If the explanation you imply here (COVID deaths are just misclassified deaths that would have happened anyway) were true, then we’d see the overall all-cause death rate holding steady, as COVID-classified deaths replace other deaths and cause heart attacks etc to drop. In fact, we see the opposite - all cause mortality has risen substantially, even more than the COVID-classified deaths account for. In uncontrolled outbreaks like Spain, Italy, New York early this year we saw the death rate more than double. In controlled outbreaks like we have in the US now, it’s more like a 10-20% increase. Either way, it’s clear the COVID is causing a significant number of additional deaths.
I don’t deny that COVID has caused deaths, I am just stating that a huge chunk of these so-called COVID deaths are not. Excess mortality is real, I agree (altho not solely due to COVID obviously).
I believe that lockdown policies worsen COVID-19 mortality. Severe COVID-19 is an immunoregulatory disorder, and lack of vit d / nitric oxide, lack of exercise/sleep, unwarranted fear/anxiety, lack of socialization all make the immune system incapable of regulating itself properly.
So I believe we would have less COVID death amortized over a year without lockdown. Look at New York’s absurd mortality rate, it’s worse than having done nothing. (NY was iatrogenic harm from early invasive ventilation which in retrospect was a horrible idea, plus lockdown depriving people of sunlight and exercise, plus Cuomo’s famous nursing home gambit)
+1 to __blockcipher__ 's points. Maybe in the beginning draconian measures might have been justified, but current panic over cases (casedemic) and continuing moral panic and lockdowns are not.
BTW, since there's not a good place to make this point, I wish more people understood that IFR is not this fixed thing. As a contrived example, if you get medical advancements that lead to half your population living to 200 years old, even the most pathetic common cold virus would appear to have a crazy high IFR.
I live in California, and every year our misguided leaders let wood and dry brush stack up like crazy. Every year wildfires erupt and every year we artificially suppress them. The result is there's a huge pile of fuel just waiting to go up.
Similarly, when you have a minor flu season for a couple years, you get a large population of elderly people that build up and are capable of being taken out by a pathogen like SARS-2.
SARS-2 already, even with the inflated death toll, is weak enough overall that we'd have barely noticed it (in our day-to-day lives) if we'd never knew it existed. But go back a few centuries to when it was rare to have people live past 60, and it would literally be an unnoticeable virus.
