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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32274 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I'm answering twice, but I think the main reason for the rather forced post-Covid amnesia is that the media went all in on lockdownism and that's increasingly embarrassing. It's hard to defend things like closing all schools for a year now that nobody's frightened of Covid any more, so they're whistling nonchalantly and desperately trying to forget it. Nobody influential will try to bring it up again because there's almost certainly public proof that they went all in on it too.

It takes a lot of guts and moral stringency to think back and realise that you panicked and smashed our society to slivers for almost nothing. Very few people, public or private, are capable of that.

But it wasn't for almost nothing. It was the deadliest pandemic in the US in over 100 years. The people who died from it are actually dead. You can argue of course that governments overreacted, but to say that it was for almost nothing is quite a distortion of reality.

The age-adjusted death rate in the US in 2020 was about the same as the death rate in 2009. Unadjusted, it was about the same as the death rate in 1946, I believe. Almost nothing.

Sorry, didn't mean to motte and bailey you. Let me try to be more specific:

  1. Yes, people literally died. But if you compare it to historic death rates, it looks more like a blip than an explosion. I'm having great difficulty finding a graph that puts mortality from pre-2020 and post-2020 on the same graph but from https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/death-rate it looks like a return to 2005 era death rates at worst. Rather than not thinking that old people's lives have any value,* I'm saying that for many of them it was just a switch in what gets written on the death certificate. Being the deadliest pandemic for 100 years says more about the lack of danger of pandemics in modern times than it does Covid. Without the media furore, I'm not sure people would have even noticed.

  2. The lockdowns don't seem to have worked. Even staying purely in the realm of preventing deaths, in the UK it seems that more people have died due to lockdown giving the NHS a death blow than due to Covid:

https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-from-the-bhf/news-archive/2023/june/100000-excess-deaths-cardiovascular-disease https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/highest-uk-weekly-death-toll-nhs-ae-waiting-times-2023-lk769d3cq https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/29/disastrous-legacy-left-lockdown-non-covid-excess-deaths-overtake/

TL;DR: the deaths from coronavirus are a mild statistical irregularity that I feel no emotional valence towards, and the lockdown either didn't help or was actively counterproductive. Thus, "for almost nothing".

*I am actually willing to bite the bullet and say that to a certain extent "old and immuno-compromised people losing some years of life is a nothingburger" but I don't think I really have to in this case.

Bugger. Thank you. In all honestly, either it just takes ages to gather this data or something a bit fishy is going on. Can anyone find a merged graph? Or does Covid just blow everything else out of the water?

It was a very deadly pandemic for very old people. It is sad they died, and especially that many died alone due to horrible/cruel hospital policies. But this was not a particularly deadly pandemic for younger adults.

Look at this age stratification https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254488/us-share-of-total-covid-deaths-by-age-group/

COVID really was basically fake. Average loss in life was like 5 years. Only person I knew who died from COVID hadn’t been out of bed in a decade.

If I had to choose between COVID was “real” or “fake” well fake seems far more accurate.

It really depends on what you value. I mean, I understand why some people on this site get more upset by a Confederate general's statue being removed or by some rage-bait that a wokeoid attention seeker with 100 followers writes on Twitter than they get upset by a disease that killed several million people, because I understand that different people value different things over others and have different notions of the possible consequences of events. There are legitimate good arguments in favor of valuing all these things differently in different ways.

But it is exasperating to argue with people who propose the bailey of "Covid is fake, just a cold, and doesn't matter at all" and then retreat the motte of "well it was mostly old people who died". Some people don't think that old and immuno-compromised people losing some years of life is a nothingburger. Some do, I get that. But let's all at least get on the same page and say no, it is not "basically fake". It is not fake at all and saying "fake seems far more accurate" is a rather bad faith use of the words, in the sense that you would not accept a similar use of language to defend a position that you dislike.

I value math. I’m not getting into a what you value thing unless you can make a math argument.

Fair enough, you of course not have to get into a discussion of values if you do not want to, but let me see where you disagree with me here...

  1. Some number of people died from covid. You seem to agree with this.

  2. A smaller number of people would have died from covid if more stringent anti-covid interventions had been pursued. Do you agree with this?

If you agree with both, then we are already basically just discussing values, basically the value of saving some life-years as opposed to the value of other things.

(2) seems potentially false to me. We needed to reach herd immunity via infection so there is no evidence that lockdown measures saved any lives.

Add in deaths from lockdowns like deaths of despair and they probably costs lives.

A smaller number of people would have died from covid if more stringent anti-covid interventions had been pursued.

Possibly. Some more stringent anti-Covid measures may have prevented Covid deaths. Some more stringent ones probably fall under security theatre (they never closed the beaches where I live, but there were Western jurisdictions where beaches were closed: I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that closing beaches prevented so much as a single Covid death). And, obviously, some more stringent anti-Covid measures may have succeeded in the narrow goal of preventing Covid deaths but caused more deaths through second-order effects, or otherwise failed to pass a cost-benefit analysis.

The thing is, we usually think in terms of died / didn’t die, and you’re using those terms We talk about things like “saving lives” when the literal autistic meaning would be “delaying death”. Which is why we talk about life-years. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here but please bear with me.

Problem is, the dichotomy makes sense for a young person. The difference between dying at 20 and at 90 is a big difference, so big that we can think about it in terms of “life or death”. But in the case of someone who’s 90 and bedridden, it becomes increasingly absurd. A big part of the feeling of fakeness came about because authorities used very strong rhetoric about saving lives to describe protecting people who were clearly at death’s door. Nobody was interested in debating the value of saving life-years.

Yes, people died. They were already going to die that year or the next anyways. Quite frankly ‘Covid is not actually a major threat unless you’re already dependent on medical intervention to survive or quite close to the end of your natural lifespan’ was obvious from very early on in the pandemic, and even if you assume that Covid deaths would have been ten times higher without mitigation measures(not, I think, a supportable assumption but a reasonable steel man of the face saving lies told by our institutions) the NPI’s did so much damage to the social fabric that it still wouldn’t be worth it.

Yes, lots of old and frail people really did die, but that doesn't actually provide justification for things like shutting down beaches and compulsory masking to walk from the door to the bar. Even if one can imagine measures that would have done something useful, the ones that were implemented weren't it. Whether Covid was worth responding to meaningfully or not, we obviously did not respond meaningfully. I could scarcely come up with a better case study in the field of Something Must Be Done And This Is Something.

The Johns Hopkins meta-analysis estimated that lockdowns and other NPIs likely prevented about 0.2% of Covid deaths i.e. almost nothing. These NPIs were instated in reaction to a real threat, but they accomplished almost nothing.

Fair enough, I assumed that Corvos meant that the pandemic itself was almost nothing but I may have misinterpreted.

forced post-Covid amnesia is that the media went all in on lockdownism and that's increasingly embarrassing

I came here to post "Normies stopped talking about it because the media stopped talking about it", so in that sense I agree entirely. Absent the daily orders of What Current Thing To Support being beamed into their devices 24/7, the Normie does not support it, and so when the media messaging stops, the Covid hawks vanish.

I'll also give a moderate agreement on your reasoning as to why the media stopped. Reminding people about Covid might remind them of a glaring example of how Big Government (and it's Cathedral tentacles in academia, NGOs, media, civil society, experts) fucked up. Which is a line of thought they want to assiduously avoid planting in the proles' heads, so better to just memory-hole the whole experience.

But the Covid hawks are very specifically not the normies. They're the guys who kept the faith long after the normies stopped. The Covid hawks are dissidents, and in some sense have at least considered themselves dissidents for the whole duration of the pandemic (after all, in most Western countries, the measures stopped far short of what the hawks were demanding at various points, and were run down far sooner than the hawks would have preferred.)

I wouldn't underestimate the commitment of normies. When the messaging was on the side of the true Covid hawks the average person was almost indistinguishable from them.

If the Covid hawks are dissidents they only became dissidents after their support evaporated. Before that they were something else... a dissident is on the outskirts of a tribe, they distinguished themselves by being more fervently tribal than those around them.

I have the same grudging respect for people that all still all-in on Covidism that I do for the farthest fringe religious believers, the guys that take the Koran completely literally. Most people kind of shrugged at Covid policies and halfassedly followed along. They might have been somewhat scared, but still gone along with going out with their friends, or they might have thought the whole thing was silly, but still gone along with masking. Likewise, most people that say they believe a given religion kind-of sort-of follow it, but might fudge a bit around the edges when it comes to literal interpretations or inconveniences like abstinence until marriage. Not the fundamentalists or Covid hawks though! In the year of our Lord 2023, they maintain that if that's the word of Allah, you need to follow it completely and that if Covid justified society-level shutdowns in 2020, the fact that it still exists means that you should at least wear a mask if not avoid all crowds entirely. I think the premises of both of these groups are incredibly incorrect, but I do have to respect the willingness to follow their principles to their logical conclusions.

For the people who are still all-in (at least in the US), it's not really about COVID and it never was. These are the kind of germophobes who wiped everything down with sanitizer and insisted that guests wash their hands when entering their homes long before COVID hit. When certain policies that played into their neuroticism became mainstream for a brief period in response to a specific threat, they latched onto them, and were surprised and appalled that the public abandoned them whenever the threat was over. If COVID were eradicated tomorrow these people wouldn't all of the sudden throw their masks away and stop caring about safety precautions, they'd go back to the germophobes they were in 2019 and argue that there are still plenty of other diseases out there that we should be requiring all these precautions to prevent.

Well said, it is truly outrageous how much was justified on such flimsy evidence and outright lies.

I am surprised that right wingers in Florida and Texas haven’t been grandstanding more about being right though.

Florida tried and Texas politics is meaningfully different because local issues- Ken Paxton impeachment, tax issues, and the state-federal showdown over border policy- are sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

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