One point I would like to see incorporated into this discussion, but is hard because it’s so politicized, is that we should accept that mistakes were made but also be very forgiving of those mistakes because this was an incredibly hard problem that forced us to take our best guess a lot of those times.
Of course, many liberals don’t want to admit mistakes while many conservatives don’t want to forgive mistakes.
Shutting down schools might have made sense in a world where it was actually dangerous to kids... but that’s not this world of course.
I did hate the extent to which my teacher union brothers and sisters went all-in on fighting reopening once it was clear that it was quite low risk and doing immense harm to students. That’s a whole other question.
Agreed. But there was also concern that those kids (even if not at danger themselves) would be vectors that spread the illness to parents or (worse) grandparents. Not saying it was CORRECT in hindsight to have closed the schools, but just reminding us all of the context.
It's not really hindsight to suggest that governments in the US at all levels could have turned their attention to other countries to see how their experiments with not shutting down schools was going.
What accounts for their failure to do so? A profound lack of curiosity?
Look at the US specifically. Montana, with a Democratic governor, reopened schools in May of 2020. And yet school closings across the country persisted for years afterwards.
Like everything else, it’s a result of our idiotic tribalism. By the summer of 2020, safetyist maximalism became the default for the blue team on all matters related to COVID, regardless of what The Science said.
There were some places where schools opened but allowed students to attend remotely if they and/or their family preferred. That might have been a reasonable compromise that allowed families to take the balance of risk and lack of childcare that they preferred.
The Bush administration came up with school closures because of a high school science fair project showed schools are where super spreading happens…in the playbook it had nothing to do with protecting children and it was to mitigate spread for the entire population. That’s the playbook we had on hand because Bush read the book Germs by the disgraced journalist Judith Miller and ordered a pandemic response playbook to be developed…I’m not joking!
The reason for closing schools was never that it was dangerous to kids. We knew kids were safe. The problem was infected kids would take the virus home to grandma with whom they lived and it was dangerous to them. And if they died then who would take care of them?
We didn't "know" it wasn't dangerous to kids. There was early evidence it wasn't as deadly as it was for others, but there were no extensive analyses or long term studies available in March and April 2020.
And even if we had known kids were 100% safe, leaders also had to consider the well-being and availability of their teachers. Schools can't function if the teachers and substitutes are getting sick or quitting in droves.
Right at the beginning we did not know. But the school policy people are complaining about was keeping schools closed into spring 2021 and in some case beyond then, at which point we DID know that.
The teachers unions didn't actually go all-in on fighting. With the exception of Chicago, anywhere schools opened, teachers went back to work. And despite all the rhetoric, unions had no influence on whether schools opened or not. Yes, I know about Randi Weingarten. She gave wording to the CDC and why no one has investigated the CDC for that is more than I can figure. But no governor had to listen to the CDC, and many didn't.
Nope. But lots of districts did open schools because white parents had more power. That's why New York City and Chicago, which have far more powerful unions than those in DC, were open in December early March, respectively, while DC schools with very weak unions didn't open until late March, and California, which also has powerful unions, didn't open until Newsom bribed schools to do so, in April.
Schools have children, but there is a rather large adult population running the place. It's around 1 adult for every 5 kids when you count in all the support and admin staff. Our school districted tried to go back to in person in September of 2020, and by October had to go back to distance learning because too many of the staff were out ill. They opened back up in March of 2021 after vaccines became available, and our Governor here in Minnesota made it a point to get the teachers vaccinated early. I don't know what situation was in other states/districts, but it would make sense for Union to advocate for their members safety, would it not?
Explain, because you're not making a point. The reason for what? The reason that the vaccine is successful is because of money? Most of that was funded by us, the tax payers.
A review of the real time news shows that we were all set to open schools in Sept 2020, but then Trump said they should be re-opened so simply to spite him liberals tortured millions of children for another 18 months.
Yes, well, we live in the real world, and the fact is that schools reopened where a majority of parents wanted them opened and that's what would have happened with or without Trump making that declaration. Although I agree with you that public discourse ramped up against openings. But discourse had nothing to do with it, so there's that.
There is a place for forgiveness by those who have been wronged, but forgiveness also requires contrition and atonement by those who did the wronging.
In this case, those who publicly and privately called for the deaths of those of us who had reasonable concerns about the cost-effectiveness of lockdown policy are prone to demand forgiveness but have generally shown no contrition nor made any attempt at atonement.
It's also hard to see even in retrospect how calling for the unvaccinated to be denied all healthcare and thus actively killed, as was common from prominent media pundits, was ever a reasonable “best guess” no matter how difficult the situation was.
So personally, while I'm open to offering forgiveness even to those who sent me death threats on social media just for saying that we shouldn't lock down, I would want to feel confident that they understand why they were wrong and are committed to not making similar mistakes in future.
Nate's point seems to be that the only thing that mattered was the vaccines. To that end, it makes sense that the government should have been as heavy-handed as possible to get as many shots in arms as they could.
The part of COVID that still enrages me is the post-vaccine period when the bars were open and the schools were closed. That's where government seemed to totally fail us.
"To that end, it makes sense that the government should have been as heavy-handed as possible to get as many shots in arms as they could."
No it doesn't. The vaccine protected those that took it from serious disease but had little affect on others and infection rates. There was no strong case for coercive action, and people who favored vaccines also ended up favoring harsher NPIs even after vaccination.
"The part of COVID that still enrages me is the post-vaccine period when the bars were open and the schools were closed. That's where government seemed to totally fail us."
Because demonizing the unvaccinated was a political strategy that eventually backfired when the vaccines didn't stop delta/omicron from infecting people, but they put you through another year of NPIs for their own interests.
> The vaccine protected those that took it from serious disease but had little affect on others and infection rates.
This doesn't seem right. At every point in the pandemic, infection rates among vaccinated people were 30-50% less than for unvaccinated people, except for one week in February 2022, when the two rates were almost identical, because so many unvaccinated people had been infected by omicron in the previous few weeks that the two groups briefly had equal protection.
The vaccine offers limited infection protection for a brief window after vaccination. In the case of getting the original vaccine versus delta/omicron it wears off within six weeks or less. That's pretty worthless for a vaccine that itself makes you really sick for a few days. That was our case, we got boosted and got Omicron maybe a month later. I heard lots of similar stories.
Of course once the virus started throwing off variants the infection value of the vaccine shrunk considerably, but the fact that it would throw off variants was very likely and already the case by the time NPIs were re-imposed in 2022.
There is also the matter of behavior, many people I knew that were vaxxed and boosted were still engaging in social distancing and isolation during delta/omicron. The homeschool skate in my town, which featured a hundred or more unmasked homeschoolers crowding into the local roller rink, were not engaging in social distancing, and I bet their overall vaccination rate was lower.
What do you mean by "wears off within six weeks or less"? Every attempt I've seen to quantify this shows that there is less infection among people with an extra vaccine dose, even a year or more after that last vaccine dose, though perhaps it's only close to 100% protection within six weeks or so.
The Yale study was of people living in 2 states, with Republicans and Democrats living together in mixed communities. Doesn't this mean that vaccines prevented death in vaccinated people and provided no detectable protection for unvaccinated neighbors? Maybe other data could get at this -- rates of covid deaths by party registration in places where relative percentages of Democrats and Republicans vary over wide ranges.. ?
We wouldn't expect vaccination to protect neighbors - we would expect it to protect people that you regularly interact with indoors, which is occasionally neighbors, but usually is a very different set of people with only small overlap with neighbors.
I don’t remember ever seeing anyone ‘calling for the unvaccinated to be denied all healthcare and thus actively killed’. Maybe I was following the wrong pundits…
I’m not doubting you about the death treats. But I also remember seeing plenty of death threats sent from anti-lockdown protesters to scientists and public health officials like Fauci. I think it’s fair to say that in that intense situation, lots of people behaved in ways they hopefully now regret…
Yes, the vaccine extremists' desire to deny healthcare to the unvaccinated has been hastily memory-holed now it's turned out that after the initial flurry of mortality we can live with this coronavirus the same way we lived with all the others for thousands of years. But let me refresh your memory with just a tiny, tiny sample of the flood of hateful bile spewed during 2021 and early 2022, when progressives suddenly decided that healthcare wasn't actually a right after all, but a privilege bestowed for conforming to central government orders:
“Doctors should be allowed to give priority to vaccinated patients when resources are scarce”
So yes, it was EXTREMELY common for pundits across the Western world to call for the unvaccinated to be denied medical treatment, which would have been a death sentence for those concerned. It says a lot, to my mind, both that so many were willing to promote such evil at the time, and also that so many have been able to conveniently excise those awkward memories from their minds.
I haven't forgotten any of these headlines. But you overstate the intent of the more mainstream and assume the universality of the intent of craziest (Piers, Stern, etc.). The primary view - and mine - is that the voluntarily vaccinated should get treated with scarce resources before the unvaccinated, assuming both are seriously ill. If there is one hospital bed, give it to the person who tried harder to preserve themselves and societal resources by taking the risk of getting vax. And I don't limit this to Covid - if there is only one bed to treat an emphysema patient, I give it to the non-smoker over the smoker; the motorcycle rider who wears a helmet over the one that does not. No free lunch for those who knowingly take risky moves when the less risky is easy and obvious.
At least you're honest about being a sociopath who wants people to die if they have a sincere disagreement with you on technical matters of science. Most pretend to be doing it because they're so kind and caring.
You don't seem to understand. This person isn't talking about keeping a hospital bed open to spite someone who didn't get vaccinated. This person is talking about a case in which there is only one bed, and someone is going to be left out in the cold regardless. It's not sociopathic to leave someone out in the cold in those circumstances - it's just a tragedy.
I wouldn't call Jimmy Kimmel a pundit (or, after this, anything other than absolutely loathsome), but given that mainstream "late show" comedians tend towards broadly-inoffensive takes, that his "rest in peace, wheezy!" take wasn't roundly condemned suggests that the stance was, if not exactly widespread, then more acceptable than anyone should consider palatable: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jimmy-kimmel-vaccinated-hospitals_n_613837dde4b0aac9c01d3766
In general, forgiveness of elected officials requires an admission of error and a sincere willingness to make changes to make things right. This is just as true for government officials as it is for friends, family and neighbors.
To my knowledge, no one has admitted fault for any policy mistakes that were made -- in fact, it's usually the opposite when it's brought up for discussion. The mistakes are often defended or ignored by those who made them.
I'm not aware of any governors or elected officials that have publicly said, "Here's exactly what I screwed up, here's what we lied about, here's how I misled you, and here are the policies we're making to address those errors so this can never happen again in the future."
In particular, many states failed to accurately count both cases and deaths, especially among highly vulnerable populations like elderly individuals living in care facilities -- which is curious in and of itself. This was true in developed and technologically advanced nations across the entire world, not just in the U.S., which is even more frustrating and bizarre.
Taking responsibility requires integrity. In general, the pandemic was a huge mess that no one will take responsibility for because the politicization and divisiveness was way too profitable for politicians and pundits and even some corporations. In situations like this, the only ones who lose are the citizens.
I’m thinking I should have used a different word than “forgive.” Maybe “recognize that these were hard issues and don’t immediately assume that what proved to be errors in hindsight are indictments of their good sense.”
I find “forgiveness” in the sense you’re using it to be an ill-defined concept anyhoo to be honest. :)
I agree that "forgiving" elected officials is different than forgiving a friend, family member, etc., but I would argue that the process is the same overall in that it involves an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, an apology, and a sincere change in behavior or a visible effort to address the harm, make it right, and prevent it from happening again.
In certain cases, elected officials who made bad calls during the pandemic have doubled down on those bad policies, or have chosen to ignore them without ever acknowledging or correcting their negative impact on the public, which naturally complicates things when it comes to moving on.
A lot of bad policies also persisted far longer than basic common sense would allow. Poor data tracking for prolonged periods of time, censorship of accurate information online, millions of dollars spent on unused field hospitals, public policies with no coherent scientific basis, and conflicting messages coming from the same public health authority are all obvious examples.
Even after the fact, establishing an updated data tracking protocol for pandemics to avoid confusion in the future would have been great, and yet no U.S. government leader (that I'm aware of) has yet attempted to spearhead such a project.
I'm just saying that a lot of voters notice these things and it doesn't sit well with them.
I think admission has to come before forgiveness, right? How can you forgive someone who says "we didn't do anything wrong, we always did whatever 'the science said' and the science just changed"?
I conceded up above that “forgive” is an inexact word and that I’m saying more that we should recognize that these were hard choices and not judge too harshly people who simply got it wrong.
(That said, forgiveness without an admission of guilt is the highest form of grace and you should try it. ;) )
And, frankly, some of the “mistakes” were so egregious, deliberate, and damaging that forgiveness is not yet on the table.
Then there are the four “Rs” indicative of a heart seeking to redress offenses—intentional or not—committed against others:
1. Recognition: Come to an understanding that you screwed up;
2. Repentance: Own your screw-up without equivocation;
3. Restitution: Find a way to make tangible payment for damage caused by your screw-up;
4. Reconciliation: With the first three “Rs” having been fulfilled, the fourth becomes a possibility for offender/offended.
Not aware of any meaningful incorporation of this model on the part of the Covid screw-ups (and by that I mean Offenders rather than Offenses).
It would go a long way toward unrealized healing for the Screw-ups to publicly and authentically OWN the messy destruction they visited upon multiple millions since early 2020.
My perception is that they simply cannot do it. Their pride has rendered their hearts hard as stone.
And, frankly, for some of them the profit motive or power/control dynamic was/is simply too intoxicating to allow repentance on any level.
There was no best guess on any of it. They very deliberately chose the worst choice every single time.
Masks have been studied going back to 1900 and they were known to not work. Hundreds of studies. Masks also were known to cause health issues. Again, from studies going back years. Simple math with geometry proves that wearing a mask will increase your breathed in CO2 far beyond healthy levels for example. You have the average human breath size, the dead space volume of the mask, the amount of CO2 in the ambient air, the amount of CO2 in your exhaled air. From this, you can get a very close approximation of what volume of CO2 you will be breathing when wearing a mask, and it is straight up scary! How many times did they lie to you and say this is not true? Then there are the social issues with masks, particularly communication for children learning to speak and communicate. Those were well known problems well before 2020 came along, but they said that was all a lie. THEY KNEW! It was not a best guess. It was a deliberate action on their part to destroy.
Social distancing. 6 feet. Seriously? And people were so convinced of this arbitrary distance that they would scream that they need their 6 feet! It did no good, but it did cause isolation and destruction.
Covid-19 will not attack you if you are sitting down at a restaurant or participating in a BLM riot, but it will get you at the beach all alone or at the park with your dog. Seriously? Shut down places people get sun and fresh air and exercise and think that is doing any good? Gyms closed, strip clubs open. You remember?
Shutting down the economy. It has been well established the place most people get sick is at home, and this has been known at least as far back as 1970. Again, all pain, no gain.
Essential and nonessential people. Any good?
Closing schools? Really?
Not acknowledging natural immunity.
mRNA vaccines. Worst choice.
Those vaccines using the most destructive part of the virus, the spike protein. Again, worst choice.
Burning trillions of future generation's wealth while at the same time destroying current production. Do you know where Biden's inflation comes from? The destroyed global supply chain that has driven scarcity. The dollars were not driving inflation until there was scarcity. Once they created scarcity, the inflation began.
EVERY SINGLE CHOICE THEY MADE WAS CHOSEN TO INFLICT MAXIMUM HARM. EVERY ONE OF THEM!
Masks never could have worked against Covid-19. How do I know? Well, outside of every high quality study that says so, it is just plain simple common sense that can be proven easily. Inhale off a cigarette, put an N95 mask on, breath out. Smoke particle size average is 0.25 micrometer. Do you see smoke? Yup, you do. The size of the covid-19 virus is about 0.05 micrometer. 1/5 the size of a tobacco smoke particle. Masks do not stop upper respiratory viruses from spreading, they likely increase the spread... So, the pore size on the N95 mask is such that it stops 95% of 0.3 micrometer or larger particles which is 6 times larger than the covid-19 particle. This means that you can fit particles with many virus in them that escape the mask. Open your browser and search for a sphere calculator. Type in 1 for the radius and note the volume of the sphere. Type in 6 for the radius and note the volume of the sphere. Divide the larger number by the smaller one. Then multiply by 0.74 which is a close estimate of the packing efficiency of spheres. 4.2 for R1, 904.8 for R6 = 215.4 * 0.74 = 159 virus can fit in a sphere that 5% of the time can penetrate an N95 mask.
They can do the math, they did do the math, they knew they would not work, but still, they force fed them down your throats.
The problem isn't that people took their best guess and were sometimes wrong. The problem is that they took their best guess, knowing that it was no more than a guess, and turned it into A: a civic religion and B: the law of half the land. That not only hurts innocent people who made better guesses, it also makes it vastly harder for you to admit you were wrong the first time and change your mind.
And, yeah, the usual prerequisite for forgiveness is atonement.
I would agree with this perspective more of the Left hadn't been so heavy-handed with their view. They used censorship, lies and shaming to enforce their views, many of which were obviously false.
They made up study results about mask effectiveness and school closures, lied about whether masks worked at all, lied about whether vaccines prevented the spread of COVID, systematically attempted to suppress legitimate scientific debate, encouraged companies to fire workers, including healthcare workers and pregnant women, and told the vaccine-hesitant they were killing the elderly
Oh, and engaged in a massive cover-up of the fact that it clearly came from a lab that we helped fund after President Obama wisely shut down this research on American soil.
All while everyone knew only the elderly and extremely chronically-Ill we're actually at any risk.
Those tactics not only harmed people directly, it destroyed public faith in public health, medicine overall, and even reversed decades of progress on belief in the effectiveness of other vaccines, like measles.
It's hard to see how mistakes that egregious could have been due merely to incompetence. We can forgive, maybe, but trusting is going to be nearly impossible until it's clear those mistakes can't happen again.
I think this comment is a pretty clear depiction of how politicization makes an honest and forthcoming discussion on this subject impossible. "I would agree with you, except those bastards on the other side of the debate are so terrible" is precisely the dynamic that I'm calling out.
I’m willing to forgive people who admit mistakes were made and try to learn from them. I’m not willing to forgive people who worked hard to keep schools closed throughout 2020 and into 2021 but now suggest that they had nothing to do with school closures and also that closures were the right move.
I think this is the third time I’ve been forced to say that “forgiveness” is not the word so much as “recognizing that this was a hard issue and not overly discounting their ability to make decisions where the circumstances were tricky.”
I don’t disagree. I was on the side of keeping schools closed in 2020; I was wrong. But anyone who can’t admit now that this was the wrong call and is still in a position to make such decisions needs to go.
But that gets to the politicized nature of the debate. People aren't in a state where they can't admit being wrong because they're incapable of doing so--it's because of the perceived political consequences. It's precisely because people are ravening for their heads that they feel compelled to double down. Polarization breaks people.
Look at the range of responses across states or even countries. Some individuals/organizations were cautious and circumspect in devising policy (Sweden springs to mind).
On the other hand there were unfortunate decisions that seem to have been made in panic or hysteria. The danger in "forgiving" such decisions is that it sends the message that next time there's an emergency making terrible decisions is fine as long as your heart was in the right place, regardless of actual outcomes.
I disagree. I think that, rather than attacking people, if we can say that something was done better but we get it, people will respond to that feedback far, far more effectively.
I think the question is this: if somebody responds to a crisis by panicking do we really want them in a position of authority? Maybe it would be better to vote them out and replace them with somebody with a sturdier constitution?
Sweden has largely been vindicated in choosing the approach that they did. It is completely possible to look back at this point and figure out who screwed up and who didn't. Plus it's certainly possible to examine the climate under which those decisions were made.
Was the discussion calm and rational? Did the people in charge take pains to justify their decisions? Or did they simply issue proclamations and expect their dictates to be followed with little if any explanation?
I wouldn't say that UK or US "screwed up"...that implies that they knew back in 2020 the data that only become clearer years later.
If someone had two revolvers in front of them -- one knew to be loaded with one bullet and the other with five -- and was forced to play "Russian roulette" with just one, I wouldn't say that person "screwed up" if they chose the one with one bullet yet it subsequently fired.
Who "panicked"? What criteria are you using to define "panic"? And are we saying someone may have "panicked" only with the benefit of hindsight? There was very little definitive empirical evidence in 2020 about so many key factors, so these politicians (including Trump, Pence...not just Blue State leaders) had to make what they thought were the best decisions in that moment.
Again, look at the range of responses. Sweden, for example, took the most cautious approach possible and largely eschewed lockdowns. Their approach looks increasingly justified with the passage of time and additional analysis.
Now look at the UK which initially proposed a governmental response that largely mirrored Sweden's--and then promptly reversed itself in the face of public and media hysteria.
I understand. But that is hindsight. I wouldn't say that the UK "panicked" necessarily in this case. (I don't recall all the specifics about its initial response and subsequent changes.)
My point is that leaders had to make what seemed to be life-or-death decisions with imperfect information. If subsequent information suggests otherwise, that doesn't mean they were "wrong" or "panicked"...or even must apologize to anyone after the fact. But those leaders (like us all) should certainly learn from the experience and thus be prepared to make a stronger decision in the future.
Forgiveness is a noble trait, but it should not be trivial. Many men and women in our armed services were discharged for refusing the COVID vaccine. And many health professionals were fired for the same reason. They too should be not only only forgiven but made whole: positions restored with back pay. Anything short of that is insincere and cannot move a discussion of retrospective forgiveness forward.
Those who thought we could distance our way to low fatalities were obviously wrong even in March 2020.
At that time, the Communist Party of China had imposed brutal lockdowns. It had engaged in far more effective coercive distancing than any free, Western country could impose. Notwithstanding these efforts, yet COVID had spread around the world. Thinking the US could achieve greater social control than an East Asian Communist Party was lunacy,
While some technical mistakes might be forgivable, excessive risk aversion is not. People who were too risk averse in Spring 2020 are unlikely to embrace cost justified risks today. They will want speed limits to be too low. They will propose strangling the economy to avert climate change. They will focus excessively on obvious harms and not give proper weight to uncertain benefits. In a word, they are no fun scolds.
Except mitigation measures clearly worked…we never found a silver bullet but the data clearly shows a state like Florida could have prevented around 20,000 deaths just by slightly more aggressive mitigation measures for longer like North Carolina.
Lol, no. You don’t adjust for age while we are in a pandemic and transforming society to protect the elderly. Anyway, GA, SC, and FL went through the same waves at the same time and they had similar Covid death rates during the pandemic stage….so compare GA or SC to California. Better yet compare them to their neighbor NC which had a Democratic governor that was a little more aggressive with mitigation measures and allowed local public health officials to continue them for longer than GA and SC. Oh, and NC has just as strong an economy as its neighbors.
The vaccine was an effective response to the pandemic and is one of the only good things Trump could justifiably take credit for but is the one thing his cult won’t give him credit for.
Here's my question/pushback Nate. I seem to recall that the Northeast (and if i'm remembering correctly, Louisiana and Michigan) were hit super hard in the initial weeks of the pandemic and that the high death rates in those mostly blue states, which is the main reason the death rates in 2020 seem to be fairly evenly split across political lines, were for that reason.
Also, if I'm remembering correctly, I think California and Oregon were the first places to have cases but escaped the fate of the Northeast in part because of more aggressive social distancing measures in the first few weeks (although I'm guessing weather played a role too).
Long story short, while I would agree that some of the social distancing measures (most notably the continued school closings into the fall of 2020) went too far, I'm less convinced that social distancing didn't play an important role in minimizing deaths pre-vaccine.
That's a fair point, but I think that's one reason that the Yale study on Ohio and Florida is worthwhile -- it essentially controls for regional differences in the overall vectors of COVID.
What I wonder is whether there was that much difference in actual behavior in 2020 between Democrats and Republicans living in.the same areas. If work had become remote and restaurants were closed, they may have all benefitted fairly equally.
Where there was probably some difference was in mask usage, and I could certainly be convinced that those have relatively little benefit if you're not wearing high quality masks in a disciplined way. My wife is a physician at UCSF, and she is certainly convinced that their mask usage was the key to keeping COVID from spreading within the hospital (which they have been extremely effective doing). But of course they are wearing n95s+ and are super rigorous about it.
In a hospital setting, after you've been trained in how to wear your N95, it is common to have a hood placed over your head while a solution containing an artificial sweetener is misted into the hood. If you can taste any sweetness you have donned your mask incorrectly and have failed the test.
For obvious reasons that can't be scaled up to the population level.
I want to agree with your hypothesis but Gordon’s point undermines your data. There were no NPIs in the Northeast until around March 13, 2020. So, the analysis to look at is deaths between, say, April 15th and January 1st, 2021. One of the things that I remember is that the death rate plummeted in the Northeast after the NPIs took hold and that was a major reason for keeping them in place. It’s unclear, in retrospect if that was just the virus burning itself out or if it was the NPIs. But if your point is about NPIs you can’t include Blue State data that includes deaths BEFORE NPIs were in place. It just doesn’t make sense.
Obviously, distancing works if you do enough of it. If everyone locked down, that would crush the curve until the disease reentered from some outside source.
Nate’s point is that, within the range of distancing that was economically and socially plausible in the US, distancing didn’t matter that much. Greater coercive distancing in northeastern states did not even offset the effect of greater population density, which pushes people closer together and encourages transmission
Obviously as the virus became endemic, the effect you cite would fade to nothingness, but yes, in the beginning, dumb luck as to how covid *seeding* transpired must have played a role. In particular I've long suspected the Northeast's exposure to travellers from Europe helped the virus get a head start in that region when the early spread was still substantially under the radar in the US. And I agree with you about weather, too.
I believe that you are correct, that geographic and climatologic differences are significant factors in morbidity and mortality burdens of respiratory infection epidemics. The mild weather and associated environmental factors on the west coast may well be important determinants of COVID infection outcomes.
I would disagree that 'non-pharmacologic mitigation measures' ('lockdown measures') had anything to do with relatively lower COVID related excess mortality on the west coast of the US. The Cochrane analysis offers essentially no support for the efficacy of 'lockdown measures.'
There has been little attention given to the fact that the initial outbreaks on the west coast were associated with the alpha strain from China. The initial outbreaks in the northeast and thence through most of the rest of the US were associated with the beta strain from Europe, which was more pathologic and more virulent. You can see on Nate's state level comparison chart that states with early outbreaks (e.g., Mississippi, New Jersey, South Dakota) demonstrated later period mortality rates which remained within about 25% of earlier period rates, even though 'lockdown' measures in NJ were far more stringent than those in MS and SD. California, Oregon, and Washington exhibited mortality rate increases of 60-300% from the earlier to the later time periods but remained lower in absolute terms than rates for most of the rest of the US. This suggests that continuing stringent 'lockdown' measures were ineffective, while geographic and climatologic factors may have been important in determining COVID infection outcomes.
I would posit that a significant measure of COVID immunity was generated by exposure to the less pathologic and virulent beta strain, which provided some protection against the beta (and later) strains when they finally arrived on the west coast. As you point out, the weather probably had something to do with it. We are finally starting to see, not surprisingly, specific evidence of genetic factors underlying outcome of COVID infection. An analysis of demographic variations among the populations of various geographic areas might shed further light.
How does voter age demographics split between Dem and Rep. Given that the vast majority of deaths were in the over 65 population, age certainly should be folded into this. Vaxxed or not, a person under 35 had a much greater than 99% chance of survival.
That wouldn’t explain why the death rates were the same before vaccines, however; you’d have to concoct a scenario where all those other programs to prevent spread were exactly canceled out by the age-politics correlation.
It probably magnifies the difference between red and blue states once the vaccine was introduced though.
Regardless, in my blue state, deaths per 1000 went up after vaccines which simply means that this apparent death by red state correlation is not anywhere near absolute at all. I think you really have to look at the flow of infection geographically, because prior to the vax, it wasn't evenly distributed across the country. We all know that NY got hit big first, then FL, with its huge elderly population, got hit much later. Also, we know that southern infections rose in the summer when they lowered in the north. So that means, the post vax summer of 2021 hit Florida much harder, and (not to be morose) 'dry tinder' deaths in the north already happened. I just think this moral argument about political affiliation is false correlation given the timeline of the spread, the age/population variability across the country and the age/political affiliation difference between ages. there are too many other data points to consider.
Don't forget that the chart on the left represents a period of 11-12 months. The chart on the right represents a period of 30 months. So all but the states hit hardest early in the pandemic have higher numbers on the right.
Nate's earlier post lead me to do my own regression and using change in excess deaths vs. change in official COIVD deaths does reduce the partisanship effect but it didn't eliminate it. Surprisingly % of over 65 was a poor predictor of either factor.
The entire study is very poor quality, see link below. It's disappointing that Nate is promoting it so uncritically, to be honest. I've followed him from the start of 538 and normally he is better at data issues. Perhaps this newly monetised blog is encouraging him to go down the path we've seen from others of deliberately pushing narratives that are controversial in order to boost engagement. That'd be even more disappointing if so.
When I use obesity and excess deaths the partisanship effect does go away but if there is a difference in obesity rates between republicans and democrats and that was the cause of the change we should be able to see that in this study. We don't.
I am not sure how to interpret your comment. If obesity accounts for the discrepancy then that is a good indication that's an important factor that needs to be explored.
It correlates with the excess deaths as well as partisanship. This doesn't prove that obesity not partisanship is the cause of the relationship it just means we can't eliminate that possibility using the data that I used alone. I don't really understand why Obesity would explain the difference between death rates in a given state more than partisanship. Obesity didn't change in these states but the partisan message did so I think partisanship is still a better explainer because I don't understand why obesity would explain why states with more obesity would have a greater death rate change.
That was a terrible article, where the author is clearly coming from a place of ideological hurt feelings and trying to throw issues at the wall, like claiming selection bias without actually proposing a mechanism for selection bias that I could see.
There may be issues with the study--we should be open to that. But this dude’s response ain’t it.
Who the heck is Dr. Vinay Prasad? And why should I/we uniquely trust him? Was there broader critique of the study than just his? And, if so, what did other experts think?
If you are incapable/lack the math to understand the technical aspects of the argument then you need to rely on the opinions of different sets of dueling experts.
That is a minefield however. At the end of the day you're relying on trust because you have no idea what they're talking about, what constitutes a valid objection, etc.
I understand what they are talking about completely. But I also see some counterarguments to this doctor's points, and (beyond that) value the opinion of a broad base of subject-matter experts to make the best decision for myself and my family. But, it seems, you do not and would rather insult me. So be it.
I am not insulting you. "You" in my post above is the generic you, meant to include all of humanity.
I am not suggesting that the problem of the technical aspects of scientific debates being out of reach for laymen is a problem that is confined to you as an individual. Clearly it is something that affects everyone on the planet at this point.
I don't think it's reasonable for even a technically sophisticated person with a decent amount of expertise in an area to rely *solely* on their own read of an article or a single critique. This stuff is complicated and people miss things. In my own field (labor economics), I'm less likely to trust my judgment that a particular approach is or isn't valid if my opinion goes against the consensus among other labor economists (of course, I don't abandon my opinion in that case, but I do look more carefully to see what I'm missing).
This is why academic journals have peer review--even the editors of journals don't trust their own judgment enough to not want to solicit additional opinions (and they typically solicit opinions from multiple people because they don't trust the opinion of a single subject matter expert even when it's an expert that they've chosen).
I'm not at all sure this is a contrarian position across America.
As long as we had neither a vaccine nor any reasonable way to know how bad the pandemic could get, it was reasonable to promote policies to minimize the spread of the disease. The death toll was appalling, and we did not know how the story was going to turn out.
Once the vaccines were available, the odds changed significantly, both for individuals and for the population as a whole.
Ordinary (that is to say not on-line partisans) people that I know, both liberal and conservative, would agree with this in general.
This is not to say that there is no blame to hand out.
One group decided to actively discourage people from doing the safe thing, while the other side went over the top in trying to force people to choose the safe thing. Politicians on both sides of the aisle egged this on, and once it reached a certain point, were at the mercy of highly agitated mobs. Worse, each mob became more strident and unreasonable because of the antics of the opposing mob. All helpfully amplified in the media outlets.
Going forward, I am reasonably confident that next time we would handle a pandemic better, but I have zero confidence that we will do better with the next great polarizing event.
There's also some reason to think that modern public health establishments were (and are) woefully unprepared for a non-selective pandemic. There hasn't been this kind of an outbreak in multiple generations, and the skillsets they developed for combating things like HIV, other STIs, smoking, etc *do not* transfer well to considerations of a highly contagious respiratory infection.
"...nor any reasonable way to know how bad the pandemic could get"
So when the expected disasters in places like TX and FL failed to materialize as they reopened what excuse did CA, for example, have for staying closed?
Absolutely, to me the clear consensus evidence-based position on covid-19 = stay current on your vaccines and move on with your life (unless you have extenuating circumstances, ie severe immunosuppression, live/work in a nursing home, etc). I think masks and testing made sense early on before vaccines, but as you said the data is very murky on how much that helped, if at all. However, once the Delta and Omicron variants came out it was so highly contagious it was probably impossible to ever make a dent in with NPIs
It's interesting that your recommendation is not in line with most health experts. Plenty of government bodies are explicitly *not* recommending boosters unless you're uniquely at risk.
You are incorrect. The CDC recommends people get an updated covid-19 booster this fall/winter, as do most state agencies and epidemiologists. States that do not recommend it like Florida are outliers from the evidence-based consensus and rely on misinterpretation and misrepresentations of the data.
It's amazing how much COVID broke liberal brains. Apparently this is the one and only issue on which we should ignore the Europeans (perennially touted as having much better health care systems than us) and trust the American health establishment. Michael Moore weeps.
I don't understand your comment about Europe. They are slower than the USA but the European Medicines Agency has recommended approval of the 2023 vaccine for everyone over the age of 6 months.
Why you gotta be so rude? Just discuss the facts, dude.
If your position is right, your facts will win. Being a dick guarantees you get ignored. You've got some interesting points in this thread, but you get in your own way right at the start.
For me, truth matters far more than anything else. I have no doubt that some people don't like me being rude to arrogant people (Mr. Fish was certainly rude first). But the idea that someone would read something true (with citations!) and decide to ignore it because of the tone of the speaker? Someone like that is already lost and not worth reaching.
My point is more that people stop reading you and never get to the WHO citation. Before reading this thread, I thought you were completely wrong, like the other guy. I almost stopped reading at this post because it was immediately turning into a classic internet flame war. I almost didn't see the WHO article you linked to later. And I'm glad I did; it gave me info I didn't know and changed my thinking.
I commented here because my job is in communications, and your communication style is undermining your ability to convey your (persuasive) message. Maybe that doesn't matter to you, but the person I am is sad that more people won't get good facts because of bad presentation. It's literally my job to fix that.
So the only government body - in the entire world - that is worth listening to is the CDC? Other countries' CDCs? WHO? We should completely ignore them?
I wonder if you even knew that other countries and the WHO don't recommend boosters for normal adults?
Sample: "Healthy younger adults - adults without comorbidities under the age of 50 to 60 years (age thresholds depend on countries); Children and adolescents with severe obesity or comorbidities that put them at higher risk of severe COVID-19 infection. For this group, WHO recommends the primary series and first booster dose. Additional booster doses are not routinely recommended."
I understand the urge to change the subject, but do you now agree that your recommendation is far from universal and not shared by the preeminent world health body? Or do you think the WHO "rel[ies] on misinterpretation and misrepresentations of the data."? Or perhaps no, the WHO has arrived at this conclusion scientifically, whereas the evil states like Florida who follow WHO recommendation are relying on misinterpretation and misrepresentation?
It's all very tricky to understand given how far the facts were from your initial assertions. Thankfully I'm informed enough to not have been deceived by what some would call your own 'misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the data'.
You are obviously here to be a trollish douche picking fights and not have a good faith discussion, learn anything, or god forbid, change your mind, so I’m muting you kthxbai
For the sake of arguing a trivial point, I'll disagree here. 9/11 may have been more consequential for Afghanistan, Iraq, and NYC. COVID was dramatically more impactful in most other parts of the world, and resulted in far more deaths, even if you count the post-9/11 wars..
I would have said that in 2019, but I think the majority of people who lived through both 2001 and 2020 will say that 2020 was the far more consequential year. I mean, which is a bigger lasting effect - the fact that you have to go through an extra layer of security when entering an airport, or the fact that most white collar professionals now work from home at least a few days a month?
If we’re counting bodies, covid is way ahead. If you’re just thinking about changes to how the world works, I think 9/11 will have a wider and much longer-lasting effect, but that seems really hard to prove
Don't differing characteristics of blue states and red states make it exceptionally misleading to look at only state-level results to assess COVID policies? I'm certainly not an expert in COVID or statistics. But, with identical NPIs, I would think blue states--on average, more urban and dense--would have had far worse outcomes than red states. If that's true, then it would follow that having roughly equally outcomes means that blue states had, on average, quite effective NPIs.
There is no correlation to “density” and COVID. There is, however; very high correlation to age with the old at risk and the young not.
That’s why if you look at overall percentages, Florida and California did similarly. However, if you break down deaths by demographics Florida was better in every single one. The problem is Florida has a substantially greater portion of old people and is one of the “oldest” states in the country and California one of the “youngest.”
There's no correlation with "density" and eventual outcomes. In terms of how quickly any pandemic spreads I am pretty sure density makes a difference.
When the vaccines were introduced what percentage of the population had not yet been exposed to Covid? I would be interested in seeing breakdowns at the state/regional level to see if there was any correlation to urbanization.
Fair point. I will run my regression to see if density gets rid of the difference.
And.... the partisan effect goes away.
Why would density change how COVID spread later vs. earlier in the pandemic though. I still think by taking out the relative differences in partisanship between rural and urban centers away by controlling for a highly partisan demographic feature (r=0.54) is the explanation for this difference.
However, if you can explain why we would need to see the change in difference between rural and urban be significant over an above the partisan differences between those type of states I would like to understand that thinking more.
assuming that political affiliation is equally split amongst all age groups and risk of death is equally split amongst all age groups. But that isnt true. A 25 year old democrat would have survived vaxxed or not.
This seems right. All together, then, there are a lot of complicating effects that would make simply looking at the state-level outcomes too simplistic (though the direction of skew for blue/red state is unclear).
Some observations on school closures as NPI (you can find the data over five articles at my blog):
1. Schools remained in remote if enough parents wanted it that way. Had nothing to do with CDC.
2. The single biggest factor in parental preference for remote vs in-person was race.
3. The single biggest factor in whether in-person instruction was full-time or hybrid (edited, I originally wrote remote in error) was the state politics. Dem governors pledged allegiance to CDC, GOP governors didn't. CDC guidelines made it impossible to offer full-time in-person.
4. Parents who wanted remote were guaranteed remote for the 2021 school year. Parents who wanted in-person were dependent on the majority parental preference in their district.
5. Since most (over 50% revealed prefernece) non-white parents wanted remote, they were generally pleased with schools, as they were always able to choose remote. Since most (over 75% polled and revealed preference) whites wanted in-person AND most whites go to majority white schools, they were generally pleased with schools as well.
6. Parents in non-majority white districts (most major cities, lots of high immigration suburbs) who wanted remote were generally screwed. This isn't a big group--about 15%, according to polls. The previous three data points suggest these parents were mostly white. They punched way above their weight level, since "mediafolks with kids" live in cities and high immigration suburbs and are mostly white.
So given that fact base, there are two ways of looking at the "damage" caused by school closures (again, important to remember that polls throughout and after showed high degrees of parental satisfaction).
First, there's no question that parents who wanted in-person instruction (regardless of race) were dependent on the will of their neighbors and this was completely unfair. Parents who wanted in-person instruction were not given equal rights (except in Florida and Texas and perhaps some other GOP states). No one ever approached the issue from this viewpoint, in large part because advocates for opening schools simply couldn't comprehend that they weren't speaking for all parents. But the anger levels among parents and non-parents who aren't aware that most parents got what they wanted would have been alleviated if they had been guaranteed in-person instruction. However, this would have been really really expensive and for all the talk of how great Florida was, the parents, kids, and teachers who had to deal with five-ten kids in person and 20 on zoom pretty unanimously say it sucked.
But that wouldn't have solved much anyway, because the pandemic damage was not, in the main, experienced by the kids of the angry white parents denied in-person instruction, but the kids of black and Hispanic who actively demanded remote instruction and indeed, would have preferred to still have their local school in remote in the 21-22 school year. The learning loss wasn't imposed on these parents. They actively chose it. This is why it shouldn't surprise anyone that California actually slightly outscored Florida and Texas on the NAEP (less learning loss).
The only way to end the learning loss was to end the parents' right to choose remote instruction, which is what most state legislatures did in summer 2021, when we lucked into a window of time when it looked like the vaccines would end covid entirely. Had we not had that window, we might still now be dealing with parents able to legally insist on remote education at their local school.
As evidence of the change, consider Lori Lightfoot's reaction to her union demands in January 2021 and January 2022. The first year, the union refused to return to the classroom and she was pissed but *didn't* shut off remote access. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of her parents wanted remote. The next year, when the union refused to go back to school, she shut down remote, to their considerable shock. But she still had a majority of parents who were keeping their kids out of school and demanding remote. The difference: the Illinois legislature had set a mandate on when she could enable remote education. Had she submitted to parent (not union) wishes in 2022, she'd have lost a lot of money for the schools. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/chicago-public-schools-cancel-classes-again-covid-19-teacher-walkout-2022-01-07/
Once the schools closed in March 2020, most states changed the laws around attendence and school funding for a year and most governors--including DeSantis--refused to even consider forcing parents into virtual academies instead of guaranteeing them the right to remote ed at their local school. The next school year, they all flipped and forced parents to choose virtual academies and banned schools from offering remote except in the case of really high case numbers and then only temporarily.
As someone who opposed school closure in March 2020, I had a lot of time to think about this and I'm pretty sure once the schools closed everything we did was baked in. No one anticipated that parents would actively resist sending their kids back to school in demographically unfortunate patterns (well, I did, but then I spend a lot of time thinking about race and education and I'm nobody, anyway.)
I realize this is only marginally ontopic, but since the enormous costs Nate mentioned very much include the learning loss, I thought people might be interested.
Our district(predominantly white) did go back to in person in Sept of 2020, but was remote again in October because of so many staff illnesses. We remained remote until March of 2021 when our Governor made sure teachers had early access to those vaccines. Your points about access are correct, but there seems to be a disconnect in discussions about education thinking that it's all about children, where there are a considerable number of adults working at these schools. Around 1 adult per 4-5 children.
I didn't want to post a bunch of links to my blog, where I spent a couple years writing this up, but I did put all the links in with the last article, so here:
I broadly agree, particularly when it comes to deaths. And certainly blue states went overboard on some NPIs.
But the idea that NPIs had no effect on *infection frequency* doesn't pass the smell test. If I avoid crowds and if my family members isolate when infected, it's hard to believe that won't reduce my infection count by ~30% or more.
Deaths are a saturating non-linear function of infection frequency, so if everyone gets infected at least once, high NPI states could fewer infections but a roughly similar death count.
Not saying you'd claim otherwise, but some people might have that takeaway.
Why are the deaths overall so much higher in the right column, period. Illinois is good example...they are high pre vaccine, then post vaccine it is basically unchanged. Many states went up in deaths...despite falling in relative state rankings. Something else is surely going on. The largest spike in death happened in the US post vaccine. Why?
Also, were vaccine uptake numbers really that different across states amongst the 65 and older? Most evidence I have seen suggests no. There was high uptake there across states. This was the cohort dying. And they were highly vaccinated.
Ok. But looking at aggregate data it is clear the most deaths were shortly after widespread vaccine uptake. This is the issue. Go look at polio deaths before and after. It goes to zero. We have had more deaths since. It's at least a reasonable thing to ask questions.
You originally mentioned Illinois. Through Jan 2021, they averaged about 140 deaths per million per month. Since Jan 2021 they averaged about 55 deaths per million per month.
We know that the vaccine doesn't 100% prevent death. And it looks like in Illinois, only about 2/3 of the population took the primary vaccine.
So we would expect deaths to continue, just at a lower rate.
Taking to monthly shows a contrast yes. But, I would like to see 12 month pre and 12 post vaccine. I bet difference is slight. As you can see from aggregate data. Plus you have massive benefit of previous infection. I am not saying the vaccine did not work somewhat...but I think the data is super unclear and many factors at play. Just showing states moving around is an odd way of proving it.
Regarding Illinois, it could be that it is essentially two geographies = Chicago-land and everyone else. I'm sure a HUGE percentage of NE Illinois was vaccianted compared to the rest of the state. So even if post-vaccine excess deaths were low in Chicago-land, they may have skyrocketed downstate...with that difference masked by combining those two competing sets of data.
As for why the highest spike was post-vaccine, one hypothesis would be that: 1) NPI were removed post-vaccine as we all went back to "normal" conditions"; but 2) that loss on NPI meant higher rate of spread to non-vaccined at-risk people.
The data suggest 95% of state over 65 vaccinated. That is who died. If that is just Chicago let's see the data. In aggregate old people got vaccinated. Big time. And they continued to die.
On NPI...the whole point of the post is nothing worked...but the vaccines. Which is it? And again high risk people did get vaccinated. Most non compliance was less risky populations.
While there is a substantial disparity rate among vaccination rates among the young based on political affiliation that disparity is much less pronounced among the elderly.
Put simply the group most at risk from the virus, the old, got vaccinated regardless of how they voted.
At least one major NPI would have a big effect and require negligible lifestyle costs. That would be to improve air quality by installing HEPA filters or Corsi-Rosenthal boxes in schools and other major indoor public spaces. They've been shown to reduce all airborne disease by ~50%-ish even in real practice. The dollar cost is negligible for the benefit. These are off-the-shelf items. It's a disgrace that major practical steps like this have been lost in the political squabbling.
What's the point of preventing transmission at a school if little Timmy just catches the virus anyway at soccer practice, or playing with friends, or when he sees visiting relatives?
Because not 100% of people get infected by other means. You don't need the ban on murder to prevent 100% of murders in order to decide that it's worth doing, and similarly you don't need your transmission prevention at school to prevent 100% of infections in order to decide that it's worth doing.
Almost 100% of the population will be infected eventually. You're talking about slowing down the rate of transmission but unless that goes to zero all you're doing is postponing the inevitable.
If you only get covid once in your life, and then you're done, then this point would be right. But it's clear now (and has been for a while) that we are all going to get covid repeatedly. In that case, what you'd want is to reduce the overall burden of covid you bear, and getting the frequency of infections lower is one way to do it. (Of course, assuming that what you're doing is less annoying than an extra few days of ache and fever every year or so.)
Vaccines reduce the severity of Covid once you catch it. There is no evidence to suggest that they present transmission.
If you are 70 or older getting a vaccine makes a lot of sense. If you are a healthy 24 year old male you should probably not get a shot because vaccines themselves carry a risk of side effects and at that age the risk from Covid is minimal.
They absolutely reduce your likelihood of getting infected. In every week that the CDC was tracking infections by vaccination status, the fraction of vaccinated people who got infected was lower than the fraction of unvaccinated people who got infected, except for a week or two in February 2022, when so many more unvaccinated people had been infected by Omicron in the previous few weeks that they were briefly just as protected as vaccinated people who hadn't recently been infected.
And of course, if you don't get infected, you can't transmit it.
School looks like the biggest single route of community transmission, unsurprisingly. It's not due to soccer practice. That ~50% is real-world, with all the parallel routes already baked in.
If you take the daily chance of transmission from 5% to 1% what exactly have you accomplished?
If you're only planning on living for a month or so I suppose this could make a difference. But for everyone else catching the virus eventually is a near certainty.
How often do they catch it? Even ignoring affecting viral evolution rates and the development of improved treatments, the steady-state infection frequency depends monotonically on R_effective, which is sensitive to NPIs.
2) There's no significant difference in the divergence of mortality right after the vaccines became available. Only in maybe August/September 2021 it starts to diverge, which is also the point in time when most coercions & mandates started! In my opinion, it's much more likely that many people (at least temporarily) moved to the 'free states', to escape the mandates. I've done so myself, spending many months in the southern states, during the height of the covid totalitarianism in my then home state of Washington.
There's no robust data by vaccination status of comparable cohorts, that allows to conclude that vaccines have saved lives or brought any clinical advantage.
Relying on voter registrations, or 'Trump voters', is not a very reliable scientific approach, as it misses to adjust for underlying confounders such as health status.
The first half of 2021 was marked by falling rates of covid everywhere as vaccines were taken up. But in July/August of 2021, there was a new variant that was both more contagious and more deadly, called "Delta", which spread, and caused the first major increase in deaths after vaccines were available. Clearly, death rates aren't going to diverge much until this variant arose. And then I would guess that as delta died out in October/November, there would be relatively little divergence again until the huge hit of Omicron, which was incredibly infectious, and thus killed more people than Delta, despite being less deadly per infection (maybe even less deadly than the original?)
My memory was that for the first few months (March through about June of 2020) urban areas that tended to lean democratic had higher COVID death rates. My interpretation of the data was that urban areas had better transportation connections to the international locations that covid came from, no one had immunity, and initially both blue states and red states locked down. After June 2020, blue states had stricter policies and also lower covid death rates. These effects cancelled out so overall death rates were similar by the time the vaccines came out.
This being said, I agree with Nate's point that the costs of many NPI's (mainly school closures) exceeded the benefits.
One point I would like to see incorporated into this discussion, but is hard because it’s so politicized, is that we should accept that mistakes were made but also be very forgiving of those mistakes because this was an incredibly hard problem that forced us to take our best guess a lot of those times.
Of course, many liberals don’t want to admit mistakes while many conservatives don’t want to forgive mistakes.
This overlooks all the pre-Pandemic public health scholarship that was like "hey closing schools for a year plus is a really bad idea!"
These were not unknown things - we just completely flipped how to respond to pandemics around in March for reasons that I still am not fully sure of.
Shutting down schools might have made sense in a world where it was actually dangerous to kids... but that’s not this world of course.
I did hate the extent to which my teacher union brothers and sisters went all-in on fighting reopening once it was clear that it was quite low risk and doing immense harm to students. That’s a whole other question.
Agreed. But there was also concern that those kids (even if not at danger themselves) would be vectors that spread the illness to parents or (worse) grandparents. Not saying it was CORRECT in hindsight to have closed the schools, but just reminding us all of the context.
It's not really hindsight to suggest that governments in the US at all levels could have turned their attention to other countries to see how their experiments with not shutting down schools was going.
What accounts for their failure to do so? A profound lack of curiosity?
It is absolutely hindsight, since all of the "experiments" were occurring simultaneously in real time.
Occurring over a period of months and years.
Look at the US specifically. Montana, with a Democratic governor, reopened schools in May of 2020. And yet school closings across the country persisted for years afterwards.
Like everything else, it’s a result of our idiotic tribalism. By the summer of 2020, safetyist maximalism became the default for the blue team on all matters related to COVID, regardless of what The Science said.
There were some places where schools opened but allowed students to attend remotely if they and/or their family preferred. That might have been a reasonable compromise that allowed families to take the balance of risk and lack of childcare that they preferred.
The Bush administration came up with school closures because of a high school science fair project showed schools are where super spreading happens…in the playbook it had nothing to do with protecting children and it was to mitigate spread for the entire population. That’s the playbook we had on hand because Bush read the book Germs by the disgraced journalist Judith Miller and ordered a pandemic response playbook to be developed…I’m not joking!
The reason for closing schools was never that it was dangerous to kids. We knew kids were safe. The problem was infected kids would take the virus home to grandma with whom they lived and it was dangerous to them. And if they died then who would take care of them?
We didn't "know" it wasn't dangerous to kids. There was early evidence it wasn't as deadly as it was for others, but there were no extensive analyses or long term studies available in March and April 2020.
And even if we had known kids were 100% safe, leaders also had to consider the well-being and availability of their teachers. Schools can't function if the teachers and substitutes are getting sick or quitting in droves.
Right at the beginning we did not know. But the school policy people are complaining about was keeping schools closed into spring 2021 and in some case beyond then, at which point we DID know that.
The teachers unions didn't actually go all-in on fighting. With the exception of Chicago, anywhere schools opened, teachers went back to work. And despite all the rhetoric, unions had no influence on whether schools opened or not. Yes, I know about Randi Weingarten. She gave wording to the CDC and why no one has investigated the CDC for that is more than I can figure. But no governor had to listen to the CDC, and many didn't.
Yeah but soft power matters; I’d be willing to bet that many schools didn’t open because of concern about blowback from the teacher unions.
Nope. But lots of districts did open schools because white parents had more power. That's why New York City and Chicago, which have far more powerful unions than those in DC, were open in December early March, respectively, while DC schools with very weak unions didn't open until late March, and California, which also has powerful unions, didn't open until Newsom bribed schools to do so, in April.
Schools have children, but there is a rather large adult population running the place. It's around 1 adult for every 5 kids when you count in all the support and admin staff. Our school districted tried to go back to in person in September of 2020, and by October had to go back to distance learning because too many of the staff were out ill. They opened back up in March of 2021 after vaccines became available, and our Governor here in Minnesota made it a point to get the teachers vaccinated early. I don't know what situation was in other states/districts, but it would make sense for Union to advocate for their members safety, would it not?
The reason is MONEY. Sponsored by Pfizer!
Explain, because you're not making a point. The reason for what? The reason that the vaccine is successful is because of money? Most of that was funded by us, the tax payers.
A review of the real time news shows that we were all set to open schools in Sept 2020, but then Trump said they should be re-opened so simply to spite him liberals tortured millions of children for another 18 months.
Governors would have had to force parents preferring remote back to school and no governor, other than maybe Abbott, was willing to try.
Nobody had to force anyone to do anything. I'm fully in favor of ending all truancy laws, if you don't want to send your kid to school then don't.
Yes, well, we live in the real world, and the fact is that schools reopened where a majority of parents wanted them opened and that's what would have happened with or without Trump making that declaration. Although I agree with you that public discourse ramped up against openings. But discourse had nothing to do with it, so there's that.
The discourse is everything.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/trump-schools-reopen.html
There is a place for forgiveness by those who have been wronged, but forgiveness also requires contrition and atonement by those who did the wronging.
In this case, those who publicly and privately called for the deaths of those of us who had reasonable concerns about the cost-effectiveness of lockdown policy are prone to demand forgiveness but have generally shown no contrition nor made any attempt at atonement.
It's also hard to see even in retrospect how calling for the unvaccinated to be denied all healthcare and thus actively killed, as was common from prominent media pundits, was ever a reasonable “best guess” no matter how difficult the situation was.
So personally, while I'm open to offering forgiveness even to those who sent me death threats on social media just for saying that we shouldn't lock down, I would want to feel confident that they understand why they were wrong and are committed to not making similar mistakes in future.
Nate's point seems to be that the only thing that mattered was the vaccines. To that end, it makes sense that the government should have been as heavy-handed as possible to get as many shots in arms as they could.
The part of COVID that still enrages me is the post-vaccine period when the bars were open and the schools were closed. That's where government seemed to totally fail us.
"To that end, it makes sense that the government should have been as heavy-handed as possible to get as many shots in arms as they could."
No it doesn't. The vaccine protected those that took it from serious disease but had little affect on others and infection rates. There was no strong case for coercive action, and people who favored vaccines also ended up favoring harsher NPIs even after vaccination.
"The part of COVID that still enrages me is the post-vaccine period when the bars were open and the schools were closed. That's where government seemed to totally fail us."
Because demonizing the unvaccinated was a political strategy that eventually backfired when the vaccines didn't stop delta/omicron from infecting people, but they put you through another year of NPIs for their own interests.
> The vaccine protected those that took it from serious disease but had little affect on others and infection rates.
This doesn't seem right. At every point in the pandemic, infection rates among vaccinated people were 30-50% less than for unvaccinated people, except for one week in February 2022, when the two rates were almost identical, because so many unvaccinated people had been infected by omicron in the previous few weeks that the two groups briefly had equal protection.
The vaccine offers limited infection protection for a brief window after vaccination. In the case of getting the original vaccine versus delta/omicron it wears off within six weeks or less. That's pretty worthless for a vaccine that itself makes you really sick for a few days. That was our case, we got boosted and got Omicron maybe a month later. I heard lots of similar stories.
Of course once the virus started throwing off variants the infection value of the vaccine shrunk considerably, but the fact that it would throw off variants was very likely and already the case by the time NPIs were re-imposed in 2022.
There is also the matter of behavior, many people I knew that were vaxxed and boosted were still engaging in social distancing and isolation during delta/omicron. The homeschool skate in my town, which featured a hundred or more unmasked homeschoolers crowding into the local roller rink, were not engaging in social distancing, and I bet their overall vaccination rate was lower.
What do you mean by "wears off within six weeks or less"? Every attempt I've seen to quantify this shows that there is less infection among people with an extra vaccine dose, even a year or more after that last vaccine dose, though perhaps it's only close to 100% protection within six weeks or so.
The Yale study was of people living in 2 states, with Republicans and Democrats living together in mixed communities. Doesn't this mean that vaccines prevented death in vaccinated people and provided no detectable protection for unvaccinated neighbors? Maybe other data could get at this -- rates of covid deaths by party registration in places where relative percentages of Democrats and Republicans vary over wide ranges.. ?
We wouldn't expect vaccination to protect neighbors - we would expect it to protect people that you regularly interact with indoors, which is occasionally neighbors, but usually is a very different set of people with only small overlap with neighbors.
I don’t remember ever seeing anyone ‘calling for the unvaccinated to be denied all healthcare and thus actively killed’. Maybe I was following the wrong pundits…
I’m not doubting you about the death treats. But I also remember seeing plenty of death threats sent from anti-lockdown protesters to scientists and public health officials like Fauci. I think it’s fair to say that in that intense situation, lots of people behaved in ways they hopefully now regret…
Yes, the vaccine extremists' desire to deny healthcare to the unvaccinated has been hastily memory-holed now it's turned out that after the initial flurry of mortality we can live with this coronavirus the same way we lived with all the others for thousands of years. But let me refresh your memory with just a tiny, tiny sample of the flood of hateful bile spewed during 2021 and early 2022, when progressives suddenly decided that healthcare wasn't actually a right after all, but a privilege bestowed for conforming to central government orders:
“Doctors should be allowed to give priority to vaccinated patients when resources are scarce”
—The Washington Post, Sep 3 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/03/doctors-should-be-allowed-give-priority-vaccinated-patients-when-resources-are-scarce/
(WaPo ran a huge number of such pieces, this is just one example)
“Rationing health care should be a scary side effect for the unvaccinated”
—The Colorado Sun, Oct 3 2021
https://coloradosun.com/2021/10/03/coronavirus-vaccine-health-care-opinion/
“No Jab? No Service. Doctors Flip The Script On Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates”
—Forbes, Oct 1 2021
https://www.forbes.com/sites/debgordon/2021/10/01/no-jab-no-service-doctors-flip-the-script-on-covid-19-vaccine-mandates/
“Howard Stern says hospitals shouldn’t admit unvaccinated patients. ‘Go home and die’”
—The Sacramento Bee, Jan 20 2022
https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article257540628.html
“Should Unvaccinated Be Denied Health Care?”
Conclusion: “As controversial as it may be, we should deprioritize the eligible unvaccinated patients during medical triage.”
—States Newsroom, published in various papers, Aug 23 2021
https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2021/08/23/op-ed-should-unvaccinated-be-denied-health-care/
“Make the unvaccinated pay for their own health care”
—Financial Post, Dec 22 2021
https://financialpost.com/diane-francis/diane-francis-make-the-unvaccinated-pay-for-their-own-health-care
“It's time to punish Britain's five million vaccine refuseniks”
—The Daily Mail, Dec 9 2021
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10294225/Its-time-punish-Britains-five-million-vaccine-refuseniks-says-ANDREW-NEIL.html
“[Former NSW Premier] Bob Carr calls for unvaccinated to be denied free healthcare”
—News.com.au, Nov 10 2021
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/you-pay-for-your-wilful-stupidity-bob-carr-calls-for-unvaccinated-to-be-denied-free-healthcare/news-story/4d8cdb8319d20dda21fbc1acf0d7a5e3
“Piers Morgan calls for Covid anti-vaxxers to be banned from getting NHS treatment”
—The Mirror, Nov 11 2020
https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/piers-morgan-calls-covid-anti-22991418
So yes, it was EXTREMELY common for pundits across the Western world to call for the unvaccinated to be denied medical treatment, which would have been a death sentence for those concerned. It says a lot, to my mind, both that so many were willing to promote such evil at the time, and also that so many have been able to conveniently excise those awkward memories from their minds.
I haven't forgotten any of these headlines. But you overstate the intent of the more mainstream and assume the universality of the intent of craziest (Piers, Stern, etc.). The primary view - and mine - is that the voluntarily vaccinated should get treated with scarce resources before the unvaccinated, assuming both are seriously ill. If there is one hospital bed, give it to the person who tried harder to preserve themselves and societal resources by taking the risk of getting vax. And I don't limit this to Covid - if there is only one bed to treat an emphysema patient, I give it to the non-smoker over the smoker; the motorcycle rider who wears a helmet over the one that does not. No free lunch for those who knowingly take risky moves when the less risky is easy and obvious.
At least you're honest about being a sociopath who wants people to die if they have a sincere disagreement with you on technical matters of science. Most pretend to be doing it because they're so kind and caring.
You don't seem to understand. This person isn't talking about keeping a hospital bed open to spite someone who didn't get vaccinated. This person is talking about a case in which there is only one bed, and someone is going to be left out in the cold regardless. It's not sociopathic to leave someone out in the cold in those circumstances - it's just a tragedy.
Yea, it happened
I wouldn't call Jimmy Kimmel a pundit (or, after this, anything other than absolutely loathsome), but given that mainstream "late show" comedians tend towards broadly-inoffensive takes, that his "rest in peace, wheezy!" take wasn't roundly condemned suggests that the stance was, if not exactly widespread, then more acceptable than anyone should consider palatable: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jimmy-kimmel-vaccinated-hospitals_n_613837dde4b0aac9c01d3766
All across tv the same.
I’m just talking about forgiving policy makers for getting hard problems wrong.
Whether to forgive evil randos for their acts of intentional evil is between you and your God (or equivalent)
In general, forgiveness of elected officials requires an admission of error and a sincere willingness to make changes to make things right. This is just as true for government officials as it is for friends, family and neighbors.
To my knowledge, no one has admitted fault for any policy mistakes that were made -- in fact, it's usually the opposite when it's brought up for discussion. The mistakes are often defended or ignored by those who made them.
I'm not aware of any governors or elected officials that have publicly said, "Here's exactly what I screwed up, here's what we lied about, here's how I misled you, and here are the policies we're making to address those errors so this can never happen again in the future."
In particular, many states failed to accurately count both cases and deaths, especially among highly vulnerable populations like elderly individuals living in care facilities -- which is curious in and of itself. This was true in developed and technologically advanced nations across the entire world, not just in the U.S., which is even more frustrating and bizarre.
Taking responsibility requires integrity. In general, the pandemic was a huge mess that no one will take responsibility for because the politicization and divisiveness was way too profitable for politicians and pundits and even some corporations. In situations like this, the only ones who lose are the citizens.
I’m thinking I should have used a different word than “forgive.” Maybe “recognize that these were hard issues and don’t immediately assume that what proved to be errors in hindsight are indictments of their good sense.”
I find “forgiveness” in the sense you’re using it to be an ill-defined concept anyhoo to be honest. :)
For SOME of these fuckups the magnitude of the fuckup was so great that there needs to be an accounting.
I'm not saying this applies to all government officials universally but at the fringes people should absolutely be fired.
I agree that "forgiving" elected officials is different than forgiving a friend, family member, etc., but I would argue that the process is the same overall in that it involves an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, an apology, and a sincere change in behavior or a visible effort to address the harm, make it right, and prevent it from happening again.
In certain cases, elected officials who made bad calls during the pandemic have doubled down on those bad policies, or have chosen to ignore them without ever acknowledging or correcting their negative impact on the public, which naturally complicates things when it comes to moving on.
A lot of bad policies also persisted far longer than basic common sense would allow. Poor data tracking for prolonged periods of time, censorship of accurate information online, millions of dollars spent on unused field hospitals, public policies with no coherent scientific basis, and conflicting messages coming from the same public health authority are all obvious examples.
Even after the fact, establishing an updated data tracking protocol for pandemics to avoid confusion in the future would have been great, and yet no U.S. government leader (that I'm aware of) has yet attempted to spearhead such a project.
I'm just saying that a lot of voters notice these things and it doesn't sit well with them.
I think admission has to come before forgiveness, right? How can you forgive someone who says "we didn't do anything wrong, we always did whatever 'the science said' and the science just changed"?
I conceded up above that “forgive” is an inexact word and that I’m saying more that we should recognize that these were hard choices and not judge too harshly people who simply got it wrong.
(That said, forgiveness without an admission of guilt is the highest form of grace and you should try it. ;) )
And, frankly, some of the “mistakes” were so egregious, deliberate, and damaging that forgiveness is not yet on the table.
Then there are the four “Rs” indicative of a heart seeking to redress offenses—intentional or not—committed against others:
1. Recognition: Come to an understanding that you screwed up;
2. Repentance: Own your screw-up without equivocation;
3. Restitution: Find a way to make tangible payment for damage caused by your screw-up;
4. Reconciliation: With the first three “Rs” having been fulfilled, the fourth becomes a possibility for offender/offended.
Not aware of any meaningful incorporation of this model on the part of the Covid screw-ups (and by that I mean Offenders rather than Offenses).
It would go a long way toward unrealized healing for the Screw-ups to publicly and authentically OWN the messy destruction they visited upon multiple millions since early 2020.
My perception is that they simply cannot do it. Their pride has rendered their hearts hard as stone.
And, frankly, for some of them the profit motive or power/control dynamic was/is simply too intoxicating to allow repentance on any level.
There was no best guess on any of it. They very deliberately chose the worst choice every single time.
Masks have been studied going back to 1900 and they were known to not work. Hundreds of studies. Masks also were known to cause health issues. Again, from studies going back years. Simple math with geometry proves that wearing a mask will increase your breathed in CO2 far beyond healthy levels for example. You have the average human breath size, the dead space volume of the mask, the amount of CO2 in the ambient air, the amount of CO2 in your exhaled air. From this, you can get a very close approximation of what volume of CO2 you will be breathing when wearing a mask, and it is straight up scary! How many times did they lie to you and say this is not true? Then there are the social issues with masks, particularly communication for children learning to speak and communicate. Those were well known problems well before 2020 came along, but they said that was all a lie. THEY KNEW! It was not a best guess. It was a deliberate action on their part to destroy.
Social distancing. 6 feet. Seriously? And people were so convinced of this arbitrary distance that they would scream that they need their 6 feet! It did no good, but it did cause isolation and destruction.
Covid-19 will not attack you if you are sitting down at a restaurant or participating in a BLM riot, but it will get you at the beach all alone or at the park with your dog. Seriously? Shut down places people get sun and fresh air and exercise and think that is doing any good? Gyms closed, strip clubs open. You remember?
Shutting down the economy. It has been well established the place most people get sick is at home, and this has been known at least as far back as 1970. Again, all pain, no gain.
Essential and nonessential people. Any good?
Closing schools? Really?
Not acknowledging natural immunity.
mRNA vaccines. Worst choice.
Those vaccines using the most destructive part of the virus, the spike protein. Again, worst choice.
Burning trillions of future generation's wealth while at the same time destroying current production. Do you know where Biden's inflation comes from? The destroyed global supply chain that has driven scarcity. The dollars were not driving inflation until there was scarcity. Once they created scarcity, the inflation began.
EVERY SINGLE CHOICE THEY MADE WAS CHOSEN TO INFLICT MAXIMUM HARM. EVERY ONE OF THEM!
Masks never could have worked against Covid-19. How do I know? Well, outside of every high quality study that says so, it is just plain simple common sense that can be proven easily. Inhale off a cigarette, put an N95 mask on, breath out. Smoke particle size average is 0.25 micrometer. Do you see smoke? Yup, you do. The size of the covid-19 virus is about 0.05 micrometer. 1/5 the size of a tobacco smoke particle. Masks do not stop upper respiratory viruses from spreading, they likely increase the spread... So, the pore size on the N95 mask is such that it stops 95% of 0.3 micrometer or larger particles which is 6 times larger than the covid-19 particle. This means that you can fit particles with many virus in them that escape the mask. Open your browser and search for a sphere calculator. Type in 1 for the radius and note the volume of the sphere. Type in 6 for the radius and note the volume of the sphere. Divide the larger number by the smaller one. Then multiply by 0.74 which is a close estimate of the packing efficiency of spheres. 4.2 for R1, 904.8 for R6 = 215.4 * 0.74 = 159 virus can fit in a sphere that 5% of the time can penetrate an N95 mask.
They can do the math, they did do the math, they knew they would not work, but still, they force fed them down your throats.
It was clear that lockdowns don't work in May of 2020: https://mattpencer.substack.com/
I forgive people who made mistakes and overreacted in March (I was one of them). Anyone who advocated for NPIs past July 2020 is unforgivable.
(Conservatives are even dumber for being against vaccines, but at least they didn't force anything on me.)
The problem isn't that people took their best guess and were sometimes wrong. The problem is that they took their best guess, knowing that it was no more than a guess, and turned it into A: a civic religion and B: the law of half the land. That not only hurts innocent people who made better guesses, it also makes it vastly harder for you to admit you were wrong the first time and change your mind.
And, yeah, the usual prerequisite for forgiveness is atonement.
I would agree with this perspective more of the Left hadn't been so heavy-handed with their view. They used censorship, lies and shaming to enforce their views, many of which were obviously false.
They made up study results about mask effectiveness and school closures, lied about whether masks worked at all, lied about whether vaccines prevented the spread of COVID, systematically attempted to suppress legitimate scientific debate, encouraged companies to fire workers, including healthcare workers and pregnant women, and told the vaccine-hesitant they were killing the elderly
Oh, and engaged in a massive cover-up of the fact that it clearly came from a lab that we helped fund after President Obama wisely shut down this research on American soil.
All while everyone knew only the elderly and extremely chronically-Ill we're actually at any risk.
Those tactics not only harmed people directly, it destroyed public faith in public health, medicine overall, and even reversed decades of progress on belief in the effectiveness of other vaccines, like measles.
It's hard to see how mistakes that egregious could have been due merely to incompetence. We can forgive, maybe, but trusting is going to be nearly impossible until it's clear those mistakes can't happen again.
I think this comment is a pretty clear depiction of how politicization makes an honest and forthcoming discussion on this subject impossible. "I would agree with you, except those bastards on the other side of the debate are so terrible" is precisely the dynamic that I'm calling out.
That's a very disingenuous summary of my comment. My comment was a recitation of facts. At no point did I call the debaters on the other side names.
I spelled out why forgiveness and trust are very hard. You read into it name-calling, which I did not do.
If you feel convicted by the facts, that's truth staring you in the face. And it may be time for an honest evaluation of your position.
I’m willing to forgive people who admit mistakes were made and try to learn from them. I’m not willing to forgive people who worked hard to keep schools closed throughout 2020 and into 2021 but now suggest that they had nothing to do with school closures and also that closures were the right move.
I think this is the third time I’ve been forced to say that “forgiveness” is not the word so much as “recognizing that this was a hard issue and not overly discounting their ability to make decisions where the circumstances were tricky.”
I don’t disagree. I was on the side of keeping schools closed in 2020; I was wrong. But anyone who can’t admit now that this was the wrong call and is still in a position to make such decisions needs to go.
But that gets to the politicized nature of the debate. People aren't in a state where they can't admit being wrong because they're incapable of doing so--it's because of the perceived political consequences. It's precisely because people are ravening for their heads that they feel compelled to double down. Polarization breaks people.
Look at the range of responses across states or even countries. Some individuals/organizations were cautious and circumspect in devising policy (Sweden springs to mind).
On the other hand there were unfortunate decisions that seem to have been made in panic or hysteria. The danger in "forgiving" such decisions is that it sends the message that next time there's an emergency making terrible decisions is fine as long as your heart was in the right place, regardless of actual outcomes.
I disagree. I think that, rather than attacking people, if we can say that something was done better but we get it, people will respond to that feedback far, far more effectively.
I think the question is this: if somebody responds to a crisis by panicking do we really want them in a position of authority? Maybe it would be better to vote them out and replace them with somebody with a sturdier constitution?
I don’t honestly trust most people’s ability these days to be non-ideological when deciding what is or is not panicking. It was an insane time.
That said, the broader question of what kind of person you want in office is up to you.
Sweden has largely been vindicated in choosing the approach that they did. It is completely possible to look back at this point and figure out who screwed up and who didn't. Plus it's certainly possible to examine the climate under which those decisions were made.
Was the discussion calm and rational? Did the people in charge take pains to justify their decisions? Or did they simply issue proclamations and expect their dictates to be followed with little if any explanation?
Sweden doesn't look good compared to the countries around it.
I wouldn't say that UK or US "screwed up"...that implies that they knew back in 2020 the data that only become clearer years later.
If someone had two revolvers in front of them -- one knew to be loaded with one bullet and the other with five -- and was forced to play "Russian roulette" with just one, I wouldn't say that person "screwed up" if they chose the one with one bullet yet it subsequently fired.
Who "panicked"? What criteria are you using to define "panic"? And are we saying someone may have "panicked" only with the benefit of hindsight? There was very little definitive empirical evidence in 2020 about so many key factors, so these politicians (including Trump, Pence...not just Blue State leaders) had to make what they thought were the best decisions in that moment.
Again, look at the range of responses. Sweden, for example, took the most cautious approach possible and largely eschewed lockdowns. Their approach looks increasingly justified with the passage of time and additional analysis.
Now look at the UK which initially proposed a governmental response that largely mirrored Sweden's--and then promptly reversed itself in the face of public and media hysteria.
I understand. But that is hindsight. I wouldn't say that the UK "panicked" necessarily in this case. (I don't recall all the specifics about its initial response and subsequent changes.)
My point is that leaders had to make what seemed to be life-or-death decisions with imperfect information. If subsequent information suggests otherwise, that doesn't mean they were "wrong" or "panicked"...or even must apologize to anyone after the fact. But those leaders (like us all) should certainly learn from the experience and thus be prepared to make a stronger decision in the future.
Forgiveness is a noble trait, but it should not be trivial. Many men and women in our armed services were discharged for refusing the COVID vaccine. And many health professionals were fired for the same reason. They too should be not only only forgiven but made whole: positions restored with back pay. Anything short of that is insincere and cannot move a discussion of retrospective forgiveness forward.
Those who thought we could distance our way to low fatalities were obviously wrong even in March 2020.
At that time, the Communist Party of China had imposed brutal lockdowns. It had engaged in far more effective coercive distancing than any free, Western country could impose. Notwithstanding these efforts, yet COVID had spread around the world. Thinking the US could achieve greater social control than an East Asian Communist Party was lunacy,
While some technical mistakes might be forgivable, excessive risk aversion is not. People who were too risk averse in Spring 2020 are unlikely to embrace cost justified risks today. They will want speed limits to be too low. They will propose strangling the economy to avert climate change. They will focus excessively on obvious harms and not give proper weight to uncertain benefits. In a word, they are no fun scolds.
Except mitigation measures clearly worked…we never found a silver bullet but the data clearly shows a state like Florida could have prevented around 20,000 deaths just by slightly more aggressive mitigation measures for longer like North Carolina.
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/why-major-study-argues-floridas-covid-death-rate-compares-favorably-to-californias/
Lol, no. You don’t adjust for age while we are in a pandemic and transforming society to protect the elderly. Anyway, GA, SC, and FL went through the same waves at the same time and they had similar Covid death rates during the pandemic stage….so compare GA or SC to California. Better yet compare them to their neighbor NC which had a Democratic governor that was a little more aggressive with mitigation measures and allowed local public health officials to continue them for longer than GA and SC. Oh, and NC has just as strong an economy as its neighbors.
Did you even read that article I linked? Or do you think the Seattle Times is fake news?
Lol, you listen to the experts. Hilarious!! Watch out for Saddam’s WMDs!!! He’s gonna get you!! Lol.
Let me guess: you think 9/11 was an inside job?
The vaccine was an effective response to the pandemic and is one of the only good things Trump could justifiably take credit for but is the one thing his cult won’t give him credit for.
What a world.
Here's my question/pushback Nate. I seem to recall that the Northeast (and if i'm remembering correctly, Louisiana and Michigan) were hit super hard in the initial weeks of the pandemic and that the high death rates in those mostly blue states, which is the main reason the death rates in 2020 seem to be fairly evenly split across political lines, were for that reason.
Also, if I'm remembering correctly, I think California and Oregon were the first places to have cases but escaped the fate of the Northeast in part because of more aggressive social distancing measures in the first few weeks (although I'm guessing weather played a role too).
Long story short, while I would agree that some of the social distancing measures (most notably the continued school closings into the fall of 2020) went too far, I'm less convinced that social distancing didn't play an important role in minimizing deaths pre-vaccine.
That's a fair point, but I think that's one reason that the Yale study on Ohio and Florida is worthwhile -- it essentially controls for regional differences in the overall vectors of COVID.
What I wonder is whether there was that much difference in actual behavior in 2020 between Democrats and Republicans living in.the same areas. If work had become remote and restaurants were closed, they may have all benefitted fairly equally.
Where there was probably some difference was in mask usage, and I could certainly be convinced that those have relatively little benefit if you're not wearing high quality masks in a disciplined way. My wife is a physician at UCSF, and she is certainly convinced that their mask usage was the key to keeping COVID from spreading within the hospital (which they have been extremely effective doing). But of course they are wearing n95s+ and are super rigorous about it.
In a hospital setting, after you've been trained in how to wear your N95, it is common to have a hood placed over your head while a solution containing an artificial sweetener is misted into the hood. If you can taste any sweetness you have donned your mask incorrectly and have failed the test.
For obvious reasons that can't be scaled up to the population level.
I want to agree with your hypothesis but Gordon’s point undermines your data. There were no NPIs in the Northeast until around March 13, 2020. So, the analysis to look at is deaths between, say, April 15th and January 1st, 2021. One of the things that I remember is that the death rate plummeted in the Northeast after the NPIs took hold and that was a major reason for keeping them in place. It’s unclear, in retrospect if that was just the virus burning itself out or if it was the NPIs. But if your point is about NPIs you can’t include Blue State data that includes deaths BEFORE NPIs were in place. It just doesn’t make sense.
Obviously, distancing works if you do enough of it. If everyone locked down, that would crush the curve until the disease reentered from some outside source.
Nate’s point is that, within the range of distancing that was economically and socially plausible in the US, distancing didn’t matter that much. Greater coercive distancing in northeastern states did not even offset the effect of greater population density, which pushes people closer together and encourages transmission
Obviously as the virus became endemic, the effect you cite would fade to nothingness, but yes, in the beginning, dumb luck as to how covid *seeding* transpired must have played a role. In particular I've long suspected the Northeast's exposure to travellers from Europe helped the virus get a head start in that region when the early spread was still substantially under the radar in the US. And I agree with you about weather, too.
I believe that you are correct, that geographic and climatologic differences are significant factors in morbidity and mortality burdens of respiratory infection epidemics. The mild weather and associated environmental factors on the west coast may well be important determinants of COVID infection outcomes.
I would disagree that 'non-pharmacologic mitigation measures' ('lockdown measures') had anything to do with relatively lower COVID related excess mortality on the west coast of the US. The Cochrane analysis offers essentially no support for the efficacy of 'lockdown measures.'
There has been little attention given to the fact that the initial outbreaks on the west coast were associated with the alpha strain from China. The initial outbreaks in the northeast and thence through most of the rest of the US were associated with the beta strain from Europe, which was more pathologic and more virulent. You can see on Nate's state level comparison chart that states with early outbreaks (e.g., Mississippi, New Jersey, South Dakota) demonstrated later period mortality rates which remained within about 25% of earlier period rates, even though 'lockdown' measures in NJ were far more stringent than those in MS and SD. California, Oregon, and Washington exhibited mortality rate increases of 60-300% from the earlier to the later time periods but remained lower in absolute terms than rates for most of the rest of the US. This suggests that continuing stringent 'lockdown' measures were ineffective, while geographic and climatologic factors may have been important in determining COVID infection outcomes.
I would posit that a significant measure of COVID immunity was generated by exposure to the less pathologic and virulent beta strain, which provided some protection against the beta (and later) strains when they finally arrived on the west coast. As you point out, the weather probably had something to do with it. We are finally starting to see, not surprisingly, specific evidence of genetic factors underlying outcome of COVID infection. An analysis of demographic variations among the populations of various geographic areas might shed further light.
How does voter age demographics split between Dem and Rep. Given that the vast majority of deaths were in the over 65 population, age certainly should be folded into this. Vaxxed or not, a person under 35 had a much greater than 99% chance of survival.
That wouldn’t explain why the death rates were the same before vaccines, however; you’d have to concoct a scenario where all those other programs to prevent spread were exactly canceled out by the age-politics correlation.
It probably magnifies the difference between red and blue states once the vaccine was introduced though.
Regardless, in my blue state, deaths per 1000 went up after vaccines which simply means that this apparent death by red state correlation is not anywhere near absolute at all. I think you really have to look at the flow of infection geographically, because prior to the vax, it wasn't evenly distributed across the country. We all know that NY got hit big first, then FL, with its huge elderly population, got hit much later. Also, we know that southern infections rose in the summer when they lowered in the north. So that means, the post vax summer of 2021 hit Florida much harder, and (not to be morose) 'dry tinder' deaths in the north already happened. I just think this moral argument about political affiliation is false correlation given the timeline of the spread, the age/population variability across the country and the age/political affiliation difference between ages. there are too many other data points to consider.
Don't forget that the chart on the left represents a period of 11-12 months. The chart on the right represents a period of 30 months. So all but the states hit hardest early in the pandemic have higher numbers on the right.
Nobody knows how many New Yorkers died from covid in the earliest days. NY was WILDLY undercounted in every way because of the early spread there.
I believe that would be the benefit of just analyzing excess deaths, you don't have to identify cause of death.
Nate's earlier post lead me to do my own regression and using change in excess deaths vs. change in official COIVD deaths does reduce the partisanship effect but it didn't eliminate it. Surprisingly % of over 65 was a poor predictor of either factor.
The entire study is very poor quality, see link below. It's disappointing that Nate is promoting it so uncritically, to be honest. I've followed him from the start of 538 and normally he is better at data issues. Perhaps this newly monetised blog is encouraging him to go down the path we've seen from others of deliberately pushing narratives that are controversial in order to boost engagement. That'd be even more disappointing if so.
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/did-republicans-die-more-during-the
And health/weight!
Yes. Isn't obesity worse in the South?
When I use obesity and excess deaths the partisanship effect does go away but if there is a difference in obesity rates between republicans and democrats and that was the cause of the change we should be able to see that in this study. We don't.
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/my-drive
I am not sure how to interpret your comment. If obesity accounts for the discrepancy then that is a good indication that's an important factor that needs to be explored.
It correlates with the excess deaths as well as partisanship. This doesn't prove that obesity not partisanship is the cause of the relationship it just means we can't eliminate that possibility using the data that I used alone. I don't really understand why Obesity would explain the difference between death rates in a given state more than partisanship. Obesity didn't change in these states but the partisan message did so I think partisanship is still a better explainer because I don't understand why obesity would explain why states with more obesity would have a greater death rate change.
Because obesity is widely recognized as a risk factor foe adverse effects from Covid, along with diabetes, asthma, etc.
I just realized that that link won't give you MY data. Here is a better one. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1anDokZ7m_EqoHTOgsJYSHl_xyXowO02azPz0m-HG7TQ/edit?usp=sharing
I agree with you.
Dr. Vinay Prasad analyzed the flaws in the paper Nate cited and the continuing failures of vaccines with trust in public health. https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/did-republicans-die-more-during-the
Hard to take any analysis seriously when they use phrases like this: "Their conclusion: Republicans were too stupid to get vaccinated "
Republicans were too [something] to get vaccinated. Argue about what [something] is all you want, but that is the truth.
That was a terrible article, where the author is clearly coming from a place of ideological hurt feelings and trying to throw issues at the wall, like claiming selection bias without actually proposing a mechanism for selection bias that I could see.
There may be issues with the study--we should be open to that. But this dude’s response ain’t it.
Who the heck is Dr. Vinay Prasad? And why should I/we uniquely trust him? Was there broader critique of the study than just his? And, if so, what did other experts think?
If you are incapable/lack the math to understand the technical aspects of the argument then you need to rely on the opinions of different sets of dueling experts.
That is a minefield however. At the end of the day you're relying on trust because you have no idea what they're talking about, what constitutes a valid objection, etc.
I understand what they are talking about completely. But I also see some counterarguments to this doctor's points, and (beyond that) value the opinion of a broad base of subject-matter experts to make the best decision for myself and my family. But, it seems, you do not and would rather insult me. So be it.
I am not insulting you. "You" in my post above is the generic you, meant to include all of humanity.
I am not suggesting that the problem of the technical aspects of scientific debates being out of reach for laymen is a problem that is confined to you as an individual. Clearly it is something that affects everyone on the planet at this point.
I don't think it's reasonable for even a technically sophisticated person with a decent amount of expertise in an area to rely *solely* on their own read of an article or a single critique. This stuff is complicated and people miss things. In my own field (labor economics), I'm less likely to trust my judgment that a particular approach is or isn't valid if my opinion goes against the consensus among other labor economists (of course, I don't abandon my opinion in that case, but I do look more carefully to see what I'm missing).
This is why academic journals have peer review--even the editors of journals don't trust their own judgment enough to not want to solicit additional opinions (and they typically solicit opinions from multiple people because they don't trust the opinion of a single subject matter expert even when it's an expert that they've chosen).
I'm not at all sure this is a contrarian position across America.
As long as we had neither a vaccine nor any reasonable way to know how bad the pandemic could get, it was reasonable to promote policies to minimize the spread of the disease. The death toll was appalling, and we did not know how the story was going to turn out.
Once the vaccines were available, the odds changed significantly, both for individuals and for the population as a whole.
Ordinary (that is to say not on-line partisans) people that I know, both liberal and conservative, would agree with this in general.
This is not to say that there is no blame to hand out.
One group decided to actively discourage people from doing the safe thing, while the other side went over the top in trying to force people to choose the safe thing. Politicians on both sides of the aisle egged this on, and once it reached a certain point, were at the mercy of highly agitated mobs. Worse, each mob became more strident and unreasonable because of the antics of the opposing mob. All helpfully amplified in the media outlets.
Going forward, I am reasonably confident that next time we would handle a pandemic better, but I have zero confidence that we will do better with the next great polarizing event.
There's also some reason to think that modern public health establishments were (and are) woefully unprepared for a non-selective pandemic. There hasn't been this kind of an outbreak in multiple generations, and the skillsets they developed for combating things like HIV, other STIs, smoking, etc *do not* transfer well to considerations of a highly contagious respiratory infection.
"...nor any reasonable way to know how bad the pandemic could get"
So when the expected disasters in places like TX and FL failed to materialize as they reopened what excuse did CA, for example, have for staying closed?
You mean FL going from 1200 to 3000 DPM wasn't a disaster compared to California going from 1000 to 1600?
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/why-major-study-argues-floridas-covid-death-rate-compares-favorably-to-californias/
Post of the Day™
Absolutely, to me the clear consensus evidence-based position on covid-19 = stay current on your vaccines and move on with your life (unless you have extenuating circumstances, ie severe immunosuppression, live/work in a nursing home, etc). I think masks and testing made sense early on before vaccines, but as you said the data is very murky on how much that helped, if at all. However, once the Delta and Omicron variants came out it was so highly contagious it was probably impossible to ever make a dent in with NPIs
It's interesting that your recommendation is not in line with most health experts. Plenty of government bodies are explicitly *not* recommending boosters unless you're uniquely at risk.
You are incorrect. The CDC recommends people get an updated covid-19 booster this fall/winter, as do most state agencies and epidemiologists. States that do not recommend it like Florida are outliers from the evidence-based consensus and rely on misinterpretation and misrepresentations of the data.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/p0912-COVID-19-Vaccine.html
It's amazing how much COVID broke liberal brains. Apparently this is the one and only issue on which we should ignore the Europeans (perennially touted as having much better health care systems than us) and trust the American health establishment. Michael Moore weeps.
I don't understand your comment about Europe. They are slower than the USA but the European Medicines Agency has recommended approval of the 2023 vaccine for everyone over the age of 6 months.
Why you gotta be so rude? Just discuss the facts, dude.
If your position is right, your facts will win. Being a dick guarantees you get ignored. You've got some interesting points in this thread, but you get in your own way right at the start.
For me, truth matters far more than anything else. I have no doubt that some people don't like me being rude to arrogant people (Mr. Fish was certainly rude first). But the idea that someone would read something true (with citations!) and decide to ignore it because of the tone of the speaker? Someone like that is already lost and not worth reaching.
My point is more that people stop reading you and never get to the WHO citation. Before reading this thread, I thought you were completely wrong, like the other guy. I almost stopped reading at this post because it was immediately turning into a classic internet flame war. I almost didn't see the WHO article you linked to later. And I'm glad I did; it gave me info I didn't know and changed my thinking.
I commented here because my job is in communications, and your communication style is undermining your ability to convey your (persuasive) message. Maybe that doesn't matter to you, but the person I am is sad that more people won't get good facts because of bad presentation. It's literally my job to fix that.
Anyway, cheers to you. Have a great weekend!
So the only government body - in the entire world - that is worth listening to is the CDC? Other countries' CDCs? WHO? We should completely ignore them?
I wonder if you even knew that other countries and the WHO don't recommend boosters for normal adults?
Sample: "Healthy younger adults - adults without comorbidities under the age of 50 to 60 years (age thresholds depend on countries); Children and adolescents with severe obesity or comorbidities that put them at higher risk of severe COVID-19 infection. For this group, WHO recommends the primary series and first booster dose. Additional booster doses are not routinely recommended."
Source: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/covid-19-vaccines/advice
There are a lot of reasons for differential recommendations between countries: https://open.substack.com/pub/yourlocalepidemiologist/p/be-careful-comparing-the-us-to-other?r=1nnpgl&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
I understand the urge to change the subject, but do you now agree that your recommendation is far from universal and not shared by the preeminent world health body? Or do you think the WHO "rel[ies] on misinterpretation and misrepresentations of the data."? Or perhaps no, the WHO has arrived at this conclusion scientifically, whereas the evil states like Florida who follow WHO recommendation are relying on misinterpretation and misrepresentation?
It's all very tricky to understand given how far the facts were from your initial assertions. Thankfully I'm informed enough to not have been deceived by what some would call your own 'misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the data'.
Ah sorry, I just realized you were a vet. Obviously I was holding you to an unrealistic standard. My mistake.
You are obviously here to be a trollish douche picking fights and not have a good faith discussion, learn anything, or god forbid, change your mind, so I’m muting you kthxbai
> Other than maybe the fall of the Soviet Union, COVID has been the most consequential event of my lifetime.
I think 9/11 wins that contest by a mile
For the sake of arguing a trivial point, I'll disagree here. 9/11 may have been more consequential for Afghanistan, Iraq, and NYC. COVID was dramatically more impactful in most other parts of the world, and resulted in far more deaths, even if you count the post-9/11 wars..
I would have said that in 2019, but I think the majority of people who lived through both 2001 and 2020 will say that 2020 was the far more consequential year. I mean, which is a bigger lasting effect - the fact that you have to go through an extra layer of security when entering an airport, or the fact that most white collar professionals now work from home at least a few days a month?
If we’re counting bodies, covid is way ahead. If you’re just thinking about changes to how the world works, I think 9/11 will have a wider and much longer-lasting effect, but that seems really hard to prove
Don't differing characteristics of blue states and red states make it exceptionally misleading to look at only state-level results to assess COVID policies? I'm certainly not an expert in COVID or statistics. But, with identical NPIs, I would think blue states--on average, more urban and dense--would have had far worse outcomes than red states. If that's true, then it would follow that having roughly equally outcomes means that blue states had, on average, quite effective NPIs.
There is no correlation to “density” and COVID. There is, however; very high correlation to age with the old at risk and the young not.
That’s why if you look at overall percentages, Florida and California did similarly. However, if you break down deaths by demographics Florida was better in every single one. The problem is Florida has a substantially greater portion of old people and is one of the “oldest” states in the country and California one of the “youngest.”
There's no correlation with "density" and eventual outcomes. In terms of how quickly any pandemic spreads I am pretty sure density makes a difference.
When the vaccines were introduced what percentage of the population had not yet been exposed to Covid? I would be interested in seeing breakdowns at the state/regional level to see if there was any correlation to urbanization.
Fair point. I will run my regression to see if density gets rid of the difference.
And.... the partisan effect goes away.
Why would density change how COVID spread later vs. earlier in the pandemic though. I still think by taking out the relative differences in partisanship between rural and urban centers away by controlling for a highly partisan demographic feature (r=0.54) is the explanation for this difference.
However, if you can explain why we would need to see the change in difference between rural and urban be significant over an above the partisan differences between those type of states I would like to understand that thinking more.
assuming that political affiliation is equally split amongst all age groups and risk of death is equally split amongst all age groups. But that isnt true. A 25 year old democrat would have survived vaxxed or not.
This seems right. All together, then, there are a lot of complicating effects that would make simply looking at the state-level outcomes too simplistic (though the direction of skew for blue/red state is unclear).
Some observations on school closures as NPI (you can find the data over five articles at my blog):
1. Schools remained in remote if enough parents wanted it that way. Had nothing to do with CDC.
2. The single biggest factor in parental preference for remote vs in-person was race.
3. The single biggest factor in whether in-person instruction was full-time or hybrid (edited, I originally wrote remote in error) was the state politics. Dem governors pledged allegiance to CDC, GOP governors didn't. CDC guidelines made it impossible to offer full-time in-person.
4. Parents who wanted remote were guaranteed remote for the 2021 school year. Parents who wanted in-person were dependent on the majority parental preference in their district.
5. Since most (over 50% revealed prefernece) non-white parents wanted remote, they were generally pleased with schools, as they were always able to choose remote. Since most (over 75% polled and revealed preference) whites wanted in-person AND most whites go to majority white schools, they were generally pleased with schools as well.
6. Parents in non-majority white districts (most major cities, lots of high immigration suburbs) who wanted remote were generally screwed. This isn't a big group--about 15%, according to polls. The previous three data points suggest these parents were mostly white. They punched way above their weight level, since "mediafolks with kids" live in cities and high immigration suburbs and are mostly white.
So given that fact base, there are two ways of looking at the "damage" caused by school closures (again, important to remember that polls throughout and after showed high degrees of parental satisfaction).
First, there's no question that parents who wanted in-person instruction (regardless of race) were dependent on the will of their neighbors and this was completely unfair. Parents who wanted in-person instruction were not given equal rights (except in Florida and Texas and perhaps some other GOP states). No one ever approached the issue from this viewpoint, in large part because advocates for opening schools simply couldn't comprehend that they weren't speaking for all parents. But the anger levels among parents and non-parents who aren't aware that most parents got what they wanted would have been alleviated if they had been guaranteed in-person instruction. However, this would have been really really expensive and for all the talk of how great Florida was, the parents, kids, and teachers who had to deal with five-ten kids in person and 20 on zoom pretty unanimously say it sucked.
But that wouldn't have solved much anyway, because the pandemic damage was not, in the main, experienced by the kids of the angry white parents denied in-person instruction, but the kids of black and Hispanic who actively demanded remote instruction and indeed, would have preferred to still have their local school in remote in the 21-22 school year. The learning loss wasn't imposed on these parents. They actively chose it. This is why it shouldn't surprise anyone that California actually slightly outscored Florida and Texas on the NAEP (less learning loss).
The only way to end the learning loss was to end the parents' right to choose remote instruction, which is what most state legislatures did in summer 2021, when we lucked into a window of time when it looked like the vaccines would end covid entirely. Had we not had that window, we might still now be dealing with parents able to legally insist on remote education at their local school.
As evidence of the change, consider Lori Lightfoot's reaction to her union demands in January 2021 and January 2022. The first year, the union refused to return to the classroom and she was pissed but *didn't* shut off remote access. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of her parents wanted remote. The next year, when the union refused to go back to school, she shut down remote, to their considerable shock. But she still had a majority of parents who were keeping their kids out of school and demanding remote. The difference: the Illinois legislature had set a mandate on when she could enable remote education. Had she submitted to parent (not union) wishes in 2022, she'd have lost a lot of money for the schools. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/chicago-public-schools-cancel-classes-again-covid-19-teacher-walkout-2022-01-07/
Once the schools closed in March 2020, most states changed the laws around attendence and school funding for a year and most governors--including DeSantis--refused to even consider forcing parents into virtual academies instead of guaranteeing them the right to remote ed at their local school. The next school year, they all flipped and forced parents to choose virtual academies and banned schools from offering remote except in the case of really high case numbers and then only temporarily.
As someone who opposed school closure in March 2020, I had a lot of time to think about this and I'm pretty sure once the schools closed everything we did was baked in. No one anticipated that parents would actively resist sending their kids back to school in demographically unfortunate patterns (well, I did, but then I spend a lot of time thinking about race and education and I'm nobody, anyway.)
I realize this is only marginally ontopic, but since the enormous costs Nate mentioned very much include the learning loss, I thought people might be interested.
Our district(predominantly white) did go back to in person in Sept of 2020, but was remote again in October because of so many staff illnesses. We remained remote until March of 2021 when our Governor made sure teachers had early access to those vaccines. Your points about access are correct, but there seems to be a disconnect in discussions about education thinking that it's all about children, where there are a considerable number of adults working at these schools. Around 1 adult per 4-5 children.
Thanks for gathering this all in one place - the bits I was aware of sound familiar, but I hadn't seen it all together before.
I didn't want to post a bunch of links to my blog, where I spent a couple years writing this up, but I did put all the links in with the last article, so here:
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2023/09/23/the-pandemic-counterfactual/
The complete list is at the bottom.
I broadly agree, particularly when it comes to deaths. And certainly blue states went overboard on some NPIs.
But the idea that NPIs had no effect on *infection frequency* doesn't pass the smell test. If I avoid crowds and if my family members isolate when infected, it's hard to believe that won't reduce my infection count by ~30% or more.
Deaths are a saturating non-linear function of infection frequency, so if everyone gets infected at least once, high NPI states could fewer infections but a roughly similar death count.
Not saying you'd claim otherwise, but some people might have that takeaway.
Charles Ryder made a good point that the behavior may be effective even if the policy is not, due to compliance issues.
Why are the deaths overall so much higher in the right column, period. Illinois is good example...they are high pre vaccine, then post vaccine it is basically unchanged. Many states went up in deaths...despite falling in relative state rankings. Something else is surely going on. The largest spike in death happened in the US post vaccine. Why?
Also, were vaccine uptake numbers really that different across states amongst the 65 and older? Most evidence I have seen suggests no. There was high uptake there across states. This was the cohort dying. And they were highly vaccinated.
Good example. Utah has 95% uptake in 65+ (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254292/share-of-older-us-adults-fully-vaccinated-against-covid-by-state/). Their deaths post vaccine went UP pre and post...as did most on your list. And almost all states has 90% compliance over 65. Please explain.
I don't think the charts are controlled for duration. So the left chart covers a period of 12 months, and the right covers a period of 30 months.
Ok. But looking at aggregate data it is clear the most deaths were shortly after widespread vaccine uptake. This is the issue. Go look at polio deaths before and after. It goes to zero. We have had more deaths since. It's at least a reasonable thing to ask questions.
I'm not following you.
You originally mentioned Illinois. Through Jan 2021, they averaged about 140 deaths per million per month. Since Jan 2021 they averaged about 55 deaths per million per month.
We know that the vaccine doesn't 100% prevent death. And it looks like in Illinois, only about 2/3 of the population took the primary vaccine.
So we would expect deaths to continue, just at a lower rate.
Taking to monthly shows a contrast yes. But, I would like to see 12 month pre and 12 post vaccine. I bet difference is slight. As you can see from aggregate data. Plus you have massive benefit of previous infection. I am not saying the vaccine did not work somewhat...but I think the data is super unclear and many factors at play. Just showing states moving around is an odd way of proving it.
Polio didn't have a delta and omicron wave - but it did still have several years of significant deaths before going down to zero.
Regarding Illinois, it could be that it is essentially two geographies = Chicago-land and everyone else. I'm sure a HUGE percentage of NE Illinois was vaccianted compared to the rest of the state. So even if post-vaccine excess deaths were low in Chicago-land, they may have skyrocketed downstate...with that difference masked by combining those two competing sets of data.
As for why the highest spike was post-vaccine, one hypothesis would be that: 1) NPI were removed post-vaccine as we all went back to "normal" conditions"; but 2) that loss on NPI meant higher rate of spread to non-vaccined at-risk people.
The data suggest 95% of state over 65 vaccinated. That is who died. If that is just Chicago let's see the data. In aggregate old people got vaccinated. Big time. And they continued to die.
On NPI...the whole point of the post is nothing worked...but the vaccines. Which is it? And again high risk people did get vaccinated. Most non compliance was less risky populations.
Because of delta and omicron.
While there is a substantial disparity rate among vaccination rates among the young based on political affiliation that disparity is much less pronounced among the elderly.
Put simply the group most at risk from the virus, the old, got vaccinated regardless of how they voted.
At least one major NPI would have a big effect and require negligible lifestyle costs. That would be to improve air quality by installing HEPA filters or Corsi-Rosenthal boxes in schools and other major indoor public spaces. They've been shown to reduce all airborne disease by ~50%-ish even in real practice. The dollar cost is negligible for the benefit. These are off-the-shelf items. It's a disgrace that major practical steps like this have been lost in the political squabbling.
What's the point of preventing transmission at a school if little Timmy just catches the virus anyway at soccer practice, or playing with friends, or when he sees visiting relatives?
Because not 100% of people get infected by other means. You don't need the ban on murder to prevent 100% of murders in order to decide that it's worth doing, and similarly you don't need your transmission prevention at school to prevent 100% of infections in order to decide that it's worth doing.
Almost 100% of the population will be infected eventually. You're talking about slowing down the rate of transmission but unless that goes to zero all you're doing is postponing the inevitable.
If you only get covid once in your life, and then you're done, then this point would be right. But it's clear now (and has been for a while) that we are all going to get covid repeatedly. In that case, what you'd want is to reduce the overall burden of covid you bear, and getting the frequency of infections lower is one way to do it. (Of course, assuming that what you're doing is less annoying than an extra few days of ache and fever every year or so.)
Vaccines reduce the severity of Covid once you catch it. There is no evidence to suggest that they present transmission.
If you are 70 or older getting a vaccine makes a lot of sense. If you are a healthy 24 year old male you should probably not get a shot because vaccines themselves carry a risk of side effects and at that age the risk from Covid is minimal.
They absolutely reduce your likelihood of getting infected. In every week that the CDC was tracking infections by vaccination status, the fraction of vaccinated people who got infected was lower than the fraction of unvaccinated people who got infected, except for a week or two in February 2022, when so many more unvaccinated people had been infected by Omicron in the previous few weeks that they were briefly just as protected as vaccinated people who hadn't recently been infected.
And of course, if you don't get infected, you can't transmit it.
School looks like the biggest single route of community transmission, unsurprisingly. It's not due to soccer practice. That ~50% is real-world, with all the parallel routes already baked in.
Despite writing elsewhere (Cribsheet) that schools absolutely spread illnesses. COVID-19 doesn't seem to show that pattern ... as much. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/16/924583724/opening-schools-and-other-hard-decisions
If you take the daily chance of transmission from 5% to 1% what exactly have you accomplished?
If you're only planning on living for a month or so I suppose this could make a difference. But for everyone else catching the virus eventually is a near certainty.
How often do they catch it? Even ignoring affecting viral evolution rates and the development of improved treatments, the steady-state infection frequency depends monotonically on R_effective, which is sensitive to NPIs.
1) Comparing COVID-19 death data is not reliable at all, as it has been demonstrated that COVID-19 deaths and all-cause excess mortality does not correlate well: https://twitter.com/orwell2022/status/1701981998200291438
2) There's no significant difference in the divergence of mortality right after the vaccines became available. Only in maybe August/September 2021 it starts to diverge, which is also the point in time when most coercions & mandates started! In my opinion, it's much more likely that many people (at least temporarily) moved to the 'free states', to escape the mandates. I've done so myself, spending many months in the southern states, during the height of the covid totalitarianism in my then home state of Washington.
There's no robust data by vaccination status of comparable cohorts, that allows to conclude that vaccines have saved lives or brought any clinical advantage.
Relying on voter registrations, or 'Trump voters', is not a very reliable scientific approach, as it misses to adjust for underlying confounders such as health status.
The first half of 2021 was marked by falling rates of covid everywhere as vaccines were taken up. But in July/August of 2021, there was a new variant that was both more contagious and more deadly, called "Delta", which spread, and caused the first major increase in deaths after vaccines were available. Clearly, death rates aren't going to diverge much until this variant arose. And then I would guess that as delta died out in October/November, there would be relatively little divergence again until the huge hit of Omicron, which was incredibly infectious, and thus killed more people than Delta, despite being less deadly per infection (maybe even less deadly than the original?)
My memory was that for the first few months (March through about June of 2020) urban areas that tended to lean democratic had higher COVID death rates. My interpretation of the data was that urban areas had better transportation connections to the international locations that covid came from, no one had immunity, and initially both blue states and red states locked down. After June 2020, blue states had stricter policies and also lower covid death rates. These effects cancelled out so overall death rates were similar by the time the vaccines came out.
This being said, I agree with Nate's point that the costs of many NPI's (mainly school closures) exceeded the benefits.