This year we kill it: Corona Virus Thread Mark II

[Squire Doodad]

It doesn't work as a mortality rate against covid cases because many of those deaths will be people who never contracted the virus. There is, of course, a wide margin of error on both the official death rate (since not all deaths are recorded, different jurisdictions assess cause of death differently, so deaths will be either over- or under-reported from place to place) and the number of confirmed cases (the latter probably an underestimate, since lack of testing capacity has been more of an issue than false positives). But if we take all the figures at face value, then since the start of the pandemic there are global excess deaths of around 24.3 million of which Covid directly accounts for 5.7 million - leading to the obvious conclusion that the cure has been significantly worse than the disease.

Frankly this reading of the statistics is highly misleading and I would suggest you try reading more articles on the topic.
With all due respect, you're conflating quite a few things that should be handled separately.

Few people are dying of other causes and being written down as "dying from COVID". Again, if someone dies indirectly due to the fact that the pandemic is raging, they are not marked as having died of COVID. Meanwhile, it is known that some people are dying from COVID but not being marked as such - though we don't know how many, so it's better to just go with the lots of deaths we already have.
Thus, we can firmly say that deaths from COVID are not being meaningfully diluted by deaths not from COVID.

And, of course, the pandemic has much further reaching consequences. As has been stated, the heavy strain on the health system - medical and mental - will get a lot of bycatch.

There is no reason to believe "the curse has been worse than the disease". Telling people to wear masks doesn't kill people. Vaccines definitely do not kill people. You can make an argument that locking down industries kills people - but that's only if they're not being given appropriate resources (via paid leave, for instance).

While the Hopkins study is something I would like to believe, because it meshes with my own preconceptions, I have to point out that snopes called this out .



So, again, while this is something I would like to believe, I think I have to dismiss this paper as a, ah, non-scientific talking point. I don't think we can accept it as the consensus of the scientific community, even of that community which works at John Hopkins.

Ah, I had been wondering about that.

I still carry an inhaler for attacks. The only reason I don't experience them is because I walk for exercise, or swim, or do anything besides heavy activity on land which would require large lungfuls of air and consequently gasping on the ground.

Yet ... life goes on.

Since I knew I couldn't make a living as an athlete or any job which required oxygen, I poured myself into intellectual studies. I had to take calculus three times before I passed it. Eventually, I found work as a software engineer, as a defense contractor, in the hospitality industry, in education. I've been successful in the field I "chose", meaning those fields which were actually available. I've even been able to go on archaeological expeditions for my university, since digging doesn't require running.

I'm not saying crippled for life is an easy thing to deal with. It's not. But it's not the end of life either. We pick ourselves up, we make the most of the cards we do have in our hand and play them to the best of our ability. Some people don't even get a pair in the five card draw that is life -- but even no pair can be a winning hand if you've got the skill at bluff.

My role model is Darth Vader. Can't walk unassisted, can't move unassisted, can't live outside his lung for five minutes .. but no one treats him with pity and he's effective in his chosen field. I'm surprised he's not a mascot for the special olympics!

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Very well said, really.
I would probably have a bit more to say but I'm also feeling completely winded from reading all of the posts.

The socio economic effects of covid are far worse than the socio economic effects of anti-covid measures. Furthermore anti-covid measures are a one-time cost assuming it succeeds, whereas the socio economic effects of covid are ongoing and ever increasing.

Oh hey, this sums it up well.

[LeSwordfish]

The comparison of deaths from covid to other excess deaths seems a strange one - surely the comparison when considering "should we have done the lockdowns" is to the death rate without lockdowns. Seems a bit like complaining that you needn't have used that uncomfortable parachute because you landed slowly and safely.

[Chen]

For excess deaths its actually fairly misleading to just look at the world picture. That does show something like ~20 million excess deaths vs 5 million COVID deaths. But when your drill down into various countries it can look very different.

For example Canada has ~30k COVID deaths. And the excess death estimate for Canada was…about 22k. The only way I can interpret this is that if there was no COVID and we did the exact same things we had been doing these last years, there would be LESS deaths than if we followed a trend pre-COVID. If you drill into the data below you see type of phenomenon in many places particularly those with heavy lockdowns. The places with the opposite (wildy higher excess deaths than COVID deaths) tend to be places where’d you’d expect undercounting of COVID deaths or places where you actually hit hospita capacity due to COVID and you actually started making triage decisions that costed lives.

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

[Squire Doodad]

From Our World In Data itself, on its excess mortality data:

We can think of them as our best, educated — but still ballpark — estimates. Some of the specific figures are highly uncertain, as the large uncertainty intervals show. But the overall conclusion remains clear: in many countries and globally, the number of confirmed deaths from COVID-19 is far below the pandemic’s full death toll.

[Bobb]

IMO I think the ship has sailed for eliminating covid, we could've done it in 2021

Doubt.


You might have had a vaguely plausible pitch if you had said we could have done it in 2019.

But not really.

[NichG]

Doubt.


You might have had a vaguely plausible pitch if you had said we could have done it in 2019.

But not really.

Even something like vaccine herd immunity without NPIs was possible for the original strain at something like a 70% vaccination rate. It only took a few weeks to actually prepare the mRNA vaccines, most of the time ended up being ramping up of production and the specific medical trials. We couldn't have done much faster within the decision parameters we tend to think of as reasonable and safe, but that's not the same as it not being possible. It means we chose not to.

[Squire Doodad]

Given the rates vaccines were being distributed at in the US, they could have easily hit 70% by the end of the summer of 2021. However, significant amounts of disinfromation and hesitancy has caused vaccination rates to fall very short.

I am not certain, but it feels plausible that if there was negligible levels of misinformation vis a vis the COVID vaccine and masking, COVID would have been partially though not completely dealt with in some areas by the end of 2021. That said, vaccine inequity would also throw a wrench in the works on a global level.

[NichG]

Given the rates vaccines were being distributed at in the US, they could have easily hit 70% by the end of the summer of 2021. However, significant amounts of disinfromation and hesitancy has caused vaccination rates to fall very short.

I am not certain, but it feels plausible that if there was negligible levels of misinformation vis a vis the COVID vaccine and masking, COVID would have been partially though not completely dealt with in some areas by the end of 2021. That said, vaccine inequity would also mean it would still need to be handled at length in countries that are not recieving the same access.

I mean, in terms of what is possible, I'm considering things more like 'imagine this was a World War and governments threw 90% of their resources at it'. There are reasons people didn't do that of course, very good reasons in some cases, but I think in the abstract its something that a civilization with our level of technology could have accomplished.

E.g. imagine that we had a virus very much like COVID, but 2 months after infection it had a 100% fatality rate. Would we be able to survive that as a species?

[Squire Doodad]

E.g. imagine that we had a virus very much like COVID, but 2 months after infection it had a 100% fatality rate. Would we be able to survive that as a species?

No. That would cause panic and disbelief to the point that society itself would likely collapse before we could find a consistent cure. And that's assuming it doesn't wipe out overwhelming amounts of people before we're aware what it is doing.

Like, would there be pockets of survivors? I guess. But also the scenario as a whole is mortifying and really not something I need to think about right now.

As for the actual question:

I mean, in terms of what is possible, I'm considering things more like 'imagine this was a World War and governments threw 90% of their resources at it'.

Yeah if this was a proper global level cooperation with all capable governments going whole hog on stopping COVID - without any major infighting, through varying means, some more or less invasive than others, but all definitively striving to stop it with every inkling of might they could - then yeah it lasting 16 months and tapering off over the next yearish sounds perfectly reasonable, assuming the vaccine takes about as long to develop and test.
Some might argue that a slightly more drawn out version of that would have happened if the pandemic was treated apolitically on a global level, with or without every last drop going towards stopping it...but I don't really know what to say on those kinds of might-have-beens.

===

Anyone have optimistic news to share??

[Mastikator]

Yeah if this was a proper global level cooperation with all capable governments going whole hog on stopping COVID - without any major infighting, [...]

Anyone have optimistic news to share??

We did actually do that with freon gas emissions which really would have been apocalyptic by now if the world didn't come together to stop it. So the idea that the world can come together to stop a global catastrophe is entirely possible. Personally I'd focus on climate change for that issue rather than covid, but covid has taught us that working from home is entirely feasible, that we don't need to consume consume consume and other stuff that can't be posted on this forum but nontheless would help against climate change.

[BaronOfHell]

For excess deaths its actually fairly misleading to just look at the world picture. That does show something like ~20 million excess deaths vs 5 million COVID deaths. But when your drill down into various countries it can look very different.

For example Canada has ~30k COVID deaths. And the excess death estimate for Canada wasÂ…about 22k. The only way I can interpret this is that if there was no COVID and we did the exact same things we had been doing these last years, there would be LESS deaths than if we followed a trend pre-COVID. If you drill into the data below you see type of phenomenon in many places particularly those with heavy lockdowns.

Except from one article from some economists, isn't it generally accepted that a lockdown does limit casualties for non-covid reasons as well?

In my country we had a very mild flu season, despite expecting a very harsh one. The general consensus is that it is due to people interacting less when we had a lockdown. Also I believe there were much less traffic on the roads, and less accident due to it.

Despite of this we've had excess rate of people leaving this world, and recently our health department estimated 60% of corona related loss of life was due to corona within the latest month. Which is shocking, because we've higher numbers than ever, and I thought it was because a huge majority was due to counting many infected, who weren't ill due to corona.

Counting backwards a month we had about 13% of the population confirmed infected, of which .75% got hospitalized of which 10% are still hospitalized.
I don't know if all the people confirmed passing away due to corona were hospitalized, I somehow doubt it, but if we assume they were, and they had been hospitalized within a time frame of a month, then 4% of those hospitalized since early January lost their life due to corona in my country.
Compared to those infected it is .004%, but considering at least 13% of the population was infected, to me that seems like a lot.

Since the start of the pandemic, in my country 15% of total casualties have been within the latest month, which is about 4% of the duration of the pandemic so far.

Given the rates vaccines were being distributed at in the US, they could have easily hit 70% by the end of the summer of 2021. However, significant amounts of disinfromation and hesitancy has caused vaccination rates to fall very short.

That said, vaccine inequity would also throw a wrench in the works on a global level.

That is my understanding too, which I think is emphasized by two of the dominant strains, delta and omicron, coming from India and South Africa, where I understood, especially in the countries of Africa, the vaccine hasn't been distributed nearly as well as, e.g. in the US.

[Aedilred]

Frankly this reading of the statistics is highly misleading and I would suggest you try reading more articles on the topic.
With all due respect, you're conflating quite a few things that should be handled separately.

Few people are dying of other causes and being written down as "dying from COVID". Again, if someone dies indirectly due to the fact that the pandemic is raging, they are not marked as having died of COVID.

Well, in the UK, for instance, for several months at the peak of the pandemic Covid was marked as the cause of death if you died within a certain number of days of a positive Covid test. This policy, intended to avoid missing Covid deaths, almost certainly led to an overcount among that test group.

Of course, it is also probable that testing didn't pick up all the positive cases, and testing will be highly variable from area to area - with other varying policies on what counts as a Covid death also varying from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The official Covid figures are therefore a bit of a mess.

They may however still be the best we have.

The excess death count is somewhere in the region of 21-25 million, but we have no idea how many positive cases there actually were, especially during the early, deadliest phases of the pandemic, because testing wasn't up to speed. We can't take the "positive cases" tally and the "excess deaths" tally and compare them to reach the conclusion that Covid is more deadly than we thought, because the pool of people from which the excess deaths are drawn is much larger than that of positive confirmed cases.

So the official Covid figures are still the best we have to go on - not least because it is unlikely that deaths from among the pool of positive testees are going to be erroneously recorded as something else when there is this much focus on this specific disease.

This matters when you're trying to assess risk profile, as opposed to just raw numbers. Then account for variable risk by population sector: while the long-term effects may be more harmful in younger people than we thought, the elderly and infirm are still far more at risk than anyone else, which skews the overall figures upwards significantly and misrepresents the danger for younger people.

Especially now vaccines are in play. The combination of vaccines and the apparently lower severity of some of the newer variants like Omicron means that Covid is significantly less dangerous than it was 18 months to two years ago. Last autumn, the UK saw a massive spike in Covid cases, far higher than at the previous peak. But while there was a corresponding upturn in hospitalisations and deaths, both figures were well below those seen at the peak of the previous surges.


As I was getting at before, the unquestioning assumption seems to be that Covid is sufficiently dangerous that virtually any measures are justified in stopping its spread, from which it follows on that this remains the case so long as Covid is in play and that the socioeconomic effects of lockdowns etc. are less damaging than that of Covid unchained would be. And, therefore, that we should be doing our best to eradicate Covid completely and not letting up on any of the preventative measures until that has been accomplished.

But all of this is entirely dependent on Covid remaining dangerous, and all the evidence points towards its becoming increasingly less dangerous as time goes on, principally due to a combination principally of vaccination and new, less serious, variants, together with better medical understanding of how to actually treat it, which can't be underestimated: our hospitals are no longer being mugged by a new and unknown condition but one that they have a pretty good idea how to deal with even if the caseload is high (which, again, varies from area to area). There will come a point - perhaps we are already there! - where socio-economically repressive containment measures can no longer be justified on the basis of the actual threat presented by Covid.

If at some point a new variant, let's say the omega variant, emerges which is essentially asymptomatic, that is still technically Covid, but it is not dangerous: it is hard to justify repressive measures on the mere basis that it exists and some of its earlier relatives were worse. So where do we draw the line between a Covid too dangerous to risk, and a Covid that is essentially harmless? Taking an absolutist position that we can't let up until every variant is gone is not, in my view at least, a sustainable or sensible stance.


Historic figures can easily prove a red herring in this respect, because it's conflating figures from the start of the period with those from the end. I mentioned them myself largely to reference the way that the 1.5-ish% mortality rate was pooh-poohed on this very forum two years ago but in the time since it seems to have been borne out... albeit I accept that that is also subject to the same ongoing adjustment to account for decreasing deadliness.

I also don't fully buy the argument that the pandemic itself is more socioeconomically destructive than the full scope of measures taken to restrict its spread and I never have, and for the same reasons as above I don't think that argument will hold much longer. It only holds so long as (1) the virus is either so deadly or (2) the population is sufficiently scared of it that the same or greater effect is had whether the containment measures are in place or not.

In the case of (1), arguably it never has been, and in any event it will not stay so forever, and in the case of (2), even discounting that this was in part the result of a deliberate terror campaign run as part of the containment measures (and so overlaps with the pandemic response, rather than being solely attributable to the virus itself) that is something that we will need to reverse at some point in order for something like normal life to resume but is essentially a separate issue to the existence of the virus itself.

Moreover, the practical impossibility of actually eradicating Covid means that at some point that call will have to be made regardless, as it has been by default with regard to every other pandemic in human history.

I am of course not saying we should stop (or slow down) producing or distributing vaccines. But the restrictions on gatherings, mandated social distancing indoors, lockdowns/quarantines/house arrests, those kind of things need to be looked at carefully to consider if they can continue to be justified.

[Squire Doodad]

Except from one article from some economists, isn't it generally accepted that a lockdown does limit casualties for non-covid reasons as well?

In my country we had a very mild flu season, despite expecting a very harsh one. The general consensus is that it is due to people interacting less when we had a lockdown. Also I believe there were much less traffic on the roads, and less accident due to it.

Tbh you can probably reap a lot of the benefits at minimal cost just by having "wear a mask when you're sick" be a societal norm like it is in South Korea.

That is my understanding too, which I think is emphasized by two of the dominant strains, delta and omicron, coming from India and South Africa, where I understood, especially in the countries of Africa, the vaccine hasn't been distributed nearly as well as, e.g. in the US.

If I'm not mistaken, the Omicron tidbit isn't actually originating from SA - South Africa has a very state of the art program for genome sequencing and the like that let them recognize it first.
That said, you also hit the nail on the head - if vaccines cannot be evenly and effectively distributed, then there is a chance for a new strain that can evade vaccines to come out of the less vaccinated areas and boomerang back, screwing up a bunch of progress on that front.

But all of this is entirely dependent on Covid remaining dangerous, and all the evidence points towards its becoming increasingly less dangerous as time goes on, principally due to a combination principally of vaccination and new, less serious, variants, together with better medical understanding of how to actually treat it, which can't be underestimated: our hospitals are no longer being mugged by a new and unknown condition but one that they have a pretty good idea how to deal with even if the caseload is high (which, again, varies from area to area). There will come a point - perhaps we are already there! - where socio-economically repressive containment measures can no longer be justified on the basis of the actual threat presented by Covid.

Okay so this would be nice but it's not happening.
Hospitals are still buckling whenever a wave happens. They lack the resources to grapple with COVID, countless nurses and doctors are quitting or burning out hard.
Omicron is less deadly than Delta, but as mentioned by someone else, COVID is not optimized to become less deadly to maximize spread. What we're basically seeing is fatality rates jumping up and down from one variant to another independent of the spread. COVID is being optimized for spread, we're just lucky that right now Omicron, which has had ludicrous spread rates, is not as fatal at face value (based on our data).
COVID still poses a real and serious threat, and that threat has not vanished. Implying we should not bother requiring masks because we should just live with it is, frankly, the wrong interpretation. Of course, I can't take a side on some of the more extreme measures being taken in some countries. Regardless you are being far more optimistic about the situation than it actually is.

Reading your edit - at this point I'm just going to stop this conversation wholesale. I'm sorry, but I do not have the time or energy to butt heads on this.

[NichG]

Historic figures can easily prove a red herring in this respect, because it's conflating figures from the start of the period with those from the end. I mentioned them myself largely to reference the way that the 1.5-ish% mortality rate was pooh-poohed on this very forum two years ago but in the time since it seems to have been borne out... albeit I accept that that is also subject to the same ongoing adjustment to account for decreasing deadliness.

You keep saying this, but I went back to that thread and re-read the first 10 pages, and the estimates people were giving were between 0.85% and 3%. If anything, the outliers were a handful of people saying 'oh, its just going to be 0.1% because of the unreported cases'. For some people at that time who had cemented the COVID/flu comparison, 1.5% was considered unthinkably high.

And 1.5% is actually ridiculously high at a population scale. The human population grows at around 1% per year, so if we actually had a yearly sustained loss of 1.5% of the population that would be an extinction level event playing out over a few centuries. If you have a highly streamlined economy (read: exactly the number of workers such that when demand is a little high everyone has to work overtime to fulfill it), removing a few percent of workers can have a huge effect. Sources of recurring, ambient harm don't need to have numbers like 20% or 50% to cause massive damage. Even with Omicron's notably reduced lethality (looks to be around 1/2 compared to Delta, though changing vax levels make the comparison tricky), hospitals are so choked where I live that there's a 1 month moratorium on all elective surgeries because there are no resources, time, or space at the hospitals to deal with anything other than COVID.

Fortunately, with prior immunity, the CFR for COVID is not 1.5% - best I can tell with recent US numbers, its around 1%-1.1% for omicron for the unvaxxed and around 0.02% - 0.1% for the vaxxed.

[Squire Doodad]

For bonus points, the sheer amount of depression from that many deaths would cause the human pop. growth rate to fall because fewer people would be up to having kids.

[georgie_leech]

For bonus points, the sheer amount of depression from that many deaths would cause the human pop. growth rate to fall because fewer people would be up to having kids.

And to piggy back off of this, no, the lockdowns etc. are not likely to have had a significant effect on this front compared to losing friends and relatives to the disease or being permanently crippled in some way. Covid has mental health effects too, not just just our responses to it.

[NichG]

For bonus points, the sheer amount of depression from that many deaths would cause the human pop. growth rate to fall because fewer people would be up to having kids.

I'm actually not sure this one is borne out, there are some odd dynamics with stress and mating impulses. The stuff I'm finding is for animals and differs in details, so I don't know that it would generalize, but roughly the pattern is that stressors inhibit mating immediately, but (in males at least) increase testosterone levels in the long term, which in those species correlates with an increase in mating behaviors - here's a paper talking about that in squirrels http://www.csun.edu/~karels/Pubs/Boo...001Ecology.pdf and another one talking about it in seals https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18021775/

So steady levels of moderate stress would probably reduce growth rate, but bursts of high-stress events with lulls in between might increase it.

[Squire Doodad]

I'm actually not sure this one is borne out, there are some odd dynamics with stress and mating impulses. The stuff I'm finding is for animals and differs in details, so I don't know that it would generalize, but roughly the pattern is that stressors inhibit mating immediately, but (in males at least) increase testosterone levels in the long term, which in those species correlates with an increase in mating behaviors - here's a paper talking about that in squirrels http://www.csun.edu/~karels/Pubs/Boo...001Ecology.pdf and another one talking about it in seals https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18021775/

So steady levels of moderate stress would probably reduce growth rate, but bursts of high-stress events with lulls in between might increase it.

I would assume humans have more complex reactions to death than squirrels? Idk how that varies in comparison to, say, dolphins, but biological urges in reaction to ensure the population bounces back once things settle seems logical. I haven't researched that kind of thing, will take a read.
But in general I would say "4 months between high stress events" would not be enough to act as enough of a lull for a resurgence.

Do the Roaring 20s and the post-WW2 Baby Boom count as the kind of "lull" being discussed?

And to piggy back off of this, no, the lockdowns etc. are not likely to have had a significant effect on this front compared to losing friends and relatives to the disease or being permanently crippled in some way. Covid has mental health effects too, not just just our responses to it.

Yeah, big time, especially in such a digitally connected age. I can keep in touch with my friends and family over Zoom or text; while it's nowhere near as good as in person meetings, it's a solid substitute.
...definitely better than meeting an elderly relative in person, only for them to die scant weeks later and wonder if you're to blame.

[Tyndmyr]

While the Hopkins study is something I would like to believe, because it meshes with my own preconceptions, I have to point out that snopes called this out .

Snopes ain't a scientific journal at all. Why should they have any standing?

What credentials do they possess that make them any different from an opinion piece? The co-founder of Snopes, who wrote many articles, recently had something of a public scandal over plagiarism, as apparently a large number of the things he published he swiped without proper credit.

This particular piece appears to be written by one Dan Evons, who specializes in coverage of social media and motorcycle racing. If one is arguing from authority, I cannot imagine why he would be considered such.

So, again, while this is something I would like to believe, I think I have to dismiss this paper as a, ah, non-scientific talking point. I don't think we can accept it as the consensus of the scientific community, even of that community which works at John Hopkins.

Just because it jibes with my preconceptions doesn't mean I can accept it as valid; the world is not as I would wish. If it was, Firefly would have had a second season!

Good news! Well, maybe. I hear Firefly is getting a reboot on Disney+.

But anyways, none of that makes this "non-scientific". The people publishing it are certainly scientists. The John Hopkins professor is the founder and co-director of the division, that's a fairly respectable title. One might fairly call economics the dismal science, but it isn't non-scientific.

Few people are dying of other causes and being written down as "dying from COVID". Again, if someone dies indirectly due to the fact that the pandemic is raging, they are not marked as having died of COVID.

I have heard official testimony in support of mandates(Anne Arundel County, Maryland) from a doctor explicitly defending our existing practice of doing just that. The example he chose to use was of someone who came into the emergency room for a broken ankle, and were unaware that they had covid until routine testing uncovered it. His rationale was that perhaps someone was tired or down because of the covid, and more prone to accidents. This is...possible, but seems to be quite a stretch. He stated that the most common condition causing such a discovery was pregnancy.

Therefore, even the best official numbers have some fuzziness, error, and subjectivity.

There is no reason to believe "the curse has been worse than the disease". Telling people to wear masks doesn't kill people. Vaccines definitely do not kill people. You can make an argument that locking down industries kills people - but that's only if they're not being given appropriate resources (via paid leave, for instance).

It isn't relevant if the cure is worse than the disease. What matters is if the "cure" provides more risks than benefits. None of these measures is a complete cure. Adding up benefits and consequences and measuring them against one another is the only reasonable way to do it.

There's about 180,000 excess deaths from 2020 that are not attributable to covid by the CDC's numbers. So even if we assume that overreporting never happened, there have clearly been significant consequences. We'll probably have to wait a bit for 2021's numbers, but it looks like suicide and addiction deaths are on the rise.

The comparison of deaths from covid to other excess deaths seems a strange one - surely the comparison when considering "should we have done the lockdowns" is to the death rate without lockdowns. Seems a bit like complaining that you needn't have used that uncomfortable parachute because you landed slowly and safely.

Per the John Hopkins study, that appears to be about 0.2% less. That's the purpose of bringing that study into this...we don't have a lot of data as to the what-if. Everyone likes to assume that what they did worked, but we have relatively little data actually demonstrating this. Part of this is that it's still fairly fresh. A lot of statistics take many months to compile, so there's some serious lag in many studies as they can't really begin until they have raw data. However, if it is even approximately accurate, then this wasn't much of a parachute. A toy parachute, perhaps, attached to a hapless skydiver who will still impact quite hard.

For excess deaths its actually fairly misleading to just look at the world picture. That does show something like ~20 million excess deaths vs 5 million COVID deaths. But when your drill down into various countries it can look very different.

All my examples were USA specific, and they show quite a lot of excess deaths in addition to the excess deaths due to COVID.

I mean, in terms of what is possible, I'm considering things more like 'imagine this was a World War and governments threw 90% of their resources at it'. There are reasons people didn't do that of course, very good reasons in some cases, but I think in the abstract its something that a civilization with our level of technology could have accomplished.

E.g. imagine that we had a virus very much like COVID, but 2 months after infection it had a 100% fatality rate. Would we be able to survive that as a species?

Well, it'd be detected sooner. The two month delay is certainly unusually nasty, but a big part of covid's spread happened while it was not yet recognized as a major threat. The first known US case didn't happen until mid Jan 2020. The first known case in China was discovered 1 Dec. It probably started circulating in China somewhat before it was noticed...we can't tell for sure exactly how long, but October-mid November has been postulated.

A wave of death, even with a two month lag time, would have been early enough to become noticeable before much of a foothold had been established elsewhere, and people would have reacted both more strongly, and earlier. No policy can save the people who become infected before we know of it, but earlier detection is probably the most helpful thing for preventing any pandemic. In that respect, high lethality can help the world, if not the initial victims.

Except from one article from some economists, isn't it generally accepted that a lockdown does limit casualties for non-covid reasons as well?

In my country we had a very mild flu season, despite expecting a very harsh one. The general consensus is that it is due to people interacting less when we had a lockdown. Also I believe there were much less traffic on the roads, and less accident due to it.

Negative. In the US, car crashes rose spectacularly during 2020, despite fewer people on the roads.

If I'm not mistaken, the Omicron tidbit isn't actually originating from SA - South Africa has a very state of the art program for genome sequencing and the like that let them recognize it first.
That said, you also hit the nail on the head - if vaccines cannot be evenly and effectively distributed, then there is a chance for a new strain that can evade vaccines to come out of the less vaccinated areas and boomerang back, screwing up a bunch of progress on that front.

SA's research program is true, they're on top of a lot of stuff. That is, in part, because of the high prevalence of HIV in the region, necessitating a great deal of medical research work. HIV tends to make folks susceptible to a number of diseases, and while that does overlap with being a risk factor for mutation, some proportion of diseases they find originate elsewhere. I've read several theories about where it might have originated, but all seem fairly speculative on anything prior to SA's discovery. *shrug* I suppose we have to accept a bit of uncertainty.

Okay so this would be nice but it's not happening.
Hospitals are still buckling whenever a wave happens. They lack the resources to grapple with COVID, countless nurses and doctors are quitting or burning out hard.

Occupancy rates have reliably hovered around 80-85% for almost the entire pandemic. This isn't the whole picture though, because extremely low occupancy rates, not being profitable, result in healthcare workers being laid off or taking better paying jobs. In early 2020, fearful of the possibility of overload, a great many non-emergency procedures were canceled. This resulted in a record amount of healthcare layoffs and furloughs.

So, yeah, there's a shortage of health care people. That tends to follow a mass firing.

Add the vaccine mandates in for healthcare workers, which resulted in additional firings or layoffs.

Lastly, add in that many facilities for the elderly have become unwilling to take back recovered patients, resulting in recovered patients remaining in hospitals. So, you have mass firings, extra people stuck there, and a lot of workload on whoever is left when spikes happen.

There are indeed great shortages, but at least a large portion of this is a result of mitigation attempts.

And 1.5% is actually ridiculously high at a population scale. The human population grows at around 1% per year, so if we actually had a yearly sustained loss of 1.5% of the population that would be an extinction level event playing out over a few centuries. If you have a highly streamlined economy (read: exactly the number of workers such that when demand is a little high everyone has to work overtime to fulfill it), removing a few percent of workers can have a huge effect

The US population never stopped growing, and we have a larger population now than we did pre-covid.

As for the worker issue, Covid-19 almost invariably kills the very elderly. This is a population that has mostly left the workforce. Average age of retirement in the US is 62, and over 75% of deaths are from the over-65 categories. Covid-19 *increases* the proportion of humanity that is in the workforce, because it preferentially kills those who are not.

Illness can create havoc, but covid-19 didn't cause a worker shortage due to killing them. Time out due to being sick, lockdowns, retiring early, etc seem more likely.

There's a saying that being poor is expensive, because you don't spend the moderate amounts that save you large amounts in the long run.

COVID has and will cost businesses an order of magnitude more than it'd cost to upgrade HVAC, much less just keep the windows open and pay more for heating.

I don't think you're wrong that people won't do it. Rather I suspect people will keep being stubborn and we'll just keep racking up preventable economic damages and quality of life damages while all the while saying we're doing it for sake of quality of life and the economy.

I wouldn't be surprised if access to COVID-safe conditions becomes a wealth and status thing. Big tech companies can advertise it as the same kind of perk as having an exercise room in the office or catered lunches. Wealthier neighborhoods can redo the HVAC of their schools and make back the investment in what that does for property values, etc. Why care about spending $10k for each family to do the school renovations when it means that everyone's house will sell for $100k more down the line, etc. 'We require businesses in our shopping center to send sick employees home for your safety' justifies raising the prices a bit, like organic labels or health-centric grocery stores, etc.

Money isn't wealth. There's only so many HVAC installers and manufacturers. One business can throw more money at it and get what they need. All of humanity cannot, at least not on anything like a short timetable.

The "throw money at it" scenario basically results in HVAC upgrades being concentrated in rich areas who can afford to buy up the supply.

Over a period of many years, sure, new businesses will open and supply will expand and what not, but production lines generally don't start overnight. Good air handling is a great thing to have. Our ability to build it is finite, and dollars only do so much to change that. Mostly they just change who gets it.

This could indeed contribute to the "wealth and status" effect you mention, but it's...not great at stopping the disease overall. It just means that it kills the poor and middle class(who are already disproportionately likely to suffer from either the disease or the mitigations), and is more likely to be seen as a solved problem and ignored by those who are now safe. Kind of an interesting path to a cyberpunk dystopia, eh?

[Squire Doodad]

Snopes ain't a scientific journal at all. Why should they have any standing?

What credentials do they possess that make them any different from an opinion piece? The co-founder of Snopes, who wrote many articles, recently had something of a public scandal over plagiarism, as apparently a large number of the things he published he swiped without proper credit.
This particular piece appears to be written by one Dan Evons, who specializes in coverage of social media and motorcycle racing. If one is arguing from authority, I cannot imagine why he would be considered such.
But anyways, none of that makes this "non-scientific". The people publishing it are certainly scientists. The John Hopkins professor is the founder and co-director of the division, that's a fairly respectable title. One might fairly call economics the dismal science, but it isn't non-scientific.

I believe you need to re-read the post.
Snopes, a fact checker, looked into the nature of the paper. The paper, as it turned out, was pre-peer review and was being written by economists.
Thus it does not have the same as a peer-review paper published by John Hopkins's medical department, written by medical officials or researchers.
Saying Snopes isn't a scientific journal as a reason to ignore what they're saying, but counting the John Hopkins econ professor's stance as relevant because it's "scientific" is a mess of an argument.
Snopes is not being provided as a source for a conflicting opinion, they're a source for context behind who the authors of the Hopkins bit are.

Economics is indeed a science but in this case, but it's also a very different one than medicine. An engineering professor is not automatically a qualified biologist.

Occupancy rates have reliably hovered around 80-85% for almost the entire pandemic. This isn't the whole picture though, because extremely low occupancy rates, not being profitable, result in healthcare workers being laid off or taking better paying jobs. In early 2020, fearful of the possibility of overload, a great many non-emergency procedures were canceled. This resulted in a record amount of healthcare layoffs and furloughs.

So, yeah, there's a shortage of health care people. That tends to follow a mass firing.

Add the vaccine mandates in for healthcare workers, which resulted in additional firings or layoffs.

Emphasis mine - the number of healthcare workers quitting because of vaccine mandates pales in comparison to the number that have quitted out of desperation or burnout. Headlines about it have been a flagrant case of how "over 500 workers fired over mandates" looks like it's a big amount while "barely 500 workers fired over mandates" is a small amount - in both cases, there's millions of workers that are complying with the mandate.

[NichG]

I would assume humans have more complex reactions to death than squirrels? Idk how that varies in comparison to, say, dolphins, but biological urges in reaction to ensure the population bounces back once things settle seems logical. I haven't researched that kind of thing, will take a read.
But in general I would say "4 months between high stress events" would not be enough to act as enough of a lull for a resurgence.

Do the Roaring 20s and the post-WW2 Baby Boom count as the kind of "lull" being discussed?

Well yes, but in terms of the cortisol/testosterone dynamic, the half-life of the former is 2 hours and the half-life of the latter is 8 days...

For a more human perspective, literature is full of the conceit of people seeking eachother for comfort and the affirmation of life in desperate times. I trust that less than a study, but...

[Squire Doodad]

Well yes, but in terms of the cortisol/testosterone dynamic, the half-life of the former is 2 hours and the half-life of the latter is 8 days...

For a more human perspective, literature is full of the conceit of people seeking eachother for comfort and the affirmation of life in desperate times. I trust that less than a study, but...

"Making Out As A Short-Term Cure For Depression" is not quite where I was expecting this to go...

[NichG]

The US population never stopped growing, and we have a larger population now than we did pre-covid.

Yeah, COVID did not infect 100% of people, it did not have a 1.5% IFR, etc...

This is more the point that something that affects 1.5% of a population is a huge thing, not a tiny thing because we're used to e.g. thinking about things like 10% effects in games as the scale of a weak buff. There's a lot of 'but look, a small number!' without a thought of what that number can mean in practice.

Maybe if we framed it as a tax people would see it differently. A 1.5% per year tax on all one's assets wouldn't be small at all.

Money isn't wealth. There's only so many HVAC installers and manufacturers. One business can throw more money at it and get what they need. All of humanity cannot, at least not on anything like a short timetable.

The "throw money at it" scenario basically results in HVAC upgrades being concentrated in rich areas who can afford to buy up the supply.

Over a period of many years, sure, new businesses will open and supply will expand and what not, but production lines generally don't start overnight. Good air handling is a great thing to have. Our ability to build it is finite, and dollars only do so much to change that. Mostly they just change who gets it.

This could indeed contribute to the "wealth and status" effect you mention, but it's...not great at stopping the disease overall. It just means that it kills the poor and middle class(who are already disproportionately likely to suffer from either the disease or the mitigations), and is more likely to be seen as a solved problem and ignored by those who are now safe. Kind of an interesting path to a cyberpunk dystopia, eh?

If we're taking the 'COVID is endemic and there's no changing that' route, then this is the sort of thing that matters of the course of 10, 20, 50 years. It's best to have it done fast, but its better to have it done eventually than not at all.

And as for a disease that just kills the poor and middle class, well, that's basically what cholera was before widespread sanitation, so I'm not exactly seeing the 'cyber' bit there. But granted, medieval-punk doesn't roll off the tongue at all.

[pendell]

I believe you need to re-read the post.
Snopes, a fact checker, looked into the nature of the paper. The paper, as it turned out, was pre-peer review and was being written by economists.
Thus it does not have the same as a peer-review paper published by John Hopkins's medical department, written by medical officials or researchers.
Saying Snopes isn't a scientific journal as a reason to ignore what they're saying, but counting the John Hopkins econ professor's stance as relevant because it's "scientific" is a mess of an argument.
Snopes is not being provided as a source for a conflicting opinion, they're a source for context behind who the authors of the Hopkins bit are.

Correct. The point I was trying to make is there's a lot of air time given to the effect "lockdowns had minimal to no effect" ... but when I trace down the sources in the various news sources , it comes back to this study. Which is a paper by three economists and is not peer reviewed. It seems to me that the paper and its conclusions are given far, far more credit than it deserves at this point.

The reason I used snopes as a reference is because they were a quick, easy cite for my point when my posts already tend to be too long. I assert that the paper is a pre-peer review paper by three economists and therefore is hardly conclusive when it asserts "lockdowns cause no harm". That the paper argues this is beyond dispute. But there's a lot of daylight between " a paper by three economists" and "the consensus of the medical/scientific community". If someone wishes to dispute this point and argue either 1) that the paper is by a scientific team which is peer-reviewed (should be easy to prove, if true) or 2) that the assertion "lockdowns have no effect is the scientific consensus", the burden of proof is now on them .

Good news! Well, maybe. I hear Firefly is getting a reboot on Disney+.

Meh. Looks like it's rumor at this point. Lovely if it pans out, even better if its a worthy successor. Although after seeing the star wars trilogy and the subsequent weakness of the later Boba Fett arcs (Mandalorian was great) I'm not convinced "Disney reboot" is a positive. At this point, I view giving intellectual property to Disney akin to taking one's pet pony, brushing it down and dressing it up with ribbons, then sending it down to the knackers. What comes out may have some of the pieces of the original, but the original spirit and intent aren't there and it will be dead forever.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Tyndmyr]

I believe you need to re-read the post.
Snopes, a fact checker,

I am going to stop you right here. The fact that you are bringing up "fact checker" as part of this indicates you are relying on this for credibility.

It is an opinion piece from a man that writes about motorcycles. "Fact checker" is not any kind of formal educational position or authority, and is in fact, nothing more than opinion.

It's an argument from authority without even a claim to authority. It is ludicrous.

looked into the nature of the paper. The paper, as it turned out, was pre-peer review and was being written by economists.
Thus it does not have the same as a peer-review paper published by John Hopkins's medical department, written by medical officials or researchers.
Saying Snopes isn't a scientific journal as a reason to ignore what they're saying, but counting the John Hopkins econ professor's stance as relevant because it's "scientific" is a mess of an argument.
Snopes is not being provided as a source for a conflicting opinion, they're a source for context behind who the authors of the Hopkins bit are.

1. Tallying up the costs and effects of programs is a routine part of economics. That's...what the field of economics is. If you took away every bit of economics that affected another aspect of life, there would be nothing left of the field. Becoming a surgeon is very useful for performing surgeries. It is mostly not relevant for evaluating the benefits and costs of policies. This objection is invalid.

2. It is a published meta-analysis of peer reviewed work. This means we have the usual assurances of peer review for all of the raw data they're working with. You are certainly welcome to read the study and check their work, as anyone else is. This isn't unusual for metastudies. A metastudy is itself a review of the works it aggregates. This is not a sign of being unscientific. This is a "gotcha" written by someone who doesn't understand the different types of studies or how scientific study works. This is probably why you shouldn't rely a dude that normally writes about motorcycles.

Emphasis mine - the number of healthcare workers quitting because of vaccine mandates pales in comparison to the number that have quitted out of desperation or burnout. Headlines about it have been a flagrant case of how "over 500 workers fired over mandates" looks like it's a big amount while "barely 500 workers fired over mandates" is a small amount - in both cases, there's millions of workers that are complying with the mandate.

I do not know where you got this number from, but 500 is quite distant from the true number. Individual hospital systems have reported numbers in the hundreds, but the total number is higher. We probably don't have complete numbers yet, but many hospital systems that implemented such a system reported approximately 1% of workers being fired. The true number may be higher if folks quietly got other jobs before the date rather than waiting to be fired. Even if that is not the case, when capacity normally sits at around 85%, losing 1% is a notable bite out of your safety margin. Together with the other reasons for turnover, it's quite a big deal indeed.

Economics is indeed a science but in this case, but it's also a very different one than medicine. An engineering professor is not automatically a qualified biologist.

They are not conducting biology. This isn't a research paper. They are aggregating data from dozens of studies and calculating costs and effects. That's Economics.

Which is, of course, why it was published in Studies in Applied Economics.

[NichG]

Talking about the actual contents of the paper and its rebuttal would be more useful than talking about the credentials of people involved with either.

That's not me coming down on either side of this mess, just an observation that the reputation of authors or things like peer review status are pretty weak things to base any kind of conclusion on. If the authors have done their work correctly, what they wrote should stand on its own merits when approached critically. Anything peer reviewed was vetted on the grounds of someone going and reading the thing and checking the methodology, so any information which would lead to an accept or reject decision should be in there already.

[Squire Doodad]

Talking about the actual contents of the paper and its rebuttal would be more useful than talking about the credentials of people involved with either.

That's not me coming down on either side of this mess, just an observation that the reputation of authors or things like peer review status are pretty weak things to base any kind of conclusion on. If the authors have done their work correctly, what they wrote should stand on its own merits when approached critically. Anything peer reviewed was vetted on the grounds of someone going and reading the thing and checking the methodology, so any information which would lead to an accept or reject decision should be in there already.

You make a good point.
Notably, it is being described as a pre-peer review paper. I have, in my experience, not seen a "peer-reviewed" instance of the paper being brought up, but rather explicitly the pre-peer review instance. Given that it is frequently being discussed with that tacked onto it, I presume that the actual paper people are citing did not pass the peer review process.
Thus, either the peer-reviewed paper has been edited and may contain different information, or the paper itself was not permitted during the peer review process.

This is also disregarding that many other papers have come to the opposite conclusion on masking and countermeasures.

In other news, anyone doubting the danger of COVID should keep in mind that over the last month, COVID had killed more people than the flu has in the last 3 years.
(Even accounting for two of those years being during a pandemic with masking at play, that's still 1 year overcome in a fraction of the time. If you want, you can re-read it as "COVID killed significantly more people in a month than the flu did in 2019".)

[NichG]

You make a good point.
Notably, it is being described as a pre-peer review paper. I have, in my experience, not seen a "peer-reviewed" instance of the paper being brought up, but rather explicitly the pre-peer review instance. Given that it is frequently being discussed with that tacked onto it, I presume that the actual paper people are citing did not pass the peer review process.
Thus, either the peer-reviewed paper has been edited and may contain different information, or the paper itself was not permitted during the peer review process.

There's lots of bad science that passes peer review. There's lots of good science that gets stuck in peer review for multiple years, or is never published for a variety of reasons. Peer review status doesn't tell you much either way. Just read the paper - if there's something wrong with the methodology or about how conclusions are drawn from results or analysis, then talk about that.

'It didn't pass peer review' or 'it did pass peer review' or 'the guy who wrote it repairs motorcycles' are extremely weak foundations to base commentary on.

And again, this isn't me saying that the paper is right or wrong, or that the fact-check is right or wrong. This is me saying that this entire line of argumentation is an incorrect way to determine whether those things are right or wrong, especially if the conclusion actually matters.

[Squire Doodad]

True, true

It's also worth noting that regardless of its nature, this is just one paper - there are many others out there that should also be, ideally, taken into consideration.

[pendell]

Here's a view from National Review -- also a non-scientific opinion piece, but it has links -- which thinks the "omicron variant is about done"

The Omicron wave is just about done.

On the New York Times's chart ( link), the seven-day average of daily new cases nationwide peaked at 806,000 on January 14. Mondays tend to bring spikes, likely reflecting a backlog of delayed reports from the weekend. On January 3, the country reported more than 1 million new cases, and on January 10, the country reported more than 1.4 million new cases.

Yesterday, the country reported about 206,000 new cases, and the seven-day average of daily new cases dropped to just below 155,000.

That comes out to an 80 percent drop in a month and puts the country back to the new-case levels of the week before Christmas. (Keep in mind, if someone feels sick, takes a home test, comes out positive, and never reports their case to their doctor or local health authorities, they don’t get added to the total, so these figures are undercounts.)

...

For all intents and purposes, the Omicron variant is the Covid-19 pandemic right now. The Delta variant stopped showing up in significant numbers the week ending January 8 and represented zero — that is 0.0 percent — of cases reported from January 30 to February 5. ( link )

Since February started, it is all Omicron, all the time, with the Omicron subvariant “BA.2” now representing 3.6 percent of cases and “classic” Omicron representing the other 96.4 percent. The BA.2 subvariant has been given the ominous nickname of “stealth Omicron,” but that mostly refers to the difficulty of genetically differentiating it from Delta. In terms of severity, it’s about the same as regular Omicron, but might be even more contagious than regular Omicron, at least according to Dr. Andrea Garcia, the American Medical Association’s director of science, medicine and public health.

Back on February 2, Garcia stated that, “In the U.S., BA.2 is about 8 percent of our cases right now. While BA.2 does not appear to cause more severe disease and our vaccines appear to be effective, BA.2 does show signs of spreading more easily, which really could translate into that slowing down of the trend we're seeing with cases declining.” ( link )

But, for what it’s worth, roughly two weeks later, the cases keep declining. So far, the BA.2 subvariant doesn’t appear to be a game-changer.

Omicron brought a lot more cases — roughly one-third of all U.S. Covid-19 cases occurred between early December and the end of January. ( link ) And the milder-but-more-contagious virus did reach those who were still most vulnerable to it — the U.S. has suffered more than 136,000 deaths from Covid-19 since the beginning of December.

Right around here, someone will look at people taking off their masks and resuming their normal lives and cry, “But there could be another variant out there!” Indeed, there could be, but right now, it’s not showing up in the CDC testing. More than 547 million Covid-19 vaccination shots have been administered in the U.S., more than 214 million Americans have two shots, and more than 91 million Americans have gotten booster shots. Nearly 76 percent of all Americans have gotten at least one shot, which is 80.7 percent of everyone eligible, more than 87 percent of all U.S. adults, and more than 95 percent of U.S. seniors. Overlapping that are the more than 79 million Americans who have had Covid-19 — and probably tens of millions more, between the asymptomatic and those who didn’t report their cases.

If somebody’s vaccinated, boosted, and had Covid-19 . . . there’s nothing else that person can do to protect themselves. (Okay, other than living a healthy lifestyle and maybe taking vitamins.) Their bodies have had it and their immune systems now know how to fight it off. Any new variants the come along might be significantly different, or they might not; we won’t know until genomic testing indicates something new and different has arrived.

I've stripped out the political bits and commentary but it does seem like a reasonable view. It doesn't mean that we've licked Covid and we'll never see it again.

I am reminded of a line from Heinlein's "The Puppet Masters". In the story, earth is invaded by an alien species which does indeed spread like a disease. In a miraculous turn of events, the human race defeats the aliens by deploying a deadly disease against the aliens -- a biological virus called "nine day fever". It kills humans in nine days but aliens in five. The resulting military operation involves spreading the disease on a massive scale then sending in people with antitoxins and treatments in really, really, fast to save as many as possible in the four days they have left.

It works. Mostly.

Even so, at the end of the book there is a discussion that, though the human race has 'won', there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. Some of the aliens survived. Which means the various restrictions used to combat them, described in the book, are never going to be completely off the table. From that moment until the end of the planet, humans have to be ready to submit to inspection for alien contamination, and aggressive nationwide countermeasures which make our real-life lockdowns look like a child's party, must remain viable contingencies in perpetuity.

I think it's the same with COVID. Yes, the disease is currently fading. Yes, people will still catch and die from it till the end of time. Perhaps there will be other diseases in the future. As the author of the book said, "it's a horror we have to live with, like the atomic bomb."

So I guess we can call this a "win" for now. With qualifiers.

Respectfully,

Brian P.