Interesting analysis, though he mentions early on a huge issue with the analysis:
> It does come with one major caveat: Because it counts ALL deaths, it cannot on its own disentangle deaths caused by Covid itself, impacts from the lockdowns themselves, impacts from vaccines, or unrelated death trends.
Especially as time goes on, and we see the effects of missed cancer screenings, economic destruction, increased obesity, etc, excess mortality will be almost entirely a measure of side effects of the pandemic response.
That is not an issue with the analysis as a whole, and indeed he addresses several of those points. It is an issue only with the excess deaths statistic. The data we have so far does not show a correlation between lockdowns and GDP, and tends to show a correlation between lockdowns and a reduction in excess deaths.
The data is the data, but there is a huge missing story that this analysis completely misses.
Why?
It is not appropriate to mix an all-cause mortality number (which is what this is) without actually tracking the underlying separation between groups to answer the why question. E.g. Vaccinated/Unvaccinated, WhichVaccine, Obesity, Age, WhichVariant, and the related ICD codes for someone's health.
Furthermore, it is a travesty to attempt to draw huge conclusions (which many are now doing) from all cause mortality at a population level without that important separation of data elements.
Because Covid in many cases does not relate to seropositivity, cases is not an accurate count, as some people with strong immune systems will never be considered a "case" [1]
We need strong analyses around health, weight, obesity, and other comorbidities, not data mingled bungled studies that look only at outcomes with no relationship. Tragically, this study points out that perhaps we should incarcerate entire populations, because if we do that, we can drive down death rates.
Is it really a "caveat" when it entirely invalidates any attempt at causal analysis with this data? So much for "maximum truth". This is a nice data visualization exercise and descriptive analysis, but that's it.
There is plenty of other data that supports the assumption that the vast majority of deaths here is due to COVID. Not all causes of death here are equally plausible.
That might affect "deaths due to COVID-19" counts, but it does not, cannot, affect "excess deaths" counts, which don't include a cause of death. It is for this reason, among others, that people looking at global trends focus on "excess deaths."
but a vaccinated population in which a vaccine is driving up adverse events would likewise contribute to All Cause Mortality would fall into this trap.
Likewise, extreme draconian governmental responses that destroyed economies, hurt supply chains, and drove many to suicide and substance abuse would increase all cause mortality.
All Cause Mortality is best when comparing outcomes between different groups A/B, but not at entire population levels which is what this "analysis" does.
We must not conflate cause and effect by using this flawed method.
Which is why comparing countries which had strict lockdowns with countries which did not have strict lockdowns is helpful in showing that stricter lockdowns resulted in lower comparative excess deaths.
Instead of hypothetical scenarios in which suicide spikes and all-cause mortality rises, we have realities in which the opposite happened[0].
There is no collection of facts from the real world in which the vaccines are causing more harm than they prevent, and no collection of facts from the real world in which lockdowns didn't save lives where implemented. But nothing is likely to convince the true believers, so carry on.
> There is no collection of facts from the real world in which the vaccines are causing more harm than they prevent, and no collection of facts from the real world in which lockdowns didn't save lives where implemented. But nothing is likely to convince the true believers, so carry on.
Actually there is.
It is called VAERS, and the statistics on Absolute Risk Reduction.
> "The concept of risk, and our ability to assess risk, has also made the headlines in the context of the COVID-19 vaccine trials. Using data from a Nov 26 opinion piece in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), we can see that vaccine efficacy in terms of the relative reduction of the risk of getting ill is around 95%. For example, in the Pfizer trial, assuming an equal split of the 44,000 participants into the vaccine and placebo groups, 0.74% of the placebo group fell ill but only 0.04% of the vaccinated participants did. The relative risk reduction is calculated as the difference between these two incidences (0.7%) divided by the placebo value (0.74%), arriving at the conclusion that 95% of COVID-19 could be avoided if people got immunized. However, there is another way of looking that the same data: The risk reduction in absolute terms is only 0.7%, from an already very low risk of 0.74% to a minimal risk of 0.04%. Thus, risk reduction is 95%, but it also is just 0.7%." [1]
> "A critical appraisal of phase III clinical trial data for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine BNT162b2 and Moderna vaccine mRNA-1273 shows that absolute risk reduction measures are very much lower than the reported relative risk reduction measures. Yet, the manufacturers failed to report absolute risk reduction measures in publicly released documents. As well, the U.S FDA Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) did not follow FDA published guidelines for communicating risks and benefits to the public, and the committee failed to report absolute risk reduction measures in authorizing the BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 vaccines for emergency use. Such examples of outcome reporting bias mislead and distort the public’s interpretation of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine efficacy and violate the ethical and legal obligations of informed consent."
Now, you may want to argue this for higher risk groups with comorbidities. What about Absolute Risk for teenage males where the risk of covid 19 is a fatality of 1 in hundreds of thousands to millions, but an MRNA vaccine carries a significantly higher chance of pericarditis/myocarditis, not to mention other AEs? What about athletes where the risk of a vaccine increases the chance the injection will not be intramusculuar, but instead, intravenous?
Some of the of the MRNA vaccines effect on the heart was not known at launch [2]
Anecdotally, I know two people that had severe adverse events to the vaccine, one almost died. The chances of that happening with a safe vaccine are miniscule. One of the aforementioned was likewise a healthy athlete with no comorbidities, in excellent health, of young age.
On the one hand, you have oddball blogs playing percentage games and arguing about semantics with "absolute" and "relative" in opposition with the history of how we've measured the value of vaccines for decades based on vaccine trials from 2021. This is not what I would consider the real world.
On the other hand we have the collection of facts from the real world I mentioned, as in this example of worldwide excess death counts by country. In this real world, the vaccines saved many lives, despite your anecdotes which definitely really happened.
Especially when you consider that countries with stricter lockdowns had considerably lower excess deaths. People just want to be contrarian about this for whatever reason and throw everything they can think of against the wall.
Seems like cancer and obesity are already quite well measured and robustly reported, though. Are there numbers to back up your hypothesis that people are dying more due to cancer and heart disease over the past two years?
Or, if you're just proposing that that "will" happen in the future, it seems like it's not really a refutation of the data in the linked article.
Does the magnitude explain excess deaths though? What this paper is saying is that rate of weight gain among already-obese kids was higher during the pandemic.
Does that rate correlate to covid death rates? Seems like a metric for childhood obesity isn't going to get there in any case, since these folks aren't dying at significant rates.
This kind of argument is exhausting. You said that excess deaths are confounded with obesity. I said that if they were, it would be comparatively easy to measure, so I suspect your hypothesis is simply wrong. Then you came back with a number that showed weight gain among kids, which I didn't try to refute.
Your hypothesis is a Big Thing. You're saying people are dying in very large numbers (millions a year), from existing syndroms that we have been tracking for decades. And... somehow epidemiologists are silent on that? It seems suspicious, you agree, right? Isn't the Occam's razor take is that you're simply wrong here, and that people are dying from a pandemic and not obesity?
> My personal answer is: No. It would not be worth it to me. I’d take that loss in expected lifespan, in order to travel and live freely for a couple years.
My understanding was that actually for people in NZ they were better off than we were in the UK. Yes they had very strong border control so international travel is difficult/impossible, but once it was clear they had it under control the internal restrictions were fairly light. I remember seeing a photo of tens of thousands of people at a rugby game at the same time as fairly serious Covid restrictions in the UK.
I think he's asking the wrong question - if you ask me "am I willing to not leave my country for two years (but have little other restriction)" for 10-15 days of extra life, then yes that sounds fine. I like international travel but can live without it for a while.
I think half hearted Covid restrictions are the problem. The UK has to me the least forgivable Covid situation. We are an island with easily controllable borders (like Japan, NZ, Aus) but we never did. There is a lot of evidence of getting Covid under control and then being re-infected from abroad so it doesn't matter that we got it early - we could have kept it under much better control.
Yes the "no lockdown ever" crowd like to pretend NZ/Aus were prison camps where everyone was confined to their house 24 hours a day, whereas the reality was packed stadiums for international rugby.
The UKs shitty confused response in autumn 2020 was an absolute disaster both from a controlling Covid and Maximising Freedom approach.
An interesting question: is paying people to go out and eat in restraurants during a pandemic count as a 'freedom' or 'nanny state' move? Definately dumb, either way.
>The United States was roughly around the global average. Contrary to the view of many conservatives, the deaths probably were caused by Covid itself, and NOT by lockdowns
I feel like the common view by people who thought numbers were being artificially inflated was that they were counting people who died while having tested positive for covid being attributed to covid and not just 'the lockdowns'
Fairly distinctly remember a million memes of like a car accident or something else tragic and a caption of "sorry to tell you mam, your son died of covid" or something to that ends.
Also remember hearing attribution to FEMA and other world health organizations offering relief and funding based on a death being covid related or not and so the thought was it was easier to check that box and receive relief to your hospital and get the family's funeral expenses paid for.
> thought numbers were being artificially inflated was that they were counting people who died while having tested positive for covid being attributed to covid
This objectively happened. Anyone who was COVID positive was being counted as a COVID death. It happened to my friend's dad- COVID was listed as the cause of death on his death certificate, v even though it was nothing to do with any illness at all, but rather an accident.
This practice varied by state and tracking eventually broke out death with COVID vs death by COVID.
"In the US, the “fudge factor” is 1.13, which means our best guess is that 13% more Covid deaths took place than were officially reported.
For skeptics who can’t believe that deaths were under-counted: both things probably happened. A few cases were wrongly counted, but even more people may have died of Covid at home, without ever getting diagnosed."
> This practice varied by state and tracking eventually broke out death with COVID vs death by COVID.
Which involves a somewhat subjective, error-prone decisionmaking process. Early in the pandemic, when the vast majority of hospitalizations-with-COVID were due-to-covid, it made sense to just do the simple thing and assume COVID caused all the deaths. After the death rate fell and this became extremely confounding, it became important to make this somewhat subjective decision.
(e.g. a guy rolls up with a "heart attack" and is COVID positive. Is it due to COVID? SARS-CoV-2 both causes cardiac complications directly and can reduce blood oxygenation / increase heart workload, so heart attacks are more common with COVID infection).
Same. Family friend had a hunting accident and shot himself. Made it to the hospital, tested positive, died within a day or two from the gunshot. "Covid death."
"From March 2020 to March 2021, DPH counted the death of any person who had previously tested positive for COVID-19 as a COVID-related death, regardless of how much time elapsed between those two events.
Even if someone contracted the virus in March and died in a car crash in July, they were added to the ongoing tally of pandemic deaths for that first year."
> Fairly distinctly remember a million memes of like a car accident or something else tragic and a caption of "sorry to tell you mam, your son died of covid" or something to that ends.
I think what they mean is, even at the time, people were tracking excess deaths above expected based on historical info (e.g. deaths might be higher in the winter so an increase or drop might be seasonal) and trying to decide how much of that excess was covid vs lockdown. The car-crash would be in the expected average deaths which had already been subtracted.
I can get onboard with most of this.. until the end. COVID deaths don’t just mean everyone losing 15 days of life. To me it meant multiple family members dying. It means my respiratory system has been absolutely wrecked, hopefully not forever but for at least several months now. It means my infant son is gasping for breath on my lap as I write this and there’s nothing we can do for him. Statistics in white towers are so decoupled from humanity they are worse than useless; these selfish attitudes cause real harm.
This is personal. 3/4 of my teenage children are receiving psychiatric care. Including a daughter who was temporarily institutionalized for being suicidal.
Do you REALLY wish to repeat your position and explain why my children need to sacrifice their personal liberty, no matter the cost to their mental health, for the benefit of others? Or is it POSSIBLE that there is a tradeoff where my children's mental health is one of the benefits that society needs to consider in deciding what policies to follow?
I've spent a lot of hours of my daughter explaining very calmly why we should stop caring about her so she can die in peace. I see this as a result of denying liberty. And so I put a very different value my family's liberty than you do.
(This post revised for various reasons, such as avoiding swearing.)
This though is another example of "people/society should do X because it has a potential negative impact on other people".
Which I generally agree with. And it appears the person you replied to thinks like that as well.
The article on the other hand is arguing that we shouldn't do things differently to avoid impacts on people, because that reduces 'freedom', and he'd rather be free to go out during a pandemic than prevent people dying.
So he's only coincidentally on your side of this, because he opposes lockdowns and you feel the lockdown policies had an impact on your family that was negative.
But if you asked him if he'd do some minor thing to avoid physical or mental harm like that to other people in future, then he's already clearly stated his position on that. No, even widespread death of other people is not a reason for people to collectively avoid potential harm to others.
It just so happens that him not caring about other people's deaths coincides in this particular case with what you feel would have helped your family, but he's not arguing for what does the least harm overall. He's saying there's a principle at stake, and he's willing to let others die to uphold it.
Just as we have to consider the price of people dying across the whole population, we also have to consider the price of lost liberty across the same population. If the average person in the population shares his preferences, that they would prefer liberty even at the risk of death, then the sum across that population of those values results in the same conclusion. The population as a whole will suffer more from loss of liberty than from excess deaths. And therefore the greatest good would follow from doing as they prefer rather than as you think that they should.
But that isn't what it actually looks like. What we actually have is about half the country who prefers liberty, and half who prefers life to be as long as possible. And this division corresponds fairly well to the existing political divide between Republicans and Democrats. Who are really good at not hearing each other already and so misrepresent each other's points. As you just did.
Now of course his argument is missing other harms that people have suffered. Such as the impact of long COVID. There are plenty volunteering to make that argument. I'm pointing out that the reverse is true as well. The cost of lockdowns includes widespread mental health problems, lost education, weight gain, increased alcohol consumption and so on. See https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/03/one-year-pan... for an idea of how common and how extreme these impacts are.
When you add up everything on both sides, it isn't obvious which side is better. I know my preference. Which is, of course, biased by my extreme experience. But in 20 years we will still be suffering from long COVID. We will also suffer from poor mental health, alcoholism, excess diabetes, and so on. It isn't clear which set of harms will be worse. But if you refuse to look at the harms that don't support your chosen position, then you literally are unable to even think about this.
I thought he was very clear that he wasn't making a "least harm" case. And I think you are misrepresenting the side that decided on lockdowns. The tradeoffs and risks were a constant topic of discussion.
Economic, schooling, mental health, excercise, business, these factored into every decision. The bend the curve thing was literally saying "we will let some people get this disease and only apply the brakes when we fear that the sheer number of people getting it will overwhelm the hospitals and cause even more deaths." Some jobs were considered "essential" some werent. Did that impact some people more than others? Kids were seen as being at low risk of dying which factored into things like school being open. Just constant, non-stop discussion about trade-offs and risks across multiple domains.
Lockdown vs no lockdown isn't a real division, each lockdown strategy was different for incedental reasons alone.
As soon as he talked about what he would vote for, and what people should be able to vote for, he was implicitly talking about the greatest good across the population (as measured by voting).
If he had been talking about unilaterally violating lockdowns, then your characterization that he was putting his interests above the life of others becomes fair. But he didn't do that.
As for strategies, he was arguing that he wouldn't want strict borders and strong lockdowns, with full vaccination before opening up. Australia and New Zealand did this. The complex tradeoffs discussion that you remember from the USA was not involved.
In the USA, a weak federal response at the start meant we began behind with endemic COVID. The most we could do was "flatten the curve" - we couldn't stop lots of people getting it. Then with vaccinations we could choose which lives to save. And so the discussions you remember. But that is entirely irrelevant to what he says he wouldn't have wanted.
Related, the fact we talked about lots of stuff didn't mean we were actually thinking very well. For example internal memos about prioritizing "essential workers" was to create some "racial justice" in early vaccinations - they didn't want to only be vaccinating old and mostly white people. And so we prioritized healthy young people blacks and hispanics over people who needed it more. And probably wound up with more dead blacks and hispanics than the "unjust" method. But hey, we got early vaccinations into a politically correct mix of arms!
(In case you didn't guess, I'm not a fan of stupid things done to be politically correct.)
That said, I believe most Democrats would have preferred "doing it right" if that was possible.
> I've spent a lot of hours of my daughter explaining very calmly why we should stop caring about her so she can die in peace.
Surely this is worded very poorly, and is not intended to say that you have been telling your daughter that you don’t care if she suicides. Because that would be monstrously cruel and quite possibly warrants prosecution per the Michelle Carter/Conrad Roy III case.
She was the one explaining to me why she wished that the people she loved could let go of their desire to hold on her. That way she could die as she wished, guilt-free. But instead she was stuck with a life of misery which she had a variety of reasons to believe would never improve.
It would be easy to dismiss were it but a childish tantrum. But it was not. She was very intelligent, mature and persuasive. And spent months improving her talking points into the best arguments that she could manage.
You find it easy to condemn someone who was in this position and was persuaded by despair. I can no more condemn them than I would a torture victim who broke. But I hope that you never are unfortunate enough to have an experience that shakes the arrogant naiveté that maintains your ignorance.
To start with, you made it about my reaction, and not what you did. Second, you have repeated your condemnation without acknowledging that you are doing so.
In polls, a significant majority of Americans support someone's right to choose suicide in the case of someone with an untreatable illness causing significant suffering for as long as they remain alive. A significant majority also support that allowing assistance in said suicide, particularly if there are sufficient protections. (Our actual laws are generally not in line with what people think, but that is what polls say people think. And it is what I think.) If your ethical judgments come from any other position, you are the one whose moral opinions are out of line.
The ethical question is whether a person with a permanent and untreatable major psychiatric disorder qualifies as an untreatable illness causing significant suffering for as long as they remain alive. If they can make that case convincingly enough, most Americans support their right to suicide. And even to receive assistance.
You've never had someone you love spend months attempting to convince you of this, that their pain is real, and the fact that you can't see from the outside what they go through on the inside doesn't make the pain any less.
Out of hand you condemn anyone who got convinced by this. Call them terrible. But you've never had to deal with this situation. This is the arrogant naïveté that I refer to.
> [Surely your post] is not intended to say that you have been telling your daughter that you don’t care if she suicides. Because that would be monstrously cruel…
I think you have misread the context. There is no condemnation of your daughter or yourself.
You have not condemned me, but you have condemned anyone who is convinced by the suicidal person that suicide is a logical choice for them. Doubly so if the convinced person assists.
I am offended at your certainty on this. Wait until you've had a suicidal loved one attempting to convince you for months to let and/or help them die. After that you have a right to opinions on what people who have been there do. Until then, please fuck off.
With that, I'm out. You are what you are. And there is no point in trying to change you.
So sorry about your family. I also started personally getting psychiatric care after all this happened, and continuing now. The situation is so complex, but definitely it should have been managed better overall. I'm no expert so can't comment.
This was my thinking. From the way the author writes, they seem to say, "I would skip lockdowns, in exchange for giving up my 15 extra days of life". If that were the thing on offer, I think a lot of people would say "forget the extra 15 days, I'll not have a lockdown".
That's not what it is though. The question is, would you go into lockdown to give everyone in the country 15 extra days of life. That's what you're trading. Personal inconvenience for strong positive externalities, you can't just think about the part of it that comes back to you. It's a general societal good that you're doing.
It's not fair to frame this as just you not having lockdown vs. everyone living 15 more days. Frame it instead as everyone not having lockdown vs. everyone living 15 more days.
As the GP points out, long Covid isn’t factored into this, let alone the cruelty of averaging lifespans with death when we know it’s an inaccurate way to understand the effects.
What I know from the Netherlands, at least from the numbers of hospitalisations, is that for the longest time we counted the number of people that had covid while being treated in hospital. This in contrast with most countries that counted the number of people in hospital, because of covid.
I remember reading that they were doing this in the US as well during the very early days of the pandemic. If you happened to have Covid in the hospital when you died, you "died from Covid".
This of course was perfect material for the Covid hoax conspiracy theorists...
For hospitalizations, at least, some states (e.g. New York [0]) did not start distinguishing between “hospitalized due to COVID” from “hospitalized with COVID” until early 2022.
That's the way these things always work. There's no way to disentangle true causes of deaths. Influenza death statistics are people who come to health care sick and then die, even when the real cause is "pneumonia" or "heart attack" caused by the infection. You don't know they didn't have another simultaneous infection. You don't know they didn't have a pre-existing cardiac problem. It's just not a resolvable problem.
But no one screams about the flu hoax, do they? Your point is being used as an excuse. It's a nitpick to allow people to ignore an obvious conclusion (a whole lot of people died from covid), presumably because they don't want to have been wrong about masks or something.
Which is what you should be counting. All the captain hindsight warriors now trying to use numbers now in attempts do discredit the actions taken in response to covid act like we were collecting numbers for their benefits. The reason it was important how many people where in hospital with covid was because we were trying to take measure to prevent overloading the healthcare system. The number of people dead would grow quite rapidly pre vaccine if those affected couldn’t get any medical treatment.
Sweden Age Adjusted Mortality 3rd January 2020 through 18th June 2021: -2.3%
Source: ONS
Not only did lockdowns fail, they were unnecessary and cruel and tyrannical. I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was.
That's the exact opposite conclusion the article finds while taking into account more countries and just one.
If you have to search out a single country out of over a hundred to find supporting data you probably are just p-hacking ....
Like go to the store and buy identical pens but of 100 different colors. Now throw them down the stairs and record which goes the farthest. Now repeat it again. Do this enough times and you'll find a pen with p<0.05 that goes the farthest. That pen isn't actually superior, you're just doing garbage analysis.
> I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was
I'm sure they're be so upset to get free money per month while not having to work.
It was not selected post-hoc, it was selected in 2020.
The result was more death early and less death later, while suffering no learning loss or adverse effects on the children and little loss in quality of life.
Here's an article from 2020 disparaging the high costs [0].
If you find any major news giving an update now that Finland and Norway have caught up in excess death, please share.
Yes- there is a life-year cost to bringing death forward.
But there has now been no excess mortality in Sweden compared to it's neighbors Finland and Norway (and all 3 blow the US and Europe out of the water.)
> If you have to search out a single country out of over a hundred to find supporting data you probably are just p-hacking
You are not considering how positivism works. If you say lockdowns work you have to prove that in all instances. I just need one (1) counter example to disprove your theory completely.
> Do this enough times and you'll find a pen with p<0.05 that goes the farthest.
Cherry-picking. Yeah, that's what focusing on Australia and NZ while ignoring Peru and Sweden is, exactly.
Finding two patients who got better after blood-letting is not enough to prove blood-letting works. Your theory has to fit all the available quality data (so no China or model "data" allowed).
> I'm sure they're be so upset to get free money per month while not having to work.
Yeah that was the extend of lockdowns. Go tell that to the people that where locked up without visitors in nursing homes for months on end.
Don't ignore the conclusion bullet point and analysis towards the end of the article which stated in multiple ways that lockdowns fail the cost-benefit analysis.
Similar to people exagerrating Australia/NZ as people being locked in their homes for two years, Sweden gets the opposite.
They had some constitutional limit on lockdowns, and a Health official who was a bit overenthusiastic about 'herd immunity' but they also had lots of recommendations and an expectation that people would actually obey them.
> As the outbreak reached Sweden, authorities responded with limited measures, in contrast with lockdowns and legal restrictions introduced in other countries. The Swedish public were expected to follow a series of non-voluntary recommendations[note 2] from the Public Health Agency of Sweden (Folkhälsomyndigheten). These included working from home where possible, limiting travel within the country, social distancing, and for people above 70 and those with potential COVID-19 symptoms to self-isolate.
> A Swedish government agency is an independent body with delegated power to pass binding regulations as well as recommendations on how someone can or should act to meet a law or binding regulation within the agency's area of activity (in this case The Swedish Communicable Diseases Act). Although there is not a legal framework for a governmental agency to impose sanctions on someone for going against its recommendations, they are not optional as they work as guidelines on how to act to follow a law or regulation (in this case an obligation to help halting the spread of an infectious disease). The Swedish Constitution prohibits ministerial rule – politicians overruling the advice from its agencies is extremely unusual in Sweden – and mandates that the relevant government body, in this case an expert agency – the Public Health Agency – must initiate all actions to prevent the virus' spread in accordance with Swedish law, rendering state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell a central figure in the crisis.
Nor did we have the data to say it WAS necessary, but we sure as hell could predict most of the negative social and economic side effects easily. Causing profound developmental delays in an entire generation of children and lowering lifetime educational attainment for almost every single teenager was worth it though, I guess.
We had data from December 2019 until April 2020 showing that it spread quickly and can kill you.
We also had data that strong action can stop an outbreak (i.e. Aviation flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, etc). Sure when we took those actions early enough to curtail the outbreak it leads to people thinking the actions were useless (see Y2K debate) but it doesn't actually mean the actions were useless. People only notice when the dam collapses, not when it doesn't.
By March 2020 we had the Diamond Princess Data which established an upper bound of 1% case fatality rate (CFR) for COVID. We already knew then that it's definitely not the Spanish Flu (2.5 - 10% CFR), not Cholera (3%), not Smallpox (3%), not SARS (11%), not even Measles (1%-3%).
Not only did we never do anything like COVID measures for any of the diseases you mentioned but the WHO described the individual NPIs that would later make up the COVID "lockdowns" as "never recommended under any circumstances" in their 2019 flu pandemic recommendations.
What happened with COVID was an unprecedented overreaction by historical standards where we threw overboard everything we knew to try authoritarian gobbledygook on the back of the carefully cultivated FUD around COVID coming out of China.
The absolutely devastating economic and social effects were known, the possible effects of the disease both short and long-term were unknown. So we decided to go for the known devastating effects in case the disease was also devastating? That makes zero sense. And there were alternatives proposed to lockdowns like the Great Barrington Declaration that were not simply not considered, but were actively suppressed and smeared by government officials and their media lackeys.
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises, is it underway?”
-NIH director Francis Collins in an email to Anthony Fauci about the Great Barrington Declaration
Great Barrington -> 4th of October. Are you even reading my comments? I am referring to the first lockdowns which took place in April 2020.
"So we decided to go for the known devastating effects in case the disease was also devastating?"
Of course we do in case of a pandemic, since we are dealing with a completely different underlying distribution of effects.
In itself your statement is accurate: we did not have data that is impossible to have.
In broader context the implication is not correct. We had experts consider long and hard what to do in the case of an influenza pandemic and the consensus for decades had been to disrupt society as little as possible.
you are making the classic mistake of judging past actions with future knowledge.
Lockdowns work and they worked well given what what was known at the time. They are also good at reducing social contacts for transmissible disease and the best evidence of this was the almost total lack of a flu season in the northern hemisphere.
While the social and economic cost is now known to be immense, public health officials have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.
>Lockdowns work and they worked well given what what was known at the time.
Objection, arguing facts not in evidence.
Edit: in response to the part you added after your original post:
>While the social and economic cost is now known to be immense, public health officials have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.
The social and economic costs were mostly predictable back before the lockdowns ever happened. People opposed to the lockdowns were practically screaming what the consequences would be. They were ignored with calls of "If it saves one life!" and "You're killing grandma!"
Meanwhile it's come out that several (if not all) countries that imposed lockdowns didn't even attempt to do a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis prior to locking everything down.
how do you square this with the fact that more and more people are calling in sick and many are continuing to die now that much of the western world has given up on pandemic restrictions?
Only if your premise that the labor shortages (and other economic issues) are caused by pandemic deaths is correct, mind you. The overwhelming majority of deaths (around 80%) from the pandemic in all countries was amongst retirement age individuals, most of whom are out of the workforce.
200,000 working age people in the US dying isn't nothing. It could also be explained by disabilities as a result of COVID and people unable to work as a result of that.
it could also be explained by All Cause Mortality being higher in vaccinated populations than unvaccinated (which, by the way, is the proper use of ACM when you compare two populations with a control).
I fundamentally disagree with the methodology and conclusion of this article.
The problem with a new disease is that we don't know the long-term impact. Polio led to post-polio syndrome. Tick diseases have impacts decades out. Rabies does nothing for 6 months, and then causes insanity and certain death. Syphilis led to insanity decades later. AIDS has minimal short-term impacts too; death is caused by follow-up diseases.
We know more about the long-term impact of COVID in 2022 than we did in 2020, but we still don't fully understand it. We still don't really understand the impact of multiple, serial COVID infections, as everyone seems to be getting.
When a new disease comes out, I'd like to exterminate it, please. I'm happy to have a month-long full lockdown everywhere it's found, like China did, while the disease dies off. If we can't do that, I'd like to lock down until we have a vaccine, and ideally, until we understand the long-term impact.
I'd take no lock-down over losing 15 days of my life (or a 1-3% chance of death, for that matter). I would take a lock-down over long-term impacts of a disease of the type we've seen with COVID and other diseases. To me, it's a numbers game on long-term health impacts, not on death. Do those happen to 1% of people? To 100% of people? Do they last weeks? Months? Years? The rest of your life? When do they start?
I'd like good answers to those questions on whatever disease comes out next before relaxing.
With travel and population growth, we will see more and more interesting disease. We need a strategy to deal with them. I'm profoundly disappointed COVID didn't lead to us even developing one.
I don’t understand. The blog is talking about death tallies which is an easily observed binary outcome. They weren’t trying to measure other outcomes. Are you thinking a COVID infection might kill you two years later? That seems unlikely. Might it cause other health impacts? That’s almost certainly true, see long COVID. But it’s simply not the analysis being done here. This is about figuring out the degree to which countries under reported COVID deaths.
What specifically do you find wrong with the methodology they took for figuring out the degree to which countries under reported COVID deaths?
I think they're referring to the stated conclusion, that this author thinks his work supports his own view that lockdown policies were too restrictive, and we should instead have more freedom/death.
Even with 20/20 hindsight, that seems like a bad take, and when the decisions were taken, we didn't have 20/20 hindsight, and we won't the next time either.
> Here’s a question: would you have preferred to live through a total travel ban and total lockdowns, like Australia’s, to save yourself 10-to-15 days of life?
> Is stopping that worth it to you?
> My personal answer is: No. It would not be worth it to me. I’d take that loss in expected lifespan, in order to travel and live freely for a couple years.
Virtually everyone's answer to that question is "no" because it's the wrong question. Phrasing this as THE question seems intellectually dishonest. There are a few better questions one might ask:
- If new diseases sweep through every so often, and each of them has a 20% chance of leading to long-term disability affecting a significant portion of the population, should we have a lock-down?
- If new diseases sweep through every so often, and a real world-wide lock-down means they don't become endemic for your children's children, is that worth it to you?
- If a disease sweeps through, and reduces the IQ of the general population by 5 points, is getting that under control worth it to you?
... and so on. I was never worried about COVID killing me. However, I was 100% in support of tight lockdowns, of the type which would have prevented COVID from becoming endemic, for reasons unrelated to my own risk of death.
I feel like the framing of Covid as a kind of flu contributed to the poor public response. Imagine if it caused boils on the face, or incontinence! I hope that people would have broadly supported lockdowns in that case, but I guess anything can be politicized these days.
The article mentions the young populations of equatorial Africa as a factor in keeping mortality low. Why don't we factor in the age distributions of countries when assessing the effectiveness of their policies?
Yeah, this is one of those cases where mean is really deceptive, almost to the point of shadowing the veracity of the rest of the paper, I wonder if they chose it because other numbers are just nearly impossible to grasp emotionally. It’s hard to make a cost benefit analysis if you’re convince you are in one camp (or the other, healthy people are probably convinced they’d survive and unhealthy/immunompromised not so)
Imho it's well past the point of "almost shadowing the rest". It singlehandledly makes the rest of the work (at least in my judgement) completely garbage. Which is a shame because it seems good. I don't want to sound too "emotional" but come the fuck on. Even if you want to be "rational" and just look at hard monetary data you could just take the years lost, give them a price tag (average yearly salary * years accounted for inflation of age/region bracket) and look at that. But to ask "Would you have preferred to live through a total travel ban, and total lockdowns, like Australia’s, to save yourself 10-to-15 days of life?" falsifies the thing completely: you didn't save yourself 2w of "life", you saved someone else decades of their life (and their impact to society/economy). And you didn't "pay" for it in time, you just had reduced quality for a while.
If lives were only relevant "on average", then reducing birth rates wouldn't be an issue for society/economy at all right? "On average" there wouldn't be a difference.
The median age of people who died of COVID in the UK was 83 [0]. Mean average was 80. (I know it was younger in the US). Most of those did not have decades of their life left.
I think it somewhat strengthens the rest of the work.
This is clearly not the answer the author wanted to find. And the bit about average number of days of life lost was a desperate attempt to hold on to his previous conclusion, before he looked at the numbers, that lockdowns were authoritarian overreactions.
I don't think it's fundamentally wrong to measure healthcare effects with numerical measures like QALY, but it's obviously looks even worse in the context of a big conspiracy theory about COVID.
Researchers investigating QALY impacts of their proposed treatments, fair enough. Philosophical Trolley problems, sure. Someone making a political point about freedom being worth killing people, where 'freedom' seems to mostly involve ignoring sensible medical advice, is less tasteful.
On the topic of total lockdowns, I thought Australia managed to keep a relatively normal life because they had a lockdown on people arriving? So they had less authoritarian stuff than a government that just let it in, could be wrong though, just how I rememebered it.
But what does losing 1-2 weeks of life really mean. It's a phrasing with intentionally reduced emotional impact. Let's say I was willing to sacrifice 3 months of my life to have avoided COVID lockdowns.
Reverse engineering that number, we get to 6 million covid deaths in the US, (1 million actual * 6 difference between 2 weeks to 3 months) and 87 million years of life lost. Converting all of that to 12 personal weeks of life lost, 1. Isn't what is actually at stake, it's a die roll and if you lose you die and 2. doesn't accurately account for the devastation. People are devastated when their loved ones lose their lives from COVID, it's not a few weeks of life lost 50 or so years from now.
132 million Americans were alive during World War 2. 300,000 of them died in the war, which is about the same ratio as COVID. But it's ok, because really it was just 2 weeks of life lost per person?
I’m not saying it’s too emotional to be data driven, I’m just saying the datapoints chosen are not equivalent.
Yeah, sorry I agree that he was intentionally trying to downplay the deaths with that phrasing.
But, he did so because he'd already picked a side. I think if the numbers had came out the other way, he'd have happily stated "x million people died because of this pointless lockdown" and made it personal and emotional.
But the fact that he had to try to blunt the impact of his own numers in this way, in a weird way gives them more credibility. If a marketer put "90% fat free" on a food package rather than "10% fat" it provides some evidence that there is at least 10% fat in the product because someone has made the effort to try to minimize that fact.
Yes. I think that's a bit fishy. A life lost affects multiple people and potentially quite severely. Most people would happily accept their share of aggregate "lifespan reduction" if it stopped someone from suddenly dying. Premature bereavement can ruin lives.
It's interesting, I do have trouble using excess deaths and attributing it to covid though. I was in Honduras in the ultra poor mountain region in intibuca and the people there said the entire town got covid, but there was only one death. It's was a small town, but the area had well over 200 people. What did happen was that the government literally cut off access to the nearest city where people could get food, supplies, and medicine.and there are many life-threatening illnesses that can be addressed with cheap medication. In the major cities, they made it so one person could leave a household during a week to get supplies, but I have to think that lockdown and decreased access to healthcare and necessities had severe impacts, especially when populations are more active.
That's 0.5% fatality rate, not infection fatality rate. Likely "everyone" in the town didn't actually get it-- it may have been an overwhelming majority but probably some people lucked out.
So the anecdote shared is even closer to the center of the range of expectations than you imply :D
That's fine for historians, but useless for making decisions about interventions in the real world where there is always more than one confounding factor.
But confounding factors average themselves out over long period of times. Hence why excess mortality is good, because you compare it to decades of data where the smaller effects even out.
If I can't get a heart surgery bc doctors unavailable and die, that's (on average) caused by covid. Sure, it's possible that my doc was unavailable at the time bc he hammered a finger, but "on average" over the timespan the only constant factor was covid (or covid-policy consequences).
If you are wondering how such underreporting could happen, just look at the comments on this thread, many of which are elaborations on the theme of "I'm not at all convinced excess deaths is a good measure of Covid-19 deaths."
Excess deaths and correcting for reporting reliability is how influenza deaths have been counted since about forever. The conclusion to draw is not that "COVID wasn't so bad" but rather that infectious disease prevention should always be taken more seriously. Policies like WFH, mask use, and limiting exposure to situations where super-spreading can take place should become part of the toolkit for fighting influenza and other infectious diseases.
Influenza had never caused such a shock for healthcare system and for the way that the society functions.
Claiming that some metrics is good because it has been used for something else is incorrect. These are different entities and the conditions for the measurements are extremely different.
India has seen some huge high profile protests against the government. The government of India could not deal with these protests and had to back down and reverse their decisions. The reality is that because of various known reasons and observations we can conclude that the Indian government is weak and can’t push back on widely held public opinions.
So it is interesting that not one big popular protest happened because 5 million or more people died because of either covid, or covid containment related reasons like the decline of the economy or unavailable of other services like surgeries. Not only this, in the many important elections that have been held in India, compensation for covid related losses is not a major election issue in any one of those.
So in my opinion, this article‘s conclusion on India is hilariously off the mark. Even most of the liberal media in India which is opposed to Modi and his government and sends people out into the countryside for investigation has said that though there is evidence of economic destruction because of the lockdown and fear there is no evidence of large scale death.
Some BJP supporters will look at articles like these and claim that this is all a vast conspiracy to defame Modi and India. I don’t put much value in such claims. I think the conclusions are because of bad application of statistical reasoning. One size fits all application of some statistical tool on a global scale clearly shows the writer’s lack of understanding and their immaturity. Whatever figures they are using are clearly missing context specific to each country and this makes these results useless.
> I spent 1.5 years in ex-Iron-Curtain countries during the Covid era, and people there acted less concerned about crowded indoor spaces and sneezing — and more concerned about surfaces. And everyone seemed to fear that getting physically cold would lead to colds
I went for the first time to Ukraine in the fall and got a fairly heavy case of COVID. My girlfriend is 29 and she was vaccinated with two Moderna shots 2 months prior and also got a heavy case of covid. We took a two-hour bus into another city. The bus was hermetically sealed because the driver bent the aluminum windows railings such that windows don't open to prevent drafts, so that people don't get colds. This was November and nobody was wearing a mask in the bus. By the end of the journey the windows were covered with condensate from 40 people breathing. When we got out of the bus we felt dizzy from lack of oxygen. I think both of us got extremely high doses of the virus and the vaccines were never really tested with those doses: this is why despite the age and recent Moderna vaccinations we both got fairly serious cases.
Our country (Czechia) count covid deaths as "those who has positive PCR test after death". Which means that covid was not always cause of death. Uncle of my friend had Alzheimer's in late stadium and died last year. She was counted as covid dead. Insurance companies payed more to hospitals for covid patients, so it was profitable to make up some cases.
Our neighbors (Slovakia) count covid deaths after autopsy where covid was main reason of death.
So... Data was collected differently. Conclusions based on those data are relative.
I ask many people about how many people dead because of covid they personally know. For today, I know only one. That lead me for conclusion that I cannot trust my gonverment any more.
I find the ‘10-15 week expected life’ extension per person quite a useless and callous statistic. You’re talking about individual lives, peoples grandparents and friends. Their death doesn’t get averaged out among the population. It’s a person. If your dad died of Covid you wouldn’t just write ‘it’s ok, the expected lifespan is only dropping by a couple of seconds’, right?
I live in Australia and I absolutely hated our policy of mandatory vaccination, but I’m glad our lockdowns saved lives. Don’t reply telling me they weren’t mandatory either. For most people quitting work or study is not an option, so bugger off.
I would prefer to see the maps by postal code or at least somehow shaded by relative population density. Showing a given country - again for me - feels deceiving. That is, it's a social virus and more or less localized. For example, poor urban areas fared worse than rich suburb ones.
I'm glad to see someone getting into the details. Finally. But I still think the inequities of the pandemic - at least in the USA - are lost when using a national average. We need to drill down further still. We need to ask, what if the poor fared as well as the middle and up? But also, flip it so we understand a true worst case scenario.
It was a bit jarring to read such careful analysis and then toward the end read that China was an example of keeping Covid out, I wonder if they fudged things enough to throw this analysis as well?
I'm not sure if you can get reliable excess mortality data for China, without that this approach would obviously fail. But I think this specific analysis is also a bit more focused on the earlier parts of the pandemic, and before Omicron at least it looked like China's policy seemed to work well in terms of stopping the spread. With Omicron this seems much more dubious.
China’s policy never worked well and the various levels of mimicry of that policy across the world was responsible for the vast majority of the avoidable pandemic damage. Their lying about the obvious human to human transmission and repression of doctors speaking out is what prevented early containment, and their draconian lockdowns were both horribly repressive and ineffective. They made a big show to compensate for their early failures, and the world took the word of a police state trying to pretend they could prevent the spread of a highly contagious aerosolized coronavirus after it was well out of control and all over a major city with an airport.
The continued credulity of the west despite all of the lying China has done is astoundingly stupid. Anyone with an ounce of understanding of the culture and the government, particularly Xi’s government, was laughing at the Chinese figures and demanding on the ground access early on to determine what was actually happening.
Many academics wanting to follow the data don’t understand that. And so we copied a fake solution because of fake data and threw out decades of pandemic response research and planning to pretend we could contain something that was obviously out of control and clearly on the path to being endemic after March 2020.
> The continued credulity of the west despite all of the lying China has done is astoundingly stupid. Anyone with an ounce of understanding of the culture and the government, particularly Xi’s government, was laughing at the Chinese figures and demanding on the ground access early on to determine what was actually happening.
How did China hide what was actually happening from foreigners at the 172 embassies in Beijing, and the 200+ consulate generals/consulate offices in the rest of the country, plus all the foreign business people who are in China long term?
They locked everyone down. After trying to hide the pandemic and failing (see https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-02-06/corona...). If everyone's locked down and the CCP is doing all the counting, how are you going to know anything other than what you're told? Undercounting is a lot easier than trying to hide it, which again, they did until they couldn't. The presence of foreign ambassadors and business people means nothing. They weren't involved in auditing data collection.
China politicized the virus more than even the US. It is very hard to trust the official figures released by the CCP. They put a lot of political capitol into the "0 COVID" policy.
I've probably already seen hundreds of map-styled infographics and somehow they all look almost exactly the same:
"Western" world is OK/Great
Scandinavia is awesome
Eastern Europe and Asia always bad, except for a few "west"-centric states, which are good/ok.
And the more I see this pattern, the more I come to a conclusion that it could not possibly be a representation of any possible data slice, but rather a sign of some systemic bias.
Very flawed report. They mentioned everything but china which had crematoriums go overdrive and massive amounts of people die. Yet they mentioned it in article once that they kept infections out? I thought that article was supposed to debunk the bs non free countries reported as their numbers
Probably the worst analysis possible that pushes a specific narrative.
I'll explain.
Excess Mortality from draconian government responses that caused job loss, depression, excess alcohol and drug deaths, suicides, mixed with adverse events, are just put into the wash, along with actual deaths, and deaths from incorrect medical interventions, as well as propensity towards bad outcomes from unhealthy populations
There is no story of nuance in this, and that is why this is over-averaged dog doo.
Though on the official case rate and excess mortality maps, it's dark pink/light red, which indicates they still did better than a whole lot of countries.
OP forgot to subtract the average death count before Covid-19. X parameters average death over the decade is Z. Current is Y. So X+Covid = Y deaths. From covid is Y-Z. Now compare these with actual
> It does come with one major caveat: Because it counts ALL deaths, it cannot on its own disentangle deaths caused by Covid itself, impacts from the lockdowns themselves, impacts from vaccines, or unrelated death trends.
Especially as time goes on, and we see the effects of missed cancer screenings, economic destruction, increased obesity, etc, excess mortality will be almost entirely a measure of side effects of the pandemic response.