Covid deaths: Simple solution, lockdown, virtual learning, 6-feet apart, cancel sports and after-school activities, miss graduations, etc. All the mental fallout from this: Too complex, just a way of life. Drip drip drip.

And if we hadn't done that stuff, we would have seen even more than the 1M deaths we did experience. Things could have gotten significantly worse as the hospitals filled up and space was not available for Covid patients and all the other people with heart attacks and other medical conditions.

Even as it is, the medical staff have been overworked and extremely stressed. They've been quitting the medical field in very high numbers:

https://morningconsult.com/2021/10/04/health-care-workers-se...

Yes, because of the lockdown, we have paid a high price, but don't just dismiss the higher price we would have paid if no mitigations had been attempted.

"It could have been much worse" seems to be a pretty common response to a few things these days. And even that single survey you point to... Many were seeking more money or career growth, or were laid off.

California and Florida couldn't have been further from each other in terms of policy and response, yet the age-adjusted mortalities weren't that far apart [1].

[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...

Also known as the preparedness paradox.

> if we hadn't done that stuff, we would have seen even more than the 1M deaths we did experience

How much more? And how would that increase compare to the drug overdoses and other mental health related deaths that lockdowns caused?

What's the control group you're using to make your claim?

Absent a feasible zero-COVID strategy, which for most countries was never in the books due to their geographical situation, lockdowns have been found to have virtually no impact on reducing the spread of COVID.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19...

https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...

Lockdowns have devasted education:

https://www.economist.com/international/2022/07/07/covid-lea...

The cost to lifetime earnings is estimated to be $17 trillion:

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/12/06/l...

Which will massively exacerbate poverty and all of its associated illnesses.

The education losses have been worst for the poor:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/remote-learni...

Social distancing and other COVID control measures, which became mandatory with lockdowns, have been associated with a surge in childhood obesity:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...

And a decline in children's IQ:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34401887/

97 million more people are estimated to be poverty due to the social reaction to COVID, the most drastic and disruptive of which were lockdowns:

https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impac...

It turns out following the lead of an authoritarian communist state on the COVID response, by totally abrogating civil liberties with community quarantines, i.e. lockdowns, wasn't a great idea.

As for voluntary social distancing, it has been found to impose more measurable costs for 89% of the population than it reduces through mitigating risks of contracting COVID.

Lockdown-type measures will do more long-term damage to the poor and exacerbate socio-economic inequality than COVID, the actual disease, ever could.

Truly the "it is what it is" method of governance.

Wrong. Most of the non-pharmaceutical interventions were pointless pandemic theater. You can find examples of other countries that took less extreme measures and still had lower death rates.

Name two countries/areas that you want to use as an example in this argument.

Otherwise if anyone else gives a counterexample you can easily move goalposts on them.

How about two states? As mentioned above, Florida and California couldn't be further from each other in terms of policy and response, yet age-adjusted mortality was about the same.

[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...

That's pretty easy. Sweden is the poster child of a rational covid19 response.

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

Sweden deaths per million: 1834

U.S. deaths per million: 3043

However you can also choose various European countries that avoided masking children and minimized school disruption. France and UK for starters, but also all the Nordic countries. Sweden being quite different from the other Nordic countries, but all of them being consistent in avoiding school disruption or masking children.

Most of Europe does not recommend vaccinating young children either.

France deaths per million: 2242

Denmark deaths per million: 1122

Sweden had a higher death rate than its neighbours combined. Also just like Denmark no very large, densely populated cities.

Paris proper is 2mln people squeezed into a 100km^2 city. Greater Paris is 10mln at a definitely urban density. It's no wonder they had larger death rates and this is a apples to oranges comparison.

All the European countries that you listed have good public heath care systems, especially when compared with the US situation. That’s the main reason they had less deaths per capita, not their lockdown policies.

The UK absolutely required children to wear masks in schools in various situations. Schools were closed for significant periods of time as well.

Please name them.

Generally those things are helpful but I think China has pretty well demonstrated that there’s no alternative universe where fully locking everything down eliminates Covid.

It worked for us in New Zealand. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When we tried the same thing a second time it didn't work, but that was due to people not following the rules.

I think it stopped working once Covid became far more infectious. Before that, it was possible to stamp out the occasional quarantine failure.

I agree, it was definitely harder the second time with Delta. People broke the rules the first time as well, or mistakes happened, but the few breakouts weren't so difficult to contain.

It worked the same as it worked on personal level too. At the very beginning you can just lock yourself inside and there is basically no chance to get sick. But what then?

If you could just lock everybody in the world for a month you could basically get rid of all the infectious diseases. However you can't. So lock down only helps to win time.

After you win your time you really need to know what to do with it - e.g. effective vaccine is created in this time.

Otherwise you just delay inevitable and that is it.

That's what the government says when they fail, they blame the people.

It's your fault for not following orders, not our fault.

Our government was pretty careful not to put blame on the people honestly, it's really me that's blaming the people (I'm not the one that's downvoted you though).

The first time round wasn't the main thing that NZ basically shut itself off from the world? I was generally supportive of the sort of measures much of the world implemented restrict the spread of covid (widespread testing, masks, vaccinations, encouraging WFH, etc) however to me both NZ and China's approaches didn't seem feasible for most of the world.

So if I understand correctly NZ had a short hard lockdown to reduce cases to zero and then maintained it by severely restricting and controlling arrivals from abroad. I live in a Central European country that simply cannot seal itself off from the world like NZ did, we have open borders within the EU via Schengen (a good thing IMO) but there's very little chance of every country in the Schengen area agreeing to follow this model. This means virus carriers would inevitably enter the country, cause an outbreak of cases, necessitating repeated lockdowns and the public would quickly rebel against the measures.

That’s like saying that your grandma was able to keep per collection of 4 books perfectly sorted 100% of the time so why can’t a public library of 50,000 books?

China represents 18% of the world's population, yet 0.07% of COVID-19 fatalities. Seems like there is some value in their approach.

0.07% of reported COVID-19 fatalities. There are a lot of incentives to keep the numbers down going up the chain in the Chinese bureaucracy. This is the opposite of most western countries, where the incentives are to over-report.

> This is the opposite of most western countries, where the incentives are to over-report.

Ahem.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/politics/donald-trump-testing...

https://floridaphoenix.com/2022/01/06/desantis-admits-roughl...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/19/rebekah-jon...

Yes, that's news about Florida and Donald Trump. Now do New York and California. The most populous states were likely over-reporting deaths.

By the way, despite the rhetoric, states were getting money from the federal government for reporting a COVID death. There was literally a per-death payment. If that is not an incentive to over-report (despite the usual bloviating from Republicans), I don't know what is.

[citation needed]

Here you go, straight from the primary source (the center for medicare and medicaid services):

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/se20015.pdf

> Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) Hospitals - Section 3710 of the CARES Act directs the Secretary to increase the weighting factor of the assigned Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) by 20 percent for an individual diagnosed with COVID-19 discharged during the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) period.

Hospitals get to charge Medicare/Medicaid a 20% surcharge for COVID patients and COVID deaths.

Note that this is deaths and patients who test positive for COVID while at the hospital, not deaths/patients whose reason for being in the hospital is COVID. At one point, those were all counted as "COVID hospitalizations/deaths" respectively by the CDC.

Given that COVID tests are tuned to have high sensitivity and (comparatively) low specificity, all a hospital needs to do to get their hands on that money is just give out a lot of COVID tests, and avoid re-testing the false positives. COVID tests are cheap, and to patients, it looks like the hospital being extra careful about keeping them safe from COVID.

That doesn't pay hospitals 20% more, the MS-DRG weighting factor is used to calculate the resources needed to care for the patient. This document is simply acknowledging the complexity and cost of COVID-19 care.

I don't expect anyone who has swallowed the pandemic conspiracy theories to change their mind. Perhaps someone who is reading along will gain insights into how misinformation starts and is spread.

And that MS-DRG premium means that they get $0 extra? Maybe it's less than 20% extra, and maybe it's more, but I certainly doubt that it's $0.

It sounds a lot like you were presented with evidence that people, particularly hospital administrators, were incentivized to pump the numbers of COVID cases in the US, and dismissed it as a "conspiracy theory."

---

The fact of the matter is that people respond to incentives. Whether consciously or not. When you pay people to hand out COVID diagnoses, you are going to get a lot of COVID diagnoses. Particularly, you are going to get people who accept false positives as true positives.

Note that this doesn't mean that they over-counted cases in total: the US likely still under-counted cases due to all the people who never took a test when they were sick. They just under-counted a lot less than many other countries, thanks in part to the incentives being in favor of producing positive test results. Past epidemics have had reporting rates well under 10% in countries with good surveillance.

In China, the incentives are different. Chinese administrators are heavily incentivized to have fewer COVID diagnoses. This means much more draconian lockdown policies (which reduce the number of true positives for COVID), but it also means that they will accept negative test results (true and false negatives) without much question and try very hard to eliminate false positives.

---

IMO the most likely story ("conspiracy theory") is:

1. The US and Western Europe, which had similar disease management policies and similar levels of contact between people, likely had very similar true positive rates of cases.

2. China probably had a lower true positive rate due to using more serious procedures to reduce R.

3. Due to co-morbidities (Americans being fat), cases in the US were on average more serious than cases in the EU, meaning more infected people going to the hospital and more people taking tests. On its own, this raised the reporting rate in the US.

4. Hospital systems and doctors in the US followed their incentives and over-reported cases (still under-counting the actual number of total cases by a factor of at least 2). What could have been "you have a mild cold, go home and get some rest" turned into "better take a COVID test just to be safe," and if that test was positive, it was reported as a case.

5. Hospital systems and doctors in China followed their incentives and under-reported cases (under-counting total cases by a factor of 50+). Things that could be COVID cases, but were unlikely, would get swept under the rug without a test.

6. Hospital systems in the EU ended up somewhere in between the US and China in terms of their surveillance rate.

This logically explains the variance in the reported case numbers between countries that did the same things, and also explains why a rational person could be skeptical of official numbers in certain countries. But sure, offering a narrative that lines up better with reality than the official narrative is a "conspiracy theory." As we all know, the official narrative is always correct, even when it is "there are WMDs in Iraq" or "smoking has no adverse heath effects."

Making the statement "The most populous states were likely over-reporting deaths" is alarmist to say the least.

Upon challenge, dialed back to "over-reported cases" or even "under-counted a lot less than many other countries" or "[didn't] try very hard to eliminate false positives" (which is a very strange accusation for different reasons?), still sounds like you have an ideological axe to grind here.

If I remember rightly we even know and have evidence of some of the specific ways in which China did this, such as not counting deaths of people in high-risk groups immediately after being infected with and hospitalized due to Covid as Covid deaths and instead blaming their deaths on some existing health conditions. Whereas the UK for example counted everyone who died reasonably soon after catching Covid as a Covid death.

we don't need to rely on the numbers coming from the CCP to get an estimate of how bad it is in china. what we can do is to rely on the covid count of passengers coming in from China, reported by non-Chinese disease authorities. we have several: south korea, singapore, and taiwan who were taking in chinese travelers at various points of the pandemic. china is a minor contributor to imported cases in these three countries.

If people don't like the China example, they can look at New Zealand or Australia, both of which had tiny fractions of our Covid deaths AND experienced less economic decline AND experienced a drop in suicides during the time.

And are now catching up.

New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday. Australia 1500. The vaccines didn't keep people from dying, they postponed them to the next flu season.

The old and sick will catch covid and die. There is nothing you can do about it. Putting your head in the sand and hoping for a magic bullet to save us - vaccines, masks, lockdowns - just means that the rest of the health system will collapse too. We need to be realistic and prepare for a world in which life expectancy is 10 years lower and we need a lot more hospital beds.

This is 100% false. The COVID vaccines continue to massively decrease the risk of severe disease, including in old people.

Can you say which of:

+ New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday.

+ Australia 1500

+ The vaccines didn't keep people from dying

Were wrong? Because a 100% false rate is a pretty high bar, especially since you already admitted 3 was true.

You almost made even me fall for the bait. Congrats.

That a simple statement of fact is bait ought to tell you how much of a fantasy world people live in.

The covid vaccines are shit and don't work.

End of story.

The mental gymnastics needed to claim they do fall apart when you compare them to vaccines for any other deadly disease. We don't still have small pox running rampant in countries with 90%+ vaccination rates. No one walks around telling you that having only your face paralyzed by polio is a great out come and a reason why we should vaccinate toddlers. If you get the MMR vaccine you're not told to be happy that you only got one of the three.

We need to move people's minds to the real world where everyone gets covid during flu season, rename it covid season while we're at it, and build a hospital system to solve that problem.

Contradicting hard medical evidence about reduced negative outcomes of the COVID vaccine that the entire medical industry has consensus around is just crank stuff at best.

The vaccines are unreasonably effective given how radically the virus has mutated.

The argument that things had to go this way, that we should just lay down our arms from the outset, throw immunocompromised, children and old folks under the bus, and treat it like "flu season" (which has a vaccine for f's sake!) has bequeathed our massive world-wide (or at least west-wide) gain-of-function laboratory that is bringing powerful new mutations to a geo near you.

Track-and-trace and countless bog-standard public health responses (like requiring masks on planes for f's sake), and yes the occasional lockdown, PLUS the fact that we got lucky on how fast we got vaccines delivering measurable improvement in outcomes, would have been a powerful combo. But it wouldn't have made any money.

Like pretending there are no covid deaths?

Surely they aren't covering up that many deaths right? The US is 4% of the world population, and represents 16% of the fatalities. If China had our rate of fatalities that would indicate that they are hiding 4.3 million deaths somehow.

Last year the Economist estimated them at about 1.7 million excess mortality. There is extremely strong pressure from the top down to minimize the public death count. The credibility of the party (and Xi personally) relies on their Zero Covid policy being seen as effective. I wouldn't even call it a cover up, there are just no incentives to accurately report and many reasons to downplay aggressively.

Why wouldn't they? It's not like they aren't used to covering up deaths

Data from China is not reliable.

There is no value in the Chinese approach. Protecting people from infectious disease can't possibly justify violating fundamental human rights, such as the right to free assembly?

Do you support the right of the polio-infected resident of Rockland County (a NYC suburb) to attend tonight’s basketball game? Would you be okay with him shopping at your grocery store, standing in line with you at the cash register?

Yeah, infectious disease beats free assembly every time.

No. There is always some sort of infectious disease going on. Even before COVID-19, thousands of people died every year from influenza and other respiratory diseases (including other corona viruses). This is not a valid reason for imposing restrictions and mandates.

Sure, not rhinovirus but definitely polio. Surely you aren't proposing that anyone ever tried to limit free assembly for run-of-the-mill germs. Point being, your rights exist in tension with public health; they are not absolute.

Or at least not without perfect worldwide coordination. And assuming there are no animal reservoirs

Well, those solutions don't really work because of the contagiousness, so they are going out of favor.

What is needed is effective prophylactics (beyond mRNA vaccines) and effective treatment. But the effort spent on that is, sadly, minimal.

Exactly. For example, how many buildings have UV sterilized return air, now?

A tiny, tiny fraction. And this would benefit us for way more than just Covid.

Honestly, I don't think UV return air would work as well as you think. The real solution is increased ventilation rates.

UV bulbs are expensive (and invisible unless you get to poke around a buildings mechanical room.), they need to be replaced typically ~annually (they won't be). If they get dust on them, they don't work as well. Etc. etc.

And here's the issue: To actually deal with high concentration infectious aerosols you need to get that air out of the room ASAP. (i.e. negative pressure rooms) If you can sterilize the return air that's great, but frankly I suspect dilution and air movement is going to be the dominant effect in reducing infection chains.

I think opening up windows is the answer, but that would mean accepting either a loss of climate control, or greatly increased energy costs. (I'd prefer the former, in all but the absolute hottest summer days or the deadliest cold.)

The most interesting phenomenon I noticed was how unquestionably loyal many places were to the mask mandates, yet kept all their windows shut even on totally nice days out.

I was in a gym that required everyone to wear a mask (yes, while working out / on a treadmill / etc), but all the large windows were shut, and nobody seemed to care or notice. No staff, no patrons, nobody. So I walked around and opened all the windows. And this wasn't March 2020. This was like end of 2021.

I'm not claiming to be some pandemic savant, nor getting into a mask debate, but what shocked me was the "group psychosis" on masking at the expense of proven and incredibly easy mitigation efforts like opening windows!

Is all this true for modern UV LEDs?

In my house at least I have a UV light in my central HVAC that is supposed to be replaced every five years. Maybe it is different for commercial buildings, but commercial buildings also tend to have professional maintenance.

You need UV-C for sterilization and there are no LEDs emitting that.

This is no longer true. Vishay and Nichia[1] for example, produce leds in the UVC range.

[1]https://led-ld.nichia.co.jp/en/product/uv_uvc.html

I don't want UV sterilized air. The war on germs is one we can't win. If everything is sterilized then our immune systems will only weaken and when we do come across a flu virus outdoors it will us 10x harder and potentially kill us.

its actually remarkable that people still believe this after 2+ years