Saturday, February 5, 2022

The Plural Of Bullsh*t Is Not "Research Study"

 

When Wassamatta U. beats John-Hopkins at anything,
it's a measure of how far the mighty have fallen.











By now, somewhere on the 'net, you've probably seen someone, somewhere (perhaps here), make reference to the Johns-Hopkins economic study that purports to show that "COVID lockdowns had no impact on COVID mortality". And in 99.9999% of all instances, whoever was blogging or reporting on it did so in the vein of "Aha! J'accuse! I told you it was all a bunch of horseshit!"

If you saw/heard/read anything to the contrary in regard to the study, raise your hand.









Everybody with me so far? Good.

Now, for the benefit of the TL;DR crowd, and Common Core grads in the audience, we will provide a summary of what I'm about to tell you about this "study", just like they do in the extract:












Still with me? Great. Now, to the fisking, wherein we illuminate why we just said that, and why it is so.

1) The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

This phenomenon was coined into the lexicon in a well-known lecture by the late Michael Crichton. The guy who graduated Harvard Medical School, went to Hollywood instead, and went on to become an author, screenwriter, director, and science lecturer, who gave you everything from Westworld to Jurassic Park, and at one point simultaneously had the number one best-selling book, number one TV show, and number one movie in the world, all at the same time. He was a true renaissance man, gifted in a host of fields of endeavor, not least of which, the ability to make science understandable and relevant to all, simultaneously educating you while holding your interest and entertaining. That's some world-class multi-tasking. But I digress.

 "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray [Gell-Mann]'s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.  

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means "untruthful in one part, untruthful in all". But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."

Why does this apply here?

Because this is the same Johns-Hopkins many of you, and likely 100% of the people pointing to this craptastic survey with sh*t-eating grins, have railed your asses off against, with levels of bitching, whining, and moaning that dogs could hear in space, for their  dashboard of COVID cases and casualties, a tally which no small number of you (I've seen you say it) think must actually be somewhere between 1 and 0, worldwide, from 2019-five minutes ago, worldwide, inclusive.

So which is it, kids? Are they all a bunch of world-class frauds and liars, all in on the conspiracy? Or earnest researchers speaking truth to power? You can't have it both ways here, and many of you are world-class cynics about pointy-headed academia, but when it tickles your confirmation bias, you become a busload of whores dogpiling a $20 bill blowing by on the day your supplier has a fresh batch of crack on offer.

50-yard penalty, and loss of possession.

2) The Economics Department? Why Not The Volleyball Coaches?














This is a study purporting to examine the medical effectiveness of lockdowns. By economists. Do you also consult your bank tellers for medical advice? Get your stock tips from your barber? That's a Gropy Dopey Biden level of dumbassery, right there.

If we wanted to know the economic effects of the lockdowns (like hundreds of businesses that went out of business didn't make that trip a total waste of time), these would be the guys to call. For medical efficacy, not so much. But if it's all just numbers, why not Bill James and the stat crunchers from ESPN? Hell, it's Black History Month: Why not get those black cleaning ladies from Hidden Figures? Or call math whiz Evita Guevara-Castro? Or Heidi Fleiss and the Mayflower Madam? Anybody that can run hookers in Manhattan and L.A. must have a head for numbers, right? (Or was it numbers for head? Sorry, I couldn't help myself there.)

While you're up, you may as well tune in to The View and ABCNNBCBS for news of the world and how things really are. Get ChuckU Schumer on the line and ask him for advice about the Second Amendment. Call Whoopi Goldberg to explain the Holocaust to you. Consult Marie Antoinette about bread distribution to the peasantry. Consult the German safety analysis on hydrogen-lifted airships. Ask Biden and the Pentagon whiz kids about the best way to evacuate and abandon a country. That's stupider than all the anchors at all the networks, plus the NYTimes, combined.

That obvious lack of any expertise or credibility alone should be enough torpedoes beneath the water line to sink the Yamato, let alone this silly-assed report. But wait! There's MOAR!

3) Wet Streets Cause Rain.

Funny Crichton should mention that. They were studying how lockdowns affect COVID mortality.

For those with memories shorter than your wedding tackle, here's a funny thing: the lockdowns weren't instituted to "decrease COVID mortality". You could look it up.

Here, let me jog your flagging memories. Fill in the blank:

"Two weeks to make less people die from COVID.."

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzztttt! WRONG! Hey, thanks for playing, but wait right there, and we'll have a lifetime supply of COVID vaxx, and a scorching case of herpes for you.

Try "Two weeks to SLOW. THE. SPREAD."

It doesn't matter that it did no such thing, and worked about as well as a screen door on a submarine, the point remains that lockdowns weren't instituted to keep people from dying from COVID AT ALL. They were instituted to keep people from dying from COVID ALL AT THE SAME TIME. By spreading the outbreak over weeks, rather than days, and delaying its spread from ports of entry to the hinterlands. 

(Nota bene that any city with a large Chinese expat (Chinatown) population did notably worse, initially. All those people crowing about how well FL, or Iowa, or Montana did: got a big Chinatown in Miami, do ya? Or Des Moines? Or Missoula? Or BFE? No?!? Color me shocked. Boston, NYFC, Frisco, Seattle, L.A.: all screwed, from the get-go. This virus came from where, again?)

File this under: Duh! Spreading is how a viral outbreaks become pandemics. And with the original strain of COVID, the death rate was always going to be what it was going to be: 1-5% historically, with 3% as the no-shit dead-on balls average, since ever. Ten to fifty times worse than common flu, but two to ninety times better than Ebola, for reference. (And I'm telling you experientially and anecdotally, subsequent strains of Kung Flu aren't even in the same ballpark as the initial one. Which probably has more to do with milder infections than the not-a-vaxxes ever did, just like with every other virus in history, AFAIK.)

If 10,000 people got the initial strain of Kung Flu, no matter when they got it, 100-500 of them were going to die. A minimum of 9,500 of them, and a maximum of 9900 of them would live. Staying at home wouldn't make them healthier, FFS. The very concept that one thing could affect the other is idiotic.

The whole point of the exercise was to make sure that Friendly Acres Mega Hospital didn't get all 500 of the sickest of the sick all in the same week.

Trying to flip the study around to see whether or not lockdowns did something they were never intended nor instituted to do is asinine, recockulous, and fucktarded. And I'm soft-soaping how jackassically moronic the very idea is, by orders of magnitude. It's like studying whether parachutes prevent plane crashes. It's asking how fast the brakes make your car go. It's looking at whether trains go faster if the conductor is right-handed or left-handed. If Gilligan, Goober, Larry, his brother Daryl, and his other brother Daryl all came up with this study, it still wouldn't be as fucking retarded as this.

(The fact that the lockdowns were extended and expanded wholly as an excuse and a means to steal an election in plain sight, and institute a bloodless coup, bears no small amount of the rationale for their continuance, either, but is beyond the scope of the moment.)

And yet, this jackassical farce of a topic is EXACTLY what they set out to study, on purpose, and we're only up to the opening introduction.

Only 60 more pages of this abominable bullshit to go. We've tortured you (and ourselves) enough for one day. You'd already be demonstrably dumber just reading the introduction to the paper in question, and doubtless can hardly wait to dig into the meat and bones of the rest of this enormous offal souffle. 









And we will continue. Just not today.



25 comments:

kurt9 said...

Its generally recognized that most scientific "research" is bogus these days. I believe about 40-50% of all published research in the hard sciences cannot be replicated. For medical, its like 70-80%. Essentially all published works in the soft fields cannot be replicated at all (e.g. its all made-up BS).

Anonymous said...

1) I don't see the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect at work; I see gloating at an Established Narrative primary source dining on some crow.

2) It's a statistical meta-study. Any group of competent statisticians could evaluate the data. So maybe the baseball coaches.

3) That is a good point nobody seems to get, and all you really needed to say.

;-)

Aesop said...

It's amnesia. Person after person is taking this at face value, as if it means something.

Steve the Boomer said...

Oh, FFS!

It was two weeks to flatten the curve. Yes, the intent was to keep the hospitals from being swamped, but if you were paying attention, nothing remotely close to the dire predictions actually came to pass. NYFC had a surge, but ended up not needing the temporary hospital at all, nor the hospital ship.

Chicago rushed a VA center at boatloads of money, and converted McCormick Place (a convention center) into a hospital, and ended up only using 30-some beds. A couple million fiat-bux a pop. Not because the hospitals lacked space, but to put a fig leaf on the expenditure.

I get that maybe you were busy for a while, but most of the country saw zippety-doo-dah, including, and maybe especially those areas smart enough to not fall for the government's sky is falling routine yet again. The CDC has had to walk back pretty much everything they've ever said about this. Though if you bother to click on their internal journal at the bottom of their page, you will see they have plausible deniability all in line.

Based on some of your posts, it seems you would not give a lot of credence to government propaganda, but obviously you do.

The Overgrown Hobbit said...

Eh, JH is an institution and a the researchers in it a mixed bag.

At one point they had a group of researchers going into the records of child deaths of Covid (at the time it was something like 300) and couldn't find one that where the poor kid was not already about the to croak from leukemia or something similar. Was the Fauciflu the proverbial last straw? Was the test one of those where they cranked the cycles to "papaya"? We'll never know because they stopped the project.

Also whot Anon. said about #3

Keep in mind that #1 is because every Rachel Maddow and Joe Biden ran around screaming that you had to stay home to avoid killing grandma. Just like they said you cannot spread the disease if you take the almost-a-vax. Just like they still claim that muzzling kindergartners in fabric face rags keeps 'em from spreading the disease. 🙄

It's just a handy lie-breaker.

For Pete's sake just ask anyone what the "curve" represents and what good "flattening" it does.

Break your heart.

And also yeah, amnesia. They'll tell you to your face that no-one ever said the clown-shots would stop the disease.

ruralcounsel said...

"It doesn't matter that it did no such thing, and worked about as well as a screen door on a submarine,"

So they were right? The lockdowns had minimal medical impact but created horrendous economic turmoil. Sounds like you agree with Johns Hopkins.

Anonymous said...

It has value in shoving it back down the covidiots' throats. Never mind that all the other ideas and studies and plans they implemented were guaranteed to have no positive impact, we were all told "shut up because Johns-Hopkins" or "shut up because Harvard".

It also feels like (I know, feels...) they could be looking for a way to back away from the ledge and maintain something that looks like credibility after blowing it so conclusively for two years. That and President * needs a way to distract from this so his party doesn't get BTFO in November.

And yes, it is confirmation bias, for those of us who said it was all bunk from the word go. If our rulers really WERE interested in "slowing the spread" they would have done everything differently -- starting with the old folks' homes.

The problem with lockdowns and travel bans is that they need to be in place before you know there's a virus about. And I left my time machine in my other pants.

Aesop said...

Folks, I point you to this excerpt of the OP:

"Because this is the same Johns-Hopkins many of you, and likely 100% of the people pointing to this craptastic survey with sh*t-eating grins, have railed your asses off against, with levels of bitching, whining, and moaning that dogs could hear in space, for their dashboard of COVID cases and casualties, a tally which no small number of you (I've seen you say it) think must actually be somewhere between 1 and 0, worldwide, from 2019-five minutes ago, worldwide, inclusive."

Because Steve the Boomer has just bellied up to the bar and said "Yeah, that's me."

Steve, explain to the class how "flatten the curve" = "make COVID less deadly" (which is impossible, btw), rather than "slow the spread" (which is entirely do-able). The two concepts are not interchangeable in English, so I want to see how you get from A to Q.

Steve has also forgotten that the hospital ships were expressly for non-COVID medical problems, which were suddenly in short supply once everyone figured out a trip to the hospital could include getting COVID.
Steve has also completely forgotten they sent the other hospital ship to L.A. for the same purpose, and with the same result: Hospitals weren't crying for more regular capacity, they were crying for more COVID beds, but the Navy at the time not being total jackasses, wisely realized that they had no isolation facilities on board either USNS Comfort nor USNS Mercy, and a they were not built to be full-ship isolation wards, both ships beat a hasty retreat when they realized they would soon, through a lack of ability to test patients for COVID before accepting them, become floating plague-bombs, infecting the entire ship's company and embarked medical staff, and they GTFO'ed both ports in some haste, at a surface speed sufficient to tow water skiers.

Steve has also forgotten that was exactly what happened in NYFC even in land-based facilities, and in which NYFC had a wee bit worse than "a surge", when despite specific instruction to send non-COVID patients to Javits Center, which had been set up as a non-COVID overflow hospital, the idiots in charge there sent full-blown COVID patients instead, contaminating the entire facility, which wasn't built as a bio-outbreak isolation center, and forced them to completely change focus, and become nothing but a COVID hospital. Exactly as I suggested ought to be done in impacted cities from the outset, which made it inevitable that government and the assclowns in charge of the response would do exactly the opposite, until Reality kicked the shit out them, like it always does.

Having one of those pud-short memories, we invite him to refresh his hazy recollections, and look it up:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/08/opinions/javits-centers-covid-19-hospital-iscol/index.html

Thanks for stepping up and being the exact low-information poster child I was writing about, to prove I wasn't making this stuff up to make a point.

Aesop said...

@ruralcounsel,

No, they weren't "right", they're fucked in the head.
They didn't say the lockdowns didn't slow the spread, they said <>COVID mortality wasn't decreased by lockdowns".

In other news, parachutes don't stop plane crashes, and better brakes don't make your car go faster, just two more among an infinite possible number of non-sequitur illogical bullshit nobody could ever be "right" about.

I didn't think I was unclear on that point, but maybe I soft-soaped the level of utter imbecility involved or required to think the end justifies the means in this case.

Furthermore, the lockdowns had tremendous medical impact, some beneficial, and some detrimental, but absolutely none of which did, nor could ever, decrease the mortality of any virus.

The very idea is farcically ludicrous, and the sort of thing only a thorough-going moron, or an academic economist (but I repeat myself) would ever express out loud, opining on topics and causations entirely beyond both their expertise, and manifestly beyond their basic ability to comprehend.

This survey makes Gilligan look like Einstein by contrast. It's that bassackwards and retarded.

It's on the level of a total witless moron asking if brown cows give chocolate milk, and then getting a grant to study the question.
The only persons dumber than the authors would have to be the person(s) doing the funding.

Aesop said...

@Anonymous 8:28A,

It has value as rose fertilizer, or maybe hog feed.
It's nothing but total bullshit coming and going, and anyone who thinks to use it as a weapon should enjoy the singular pleasure of his own stupidity in having it blow up in his face.

It wasn't "all bunk from the word go".
The virus was real, the deaths were real, and the pandemic was real. I bagged and tagged the bodies, and treated the hacking hordes, in COVID hell, for months on end.
Anybody who thinks that was imaginary is a fucking idiot, or a total moron.
There's no way to soften that blow. They are on the level of Flat Earthers and people who think they're potatoes. They range from mere assholes, to dangerous assholes, and most should be lifetime locked down in a facility with soft music, soft beds, soft food, and soft walls.

That said, this all morphed rather quickly from a legitimate pandemic, to an exercise in totalitarian wet dreams run amok, in service of a bloodless coup, and attempted genocide.

Kind of like how 9/11 was morphed into the Patriot Act et al, and turned liberty into a surveillance state that would have given Laurentiy Beria and his Cheka woodies that would have lasted for their entire lives.

Anonymous said...

I'm Anonymous at 8:28A. Allow me to clarify what I was saying was bunk.

>>It wasn't "all bunk from the word go".
The virus was real, the deaths were real, and the pandemic was real. I bagged and tagged the bodies, and treated the hacking hordes, in COVID hell, for months on end.
Anybody who thinks that was imaginary is a fucking idiot, or a total moron<<

The response was the part that was bunk. We had a real virus, we had a real outbreak. We even had a pandemic. What we didn't have was the end of the world as we know it.

That said, the idea that a lockdown was going to do any good at slowing the spread of a respiratory virus was, in my opinion, fanciful. I don't know that it's ever worked in history. Lord knows I couldn't find any evidence.

So the JH study proves that something nobody claimed was going to happen didn't happen. Yawn. Every "expert" and "study" that supported the totalitarian wet dreams of the ruling class was used as a hammer to silence anyone who had a think and said "Surely there's a better way than destroying the entire world to beat back a virus?"

But no. The Chinese propaganda mills started churning out videos of people dropping dead mid-sentence from the coof and it was off to the races.

THAT was the bunk. The "experts" lying from October 2019 onward about literally everything, whether they did it because they assumed we morons couldn't handle the truth, or because they had more sinister motives is irrelevant. The Chinese knew in October-November 2019 that they had a human-human transmissible SARS variant on their hands, and instead of containing it in Wuhan, they deliberately spread it all over the world while lying their asses off.

And our government knew from the beginning they were doing it and they said nothing. Why? Who knows. Kompromat? Graft? Doesn't matter.

Every government at every level failed. Maybe we should look in to why?

Aesop said...

@Anon,

100% agreement.
On target.
Repeat.

Jim Wetzel said...

"For those with memories shorter than your wedding tackle ... "

No need to hurt my feelings, dammit! You must-a been talkin' to my wife.

Steve the Boomer said...

---Steve, explain to the class how "flatten the curve" = "make COVID less deadly"

What does that have to do with the claim that the selling point was not "flatten the curve"? No one who was paying attention thought it had anything to do with reducing lethality.

--Steve has also forgotten that the hospital ships were expressly for non-COVID medical problems

According to Navy Times, who might have a bit more of a clue about how the Navy ship was deployed, ( https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2020/04/30/hospital-ship-comfort-departs-nyc-having-treated-fewer-than-200-patients/ )

"The ship arrived in New York’s Pier 90 exactly one month ago with the mission of accepting non-coronavirus patients to alleviate the burden on local hospitals, but a minimal number of patients admitted during the first week prompted officials to modify the ship’s mission."

...


"By the time of Comfort’s departure, the approximately 1,200-person crew and 1,000-bed hospital had treated just 182 patients, of which approximately 70 percent had COVID-19, according to Capt. Patrick Amersbach, commanding officer of the Comfort’s Medical Treatment Facility."

--Steve has also forgotten that was exactly what happened in NYFC even in land-based facilities, and in which NYFC had a wee bit worse than "a surge", when despite specific instruction to send non-COVID patients to Javits Center, which had been set up as a non-COVID overflow hospital, the idiots in charge there sent full-blown COVID patients instead, contaminating the entire facility, which wasn't built as a bio-outbreak isolation center, and forced them to completely change focus, and become nothing but a COVID hospital.

Again, nice try. Check what someone from that same side of the country had to say about it back at the time: ( https://nypost.com/2020/04/09/usns-comfort-and-javits-center-mostly-empty-amid-coronavirus/ )

The USNS Comfort and the Javits Center field hospital remain practically empty of COVID-19 patients as both Department of Defense-run facilities strictly manage intake while getting up to speed — to the frustration of medical staffers at swamped city emergency rooms.

The Navy-manned, 500-bed Comfort, which docked last week on the city’s West Side — and was this week reconfigured to take high-severity coronavirus cases — has just over 60 patients, Navy officials said Thursday.

And the Army-manned, 1,000-bed Javits Center field hospital — now serving lower-severity COVID-19 cases — had only 225 patients, officials said Thursday.

Batting zero there, Aesop. Not that I really fault you for it, being on the other side of the country and working 36 hours a day. Some of us had the time to follow it a little more closely, and don't feel the need to go to CNN's OPINION page to find out what their opinion of Trump was...

Aesop said...

Steve,

1) Read this part real slowly:

"Flatten the curve" is why the mandates and lockdowns were instituted.
"Make COVID less deadly" is what the "study" claims to be studying.
One has nothing to do with the other, in fact never could, which is why the entire premise of the "study" is asinine before they even started out. Maybe you missed this point the 20 times I made it.

2) When you pull a quote from Navy Times (which, btw, is published now by the USAToday people, not the Navy - in case this is news to you - and they know as much about why the Navy does things as they know about a wild bear's ass), which you cannot comprehend, maybe you should stop trying so hard.
"...with the mission of accepting non-coronavirus patients..."
The word "mission" in that sentence is what brighter folks call an "indicator".
So, exactly as I told you, the ships were deployed to not take any COVID patients, because they weren't designed to handle bio-warfare isolation cases.
And then:
"...By the time of Comfort’s departure, the approximately 1,200-person crew and 1,000-bed hospital had treated just 182 patients, of which approximately 70 percent had COVID-19..."
Let me help you out Steve; comprehension isn't your strong suit.
After the authorities sent the ship COVID-infected patients, which they were neither tasked with nor equipped to handle, and did so seven times out of every ten, the Navy told the ship that TPTB in NYFC were too fucking stupid to be in charge of pouring piss out of a boot, and ordered Comfort to GTFO of NYFC Harbor, before the COVIDiots infected the 2200 crew and staff, due to shared spaces, shared air handling, and a dearth of sufficient PPE to deal with infectious disease patients, rather than with ordinary hospital patients, as was announced and intended, and which exact outbreak would have taken Comfort out of action indefinitely, and required the entire ship to be decontaminated for weeks before it could be returned to active service.
Yet again, exactly as I told you happened. Why did sussing that out from what you just linked prove so difficult for you to grasp?

3) And then, you step all over your dick with cleats on missing the exact same point about the Army-run Javits center Hospital:
"The USNS Comfort and the Javits Center field hospital remain practically empty of COVID-19 patients as both Department of Defense-run facilities strictly manage intake while getting up to speed..." because if you'd read a paragraph of the story I linked to, they were neither designed, equipped, trained, nor expected to be COVID facilities - say it with me again: exactly as I told you.

And the money quote, which you blew right by along with the entire point of everything else: "to the frustration of medical staffers at swamped city emergency rooms."

So, your source just kicked your ass, on the notion that things in NYFC hospitals were barely used, and were, in fact, just a wee bit beyond "busy".
Exactly like I told you.

It pains me to ask, but maybe you could tap your head, and see if it's turned on?

You just quoted two stories that verified exactly what I told you, multiple times, and over there in Opposite World, you're totally unable to figure that out, and think you got this right all along.

I can pass along information, which can be readily verified.
But I cannot help you get your GED, starting with repeating basic English comprehension from the 3rd grade onwards. It's simply beyond the scope of this blog.

Tucanae Services said...

Re: Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Yes its an observation worth noting. It can also be negated.

The charge is if I read one article in a publication that is BS then it is all BS. Lets use the NYT for an example. Yeah most everything from page A-1 to section D-34 is probably BS. But then I turn to the Sports page and read its the rams vs bengals, or read the last OTB results. Do I discount that? No. I can verify it multiple ways as to authenticity of results.

By the way, want something close to reality from a legacy news source? Read the last 3 paragraphs. (but even treat that with a grain of salt) That is probably as close as one can get to knowing what is going on. They damn well know most folks never get past the first paragraph let alone the end of the article. (and their lawyers demand some truth just to set up plausible deniability.) Oh and throw out the opinion section since none of that requires the truth.

Aesop said...

There's always truth in the state-owned rags: they tell you who TPTB hate today.

GuardDuck said...

Flattening the curve was the original stated reason for the lock down. Since Trump stated he wanted to open the country by Easter, that generally changed to 'keeping grandma alive'.

Hence opposition to the lockdowns was attacked as 'wanting to kill people'.

That means the general idea of the lockdowns, by the public since that time, was indeed to save lives.

Aesop said...

Show your work.
Conflating imaginary reasons and excuses into "what the public thought", and hand-waving, are neither evidence nor proof.

You don't get to leap from Trump, to the MSM jackasses, to Gov. Retard (for any 40 values of that person), and roll them into a nice neat ball of shit, and call it good.
It won't fly, and it's why this "study" is still outright bullshit.

Nobody was locked down "to lower COVID mortality".
One can have no effect whatsoever on the other.
Unless you literally put the entire country on solitary confinement, forever.
No one did that, anywhere, ever, nor ever would.
Transmogrifying the original rationale is as stupid as surveying for it.
It's like judging the value of electric light by whether or not it heats your home, when it was never intended to do so.
Just because you look at that, doesn't make it scientifically valid, or any less asinine.

We will get to "lockdowns" per the economists in this pile of shit presently.

GuardDuck said...

Ah. So you never saw the news leading with the daily COVID death numbers. Got it.

ruralcounsel said...

So your hypothesis is that the lockdowns were to flatten the curve and keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, and not to lower covid mortality, right? That only idiots thought overall covid mortality could be changed, hospitals or not.

Ignoring the fact that the lockdowns should have then ended after a few weeks ...

So that means hospital availability had no impact on overall covid mortality. In other words, the hospitals were useless. They killed people just as fast as if they hadn't been there.

So apparently we destroyed the economy with long duration lockdowns just to keep hospital staff from being too tired and overwhelmed. Sorry, but I don't think the general public cares that much about doctors, nurses, or other medical staff. Especially if the same number of people are going to die anyway. The public was sold on the lockdown approach by telling them it would reduce the deaths. Now that may be bad science, but it was the public policy that was sold to the public.


And yes, I believe that the authorities would love to put us all in permanent lockdown. We are so much easier to control and "manage" that way. Just like inmates in a prison.

Aesop said...

@GuardDuck,

Explain the correlation between what the news leads with, and what the lockdowns were put in place to accomplish.

Then explain how staying home makes COVID less deadly.
Show your work.
Continual pointing to non-sequiturs isn't making the case for anything but a lack of understanding on your part.

Aesop said...

"So your hypothesis is that the lockdowns were to flatten the curve and keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, and not to lower covid mortality, right?"
No, not a hypothesis, a common-sensical truth, and a historical fact. If you think you can lower COVID mortality with a lockdown (short of putting the entire world into solitary confinement forever), show your work, and explain how you would accomplish it. I'll wait while you work that one out.

"That only idiots thought overall covid mortality could be changed, hospitals or not."
If you didn't know that next step was a reductio ad absurdum fallacy, you should have. 20 yard penalty, and loss of down.
Hospitals are how you only have a 1-5% mortality rate from corona viruses.
Getting rid of hospitals (any number of ways) is a great way to turn that into a 20-50% mortality, and pile on by having everyone die from everything else, too. Well-played, but ham-fisted. You should know better.

Ignoring the fact that the lockdowns should have then ended after a few weeks ...
Precisely as we said, on this very blog, at the time, nearly two years ago. IIRC, that we should have ended that crap by Memorial Day 2020, at the latest.

So that means hospital availability had no impact on overall covid mortality. In other words, the hospitals were useless. They killed people just as fast as if they hadn't been there.
Once you've latched onto a fallacy like a terrier on a rat, you don't let go, do you?
That's a safety. 2 points against you, and you're kicking off.

So apparently we destroyed the economy with long duration lockdowns just to keep hospital staff from being too tired and overwhelmed. Sorry, but I don't think the general public cares that much about doctors, nurses, or other medical staff.
No, the economy was destroyed because once they realized the potential to steal an election, paltry problems like massive unemployment and the destruction of the economy (the thing that Trump was mowing their asses with 24/7/365, via the greatest economic boom in US history) was serendipitous collateral damage and an unimaginable boon to those bootstrapping their entire long-game strategy on continuing it.

Especially if the same number of people are going to die anyway.
Three strikes at the same fallacy. Destroying the entire health care system is great way to make a bad situation worse. Your argument is that after the plane crashes, and you're in the life raft, you might as well slash that too, and just tie an anchor to your feet. Personal foul - unsportsmanlike conduct. Forfeiture of possession.

The public was sold on the lockdown approach by telling them it would reduce the deaths. Now that may be bad science, but it was the public policy that was sold to the public.
1) No, it wasn't.
"Flatten the curve"≠"nobody dies".
"Flatten the curve" ≠ "fewer people die".
"Flatten the curve" = "fewer people die all at once".
QED

2) Pics of this alleged sale, or it never happened. Anything the media said doesn't count.
Which governor or president said "If only we make everyone stay home, very few people will die from COVID." It was sold to spread out the impact and keep caseload to a manageable number, to keep from crashing healthcare. It wasn't instituted to keep people from getting sick, which necessarily entails a non-negotiable number of them dying. Just not all in the same week.
(cont.)

Aesop said...


(cont.)
3) The public who thought this are idiots. Not because it's bad science. Because it's nonsensical and mentally retarded. If you wish to argue that "the public" are retarded, I concede. And I win again. Anyone falling for such complete bullshit would trade the family cow for "magic" beans. For real.

Q.:If only 100 people get seriously sick in a week, and 3 die, the mortality is 3%. If 100,000 people get seriously sick, and 3000 die, the mortality is what percent?

Bonus Q.: Which of the above would be worse for hospitals?

Now, for the silver tuna Bonus: If you lose all the hospitals, and everyone seriously sick dies, including all the ones we normally save despite car accidents, heart attacks, strokes, shootings, stabbings, falls, etc., which of the three outcomes would be the worst for society?

And yes, I believe that the authorities would love to put us all in permanent lockdown. We are so much easier to control and "manage" that way. Just like inmates in a prison.
D'accord, monsieur. They tried, and they keep on trying.

Aesop said...

If this concept is really kicking anyone's ass, now, or anytime since February of 2020, I suggest you google "flatten the curve", and look at "Images".

https://www.google.com/search?q=flatten+the+curve&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwijsN31yvD1AhWhKzQIHXNXCOUQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=flatten+the+curve&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQDFDSClipPWDYUGgAcAB4BIABiQKIAeojkgEHMC4xMi4xMZgBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1nsAEAwAEB&sclient=img&ei=JqICYqOFHKHX0PEP866hqA4

We'll wait, while you see if it rings any bells.

The lives to be saved were not going to be those saved from COVID deaths.
They were the people who wouldn't die because there was no healthcare at all left to treat anydamnedthing else, either.

If you missed that memo, didn't understand that concept, or thought that lockdowns were going to magically make COVID-19 less lethal, and being called "stupid" bothers you, you have my sincerest condolences for the imprint of a 2x4 on the backside of your head, and the resultant goose-egg, dizziness, and stinging sensation afterwards.