Relaxation of Restrictions, Part XII *Read OP For Mod Warnings*

I've not seen this amount of rubbish since the last time RTE news was on in my house. And that was Nov 2020.

Can you please quote IFR numbers to support what you say that the fatality rate of covid is several orders of magnitude greater than flu?

Also your claim that lockdowns did such an amazing job in stoping the virus … well a couple of guys from Johns Hopkins Institute tend to disagree. According to them lockdowns in Europe and US have reduced mortality by as little as 0.2% on average. Some effectiveness ffs. Lockdowns saved millions of lives? Yet another BS.

I suggest that you update your science and stop accusing people of lying. That is totally unacceptable.

great maths but so what? How is what you calculated relevant?

Exactly. Assuming that Johns Hopkins guys are correct lockdowns in Ireland have saved 13 people (6,300 x 0.2%) from dying of covid. That is at a cost of what 50 bn? Not to mention secondary deaths caused by lockdowns alone, that I’m sure someone smart will calculate sooner rather than later.

I don’t know either. It does seem like a comprehensive study to me though: https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf

Which confirms what I said that the fatality rate of covid was never several orders of magnitude greater than for flu. One order of magnitude is 10x, two orders of magnitude is 100x etc.

I’m still waiting to see a proof that it is “several orders of magnitude …”.

Astro, I’m not sure what you are trying to prove there.

There are a number of other publications that failed to find any tangible benefits of lockdowns.

https://academic.oup.com/cesifo/article/67/3/318/6199605?login=false - “I find no clear association between lockdown policies and mortality development. …The results suggest that stricter lockdown policies have not been associated with lower mortality.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33400268/ - “we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less-restrictive interventions.”

What do you define several as? Even "an" order of magnitude worse than flu for a highly transmissible disease is a pretty sh*tty situation to be in. "Several" would have most of the world already dead.

But this seems to be your latest tangent to distract from previous nonsense.

If you criticise walus and the JH study you need to remain fair.

The idea of posters that lockdowns saved many many lives is first of all an emotional one. Like OMG Bergamo! Where the media sold the idea that the army was hauling coffins by the thousands around which was nonsense and the doctors were intubating people for whom that procedure alone was enough to kill them off.

Because whether you agree with the JH numbers or not there certainly is no proof out there that lockdowns and stringent measures did save many lives. Only the word of the politicians and health officials who - guess what - prescribed those very lockdowns. And you must admit they hardly gonna make a case otherwise in hindsight. Way too much is and was at stake economically, psychologically, politically, socially so they'll remain married to that idea no matter what.

Like I said previously the only way available to us to get any idea is to look at control groups; countries that did not apply such stringent measures. And the fact remains that the outcome there didnt differ much or at all from countries with the most stringent measures. Some countries with no or less measures did worse than some countries with them and some did better than many countries with even the most stringent ones. Its a more or less random splattering, suggesting that other factors like demographics and general population health are much much more at play.

In Europe we only have Sweden and Belarus to look at AFAIK and I can't see much of a difference between their outcomes and for example ours or many others in Europe. People are very unhappy about Sweden for that very reason, for them providing a control group. And so they come out with all sorts of statistical gymnastics to prove they had x number of more deaths than others.

I have no intention of repeating the silly Sweden debate here again, but Sweden certainly did not have tens or hundreds of thousand of deaths. And if you carefully observe their age pyramid you will find they didnt have more than many many others including ourselves at all.

So if we strip away the emotional stuff what remains is maybe the idea that lockdowns were the prudent choice but that's about all there is. And if we take the aforementioned economical, psychological, political and social fallout into account then the onus of proof that lockdowns did indeed save many many lives and was all worth it is IMHO certainly on those who imposed lockdowns not on those who question them. But of course that will never happen.

I have been accused of lying, and am yet to see a proof of that. It seems that it is ok for people to accuse others of lying without providing any evidence to support that. That is not ok. And that is all I’m arguing - these are not lies, these are facts. Mortality rate is only one of the examples that I decided to argue on as a matter of principle.

They are already looking to take out death with covid numbers from the death toll and count only those who truly died of covid. In UK reckon that the actual dearth toll will be around 12% of the total number (158k I think it is right now, so about 19k). The narrative that covid has been very deadly will fall apart shortly too.

The negative health and economic implications of lockdowns already are coming up to the surface:

• missed cancer treatments and diagnosis (millions of cancer cases went undetected globally, in US over 1m new cases were not detected in 2020)
• physical abuse cases (children an women)
• deferred treatment of many other diseases
• Organ transplants were down 70-85%
• Almost 100 m people where thrown into an extreme poverty in 2020 because of lockdowns of Western Europe and US
• 30m million people in India from middle class were thrown under the poverty line
• Bangladesh lost $3Bn of revenue and 4.1m families their income due to order's cancelation
• For roughly 370m kids around the world shutting down schools meant not getting proper food as schools meals were not available (up to 1.5B kids were shut out of education as some stage during pandemic)

Thee list of collateral damage to health and economy from lockdowns is virtually endless. The abundance of caution has its price to pay in monetary terms as well as lives as economic hardship means deaths. The lockdowns most likely caused or will cause more deaths than they have saved.

If that is what you genuinely thought, then you have wasted many countless hours tapping away on your keyboard. Trying to convince people of something they didn't believe themselves. Absolutely nuts.

You have just said

"I did not ask for a proof that covid is more deadly than flu."

Yesterday you said :

"Can you please quote IFR numbers to support what you say that the fatality rate of covid is several orders of magnitude greater than flu?"

You wrote that yesterday. Dear God man, please stop!

Right. I'll leave it there. I don't think I have seen anyone so thoroughly self own themselves so quickly. Good luck.

You’re just not understanding what he’s saying.

It’s not walus that’s looking silly in this particular exchange, and I don’t know if it’s because you’re being disingenuous or you really actually don’t understand.

And for the vaccine hounds: it doesn't matter if you are more likely to get myocarditis from covid than from a vaccine (though this is far from true in young men) since the mRNA injectables don't stop you getting Covid. So the effect is cumulative, not either-or.