If your general covid argument is to listen to the science, I think you're not following your own advice with this comment.

If your general covid argument is to listen to the science when the science is in favor of your personal goals and desires, I think that's not called science.

We should be open to questioning apriori assumptions and our subsequent practices. Especially when the apriori had very little ground to stand on considering we're 9-12 months removed from the discovery of this virus and 6 months removed from the implementation of mitigation procedures. There is truly very little evidence and so new approaches or viewpoints should not be dismissed outright like this. You risk being labeled as recalcitrant and bellicose...

What have we seen so far? In America at least, 190k dead, but over 95% of them are over 55 and >80% over 65. Only around ~6k did not have other comorbidities. People have complained the US lockdowns weren't strong enough compared to Australia, NZ; or we lacked the testing of Korea or Germany.

What do we see now? We're getting close to the same per-capita rates of Sweden, which had a much more liberal policy (although they still locked down quite a bit).

All the facts so far makes it seem like this was a gorse overreaction. Yes a lot of people got sick and died. NYC was bad, but it also showed we should have focused on isolating the elderly and high risk instead of shutting down everything.

I wrote this a few months back and still stand behind it:

https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/covid-19-is-two-disease...

History will not look back kindly on this year.

Working in hospitals, nobody will say it was a gross over-reaction. Everyone agrees we didn't delay the breakout long enough to get the right staff, equipment, and materials in place to treat, resulting in tens of thousands of additional deaths.

Here in Florida when cases spiked, patients were having to be sedated with drugs not originally meant for sedation, due to etomidate, ketamine, and propofol supplies running out. There was no PPE, everyone was reusing masks and gowns. Doctors got sick, some died. Everyone was working 60+ hours and I know many hospitals were offering $100+/hr with multi thousand dollar bonuses per week to get staff to come in. Staff still turned down these offers, due to the stress.

Advent Health setup a dedicated hospital for COVID in every major city to try and efficiently use PPE, they were quickly overwhelmed and the covid patient's flooded every hospital, resulting in even less PPE availability.

One ICU nurse I know summed it up best "We went from working 2-3 patients that each had one problem, to work 5-8 patients, each one with a myriad of problems. I want to go back to the simple patients, I have to code patients several times a week now."

Sure maybe if our government was effective we could have come up with a better plan, but implementing a "segregation" of elderly from the general population simply wasn't going to happen. The efforts to "lower the curve" were 100% necessary and didn't go far enough or last long enough. Now we get the worst of everything, mass death, continuing outbreak and a damaged economy.

Also: These weren't small podunk hospitals, these were the Advent Health's, Baptist Health, Cleveland Clinic size health systems, it's not a lack of money or trying that this all went down, it was a real crisis.

You are making a good argument for the initial lockdown, not this continuing insanity. We should have started challenge trials on day one, I would have been first in line to try this new respiratory virus (and I did sign up to participate in one project that has still not been approved). From there we could have evaluated the risk to different groups, and started building population immunity in the best way for overall public health. Instead, we went down the most cowardly and destructive path possible, and it is a travesty. The people who led us here should be sacked.

"Continuing insanity" ? It's completely absurd to say that we can achieve controlled herd immunity when a) we don't know how much of the population is required to be infected to achieve it and b) we don't know how long immunity lasts and c) the serology tests are not completely accurate.

In order to beat this thing back, we need to use the tools our ancestors did - quarantine and isolation - and complement them with modern strategies. In the US, we still have approximately 40k additional infections a day, and we're drowning in a sea of comorbidities.

Re-opening to let however many people die so we can get back to normal isn't a strategy, it's giving up.

I just described a modern strategy that includes tactical quarantine and isolation! What we have done instead (spew absurd panic from every mainstream institution for the better part of a year, while sending kids home from school and COVID patients into nursing homes) is a disgrace.

More about the modern strategy that we could have used instead: https://youtu.be/VK0Wtjh3HVA

It's the "tactical" part I have a problem with - from what we're seeing, we don't have enough information about the disease to make an informed decision.

E.g. the drastic differences in infection rates and mortality in different countries in Europe with nominally similar strategies gives us an indication that there is a lot more to learn.

Additionally, we don't know the long term consequences of this thing yet - it's possible that it's going to cause chronic issues a lot of people who would've otherwise been healthy.

The best way to get that information quickly is to expose volunteers to infection, which is admittedly an ethical lapse, but one nowhere near as bad as what actually happened (“spread panic and write off the nursing home residents!”) in my opinion.

> Additionally, we don't know the long term consequences of this thing yet - it's possible that it's going to cause chronic issues a lot of people who would've otherwise been healthy.

That is a risk I understand and am completely willing to take. Instead, a bunch of people with medical degrees have banned me from making this choice, hiding behind “informed consent” doublespeak (and pernicious nonsense in this case - nobody is informed, the risks from an unprecedented year-long lockdown are unknown too, and those are simply the stakes) while taking a giant dump all over the Hippocratic Oath. The reckoning can’t come soon enough.

Considering you call your blog article about this "pandemic woo" and start it off with saying "Here we are part-way through 2020, the year humanity started a war against the common cold, and lost", I'm going to say that we'll never even approach middle ground on this and wish you a good day.

Same to you. Hopefully things work out for the best, no matter who is right.

> Only around ~6k did not have other comorbidities.

I thought the figure was 6% had no comorbidity, which would be ~12K people.

One figure I'd like to see is what percentage of people don't have some comorbidity. I mean, 1/3 of the US population is obsese and another 1/3 are overweight. 10% or so of us are diabetics. 20% or whatever smoke.

I suspect it is rather high, which would mean your 6% statistic isn't as indicative as you might think.

Very well argued. Here’s my rant from May. I also go waaay out on a limb to claim that this episode will be the final nail in the coffin of what we know today as “science”, so YMMV: https://guscost.com/2020/05/12/pandemic-woo/

> Only around ~6k did not have other comorbidities

How many Americans have other comorbidities? Especially Americans over the age of 55?

> Sweden, which had a much more liberal policy

I don't see how that follows. In fact the bulk of US cases and deaths right now are happening in states with limited mitigations very much along the lines of what was happening in Sweden. The US has stricter rules in some areas, and most of those (in particular the northeast) are showing much better control of the outbreak than Sweden.

Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island all have a total covid-19 death rate that's more than 2x that of Sweden.

Currently, the average daily cases is 5x higher in Rhode Island than in Sweden, 3x higher in Connecticut than in Sweden, and 2x higher in Massachusetts than in Sweden. The current daily covid-19 death rate in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island is higher than in Sweden.

How the hell can you claim that that is "much better control" with a straight face?

(And I didn't even need to bring up NY or NJ to find US states in the northeast that are doing much worse than Sweden.)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/connecticut/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/massachusetts/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/rhode-island/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

"Only around ~6k did not have other comorbidities."

It's so sad to see this narrative take hold even here. But hey, at least you got the technical description correct, and it's only us fatties who are running the risk, so let's just discount the 95% of the deaths, right? The perspectives here, in my opinion, are incredibly skewed when you remember we're supposed to be a society whose goal is liberty and justice for all.

This teacher needn't have died: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/south-carolina/artic...

And you've taken the opposite, emotionally-charged route.

In my opinion, I've taken no route. I've pointed out the dismissals in their stance. I agree that the route we've taken is bad, I agree things should change and this study should inform those changes. However, I'm not going to minimize the death nor avoid the suffering. I'm at least explicit in my belief that we should be minimizing death as much as possible, fairness to the owners be damned.

Minimizing death as much as possible isn't and cannot ever be a goal. There's a balance that must be struck.

Why not?

Virtually every decision we make as a society is a trade off, from highway speed limits to school funding. We never optimize for the lowest possible risk of death.

This is missing the point I was trying to make. Of course everything is a tradeoff, I'm not trying to claim we are post scarcity. I'm making a point about aspects of the "trading space" -- for lack of a better term -- being poorly represented by the discussions here. In my opinion, I think we are doing a disservice by trying to focus on the things we can be dispassionate about -- as an example arguing about what portion of our nation we want to abandon to nature while maintaining and actively suppressing the aspects of this calamity that stoke moral outrage. Maybe I'm just the crazy techno-hippy here, but it says something to me about this community when none of the responses posted above touch on the most ideologically charged statement I made: "fairness to the owners be damned". Blind spots abound, and it's a shame we can't have a more interesting discussion.

I'm curious about your opinions: What is the point of civilization if not to work at minimizing death and suffering (or to maximize well-being and liberty, same-same)? What is of higher value to you, and what do you see as the point of all this?

Among the people that are not using this disease as an excuse for a power grab or ego boost this should come as nothing but good news.

Some people are also capable of disconfirming their beliefs instead of just confirming what they thought they already knew. Which one are you?

I'd argue that the proliferation of 'pre-publish' papers and the fact that anyone with a blog can push disinformation confirming anyone's point of view has made it less likely that people will disconfirm their beliefs.

I can't tell you how many people I've found who are still convinced hydroxycloroquine cures Covid-19.

Not a scientist or doctor, but have taken a lot of time to understand how I can protect my family if needed.

Not picking a fight as I feel that evidence based analysis is paramount.

There are some good studies that show that HCQ+ ( HCQ with Azithromycin and Zinc ) is quite effective at PREVENTING serious outcomes in many cases as it seems to interfere with portions of the viral replication lifecycle. There haven't been large scale double-blind trials yet, but there should be. The few double-blind trials there have been have focused exclusively on HCQ without the additional viral inhibitors and were done at toxic doses when the virus had largely already replicated and the patients had progressed to a "serious illness" with the accompanied "cytokine storm". Lots of bad information out there, 'politically' deployed with little information behind it.

This isn't and shouldn't be the only treatment available, but we shouldn't discount things because they don't fit with our worldview or because our 'enemies' promote them. Facts are stubborn things. We should strive to do better collectively.

I'll leave speculation of motivations behind on why more types of treatments haven't been tried. We're in a strange time when a lot of the institutions that have failed the public are still being weaponized against people who desperately want the best outcome for folks.

> I'll leave speculation of motivations behind on why more types of treatments haven't been tried. We're in a strange time when a lot of the institutions that have failed the public are still being weaponized against people who desperately want the best outcome for folks.

See, this is a complete misconception based on a conspiratorial mind. I'm not blaming you specifically for it - I used to think the same way myself - but it's something I've seen repeated over and over by people as if it's fact, when in reality there's plenty of proof it isn't.

For example, there's several trials being done on common anti-inflammatory drugs to prevent the cytokine storm [1]. Dexamethasone - a very cheap corticosteroid - has been found to be effective in reducing risk for people with severe cases [2]. There's a bunch of other almost over-the-counter drugs being trialed.

Are companies interested in making a ton of money by developing a new drug? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean the scientific community is just 'sitting this one out'.

[1] https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/04/417196/clinical-trial-test...

[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2021436

Thanks for responding, I had seen dexamthasone as a post-treatment for serious cases of the disease and to help out with the cytokine storm on Chris Martenson's series about COVID-19. Thanks for sharing your perspective!

>The few double-blind trials there have been have focused exclusively on HCQ without the additional viral inhibitors and were done at toxic doses when the virus had largely already replicated and the patients had progressed to a "serious illness" with the accompanied "cytokine storm".

Not true.

July 30, 2020, Research Update

Spanish RCT of Hydroxychloroquine for Patients with Early, Nonsevere COVID-19 Finds No Benefit.

July 29, 2020, Research Update

United States/Canadian RCT of Hydroxychloroquine for Patients with Early, Nonsevere COVID-19 Finds No Benefit

>Lots of bad information out there, 'politically' deployed with little information behind it.

Ironic because you're the one believing and spreading the misinformation.

>I'll leave speculation of motivations behind on why more types of treatments haven't been tried. We're in a strange time when a lot of the institutions that have failed the public are still being weaponized against people who desperately want the best outcome for folks.

Can you explain why India(where HCQ is widely used for malaria) would lock itself down and suffer severe consequences to make Trump look bad? Modi and Trump are buddies and Trump was invited to and visited India just in Jan or Feb.

Why would Europe give a flying fuck about Trump getting re-elected? Four more years would barely make a difference to Europe, surely whatever the impact is, isn't worth a 10% drop in GDP?

>Not a scientist or doctor, but have taken a lot of time to understand how I can protect my family if needed.

If you really took a lot of time to look in the right places, you'd have found that promising observational studies happen all the time in drug discovery which are eventually found not to have any effects.

This explains it well, and it was quite early on:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/06/hy...

It's sad that so many smart people believe and are misled by misinformation that started with Fox News pushing badly done research studies to push a political agenda. The mistrust intentionally cultivated against scientists will harm us for generations.

To put to rest your straw man argument: Actually wasn't referencing Trump or Fox News at all. I don't watch television at all and Trump is a buffoon. I wish Trump had never even talked about it because then it wouldn't have become taboo for otherwise intelligent people to discuss. I personally don't care if he is re-elected or not, we're on our own regardless.

I rely on facts, not belief. Integrity is important and in short supply in our age.

The author of the article you sent made a great point near the end of his article:

<quote> I called it “potentially very interesting” and called for more data to see if it was real. That’s where I still am. </quote>

I completely agree with this, let's disprove it and strike it off the list, but the studies that I have read so far don't seem to do a good job of disproving.

I appreciate the link and am happy to read what people send, keep sharing information! I am always interested and want to get the best information possible to help the people I know if at all possible. Thanks again for taking the time to share with me.

Here's a link to a pre-print that seems like it holds a pretty promising review of existing studies.

https://www.palmerfoundation.com.au/hydroxychloroquine-is-ef...

> completely agree with this, let's disprove it and strike it off the list, but the studies that I have read so far don't seem to do a good job of disproving.

That's not how science or research works. The onus is on the ones that are claiming something works to prove it works. So far they have failed. Otherwise one could come up with zillions of alleged treatments that are assumed to work unless someone disproves them.

Anyway, he wrote that in early April. If you read his writings in the next few months he think HCQ doesn't work.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/

Is your problem with the crowd then, and not information? You show your hand, Dirlewanger :)