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.
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.