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Renewed questions about the virus, and hard-to-face answers

62 points by AndrewBissell 5y ago

dang 5y ago
I've replaced the article's title in accordance with the HN guidelines [1], using a representative phrase [2] from the article itself. If anyone can find a better such phrase, we'd be happy to change it again. [1] Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). [2] When changing a title, it's best to use representative language from the article itself https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=representative%20article%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
cpr 5y ago
Can't upvote this enough. Goes against the mainstream narrative, so may not get much traction here on "mainstream narrative" HN.
- TiberiusC 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27665919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27665919 Great opportunity for one to start a new HN
piker 5y ago
Content aside, this site is beautiful on mobile. Bravo.
- beervirus 5y ago
  It’s slow as molasses to load, and it’s non-functional without JavaScript. It’s text data that would lose nothing by being presented as static HTML.
Spivak 5y ago
Oh good lord the first two paragraphs. Are you really going to "think of the children" this issue while immediately roasting your rhetorical adversary for making decisions based on what they thought at the time was best for the safety of children? This is sure to be one of many articles that use the benefit of hindsight to paint policymakers and scientists who were being cautious, deferring to the scientific consensus as it was best understood at the time, and operating with very little very messy real life data as deceivers because they didn't magically know everything from the beginning. Misc comments: It's not okay to just say that only the old, fat, and vulnerable are at risk of dying so why should everyone else have to take all these precautions? The lack of empathy is staggering. "Stay at home orders" didn't literally mean stay confined to your house at least around here. You could go outside at literally any time during the past year regardless of orders. Moving the goalposts and "covering up their failures" has another less-pejorative name "updating your recommendations based on research and data." If you're upset that scientists didn't tell the public "here's our recommendation based on the data we have -- it's probably not perfect so you should just not listen to us and go with your gut" I don't know what to tell you. Everyone was sanitizing everything at the beginning of the pandemic until it came out that transmission was basically entirely airborn then everyone stopped. Those flip-floppers working for Big Purell.
- redleader55 5y ago
  > You could go outside at literally any time during the past year regardless of orders. If you talk about Europe and parts of Asia, I can tell you from experience that, no, you couldn't go out of the house for long periods of time in certain hourly intervals during the past year.
  - ralph84 5y ago
    Lots of places in the US had "covid curfews" too.
  - heikkilevanto 5y ago
    I don't know about the rest of Europe, but at least here in Denmark we had no restrictions on going outdoors.
hinkley 5y ago
Are there things we need to look at? Yes. But if someone doesn’t save your life then you won’t be around to argue about how they could have done it better. It’s also pretty rich to claim the numbers don’t add up and substitute numbers that don’t add up either. Speaking about the war on reality (original title): This article claims an infection fatality rate of 0.15%. Currently we list 604 thousand Americans dead from COVID, that’s 0.18% of the entire population - not the infected population. Brazil is at 0.23%, and rising fast. Worldwide it’s almost 4 million out of 181M reported cases. That’s over 2% IFR. If one were to assume that everyone in these countries was infected and we are just really awful at reporting, that number is still wrong. But the US is currently reporting a hair over 1:10 people as having been infected, and Brazil has not crossed that threshold yet, so 0.15% is already empirically - to use the technical term - horse shit [1]. Since the quarantine was about firewalling especially vulnerable populations, I won’t hazard a guess as to how this would have scaled, but we do know that if it had scaled, a great many people would have not had or lost access to medical equipment and labor that was in extremely short supply. The argument about how we didn’t actually run out of beds or labor may or may not be true for the rate of exposure we actually experienced but claiming that would not have been affected by a do-nothing policy is arguing both sides. [1] This article should make you cussing-angry, because this sort of retroactive second-guessing is going to get a lot of people killed the next time around. Most especially old people.
- Huwyt_Nashi047 5y ago
  > we list 604 thousand Americans dead from COVID You're assuming this number is accurate, which is a very controversial assumption.
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    According to the CDC[0] the number is a bit lower but in the same ballpark. Do you think the CDC cannot be trusted or the medical professionals that determine cause of death? [0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm
    - 5y ago
snowwrestler 5y ago
It’s important to remember the public demand for safety. My child’s school district went remote when I and thousands of other parents told teachers and administrators at individual schools that we were pulling our kids out regardless of their policies. Same with work: I told my manager in the 3rd week of March I was working remotely starting the following week. So many others did the same thing that my employer closed the office and went remote. My wife’s company also voluntarily went remote the same week. This was all before state mandated closures and lockdowns, etc. People, in huge numbers, started trying to protect themselves and their families. We had NO IDEA how this virus was going to progress, and what we would learn the hard way. In retrospect, it’s beneficial to a certain point of view to reframe what happened as some sort of top-down authoritarian dystopia. But the reality at the time was bottom-up and we should not forget that.
- allturtles 5y ago
  This post provides a great visualization of this: https://www.vumc.org/health-policy/covid19-model-vanderbilt-mobility-economy-tennessee https://www.vumc.org/health-policy/covid19-model-vanderbilt-... The rapid decline in travel precedes the statewide order.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  > It’s important to remember the public demand for safety. Let's not pretend that the TSA makes travelers "safer"...admittedly, if you've seen the crap people try to take onboard you might disagree. Regardless, the "public demand for safety" is not that. There is a demand for disclosed risk. The world is not safe, but if A happens when B happens % of the time, people are able to feel like they are making informed choices (even if the choices are misinformed). When this cannot be established or remains largely in dispute, society in the USA starts to crumble. So what the US gets is lots of theater with less and less disclosure of actual numbers until it becomes a stream of random noise. This pandemic has highlighted the well-known quality about the US public. The US public demands a specific kind of answers, but the media and government continue to play sensationalism and politics, while everyone else scrambled. That's what I won't forget.
  - 5y ago
ctoth 5y ago
> In the U.S. 78% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 were overweight or obese. According to [0], 70.2% of US adults are overweight or obese. The base rate seems like an important fact when making this point. [0]: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
- baybal2 5y ago
  > According to [0], 70.2% of US adults are overweight or obese[0]. This is really a lot. The last time I was in USA, it did not look like so.
  - ctoth 5y ago
    I agree it sounds high, but remember that anyone over 25 BMI would qualify for this, for both the COVID and population-level stats.
  - ectopod 5y ago
    In the UK it is 62.8%. Americans don't seem especially fat because we're all fat. In many countries, anyway.
  - allturtles 5y ago
    Where were you? the 30% who aren't overweight are concentrated near the areas where a traveler would be most likely to visit (e.g. New York City, major California urban areas, ski resorts). In most small/medium towns/cities you will see most people are overweight.
  - castlecrasher2 5y ago
    "Overweight" is not a terribly high bar to reach. The CDC defines it as "BMI is 25.0 to <30", which for an individual like myself at 6'1" is just 179 lbs, a weight at which I was rail thin and low-muscle mass.
    - allturtles 5y ago
javagram 5y ago
> A trove of media darling Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails was recently released to the public. The emails reveal early assertions that asymptomatic transmission is rare, that post-infection immunity is highly likely, and that masks are “not really effective.” However, you wouldn’t know that from the public messaging since the start of the pandemic, in which bureaucrats and journalists upheld lasting misconceptions that asymptomatic cases are dangerous, natural immunity is not a factor in protecting the population, and individuals are responsible for viral spread. These misconceptions fueled countless months of lockdowns, business closures, and job losses This article is a complete mess in this section. Yes, emails from February 2020 revealed the scientific community still had a lack of understanding of the virus’ ability to spread from a pre-symptomatic host (often confused or merged with “asymptomatic” hosts who seem to typically not transmit due to lower viral load). That isn’t exactly a scandal, it’s exactly what was being said publicly at the time too. There wasn’t anything surprising in the emails to anyone who followed the news and discussion in March-May 2020. We all saw, for instance, Fauci in the White House insisting 6 feet was enough to protect people because droplets from a cough don’t travel farther (wrong: overseas research and contact tracing showed the virus can be airborne and travel more than 6 feet inside a room), right alongside the early insistence that masks weren’t needed to reduce disease spread. Exactly what was being said in the emails was said publicly on TV. Meanwhile, the emails seemed to show a lack of understanding of just how dangerous Covid-19 would be. We hit 600,000 deaths while the worst case models being discussed in Spring 2020 (on TV and privately) were just between 60k and 200k deaths. The virus did far more damage than people feared at first when lockdowns went into place.
- FabHK 5y ago
  > This article is a complete mess in this section. Not only in this section, but overall.
javagram 5y ago
> Usually, 40%-50% of patients in severe respiratory distress die on ventilators, but in New York City the death rate for COVID-19 patients on ventilators was 88%. Continued to read through the article and just be aware that a lot of the statistics the author cites are questionable. For instance, the 88% number here leads to an article from April 2020. Even without looking it up, I remember articles from may 2020 debunking this number. A simple Google reveals the real number is probably around 50% and that 88% is an outlier. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33119402/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33119402/ Polifact has an article on the 88% number https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/apr/28/are-88-covid-19-patients-ventilators-dying-its-not/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/apr/28/are-88-covid-... “ The 88% death rate was among patients who either died or recovered. It did not account for the roughly three-quarters of patients involved in the study who were still on a ventilator at the end of the study, leaving in doubt what the eventual mortality rate will be.” Using that number a year later is extremely irresponsible and it’s obvious to me the author is cherry-picking numbers to support their preconceived position.
tcmart14 5y ago
Is anyone gonna mention this was the first world wide pandemic of this scale since modern medicine really? There were pandemics, but not of such a world wide scale. Sure 1918, but that wasn't to much past just throwing leeches on a person to filter out the bad blood or demons. I bring it up because, yea execution was not perfect. I expected this in the beginning. But so many people act like the response should have been perfect. Critique what was wrong with it and learn. However, assuming everyone who made a decision we didn't like as evil isn't going to help us at all. At some point in the future, there will be another world wide pandemic. It could be tomorrow, it could be 20 years from now, it could be 100 years from now. Unless everyone stays within 10 miles within home, it will happen again. And it may be be worst, like Ebola with flu-like transmission, or it may be not as bad. Whatever the case, lessons learned now will influence decisions later.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  > But so many people act like the response should have been perfect. No, no one is demanding "perfect" here, just a media and governmental infrastructure that responds to changing data to accurately inform the public and enact policies which properly balance the risks of the virus with the potential harms of the intervention. Instead what we're getting is constant overhyping of the threat (e.g. emphasizing that the % of children being hospitalized by the Delta variant is higher as a way of downplaying the reduced hospitalizations in the older, vaccinated population) to support various power grabs like restricting freedom of movement and assembly, mandating pharmaceutical interventions, and consolidating the economy into the hands of large, entrenched corporations. The fact that this pandemic is nowhere near the level of 1918's and yet we are blithely accepting the proposition "we can never go back to normal" should be giving everyone serious pause right now.
- ajkdhcb2 5y ago
  I think the execution was unbelievably incredible for most governments - if you take a cynical view that the goal was to manufacture consent to erode personal freedoms of the populace.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
I wish some things had been handled differently. But I think the better question at this point is "Where do we go from here?" An endless rehash of shoulda, woulda, coulda seems unproductive.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  I would say we just go back to normal. With the vaccinations being rolled out, I see no reason to stay in eternal quarantine. Unless some new vaccine evading hyperdangerous mutant strain emerges, then yes, we have a lasting problem, but I don't see solid data, that this is happening. Edit: In either case, it is good, that vaccination research and production got a huge boost. But I really want to get rid of the mask as soon as possible.
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K0balt 5y ago
This article is biased garbage. Half truths mixed with important facts, threads of truth woven into a tapestry of lies. Wuhan lab leak? Probably. Long Covid debunked? Not even. Social distancing cost lives because we didn’t achieve herd immunity? Really? Really?
jkubicek 5y ago
> the U.S.’s excess mortality in 2017 was greater than its excess mortality in 2020. Correct me if I'm missing something, but this comment is completely wrong. The cited paper compares 2017 excess deaths in the US vs. similar aged populations in Europe. The "excess death rates" for 2020, as cited in the linked paper, is estimated COVID-19 death counts for the US (which isn't even what "excess deaths" is).
- raphlinus 5y ago
  You're not wrong. The original article is. The cited paper makes an apples-to-oranges comparison. The 2017 figure (~400k) is an estimate of excess deaths in the US compared to age-specific death rates of an average of five European countries. The 2020 number is the CDC estimate of coronavirus deaths (~375k). In any case, this is considerably smaller than the overall excess mortality (from the US baseline, not a comparison to Europe), which is estimated at 522k (and doesn't count the first two months of the year)[1]. In this comment, I only point out verifiable facts. People can come to their own conclusion about the extent to which the original article makes good faith or bad faith arguments based on citations to the literature. [1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361
taylodl 5y ago
This article misses one critical point - the near collapse of our healthcare system, not just here in the United States but around the world. The problem being the run on emergency services and ICU resources. Look at what’s happening in India at this very moment. All in all, over 600,000 Americans died in confirmed Covid cases and even accounting for that there were an additional 300,000 deaths in excess of the annual average whose cause was not established. Many assume Covid but no posthumous testing was being performed. We’re going to armchair quarterback this for years to come, but we shouldn’t forget the facts of an overloaded healthcare system.
bartimus 5y ago
> but the actual IFR of COVID-19 is 0.15% * US total COVID-19 deaths: 600.000 * US total population: 328.200.000 = 0.18% COVID-19 deaths of total population. The IFR must be even higher.
ivraatiems 5y ago
This is an absurd article written by a person with a barely-hidden agenda. A review of their Twitter makes it clear this is not a matter of "renewed concern"; this is a person who has resisted every measure used to fight COVID from the beginning because that "disrupts normalcy" or gives public health officials even a smidge of temporary control over one's life.[1] I have no patience for works like this, written by people for whom any modification to their existence, even the most minor and most voluntary, is one change too many (and a sign of malign conspiracy to destroy them). Masks? Nah, who knows whether they're effective. Distance? No, it's not a big deal if I just don't. Vaccine to avoid the above? No, it's "too experimental" and I "just don't trust it" no matter whether it's based on decade-old or century-old technology. The author makes no concrete suggestions about what we should do differently, and I think it's because for them, any change to their behavior whatsoever is one change too many. It's all well and good to try to help people as long as it doesn't require any personal effort or sacrifice after all, and as long as absolutely no mistakes are made and no missteps ever occur. In the mind of the author, anybody who would dare ask them to do anything at all to help their fellow human is a ghoul who must have an ulterior motive. This says much more about the author than it does the people asking. It's tempting to ask sanctimonious questions, like, how many people would have had to die before this person considered that that loss of life might justify temporarily changing their behavior, or (the horror) listening to the government or working with their fellow man just a little? How bad would something have to be before they'd agree to try, just try, to do something that might help? What a shame that there are so many selfish and conspiratorial people in American society. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/galexybrane?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor https://mobile.twitter.com/galexybrane?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogl...
- throwawaynumber 5y ago
  Conversely I think most people who were the most vocal cheerleaders of the anti virus measures were so vocal precisely because it didn't require them to change their life - stay at home introverted shut ins basically.
  - AndrewBissell 5y ago
    Whenever I see someone minimizing everything done over the past year as "not a big deal" or "really just the bare minimum you could ask" or (lol) "voluntary," I know that they either have no conception of the vast amounts of harm that was inflicted on people over the past year by NPIs or they just don't care. What if a disease that is maybe 4x or 5x a bad flu really wasn't worth upending all of civil society (particularly for its youngest) to combat? Wow, it's almost like the Hippocratic Oath says "first, do no harm" for a reason!
johbjo 5y ago
The total IFR is essentially an exponential function of the age and health distribution in the population. Without specifying the population further, many numbers can be correct. When high IFR:s are presented to the public, most people (both old and young) believe it applies to them, it is misguided in both directions.

62 points by AndrewBissell 5y ago

dang 5y ago

I've replaced the article's title in accordance with the HN guidelines [1], using a representative phrase [2] from the article itself. If anyone can find a better such phrase, we'd be happy to change it again. [1] Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). [2] When changing a title, it's best to use representative language from the article itself https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=representative%20article%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

cpr 5y ago

Can't upvote this enough. Goes against the mainstream narrative, so may not get much traction here on "mainstream narrative" HN.

TiberiusC 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27665919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27665919 Great opportunity for one to start a new HN

piker 5y ago

Content aside, this site is beautiful on mobile. Bravo.

beervirus 5y ago
It’s slow as molasses to load, and it’s non-functional without JavaScript. It’s text data that would lose nothing by being presented as static HTML.

Spivak 5y ago

Oh good lord the first two paragraphs. Are you really going to "think of the children" this issue while immediately roasting your rhetorical adversary for making decisions based on what they thought at the time was best for the safety of children? This is sure to be one of many articles that use the benefit of hindsight to paint policymakers and scientists who were being cautious, deferring to the scientific consensus as it was best understood at the time, and operating with very little very messy real life data as deceivers because they didn't magically know everything from the beginning. Misc comments: It's not okay to just say that only the old, fat, and vulnerable are at risk of dying so why should everyone else have to take all these precautions? The lack of empathy is staggering. "Stay at home orders" didn't literally mean stay confined to your house at least around here. You could go outside at literally any time during the past year regardless of orders. Moving the goalposts and "covering up their failures" has another less-pejorative name "updating your recommendations based on research and data." If you're upset that scientists didn't tell the public "here's our recommendation based on the data we have -- it's probably not perfect so you should just not listen to us and go with your gut" I don't know what to tell you. Everyone was sanitizing everything at the beginning of the pandemic until it came out that transmission was basically entirely airborn then everyone stopped. Those flip-floppers working for Big Purell.

redleader55 5y ago
> You could go outside at literally any time during the past year regardless of orders. If you talk about Europe and parts of Asia, I can tell you from experience that, no, you couldn't go out of the house for long periods of time in certain hourly intervals during the past year.
- ralph84 5y ago
  Lots of places in the US had "covid curfews" too.
- heikkilevanto 5y ago
  I don't know about the rest of Europe, but at least here in Denmark we had no restrictions on going outdoors.

hinkley 5y ago

Are there things we need to look at? Yes. But if someone doesn’t save your life then you won’t be around to argue about how they could have done it better. It’s also pretty rich to claim the numbers don’t add up and substitute numbers that don’t add up either. Speaking about the war on reality (original title): This article claims an infection fatality rate of 0.15%. Currently we list 604 thousand Americans dead from COVID, that’s 0.18% of the entire population - not the infected population. Brazil is at 0.23%, and rising fast. Worldwide it’s almost 4 million out of 181M reported cases. That’s over 2% IFR. If one were to assume that everyone in these countries was infected and we are just really awful at reporting, that number is still wrong. But the US is currently reporting a hair over 1:10 people as having been infected, and Brazil has not crossed that threshold yet, so 0.15% is already empirically - to use the technical term - horse shit [1]. Since the quarantine was about firewalling especially vulnerable populations, I won’t hazard a guess as to how this would have scaled, but we do know that if it had scaled, a great many people would have not had or lost access to medical equipment and labor that was in extremely short supply. The argument about how we didn’t actually run out of beds or labor may or may not be true for the rate of exposure we actually experienced but claiming that would not have been affected by a do-nothing policy is arguing both sides. [1] This article should make you cussing-angry, because this sort of retroactive second-guessing is going to get a lot of people killed the next time around. Most especially old people.

Huwyt_Nashi047 5y ago
> we list 604 thousand Americans dead from COVID You're assuming this number is accurate, which is a very controversial assumption.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  According to the CDC[0] the number is a bit lower but in the same ballpark. Do you think the CDC cannot be trusted or the medical professionals that determine cause of death? [0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm
  - 5y ago

snowwrestler 5y ago

It’s important to remember the public demand for safety. My child’s school district went remote when I and thousands of other parents told teachers and administrators at individual schools that we were pulling our kids out regardless of their policies. Same with work: I told my manager in the 3rd week of March I was working remotely starting the following week. So many others did the same thing that my employer closed the office and went remote. My wife’s company also voluntarily went remote the same week. This was all before state mandated closures and lockdowns, etc. People, in huge numbers, started trying to protect themselves and their families. We had NO IDEA how this virus was going to progress, and what we would learn the hard way. In retrospect, it’s beneficial to a certain point of view to reframe what happened as some sort of top-down authoritarian dystopia. But the reality at the time was bottom-up and we should not forget that.

allturtles 5y ago
This post provides a great visualization of this: https://www.vumc.org/health-policy/covid19-model-vanderbilt-mobility-economy-tennessee https://www.vumc.org/health-policy/covid19-model-vanderbilt-... The rapid decline in travel precedes the statewide order.
Supermancho 5y ago
> It’s important to remember the public demand for safety. Let's not pretend that the TSA makes travelers "safer"...admittedly, if you've seen the crap people try to take onboard you might disagree. Regardless, the "public demand for safety" is not that. There is a demand for disclosed risk. The world is not safe, but if A happens when B happens % of the time, people are able to feel like they are making informed choices (even if the choices are misinformed). When this cannot be established or remains largely in dispute, society in the USA starts to crumble. So what the US gets is lots of theater with less and less disclosure of actual numbers until it becomes a stream of random noise. This pandemic has highlighted the well-known quality about the US public. The US public demands a specific kind of answers, but the media and government continue to play sensationalism and politics, while everyone else scrambled. That's what I won't forget.
- 5y ago

ctoth 5y ago

> In the U.S. 78% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 were overweight or obese. According to [0], 70.2% of US adults are overweight or obese. The base rate seems like an important fact when making this point. [0]: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...

baybal2 5y ago
> According to [0], 70.2% of US adults are overweight or obese[0]. This is really a lot. The last time I was in USA, it did not look like so.
- ctoth 5y ago
  I agree it sounds high, but remember that anyone over 25 BMI would qualify for this, for both the COVID and population-level stats.
- ectopod 5y ago
  In the UK it is 62.8%. Americans don't seem especially fat because we're all fat. In many countries, anyway.
- allturtles 5y ago
  Where were you? the 30% who aren't overweight are concentrated near the areas where a traveler would be most likely to visit (e.g. New York City, major California urban areas, ski resorts). In most small/medium towns/cities you will see most people are overweight.
- castlecrasher2 5y ago
  "Overweight" is not a terribly high bar to reach. The CDC defines it as "BMI is 25.0 to <30", which for an individual like myself at 6'1" is just 179 lbs, a weight at which I was rail thin and low-muscle mass.
  - allturtles 5y ago

javagram 5y ago

> A trove of media darling Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails was recently released to the public. The emails reveal early assertions that asymptomatic transmission is rare, that post-infection immunity is highly likely, and that masks are “not really effective.” However, you wouldn’t know that from the public messaging since the start of the pandemic, in which bureaucrats and journalists upheld lasting misconceptions that asymptomatic cases are dangerous, natural immunity is not a factor in protecting the population, and individuals are responsible for viral spread. These misconceptions fueled countless months of lockdowns, business closures, and job losses This article is a complete mess in this section. Yes, emails from February 2020 revealed the scientific community still had a lack of understanding of the virus’ ability to spread from a pre-symptomatic host (often confused or merged with “asymptomatic” hosts who seem to typically not transmit due to lower viral load). That isn’t exactly a scandal, it’s exactly what was being said publicly at the time too. There wasn’t anything surprising in the emails to anyone who followed the news and discussion in March-May 2020. We all saw, for instance, Fauci in the White House insisting 6 feet was enough to protect people because droplets from a cough don’t travel farther (wrong: overseas research and contact tracing showed the virus can be airborne and travel more than 6 feet inside a room), right alongside the early insistence that masks weren’t needed to reduce disease spread. Exactly what was being said in the emails was said publicly on TV. Meanwhile, the emails seemed to show a lack of understanding of just how dangerous Covid-19 would be. We hit 600,000 deaths while the worst case models being discussed in Spring 2020 (on TV and privately) were just between 60k and 200k deaths. The virus did far more damage than people feared at first when lockdowns went into place.

FabHK 5y ago
> This article is a complete mess in this section. Not only in this section, but overall.

javagram 5y ago

> Usually, 40%-50% of patients in severe respiratory distress die on ventilators, but in New York City the death rate for COVID-19 patients on ventilators was 88%. Continued to read through the article and just be aware that a lot of the statistics the author cites are questionable. For instance, the 88% number here leads to an article from April 2020. Even without looking it up, I remember articles from may 2020 debunking this number. A simple Google reveals the real number is probably around 50% and that 88% is an outlier. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33119402/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33119402/ Polifact has an article on the 88% number https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/apr/28/are-88-covid-19-patients-ventilators-dying-its-not/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/apr/28/are-88-covid-... “ The 88% death rate was among patients who either died or recovered. It did not account for the roughly three-quarters of patients involved in the study who were still on a ventilator at the end of the study, leaving in doubt what the eventual mortality rate will be.” Using that number a year later is extremely irresponsible and it’s obvious to me the author is cherry-picking numbers to support their preconceived position.

tcmart14 5y ago

Is anyone gonna mention this was the first world wide pandemic of this scale since modern medicine really? There were pandemics, but not of such a world wide scale. Sure 1918, but that wasn't to much past just throwing leeches on a person to filter out the bad blood or demons. I bring it up because, yea execution was not perfect. I expected this in the beginning. But so many people act like the response should have been perfect. Critique what was wrong with it and learn. However, assuming everyone who made a decision we didn't like as evil isn't going to help us at all. At some point in the future, there will be another world wide pandemic. It could be tomorrow, it could be 20 years from now, it could be 100 years from now. Unless everyone stays within 10 miles within home, it will happen again. And it may be be worst, like Ebola with flu-like transmission, or it may be not as bad. Whatever the case, lessons learned now will influence decisions later.

AndrewBissell 5y ago
> But so many people act like the response should have been perfect. No, no one is demanding "perfect" here, just a media and governmental infrastructure that responds to changing data to accurately inform the public and enact policies which properly balance the risks of the virus with the potential harms of the intervention. Instead what we're getting is constant overhyping of the threat (e.g. emphasizing that the % of children being hospitalized by the Delta variant is higher as a way of downplaying the reduced hospitalizations in the older, vaccinated population) to support various power grabs like restricting freedom of movement and assembly, mandating pharmaceutical interventions, and consolidating the economy into the hands of large, entrenched corporations. The fact that this pandemic is nowhere near the level of 1918's and yet we are blithely accepting the proposition "we can never go back to normal" should be giving everyone serious pause right now.
ajkdhcb2 5y ago
I think the execution was unbelievably incredible for most governments - if you take a cynical view that the goal was to manufacture consent to erode personal freedoms of the populace.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

I wish some things had been handled differently. But I think the better question at this point is "Where do we go from here?" An endless rehash of shoulda, woulda, coulda seems unproductive.

hutzlibu 5y ago
I would say we just go back to normal. With the vaccinations being rolled out, I see no reason to stay in eternal quarantine. Unless some new vaccine evading hyperdangerous mutant strain emerges, then yes, we have a lasting problem, but I don't see solid data, that this is happening. Edit: In either case, it is good, that vaccination research and production got a huge boost. But I really want to get rid of the mask as soon as possible.
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K0balt 5y ago

This article is biased garbage. Half truths mixed with important facts, threads of truth woven into a tapestry of lies. Wuhan lab leak? Probably. Long Covid debunked? Not even. Social distancing cost lives because we didn’t achieve herd immunity? Really? Really?

jkubicek 5y ago

> the U.S.’s excess mortality in 2017 was greater than its excess mortality in 2020. Correct me if I'm missing something, but this comment is completely wrong. The cited paper compares 2017 excess deaths in the US vs. similar aged populations in Europe. The "excess death rates" for 2020, as cited in the linked paper, is estimated COVID-19 death counts for the US (which isn't even what "excess deaths" is).

raphlinus 5y ago
You're not wrong. The original article is. The cited paper makes an apples-to-oranges comparison. The 2017 figure (~400k) is an estimate of excess deaths in the US compared to age-specific death rates of an average of five European countries. The 2020 number is the CDC estimate of coronavirus deaths (~375k). In any case, this is considerably smaller than the overall excess mortality (from the US baseline, not a comparison to Europe), which is estimated at 522k (and doesn't count the first two months of the year)[1]. In this comment, I only point out verifiable facts. People can come to their own conclusion about the extent to which the original article makes good faith or bad faith arguments based on citations to the literature. [1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361

taylodl 5y ago

This article misses one critical point - the near collapse of our healthcare system, not just here in the United States but around the world. The problem being the run on emergency services and ICU resources. Look at what’s happening in India at this very moment. All in all, over 600,000 Americans died in confirmed Covid cases and even accounting for that there were an additional 300,000 deaths in excess of the annual average whose cause was not established. Many assume Covid but no posthumous testing was being performed. We’re going to armchair quarterback this for years to come, but we shouldn’t forget the facts of an overloaded healthcare system.

bartimus 5y ago

> but the actual IFR of COVID-19 is 0.15% * US total COVID-19 deaths: 600.000 * US total population: 328.200.000 = 0.18% COVID-19 deaths of total population. The IFR must be even higher.

ivraatiems 5y ago

This is an absurd article written by a person with a barely-hidden agenda. A review of their Twitter makes it clear this is not a matter of "renewed concern"; this is a person who has resisted every measure used to fight COVID from the beginning because that "disrupts normalcy" or gives public health officials even a smidge of temporary control over one's life.[1] I have no patience for works like this, written by people for whom any modification to their existence, even the most minor and most voluntary, is one change too many (and a sign of malign conspiracy to destroy them). Masks? Nah, who knows whether they're effective. Distance? No, it's not a big deal if I just don't. Vaccine to avoid the above? No, it's "too experimental" and I "just don't trust it" no matter whether it's based on decade-old or century-old technology. The author makes no concrete suggestions about what we should do differently, and I think it's because for them, any change to their behavior whatsoever is one change too many. It's all well and good to try to help people as long as it doesn't require any personal effort or sacrifice after all, and as long as absolutely no mistakes are made and no missteps ever occur. In the mind of the author, anybody who would dare ask them to do anything at all to help their fellow human is a ghoul who must have an ulterior motive. This says much more about the author than it does the people asking. It's tempting to ask sanctimonious questions, like, how many people would have had to die before this person considered that that loss of life might justify temporarily changing their behavior, or (the horror) listening to the government or working with their fellow man just a little? How bad would something have to be before they'd agree to try, just try, to do something that might help? What a shame that there are so many selfish and conspiratorial people in American society. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/galexybrane?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor https://mobile.twitter.com/galexybrane?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogl...

throwawaynumber 5y ago
Conversely I think most people who were the most vocal cheerleaders of the anti virus measures were so vocal precisely because it didn't require them to change their life - stay at home introverted shut ins basically.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  Whenever I see someone minimizing everything done over the past year as "not a big deal" or "really just the bare minimum you could ask" or (lol) "voluntary," I know that they either have no conception of the vast amounts of harm that was inflicted on people over the past year by NPIs or they just don't care. What if a disease that is maybe 4x or 5x a bad flu really wasn't worth upending all of civil society (particularly for its youngest) to combat? Wow, it's almost like the Hippocratic Oath says "first, do no harm" for a reason!

johbjo 5y ago

The total IFR is essentially an exponential function of the age and health distribution in the population. Without specifying the population further, many numbers can be correct. When high IFR:s are presented to the public, most people (both old and young) believe it applies to them, it is misguided in both directions.