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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13333 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?)

1.2 million people died? You mean the lockdowns didn’t prevent large numbers of deaths?

We should have let the Kung flu burn itself out faster. Lockdown advocates should be stripped of their professional credentials(and if that means ‘no doctors for a few years’ then so be it) and forbidden to work, address the public, or collect social security, and the head honchos executed. The lockdown itself needs to be the subject of a sustained ‘never again’ campaign similar to the Holocaust, and future generations should be guilt tripped endlessly about what their ancestors did.

Sound harsh? ‘Covid was really bad’ apologia is just an attempt to rehabilitate the lockdowns to do it again. I’ll have an objective discussion about it when dr Fauci is executed after a public show trial.

We should have let the Kung flu burn itself out faster.

Did anyplace on Earth achieve herd immunity? What makes you think this was possible? What was to prevent more dangerous mutations from spreading, before herd immunity was reached?

(Also, if you want to annoy the CCP, call it "Sars-Cov-2," not "Kung Flu.")

It really should have been Wuhan Flu.

Except it wasn't a flu, so that would just be incorrect.

Flu is almost always symptomatically indistinguishable from COVID. Not very many people need to know or care about the exact taxonomy of a moderate respiratory infection, and frankly speaking, most doctors don't either. To the minor extent that treatment might differ, we'd mentally just keep that bit in mind. It would hardly be the worst name in the world.

Flu is almost always symptomatically indistinguishable from COVID

My theory is that it was much more widespread in the US than anyone admitted because testing was constrained early on, and a lot of first-wave cases got called flu with no further diagnostics.

I'm not sure why there are so many people insisting that we should have used a more inexact name for this disease just because it fits a certain naming scheme (or geopolitical interest).

There's a clear different memetic impact depending on whether people mentally bucketed covid as 'a new potentially-deadly virus' or 'a new strain of the flu', so that was always an important territory to fight over.

The implication with "Wuhan flu"/"Chinese flu" etc comparisons was that it was comparable to the Spanish flu, which is our primary modern point of reference for a communicable disease that kills a lot of people.

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Remember when we all pretended it was a rule not to name diseases after places? That was fun.

Or name them after monkeys because of homosexuals?

Again, I'm not sure why people are insisting on this. Is there something particular gained, apart from - again - the geopolitical interest?

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