Assessing the harms of pandemic policies, not just their benefits.

A thoughtful balanced essay on managing the response to Covid-19. Here's something new to me that's really disturbing about the potential costs of the response measures we've taken.

"suspension of mass vaccination campaigns is posing a threat of resurgence of infectious diseases that kill children, modeling suggests an excess of 1.4 million deaths from tuberculosis by 2025, and a doubling of the death toll from malaria in 2020 is expected compared with 2018."

The doubled malaria deaths would be an extra ~400,000 people. Add that to the number of excess tuberculosis deaths (and let us pray that model is as bad as some of the models predicting millions of Covid-19 deaths in the U.S.), and we're up to almost 2 million excess deaths just from those two causes. Add on more from childhood infectious diseases, from delayed medical care and cancers caught too late. From suicides and domestic abuse. Future early deaths from the stress of being unemployed for a long time (iirc, 6 months of unemployment on average takes 18 months off a person's life).

All that to save how many lives? We don't actually know, I believe, and that's worrisome. And we know we've inadvertently caused thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of excess deaths from Covid-19 by not protecting nursing homes.

As I said before, what's past is past. We can't change what we've done so far, but we can change what we're doing from this point forward. It looks to me like lockdowns should be ended quickly, very strong focus should be directed toward protecting the elderly and others at heightened risk. Businesses and individuals should continue to take reasonable precautions - big fudge word there, I know!