101–110 of 151 posts
"Western" world is OK/Great
Scandinavia is awesome
Eastern Europe and Asia always bad, except for a few "west"-centric states, which are good/ok.
And the more I see this pattern, the more I come to a conclusion that it could not possibly be a representation of any possible data slice, but rather a sign of some systemic bias.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Some of the approaches used for counting such deaths should be considered quite suspect. Take Toronto, the most populous city in Canada, and one of the most populous in North America, for example. This is how Toronto's public health unit described its methodology: "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto." https://twitter.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 accoun…
This is clearly not the answer the author wanted to find. And the bit about average number of days of life lost was a desperate attempt to hold on to his previous conclusion, before he looked at the numbers, that lockdowns were authoritarian overreactions.
I don't think it's fundamentally wrong to measure healthcare effects with numerical measures like QALY, but it's obviously looks even worse in the context of a big conspiracy theory about COVID.
Researchers investigating QALY impacts of their proposed treatments, fair enough. Philosophical Trolley problems, sure. Someone making a political point about freedom being worth killing people, where 'freedom' seems to mostly involve ignoring sensible medical advice, is less tasteful.
On the topic of total lockdowns, I thought Australia managed to keep a relatively normal life because they had a lockdown on people arriving? So they had less authoritarian stuff than a government that just let it in, could be wrong though, just how I rememebered it.
I can get onboard with most of this.. until the end. COVID deaths don’t just mean everyone losing 15 days of life. To me it meant multiple family members dying. It means my respiratory system has been absolutely wrecked, hopefully not forever but for at least several months now. It means my infant son is gasping for breath on my lap as I write this and there’s nothing we can do for him. Statistics in white towers are…
That's exactly what I thought. We have to learn to live in a community, and that means sacrificing personal liberty for the benefit of others.
That's not what it is though. The question is, would you go into lockdown to give everyone in the country 15 extra days of life. That's what you're trading. Personal inconvenience for strong positive externalities, you can't just think about the part of it that comes back to you. It's a general societal good that you're doing.
If you are wondering how such underreporting could happen, just look at the comments on this thread, many of which are elaborations on the theme of "I'm not at all convinced excess deaths is a good measure of Covid-19 deaths." Excess deaths and correcting for reporting reliability is how influenza deaths have been counted since about forever. The conclusion to draw is not that "COVID wasn't so bad" but rather that in…
Claiming that some metrics is good because it has been used for something else is incorrect. These are different entities and the conditions for the measurements are extremely different.
are all these countries corrupt or is it WHO that’s corrupt?
> My personal answer is: No. It would not be worth it to me. I’d take that loss in expected lifespan, in order to travel and live freely for a couple years. My understanding was that actually for people in NZ they were better off than we were in the UK. Yes they had very strong border control so international travel is difficult/impossible, but once it was clear they had it under control the internal restrictions wer…
Yes the "no lockdown ever" crowd like to pretend NZ/Aus were prison camps where everyone was confined to their house 24 hours a day, whereas the reality was packed stadiums for international rugby. The UKs shitty confused response in autumn 2020 was an absolute disaster both from a controlling Covid and Maximising Freedom approach.
> I spent 1.5 years in ex-Iron-Curtain countries during the Covid era, and people there acted less concerned about crowded indoor spaces and sneezing — and more concerned about surfaces. And everyone seemed to fear that getting physically cold would lead to colds I went for the first time to Ukraine in the fall and got a fairly heavy case of COVID. My girlfriend is 29 and she was vaccinated with two Moderna shots 2 m…
Alternatively, based on demographics you should have had minor cases.
Maybe the vaccines weren't effective, or had negative efficacy due to the mismatch between circulating variant & vaccine, and Original Antigenic Sin?
I can get onboard with most of this.. until the end. COVID deaths don’t just mean everyone losing 15 days of life. To me it meant multiple family members dying. It means my respiratory system has been absolutely wrecked, hopefully not forever but for at least several months now. It means my infant son is gasping for breath on my lap as I write this and there’s nothing we can do for him. Statistics in white towers are…
That's exactly what I thought. We have to learn to live in a community, and that means sacrificing personal liberty for the benefit of others.
As https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... and many other sources will attest, COVID and COVID lockdowns was TERRIBLE for mental health among teenagers. And yes, poor mental health is a communicable disease within a family.
This is personal. 3/4 of my teenage children are receiving psychiatric care. Including a daughter who was temporarily institutionalized for being suicidal.
Do you REALLY wish to repeat your position and explain why my children need to sacrifice their personal liberty, no matter the cost to their mental health, for the benefit of others? Or is it POSSIBLE that there is a tradeoff where my children's mental health is one of the benefits that society needs to consider in deciding what policies to follow?
I've spent a lot of hours of my daughter explaining very calmly why we should stop caring about her so she can die in peace. I see this as a result of denying liberty. And so I put a very different value my family's liberty than you do.
(This post revised for various reasons, such as avoiding swearing.)
If you are wondering how such underreporting could happen, just look at the comments on this thread, many of which are elaborations on the theme of "I'm not at all convinced excess deaths is a good measure of Covid-19 deaths." Excess deaths and correcting for reporting reliability is how influenza deaths have been counted since about forever. The conclusion to draw is not that "COVID wasn't so bad" but rather that in…
Influenza had never caused such a shock for healthcare system and for the way that the society functions. Claiming that some metrics is good because it has been used for something else is incorrect. These are different entities and the conditions for the measurements are extremely different.
In this case though, the media was pushing a specific narrative so much it rose to the level of fearporn.