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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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Replying to @GidMK
Depends surely on the width of your view. In some countries the pandemic has been very bad indeed, in others hardly seen at all. In global terms has excess mortality risen significantly ?
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Replying to @bulkbiker
The challenge is that mortality at a global level is a very crude estimate, because the reporting systems in different countries vary so widely. It would be very hard to estimate excess mortality for the entire world in any realistic way
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Replying to @GidMK
But would be a very interesting metric to look at in COVID terms don't you think? Are UK based commentators biased because we have done so badly compared to others?
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Replying to @bulkbiker
Meh, global aggregates are pretty useless for most analysis. The world is a ridiculously heterogeneous sample and it rarely makes sense to analyze all 7.5 billion of us in one metric
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As to the UK, I don't live there so I don't really know what you're talking about tbh
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Replying to @GidMK
Fair enough I still think it would be very interesting to know if 2020 had higher global mortality than 2019 or 2010 for example on a population adjusted basis.. maybe I'm simply more curious.
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