The key issue with the Great Barrington Declaration and similar efforts was never about the policy per se, it was the absurd pretence that we could have enormous COVID-19 outbreaks without cost
This was clearly never true
We had more than sufficient evidence by mid-2020 (and earlier) that large COVID-19 outbreaks come with an associated cost. People desperately wanted this to be untrue, despite the very clear reality
And so we got all this obvious misinformation, like the idea that the whole pandemic was just down to false positive results, or that we were all already immune to COVID-19 anyway
If these efforts had consisted of honest, reasonable arguments about whether government restrictions were the best path forward based on the data at hand, we would've been having very different conversations for the last 6-12 months
Instead, over and over again, we've had to spend countless hours fighting over basic facts, because the denialists would rather pretend that there was no pandemic than face reality and the difficult trade-offs that entails
It is totally acceptable to say "the pandemic is bad but I think there will be greater harms from government action". I might disagree, it's complex, but that's a totally defensible position
Instead, most denialists have just said "the pandemic isn't bad"
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A very interesting paper on global excess mortality during COVID-19 from @hippopedoid
"...suggests that the world’s COVID-19 death toll may be at least 1.6 times higher than the reported number of confirmed deaths" medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
Basically, they predicted excess mortality based on previous years using a linear forecast, and capturing seasonal and other variation in mortality
This came up with some very interesting results. For example, here are the excess mortality curves for Australia/New Zealand with #ZeroCovid
At first glance, it appears to be a randomized controlled trial comparing calcifediol (vitamin D metabolite) to a control for severe COVID-19 with amazing outcomes (60% mortality reduction 👀)
3/n So, if you only glance at the abstract, you get the picture of an amazing positive result for vitamin D
But reading further, the problems start almost immediately
A lot of people have been talking about it, so I thought I might do a bit of a thread on plausible reasons for the decline in COVID-19 cases in places where behaviour hasn't changed much recently 1/n
2/n The basic background is that there are some places across the world where there hasn't been a reportedly huge behavioural change since Nov/Dec last year where cases are dropping, sometimes quite quickly
So what's causing this?
3/n The explanation proposed by some has been that these places have reached "herd immunity", essentially a threshold where enough people have been infected and recovered such that the disease can no longer spread
This stuff is fascinating. Pay to low-income workers would increase by $509 billion under the bill, but the CBO has assumed that this is a fixed system and that higher wages -> higher prices -> less spending -> fewer jobs
Even more interesting is when you really dig into the weeds. For example, half of all those 'lost' jobs are estimated to be from teens working at the minimum wage
This is a problem that is quite easily solvable. In Australia we have age-adjusted minimum wages for precisely this reason
Always remember the Golden Rule of international comparisons: the most common explanation for a difference between two places is to do with DATA COLLECTION
For example, maternal mortality. Commonly used as a proxy for the wellbeing of a healthcare system
Also, notoriously complex to measure. Here's some examples from the UK, US, and Australia on the measurement
And those are just the top-line statements! The true divergence between the recording across healthcare systems can be massive, because everything from death certificates to doctors' training differs