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Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

maximumtruth.substack.com

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Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#41

Post by tonmoy »

Mattasher wrote: post #5

Interesting analysis, though he mentions early on a huge issue with the analysis: > It does come with one major caveat: Because it counts ALL deaths, it cannot on its own disentangle deaths caused by Covid itself, impacts from the lockdowns themselves, impacts from vaccines, or unrelated death trends. Especially as time goes on, and we see the effects of missed cancer screenings, economic destruction, increased obesi…

That analysis was just for figuring out the actual Covid death numbers using the excess deaths in this two year time period

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#42

Post by TheFattestNinja »

mikkergp wrote: post #14
mhd wrote: post #8

Averaging out people dying to "days lost per life"?

Yeah, this is one of those cases where mean is really deceptive, almost to the point of shadowing the veracity of the rest of the paper, I wonder if they chose it because other numbers are just nearly impossible to grasp emotionally. It’s hard to make a cost benefit analysis if you’re convince you are in one camp (or the other, healthy people are probably convinced they’d survive and unhealthy/immunompromised not so)

Imho it's well past the point of "almost shadowing the rest". It singlehandledly makes the rest of the work (at least in my judgement) completely garbage. Which is a shame because it seems good. I don't want to sound too "emotional" but come the fuck on. Even if you want to be "rational" and just look at hard monetary data you could just take the years lost, give them a price tag (average yearly salary * years accounted for inflation of age/region bracket) and look at that. But to ask "Would you have preferred to live through a total travel ban, and total lockdowns, like Australia’s, to save yourself 10-to-15 days of life?" falsifies the thing completely: you didn't save yourself 2w of "life", you saved someone else decades of their life (and their impact to society/economy). And you didn't "pay" for it in time, you just had reduced quality for a while.

If lives were only relevant "on average", then reducing birth rates wouldn't be an issue for society/economy at all right? "On average" there wouldn't be a difference.

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#43

Post by pacerwpg »

fabian2k wrote: post #31
nerdponx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really a "caveat" when it entirely invalidates any attempt at causal analysis with this data? So much for "maximum truth". This is a nice data visualization exercise and descriptive analysis, but that's it.

There is plenty of other data that supports the assumption that the vast majority of deaths here is due to COVID. Not all causes of death here are equally plausible.

Especially when you consider that countries with stricter lockdowns had considerably lower excess deaths. People just want to be contrarian about this for whatever reason and throw everything they can think of against the wall.

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#44

Post by jandrese »

fabian2k wrote: post #17
plasticchris wrote: post #11

It was a bit jarring to read such careful analysis and then toward the end read that China was an example of keeping Covid out, I wonder if they fudged things enough to throw this analysis as well?

I'm not sure if you can get reliable excess mortality data for China, without that this approach would obviously fail. But I think this specific analysis is also a bit more focused on the earlier parts of the pandemic, and before Omicron at least it looked like China's policy seemed to work well in terms of stopping the spread. With Omicron this seems much more dubious.

China politicized the virus more than even the US. It is very hard to trust the official figures released by the CCP. They put a lot of political capitol into the "0 COVID" policy.

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#45

Post by blagie »

I fundamentally disagree with the methodology and conclusion of this article.

The problem with a new disease is that we don't know the long-term impact. Polio led to post-polio syndrome. Tick diseases have impacts decades out. Rabies does nothing for 6 months, and then causes insanity and certain death. Syphilis led to insanity decades later. AIDS has minimal short-term impacts too; death is caused by follow-up diseases.

We know more about the long-term impact of COVID in 2022 than we did in 2020, but we still don't fully understand it. We still don't really understand the impact of multiple, serial COVID infections, as everyone seems to be getting.

When a new disease comes out, I'd like to exterminate it, please. I'm happy to have a month-long full lockdown everywhere it's found, like China did, while the disease dies off. If we can't do that, I'd like to lock down until we have a vaccine, and ideally, until we understand the long-term impact.

I'd take no lock-down over losing 15 days of my life (or a 1-3% chance of death, for that matter). I would take a lock-down over long-term impacts of a disease of the type we've seen with COVID and other diseases. To me, it's a numbers game on long-term health impacts, not on death. Do those happen to 1% of people? To 100% of people? Do they last weeks? Months? Years? The rest of your life? When do they start?

I'd like good answers to those questions on whatever disease comes out next before relaxing.

With travel and population growth, we will see more and more interesting disease. We need a strategy to deal with them. I'm profoundly disappointed COVID didn't lead to us even developing one.

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#46

Post by artificialLimbs »

zdragnar wrote: post #34
boredumb wrote: post #27

>The United States was roughly around the global average. Contrary to the view of many conservatives, the deaths probably were caused by Covid itself, and NOT by lockdowns I feel like the common view by people who thought numbers were being artificially inflated was that they were counting people who died while having tested positive for covid being attributed to covid and not just 'the lockdowns' Fairly distinctly r…

> thought numbers were being artificially inflated was that they were counting people who died while having tested positive for covid being attributed to covid This objectively happened. Anyone who was COVID positive was being counted as a COVID death. It happened to my friend's dad- COVID was listed as the cause of death on his death certificate, v even though it was nothing to do with any illness at all, but rather…

Same. Family friend had a hunting accident and shot himself. Made it to the hospital, tested positive, died within a day or two from the gunshot. "Covid death."

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#47

Post by eldaisfish »

cas14655 wrote: post #40

Sweden Age Adjusted Mortality 3rd January 2020 through 18th June 2021: -2.3% Source: ONS Not only did lockdowns fail, they were unnecessary and cruel and tyrannical. I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was.

you are making the classic mistake of judging past actions with future knowledge.

Lockdowns work and they worked well given what what was known at the time. They are also good at reducing social contacts for transmissible disease and the best evidence of this was the almost total lack of a flu season in the northern hemisphere.

While the social and economic cost is now known to be immense, public health officials have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#48

Post by TheFattestNinja »

jdpel wrote: post #25
nerdponx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought that this was a feature of "excess death" analysis! It's the combined effect of the pandemic, not just the disease itself.

That's fine for historians, but useless for making decisions about interventions in the real world where there is always more than one confounding factor.

But confounding factors average themselves out over long period of times. Hence why excess mortality is good, because you compare it to decades of data where the smaller effects even out.

If I can't get a heart surgery bc doctors unavailable and die, that's (on average) caused by covid. Sure, it's possible that my doc was unavailable at the time bc he hammered a finger, but "on average" over the timespan the only constant factor was covid (or covid-policy consequences).

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#49

Post by Mattasher »

ajross wrote: post #22
Mattasher wrote: post #5

Interesting analysis, though he mentions early on a huge issue with the analysis: > It does come with one major caveat: Because it counts ALL deaths, it cannot on its own disentangle deaths caused by Covid itself, impacts from the lockdowns themselves, impacts from vaccines, or unrelated death trends. Especially as time goes on, and we see the effects of missed cancer screenings, economic destruction, increased obesi…

Seems like cancer and obesity are already quite well measured and robustly reported, though. Are there numbers to back up your hypothesis that people are dying more due to cancer and heart disease over the past two years? Or, if you're just proposing that that "will" happen in the future, it seems like it's not really a refutation of the data in the linked article.

Evidence of all these impacts is easy to find. Here's just one link about the increased rate of childhood obesity:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#50

Post by robertkoss »

cas14655 wrote: post #40

Sweden Age Adjusted Mortality 3rd January 2020 through 18th June 2021: -2.3% Source: ONS Not only did lockdowns fail, they were unnecessary and cruel and tyrannical. I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was.

Typical hindsight bias. At the time of the debate (April 2020) we DID NOT have the data to say that a lockdown was unnecessary.
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