>There is a COVID-19 virus; however, COVID is not more dangerous than all other flu-like viruses that impact the respiratory system. COVID-19 is very manageable and doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate.
COVID-19 has a fatality rate between 1 and 10%[1]. The variation is mostly due to testing - the places with the higher rate are under testing.
The flu has a death rate around 0.1% in the US - although that overestimate it because most people who get the flu are never tested and don't report it[2].
The flu is also much less contagious than COVID-19. Influenza has a R0 of between 0.9 and 2.8 (for the 1928 Pandemic stream). COVID-19 is between 3 and 6[3].
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
[2] https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu...
There's a whole slew of reasons why even 1% estimate is bullshit. Consider this: median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US all-age life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year. Now granted, expectancy is a mean, not a median, but you get my point.
1% CFR means 3.3 million deaths in the US alone if everyone gets it, which everyone eventually will, and which exceeds even the most ridiculous estimates from March of this year by a factor of 1.5, and is quite obviously not going to happen.
It's also ridiculously difficult to track down this median age number for the US, by the way. I wonder why that is.
That's before we even consider how the US has 760 deaths per million, and the likes of Iran or Russia (which have nowhere near the medicine the US has) report one half and one third that correspondingly.
So yes, C19 quite obviously has substantially higher CFR than the flu, but 9 months in nobody has any idea as to how much higher. Anyone who says otherwise is selling you something.
You are confusing life expectancy at birth of 78.9 for life expectancy at age 78 of 0.9, that's not correct. Life expectancy at age 78 is 9.43 years for males, 10.98 years for females.
Again, it is more dangerous than the flu. But nobody knows by how much, and nobody is even trying to find out as far as I can tell. Seems like a crucial question that needs to be answered, no?
This argument makes a lot more sense than your previous one.
> nobody is even trying to find out as far as I can tell.
As someone who has friends who have been working on this for months, I can assure you this is absolutely not true. There must be tens of thousands working on it, since the people I know are members of a group approaching 100.
Two of the big problems I hear about are:
Different interventions make modelling the effective reproduction number difficult, since this gets altered so much by the interventions
Different tests have different false positive (and false negative) rates and it is really hard to find out what test is used in which jurisdiction (and even harder to find that out historically).
It's not some big conspiracy. It's more that everyone Excel files are in different formats... sigh.
This argument is nonsense.
Say there was a person with a gun, who pulled people out of a crowd, made sure their median age was 78, and then shot all of them. Approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year.
The death rate is important.
> and the likes of Iran or Russia (which have nowhere near the medicine the US has) report one half and one third that correspondingly.
I assume you actually do realise why this is, right? Places are doing hard lockdowns and it is working.
> It's also ridiculously difficult to track down this median age number for the US, by the way. I wonder why that is.
Do you mean the median COVID death age?
The CDC is publishing this which should help: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Ag...
Not sure what you are implying by "I wonder why that is"
Russia isn't doing "hard" lockdowns. I know because I have relatives there. Schools are open. Airlines are flying. Where there are restrictions, they are pretty mild.
For that matter Sweden, which has _no_ lockdowns still has 150 deaths per million less than the United States. Italy, which had severe lockdowns, has a comparable number of deaths per million (from which it follows lockdowns aren't "working" as well as you imply unless you catch the spread very early and are able to close the borders a-la NZ).
The difference is mostly how deaths are counted, not the CFR per se. If you only count people dying of COVID as a primary cause, you get Russia/Iran number. If you count people run over by a bus who also had COVID, you get the US rate. Which one is better is up for debate, the point is you can't compare if you don't count the same way, nor can you even tell the CFR accurately if you count deaths where COVID was merely present, but did not cause the death per se.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
The link you posted is for case fatality rates. Those are essentially meaningless because so many infections are never counted as official cases.
I don't think you can get infection fatality rates for flu, since it is so low (and so many infected people are never tested) but feel free to provide them
They have whole posts like https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/13/steve-cortes.... Of course, this just isn't a thing![1] But people seem to believe it is because it is presented as fact.
I guess they (or you) will argue they just pass along false rumours and that isn't their fault. But if they claim to be something that deserves any kind of protection against deplatforming then surely they can't just be a spam mill?
People spreading falsehoods deserve limited protection IMHO.
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-there-were-not-9500...
Nobody deserves special protection from "deplatforming"[0] from the government; giving the government the ability to say "you must carry this speech" is just as tyrannical as giving them the right to say "you must not carry this speech". If one has the freedom to speak and associate, one must also have the freedom to be silent and disassociate.
[0] It's amazing how many people who've been "cancelled" or "deplatformed" continue to tell me so on the internet. One can't help but wonder how effective this so-called deplatforming really is.
Don't we do exactly that with the phone company and the post office?
Neither allows you to target millions of gullible targets almost for free.
So the general rule is that the government can override one's right to free association, but that the government needs a compelling reason to do so. This is the basis for very important civil rights rulings, as the courts have overridden one's ability to refuse service based on various protected characteristics. The question is, does speech and speech alone rise to this standard? In a few cases yes, but in general no.
The rationale for phone companies is that they're classified as "Common Carriers", a concept that comes from common law. A common carrier is a regulatory concept that places certain obligations on service providers (typically transit companies) in exchange for the right to sell to the general public. This has never been a mandatory thing, private and contract carriers have always existed in parallel with common carriers, but if you want to sell to the public directly without drawing up a contract per client one has to be a common carrier. Telephone companies fall under this common carrier distinction largely because they must connect with each other; it's pretty much impossible to create the equivalent of a "contract carrier" in the telephone space, since they're only useful when interconnected.
You'll note that your ISP is not actually a common carrier, as the FCC reversed its stance in 2017. Technically speaking there is no legal requirement that your ISP carry any speech disagrees with, even though from a marketing standpoint that would be a disaster. Given that we haven't regulated ISPs as common carriers, despite the relative lack of competition in this area, there is no clear legal rationale for the government to regulate hosting providers as common carriers. They don't sell to the general public, you in fact actually sign a one-off contract to work with them, and the end consumer has a dizzying array of options for hosting providers in the case of bad behavior by one. Any attempt by the government to force a host like Wordpress to carry speech would be both an unnecessary attempted expansion of government power, but would probably crash and burn in the courts almost immediately.
Quite fair.
As to the rest of it: I agree with your description of how things work, but I don't think it really addresses the point I was trying to make which (made more explicit and construed narrowly) is that we need to be more precise about the situation before we say "compelling carriage of speech is tyranny".