32 ms·

Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

321 points by sieste 3y ago

thefringthing 3y ago
Isn't Nate falling for the Table 2 fallacy here? (Edit: Perhaps not, but it took drawing the DAG for me to be convinced.)
KerrAvon 3y ago
This is all fine, but the focus on deaths is sort of missing the larger societal problem. The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. edit: Which is to say: The Great Barrington Declaration was wrong directionally as well. We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much as possible to have a hope of a return to normality. Death is not the only issue with COVID. Too fucking late now, but anyone who supported that is a quack and should have been stripped of their license.
- cm2012 3y ago
  Good news then that long covid is probably not a real issue
- noirbot 3y ago
  I haven't read the specifics of the GBD, but isn't some of the "it was clearly quackery" confounded by: 1. In 2020 especially, and even now, the specifics of long covid and other side effects, as compared to other downsides of lockdowns on mental health/delayed treatments are hard to predict? We don't have the counterfactual of what would have been the 3-5-10 year implications of a multi-year lockdown. 2. Does the general directionality of that change in a world where it's obvious that global lockdown/elimination of covid wasn't feasible because there isn't some global government to impose it? As long as a large enough population wasn't going along with the elimination strategy, it makes it less viable and more costly for everyone else. If the "2 week lockdown and it all goes away" had happened, then absolutely that would have been right. If all of, say, Europe doesn't lock down and everywhere else does, then how long of a lockdown do you need in order to have it do anything, and at that length, what other major problems emerge? At least personally, the point I somewhat gave up on elimination was when the first variants started emerging from South Africa and Europe. It seems like that's generally borne out too - I'd be curious what the infection/long covid rates in the more successfully locked down countries like New Zealand or Japan are at this point.
  - b112 3y ago
    The problem is, even lockdowns weren't lockdowns. There were endless people who had to work, just to keep water, power, food flowing. And those people needed transportation. And past 2 weeks, transportation means parts for vehicles, maintenance, gas, oil, and food means transportation and food processors and.... It was a good idea at the time, but doomed to fail.
    - mikem170 3y ago
      Agreed. There's a lot of animals that can catch and spread covid [0]: > many if not most mammalian ACE-2 receptors are susceptible > the virus has gone from humans to the animals and back again to human > found signs of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in significant percentages of six urban wildlife species > found signs of the pathogen infecting 17 percent of New York City sewer rats tested > Exposure could also occur following interactions with pets such as cats and dogs Lockdowns were never going to be able to eliminate the virus. [0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-many-animal-species-contract-covid https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...
      - autoexec 3y ago
        I'm not too worried about a random sick deer in the middle of some forest infecting a whole bunch of humans. The worry with animals is that they could mutate the virus into something much more nasty. Especially in factory farm settings where animals aren't properly cared for and are packed in like sardines while covered in shit and open sores, and where workers who are also treated terribly could end up getting exposed. Lockdowns could do a lot to reduce spread and protect people from infection in large population centers, but certain areas are basically breeding grounds for disease and even before covid they were a risk for things like antibiotic resistant bacteria. Ignoring them was always going to be a problem.
        mikem170 3y ago
        I brought up covid in animals because the original poster mentioned the elimination of covid in the context of lockdowns. The fact that covid can move between animal and human populations would seem to mean that lockdowns for the purpose of elimination will not work. Eventually humans would be reinfected from animals - mice, rats, pets, etc. This has perhaps already happened. There is dna evidence that omicron evolved in mice and then jumped back into humans [0]. On the idea of lockdowns to eliminate the virus: > The coronavirus’ ability to infect so many different animals, and to spread within some of those populations, is worrying news: It means there’s virtually no chance the world will ever be rid of this particularly destructive coronavirus, scientists said [1]. It would be a bummer to be locked down for months or years in an effort to eliminate the virus, and have to deal with the negative repercussions of lockdowns during and afterwards, only for everyone to become reinfected again from animals, and the whole thing start up again. My apologies if I misunderstood your reply. You did seem to have a different angle than the original post. I just don't get it when people mention lockdowns to eliminate covid, when such a thing isn't possible. I'm not sure what to say about your concern that animals can evolve a more dangerous virus. That seems like it can go either way. Animal evolved variants can also be less dangerous, like omicron, which is a good thing. Also locked down humans could be more vulnerable to more dangerous variants, their immune systems not having any prior exposure. How can anyone be so sure lockdowns always help? [0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-did-omicron-evolve-in-mice https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-did-omicr... [1] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-06-09/coronavirus-is-spreading-among-animals-that-ramps-up-risk-to-people https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-06-09/coronavirus...
- gadders 3y ago
  You seem to have lived through a different pandemic than the rest of the world. It's hard to say the GBD was wrong when Sweden didn't lock down and they weren't exactly seeing bodies pile up in the street. Covid is now here to stay, ranking somewhere in severity between the common cold, flu or pneumonia.
  - leksak 3y ago
    I think the severity of long Covid might be more debilitating as it is my understanding that the long-term consequences of pneumonia is not as long lasting. I've not known of people that have had to change their whole way of life, and possibly their career, because of pneumonia or flu but have met a few that have had to do so as a consequence of long Covid.
    - kbelder 3y ago
      I think it's very possible there ARE occasional life-long consequences of the flu and other such infections that are so normalized we don't even notice.
    - gadders 3y ago
      Apart from having taste or smell affected, I don't know anyone with "long COVID".
      - kenjackson 3y ago
        I know a few people who are impacted by it. But they all, if I recall correctly, have confounding factors. For example, I know two people with MS where Covid has completely wrecked havoc -- and a year or so later are still largely devastated.
        marginalia_nu 3y ago
        There's also the fact that for a lot of people, COVID isolation meant a precipitous decline in physical and social activity that lasted for years. We know this stuff can fuck you up pretty bad both mentally and physically. Depressive symptoms and a steep decline in physical fitness is very much the expected outcome from that.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - cptskippy 3y ago
    What has the Republican party done exactly to support OSHA protections or worker benefits? Nothing? Oh so perhaps it isn't about the party but about how our politicians are bought and sold by business interests. Please stop trying to make something partisan that isn't.
  - postmodest 3y ago
    Yeah, we should vote for the other party to punish the--what? That's their platform? Oh. Posts like this, which blame only the Democrats by name, are practically agitprop.
    - uoaei 3y ago
      The real fuckery is the system-wide insistence that there's only two sides to every debate and that the line between the two parties defines the terms of the debate.
    - School-Cotton 3y ago
      The person you're replying to didn't suggest voting for Republicans; that's just something you invented because of the uniquely American habit of assuming politics is a zero-sum game with exactly two players. I hate the state of our political system so much...
- kingds 3y ago
  in what ways have we not already returned to normality?
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    I think we’ve returned to a new, more callous form of reality, where mass injury, illness, and death are normalized, and any real concern for public health or intervention, including that which was considered entirely rational before COVID, is now greeted as impossible or insanity.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      Yea, this is one of the sad long term consequences I've taken away from COVID: I used to think that when a crisis happened, we would all pull together and rely on each other to do the right thing and collectively act to help. Now, I know that when the next crisis happens, half of the country is going to whine and complain, deny, protest, defy, and belligerently do everything in their power to deliberately make it worse. I've totally lost faith in humanity.
  - iwonthecase 3y ago
    Well flu vaccination rates are down from pre-covid levels, I'd guess more antivax sentiment's also impacting other common vaccines.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      This inanity is impacting even vaccination rates for rabies in pets! https://time.com/5538926/dogs-vaccines-antivaxxers/ https://time.com/5538926/dogs-vaccines-antivaxxers/
  - cptskippy 3y ago
    I think it very much depends on where you live. Rural America returned to normal a long time ago. Many cities, like San Francisco and Atlanta, have not and are still feeling the effects to varying degrees.
- nradov 3y ago
  That is misinformation. The risk of "long COVID" has been widely overstated. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2023-112338 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2023-112338 Most any serious viral infection can potentially cause post-viral syndrome, but there is nothing particularly dangerous about SARS-CoV-2. And there is no realistic possibility of eliminating that virus. There is no sterilizing vaccine. It is now endemic worldwide through humans and multiple animal species. It's time to move on. The notion of punishing people for exercising their freedom of expression is horrifying. That is unacceptable in a modern liberal society.
  - Yoric 3y ago
    Interesting read, but as far as I can tell, this has not been peer-reviewed. At a casual glance, it didn't seem to be a survey or a summary of peer-reviewed research, either. In other words, if I'm right, this is an opinion piece.
  - blueskies89 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - YeezyMode 3y ago
    It isn't misinformation. Here is a study that basically rebuts every implication of the study you linked: https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/1706332965792272722?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1706332965792272722%7Ctwgr%5Eb20d95af30aaf47198d512bdd5cee0fbd25e6820%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FCoronavirus%2Fcomments%2F16svf05%2Fhow_methodological_pitfalls_have_created%2F https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/17063329657922727... Another link questioning the process behind the entire study itself: https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-an-analysis-of-the-body-of-research-on-long-covid-suggesting-potential-methodological-flaws/ https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-an-ana...
- jsnell 3y ago
  Eliminating Covid stopped being an option roughly around January 2020. The partial elimination you seem to be implying with "as much as possible" was never an option. It was always all or nothing.
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    and China tried really, really hard to eliminate it over the next 3 years. They couldn't.
    - orangecat 3y ago
      Right, and they had the "advantages" of having no limitations on government power, and assigning no value to individual freedom. If they couldn't do it, it's lunacy to believe that anyone else could.
  - EdwardDiego 3y ago
    Even NZ gave up on our island defence once Omicron got in. We'd managed to stave off widespread Delta, but Omicron was far more transmissible, but also, far less lethal, and its arrival and spread came just after we started vaccinating. So by then the cost/benefit analysis made it clear that reopening, while bringing more sickness, would ultimately cost less than not. The isolation caused some havoc in our economy that we're still recovering from, but large amounts of excess deaths brings its own economic impacts that would likely have been far worse.
- umvi 3y ago
  > None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. In what sense? I'm in a deep red state, and I haven't noticed much "devastation" in my community due to COVID. Seems like you can work yourself up about anything. Doomscroll enough Type 2 diabetes articles and you'll convince yourself that COVID is the absolute least of USA's public health problems compared to the complications resulting from that.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Why not both? COVID outcomes tend to be worse for diabetics and COVID infection increases the risk of developing diabetes as well.
- PheonixPharts 3y ago
  > None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. I love doom more than the average person, by what I would say is a quite significant margin... but I don't see this at all. I've had covid at least twice, including some awful symptoms a month after recovery that had me convinced I had long covid as well... a few months later (now years) not so much. While I do know many people of who have lost loved ones from Covid, I don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone who has any serious "long-covid" symptoms. To be clear, I'm not doubting that long-covid exists. But I'm very skeptical, based on my own observations, that "we are so, so fucked" and covid of all things is the source of that "fucking". Personally I think a lot of the post-covid strangeness is because, for a variety of other reasons (not the least of which is rapidly progressing climate change), people are under tremendous stress and at the same time can't quite articulate what that stress is, nor find relief from it. A lot of people (not me) did believe there was going to be a return to normal post-covid, and the increasingly obvious impossibility of this is causing people to have tremendous mental health problems. But long-covid itself being the source is something that I just don't see anywhere. And, as I said, I'm not afraid of being labeled a "doomer", so if you have some good sources to read up on, I'm all ears (er, eyes).
  - scubbo 3y ago
    > I don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone who has any serious "long-covid" symptoms. You are fortunate. I know several who have those symptoms (ranging in age from my own - mid-30's - to my parents' - early 60's), and have had several friends relate their own observations of loved-ones. If Long Covid isn't real, there's an astonishingly-coincidental prevalence of fatigue and impaired cognition from some other source, which is correlated with those who (from my own observations) took less precautions regarding Covid and/or who caught it more often. I recognize the irony of responding to your anecdata with my own. No, I don't have any hard data to provide - though given the partisanship observed in the reporting of COVID _itself_, I have somewhat lost faith in the availability of trustworthy data about public health.
    - darkerside 3y ago
      I don't doubt the symptoms, but I think there's always been a percentage of the population that suffers from these types of symptoms. They get rediagnosed as the latest thing every so often, and the latest one is Long COVID. Even if COVID is a trigger (and really any illness could be), there's probably something else underlying all of these.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  > None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. Some fraction of us are fucked, but surely not “we” as a whole. The vast majority of people I know have had Covid (many multiple times), and the vast majority are now perfectly fine. > We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much as possible This was already impossible by Feb. 2020 when it was spreading like wildfire in China, Iran, and Italy. > to have a hope of a return to normality. We have already returned to normality, so reality doesn’t back up your assertion.
- Racing0461 3y ago
  [flagged]
- walnutclosefarm 3y ago
  > The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. SARS-CoV-2 is certainly with us to stay, so in that sense it's not over. But beyond that, I don't see how "we are so, so fucked" as you say. Covid is no doubt taking a small nibble out of life expectency, and yes there is some long Covid still taking its own nibble out of productivity and life satisfaction ... but it's not that big a part of the big picture. Covid is killing less than half as many people in the US at this point as lung cancer, and those deaths are overwhelmingly amongst the elderly. I don't want to be overtly callous, but knocking a few years of life off people well into retirement is hardly going to bring the country to its knees. There are essentially no Covid deaths among people under age 18, and among the working age population, cases requiring hospitalization or leading to long term debilitization are rare. Those who suffer, of course, suffer. We shouldn't be unsupportive of them in their trials. But Covid as a public health crisis is largely over.
  - blueskies89 3y ago
    This isn't how the math works. The reason why life expectancy is going down is because middle age people are dying. People dying in their 80s has almost no impact on life expectancy calculations
    - sixstringtheory 3y ago
      Isn’t life expectancy an average? If so, then reducing any input values (people dying earlier than they otherwise would) would reduce the average. Doesn’t matter in which n-tile the reductions occur.
      - pohuing 3y ago
        Wouldn't a person dying 40 years early have a tenfold impact on the average compared to someone dying 4 years early. Early being compared to the expectancy calculated without them.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
- CiteXieAlAlyEtc 3y ago
  > The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked You're right by way of the literature available to evaluate this claim. (Even jobs numbers are starting to note that some amount of the worker shortage is likely related to long COVID) Most of the "oh i got it [a few times] and i'm fine" posts are ignoring the long tail risks here. Unfortunately, it will take 5-20 years for many of the worst long tail consequences of mass spread of sars-cov-2 to become imminently clear. (Enjoy access to your medical specialists while you can! There's not enough slack in the system for doubled-or-worse hazard ratios for most serious conditions, lol!) Decision makers broadly prioritized public dining over prudence. For this choice, we get at least an entire generation picking up sars-cov-2, likely yearly, and our reward will be a horrifying number of early deaths and disability. This tragedy is so senseless and so avoidable. Zero COVID was and still is the rational strategy; "Let-er-rip" (and the GBD by extension) is anything but rational. Poz rates in NY state have been sitting near 60ish percent, don't forget your well fitted respirator, usps is doing another round of free test distribution (RATs but better than nothing), and good luck out there. solidarity.
  - amluto 3y ago
    > Zero COVID was and still is the rational strategy How? The vaccines are mediocre at best and are nowhere near good enough to get R < 1 (except maybe in a population where most people already had COVID, and that’s a big maybe). Masks might be effective enough if everyone wears a good one correctly, but good luck — even if you convinced people, people like eating indoors. And seeing each other’s faces, etc. And the antigen tests are not terrible sensitive.
  - brazzy 3y ago
    >This tragedy is so senseless and so avoidable. Zero COVID was and still is the rational strategy That statement is beyond ridiculous. Zero COVID was a pipe dream (as in: flat out impossible to achieve by any realistically implementable policy) by the time Omicron appeared, which really means: by the time it was spreading in Africa and India.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- glenstein 3y ago
  >This is all fine, but the focus on deaths is sort of missing the larger societal problem. The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. And to your point, it is about everyone else who couldn't get the care they needed because COVID overwhelmed our infrastructure.
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  You have to stack long COVID against the long term mental health and social effects of lockdown, including but not limited to the atrocious loss of learning in school children, domestic abuse situations that spiraled, and an already alarming teen mental health problem that Jonathan Haidt has been documenting for about a decade. Lockdowns did make sense initially, especially during the dominance of the Wuhan strain. But some countries like Taiwan and SK with experience dealing with respiratory virus pandemics opened up way sooner, smartly, and did not suffer tremendously for it.
- roenxi 3y ago
  These numbers vindicate the GBD - the change here isn't big enough to justify the society-level responses, coercion or mass human rights violations. We're seeing that the vaccine didn't even bring COVID down to sub-exponential growth. If a 3% risk of death in West Virginia justifies parking up society then a 1% risk of death in Vermont would. Neither does. If the outcome lands on people who choose to take risks, there is no need for the police to step in.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  > None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. Humans used to be "so, so fucked" when... - the volcano on the island erupted, - the harvest failed for the third year in a row - the neighbouring tribe learned to ride horses and started a campaign for domination - some strange curse fell upon the land killing ⅓ of the population which left the fields unworked and the land barren We're still the same species with the same instincts for survival, the same alarm mechanisms for detecting impending catastrophic situations and the same urge to act upon impending disasters. Modern society has - especially since the introduction of antibiotics - largely done away with those traditional doom scenarios. We're no longer starving, no longer dying in droves from infectious diseases, no longer totally at the mercy of nature... but our alarm mechanisms are still in place although they are differently tuned in different people. In some people - you seem to be one of those - these mechanisms are so finely tuned that they pick up minute signals which are amplified until they trigger the 'impending catastrophic situation' alarm (we're so, so fucked) where those same signals do not even register for others. The same is true for other triggers like 'climate change', 'migration', 'systemic ...-ism' and others where some people are completely taken over by their alarms going off where others don't even hear a single bell. Many of these triggers - 'systemic ...-ism' and to a lesser extent 'migration' being prime examples - are intentionally amplified because those who do the amplification stand to gain power (and money) by doing so, others - 'climate change' - are being used by third parties for monetary gain ('greenwashing' and the multitude of 'green' scams like 'carbon offsets'/'carbon credits') or political power. Are we 'fucked'? That depends on who you ask. Ask me and I'll say "only if we want to be". Is SARS-2 going to be with us for the foreseeable future? Yes, most likely. Is that a big problem? No, not really since it has rapidly mutated to become 'yet another Corona-related upper airway infection' while our species has developed a form of natural immunity which has taken the edge off the disease. Upper airway diseases are annoying and lead to a loss in productivity, sure, but they tend not to mail or kill. What remains is the long tail of the initial pandemic and even more of the (over)reaction to it, especially in those countries which had strict lockdown regimes. Recovering from the damage caused by those measures will take a lot of time and money and it can only be hoped that a lesson will be learned from this experience. As to returning to 'normality' I can safely state that we have done so quite a while ago here in Sweden [1]. [1] https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-lower-pandemic-mortality-than-denmark-and-norway https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-...
SilverBirch 3y ago
I think the funny thing is that Nate can be a flippant twit on Twitter but has totally fallen for it in critiques of him. Essentially this article is “a bunch of people baselessly speculated about an assertion I made, so I’m going to spend lots of time proving something they don’t care about”
- MauranKilom 3y ago
  As a bystander this seems accurate, but at the end of the article Nate himself states that he has little hope that it will convince people on Twitter/X. It's more about credibility to his own readership, I suppose.
  - onthecanposting 3y ago
    I think he's writing to convince himself more than his readers, if he has any.
    - SilverBirch 3y ago
      Look him up, he has readers.
  - abirch 3y ago
    Getting in an argument (vs disagreement) in real life is worthless. Getting into an argument on the Internet has even less value. Personally I think this was an easy article for him to write because he already had the data and he wants more subscribers (please take this take as neutral opinion and not a dis to Silver)
    - stu2b50 3y ago
      That depends on what the goal is. It's worthless if you're trying to convince the other side. But in many cases, you're actually trying to convince the audience, and certainly for something like a blogpost here, I'd argue that it is not only the case, but successful, since at minimum we know it got posted to hackernews and has traction.
wilg 3y ago
I'm excited to find out in 20 years what the deal was with Covid once everybody has forgotten all their political opinions.
- iwonthecase 3y ago
  Good luck, there's still academics debating about the 1977 "Russian" flu [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu
  - Aachen 3y ago
    > The outbreak in northern China started in May 1977 Coincidence? Do they have a climate conducive to these sorts of viruses combined with a large enough population to make it likely they get infected first or is this my selection bias in noticing when it says "started in China" versus any other country?
    - philjohn 3y ago
      Large population that lives very close to natural reservoirs for viruses. Spillover is a great book to read about zoonotic diseases.
    - pvg 3y ago
      It would be odd vs any other country if any other country contained a quarter of the world population in 1977.
- Aachen 3y ago
  To me on an individual level, it feels like there isn't much unclear about covid if you know how to filter unlikely conspiracy theories and such. In what way do you see politics colouring the generally established information?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
notjoemama 3y ago
“Until vaccines became available, there was little difference in COVID death rates between blue states and red states. After vaccines became available, there were clear differences, with red states having higher death rates, almost certainly as a result of lower vaccine uptake among Republicans.” These are the claims he makes and arguably the data shows these to be true. The rest looks like whining where he objects to failures like “ice cream causes drowning” then eventually comes around to show the most applicable categorical statement is “states with higher vaccination rates had lower death rates. Sure. There’s a political divide that causes differences in behavior and outcomes. I don’t know. I spent the time reading but I can’t find any value in that post. Seems like venting to me.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fwungy 3y ago
I really don't trust any of the numbers on covid. A vaccine for a dangerous illness that can affect billions of people is a very big payday. There's lots of money to spread around to politicians, corrupt scientists, and corrupt media. I'd like to see a real scientific debate with adversarial inquiry so we could know if numbers are being fudged and which ones they are. I trust science, but not greed driven capitalists corporations. Having a measure of distrust for pharmaceutical companies given their historical record is prudent.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been approved by the national health agencies of dozens of countries, and China has approved a very similar home grown mRNA Covid vaccine. No amount of money in the world could pay to do that and keep it secret.
  - fwungy 3y ago
    Corrupt government officials get a commission on big contracts. It happens all the time. Why do you think people spend so much campaigning for low paying political offices? They can be quite lucrative investments. There are NDAs and other threats to shutdown whistleblowers.
    - sarchertech 3y ago
      Think about how many people were involved in the approvals across the entire globe? Most of the approvals processes were conducted in public by career scientists and doctors. There were tens of thousands of people involved that would have to look the other way. Any company that’s capable of pulling off a global operation like that with absolutely zero exposure, is already running the world and doesn’t need to bother with piddly $40 billion scams.
      - fwungy 3y ago
        You don't become a career scientist or doctor by rocking the boat. A medical degree is a huge investment. Doctors have student loans and families. Anyone who sticks their neck out is at risk of losing their license or research grants.
pierat 3y ago
[flagged]
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > Republicans were frothing at the mouth over hydroxcloroquine or whatever that horse dewormer was. No, they weren't. The foaming was from the other side of the aisle, in a similar vein to your post. Hydroxychloroquine was investigated quite a bit[0], found wanting, and dropped. The horse dewormer story you're confusing it with; I think this was a Joe Rogan thing, where his doctor prescribed him the human form of Ivermectin, and he mentioned it, and the left-leaning media (even though, as usual, Joe Rogan is a left-leaning guy on almost every issue) sent the story round the world that he was taking horse dewormer, before the truth could get its boots on. As for masks - who knows? The largest metastudy in existence on the subject seems rather less sure than you about them[1]. Maybe that metastudy is flawed, but it seems worth considering at least. > My dark thoughts: hmm, let as many republicans die from COVID. Maybe we can do better with govt with them killing themselves. I'm not sure what to say about this, except I hope you can stand down a little from your aggressive, hyper-partisan emotionalism. You cannot contribute anything if you're just regurgitating memorised emotional responses others have installed in you. [0] e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECOVERY_Trial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECOVERY_Trial [1] https://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-physical-interventions-interrupt-or-reduce-spread-respiratory-viruses https://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-physical-inter...
  - fabian2k 3y ago
    There absolutely was an enormous amount of misinformation around Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. And as far as it was picked up politically, that was almost exclusively by Republicans. And Hydroxychloroquine was certainly dropped much later than it should have. It was added to studies in the control branch because people were expecting it to be the standard of care. There never was justification for that, but it was unreasonably hyped from the start.
  - hwillis 3y ago
    > The foaming was from the other side of the aisle, in a similar vein to your post. That's a WILD thing to say. People are still going crazy over ivermectin, an senators are still posting conspiracy theories about it: https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1690009000857710592 https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1690009000857710592 > The largest metastudy in existence on the subject seems rather less sure than you about them[1]. Maybe that metastudy is flawed From Cochrane themselves: https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventions-interrupt-or-reduce-spread-respiratory-viruses-review https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventio... > For example, in the most heavily-weighted trial of interventions to promote community mask wearing, 42.3% of people in the intervention arm wore masks compared to 13.3% of those in the control arm. And the study still found that they work, just not the 50% reduction they considered statistically significant. Small wonder given the above. > Joe Rogan is a left-leaning guy on almost every issue hilarious
Amorymeltzer 3y ago
For those curious (as I was) what he's using, it looks like Stata: https://www.reed.edu/psychology/stata/analyses/parametric/Regression/regress.html https://www.reed.edu/psychology/stata/analyses/parametric/Re...
- Aachen 3y ago
  Was looking for a download, but there's precious little about that on the website. The closest I got were these remarks: > On all Reed lab computers, Stata is located in the Applications folder. > Stata can be found in the Applications folder of any school machine. On a PC, it is most likely located in Program Files. Does that imply it's neither open source nor even commercially available? Seems rather odd, surely it is either of those two
  - mb7733 3y ago
    That isn't the home page for Stata, that is a page put up by Reed about where to find Stata on their computers. Go to stata.com
  - ikjasdlk2234 3y ago
    Stata is fairly ubiquitous in statistical circles, especially those working in econometrics. While I preferred using Stata in academia, it is expensive and R is similar, just not as easy to use.
    - Breza 3y ago
      Agreed. Stata makes common statistical operations easy, and the higher-level licenses are extremely powerful. But I prefer R because it's so much more flexible when trying to perform more complex data manipulations. Plus lots of statistical papers with new techniques include R code.
  - Amorymeltzer 3y ago
    As noted in other replies, this isn’t the Stata homepage, but rather an academic page about the use of the program. Apologies for the confusion, I chose it because it has images that neatly match what Silver shows.
Mordisquitos 3y ago
I have to nitpick Nate Silver on a tangential point here (emphasis mine) > The more complications you introduce into an analysis, the more confounding variables that you attempt to control for, the more you expand researcher degrees of freedom — in other words, decision points by the analyst about how to run the numbers. > I don’t think it’s quite right to say these decisions are arbitrary. Ideally they’ll reflect a statistician’s judgment, experience and familiarity with the subject matter. But, according to the sentence immediately following the one I highlighted, it absolutely is quite right to say those decisions are arbitrary! They are arbitrary inasmuch as they are arbitrated by the statistician's educated judgement and experience. That these decisions are arbitrary does not intrinsically strip away their value. Rather, it subordinates their value to the presumed ability of their arbiter — in this case the statistician, whom we presuppose is well trained and capable. I feel that in common parlance the word "arbitrary" is undergoing the opposite process of the term "literally". Where one word is losing its meaning by arbitrarily narrowing it down too much, the other is literally losing its meaning by making it too broad. It figuratively grinds my gears.
- burkaman 3y ago
  I don't think the word "arbitrary" is currently undergoing any change, it hasn't been used the way you use it in like 400+ years.
  - diogenes4 3y ago
    Wait, so what does arbitrary mean to you if not "the result of a judgement or choice"? Is it just a synonym for random to you?
    - staticfloat 3y ago
      Yes, that’s what it means for me. I’ve never heard someone use the word arbitrary to mean anything other than “a random choice”, or even “a poorly thought-out choice”. My professors in grad school explicitly discouraged use of that word anywhere in technical writing, as they felt it would immediately give the reader the impression that the actions taken in the research were not thought through. Example: “This new technique enables arbitrary manipulations of data” should instead be replaced by something like “this technique enables a wide range of manipulations of data”.
phkahler 3y ago
>> This wasn’t intended as any sort of super-duper hot take, and I pared the post down to avoid having too much of an attack surface. It is intended to shame Republicans. What other possible reason is there to tie death rates to political party? So yes it was a hot take. You planted a lightning rod. Making something like vaccination a political issue does everyone a disservice.
- mjmsmith 3y ago
  It certainly did a disservice to the people who died because their politics convinced them that the vaccine was worse than the disease.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    The idea that nobody should ever point that fact out seems crazy to me. We should be using this as an example when teaching critical thinking skills to kids in schools so that they know not to let political ideology and lies manipulate them into the grave.
- RIMR 3y ago
  Yeah, let's not make this political. /s
- orblivion 3y ago
  It also shames Democrats to an extent because they were more likely to support restrictions before the vaccines.
- lemmsjid 3y ago
  While I’m a democrat, I don’t believe republicans or democrats are inherently better people, or that their overarching ideologies are inherently better. In fact I am a strong believer that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and neither republicans or democrats should win it all. That said, certain Republicans should very much feel shame about the fear mongering behind the vaccine. It isn’t automatically a hot take or a lightning rod to use statistical analyses to suggest that systemic fear mongering against a vaccine that has a powerful effect would lead to excess death. The vaccine long ago became a political issue, but the real world need for people to take it doesn’t go away because of that.
flashback2199 3y ago
A regression analysis without one single graph rolls eyes
- Izkata 3y ago
  For the downvoters, we even have a name for this: Anscombe's quartet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet Always visualize your data.
  - biorach 3y ago
    The downvotes were due to the complete lack of context in the vaguely derogatory post.
    - flashback2199 3y ago
      Plots are such a basic expectation for stats that I don't see why I should be required to write more about it..
      - biorach 3y ago
        just give some context dammit
da39a3ee 3y ago
There should be scatter plots or other data visualizations in a post like this.
mcguire 3y ago
Ok, so now I want to see the details of his first claim, "Until vaccines became available, there was little difference in COVID death rates between blue states and red states."
- mcguire 3y ago
  Note: not because I don't believe it; I just want to see the evidence.
rcbdev 3y ago
I don't know about other countries but in Austria nurses were highly incentivized to report deaths immediately following a vaccination or weeks after an infection has passed as a covid death in the sense of national statistics. I would not be surprised if this "nudging" of on the ground reports over the course of the pandemic has rendered the data around covid deaths unreliable.
- gregw2 3y ago
  Overall death rates shouldn’t be affected by this. Were they?
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  The death counts from Canada from that era are very questionable. As early as June of 2020, the "public health" authority in Canada's most-populous city (4th highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious: "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto." https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/1275888390060285967 https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596... By mid-2021, there were news reports like the following ("LTC" stands for "long-term care"): "Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-military-report-documents-deplorable-conditions-at-two/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili... After stuff like that and everything else that went on from 2020 through 2022, I can't trust "public health" officials at all at this point.
  - Yoric 3y ago
    I don't have reference from the top of my head, but I seem to remember that the UK also started with the same counting methodology, then fixed it a few months into COVID. If my memory serves, the difference between the curves was pretty negligible.
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    Attributing what happened in Ontario to the whole of Canada is something that happens way too often. As a Western Canadian resident, I don't think it's fair or reasonable to extrapolate about all of Canada from a single tweet from a TO health authority, and an article with a disclaimer about it's own accuracy. There well may be problems, but please keep in mind that while 50% of Canadians live between Montreal and Toronto, 50% of Canadians don't, and many of us live lifestyles that have absolutely nothing to do with that region and it's governance.
todd8 3y ago
Here are a few observations. From the CDC [1], 2020 total covid deaths by state: West Virginia 1318, Florida 21546, Maine 344, Vermont 134. The corresponding April 2020 census populations [2] for these four states are: West Virginia 1793716, Florida 21538187, Maine 1362359, Vermont 643077. Thus, before the vaccines for covid were available the deaths per 100,000 persons for these four states are: West Virginia 73, Florida 100, Vermont 21, Maine 25. Someone should probably check my math, but it looks like voting for Trump causes over three times as many deaths even before vaccinations were available. In other words, the analysis in the original article may be affected by unaccounted for confounding factors. For example, COPD is a significant medical risk factor for serious covid complications according to the CDC. COPD affects over 13.6% of the population of West Virginia (the worst rate in the country) but affects only 5.9% of the population of Vermont [3]. Personally, I chose to get vaccinated and boosted at the earliest possible dates. I also caught covid during the initial big wave of omicron cases in my state. [1] https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/99750 https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/99750 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... [3] https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/copd-trends-brief/data-tables/copd-prevalence-rates-by-state-gender https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/copd-tr...
- vharuck 3y ago
  I'd say the pre-vax differences likely came from how people treated public health advice and precautions. If somebody believed it was no worse than the flu or even didn't exist (like some of my in-laws in Summer 2020), they would be far more likely to catch it, spread it, and receive poor treatment. Those differences in behavior would carry over to vaccination rates, since that's also responding to public health recommendations. It's hard to believe Silver didn't do the analysis on pre-vax death rates, but he didn't mention it so I don't know. If COPD and similar conditions were the major difference, I would expect the difference in death rates to be closer to 2.3x (13.6%/5.9%) than 2.9x (73/25 per 100k). Those are very different ratios. And I don't know about any other complicating conditions with larger relative rates than 2.3x for those two states. Obesity is only 1.3x higher in West Virginia. So this gets back to Silver's point: you can almost always find other contributors, but that doesn't necessarily prove something else didn't contribute. You have to do that analysis all together. But complicating health conditions don't seem to be able to account for the differences, even before a regression test.
Waterluvian 3y ago
It was a hard thing to broach at the time without people frothing at the mouth about how I must be anti vaccine or something: Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them? I’m guessing it’s hard to quantify and compare. A lot of things like general depression, isolation, kids missing half a year of school, etc. can’t really be evaluated against people dying. And on its surface it seems obvious: uh, people dying is much worse than any of those things. But if I said that everything we did was to save one life, people probably would generally agree it wasn’t worth it (obviously so: people don’t seem too interested in preventing all kinds of deaths at all costs). What about ten lives? One thousand? Ten thousand? There’s some subjective level where it starts to feel obvious to more and more of us, until a majority of us agree. But do we have any general sense what that number is? How do we decide how much to care? It might seem ghoulish to decide how many dollars is worth a life, but we do it every day. With the data we have now, I imagine we can somewhat quantify this given enough sample jurisdictions with different rules? “Masking saves x lives per 1000.” “Closing schools saves y lives per 1000” etc. And perhaps then we’re able to decide “is x lives worth the qualitative harm done?” Probably. “What about y?” Maybe not.
- fhcuvuvuc 3y ago
  It doesn't matter. You can't have these conversations without being censored anymore. My works HR department got sick of having people use "logic" and "evidence" to argue against their policies. After kicking a few people out the door and generally saying you can't talk about this at work anymore, nobody talks about it.
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    Thats the company’s choice to make. A workplace isn’t exactly meant to be a town square. Luckily my workplace was mature enough to decide to leave those topics for the pub and social media so we didn’t have to be told that.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3y ago
shyn3 3y ago
Thanks for helping power the Internet
tegmark 3y ago
compare all cause mortality before and after covid in red and blue states. its that simple
fredgrott 3y ago
A thing not addressed Was it the cost benefit of less people dying or our entire health system collapsing and causing massive more deaths.
tommykins 3y ago
I will never understand the use of Stata to achieve anything.
- pottertheotter 3y ago
  What does this mean? I used Stata a ton during my PhD. It’s not my preferred software for statistical analysis but it does a regression the same as anything else.
ezekiel68 3y ago
I was a good US citizen and used what little influence I had among my social circle to encourage others to follow the COVID protection measures. And I adore Nate Silver. So, pardon me if I confess that all I read in this article was: Blah blah blah 'I mostly agree with ... an October 2020 anti-lockdown statement signed by a large number of scientists and medical professionals. “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal”' blah blah. I don't have any regrets about the position I took, since it seemed to be based on all the verified information we had at the time. YET, I hope our society will embrace the fact that we were largely wrong to prolong the lockdown measures. Humility doesn't hurt the Left either.
- pwarner 3y ago
  Almost everyone was pretty wrong about COVID, at least at some points in time. But it's very rare for anyone to admit it. I'll admit I was wrong, between sanitizing my hands when it was really in the air, to assuming the vaccines would end it. Lots of mistakes on my end!
  - lethoso 3y ago
    Sanitizing your hands, that must really haunt you.
    - LudwigNagasena 3y ago
      Pouring alcohol on your hands every day isn’t really a good habit in the long term.
  - listenallyall 3y ago
    This "everybody was wrong" and "whoopsie!" self-absolution is some of the ugliest and most hypocritical parts of the entire Covid phenomenon. No -- plenty of people were ardently against lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school shutdowns, but all kinds of pundits and self-selected rule enforcers loudly lambasted and insulted them endlessly. Many, many lives were permanently affected in multiple, very negative ways, with no chance of returning to pre-covid "normal." The resentment and frustration from individual lives being crushed while the entire ordeal seemingly aligned and advanced corporate interests, is only triggered further by the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ attitude.
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
I think if one calls themselves a statistician, they should do a proper analysis or at least reference such analysis. This is either a joke or a first homework assignment one would do to learn Stata.
plaidfuji 3y ago
Although the body of this article is about Covid policies and vaccine usage, which seems to have set off a whole round of discussion here on that topic, my sense was that the point of this article was more general: > So my aim is generally to focus on stylized facts that are true and robust. And to keep repeating them. I like simple (or simple-seeming) claims that — and I can’t emphasize this last part enough — I expect will hold up to scrutiny. As somebody who presents results of analyses and models for a living, I couldn’t agree more. Present the simplest possible finding that gets the point across and move on. Maybe mention “and this holds up when accounting for x, y, z”, or just keep those analyses in the backup slides in case you have a feisty audience member. Nobody cares how complex your model is, just that it works.
- gpt5 3y ago
  To be fair, COVID's death rate has such a strong association with (very) old age, that not accounting for it is quite questionable. In the article, Nate mentioned himself that Mormon population is 100x higher in Utah and that's a significant effect. The COVID death rate of over 85 years old is more than 100x higher than the very young. I'm not questioning the results, just that accounting for age when analyzing COVID is definitely a reasonable question to ask for any conclusion.
anyonecancode 3y ago
I think for the pre-vaccine period, there's at least a couple issues that are still very unclear: - how well did official policies map to actual behavior? I expect a lot of people still masked and distanced, regardless of what their particular state's policies were - what specific behaviors actually made a difference? (Well, maybe it's really just a question of how much difference masking made -- I'd expect it's pretty clear that avoiding other people was pretty effective) So for me, a more interesting and, I'd argue, practical question, is really about how effective _policy_ is. There were definitely a lot of costs, as it helped politicize things (who would have guess masks would become a partisan issue?). I think of the case of Sweden, for example, where IIUC behavior was pretty cautious although policy was pretty loose.

321 points by sieste 3y ago

Isn't Nate falling for the Table 2 fallacy here? (Edit: Perhaps not, but it took drawing the DAG for me to be convinced.)

KerrAvon 3y ago

This is all fine, but the focus on deaths is sort of missing the larger societal problem. The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. edit: Which is to say: The Great Barrington Declaration was wrong directionally as well. We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much as possible to have a hope of a return to normality. Death is not the only issue with COVID. Too fucking late now, but anyone who supported that is a quack and should have been stripped of their license.

cm2012 3y ago
Good news then that long covid is probably not a real issue
noirbot 3y ago
I haven't read the specifics of the GBD, but isn't some of the "it was clearly quackery" confounded by: 1. In 2020 especially, and even now, the specifics of long covid and other side effects, as compared to other downsides of lockdowns on mental health/delayed treatments are hard to predict? We don't have the counterfactual of what would have been the 3-5-10 year implications of a multi-year lockdown. 2. Does the general directionality of that change in a world where it's obvious that global lockdown/elimination of covid wasn't feasible because there isn't some global government to impose it? As long as a large enough population wasn't going along with the elimination strategy, it makes it less viable and more costly for everyone else. If the "2 week lockdown and it all goes away" had happened, then absolutely that would have been right. If all of, say, Europe doesn't lock down and everywhere else does, then how long of a lockdown do you need in order to have it do anything, and at that length, what other major problems emerge? At least personally, the point I somewhat gave up on elimination was when the first variants started emerging from South Africa and Europe. It seems like that's generally borne out too - I'd be curious what the infection/long covid rates in the more successfully locked down countries like New Zealand or Japan are at this point.
- b112 3y ago
  The problem is, even lockdowns weren't lockdowns. There were endless people who had to work, just to keep water, power, food flowing. And those people needed transportation. And past 2 weeks, transportation means parts for vehicles, maintenance, gas, oil, and food means transportation and food processors and.... It was a good idea at the time, but doomed to fail.
  - mikem170 3y ago
    Agreed. There's a lot of animals that can catch and spread covid [0]: > many if not most mammalian ACE-2 receptors are susceptible > the virus has gone from humans to the animals and back again to human > found signs of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in significant percentages of six urban wildlife species > found signs of the pathogen infecting 17 percent of New York City sewer rats tested > Exposure could also occur following interactions with pets such as cats and dogs Lockdowns were never going to be able to eliminate the virus. [0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-many-animal-species-contract-covid https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...
    - autoexec 3y ago
      I'm not too worried about a random sick deer in the middle of some forest infecting a whole bunch of humans. The worry with animals is that they could mutate the virus into something much more nasty. Especially in factory farm settings where animals aren't properly cared for and are packed in like sardines while covered in shit and open sores, and where workers who are also treated terribly could end up getting exposed. Lockdowns could do a lot to reduce spread and protect people from infection in large population centers, but certain areas are basically breeding grounds for disease and even before covid they were a risk for things like antibiotic resistant bacteria. Ignoring them was always going to be a problem.
      - mikem170 3y ago
        I brought up covid in animals because the original poster mentioned the elimination of covid in the context of lockdowns. The fact that covid can move between animal and human populations would seem to mean that lockdowns for the purpose of elimination will not work. Eventually humans would be reinfected from animals - mice, rats, pets, etc. This has perhaps already happened. There is dna evidence that omicron evolved in mice and then jumped back into humans [0]. On the idea of lockdowns to eliminate the virus: > The coronavirus’ ability to infect so many different animals, and to spread within some of those populations, is worrying news: It means there’s virtually no chance the world will ever be rid of this particularly destructive coronavirus, scientists said [1]. It would be a bummer to be locked down for months or years in an effort to eliminate the virus, and have to deal with the negative repercussions of lockdowns during and afterwards, only for everyone to become reinfected again from animals, and the whole thing start up again. My apologies if I misunderstood your reply. You did seem to have a different angle than the original post. I just don't get it when people mention lockdowns to eliminate covid, when such a thing isn't possible. I'm not sure what to say about your concern that animals can evolve a more dangerous virus. That seems like it can go either way. Animal evolved variants can also be less dangerous, like omicron, which is a good thing. Also locked down humans could be more vulnerable to more dangerous variants, their immune systems not having any prior exposure. How can anyone be so sure lockdowns always help? [0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-did-omicron-evolve-in-mice https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-did-omicr... [1] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-06-09/coronavirus-is-spreading-among-animals-that-ramps-up-risk-to-people https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-06-09/coronavirus...
gadders 3y ago
You seem to have lived through a different pandemic than the rest of the world. It's hard to say the GBD was wrong when Sweden didn't lock down and they weren't exactly seeing bodies pile up in the street. Covid is now here to stay, ranking somewhere in severity between the common cold, flu or pneumonia.
- leksak 3y ago
  I think the severity of long Covid might be more debilitating as it is my understanding that the long-term consequences of pneumonia is not as long lasting. I've not known of people that have had to change their whole way of life, and possibly their career, because of pneumonia or flu but have met a few that have had to do so as a consequence of long Covid.
  - kbelder 3y ago
    I think it's very possible there ARE occasional life-long consequences of the flu and other such infections that are so normalized we don't even notice.
  - gadders 3y ago
    Apart from having taste or smell affected, I don't know anyone with "long COVID".
    - kenjackson 3y ago
      I know a few people who are impacted by it. But they all, if I recall correctly, have confounding factors. For example, I know two people with MS where Covid has completely wrecked havoc -- and a year or so later are still largely devastated.
      - marginalia_nu 3y ago
        There's also the fact that for a lot of people, COVID isolation meant a precipitous decline in physical and social activity that lasted for years. We know this stuff can fuck you up pretty bad both mentally and physically. Depressive symptoms and a steep decline in physical fitness is very much the expected outcome from that.
bugglebeetle 3y ago
[flagged]
- cptskippy 3y ago
  What has the Republican party done exactly to support OSHA protections or worker benefits? Nothing? Oh so perhaps it isn't about the party but about how our politicians are bought and sold by business interests. Please stop trying to make something partisan that isn't.
- postmodest 3y ago
  Yeah, we should vote for the other party to punish the--what? That's their platform? Oh. Posts like this, which blame only the Democrats by name, are practically agitprop.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    The real fuckery is the system-wide insistence that there's only two sides to every debate and that the line between the two parties defines the terms of the debate.
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    The person you're replying to didn't suggest voting for Republicans; that's just something you invented because of the uniquely American habit of assuming politics is a zero-sum game with exactly two players. I hate the state of our political system so much...
kingds 3y ago
in what ways have we not already returned to normality?
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  I think we’ve returned to a new, more callous form of reality, where mass injury, illness, and death are normalized, and any real concern for public health or intervention, including that which was considered entirely rational before COVID, is now greeted as impossible or insanity.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Yea, this is one of the sad long term consequences I've taken away from COVID: I used to think that when a crisis happened, we would all pull together and rely on each other to do the right thing and collectively act to help. Now, I know that when the next crisis happens, half of the country is going to whine and complain, deny, protest, defy, and belligerently do everything in their power to deliberately make it worse. I've totally lost faith in humanity.
- iwonthecase 3y ago
  Well flu vaccination rates are down from pre-covid levels, I'd guess more antivax sentiment's also impacting other common vaccines.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    This inanity is impacting even vaccination rates for rabies in pets! https://time.com/5538926/dogs-vaccines-antivaxxers/ https://time.com/5538926/dogs-vaccines-antivaxxers/
- cptskippy 3y ago
  I think it very much depends on where you live. Rural America returned to normal a long time ago. Many cities, like San Francisco and Atlanta, have not and are still feeling the effects to varying degrees.
nradov 3y ago
That is misinformation. The risk of "long COVID" has been widely overstated. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2023-112338 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2023-112338 Most any serious viral infection can potentially cause post-viral syndrome, but there is nothing particularly dangerous about SARS-CoV-2. And there is no realistic possibility of eliminating that virus. There is no sterilizing vaccine. It is now endemic worldwide through humans and multiple animal species. It's time to move on. The notion of punishing people for exercising their freedom of expression is horrifying. That is unacceptable in a modern liberal society.
- Yoric 3y ago
  Interesting read, but as far as I can tell, this has not been peer-reviewed. At a casual glance, it didn't seem to be a survey or a summary of peer-reviewed research, either. In other words, if I'm right, this is an opinion piece.
- blueskies89 3y ago
  [flagged]
- YeezyMode 3y ago
  It isn't misinformation. Here is a study that basically rebuts every implication of the study you linked: https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/1706332965792272722?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1706332965792272722%7Ctwgr%5Eb20d95af30aaf47198d512bdd5cee0fbd25e6820%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FCoronavirus%2Fcomments%2F16svf05%2Fhow_methodological_pitfalls_have_created%2F https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/17063329657922727... Another link questioning the process behind the entire study itself: https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-an-analysis-of-the-body-of-research-on-long-covid-suggesting-potential-methodological-flaws/ https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-an-ana...
jsnell 3y ago
Eliminating Covid stopped being an option roughly around January 2020. The partial elimination you seem to be implying with "as much as possible" was never an option. It was always all or nothing.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  and China tried really, really hard to eliminate it over the next 3 years. They couldn't.
  - orangecat 3y ago
    Right, and they had the "advantages" of having no limitations on government power, and assigning no value to individual freedom. If they couldn't do it, it's lunacy to believe that anyone else could.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  Even NZ gave up on our island defence once Omicron got in. We'd managed to stave off widespread Delta, but Omicron was far more transmissible, but also, far less lethal, and its arrival and spread came just after we started vaccinating. So by then the cost/benefit analysis made it clear that reopening, while bringing more sickness, would ultimately cost less than not. The isolation caused some havoc in our economy that we're still recovering from, but large amounts of excess deaths brings its own economic impacts that would likely have been far worse.
umvi 3y ago
> None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. In what sense? I'm in a deep red state, and I haven't noticed much "devastation" in my community due to COVID. Seems like you can work yourself up about anything. Doomscroll enough Type 2 diabetes articles and you'll convince yourself that COVID is the absolute least of USA's public health problems compared to the complications resulting from that.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Why not both? COVID outcomes tend to be worse for diabetics and COVID infection increases the risk of developing diabetes as well.
PheonixPharts 3y ago
> None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. I love doom more than the average person, by what I would say is a quite significant margin... but I don't see this at all. I've had covid at least twice, including some awful symptoms a month after recovery that had me convinced I had long covid as well... a few months later (now years) not so much. While I do know many people of who have lost loved ones from Covid, I don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone who has any serious "long-covid" symptoms. To be clear, I'm not doubting that long-covid exists. But I'm very skeptical, based on my own observations, that "we are so, so fucked" and covid of all things is the source of that "fucking". Personally I think a lot of the post-covid strangeness is because, for a variety of other reasons (not the least of which is rapidly progressing climate change), people are under tremendous stress and at the same time can't quite articulate what that stress is, nor find relief from it. A lot of people (not me) did believe there was going to be a return to normal post-covid, and the increasingly obvious impossibility of this is causing people to have tremendous mental health problems. But long-covid itself being the source is something that I just don't see anywhere. And, as I said, I'm not afraid of being labeled a "doomer", so if you have some good sources to read up on, I'm all ears (er, eyes).
- scubbo 3y ago
  > I don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone who has any serious "long-covid" symptoms. You are fortunate. I know several who have those symptoms (ranging in age from my own - mid-30's - to my parents' - early 60's), and have had several friends relate their own observations of loved-ones. If Long Covid isn't real, there's an astonishingly-coincidental prevalence of fatigue and impaired cognition from some other source, which is correlated with those who (from my own observations) took less precautions regarding Covid and/or who caught it more often. I recognize the irony of responding to your anecdata with my own. No, I don't have any hard data to provide - though given the partisanship observed in the reporting of COVID _itself_, I have somewhat lost faith in the availability of trustworthy data about public health.
  - darkerside 3y ago
    I don't doubt the symptoms, but I think there's always been a percentage of the population that suffers from these types of symptoms. They get rediagnosed as the latest thing every so often, and the latest one is Long COVID. Even if COVID is a trigger (and really any illness could be), there's probably something else underlying all of these.
School-Cotton 3y ago
> None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. Some fraction of us are fucked, but surely not “we” as a whole. The vast majority of people I know have had Covid (many multiple times), and the vast majority are now perfectly fine. > We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much as possible This was already impossible by Feb. 2020 when it was spreading like wildfire in China, Iran, and Italy. > to have a hope of a return to normality. We have already returned to normality, so reality doesn’t back up your assertion.
Racing0461 3y ago
[flagged]
walnutclosefarm 3y ago
> The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. SARS-CoV-2 is certainly with us to stay, so in that sense it's not over. But beyond that, I don't see how "we are so, so fucked" as you say. Covid is no doubt taking a small nibble out of life expectency, and yes there is some long Covid still taking its own nibble out of productivity and life satisfaction ... but it's not that big a part of the big picture. Covid is killing less than half as many people in the US at this point as lung cancer, and those deaths are overwhelmingly amongst the elderly. I don't want to be overtly callous, but knocking a few years of life off people well into retirement is hardly going to bring the country to its knees. There are essentially no Covid deaths among people under age 18, and among the working age population, cases requiring hospitalization or leading to long term debilitization are rare. Those who suffer, of course, suffer. We shouldn't be unsupportive of them in their trials. But Covid as a public health crisis is largely over.
- blueskies89 3y ago
  This isn't how the math works. The reason why life expectancy is going down is because middle age people are dying. People dying in their 80s has almost no impact on life expectancy calculations
  - sixstringtheory 3y ago
    Isn’t life expectancy an average? If so, then reducing any input values (people dying earlier than they otherwise would) would reduce the average. Doesn’t matter in which n-tile the reductions occur.
    - pohuing 3y ago
      Wouldn't a person dying 40 years early have a tenfold impact on the average compared to someone dying 4 years early. Early being compared to the expectancy calculated without them.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
CiteXieAlAlyEtc 3y ago
> The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked You're right by way of the literature available to evaluate this claim. (Even jobs numbers are starting to note that some amount of the worker shortage is likely related to long COVID) Most of the "oh i got it [a few times] and i'm fine" posts are ignoring the long tail risks here. Unfortunately, it will take 5-20 years for many of the worst long tail consequences of mass spread of sars-cov-2 to become imminently clear. (Enjoy access to your medical specialists while you can! There's not enough slack in the system for doubled-or-worse hazard ratios for most serious conditions, lol!) Decision makers broadly prioritized public dining over prudence. For this choice, we get at least an entire generation picking up sars-cov-2, likely yearly, and our reward will be a horrifying number of early deaths and disability. This tragedy is so senseless and so avoidable. Zero COVID was and still is the rational strategy; "Let-er-rip" (and the GBD by extension) is anything but rational. Poz rates in NY state have been sitting near 60ish percent, don't forget your well fitted respirator, usps is doing another round of free test distribution (RATs but better than nothing), and good luck out there. solidarity.
- amluto 3y ago
  > Zero COVID was and still is the rational strategy How? The vaccines are mediocre at best and are nowhere near good enough to get R < 1 (except maybe in a population where most people already had COVID, and that’s a big maybe). Masks might be effective enough if everyone wears a good one correctly, but good luck — even if you convinced people, people like eating indoors. And seeing each other’s faces, etc. And the antigen tests are not terrible sensitive.
- brazzy 3y ago
  >This tragedy is so senseless and so avoidable. Zero COVID was and still is the rational strategy That statement is beyond ridiculous. Zero COVID was a pipe dream (as in: flat out impossible to achieve by any realistically implementable policy) by the time Omicron appeared, which really means: by the time it was spreading in Africa and India.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
glenstein 3y ago
>This is all fine, but the focus on deaths is sort of missing the larger societal problem. The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. And to your point, it is about everyone else who couldn't get the care they needed because COVID overwhelmed our infrastructure.
lr4444lr 3y ago
You have to stack long COVID against the long term mental health and social effects of lockdown, including but not limited to the atrocious loss of learning in school children, domestic abuse situations that spiraled, and an already alarming teen mental health problem that Jonathan Haidt has been documenting for about a decade. Lockdowns did make sense initially, especially during the dominance of the Wuhan strain. But some countries like Taiwan and SK with experience dealing with respiratory virus pandemics opened up way sooner, smartly, and did not suffer tremendously for it.
roenxi 3y ago
These numbers vindicate the GBD - the change here isn't big enough to justify the society-level responses, coercion or mass human rights violations. We're seeing that the vaccine didn't even bring COVID down to sub-exponential growth. If a 3% risk of death in West Virginia justifies parking up society then a 1% risk of death in Vermont would. Neither does. If the outcome lands on people who choose to take risks, there is no need for the police to step in.
the_third_wave 3y ago
> None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. Humans used to be "so, so fucked" when... - the volcano on the island erupted, - the harvest failed for the third year in a row - the neighbouring tribe learned to ride horses and started a campaign for domination - some strange curse fell upon the land killing ⅓ of the population which left the fields unworked and the land barren We're still the same species with the same instincts for survival, the same alarm mechanisms for detecting impending catastrophic situations and the same urge to act upon impending disasters. Modern society has - especially since the introduction of antibiotics - largely done away with those traditional doom scenarios. We're no longer starving, no longer dying in droves from infectious diseases, no longer totally at the mercy of nature... but our alarm mechanisms are still in place although they are differently tuned in different people. In some people - you seem to be one of those - these mechanisms are so finely tuned that they pick up minute signals which are amplified until they trigger the 'impending catastrophic situation' alarm (we're so, so fucked) where those same signals do not even register for others. The same is true for other triggers like 'climate change', 'migration', 'systemic ...-ism' and others where some people are completely taken over by their alarms going off where others don't even hear a single bell. Many of these triggers - 'systemic ...-ism' and to a lesser extent 'migration' being prime examples - are intentionally amplified because those who do the amplification stand to gain power (and money) by doing so, others - 'climate change' - are being used by third parties for monetary gain ('greenwashing' and the multitude of 'green' scams like 'carbon offsets'/'carbon credits') or political power. Are we 'fucked'? That depends on who you ask. Ask me and I'll say "only if we want to be". Is SARS-2 going to be with us for the foreseeable future? Yes, most likely. Is that a big problem? No, not really since it has rapidly mutated to become 'yet another Corona-related upper airway infection' while our species has developed a form of natural immunity which has taken the edge off the disease. Upper airway diseases are annoying and lead to a loss in productivity, sure, but they tend not to mail or kill. What remains is the long tail of the initial pandemic and even more of the (over)reaction to it, especially in those countries which had strict lockdown regimes. Recovering from the damage caused by those measures will take a lot of time and money and it can only be hoped that a lesson will be learned from this experience. As to returning to 'normality' I can safely state that we have done so quite a while ago here in Sweden [1]. [1] https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-lower-pandemic-mortality-than-denmark-and-norway https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-...

SilverBirch 3y ago

I think the funny thing is that Nate can be a flippant twit on Twitter but has totally fallen for it in critiques of him. Essentially this article is “a bunch of people baselessly speculated about an assertion I made, so I’m going to spend lots of time proving something they don’t care about”

MauranKilom 3y ago
As a bystander this seems accurate, but at the end of the article Nate himself states that he has little hope that it will convince people on Twitter/X. It's more about credibility to his own readership, I suppose.
- onthecanposting 3y ago
  I think he's writing to convince himself more than his readers, if he has any.
  - SilverBirch 3y ago
    Look him up, he has readers.
- abirch 3y ago
  Getting in an argument (vs disagreement) in real life is worthless. Getting into an argument on the Internet has even less value. Personally I think this was an easy article for him to write because he already had the data and he wants more subscribers (please take this take as neutral opinion and not a dis to Silver)
  - stu2b50 3y ago
    That depends on what the goal is. It's worthless if you're trying to convince the other side. But in many cases, you're actually trying to convince the audience, and certainly for something like a blogpost here, I'd argue that it is not only the case, but successful, since at minimum we know it got posted to hackernews and has traction.

wilg 3y ago

I'm excited to find out in 20 years what the deal was with Covid once everybody has forgotten all their political opinions.

iwonthecase 3y ago
Good luck, there's still academics debating about the 1977 "Russian" flu [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu
- Aachen 3y ago
  > The outbreak in northern China started in May 1977 Coincidence? Do they have a climate conducive to these sorts of viruses combined with a large enough population to make it likely they get infected first or is this my selection bias in noticing when it says "started in China" versus any other country?
  - philjohn 3y ago
    Large population that lives very close to natural reservoirs for viruses. Spillover is a great book to read about zoonotic diseases.
  - pvg 3y ago
    It would be odd vs any other country if any other country contained a quarter of the world population in 1977.
Aachen 3y ago
To me on an individual level, it feels like there isn't much unclear about covid if you know how to filter unlikely conspiracy theories and such. In what way do you see politics colouring the generally established information?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

notjoemama 3y ago

“Until vaccines became available, there was little difference in COVID death rates between blue states and red states. After vaccines became available, there were clear differences, with red states having higher death rates, almost certainly as a result of lower vaccine uptake among Republicans.” These are the claims he makes and arguably the data shows these to be true. The rest looks like whining where he objects to failures like “ice cream causes drowning” then eventually comes around to show the most applicable categorical statement is “states with higher vaccination rates had lower death rates. Sure. There’s a political divide that causes differences in behavior and outcomes. I don’t know. I spent the time reading but I can’t find any value in that post. Seems like venting to me.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

fwungy 3y ago

I really don't trust any of the numbers on covid. A vaccine for a dangerous illness that can affect billions of people is a very big payday. There's lots of money to spread around to politicians, corrupt scientists, and corrupt media. I'd like to see a real scientific debate with adversarial inquiry so we could know if numbers are being fudged and which ones they are. I trust science, but not greed driven capitalists corporations. Having a measure of distrust for pharmaceutical companies given their historical record is prudent.

sarchertech 3y ago
The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been approved by the national health agencies of dozens of countries, and China has approved a very similar home grown mRNA Covid vaccine. No amount of money in the world could pay to do that and keep it secret.
- fwungy 3y ago
  Corrupt government officials get a commission on big contracts. It happens all the time. Why do you think people spend so much campaigning for low paying political offices? They can be quite lucrative investments. There are NDAs and other threats to shutdown whistleblowers.
  - sarchertech 3y ago
    Think about how many people were involved in the approvals across the entire globe? Most of the approvals processes were conducted in public by career scientists and doctors. There were tens of thousands of people involved that would have to look the other way. Any company that’s capable of pulling off a global operation like that with absolutely zero exposure, is already running the world and doesn’t need to bother with piddly $40 billion scams.
    - fwungy 3y ago
      You don't become a career scientist or doctor by rocking the boat. A medical degree is a huge investment. Doctors have student loans and families. Anyone who sticks their neck out is at risk of losing their license or research grants.

pierat 3y ago

[flagged]

robertlagrant 3y ago
> Republicans were frothing at the mouth over hydroxcloroquine or whatever that horse dewormer was. No, they weren't. The foaming was from the other side of the aisle, in a similar vein to your post. Hydroxychloroquine was investigated quite a bit[0], found wanting, and dropped. The horse dewormer story you're confusing it with; I think this was a Joe Rogan thing, where his doctor prescribed him the human form of Ivermectin, and he mentioned it, and the left-leaning media (even though, as usual, Joe Rogan is a left-leaning guy on almost every issue) sent the story round the world that he was taking horse dewormer, before the truth could get its boots on. As for masks - who knows? The largest metastudy in existence on the subject seems rather less sure than you about them[1]. Maybe that metastudy is flawed, but it seems worth considering at least. > My dark thoughts: hmm, let as many republicans die from COVID. Maybe we can do better with govt with them killing themselves. I'm not sure what to say about this, except I hope you can stand down a little from your aggressive, hyper-partisan emotionalism. You cannot contribute anything if you're just regurgitating memorised emotional responses others have installed in you. [0] e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECOVERY_Trial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECOVERY_Trial [1] https://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-physical-interventions-interrupt-or-reduce-spread-respiratory-viruses https://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-physical-inter...
- fabian2k 3y ago
  There absolutely was an enormous amount of misinformation around Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. And as far as it was picked up politically, that was almost exclusively by Republicans. And Hydroxychloroquine was certainly dropped much later than it should have. It was added to studies in the control branch because people were expecting it to be the standard of care. There never was justification for that, but it was unreasonably hyped from the start.
- hwillis 3y ago
  > The foaming was from the other side of the aisle, in a similar vein to your post. That's a WILD thing to say. People are still going crazy over ivermectin, an senators are still posting conspiracy theories about it: https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1690009000857710592 https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1690009000857710592 > The largest metastudy in existence on the subject seems rather less sure than you about them[1]. Maybe that metastudy is flawed From Cochrane themselves: https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventions-interrupt-or-reduce-spread-respiratory-viruses-review https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventio... > For example, in the most heavily-weighted trial of interventions to promote community mask wearing, 42.3% of people in the intervention arm wore masks compared to 13.3% of those in the control arm. And the study still found that they work, just not the 50% reduction they considered statistically significant. Small wonder given the above. > Joe Rogan is a left-leaning guy on almost every issue hilarious

Amorymeltzer 3y ago

For those curious (as I was) what he's using, it looks like Stata: https://www.reed.edu/psychology/stata/analyses/parametric/Regression/regress.html https://www.reed.edu/psychology/stata/analyses/parametric/Re...

Aachen 3y ago
Was looking for a download, but there's precious little about that on the website. The closest I got were these remarks: > On all Reed lab computers, Stata is located in the Applications folder. > Stata can be found in the Applications folder of any school machine. On a PC, it is most likely located in Program Files. Does that imply it's neither open source nor even commercially available? Seems rather odd, surely it is either of those two
- mb7733 3y ago
  That isn't the home page for Stata, that is a page put up by Reed about where to find Stata on their computers. Go to stata.com
- ikjasdlk2234 3y ago
  Stata is fairly ubiquitous in statistical circles, especially those working in econometrics. While I preferred using Stata in academia, it is expensive and R is similar, just not as easy to use.
  - Breza 3y ago
    Agreed. Stata makes common statistical operations easy, and the higher-level licenses are extremely powerful. But I prefer R because it's so much more flexible when trying to perform more complex data manipulations. Plus lots of statistical papers with new techniques include R code.
- Amorymeltzer 3y ago
  As noted in other replies, this isn’t the Stata homepage, but rather an academic page about the use of the program. Apologies for the confusion, I chose it because it has images that neatly match what Silver shows.

Mordisquitos 3y ago

I have to nitpick Nate Silver on a tangential point here (emphasis mine) > The more complications you introduce into an analysis, the more confounding variables that you attempt to control for, the more you expand researcher degrees of freedom — in other words, decision points by the analyst about how to run the numbers. > I don’t think it’s quite right to say these decisions are arbitrary. Ideally they’ll reflect a statistician’s judgment, experience and familiarity with the subject matter. But, according to the sentence immediately following the one I highlighted, it absolutely is quite right to say those decisions are arbitrary! They are arbitrary inasmuch as they are arbitrated by the statistician's educated judgement and experience. That these decisions are arbitrary does not intrinsically strip away their value. Rather, it subordinates their value to the presumed ability of their arbiter — in this case the statistician, whom we presuppose is well trained and capable. I feel that in common parlance the word "arbitrary" is undergoing the opposite process of the term "literally". Where one word is losing its meaning by arbitrarily narrowing it down too much, the other is literally losing its meaning by making it too broad. It figuratively grinds my gears.

burkaman 3y ago
I don't think the word "arbitrary" is currently undergoing any change, it hasn't been used the way you use it in like 400+ years.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  Wait, so what does arbitrary mean to you if not "the result of a judgement or choice"? Is it just a synonym for random to you?
  - staticfloat 3y ago
    Yes, that’s what it means for me. I’ve never heard someone use the word arbitrary to mean anything other than “a random choice”, or even “a poorly thought-out choice”. My professors in grad school explicitly discouraged use of that word anywhere in technical writing, as they felt it would immediately give the reader the impression that the actions taken in the research were not thought through. Example: “This new technique enables arbitrary manipulations of data” should instead be replaced by something like “this technique enables a wide range of manipulations of data”.

phkahler 3y ago

>> This wasn’t intended as any sort of super-duper hot take, and I pared the post down to avoid having too much of an attack surface. It is intended to shame Republicans. What other possible reason is there to tie death rates to political party? So yes it was a hot take. You planted a lightning rod. Making something like vaccination a political issue does everyone a disservice.

mjmsmith 3y ago
It certainly did a disservice to the people who died because their politics convinced them that the vaccine was worse than the disease.
- autoexec 3y ago
  The idea that nobody should ever point that fact out seems crazy to me. We should be using this as an example when teaching critical thinking skills to kids in schools so that they know not to let political ideology and lies manipulate them into the grave.
RIMR 3y ago
Yeah, let's not make this political. /s
orblivion 3y ago
It also shames Democrats to an extent because they were more likely to support restrictions before the vaccines.
lemmsjid 3y ago
While I’m a democrat, I don’t believe republicans or democrats are inherently better people, or that their overarching ideologies are inherently better. In fact I am a strong believer that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and neither republicans or democrats should win it all. That said, certain Republicans should very much feel shame about the fear mongering behind the vaccine. It isn’t automatically a hot take or a lightning rod to use statistical analyses to suggest that systemic fear mongering against a vaccine that has a powerful effect would lead to excess death. The vaccine long ago became a political issue, but the real world need for people to take it doesn’t go away because of that.

flashback2199 3y ago

A regression analysis without one single graph rolls eyes

Izkata 3y ago
For the downvoters, we even have a name for this: Anscombe's quartet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet Always visualize your data.
- biorach 3y ago
  The downvotes were due to the complete lack of context in the vaguely derogatory post.
  - flashback2199 3y ago
    Plots are such a basic expectation for stats that I don't see why I should be required to write more about it..
    - biorach 3y ago
      just give some context dammit

da39a3ee 3y ago

There should be scatter plots or other data visualizations in a post like this.

mcguire 3y ago

Ok, so now I want to see the details of his first claim, "Until vaccines became available, there was little difference in COVID death rates between blue states and red states."

mcguire 3y ago
Note: not because I don't believe it; I just want to see the evidence.

rcbdev 3y ago

I don't know about other countries but in Austria nurses were highly incentivized to report deaths immediately following a vaccination or weeks after an infection has passed as a covid death in the sense of national statistics. I would not be surprised if this "nudging" of on the ground reports over the course of the pandemic has rendered the data around covid deaths unreliable.

gregw2 3y ago
Overall death rates shouldn’t be affected by this. Were they?
VancouverMan 3y ago
The death counts from Canada from that era are very questionable. As early as June of 2020, the "public health" authority in Canada's most-populous city (4th highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious: "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto." https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/1275888390060285967 https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596... By mid-2021, there were news reports like the following ("LTC" stands for "long-term care"): "Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-military-report-documents-deplorable-conditions-at-two/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili... After stuff like that and everything else that went on from 2020 through 2022, I can't trust "public health" officials at all at this point.
- Yoric 3y ago
  I don't have reference from the top of my head, but I seem to remember that the UK also started with the same counting methodology, then fixed it a few months into COVID. If my memory serves, the difference between the curves was pretty negligible.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  Attributing what happened in Ontario to the whole of Canada is something that happens way too often. As a Western Canadian resident, I don't think it's fair or reasonable to extrapolate about all of Canada from a single tweet from a TO health authority, and an article with a disclaimer about it's own accuracy. There well may be problems, but please keep in mind that while 50% of Canadians live between Montreal and Toronto, 50% of Canadians don't, and many of us live lifestyles that have absolutely nothing to do with that region and it's governance.

todd8 3y ago

Here are a few observations. From the CDC [1], 2020 total covid deaths by state: West Virginia 1318, Florida 21546, Maine 344, Vermont 134. The corresponding April 2020 census populations [2] for these four states are: West Virginia 1793716, Florida 21538187, Maine 1362359, Vermont 643077. Thus, before the vaccines for covid were available the deaths per 100,000 persons for these four states are: West Virginia 73, Florida 100, Vermont 21, Maine 25. Someone should probably check my math, but it looks like voting for Trump causes over three times as many deaths even before vaccinations were available. In other words, the analysis in the original article may be affected by unaccounted for confounding factors. For example, COPD is a significant medical risk factor for serious covid complications according to the CDC. COPD affects over 13.6% of the population of West Virginia (the worst rate in the country) but affects only 5.9% of the population of Vermont [3]. Personally, I chose to get vaccinated and boosted at the earliest possible dates. I also caught covid during the initial big wave of omicron cases in my state. [1] https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/99750 https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/99750 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... [3] https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/copd-trends-brief/data-tables/copd-prevalence-rates-by-state-gender https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/copd-tr...

vharuck 3y ago
I'd say the pre-vax differences likely came from how people treated public health advice and precautions. If somebody believed it was no worse than the flu or even didn't exist (like some of my in-laws in Summer 2020), they would be far more likely to catch it, spread it, and receive poor treatment. Those differences in behavior would carry over to vaccination rates, since that's also responding to public health recommendations. It's hard to believe Silver didn't do the analysis on pre-vax death rates, but he didn't mention it so I don't know. If COPD and similar conditions were the major difference, I would expect the difference in death rates to be closer to 2.3x (13.6%/5.9%) than 2.9x (73/25 per 100k). Those are very different ratios. And I don't know about any other complicating conditions with larger relative rates than 2.3x for those two states. Obesity is only 1.3x higher in West Virginia. So this gets back to Silver's point: you can almost always find other contributors, but that doesn't necessarily prove something else didn't contribute. You have to do that analysis all together. But complicating health conditions don't seem to be able to account for the differences, even before a regression test.

Waterluvian 3y ago

It was a hard thing to broach at the time without people frothing at the mouth about how I must be anti vaccine or something: Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them? I’m guessing it’s hard to quantify and compare. A lot of things like general depression, isolation, kids missing half a year of school, etc. can’t really be evaluated against people dying. And on its surface it seems obvious: uh, people dying is much worse than any of those things. But if I said that everything we did was to save one life, people probably would generally agree it wasn’t worth it (obviously so: people don’t seem too interested in preventing all kinds of deaths at all costs). What about ten lives? One thousand? Ten thousand? There’s some subjective level where it starts to feel obvious to more and more of us, until a majority of us agree. But do we have any general sense what that number is? How do we decide how much to care? It might seem ghoulish to decide how many dollars is worth a life, but we do it every day. With the data we have now, I imagine we can somewhat quantify this given enough sample jurisdictions with different rules? “Masking saves x lives per 1000.” “Closing schools saves y lives per 1000” etc. And perhaps then we’re able to decide “is x lives worth the qualitative harm done?” Probably. “What about y?” Maybe not.

fhcuvuvuc 3y ago
It doesn't matter. You can't have these conversations without being censored anymore. My works HR department got sick of having people use "logic" and "evidence" to argue against their policies. After kicking a few people out the door and generally saying you can't talk about this at work anymore, nobody talks about it.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Thats the company’s choice to make. A workplace isn’t exactly meant to be a town square. Luckily my workplace was mature enough to decide to leave those topics for the pub and social media so we didn’t have to be told that.
- deleted 3y ago
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- 3y ago

shyn3 3y ago

Thanks for helping power the Internet

tegmark 3y ago

compare all cause mortality before and after covid in red and blue states. its that simple

fredgrott 3y ago

A thing not addressed Was it the cost benefit of less people dying or our entire health system collapsing and causing massive more deaths.

tommykins 3y ago

I will never understand the use of Stata to achieve anything.

pottertheotter 3y ago
What does this mean? I used Stata a ton during my PhD. It’s not my preferred software for statistical analysis but it does a regression the same as anything else.

ezekiel68 3y ago

I was a good US citizen and used what little influence I had among my social circle to encourage others to follow the COVID protection measures. And I adore Nate Silver. So, pardon me if I confess that all I read in this article was: Blah blah blah 'I mostly agree with ... an October 2020 anti-lockdown statement signed by a large number of scientists and medical professionals. “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal”' blah blah. I don't have any regrets about the position I took, since it seemed to be based on all the verified information we had at the time. YET, I hope our society will embrace the fact that we were largely wrong to prolong the lockdown measures. Humility doesn't hurt the Left either.

pwarner 3y ago
Almost everyone was pretty wrong about COVID, at least at some points in time. But it's very rare for anyone to admit it. I'll admit I was wrong, between sanitizing my hands when it was really in the air, to assuming the vaccines would end it. Lots of mistakes on my end!
- lethoso 3y ago
  Sanitizing your hands, that must really haunt you.
  - LudwigNagasena 3y ago
    Pouring alcohol on your hands every day isn’t really a good habit in the long term.
- listenallyall 3y ago
  This "everybody was wrong" and "whoopsie!" self-absolution is some of the ugliest and most hypocritical parts of the entire Covid phenomenon. No -- plenty of people were ardently against lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school shutdowns, but all kinds of pundits and self-selected rule enforcers loudly lambasted and insulted them endlessly. Many, many lives were permanently affected in multiple, very negative ways, with no chance of returning to pre-covid "normal." The resentment and frustration from individual lives being crushed while the entire ordeal seemingly aligned and advanced corporate interests, is only triggered further by the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ attitude.

LudwigNagasena 3y ago

I think if one calls themselves a statistician, they should do a proper analysis or at least reference such analysis. This is either a joke or a first homework assignment one would do to learn Stata.

plaidfuji 3y ago

Although the body of this article is about Covid policies and vaccine usage, which seems to have set off a whole round of discussion here on that topic, my sense was that the point of this article was more general: > So my aim is generally to focus on stylized facts that are true and robust. And to keep repeating them. I like simple (or simple-seeming) claims that — and I can’t emphasize this last part enough — I expect will hold up to scrutiny. As somebody who presents results of analyses and models for a living, I couldn’t agree more. Present the simplest possible finding that gets the point across and move on. Maybe mention “and this holds up when accounting for x, y, z”, or just keep those analyses in the backup slides in case you have a feisty audience member. Nobody cares how complex your model is, just that it works.

gpt5 3y ago
To be fair, COVID's death rate has such a strong association with (very) old age, that not accounting for it is quite questionable. In the article, Nate mentioned himself that Mormon population is 100x higher in Utah and that's a significant effect. The COVID death rate of over 85 years old is more than 100x higher than the very young. I'm not questioning the results, just that accounting for age when analyzing COVID is definitely a reasonable question to ask for any conclusion.

anyonecancode 3y ago

I think for the pre-vaccine period, there's at least a couple issues that are still very unclear: - how well did official policies map to actual behavior? I expect a lot of people still masked and distanced, regardless of what their particular state's policies were - what specific behaviors actually made a difference? (Well, maybe it's really just a question of how much difference masking made -- I'd expect it's pretty clear that avoiding other people was pretty effective) So for me, a more interesting and, I'd argue, practical question, is really about how effective _policy_ is. There were definitely a lot of costs, as it helped politicize things (who would have guess masks would become a partisan issue?). I think of the case of Sweden, for example, where IIUC behavior was pretty cautious although policy was pretty loose.