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