Even if this is right, it still seems incredibly dysfunctional for CDC (and other governing bodies) to not use age categories among healthcare workers, and other essential worker categories.
JesperO
Karma: 105
Maybe useful to put the TLDR at the top of the post? I had a similar reaction to MikkW and was originally intending to save the link to possibly read at some later time. But then I was lucky enough to start skimming the post instead, getting a good chunk of value. Would have done that for sure if there was TLDR that gave some more guidance.
(Great and well-written post-overall.)
Also curious about this.
Some more guidepost #7 experiences: I used to take daytime naps frequently, and ended up getting a lot of experience of #7. For me there was a lot of scary phenomenology in the beginning. Often I would see flashing occult symbols, hear loud noises and feel like my body was rapidly falling or being pulled off in some direction. If I let the fear take over I would wake up. But when I eventually learned to just observe the sensations, and solidly believed that they were nothing dangerous the sequence would reliably take me directly into lucid dreams.
Not sure how common these experiences are. Maybe they are more common during morning/daytime naps (and some lucid dreaming techniques recommend setting an early alarm and then going back to sleep). I almost never experienced the #7 stage when going to sleep at night, instead I would just fall asleep at some earlier step.
Where can one get fluvoxamine and antivirals?
Great to hear you only got a mild case.
OT: what’s your impression of COVID spread in Russia? According to official statistics total cumulative deaths and confirmed cases per capita in Russia are maybe half of what they are in Europe and the Americas.
Do you expect this is right, or is there severe underreporting? If no underreporting—did Russia somehow manage the COVID response much better for some reason, or were you guys just lucky?
On the bright side, that 88% of people may not be as insane as they seem. The vast majority of people don’t think for themselves on most topics. Rather people outsource thinking to trusted institutions and specialized individuals. That makes sense. Unless you’ve focused a lot on how to think well it’s going to be far too expensive and ineffective to figure out (most things) by yourself.
Unfortunately, when the institutions are bad and spread insane views, this outsourced thinking causes the trusting majority to share those insane views.
Cool! So that explains the weird effects at state borders.
At least on the internet you could argue that people give their permission by choosing to visit the sites (as opposed to avoiding them, or paying for an adfree experience). But maybe people aren’t giving their permission because they underestimate the power of ads and are not making a conscious choice?
Curious what you think of JeffTk’s argument about the counterfactual - would universal paywalls be better?
Re “proof of a lab leak [is] potentially very dangerous”:
What’s the danger model here? That the US government would be forced to condemn China in that case and that China would react very aggressively to that? And that would lead to some kind of escalating spiral? Or something else?
Good points.
Notably, those studies are still based on surveys and self-reports.
Compare supposed long lyme disease or previously, supposed candida infection. In those cases a lot of people self-report various general, common symptoms like tiredness. In neither case is the disease medically recognized. Rather, its existence is doubted by medical authorities. In addition to these two, I there’s a series of past similar scares, with the same properties. These scares include at least electricity oversensitivity and worries about mercury dental implants.
In all these cases it seems likely that there is no physiological long-lasting disease. Rather, because belief in a long disease spreads, people start to wrongly attribute their general symptoms and issues in life to it. Things such as tiredness, depression and pain get self-reported in large numbers.
Now, it seems to me somewhat likely that long covid will turn out to be in the same category. There is a lot more self-reported cases of long covid than long lyme disease. But belief in long covid is also a lot more widespread.
Why do medical authorities not apply to same skepticism to long covid as they did to eg long lyme disease? One possibility is that there’s a perceived (maybe justified) need to spread beliefs about how covid is dangerous, and so a different standard of evidence is applied.
And if things get bad?
Yeah, it’s overconfident to claim that lockdowns are “almost certainly net negative”. This stuff is complicated.
But it’s also not certain that lockdowns were “definitely a huge net positive” for older people. For example, for my 90 year old grandmother the life-saving benefits are much larger than for younger people. But the costs of a couple years in lockdown has also been huge for her. She’s been persistently depressed, and her health has deteriorated a lot. Presumably from not moving around much any more. She’s felt really bad about life since the pandemic started.
Especially given that her statistical risk of dying per year is something like 50% pre-covid, it’s not obvious whether this is a good trade-off. It all comes down to details about just how big the mental health costs are and the specific number for mortality reduction from covid.
Hm. I wonder if there’s really a ” minimal difference between the outcomes of US red states and blue states”. From the graph here it looks like red states had ~40% higher mortality per capita: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/briefing/covid-death-toll-red-america.html
Maybe that’s more from lower vaccination rates, than lockdowns—but it still undermines the argument that´s based on no significant red/blue state differences.
Yeah, I agree that excess death data is preferable when available. For some reason Dumbledore’s Army’s original link isn’t working for me (“page not found”). So I haven’t yet seen state by state excess mortality data. But if it actually doesn’t find any difference between the red/blue states that would undermine the argument from the NYT article above.
Looking at Our World in Data’s limited cumulative excess mortality data Sweden has 2-8X higher excess mortality during the pandemic compared to other Scandinavian countries (with similar vaccination rates). That undermines any simple arguments based on Sweden (other than ones with weaker conclusions—such as that avoiding lockdowns don’t 10X+ net covid mortality).
Ofc there could be some other explanation for excess Swedish mortality. But an argument against lockdowns based on Sweden as a datapoint would need a pretty solid explanation of this.
Yeah, precisely that page. Scroll down to the graph:
”Excess mortality: Cumulative number of deaths from all causes compared to projection based on
previous years, per million people, Dec 19, 2021“The cumulative difference between the reported number of deaths since 1 January 2020 and the projected number of deaths for the same period based on previous years.”
Sweden 883
Finland 411
Denmark 154
Norway 110
Iceland 92
Proportions are similar if you check out the economist’s data below: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-per-100k-economist?country=OWID_WRL~CHN~IND~USA~IDN~BRA
Where are you getting your numbers?
“Sweden has a higher population than the other countries listed so total numbers are not comparable. That alone doesn’t explain all the difference.”
The numbers I’m citing above are population normalized. They are total excess deaths per million (and per 100k in the economist link).
”It’s unclear to me why https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?tab=map&country=MEX~RUS~ZAF and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid come to such different conclusions.”
Ah, that data isn’t cumulative. It is just looking at current excess mortality. A lot of Sweden’s excess mortality happened early on (I believe, while the other Scandinavian countries were locking down more). So the cumulative number is higher, but not the current number.
Aren’t those excess deaths just the direct covid deaths, from the unlucky few younger people who got covid and died from it?
Agree that empirical performance is a very important way to assess experts.
Unfortunately it can be tricky. In the RCT example, you need expertise to be able to evaluate the RCT. It’s not just about knowing about their existence, but also you’d need to be able to eg avoid p-hacking, file-drawer effects and other methodological issues. Especially in a high stakes adversarial landscape like national politics. Joe Biden himself doesn’t have enough expertise to assess empirical performance using RCTs. And it’s unclear if even any of his advisors can.
Very interesting overview!
It looks like most of the data is from relatively recent, smaller, recessions.
Did you look into the consequences of much bigger economic upheavals, like the great depression, any? Since there’s some risk that the covid crisis could cause a much bigger recession than anything recent it would be interesting to know if these could have outsized effects.
• The Russia-suicides result may point in that direction, since the collapse of the USSR was a much larger crisis than—and there was a large increase in suicides.
• Also, here’s mention of a ~20% increase in US suicides in 1932 compared to 1928: https://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2011/04/suicide-rates-rise-and-fall-economy-say-cdc-researchers/
Further, from skimming the “great depression” wikipedia article it’s notable that a lot of regime change happened during that era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Socio-economic_effects
That may be another important consequence of large recessions to look into.