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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   38813 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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The point of COVID was the noticing more than it having any insane outlier effectiveness as a disease

In the US, COVID was the most deadly pandemic since the Spanish flu of more than 100 years ago. That makes it an outlier in my book.

Had the most aggressive attribution modelling, the highest population of US citizens, incredibly fallow grounds in terms of the vulnerable (More obese, elderly, immunocompromised exist today than at any other point in human history). It was the biggest in a while (though I do think if the same laxitude of attribution was extended to other historic bad flus it'd likely be very similar), but was hardly an outlier.

It's the worst pandemic in the US since the Spanish Flu even in per-capita terms.

It wasn't. It was on the level of flu outbreaks in 1970s.

The US had higher excess mortality than some other countries, totally due to unnecessary and wrong measures taken.

It was on the level of flu outbreaks in 1970s.

Give an example of such a flu outbreak in the 1970s.

Here it is: http://avepri.com/a/sweden1.jpeg

Notice that the little COVID bump is bigger than the bumps under any of the three arrows showing the "Severe Flu Waves". It's just that the general level of deaths per capita was higher in the 70s and 80s, not that the flu waves were worse than COVID.

Of course. In those days you could die from anything else before you would die from covid. In fact, it could even be coronavirus-1970 that was worse than Sars-CoV-2. We just didn't notice it because we expected people to die at this level every year.

There are always different ways to look at the same data. With Covid certain level of deaths were inevitable. Everything that was above that we brought upon us ourselves.

Comparison of extra mortality during pandemic period between periods and/or countries can be even more fun.

Pandemic reduced life expectancy by about a half year, maybe up to one year in very unlucky countries. At the same time life expectancy in Sweden currently is roughly 4 or 5 years higher than in the US. Obviously there are some public health and/or cultural issues that make it impossible for the US to catch up with Sweden in short term. Some could even argue that it is more important to preserve freedom and dynamics, maybe even more quality of life instead of longer life.

Even if you accept those arguments, it still means that there are certain policies that impact life expectancy metric worse than covid. If preventing covid was an easy fruit to pick, the US should have prevented it. But it wasn't. Most likely the US robbed people of their agency, their freedoms and caused more harm than it would have done by implementing different policies to catch up Sweden in life expectancy.

Sweden refused to implement harsh and mostly useless policies exactly because their public health leaders were worried about life expectancy. Whereas the US and most other countries just followed the narrative which was wrong.

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