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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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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?

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