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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14355 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?)

I don't have a direct answer to your question, but I also don't think there's really any way around the fact that Covid was exceptionally deadly when compared to the common flu, and that given what they knew at the time the public health response was somewhat reasonable. That being said, a widespread tailored approach that focused on vulnerable individuals with at least one comorbidity probably would have softened the blow to the global economy, but almost certainly would have killed more people. The blowback to their approach coupled with the political environment was probably unavoidable, but the disgusting behavior of the Western media apparatus made it worse. Every dissenting opinion was met with accusations of racism or conspiracy theory. It was so difficult to wade through all of it at the time because the shear magnitude of manipulation and moral blackmail that was occurring through the media caused me to warp my own perception of what was medically true and what wasn't. The Ivermectin trend I latched onto had me reading all types of studies and meta-analyses that I thought were sufficient enough to support the efficacy of it. It took me a while to emotionally accept the dubious nature of those studies because my hatred of our mainstream and expert class was so deep at the time.

I was less emotionally invested in the lab leak theory although, due to the media's treatment of it, I also ended up digging into it as well. I found myself more fascinated from a curiosity standpoint with the lab leak vs. market origins than my continued efforts at trying to find a grain of truth supporting the efficacy of alternative treatments and prophylactics. Admittedly, this probably had to do with the fact that there no longer seemed to be a light at the end of the Ivermectin tunnel. Overall, I wasn't greatly affected by the lockdowns, or the Pfizer vaccine I took, but I felt and still feel deeply affected by everything the mainstream did outside of that. At the time, I was unable to distinguish between the lies and the medical truths that were being shelled out by the same group of people.

Covid was exceptionally deadly when compared to the common flu

I don't want to get into a debate about what "exceptionally deadly" means, but I don't think this is true. Spanish Flu was exceptionally deadly, COVID was largely on par with the Hong Kong and Asian Flu epidemics of the 60s, but in a much more globalised world.

I'm not really sure what prompted this article from Scott, but it does kind of follow the path the lockdown skeptical have been saying, that of the Iraq war. You start with enthusiastic support from all sides. Later you get "with the evidence at the time, support made sense" ( we are here). Then it's "I didn't support it, but I understand those who did". And finally you get to "No I never supported it and all those who did were clearly in the wrong/outright evil".

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