This is incorrect. Almost the opposite is true: if anything masks might be of some use on inhale but not on exhale. Bear in mind that almost nobody uses N95 masks and many of those who do are not properly fitted. As I explained in my comment, the commonly-used surgical masks are leaky, particularly on exhale and turbulence in most environments mixes aerosols throughout. There are countless videos showing this online, e.g., this one. But, frankly, you don’t need a video to see this is true; just observe one of those paper masks upon exhale.
There is little, if any, evidence that these measures made any difference. On the contrary, there is evidence of their ineffectiveness by comparing locations that implemented various measures in varying degrees. Outcomes did not correlate with severity of the measures.
Of course not. What a straw man argument! Indeed, I wish those who are afraid would stay home even more. Please, stay home as much as possible.
With regard to variability in deaths… at least variability in predicted deaths. This is from 2019. I have no idea what variables go into the projections.
Regarding Florida and regional covid rates in general, sometimes pictures are worth more than a thousand words, especially when those words are written by ‘journo-lists’.
Two maps showing covid case rates per 1K population compiled over 30 day periods, using data from the New York Times database. First, the 30 days prior to August 19, 2021. During this time, the journo-listas were calling for Ron DeSantis’ head on a platter. Good times, good times.
While it’s great fun to explain everything with politics, especially if you’re a dumbass journo-lista, sometimes seasonality is a better explanation. More than a passing resemblance to the flu.
I don’t know the methodology, but when summing up the 3142 counties in the US, it is at least imaginable that counting and reporting to the feds is subject to variation which is not outright or intentional manipulation. It could be that simply greater attention caused by the news (let’s leave aside for now whether or not this is a pandemic) results in more counties reporting more deaths. As well, consider how government reports of inflation include things like “hedonic adjustments”. I suspect there are adjustments made to raw data - if for no other reason, to account for a small percentage of counties not reporting as well as other variables. It would be enlightening to see the entire methodology behind what is put out.
Some have said how the public health officials don’t profit by their decisions. If you measure in their own currency, they profit plenty. They count profit in increased power over and perceived importance to the public. BTW, I studied for a time in the legal department of a graduate school of public health. It was a repository of the most left wing radicals on the entire campus. “By any means necessary” was a frequent refrain. Just sayin’.
I think overall mortality is the best measure. I did start with the idea that you could not fake deaths. However, as soon as I asked myself “How would I know if the data was manipulated?” I decided I couldn’t be absolute.
You point out a few really good points that are realistic issues and may not be intentional. It made me think about the Indian reservations.
I don’t know the situation now, but when I was young it was not uncommon for Native Americans not to have birth certificates. It was not uncommon that in the spring a body would be found in the ditch that was a person never reported missing. Record keeping was not a priority.
I am not saying this alone could impact the numbers greatly, but a lesson I learned long ago is that data analysis starts by understanding how the data is collected.
We agree on that point. But what do total death numbers tell us? In the US, a human being dies about every 10 seconds – and it has been that way since long before anyone ever heard of Covid. The number dying has been a little higher in the last couple of years. Why?
Variations of all kinds.
Some of this could be simple statistical variation. Some might be related to the aging of the native population. Some might be related to allowing 2 Million (?) people to cross into the US over the southern border – many of whom may have health issues.
The “Dry Tinder” hypothesis.
Although it causes distress for many in these irreligious times, the reality is that everyone dies. All of us! Some analysis suggests that fewer people than “normal” were dying in previous years, probably due to mild flu seasons and ever-advancing medical care. Thus, when a new Influenza-Like-Illness appeared, there was some inevitable catch-up. The observation in some countries that the average age of those whose deaths are ascribed to Covid is in their 80s lends some credence to this.
Covid.
Indisputably, there has been an Influenza-Like-Illness which has resulted in deaths – mainly in the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions.
Lock Downs.
Again indisputably, there have been people who died prematurely because the politician-imposed Lock Downs resulted in them failing to get prompt treatment for heart attacks, strokes, cancer.
The question is – how do we estimate what share of the total ~3 Million US residents per year dying under to group under each category? It is not simple – and we probably don’t have enough reliable data to make well-supported estimates. The one thing that is obvious is it would be simple-minded to suggest that any increase over “trend” (however defined) is solely due to the Dreaded Covid.
I never tire of pointing this out, much to the chagrin of most listeners. We agree. This important context is always left out.
Nope, these don’t make sense. The excess deaths are seasonal and well correlated with the admittedly imperfect measurements of cases. We’ve had an aging population for a long time: no sudden changes in 2020. Furthermore, it’s a global phenomenon that can’t be pinned on illegals crossing the US border. These are poor hypotheses.
A variation on your theme is that various calamities ‘harvest’ the vulnerable, resulting in lower death rates after the calamity passes. A good example is heat waves, which raise the death rate for a few weeks, followed by a lower death rate subsequently. News media breathlessly report that a heat wave killed 500 people but fail to note that they were near death anyway and that deaths dropped below normal the next week. I expect this to play out over a longer period for Covid, though it might be hard to discern the signal in the noise.
Undoubtedly true but not quantified. Sure, the figures are exaggerated for numerous reasons. I doubt that any of this will change the numbers by as much as a factor of two, which still leaves the death count per capita well above any flu pandemic in the last 50 years or so.
No reasonable person would make such a claim: not solely but likely principally or at least significantly.
There’s no sense trying to deny that this thing was bad. The focus should be on which mitigation measures, if any, made sense. It’s fairly clear that the lockdowns, and especially the preposterous masks, have had little positive effect and have caused great harms.The vaccines have poor effectiveness, regardless of how hard the regime media claim otherwise. Arguably, the most significant damage has been to the credibility of the public health establishment that has repeatedly dissembled about the vaccines, the therapies, and the non-therapeutic measures (masks, social distancing, etc.).
The greater questions are
Will there ever be a reckoning?
Will we learn from our mistakes?
A reckoning is required for the public health establishment, the media, and the political class to recover even a modicum of credibility.
There’s little cause for optimism on either front. Then again, this is of a piece with the broader civilizational decline. Winter is coming.
Perhaps the closest were the two cruise ships that wandered the Asian waters for 2 weeks before hitting Japan with WuFlu on board. Their deaths were primarily in the 75 and over group. There was no quarrantine nor any effective treatment, since none was known then.
Then there are the early statistics - before it became a political football. The median age of death was 83 or 84, while deaths below 60 were rare. Then there was the fact that children <18 had some incredibly large number of deaths - like 115-120 total - and NO evidence of transmission to adults - although they DID get infected by adults.
So you can read the BS “papers” - like those that claimed “masks worked - but there were ‘complications’” and when you actually read the whole paper you found NONE of them had statistically significant results. So you read the meta-analyses, and they TOO found no statistical significance.
Then there’s the Irish Times that report two of their counties with vax rates of 97-99+% have had THE worst breakout of Delta of any WuFlu attack.
Believe what you will - read the papers or look around you. Whatever floats your boat.
One of my favorite guys posted a link to this video from New Zealand with the comment, “New Zealand should be converted into a nuclear testing site.” And you thought ‘scientists’ could not further debase themselves. (added scare quotes)
“Make science cool again”, he says. It would be better to make science true again. Of all the institutions which have forsaken truth, it may be that peer reviewed science’s (=scientism) collapse into a political black hole will have the longest lasting damage.
One can see why people of African heritage need have no concerns about honkies appropriating their culture and making rap videos.
What has gone wrong in the Southern Hemisphere? Australia with Covid Concentration Camps and New Zealand with generalized insanity. Should those Northern Hemisphere billionaires who built bunkers in New Zealand for when the world goes pear-shaped be beginning to wonder if maybe they would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire?
Will they let the folks in the concentration camps vote or are they classified as non human pests.
The increase in death rate is roughly 1 per thousand. I grew up in a town of 1000. I don’t think an additional death, most likely from an elderly person, would even be noticed. As they say. If you turn off the tv, you wouldn’t even know it exists.
The logic that we should do whatever it takes in order to prevent this from happening sells in the burbs due to the disconnect with reality. Safety at all costs.
In that same small town, in the before times (coined by Doug Casey), the idea that you would impact the children’s education alone would have killed the discussion. We don’t sacrifice the youth and we don’t disrupt the livelihood of people. We celebrate marriage and attend funerals. Someone shouting that grandpa Pete must be saved would have been met with “Pete has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.” It is likely that Pete would have nodded.
They were in touch with the realities of life and death. Every so often a child would die in a farm accident. The reaction wasn’t to prevent these tragedies by demanding that children stop working on the farms.
When I was a freshman my classmate and her sister died driving home from school. Both were smart and of excellent character. Nobody even thought to suggest that we could prevent this from happening in the future if we just did not let teenagers drive.
Helicopter parenting in the burbs has arrested the development of the youth. Society is and will continue to pay. The mature adults of my youth understood that this would be a much bigger tragedy. They were right.
As far back as the 1980s, Harry Schultz was warning his subscribers that the greatest threat to their liberty, privacy, and wealth came not from the Soviet bloc or other malefactors in various axes of evil, but rather countries in the Anglosphere. Why was this? Well, Sir Harry had a hypothesis but didn’t claim it proved. He believed that centuries of respect for the rule of law had inured residents of the Anglosphere to a default assumption of the legitimacy of their governments and a predisposition to obey their decrees. This sounds like a good thing, and it is in a high trust society. But when the wolves are voting with the minority sheep on what to have for dinner, that’s another matter entirely.
In many other cultures, in particular those in Latin countries, the assumption among the vast majority of the population is that the government is a crooked racket run by gangsters bent on extracting the maximum wealth from the labour of those they rule. Consequently, there is nothing wrong in minimising their take by any means possible.
This has not been the assumption in the Anglosphere. Most people, within my living memory, assumed the system was fundamentally fair and that those who obeyed the rules were treated equally with all others. This has been sacrificed in the expedient interest of raising revenue in recent years, and the milk cows are awakening to the racket. I think a major turning point was in the United Kingdom after World War II when the Labour party continued wartime rationing and austerity to finance its social programmes such as enslavement of physicians in the “National Health Service”. When the populace did not arise in defence of their rights, the slavers took notice and proceeded to further reduce citizens to subjects, or serfs. When mass immigration from third world countries in the 1960s went unopposed (“our democratically-elected parliament approved it”), the ability of the ruling class to import a new electorate was confirmed.
There are advantages of living in the Anglosphere, but it has been deeply corrupted by those who have exploited its population’s assumption of legitimacy to enslave them. It may seem cynical to prefer to live in a place where most people assume the government is a band of looters and murderers that one is wise to avoid in any way possible, but you can be a lot more free there than in the soi-disant “land of the free”.
Sad, but true. But that respect may be changing. We are steadily learning that official pronouncements do not necessarily reflect reality; that “independent” media reports do not necessarily reflect the truth; that the legal system certainly does not dispense justice; that the education system indoctrinates rather than teaches; that democracy has failed.
Even more sadly, we may be learning that this is not limited to the Anglosphere, as demonstrated by the recent action of Swiss voters to allow their Political Class to deny them freedom in the name of Covid.
Perhaps most sadly, history tells us these problems can last for a very long time. The USSR survived for several human generations, and Venezuela stumbles on year after year.
Hypatia asked in another thread – What can we do? Voting with one’s feet is certainly an option – but still leaves us with the question of which set of crooked incompetents to vote for. Nothing else is on offer, unfortunately.
The major difference between “then” - say 19th century - and now, is that we now no longer actively consider physically resisting “our” government. Back when government was small, no one was too worried about what the government did - because there was little they could do. No more, and it’s time to put that cat back in the bag again, a la Bunker Hill.
