@Laurie_Garrett@birdsite: @Atipico1996 > This is how Sweden’s herd immunity compares to New Zealand’s ZeroCovid in the long term. Shocking differences in excess mortality highlighting how important was to contain COVID. https://twitter.com/Atipico1996/status/1629514437253103618
Unfortunately, we'll never be free of these things. That's the problem with humans. Even if we get rid of the dumb causes of death that we have today, humanity will discover new dumb causes of death to replace the old ones.
@jeffcliff@xue I lose faith a bit in how deeply New Zealand went into negative territory here. Something is funky in the data, the first reflex is a US based "less car accident and crime during lockdown" but it just doesn't wash it could go that hard that far that fast. Something is odd here, because I do trust excess mortality more, good data pick (compared to covid deaths), but, something is funky with this data.
>sed "less car accident and crime during lockdown" but it just doesn't wash it could go that hard that far that fast.
Even just preventing young people from killing themselves / eachother ( by not having them in public schools ) is a huge win, keeping people from driving is another huge win. Auto accidents kill 100,000s per year and any reduction in driving drives those numbers down. And then there's influenza - many of the public health measures taken against covid were ineffective against covid, but *effective* against influenza. Influenza can be a major killer, though roughly an order of magnitude less than covid.
There are important discussions worth having, post-covid, in terms of reducing the impact of both public school and driving, long term, as well as eradicating influenza.