Covid Is Now Saving Lives
Here is a link to EU statistics on excess mortality.
Read it with a grain of salt, its polluted by politics but its the best we got.
Wow, and whoâd have thought all weâd need to do would be mass restrictions to movement, no tourism for over a year, border controls, mask mandates, 3 million global deaths, and a global vaccination program to inoculate everyone, thus bringing the curve down in the US in recent weeks.
I note also that this is only the US, not most of the rest of the world, which is currently in Covid meltdown.
Parenthetically I would add that âPowerlineblogâ is a ludicrous source of information. Look at the homepage, first headline I saw was âToday in punitive liberalism.â What a bunch of bitter old men ranting. Ew.
I donât line up with their thinking on most things either but the chart is from the CDC (I havenât checked this, though).
What? a lot of the US is actually not in Covid meltdown. The rest of us have governors who seem to have trouble reading graphs.
Sure. If we simply culled all the people in the world over 60 years old, the death rate in future years would be lower than before for a decade or more. Does that mean it saved lives to cull the older people?
I think the actual experts were right in their original thinking- the virus was always going to do what it was going to do. Thatâs what âflatten the curveâ was about in the beginning, just spreading the infections out longer so the health care system could handle them. They needed to figure out how to treat people, especially since they early plans to treat it like any pneumonia failed so spectacularly.
It wasnât until politicians got involved that we got the idea it could be stopped with social mitigation measures. Since then we have been judging the behavior of the virus through the lens of those measures. If rates of infections or deaths go down, lock-down must be working. If rates go up, we must need a stricter lock-down. There has been very little serious mention in the mainstream media of treatments or preventative measures (the president talked about a plan to send a mask to everyone in America, it would be far better to send a bottle of vitamin D), only the varying degrees of restricting business and activity.
I think thereâs probably a name for this way of framing an argument.
For instance, I donât like school closures so I could say âlook, if we keep schools closed for another year, enough at-risk students will have dropped out that we will have lower educational costs across the board, so⌠yay?â
(Note that Iâm not equating death with loss of education; Iâm just talking about this form of argument, which is something like - letâs take this to an extreme and look at how ridiculous that is.)
I donât need politicians to tell me how to take care of myself.
I need access to correct information and advice from real expertâs who are capable of saying âI donât knowâ if they donât know something yet.
The only thing that needs to be lockdown is those who enforce lockdowns on others.
AMEN @Carnivoor
and just to say to Michael on this post you made: Covid IS saving lives? What ironic title is that truly LOL Come on LOL I swear what we read and how we are spoonfed titles and thoughts before we even open an article is horrible truly.
Covid is savings lives and SHOW me in real truth how that is happening? Not aiming at you Michael, just the world in general, how disease saves? How death and disease is now saving other than the more sick that die the spread is less for stronger ones to make it?
Covid is NOW saving livesâŚomg
I get the article tho!!! Just questioning the crazy of the title of this article and the âsome are gonna die and they âthrow off that curveâ and it ainât bad if already sick people get taken out before their time?â thinking is cool and hype to plug an article that way and again, I get it âŚainât cool to me!
and ya, one might only have another year to live in misery?? misery?? does one know that truly on what another human wants in their life and situation? I bet a crapload of those who perished never wanted to die from Covid or anything taking them out and wanting âtheir extra timeâ on this planet! Yet we humans just âthrow it into a binâ and lump âdeathâ as âgreatâ and into that âpackaged wonderful curve thoughtsâ cause they were sick anywayâ as some âdefense we must haveâ to even process this situation. what a crock. but humans need an out and this type of crap is it.
just thoughts on it allâŚjust a baby rant on the crazy out there
I donât know where you live, but we never had an actual lockdown where I live (Maryland). They had an order for a bit early on that closed businesses. That was the closest thing, and it was made at a time that we didnât know how bad this virus was or how it spreads. Thus, itâs wise to halt activity while that happens. Later on, you can figure out how much everything can âopenâ as conditions give you data.
Same here next door in VA, closures at first, then stuff started reopening. Weâve had most things back since last June I believe, things constantly being allowed to reopen, capacities being constantly raised back to near normal levels, no âlockdownsâ like the prisoners in CA and NY had to deal with. Minus masks inside of public places (luckily not the gyms) life has been almost normal for quite some time now.
I donât go out; so itâs not normal for me, but I havenât been trapped at home. Gyms in MD require masks.
You misread what I wrote. I said âI note also that this is only the US, not most of the rest of the world, which is currently in Covid meltdown.â Ie the figures citing reduced excess deaths only applies to the US (and presumably Israel and the UK, where vaccination rates are similarly high.)
Totally agree with you, the establishment has virtually ignored the contribution of overweight and obesity to Covid outcomes, no mention of vitamin D despite overwhelming evidence, almost totally ignored the critical role of ventilation, and as of April 2021 we are still treating the virus as if itâs not airborne, which weâve known for over a year that it is.
Many of these lockdowns have been largely unnecessary. They were only ever meant as an emergency measure to stamp out the virus while governments got their act together with all the other, less restrictive, mitigation measures like mask mandates and reducing occupancy limits in establishments. Governments, unfortunately, were incentivised to open up for business as usual far too rapidly and without adequate mitigation measures. The short-term gain of opening retail establishments and offices was outweighed by the long-term, 100% foreseeable, pain of the 2nd and 3rd waves.
The chaos in most of the world, from my perspective here in Australia, has been nearly completely unnecessary. Taiwan proved early on that the elimination model was the correct one. Suppression was nearly impossible, Covid has proven far too contagious and should have been presumed to be so from the beginning, if weâd bothered to use the precautionary principle (which no country but Taiwan did.)
Countries that eliminated the virus, even those that did so sluggishly like Australia, will be shown to have selected the correct strategy. China and Taiwan were, I believe, the only countries that didnât contract economically last year. Australia, NZ, and other Asian nations like Vietnam have done very well, both in terms of health and the economy. Even after the vaccines roll out far too slowly in these elimination countries, which will impair our ability to open international borders, I think it will be clear that elimination was the right path.
Most Australians have been at restaurants, cafes, and bars since the initial lockdown ended in June. The same is true in other countries that chose to eliminate covid. The rest of the world, from our perspective, has been a hot mess. But this path required leadership (or, in our case, a bureaucracy and health establishment that stubbornly refused to accept our poor leadersâ choices and lobbied hard to change them to the correct ones.) For instance, you canât control this virus properly without a serious quarantine program. âHome quarantineâ is not quarantine, itâs a recipe for failure unless you have rigid surveillance and control systems like the Taiwanese. You need facility quarantine.
It is a shame that the world will not learn these lessons from this pandemic. If the next pandemic rolls around with anything like this level of contagiousness and, say, a double-digit fatality rate, weâre doomed, because weâll be too busy arguing about âlockdownsâ and âthe economyâ to battle the pathogen in any serious way.
2 articles worth reading:
I am in California and I have never felt like a prisoner. I am curious as to how you ended up with that conclusion. I have gone out on daily walks, taken vacations and have never felt like I had to not shop at a store (except when people were hoarding). In fact, I noticed a huge jump in people outdoors and in RV parks. I am not a gym or bar person and those did seem to have restrictions but nothing has really changed for me. I have a friend that claims restrictions have been difficult for her. When I asked her how, she could only point to school closures and wearing a mask. Just a voice from California to say I am not a prisoner but I am willing to hear other perspectives.
In my own country of Belgium we are prisoners.
Last excess death was 30 november 2020.
Schools are closed, not allowed to leave your home after 12pm till 5am.
Only 1 person allowed in your house. Bad luck if you have more than 1 parent, child or siblings alive.
Bars and restaurants and many shops are closed.
There are snitchlines to the police for those who like the current policy. 150euro for not wearing a mask outside in a shopping street.
The list goes on and on.
I been living like a criminal for a year now, to the point I donât care anymore. I donât wear masks and I will lick you if you come to close.
Tell me what happens if you shield youârr immune system from the outside world for a year? Does it become weaker or does it stay trained, fit and strong.
No masks, no social isolation. No weak immune system, no carbs 
I donât think this is your finest moment on these forums. Your right to swing your fist ends at someone elseâs face. Threatening to lick people who are keeping rules designed to mitigate against a pandemic thatâs claimed 3 million lives and climbing is, well, illegal and just really punitive.
As poorly as the European countries have handled this, they are operating in an environment in which some of the population still doesnât fully comprehend the exponential function. 3 million dead people and counting. Nearly 150 million cases so far. These numbers would be unspeakably higher if there had not been mitigation measures.
Your immune system cannot stay âstrongâ against a novel pathogen. You would likely be infected and then itâs a dice roll. And sure, you might not care about your own health (see: long covid) or your own life (see: 3 million fatalities), but what about the people you infect unwittingly while youâre walking around Antwerp or Brussels maskless while youâre infected and asymptomatic? You say you donât care anymore, and frankly I think that just sounds really selfish.
My tongue is not 1.5m long.
Those who want to keep their distance are free to do so.
Feel free to believe the 3M numbers for reality. Tel me what tis relative numbers means against absolute numbers.
Yes Iâm selfish and on the side of victims of the irrational rules. They have no number, they are ignored.