I mean, basic virus protocols almost eliminated the flu. We should probably keep doing them, I dunno. I also never liked people being able to reach into my pockets in line and cough on my food though, so maybe I'm weird.
Our Covid Response
- Thread starter gorfias
- Start date
Again, you're oversimplifying a lot things: the impact of covid is affected by a lot more things than government policy, and you are inconsistent in how you want to treat evidence. Remember you posted that Vinay Prasad video where he attacks a paper for not covering all the bases in a comparison of two places? One thing you could learn from that is the principle that simple comparisons often do tend to be very flawed. But you haven't learnt anything, you're just grabbing what suits you.
No, that's not quite true. I'm questioning selecting out two states under a specific (and limited) analysis, which you appear to be doing for no coherent logic other than that they happen to flatter your prejudices. Again, I point out that other states which had similarly lax regulations like Florida had very, very poor outcomes. Why not talk about them?
...and yet he co-authored at least one covid paper with very significant flaws. medice, cura te ipsum.
That's because I believe a lot of it is unknown. And good scientist that I am, if I don't think there's sufficient evidence to make a strong claim, I don't. Although I'd be absolutely clear about one thing though: lockdowns saved a lot of lives.
He did that long before the Great Barrington Declaration, though, didn't he? And let's face it, that doesn't make him particular special either, as a great deal other jurisdictions around the world took that measure. And even where governments hadn't, individual facilities took that step on their own.
Not that I have any great inclination to stick up for Cuomo as he made a serious misjudgement, but I would point out in at least some mitigation that NY's hospitals were flooded and they urgently needed to free up space.
Again, you're just rigging the argument here. Covid struck in waves, and the waves hit different places at different times with different intensity. So you can cheat by selecting out a particularly helpful time point... and you are.
If you were to use end 2020, California was doing vastly better than Florida. California then takes heavy losses in early 2021 where Florida gets off quite lightly, but then in late 2021, Florida does very badly where California does not. I really don't think those things are all about policy.
I do not necessarily think these are highest reliability, but if true they might lead us to ask some searching questions about how effective Florida really was at protecting its elderly.
What Share of People Who Have Died of COVID-19 Are 65 and Older – and How Does It Vary By State? | KFF
This analysis examines the extent of state-level variation in the share of COVID-19 deaths accounted for by older adults, using data from the CDC as of July 22, 2020, for the week ending July 11, 2020.
www.kff.org
COVID-19 Deaths Among Older Adults During the Delta Surge Were Higher in States with Lower Vaccination Rates | KFF
This analysis looks at the relationship between vaccination rates and COVID-19 deaths for adults 65 and older since the Delta variant took hold, and finds that states with lower vaccination rates among adults ages 65 and older had higher death rates among older adults during this period.
www.kff.org
Then what does the equation do because it doesn't do what you said either. How would you make an age-adjusted equation that counts every death?
Florida didn't collapse, it's still better than average. Post-vaccine, vaccination rates are gonna be the main determinate. Thus, pre-vaccine highlights best what effects all other interventions had. What other red states did the interventions that Florida did because Florida did some pretty important interventions, it's just that the news you watch doesn't report on those things because it doesn't go along with the narrative. Also, if you look at the most obese states, that list comes pretty close to mirroring the states that did worse with covid because after age, obesity is the next biggest factor. I never said to "blow off" the disease, why must you lie?
Yeah, heavily restricting the least vulnerable groups is doing the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do.
You're going to fucking cite China as what you're supposed to do?!?! Have you not seen what China did or what China is doing now? I guess good measures to you include locking people in their homes to die, taking kids from parents, killing pets. China is so dystopian right now it's not even funny. Also, it's not like you can actually trust China's numbers anyway.
Washing hands doesn't stop respiratory diseases. And, if fact, using hand sanitizer has caused more sickness. I never used hand sanitizer the entire pandemic because we already had studies before March 2020 that told us covid didn't spread on surfaces.
Increased hand sanitizer use blamed for rise in gastro outbreaks
A number of countries are reporting increasing rates of viral gastroenteritis over recent months, and experts suggest greater use of hand sanitizers, known to have little effect on pathogens such as norovirus, may be partly responsible.
newatlas.com
OMG, basic virus protocols did not eliminate the flu, it was viral interference from covid that out-competed the flu.
My argument wasn't that comparing Florida and California is some perfect comparison that objectively proves XYZ. My argument is that "the science" spouted by the media was basically bullshit. The CDC director literally tweeted that masks are 80+% effective is stopping transmissions NOVEMBER 2021. If all these interventions work as well as they were touted (deemed "the science"), then there's no fucking way Florida can outperform California when one of the states gave a big fat middle finger to "the science" and the other state followed "the science" probably more than any other state. One of the doctors I listen to that lives in California couldn't take his daughter to the SCIENCE museum because she wasn't boosted (no fucking joke).
I don't know what most the states did so I'm comparing a few that I do know what they did. Why do you think Florida had lax regulations? Because they allowed people to go to the beaches? What's your explanation for Florida, they just got lucky? Also, most of the states that did very poor have the highest obesity rates. If you look at the most obese states and the worst performing states, they almost mirror each other.
The IFR paper? What was flawed about that paper? I could buy covid having that IFR worldwide as a very large percentage of the world population skews quite a bit younger than US and other developed western countries.
I keep asking you to stop attacking the person but the argument. If you don't know, then why do you keep saying how wrong someone is? Attack the argument, not the person. Why is doing focused protection worse than doing basically equal protection across the entire population (same measures for everyone basically)?
Lockdowns saved covid deaths but covid isn't the only public health issue. Do lockdowns end up saving more life in the long run? Obesity rates climbed during the pandemic, along with mental health issues, and drug overdoses. Even car deaths increased.
Has the Pandemic Affected Obesity Rates?
Obesity has been a serious chronic disease in the U.S. and globally for decades. As the pandemic continues, weight gain becomes more severe.
The Great Barrington Declaration wasn't some new idea that just came about at said declaration, it was just a declaration about using known measures we've done throughout history. Lockdowns were the new idea.
Cuomo also fudged the numbers. Funny how most people think it was Florida and DeSantis fudging numbers because the media ran wild with that bullshit story and most probably don't even know Cuomo literally did fudge the numbers.
Cuomo also did make the following statement March 1, 2020:
"There is no reason for undue anxiety -- the general risk remains low in New York. We are diligently managing this situation and will continue to provide information as it becomes available."
You're criticizing me for selecting too small a time frame when you said that mask studies that target a specific time frame are better than studies looking over a longer period of time? I responded to basically that up above. But if California is doing all the interventions that work so very well, how are they getting hit hard and taking heavy losses to begin with? I thought listening to "the science" would stop such things from happening. In seriousness, I do feel the best data for interventions is before the vaccine is really getting out there so maybe before March/April 2021 when the vaccine really got rolling out in the US IIRC.
There's also differences in the makeup of the elderly populations. If you're say 70 vs 80, chances are a lot less that you're in an assisted living facility. A problem with all the vaccine mandates and stuff was that you kinda can't mandate old people to get vaccinated, they aren't going to school and they aren't working. All that push for the mandates and shaming the unvaccinated only made the whole thing for more political than it needed to be. Making a college student get boosted to go to school isn't doing anything to slow down covid and is, in fact, making it worse because you're basically sparking unrest with people's willingness to get vaccinated. You need to target the vulnerable in your push for vaccination.I do not necessarily think these are highest reliability, but if true they might lead us to ask some searching questions about how effective Florida really was at protecting its elderly.
What Share of People Who Have Died of COVID-19 Are 65 and Older – and How Does It Vary By State? | KFF
This analysis examines the extent of state-level variation in the share of COVID-19 deaths accounted for by older adults, using data from the CDC as of July 22, 2020, for the week ending July 11, 2020.
COVID-19 Deaths Among Older Adults During the Delta Surge Were Higher in States with Lower Vaccination Rates | KFF
This analysis looks at the relationship between vaccination rates and COVID-19 deaths for adults 65 and older since the Delta variant took hold, and finds that states with lower vaccination rates among adults ages 65 and older had higher death rates among older adults during this period.
It does do what I said, it very plainly just counts old people deaths as less important than other deaths. You have to be blind not to see it. I already said what could be done, comparing the deaths of the relatively old between states to see if one state's methods were better for the most vulnerable population or not. But judging from what Agema posted earlier, you really don't want to do that with Florida since it looks like they far and away killed their old worse than most any other state. Which lines up with the equation just erasing old deaths.
Factually incorrect.
You didn't, but red states sure as hell did. Paying some lip service to it then just "moving on". Lo and behold, red states did worse. 8 of the top 10 worst states in deaths per capita are red states, meanwhile only 2 states in the top 10 are a red state. There is a very clear pattern here and no amount of just ignoring deaths you don't like is going to change that.
You're using a cherry picked comparison to try to make your point. It's like selecting a 5'10" woman and a 5'10" man and arguing all that stuff about men being taller than women is bullshit.
Well you should know and think about how other states did.
Then you need to start presenting the argument, not the person, by not attempting to buttress your cherry picked data by telling us how eminent the researchers are.
Yes, and what causes those things? You are implicitly assuming it is lockdown: that is an unsafe assumption.
Lockdowns are not a new idea. The covid lockdowns were perhaps a development in scale and tactics.
No, I'm criticising you for cherry picking: in this case, a time frame advantageous to your argument. You cherry pick all your data, it's habit.
??? They did, at a national level, almost everywhere in the world. The elderly and vulnerable got it first.
The fact remains that for all your touted claims of Florida protecting its elderly, if those figures are correct then it did not do a good job.
No, you said it counts old people as 1/3, which isn't true. I'm all for you or anyone providing a better way to evaluate states but nobody has. Agema's link wasn't very good as to accessing how good any state did because it's a very flawed why of looking at it. Firstly, it was done in July 2020 so only the 1st few months of the pandemic (most places didn't even get a 1st wave yet). Secondly, it's a flawed why to look at it even if it was the entirety of the pandemic for numerous reasons. You have places like Arkansas and Mississippi on there as doing the best probably because they have high obesity rates so a higher percentage of their non-elderly have died from covid, thus making it look like they protected their elderly better when you view it as % of old people that died. If you want to do it a much better way, do it based on what percentage of the elderly population died in each state.
Florida beat California in straight mortality rate the 1st year of the pandemic when restrictions would actually affect mortality rate the most. And again, that gross mortality rate is not a fair comparison. Mine is more fair with regards to accessing how well each state did. Again, far from perfect, but better than gross mortality. I'd much prefer something like age-adjusted along with obesity adjustments and a population density adjustment as those are probably the biggest factors by a long shot.
I never proclaimed red states overall did a good job because I really don't know what most of them did or didn't do. I know what Florida did and it worked better than average. The main problem with Florida in the long run is vaccination rates which covid restrictions don't really contribute to. Again, why don't you look at the pattern Agema's "age-adjusted" article paints a picture of? Without looking at the election map to confirm, I believe 9 out of the 10 best performing states at "protecting the old people" were red states (only Arizona was blue in 2020 IIRC and just barely at that). But again, I explained why that's a very flawed way to look at things and why I'm not using it as some pro red state data because the data is junk while you act like I'll cling onto any bad data that shows red states doing better.
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How is it cherry-picked? If these covid restrictions work as good as they say, how wasn't Florida an apocalyptic hellscape? How did Florida beat California in gross mortality rate the 1st year of the pandemic when both states did completely opposite responses?
Why do I need to know what literally every state did? I only need to show one example of a state not following "the science" and doing just fine to show "the science" isn't actually the science.
I did, the argument is very simple. Why is having a one-size fits all response to the entire population better than doing a focused protection for the vulnerable?
Perhaps not lockdowns entirely but the overall covid response caused all those things. Also, you have to minus the normal flu deaths per year from covid death numbers because covid stopped the flu (at least 100,000 in the US over 2 years would've died from catching the flu if they didn't catch covid instead). How does this video lead you to believing living life like this is healthy? This is one of the most depressing videos I've ever watched.
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Lockdowns are new, perhaps not a new idea entirely, but actual implementation is. We have no data for lockdowns and their affects but they are better because why?
The whole first year of the pandemic pre-vaccine is now cherry picking data? Yet picking just a month or 2 for a mask study is not cherry picking data according to you? That makes no sense.
I'm talking about stuff like vax mandates and booster mandates, they don't target the vulnerable but the young and healthy. The least vulnerable, the people (kids) that have better odds when they are unvaccinated vs a vaccinated person are the ones with the most restrictions. Also, giving the vaccine to the elderly first sounds almost exactly like focused protection now doesn't it? And if your figures of the states that protected old people the best are correct, then red states completely walloped the blue states in a knockout in the 1st round.
Masks are the dumbest things ever, you expect Americans to be obedient little lemmings like various authoritarian Asian countries that have many boot-licking citizens. No, I don't agree, take three-four shots of the vaccine, and piss off with that mask nonsense. It's literally security theater.
Bruh. I said the specific number doesn't matter. It could be 1/3, 1/2, 9/10, the number isn't the issue. That there is a number is the issue. That old people deaths are counted as some fraction of other deaths is the problem.
Literally other people have and you just ignore it. You also ignore how your method isn't at all good.
Pro-tip, that's what Agema posted. The death rate of the 65+ crowd in each state. Which is what I said to do pages ago, and you ignored. Florida was atrocious.
But not a lot of other red states and now not even Florida as the pandemic has rolled on. So a useless data point on your end. Florida is doing worse than California, objective fact.
No it isn't because it's flim flammery in erasing deaths, not adjusting for anything.
The data disagrees.
They aren't, the graph you found is the relative percentage of deaths in the state of the elderly compared to the non-elderly. It says nothing about the mortality rate of the elderly or of the state in general. A better graph was posted in one of the articles to show.
Deaths per capita of the 65+ crowd, and you can roughly compare by state. And you can see Florida is way up there in deaths per capita.
You will. You want to know how bogus your "age adjusted" chart is? Take a look at New York and New Jersey on it. By their own count, Jersey did better than NY in raw per capita deaths, but when "adjusting for age", they suddenly tie. Now, you can look up their relative demographics and see they're nearly identical. Certainly not so out of phase that grading by age should change their standings relative to each other by any serious amount.
But your source does. Is it adjusting for age, or is it covering for Cuomo's terrible policy that disproportionately killed the old? I guess Cuomo's policy wasn't actually that bad, all things considered.
Lockdowns were new in the same way the iPhone 12 was new in 2020. They are definitely in a certain sense new. They aren't however "new" in the sense they are just the latest iteration of ongoing development. Forms of disease control have existed across millennia. What we call "lockdown" has clear antecedants from previous centuries: quarantines / isolation, shutting down public spaces or places of mass gathering, restricting movement (at the level of houses to whole cities). These have all been done before.
I'm not sure whether this is just a genuine lack of understanding or being maliciously vexatious.
I have no idea what pointless wank this whole paragraph is about except an excuse to tubthump more of your longstanding nonsense.
You just dismissed the fact that airlines in general have experienced covid issues after unmasking, on the basis that one airline didn't. In the same post. You literally made the case that something didn't happen on the basis of a single data point.
I work at a compounding pharmacy. Masks work or we wouldn't wear them
And explain to me why that's bad outside of just "it's counting old people less". How do you think things get adjusted in any kind of math? Is adjusting for inflation bad because it counts some dollars less than others?
No, they haven't.
That's not what Agema posted, read the figures and study. Agema posted that say 80% of State_A's deaths were 65+ and that's worse than say 75% of State_B's deaths being 65+, and thus concluded that A was worse than B. The problem is when a state has a higher unhealthy population (like the red states all doing super great) then you have more younger people dying and thus the amount of elderly dying is a lower percentage. That's why Arkansas and Mississippi are doing the "best" in that study.
What I said to do is say State_A has 100 65+ people total (low numbers for easier math) and 15 die from covid while State_B has 50 65+ people total and 10 die from covid. State_A has 15% of their elderly population die from covid while State_B has 20% of their elderly die from covid. That's what I said to do, which is not what Agema's study did. Giving me the percentage of old people that died from a state in comparison to younger people is completely useless data, which is why all those red states did so well in the study Agema linked to. Shouldn't I be championing that study showing all the red states doing so well?
Why does it matter if not a lot of other red states? I don't care that Florida is red and California is blue, I care that they took different strategies. Florida's strategy worked better pre-vaccine when said strategies were important. What's the point of restrictions after the vaccine is widely available to all? The point was stopping people from getting covid before they had gained immunity and an opportunity to do so, after that it doesn't matter. The reason Florida hasn't done as well after that 1st year is because their vaccination rate was lower, it wasn't because they didn't wear masks or they went to the beach or the kids were in school, or else they would've done just as bad the 1st year.
Can you actually make arguments in good faith? Look how cherry picked that data is. I wonder why Florida did so bad during that exact picked time period. Perhaps it was because they had a wave during that period vs other states that didn't? This is why you have to look at data from a much longer point in time because covid waves are drastically different from state to state.
Huh? According to Statista New Jersey did worse than New York. A quick google search of "new york elderly population" puts NY at 13% and then searching the same for NJ puts its elderly pop at 16.6%. Thus when you age adjust, NJ and NY should get closer together.
U.S. COVID death rate by state 2023 | Statista
As of March 2023, Arizona had the highest COVID death rate in the U.S., with 455 deaths per 100,000 population. Hawaii had the lowest death rate.
www.statista.com
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Tell me when the 1st time public health decided to treat everyone the same (when risk factors vary greatly) and shut down the economy to stop a virus across a nation?
I can say the same thing about that completely useless "age-adjusted" study you posted, it's complete garbage data that means nothing. I'm not sure whether this is just a genuine lack of understanding or being maliciously vexatious.
Vax mandates and booster mandates do nothing to help and you're just wasting your pandemic/political "capital" on stuff that doesn't help and then when you want to do something that is good, the public is done with you because you used up your "capital" already. You can't mandate the vulnerable to get vaccinated because they don't participate in society in places that you can mandate.
Also, you keep avoiding actually talking about the argument at hand. Why is doing a focused protection on the vulnerable worse than doing the equal protection to all of the population (when risk factors greatly vary within said population)?
I believe I said if masks work so well why did the one airline that stayed masked have a large amount of sick employees and cancelled flights at a different point in time then? Just because one thing happens after something doesn't mean causation. General sickness hits different groups at different times like say your friend's workplace all got sick in October while your place of work passed it around in November. Just because your placed dropped masks in November doesn't mean that was the cause of people getting sick as your friend's workplace was masking in October.
Dollars aren't lives, first off. Second off we already have per capita calculations if you want to control for a segment of population that doesn't erase deaths.
Yes they have, just because you don't read doesn't mean they haven't been provided.
Congratulations on coming up with a reason to not use that graph as an example of a state doing well with protecting the elderly? I have no idea how you can hold the opinion that it was at all smart to use that graph while explaining precisely why you shouldn't use that graph.
Look at other data, like the graph I posted that does in fact do precisely what I said to do pages ago and you're now pretending you came up with.
Because red states followed similar strategies, i.e. Florida's strategy. And it didn't work. By the weight of statistics, states that took Florida's stance did on average worse than states that went more in the direction of California.
You really don't get to complain about cherry picked data. Now explain away how the graph trends with Florida style states doing conspicuously worse than states that took the disease more seriously. Because it's not just Florida (which wowee look, they killed their elderly real good), your whole argument for how the disease should be handled was executed by a very good chunk of the country and it is consistently shown to be a bad choice.
Then you really have to explain why you believe your own source since they say the opposite. Looks like the source you use to tell everyone Florida's doing well is just making up numbers. Absolutely no reason anybody should trust it then, and should be thrown out like everyone told you pages ago.
