6 ms·

It was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020 that Covid was no threat to children and non-elderly adults without risk factors li

by kleton 2y ago

It was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020 that Covid was no threat to children and non-elderly adults without risk factors like obesity, which led to the rational decision to treat it as a non-risk. If something bad comes around that is actually killing healthy adults, they would stay home.

skybrian 2y ago
This seems like hindsight bias. Much less was understood about COVID back then and maybe you forgot how uncertain it was?
- kleton 2y ago
  I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    How do you know it was COVID and not some other disease with similar symptoms? Also, why would you be confident that your experience generalizes? Getting to “not one bit uncertain” from what you could possibly have known then shows poor reasoning skills.
    - kleton 2y ago
      There was only one thing going around in the Bay Area in January 2020, and the symptoms clearly lined up for everyone in my network.
      - skybrian 2y ago
        How could you know that there was "only one thing going around?" That would be kind of weird. Maybe you and your friends got a cold?
        kleton 2y ago
        If there were two things going around January 2020, I would have gotten both of them. This is common sense to anyone who has had school age children.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    >>> it was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020 > I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me. We learned a lot of lessons in the 18 months after Feb 2020, including about long COVID and who was impacted. Were any of your conclusions reshaped in the face of later broad, consistent medical evidence? If you were to consider your process of understanding COVID, was there ever a point where it could be fairly described as working backward from a conclusion?
    - kleton 2y ago
      One thing remained clear from the time I got Covid the first time- people with natural immunity should be allowed to return to going about their normal lives.
      - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
        > One thing remained clear from the time I got Covid the first time- people with natural immunity should be allowed to return to going about their normal lives. I'm going to parse this and offer some personal impressions. "One thing" (variant = "All I know") signals to me that my question - are you working backward from a conclusion - can't be considered at this time. It's a reasonable response and I hope you will consider my Q at a later time. In considering your whole response, I get a vibe that you were justified or maybe vindicated. In my experience, those are markers of clinging to a conclusion and waiting for evidence of it. If I'm off base, help me out here. I also think you're being forthright with me and not subversive.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  It really wasn't that uncertain. SARS-CoV-2 behaved exactly like what it was (a novel coronavirus). Public health officials and those on their side tried to play it up as a totally unknown thing that could do literally anything, but that was just a way to obfuscate their bad decisions combined with a general tendency to engage in fear mongering.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    It doesn't seem like other novel coronaviruses filled the hospitals like COVID did.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Coronaviruses can certainly do that. The Russian "flu" at the end of the 19th century is now believed to have been caused by a novel coronavirus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Coronavirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Cor... (BTW, take all death estimates for old pandemics with a giant pinch of salt). But at any rate, COVID didn't fill the hospitals. New York had a problem temporarily due to bad management of their very limited morgue capacity, but look at most other places and there was no issue. Even in Bergamo early on, in the period when doctors were accidentally killing patients with unnecessary intubation, they never actually ran out of hospital capacity. Go check the reports at the time if you don't believe me. Unfortunately, almost everything that people believe about COVID and what happened during it is wrong. When it came to hospitals what you'll see if you review the historical evidence carefully is that media reports and online commentary frequently blurred the line between "it is predicted that hospitals will overflow" and "hospitals are actually overflowing". The former rapidly became reported as the latter with no actual change in the situation. This kind of problem of predictions/reality getting mixed up cropped up many times in different contexts. Then on top you have the problem of outright fake or misleading reporting. For instance, there was a brief period when TV news crews simply faked reports of full hospitals. They often liked to do this by reporting on a local hospital and claiming it was straining/at the limit etc, then showing video footage of an ICU in Bergamo from months or even years ago without informing the viewer of where it was, leaving viewers to infer it was a video of what was actually happening. This trick with that specific video happened so frequently it became something of a meme. In another case, a news crew turned up and organized doctors and medical staff at the (in reality fairly quiet) hospital to get in their cars and pretend to be patients queuing up to enter the hospital. Someone local got suspicious and visited the hospital a day after the report, discovered there were no queues or overload problems anywhere and asked around what had happened, which is how the news crew were found out. If you remember, this blew up when bored medical workers started uploading videos of themselves dancing to Tiktok. This revealed the true situation at a time when people were being told to stay home to save the hospitals from overload. I remember getting into an argument with my German teacher about this topic, because the Swiss health minister (Berset, ugh) actually went on TV and claimed hospitals were overflowing. The Swiss government's own dashboard showed that there was no unusual level of hospital load, there were lots of free beds all over the country and there were no problems to report. He literally just made up a non-existent crisis. They do this because it works, she had no idea he was lying and when I tried to show her the actual graphs just got distressed, saying "I'm not a data person".
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> It was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020 that Covid was no threat to children and non-elderly adults ... which led to the rational decision to treat it as a non-risk. I found that the risk of supplying a deadly contagion to a loved one is a risk that mattered to me. Even if my loved one were elderly or burdened with a health issue. I also realized some concern for the lives of people I didn't love. FF to now and I mask up when I do service calls in medical buildings (because of high risk patients).
bfdm 2y ago
This is a whole lot of wrong information and eugenicist thinking, yikes. 1) healthy adults and children were and continue to be killed by covid, even if at lower rates. 2) this is horribly devaluing the lives of people with confounding vulnerabilities. Are you suggesting it's fine if they get decimated or worse? 3) This ignores the long term disabling effects population wide where patients survive but suffer awful quality of life for months or years I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion for mentioning long covid and eugenics, but I'm fine with that. I've been very disappointed in the shift observed in HN commenter population lately. I used to think this was a group of intelligent & thoughtful people but am no longer suffering that illusion.
- kleton 2y ago
  Quarantine, voluntary or otherwise, the elderly and at-risk then. In the Bay Area, anyone who had children in daycare had already gotten Covid and recovered from it before the lockdowns began. A rational policy needed to recognize natural immunity.
  - bfdm 2y ago
    That is impossible, their lives depend on complex care networks of family and staff that would also need to isolate, but cannot for need to interact with other parts of the world. It is a fantasy to consider your suggestion as a solution. Even if it were possible, you're condemning those people to a life of isolation and slowly dying alone. If we instead set & raised indoor air quality standards and established social norms of staying home when sick or masking when that's not possible, then life could go on mostly as normal. But fuck me for asking people for small inconveniences to help others. I would say it's reasonable to suggest vulnerable folks avoid indoor public dining, but not to remain alone indefinitely. Anyways, bring on the downvotes.
    - kleton 2y ago
      If you lock down everyone, or just lock down the elderly, what is the difference to the elderly person locked down? Either way they are isolated.
charlotte-fyi 2y ago
> without risk factors like obesity 40% of Americans are obese.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bdangubic 2y ago
  42% after the holidays :)
wumeow 2y ago
That’s cool, when do I get my lost white matter and sense of smell back?
- OptionOfT 2y ago
  I'd also like the tinnitus to go away.
terminatornet 2y ago
guess you're not planning on getting old huh?
- kleton 2y ago
  I'll stay home
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > I'll stay home This implies you have the means to have every need met at home. It's not the most common scenario.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > I'll stay home This response (and a few others here) hints that your concern for well being might not extend much to other people. This isn't a condemnation. I have HFA relatives who struggle with this limit, particularly those who are especially gifted elsewhere. Demonizing them is wrong. However, views without empathy might necessarily be downgraded - that is, they may carry less weight where empathy is needed.
    - kleton 2y ago
      In previous generations there was a sense that the elderly had already lived their best years, and the young should be prioritized in emergencies. "Women and children first" The American Boomer generation flipped this on its head, with them demanding the young make sacrifices for them.
      - cudgy 2y ago
        Old women are not women?
    - sincerecook 2y ago
      Yes, anyone who isn't hysterical about the possibility of old people dying is autistic.
snowwrestler 2y ago
This comment is a great example of why it is so hard to fight pandemics. It is incredibly tempting to give in to the post-hoc rationalization of how things worked out. Which then leads to a high degree of public complacency prior to the next pandemic. On an individual basis, people who survive the pandemic (by avoiding infection or by surviving infection) are tempted to reason that the fear, doubt, and mitigations were all in fact overblown. After all, most folks got through it ok, right? The reality is that COVID worked out way, way worse than even pessimistic guesses in early 2020. It killed over a million Americans, many of whom were in fact healthy adults without obvious risk factors. And the long-term legacy of “long COVID” impairment is still being learned.
- cogman10 2y ago
  It nearly killed my sister-in-law who is a (relatively) healthy 20 something. Definitely gave her long covid and she definitely treated it with ivermectin. To this day, her and her husband will rant and rave about how dangerous the vaccine is (which my family and I all the boosters for). I've been told about the millions that will die any day now from the vaccines. And while I've yet to actually hear of a single person that took the vaccine who's died from either covid or the vaccine itself, I have multiple family members and friends family members that I know died from covid. I don't even doubt that there are people that have received the vaccine and later died from covid, I just don't personally know anyone that is in that category.
- motohagiography 2y ago
  calling high quality decisions about risk post-hoc rationalizations is like saying an athlete is just dumb and lucky.
  - snowwrestler 2y ago
    Thinking we “won” COVID like a skilled athlete seems like an example of the complacency I’m referring to.
    - motohagiography 2y ago
SalmonSnarker 2y ago
covid infection in children increases their rate of acquiring type 2 diabetes in the 6 months after infection (RR 1.58 for most children, 2.0 for obese, 3 for hospitalized) [0] but sure, "no threat to children", go off king. [0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2824731 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
tsimionescu 2y ago
Oh, sure, a disease that killed more people than tuberculosis or HIV/AIDS those two years was not a big deal. This is so absurdly silly to say now that I can't fathom how someone who can work a computer well enough to post a message online is still able to believe such drivel.
blharr 2y ago
Only 40% are obese (US) so it affects a minority of the population, therefore it should be disregarded?
Izkata 2y ago
I'm not even that confident about obesity being a risk factor. Obesity rates in hospitalizations were often a little lower than the population rates (implying a slight protective effect instead of a risk factor), and almost all the reporting on it either compared "obese" to "overweight and obese" to massively inflate the apparent risk, or shared the obesity rate with no comparison. Even assuming it was, it would only have been a fraction of a fraction of the risk from age.

by kleton 2y ago

skybrian 2y ago

This seems like hindsight bias. Much less was understood about COVID back then and maybe you forgot how uncertain it was?

kleton 2y ago
I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me.
- skybrian 2y ago
  How do you know it was COVID and not some other disease with similar symptoms? Also, why would you be confident that your experience generalizes? Getting to “not one bit uncertain” from what you could possibly have known then shows poor reasoning skills.
  - kleton 2y ago
    There was only one thing going around in the Bay Area in January 2020, and the symptoms clearly lined up for everyone in my network.
    - skybrian 2y ago
      How could you know that there was "only one thing going around?" That would be kind of weird. Maybe you and your friends got a cold?
      - kleton 2y ago
        If there were two things going around January 2020, I would have gotten both of them. This is common sense to anyone who has had school age children.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  >>> it was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020 > I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me. We learned a lot of lessons in the 18 months after Feb 2020, including about long COVID and who was impacted. Were any of your conclusions reshaped in the face of later broad, consistent medical evidence? If you were to consider your process of understanding COVID, was there ever a point where it could be fairly described as working backward from a conclusion?
  - kleton 2y ago
    One thing remained clear from the time I got Covid the first time- people with natural immunity should be allowed to return to going about their normal lives.
    - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
      > One thing remained clear from the time I got Covid the first time- people with natural immunity should be allowed to return to going about their normal lives. I'm going to parse this and offer some personal impressions. "One thing" (variant = "All I know") signals to me that my question - are you working backward from a conclusion - can't be considered at this time. It's a reasonable response and I hope you will consider my Q at a later time. In considering your whole response, I get a vibe that you were justified or maybe vindicated. In my experience, those are markers of clinging to a conclusion and waiting for evidence of it. If I'm off base, help me out here. I also think you're being forthright with me and not subversive.
mike_hearn 2y ago
It really wasn't that uncertain. SARS-CoV-2 behaved exactly like what it was (a novel coronavirus). Public health officials and those on their side tried to play it up as a totally unknown thing that could do literally anything, but that was just a way to obfuscate their bad decisions combined with a general tendency to engage in fear mongering.
- skybrian 2y ago
  It doesn't seem like other novel coronaviruses filled the hospitals like COVID did.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Coronaviruses can certainly do that. The Russian "flu" at the end of the 19th century is now believed to have been caused by a novel coronavirus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Coronavirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Cor... (BTW, take all death estimates for old pandemics with a giant pinch of salt). But at any rate, COVID didn't fill the hospitals. New York had a problem temporarily due to bad management of their very limited morgue capacity, but look at most other places and there was no issue. Even in Bergamo early on, in the period when doctors were accidentally killing patients with unnecessary intubation, they never actually ran out of hospital capacity. Go check the reports at the time if you don't believe me. Unfortunately, almost everything that people believe about COVID and what happened during it is wrong. When it came to hospitals what you'll see if you review the historical evidence carefully is that media reports and online commentary frequently blurred the line between "it is predicted that hospitals will overflow" and "hospitals are actually overflowing". The former rapidly became reported as the latter with no actual change in the situation. This kind of problem of predictions/reality getting mixed up cropped up many times in different contexts. Then on top you have the problem of outright fake or misleading reporting. For instance, there was a brief period when TV news crews simply faked reports of full hospitals. They often liked to do this by reporting on a local hospital and claiming it was straining/at the limit etc, then showing video footage of an ICU in Bergamo from months or even years ago without informing the viewer of where it was, leaving viewers to infer it was a video of what was actually happening. This trick with that specific video happened so frequently it became something of a meme. In another case, a news crew turned up and organized doctors and medical staff at the (in reality fairly quiet) hospital to get in their cars and pretend to be patients queuing up to enter the hospital. Someone local got suspicious and visited the hospital a day after the report, discovered there were no queues or overload problems anywhere and asked around what had happened, which is how the news crew were found out. If you remember, this blew up when bored medical workers started uploading videos of themselves dancing to Tiktok. This revealed the true situation at a time when people were being told to stay home to save the hospitals from overload. I remember getting into an argument with my German teacher about this topic, because the Swiss health minister (Berset, ugh) actually went on TV and claimed hospitals were overflowing. The Swiss government's own dashboard showed that there was no unusual level of hospital load, there were lots of free beds all over the country and there were no problems to report. He literally just made up a non-existent crisis. They do this because it works, she had no idea he was lying and when I tried to show her the actual graphs just got distressed, saying "I'm not a data person".

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

> It was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020 that Covid was no threat to children and non-elderly adults ... which led to the rational decision to treat it as a non-risk. I found that the risk of supplying a deadly contagion to a loved one is a risk that mattered to me. Even if my loved one were elderly or burdened with a health issue. I also realized some concern for the lives of people I didn't love. FF to now and I mask up when I do service calls in medical buildings (because of high risk patients).

bfdm 2y ago

This is a whole lot of wrong information and eugenicist thinking, yikes. 1) healthy adults and children were and continue to be killed by covid, even if at lower rates. 2) this is horribly devaluing the lives of people with confounding vulnerabilities. Are you suggesting it's fine if they get decimated or worse? 3) This ignores the long term disabling effects population wide where patients survive but suffer awful quality of life for months or years I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion for mentioning long covid and eugenics, but I'm fine with that. I've been very disappointed in the shift observed in HN commenter population lately. I used to think this was a group of intelligent & thoughtful people but am no longer suffering that illusion.

kleton 2y ago
Quarantine, voluntary or otherwise, the elderly and at-risk then. In the Bay Area, anyone who had children in daycare had already gotten Covid and recovered from it before the lockdowns began. A rational policy needed to recognize natural immunity.
- bfdm 2y ago
  That is impossible, their lives depend on complex care networks of family and staff that would also need to isolate, but cannot for need to interact with other parts of the world. It is a fantasy to consider your suggestion as a solution. Even if it were possible, you're condemning those people to a life of isolation and slowly dying alone. If we instead set & raised indoor air quality standards and established social norms of staying home when sick or masking when that's not possible, then life could go on mostly as normal. But fuck me for asking people for small inconveniences to help others. I would say it's reasonable to suggest vulnerable folks avoid indoor public dining, but not to remain alone indefinitely. Anyways, bring on the downvotes.
  - kleton 2y ago
    If you lock down everyone, or just lock down the elderly, what is the difference to the elderly person locked down? Either way they are isolated.

charlotte-fyi 2y ago

> without risk factors like obesity 40% of Americans are obese.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bdangubic 2y ago
42% after the holidays :)

wumeow 2y ago

That’s cool, when do I get my lost white matter and sense of smell back?

OptionOfT 2y ago
I'd also like the tinnitus to go away.

terminatornet 2y ago

guess you're not planning on getting old huh?

kleton 2y ago
I'll stay home
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > I'll stay home This implies you have the means to have every need met at home. It's not the most common scenario.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > I'll stay home This response (and a few others here) hints that your concern for well being might not extend much to other people. This isn't a condemnation. I have HFA relatives who struggle with this limit, particularly those who are especially gifted elsewhere. Demonizing them is wrong. However, views without empathy might necessarily be downgraded - that is, they may carry less weight where empathy is needed.
  - kleton 2y ago
    In previous generations there was a sense that the elderly had already lived their best years, and the young should be prioritized in emergencies. "Women and children first" The American Boomer generation flipped this on its head, with them demanding the young make sacrifices for them.
    - cudgy 2y ago
      Old women are not women?
  - sincerecook 2y ago
    Yes, anyone who isn't hysterical about the possibility of old people dying is autistic.

snowwrestler 2y ago

This comment is a great example of why it is so hard to fight pandemics. It is incredibly tempting to give in to the post-hoc rationalization of how things worked out. Which then leads to a high degree of public complacency prior to the next pandemic. On an individual basis, people who survive the pandemic (by avoiding infection or by surviving infection) are tempted to reason that the fear, doubt, and mitigations were all in fact overblown. After all, most folks got through it ok, right? The reality is that COVID worked out way, way worse than even pessimistic guesses in early 2020. It killed over a million Americans, many of whom were in fact healthy adults without obvious risk factors. And the long-term legacy of “long COVID” impairment is still being learned.

cogman10 2y ago
It nearly killed my sister-in-law who is a (relatively) healthy 20 something. Definitely gave her long covid and she definitely treated it with ivermectin. To this day, her and her husband will rant and rave about how dangerous the vaccine is (which my family and I all the boosters for). I've been told about the millions that will die any day now from the vaccines. And while I've yet to actually hear of a single person that took the vaccine who's died from either covid or the vaccine itself, I have multiple family members and friends family members that I know died from covid. I don't even doubt that there are people that have received the vaccine and later died from covid, I just don't personally know anyone that is in that category.
motohagiography 2y ago
calling high quality decisions about risk post-hoc rationalizations is like saying an athlete is just dumb and lucky.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  Thinking we “won” COVID like a skilled athlete seems like an example of the complacency I’m referring to.
  - motohagiography 2y ago

SalmonSnarker 2y ago

covid infection in children increases their rate of acquiring type 2 diabetes in the 6 months after infection (RR 1.58 for most children, 2.0 for obese, 3 for hospitalized) [0] but sure, "no threat to children", go off king. [0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2824731 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

tsimionescu 2y ago

Oh, sure, a disease that killed more people than tuberculosis or HIV/AIDS those two years was not a big deal. This is so absurdly silly to say now that I can't fathom how someone who can work a computer well enough to post a message online is still able to believe such drivel.

blharr 2y ago

Only 40% are obese (US) so it affects a minority of the population, therefore it should be disregarded?

Izkata 2y ago

I'm not even that confident about obesity being a risk factor. Obesity rates in hospitalizations were often a little lower than the population rates (implying a slight protective effect instead of a risk factor), and almost all the reporting on it either compared "obese" to "overweight and obese" to massively inflate the apparent risk, or shared the obesity rate with no comparison. Even assuming it was, it would only have been a fraction of a fraction of the risk from age.