I was a good US citizen and used what little influence I had among my social circle to encourage others to follow the COVID protection measures. And I adore Nate Silver. So, pardon me if I confess that all I read in this article was:
Blah blah blah 'I mostly agree with ... an October 2020 anti-lockdown statement signed by a large number of scientists and medical professionals. “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal”' blah blah.
I don't have any regrets about the position I took, since it seemed to be based on all the verified information we had at the time. YET, I hope our society will embrace the fact that we were largely wrong to prolong the lockdown measures. Humility doesn't hurt the Left either.
The measures that seem like they should have worked, but people claim they didn't are:
- masks: clearly they worked for the medical professionals that were treating patients during the first waves, as they were directly exposed and didn't get sick, why didn't they work for the population at large? Did we not wear them correctly, consistently?
- schools: It seems obvious that schools could be a huge vector of transmission, kids largely were asymptomatic and when they got sick, they would still spread it, both inside the school and to their vulnerable relatives. Were the school shutdowns a mistake? Should they have been done differently?
Almost everyone was pretty wrong about COVID, at least at some points in time.
But it's very rare for anyone to admit it.
I'll admit I was wrong, between sanitizing my hands when it was really in the air, to assuming the vaccines would end it.
Lots of mistakes on my end!
There's some people who are still manage to be newly wrong even today.
For example, asserting that the government was enforcing strict lockdown measures in October 2020, if ever. This is despite obvious evidence that people preferred staying home, such as the still historically low rate of people working from offices.
I wasn't wrong once, from the first videos from China in January 2020. it's been amusing to watch people overthink and moralize and become very rabid over side alley of side alleys of 3 simple facts a high schooler knows: "very contagious respiratory disease bad, vaxx's don't prevent infection or transmission, people like working from home"
It was a hard thing to broach at the time without people frothing at the mouth about how I must be anti vaccine or something:
Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them?
I’m guessing it’s hard to quantify and compare. A lot of things like general depression, isolation, kids missing half a year of school, etc. can’t really be evaluated against people dying. And on its surface it seems obvious: uh, people dying is much worse than any of those things.
But if I said that everything we did was to save one life, people probably would generally agree it wasn’t worth it (obviously so: people don’t seem too interested in preventing all kinds of deaths at all costs). What about ten lives? One thousand? Ten thousand? There’s some subjective level where it starts to feel obvious to more and more of us, until a majority of us agree.
But do we have any general sense what that number is? How do we decide how much to care? It might seem ghoulish to decide how many dollars is worth a life, but we do it every day.
With the data we have now, I imagine we can somewhat quantify this given enough sample jurisdictions with different rules? “Masking saves x lives per 1000.” “Closing schools saves y lives per 1000” etc. And perhaps then we’re able to decide “is x lives worth the qualitative harm done?” Probably. “What about y?” Maybe not.
The cost-benefit calculations in terms of excess deaths are irrelevant. It was clear even during the initial outbreak that policymakers primary constraints were the due to uncertainty about the virus and limits on availability of protective gear and ICU beds. Without protective gear there was no way to reduce transmission without isolation and once ICU beds are at capacity mortality rates double and people are dying in the streets and the medical system collapses.
There is no scenarios where the collapse of the medical system is a viable outcome for policymakers that is also compatible with a functioning economy. A collapse of the medical system means non-covid fatalities also increase. Heart attacks, car accidents and childbirth all become mortality contributors. The most likely outcome of a medical system collapse would be martial law, mass graves, economic collapse and potential collapse of essential systems like food distribution.
The idea that policymakers were primarily constrained by the thought of grandpa dying a few years early and weighing it against the grandkids social isolation needs to die.
"Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates."
In Canada (and likely elsewhere), there were a number of restrictions which were tied to hospital capacity. As the number of available ICU beds dropped: more restrictions were put in place, and vice versa.
A lot of emphasis was placed on preventable deaths. That is; situations where we’re turning away a patient that we could’ve saved, because we don’t have a bed available for them.
I thought this was a solid, intuitive approach. Preventable deaths are really, really unfortunate.
Most people don't even know how to mentally frame the problem. It's the number of life years lost that matters, not the number of lives, e.g. the death of a child with their whole life before them is worse than the death of an elderly person who's already on deaths door. Current statitics focus solely on number of deaths rather than expected years of life lost so we can't even make a fair assessment of the trade-offs involved in different policies.
> There’s some subjective level where it starts to feel obvious to more and more of us, until a majority of us agree.
I had this same thought during COVID, but like you said, it's not something others want to talk about. COVID was serious, but the American reaction to it was so strange. The whole approach to masking at restaurants has to be one of the most bizzare moments of American history.
It doesn't matter. You can't have these conversations without being censored anymore.
My works HR department got sick of having people use "logic" and "evidence" to argue against their policies. After kicking a few people out the door and generally saying you can't talk about this at work anymore, nobody talks about it.
I think that's kind of with the benefit of hindsight though. In 2020 we really didn't know if this stuff would kill everyone or just be a nuisance/deadly if you're vulnerable.
Some governments became drunk with power and ended up implementing authoritarian measures which were pretty obviously useless at actually stopping the virus. Stopping people from wandering the beach alone or sharing a car with their partner, for example.
I am familiar with the case of Spain, but I’m sure in other countries the situation was similar.
This utilitarian reduce-to-numbers approach misses the important matter of the inevitability of death.
In the grand scheme of things, all those who died purely from COVID were going to die anyway.
A more important question is what has happened as a result of societies responses to this pandemic, especially in light of how marginal this virus' lethality was (this was no plague).
It has set precedent that in the case of relatively minor social distress, the government can take unlimited power, and the populace will just knod their heads.
It has also set precedent that the old can parasitize the young even further. Saving a few boomers a few years is worth masking up young school kids, affecting their communicative and social development.
The only silver lining to this has been the resulting explosion of remote work, which of course the boomers are now trying to undo. Fortunately, that's a cat-out-of-the-bag.
It's unfortunate that the boomers didn't learn an important lesson from their parents, who fought WW2 - sometimes dying is the right and proud thing to do.
> Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them?
In Australia there is huge pushback politically about holding an inquiry to determine what could be done better, a lot of politicians hid behind faceless "health advice" for their actions that wouldn't last a minute when the public servants involved face an inquiry.
Current estimates of the jobkeeper program put it at $110,000 per job saved, in comparison to the median wage of $52,338. Basically all of it went into the pockets of big companies rather than paid directly to people. That was just one of many programs at the time, debt blew out by hundreds of billions which the populace on both sides strangely cheered on.
You’d have a better argument if you cited the age population bomb where retired seniors are starting outnumber working adults.
Today, most countries are not going to do lockdowns for Covid due to the data. That was temporary for a highly infectious airborne virus that we didn’t know much about at the time, which was overwhelming our hospitals.
Today, no one is closing anything since we know much more about the virus, and it’s becoming less lethal. All people are asking today is for everyone to either regularly vaccinate, wear good masks indoors (no need for this outdoors), or both. That isn’t going to result in either isolation or depression.
I think key investors and patent holders in mRNA technology, which had been until recently waz a significant sunk cost, had made some manner of cost-benefit analysis and were satisfied with the results.
I think it’s a fairly simple equation for most people. “Am I going to be (negatively) affected by this?” And this was obviously true for COVID even from the start.
The controversy occurred when people found out that they were definitely negatively affected by all the lockdown policies when they still hadn’t had COVID.
In the post truth era, the only rights answer is the one that serves one’s geopolitical goals. Don’t like China, look at what zéro Covid did to their economy. Don’t like America, look at all the people who died. Is it even possible to find an acceptable subjective answer when things are polarized?
Although the body of this article is about Covid policies and vaccine usage, which seems to have set off a whole round of discussion here on that topic, my sense was that the point of this article was more general:
> So my aim is generally to focus on stylized facts that are true and robust. And to keep repeating them. I like simple (or simple-seeming) claims that — and I can’t emphasize this last part enough — I expect will hold up to scrutiny.
As somebody who presents results of analyses and models for a living, I couldn’t agree more. Present the simplest possible finding that gets the point across and move on. Maybe mention “and this holds up when accounting for x, y, z”, or just keep those analyses in the backup slides in case you have a feisty audience member. Nobody cares how complex your model is, just that it works.
This is all fine, but the focus on deaths is sort of missing the larger societal problem. The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked.
edit: Which is to say: The Great Barrington Declaration was wrong directionally as well. We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much as possible to have a hope of a return to normality. Death is not the only issue with COVID. Too fucking late now, but anyone who supported that is a quack and should have been stripped of their license.
> The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked.
SARS-CoV-2 is certainly with us to stay, so in that sense it's not over. But beyond that, I don't see how "we are so, so fucked" as you say. Covid is no doubt taking a small nibble out of life expectency, and yes there is some long Covid still taking its own nibble out of productivity and life satisfaction ... but it's not that big a part of the big picture. Covid is killing less than half as many people in the US at this point as lung cancer, and those deaths are overwhelmingly amongst the elderly. I don't want to be overtly callous, but knocking a few years of life off people well into retirement is hardly going to bring the country to its knees. There are essentially no Covid deaths among people under age 18, and among the working age population, cases requiring hospitalization or leading to long term debilitization are rare.
Those who suffer, of course, suffer. We shouldn't be unsupportive of them in their trials. But Covid as a public health crisis is largely over.
I love doom more than the average person, by what I would say is a quite significant margin... but I don't see this at all.
I've had covid at least twice, including some awful symptoms a month after recovery that had me convinced I had long covid as well... a few months later (now years) not so much.
While I do know many people of who have lost loved ones from Covid, I don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone who has any serious "long-covid" symptoms.
To be clear, I'm not doubting that long-covid exists. But I'm very skeptical, based on my own observations, that "we are so, so fucked" and covid of all things is the source of that "fucking". Personally I think a lot of the post-covid strangeness is because, for a variety of other reasons (not the least of which is rapidly progressing climate change), people are under tremendous stress and at the same time can't quite articulate what that stress is, nor find relief from it.
A lot of people (not me) did believe there was going to be a return to normal post-covid, and the increasingly obvious impossibility of this is causing people to have tremendous mental health problems. But long-covid itself being the source is something that I just don't see anywhere.
And, as I said, I'm not afraid of being labeled a "doomer", so if you have some good sources to read up on, I'm all ears (er, eyes).
I think the funny thing is that Nate can be a flippant twit on Twitter but has totally fallen for it in critiques of him. Essentially this article is “a bunch of people baselessly speculated about an assertion I made, so I’m going to spend lots of time proving something they don’t care about”
"Bunch of people" doesn't seem like a good characterization considering he's at least partially responding to Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine and biostatistician at Harvard and a co-author of the GBD.
As a bystander this seems accurate, but at the end of the article Nate himself states that he has little hope that it will convince people on Twitter/X. It's more about credibility to his own readership, I suppose.
FWIW, I think Twitter is a rabid cesspool that will be a big piece in the downfall of humanity, but I didn't really share your assessment. For whatever reason he decided to write this blog post, I thought it was really interesting, insightful, and I appreciated the detail and clarity of thought that went into it (e.g. the analysis at the bottom of the article that showed vaccination rates were the real factor that resulted in differences in death rates, and that partisanship was really just a proxy for that).
So, Twitter folk may not care about what he showed in this post, but FWIW I certainly appreciated it.
Typical narcissist. I'll always think of Nate Silver as the bedraggled man with a mid-range stare on election night 2016. Silver's utility is limited to knowing what the establishment talking points are.
I don't know about other countries but in Austria nurses were highly incentivized to report deaths immediately following a vaccination or weeks after an infection has passed as a covid death in the sense of national statistics.
I would not be surprised if this "nudging" of on the ground reports over the course of the pandemic has rendered the data around covid deaths unreliable.
From the CDC [1], 2020 total covid deaths by state: West Virginia 1318, Florida 21546, Maine 344, Vermont 134.
The corresponding April 2020 census populations [2] for these four states are: West Virginia 1793716, Florida 21538187, Maine 1362359, Vermont 643077.
Thus, before the vaccines for covid were available the deaths per 100,000 persons for these four states are: West Virginia 73, Florida 100, Vermont 21, Maine 25.
Someone should probably check my math, but it looks like voting for Trump causes over three times as many deaths even before vaccinations were available. In other words, the analysis in the original article may be affected by unaccounted for confounding factors. For example, COPD is a significant medical risk factor for serious covid complications according to the CDC. COPD affects over 13.6% of the population of West Virginia (the worst rate in the country) but affects only 5.9% of the population of Vermont [3].
Personally, I chose to get vaccinated and boosted at the earliest possible dates. I also caught covid during the initial big wave of omicron cases in my state.
Ok, so now I want to see the details of his first claim, "Until vaccines became available, there was little difference in COVID death rates between blue states and red states."
I think for the pre-vaccine period, there's at least a couple issues that are still very unclear:
- how well did official policies map to actual behavior? I expect a lot of people still masked and distanced, regardless of what their particular state's policies were
- what specific behaviors actually made a difference? (Well, maybe it's really just a question of how much difference masking made -- I'd expect it's pretty clear that avoiding other people was pretty effective)
So for me, a more interesting and, I'd argue, practical question, is really about how effective _policy_ is. There were definitely a lot of costs, as it helped politicize things (who would have guess masks would become a partisan issue?).
I think of the case of Sweden, for example, where IIUC behavior was pretty cautious although policy was pretty loose.
I really don't trust any of the numbers on covid. A vaccine for a dangerous illness that can affect billions of people is a very big payday. There's lots of money to spread around to politicians, corrupt scientists, and corrupt media.
I'd like to see a real scientific debate with adversarial inquiry so we could know if numbers are being fudged and which ones they are.
I trust science, but not greed driven capitalists corporations. Having a measure of distrust for pharmaceutical companies given their historical record is prudent.
“Until vaccines became available, there was little difference in COVID death rates between blue states and red states.
After vaccines became available, there were clear differences, with red states having higher death rates, almost certainly as a result of lower vaccine uptake among Republicans.”
These are the claims he makes and arguably the data shows these to be true. The rest looks like whining where he objects to failures like “ice cream causes drowning” then eventually comes around to show the most applicable categorical statement is “states with higher vaccination rates had lower death rates. Sure. There’s a political divide that causes differences in behavior and outcomes. I don’t know. I spent the time reading but I can’t find any value in that post. Seems like venting to me.
I think if one calls themselves a statistician, they should do a proper analysis or at least reference such analysis. This is either a joke or a first homework assignment one would do to learn Stata.
[+] [-] ezekiel68|2 years ago|reply
Blah blah blah 'I mostly agree with ... an October 2020 anti-lockdown statement signed by a large number of scientists and medical professionals. “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal”' blah blah.
I don't have any regrets about the position I took, since it seemed to be based on all the verified information we had at the time. YET, I hope our society will embrace the fact that we were largely wrong to prolong the lockdown measures. Humility doesn't hurt the Left either.
[+] [-] jonahhorowitz|2 years ago|reply
- masks: clearly they worked for the medical professionals that were treating patients during the first waves, as they were directly exposed and didn't get sick, why didn't they work for the population at large? Did we not wear them correctly, consistently?
- schools: It seems obvious that schools could be a huge vector of transmission, kids largely were asymptomatic and when they got sick, they would still spread it, both inside the school and to their vulnerable relatives. Were the school shutdowns a mistake? Should they have been done differently?
[+] [-] pwarner|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refulgentis|2 years ago|reply
For example, asserting that the government was enforcing strict lockdown measures in October 2020, if ever. This is despite obvious evidence that people preferred staying home, such as the still historically low rate of people working from offices.
I wasn't wrong once, from the first videos from China in January 2020. it's been amusing to watch people overthink and moralize and become very rabid over side alley of side alleys of 3 simple facts a high schooler knows: "very contagious respiratory disease bad, vaxx's don't prevent infection or transmission, people like working from home"
[+] [-] Waterluvian|2 years ago|reply
Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them?
I’m guessing it’s hard to quantify and compare. A lot of things like general depression, isolation, kids missing half a year of school, etc. can’t really be evaluated against people dying. And on its surface it seems obvious: uh, people dying is much worse than any of those things.
But if I said that everything we did was to save one life, people probably would generally agree it wasn’t worth it (obviously so: people don’t seem too interested in preventing all kinds of deaths at all costs). What about ten lives? One thousand? Ten thousand? There’s some subjective level where it starts to feel obvious to more and more of us, until a majority of us agree.
But do we have any general sense what that number is? How do we decide how much to care? It might seem ghoulish to decide how many dollars is worth a life, but we do it every day.
With the data we have now, I imagine we can somewhat quantify this given enough sample jurisdictions with different rules? “Masking saves x lives per 1000.” “Closing schools saves y lives per 1000” etc. And perhaps then we’re able to decide “is x lives worth the qualitative harm done?” Probably. “What about y?” Maybe not.
[+] [-] slv77|2 years ago|reply
There is no scenarios where the collapse of the medical system is a viable outcome for policymakers that is also compatible with a functioning economy. A collapse of the medical system means non-covid fatalities also increase. Heart attacks, car accidents and childbirth all become mortality contributors. The most likely outcome of a medical system collapse would be martial law, mass graves, economic collapse and potential collapse of essential systems like food distribution.
The idea that policymakers were primarily constrained by the thought of grandpa dying a few years early and weighing it against the grandkids social isolation needs to die.
[+] [-] logicchains|2 years ago|reply
"Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates."
[+] [-] brody_hamer|2 years ago|reply
A lot of emphasis was placed on preventable deaths. That is; situations where we’re turning away a patient that we could’ve saved, because we don’t have a bed available for them.
I thought this was a solid, intuitive approach. Preventable deaths are really, really unfortunate.
[+] [-] vcdimension|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shepherdjerred|2 years ago|reply
I had this same thought during COVID, but like you said, it's not something others want to talk about. COVID was serious, but the American reaction to it was so strange. The whole approach to masking at restaurants has to be one of the most bizzare moments of American history.
[+] [-] fhcuvuvuc|2 years ago|reply
My works HR department got sick of having people use "logic" and "evidence" to argue against their policies. After kicking a few people out the door and generally saying you can't talk about this at work anymore, nobody talks about it.
[+] [-] chpatrick|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] felipeerias|2 years ago|reply
I am familiar with the case of Spain, but I’m sure in other countries the situation was similar.
[+] [-] jalapenos|2 years ago|reply
In the grand scheme of things, all those who died purely from COVID were going to die anyway.
A more important question is what has happened as a result of societies responses to this pandemic, especially in light of how marginal this virus' lethality was (this was no plague).
It has set precedent that in the case of relatively minor social distress, the government can take unlimited power, and the populace will just knod their heads.
It has also set precedent that the old can parasitize the young even further. Saving a few boomers a few years is worth masking up young school kids, affecting their communicative and social development.
The only silver lining to this has been the resulting explosion of remote work, which of course the boomers are now trying to undo. Fortunately, that's a cat-out-of-the-bag.
It's unfortunate that the boomers didn't learn an important lesson from their parents, who fought WW2 - sometimes dying is the right and proud thing to do.
[+] [-] Grimburger|2 years ago|reply
In Australia there is huge pushback politically about holding an inquiry to determine what could be done better, a lot of politicians hid behind faceless "health advice" for their actions that wouldn't last a minute when the public servants involved face an inquiry.
Current estimates of the jobkeeper program put it at $110,000 per job saved, in comparison to the median wage of $52,338. Basically all of it went into the pockets of big companies rather than paid directly to people. That was just one of many programs at the time, debt blew out by hundreds of billions which the populace on both sides strangely cheered on.
[+] [-] chaostheory|2 years ago|reply
Today, most countries are not going to do lockdowns for Covid due to the data. That was temporary for a highly infectious airborne virus that we didn’t know much about at the time, which was overwhelming our hospitals.
Today, no one is closing anything since we know much more about the virus, and it’s becoming less lethal. All people are asking today is for everyone to either regularly vaccinate, wear good masks indoors (no need for this outdoors), or both. That isn’t going to result in either isolation or depression.
[+] [-] onthecanposting|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|2 years ago|reply
The controversy occurred when people found out that they were definitely negatively affected by all the lockdown policies when they still hadn’t had COVID.
[+] [-] totetsu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alan-crowe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isthispermanent|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Amorymeltzer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e12e|2 years ago|reply
https://www.stata.com/
[+] [-] Aachen|2 years ago|reply
> On all Reed lab computers, Stata is located in the Applications folder.
> Stata can be found in the Applications folder of any school machine. On a PC, it is most likely located in Program Files.
Does that imply it's neither open source nor even commercially available? Seems rather odd, surely it is either of those two
[+] [-] Anon84|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plaidfuji|2 years ago|reply
> So my aim is generally to focus on stylized facts that are true and robust. And to keep repeating them. I like simple (or simple-seeming) claims that — and I can’t emphasize this last part enough — I expect will hold up to scrutiny.
As somebody who presents results of analyses and models for a living, I couldn’t agree more. Present the simplest possible finding that gets the point across and move on. Maybe mention “and this holds up when accounting for x, y, z”, or just keep those analyses in the backup slides in case you have a feisty audience member. Nobody cares how complex your model is, just that it works.
[+] [-] KerrAvon|2 years ago|reply
edit: Which is to say: The Great Barrington Declaration was wrong directionally as well. We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much as possible to have a hope of a return to normality. Death is not the only issue with COVID. Too fucking late now, but anyone who supported that is a quack and should have been stripped of their license.
[+] [-] walnutclosefarm|2 years ago|reply
SARS-CoV-2 is certainly with us to stay, so in that sense it's not over. But beyond that, I don't see how "we are so, so fucked" as you say. Covid is no doubt taking a small nibble out of life expectency, and yes there is some long Covid still taking its own nibble out of productivity and life satisfaction ... but it's not that big a part of the big picture. Covid is killing less than half as many people in the US at this point as lung cancer, and those deaths are overwhelmingly amongst the elderly. I don't want to be overtly callous, but knocking a few years of life off people well into retirement is hardly going to bring the country to its knees. There are essentially no Covid deaths among people under age 18, and among the working age population, cases requiring hospitalization or leading to long term debilitization are rare.
Those who suffer, of course, suffer. We shouldn't be unsupportive of them in their trials. But Covid as a public health crisis is largely over.
[+] [-] PheonixPharts|2 years ago|reply
I love doom more than the average person, by what I would say is a quite significant margin... but I don't see this at all.
I've had covid at least twice, including some awful symptoms a month after recovery that had me convinced I had long covid as well... a few months later (now years) not so much.
While I do know many people of who have lost loved ones from Covid, I don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone who has any serious "long-covid" symptoms.
To be clear, I'm not doubting that long-covid exists. But I'm very skeptical, based on my own observations, that "we are so, so fucked" and covid of all things is the source of that "fucking". Personally I think a lot of the post-covid strangeness is because, for a variety of other reasons (not the least of which is rapidly progressing climate change), people are under tremendous stress and at the same time can't quite articulate what that stress is, nor find relief from it.
A lot of people (not me) did believe there was going to be a return to normal post-covid, and the increasingly obvious impossibility of this is causing people to have tremendous mental health problems. But long-covid itself being the source is something that I just don't see anywhere.
And, as I said, I'm not afraid of being labeled a "doomer", so if you have some good sources to read up on, I'm all ears (er, eyes).
[+] [-] wilg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SilverBirch|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianpan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MauranKilom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago|reply
So, Twitter folk may not care about what he showed in this post, but FWIW I certainly appreciated it.
[+] [-] onthecanposting|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcbdev|2 years ago|reply
I would not be surprised if this "nudging" of on the ground reports over the course of the pandemic has rendered the data around covid deaths unreliable.
[+] [-] todd8|2 years ago|reply
From the CDC [1], 2020 total covid deaths by state: West Virginia 1318, Florida 21546, Maine 344, Vermont 134.
The corresponding April 2020 census populations [2] for these four states are: West Virginia 1793716, Florida 21538187, Maine 1362359, Vermont 643077.
Thus, before the vaccines for covid were available the deaths per 100,000 persons for these four states are: West Virginia 73, Florida 100, Vermont 21, Maine 25.
Someone should probably check my math, but it looks like voting for Trump causes over three times as many deaths even before vaccinations were available. In other words, the analysis in the original article may be affected by unaccounted for confounding factors. For example, COPD is a significant medical risk factor for serious covid complications according to the CDC. COPD affects over 13.6% of the population of West Virginia (the worst rate in the country) but affects only 5.9% of the population of Vermont [3].
Personally, I chose to get vaccinated and boosted at the earliest possible dates. I also caught covid during the initial big wave of omicron cases in my state.
[1] https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/99750
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
[3] https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/copd-tr...
[+] [-] mcguire|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flashback2199|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anyonecancode|2 years ago|reply
- how well did official policies map to actual behavior? I expect a lot of people still masked and distanced, regardless of what their particular state's policies were
- what specific behaviors actually made a difference? (Well, maybe it's really just a question of how much difference masking made -- I'd expect it's pretty clear that avoiding other people was pretty effective)
So for me, a more interesting and, I'd argue, practical question, is really about how effective _policy_ is. There were definitely a lot of costs, as it helped politicize things (who would have guess masks would become a partisan issue?).
I think of the case of Sweden, for example, where IIUC behavior was pretty cautious although policy was pretty loose.
[+] [-] da39a3ee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fwungy|2 years ago|reply
I'd like to see a real scientific debate with adversarial inquiry so we could know if numbers are being fudged and which ones they are.
I trust science, but not greed driven capitalists corporations. Having a measure of distrust for pharmaceutical companies given their historical record is prudent.
[+] [-] notjoemama|2 years ago|reply
These are the claims he makes and arguably the data shows these to be true. The rest looks like whining where he objects to failures like “ice cream causes drowning” then eventually comes around to show the most applicable categorical statement is “states with higher vaccination rates had lower death rates. Sure. There’s a political divide that causes differences in behavior and outcomes. I don’t know. I spent the time reading but I can’t find any value in that post. Seems like venting to me.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tommykins|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thefringthing|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LudwigNagasena|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shyn3|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tegmark|2 years ago|reply