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The whole COVID debacle illustrated pretty profoundly how much public health academica is a circlejerk of people who called for lockdowns then marking their own homework. Honestly the way that the period has killed a lot of trust in science & politicans will be one of the bigger legacies.
My personal experience with my relatives and friends is that people who died from covid were already on the verge of death (very frail, in really bad health, in most cases bedridden) and their deaths didn't surprise anyone. Now that pandemic has ended I wonder if those with better access to global data have evaluated if my experience is true globally? Of course, there will always be exceptions but generally speaking I think that excluding this vulnerable population, not many people died or suffered severe consequences from covid.
I base my assumption from the fact that we know that risk from covid was greatly stratified by age. Statistics show that some younger people also died but we don't know very well what was their health status. Even listing of all comorbidities is not very helpful because the health of people can be different. People with diabetes can be very healthy and can be in very poor health, the same applies to people with different heart diseases. Hypertension may be nothing in one person, and it may be causing heart failure in another.
Anecdotal data is not very helpful. We really need to evaluate this aspect because there was so much fear and paranoia that a lot of purported data is not trustable. Probably, those with access to this level of granularity (like NHS in the UK) do not want to do this type of research because the outcomes can be politically unpalatable, i.e., it would show that it really was the case that most people who died from covid would have been dead a few months later in any case. It was sad for them to die but it was inevitable outcome that didn't deserve damaging the lives of children and all of us.
From my reading of the literature:
Most comorbidities don't amount to much compared to just age + being male. There's no way to give a young person enough comorbidities to make them at high risk as an old person without also making them instantly die from their comorbidities. You'd need to be a quintuple amputee with stage 11 cancer and multiple organ failure. Governments incorrectly communicated the risk of comorbidities and never rescinded this communication (and also never properly communicated the sheer impact age has), resulting in plenty of 20 year olds with asthma thinking they're more likely to die than their grandparents.
Chance of dying from OG covid correlates pretty much 1:1 with your chance of dying in the next year once you are over 30. Below 30, this pattern doesn't hold, as teens and 20-somethings have a bump of risk of dying from suicide/violence/vehicles and under-5s have infant mortality effects despite being unaffected by covid.
The average age of covid deaths, and life expectancy tables, come together to yield a result that the average person who died from covid probably had 7 years left to live. Eyeball-tier adjustments for how the average person who dies of covid is frailer than the average person of the same age probably reduces this to ~4 years. This doesn't sound good for lockdowns as it means, in a circumstance where as much as 1% of the population die from covid, that's still only two weeks lost per person. Does not bode well for stealing multiple months away with lockdowns.
However, our counting system for covid deaths introduces all kinds of oddities, because the more ill you are, the greater the chance of you incidentally dying shortly after catching covid even if covid plays no role in it. There's a double whammy when you add in nosocomial infections. In the UK, there have been periods where it is likely that as many as 50% of recorded deaths are incidental, simply as a by-product of the number of positive tests * the chance of dying in any random 28 day period.
High level court officials were giving completely misleading data about how many kids have been hospitalized due to covid and how many of them died from covid. I cannot simply trust any officially published data now. I will need several confirmatory sources with good methodology and tested by rigorous review process.
I work at the pharmacy. Some children we dispense medicines to are wheelchair bound. In fact, they have severe disabilities, including mental disabilities. In vulgar language such a child is sometimes called “a vegetable”. People talk like that although I am conscious that some people will consider that it is very disrespectful to use such a word. In any case, one of them died from covid. It is sad but I am sure the parents saw his death from covid as mercy. He had no chance of fulfilling life and was only suffering every hour of his existence.
Elon Musk refused to reinstate Alex Jones on twitter because he was using child tragedies for personal gain. I agree with this decision. But I think that many people were using those rare child deaths from covid to spread fear and push their narratives. Their actions are abominable similar to Alex Jones'.
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