[DocSavage]

There's the GBD proposal, and then there's the actual media tours by the GBD proponents, particularly on Fox, where COVID-19 was downplayed. Some of them famously wrote columns how there'd be maybe 10,000 fatalities and it was like the flu. Is it surprising that downplaying the virus also worked against spending huge amounts of money to protect the elderly? Like govt renting hotels to isolate elderly living with families? Or providing deliveries so they could stay at home?

[orblivion]

I think Dr. Jay B seemed reasonable and honest enough. For instance you can find him saying that he's not comfortable comparing it to the flu, since he suspects flu deaths may be greatly overcounted. He talks now (not sure about before) about deliveries and hotels as you say. Etc.

But yes, the loudest dissenters seemed to be contrarians, rather than people with a specific plan. They take a big mash of GBD, "lol it's not that bad, not everybody's going to get it", "lol everybody's going to get it so there's nothing we can do anyway", "we're not obligated to look out for other people anyway", etc etc with all the inherent contradictions. Any signal that went against "THE COVID NARRATIVE" they signal boosted.

Something like insecurity must have been driving this stuff. I think some of the counter-maintstream points were right, particularly about being sober about tradeoffs, but overall it was a total embarrassment. Granted the other side wasn't much better.

[DocSavage]

I think Jay B was better than most of the GBD supporters because he seemed to focus more on the targeted prevention. The problem was he didn't counter the downplaying of SARS-CoV-2 by people using his own seroprevalence paper (which had problems), or at least I never saw him push back on Atlas and others. So his criticism about public health issues is completely devoid of his own part in the story. They went heavy with part 1 (COVID isn't that bad for non-elderly) and were surprised that downplaying the impact didn't shift resources to the elderly. If people using his data were saying the overall IFR was like the flu, why should the govt go way into debt protecting the elderly?