6 ms·

A retrospective summary of the Covid-19 pandemic

20 points by ramraj07 3y ago

frank_bb 3y ago
[dead]
tinus_hn 3y ago
[flagged]
- slaw 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    The deaths were predominantly in the older population. I doubt the warship doubled as a retirement home. The death rates changed significantly with each strain and the bulk of the casualties happened with Delta. There was disproportionate deaths with more disenfranchised. Even before the end of the pandemic NYT estimated a million confirmed deaths in the US alone. Some estimates by the nytimes puts the estimated Covid deaths in india at 1-4 million. I think it’s higher from how bad it was in the ground here. Every extended family and friend group knew a couple of people who died of it. Cremation centers were full. You couldn’t even see the bodies. A large fraction of oxygen cylinders and concentrators were hoarded by the rich just when peak delta wave hit. Most people in hospitals didn’t have oxygen at all meaning they just died with no recourse. At some point hospitals just didn’t take them. People just had their loved ones suffocate and die in their homes with nothing to do. We literally saw 3 different bodies being taken unceremoniously in unmarked vans from our street alone (granted the street had a thousand plus residents; it was dense).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - slaw 3y ago
      Do you know there is a country named Sweden, that didn't follow lockdown herd mentality and they didn't die?
      - ramraj07 3y ago
        Please read my post then. I explicitly said it’s not clear what level of lockdowns were the most effective. Further reading about swedens performance as a retrospective: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/opinion/sweden-pandemic-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/opinion/sweden-pandemic-c...
        spookthesunset 3y ago
        The thing you miss, and is the most important part of an actual retrospective is to put covid into context. Focusing myopically on only covid outcomes to the literal exclusion of virtually all other issues was one of the big fuckups made. Believe it or not, even back in April of 2020 there was millions of other problems besides covid. Examine only covid outcomes is not a retrospective at all. Examining the sum of all outcomes for all things holistically is a retrospective. And doing that you only arrive at one conclusion: literally every single thing society chose to do for covid was wrong. We could have done nothing at all and been better off. There is more to living than the avoidance of exactly one specific disease. Anything that attempts to focus on only covid outcomes is not a retrospective. It’s a circle jerk.
      - Sankozi 3y ago
        "The Swedish government's approach has attracted controversy. The impact on the country's healthcare system and its reported death toll have been far greater than in other Nordic countries, in part due to its unique strategy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden
        throwaway22032 3y ago
        This is about as obvious as saying that we have more car accidents now than before the invention of the car. The question is whether the cost-benefit analysis stacked up. The overall mortality rate was about 0.2-0.3%, which is... on par with the UK, US, and tons of places that played restriction bingo.
roenxi 3y ago
Looks reasonable to me; but this analysis doesn't really try to grapple with the political consequences of the coercive vaccination campaigns backed up by what were, as far as I can tell, human rights violations: 1) Massive and public damage done to the cause of liberty. Picking a minor, I wouldn't want to imagine the looks that someone protesting the Roe v. Wade overturning got if they tried to chant "my body, my choice!". There is firm precedent now for a generation that your body, government's choice. We're more likely to regret that than a few people hurting/killing themselves out of stupidity refusing to take a vaccine as the authoritarians start making more invasive demands. 2) Forcing someone to do something against their volition, followed up by the rather obvious point that the coercers were acting without full information or particularly good intent (see: "Why did COVID become so polarizing?"), will have consequences just from the bad blood it created. There are some angry, angry people out there now. People who have a very compelling argument that it is acceptable to coerce your political opponents and punish them in disproportionate ways. 3) It still isn't obvious that the all in cost/benefits of the policies were worth it factoring in 2nd order effects and opportunity costs. We're staring at nuclear war between the two countries with the largest arsenals right now. It might have been worth just ignoring COVID, letting people make their own choices for better or worse and focusing on not finding a diplomatic peace in the northern hemisphere. The nuclear war risk is probably higher than the COVID risk, although a lot more all-or-nothing. It was almost completely ignored because of the resources spent trying to keep unwilling people inside their own homes. Also the global economy overall is in a terrible place, the damage is incalculable but large and probably comparable to losing 1% of the population. There is a famine problem out there [0]. A well-meaning analysis and noting that 1% of the population could die doesn't really capture the trade offs here. 1% of the world is going to die every year anyway; doubling that is bad. Normalising, justifying and defending mass suspensions of human rights is, amazingly, probably going to be worse. [0] https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-hunger-numbers-rose-to-as-many-as-828-million-in-2021 https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-h...
- ramraj07 3y ago
  I explicitly didn’t touch the forced vaccination part in the article to avoid being misquoted tbh. As far as I can tell the United States did not make any undue coercive steps; are you talking about the period when some states required vaccination proof for entering public closed spaces? How is that different from banning smoking in closed spaces?
jleyank 3y ago
Coercive vaccination and exclusion by medical condition or vaccination status was common before covid - they were called childhood vaccines and were required to go to school, etc. The military, immigration processes, employment conditions, group living situations, all of these required vaccination and/or medical testing and status. Similarly, large scale loss of people and restrictions of freedom have been disturbingly frequent. They were called plagues or wars, and seem to be an aspect of the human condition. Remember aids? Polio? The only real difference with covid was that it occurred in the age of social media. Dying on tv seems to affect people more than dying in some distant land almost out of memory. Smoked inside recently?
- ekanes 3y ago
  Within the point you think you're making is a counter-point. "Remember Polio?" --> Yes, polio was largely eliminated from it's devastating effects on humans by what you're calling "coercive vaccination."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
albert_e 3y ago
Off-topic: I find it interesting that the blog post accepts "comments on github". Bookmarking this idea.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  Thanks! I’ve been experimenting with this open model of blog hosting without extra charges and using some other commenting plugin - I create a new post by creating an issue (which triggers a PR and a quick Netlify deploy of the post for preview). The issue now becomes the home for comments. Not that it’s been popular enough to validate it yet :)
- suprjami 3y ago
  I have a Giscus widget which uses GitHub Discussions on the same repo which hosts the GitHub Pages that I publish the site from. iirc I followed this https://bartoszgorka.com/github-discussion-comments-for-jekyll-blog https://bartoszgorka.com/github-discussion-comments-for-jeky...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
spookthesunset 3y ago
The thing you miss, and is the most important part of an actual retrospective is to put covid into context. Focusing myopically on only covid outcomes to the literal exclusion of virtually all other issues was one of the big fuckups made. Believe it or not, even back in April of 2020 there was millions of other problems besides covid. Examining only covid outcomes is not a retrospective at all. Examining the sum of all outcomes for all things holistically is a retrospective. And doing that you only arrive at one conclusion: literally every single thing society chose to do for covid was wrong. We could have done nothing at all and been better off. There is more to living than the avoidance of exactly one specific disease. Anything that attempts to focus on only covid outcomes is not a retrospective. It’s a circle jerk.
- ksaun 3y ago
  (I had thought I was in agreement with your overall point until I reached this part: > "literally every single thing society chose to do for covid was wrong. We could have done nothing at all and been better off." Perhaps this is only indicative of my own failings, but the absolute certainty you express here led me to greatly devalue your opinion and conclude that engaging with you wouldn't likely lead to an interesting discussion on the main topic. (E.g., Do you really believe that nothing that any aspect of society did related to covid positively affected the outcome?) (Somehow, apparently, I still felt compelled to comment on this tangential/meta topic. Maybe I'm imagining that you might find my reaction useful or interesting or maybe I'm driven by internal factors, such as guilt at dismissing your perspective because of a couple of your specific word choices.))

20 points by ramraj07 3y ago

frank_bb 3y ago

[dead]

tinus_hn 3y ago

[flagged]

slaw 3y ago
[flagged]
- ramraj07 3y ago
  The deaths were predominantly in the older population. I doubt the warship doubled as a retirement home. The death rates changed significantly with each strain and the bulk of the casualties happened with Delta. There was disproportionate deaths with more disenfranchised. Even before the end of the pandemic NYT estimated a million confirmed deaths in the US alone. Some estimates by the nytimes puts the estimated Covid deaths in india at 1-4 million. I think it’s higher from how bad it was in the ground here. Every extended family and friend group knew a couple of people who died of it. Cremation centers were full. You couldn’t even see the bodies. A large fraction of oxygen cylinders and concentrators were hoarded by the rich just when peak delta wave hit. Most people in hospitals didn’t have oxygen at all meaning they just died with no recourse. At some point hospitals just didn’t take them. People just had their loved ones suffocate and die in their homes with nothing to do. We literally saw 3 different bodies being taken unceremoniously in unmarked vans from our street alone (granted the street had a thousand plus residents; it was dense).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - slaw 3y ago
    Do you know there is a country named Sweden, that didn't follow lockdown herd mentality and they didn't die?
    - ramraj07 3y ago
      Please read my post then. I explicitly said it’s not clear what level of lockdowns were the most effective. Further reading about swedens performance as a retrospective: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/opinion/sweden-pandemic-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/opinion/sweden-pandemic-c...
      - spookthesunset 3y ago
        The thing you miss, and is the most important part of an actual retrospective is to put covid into context. Focusing myopically on only covid outcomes to the literal exclusion of virtually all other issues was one of the big fuckups made. Believe it or not, even back in April of 2020 there was millions of other problems besides covid. Examine only covid outcomes is not a retrospective at all. Examining the sum of all outcomes for all things holistically is a retrospective. And doing that you only arrive at one conclusion: literally every single thing society chose to do for covid was wrong. We could have done nothing at all and been better off. There is more to living than the avoidance of exactly one specific disease. Anything that attempts to focus on only covid outcomes is not a retrospective. It’s a circle jerk.
    - Sankozi 3y ago
      "The Swedish government's approach has attracted controversy. The impact on the country's healthcare system and its reported death toll have been far greater than in other Nordic countries, in part due to its unique strategy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden
      - throwaway22032 3y ago
        This is about as obvious as saying that we have more car accidents now than before the invention of the car. The question is whether the cost-benefit analysis stacked up. The overall mortality rate was about 0.2-0.3%, which is... on par with the UK, US, and tons of places that played restriction bingo.

roenxi 3y ago

Looks reasonable to me; but this analysis doesn't really try to grapple with the political consequences of the coercive vaccination campaigns backed up by what were, as far as I can tell, human rights violations: 1) Massive and public damage done to the cause of liberty. Picking a minor, I wouldn't want to imagine the looks that someone protesting the Roe v. Wade overturning got if they tried to chant "my body, my choice!". There is firm precedent now for a generation that your body, government's choice. We're more likely to regret that than a few people hurting/killing themselves out of stupidity refusing to take a vaccine as the authoritarians start making more invasive demands. 2) Forcing someone to do something against their volition, followed up by the rather obvious point that the coercers were acting without full information or particularly good intent (see: "Why did COVID become so polarizing?"), will have consequences just from the bad blood it created. There are some angry, angry people out there now. People who have a very compelling argument that it is acceptable to coerce your political opponents and punish them in disproportionate ways. 3) It still isn't obvious that the all in cost/benefits of the policies were worth it factoring in 2nd order effects and opportunity costs. We're staring at nuclear war between the two countries with the largest arsenals right now. It might have been worth just ignoring COVID, letting people make their own choices for better or worse and focusing on not finding a diplomatic peace in the northern hemisphere. The nuclear war risk is probably higher than the COVID risk, although a lot more all-or-nothing. It was almost completely ignored because of the resources spent trying to keep unwilling people inside their own homes. Also the global economy overall is in a terrible place, the damage is incalculable but large and probably comparable to losing 1% of the population. There is a famine problem out there [0]. A well-meaning analysis and noting that 1% of the population could die doesn't really capture the trade offs here. 1% of the world is going to die every year anyway; doubling that is bad. Normalising, justifying and defending mass suspensions of human rights is, amazingly, probably going to be worse. [0] https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-hunger-numbers-rose-to-as-many-as-828-million-in-2021 https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-h...

ramraj07 3y ago
I explicitly didn’t touch the forced vaccination part in the article to avoid being misquoted tbh. As far as I can tell the United States did not make any undue coercive steps; are you talking about the period when some states required vaccination proof for entering public closed spaces? How is that different from banning smoking in closed spaces?

jleyank 3y ago

Coercive vaccination and exclusion by medical condition or vaccination status was common before covid - they were called childhood vaccines and were required to go to school, etc. The military, immigration processes, employment conditions, group living situations, all of these required vaccination and/or medical testing and status. Similarly, large scale loss of people and restrictions of freedom have been disturbingly frequent. They were called plagues or wars, and seem to be an aspect of the human condition. Remember aids? Polio? The only real difference with covid was that it occurred in the age of social media. Dying on tv seems to affect people more than dying in some distant land almost out of memory. Smoked inside recently?

ekanes 3y ago
Within the point you think you're making is a counter-point. "Remember Polio?" --> Yes, polio was largely eliminated from it's devastating effects on humans by what you're calling "coercive vaccination."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

albert_e 3y ago

Off-topic: I find it interesting that the blog post accepts "comments on github". Bookmarking this idea.

ramraj07 3y ago
Thanks! I’ve been experimenting with this open model of blog hosting without extra charges and using some other commenting plugin - I create a new post by creating an issue (which triggers a PR and a quick Netlify deploy of the post for preview). The issue now becomes the home for comments. Not that it’s been popular enough to validate it yet :)
suprjami 3y ago
I have a Giscus widget which uses GitHub Discussions on the same repo which hosts the GitHub Pages that I publish the site from. iirc I followed this https://bartoszgorka.com/github-discussion-comments-for-jekyll-blog https://bartoszgorka.com/github-discussion-comments-for-jeky...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

spookthesunset 3y ago

The thing you miss, and is the most important part of an actual retrospective is to put covid into context. Focusing myopically on only covid outcomes to the literal exclusion of virtually all other issues was one of the big fuckups made. Believe it or not, even back in April of 2020 there was millions of other problems besides covid. Examining only covid outcomes is not a retrospective at all. Examining the sum of all outcomes for all things holistically is a retrospective. And doing that you only arrive at one conclusion: literally every single thing society chose to do for covid was wrong. We could have done nothing at all and been better off. There is more to living than the avoidance of exactly one specific disease. Anything that attempts to focus on only covid outcomes is not a retrospective. It’s a circle jerk.

ksaun 3y ago
(I had thought I was in agreement with your overall point until I reached this part: > "literally every single thing society chose to do for covid was wrong. We could have done nothing at all and been better off." Perhaps this is only indicative of my own failings, but the absolute certainty you express here led me to greatly devalue your opinion and conclude that engaging with you wouldn't likely lead to an interesting discussion on the main topic. (E.g., Do you really believe that nothing that any aspect of society did related to covid positively affected the outcome?) (Somehow, apparently, I still felt compelled to comment on this tangential/meta topic. Maybe I'm imagining that you might find my reaction useful or interesting or maybe I'm driven by internal factors, such as guilt at dismissing your perspective because of a couple of your specific word choices.))