In America, a lot more crazy things were happening in 1968 than the Hong Kong flu. Tet. 18,000 dead in Vietnam. King and Kennedy assassinations. Riots. The Heidi Game.
I think the Jets won the Heidi game. And they won the Super Bowl. And the Jets have been cursed since. I don't think the Jets will win a Super Bowl until Joe Namath dies. Did Broadway Joe make a pact with the Devil?
My sister had successfully finished chemo in the fall of '19 and didn't leave her house for two years except for a few dinners with my dad and me. As he was 93, he was her canary in the coal mine of my house. Despite my weekly trips to Aldi, none of us got it.
The best-supported modern estimates put the infection-fatality rate (IFR) of the 1957-58 “Asian” influenza pandemic in the range ≈ 0.1 % – 0.3 %, with a central value around 0.18 % globally and ≈ 0.25 – 0.27 % for the United States.
COVID was under 0.2% in the US.
There were batches of shots that had much higher rates of adverse reactions than others. Also, some affects may not revealed for years after the last shot, like antibody class switching.
I am sorry to say I don't know who Tyler Cowen is. I knew only one person who died of Covid, a 72-year old formerly homeless woman named Margaret who once attended our church. About 2016, someone in our church figured Margaret was eligible for Social Security and Medicare, did the legwork, and had Margaret placed in an old folks home with the help of her retired brother. Margaret died in April, 2020 of Covid at the old folks home. I guess she would have been better off homeless and sleeping at shelters and bus stops.
Covid seems to have culled a lot of old folks who were near the end of their lives. Talk radio blabbermouth Larry King, age 87. Country singer Charlie Pride, age 86. All time home run leader- sorry, Barry Bonds, you're a cheat- Hank Aaron, age 86. General Colin Powell, age 84. Pitching ace Tom Seaver, age 75. Ace spit-balling pitcher Gaylord Perry, age 84.
The closing down of the economy affected tens of millions of people and tens of thousands of businesses. I am sure nobody on the left cares about that. The left thinks the economy is run by the magic wand of government. Some on the right don't much care either. In Washington DC, where I had a business, the business district was closed down for over four years. Restaurants went out of business. Clothiers went out of business. Bars went out of business. Print shops went out of business. Parking garages went out of business. The value of the office buildings in the downtown of Washington declined precipitously with few customers downtown. Hundreds of thousands of people in just DC were put in economic hardship due to the idiotic closing down of the economy. It is hard to quantify these people unlike the 1.4 million who died of Covid according to CNN but it was fun for CNN to have a running count of Covid dead while the hated Trump was president. For the most part, Covid and the closedown of the economy was just a leftist trick to destroy Donald Trump. And it worked in 2020.
It's also anecdote, but I didn't know *anybody* who died of Covid. Here in the UK, the average age of a person who died of Covid was slightly higher than the average life expectancy. (p.s. Tyler Cower is a popular economics blogger, marginalrevolution.com)
By 2020, I had moved to the mountains of the state of West Virginia. One of the first to die of Covid in West Virginia was a 24-year old man who was morbidly obese. He weighed over 400 pounds, nearly 30 stone. Covid not only killed the old but the unhealthy.
The type of celebrity still in his prime who appeared to be most likely to die of covid were rightwing talk radio hosts because: they were ideologically opposed to vaccines and the like; and because that's one of the few celebrity jobs where you can be fat because people don't look at you.
Tyler is a GMU economist who, along with his colleague Alex Tabarrok, writes the Marginal Revolution blog. If you want to know the governing elite's frame of reference and what they are talking about, and equally important what they're not talking about, read Marginal Revolution.
For the record, my wife has not had a "time of the month" since she took an mRNA version of said novel pharmaceutical product in August 2021, at which time she was 34 years old.
I'm generally pro-vaccine, too. It's just I have a lot of problems with the mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaxes. From the science, they do little when helping a recipient resist infection, they do not preclude retransmission, and they're causing too many health problems otherwise. There happened to be another vax, not an mRNA vax, for Covid, that came along later, called Novavax. It was developed with the traditional process, which is why it took longer. And from what science I've seen about it, it works a lot better on all three fronts.
The Great Barrington Declaration early on wanted limited targeted lockdowns and wait on a traditional vax. From what we see now, they were on the right side of both science and history.
I find it hard to believe that a traditional vaccine would be much better at preventing initial infection and especially transmission. Most of that is down to characteristics of the virus.
Two were very large obese diabetic hispanic men. The third was an older gentleman in his 70's who didn't have any health problems that I know of, but I also didn't know him well enough to be sure.
I think the point is - like you say, Steve - is that it disproportionately affected certain populations but, in general, wasn't that significant overall.
To be honest, right when the panic started and the lockdowns started being implemented, I was on board, personally. "Two weeks to slow the spread" made sense to me and I thought it was reasonable given how lethal it was being reported to be.
But then, two weeks later, I noticed that there were no reports of hospitals being overwhelmed. I drove past a couple of local hospitals a few times and the parking lots were not full. Groceries were still getting delivered, gasoline still flowed, water treatment plants were still operating, stores were not closing for a lack of workers. To me, these were clear signs that the apocalypse was not coming and it wasn't as bad as they said.
It seemed to me that the worst case scenario had been avoided, so I fully expected the "all clear" to be sounded and society to let out a collective, "whew" and move on... But as Lee Corso says, "NOT SO FAST MY FRIEND!"
So when the politicians not only didn't reverse course but in many instances doubled down and extended their power grab, I pivoted on a dime and immediately started calling bullshit on all of it.
And it still annoys me to no end - angers me, even - that there was no accountability in the 2022 elections for all of these awful governors. I lost a lot of faith in American voters when they didn't throw the bums out in response to their tyranny.
The situation in New York City in March 2020 was pretty bad and nobody knew how much worse it was going to get.
My recollection is that a NYC ER doctor recounted in late April 2020 that the constant wailing of ambulance sirens bringing new covid patients to his hospital, which had been going on for about a month, suddenly abated in the early afternoon of April 7, 2020. That's about 2 to 3 weeks after severe restrictions on daily life were imposed upon NYC in mid-March.
In retrospect, it's clear that covid acted largely in discrete waves. In 2020-2021, there were five major waves:
1. March-April 2020 in NYC
2. Mid-summer in air conditioned sunbelt states
3. The big December-January wave across much of the country
4. The nasty mid-summer Delta variant wave in 2021 that started in Springfield, MO
5. The Omicron wave in late 2021 that appeared to spread a less lethal but highly infectious new variant, which in retrospect seems to have largely moved us past the crisis.
So, the debate we ought to have had was whether measures to blunt waves should have been preventative (hunker down all the time to keep them from getting started) or reactive (just hunker down when a wave gets going). Over time, the former became standard in the bluer parts of the country and the latter in the redder parts of the country.
But I only thought of this preventative vs. reactive terminology yesterday, five years too late.
Preventative made more sense in urban/mass transit areas but was too onerous in less dense parts. What happened to the threatened wave of commercial real estate defaults due to WFH, riots/looting, and higher interest rates?
I was just reading about how there was a good chance that a 65 story office building that opened in Chicago in 1990 where I used to eat lunch frequently might get torn down. But it was a complicated story about market expectations. It's not making much money because it's octagonal and renters don't like that and the office space market is so soft. But they might tear it down so they can put up 3 buildings on the site on Wacker next to the Sears (Willis) Tower.
Maybe that's why Trump keeps pushing the Fed for lower rates. Reagan's boom began with ridiculously high rates until ~'87, when 8.5% refinancing felt wonderful after 12.75% in '85. Trump and sons must be paying attention, even if they work in residential & golf.
They kept saying we need to shut down to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed and extra people dying as a result. I kept a lookout for stories of this actually happening. Never found one. I read plenty of stories about hospitals 'about to be overwhelmed' and medical pros being very stressed out, but never about deaths due to overwhelming.
Given the way stats work, that means we were never close to our system being overwhelmed.
Exactly. As soon as it became clear that nobody was being “overwhelmed” the official panic should have ended immediately.
Your experience was exactly the same mine described in the original comment. I believed them for a couple of weeks but it became pretty clear early on that their expectations were wrong. There is both wrong about being wrong, but there is something wrong with being stubborn and prideful.
The entire public health decision making process was embarrassing, panic driven, improvisational. After a short time it became clear that the government had two levers to pull and whenever the numbers changed they would pull one or both of them just because, you know, you have to do something, right?
I think if public health authorities from the early 1990s could have been shown a time portal view to the great pandemic of 2020, they would have been ashamed of what their descendants had wrought.
COVID fatalities were the old, obese and the immuno-compromised. The US has outsized cohorts of old, fat, unhealthy individuals. Even then the fatality rates are not dramatic. Nobody in my personal Dunbar number died from COVID, including two astonishingly unhealthy 80 yr olds. A friend's drug addicted nephew died from it.
By contrast, imagine the horror of the Spanish Flu, watching healthy young people succumb to it.
COVID counts as the greatest failure of the institutions in my lifetime, from the Wuhan lab leak and illegal funding, to shutting down a quarter of the economy and nobody even got a vote, to the vaccines that aren't really vaccines. The next instance of mass formation psychosis is really going to be something.
Also, I'm confident at least one Cluster B-disordered person out there in the same building with some nasty stuff is contemplating a "12 Monkeys" scenario. (This has already happened once in US history.) At some point the conflict between Blue State America and Red State America is going to be existential.
I'm with you on all of this except the idea that vaccines aren't really vaccines. What does this mean? Some kind of technicality or semantic argument or do you think the mRNA vax was phony? Also the fatality rates were pretty impressive when you multiply them by this pandemic lasting way longer than the previous couple of flu pandemics. I wonder if we prolonged it with policy or if it was just the novelty of it. You know, it had the opportunity to mutate into a few also kind of deadly variants and have another run through the population.
A vaccine provides a public health benefit by suppressing the virus to the point you're not transmitting it. The jab gives a "heads up" to an individual's immune system to respond after they're already infected and doesn't reduce transmission. The effect is so ephemeral the CDC was recommending shots every 90-120 days at one point. It is, by design in fact, a "leaky" vaccine. It's always going to be chasing and pushing the virus from behind.
My educated guess about the effect of the COVID vaccine is this- initially you get IgG floating in the blood which is decent at preventing you from getting noticeably sick. That wanes to uselessness in 3-6 months but it leaves behind cellular immunity which has some effect in helping you not die of the disease.
My thinking about COVID is that it isn't especially deadly; it was just especially novel. We had a huge population of oldsters whose immune system had no experience with anything antigenically similar.
A lot of people had a bug up their ass about hoped for 'herd immunity' (I had a doctor acquaintance call me insane for not thinking we should try to get to herd immunity) even though it was always obviously unlikely. I think that's why the stupid recommendation to get vaxed every three months.
I live in a heavily Amish area. Talking to them, they were just about entirely unvaccinated. I’ve never heard of a wave of Covid deaths among them either, at least not in SE PA.
I’ll add my anecdote: one person known to me died of COVID. An elderly relative, in a nursing home, also had colon cancer. That’s one out of hundreds of people whose death I’d have heard of.
I know of two young people who overdosed during the period 2020-2023. And two high school suicides, one hanging and one who jumped to his death from a bridge.
The continued lockdowns, long after it was obvious that they were unnecessary should have resulted in marches on world capitals.
The mask debate was pretty infuriating. People, including Razib Khan and Nassim Taleb, were telling themselves their sheetrock hangers' mask was cutting through the viral miasma like a car's windshield, and not settling in their eyes, ears, hair, clothes, hands. I saw people wearing them on the beach with nobody in 20 yards and 15 mph winds.
I still see people walking around the grocery store in masks. Not a lot. Maybe 1 in 20 or so, but still noticeable. Some older people still show up at my church every Sunday wearing them, too.
I get that a mask provides a sense of comfort to some people, especially back in 2021-2022, but I also cannot get past how irrational and illogical the whole concept is. Where do they think the virus goes? That is collects on the mask? Wouldn't that make the mask for dangerous? Do they think the mask blocks the virus from other people?
It's a shorthand for people's levels of susceptibility and lack of critical thinking.
I'd say it's polite and appropriate to wear one when you're sick and have to go out, instead of lying on the sofa hydrating. But if the mask protected you all we'd have to do is point to the pile of dead, infected bodies without masks and all the live, covid-free people with masks. Like I said the next mass formation psychosis event is really going to be something.
Death rates were lower in parts of the country, like the SF Bay area, with lots of masking. But those areas also had lots of social distancing, work from home, and vaccinating.
My guess is that because covid largely spread by people socializing face to face, and wearing masks made socializing more awkward, that masking did reduce infections, but in sizable part not by technical means but by causing people to stay home and watch Netflix rather than go out and talk to other people by making socializing less fun.
But Bay Area yuppies don't die from Covid. Old, fat and immuno-compromised people do. So a 35 year old IT worker who masks up can't point to the mask as the thin veil between him and death by covid. Ornery, elderly Florida, by contrast, should have been bulldozing bodies into mass graves. Again masks probably help to keep infected people from spewing virus late and mucus all over everybody but Nassim Taleb wearing scuba goggles and two masks was just a hilarious spectacle.
But take the Amish example. The Amish stores I frequent had signs up refusing service to anyone masked. As far as I know, their religious services continued; I know for a fact that their schools were open. I must admit that I haven’t seen any figures separating out Amish deaths, but I’m also of the opinion that such numbers would be readily available if they had died in droves.
My opinion is that deaths of despair and deaths of exuberance had a higher impact on US mortality than did COVID.
In five years, I haven't seen any studies settling whether N-95 masks did any good for defensive purposes (lesser masks obviously were just lucky charms), so I'm guessing they didn't.
Perhaps, though, they were helpful at helping you not infect other people? If you test positive for covid, should you wear a mask when you have to go out? I'd say yes, but I haven't seen any studies of the question.
The studies are in and masking doesn't look like it did much. I ran an analysis during the pandemic which I believe showed that a high masking area slowed the spread to about half the rate of a low masking area. I controlled for stage of pandemic. Thing is, that's just slowing. Doesn't tell us anything about the effect it had on mortality. Given the way complex systems work it's entirely plausible that slowing the spread could make mortality worse.
At the beginning of the pandemic I read masking studies from Asia (where is was already common) to see if it had any effect on influenza epidemics. These are difficult studies to do but the survey indicated maybe they did something but pretty unimpressive. Same thing with mask studies done about COVID. Maybe some effect but overall not much. Could be random.
I partially disagree. As my comment elsewhere in the thread indicates, I've got a *LOT* of experience with masking in Hong Kong.
I don't think most people here are that stupid about masking; they know it's far from perfect, and that it didn't really work during COVID. And there's no political component to it, as there is in western countries.
I think there are two main reasons for it carrying on here. One is that Hong Kong -- much like the USA, actually -- has a 'can do' traditional spirit, i.e. if there's a problem, then there's always a way to work, work, work at it and overcome it. In the HK ethos, if you can find a quick and clever way to work your way to a goal, then good for you, but if a brute force solution is all that's available, well, then you grind away at it. Wearing a mask helps some people feel like they're 'doing something' rather than just being passive, thereby enhancing their sense of control over their health and well-being.
The second is willingness to accede to external expectations and influences. Although the government finally dropped its masking mandate in 2023, there are still signals from HK health authorities about how useful it is to wear a mask if you're at a clinic or hospital, when you're sick, etc. And I think some people here may keep on with the masks to placate family members, especially elderly ones, in order to maintain family peace.
I had my eyes checked last month. I have complicated eyes that need complicated tests, so every year I'm at my eye doctor's clinic for quite a while. Even though nobody there has any infectious diseases -- it's strictly eye stuff -- I absolutely have to wear a mask. I asked a staff member this year if I could finally skip it, and I thought she was going to cry, and then spontaneously combust. Sitting there recirculating my exhalations was a good reminder of how far the crazy went, and how it's still lurking not too far back on the shelf, waiting to be pulled out again . . . .
I nearly lost my mind after three years and two months straight of mandated mask wearing in Hong Kong. For great majority of this period, this included the great outdoors. Hong Kong is really, really, really hot and humid for six months each year, so wearing a mask is incredibly uncomfortable and outright gross.
The sad thing is that, based on my observations, roughly 30-40% of Hong Kong people still wear masks in public, at least at points. The concentration is highest on public transport, as you'd expect.
SARS/COVID/masking broke the wills of quite a few people here. The saddest are the families I see in which Dad, Mom, and kids (down to toddlers) are still all masked up. There are many kids who are now five years old who've basically never gone out in public unmasked. It's madness.
That 12 years lost/fatality estimate seems awfully high, if the younger people killed were that unhealthy before. Does the CDC have a good grasp on how ever-rising obesity will affect life expectancy of younger people? It used to be expressed as the lifespan of a one year old today, or something like that, which I always thought was ridiculous.
Let's see a comparison of absolute numbers and years lost to Deaths of Exuberance/Despair compared to covid. The E/D fatalities were obviously much younger, but maybe the numbers were dwarfed, as with AIDS.
Deaths of Exuberance (homicides and car crashes) tended to take 40 or 50 years of life expectancy away. So they had an outsized impact on life expectancy relative to covid per capita. On the other hand, the human capital costs of people who die in shootouts with other knuckleheads or drive into a bridge abutment while drunk per person tended not to be that high.
This may be off-topic and feel free to delete, but I recall commenters claiming that the Sailer readership at Unz.com turned hostile when Mr. Sailer's views on COVID and Ukraine failed to conform to the consensus of the commenters.
I don't know whether this is true or not, but in any case, when commentators resist the ever-present threat of "audience capture," that increases their credibility in my mind (independent of the substance of their views).
Steve's a reasonable guy with reasoned opinions and actual people he knows IRL he'd like to have read his work. But unz.com was getting to be like the squeeze you really don't want your friends to see you with.
When a lot of old people die, that all by itself reduces the average life span in a society because the elderly, even though advanced in years, are precisely the cohort which is likely to live the largest total number of years. In other words, the more old people alive the higher the average lifespan. I only know this because I got it wrong in a quiz.
Does this speak to the issue you are writing about?
I can recall reading about an ER doctor who got covid in spring 2020 and spent a month on a heart-and-lung machine, which is just about the most severe intervention imaginable, more even than a ventilator. He eventually survived, but I bet he hasn't since been quite the vigorous man in his prime that he was in 2019.
So, yeah, there are definite cases of Long Covid like him.
But, a lot of Long Covid cases seem to be among the kind of women who would be trans if they were a generation younger.
That’s one case and we don’t know if the illness or its symptoms were a result of long-COVID or other confounding factors like a latent disease or illness or Roger medications for example. We may also discover later one that some people’s immune system makes them particularly vulnerable or impervious to COVID.
There are all kinds of weird post-viral syndromes that lots of people get. I had rubella in my early 30s because the vaccine I got for it in the late 60s was worthless. The illness itself was very mild, but afterward I had some neurological symptoms -- numbness, odd sensations -- that had me worried enough to research. I was reassured to find out that such things are pretty common, and in my case they eventually went away.
So did some people likely have weird feelings after COVID? I think it's likely they did, but it's also likely that most of these fit into this wider pattern of post-viral stuff that's been going on forever.
I think many of the people who were already saying they had long COVID and were ruined forever just months after having the initial infection were getting caught up in the hysteria to one degree or another.
Good thing you weren't pregnant when you had rubella.
My late step-monster had Munchausen's, which made my father's life interesting for over 2 decades. Fittingly, she dropped dead getting out of the car after a doctor's appointment in 2013. She would have loved covid.
I'm hoping that eventually someone will do an age-controlled comparison of excess mortality from the 1968 Hong Kong Flu versus excess mortality from the Rona Panic. (Hint, hint, nudge, nudge, know what I mean, Steve!) The US age-distribution in 1968 is so different from 2020 that a direct comparison is virtually useless.
My recollection is that the Hong Kong Flu was at least as bad in terms of morbidity and mortality as Covid 19, and based on personal experience living through both pandemics, probably much worse. The country got through the 1968 pandemic without any significant government intervention and dis just fine, probably better than the experience with the Rona Panic. The US population, elites, the masses, and particularly the MSM suffers from severe historical amnesia which almost inevitably leads to bad policies.
0.12% of lifespan lost among the average American is the kind of number that's hard to say whether it's too small to worry about or a massive catastrophe.
Also, we don't what to multiply it by to measure the alternative timeline world in which we didn't do NPIs and/or the vax. I would guess that would be a factor of several times, so we are talking about 2 million to 8 million deaths, say.
The New York City numbers in March 2020 when covid arrived with zero NPIs in place is pretty scary. Of course, NYC doctors didn't have much of a clue how to treat covid in March 2020 and wrecked a lot of patients by ventilating them, but by the end of April 2020 ER doctors were doing a good job of getting the word out to other doctors about what they had learned the hard way.
Another question is what happens if the government doesn't impose lockdowns? Do people lock themselves down? A comparison of daily life in Sweden and Denmark might help answer that question.
My rule of thumb when looking at covid infection maps for the US in 2021-22 was that when infection rates hit about 100 in a locality with less strict government rules, the population would voluntarily hunker down.
In general, in 2021-2022, infection and death rates were considerably lower in Blue places likes the Bay Area, Seattle, and Boston than in Red areas. But Red areas would tend to voluntarily hunker down when infection waves got bad until they diminished. In other words, leaving aside government policy, the Blue attitude among the populace tended to be preventive, the Red attitude reactive. I.e., covid does most of its hard in a few discrete waves, so is it better to focus on preventing waves from starting or to live your life until a wave gets going and then hunker down?
I'd suggest somebody try to calculate the costs and benefits of both approaches.
A friend who is a pathologist at a major pharmaceutical company told me what he thought would happen at the onset of the pandemic and he was more right than any “official” source I saw from the government or media. And that’s what bugs me about the entire thing - clearly there are lots of scientists like my friend that understood a) everyone was going to be exposed and get it whether symptomatic or not, b) it was not a threat to healthy people or non-seniors, c) masks were useless, d) social distancing was made up and wouldn’t really change the reality of point a, e) it would get weaker over time and in a few years absolutely no one would care about Covid. And yet we got fed a lot of BS and out of context information, as well as outright lies about the origin of the disease.
E may be the semi-wrong thing, insofar as there are still a surprising number of neurotic virtue signalers who just shifted some of their typical nuttiness focused on climate or gender woo and placed it behind masking in perpetuity. I initially felt sorry for them but now I actively dislike them as it’s a 100% accurate signal about the extremism of their personal politics.
There were 15,480 covid deaths in New York City in April 2020 alone. NYC is about 1/40th of the national population, so that would project to about 600,000 deaths per month nationally. If the pandemic ran for two years at that rate each month before a vaccine arrived or herd immunity was reached, that would be about 14,000,000 deaths.
Of course, as it happened, covid tended to come and go in waves, so that kind of steady state pandemic wouldn't have happened. What's unclear today is whether the rise and fall of covid (e.g., emergency room arrivals in NYC started to drop around April 7, 2020 after 2 or 3 weeks of lockdowns) would have happened without people hunkering down, whether due to government mandates or individual choice.
For example, I followed Sweden's movie theater attendance closely in the spring of 2020 because the Swedish government refused to close theaters. As it turned out, Swedish theater owners voluntarily shut their theaters after a few weeks because customers weren't showing up and the world film industry wasn't releasing new movies.
Also, as it turned out, but was unknown in mid-March 2020 when lockdown decisions were made, over the course of April 2020, NYC doctors figured out better ways to treat covid patients that reduced the death rate and they did a decent job of getting that info out to the rest of the world.
The officer who presented the hospital ship to NYC was the third generation Vice Admiral Mustin. They have a namesake Aegis destroyer, like the McCains, but earned it without a senator. His father relieved mine in command of a mine hunter--three years out of Annapolis.
NYC, with its housing density, subways, and elevators, is atypical for most of the US. Then there's its international traffic and population bringing in large numbers of the infected at once. Their fatality numbers should have been lower if Cuomo had used the Navy hospital ship and tent hospitals, instead of sending patients to infect nursing homes, but he couldn't give Trump credit for them. Now he wants to be mayor, when he ought to be in prison.
Also steel canyons: lack of sunlight. NYC doctors were putting the worried well with the actually sick for testing. And we're using ventilators for "contagion control," which is just about up there with medieval barbers doing therapeutic bleeding.
No, that was one guy on Twitter in February 2020 who didn't know much about Italy who came up with the theory that there were vast numbers of Chinese workers in the afflicted Italian towns. That turned out just to be cope.
There was a lot of cope before covid slammed into NYC about how Americans weren't at risk because the Italians DESERVED to get the coronavirus. One popular theory was that Italy has terrible smog and Italians are all lazy and fat. So I looked up the places getting hit hardest in Italy and they turned out to be superb places in the foothills of the Alps.
I remember going by the ER ten years ago for something that turned out to not to be a problem and being asked if I'd been out of the country recently. I said, no, but on the other hand two nights before I'd been walking around Times Square.
Then I blame dry Alpine air wreaking havoc on mucus membranes. In 40+ years, I've never had a cold, flu, or covid (at all) when I had a humidifier running when the furnace was needed. I overdid it the first year and ruined most of the glazing putty in my parents' nearly new house when moisture got caught between the sashes and storm windows. Cheap contractor windows.
I lost some of my sense of smell and taste for a week in April '21, which spurred me to get vaxxed, but my ancient father didn't get sick sitting in the same room, so it could have just been allergies. Every year, I react a bit differently to the waves of spring pollen.
It was obscene that they arrested people for going outside, even ignoring the pass given to BLM protests.
You almost certainly did but were asymptomatic. Three of the five members of my family tested positive at least once, but one never showed any symptoms and my youngest and myself never tested positive or got visibly sick at all. The two who did get visibly sick were in close contact with the rest of us for a day or two while symptomatic before they were tested as well, and we really didn’t make any unusual efforts to stay away from them going forward.
Now, I did get very sick in December 2019 when I used to fly a lot - fever, chills, dry cough, lethargic…so maybe I got the earliest variant or maybe it was something else. No one else got sick even though we drove ten hours in the car together to visit family for Christmas.
Airplane air is very dry, which makes you more susceptible to everything airborne. OTOH, the horrible allergic reaction to ragweed I had in O'Hare airport lifted as soon as I got back on the plane, so they must have good pollen filters.
In retrospect, one of the saddest things about COVID was that the world had a shining example of how it was likely to go, i.e. that cruise ship where nearly everybody caught it, but only a few old people died.
I recall when everybody was extrapolating out from that incident, but then it was sidelined once the more widespread infection and death numbers starting dominating people's attention.
In HK, did you get a sense of what really happened in Wuhan? In retrospect, it seems like the CCP overreacted to scare the West's leaders into doing the same, but I could be totally wrong, as they foolishly didn't stop flights from China 'til too late. It's possible the virus lost some lethality quicker than we think.
Not really. The KOVID Krazy Kick-off was a blur here. There were those ridiculous videos of people purportedly keeling over dead instantaneously in the street that circulated around social media, so lots of people panicked right away. And because HK had been through SARS in 2003, everybody snapped into mask mode with almost no pushback.
What were the improved treatment methods? I don't remember them becoming public knowledge--it seemed like they'd intubate bad cases until most of them died.
Don't rush people onto ventilators, give them passive oxygen, have them lie prone, have people buy oximeters so they can come to the ER earlier for oxygen, etc.
I can remember a viral video from late March 2020 by a young NYC ER doc who announced he was quitting because the standard protocol was killing patients who could be saved. By four weeks later, the NYT was running an op-ed by another NYC ER doc saying the same thing.
NYC doctors are pretty good at getting the national media to spread the word. If Duluth had been hit first and some heroic Duluth doctors had figured out better treatments, it might have taken months longer to get the word out.
Look at the 57-58 flu season and the Hong Kong flu pandemic of ‘68. COVID was about the same severity and things weren’t going crazy then.
In America, a lot more crazy things were happening in 1968 than the Hong Kong flu. Tet. 18,000 dead in Vietnam. King and Kennedy assassinations. Riots. The Heidi Game.
Ha Ha, good one. How many did NBC kill?
I think the Jets won the Heidi game. And they won the Super Bowl. And the Jets have been cursed since. I don't think the Jets will win a Super Bowl until Joe Namath dies. Did Broadway Joe make a pact with the Devil?
He’s talking about the 57-58 pandemic. I think there was one in the 60s too. I remember how many people were off school.
According to Wikipedia the fatality rate for the 57-8 flu was half of the Covid rate, in the US.
Also the population was younger in 57-58, full of child boomers.
By the time of Covid, boomers were old. I was 69 in 2020. I hunkered down, ordered groceries online (I had started doing that pre pandemic).
I got all the vaccines as did my same age friends and relatives. I don’t know anyone who died.
My sister had successfully finished chemo in the fall of '19 and didn't leave her house for two years except for a few dinners with my dad and me. As he was 93, he was her canary in the coal mine of my house. Despite my weekly trips to Aldi, none of us got it.
I would have done the same as your sister.
The best-supported modern estimates put the infection-fatality rate (IFR) of the 1957-58 “Asian” influenza pandemic in the range ≈ 0.1 % – 0.3 %, with a central value around 0.18 % globally and ≈ 0.25 – 0.27 % for the United States.
COVID was under 0.2% in the US.
There were batches of shots that had much higher rates of adverse reactions than others. Also, some affects may not revealed for years after the last shot, like antibody class switching.
I am sorry to say I don't know who Tyler Cowen is. I knew only one person who died of Covid, a 72-year old formerly homeless woman named Margaret who once attended our church. About 2016, someone in our church figured Margaret was eligible for Social Security and Medicare, did the legwork, and had Margaret placed in an old folks home with the help of her retired brother. Margaret died in April, 2020 of Covid at the old folks home. I guess she would have been better off homeless and sleeping at shelters and bus stops.
Covid seems to have culled a lot of old folks who were near the end of their lives. Talk radio blabbermouth Larry King, age 87. Country singer Charlie Pride, age 86. All time home run leader- sorry, Barry Bonds, you're a cheat- Hank Aaron, age 86. General Colin Powell, age 84. Pitching ace Tom Seaver, age 75. Ace spit-balling pitcher Gaylord Perry, age 84.
The closing down of the economy affected tens of millions of people and tens of thousands of businesses. I am sure nobody on the left cares about that. The left thinks the economy is run by the magic wand of government. Some on the right don't much care either. In Washington DC, where I had a business, the business district was closed down for over four years. Restaurants went out of business. Clothiers went out of business. Bars went out of business. Print shops went out of business. Parking garages went out of business. The value of the office buildings in the downtown of Washington declined precipitously with few customers downtown. Hundreds of thousands of people in just DC were put in economic hardship due to the idiotic closing down of the economy. It is hard to quantify these people unlike the 1.4 million who died of Covid according to CNN but it was fun for CNN to have a running count of Covid dead while the hated Trump was president. For the most part, Covid and the closedown of the economy was just a leftist trick to destroy Donald Trump. And it worked in 2020.
It's also anecdote, but I didn't know *anybody* who died of Covid. Here in the UK, the average age of a person who died of Covid was slightly higher than the average life expectancy. (p.s. Tyler Cower is a popular economics blogger, marginalrevolution.com)
By 2020, I had moved to the mountains of the state of West Virginia. One of the first to die of Covid in West Virginia was a 24-year old man who was morbidly obese. He weighed over 400 pounds, nearly 30 stone. Covid not only killed the old but the unhealthy.
The type of celebrity still in his prime who appeared to be most likely to die of covid were rightwing talk radio hosts because: they were ideologically opposed to vaccines and the like; and because that's one of the few celebrity jobs where you can be fat because people don't look at you.
So why didn't the slovenly Limbaugh die of Covid? Or the balloon-headed Hannity?
Herman cain did instead
Rush looked much less fat in some photos--not sure if that was before or after his cancer treatment started.
Tyler is a GMU economist who, along with his colleague Alex Tabarrok, writes the Marginal Revolution blog. If you want to know the governing elite's frame of reference and what they are talking about, and equally important what they're not talking about, read Marginal Revolution.
Thank you for the suggestion.
For the record, my wife has not had a "time of the month" since she took an mRNA version of said novel pharmaceutical product in August 2021, at which time she was 34 years old.
This is an unquestioningly pro-vaccine publication, sir.
I'm generally pro-vaccine, too. It's just I have a lot of problems with the mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaxes. From the science, they do little when helping a recipient resist infection, they do not preclude retransmission, and they're causing too many health problems otherwise. There happened to be another vax, not an mRNA vax, for Covid, that came along later, called Novavax. It was developed with the traditional process, which is why it took longer. And from what science I've seen about it, it works a lot better on all three fronts.
The Great Barrington Declaration early on wanted limited targeted lockdowns and wait on a traditional vax. From what we see now, they were on the right side of both science and history.
Good point! I’m sure all of the other ones are 100% legitimately warranted for every single person though. All 82 of them.
There’s still no traditional vax.
I find it hard to believe that a traditional vaccine would be much better at preventing initial infection and especially transmission. Most of that is down to characteristics of the virus.
That is bizarre. It's difficult to imagine a mechanism. Have you checked to see if there are more reported cases?
I know three people who died of Covid.
Two were very large obese diabetic hispanic men. The third was an older gentleman in his 70's who didn't have any health problems that I know of, but I also didn't know him well enough to be sure.
I think the point is - like you say, Steve - is that it disproportionately affected certain populations but, in general, wasn't that significant overall.
To be honest, right when the panic started and the lockdowns started being implemented, I was on board, personally. "Two weeks to slow the spread" made sense to me and I thought it was reasonable given how lethal it was being reported to be.
But then, two weeks later, I noticed that there were no reports of hospitals being overwhelmed. I drove past a couple of local hospitals a few times and the parking lots were not full. Groceries were still getting delivered, gasoline still flowed, water treatment plants were still operating, stores were not closing for a lack of workers. To me, these were clear signs that the apocalypse was not coming and it wasn't as bad as they said.
It seemed to me that the worst case scenario had been avoided, so I fully expected the "all clear" to be sounded and society to let out a collective, "whew" and move on... But as Lee Corso says, "NOT SO FAST MY FRIEND!"
So when the politicians not only didn't reverse course but in many instances doubled down and extended their power grab, I pivoted on a dime and immediately started calling bullshit on all of it.
And it still annoys me to no end - angers me, even - that there was no accountability in the 2022 elections for all of these awful governors. I lost a lot of faith in American voters when they didn't throw the bums out in response to their tyranny.
The situation in New York City in March 2020 was pretty bad and nobody knew how much worse it was going to get.
My recollection is that a NYC ER doctor recounted in late April 2020 that the constant wailing of ambulance sirens bringing new covid patients to his hospital, which had been going on for about a month, suddenly abated in the early afternoon of April 7, 2020. That's about 2 to 3 weeks after severe restrictions on daily life were imposed upon NYC in mid-March.
In retrospect, it's clear that covid acted largely in discrete waves. In 2020-2021, there were five major waves:
1. March-April 2020 in NYC
2. Mid-summer in air conditioned sunbelt states
3. The big December-January wave across much of the country
4. The nasty mid-summer Delta variant wave in 2021 that started in Springfield, MO
5. The Omicron wave in late 2021 that appeared to spread a less lethal but highly infectious new variant, which in retrospect seems to have largely moved us past the crisis.
So, the debate we ought to have had was whether measures to blunt waves should have been preventative (hunker down all the time to keep them from getting started) or reactive (just hunker down when a wave gets going). Over time, the former became standard in the bluer parts of the country and the latter in the redder parts of the country.
But I only thought of this preventative vs. reactive terminology yesterday, five years too late.
Preventative made more sense in urban/mass transit areas but was too onerous in less dense parts. What happened to the threatened wave of commercial real estate defaults due to WFH, riots/looting, and higher interest rates?
I'm assuming it's still out there looming.
I was just reading about how there was a good chance that a 65 story office building that opened in Chicago in 1990 where I used to eat lunch frequently might get torn down. But it was a complicated story about market expectations. It's not making much money because it's octagonal and renters don't like that and the office space market is so soft. But they might tear it down so they can put up 3 buildings on the site on Wacker next to the Sears (Willis) Tower.
Maybe that's why Trump keeps pushing the Fed for lower rates. Reagan's boom began with ridiculously high rates until ~'87, when 8.5% refinancing felt wonderful after 12.75% in '85. Trump and sons must be paying attention, even if they work in residential & golf.
They kept saying we need to shut down to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed and extra people dying as a result. I kept a lookout for stories of this actually happening. Never found one. I read plenty of stories about hospitals 'about to be overwhelmed' and medical pros being very stressed out, but never about deaths due to overwhelming.
Given the way stats work, that means we were never close to our system being overwhelmed.
Exactly. As soon as it became clear that nobody was being “overwhelmed” the official panic should have ended immediately.
Your experience was exactly the same mine described in the original comment. I believed them for a couple of weeks but it became pretty clear early on that their expectations were wrong. There is both wrong about being wrong, but there is something wrong with being stubborn and prideful.
The entire public health decision making process was embarrassing, panic driven, improvisational. After a short time it became clear that the government had two levers to pull and whenever the numbers changed they would pull one or both of them just because, you know, you have to do something, right?
I think if public health authorities from the early 1990s could have been shown a time portal view to the great pandemic of 2020, they would have been ashamed of what their descendants had wrought.
I’m surprised the CDC or some life insurance company doesn’t have this data for all diseases and all demographics.
They do.
https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd.html
COVID fatalities were the old, obese and the immuno-compromised. The US has outsized cohorts of old, fat, unhealthy individuals. Even then the fatality rates are not dramatic. Nobody in my personal Dunbar number died from COVID, including two astonishingly unhealthy 80 yr olds. A friend's drug addicted nephew died from it.
By contrast, imagine the horror of the Spanish Flu, watching healthy young people succumb to it.
COVID counts as the greatest failure of the institutions in my lifetime, from the Wuhan lab leak and illegal funding, to shutting down a quarter of the economy and nobody even got a vote, to the vaccines that aren't really vaccines. The next instance of mass formation psychosis is really going to be something.
Also, I'm confident at least one Cluster B-disordered person out there in the same building with some nasty stuff is contemplating a "12 Monkeys" scenario. (This has already happened once in US history.) At some point the conflict between Blue State America and Red State America is going to be existential.
I'm with you on all of this except the idea that vaccines aren't really vaccines. What does this mean? Some kind of technicality or semantic argument or do you think the mRNA vax was phony? Also the fatality rates were pretty impressive when you multiply them by this pandemic lasting way longer than the previous couple of flu pandemics. I wonder if we prolonged it with policy or if it was just the novelty of it. You know, it had the opportunity to mutate into a few also kind of deadly variants and have another run through the population.
A vaccine provides a public health benefit by suppressing the virus to the point you're not transmitting it. The jab gives a "heads up" to an individual's immune system to respond after they're already infected and doesn't reduce transmission. The effect is so ephemeral the CDC was recommending shots every 90-120 days at one point. It is, by design in fact, a "leaky" vaccine. It's always going to be chasing and pushing the virus from behind.
My educated guess about the effect of the COVID vaccine is this- initially you get IgG floating in the blood which is decent at preventing you from getting noticeably sick. That wanes to uselessness in 3-6 months but it leaves behind cellular immunity which has some effect in helping you not die of the disease.
My thinking about COVID is that it isn't especially deadly; it was just especially novel. We had a huge population of oldsters whose immune system had no experience with anything antigenically similar.
A lot of people had a bug up their ass about hoped for 'herd immunity' (I had a doctor acquaintance call me insane for not thinking we should try to get to herd immunity) even though it was always obviously unlikely. I think that's why the stupid recommendation to get vaxed every three months.
I live in a heavily Amish area. Talking to them, they were just about entirely unvaccinated. I’ve never heard of a wave of Covid deaths among them either, at least not in SE PA.
I’ll add my anecdote: one person known to me died of COVID. An elderly relative, in a nursing home, also had colon cancer. That’s one out of hundreds of people whose death I’d have heard of.
I know of two young people who overdosed during the period 2020-2023. And two high school suicides, one hanging and one who jumped to his death from a bridge.
The continued lockdowns, long after it was obvious that they were unnecessary should have resulted in marches on world capitals.
The mask debate was pretty infuriating. People, including Razib Khan and Nassim Taleb, were telling themselves their sheetrock hangers' mask was cutting through the viral miasma like a car's windshield, and not settling in their eyes, ears, hair, clothes, hands. I saw people wearing them on the beach with nobody in 20 yards and 15 mph winds.
I still see people walking around the grocery store in masks. Not a lot. Maybe 1 in 20 or so, but still noticeable. Some older people still show up at my church every Sunday wearing them, too.
I get that a mask provides a sense of comfort to some people, especially back in 2021-2022, but I also cannot get past how irrational and illogical the whole concept is. Where do they think the virus goes? That is collects on the mask? Wouldn't that make the mask for dangerous? Do they think the mask blocks the virus from other people?
It's a shorthand for people's levels of susceptibility and lack of critical thinking.
I'd say it's polite and appropriate to wear one when you're sick and have to go out, instead of lying on the sofa hydrating. But if the mask protected you all we'd have to do is point to the pile of dead, infected bodies without masks and all the live, covid-free people with masks. Like I said the next mass formation psychosis event is really going to be something.
Death rates were lower in parts of the country, like the SF Bay area, with lots of masking. But those areas also had lots of social distancing, work from home, and vaccinating.
My guess is that because covid largely spread by people socializing face to face, and wearing masks made socializing more awkward, that masking did reduce infections, but in sizable part not by technical means but by causing people to stay home and watch Netflix rather than go out and talk to other people by making socializing less fun.
But Bay Area yuppies don't die from Covid. Old, fat and immuno-compromised people do. So a 35 year old IT worker who masks up can't point to the mask as the thin veil between him and death by covid. Ornery, elderly Florida, by contrast, should have been bulldozing bodies into mass graves. Again masks probably help to keep infected people from spewing virus late and mucus all over everybody but Nassim Taleb wearing scuba goggles and two masks was just a hilarious spectacle.
There are lots of old people in the Bay Area. Proposition 13 means they don't have to pay much property tax, and the climate is ideal, so why leave?
But take the Amish example. The Amish stores I frequent had signs up refusing service to anyone masked. As far as I know, their religious services continued; I know for a fact that their schools were open. I must admit that I haven’t seen any figures separating out Amish deaths, but I’m also of the opinion that such numbers would be readily available if they had died in droves.
My opinion is that deaths of despair and deaths of exuberance had a higher impact on US mortality than did COVID.
In five years, I haven't seen any studies settling whether N-95 masks did any good for defensive purposes (lesser masks obviously were just lucky charms), so I'm guessing they didn't.
Perhaps, though, they were helpful at helping you not infect other people? If you test positive for covid, should you wear a mask when you have to go out? I'd say yes, but I haven't seen any studies of the question.
The studies are in and masking doesn't look like it did much. I ran an analysis during the pandemic which I believe showed that a high masking area slowed the spread to about half the rate of a low masking area. I controlled for stage of pandemic. Thing is, that's just slowing. Doesn't tell us anything about the effect it had on mortality. Given the way complex systems work it's entirely plausible that slowing the spread could make mortality worse.
At the beginning of the pandemic I read masking studies from Asia (where is was already common) to see if it had any effect on influenza epidemics. These are difficult studies to do but the survey indicated maybe they did something but pretty unimpressive. Same thing with mask studies done about COVID. Maybe some effect but overall not much. Could be random.
I partially disagree. As my comment elsewhere in the thread indicates, I've got a *LOT* of experience with masking in Hong Kong.
I don't think most people here are that stupid about masking; they know it's far from perfect, and that it didn't really work during COVID. And there's no political component to it, as there is in western countries.
I think there are two main reasons for it carrying on here. One is that Hong Kong -- much like the USA, actually -- has a 'can do' traditional spirit, i.e. if there's a problem, then there's always a way to work, work, work at it and overcome it. In the HK ethos, if you can find a quick and clever way to work your way to a goal, then good for you, but if a brute force solution is all that's available, well, then you grind away at it. Wearing a mask helps some people feel like they're 'doing something' rather than just being passive, thereby enhancing their sense of control over their health and well-being.
The second is willingness to accede to external expectations and influences. Although the government finally dropped its masking mandate in 2023, there are still signals from HK health authorities about how useful it is to wear a mask if you're at a clinic or hospital, when you're sick, etc. And I think some people here may keep on with the masks to placate family members, especially elderly ones, in order to maintain family peace.
I had my eyes checked last month. I have complicated eyes that need complicated tests, so every year I'm at my eye doctor's clinic for quite a while. Even though nobody there has any infectious diseases -- it's strictly eye stuff -- I absolutely have to wear a mask. I asked a staff member this year if I could finally skip it, and I thought she was going to cry, and then spontaneously combust. Sitting there recirculating my exhalations was a good reminder of how far the crazy went, and how it's still lurking not too far back on the shelf, waiting to be pulled out again . . . .
I nearly lost my mind after three years and two months straight of mandated mask wearing in Hong Kong. For great majority of this period, this included the great outdoors. Hong Kong is really, really, really hot and humid for six months each year, so wearing a mask is incredibly uncomfortable and outright gross.
The sad thing is that, based on my observations, roughly 30-40% of Hong Kong people still wear masks in public, at least at points. The concentration is highest on public transport, as you'd expect.
SARS/COVID/masking broke the wills of quite a few people here. The saddest are the families I see in which Dad, Mom, and kids (down to toddlers) are still all masked up. There are many kids who are now five years old who've basically never gone out in public unmasked. It's madness.
In West Virginia, more people die of drug overdoses than ever died of Covid.
That 12 years lost/fatality estimate seems awfully high, if the younger people killed were that unhealthy before. Does the CDC have a good grasp on how ever-rising obesity will affect life expectancy of younger people? It used to be expressed as the lifespan of a one year old today, or something like that, which I always thought was ridiculous.
Let's see a comparison of absolute numbers and years lost to Deaths of Exuberance/Despair compared to covid. The E/D fatalities were obviously much younger, but maybe the numbers were dwarfed, as with AIDS.
Deaths of Exuberance (homicides and car crashes) tended to take 40 or 50 years of life expectancy away. So they had an outsized impact on life expectancy relative to covid per capita. On the other hand, the human capital costs of people who die in shootouts with other knuckleheads or drive into a bridge abutment while drunk per person tended not to be that high.
This may be off-topic and feel free to delete, but I recall commenters claiming that the Sailer readership at Unz.com turned hostile when Mr. Sailer's views on COVID and Ukraine failed to conform to the consensus of the commenters.
I don't know whether this is true or not, but in any case, when commentators resist the ever-present threat of "audience capture," that increases their credibility in my mind (independent of the substance of their views).
Steve's a reasonable guy with reasoned opinions and actual people he knows IRL he'd like to have read his work. But unz.com was getting to be like the squeeze you really don't want your friends to see you with.
When a lot of old people die, that all by itself reduces the average life span in a society because the elderly, even though advanced in years, are precisely the cohort which is likely to live the largest total number of years. In other words, the more old people alive the higher the average lifespan. I only know this because I got it wrong in a quiz.
Does this speak to the issue you are writing about?
Long COVID is real? Doubtful. And evem if it were, the number of people suffering from it are much smaller than those who claim to have it.
Count me as not sold on long COVID. Made up like trans by the left.
I can recall reading about an ER doctor who got covid in spring 2020 and spent a month on a heart-and-lung machine, which is just about the most severe intervention imaginable, more even than a ventilator. He eventually survived, but I bet he hasn't since been quite the vigorous man in his prime that he was in 2019.
So, yeah, there are definite cases of Long Covid like him.
But, a lot of Long Covid cases seem to be among the kind of women who would be trans if they were a generation younger.
That’s one case and we don’t know if the illness or its symptoms were a result of long-COVID or other confounding factors like a latent disease or illness or Roger medications for example. We may also discover later one that some people’s immune system makes them particularly vulnerable or impervious to COVID.
There are all kinds of weird post-viral syndromes that lots of people get. I had rubella in my early 30s because the vaccine I got for it in the late 60s was worthless. The illness itself was very mild, but afterward I had some neurological symptoms -- numbness, odd sensations -- that had me worried enough to research. I was reassured to find out that such things are pretty common, and in my case they eventually went away.
So did some people likely have weird feelings after COVID? I think it's likely they did, but it's also likely that most of these fit into this wider pattern of post-viral stuff that's been going on forever.
I think many of the people who were already saying they had long COVID and were ruined forever just months after having the initial infection were getting caught up in the hysteria to one degree or another.
Good thing you weren't pregnant when you had rubella.
My late step-monster had Munchausen's, which made my father's life interesting for over 2 decades. Fittingly, she dropped dead getting out of the car after a doctor's appointment in 2013. She would have loved covid.
That was one set of side effects I could be pretty sure I was not experiencing.
I'm hoping that eventually someone will do an age-controlled comparison of excess mortality from the 1968 Hong Kong Flu versus excess mortality from the Rona Panic. (Hint, hint, nudge, nudge, know what I mean, Steve!) The US age-distribution in 1968 is so different from 2020 that a direct comparison is virtually useless.
My recollection is that the Hong Kong Flu was at least as bad in terms of morbidity and mortality as Covid 19, and based on personal experience living through both pandemics, probably much worse. The country got through the 1968 pandemic without any significant government intervention and dis just fine, probably better than the experience with the Rona Panic. The US population, elites, the masses, and particularly the MSM suffers from severe historical amnesia which almost inevitably leads to bad policies.
0.12% of lifespan lost among the average American is the kind of number that's hard to say whether it's too small to worry about or a massive catastrophe.
Also, we don't what to multiply it by to measure the alternative timeline world in which we didn't do NPIs and/or the vax. I would guess that would be a factor of several times, so we are talking about 2 million to 8 million deaths, say.
The New York City numbers in March 2020 when covid arrived with zero NPIs in place is pretty scary. Of course, NYC doctors didn't have much of a clue how to treat covid in March 2020 and wrecked a lot of patients by ventilating them, but by the end of April 2020 ER doctors were doing a good job of getting the word out to other doctors about what they had learned the hard way.
Another question is what happens if the government doesn't impose lockdowns? Do people lock themselves down? A comparison of daily life in Sweden and Denmark might help answer that question.
My rule of thumb when looking at covid infection maps for the US in 2021-22 was that when infection rates hit about 100 in a locality with less strict government rules, the population would voluntarily hunker down.
In general, in 2021-2022, infection and death rates were considerably lower in Blue places likes the Bay Area, Seattle, and Boston than in Red areas. But Red areas would tend to voluntarily hunker down when infection waves got bad until they diminished. In other words, leaving aside government policy, the Blue attitude among the populace tended to be preventive, the Red attitude reactive. I.e., covid does most of its hard in a few discrete waves, so is it better to focus on preventing waves from starting or to live your life until a wave gets going and then hunker down?
I'd suggest somebody try to calculate the costs and benefits of both approaches.
A friend who is a pathologist at a major pharmaceutical company told me what he thought would happen at the onset of the pandemic and he was more right than any “official” source I saw from the government or media. And that’s what bugs me about the entire thing - clearly there are lots of scientists like my friend that understood a) everyone was going to be exposed and get it whether symptomatic or not, b) it was not a threat to healthy people or non-seniors, c) masks were useless, d) social distancing was made up and wouldn’t really change the reality of point a, e) it would get weaker over time and in a few years absolutely no one would care about Covid. And yet we got fed a lot of BS and out of context information, as well as outright lies about the origin of the disease.
E may be the semi-wrong thing, insofar as there are still a surprising number of neurotic virtue signalers who just shifted some of their typical nuttiness focused on climate or gender woo and placed it behind masking in perpetuity. I initially felt sorry for them but now I actively dislike them as it’s a 100% accurate signal about the extremism of their personal politics.
There were 15,480 covid deaths in New York City in April 2020 alone. NYC is about 1/40th of the national population, so that would project to about 600,000 deaths per month nationally. If the pandemic ran for two years at that rate each month before a vaccine arrived or herd immunity was reached, that would be about 14,000,000 deaths.
Of course, as it happened, covid tended to come and go in waves, so that kind of steady state pandemic wouldn't have happened. What's unclear today is whether the rise and fall of covid (e.g., emergency room arrivals in NYC started to drop around April 7, 2020 after 2 or 3 weeks of lockdowns) would have happened without people hunkering down, whether due to government mandates or individual choice.
For example, I followed Sweden's movie theater attendance closely in the spring of 2020 because the Swedish government refused to close theaters. As it turned out, Swedish theater owners voluntarily shut their theaters after a few weeks because customers weren't showing up and the world film industry wasn't releasing new movies.
Also, as it turned out, but was unknown in mid-March 2020 when lockdown decisions were made, over the course of April 2020, NYC doctors figured out better ways to treat covid patients that reduced the death rate and they did a decent job of getting that info out to the rest of the world.
The officer who presented the hospital ship to NYC was the third generation Vice Admiral Mustin. They have a namesake Aegis destroyer, like the McCains, but earned it without a senator. His father relieved mine in command of a mine hunter--three years out of Annapolis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustin_family
NYC, with its housing density, subways, and elevators, is atypical for most of the US. Then there's its international traffic and population bringing in large numbers of the infected at once. Their fatality numbers should have been lower if Cuomo had used the Navy hospital ship and tent hospitals, instead of sending patients to infect nursing homes, but he couldn't give Trump credit for them. Now he wants to be mayor, when he ought to be in prison.
Also steel canyons: lack of sunlight. NYC doctors were putting the worried well with the actually sick for testing. And we're using ventilators for "contagion control," which is just about up there with medieval barbers doing therapeutic bleeding.
They'd have been better off recreating TB sanatoria, where people slept with the windows wide open all year.
In the 20s and 30s, my house had two screened sleeping porches, one for each bedroom. It was considered healthier all year and less hot in summer.
Were the Italian alpine foothill towns that got hammered in February 2020 much like New York City?
No, they were like Chinese cities--lots of Chinese sent back to infest the West.
Last month, my dermatologist's receptionist still asked if I'd been outside the country recently.
No, that was one guy on Twitter in February 2020 who didn't know much about Italy who came up with the theory that there were vast numbers of Chinese workers in the afflicted Italian towns. That turned out just to be cope.
There was a lot of cope before covid slammed into NYC about how Americans weren't at risk because the Italians DESERVED to get the coronavirus. One popular theory was that Italy has terrible smog and Italians are all lazy and fat. So I looked up the places getting hit hardest in Italy and they turned out to be superb places in the foothills of the Alps.
I remember going by the ER ten years ago for something that turned out to not to be a problem and being asked if I'd been out of the country recently. I said, no, but on the other hand two nights before I'd been walking around Times Square.
Then I blame dry Alpine air wreaking havoc on mucus membranes. In 40+ years, I've never had a cold, flu, or covid (at all) when I had a humidifier running when the furnace was needed. I overdid it the first year and ruined most of the glazing putty in my parents' nearly new house when moisture got caught between the sashes and storm windows. Cheap contractor windows.
I never got Covid.
I didn't either, but I spent all my time on the golf course, whether it was open or not.
I lost some of my sense of smell and taste for a week in April '21, which spurred me to get vaxxed, but my ancient father didn't get sick sitting in the same room, so it could have just been allergies. Every year, I react a bit differently to the waves of spring pollen.
It was obscene that they arrested people for going outside, even ignoring the pass given to BLM protests.
You almost certainly did but were asymptomatic. Three of the five members of my family tested positive at least once, but one never showed any symptoms and my youngest and myself never tested positive or got visibly sick at all. The two who did get visibly sick were in close contact with the rest of us for a day or two while symptomatic before they were tested as well, and we really didn’t make any unusual efforts to stay away from them going forward.
Now, I did get very sick in December 2019 when I used to fly a lot - fever, chills, dry cough, lethargic…so maybe I got the earliest variant or maybe it was something else. No one else got sick even though we drove ten hours in the car together to visit family for Christmas.
I never tested positive. Given my age, I avoided all gatherings. Pretty sure I never got it.
Airplane air is very dry, which makes you more susceptible to everything airborne. OTOH, the horrible allergic reaction to ragweed I had in O'Hare airport lifted as soon as I got back on the plane, so they must have good pollen filters.
In retrospect, one of the saddest things about COVID was that the world had a shining example of how it was likely to go, i.e. that cruise ship where nearly everybody caught it, but only a few old people died.
I recall when everybody was extrapolating out from that incident, but then it was sidelined once the more widespread infection and death numbers starting dominating people's attention.
In HK, did you get a sense of what really happened in Wuhan? In retrospect, it seems like the CCP overreacted to scare the West's leaders into doing the same, but I could be totally wrong, as they foolishly didn't stop flights from China 'til too late. It's possible the virus lost some lethality quicker than we think.
Not really. The KOVID Krazy Kick-off was a blur here. There were those ridiculous videos of people purportedly keeling over dead instantaneously in the street that circulated around social media, so lots of people panicked right away. And because HK had been through SARS in 2003, everybody snapped into mask mode with almost no pushback.
What were the improved treatment methods? I don't remember them becoming public knowledge--it seemed like they'd intubate bad cases until most of them died.
Don't rush people onto ventilators, give them passive oxygen, have them lie prone, have people buy oximeters so they can come to the ER earlier for oxygen, etc.
I can remember a viral video from late March 2020 by a young NYC ER doc who announced he was quitting because the standard protocol was killing patients who could be saved. By four weeks later, the NYT was running an op-ed by another NYC ER doc saying the same thing.
NYC doctors are pretty good at getting the national media to spread the word. If Duluth had been hit first and some heroic Duluth doctors had figured out better treatments, it might have taken months longer to get the word out.
Where's " Je suis Omar Mateen " when you need him?