CDC's reported death counts are assimilated from and traceable to at least the county level, so if your position is that the CDC numbers are bogus, it should be pretty straightforward to provide supporting evidence to that effect.
Also even mentioning swine flu, that has a 20-30X lower IFR, is even funnier.
2600 bro wrote:
No way to stop the spread of this virus? So much empirical evidence otherwise... it's hilarious:
1) Explain the countries that had 10-100X less deaths per capita?
2) Explain how the US managed to keep hospitalization and ICU loads below complete collapse everywhere (except NYC) and avoided the situations of Manaus, N. Italy, and Wuhan - wasn't the restrictions right?
If you have a brain you know understand some forms of restrictions work - so go do you math on the death rate with no restrictions (~75-90% attack rate), maybe bump IFR up 2X for healthcare system overland, and tell me if that would be an acceptable amount of death as well?
Do you just say what pops into your head without thinking?
I love that we are back to "people dying is actually good" arguments.
pinesol II wrote:
The cartoon of the argument is closer to: people are going to die anyway and for a lot of them, it is happening a decade later than expected.
Deficit of deaths for about a decade 2004 to 2015 was dry tinder.
Correlated with baby boomers entering mid 70's, more dry tinder.
Swine flu came along a decade ago. Didn't happen to catch, and less dry tinder anyway.
COVID came along. This spark happened to catch, otherwise maybe would just have been a "bad flu season." (I know COVID is not a flu variant.) Forest fire. Especially in long term care facilities. Especially in Spring 2020 when aggressive ventilation was the fashion, and, if I recall, turned out not to be the optimal course of treatment for most.
There is no reasonable way to contain the spread of this sort of virus. See Inglesby, Nuzzo et al 2006. Strict protocols as in a hospital setting seem to show some efficacy, but are infeasible for casual settings: negative pressure rooms, physical barriers, fitted masks, close attention to not touching face, etc. Stuff that the Wuhan laboratory was observed to fall short on, regardless of whether it was the origin of COVID. Travel bans not so much, masks nope, the six foot rule, closing schools and businesses nope. Maybe sealing people into their apartments by welding doors and windows shut works, but that has, um, side effects.
Top predictor of bad COVID outcomes besides age is obesity, next and correlated with that is diabetes.
Fix up your diet, get some exercise and sunshine. These simple tools have always been available and improve so many health metrics.
You could try checking the references I have offered at various times. Hospital systems in US were nowhere near collapse, not even in metro NYC area. There were a some particular facilities that were severely impacted and made photo ops. Perennially stressed hospitals were stressed, including in Italy and Britain and parts of NYC, where every year, cold and flu season is a debacle. So many articles over the past decade or two, scientific, popular, the full flu wards in UK are just not news, and parts of Italy have routinely bad respiratory disease outcomes. Hospital usage in New Jersey peaked at something around 85% of beds occupied, including something like 75% of ICU, in mid-April 2020, according to governor. There was additional 25% capacity at a particular hospital made by cancelling non-emergency ("elective") surgery, plus outpatient and dental offices, beyond regular hospital beds. That hospital ship came and went almost unused. Part of its capacity was designated for NJ, and NJ did not need it. According to DeLia in "Hospital Capacity, Patient Flow..." (Sept. 2007), iIn the period 2003 to 2005, there were days with over 95% of beds occupied in NJ. So it turns out the peak usage in 2020 was actually not a disaster. (Anecdotal accounts given to me of scramble for PPE because suddenly everything was full dress all the time, and confusion as floor level staff struggled to comply with evolving federal, state, local, and facility mandates, plus popular hysteria.) Arizona, media reported in July 2020, oh noes, hospitals will be overwhelmed, as usage climbed from just below 70% in early April to mid to high 80's. No surprise, because non-emergency surgery resumed in May. In mid-September 2020, with usage continuing in the high 80's to even low 90's, media decided there was no hospital crisis in AZ. California was doing so well, we were told, throughout spring and summer, and we were told, doing well because of the hard lockdown policies. November and December, oh noes, CA is not doing well at all, and Los Angeles needed tent hospitals. I guess those lockdown measures don't work so well. It turns out that tent hospitals is just something that is needed in Los Angeles from time to time, such as in 2018. Here's a list of countries and COVID deaths per capita.https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ USA is at 1700 per million dead. You can look down the list and imagine reasons why some countries might be higher or lower. Some of it has to do with how a COVID death is defined. Some of it has to do with rural vs. urban. Some of it has to do with how early places got the initial wave -- deaths in USA I think are still dominated by greater NYC metro area, and still something like 40% in long term care facilities. New York and New Jersey have over 2600 per million dead, and if you center on the metro area only, it's surely greater. China is under 4 per million dead. Believe it? The government booted foreign media coverage (probably smart if object is to tamp down fear). The circumstantial evidence is that the government harvests organs from Falun Gong practitioners and enslaves and/or genecides Uighurs. Would you care to suffer the other all-cause mortality living as an ordinary Chinese citizen? I am not claiming any special knowledge of mechanism of action of disease process or mitigation measures. Nor do I claim that I know infection fatality rate, or even that something designated a COVID death is "because of" or "with" COVID. I have heard some anecdotes that suggest sorting that out is truly impossible. One example: lung transplant patient, 10 years post-op, gets COVID, tests positive, dies in the way characteristic of COVID death, and death is coded as COVID death. Typical survival for that sort of patient (maybe given other characteristics) is 5 years post-op. Definitely a COVID death, also definitely a medically fragile person who was primed to succumb to any crisis. Of course, we have heard about silly cases like the motor cycle accident coded as COVID. I do claim than the fear campaign is at once bonkers and terrifying. And truly sad for the damage it is causing to so many vulnerable people, especially children.
2600 bro wrote:
Also even mentioning swine flu, that has a 20-30X lower IFR, is even funnier.
2600 bro wrote:
No way to stop the spread of this virus? So much empirical evidence otherwise... it's hilarious:
1) Explain the countries that had 10-100X less deaths per capita?
2) Explain how the US managed to keep hospitalization and ICU loads below complete collapse everywhere (except NYC) and avoided the situations of Manaus, N. Italy, and Wuhan - wasn't the restrictions right?
If you have a brain you know understand some forms of restrictions work - so go do you math on the death rate with no restrictions (~75-90% attack rate), maybe bump IFR up 2X for healthcare system overland, and tell me if that would be an acceptable amount of death as well?
Do you just say what pops into your head without thinking?
I love that we are back to "people dying is actually good" arguments.
I think you missed the point: how did we avoid hospital collapse if restrictions don't work? Not saying all restrictions work well, but clearly some things “stopped the spread" at various times.
You really lose my interest when you devolve into COVID-death-definition fearmongering. We have discussed this many many times on LRC:
1) COVID is the underlying cause, as assessed by a doctor, on the death certificate for 91% of coded COVID deaths.
2) COVID deaths and excess deaths overlap very well throughout time and space.
It would require a truly extraordinary explanation for COVID to not the be cause of death of those 500k+ Americans.
The US is in poor health at baseline (fatties, diabetics, COPDers), w many more ESRD pts on HD, immunosuppressed (chemo, organ txp etc) than ever before. Some of it is lifestyle, some of it is modern medicine. Not going to change anytime soon. COVID is the cause of the death, even if there are comorbidities the person would be alive if not for COVId. The fear is real for fatties but skinny runners need not worry. No one is coding a motorcycle crash as death due to COvId, that’s some fantasy some nut created.
Poor life expectancy, sure but we don’t judge in the US right? Take care of everyone? Even if it results in ridiculous costs for everyone else? Now COVId will create another crop of disabled fatties. Vaccinate, isolate the fatties and hope for the best bros
Some years deaths go up more than other years, this is to be expected.
In 2020, this happened.
The magnitude doesn't matter.
Therefore COVID doesn't matter, because we know deaths will go up sometimes.
It's braindead.
Throw in some 'from' vs. 'with' fearmonger-denialism at the end for good measure. (Excess deaths correlation with COVID deaths in time and space disproves the entire talking point (and has done so for almost a year!))
Adding more: you seem to just assume a homogenous population. Population distribution, risks, treatments, outcomes, etc just stay the same from 1990->now?
That's the only way your death rate tabulation makes sense.
Permanent external factors such as better healthcare or age distribution changes explain the changing death rates just as clearly without demanding a regression to the mean that you are contending must occur.
Unclear why I am wasting so many thoughts on a denier just trying to minimize 500k dead americans, but there.
You wrote on this thread from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. And then there are the other threads you post on.
Whoever is paying you to fearmonger and insult people, they are getting a good service from their lackey.
It is good for my mental health to remind myself how dumb people can be (and to inform them of this, as well)
In common terms, one would say the mitigations were ineffective. Perhaps not zero effect. Looking and charts from different localities, it is not possible to see the kink in the curves. If one can only see the effect with vast data and advanced statistics, the answer is, not highly effective. Hospital systems were not close to overwhelmed and mitigations did not tip the balance one way or the other. It is a policy question to balance percentage points reduction in case load against every other priority in society. With community spread respiratory virus diseases, there's a pattern. It seems somewhat linked to climate and seasonality. In temparate regions, the wave comes and goes over a roughly two month period. It does that whether we do the mitigation thing or not. So in NJ, school closure came in about March 16, 2020. Mask mandate for everything about April 10, 2020. I might have the dates off by little. Peak hospital use around April 14, too soon after mask mandate for mask mandate to have made a difference. NYC was about the same schedule. Subways kept running. The night time subway pause did not come in until May. The rise and fall of the case and death wave in the NYC metro area was substantially the normal natural process of the disease moving through a population. The mitigations might have had some marginal effect. There are fancy models to describe the shape of the curve. The basic SIR model, which can be run in a spreadsheet, predicts that for any reasonable rage of force of infection (R0 is a way to parametrize), case fatality rate, you get about the same shape curve. I tried R0's in the range 1.5 to 4.0. As long as the CFR does not change population dynamics, it does not affect the shape. Any CFR from 0 to 3% does not matter to the shape of the curve. CFR = 3% would be awful, but has really no impact on demographics. Spanish flu at CFR around 2% among health prime age people had possibly some short term impact on WWI, generally no demographic impact. Smallpox at CFR around 30% did have an impact. Anyway, the basic SIR model curve produces an approximation of what was observed. Science: experience, model, prediction, observation, compare. If the model needs to be revised with endless complication, it is no good. If the model produces a prediction that is a good fit with observation, we believe it more strongly. Detailed model refinements have less certainty than the base model. Here, there are more advanced models that fit better, but the details make no difference at this level of discussion. The level of death was significant (I have read 20 sigma event somewhere). No doubt, +17.5% for year 2020 over year 2019. It was also within capacity of our systems. NYC put out a call for funeral directors from outside the city to help. Funeral directors registered, but were never called. I talked with someone in the business, and then checked the press releases from National Funeral Directors Association. There was the press release about responding to NYC's plea for help by registering, but nothing about ever actually serving in NYC. I have written many times, I am not arguing "with" COVID or "beacause" of COVID. The death certificates say what they say, and we will never resolve that question to anyone's satisfaction. I tend to think it is substantially "because of COVID but primed for whatever bad thing came along." How many elderly die from breaking a hip? Is it the broken hip or the cascade of other bad things that come after? I am looking at total deaths, the shapes of curves of COVID cases and COVID deaths taken under consistent definition metrics, capacities of systems like hospital systems. Nothing truly extraordinary happened with COVID. We have a skewed impression, as every generation does, that our beliefs about our lives of the past 20 or 40 or 60 years are representative of human experience.
2600 bro wrote:
I think you missed the point: how did we avoid hospital collapse if restrictions don't work? Not saying all restrictions work well, but clearly some things “stopped the spread" at various times.
(training response is such an example)
You really lose my interest when you devolve into COVID-death-definition fearmongering. We have discussed this many many times on LRC:
1) COVID is the underlying cause, as assessed by a doctor, on the death certificate for 91% of coded COVID deaths.
2) COVID deaths and excess deaths overlap very well throughout time and space.
It would require a truly extraordinary explanation for COVID to not the be cause of death of those 500k+ Americans.
Quite clearly SOMETHING had an effect on COVID dynamics in the USA as we saw multiple distinct waves of mass death.
The cop-out answer is it's a combination of many factors but likely dominated by individual behavioral changes.
Considering how weakly the "lockdowns" were enforced in the USA, it came down to an individual decision to limit spread. When lots of people around you were dying (note: no demographic impact, just lots death so no big deal (yeah?)), you tended to be more cautious.
Some French dude wrote like 10k words about this.
The takeaway is not that COVID is impossible to control, but in the West governments could generally not control their populations enough to make a predictable impact on transmission dynamics by regulation -alone-.
The claim that 4 regression techniques is "advanced statistics" funny. Also surely he realizes that "simple statistics" would likely have made the effects LARGER due to overlapping influence of multiple NPIs!
"Unfortunately, weekly and monthly data can be confusing, particularly if delays in reporting cloud the picture. Some have taken advantage by comparing figures for part of 2020 with the whole of previous years.
"The release of figures covering an entire year, broken down both by state and cause of death, provide an ideal opportunity to take stock.
"These are now published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Total US deaths for 2020 were 3,358,814, an increase of 503,976 on 2019, which itself was marginally up on previous years. Proportionally more died in the Civil War years and the 1918/19 flu, but in absolute numbers, no previous year came close."
So, wait--I thought several LRCers were saying that the people who died of Covid-19 in 2020 would have died last year anyway, because they already had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. So is it *this* year that those extra half-million or so would have died? Which means we can look for 2021 to end with about a half-million *fewer* deaths than would ordinarily be expected?
What is the solution? Do you guys want to go to war against China and Russia simultaneously? Kids and emotional women state problems. Men seek solutions. What is the next step? Do you guys want to be locked down again?
"Unfortunately, weekly and monthly data can be confusing, particularly if delays in reporting cloud the picture. Some have taken advantage by comparing figures for part of 2020 with the whole of previous years.
"The release of figures covering an entire year, broken down both by state and cause of death, provide an ideal opportunity to take stock.
"These are now published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Total US deaths for 2020 were 3,358,814, an increase of 503,976 on 2019, which itself was marginally up on previous years. Proportionally more died in the Civil War years and the 1918/19 flu, but in absolute numbers, no previous year came close."
So, wait--I thought several LRCers were saying that the people who died of Covid-19 in 2020 would have died last year anyway, because they already had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. So is it *this* year that those extra half-million or so would have died? Which means we can look for 2021 to end with about a half-million *fewer* deaths than would ordinarily be expected?
What, did you not see the marginally up from the previous year? This is when people who don’t understand statistics try to fit something to their view. Do you think the deaths were highest because this is the highest population? Look at previous years, deaths go up every year because our population increases. If anything that proves covid wasn’t that bad.
A 15% increase is marginal? What would you consider significant? 100%?
But yeah we should have done nothing and let 2 million die. Would have been a much better outcome than having to wear a mask...
Was wearing a mask the difference between 500,000 and 2 million dying? I doubt it. I think the biggest difference was social distancing and vaccination.
