#1 – Denial – Pretending a problem does not exist to provide artificial relief from anxiety.

Citing excess mortality without adjusting for survivorship bias.

I found this article:

Accelerated deaths and survivorship bias: The excess deaths directly attributed to COVID-19 are most likely not realized in a world without COVID-19. In other words, they are carried forward, or accelerated, from expected deaths in the future. This rate of acceleration largely depends on, firstly, the percentage of excess COVID-19 deaths, which depends on the duration and severity of the pandemic, and, secondly, the mortality risk differential in factors such as age, gender, and socio-economic status. All else being equal, accelerated deaths may bring forth lower than expected mortality rates, or “negative” excess deaths, in the future.

So they're saying that because COVID kills the most vulnerable people first, future excess deaths will be decreased as a result because so many of the vulnerable people are already dead?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Yeah, we've talked about this around here before in that if you were to just randomly kill off a million members of your elderly and vulnerable population you would be running a negative excess morbidity for years because those deaths would be missing in the future.

I believe what they're saying is that there are people out there like:

smuglord Excess Morbidity is down to 4%!

And we're like:

doomjak Even with all those deaths, Excess Morbidity is still at 4%!

Edit: This also why claims of Covid being less lethal now are bullshit when we've killed off a couple million of the people most vulnerable to it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

it's outstanding to me that they cannot understand that people who are not old now will become old later and also die earlier than they though ought to have. a permanent reduction of life span for everyone going forwards forever, not just a one off thing.

can't even get people to understand that let alone that you know there's a thing going around that makes everyone progressively more vulnerable regardless of age.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

To be totally honest, I think even excluding all the other horrible shit that ignoring Covid is going to bring along, that kids these days getting Covid once or twice year for the rest of their life seem really unlikely to live to their 30s. Like we're all pretty much playing the 'How many Covid infections does it take to kill you?' game and that's not even including the mass Immune Dysregulation that's allowing other pathogens to spread out of control, or the wild shit Climate Change is bringing out. I just deleted a whole list of shit because I was depressing myself, but it's a fucking lot. doomjak

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Just gonna leave this here.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-average-baseline?country=~USA

this-is-fine

Doing the cognitive processing of explaining it and then seeing the graph and I am flat out experiencing dread. doomjak

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I've fallen down a rabbit hole. Japan is a really good example of a country that didn't front load all their deaths at once but eventually stopped giving a shit. Even with their mask friendly culture Covid is still running wild and we can see how things are playing out at a slow drip.

rust-darkness

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-average-baseline?country=~JPN

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

doomer

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Man, this is the one that got me. What do you even say to this? What do you say to someone who does not get this? I'm truly at a loss anymore.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

yea

I'm pretty much of the opinion that 1 on 1 persuasion is very unlikely. If you wanna convince someone of something you've gotta basically hijack their echo chamber by getting them to think that what you're proposing is the popular stance. I mean, even here among folks who are at the fringes of liberalism, the vast majority are not masking or taking Covid seriously, instead just trailing months behind the actions of the mainstream libs. You've gotta create competition to the Hegemonic Culture, but that means actual organizing; Creating propaganda, coordinated posting, strategic advertising, mass slop creation, think tanks, etc. If you really wanna know what it would take, read Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer, it's basically a blueprint for hijacking a culture and it totally worked. Even though it's pretty lib, every leftist should read it because the techniques they used is the only way anything is gonna change.