Despite my desire to keep controversy away from my own name online, it seems that you can only do that for so long. Our collective societal response to Covid has become so incredibly stupid that I feel a moral obligation to address it under my own name.
There are a lot of complex parts to this. There has already been at least one book written about it, and I am sure that there will be many, many more.
So there is a ton to address. What is clear, unequivocally, is that modern journalism is not up to the task.
That’s been true from the beginning, when they minimized the risk even when it was apparent. It is even more true now, as they fail to grasp the many facets of how our response to Covid has been illogical, destructive, and presents many more long-term dangers.
Thus, I’ve decided to bring a little festive cheer with the “12 days of Covidmas”. There will be one new post each day between now and Christmas, each addressing a different facet of Covid and the response.
My goals here are fairly simple:
I’m looking for the best factual understanding of how Covid impacts people, and
to build understanding what actions are the best mitigations net of the unintended consequences, so that
we can identify the best path forward as a nation.
There are some people who are not going to want to hear what I’ll lay out over the next twelve days. They would prefer not just to hide in their closet for the next 6 to 9 months, but also to have the government tell everyone else to do that too. And some of them are pretty militant about this, presumably because there isn’t much else to do when you are hiding in your closet.
We’ll cover all of the objections that these kinds of people bring up as they insist they know what’s best not just for themselves (reasonable), but also for each of the other 330 million of us as Americans, and more worldwide. They don’t. The view that lockdowns can solve everything are childish, short-sighted, and destructive. Someone needs to call these people out on their bullshit.
Some things are worth saying even (especially) when groupthink has led people so far astray. So let’s dive in.
Covid is a real and serious disease. All else being equal, you should do your best to avoid getting it.
That needs to be said to avoid any confusion or effort to paint those with reasonable objections to our Covid approach as conspiracy theorists or “Covid Truthers”.
Here in the U.S. we are approaching 300,000 deaths due to Covid for the year. There are claims that this number is higher or lower, depending on who you ask.
300,000 could be too high because many of the people who die with Covid have overlapping high-risk conditions. While it is still clear that Covid was the proximate cause in many of those cases, a non-trivial portion of the Covid deaths have been people with terminal cancer or other conditions that it would be more appropriate to credit Covid with the assist rather than the kill.
But 300,000 could also be too low. Especially early on, a lot of deaths occurred when testing was not yet abundant. Many deaths that happened may have been caused by Covid but not attributed to it. This is less of a concern now as we can now run plenty of tests and essentially anyone who makes their way to a hospital is tested for Covid.
For our sake, let’s stipulate that 300,000 is roughly accurate at this point in time. We can get into both the above scenarios a bit more later on, but frankly there isn’t substantial evidence that would shift this number tremendously.
Now, 300,000 sounds like a lot. I mean, it is a lot, and not in a good way. But large numbers without comparisons are just large numbers. Let’s present two numbers to put some context on this:
Americans who died fighting in combat in World War Two: 291,000
Americans who died from any cause during 2019: 2,830,000
These two numbers can present two drastically different narratives that are both true on the surface: Covid has (already) been more deadly than World War Two, and Covid is only causing a ~10% increase in deaths compared to last year.
That said, one of these narratives is more accurate than the other. Whereas World War Two was killing young and otherwise healthy Americans, Covid’s target is essentially identical to the mix of people who die in a normal year. To illustrate that:
What else is known about Covid deaths? Two more relevant nuggets:
94% of Covid deaths are people who had at least one high-risk pre-existing condition (principally cancer, kidney disease, COPD, heart conditions, obesity, or a compromised immune system) (source)
81% of Covid deaths are people over the age of 65 (and 95% are over the age of 50) (source)
Taken together, this should make it clear that thinking of this as “another World War Two” is inaccurate, and a more accurate paradigm is to see it as that 10% increase in annual mortality largely (but not entirely) targeting people who were already in danger of dying.
That is still sad, of course. The tough thing for us all to accept is that this is a deadly new disease. There will be bad outcomes. There have (rarely) been deaths of people who are young and healthy. There is the potential for long-term complications.
This does present meaningful risks, dilemmas, and challenges for people who are older or have other high-risk conditions. Many of these people are still dying years before their time. By some studies, the estimate is that the average Covid death reflects a loss of 10-13 quality-adjusted life years (QALY) But we’ll dive into all of this throughout the series.
But hopefully this gives you a basic starting point. While many of these facts are out there, it can be hard to bring them together and conceptualize them properly. Even something as simple as a raw death toll shows the challenges in understanding Covid. And guess what: it only gets tougher from here.
What’s to come in this series will be looks at Covid in a historical context, risk assessment, lockdowns, masks, hospital capacity, the vaccines, and more.
As I did here, I will do my best to source any core data points or research, most (or all) of which is uncontroversial. What does get controversial is what we should do about it.
Despite what politicians tell you, there is not some easy way out where we just “follow the science” to happiness.