441–443 of 443 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone healthy enough to be a firefighter has a near-zero chance of being hospitalized because of Covid.
Can't be that near zero if COVID deaths were about the same as all other causes of firefighter deaths combined in 2021.
Of course, there's the huge complicating factor that the official figures for "covid deaths" conflate "died with" and "died from".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The relative importance of churches and Home Depots is not important. It absolutely is. The risk between churchgoing and Home Depot shopping, or going to school vs a bar may be equivalent, if we accept your analysis. But when taking risks, we also consider benefit. Risk for little to no benefit is best not taken. Risk for benefit may be worth taking, depending on how much benefit. If you can't accept this basic pri…
Not everyone judges the importance of things the same way. If it is ok to force churches to meet outside (and many churches did), why not force Home Depot to move their goods outside to sell? > Risk for benefit may be worth taking, depending on how much benefit. This is true. We each judge both the level of risk of each action we take, and the amount of benefit we gain from it. It is an _individual_ decision whether…
Because a lot of products can't stay outside. It would be incredibly disruptive to operations. Not to mention that many stores, including Home Depot, did start offering curbside pickup to reduce risk.
Fire danger is omnipresent and essentially forever. Pandemics are not. So your analogy doesn't apply. I don't even know why I'm bothering. F it. Have a good weekend. Pretend you won the argument.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excess deaths per capita show us where cultures are better than others at policy. Yes, some of those cultures have healthier people. e.g., Those countries that paid only the sick to stay home were smarter than those who locked down everyone. We should have invested in the infrastructure that will be of use in the next pandemic. There are many obvious good policy decisions other than "do nothing". I do realize that in…
What are some of those "obvious good policy decisions"? Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another. Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospit…
I stated the biggest example in my previous reply: Paying the sick to stay home would have been smarter than the lockdowns.
Spending on infrastructure for health testing at airports and air monitoring in public spaces would have been smart and we will need this for future pandemics.
The country with the most nuclear aircraft carriers could have invested in getting PCR machines installed everywhere. Instead, it propped up the cruise ship industry.
> Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another.
Yes, all government policy decisions are about allocation of capital. I never wrote otherwise.
> Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.
Yes, spending money training doctors and nurses would have been smarter than corporate welfare in the form of PPP and Fed bond purchases. Our demographic collapse will have us needing more doctors and nurses even without accounting for future pandemics. Imagine if elected representatives were able to make decisions that made sense in the long term.
> And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers. Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making.
According to that table, there is a difference of over 1,000 excess deaths per 100K people. Clearly, some cultures will survive pandemics better than others.
> Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.
Sweden did not “do nothing” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_government_response_to...).
> Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar.
I see no mystery here. There are no ways for states to protect themselves from the citizens of other states. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution enables effective virus distribution. Where there are differences, the simplest explanation I see is difference in elderly population versus seasonal cold, dry air.
> Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.
The excess death curves for California and Florida are very different. I live in Florida. I have been tracking the CDC data since early 2020 and built tooling around it to better understand the failures: https://mcculley.github.io/VisualizingObservedDeaths/
> But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.
This is a false dilemma. Of course we expect government to do smart things which result in fewer excess deaths, especially when we can see other governments doing smarter things.
The decision of St. James's parish to remove a handle from a well pump is the canonical example. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...) Should they have done nothing instead?
I enjoy civilization. I choose to live in a city. This requires compromises due to density. Should we have no regulation for how sewage is treated?