Also your argument that they imposed lockdowns that were economically destructive and caused death is exactly the opposite of what we know to be true as evidenced by the countries that successfully implemented lockdowns initially and slowed the spread. It's these types of mental gymnastics that represent our failure as a nation to combat this.

Like, imagine I have a bug in my Production hospital billing system, and instead of looking inwards, I decided to say “there is now a moratorium on car sales — they sell cars which cause accidents which land people in the hospital, to hell with the dealerships — those dealerships are investments and deserve to lose!

That's a odd choice of words to describe policy that is preventing people from dying from exposure during the worst pandemic in a century.

We do that all the time. Major industries are bailed out all the time by the government with negligible interest loans. We've literally done that in COVID times already.

We should have deferrals up the chain if the government is preventing people from working.

Unless you can change the reality that rental properties are investments, making them artificially riskier will reduce new housing construction and lead to less affordable housing overall.

Once your investment has renters and a legal document it's a contract and a business. And the person that signed the lease made an agreement and the gamble is almost over, now the issues you have afterward are quite risky ( maintenance, evictions, and etc ). I am glad the CDC is stepping up to stop people from being kicked out during issues of business being closed. But a contract is in place which ends the fact its an investment and turns into a structured business.

Well, I think if you are changing the rules of the game, then you ought to compensate my losses.

The government essentially expropriating your investment is not a part of traditional risk profile.

I wouldn't call it "admirably", but not a "choked up" either. Just in the middle of the pack.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

Leaving my comment up cause the points themselves are still valid

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(1) Middle of the pack while having never locked down is incredible. Most pro-lockdown people still trot out Ferguson’s model which predicts about .8% of the entire population dying.

(2) You didn’t really look at the number I said to. Look at excess mortality over time. Sweden at this point had no excess mortality. They are done with COVID mortality.

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Unfortunately there is a vested interest in ignoring Sweden’s success. They fucked up the nursing homes, Tegnell has said as much, but they got the important part right: they NEVER locked down and COVID-19 mortality is no longer a thing.

BTW, you never answered my question about how Sweden’s mortality is back at or below baseline in the absence of lockdowns nor universal masking. All you did was screech angrily about politics, not realizing that it is the lockdown-loving camp that made this whole thing about about politics over public health policy.

(https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-decline-coronavirus-d... discusses some of the things that Sweden is doing, which are indeed largely voluntary)

R, or as I prefer to call it, R(t), is the number that factors in how many have immunity. So you mean herd immunity is when R(t) < 1.

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Anyway, I was having trouble understanding exactly what you were saying about Sweden, but to be clear, Sweden has hit herd immunity, unless you think that the utter absence of COVID mortality at this point is due to seasonality.

What you need to understand is that simplistic models view the population as homogenous, both in terms of mixing (social connections) AND susceptibility/transmissibility. Neither are true. Essentially, the people who tend to get infected sooner in the pandemic are the ones who tend to spread more, so the first, say, 10% of antibody prevalence is worth a lot more than the next 10%.

There's also the presence of pre-existing T-cell cross-reactivity; exposure to other hCoVs is protective against SARS-2. It seems that it does not protect infection, but it does make the disease course a non-issue: this probably explains the high degree of asymptomatic infection (with part of it just being explained as an artifact of the PCR cycle threshold fuckery). Technically these findings are already implicitly factored into the estimates we have for R_0, etc. (BTW, initial studies were claiming R_0 of 5.2, 5.5, etc, but now with more data it seems it's around 2, give or take)

Many, and I am in this category, believe that the true herd immunity threshold is somewhere around 20% of the population. That explains what we've seen in places like New York, Sweden, etc. This is lower than what the classic herd immunity formula would predict, because that formula does not account for a non-homogenously-mixed population (as I mentioned earlier), nor does it account for certain individuals having an innate genetic resistance that makes it less likely that they get infected.

BTW, this is what Sweden looks like now:

https://twitter.com/SeanCollins66/status/1309179008018513926

There is cognizable legal argument that this order might qualify as a 'taking' within the terms of the 5th amendment, which might require the government to compensate landlords, but I don't think that argument will be successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_...

As an aside, I wish Jacobson v Massachusetts was never a thing. It opened such a big can of worms. Public health pseudocrises now allow our government to take on full emergency powers in perpetuity.

I believe that lockdown policies worsen COVID-19 mortality. Severe COVID-19 is an immunoregulatory disorder, and lack of vit d / nitric oxide, lack of exercise/sleep, unwarranted fear/anxiety, lack of socialization all make the immune system incapable of regulating itself properly.

So I believe we would have less COVID death amortized over a year without lockdown. Look at New York’s absurd mortality rate, it’s worse than having done nothing. (NY was iatrogenic harm from early invasive ventilation which in retrospect was a horrible idea, plus lockdown depriving people of sunlight and exercise, plus Cuomo’s famous nursing home gambit)

+1 to __blockcipher__ 's points. Maybe in the beginning draconian measures might have been justified, but current panic over cases (casedemic) and continuing moral panic and lockdowns are not.

I live in California, and every year our misguided leaders let wood and dry brush stack up like crazy. Every year wildfires erupt and every year we artificially suppress them. The result is there's a huge pile of fuel just waiting to go up.

Similarly, when you have a minor flu season for a couple years, you get a large population of elderly people that build up and are capable of being taken out by a pathogen like SARS-2.

SARS-2 already, even with the inflated death toll, is weak enough overall that we'd have barely noticed it (in our day-to-day lives) if we'd never knew it existed. But go back a few centuries to when it was rare to have people live past 60, and it would literally be an unnoticeable virus.

Anyway, that's enough rambling for now.

You can look at excess mortality all around the world, and there are large, otherwise-unexplained spikes in mortality everywhere. Sweden has the same large spike in deaths from all causes.

The problem is that if you die and are PCR-positive for COVID, that's a COVID death. We don't use that standard for any other disease because it's the wrong standard.

Once you get infected and recover, you still test PCR-positive for months afterwards even when you have NO viable SARS-CoV-2 inside your body. This is because the rt-PCR cycle threshold is set at 40-something when it should be 30 maximum. This means we're magnifying DNA by several orders of magnitude beyond where we should, and thus hitting on the presence of viral debris.

This is why, for example, George Floyd was PCR-positive despite having recovered from SARS-2 infection weeks or months earlier.

BTW, I also believe that lockdown increases COVID-19 mortality. Meaning if you do get infected you are more likely to die, since you've been stuck inside out of the sun, riddled with fear and anxiety, with almost all avenues for exercise closed down, etc. But like you said, in places that never locked down, like Sweden, there was still excess mortality.

BTW, I wish more people talked about life-years over lifes. Flu is a bimodal distribution; it kills the very young and very old. COVID kills the very old but not the very young. Look at the average age of death. I haven't ran the numbers but each COVID death probably only represents an average of 2, 3, 5 years of life lost. As opposed to a baby dying of the Flu, which would be 70+ years (picking the most extreme example of course).

I'll see you with reparations when we do it for the Tulsa massacre survivors and generally survivors of slavery.

Also survivors of Japanese concentration camps.

I seriously think those have a FAR higher precedent than landlords.

Universal lockdown, ignoring constitutional rights for a second, increases the proportion of at-risk individuals who must get sick before herd immunity is reached.

If you have a population of 100 people, the HIT is 20% (assume homogenous mixing), of which half your population is high-risk and half is low-risk, you can enforce universal lockdown and end up with 10 high-risk and 10 low-risk infections, or you can encourage just the at-risk to isolate and end up with like 18 low-risk and 2 high-risk. It should be self evident which course is better.

Unfortunately the world has been tricked into viewing “herd immunity” as a dirty word as opposed to an emergent phenomenom.

My point is COVID-19 stands for coronavirus infectious disease 2019. If you have no symptoms you have no disease. You don’t have COVID-19 without symptoms, you have a SARS-2 infection. The distinction is incredibly important.

also landlords: we need a bailout from our risky investments

I disagree. When a company goes under for a bad investment, they need to not be bailed out. But when the government comes in and says it’s illegal to work your job period, the government needs to pay all the lost income from that forced closure. That’s all I’m saying.

Why should the government back up somebody's risky investment?

My point is the government should not make it illegal to generate income and then turn around and say that renters need to pay rent, but neither should they say that landlords must be stuck holding the bag.

Do people understand that landlords aren’t this mysterious class of evil overlords? They’re just people. I’ve taken evil landlords to small claims court before, but that doesn’t mean I think I should be entitled to live in someone’s house for free.

I am absolutely flabbergasted by how “billionaire” and “landlord” are now bad words.

The only exceptions are those who made fortunes via government monopolies, which is yet another example of why the State needs to have its power checked. Unrestrained capitalism is not the problem, crony capitalism is, and crony capitalism is a function of Statism.

Although you can argue that the gov did punish banks for not loaning to low-income individuals. I’m rusty on those details. But you get the point.

Government: Absolutely! We too would also like to become a larger socialist entity that puts everyone on the dole. We will fix it all for you! Just give us complete control!

How can you make it illegal to work and then demand someone pay rent? Neither is it fair to make landlords be stuck holding the bag.

Here in California, my rock climbing gym, which has to pay sky-high rent, was closed down when we locked down 6+ months ago. When gyms were allowed to reopen they weren’t classified as a gym and somehow were never allowed to reopen. Now gyms are closed again anyway (thanks Newsom). It’s been like 7 months of them being completely closed while paying sky-high rent. They weren’t swimming in money before all this; rock climbing is a niche market. What was done to them is WRONG.

My landlord told me to get a second job after I got laid off. Maybe the landlords should get second jobs.

This is the lesson every corrupt nation learns the hard way. We agree to the laws of the nation to secure peace, but when that peace becomes oppressive, when that peace means slavery to the oligarchy, that peace is no longer peace but silent war.

The people will not tolerate this extreme inequality anymore.

Edit: to those claiming what I've said is "hateful" or incendiary...this is simply the truth -- as proven by history. Don't shoot the messenger.

IMO the underlying don't-fight-your-fellow-citizen analysis here is that the debt treadmill has to bind up some time. Housing rent is at the first level, followed by mortgages, then muni bonds, wall st paper games, etc. All these levels of recurring payments that have been created to channel real wealth upwards and force everybody to keep working in spite of technological abundance. If it does not bind up now, that's just delaying the inevitable to some time in the future when the phony asset valuations have gotten higher and even less serviceable.

Suffice to say I disagree. Call me old-school, but I believe in the rights to life, liberty, and property.