Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
Did the GOP hurt their own election chances by downplaying COVID?
This tweet claims that Lauren Boebert may lose her race by less than 100 votes, in a district with over 2,500 covid deaths. While one can certainly argue over the effectiveness of various measures, I think a combination of masking, distancing, and (of course) vaccinating could easily be worth plus or minus 8% deaths (the vote is roughly evenly split, so if there would otherwise be about 1250 dead from each group, then we have 100/1250 = about 8%). And the elderly, who were disproportionately affected by COVID, tend to vote Republican.
Note, the original tweet is now out of date; https://elections.denverpost.com/ has Boebert ahead by just over 1,000 votes. The closest House race where the Dem is currently ahead, coincidentally also in CO, unfortunately does not appear in https://geographicinsights.iq.harvard.edu/coviduscongress because it's a new district (CO 8). CA District 13 is also very close, with the Republican ahead by 267 (according to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/10/us/elections/results-house-seats-elections-congress.html, at time of writing) in a district with 945 covid deaths. If this race does flip, it could easily be by just a few hundred votes (currently only 58% counted though).
This was a trollish take back in the spring of 2020 when twitter blue-checks were suggesting with barely concealed glee that Republican's refusal to mask up, cancel grandma's funeral, bend the knee to saint Fauci, etc... was going to result in mass deaths and the depopulation of the red states.
It's an even more trollish take now, given what we no about Covid-19's lethality (or rather relative lack there of), and the long term damage done by the lockdowns.
A lot of people might have been gleeful. I was not one of them; I'm asking a serious question because it seems like, potentially, a pretty big own goal to encourage your constituents to do things that are fairly risky. If a lot of people ended up with felony convictions because the Dems encouraged them to riot, for example, that would also be a pretty big own goal.
I'm not really sure how either of these points are supposed to be relevant. For races that aren't very close it obviously doesn't matter, but it isn't hard to look up actual COVID deaths by congressional district and compare it to the margin. Saying "the lethality is low!" is completely irrelevant. And you can oppose lockdowns without telling people COVID is just the flu (which isn't even a nontrivial risk for the elderly).
Define "risky"
My point is that given that covid-19 turned out to be orders of magnitude less lethal than was initially claimed you're going to put in some work if your going to argue the GOP lost more votes to Covid deaths than it would have had it supported strict lockdowns mail in voting etc...
Orders of magnitude? Do you have anything resembling a citation for that? I saw initial estimate of maybe 1% IFR, decreasing down to a few tenths of a percent as the most vulnerable died/treatment improved. This paper from May claims anywhere from 0.5-2.5%. For covid to be "orders of magnitude less risky" than originally claimed would make it among the least-deadly viruses ever known.
There's some math in the original post, did you not bother to read it?
Or, you know, not gone crazy shouting that covid was just the flu and getting sick just to own the libs.
One percent getting cut to a tenth of a percent is an order of magnitude and that was before we found out that rates of infection may have actually been much higher than previously thought making the disease that much less lethal.
If that article is correct, with about 6.6M deaths and world population of 8 billion, then the IFR is still over 0.1%, within 1 order of magnitude of the original estimates.
A naive rate calculation 6.6 million deaths in a population of 7.8 billion yields an IFR of 0.084%, and that's assuming that 100% of those 6.6 million deaths were actually caused by covid and not "died by other causes while infected with covid". Meanwhile at the height of the lockdown hysteria government officials were speculating that the IFR might be as high as 3%, but that was quietly memory-holed when it came out that that particular estimate was based solely on data from the state of New York where some bright spark had decided that the best place to house patients with a respiratory disease would be in public nursing homes.
Accordingly I stand by my initial statement.
That's not an IFR. Your source claimed about 60% of the world may have been infected, so the IFR would be 6.6 million / (7.8*0.6) = 0.14%.
It's also assuming that there weren't deaths caused by covid which were missed. This blog post, which I thought was posted here or on the subreddit at some point, finds that total excess deaths usually substantially exceed official COVID deaths, although there's no way to know if that's because of missed COVID deaths or because of other factors, such as the spike in traffic fatalities in the US. (Unfortunately the post itself skips this point and just calls the difference a "fudge factor.")
You have compared the absolute highest IFR I've seen for Covid (actually I'm not sure I've ever seen 3% claimed; this paper gives estimates of over 5%, but that's for the case fatality rate, and so is much higher where there are more uncaught cases; the lower end 0.15%, almost identical to the 0.14% I gave above, is probably closer to the IFR, but I can't find any similar papers attempting to calculate IFR directly with early data), which also was not the "initial" estimate since NY didn't have a big wave until at least 6 months after it started in China and which you also seem to agree was an anomaly that was retracted, and comparing to an IFR that is substantially lower than even what your own source would support. Even with the absolute highest gap one can possibly construct, misleadingly so in fact, you can only muster log_10(35) = 1.54 orders of magnitude, and even that includes real changes to the IFR over time (improved treatment, most vulnerable people dying first--according to this paper, IFR might have dropped by around 1/3 in the last 9 months of 2020).
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