3 ms·

During the first weeks of covid, the strategy proposed by most of the medical establishment was to "flatten the curve", which basically is to allow everyone to

During the first weeks of covid, the strategy proposed by most of the medical establishment was to "flatten the curve", which basically is to allow everyone to be exposed, but at a pace that is gradual enough that the healthcare system isn't overwhelmed. (Sweden continued this approach for months.) https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.ht... In effect, that was what was still proposed in the Barrington Declaration in October. While I disagreed with the proposal (just as I did with flatting the curve in March/April), I don't think it was disinformation. Rather, I think the declaration represents a value systems (liberitarianism) where liberty is seen as more important than safety, and where harming one group (children and young people) to help another (sick and elderly) is seen as unethical. My main objection was that I didn't think it would be realistic with our current population to be able to stomach such an approach to the end, with the number of deaths that would be likely to follow, and that starting lockdowns late might cause roughly as much harm from the lockdowns as starting them early. (Even Sweden did partically pivot, eventually.) Basically, though, I think the view presented in the declartion simply represents a political view, not disinformation. And I'm not a big fan of sensoring political views.

themitigating 4y ago
What makes it a political view? The cooperation of the population is a valid concern when planning a response to an emergency
- trashtester 4y ago
  Politics is when there is a disagreement about values. For example, pro choice vs pro life is about values, not facts. Scientific misinformation is when someone someone makes statements that are in disagreement with established scientific facts. For example, the theory of evolution is established enough to be considered a fact. Rejecting it is either misinformation, delusional or both. Now, it is possible that there were elements in the Barrington Declaration that was also presenting alternative ways of looking at the data, maybe opinions that would be fringe at the time (but definitely mainstream just months before). But part of this is also how you quantify deaths. Either you can count all lives equally, especially when including those who would have died roughly at the same time, even if they did not have covid. On the other hand, if you look at number of potential years of life lost, the numbers become quite different, such as in this study: https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/potential-years-of-life-lost.htm https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/potential-years-of-life-los... If you look at the US (which was one of the highest), the OECD study above shows that 7700 years of life were lost per 100000 people, for the sample in time and age groups that were used. That is about 4 weeks for the average citizen. If you use a time window that includes 2021 and 2022, that could perhaps increase to 8-10 weeks per inhabitant. Maybe this would have been 2-4 weeks higher, if lockdowns had only lasted half as long, who knows. Anyway, I think average number of life-years lost per capita is a relevant metric to compare to the sacrifices involved in long-lasting lockdowns. Now, if you look at the main risk factor for dying from covid, namely obesity, the obesity in itself carries a cost in terms of expected years of life lost of 2-5 YEARS (not weeks as for covid), depending on the level of obesity. https://www.hopkinsarthritis.org/arthritis-news/years-of-life-lost-due-to-obesity/#:~:text=It%20was%20estimated%20that%202,at%20least%20174%20lbs https://www.hopkinsarthritis.org/arthritis-news/years-of-lif....). In other words, if instead of mandating lockdowns, the government would spend a similar effort in schools, collages and workplaces to stimulate exercise, one could quite probably have have reduced years of life lost more than the lockdowns achieved, especially during the later stages of the pandemic. Oh, btw, I'm obese myself, which probably contributed to me being happy about lockdowns for selfish reasons, especially before vaccines were available.
- meltyness 4y ago
  Federalism. To color the situation a bit without presuming too much. Should the whole country shut down because DC, NY, and LA are reaching dangerous levels of hospital burden? I suspect the whole country took on the measures needed in denser areas, but I speculate that it looked draconian there since the spread was delayed by a year before it really hit a quorum in some central states[0]. It's a political argument because they can contend it would have been handled better by local, county, state officials. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kQKvnpyHXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kQKvnpyHXM
dahart 4y ago
I actually agree almost entirely with this, and I further appreciate your positive glass-half-full take on the debate and the motivations behind it, that it’s political. Generally speaking I’m also not a fan of the government censoring political views. (I’m not sure that happened here. The article is making accusations of coordinated government censorship, but admitted the accusation lacks evidence. It’s possible many people independently decided against hosting the GBD because of it’s political bias.) There are a couple of reasons I think this particular political view does cross the threshold and amount to mild disinformation, which are that the stakes are far higher than most political debates. This isn’t a tax or budget discussion, it’s an ongoing pandemic with an outcome of millions of premature deaths so far. The GBD did speculate on both the unknown future harm of lockdowns and the safety of herd immunity. It also attacks and contradicts the conclusions of many many fellow scientists and epidemiologists based on speculation and not established facts. Part of the issue for me is that free market policies tend to externalize damage caused by deregulation, here for example by comparing human death today to unknown amount of human suffering, and (as in this case) they make a sort of unfounded social Darwinism argument that presumes pure economic policy can and should be applied to everything non-monetary. This has been especially true for the last century when it comes to the environment; we’re just starting to pay the real costs and asses the real damage from 100+ years of failure to take enough action and properly regulate pollution, a time during which it was argued constantly that the free market would minimize the total harm. I don’t know how history will look upon the lockdowns in 10 or 100 years, and I feel like lockdowns suck just as much as everyone else does. But people dying sucks hard, we’re all fighting fiercely over what is the lesser of two bad outcomes. Without evidence to back it up though, it’s hard to say yes we should let more people die because we think in the long term it might be less “total harm” if we do.
- trashtester 4y ago
  > This has been especially true for the last century when it comes to the environment This picture is from 99 years ago in Ukraine. It shows the effect of inefficient agriculture and the harm done by dogmatic socialism in the most fertile part of Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921%E2%80%931923_famine_in_Ukraine#/media/File:Children_affected_by_famine_in_Berdyansk,_Ukraine_-_1922.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921%E2%80%931923_famine_in_Uk... Millions were starving to death, and Ukraine was not an exception. In most of the world, periods of hunger and starvation was quite normal. This graph shows the percentage of the world population living in extreme poverty, from 1820 to 2015: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute-bb127cf20e258cae7b176045ef825838_v17_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/world-population-in-extre... The graph starts at around 90% of the world living in extreme poverty, and is down to less than 10% by 2015. To a large extent, this development was made possible by fossil fuels. > But people dying sucks hard, we’re all fighting fiercely over what is the lesser of two bad outcomes. True, and I was all for lockdowns during the early stages, and later on still happy about them for more personal reasons (I'm obese, and I like working from home). But for some groups, the costs were really high, not just economically. For children, students and many single young people, 1-3 years of isoloation can carry a huge toll socially, psychologically and academically. When I mentioned that to elderly people I know around that time (that were afraid for their lives), they did not show much empathy for those young people who were forced into isolation for the protection of the elderly and obese.

themitigating 4y ago

What makes it a political view? The cooperation of the population is a valid concern when planning a response to an emergency

trashtester 4y ago
Politics is when there is a disagreement about values. For example, pro choice vs pro life is about values, not facts. Scientific misinformation is when someone someone makes statements that are in disagreement with established scientific facts. For example, the theory of evolution is established enough to be considered a fact. Rejecting it is either misinformation, delusional or both. Now, it is possible that there were elements in the Barrington Declaration that was also presenting alternative ways of looking at the data, maybe opinions that would be fringe at the time (but definitely mainstream just months before). But part of this is also how you quantify deaths. Either you can count all lives equally, especially when including those who would have died roughly at the same time, even if they did not have covid. On the other hand, if you look at number of potential years of life lost, the numbers become quite different, such as in this study: https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/potential-years-of-life-lost.htm https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/potential-years-of-life-los... If you look at the US (which was one of the highest), the OECD study above shows that 7700 years of life were lost per 100000 people, for the sample in time and age groups that were used. That is about 4 weeks for the average citizen. If you use a time window that includes 2021 and 2022, that could perhaps increase to 8-10 weeks per inhabitant. Maybe this would have been 2-4 weeks higher, if lockdowns had only lasted half as long, who knows. Anyway, I think average number of life-years lost per capita is a relevant metric to compare to the sacrifices involved in long-lasting lockdowns. Now, if you look at the main risk factor for dying from covid, namely obesity, the obesity in itself carries a cost in terms of expected years of life lost of 2-5 YEARS (not weeks as for covid), depending on the level of obesity. https://www.hopkinsarthritis.org/arthritis-news/years-of-life-lost-due-to-obesity/#:~:text=It%20was%20estimated%20that%202,at%20least%20174%20lbs https://www.hopkinsarthritis.org/arthritis-news/years-of-lif....). In other words, if instead of mandating lockdowns, the government would spend a similar effort in schools, collages and workplaces to stimulate exercise, one could quite probably have have reduced years of life lost more than the lockdowns achieved, especially during the later stages of the pandemic. Oh, btw, I'm obese myself, which probably contributed to me being happy about lockdowns for selfish reasons, especially before vaccines were available.
meltyness 4y ago
Federalism. To color the situation a bit without presuming too much. Should the whole country shut down because DC, NY, and LA are reaching dangerous levels of hospital burden? I suspect the whole country took on the measures needed in denser areas, but I speculate that it looked draconian there since the spread was delayed by a year before it really hit a quorum in some central states[0]. It's a political argument because they can contend it would have been handled better by local, county, state officials. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kQKvnpyHXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kQKvnpyHXM

dahart 4y ago

I actually agree almost entirely with this, and I further appreciate your positive glass-half-full take on the debate and the motivations behind it, that it’s political. Generally speaking I’m also not a fan of the government censoring political views. (I’m not sure that happened here. The article is making accusations of coordinated government censorship, but admitted the accusation lacks evidence. It’s possible many people independently decided against hosting the GBD because of it’s political bias.) There are a couple of reasons I think this particular political view does cross the threshold and amount to mild disinformation, which are that the stakes are far higher than most political debates. This isn’t a tax or budget discussion, it’s an ongoing pandemic with an outcome of millions of premature deaths so far. The GBD did speculate on both the unknown future harm of lockdowns and the safety of herd immunity. It also attacks and contradicts the conclusions of many many fellow scientists and epidemiologists based on speculation and not established facts. Part of the issue for me is that free market policies tend to externalize damage caused by deregulation, here for example by comparing human death today to unknown amount of human suffering, and (as in this case) they make a sort of unfounded social Darwinism argument that presumes pure economic policy can and should be applied to everything non-monetary. This has been especially true for the last century when it comes to the environment; we’re just starting to pay the real costs and asses the real damage from 100+ years of failure to take enough action and properly regulate pollution, a time during which it was argued constantly that the free market would minimize the total harm. I don’t know how history will look upon the lockdowns in 10 or 100 years, and I feel like lockdowns suck just as much as everyone else does. But people dying sucks hard, we’re all fighting fiercely over what is the lesser of two bad outcomes. Without evidence to back it up though, it’s hard to say yes we should let more people die because we think in the long term it might be less “total harm” if we do.

trashtester 4y ago
> This has been especially true for the last century when it comes to the environment This picture is from 99 years ago in Ukraine. It shows the effect of inefficient agriculture and the harm done by dogmatic socialism in the most fertile part of Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921%E2%80%931923_famine_in_Ukraine#/media/File:Children_affected_by_famine_in_Berdyansk,_Ukraine_-_1922.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921%E2%80%931923_famine_in_Uk... Millions were starving to death, and Ukraine was not an exception. In most of the world, periods of hunger and starvation was quite normal. This graph shows the percentage of the world population living in extreme poverty, from 1820 to 2015: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute-bb127cf20e258cae7b176045ef825838_v17_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/world-population-in-extre... The graph starts at around 90% of the world living in extreme poverty, and is down to less than 10% by 2015. To a large extent, this development was made possible by fossil fuels. > But people dying sucks hard, we’re all fighting fiercely over what is the lesser of two bad outcomes. True, and I was all for lockdowns during the early stages, and later on still happy about them for more personal reasons (I'm obese, and I like working from home). But for some groups, the costs were really high, not just economically. For children, students and many single young people, 1-3 years of isoloation can carry a huge toll socially, psychologically and academically. When I mentioned that to elderly people I know around that time (that were afraid for their lives), they did not show much empathy for those young people who were forced into isolation for the protection of the elderly and obese.