontario for running PCR cycles far too high causing significant false positives. This actually accounts for the significant portion of 'symptomless spreader' having not actually been covid but rather just false positives.
Vaccination numbers were also impossibly high. We had a shortage of vaccines available and it was reported ~80% of the population had 1 shot when nobody under 40 could have the shot without some high risk diseases. The numbers were either false or Ontario is far worse off than official numbers allow in terms of aging population and illness. The assumption is that Ontario also misreported how many people were vaccinated. The actual real numbers seem to be much more in line with the USA, at that time period it was most likely more like 30-40%.
The next problem is the misrpresentation of covid being the problem. How many people go to the hospital for not-covid and get tested but test positive. They aren't there for covid but they are represented as being there for only covid. Which is not right.
Certainly the extended lockdowns were harmful, I totally agree. I do think it's important to call out our increasing knowledge over time. Executively imposed lockdowns we're certainly justified under most states' emergency laws.
Firstly, based on what we knew at the time, lockdowns in March and April were absolutely warranted. Beyond that, many states started building frameworks to manage public health, relying on indicators and public data. Mostly those frameworks stopped adapting in summer/fall 2020 despite radically increasing knowledge. That's when it all became politicized.
Metrics should have been updated over time and they largely didn't. We started hearing whispers of hospital utilization and some metrics like bed count started showing up but then it became clear Those were misleading numbers anyway. We never got any sense of the medical staff burnout crisis which should have been critical.
Those emergency laws were badly abused though and many legislatures simply allowed the executive to usurp power instead of jealously guarding it (as they should) and taking up debate on its own. Emergency laws have expiration dates to prevent executive overreach and few states complained when the executive just started declaring the same emergency over and over again, a clear corruption of the purpose of the statute.
It's always a 20/20 hindsight thing. I think I would have also locked down for 2 weeks and shutdown the borders.
>Firstly, based on what we knew at the time, lockdowns in March and April were absolutely warranted. Beyond that, many states started building frameworks to manage public health, relying on indicators and public data. Mostly those frameworks stopped adapting in summer/fall 2020 despite radically increasing knowledge. That's when it all became politicized.
Yep, this.
>Metrics should have been updated over time and they largely didn't. We started hearing whispers of hospital utilization and some metrics like bed count started showing up but then it became clear Those were misleading numbers anyway. We never got any sense of the medical staff burnout crisis which should have been critical.
100% of ICU beds are occupied! Oh wait.. that's true literally all the time.
>Those emergency laws were badly abused though and many legislatures simply allowed the executive to usurp power instead of jealously guarding it (as they should) and taking up debate on its own. Emergency laws have expiration dates to prevent executive overreach and few states complained when the executive just started declaring the same emergency over and over again, a clear corruption of the purpose of the statute.
Now imagine another virus escapes a lab. One that is actually far worse than the spanish flu. Will kill 50% of the world population.
Are we ready for it now? Nope. No way.
Allow me to twiddle the brim of my shiny aluminum hat here and ask objectively one more nagging question, was there any possible benefit to misreporting this data? What resources and opportunities did that afford at the time?
Hospitals were/still are getting subsidies for every covid patient treated. There is a financial incentive to inflating the covid numbers. Couple that with COVID resembling the regular old flu in many cases and you get inflated numbers.
IMO the idea peddled around last year that the regular flu just took a year off while covid was emerging will go down as one of the more egregious examples of cherry picking data in the covid era.
even if the hypothesis was true , the lack of any meaningful evidence or due process itself should worry people . and the hypothesis is preposterous
> The State and Territorial Epidemiologists Report, a weekly estimate of the geographic spread of influenza activity in each jurisdiction, was suspended for the 2020-21 influenza season due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic which impacted the data systems used to generate the estimates.
From near the bottom of https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/overview.htm
As far as I know, in the beginning of the pandemic, western countries generally relied on rtPCR for confirming COVID-19 cases. This makes it extremely unlikely that Influenza cases were mislabeled.
Wait, in the US or world-wide? When did that happen?
No matches for flu on the submitted page… I can recall - it was reported in the news - flu cases in the US dropping dramatically.
When did we have no flu at all?
From the table, Australia has 9.59, which is comparable to Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg and Switzerland, but also Nicaragua, Thailand, Tajikistan, Haiti. Why is Australia a special case here, why does the same reasoning not apply to China (which has/had, to say the least, "highly restrictive government measures"), and why is it not weird that all these countries, regardless of their autoritarian status, have a "high MAD"?
In my own case, personally, I am pretty sure Canada's response policies are leveraging the pandemic as a pretext to impose a digital identity system designed to have the effect of reducing every person to a political minority of one, as a means to neutralize resistance to ever more radical non-consensual transformations of our society. Sure, get shots, take care of yourself, wear a mask if you think you are a source of risk. Rolling political compliance checks at every public gathering and turning principled people into an outgroup and a new underclass? No thanks. Even if it's a small probability, the impact is so huge that it's reasonable to index on mitigating it. There are reasonable and thoughtful people who are ready to draw a line. Data like this is pretty good, but even when it supports my particular flavour of ideology, I'd still treat it as an interesting anecdote, and not evidence.
There are no short answers, but since you've asked - Essentially, the rule of law has no business in the lives of a "community," and while the freedoms of speech, movement, and association allow a community to pursue their collective interests, those interests and rights are limited by the equality of the individuals that make up the whole society. It's an imperfect dynamic, but the alternatives are 20th century history.
Remember that freedom is different from a right, in that a freedom represents the limit on an external human/state power, where a right is something given and enforced by one. A right is just permission, which reinforces the power of the grantor. You don't have rights to freedoms, you have freedoms that the rights of others balance. (to say you can be free from hunger or forces of nature, is essentially a misuse of the term because there is no other person involved) In this taxonomy, taking liberty is the act of exercising both rights and freedom.
In this sense, communities are not, and cannot be free because they are not individuals, and to limit the power of a nation state to impose rules on a community (to free a communuty), creates a an unequal class just as privileged as one given special rights. A community can be granted rights, but very sparingly, because every single one has to be weighed against the necessary compromise it creates against the principle of legal equality. (The notion of "human rights," is its own issue because it implies a universal earthly grantor and enforcer, which you can appreciate the complexity of. Originally they were called "human dignity," which was more practical, but again, different can of worms.)
If the communities I live around want to collude to restrict my nationally guaranteed Charter rights of movement, association, and making a living using an internal compliance passport, it's illegal, but there is still a legal mechanism if they want to push it, and it requires passing legislation with specific prescribed legal tests, which this govt has not done. Instead, this govt (federally, and provincially) has abused "temporary" emergency powers to normalize abhorrent 20th century internal passport systems that violate Charter rights, and stepped out of their mandates into attacking freedom - which means overstepping its authority and voiding the entire social contract.
This idea that science (and not, say, math) overrides our Charter, legal system and social contract is necessarily absurd because science is how we discover and organize knowledge (or lately, produce narratives), and at it's base level, law is how we agree not to hunt each other for sport. They can enlighten each other, but they can have no power over each other that reconciles to truth.
Using this medical emergency to contrive exception after exception to unmoor our society from these limits on state power so as to be able to privilege the "communities" that prop it up at the expense of the rights and freedoms of all individuals has been a clever application of a specific theory, but they've broken the rules.
Hence, I'd say the question of balancing freedoms of individuals against those of communities while preserving the integrity of the principle of equality is a false dichotomy, and is a begged question for the legal legitimacy of a community as a thing at all. So, get shots, wear masks, stay home if you want to, don't invite wrongists to your house, but otherwise, we're equals, so farewell and good luck!
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide treats peoples (identity communities), as such, as having rights, and is recognized as embodying peremptory norms of customary international law, thus any Charter or other international or national decree or declaration which purports to deny—or conflicts with the idea—that communities, as such, have distinct rights is, to the extent it does so, invalid.