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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31624 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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if there is a 50-50 chance of excess deaths, then there is a 1/4 odds by chance alone of two consecutive years of excess deaths.

Naively, one might have predicted excess deaths to be unusually low, perhaps negative, following a pandemic which disproportionately and prematurely killed off so many elderly and unhealthy people. Instead, we have significant, consistent, and prolonged increases across all groups. There is a clear signal in the data, and it is not wrong to suspect the mRNA vaccines as a potential culprit. Unfortunately, the institutions which we depend upon to research these questions have strong incentives to avoid particular results, and they have proven themselves quite untrustworthy where such conflicts of interest are in play. We're left with a lot of anecdotes, hear say, conspiracy theories, and gut instincts to guide our action.

I mean, the pandemic is still ongoing. If COVID were suddenly gone, sure. And even then we might still expect excess deaths from long-term damage of the pandemic.

Covid will never be gone, nevermind suddenly gone. By that logic, the pandemic will go on forever. But almost everyone has had the virus; it's endemic now. We lost. The question is now just discovering how badly we lost, and how much of the damage was self-inflicted (if the virus was made in a lab, then I guess it was all self-inflicted, but you know what I mean).

the pandemic

Please define.

Covid infections "strongly" (arguable) above longterm YOY. "Abnormal" amounts of Covid.

LOL. The longterm is epsilon, since COVID didn't exist prior to 2019. If you're going to use that as a criterion, you're never going to declare the pandemic over. And your criteria are broken.

There's going to be a "new normal". I think we're still well above it.

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