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We could have saved so many more lives. I remember midway through the first year (pre-vaccine) people arguing against mandates and masks and lockdowns, while se
by tunesmith 5y ago
We could have saved so many more lives. I remember midway through the first year (pre-vaccine) people arguing against mandates and masks and lockdowns, while severely underestimating the damage. One exchange I had here was from a person allowing that maybe they'd reconsider if we ever reached US deaths at something like 350,000, as if that were an astronomical figure.
And the vaccines... one thing I haven't found yet is an article that tries to make a well-studied estimate of where we'd be right now if the vaccine hadn't come out, or had been just a year later, or had the kind of (lower) efficacy that people were initially trying to set expectations for. In contrast to that, the kind of numbers I believe we would have seen or experienced... makes all our fighting about masks and mandates and lockdowns seem pretty irrelevant. I doubt we can even fathom the difference.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> And the vaccines... one thing I haven't found yet is an article that tries to make a well-studied estimate of where we'd be right now if the vaccine hadn't come out, or had been just a year later, or had the kind of (lower) efficacy that people were initially trying to set expectations for. At the beginning of the pandemic, I saw an estimate of projected deaths from COVID in a scenario where mitigations were taken and in another scenario where none were taken. It was the difference between projecting 300k to 600k dead in the US after more than a year, and 2 million to 6 million dead in the US.