I don't think everything on here is fact. Not trying to argue per se, but if you're trying to outline "what we know" it needs to be pretty strict on what is and isn't absolutely true. motivations are hard to make facts out of, and that's mostly where I'd raise the flag.
The original fatality rate estimates were all over the place, but wayyyyyy back early March of '20 the much-maligned (incorrectly, in my opinion) Imperial College put out a paper that had an IFR of 0.6% for the US, based on our demographics. It also broke down IFR by age group. I've seen several subsequent papers that make that a pretty dang good prediction for the initial variant. The transmissibility estimates were also good - if you're saying how does it transmit (aerosol, touch, whatever) I think a lot of that was just wtf mass chaos of research trying to figure it out.
One thing I learned when I was digging into stuff at the beginning of the pandemic was that you could fill books with things we don't know about everyday diseases like flu and seasonal colds...questions like, how transmissible is it, how many people are actually immune, how often do we get reinfected by the same virus, how long does immunity last, how does flu actually spread. it was pretty eye-opening. So I think you should also extend at least some grace to genuine not knowing on some of the contradicting early information. The other thing that contributed to the chaos was the sheer volume of research being done - a lot of it by people who are not experts in that field. there was so much money available for research that anyone with a PhD in almost any subject was researching, and the volume overwhelmed journals, which lead to a ton of pre-prints being out there before review, which lead to many retractions, which lead to more confusion.
I agree that politicization began from the left. It was disheartening, actually.. a stark contrast to how the country came together after 9/11 for example.
I would really contest item 4. I just don't think this comports with the facts at all. This is one of those social media filter things, that depending on where you look you get an extremely different perspective. the signal to noise ratio of research publications as above contributed a lot to this. What's more, effective therapeutics were identified (dexamethosone, for example) and care got better as people got more experience with the disease, so I'm not sure the narrative is even directionally correct. There were tens of thousands of studies done on all kinds of therapeutics.
Item 6 is again moving the locus of power way too far into the hands of politicians. I think there was some element of the "noble lie" going on, but there is again also a genuine element of unknowing. The efficacy claim was what was measured, it isn't a lie to report it. What was part of the "noble lie" was not also saying that we didn't know how long that would last - because we didn't know very much about immunity vs coronaviruses. So more of a lie of omission than a lie about facts.
Sometime around item 7 is where things become a false dichotomy. The vaccine was never tested to prevent PCR positive nose swabs. This was just a complete mismanagement and poor messaging by the CDC etc - we should never have been counting cases that way. Early on, maybe, because you're trying to halt general spread, but later it was just nonsense and led to sensationalist reporting. Too easy to make if it bleeds it leads headlines from it. The other thing that matters is that the virus did mutate, and that did make the vaccine less effective at preventing minor illness. So this doesn't show the vaccine never worked, or that the 95% finding was wrong. It shows that it worked differently against a different virus. It also gave us some understanding of how long the protection lasted - just like we learned over time how long protection from infection lasted.
A big part of the problem with 7 is that the public's perception of how well vaccines work is skewed by vaccines like measles and polio, and most people don't know how effective vaccines in general are at preventing infection and illness (most don't prevent infection, most aren't 99% effective, and so on). I know I was completely ignorant of those things because it never mattered before. And politicians I think played into that ignorance to some extent with the messaging, which backfired spectacularly.
I think item 8 is more explained by ineptitude and a general belief in the illusion of control than anything else. people in government felt like they had to do something, so they tried something, anything. in the end lockdowns etc probably did delay the spread, but the economic and human cost was incredibly high. the facts about the efficacy of the lockdown measures can be established, but the motivations are less absolute.
I think items 9-10 are very fair.
Ironically a big part of the lack of trust comes from a kind of paradox of trusting the CDC and FDA too much before this. Prior to covid I think most Americans would have given both of those institutions very very high scores in credibility and reliability. Too high, to be frank. But people have a incredibly high degree of trust in the FDA that's well earned, largely. We don't worry about food and medicines being crappy in this country. So when we needed them, and they couldn't answer what seem like the most basic of questions, it shattered the illusion. Because people are what they are, the perception way overcorrected to the other side, so now you have people that think the CDC and FDA are utterly incompetent and suck at everything. That's just as wrong as the former view, I think. They're actually pretty good at what they do, with certain areas where they are exceptionally good, and certain areas where they're bad, and a bunch of stuff in the middle.
There's also a kind of bitter irony in that President Trump spent a good chunk of his campaign and presidency deliberately sowing distrust in the federal government. Rightly or wrongly, when he needed people to come together and listen to federal institutions, it felt hypocritical (even if the FDA and CDC weren't the organizations he was originally talking about as the swamp). When you spend years telling everyone not to trust anything in DC, it shouldn't be surprising when people don't. I do think a different president, like a Reagan, could have guided us through this with a very different outcome. Maybe not from a statistics perspective, but definitely from a cultural one.
A lot of the disconnects we have even on these two posts link directly back to these last two paragraphs.
Really good post, thanks.
The original fatality rate estimates were all over the place, but wayyyyyy back early March of '20 the much-maligned (incorrectly, in my opinion) Imperial College put out a paper that had an IFR of 0.6% for the US, based on our demographics. It also broke down IFR by age group. I've seen several subsequent papers that make that a pretty dang good prediction for the initial variant. The transmissibility estimates were also good - if you're saying how does it transmit (aerosol, touch, whatever) I think a lot of that was just wtf mass chaos of research trying to figure it out.
One thing I learned when I was digging into stuff at the beginning of the pandemic was that you could fill books with things we don't know about everyday diseases like flu and seasonal colds...questions like, how transmissible is it, how many people are actually immune, how often do we get reinfected by the same virus, how long does immunity last, how does flu actually spread. it was pretty eye-opening. So I think you should also extend at least some grace to genuine not knowing on some of the contradicting early information. The other thing that contributed to the chaos was the sheer volume of research being done - a lot of it by people who are not experts in that field. there was so much money available for research that anyone with a PhD in almost any subject was researching, and the volume overwhelmed journals, which lead to a ton of pre-prints being out there before review, which lead to many retractions, which lead to more confusion.
I agree that politicization began from the left. It was disheartening, actually.. a stark contrast to how the country came together after 9/11 for example.
I would really contest item 4. I just don't think this comports with the facts at all. This is one of those social media filter things, that depending on where you look you get an extremely different perspective. the signal to noise ratio of research publications as above contributed a lot to this. What's more, effective therapeutics were identified (dexamethosone, for example) and care got better as people got more experience with the disease, so I'm not sure the narrative is even directionally correct. There were tens of thousands of studies done on all kinds of therapeutics.
Item 6 is again moving the locus of power way too far into the hands of politicians. I think there was some element of the "noble lie" going on, but there is again also a genuine element of unknowing. The efficacy claim was what was measured, it isn't a lie to report it. What was part of the "noble lie" was not also saying that we didn't know how long that would last - because we didn't know very much about immunity vs coronaviruses. So more of a lie of omission than a lie about facts.
Sometime around item 7 is where things become a false dichotomy. The vaccine was never tested to prevent PCR positive nose swabs. This was just a complete mismanagement and poor messaging by the CDC etc - we should never have been counting cases that way. Early on, maybe, because you're trying to halt general spread, but later it was just nonsense and led to sensationalist reporting. Too easy to make if it bleeds it leads headlines from it. The other thing that matters is that the virus did mutate, and that did make the vaccine less effective at preventing minor illness. So this doesn't show the vaccine never worked, or that the 95% finding was wrong. It shows that it worked differently against a different virus. It also gave us some understanding of how long the protection lasted - just like we learned over time how long protection from infection lasted.
A big part of the problem with 7 is that the public's perception of how well vaccines work is skewed by vaccines like measles and polio, and most people don't know how effective vaccines in general are at preventing infection and illness (most don't prevent infection, most aren't 99% effective, and so on). I know I was completely ignorant of those things because it never mattered before. And politicians I think played into that ignorance to some extent with the messaging, which backfired spectacularly.
I think item 8 is more explained by ineptitude and a general belief in the illusion of control than anything else. people in government felt like they had to do something, so they tried something, anything. in the end lockdowns etc probably did delay the spread, but the economic and human cost was incredibly high. the facts about the efficacy of the lockdown measures can be established, but the motivations are less absolute.
I think items 9-10 are very fair.
Ironically a big part of the lack of trust comes from a kind of paradox of trusting the CDC and FDA too much before this. Prior to covid I think most Americans would have given both of those institutions very very high scores in credibility and reliability. Too high, to be frank. But people have a incredibly high degree of trust in the FDA that's well earned, largely. We don't worry about food and medicines being crappy in this country. So when we needed them, and they couldn't answer what seem like the most basic of questions, it shattered the illusion. Because people are what they are, the perception way overcorrected to the other side, so now you have people that think the CDC and FDA are utterly incompetent and suck at everything. That's just as wrong as the former view, I think. They're actually pretty good at what they do, with certain areas where they are exceptionally good, and certain areas where they're bad, and a bunch of stuff in the middle.
There's also a kind of bitter irony in that President Trump spent a good chunk of his campaign and presidency deliberately sowing distrust in the federal government. Rightly or wrongly, when he needed people to come together and listen to federal institutions, it felt hypocritical (even if the FDA and CDC weren't the organizations he was originally talking about as the swamp). When you spend years telling everyone not to trust anything in DC, it shouldn't be surprising when people don't. I do think a different president, like a Reagan, could have guided us through this with a very different outcome. Maybe not from a statistics perspective, but definitely from a cultural one.
A lot of the disconnects we have even on these two posts link directly back to these last two paragraphs.
Really good post, thanks.
