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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

#51

Post by [deleted] »

nerdponx wrote: post #12
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#52

Post by HideousKojima »

eldaisfish wrote: post #47
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 hav…

>Lockdowns work and they worked well given what what was known at the time.

Objection, arguing facts not in evidence.

Edit: in response to the part you added after your original post:

>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.

The social and economic costs were mostly predictable back before the lockdowns ever happened. People opposed to the lockdowns were practically screaming what the consequences would be. They were ignored with calls of "If it saves one life!" and "You're killing grandma!"

Meanwhile it's come out that several (if not all) countries that imposed lockdowns didn't even attempt to do a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis prior to locking everything down.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-lockdown-files-rishi...

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

#53

Post by bqmjjx0kac »

blagie wrote: post #45

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 disea…

I feel like the framing of Covid as a kind of flu contributed to the poor public response. Imagine if it caused boils on the face, or incontinence! I hope that people would have broadly supported lockdowns in that case, but I guess anything can be politicized these days.

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

#54

Post by fnordpiglet »

blagie wrote: post #45

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 disea…

I don’t understand. The blog is talking about death tallies which is an easily observed binary outcome. They weren’t trying to measure other outcomes. Are you thinking a COVID infection might kill you two years later? That seems unlikely. Might it cause other health impacts? That’s almost certainly true, see long COVID. But it’s simply not the analysis being done here. This is about figuring out the degree to which countries under reported COVID deaths.

What specifically do you find wrong with the methodology they took for figuring out the degree to which countries under reported COVID deaths?

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

#55

Post by HideousKojima »

robertkoss wrote: post #50
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.

Nor did we have the data to say it WAS necessary, but we sure as hell could predict most of the negative social and economic side effects easily. Causing profound developmental delays in an entire generation of children and lowering lifetime educational attainment for almost every single teenager was worth it though, I guess.

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

#57

Post by robertkoss »

HideousKojima wrote: post #55
robertkoss wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nor did we have the data to say it WAS necessary, but we sure as hell could predict most of the negative social and economic side effects easily. Causing profound developmental delays in an entire generation of children and lowering lifetime educational attainment for almost every single teenager was worth it though, I guess.

You said it yourself, we were lacking the data which in a fat tailed event like a pandemic means that you should be as careful as possible.

It boggles my mind that people don't understand how to act under uncertainty.

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

#58

Post by cloutchaser »

robertkoss wrote: post #50
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.

Going by this argument we should lock down for every possible adverse future event where it might help.

Thinking about it lockdowns could definitely help with climate change, should we just lock down for the next 20 years?

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

#59

Post by lesuorac »

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.

> Not only did lockdowns fail

That's the exact opposite conclusion the article finds while taking into account more countries and just one.

If you have to search out a single country out of over a hundred to find supporting data you probably are just p-hacking .... Like go to the store and buy identical pens but of 100 different colors. Now throw them down the stairs and record which goes the farthest. Now repeat it again. Do this enough times and you'll find a pen with p> I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was

I'm sure they're be so upset to get free money per month while not having to work.

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

#60

Post by ajross »

Mattasher wrote: post #49
ajross wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does the magnitude explain excess deaths though? What this paper is saying is that rate of weight gain among already-obese kids was higher during the pandemic. Does that rate correlate to covid death rates? Seems like a metric for childhood obesity isn't going to get there in any case, since these folks aren't dying at significant rates.

This kind of argument is exhausting. You said that excess deaths are confounded with obesity. I said that if they were, it would be comparatively easy to measure, so I suspect your hypothesis is simply wrong. Then you came back with a number that showed weight gain among kids, which I didn't try to refute.

Your hypothesis is a Big Thing. You're saying people are dying in very large numbers (millions a year), from existing syndroms that we have been tracking for decades. And... somehow epidemiologists are silent on that? It seems suspicious, you agree, right? Isn't the Occam's razor take is that you're simply wrong here, and that people are dying from a pandemic and not obesity?

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