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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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I think COVID was a problem, and obviously people did die. It just turns out that unless you had a pretty serious health condition, if you were under 50, you could go on about your life and never get anything that much worse than a bad flu.

This is false.

We can argue over exactly what rate of death and severe side effects is acceptable and what mitigations are acceptable to reduce those rates, but COVID-19 causes a lot more of both than any flu we've seen other than the 1918 one, including among the young and healthy. Previously young and healthy people becoming majorly disabled by Long COVID is something that happens, albeit rarely. I'm not sure where to get the best data on this, but the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season, but that's not counting post-COVID sequela which we know is significantly more common than with the flu but difficult to measure, partially because studies vary widely in their definitions. And it's unclear how to define a fair comparison because getting the flu rarely happens more than once a year and usually significantly less often while COVID-19 infections happening multiple times a year is common.

Mind, the flu poses very little danger to the young and healthy, so even a lot more dangerous than the flu can quite reasonably fit inside your acceptable risk profile. But treating them as the same is not accurate.

(And, uh, maybe it wouldn't be terrible if we took some measures to strengthen our protection against airborne pandemics like improving ventilation and accidentally reduced flu prevalence as a side effect.)

the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season

Which puts it in the range of the Hong Kong Flu and Asian Flu, two mostly-forgotten pandemic flus in the latter half of the 20th century.

but that's not counting post-COVID sequela which we know is significantly more common than with the flu but difficult to measure

We know no such thing.

the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season

How much of this was due to mismanagement? Such as, the initial treatment plan of putting the sick on ventilators, which didn't work and basically consigned many to death who might have survived with some other basic treatment approach? Or how the Northeast US hit a death jackpot by putting sick people in nursing homes, which was like throwing a match on dry kindling? Not to mention the financial incentives for hospitals to mislabel deaths as "due to COVID" rather than "tangentially adjacent to COVID?" When the entire bureaucratic/media complex has a vested interest in proving that fear of COVID is warranted, I'm skeptical of the numbers they present to press their case.