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«I personally know someone whose father likely died due to being unable to access health care in a timely fashion, as well as someone else who died of cancer af

by mrb 6y ago

«I personally know someone whose father likely died due to being unable to access health care in a timely fashion, as well as someone else who died of cancer after their chemotherapy was postponed» Without lockdowns these people would probably not have been able to access health care either, because of, well, the pandemic.

thu2111 6y ago
That's not correct. Sweden, which did not restrict healthcare access, and has one of the lowest ICU capacities in Europe, did not see hospital overload or healthcare rationing at any point. Lockdowns have certainly created a death toll, that is by now mainstream consensus. The debate is about whether it's most of the excess death or only a large chunk of it. But it's worth remembering that even then excess death numbers are low in absolute terms. A lot of people can't see that because for some reason it's standard for statistical agencies to only give a few years of data in convenient graphs on their websites, but older data is there, and it puts things in proportion. In the UK for example, which has one of the worst excess death rates in Europe, 2020 is so far a bit less deadly than 1999/2000 and the gap is widening [1]. But nothing remarkable happened in the UK in 1999/2000, nobody talks with sadness about those who were lost at the millennium. Nobody noticed anything at all. The idea that we've had some sort of terribly high or remarkable levels of excess death isn't the case: it's being noticed because people were told to expect enormous levels so started tracking the data with a microscope, and then it went up partly due to lockdowns. In many other countries excess death is even less remarkable than that. Germany and Switzerland have seen years no different to the previous years for example. Cumulative death in Switzerland for 2020 is by now completely average, for example. There was no plague in Switzerland at any point. [1] http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/ http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/
- mrb 6y ago
  «did not see hospital overload or healthcare rationing at any point.» They did ration healthcare. This was the object of multiple news articles last week: https://time.com/5899432/sweden-coronovirus-disaster/ https://time.com/5899432/sweden-coronovirus-disaster/ «the country’s hospitals were implementing a triage system» The triaging was so severe that «Only 13% of the elderly residents who died with COVID-19 during the spring received hospital care» Get your facts right. «Lockdowns have certainly created a death toll, that is by now mainstream consensus. The debate is about whether it's most of the excess death or only a large chunk of it.» This is laughably inaccurate. On the contrary, lockdowns are largely credited for overall having averted cases and deaths. I maintain a list of peer-reviewed studies (and some preprints) on the subject, and the vast majority agree: https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1307723024523616257 https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1307723024523616257 There isn't a single peer-reviewed study that suggests lockdowns are responsible for a "large chunk" of excess deaths. You are victim of misinformation. Your comparison to 1999/2000 flu death is invalid: there were delays in reporting deaths that caused many deaths to be reported on the week after Xmas, hence the artificially high peak of that week of 2000. If you compare monthly excess deaths (to smooth artificial peaks) you will see covid excess deaths in April 2020 surpass flu excess deaths of January 2000. And yet, this comparison would still miss the point: covid is such a serious disease that despite (effective) lockdowns, it still managed to kill more than he most severe flu seasons of the last 20+ years. That alone should make you stop and think... There is in fact a government report that found «in comparison with the deaths due to influenza and pneumonia occurring in the year to 31 August 2020, deaths due to COVID-19 have been higher than every year monthly data are available (1959 to 2020).» https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsduetocoronaviruscovid19comparedwithdeathsfrominfluenzaandpneumoniaenglandandwales/deathsoccurringbetween1januaryand31august2020 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... Germany and Switzerland have implemented particularly effective lockdowns, hence little to no excess deaths.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    The triaging was so severe that «Only 13% of the elderly residents who died with COVID-19 during the spring received hospital care» You're seeing what you want to see. It is normal for elderly patients in nursing homes to die without being in a hospital. You're claiming that Swedish hospitals were so overloaded they turned away patients they would normally have seen, but there is no evidence of that and the paper TIME cited as support actually doesn't give any. Rather, it says: "Swedish ICU use rates remained lower than predicted, but a large fraction of deaths occurred in non-ICU patients. This suggests that patient prognosis was considered in ICU admission, reducing healthcare load at a cost of decreased survival in patients not admitted." The latter sentence doesn't follow logically from the first in any way. They are assuming that all COVID patients should have ended up in ICU and if they didn't, that can only be due to evil doctors turning them away at the door despite having spare beds (which Sweden always did have). That is an absurd assumption, unsupported by any direct evidence, which is why they have to rely on invalid statistical inferencing. What happened is that PCR testing labelled a whole lot of people who were about to die anyway as "COVID deaths". COVID symptoms are so mild in virtually all cases that many patients will have simply got a little bit sick but not enough to rush them to hospital, which can at any rate be quite dangerous for the very elderly and frail, and then they died. Was it COVID that pushed them over the edge? Was it just old age? Who can really say when it gets right to the edge of a life - something has to give. lockdowns are largely credited for overall having averted cases and deaths By the people who recommended them in the first place. Many other people without obvious conflicts of interest have looked at this and concluded the opposite. There isn't a single peer-reviewed study that suggests lockdowns are responsible for a "large chunk" of excess deaths. You are victim of misinformation. The UK Government's own reports say otherwise. In fact here's an article on the BBC today: "Between March and September 2020, there were 24,387 more deaths in England than expected in private homes, and 1,644 in Wales. The large majority did not involve COVID-19." https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54598728 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54598728 Lockdowns have obviously killed people in the UK. Hospital admissions halved at the start, do you really think that would have had no impact on mortality? There is now a massive cancer backlog. The death toll of COVID is a handful of people per day in the UK, but the death toll from telling people to avoid hospitals during 2020 is going to be racking up for years, perhaps decades. Why do lockdown supporters so often believe other people are the victims of misinformation? I've read a lot of papers coming out of epidemiology and the academic research establishments this year, many of them are atrocious. They mis-use logic and statistics every third paragraph, scientists mis-represent their own papers in press releases, their code sometimes just doesn't work. The standards in academia are incredibly low and they pump out "misinformation" at a shocking rate. If you simply believe peer reviewed studies without double checking them, you're the one being misled, not me. Germany and Switzerland have implemented particularly effective lockdowns, hence little to no excess deaths. I live in Switzerland. It had a rather mild lockdown, quite incomparable to many other countries thank god. It's astonishing you believe these were "particularly effective". But if you get your information from TIME, well, it's less of a surprise.

by mrb 6y ago

thu2111 6y ago

That's not correct. Sweden, which did not restrict healthcare access, and has one of the lowest ICU capacities in Europe, did not see hospital overload or healthcare rationing at any point. Lockdowns have certainly created a death toll, that is by now mainstream consensus. The debate is about whether it's most of the excess death or only a large chunk of it. But it's worth remembering that even then excess death numbers are low in absolute terms. A lot of people can't see that because for some reason it's standard for statistical agencies to only give a few years of data in convenient graphs on their websites, but older data is there, and it puts things in proportion. In the UK for example, which has one of the worst excess death rates in Europe, 2020 is so far a bit less deadly than 1999/2000 and the gap is widening [1]. But nothing remarkable happened in the UK in 1999/2000, nobody talks with sadness about those who were lost at the millennium. Nobody noticed anything at all. The idea that we've had some sort of terribly high or remarkable levels of excess death isn't the case: it's being noticed because people were told to expect enormous levels so started tracking the data with a microscope, and then it went up partly due to lockdowns. In many other countries excess death is even less remarkable than that. Germany and Switzerland have seen years no different to the previous years for example. Cumulative death in Switzerland for 2020 is by now completely average, for example. There was no plague in Switzerland at any point. [1] http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/ http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/

mrb 6y ago
«did not see hospital overload or healthcare rationing at any point.» They did ration healthcare. This was the object of multiple news articles last week: https://time.com/5899432/sweden-coronovirus-disaster/ https://time.com/5899432/sweden-coronovirus-disaster/ «the country’s hospitals were implementing a triage system» The triaging was so severe that «Only 13% of the elderly residents who died with COVID-19 during the spring received hospital care» Get your facts right. «Lockdowns have certainly created a death toll, that is by now mainstream consensus. The debate is about whether it's most of the excess death or only a large chunk of it.» This is laughably inaccurate. On the contrary, lockdowns are largely credited for overall having averted cases and deaths. I maintain a list of peer-reviewed studies (and some preprints) on the subject, and the vast majority agree: https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1307723024523616257 https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1307723024523616257 There isn't a single peer-reviewed study that suggests lockdowns are responsible for a "large chunk" of excess deaths. You are victim of misinformation. Your comparison to 1999/2000 flu death is invalid: there were delays in reporting deaths that caused many deaths to be reported on the week after Xmas, hence the artificially high peak of that week of 2000. If you compare monthly excess deaths (to smooth artificial peaks) you will see covid excess deaths in April 2020 surpass flu excess deaths of January 2000. And yet, this comparison would still miss the point: covid is such a serious disease that despite (effective) lockdowns, it still managed to kill more than he most severe flu seasons of the last 20+ years. That alone should make you stop and think... There is in fact a government report that found «in comparison with the deaths due to influenza and pneumonia occurring in the year to 31 August 2020, deaths due to COVID-19 have been higher than every year monthly data are available (1959 to 2020).» https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsduetocoronaviruscovid19comparedwithdeathsfrominfluenzaandpneumoniaenglandandwales/deathsoccurringbetween1januaryand31august2020 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... Germany and Switzerland have implemented particularly effective lockdowns, hence little to no excess deaths.
- thu2111 6y ago
  The triaging was so severe that «Only 13% of the elderly residents who died with COVID-19 during the spring received hospital care» You're seeing what you want to see. It is normal for elderly patients in nursing homes to die without being in a hospital. You're claiming that Swedish hospitals were so overloaded they turned away patients they would normally have seen, but there is no evidence of that and the paper TIME cited as support actually doesn't give any. Rather, it says: "Swedish ICU use rates remained lower than predicted, but a large fraction of deaths occurred in non-ICU patients. This suggests that patient prognosis was considered in ICU admission, reducing healthcare load at a cost of decreased survival in patients not admitted." The latter sentence doesn't follow logically from the first in any way. They are assuming that all COVID patients should have ended up in ICU and if they didn't, that can only be due to evil doctors turning them away at the door despite having spare beds (which Sweden always did have). That is an absurd assumption, unsupported by any direct evidence, which is why they have to rely on invalid statistical inferencing. What happened is that PCR testing labelled a whole lot of people who were about to die anyway as "COVID deaths". COVID symptoms are so mild in virtually all cases that many patients will have simply got a little bit sick but not enough to rush them to hospital, which can at any rate be quite dangerous for the very elderly and frail, and then they died. Was it COVID that pushed them over the edge? Was it just old age? Who can really say when it gets right to the edge of a life - something has to give. lockdowns are largely credited for overall having averted cases and deaths By the people who recommended them in the first place. Many other people without obvious conflicts of interest have looked at this and concluded the opposite. There isn't a single peer-reviewed study that suggests lockdowns are responsible for a "large chunk" of excess deaths. You are victim of misinformation. The UK Government's own reports say otherwise. In fact here's an article on the BBC today: "Between March and September 2020, there were 24,387 more deaths in England than expected in private homes, and 1,644 in Wales. The large majority did not involve COVID-19." https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54598728 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54598728 Lockdowns have obviously killed people in the UK. Hospital admissions halved at the start, do you really think that would have had no impact on mortality? There is now a massive cancer backlog. The death toll of COVID is a handful of people per day in the UK, but the death toll from telling people to avoid hospitals during 2020 is going to be racking up for years, perhaps decades. Why do lockdown supporters so often believe other people are the victims of misinformation? I've read a lot of papers coming out of epidemiology and the academic research establishments this year, many of them are atrocious. They mis-use logic and statistics every third paragraph, scientists mis-represent their own papers in press releases, their code sometimes just doesn't work. The standards in academia are incredibly low and they pump out "misinformation" at a shocking rate. If you simply believe peer reviewed studies without double checking them, you're the one being misled, not me. Germany and Switzerland have implemented particularly effective lockdowns, hence little to no excess deaths. I live in Switzerland. It had a rather mild lockdown, quite incomparable to many other countries thank god. It's astonishing you believe these were "particularly effective". But if you get your information from TIME, well, it's less of a surprise.