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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

#71

Post by pacerwpg »

HideousKojima wrote: post #52
eldaisfish wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interestingly the economies of the world seem to be fairing worse now that lockdowns have lifted and there are labor shortages in every area.

The effects of people dying and the unchecked spread of illness were ignored with calls of "you're killing the economy!".

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

#72

Post by hnuser847 »

cloutchaser wrote: post #58
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.

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?

Please don't give them any ideas.

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

#73

Post by 1MachineElf »

lesuorac wrote: post #59
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…

Don't ignore the conclusion bullet point and analysis towards the end of the article which stated in multiple ways that lockdowns fail the cost-benefit analysis.

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

#74

Post by cas14655 »

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.

In itself your statement is accurate: we did not have data that is impossible to have.

In broader context the implication is not correct. We had experts consider long and hard what to do in the case of an influenza pandemic and the consensus for decades had been to disrupt society as little as possible.

This is the WHOs evaluation of NPIs in 2019 (PDF Warning): https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789...

It says Contact tracing, Quarantine of exposed individuals, Entry and exit screening and Border closures are "Not recommended in any circumstances".

The experts thought about and decided it was not worth it.

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

#75

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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…

I think what they mean is, even at the time, people were tracking excess deaths above expected based on historical info (e.g. deaths might be higher in the winter so an increase or drop might be seasonal) and trying to decide how much of that excess was covid vs lockdown. The car-crash would be in the expected average deaths which had already been subtracted.

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

#76

Post by peteradio »

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…

> public health officials have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.

This seems to imply they only need to protect the most vulnerable. You wouldn't sacrifice strong for weak, that is not duty of care.

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

#77

Post by pacerwpg »

michael_j_ward wrote: post #69
lesuorac wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sweden was the well publicized "control group." It was not selected post-hoc, it was selected in 2020. The result was more death early and less death later, while suffering no learning loss or adverse effects on the children and little loss in quality of life. Here's an article from 2020 disparaging the high costs [0]. If you find any major news giving an update now that Finland and Norway have caught up in excess de…

Of note, the 'more death early and less death later' resulted in significantly more death overall. It wasn't a wash.

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

#78

Post by HideousKojima »

robertkoss wrote: post #57
HideousKojima wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The absolutely devastating economic and social effects were known, the possible effects of the disease both short and long-term were unknown. So we decided to go for the known devastating effects in case the disease was also devastating? That makes zero sense. And there were alternatives proposed to lockdowns like the Great Barrington Declaration that were not simply not considered, but were actively suppressed and smeared by government officials and their media lackeys.

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises, is it underway?”

-NIH director Francis Collins in an email to Anthony Fauci about the Great Barrington Declaration

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

#79

Post by didericis »

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’s policy never worked well and the various levels of mimicry of that policy across the world was responsible for the vast majority of the avoidable pandemic damage. Their lying about the obvious human to human transmission and repression of doctors speaking out is what prevented early containment, and their draconian lockdowns were both horribly repressive and ineffective. They made a big show to compensate for their early failures, and the world took the word of a police state trying to pretend they could prevent the spread of a highly contagious aerosolized coronavirus after it was well out of control and all over a major city with an airport.

The continued credulity of the west despite all of the lying China has done is astoundingly stupid. Anyone with an ounce of understanding of the culture and the government, particularly Xi’s government, was laughing at the Chinese figures and demanding on the ground access early on to determine what was actually happening.

Many academics wanting to follow the data don’t understand that. And so we copied a fake solution because of fake data and threw out decades of pandemic response research and planning to pretend we could contain something that was obviously out of control and clearly on the path to being endemic after March 2020.

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

#80

Post by robertkoss »

cas14655 wrote: post #74
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.

In itself your statement is accurate: we did not have data that is impossible to have. In broader context the implication is not correct. We had experts consider long and hard what to do in the case of an influenza pandemic and the consensus for decades had been to disrupt society as little as possible. This is the WHOs evaluation of NPIs in 2019 (PDF Warning): https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/…

You don't want to generalise (COVID similar to influenza huh?) if you don't know anything about the virus.

I repeat myself, at that point We didn't know much about SARS2.

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