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

India has seen some huge high profile protests against the government. The government of India could not deal with these protests and had to back down and reverse their decisions. The reality is that because of various known reasons and observations we can conclude that the Indian government is weak and can’t push back on widely held public opinions.

So it is interesting that not one big popular protest happened because 5 million or more people died because of either covid, or covid containment related reasons like the decline of the economy or unavailable of other services like surgeries. Not only this, in the many important elections that have been held in India, compensation for covid related losses is not a major election issue in any one of those.

So in my opinion, this article‘s conclusion on India is hilariously off the mark. Even most of the liberal media in India which is opposed to Modi and his government and sends people out into the countryside for investigation has said that though there is evidence of economic destruction because of the lockdown and fear there is no evidence of large scale death.

Some BJP supporters will look at articles like these and claim that this is all a vast conspiracy to defame Modi and India. I don’t put much value in such claims. I think the conclusions are because of bad application of statistical reasoning. One size fits all application of some statistical tool on a global scale clearly shows the writer’s lack of understanding and their immaturity. Whatever figures they are using are clearly missing context specific to each country and this makes these results useless.

By March 2020 we had the Diamond Princess Data which established an upper bound of 1% case fatality rate (CFR) for COVID. We already knew then that it's definitely not the Spanish Flu (2.5 - 10% CFR), not Cholera (3%), not Smallpox (3%), not SARS (11%), not even Measles (1%-3%).

Not only did we never do anything like COVID measures for any of the diseases you mentioned but the WHO described the individual NPIs that would later make up the COVID "lockdowns" as "never recommended under any circumstances" in their 2019 flu pandemic recommendations.

What happened with COVID was an unprecedented overreaction by historical standards where we threw overboard everything we knew to try authoritarian gobbledygook on the back of the carefully cultivated FUD around COVID coming out of China.

As soon as he talked about what he would vote for, and what people should be able to vote for, he was implicitly talking about the greatest good across the population (as measured by voting).

If he had been talking about unilaterally violating lockdowns, then your characterization that he was putting his interests above the life of others becomes fair. But he didn't do that.

As for strategies, he was arguing that he wouldn't want strict borders and strong lockdowns, with full vaccination before opening up. Australia and New Zealand did this. The complex tradeoffs discussion that you remember from the USA was not involved.

In the USA, a weak federal response at the start meant we began behind with endemic COVID. The most we could do was "flatten the curve" - we couldn't stop lots of people getting it. Then with vaccinations we could choose which lives to save. And so the discussions you remember. But that is entirely irrelevant to what he says he wouldn't have wanted.

Related, the fact we talked about lots of stuff didn't mean we were actually thinking very well. For example internal memos about prioritizing "essential workers" was to create some "racial justice" in early vaccinations - they didn't want to only be vaccinating old and mostly white people. And so we prioritized healthy young people blacks and hispanics over people who needed it more. And probably wound up with more dead blacks and hispanics than the "unjust" method. But hey, we got early vaccinations into a politically correct mix of arms!

(In case you didn't guess, I'm not a fan of stupid things done to be politically correct.)

That said, I believe most Democrats would have preferred "doing it right" if that was possible.

On the one hand, you have oddball blogs playing percentage games and arguing about semantics with "absolute" and "relative" in opposition with the history of how we've measured the value of vaccines for decades based on vaccine trials from 2021. This is not what I would consider the real world.

On the other hand we have the collection of facts from the real world I mentioned, as in this example of worldwide excess death counts by country. In this real world, the vaccines saved many lives, despite your anecdotes which definitely really happened.

I have not misread your context.

You have not condemned me, but you have condemned anyone who is convinced by the suicidal person that suicide is a logical choice for them. Doubly so if the convinced person assists.

I am offended at your certainty on this. Wait until you've had a suicidal loved one attempting to convince you for months to let and/or help them die. After that you have a right to opinions on what people who have been there do. Until then, please fuck off.

With that, I'm out. You are what you are. And there is no point in trying to change you.