Fuck authoritarians!
Never forget.
Totally.
And what was the gov's response? An even greater swing toward authoritarianism - the Canadian government literally locked people out of their own bank accounts, seized property and arrested and charged hundreds.
Incredible. Absolutely incredible. The anger is still palpable. And its going to simmer til our current gov is replaced.
This has never really been shown to be that accurate considering the excess deaths from the averages every year. You’re ignoring an inconvenient fact.
I took screen shots almost daily of all-cause mortality stats through the lockdown.
The entire time it tracked pretty close to the expected linear increase that we see year over year with an aging population, with the exception of a bump in April that was almost exclusively New York City. Given the reported quality of care issues that drove a lot of that, there are still a lot of unanswered questions.
I also saw a sudden jump in these numbers right at the end of the year. Could have been completely legitimate due to delays in reporting, but for some reason the CDC refuses to release anonymized data sets that would allow independent analysis.
Which is highly abnormal.
Additionally, all-cause mortality measures don't do a good job of indicating covid deaths, necessarily. Many deaths were due to delays of care for critical conditions. I experienced this myself, and was fortunate to not have become a statistic. We had deaths of despair, and we have several conflicting studies about those. We also have a significant (maybe majority) number of the deaths attributed to covid being a six to twelve month acceleration of death for those who were at end of life, especially the elderly with comorbidities.
While sad, it's not quite the terrifying tragedy that the numbers without nuance present. It will be interesting to see if 2022 and 2023 see a concomitant dip in expected mortality.
I also spent countless hours hunting down source data (as much as was available) understanding how Covid ID was generated for cross region case tracking, data collection methodology and evaluting transmission studies and models.
I saw massive revisions of numbers post-investigation in several counties, such as Collin county in TX.
If there's one thing we know for sure, it's that the data is a collosal mess. If you spend any time digging into the data collection methods and how reporting was happening you'd see this for yourself.
FWIW, my background is in healthcare logistics, data analysis and technology.
So if you are aware of some facts that I'm ignoring, I'd love to understand them.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-...
I wonder what happened in 2020 and beyond that so many more died? It must just be the weather
But here, I'll save you some time. Those pretty graphs you're linking to use the HMD database as the primary source through Feb 2021.
Take a look at how the HMD database derives it's numbers [1].
Now we can discuss the issue in rational, educated terms.
[1]https://www.mortality.org/File/GetDocument/Public/Docs/Metho...
2018 - 2,839,205
2019 - 2,854,838
2020 - 3,383,729
Expected deaths for a given year are based on a combination of factors such as the population age, and function fitting previous trends. It would have been around 2.9 million for 2020.
So the raw excess death count for 2020 is somewhere south of 500k.
Many of these deaths were due to covid directly. The vast majority of which were people already at end of life, very elderly and with significant comorbidities.
We're still doing research on how many of these excess deaths were due to downstream effects of covid interventions, such as lack of access to care, deaths of despair, etc...
Also, when researching all cause mortality in 2020 and 2021 make sure to take into account fentanyl, which has exploded during those years and account for over 100,000 deaths in 2021 alone.
Honestly, I seriously doubt it. I think the resistance would have been about the same; even the most gentle "recommendation" would have been cast as coercive by those who oppose the vaccine now. All a more "gentle" approach would have done is to dissuade those on the fence.
> The problem is the massive leaps of logic being made by people who have (quite wrongly, based on available evidence) become convinced that the vaccines are a greater threat to healthy people than the virus is.
I believe the problem is that we were so convinced that our solution to covid was infallible that we removed a basic human right: the ability to make informed choice about your medical care.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I believe that most people involved did this out of a genuine desire to save lives and help people.
The issue is the hubris.
The idea that "I know better than you do what's good for you and for society, so I'm going to force you to do a thing".
This is where we went wrong. The forcing.
If we'd presented vaccination as informed choice, had recommendations but not coercion, I think there would have been a lot less resistance.
We decided that public health was a trump card that allowed us to ignore almost every civil liberty the U.S. was founded on.
We actively limited speech and debate, going to far as to silence and destroy the lives and careers of qualified physicians who dissented.
We restricted freedom of assembly.
We seized property through forced business closing without compensation.
We restricted free movement.
We coerced vaccination in the strongest possible ways shy of physical force.
The list goes on.
We did this out of a hubris that "we know better than you".
It doesn't really matter whether this is true or not, it's fundamentally anti-liberal.
It's made worse by the unfortunate fact that in most cases we were wrong.
Asymptomatic spread wasn't a thing. The initial studies that said it was were based on flawed methodology. Even China isn't counting asymptomatic cases anymore.
Pretty much every model that we based policy off of, predicting extreme fatality rates and recommending extraordinary interventions, were dead wrong.
As others have pointed out, mortality counts were wildly off due to many factors, including how death certificates were filled out (died with covid v/s died from covid).
The vulnerable populations were identified fairly early on, but we chose to implement draconian restrictions for everyone, regardless of their individual risk.
This was the problem.
Hubris.