The Lemon Fool

Hallucigenia wrote:

Lootman wrote:Yes but there was more to it than that with the low numbers in Africa. Nigeria has a large population and yet it had only 14 deaths per million. Dirt poor countries like Chad and Burundi had negligible deaths. Very odd.

The thinking is that it was pretty bad in Africa - but just didn't get reported. Certainly there seems to have been a massive amounts of excess mortality in the BRICS that wasn't reflected in the official "due to Covid" figures, the Economist's central estimate is for 21 million excess deaths versus <7 million "official" Covid deaths. See eg

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)02796-3/fulltext

That is obviously possible but then, if the data is that bad. then who knows what is true?

The data we do have is that over 99.9% of the global population did not die from Covid.

The threat from letting Covid run wild through large populations is mutations (and recombination). Imagine Covid combined with MERS to have high transmissibility and high (>30%) mortality or a mutation that had high mortality among children and young people.

Best wishes, Steve

Steveam wrote:The threat from letting Covid run wild through large populations is mutations (and recombination). Imagine Covid combined with MERS to have high transmissibility and high (>30%) mortality or a mutation that had high mortality among children and young people.

Similarly Martians with ray guns could invade, killing us all. A massive solar event could wipe all telecoms. Mutant cockroaches could use us as food.

Lootman wrote:

Steveam wrote:The threat from letting Covid run wild through large populations is mutations (and recombination). Imagine Covid combined with MERS to have high transmissibility and high (>30%) mortality or a mutation that had high mortality among children and young people.

Similarly Martians with ray guns could invade, killing us all. A massive solar event could wipe all telecoms. Mutant cockroaches could use us as food.

?

Steveam wrote:

Lootman wrote:Similarly Martians with ray guns could invade, killing us all. A massive solar event could wipe all telecoms. Mutant cockroaches could use us as food.

?

The point being that "black swan" tail risks should be given the statistical probability that they deserve.

Lootman wrote:The data we do have is that over 99.9% of the global population did not die from Covid.

Really? So that means only 0.1% of the global population (your figures) did die from COVID?

OK. Well, global population in 2019 was 8 Bn, and 0.1% of that is a mere 8 million people - even more than the Holocaust.

Not really worth making a fuss about then.

XFool wrote:Really? So that means only 0.1% of the global population (your figures) did die from COVID?

OK. Well, global population in 2019 was 8 Bn, and 0.1% of that is a mere 8 million people - even more than the Holocaust.

Not really worth making a fuss about then.

try that view if just one of them is a family member of yours

Lootman wrote:The point being that "black swan" tail risks should be given the statistical probability that they deserve.

But surely the point being about "black swan" events is that they don't have a "statistical probability".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

"The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight"

Um...

XFool wrote:

Lootman wrote:The data we do have is that over 99.9% of the global population did not die from Covid.

Really? So that means only 0.1% of the global population (your figures) did die from COVID?

OK. Well, global population in 2019 was 8 Bn, and 0.1% of that is a mere 8 million people - even more than the Holocaust.

Not really worth making a fuss about then.

Global population increased every year during the pandemic which demonstrates the effects Covid had. A pandemic to be concerned about would be one where the global population decreased...

...So those Boeing Super Max plane crashes should just have been ignored?

"Small plane crash, only a few score killed".

Only need to do something if: "Every plane in air during last 24 hours nose dived into ground - tens of thousands dead" - Might(?) need referring to Air Crash Investigation. Bit of a judgement call though...

As I said previously, this kind of 'argument' can be extended to apply however and wherever you want it too:

Small outbreak of Ebola in Paris - only three dead, so nobody much bothered.
New disease discovered in gay men in San Francisco - most people aren't gay and don't live in San Francisco. So...
Nuclear power station on fire in Europe. It's only one so... RELAX!
Small nuclear explosion over London, nothing to worry about, Liverpool and Birmingham doing just fine!

Steveam wrote:The threat from letting Covid run wild through large populations is mutations (and recombination). Imagine Covid combined with MERS to have high transmissibility and high (>30%) mortality or a mutation that had high mortality among children and young people.

Best wishes, Steve

But it did run wild through large populations when the virus won the transmission battle over the lockdown down restrictions with the Omicron variant. It also mutated to be virulent. Equally, using your view, lockdowns and restrictions could have extended the pandemic and the costs and deaths from it, by not allowing the virus to become less virulent naturally...

Additionally, why does your listed risk only exist with Covid(sars-cov-2) and not any of the 200+ viruses that make up the common cold?

You seem to be only considering bad outcomes to justify the actions taken that you supported. Are you doing so to appease your guilt from the negative impacts that the restrictions had on health & care services, education, the economy and mental health?

Ashfordian wrote:

Steveam wrote:The threat from letting Covid run wild through large populations is mutations (and recombination). Imagine Covid combined with MERS to have high transmissibility and high (>30%) mortality or a mutation that had high mortality among children and young people.

But it did run wild through large populations when the virus won the transmission battle over the lockdown down restrictions with the Omicron variant. It also mutated to be virulent. Equally, using your view, lockdowns and restrictions could have extended the pandemic and the costs and deaths from it, by not allowing the virus to become less virulent naturally...

You appear to have written the COVID vaccines out of the history...

Ashfordian wrote:You seem to be only considering bad outcomes to justify the actions taken that you supported. Are you doing so to appease your guilt from the negative impacts that the restrictions had on health & care services, education, the economy and mental health?

So I wonder what it is you are striving so hard to "justify", in retrospect?

XFool wrote:

Ashfordian wrote:You seem to be only considering bad outcomes to justify the actions taken that you supported. Are you doing so to appease your guilt from the negative impacts that the restrictions had on health & care services, education, the economy and mental health?

So I wonder what it is you are striving so hard to "justify", in retrospect?

It's not hard to "justify" that we overreacted to Covid? And as time goes on and more long term effects are revealed, the easier this will be.

I know I am making valid points around this topic that are making you and others feel uncomfortable around the restrictions they were gullible enough to support because of the number of posts from yourself where you are just trying to distract and deflect, eg Boeing aircraft...

Ashfordian wrote:I know I am making valid points around this topic that are making you and others feel uncomfortable around the restrictions they were gullible enough to support because of the number of posts from yourself where you are just trying to distract and deflect, eg Boeing aircraft...

Dude, you are flailing. No amount of straw man allegations against other posters can hide the impression that you've backed yourself into a very tight corner and you've decided to defend it against all comers.

It happens that the draconian (and highly inconvenient) measures enacted by governments around the world succeeded in heading off the emergency, but to conclude from that success that there never was an emergency defies logic in every way.

There are echoes here of the 1999 millennium bug, which some people also say didn't exist because the (expensive and inconvenient) measures adopted generally worked. Hindsight doesn't always provide 20-20 vision.

BJ

bungeejumper wrote:It happens that the draconian (and highly inconvenient) measures enacted by governments around the world succeeded in heading off the emergency, but to conclude from that success that there never was an emergency defies logic in every way.

I don't think that anyone is claiming there was never a problem. But rather that even for the nation with the worst Covid numbers (Peru, from my earlier link), 99.35% of people there survived.

Let's assume that Peru took the least precautions. That can be our estimate for the UK survival rate had we done little or nothing. Call that an extra 200,000 deaths. Now work out the cost in billions of all the restrictions, compute the cost-per-life-saved.

Globally the survival rate was over 99.9%.

Lootman wrote:Now work out the cost in billions of all the restrictions, compute the cost-per-life-saved.

It's not just this, but also the knock-on consequences of pumping hundreds of billions into the economy and the economic disruption from the lockdowns and restrictions.

Those who supported the lockdowns and restrictions without question, now also have to shoulder some of the responsibility for the suffering that millions are now experiencing in the UK. The problem is the they will deflect and distract as they don't want to face up to and accept this and other harms their support for restrictions caused.

Lootman wrote:That is obviously possible but then, if the data is that bad. then who knows what is true?

Well you might want to reconsider the truth of your claim "Chad and Burundi had negligible deaths". We'll never know for certain, but doing statistics on excess deaths is probably the least unreliable way of approaching the truth, it's not a question of "any truth is equally likely"

Lootman wrote:The data we do have is that over 99.9% of the global population did not die from Covid.

Deaths are the wrong metric though. This is more like polio or something - the real threat is the slow disabling effect, it's really a long-term disease of the blood and immune systems that also happens to kill some people immediately. I'm relatively lucky to have only relatively mild symptoms which have still had an economic effect on me, but it could have been plenty worse :

How long COVID ruined my life, from crushing fatigue to brain fog

40-something FD from Godalming had to give up her job :
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsuppo ... uki-newman

My wife had long Covid and killed herself.
My wife, Heidi, took her own life after a 13-month battle with long Covid that started as a mostly asymptomatic coronavirus infection. Long Covid took her from one of the healthiest, most vibrant people I’ve ever known to a person so debilitated that she could not bear another day on this planet....Watching long Covid systematically take her apart, organ system by organ system, was the most terrifying deterioration of a human being I have ever witnessed.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/memory-long-COVID
In a study of 181 long COVID patients, 78% reported difficulty concentrating, 69% reported brain fog, 68% reported forgetfulness, and 60% reported problems finding the right word in speech. These self-reported symptoms were reflected in significantly lower ability to remember words and pictures in cognitive tests.
Participants carried out multiple tasks to assess their decision-making and memory. These included remembering words in a list, and remembering which two images appeared together. The results revealed a consistent pattern of ongoing memory problems in those who had suffered COVID-19 infection.

And this is feeding through into the economy, this report from the Spanish central bank is one of the better ones I've seen, work days lost to sickness went from 2-2.5% in the decade before the pandemic to >4%. That starts to become a serious economic hit even before you consider the effect of extra demand on health systems.

Hallucigenia wrote:

Lootman wrote:The data we do have is that over 99.9% of the global population did not die from Covid.

Deaths are the wrong metric though. This is more like polio or something - the real threat is the slow disabling effect, it's really a long-term disease of the blood and immune systems that also happens to kill some people immediately.

I happen to agree that deaths are not the only metric. But it was the one that a lot of people had a focus on, perhaps not least because it is so definite and measurable.

So-called Long Covid is a thing. But it was by definition not known about in the first few months of the pandemic. So the lockdown decisions were not based on that issue, and should be judged based on what was known at the time.

It seems reasonable to me, now that there is near universal consensus that Covid has reached the point where we can just live with it, to look back and assess which nations under-reacted, which over-reacted, and which got it about right. That assessment should take into account the number of deaths and disabilities, but also the massive cost of shutting down entire countries and economies. And the "winner" may not be the country that had the lowest death rate or the tightest restrictions.

Lootman wrote:So-called Long Covid is a thing. But it was by definition not known about in the first few months of the pandemic. So the lockdown decisions were not based on that issue, and should be judged based on what was known at the time.

Long-term complications are always a risk with any viral disease, and even if you don't know *exactly* how they'll pan out at the beginning, they're a known unknown and as such would always be a factor in risk assessment. It's a bit like option value when assessing the value of an investment, only on the downside (like if there's potential for a lawsuit against the company etc).

So it's something that should be a consideration when assessing the risk, which would tend towards being a bit more cautious until the long-term risk was better characterised, up or down.

Lootman wrote:It seems reasonable to me, now that there is near universal consensus that Covid has reached the point where we can just live with it, to look back and assess which nations under-reacted, which over-reacted, and which got it about right. That assessment should take into account the number of deaths and disabilities, but also the massive cost of shutting down entire countries and economies. And the "winner" may not be the country that had the lowest death rate or the tightest restrictions.

Indeed - but it works the other way, some of the countries with the least economic impact were also the ones that worked hard to minimise Covid - Japan, South Korea etc are obvious examples. And that long-term impact has been known about for a while now, so you have to include it when weighing up the costs and benefits - and the way health effects are calculated, something that damages a 40-something for life "costs" as much as a dozen elderly dying a couple of years before their time. Also it's not just about costly lockdowns - as Asia found, masks are a relatively cheap intervention that is pretty effective, likewise HEPA filtration pretty much stops in-school transmission and is not that expensive (Illinois is putting 60,000 HEPA filters in 3,000 schools at a cost of <$500/machine, or $25 per pupil. These are not expensive measures but can have a significant effect in reducing the burden of Covid.

And it's more complicated than a simple on/off analysis of lockdowns, timing matters as well when you're faced with a disease doubling every 3.5 days as Covid was in March 2020. Johnson dithering by a week means that 10,000 cases become 40,000 cases - you can't wait until you have all the evidence, you have to get ahead of these things.

Hallucigenia wrote:And it's more complicated than a simple on/off analysis of lockdowns, timing matters as well when you're faced with a disease doubling every 3.5 days as Covid was in March 2020. Johnson dithering by a week means that 10,000 cases become 40,000 cases - you can't wait until you have all the evidence, you have to get ahead of these things.

True, but rationally that "difficulty" should also be taken into account when assessing decision making at the time. For many, including a number of otherwise sensible and rational commentators, this gets forgotten and the simple, and with the benefit of hindsight, judgements are made unfairly.