“All Life-Years Matter” — On the Corona-Panic’s social and economic costs vs. Covid-deaths, an Appeal to the Pro-Panic side

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6900 words

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See previous posts: “On the Lack of high-profile opinion-leaders for the Corona Anti-Panic Side” (Feb. 20); “Wuhan-Corona vs. previous flu-waves: You’ve lived through these, unaware, many times.”

All Life-Years Matter

Short Version / Summary of Content (800 words).

(Full version, 6100 words, follows.)

Moral Premise: All human time (“life-years”) has value.

Background: To the extent the “Pro-Panic vs. Anti-Panic” debate on the 2020-21 Wuhan-Coronavirus consists of rational argument (a big qualification), the Pro-Panic side’s Achilles Heel is how easy it is to demonstrate the following Thesis: FAR more life-years are lost to the effects of the Panic and Response than to the Virus, and it’s not even close.

Problem: The concepts of “life-years” (against “lives”), and “lost life-years,” “life-years lost to the effects of the Corona-Panic and Lockdowns,” and “life-year-equivalents lost” to the same, are either not understood, or not believed, or not appreciated, by many on the Pro-Panic side. The argument, when made directly, is often less-than-compelling to Pro-Panic and Neutrals. Why?

Understanding the Pro-Panic Side: I propose two types of core member of the Pro-Panic side: The “ceteris paribus carefree Anti-Covid Crusader” and the “Terror-Virus Fanatic.” The two have different psychological approaches to the Corona Question and self-justifications for why they support the Panic. Understanding the different types of Pro-Panic partisan help us understand the difficulty in persuading people of the above (on lost-life-years). Some on the Pro-Panic side are theoretically persuadable if the idea that pursuing a Pro-Panic policy line can be “cost-free” were to be broken.

With the understanding that any argument at all is pearls-before-swine before many of the more extreme Pro-Panic partisans, but also understanding that some can be persuaded, the “lost life-years” concept could be demonstrated with data, quantified rather than relying too much on intangibles and abstractions. Doing so may help anchor the argument and allow moderates on the Pro-Panic side to think again before more damage is done.

Proposal: The dataset “Unemployment” can be used. How many jobs were lost due to the Panic, Shutdowns, Lockdowns, CoronaPanic-Recession? How many aggregate life-years does this represent? For work-life and income and social standing and social/career advancement terms, these are “lost” years. “Aggregate life-years lost to unemployment” is quantifiable and also comparable to the same calculation for “Covid” deaths. We can also roughly quantify Covid-deaths in life-years-lost terms in the same way, given that we know the age-condition profile for Corona-Deaths, to create and apples-to-apples comparison.

Discussion: The Wuhan-Corona “flu”-wave is surprisingly mild when measured in aggregate-lost-life-years, though this argument itself is often unpersuasive to emotionally committed Pro-Panickers.

On the other hand, life-years lost (and to-be-lost) to the Corona-Panic and Response often come in ways neither immediately intuitive nor ‘sexy.’ There are several categories of losses, including public health, economic, social, and fertility (the latter alone potentially swamping losses to Wuhan-Corona in lost-life-years terms and even in absolute terms).

Slightly or moderately worse health outcomes at population-scale over a period of years will, it looks certain, easily swamp ‘Covid.’ They will also be invisible. Other effects are real and important to social, political, and (dare we say) civilizational health, but can hard to calculate and so simply get dismissed. Things like frayed relationships, weakened broad social ties, delayed relationship-formation, loss of opportunities for normal life-enhancing experiences, disrupted or distorted socialization and education of children, proliferating psychological problems, worsened working-life experience for young adults, and much more.

There are some natural objections to using unemployment life-years to compare with Corona-Deaths’ social impact, we can firmly and uncontroversially calculate unemployment, which anchors the analysis and signposts the way towards some of the other losses.

Data: Employment ‘Hard’ Losses: CoronaPanic-induced unemployment, which is ongoing at severe-recession levels, swamps the effects of the Virus in terms of aggregate lost-life-years. We now have one year of data, so a Lockdown-Recession and major unemployment is not prospective or hypothetical, as it was one year ago at the cusp of the Panic. It is now observed-data. We can also calculate the ongoing aggregate-lost-worklife-years and compare them to Covid-Deaths’ aggregate lost-life-years.

Data: Employment ‘Soft‘ Losses: The ‘hard’ number of jobs lost is, in some ways, of limited value. There are also work-life ‘soft’ losses relating to lowered quality of work, and what one is able to both give and get from it, due to the shutdowns, disruptions, work-from-home regime, and general Panic atmosphere. Lowered interaction with dedicated workspaces, (theoretically) lower productivity by many, much lower (and less meaningful) contact with colleagues and other potential contacts and new professional contacts, all are theoretically quantifiable in terms of “lost-life-year-equivalents.”

Results: On “hard losses”: At least 13 million life-years have been lost, as of this writing, to Corona-Unemployment, which is several times higher than the total number of life-years lost to the Virus (2.5 to 5 million). In the latter case many of the lost life-years are to those in seriously bad health condition, e.g. dementia or late-stage cancer, so a fairer comparison would require the calculated Virus Loss to take a deflating multiplier of some kind.

Results: On “soft losses”: Adding in the effects of worsened work experiences, etc. (as proposed above), Panic Losses probably double.

This puts direct Employment-related losses from the Corona-Panic, in life-years-lost terms, at around 10x the losses from the Virus, and that is (1) before any kind of quality-of-life multiplier is applied, and (2) before longer-term second-order effects of unemployment are considered. As the recession continues and unnecessary joblessness from the effects of the Corona-Panic continues, even as the virus fades away, the ratio will also continue to increase. When all is said and done, the ratio could be 50x more employment-related lost-life-years and lost-life-year-equivalents, again before second-order effects such as slightly worse health outcomes at population scale from income losses.

Implication: The employment “life-year losses” is real and important but also demonstrative of how the Panic affects everything. Lost life-years already logged and those impending. The ratio, once one starts making similar estimates for other losses, turns out to be so lopsided that the question is not which is worse, Virus or Response (“the disease or the medicine”), but rather how many orders-of-magnitude worse the Panic will end up being than the Virus. 100x? 1000x? More?

Prediction: The Corona-Religion which burst on the scene one year ago may roll on a while longer, but real damage has been caused, and by metaphor this fiasco is an undersea earthquake of great power, which causes a tidal wave to form beneath the surface, at first only observable as a minor ripple.

Follow-on effects of the Corona-Panic in coming years, unforeseen by the Pro-Panic side’s cheerleaders in their fervor, could be a big deal. Why would the millions of core-working-age people, the primary victims of the CoronaPanic, do nothing? (A future essay will be a continuation of this thought, on the subject of “Corona and Regime Stability”).

(End of Summary / End of Short Version.)

(Below, start of Full Version.)

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“All Life-Years Matter“

An appeal to the Pro-Panic side.

If all human life is valuable, then all human time is valuable.

On the lack of high-profile opinion-leaders for the Corona Anti-Panic side: Why? Peering into “Covid” as social phenomenon

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(2500 words) (Revised/Expanded: Feb. 20, edited Feb. 21)

(TL;DR Summary, 125 words: Question: Why has Anti-Panic leadership during the ongoing Coronavirus Panic been so lacking, so apparently weak? Discussion: We can first ask, What is ‘Leadership’? There are Original-Ideas leaders and Cheerleader-leaders. Given the constant defeats-on-evidence for the Corona Pro-Panic side, why haven’t more thought-leaders of the influential ‘Cheerleader’ type spoken out, consistently and strongly, against the Corona-Panic? Answer. I don’t know, but there are several families of explanations related to social pressures. Importance of this Inquiry: I believe following this question where it leads allows us to peek into how “discourse control” works in our time, with implications beyond the “Corona-Crisis.” Hypothesis: The obvious answers to the weakness of Anti-Panic/Anti-Lockdown leadership come with censorship and social-opprobrium. I propose another, what I call herein The Cognitive Dissonance of the Corona-Cult-Defector, a condition I hypothesize is suffered from by those who “snap out of” any cult or discover deception related thereto; defectors become disoriented and ineffective.)

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Much writing on these pages in 2020 was on the Corona Question. I came to see the Anti-Panic (Anti-Lockdown) side as correct on all the main points, correct on the data, yet even so treated like Flat-Earth-ism when dealt with at all. It was strangely hard to find basic Anti-Panic positions in the news and wider discourse, but eventually much of it seeped through (usually many months after the findings, months after the ideas began to be discussed on the Anti-Panic side). We can postulate some reasons why this may have been so in the initial Panic (I mean, it was a classic mass-hysteria period with all the telltale signs). That might cover Month 1. But I wonder to ask about Month 4, Month 8, and now even reaching Month 12. Where are the major promoters of Anti-Panic material?

The Anti-Panic general position was the better “bet” all along. Of course there was uncertainty. After more data came in, it became a surer bet, and eventually it became as sure as we know anything on questions like this (it was a flu wave at the upper-end of the normal historical range for flu waves, that’s all). In other words, the Anti-Panic side won on the data. I think it had won by May 1st. After May 1st, anyone still on the Pro-Panic side was either willfully ignoring the data, or ignorant of the data and/or what it meant (in fact many were something else, they were in an emotionalized, politicized, religious mega-scale Virus-Cult).

May 1st was something like two or three months into the Panic-cycle (depending on when you choose to start the Panic). Now we are at something like the One Year mark. It’s been a strange ride…

I stopped posting on the matter. I was convinced the argument was over, the Anti-Panic side was right both factually and morally. I am still sure that will be the judgement of history.

There is so much puzzling about the whole thing. How do we account for the comfortable victory of the Anti-Panic side on the facts/data but at the same time a disastrous defeat for the Anti-Panic side in public policy? To appearances, it would seem an at-first-somewhat-shabby coalition of often-shrill Pro-Panic forces, and second-rate demagogues, was able to seize control of an entire civilization and inflict enormous damage. And not just for a few weeks or months but now one year and counting, with many of the Pro-Panic regimes signaling they are going to stay loyal to the Virus-Cult for a long time to come, a Forever War against what is now a moderate flu virus (which is of course delusional). This global fiasco is sure to provoke commentary for years to come. (The best I’ve seen recently is Edward Hadas’ “The War Against Covid-19.“)

Yes, we need answers. The whole thing seems so bizarre, really, in big-picture terms that it is guaranteed to get a large portion of the Anti-Panic side to drift into thinking the entire thing was part of a deliberate coup d’etat, or series of coups d’etat. But we don’t necessarily need such explanations.

We should ask questions like this: Who were the leaders on the Pro-Panic side? Not specific individuals per se, but types of person. When and why did they attach themselves to the Pro-Panic side? Why are there so few major-platform leaders who speak n behalf of the Anti-Panic side?

Actually, I think it would help to back up and ask some really basic questions:

What is a leader?

Let’s say a leader is one who influences others or seeks to influence others (some would-be leaders have very limited success) with some kind of agenda or plan. When speaking at the full-society level of a complex society, these are necessarily thought-leaders. And they come in many forms. There are different varieties of people who come up with their own thoughts, or who boost somebody else’s thoughts, or both.

Someone once wisely said that a true leader is not one who observes where the pack is going and rushes to the front and declares himself the “leader.” The true leader is the one out in front, getting others to follow him.

In the comments section of the Peak Stupidity blog, recently, two categories of thought-leader were proposed: “Original Ideas” thought-leaders and “Cheerleaders.” (Both “Cheerleader Leaders” and “Original-Ideas Leaders” are important and can exist in symbiosis or in opposition. Some of us have clear biases towards one type over the other and would do well to recognize the importance of the other type.)

There are plenty of Original-Ideas Leaders who areAnti-Panic. But Commenter GAnderson asks, at Peak Stupidity, the question that inspires this post: Why do there seem to be so few Corona-Anti-Panic ‘Cheerleader’ thought-leaders?

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Getting ideas out (cheerleading, if you will) is important.

Look at the current Corona-mess. If one reads Mr. Hail, Kevin Roche, Briggs (apologies to anyone I’ve left out) listen to the guy from Catholic U whose name escapes me right now, Howie Carr, etc., well, I think it’s obvious that the corona panic couldn’t be anything other than a scam- but who’s saying that nationally, with the kind of megaphone Rush had. […]

Is anyone? Carlson? To my observation none of our representatives in Congress are, yet after a year, and the evidence pointing directly to the notion that this panic is a scam, we are, at least where I live more committed to panicking than ever.

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I had written:

Against the Corona-Panic, Part XIX: Wuhan-Corona vs. previous flu waves (Sweden) quantified on near-final data for 2020: You’ve lived through these, unaware, many times

I present a Corona-Context graph. Plus corresponding data.

We see Wuhan-Corona (the right-most upswing) in the context of the past ninety years. We can now say on firm/near-final data for 2020 that there is really nothing to be particularly alarmed about — unless you are constantly alarmed.

There are a lot of lessons here, and they go some way towards giving fuel to the investigative fires of how the destructive Panic could have happened.

On the graph:

Expected: Deaths in 2020 in Sweden as a percentage of the population were expected to be 0.89% (the dotted orange line on graphs).

Actual: The year 2020, soon finishing, will end at either 0.92% or 0.93%, for an excess death range of +0.03% or +0.04% over the expected level (0.89%).

(This excess is entirely drawn from those above age 75. A calculation of the net-loss in “expected quality-life-years” associated with the Wuhan-Corona flu wave rounds to -0.00%, which means you’d have to go to the thousandths place to measure it at all — it looks likely to be as low as -0.001%; this post will leave aside this important point, but a deeper age- and condition-adjusted analysis might show Wuhan-Corona as among the milder of the distinct flu waves of our time.)

You see that 2020 shows a clear “spike.” Around half of the 2020 spike’s magnitude is itself an upward correction to the unusually mild 2019 (which was around -0.02% below the long-running baseline). (Note the worst flu year of the 2010s, 2012, was preceded by two modestly below-baseline years in 2010 and 2011.)

(Note also in the graph how the [quickly-forgotten] Swine Flu of 2009 does not show up at all in full-year mortality — the vaccination racket associated with it is another story. I doubt many gave much of any thought in the entirety of the 2010s to the 2009 Swine Flu Panic, but it was a clear harbinger of the madness of 2020. It’s funny what cycles complete themselves. Clearly there were deeper forces at work that allowed the Panic Pandemic.)

The most important finding, one which I first noticed and wrote about in April in May, is that we have firm evidence that Wuhan-Corona is an ordinary flu wave, of the kind all living adults have lived through and never noticed.

Here are all the severe flu years for 1930 to 2020. A ninety year old has lived through about twenty flu waves approximately equivalent to Wuhan-Corona. This is going to be the same in other countries.

Against the Corona-Panic, Part XVIII: Lessons from no-lockdown Belarus; mortality rise from Wuhan-Corona Flu Wave in line with previous peak flu waves; Wuhan-Corona dwarfed by effects of Soviet breakup

(2200 words)

What insights might Corona-Panic Studies get from Belarus?

Compared to Belarus, even Sweden looked like it might be overreacting.

Here is a graphical representation I’ve put together of total all-cause mortality in Belarus over the past forty years. I think the patterns speak for themselves but some commentary is included below anyway:

(Graph by E.H. Hail [Hail To You].)

Belarus’ Anti-Lockdown Regime

At a time many were embracing delusion, panic, and group-think, at a time millions began indoctrinating themselves into the Virus Cult, Belarus stayed totally open. It kept its sports leagues open, playing without missing a match, spectators and all. Nothing was closed. No masks. Nothing. This is how a visitor described it in late May:

[S]chools remain open, as do cafés, restaurants, bars, shopping malls and most outdoor events. Indeed, many thousands of people lined the streets for the annual Victory Day parade on May 9th. Belarus has struck a refreshing balance: one which has not led to a population in fear of one another.

Just like a normal flu wave. People would have had little idea anything was “going on,” if they relied entirely on lived experience. Now that the flu wave is over, none outside certain specialized occupations would have ever noticed it had ever happened, exactly as it would have been in any of our countries if this the exact same flu wave had spread in 1990, 2000, or even 2010.

The president of Belarus was defiant and stood with both feet in the anti-Panic camp in a way that was much less possible in the West. (Belarus might have a state-run media, while we have a media-run state.)

As the LockdownSkeptics corrspondent wrote in late May:

The country often referred to as the last dictatorship in Europe suddenly has more individual freedoms than virtually anywhere

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The Two Lessons of Belarus

Against the Corona-Panic, Part XVII: Tom Woods slams “Fact-Free COVID Dystopia” in fiery 45-minute speech

(1000 words)

I want to highlight an excellent talk by Tom Woods on Covid-ism and the Lockdown psychology. It is the kind of impassioned call to snap out of delusion, which, if more in public life had had the courage to make in March/April, we’d never have gotten into this.

Here is the Youtube upload of his talk (also audio link; mp3-download available):

This is worth listening to. It may also work on neutrals and softliners the pro-Panic side (but not the hardliners). I wouldn’t sell it to them in these terms, but the talk is Corona-Cult Detox, or probably better stated, deprogramming.

(See also Youtube backup version, audio only.)

Woods makes forceful and passionate points about costs that are overlooked/ignored, including about Covid-ism vs. the purpose of human life. Presented effectively and efficiently. This talk by Woods is probably more effective than anything I’ve written, especially for those who prefer the spoken word over the written. He streamlines a lot into this talk.

Tom Woods (at podium) slams the Corona-Panic and Lockdown-ism (Oct. 9, 2020)

Tom Woods denounces Lockdown-ism