Maggie's Farm

Unwarranted panic: Please no more articles using the same cherry-picked anecdotes of a few places miscounting to give the impression that all of covid has been overcounted. That is deeply untrue, and a few exceptions, held aloft like a bloody shirt, doesn't change that. There are more deaths from covid than the official totals, not fewer.

Data. The actual data, please, not that kind of crap.

700,000 died and without our "panicked" responses it would have been more, likely many more. How many would be okay? Tell me the number of deaths that would have been okay. No one at MF goes there, they leave the question on the table, pretending it doesn't really exist. The repeated reasons are that the government got some things wrong, and some badly, they don't like the government telling them what to do, some of the people who advocated caution are hypocrites and jerks, and they don't like masks. None of those is a solid reason to keep stamping your little foot.

It's just the flu, right? Isn't that what people here kept saying a year ago? Or have you forgotten?

the spam filter takes out links, but look at the graphs yourself. Yes. Look at the graphs yourself at CDC covid excess deaths. Pretty dramatic, pretty clear . 750,000 excess deaths during the covid period. Probably some of them are drug OD's, homicides*, or postponed medical care, but not many. They aren't suicides, heart disease, cancer, or the other usuals. You can try to escape into pneumonia or COPD, but excess deaths there are going to be suspiciously close to aiee! I can't take it! covid, aren't they?

Do you have another explanation for excess deaths that started in March or 2020? Countries that had fewer restrictions had more deaths than similar countries that had more. Unless you think that Sweden isn't all that similar to Norway, Finland and Denmark. Or that Serbia isn't really, really similar to neighboring Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, etc.

So extrapolating Sweden to the other Scandinavian countries, or Serbia to the other Balkans, and applying a back-of-the-envelope calculation (you could do it for adjoining US states or Canadian provinces instead if you like) and you get at least 50% and as much as 150% more death. So cut that in half, just to be cautious 25-75%. That's the "without panic" number. Is that an okay number of people to die? You tell me. Lots of people did lose jobs, lose businesses - that counts for something. What's the tradeoff?

In the US, Texas and Florida got a very late start but still quickly got up to the national average, yet are crowing about how great they did, even as everyone else goes to near-zero and they are stalled at a low number of deaths. Not terrible, perhaps. The vaccines allowed them to outrun opening 2-3 weeks too early.

What's the okay number of deaths we should have been willing to swallow so that the people at MF could pride themselves that no one told them what to do?

*Homicides have another cause related to decreased policing, I think. But count them as "cooped up anger" if you like.