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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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I posted about excess deaths continuing a few weeks ago. Eric Topol writes on that today and blames it on COVID causing heart attacks/strokes far later. The evidence seems solid though I don’t think it’s the sole explanation of excess deaths. I do think this is an underreported story and quite alarming. We should seem to want to know if vaccines or covid are causing the continued rise (along with increased deaths of despair amongst other things).

Anywhere on Reddit I couldn’t even get people to deal with the data. Even throw a blue tribe approved cause of long covid effects. Here’s his article and data he’s citing. Because of replication issues, confounding biases, and my guess excess deaths are coming from multiple causes I don’t ever truly understand what’s going on. Especially when these things can get blended into culture wars. My guess is and I don’t understand why covid does have some kind of long term damage effect that’s not common in other colds. And the vaccine also causes this effect probably at a lower rate.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/heart-attacks-and-strokes-late-after

Somewhat related The Swedish govermnetal statistics bureau released new data on excess mortality in Europe

Turns out Sweden has had the lowest excess mortality in Europe during the pandemic. Previously there some of our neighbours had lower numbers but now that the data is in for the full 2020-2022 it turns out sweden is even below them and compared to Finland Sweden had half as high excess mortality.

This strikes me as a somewhat funny result because Sweden both didn't really lock down or use masks, but at the same time we were very good at vaccinating people, so it's not because "people aren't dying from the vaccines" either like some people like to imply. It seems to me that hysterical people and conspiracy theorists everywhere can go and pound sand.

Should be noted that for large stretches of the crisis, Finland actually had less stringent measures than Sweden.

The oxford stringency index is alright for large-scale studies where you use the entire dataset to mine for trends, but it falls short when making individual comparisons. The reason being the differential in enforcement and on-paper laws were quite varied from locale to locale, and this adds a tremendous amount of noise to the data. To make sure a comparison you would have actually had to be on the ground in both countries and carried out a detailed study taking those things into account. I don't want to give examples now because covid talk is tiring, but one simple example is Japan, they had no legal mask mandates, but did it feel like such on the ground, there definitely was a social one. Or in India there were on-paper mandates/restrictions for all kinds of things, but people stopped giving a shit altogether 2 weeks after they were put on paper.