[frereubu]

1-3: Have you heard of "excess mortality"? (Genuine question, not snark). That's commonly used as a measure to understand the underlying mortality rather than "death within X days of a positive PCR test". E.g. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

4: People are absolutely talking about the negative impact of the lockdowns. I'm not sure why you think otherwise - there have been robust debates about this, at least in the UK media. Perhaps what you mean is that you think it hasn't been taken into account in a way that you'd like?

5: This is a once-in-a-century event. Of course there's new language around it.

[liversage]

As mentioned in the article Sweden is part of EUROMOMO that tracks excess mortality which doesn't measure if someone died from covid or from negative effects of a lockdown but simply that they died.

Even though it's downplayed in the article Sweden had significant excess mortality in the spring of 2020 and at the turn of 2020-2021 compared to other countries like Norway and Finland that are used as benchmarks in the article.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

[erichahn]

1: This has nothing to do with excess mortality per se but rather with proper data analysis.

2-3: That's exactly what I mean but you should not measure excess mortality as absolute deaths / million people but you should adjust for demographics. Because if you have older population, you will have more expected deaths. And if you adjust for age the excess mortality vanishes for germany.

4: Yes, it is talked about but not to the extend that would be necessary. In reality most people experience the various negative consequences of the lockdown policies but very few the negative consequences of the virus.

5: This is certainly debatable. If you compare this to the HIV-pandemic (still ~1mio Deaths / yr), then Covid has a factor of 10^5 more public attention (but 2x the death toll). A similar number of people die of tuberculosis. Nobody knows how many people die of influenza or coronavirus each year. We suspect there are 100 Mio dengue virus infections each year. Nobody knows what a once-in-a-century pandemic is. It seems to be a matter of public attention and newness instead of careful data analysis.

[FiggyPudding]

Necessary for what? To convince everyone to stop with masks and restrictions?

It's not just about mortality rates. The other problem is hospitalizations. If you get in a bad car accident, get a bad infection, or have a pregnancy go bad you want an ICU bed not occupied by someone drowning from COVID. I expect most of these mortality rates are from places that didn't have their hospital systems collapse and have to ration care. I think US is heading there in some states, then mortality will get closer to that hospitalization rate.

Excess mortality has to somehow account for reduced commuting, reduced regular medical visits, more domestic violence, etc it's a mixed bag when you are dealing with pandemic behavioral changes do they have real models for all that?

[erichahn]

The same baseline problem holds for hospitalizations as well. Nobody knows how many hospital beds were occupied in the last 10 years. Evidence points to a strong decrease in hospital capacity in germany at least in the last 20 years. Talking about "collapse of hospital system" is very bad in my opinion. No data shows that this actually happened in the EU at least. Also keep in mind that there is always (year does not matter) some place on earth where a hospital may collapse. So bergamo (italy) for example is just anecdotal evidence.

On possibly reduced mortality by lockdown : OK, fair enough. I think you can see it in decreased car accidents in germany and also in seemingly low influenza associated deaths. But my theory is that influenza and sars2 are evolutionary competing for vulnerable individuals and sars2 seems to be winning right now. I saw a nice study showing this for several flu-like viruses a couple of years ago. But getting enough and clean data for problems like this is very hard.

I think the lockdown has almost nothing to do with the virus but is a strange reaction to increased pressure of globalization and digitalization on the societies as well as a global economic crisis. Maybe lockdown policies will stay for a long time. But not to protect us from a dangerous virus but to ease some kind of mass anxiety and to make us ready for a new kind of governance focused on ai, big data and techocracy.

[gus_massa]

Here in Buenos Aires, 2 months ago, we a big covid19 wave an we had more than 90% of occupation of the ICU beds, after delaying all the medical procedures that was possible to delay. It was not normal, because during the rest of the pandemic it was much smaller, and the government of the city, and the government of the province that controls most of the area of the extended metropolitan area were worried. (They also had different opinions about how strict should be the lockdown, so they blamed each other.)

[nasmorn]

In Austria there were multiple times that all planned operations have been postponed. This has never happened previously. I would present that as a clear case of this being a different situation.

[FiggyPudding]

I'm talking from the point of view that the lockdown measures managed to keep ICU capacity open which reduced our current excess mortality observed. As far as I've read ICU capacity dropped greatly in many countries over the past decades, but my thinking is that we can't easily argue the various lockdown measures were bad using figures like national excess mortality because our current measures don't share the same baseline as an unrestricted pandemic free society.

Everyone has had vastly different experiences with the virus which affects views of the lockdown and behaviors.

Within the first few months of it in the US lost 3 coworkers to it, 1 known personally all around the same time. No clear mortality rate at the time, lockdowns made sense to us, it was real, we stayed masked up and crazy isolated. By comparison to my father who knew no one affected at all for the first year or longer. So to everyone outside of NY and California or wherever it started it was a whole lot of nothing. Either anxiety of virus that wasn't nearby for the vulnerable or another media hype like Swine flu or Avian flu or MERS that never really hit.

I'm sure there are still plenty of people who haven't been directly affected by the actual virus just the restrictions, only know people who maybe had a positive test or a short fever with their kids. When people only get news loosely from posts on the internet I'm sure many ignore or miss the semi-regular pleas from doctors and nurses to take it seriously and keep the F out of the hospitals. Like one I recently saw from Florida.

I consider COVID a new killer in addition to flu, I assume flu vaccines actually work (imperfectly) to lessen symptoms and everyone's annual clichè claims that the vaccine makes them sick or does nothing is just repeating the same old shtick. To be fair I have no data to back that up that the influenza vaccine does anything but I think it just underscores the vague distrust of medicine floating about. I'm almost a scientist and optimistically drink the koolaid and get my flu shot annual and trust that government fda, cdc, whatever generally does want medicines to actually work to keep people working.

"to ease some kind of mass anxiety and to make us ready for a new kind of governance focused on ai, big data and techocracy."

I don't usually go along with these things that sound like grand control conspiracies.

The anxiety about globalization and digitization is probably part of all the conspiracy thinking. Globalization is moving what used to be semi livable jobs out and replacing livable wage work with software engineering and advanced degree jobs or rent seeking almost exclusively. Everyone else is getting squeezed by big corps, franchise contracts vs minimum wage, high tech gear with no right to repair, etc. Grand control conspiracies in my mind are a weird commiserating hope that the world sucks on purpose because some elite levers of power are making it that way when really the world sucks because a bunch of simple systems chasing money or power are making a big complicated mess the crushed the unlucky under the cruel invisible hand of the market.

On the other hand hearing vaguely about Turing being part of a team successfully handling details from the cracked enigma machine to steer WWII without letting Nazis realize the code was broken seems to give credit to the idea that the knowledge collected by agencies like the NSA could be used by geniuses around the world to manipulate things. But if they exist they do a great job making governments look dumb...

Sorry this turned into word spaghetti.

[erichahn]

Mass anxiety is not a conspiracy theory but rather a measurable social effect. See social cooling.

I didn't say there is somebody controlling or forcing the population into technocracy. What I meant is that it is inevitable to some degree that tech will continue to shape our society in unexpected and unintended ways.

Even if I did. Nothing is wrong with good conspiracy theories. Sometimes they turn out to be true.