281–290 of 387 posts
About time we start asking hard questions on the virus origin.
As opposed to all the ones that have been asked so far, which were somehow "not hard"?
I won't make the unfair comparison to, say, New Zealand, which has no land borders, but let's take Vietnam: * 100M people * Long land borders with Laos, Cambodia, and China * Virus located in state territory in Jan 2020 * Total number of verified cases: 3,137. * Total number of deaths: 35 * Current number of daily new cases: ~50. Multiply the figures by 3.3 or so to normalize with US population. Forget the quibbling…
https://www.vox.com/22346085/covid-19-vietnam-response-trave...
This isn't a "study", it's a statistical model. It reflects the assumptions put into it. To wit: > Our analysis follows four key steps. First, for all locations where weekly or monthly all-cause mortality has been reported since the start of the pandemic, we estimate how much mortality increased compared to the expected death rate....Second, based on a range of studies and consideration of other evidence, we estimate…
Yep, and it's a suspect one at best. Personally I wouldn't trust a stastical model from someone who advertises that they own the book "how to lie with statistics" and obviously used it
I own an inherited blue Pelican paperbook copy from my pharmacist grandfather.
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YLL is a horrifying metric because it values someone who is 20 over someone who is 60. The only argument I can see for its "usefulness" as a statistic is if you want to imply that the old are less useful than the young. This kind of statement about the bare utility of a human life is the same statement that underlies a lot of how we have treated the disabled or those on welfare in the past. And it only makes sense if…
> YLL is a horrifying metric because it values someone who is 20 over someone who is 60. Not to my father, who is in his late 60s and the most at-risk member of the family, and who has been more opposed to the lockdowns than any of us. His calculation is that at some point - for the good of the family, long-term - the economic damage and delayed social development of his grandchildren outweigh his personal safety. I…
But some older people aren't useless Fox News addicted dipshits.
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>Something to consider if you see anyone trying to downplay this. Most of the downplaying I've seen has revolved around the idea that those who died would have, "died anyway" from some other ailment or that hospitals are finding any reason they can to attribute deaths to covid. So, while you have a great argument, I doubt you'll change any minds because those who disagree flat out reject your premise.
For the former, if someone is actually willing to listen to evidence, you can cite them numbers of average years of life lost per covid death (~15).
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> There are lots of other plausible alternative hypotheses. Please list them. We have data about deaths going back many decades. It's very safe to say that if in 2010 you made a prediction about the number of expected deaths in 2011, you would have been very close to the real number. Same if you had predicted the deaths for 2019 in 2018. Suddenly, after decades and decades of being almost perfect in your predictions,…
And that's the very beginning. We also have plenty of time series data from effectively instituted lockdowns worldwide. Excess deaths rise prior to the lockdown, in line with but greater than reported COVID deaths. They continue rising until median COVID- time-to-death days after the start of lockdown. Then they fall, sharply, dipping below regular excess deaths (and tracking the fall in COVID deaths). That isn't a p…
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Yes, it's considered downplaying to try and attribute these people's deaths to something that didn't kill them. If the answer to the question of, "Would this person be alive were it not for COVID?" is "Yes", then COVID killed that person. You should be able to be fragile and still survive, that isn't an excuse to let someone die.
That's... exactly the point? Dying with COVID does not mean you would be alive today if you hadn't contracted COVID.
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> Surely you'd agree that "2020 excess deaths are going to be predominantly covid" is a very reasonable hypothesis though, right? And you agree that "2020 has an extraordinarily high excess death rate", because that part is easily measured data, right? I don't know the answer, and neither do you. But given that the top-line is asserting that there are 900k excess deaths due to Covid, the choice of assumption here is…
> There are lots of other plausible alternative hypotheses. I would be curious which ones that would be.
Third, we build a statistical model that predicts the weekly ratio of total COVID-19 deaths to reported COVID-19 deaths based on covariates and spatial effects. Given how disastrously wrong most modeling/forecasting(1) has been during this pandemic color me a little bit skeptical that their model is somehow better. Models give wide latitude to fiddle with parameters. (1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7…
Color me completely distrusting. Between the IHME and Neil Ferguson (aka The Master of Disaster because of how horrifically wrong his models have been) models in the UK, they haven't even been close to reality. The IHME was even called out last year by other data modelers at one point for how poorly done their models were.
Neil Ferguson's earliest models were used to justify no action/herd immunity as the UK's initial strategy.
I recall (but can't find) the Imperial College scientists saying they didn't fully consider any other option at first, because they understood that it would be politically unpalatable.
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And that's the very beginning. We also have plenty of time series data from effectively instituted lockdowns worldwide. Excess deaths rise prior to the lockdown, in line with but greater than reported COVID deaths. They continue rising until median COVID- time-to-death days after the start of lockdown. Then they fall, sharply, dipping below regular excess deaths (and tracking the fall in COVID deaths). That isn't a p…
Not sure why I can’t reply to the person who replied to you - “timr” who is asking for data, but there is data here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
Nobody is disputing that excess deaths are happening, the question is why they're happening.