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These sort of “over sensitive PCR tests”, “died with not of” claims are silly. You start peeling away at them even a little - why are hospitals overwhelmed? Why

by wk_end 5y ago

These sort of “over sensitive PCR tests”, “died with not of” claims are silly. You start peeling away at them even a little - why are hospitals overwhelmed? Why are there so many excess deaths? - and any explanations start becoming conspiratorial (“there’s no actual overwhelmed hospital, it’s all fearmongering from the media”) or completely implausible (“hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, in numbers that line up with positive PCR tests, were actually caused by lockdowns”).

kcplate 5y ago
My prediction—-when this point in time is measured 20 years from now, I suspect we are going to see that the excess deaths measured 2020-2025 are not going to be dramatically higher compared to 2014-2019 (at least as high as people today anticipate. There will be some, but Covid seems to be extremely skillful at killing people early who were statistically likely to die in the coming 5 years.
- thom 5y ago
  Can we agree that losing millions of years of human lives is a bad thing though?
  - kcplate 5y ago
    Perhaps it’s a bad thing in the moment and for survivors of the dead, but it’s really just going to be a footnote in history though.
rajin444 5y ago
How often are hospitals overwhelmed? What does “overwhelmed” mean - 95% capacity? Excess beds but not enough nurses? Turning patients away? Operating at max capacity? What qualifies as “so many excess deaths”? The Hong Kong flu was per capita comparable to what we have now and most people didn’t know anything was happening.
- wk_end 5y ago
  “Overwhelmed” means “hospitals, doctors, nurses, and health care officials all over the world say they’re overwhelmed, and say that it’s due to COVID”. This is what I mean by “conspiratorial” - you need to assume that massive numbers of people in dozens of countries are colluding and lying to believe that medical systems aren’t struggling due to COVID. The idea that COVID and the Hong Kong flu were comparable is, at this point, outdated. For instance, the most liberal estimate (per Wikipedia) of HKF deaths is around 100k in the US. Adjusting for population growth you’d see something like 175k dead (the US population was 200M at the time). The US is now at ~800,000 excess deaths since the start of the pandemic, and rising.

by wk_end 5y ago

kcplate 5y ago

My prediction—-when this point in time is measured 20 years from now, I suspect we are going to see that the excess deaths measured 2020-2025 are not going to be dramatically higher compared to 2014-2019 (at least as high as people today anticipate. There will be some, but Covid seems to be extremely skillful at killing people early who were statistically likely to die in the coming 5 years.

thom 5y ago
Can we agree that losing millions of years of human lives is a bad thing though?
- kcplate 5y ago
  Perhaps it’s a bad thing in the moment and for survivors of the dead, but it’s really just going to be a footnote in history though.

rajin444 5y ago

How often are hospitals overwhelmed? What does “overwhelmed” mean - 95% capacity? Excess beds but not enough nurses? Turning patients away? Operating at max capacity? What qualifies as “so many excess deaths”? The Hong Kong flu was per capita comparable to what we have now and most people didn’t know anything was happening.

wk_end 5y ago
“Overwhelmed” means “hospitals, doctors, nurses, and health care officials all over the world say they’re overwhelmed, and say that it’s due to COVID”. This is what I mean by “conspiratorial” - you need to assume that massive numbers of people in dozens of countries are colluding and lying to believe that medical systems aren’t struggling due to COVID. The idea that COVID and the Hong Kong flu were comparable is, at this point, outdated. For instance, the most liberal estimate (per Wikipedia) of HKF deaths is around 100k in the US. Adjusting for population growth you’d see something like 175k dead (the US population was 200M at the time). The US is now at ~800,000 excess deaths since the start of the pandemic, and rising.