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

https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/the-covid-fudge-factor

by pannkor • 4 years ago

94 144 4 years ago

maximumtruth.substack.com

Sweden, which didn't lock down, also in the green.

jahnu• 4 years ago

The green on that map means they didn't fudge the numbers, not that having or not having a lockdown influences the number of excess deaths.

mlyle3• 4 years ago

Though on the official case rate and excess mortality maps, it's dark pink/light red, which indicates they still did better than a whole lot of countries.

chiefalchemist• 4 years ago

I would prefer to see the maps by postal code or at least somehow shaded by relative population density. Showing a given country - again for me - feels deceiving. That is, it's a social virus and more or less localized. For example, poor urban areas fared worse than rich suburb ones.

I'm glad to see someone getting into the details. Finally. But I still think the inequities of the pandemic - at least in the USA - are lost when using a national average. We need to drill down further still. We need to ask, what if the poor fared as well as the middle and up? But also, flip it so we understand a true worst case scenario.

leeroyjenkins11• 4 years ago

It's interesting, I do have trouble using excess deaths and attributing it to covid though. I was in Honduras in the ultra poor mountain region in intibuca and the people there said the entire town got covid, but there was only one death. It's was a small town, but the area had well over 200 people. What did happen was that the government literally cut off access to the nearest city where people could get food, supplies, and medicine.and there are many life-threatening illnesses that can be addressed with cheap medication. In the major cities, they made it so one person could leave a household during a week to get supplies, but I have to think that lockdown and decreased access to healthcare and necessities had severe impacts, especially when populations are more active.

nerdponx3• 4 years ago

I always thought that this was a feature of "excess death" analysis! It's the combined effect of the pandemic, not just the disease itself.

jdpel• 4 years ago

That's fine for historians, but useless for making decisions about interventions in the real world where there is always more than one confounding factor.

r721• 4 years ago

one death
over 200 people

That's like ~ 0.5% IFR which is quite close to the widely cited 0.68% IFR estimation (from 2020, for the original strain):

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33007452/

mlyle3• 4 years ago

That's 0.5% fatality rate, not infection fatality rate. Likely "everyone" in the town didn't actually get it-- it may have been an overwhelming majority but probably some people lucked out.

So the anecdote shared is even closer to the center of the range of expectations than you imply :D

Mattasher2• 4 years ago

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 obesity, etc, excess mortality will be almost entirely a measure of side effects of the pandemic response.

nerdponx3• 4 years ago

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.

fabian2k2• 4 years ago

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.

ajross3• 4 years ago

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.

Mattasher2• 4 years ago

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

praestigiare• 4 years ago

That is not an issue with the analysis as a whole, and indeed he addresses several of those points. It is an issue only with the excess deaths statistic. The data we have so far does not show a correlation between lockdowns and GDP, and tends to show a correlation between lockdowns and a reduction in excess deaths.

OrvalWintermute9• 4 years ago

The data is the data, but there is a huge missing story that this analysis completely misses.

Why?

It is not appropriate to mix an all-cause mortality number (which is what this is) without actually tracking the underlying separation between groups to answer the why question. E.g. Vaccinated/Unvaccinated, WhichVaccine, Obesity, Age, WhichVariant, and the related ICD codes for someone's health.

Furthermore, it is a travesty to attempt to draw huge conclusions (which many are now doing) from all cause mortality at a population level without that important separation of data elements.

Because Covid in many cases does not relate to seropositivity, cases is not an accurate count, as some people with strong immune systems will never be considered a "case" [1]

We need strong analyses around health, weight, obesity, and other comorbidities, not data mingled bungled studies that look only at outcomes with no relationship. Tragically, this study points out that perhaps we should incarcerate entire populations, because if we do that, we can drive down death rates.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.26.21259239v...

tonmoy• 4 years ago

That analysis was just for figuring out the actual Covid death numbers using the excess deaths in this two year time period

fudgefactorfive• 4 years ago

What a sad thing for my username to line up with...

einpoklum2• 4 years ago

I'm not at all convinced excess deaths is a good measure of Covid-19 deaths.

SeanLuke• 4 years ago

What would you use instead?

einpoklum2• 4 years ago

1. I didn't make claims about Covid response quality in different countries, so I don't have to use anything...

2. I might try to adapt a normalization scheme to countries reporting methodologies. Of course that would be complex and difficult to derive.

mhd• 4 years ago

Averaging out people dying to "days lost per life"?

mikkergp2• 4 years ago

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)

TheFattestNinja2• 4 years ago

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 accounted for inflation of age/region bracket) and look at that. But to ask "Would you have preferred to live through a total travel ban, and total lockdowns, like Australia’s, to save yourself 10-to-15 days of life?" falsifies the thing completely: you didn't save yourself 2w of "life", you saved someone else decades of their life (and their impact to society/economy). And you didn't "pay" for it in time, you just had reduced quality for a while.

If lives were only relevant "on average", then reducing birth rates wouldn't be an issue for society/economy at all right? "On average" there wouldn't be a difference.

andybak• 4 years ago

Yes. I think that's a bit fishy. A life lost affects multiple people and potentially quite severely. Most people would happily accept their share of aggregate "lifespan reduction" if it stopped someone from suddenly dying. Premature bereavement can ruin lives.

pluijzer• 4 years ago

What I know from the Netherlands, at least from the numbers of hospitalisations, is that for the longest time we counted the number of people that had covid while being treated in hospital. This in contrast with most countries that counted the number of people in hospital, because of covid.

nerdponx3• 4 years ago

I remember reading that they were doing this in the US as well during the very early days of the pandemic. If you happened to have Covid in the hospital when you died, you "died from Covid".

This of course was perfect material for the Covid hoax conspiracy theorists...

ajross3• 4 years ago

That's the way these things always work. There's no way to disentangle true causes of deaths. Influenza death statistics are people who come to health care sick and then die, even when the real cause is "pneumonia" or "heart attack" caused by the infection. You don't know they didn't have another simultaneous infection. You don't know they didn't have a pre-existing cardiac problem. It's just not a resolvable problem.

But no one screams about the flu hoax, do they? Your point is being used as an excuse. It's a nitpick to allow people to ignore an obvious conclusion (a whole lot of people died from covid), presumably because they don't want to have been wrong about masks or something.

MontyCarloHall• 4 years ago

For hospitalizations, at least, some states (e.g. New York [0]) did not start distinguishing between “hospitalized due to COVID” from “hospitalized with COVID” until early 2022.

[0] https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/ny-state-of-pol...

isitmadeofglass• 4 years ago

Which is what you should be counting. All the captain hindsight warriors now trying to use numbers now in attempts do discredit the actions taken in response to covid act like we were collecting numbers for their benefits. The reason it was important how many people where in hospital with covid was because we were trying to take measure to prevent overloading the healthcare system. The number of people dead would grow quite rapidly pre vaccine if those affected couldn’t get any medical treatment.

plasticchris• 4 years ago

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?

fabian2k2• 4 years ago

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.

jandrese• 4 years ago

China politicized the virus more than even the US. It is very hard to trust the official figures released by the CCP. They put a lot of political capitol into the "0 COVID" policy.

didericis3• 4 years ago

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.

jackcosgrove• 4 years ago

The article mentions the young populations of equatorial Africa as a factor in keeping mortality low. Why don't we factor in the age distributions of countries when assessing the effectiveness of their policies?

Zigurd• 4 years ago

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 infectious disease prevention should always be taken more seriously. Policies like WFH, mask use, and limiting exposure to situations where super-spreading can take place should become part of the toolkit for fighting influenza and other infectious diseases.

foverzar2• 4 years ago

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.

OrvalWintermute9• 4 years ago

in some foreign countries with advanced in age populations, influenza seasons bring substantial death waves with them.

In this case though, the media was pushing a specific narrative so much it rose to the level of fearporn.

cft• 4 years ago

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 months prior and also got a heavy case of covid. We took a two-hour bus into another city. The bus was hermetically sealed because the driver bent the aluminum windows railings such that windows don't open to prevent drafts, so that people don't get colds. This was November and nobody was wearing a mask in the bus. By the end of the journey the windows were covered with condensate from 40 people breathing. When we got out of the bus we felt dizzy from lack of oxygen. I think both of us got extremely high doses of the virus and the vaccines were never really tested with those doses: this is why despite the age and recent Moderna vaccinations we both got fairly serious cases.

OrvalWintermute9• 4 years ago

this is why despite the age and recent Moderna vaccinations we both got fairly serious cases.

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?

llimllib• 4 years ago

When you make graphs (and choropleths are a type of graph), please include the scale on the graph!

(I enjoyed the article but the lack of scales is killing me)

boredumb• 4 years ago

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 remember a million memes of like a car accident or something else tragic and a caption of "sorry to tell you mam, your son died of covid" or something to that ends.

Also remember hearing attribution to FEMA and other world health organizations offering relief and funding based on a death being covid related or not and so the thought was it was easier to check that box and receive relief to your hospital and get the family's funeral expenses paid for.

zdragnar2• 4 years ago

thought numbers were being artificially inflated was that they were counting people who died while having tested positive for covid being attributed to covid

This objectively happened. Anyone who was COVID positive was being counted as a COVID death. It happened to my friend's dad- COVID was listed as the cause of death on his death certificate, v even though it was nothing to do with any illness at all, but rather an accident.

This practice varied by state and tracking eventually broke out death with COVID vs death by COVID.

mlyle3• 4 years ago

This objectively happened.

Sure.

As the article we're discussing states:

"In the US, the “fudge factor” is 1.13, which means our best guess is that 13% more Covid deaths took place than were officially reported.

For skeptics who can’t believe that deaths were under-counted: both things probably happened. A few cases were wrongly counted, but even more people may have died of Covid at home, without ever getting diagnosed."

This practice varied by state and tracking eventually broke out death with COVID vs death by COVID.

Which involves a somewhat subjective, error-prone decisionmaking process. Early in the pandemic, when the vast majority of hospitalizations-with-COVID were due-to-covid, it made sense to just do the simple thing and assume COVID caused all the deaths. After the death rate fell and this became extremely confounding, it became important to make this somewhat subjective decision.

(e.g. a guy rolls up with a "heart attack" and is COVID positive. Is it due to COVID? SARS-CoV-2 both causes cardiac complications directly and can reduce blood oxygenation / increase heart workload, so heart attacks are more common with COVID infection).

draw_down• 4 years ago

Very eventually, yes. Specifically when larger covid death numbers stopped being politically useful.

artificialLimbs• 4 years ago

Same. Family friend had a hunting accident and shot himself. Made it to the hospital, tested positive, died within a day or two from the gunshot. "Covid death."

ZeroGravitas8• 4 years ago

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.

josephcsible2• 4 years ago

Fairly distinctly remember a million memes of like a car accident or something else tragic and a caption of "sorry to tell you mam, your son died of covid" or something to that ends.

Those weren't just memes. That really happened. https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/man-who-died-in-motorcycl...

pmg1991• 4 years ago

OP forgot to subtract the average death count before Covid-19. X parameters average death over the decade is Z. Current is Y. So X+Covid = Y deaths. From covid is Y-Z. Now compare these with actual

OrvalWintermute9• 4 years ago

Probably the worst analysis possible that pushes a specific narrative.

I'll explain.

Excess Mortality from draconian government responses that caused job loss, depression, excess alcohol and drug deaths, suicides, mixed with adverse events, are just put into the wash, along with actual deaths, and deaths from incorrect medical interventions, as well as propensity towards bad outcomes from unhealthy populations

There is no story of nuance in this, and that is why this is over-averaged dog doo.

cas146556• 4 years ago

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.

eldaisfish2• 4 years ago

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 have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.

HideousKojima6• 4 years ago

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...

thisisauserid• 4 years ago

In the absence of data do something drastic. Got it.

peteradio• 4 years ago

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.

robertkoss5• 4 years ago

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

HideousKojima6• 4 years ago

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.

cloutchaser• 4 years ago

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?

shrubble• 4 years ago

So they were just accidentally correct?

cas146556• 4 years ago

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.

lesuorac2• 4 years ago

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<0.05 that goes the farthest. That pen isn't actually superior, you're just doing garbage analysis.

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.

michael_j_ward2• 4 years ago

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 death, please share.

[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-been-so-so-surr...

1MachineElf• 4 years ago

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.

cas146556• 4 years ago

If you have to search out a single country out of over a hundred to find supporting data you probably are just p-hacking

You are not considering how positivism works. If you say lockdowns work you have to prove that in all instances. I just need one (1) counter example to disprove your theory completely.

Do this enough times and you'll find a pen with p<0.05 that goes the farthest.

Cherry-picking. Yeah, that's what focusing on Australia and NZ while ignoring Peru and Sweden is, exactly.

Finding two patients who got better after blood-letting is not enough to prove blood-letting works. Your theory has to fit all the available quality data (so no China or model "data" allowed).

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

Yeah that was the extend of lockdowns. Go tell that to the people that where locked up without visitors in nursing homes for months on end.

fnordpiglet2• 4 years ago

A respiratory disease requires collocation of people. How do people get infected in a lockdown? Over the internet?

didericis3• 4 years ago

In the stores they go to in order to feed themselves and run errands, or by people that drop off food.

It only takes one person in an apartment building to infect the whole building if the ventilation is poor.

ZeroGravitas8• 4 years ago

Similar to people exagerrating Australia/NZ as people being locked in their homes for two years, Sweden gets the opposite.

They had some constitutional limit on lockdowns, and a Health official who was a bit overenthusiastic about 'herd immunity' but they also had lots of recommendations and an expectation that people would actually obey them.

As the outbreak reached Sweden, authorities responded with limited measures, in contrast with lockdowns and legal restrictions introduced in other countries. The Swedish public were expected to follow a series of non-voluntary recommendations[note 2] from the Public Health Agency of Sweden (Folkhälsomyndigheten). These included working from home where possible, limiting travel within the country, social distancing, and for people above 70 and those with potential COVID-19 symptoms to self-isolate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden

"non-voluntary recommendations"? Note 2 is:

A Swedish government agency is an independent body with delegated power to pass binding regulations as well as recommendations on how someone can or should act to meet a law or binding regulation within the agency's area of activity (in this case The Swedish Communicable Diseases Act). Although there is not a legal framework for a governmental agency to impose sanctions on someone for going against its recommendations, they are not optional as they work as guidelines on how to act to follow a law or regulation (in this case an obligation to help halting the spread of an infectious disease). The Swedish Constitution prohibits ministerial rule – politicians overruling the advice from its agencies is extremely unusual in Sweden – and mandates that the relevant government body, in this case an expert agency – the Public Health Agency – must initiate all actions to prevent the virus' spread in accordance with Swedish law, rendering state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell a central figure in the crisis.

blagie2• 4 years ago

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 diseases.

We know more about the long-term impact of COVID in 2022 than we did in 2020, but we still don't fully understand it. We still don't really understand the impact of multiple, serial COVID infections, as everyone seems to be getting.

When a new disease comes out, I'd like to exterminate it, please. I'm happy to have a month-long full lockdown everywhere it's found, like China did, while the disease dies off. If we can't do that, I'd like to lock down until we have a vaccine, and ideally, until we understand the long-term impact.

I'd take no lock-down over losing 15 days of my life (or a 1-3% chance of death, for that matter). I would take a lock-down over long-term impacts of a disease of the type we've seen with COVID and other diseases. To me, it's a numbers game on long-term health impacts, not on death. Do those happen to 1% of people? To 100% of people? Do they last weeks? Months? Years? The rest of your life? When do they start?

I'd like good answers to those questions on whatever disease comes out next before relaxing.

With travel and population growth, we will see more and more interesting disease. We need a strategy to deal with them. I'm profoundly disappointed COVID didn't lead to us even developing one.

bqmjjx0kac• 4 years ago

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.

fnordpiglet2• 4 years ago

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?

ZeroGravitas8• 4 years ago

I think they're referring to the stated conclusion, that this author thinks his work supports his own view that lockdown policies were too restrictive, and we should instead have more freedom/death.

Even with 20/20 hindsight, that seems like a bad take, and when the decisions were taken, we didn't have 20/20 hindsight, and we won't the next time either.

hamaluik• 4 years ago

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 so decoupled from humanity they are worse than useless; these selfish attitudes cause real harm.

geiser2• 4 years ago

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.

azinman2• 4 years ago

As the GP points out, long Covid isn’t factored into this, let alone the cruelty of averaging lifespans with death when we know it’s an inaccurate way to understand the effects.

mijoharas• 4 years ago

This was my thinking. From the way the author writes, they seem to say, "I would skip lockdowns, in exchange for giving up my 15 extra days of life". If that were the thing on offer, I think a lot of people would say "forget the extra 15 days, I'll not have a lockdown".

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.

btilly7• 4 years ago

And if we fail to be able to cope, what then?

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.)

thrwyoilarticle• 4 years ago

This makes me want to see a collection of all the graphs that have weird discontinuities from pandemic changes. e.g. car journeys.

rkangel• 4 years ago

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 were fairly light. I remember seeing a photo of tens of thousands of people at a rugby game at the same time as fairly serious Covid restrictions in the UK.

I think he's asking the wrong question - if you ask me "am I willing to not leave my country for two years (but have little other restriction)" for 10-15 days of extra life, then yes that sounds fine. I like international travel but can live without it for a while.

I think half hearted Covid restrictions are the problem. The UK has to me the least forgivable Covid situation. We are an island with easily controllable borders (like Japan, NZ, Aus) but we never did. There is a lot of evidence of getting Covid under control and then being re-infected from abroad so it doesn't matter that we got it early - we could have kept it under much better control.

Marazan• 4 years ago

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.

ZeroGravitas8• 4 years ago

An interesting question: is paying people to go out and eat in restraurants during a pandemic count as a 'freedom' or 'nanny state' move? Definately dumb, either way.

foverzar2• 4 years ago

I've probably already seen hundreds of map-styled infographics and somehow they all look almost exactly the same:

"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.

mikymoothrowa• 4 years ago

May be the simpler explanation is that WHO data is wrong?

are all these countries corrupt or is it WHO that’s corrupt?

Kasutaja11• 4 years ago

Very flawed report. They mentioned everything but china which had crematoriums go overdrive and massive amounts of people die. Yet they mentioned it in article once that they kept infections out? I thought that article was supposed to debunk the bs non free countries reported as their numbers

t0bia_s• 4 years ago

Our country (Czechia) count covid deaths as "those who has positive PCR test after death". Which means that covid was not always cause of death. Uncle of my friend had Alzheimer's in late stadium and died last year. She was counted as covid dead. Insurance companies payed more to hospitals for covid patients, so it was profitable to make up some cases.

Our neighbors (Slovakia) count covid deaths after autopsy where covid was main reason of death.

So... Data was collected differently. Conclusions based on those data are relative.

I ask many people about how many people dead because of covid they personally know. For today, I know only one. That lead me for conclusion that I cannot trust my gonverment any more.

joeman1000• 4 years ago

I find the ‘10-15 week expected life’ extension per person quite a useless and callous statistic. You’re talking about individual lives, peoples grandparents and friends. Their death doesn’t get averaged out among the population. It’s a person. If your dad died of Covid you wouldn’t just write ‘it’s ok, the expected lifespan is only dropping by a couple of seconds’, right?

I live in Australia and I absolutely hated our policy of mandatory vaccination, but I’m glad our lockdowns saved lives. Don’t reply telling me they weren’t mandatory either. For most people quitting work or study is not an option, so bugger off.

fellellor• 4 years ago

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.

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

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