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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32646 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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Scott briefly observes, "The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.

That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%. All these lives seem to have fallen into oblivion too quietly to be heard over the noise of Lab Leak Debate #35960381.

Maybe it’s because they were mostly old people? Old people have already lived a long life, nobody can get too surprised about them dying. But although only a small fraction of COVID deaths were young people, a small fraction of a large number can still be large: the pandemic killed 250,000 <65-year-old Americans, wiping out enough non-seniors to populate Salt Lake City. More military-age young men died in COVID than in Iraq/Afghanistan. Even the old people were somebody’s spouse or parent or grandparent; many should have had a good 5 - 10 years left.

Usually I’m the one arguing that we have to do cost-benefit analysis, that it’s impractical and incoherent to value every life at infinity billion dollars. And indeed, most lockdown-type measures look marginal on a purely economic analysis, and utterly fail one that includes hedonic costs. Rejecting some safety measures even though they saved lives was probably the right call. Still, I didn’t want to win this hard. People are saying things like “COVID taught us that scientists will always exaggerate how bad things will be.” I think if we’d known at the beginning of COVID that it would kill 1.2 million Americans, people would have thought that whatever warnings they were getting, or panicky responses were being proposed, were - if anything - understated.1

A better comparison for 1.2 million Americans dying would be the Spanish Flu: An estimated 675,000 Americans died, while the total population was estimated to be round 106,000,000. (The 2020 estimated population was around 331,500,000.)

One problem I have with the online debates about covid policy is there's no clear counterfactual: 2021 deaths were higher than 2020 deaths, which is bad for arguments that containment policies were only protecting the most vulnerable at the expense of the general population, because the most vulnerable had disproportionately died in 2020 and management had improved. It's possible that a different set of policies would have resulted in disproportionately more QALYs lost by lower-risk demographics, due to the non-linear dynamics of disease transmission (don't forget rates of mutation). I don't really care to defend any policy, since there were a lot of avoidable mistakes, but I think the criticism should be more specific and measured.

(Edit: Scott's Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, published July 1, 2021 - anyone know if there's been much change in the understanding of NPI effectiveness?)

The counter factual is Sweden, tge country that didn’t lock down at all. And to my knowledge, they didn’t really do any worse than their near neighbors.

And the reason it’s so hard to get talking about 1.2 million deaths on the radar is just how much the lockdowns cost the rest of us. People thrown into unemployment (and in the USA, it was hard to get unemployment because the systems were overwhelmed) with a small one time “bonus”. Businesses forced out of business because they couldn’t open, but their creditors could still demand payments. Children deprived of important social development because they couldn’t socialize with other kids. Those same kids given zoom classes instead of a real education. People denied the right to socialize, and when one of those 1.2 million people died, they were forced to die alone, with their families huddles around an iPad.

Scatter plots of measures of lockdown strictness versus disease impact tend to look like shotshell patterns. That is, no correlation. The lockdowns were on the close order of completely useless.

Sweden and its neighbours are much less densely populated than most of Europe, meaning the virus generally has a lower transmission rate in those countries. I'm not sure lockdown lessons from Sweden can necessarily be applied to e.g Germany.

Sweden's population density is comparable to the UK's population density if you treat the British Antarctic Territory as actually belonging to the UK. In an alternative timeline where the UK annexed the British Antarctic Territory in 2019, do you think this will have reduced the transition rate of COVID?

Sweden, Finland and Norway owning a bunch of tundra does not affect the population density that the average person experiences. That tundra cannot perform spooky action at a distance and affect what happens in Stockholm.

Sweden's population density is comparable to the UK's population density if you treat the British Antarctic Territory as actually belonging to the UK. In an alternative timeline where the UK annexed the British Antarctic Territory in 2019, do you think this will have reduced the transition rate of COVID?#

The population of Sweden isn't concentrated in a region that makes up only ~13% of its total landmass, as the British population would be if we were to include its Antarctic Territory in its land area.

Sweden, Finland and Norway owning a bunch of tundra does not affect the population density that the average person experiences. That tundra cannot perform spooky action at a distance and affect what happens in Stockholm.

People living in the middle of Stockholm, as well as in Sweden's other two core urban areas, will experience a high level of population density, but most Swedes are spread out in the sparsely populated regions between these cities, and they will experience a much lower population density than most people living in the UK.

I don't have strong feelings about lockdowns either way. But as someone who's lived in both countries we're discussing, the much sparser nature of the population in Sweden compared to the UK is very obvious no matter where you are in the country.

Sweden's population is almost 90% urban. It is just not the case that most Swedes live in rural areas.

As I mentioned in my reply to Crowstep, that sort of figure depends heavily on how you define urban. If we use a figure of 500/km^2, ChatGPT gives the percentage of people living at >= this density in Sweden as 15%, while in the UK it's 45%.

Why do you think ChatGPT would be able to accurately calculate that value?

To quote myself:

Fallacy of ad hoc post hoc justification

As mentioned in the first item, the Covid hawks’ basic model of how a lockdown works assumes a simple linear relationship between how restrictive the lockdown is (and the degree of public compliance) and the rate of cases/hospitalisations/deaths. When a lockdown is implemented, followed by a spike in cases and deaths, the standard response is to blame overly permissive restrictions or poor public compliance. Conversely, if a lockdown is relaxed and there is no spike, this will be attributed to an exceptionally cautious public: an “unofficial” lockdown.

But sooner or later, these simplistic explanations for the failure of the model to describe reality begin to strain credibility, and Covid hawks are forced to introduce additional epicycles into their model. When faced with incontrovertible evidence that cases failed to spike even in the absence of exceptional voluntary compliance, Covid hawks will begrudgingly acknowledge assorted secular factors which likely contributed to the rate of transmission: “lots of people in Sweden live alone”, “Florida is close to the equator”, “there’s a seasonal component to transmission” etc.

The reason this is fallacious is not that these secular factors didn’t contribute to the spread of the virus and rates of hospitalisation and deaths - of course they did. It’s fallacious because these secular factors are only ever considered post hoc, after the limitations of lockdowns and other restrictions have been empirically exposed. Covid hawks never consider in advance of enacting or supporting a lockdown whether or not the lockdown passes a cost-benefit analysis, after taking these secular factors into account. Surely it would be trivial to find or estimate some key metrics about a particular region (the season, presence or absence of land borders, the percentage of adults who live alone, the rate of obesity etc.), estimate the expected “return” of the proposed restrictions, and input all of these variables into a formula which would indicate whether the proposed restrictions will pass a cost-benefit analysis. Many Western governments were already producing models which forecast cases and deaths conditional on the predicted rate of public compliance; what am I proposing seems like a logical extension of the foregoing.

But aggressive Covid hawks are reluctant to acknowledge secular factors which impact upon the rate of Covid transmission, and not just because these other factors complicate their simple, easy to grasp model of the world. Whether or not to enact a lockdown is supposed to be an easy and straightforward question: when you enact a lockdown, cases and deaths go down; when you don’t, they go up. Once you have acknowledged the fact that factors other than the lockdown itself might affect the rate of Covid transmission and serious illness, you’re only a step away from recognising that these other factors might dwarf or even negate the benefits of the lockdown itself. This in turn implies the uncomfortable possibility that locking down might sometimes be a bad thing on net: that you might throw thousands of people out of work or disrupt cancer screenings for weeks at a time for no reason, breaking a dozen eggs with no omelette to show for it.

To avoid confronting this discomfiting conclusion, lockdown proponents are incentivised to downplay the impact of secular factors, or deny them altogether. You will still, to this day*, encounter Australians and New Zealanders who will proudly declare that it was their lockdown measures (and their lockdown measures alone) which got Covid under control within their borders; and who will become very defensive when you suggest that their success with managing Covid might have something to do with the fact that both nations are geographically isolated islands without land borders.

"Lots of people in Sweden live alone" was an ad hoc justification I saw a lot during Covid to explain how the country was able to maintain a low rate of Covid transmission without ever officially locking down. And indeed, this is true. For reference, Sweden's Covid case count and death count per capita currently stands at 269,511 and 2,682, respectively.

After Sweden, the country with second-highest percentage of people living alone is Lithuania, which locked down and nonetheless saw 525,154 Covid cases, and 3,718 Covid deaths per capita. So much for that as a causal explanation.

The picture's not much better when looking at population density in Europe. Directly above Sweden is Latvia, which locked down and whose Covid case and death counts per capita were roughly the same as Lithuania. Next is Estonia (which admittedly did have a slightly lower Covid death count per capita than Sweden), Lithuania, then Montenegro (472,238; 4,532), Belarus (dramatically lower than Sweden on both metrics), then Bulgaria (195,753 cases per capita; 5,661 deaths per capita - literally second-highest in the world after Peru).

This is not to argue that lockdowns exacerbate Covid metrics: it's merely to argue, as @The_Nybbler did above, that a simplistic model of "impose lockdowns in any given country -> Covid cases go down -> Covid deaths go down" is extremely lacking in predictive power, and the effect of lockdowns will likely be completely dwarfed or negated by local factors (percentage of population who are obese, average population age etc.). In other words: if you were to show you a list of anonymised countries' Covid cases per capita, Covid deaths per capita and case fatality rates and told you that some of them had locked down and some hadn't: I think you'd find it extremely difficult to identify which was which.

As soon as you say "lockdowns do work in general, but happened not to work in location X because of [ad hoc factor]", consider how easy it was for me to disprove the "Sweden didn't need to lock down because of population density/people living alone" ad hoc hypothesis.

*I published this article over a year ago, but this statement is literally true: earlier today I got into an argument with a guy who argued that of course lockdowns work - look at Australia and New Zealand! His argument, as I understand it, was that lockdowns work when used in concert with strict border controls, but don't work otherwise. Which struck me as an extremely roundabout way of saying "strict border controls are an effective way of stopping the spread of Covid; lockdowns unnecessary".

Honestly I can't do much better at this point than lamely conceding that I'm pretty overmatched in this debate.

Sorry if that came off as a bit of a Gish gallop. I had variations on this debate a lot between 2020-21 and you, for a want of a better word, "triggered" me.

Not at all - it's just not an issue I'm particularly well informed on*, so I don't think I've got a lot to contribute to a discussion with someone who clearly knows a lot about it.

*This feels like a weird thing to write about a topic that involved me living under near house arrest for over a year, but whatever.

Well there is also the point that we don’t really care about covid deaths; we care about deaths. Sweden all cause death for the period looks great! Even better than the #s you posted.

You're absolutely right. I noted in another comment that, during the period, Sweden had fewer excess deaths per capita than the EU average.

My recollection is that after Omni wave they had the best #s in Europe.

The Scandinavian countries have low levels of population density because vast tracts in the frozen north are empty, but that doesn't mean the people are spread out. Excluding city-states, Sweden is the 8th most urban country in Europe. It's significantly more densely populated than Germany by that metric.

The Scandinavian countries have low levels of population density because vast tracts in the frozen north are empty, but that doesn't mean the people are spread out.

Wikipedia gives the respective population density of Germany and Sweden as 234/km^2 and 25/km^2. You could make Sweden a fifth of its current size - going far beyond the point at which you'd be cutting out empty northern regions - and Germany would still be about twice as dense.

Excluding city-states, Sweden is the 8th most urban country in Europe. It's significantly more densely populated than Germany by that metric.

That sort of number depends heavily on how you define urban. The wikipedia page you linked cites the World Bank but they don't provide any actual definition for what counts as urban.

ChatGPT gives the percentage of the population of Sweden that live in an area with density >500/km^2 as 15%, while that same number for Germany is 45%. This seems to suggest that Germany is significantly more densely populated than Sweden when you drill into the numbers.

You forgot massive self-inflicted economic damage (inflation, shuttered businesses, layoffs) caused by the lockdown ands insane money printing. All for basically nothing other tha our leaders indulging their "don't just stand there, do something!!!" impulse. I think about that every few days and I'm still angry about it. Really fucked up my plans, and I think I got off better than most.

Oh, and the insane powegrabs by literal-whos at all levels of federal, state, and city bureaucracy. Pencil necked losers in gubmint jobs suddenly issuing edicts about what free citizens of republic can and cannot do. And people obeyed. I will never be able to unsee that.

Post about specific groups, not general groups, whenever possible.

Calling out the general category of government employees does not clear that bar.

Okay, fair enough.

Yes, I remember seeing people spray down their shoes with disinfectant when returning to the house. Or spraying down the table at a shared eating space (because what we really needed is a bunch of people touching the same squirter, squirting down their tape-demarcated part of the table).

There was a shocking level of hysteria.

Certainly Sweden's excess death toll was lower than the European average, which seems like the most damning statistic for the efficacy of lockdowns.

It’s damning for the state enforced lockdowns which most other states were eager to implement. I think a lot of states used it as a compliance test *just how long can we get people to obey arbitrary rules and be shut in their homes without creating a backlash. Rather frightening to now understand that if you make the situation sound bad enough, you can get this sort of thing to go on for a long time. More than a year.

And other states were actually pretty upset that Sweden didn’t go along because it did provide an alternative to arresting people who dared to leave their homes.

Scott's "more than you wanted to know" assessment was that Sweden most likely did worse, albeit by a difficult to quantify margin.

Sweden did do a soft lockdown in the sense that businesses had reduced hours/density or encouraged people to work from home, and restricted the occupancy of certain public facilities like swimming pools. That, and I got the subjective sense that they have much less of a contingent of people who are young and severely unhealthy even compared to countries like Germany.

I mean as compared to much of the rest of the world, and certainly blue tribe areas of America, and as such I think it’s a reasonable counter factual case. They didn’t have to shut down everything, rope off playgrounds or cancel schools. Yes, they limited capacity, but for the most part, you could do what you wanted to.

Sweden did better than any country in Europe on an excess death basis.

I continue to dislike that as the primary metric of doing better during Covid. The important way that Sweden did better is that they engaged in fewer human rights violations, which is much more important to me than how many elderly people passed away of natural causes.

I’m not suggesting that is the primary benefit. But if the stated rationale for the human rights violation doesn’t produce any benefits as evidenced by Sweden, then that’s even stronger argument against those violations.

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