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What's more, before omicron it was a pretty reasonable position to conclude vaccinations were ending the pandemic. By that I mean... That is a very reasonable p

What's more, before omicron it was a pretty reasonable position to conclude vaccinations were ending the pandemic. By that I mean... That is a very reasonable position to hold only 3 months ago. And I still think the vaccines are substantially accelerating the end. So I'm not even sure what the complaint is. That it isn't the only factor? Sure, but it's a huge one, and one of few that we can control.

ssl232 5y ago
> What's more, before omicron it was a pretty reasonable position to conclude vaccinations were ending the pandemic. I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths. This avoids all of the problems around classifcations of deaths with/from COVID, vaccination statuses, etc. It's much harder to disguise deaths or lack of deaths. EuroMOMO [1; scroll 60% down to the z-scores] shows excess deaths in Europe basically went back to normal in most countries after the European wave in spring 2020, long before vaccines were available. This was the case despite widely varying levels of lockdown stringency - with at least one country, Sweden, not doing any significant locking down at all. And many countries' peaks at this time were, if you scroll back in time, comparable in magnitude to excess deaths during previous winters. If you draw a line in your mind down the various countries' graphs at early 2021 when significant fractions of the populations of these countries were starting to get vaccinated, you will probably struggle to determine that they've had any real positive effect at all. Once you do that, consider an alternative hypothesis could better describe the data, for example that the virus is highly seasonal and we have very little control over it. Now, a bonus: change the age group from "all ages" to younger cohorts and observe that in many countries excess deaths did not shift from resembling noise during the entirely of the past 2 years. There are even some countries, not known for being paragons of good health such as Scotland, that barely saw any out of the ordinary excess deaths in the young during the whole period. I think people seem to think things are far worse than they actually are in most countries because of the panic created by media and politicians. This is why I am very unconvinced by the argument that vaccines have been helping to end the pandemic, at very least amongst most of those who have been locked down. It seems much more reasonable to me that other factors are at play here. [1] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
- peter422 5y ago
  After you’ve had a bunch of excess deaths (of the oldest and most vulnerable) wouldn’t you expect it to go below normal after that? Isn’t staying above normal still indicative that lots of excess people are dying? No country was even close to what you could call significantly vaccinated until mid-2021. The winter 20-21 wave is almost entirely unvaccinated populations. The winter 21-22 is now mostly vaccinated and, surprise, it’s much lower (and unvaccinated are still the majority of deaths).
  - rajin444 5y ago
    > After you’ve had a bunch of excess deaths (of the oldest and most vulnerable) wouldn’t you expect it to go below normal after that? This argument also works against vaccine efficacy.
- gernb 5y ago
  when you say "it's seasonal" what do you mean? It certainly is not a "winter" thing given that until omicron, Japan's highest numbers were in the middle of hot and humid summer.
- Izkata 5y ago
  > I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths. The upset from lockdowns and delayed or canceled treatments/surgeries is why. I don't think we have final numbers for 2021 yet, but the numbers from the US in 2020 showed a jump in non-covid deaths about half as big as covid deaths. Cancer didn't have a big jump that year, but it is one of the things that got postponed diagnoses and treatments, because it doesn't kill immediately so it's not an emergency, so one expectation I've seen is for it to spike in 2021. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234#247782549 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234#24...
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    And there will be a long tail of death and shortened lives that haunt the entire generation of young people these public health policies fucked over. And the worse part is the spite, hatred, and bullying anybody who expressed any concern got. Especially when the evidence is increasingly showing virtually all of our panicked reactions didn’t really do a god damn bit of good against Covid. This outcome was obvious to anybody paying attention in the beginning.
beerandt 5y ago
It wasn't a reasonable position since we've known cats and dogs (and everything else) could catch it. (Among other reasons, but this is the most obvious for anyone even slightly familiar with previous vaccination efforts.) For a virus that supposedly just jumped from wild animals to humans, it'd be irresponsible to simultaneously think it couldn't happen again from any of the number of species potentially acting as reservoirs.
- Izkata 5y ago
  Unless there's been new information in the past few weeks I haven't seen, one of the strongest theories about Omicron is that it's a hop back from rats that had been infected with Alpha.
lamontcg 5y ago
Vaccines are still going to end the pandemic earlier with an enormous amount of lives saved. But, you need to stop equating ending the pandemic with eliminating the virus. After the pandemic ends the virus will be with the human race for the rest of our natural lives most likely. We live with HCoV-229E and HCoV-OC43 and all of us catch that and nobody considers the pandemics that started transmission of those viruses in the human race to still be pandemics. When the disease burden drops sufficiently then the pandemic is over. Vaccines reduce the disease burden dramatically.

ssl232 5y ago

> What's more, before omicron it was a pretty reasonable position to conclude vaccinations were ending the pandemic. I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths. This avoids all of the problems around classifcations of deaths with/from COVID, vaccination statuses, etc. It's much harder to disguise deaths or lack of deaths. EuroMOMO [1; scroll 60% down to the z-scores] shows excess deaths in Europe basically went back to normal in most countries after the European wave in spring 2020, long before vaccines were available. This was the case despite widely varying levels of lockdown stringency - with at least one country, Sweden, not doing any significant locking down at all. And many countries' peaks at this time were, if you scroll back in time, comparable in magnitude to excess deaths during previous winters. If you draw a line in your mind down the various countries' graphs at early 2021 when significant fractions of the populations of these countries were starting to get vaccinated, you will probably struggle to determine that they've had any real positive effect at all. Once you do that, consider an alternative hypothesis could better describe the data, for example that the virus is highly seasonal and we have very little control over it. Now, a bonus: change the age group from "all ages" to younger cohorts and observe that in many countries excess deaths did not shift from resembling noise during the entirely of the past 2 years. There are even some countries, not known for being paragons of good health such as Scotland, that barely saw any out of the ordinary excess deaths in the young during the whole period. I think people seem to think things are far worse than they actually are in most countries because of the panic created by media and politicians. This is why I am very unconvinced by the argument that vaccines have been helping to end the pandemic, at very least amongst most of those who have been locked down. It seems much more reasonable to me that other factors are at play here. [1] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

peter422 5y ago
After you’ve had a bunch of excess deaths (of the oldest and most vulnerable) wouldn’t you expect it to go below normal after that? Isn’t staying above normal still indicative that lots of excess people are dying? No country was even close to what you could call significantly vaccinated until mid-2021. The winter 20-21 wave is almost entirely unvaccinated populations. The winter 21-22 is now mostly vaccinated and, surprise, it’s much lower (and unvaccinated are still the majority of deaths).
- rajin444 5y ago
  > After you’ve had a bunch of excess deaths (of the oldest and most vulnerable) wouldn’t you expect it to go below normal after that? This argument also works against vaccine efficacy.
gernb 5y ago
when you say "it's seasonal" what do you mean? It certainly is not a "winter" thing given that until omicron, Japan's highest numbers were in the middle of hot and humid summer.
Izkata 5y ago
> I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths. The upset from lockdowns and delayed or canceled treatments/surgeries is why. I don't think we have final numbers for 2021 yet, but the numbers from the US in 2020 showed a jump in non-covid deaths about half as big as covid deaths. Cancer didn't have a big jump that year, but it is one of the things that got postponed diagnoses and treatments, because it doesn't kill immediately so it's not an emergency, so one expectation I've seen is for it to spike in 2021. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234#247782549 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234#24...
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  And there will be a long tail of death and shortened lives that haunt the entire generation of young people these public health policies fucked over. And the worse part is the spite, hatred, and bullying anybody who expressed any concern got. Especially when the evidence is increasingly showing virtually all of our panicked reactions didn’t really do a god damn bit of good against Covid. This outcome was obvious to anybody paying attention in the beginning.

beerandt 5y ago

It wasn't a reasonable position since we've known cats and dogs (and everything else) could catch it. (Among other reasons, but this is the most obvious for anyone even slightly familiar with previous vaccination efforts.) For a virus that supposedly just jumped from wild animals to humans, it'd be irresponsible to simultaneously think it couldn't happen again from any of the number of species potentially acting as reservoirs.

Izkata 5y ago
Unless there's been new information in the past few weeks I haven't seen, one of the strongest theories about Omicron is that it's a hop back from rats that had been infected with Alpha.

lamontcg 5y ago

Vaccines are still going to end the pandemic earlier with an enormous amount of lives saved. But, you need to stop equating ending the pandemic with eliminating the virus. After the pandemic ends the virus will be with the human race for the rest of our natural lives most likely. We live with HCoV-229E and HCoV-OC43 and all of us catch that and nobody considers the pandemics that started transmission of those viruses in the human race to still be pandemics. When the disease burden drops sufficiently then the pandemic is over. Vaccines reduce the disease burden dramatically.