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Notes -
Rabies kills 70,000 people per year, with a 100% lethality rate. Does that make rabies worse than the black plague (a pathetic 30-50% lethality)? If you could trade rabies for a new black plague, do you think that would be a good deal? Would you rather 70 thousand people die of rabies, or 30 million people die of the black plague?
I do understand the difference between absolute lethality and lethality percent. But despite what you say, they are both valid measures. The really vicious stuff with 100% lethality tends to burn itself out. The lower the lethality, the higher the transmissibility, because dead people are terrible vectors. That means the most damage is done somewhere in the middle, where a disease has a bunch of hosts to help it spread
And you don't find it all odd that your proposed policy is 100% benefit, 0% cost? Do you think I'm arguing that we should just leave money on the table?
Did you read the article you linked? It's really not that supportive of your case. The 0.2% is just lockdowns. They go on to say: "The study did give partial credit to policies that shut down “non-essential” businesses — which they concluded could bring down COVID death rates by as much as 10 per cent." Then there's the bit about which studies got excluded, etc.. Also the bit about it being done by economists with major political ties. But even if we take it at face value, it's saying there's easily a 10% difference to be made here.
To say nothing of, again, Australia: which managed a very clear 90% reduction in deaths the first two years.
I mean, it's pretty obnoxious having someone try to engage me in a cost-benefit analysis and then refuse to acknowledge the "cost" half of that equation. It's one thing to say "70 deaths is nothing to the 487 suicides" - we can have a conversation there. But if your stance is really "there is absolutely nothing anyone in the entire world could possibly have done that could have reduced Covid deaths in any way", then obviously I can't argue with that, because there is no argument for leaving free money on the table.
Heck, your link did a decent job convincing me that lockdowns were probably a bad policy: 0.2% is a real number, unlike zero. But again, the article also discusses how closing bars and restaurants probably cut deaths by 10%. That's an intervention worth talking about! How does the suicide rate compare to that? If we had just focused on the interventions that worked, wouldn't the suicide rate have been much lower?
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