[HN Gopher] Our model suggests that global deaths remain 5% abov...
___________________________________________________________________
Our model suggests that global deaths remain 5% above pre-Covid
forecasts
Author : Anon84
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-05-27 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| tourgen wrote:
| [dead]
| hartator wrote:
| Locking down people in their house can be also a root cause. Our
| reaction to covid has been probably worse than actual covid.
| someNameIG wrote:
| Here in Australia we had pretty long lockdowns compared to many
| other places. Our excess deaths are multiple times lower than
| say the US or UK for example.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| "Tiny island nation which has extremely tough rules on
| biological imports shielded itself from the rest of humanity
| for two years" does not have the same ring to it.
|
| Be careful to equate correlation, i.e. fewer deaths due to
| stringent lockdowns to causation
|
| Or just contrast what you said with what at the time came
| known as the _" Swedish Experiment"_. You know, letting kids
| and teenagers go to school.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-
| deaths-...
| andybak wrote:
| How does that mesh with this article?
|
| Also where do you live? I'm curious what your experience was.
| tomrod wrote:
| Respectfully, I think you're wrong and assuming a personal
| speculation.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I actually sort of enjoyed the lockdowns, but I have a job
| that I can do from home and I'm not a particularly social
| person. Pretending that they didn't or couldn't have harmed
| other people - significantly - is arrogant.
| tomrod wrote:
| Pretending to no effect whatsoever of lockdowns on people
| would be arrogant. I'm glad we agree. It's also not what
| the parent commentator said, when they point to lockdown as
| the root cause (not a cause) of the 5% increased death
| rate. The activity you labeled as arrogant is denying the
| antecedent to what the parent and my comment said.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| So 307 / 100,000 = 0.3% of the population above what would
| naturally occur.
|
| I wonder how this trend plays out in the long run. I.e. how many
| of the 0.3% were due to die in the next few years because of
| existing health conditions?
|
| It's interesting how people reacted during the pandemic.
|
| While I sympathise with anyone that has a loved one that is
| vulnerable to disease (I certainly have some!), one could make
| the case that many lives could be saved by banning sugar and
| forcing mandatory gym memberships. You could argue that one is
| within our control vs the other - but you could also argue that
| many are not in control of their addictions (food for example) as
| well.
|
| The scariest part of it all for me was the way government quickly
| attempts to rewrite the rules and gain control. Being in
| Melbourne where the gov tried pushing through a bill to give them
| seemingly unlimited power during "emergencies" (as defined by
| them) was really crazy.
| hoorible wrote:
| > how many of the 0.3% were due to die in the next few years
| because of existing health conditions?
|
| "They were going to die anyways!" was always a common argument
| one among the "muh freedoms!" crowd. When someone dies in a car
| crash, we don't just shrug it off if the victim was terminally
| ill. Why is this different? A preventable death is still a
| preventable death and their life still has value whether it's
| for another 20 years or 20 days.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > their life still has value whether it's for another 20
| years or 20 days.
|
| This is avoiding the question by being emotive and vague.
| Would you trade the life of somebody who had 30 years more to
| live for the life of someone who had 30 seconds to live? Why
| or why not?
| hoorible wrote:
| Not giving a direct answer to a question isn't the same as
| avoiding it; it's asked disingenuously, so the actual
| answer doesn't matter.
|
| Just like your follow up question, which is similarly
| irrelevant, since changing behaviours to save lives isn't
| at all the same as trading lives.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| Technically, everyone is "going to die anyways"...
|
| What I'm asking is what the percentage difference is, of
| those that are not vulnerable - which is still a valid
| question to be asking.
| pranjalv123 wrote:
| If they were "due to die", you'd see negative excess mortality
| in future years because the people who were going to die in
| those years already died. And excess mortality has continued to
| be positive and high.
| kpennell wrote:
| If anyone is reading this, please don't exercise very hard when
| you're recovering from COVID. I went on two bike rides two weeks
| after I got my negative test. I was so eager to get out of the
| house and back on my goal of 3,000 miles for the year. And that's
| when all my symptoms like tremors, brain fog, and memory issues
| started. There were also a few times I struggled to understand
| people. There are many similar anecdotes out there of formerly
| athletic people trying to get back to training too soon, and
| that's when their long COVID symptoms started. So, if you're
| reading this, please give yourself at least a month of slow
| movement and don't jump back into vigorous activities right away.
| AgentOrange1234 wrote:
| This is important advice. I was lucky to have heard this before
| getting infected. The immediate infection hit me hard for a
| week, but I waited a good couple of months before trying any
| exercise more vigorous than a long walk. Even so, an hour after
| my first (short!) run, my watch gives me a high heart rate
| alert. Heart continues to clock 100bpm for the next three hours
| while I lay around doing nothing. Freaked me out. Take getting
| back to normal very slowly, and watch for weirdness.
| lorddoig wrote:
| There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that heart deaths
| are up by a significant amount, that those deaths _may_ account
| for most or all of excess deaths currently seen, and that they
| _may_ be related to safety issues with some of the mRNA
| vaccines.[0]
|
| I resent the fact that statements like this have become political
| and that I now have to explain myself. Nevertheless, here we go:
| I have no vested interested in this being true. I've had two
| doses of the stuff, I want it not to be true. However, there are
| legitimate questions here that have not been satisfactorily
| addressed. I'm raising this because reading the article and the
| other comments I can see nobody else has.
|
| I would encourage people to look at the link and scrutinise the
| evidence presented themselves before deciding whether or not
| there might be an issue here that needs looking at.
|
| [0]: https://www.hartgroup.org/what-are-people-not-dying-of/
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| World population is larger than what the planet can sustain, so
| 5% higher death rate, even if unfortunate and sad at the
| individual level, helps humanity become more sustainable at a
| collective level.
|
| Also, 5% less demand for cattle and resources or so.
| [deleted]
| Wiki39366 wrote:
| [flagged]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's a very modest proposal.
| thwoerjwda wrote:
| Wouldn't we expect this to be high with declining birth rates and
| aging population?
| simonster wrote:
| Excess deaths are the number of deaths above the expected
| number of deaths. The expected number of deaths usually comes
| from a model that takes into account how the number of deaths
| would normally change from one year to the next. This model
| would incorporate the effect of changes in the composition of
| the population that are occurring over long timescales.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I for one am sick of all the covid related back biting and second
| guessing. There was no way a major pandemic was going to be
| anything but an unmitigated natural disaster of global
| proportions. Policies chosen as "least bad" are still bad. Maybe
| they were worse, maybe they were just less bad. No one sold them
| as good. Now the job of science is to pick out what was
| efficacious and what was worse. But the moaning about policies
| that were unpleasant to my mind ignores the fact that _it was a
| global natural disaster_ and it was _never_ going to be ok, or
| pleasant, or not inconvenience you. For some people the policies
| were worse than the disease. For millions that didn't die, they
| were better. As a species I wish we could put down our gripes and
| figure out how to make the next time less bad, but we need to
| realize even then it's going to be a global natural disaster and
| those might interfere with your preferred daily routine.
|
| Edit: to those who brought up ways that the inconvenience was
| greater than disrupting their preferred daily routines (missed
| funerals - same happened to me, loneliness, other tragedies).
| First, I had my share as well and I empathize and mine were
| fairly horrific with profound impact on me and my family I still
| struggle with. That comment wasn't meant for you, but there are
| many who just simply didn't like the inconveniences. The rest was
| for you. It was a global disaster. Disasters are tragedies,
| heaped upon tragedies. We made good decisions, bad decisions,
| ineffectual decisions, but ultimately nothing would have made it
| good, ok, or anything but a disaster of monumental proportion.
| I'm sorry it was hard for you, it was for me too. It was hard for
| _everyone_. I'm down with healing together. I'm down with
| learning and evaluating. I'm down with building a better society
| from our pain.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I raised a child during the pandemic, during the lockdowns. His
| grandparents missed out on most of the first year of his life
| because of travel restrictions. They lived just across town.
|
| What lesson did I learn from this?
|
| I learned that toddlers will throw an epic hissy fit if they
| don't get what they want, even if what they want is impossible,
| impractical, or goes against either their own personal interest
| or the interests of their family. They'll _insist_ on doing
| things that have a very decent chance of killing them on the
| spot.
|
| "I want it!" followed by 120 decibel screeching is the
| behaviour of a toddler.
|
| We're teaching him better, of course. We're teaching about
| sharing. About saying sorry. Telling him when to say "thank
| you" and "please". I'm also teaching him not to poke metal
| utensils into power sockets or to sneeze in my face.
|
| Apparently not all parents bothered with this. Their children
| grew up to be big children, unable the grasp these simple
| concepts despite having adult bodies.
|
| Yes, the speed limit on the highway is _inconvenient for you_
| if you 're late for a meeting. No, nobody cares about you and
| your stupid appointment, we care about the family of four you
| might kill for your own convenience if we let you drive as fast
| as you possibly can.
|
| This is the crux of it. Some people think being allowed to
| drive as fast as they can is _freedom_ , and any curtailment of
| that freedom is _oppression_.
|
| What's truly sad about all of this is not the political
| polarisation over the type of health policy that goes back
| _centuries_ [1]. No, it's that Katalin Kariko, the woman who
| spent here entire life toiling away in obscurity, never got a
| proper "Thank you!" from the world that she saved.
|
| She should be more famous than Beyonce and richer than Bill
| Gates, and instead she's a little-known scientist with a few
| pats on the back from jealous colleagues mumbling "I could have
| invented that" under their breath.
|
| [1] Go look up how old the word "quarantine" is and where it
| originated from.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I still can't get over how we shut down schools in a huge
| amount of the world for a long period of time, and didn't come
| out of that with high-quality, open source, government-
| sponsored software for remote education. Instead, we just
| waited it out on every level, while the rich got a lot richer.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| That we don't have that anyway is mind-blowing. An open-
| source corpus of educational material seems like an obvious
| social good in excess of many things that do get huge
| quantities of money sprayed at them.
|
| Why does every school need to figure out sourcing their own
| worksheets for teaching kids about oxbow lakes or copper
| sulphate or whatever? Half the time they look like a teacher
| made them in 1993 using Windows NT clipart program, a
| typewriter and a photocopier, the other half of the time they
| are sloppily and half-heartedly cobbled together by some
| educational company.
|
| The BBC does do quite a bit of this with BiteSize, bit it
| still seems limited compared to what I would really hope for.
| abirch wrote:
| Correct, not a lot has happened in Trigonometry or
| introductory calculus for centuries but colleges are always
| requiring newer editions.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Has government done software well anywhere in terms of user
| friendliness?
| tomrod wrote:
| Check out US digital services and 18F
| tapland wrote:
| Yes. Many examples in the EU
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| The UK Government Digital Service has produced some pretty
| excellent, useable and consistent online services, with a
| particular focus on accessibility. Also great care taken to
| keep the services functional on very old and low-spec
| devices, far in excess of any private company I have used a
| website from, which are usually so bogged down with JS
| glitz that they barely actually work.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Outschool is pretty amazing. I think through a Darwinian
| process a lot of remote education tools will emerge. I think
| people ignore that remote education tech is helpful for
| homeschooling, for extracurriculars, for people trying to get
| a degree while working, people in very rural areas,
| developing countries, and a whole host of other use cases.
| There was definitely a "we will hack this stuff together and
| throw it aside asap" mentality which baffled me as an
| engineer, but I'm certain a lot of very capable and smart
| people have learned amazing things and built great tech.
| It'll take a while for the bitter after taste to wear off,
| and as I discussed above, the back biting and second guessing
| and the indignation that they had to sacrifice or suffer in
| some way in a disaster. But as emotions cool, I think we will
| see a resurgence of the techniques and technologies.
|
| Re: governmental open source - the government is typically
| bad at such things. It'll be private sector, educator, and
| contributor sourced as with all great things in the space of
| tech, for better or worse.
| threeseed wrote:
| Because nobody e.g. teachers, students, parents wants remote
| education.
|
| Attending schools is about 50% education, 50% social
| development.
|
| Many students don't have strong family structures at home and
| fall behind academically and socially if not attending in
| person.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| And for many parents 100% daycare.
| quags wrote:
| Perhaps but I'd argue society has moved to where this is
| better (children must have an education) vs the
| alternative say getting a job or whatever children did
| 100 years ago. Also it is being paid for, at least in my
| area, through quite high property taxes where over 60% go
| to school. So if the alternative is find day care or
| educate them myself I expect my taxes to go down where I
| can use that money for education and day care.
| 015UUZn8aEvW wrote:
| When you observe school policy debates at the local level,
| you come to realize that, for many parents, school's main
| function is free daycare for the kids so that they can go to
| work. Remote school doesn't help much on that front.
| tmaly wrote:
| I think Andrew Huff would contest your qualification of it as
| "natural"
| zmgsabst wrote:
| [flagged]
| AgentOrange1234 wrote:
| What's your source on this? I haven't heard anything like
| this.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| On what?
|
| I cited the OECD data; I downloaded it, added up COVID
| deaths, excess deaths, and subtracted COVID from excess to
| get "non-COVID attributed excess".
| someNameIG wrote:
| Here in Australia our interventions were longer and more
| sever that that of the US, our excess deaths are about 4
| times less than youse over there.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusDownunder/comments/13pgt.
| ..
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| > No one sold them as good.
|
| What? Why'd we implement them then? Plenty of people were
| criticizing the policies, but they were generally overruled in
| favor of vague goals which were "sold as good," like
| "flattening the curve."
|
| Relatedly, one of my pet peeves is when people talk about the
| harms of lockdowns but frame it as "the damage that covid did
| to children's education." It wasn't the virus that did that
| damage. It was the policies.
| jen20 wrote:
| Less bad need not be good. One only need look at electoral
| politics in the US for this to be obvious.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > Why'd we implement them then?
|
| Because they were, as the post you're replying to makes
| pretty clear, still in the realm of less bad, or at least
| very probably less bad. The point GP is making is that there
| were _zero_ "good" options. In a global pandemic, every
| choice has only bad options, and you try to pick the least
| bad.
|
| Or in other words, they're saying that the "correct" decision
| was still ultimately a bad one. And you're trying to frame
| that statement as though the decisions made were incorrect.
| That's pretty rhetorically unkind of you.
| lazide wrote:
| Uh, they were sold as better than the alternatives.
|
| And even without the policies, things were going to happen.
|
| The initial economic impacts preceded any of the policies by
| weeks, for instance, and the social changes (including WFH)
| started rolling out before any formal policies did. The tech
| companies started to do it weeks ahead of public policy on
| the matter for instance, because _they didn't have any better
| alternatives_ , and it would have been worse otherwise.
| carlmr wrote:
| While I agree with you that a lot of the damage we did wasn't
| the virus, I feel like OP was quite clear in saying if
| there's only bad and worse, pick bad.
|
| Which logically I agree with, although I still think that
| post CDC study on statistically negligible outdoor
| transmission, any government that didn't allow people to
| socialize and gather outside was not listening to science and
| picking worse over bad.
|
| I think we could have done a lot better, even with the
| available evidence at that time, in finding ways to socialize
| that wouldn't cause so much mental and economic harm.
| Izkata wrote:
| > was not listening to science and picking worse over bad.
|
| The problem was anyone trying to say this, no matter how
| much evidence they had, was censored and ignored. Called an
| idiot. Asked "why they wanted to kill grandma". So on and
| so forth.
|
| "Worse" was treated as "good" for years in spite of the
| science.
| zizee wrote:
| The GP means the policies were sold as the "least worst"
| option.
| geekpowa wrote:
| The living complain about the adverse impacts they
| experienced, while the dead remain dead.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I see this argument a lot but I don't understand it. Are
| you suggesting the dead people would have been grateful for
| the policies that didn't stop them from dying? Or are you
| suggesting the policies didn't go far enough, and if the
| dead people could complain, then we'd be convinced to
| implement even stricter policies next time?
|
| I think the argument would be more convincing if there were
| a group of people who are still alive that could say they
| would have been dead without the policies. Obviously this
| is impossible for anyone to say with certainty, but given
| that it's the corollary of the "if dead people could talk"
| argument, perhaps that indicates that both arguments are
| unfalsifiable and thus ineffective.
| dmbche wrote:
| It's not about what the dead would say - it's about the
| difference in degree between inconvenience and death.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| The implication of this argument is that if people are
| dying, the government can implement any policy they want
| with the nominal intention of "saving lives," and nobody
| has any right to complain about "inconveniences" because
| they're not dead, unlike the people who died _despite the
| policies meant to prevent their deaths_.
| dmbche wrote:
| While I agree with your statement, I think you might be
| projecting a little - this is a simple comment, kind of
| like saying "nothing new under the sun". Not all
| statements are necessarily prescriptive.
|
| This is used to keep things in perspective when talking
| about such emotional subjects, not be a final word, I
| believe
| geekpowa wrote:
| It's an argument about survivorship bias in any critique
| of Covid policies that imply Covid response was
| unnecessarily harmful
|
| My personal pandemic experience was luckier than many . 3
| wilderness years of lost time only; of no growth. no loss
| of business, work , home etc. more importantly I'm alive
| and so is everyone I love
| jfengel wrote:
| Everything that went wrong is evidence that if everyone had
| done my thing, it would all have been perfect.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Policies chosen as "least bad" are still bad.
|
| But they deliberately chose the least _good_ policies, when it
| was very obvious that the choices they were making were by far
| the worst.
| gd1 wrote:
| [dead]
| momirlan wrote:
| [flagged]
| londons_explore wrote:
| There aren't many claiming it was deliberate...
|
| The main claims seems to be accidental release of a virus. If
| it was deliberate, you probably wouldn't release it right at
| the lab that developed it...
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Okay, but if you're driving recklessly and cause a car
| crash which kills someone, I don't say they died
| "naturally".
|
| There's a reason the US banned that variety of gain of
| function -- and a reason why people are outraged Fauci and
| EcoHealth Alliance sponsored it in China to circumvent
| that.
| hanoz wrote:
| It makes me sick to my stomach to hear entirely reasonable
| anger about the catalogue of ill-judged, immoral and inhumane
| policy cooked up on the hoof by ignorant politicians, egged on
| by should-know-better power-tripping scientists, belittled as
| mere quibbles about interferences with thier _preferred daily
| routines_.
| Fgehono wrote:
| Easy eays captain hindsight
| saiya-jin wrote:
| What if both of you are right? Or wrong for that matter?
| Everybody acknowledges that some people got hurt pretty badly
| by policies applied, and those people are in millions on
| global scale. Clearly you are one of them.
|
| Yet we saved by some estimates lower tens of millions of
| lives, and we tested en masse extremely promising new way of
| administering cures/vaccinations. Attacking that takes more
| than just some emotional outbursts, better come with some
| cold hard facts. Ie I don't know a single person who doesn't
| have in circle of family or close friends somebody who passed
| away directly due to covid.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Go ahead and post a study that says we saved tens of
| millions.
|
| Not one intervention has been shown to reduce mortality by
| 50% across the general population -- you're making facts up
| to deny the harms caused.
| tapland wrote:
| No but we hsve things like Sweden with a demographic and
| social systems very similar to its neighbors (norway,
| denmark,finland) ending up with 2x the mortality of said
| neighbors by choosing milder interventions.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Sweden had a higher mortality at the start but ended up
| with the lowest excess mortality in Europe starting
| January 2021 [1]. The country had the lowest excess
| mortality overall during the SARS2 years 2020-2022 [1].
|
| [1] https://www.dagensmedicin.se/specialistomraden/infekt
| ion/sve...
|
| [2] https://www.europaportalen.se/2023/03/sverige-hade-
| lagsta-ov...
| peyton wrote:
| Yeah, my grandmother was very social. She had dementia and
| didn't understand what was happening. She cried about how
| lonely she was every single day for months until she passed.
| pessimizer wrote:
| My grandfather had been holding off the worsening of his
| vascular dementia for a long time because he had a lot of
| family around him to remind him who he was. Cutting him off
| from the world resulted in quick decline and death.
| Lockdown killed dementia patients:
| https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2020-07-30/lockdown-
| isola...
| erulabs wrote:
| You're missing the forest for the trees. It's not about if the
| lockdowns were better or worse, not even a bit. It's about
| whether or not governments should have the power and ability to
| enact lockdowns in the first place. This was a somewhat mocked
| perspective when the general idea was the lockdowns were
| absolutely necessary. Now that the data, retrospectively, seems
| muddled and unclear, the conversation can recenter on if the
| government we want should even have the power to do what they
| did.
|
| It's not even a little bit about being inconvenienced, and
| anyone who says that is either a straw man or an idiot. It's
| about the basic principle of the individual and their rights
| versus the group.
|
| Of course it was a chaotic natural disaster. The question is,
| in the face of a natural disaster, do you or do you not want
| the ability to make your own decisions.
|
| I'm no anarchist or libertarian, but if we can't understand why
| those folks are _really pissed off_ and why it has nothing to
| do with whatever the R-naught _actually was_ , we'll never make
| progress.
| discreteevent wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by "your own decision". For
| example: If someone wants to smoke in the office that should
| be their own decision.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| I mean ultimately the answer is yes. People look at COVID and
| say it's not a big deal, but I look at it and say that we're
| lucky it wasn't something far worse. We're not at all
| prepared if we have something like a Black Death 2.0 and
| ultimately your ability to function as an individual depends
| on society's ability to actually function. Even the half-
| assed measures we took against COVID helped prevent our
| hospital systems from completely collapsing which would've
| led to far more deaths.
|
| The fact that people don't see this means they've grown too
| comfortable with modern society and how far we've become in
| preventing disease spread. Maybe it'll take a Black Death 2.0
| for people to understand this.
| doug_durham wrote:
| Public Health == Police == Fire fighting. They all exist to
| protect the population. They are peers. That some how Public
| Health would occur outside of the government is truly odd.
| Would you be in favor of Fire Departments being left up to
| individuals?
| [deleted]
| pupppet wrote:
| I would argue it is the government's job to ensure there is
| room in our hospitals.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| I agree. I was thinking today how during covid, my country was
| short of PPE for doctors and nurses. As were many countries
|
| One policy failing in this instance, was our reduction of
| stockpiled PPE several years earlier.
|
| Since COVID, there has been no discusion or suggestion of how
| to prepare better for next time
| lazide wrote:
| We likely won't see any real retrospectives for another 5-10
| years. It's still too raw and difficult to process the
| reality, as you can see in some of the other responses.
| ls612 wrote:
| We realistically won't see a good retrospective until the
| political leaders in 2020 have exited the political scene.
| Until then reactions to Covid stuff will just be a culture
| war reflex response of self-preservation.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| There are many covid counterfactuals we'll never know the
| answer to, but personally, I wish we could see the
| timeline where Trump won the election. Would the
| vaccination positions have been completely flipped? Pre-
| election you had democrat leaders saying things like "I
| wouldn't take a Trump vaccine." If we could only see that
| play out, I think it would expose how arbitrary much of
| the US political division really is.
| ls612 wrote:
| Or similarly what if Clinton wins in 2016, and gets stuck
| with the mess and cratering economy in her re-election
| campaign.
| daveguy wrote:
| This seems very inconsistent with what I remember. "I
| wouldn't take a trump vaccine" is completely incongruent
| with the fact that the vast majority of "the gubment
| can't make me wear a mask or take a vaccine" were in the
| middle of trump country. Trump got boo'd for promoting
| the vaccine after he lost. They would have been just as
| anti-gubment regardless. There was a brief period of time
| I heard that about a month or two before the election. "I
| wouldn't take a trump vaccine" completely disappeared as
| soon as it was obvious that the FDA wasn't going to let
| trump circumvent basic safety controls to push a vaccine
| in 6 months (before the election) instead of 12 months
| (after the election).
| abirch wrote:
| The difficult thing for the USA is that we treat healthcare
| as a profit center. This leads to focusing on efficiencies
| instead of extra capacity. You don't want extra beds, unless
| you have a pandemic. There aren't hospital beds as a
| services.
| macinjosh wrote:
| Missing my grandmas funeral or my parents missing the birth of
| their granddaughter are not minor changes to a 'preferred daily
| routine.' Lockdowns were a not only a useless public health
| measure they caused additional damage on top of the damage the
| pandemic was doing. Plenty of smart people warned against
| lockdowns but those in power ignored them. Sorry not gonna let
| this stuff go.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| I don't wish in any way to minimise or attempt to refute how
| you feel about the events your family missed, and I know a
| great many other people had similar experiences. Lockdowns,
| when done properly, do work. Here in New Zealand, we enjoyed
| more than a year of _normal_ life between our first Nation-
| wide lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, and the
| eventual emergence of omicron in the community. That period
| not only provided time for the population to be vaccinated
| (we got to 92% fully vaccinated) but also saved many many
| lives, and allowed people to do things like attend funerals
| and births which _they wouldn't have been able to do_
| (safely) if there was no lockdown. History will record that
| it was the right approach.
| User23 wrote:
| And Sweden did nothing and got an equally good outcome and
| doesn't even have the benefit of being an island country.
| 015UUZn8aEvW wrote:
| The US has 70 times the population of New Zealand, an
| underclass that's larger in percentage terms and less
| functional than New Zealand's, a porous border through
| which literally millions of people pass illegally-outside
| of the government's control, and tens of millions of
| illegal residents who have illegal or no ID and studiously
| avoid being tracked by the government. New Zealand is an
| island country with only a handful of international
| airports. There was no possible way that the US could ever
| have implemented New Zealand's policy successfully, even if
| Americans wanted to do so.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| Sure - I think I agree that the same approach wouldn't
| have worked in the USA. But it's also not a binary choice
| between 'lockdown until elimination' and no lockdowns,
| but having said that, I don't know what the US or
| similarly large countries should have done.
| _Microft wrote:
| My condolences for your loss.
|
| GP certainly exaggerated by labelling the situation as minor
| inconvenience. It was a major upheaval to all our lives.
| There is no arguing though that curfews can and did help - at
| least where conducted properly and with support of the
| populace (there's little hope if people are not even trying
| to cooperate though); the first "lockdown" (it was called
| like that but actually there were only curfews here) in
| Germany comes to mind - things went only downhill here after
| the first partially re-opened summer when different states
| and politicians discovered the situation as a way to compete
| with each other.
|
| This is hindsight though. In the beginning there was no
| reliable information on transmission vectors or
| infectiousness and the lack of tests, drugs, vaccines and
| treatments (even simple things like positioning patients
| prone to make breathing easier) or simply protection
| equipment left imo little choice than to treat the situation
| as severe as possible (better save than sorry).
|
| All in all I think that most of it was unavoidable, although
| I absolutely agree that this was in every way a situation
| that was hard to deal with for all of us.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > There is no arguing though that curfews can and did help
|
| I absolutely argue that they did not "help". COVID is still
| here. Everybody will still get it at some point in their
| lives and it's no less deadly than it was when the curfews
| started. They delayed some cases of COVID but did t prevent
| anything. At enormous cost, any way you measure it.
| terminatornet wrote:
| i would argue they did help. i have not gotten covid yet
| as far as I know. If and when I do, I guarantee I will be
| much happier to have gotten it when vaccines, treatments
| and therapeutics are improved compared to 3 years ago.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| The point was the delay of cases. During COVID many
| people died of preventable diseases or issues because
| COVID patients were siphoning our hospital and medical
| systems of resources. This man died of something that
| could've been prevented because hospitals were full and
| he couldn't get an ICU bed [1]. There are many more
| stories of this during the height of COVID of people
| dying from things that were low risk emergencies that
| became high risk ones because of hospitals being
| stressed.
|
| In a situation where we did not have any lockdowns or
| curfews or measures in place, there would've been far
| more deaths because of limited hospital capacity being
| entirely consumed.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
| updates/2021/0...
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| Omicron is certainly less deadly that the earlier
| variants, and the time gained with lockdowns allowed the
| population to get vaccinated, and gave hospitals time to
| build more ICUs. I think it's fair to say that these
| things are facts, not opinions!
| f6v wrote:
| Just by looking at the map there might be some correlation with
| vaccination rate.
| Mesopropithecus wrote:
| Meaningless statement unless you correct at the very least also
| for demographics and infection rates.
| zvmaz wrote:
| Yes, there is [1]. I remember vividly this one cop that quit
| his job of so many years over a vaccine mandate. He was invited
| on TV, and was all proud and righteous of his great deed. He
| died of COVID. His name was Robert LeMay [2].
|
| I wonder how many deaths could have been avoided were it not
| for vaccine skepticism.
|
| [1]
| https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2022/3/17/22979105/covid...
|
| [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trooper-
| co...
| croes wrote:
| Here you can see the excess death rate if Europe
|
| https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1632003510274347010
|
| Here the vaccination rate
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1196071/covid-19-vaccina...
| Djeman wrote:
| Completely opposite. Western Europe was highly vaccinated low
| mortality in map. Eastern Europe low vaccination high mortality
| draw_down wrote:
| [dead]
| awestroke wrote:
| Yes, it's thoroughly documented that increasing vaccination
| rates decreases mortality rates
| Izkata wrote:
| That would be a negative correlation. The map seems to
| indicate a positive correlation overall, negative correlation
| only if you ignore Africa and half of South America.
|
| (Eyeballing it side-by-side with the vaccination map here:
| https://fortune.com/2021/06/30/covid-vaccines-global-
| vaccina... )
| croes wrote:
| And if you ignore east Europe and north europe.
|
| East has low vaccination rates and high excess mortality,
| north has high vaccination rate and low excess deaths.
|
| Africa and South America could be different effects. I
| don't know how thoroughly they do, can or want to track
| excess deaths.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Wealthy countries have way more old people, and way more
| vaccines. COVID is still more dangerous to elderly
| vaccinated people than to unvaccinated teenagers.
|
| You can sometimes even see this effect in one country, if
| all the old people are vaccinated and none of the young
| people are, you'll still probably get more COVID deaths per
| old person. If you just look at mortality by vaccination
| status you'll see lots more COVID deaths in the vaccinated
| cohort, but that's because the vaccinated cohort is just
| old.
| nwienert wrote:
| Why do you immediately jump to one conclusion as to
| explain this?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Probably because while it's a simple observation, it's
| not an intuitive one, so a lot of us had to have it
| pointed out recently. It's the nature of the math, not
| anything that has to do with covid or can be sensibly
| argued with.
| nwienert wrote:
| Sure it's something to take into your model, but I find
| the just so framing weirdly pressing in these types of
| threads.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Big red splotch over Russia, and data includes 2022-2023...
| maybe there's also some other factor inducing excess death in
| Russians?
| ls612 wrote:
| The upper estimates are that Russia has suffered 50k KIA in
| the war which is a lot but in the grand scheme of things
| won't show up much in excess deaths.
| awestroke wrote:
| Fourth leading cause of death. Wow. But we decided as a society
| that, enough is enough, economic output is more important
| hgsgm wrote:
| Let's assume that eradicating covid (if somehow possible) via
| lockdowns and distancing would cost a 25% quality of life
| decrease for 2 years. That's equivalent losing 1% of all
| current human life.
|
| Or perhaps we would not eradicate COVID, but we'd avoid dying
| from it, and we'd have reduced quality of life _forever_.
| wizofaus wrote:
| That's not so unreasonable given significantly reduced economic
| output for long enough would inevitably result in a significant
| number of deaths that wouldn't have otherwise occurred (and
| yes, this would also be an argument for not being overly hasty
| in winding down fossil fuel usage, but given there's almost no
| indication any country in last 20 or 30 years has been willing
| to do so at a "hasty" rate, I don't think it needs to be made).
| Plus measures to prevent Covid spreading had a lot more
| downsides than just being a brake on economic growth.
| Ultimately you could see it as some sort of balance between
| aiming for "quantity" vs "quality" of life, though of course
| many have had the quality of their lives significantly
| disrupted by becoming ill with COVID.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| At this point, the only people dying are the ones who refuse to
| get vaccinated.
| momirlan wrote:
| absolute rubbish. your hate is blinding you.
| terminatornet wrote:
| quite wrong! as of august 2022, the majority of deaths, at
| least in the US, were among the vaccinated
|
| https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/why-do-vaccinated-people-
| re...
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I feel very torn on this topic. I still wear a mask in
| situations like a crowded airplane and likely always will. I
| was for much tighter lockdowns and am vehemently pro-vaccine
| and even people I highly respect cannot really convince me that
| school shutdowns were a mistake. I'm also really worried about
| long COVID and am worried what might happen with repeated
| infections. Yet I personally lost three loved ones during the
| pandemic. One person was my grandma. She was in her late
| nineties, had advanced dementia and died of a COVID infection.
| The other two were friends who died from causes related to
| mental health and I think there is a good chance they'd still
| be around right now if it wasn't for the pandemic and the
| isolation that came with it.
| abdabab wrote:
| Yes, now return to office. /s
| jehb wrote:
| I don't think you intended economic output as a strawman, but
| it seems like everyone replying to you turned it into one.
|
| There are an awful lot of public health measures not being
| taken that would have little to no impact on economic output,
| yet, society still can't seem to be bothered.
| colecut wrote:
| Or, living is more important
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I mean how many more years should we have been locked down?
| raincole wrote:
| But lockdowns don't solve it. Just delay it. Unless you're
| going to implement global lockdown (including all the
| developing countries), which will, almost guaranteed, cause
| more death than any natural disaster.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| And the vaccines didn't stop the spread of the virus. So
| there never was a exit strategy other than basically what we
| did. I'm quite confused what the COVID forever die-hards
| would have us do
| terminatornet wrote:
| I'd recommend looking into the "swiss cheese" model of risk
| reduction. The idea being that each method of prevention
| has holes in different locations, but combining some or all
| will be better at stopping infection than each on their
| own.
|
| https://www.coxhealth.com/newsroom/preventing-
| covid-19-using...
|
| as a forever covid die-hard, in my ideal world I'd like to
| see:
|
| better mask education - the US did an absolutely awful job
| at recognizing that all masks are not created equal,
| specifically that cloth and surgical masks are not as
| effective as KN95 or N95 masks
|
| free mask distribution - not everyone can afford to
| purchase new, high quality masks for regular use.
|
| free covid testing - if we're not giving people free access
| to testing, then how can anyone make a proper risk
| assessment of current covid levels?
|
| mask mandates - this does not have to be legally enforced
| by any means, but a mandate would show folks that masks are
| encouraged and needed at this time. Some people wearing
| masks is better than no one.
|
| indoor air testing/filtration improvement - for everyone
| who can't or won't wear masks, having minimum air quality
| levels for large indoor spaces/events would also help cut
| down on transmission.
|
| there's probably some more here i'm forgetting, but my
| point being is that an individual doesn't have to do
| everything here for us to decrease transmission of covid,
| nor do we have to shut down society to have that same
| effect.
| mjr00 wrote:
| There is no conclusion that all of those deaths were due to
| COVID, and the article is irresponsible for implying as much
| even after repeatedly saying that attributing all the excess
| deaths to COVID is jumping to conclusions.
|
| Some other things that have happened since before COVID which
| would cause an increase in pre-COVID forecasts include a war
| between the world's two global superpowers, a global recession
| and disruption of the supply chain, a massive shortage of
| healthcare workers in many countries, and an enormous spike in
| usage of fentanyl in the developed world.
|
| COVID plus any or all of those factors are contributing to
| excess deaths.
| gtop3 wrote:
| The direct losses between the war and fentanyl won't account
| for much.
|
| 100k of those are drug overdoses in the US (the place with by
| far the highest rate of fentanyl use). There is a similar
| number of killed in the first year of the Ukraine war. The
| economist is pointing out the estimates are off by 3M lives,
| so those two directly account for less than 10%.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > a war between the world's two global superpowers
|
| Yeah I don't think Russia qualifies as a superpower
| anymore...
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Pretty sure Ukraine isn't either.
| gt565k wrote:
| I agree. You lock everybody up. Cant go outside in some
| countries but for certain hours. The stress from losing your
| job too and not having income and seeing friends and family.
| Lack of physical exercise from staying at home and watching
| the news on the couch all day. It all adds up.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Your points of a global recession, disruption of the supply
| chain and shortage of healthcare workers could quite easily
| be attributed to covid because excess deaths during the
| initial outbreak contributed to massive burnout and a loss of
| workforce.
| mjr00 wrote:
| As much as hospital administrators love to blame COVID for
| underpaying and overworking healthcare professionals, a
| person dying because they got a late cancer diagnosis
| because they couldn't see a family doctor for 6 months
| because of a shortage caused by burnout is too far removed
| to attribute to COVID in good faith.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| From everything we know the opposite is true in that
| deaths directly due to COVID are undercounted, not
| overcounted. Multiple states in the US were directly seen
| undercooking the numbers so that it looked better. See
| here [1]
|
| Also even in the scenario you post as a semi-gotcha
| moment wouldn't be counted as COVID-related, but I would
| hope it would be obvious to you that certain fast growing
| cancers have significantly better prognosis if caught
| early.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236613
| AgentOrange1234 wrote:
| Yup. Anyone in power has an incentive to say "we've got
| this under control, trust us everything's fine."
|
| This is true at every level. From downplaying mistakes in
| nursing homes in NY, to fudging numbers in FL, to Trump
| wishing we'd stop testing, to Biden proclaiming victory
| upon the vaccine rollout, it's all the same incentive.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Why?
| someNameIG wrote:
| I don't see it as being far removed.
|
| And it wasn't just medium-long term issues like cancer
| diagnosis that was impacted but very time sensitive
| medical emergencies also, like heart attacks. The
| pandemic increased ambulance response times, time to
| emergency room beds, stretching of healthcare resources
| over emergency departments, even things like the added
| PPE requirements slowed everything down.
| prepend wrote:
| Kind of surprised that society was able to make the decision.
| It seems reasonable, right?
|
| Is it worth a 50% gdp hit to reduce cases by 10%?
|
| How many deaths are caused by reduced economic output?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Is it worth a 50% gdp hit to reduce cases by 10%?
|
| It is not. Fortunately those numbers aren't remotely close to
| reality.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Economic output is also what keeps people fed and the lights
| on, it's not really something people are going to tolerate
| turning down indefinitely.
| spurgu wrote:
| Governments can just keep printing money forever, no one has
| to work. /s
| zvmaz wrote:
| COVID has wreaked havoc in many aspects of life. There may well
| be a pandemic of prolonged grief [1].
|
| https://www.reuters.com/graphics/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/USA-CASU...
| tines wrote:
| > wrecked
|
| I think the term you're thinking of is "has wreaked" which is
| the present perfect tense of "wreak" which means to inflict or
| avenge.
| zvmaz wrote:
| Corrected. Thank you.
| CPLX wrote:
| My problem with this is that there seem to be two related but not
| really correlated points of opinion:
|
| 1. How bad Covid was, like was it a big deal or not.
|
| 2. The effectiveness of the means we had at our disposal to do
| anything about it.
|
| At least in the US everyone's responses are highly correlated.
|
| For example: if you think Covid is a big deal you think we should
| have taken all the measures we took and that relaxing
| restrictions was a mistake.
|
| If you're on the other team you feel like we shouldn't have done
| the interventions and lockdowns because you think Covid is not
| that big a deal and is overhyped.
|
| I feel most attracted to the group that agrees that Covid is a
| pretty big deal and very deadly and an incredible tragedy.
|
| I also think that except for the vaccines we've never had much
| control over it at all, and that for the most part the various
| lockdowns and mandates were pretty pointless after the first few
| months had passed and we knew what we were dealing with.
|
| Not much of a constituency for this point of view in the
| narrative, though I feel like it might be commonly held.
| x86x87 wrote:
| One thing that stuck with me since the early stages was the
| remark that if by looking at it after it's over the measures
| that were taken don't look like an overreaction it means we
| didn't do enough. My guess is that we'll see the effects of
| covid for decades both in the form of long covid and socio-
| economic impacts.
| CPLX wrote:
| I remember that line too but it's just a slogan, it doesn't
| really have normative meaning.
|
| For example, closing public beaches was an overreaction. It
| was pointless and had no positive effect at all. Noticing
| that doesn't prove that we did enough.
|
| It's still possible that we didn't manufacture vaccines or
| staff hospitals fast enough for example.
| andybak wrote:
| I think broadly speaking there were plenty of outdoor
| measures that quickly felt like overreactions. Indoor
| measures often felt the opposite (at least in terms of how
| they actually played out)
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, that's very much hindsight bias.
|
| We didn't know at the time that closing beaches was
| useless. Once we found out, those bans started to be
| reversed.
|
| That is why the 'slogan'.
|
| If you take proactive precautions based on what _might_
| help, you'll always look like you were overreacting
| afterwards because not all of them will be true.
|
| On the flip side, if you wait for solid evidence of what is
| actually effective or not, you'll _definitely_ end up with
| much larger spread and more damage, because it takes a lot
| of time for that data to be gathered, confounding variables
| to be identified, etc.
|
| In the face of an unknown pathogen, (like an unknown enemy
| in a war), it's important to defend against apparent
| threats, not just wait to see which ones are real - as by
| then it's too late.
| peyton wrote:
| I mean, coronaviruses are some of the most studied human
| pathogens on the planet, especially after SARS. The whole
| "we don't know what we're dealing with" shtick was hard
| to swallow.
|
| Health authorities should have been better prepared for a
| respiratory pandemic, period. We spend too much money on
| public health for the response we got.
| lazide wrote:
| SARS case fatality rate was 14-15% (roughly).
|
| [https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/sars/estimates-sars-death-
| rates-r...]
|
| During the first year of the pandemic, figuring out much
| of anything except that bodies were piling up faster than
| they could be managed in all the cities was extremely
| difficult, and there was a lot of clear political
| manipulation of the numbers everywhere, so trust was...
| thin. To put it mildly.
|
| COVID was clearly not as bad as SARS, but it was also
| clearly not the Flu.
|
| So what was the correct policy exactly?
| fzeroracer wrote:
| By all means then, if you're an expert then why didn't
| you tell us about the disease when it got started? Think
| of all the lives you, personally, could've saved if you
| shared your expert knowledge. Knowledge that no one else
| in the entire world knew about apparently as the disease
| transitioned to a pandemic.
|
| I assume that at least one health authority on this
| planet would've been prepared and know exactly how to
| respond, according to your expertise.
| CPLX wrote:
| I'm kind of exhausted with public policy elites lecturing
| me about hindsight bias.
|
| Year after year we're treated to idiotic policy decisions
| with obvious consequence like invading middle eastern
| countries for no reason, allowing obviously illegal and
| harmful market consolidation and mergers, mass delivery
| of opiates to literally everyone, and so forth.
|
| All the while people who gain massive amounts of power
| and money from the system tell us we're just not
| "serious" when we predict the consequences. We're told to
| trust the experts but then the self apointed expert class
| is not held accountable whatsoever when they come true.
|
| Fuck that, if people want to be entrusted with policy
| power they should get things right. And if they get it
| wrong, fine, but let's hold them accountable and notice
| who was right the whole time.
|
| A lot of the Covid policy decisions were idiotic and
| symbolic and wildly inconsistent, and many were based on
| lies or conflict of interest. It's fine to notice that
| this is a problem.
| lazide wrote:
| So I'm a public policy elite now? Sweet!
|
| Those things you're talking about don't seem to have
| anything to do with the topic at hand though?
|
| I agree re: many of the Covid policy decisions you
| mention at the end, but frankly given the options they
| had available I'm not sure I (or anyone) could have done
| anything different given the circumstances.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I don't fully agree, some overreactions were simply crowd
| management pointed at lowest denominator, or most
| stupidly behaving individuals. In France, one of bastions
| of freedom (liberte, at least on paper) there was a long
| period when people could only go 1km from their permanent
| residence. Even if you were a sporty person, wanted to
| keep fit, and did completely alone with absolutely 0 risk
| trail running in the alps around you, you were breaking
| the law. Cops could get nasty if they caught you.
| Neighboring Switzerland never applied similar
| restrictions, they trust their population way more.
| _That_ was smarter approach, and it sure as hell looked
| as that even during those times.
|
| In my crappy eastern europe home country, there was
| curfew after 8pm long after most of western europe
| abandoned any restrictions. I like to clear my head by
| long evening walks. I simply couldn't when being home, it
| felt I came to North Korea since cops back there are
| overzealous and often enjoy flexing their powers on
| common folks.
|
| Many policies were good and at least somewhat effective,
| some were outright restrictive or punitive bullshit with
| 0 positive effect, just fucking up people mentally more
| than they already were. That I think was the main point
| of critique - policy makers looked hard on numbers alone,
| not on psychological impacts of pushing too far. Its like
| chasing everything that kills people, you soon end up
| banning all cars since numbers alone are pretty horrible.
|
| We have generation of kids who are subtly (or not) fucked
| up, more than they should have been. Maybe 50 million
| affected? Many grandmas would gladly increase their risks
| a bit if they could see more freedom to their
| grandchildren, you have different (often better)
| priorities when older.
| lazide wrote:
| Every generation is subtly (or not) fucked up, near as I
| can tell.
|
| But most old folks I know were explicitly NOT visiting
| folks, not because of policies, but because they didn't
| want to die.
|
| And some I know that did anyway did in fact die - and
| their family has to deal with knowing they infected them
| and caused them to die. Which also causes some serious
| head fucking up.
| ghaff wrote:
| I pretty much agree with that. I think the evidence strongly
| suggests that vaccines help to reduce the effect of COVID
| especially in more vulnerable populations though it may not do
| much in terms of spread--especially with later, more
| infectious, strains.
|
| In aggregate, other interventions probably did some good at the
| margins? Especially early on? But it's easy to look at the
| policies in some countries and declare success--so long as you
| look at the right time window.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I know where I live the concern was about overwhelming
| hospitals. The early experience in Italy drove their thinking
| about it. When it seemed like the hospitals were going to be
| ok, "lockdown" measures were dropped.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Well, anecdata, but I'm generally very healthy, vaccinated, what
| not... I managed to not get covid until early this year.
|
| I was so tired for two weeks, I literally spent a good hour
| watching a shadow moving across the wall, hyping myself up
| thinking "when that bit of shadow hits that spot, I will have the
| energy to get up from this chair"
|
| It was no joke, and with young kids, I caught my fair share of
| other bugs over the last 6 years. I'm not surprised at all that
| this pushes some people over the edge, like influenza.
| Wiki39366 wrote:
| Did you had all booster shots? Many people skip couple of doses
| last year!
| [deleted]
| Toutouxc wrote:
| I got it last year, reasonably healthy, late twenties,
| vaccinated. Thought I was gonna die on the first day. Then two
| weeks of really bad influenza and two months of having to catch
| my breath after a flight of stairs. Since then -- heart
| arrhythmias, irritable bowel, all kinds of pain in all kinds of
| places, generally much worse mood. I was okay through the
| lockdowns btw, but fuck Covid itself.
| paganel wrote:
| Maybe in Western Europe and in North America, here in Romania
| we've had the month of March with the lowest number of deaths for
| the last 10 years (maybe more, I didn't look further back), and
| the same went for February. We also had a much higher number of
| deaths during the height of the pandemic (October 2021 had about
| 100% more deaths compared to a "normal" month of October), and
| one of the lowest vaccinations rates in the European Union.
|
| Which goes to say that many of the people who would have died
| now, so to speak, have in fact died one or two years prior,
| during the pandemic. Can't find the link, but a similar effect
| was noticed in Netherlands after their great famine of 1944-1945,
| which was followed by about a decade of bellow average death
| numbers.
|
| For those interested the Excel with the official data is in here
| [1], it's in Romanian but relatively easy enough to understand
| the data in there.
|
| [1]
| https://insse.ro/cms/sites/default/files/com_presa/anexa_dat...
| momirlan wrote:
| pai cine mai e tampit sa moara in Romania? au fugit sa moara in
| alte parti...
| DantesKite wrote:
| One of the things that isn't talked about enough in a reasonable
| and calm way is the impact COVID can have on the immune system
| long term.
|
| It's talked about in terms of Long COVID and whether or not it's
| psychosomatic, the policies made during the lockdowns, and so
| forth, but always with so much emotion, and sometimes for good
| reason. I don't want to dismiss that or trivialize it. Those are
| important topics to discuss for how we'll handle future
| pandemics.
|
| But the evidence is accumulating that COVID does seem to impact
| CD8+ T cells, causing T cell exhaustion and reduced effector
| response. One running hypothesis is that the impaired immune
| response is caused by a persistent viral reservoir infection,
| particularly in the gut (although not all people show signs of a
| spike protein months after the initial infection) causing your
| CD8+ T cells to express more inhibitory receptors (similar to
| what happens in HIV or cancer with excessive and prolonged
| exposure to cancer cells).
|
| Another hypothesis that is lesser known but I find particularly
| compelling is gut dysbiosis following a COVID infection causing a
| persistent immune activation that leads to T cell exhaustion or
| impaired T cell functionality especially through persistent
| activation of the dendritic cells (which are important for
| presenting antigens to the adaptive immune systems (i.e. T cells,
| B cells, etc)).
|
| I think a researcher put it best when they said COVID is roughly
| halfway between HIV and the common cold in terms of the impact it
| has on the immune system. It may also not be accurate. We have to
| find out.
|
| For context, think about how long it took to realize the Epstein
| Barr virus was a causal factor in multiple sclerosis. It took
| years of evidence collecting and data analysis to eliminate other
| confounding variables.
|
| We shouldn't rush to judgement or a narrative, but remain calm
| and dispassionate here and examine what's going on, both for the
| virus, the vaccine, and the actions taken during the pandemic.
| It's important we get it right.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Me & my family had covid at least 6 times, possibly 7-8. It
| happens when you have small kids in kindergarten who yet don't
| grok concepts of sanitation. Very anecdotal, but no observed
| immunity impact. What I do, eat, train/workout, sleep, expose
| ie to cold etc. has much higher impact on immunity. Sure as
| hell hope that's also valid long term.
| terminatornet wrote:
| jeeze, save some for the rest of us!
| Jabbles wrote:
| Please provide some citations.
| gtop3 wrote:
| > It's important we get it right.
|
| I really want to echo this. We are talking about millions of
| lives a year right now, and basically every human has been
| infected. We need a solid answer for why some people have long
| term health impacts and others do not. There are many brilliant
| people working on this problem. Let's accept that this might
| actually be a complicated long term problem.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > basically every human has been infected
|
| A majority, maybe. Certainly not "basically every human".
| lazide wrote:
| Know any sizable groups that _haven't_ been exposed?
|
| It's pretty statistically unlikely at this point.
| tomrod wrote:
| A lot of vaccinated folks, perhaps.
| lazide wrote:
| So vaccination stops you from being exposed?
|
| Pretty sure that's not true!
| momirlan wrote:
| never been infected. maybe I'm not "basically" human
| x86x87 wrote:
| Just accept it /s
|
| Also, how did you manage to not get infected?
| zwily wrote:
| How do you know you haven't been infected?
| x86x87 wrote:
| Yup. Not every human. Exposed? Maybe. Infected? Nope.
| smeeth wrote:
| In the interest of being "calm and reasonable," I'd like to
| point out that some of the language you used in your third
| block might need a few caveats to be aligned with the state of
| the research.
|
| In particular:
|
| - "COVID does seem to impact CD8+ T cells": the adjustment I'd
| make here is that evidence exists that COVID *can* influence T
| cells, not that it always does.
|
| - "causing T cell exhaustion and reduced effector response.": a
| quick google suggests there is some conflicting evidence on
| this point, and most of the studies are done on t cell
| responses to vaccines delivered after infections, which is a
| very particular thing.
|
| It seems like you're drawing very heavily from Anthony
| Leonardi, who, while definitely a scientist and likely right
| about some things, isn't exactly someone with median (or
| emotionless) opinions on long covid. The HIV comparison in
| particular is really out there and unnecessary.
| rtz121 wrote:
| [flagged]
| netsharc wrote:
| Geez, that deep red for Russia in the diagram, I wonder what the
| official figures of deaths due to war is.
|
| Radio Yerevan was asked: "Why does Russia have high excess
| deaths, is it because of the what the government has deemed as
| special military operation?"
|
| Radio Yerevan answered: "No, it's because of Covid."
|
| Radio Yerevan was further asked: "Is the government mishandling
| the Covid-crisis?"
|
| Radio Yerevan answered: "The government has successfully managed
| the pandemic and ended Covid."
| yarg wrote:
| It might be worth generating a version that excludes Russia and
| Ukraine.
|
| https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-globa...
| Anon84 wrote:
| https://archive.md/PmmMY
| [deleted]
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