4 ms·

The first point is already demonstrably false. Similar countries right next to each other have different death tolls in the order of multiples (Sweden vs. othe

The first point is already demonstrably false. Similar countries right next to each other have different death tolls in the order of multiples (Sweden vs. other Nordics). Also, similar geographic and demographic countries have performed vastly different in different parts of the of world (eg. South Korea or Japan vs. UK in order of magnitude)

bananapear 6y ago
I think it’s certainly demonstrably complex enough to make drawing a binary conclusion difficult at this point. This is an interesting study which takes a wide variety of factors into account - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...
- i_love_limes 6y ago
  I'm not arguing it's not complex or that a lot of factors go into the response. I am however suggesting your original claim that non pharmaceutical interventions had little effect is demonstrably false. Comparing the 1 death in Taiwan and the to tens of thousands in the UK, including strong quarantines and contact tracing quite obviously had an impact.
  - bananapear 6y ago
    Though likely a much smaller impact than other factors such as cross-immunity from previous HCoV epidemics such as SARS and MERS. There are no studies which have found statistically significant links between political measures and excess COVID deaths. From the conclusions section: “Regarding government's actions (i.e., containment and stringency index), no association was found with the outcome, suggesting that the other studied factors were more important in the Covid-19 mortality than political measures implemented to fight the virus, except for the economic support index.”
    - i_love_limes 6y ago
      SARS and MERS didn't reach anywhere close to spreading through the population, so cross immunity (if it's strong, which we don't know), wouldn't have done much. The fact that you bring that up as a rebuttal is telling. One difference with those is that their governance and infrastructure to tackle a pandemic already existed, which counts. You could write that off to existing 'public health', as you have tried to stretch from the paper, but that is a disingenuous of that research. A quick search implies that you are also not looking very hard to find studies that don't find linkages. "The results presented in this paper suggest that policy interventions may well explain the majority of cross-country variation in officially reported Covid-19 deaths." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-020-00466-5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-020-00466-5
      - bananapear 6y ago
        My prediction for 2021 was widespread acknowledgement by the end of the year that lockdown measures had less impact than other factors. Since we’re not there yet, let’s wait and see.

bananapear 6y ago

I think it’s certainly demonstrably complex enough to make drawing a binary conclusion difficult at this point. This is an interesting study which takes a wide variety of factors into account - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...

i_love_limes 6y ago
I'm not arguing it's not complex or that a lot of factors go into the response. I am however suggesting your original claim that non pharmaceutical interventions had little effect is demonstrably false. Comparing the 1 death in Taiwan and the to tens of thousands in the UK, including strong quarantines and contact tracing quite obviously had an impact.
- bananapear 6y ago
  Though likely a much smaller impact than other factors such as cross-immunity from previous HCoV epidemics such as SARS and MERS. There are no studies which have found statistically significant links between political measures and excess COVID deaths. From the conclusions section: “Regarding government's actions (i.e., containment and stringency index), no association was found with the outcome, suggesting that the other studied factors were more important in the Covid-19 mortality than political measures implemented to fight the virus, except for the economic support index.”
  - i_love_limes 6y ago
    SARS and MERS didn't reach anywhere close to spreading through the population, so cross immunity (if it's strong, which we don't know), wouldn't have done much. The fact that you bring that up as a rebuttal is telling. One difference with those is that their governance and infrastructure to tackle a pandemic already existed, which counts. You could write that off to existing 'public health', as you have tried to stretch from the paper, but that is a disingenuous of that research. A quick search implies that you are also not looking very hard to find studies that don't find linkages. "The results presented in this paper suggest that policy interventions may well explain the majority of cross-country variation in officially reported Covid-19 deaths." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-020-00466-5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-020-00466-5
    - bananapear 6y ago
      My prediction for 2021 was widespread acknowledgement by the end of the year that lockdown measures had less impact than other factors. Since we’re not there yet, let’s wait and see.