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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14651 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?)

It's difficult to talk about covid deaths without also talking about how the data was recorded.

For example, if someone was in a nasty car accident and died in the hospital. They would be considered a covid related death if they tested positive for covid.

There are other examples I could give (data taken during protests, etc) and we can talk about how often this actually happened but once data becomes suspicious, it's difficult to take it seriously.

For example, if someone was in a nasty car accident and died in the hospital. They would be considered a covid related death if they tested positive for covid.

Does anyone have a citation for a policy of counting everyone who tests positive for covid shortly before death as "a covid related death?" How should causes of death like "two illnesses, one of which is symptomatic covid" or "respiratory distress a positive covid test, but no other clear covid symptoms" have been counted?

I remember reading an article at the time that said much of the confusion was due to the process used to investigate COVID deaths. Since all COVID cases were being reported to the health department at the time, any death with COVID was reported as a suspected COVID death, keeping in mind that all the health department knew initially was that a. The person had COVID and b. The person died. Since it takes a couple weeks for a death certificate to be issued, stories would come out of someone dying in a car crash who was on the COVID death list. But once the health department had the death certificate, they would then exclude anyone for whom COVID wasn't a contributing factor in their death.

It should be mentioned that the opposite happened, as well. There was a guy out by Philadelphia who crashed his car, was taken to the hospital, and died. He tested positive in the hospital, and was listed as having died from COVID, which cased a minor outrage for being so obviously the "guy who dies in a car accident tests positive and gets counted as a COVID death". Except in this case, they were right, but for the wrong reasons. The guy was sick with COVID, and the accident was actually caused because he lost control of his car after getting into a coughing fit. His injuries from the accident weren't life threatening, and he died of COVID at the hospital. In other words, he died with car accident.

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