Sometimes its crazy how fast the world changes

[HomeAgain]

I was relaying a conversation I had with another parent this week to dh.  Both of our families had gone to WDW in Feb/Mar of 2020, both of our kids got incredibly sick from there with an unknown virus (that didn't present anything like Covid).  It was a crazy experience that shaped our first few months of the shutdown - and we were only prepared for what happened next because of the megathread that was going on here.  We had a leg up while the shutdowns started and we were still dealing with ds's illness. Our house was stocked with basic shelf stable foods, we had Clorox wipes, gloves, masks, disinfectant sprays....

But as I was telling dh the story, and we related other parts of that trip from hell, I dropped in the tidbit that there was a guy there who had the first verified case of Covid in the parks, who was verified to be there the same day/park we were.  And he flipped.  "I don't remember that!  There's no way!"  We both started searching for any evidence.....but you guys...it was like it was scrubbed.  Nothing we searched for brought it up.  So I thought that I'd just pull up my posts interacting with the information.

Due to a board glitch, everything I wrote from Dec 2019-April 2021 is gone.

Searching the megathread was enlightening, though.  I realized we had been searching all wrong.  I was looking for a specific date range and 'covid" or "covid-19" with "WDW", "Disney", "Orlando", or "Epcot".

30 pages into the Wuhan - Coronavirus thread and I realized nobody was calling it Covid yet.  It was "Coronavirus" "Wuhan virus" or "Chinese virus", which was surreal.  The only mentions of Covid were in sites/stories that had been updated as it went along.  Our terminology changed entirely within a short time.

It made me wonder how many other historical stories have gaps or parts that have fallen away because the terms now used are not the terms most commonly used for short periods of significance.

 

FWIW, I did find the story, at least an overview of it, by narrowing my search to only information we could have known at the time with dates the information could have become available.  It broke nearly 3 weeks after we left and made the news because the gentleman died, sadly.

[wathe]

Covid terminology did change really fast.   

Early on,  we were calling it 2019-nCOV.   I still have grand rounds notes from Feb 11, 2020, and that's the term that was in use on that date.  By March, the terminology had shifted to COVID-19.

[SKL]

It really is scary how history is rewritten.  And it happens a lot. 

[Amoret]

This topic has been getting some media attention lately. For example from The Conversation:

COVID: there’s a strong current of pandemic revisionism in the mainstream media, and it’s dangerous

[pinball]

4 hours ago, HomeAgain said:

But as I was telling dh the story, and we related other parts of that trip from hell, I dropped in the tidbit that there was a guy there who had the first verified case of Covid in the parks, who was verified to be there the same day/park we were.  And he flipped.  "I don't remember that!  There's no way!"  We both started searching for any evidence.....but you guys...it was like it was scrubbed.  Nothing we searched for brought it up.  So I thought that I'd just pull up my posts interacting with the information.

I searched “first man to die of Covid visited Disney”

Immediately got a hit

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/l-county-man-died-coronavirus-013527379.html

edited:

i meant to link the AJC article, not the yahoo:

https://www.ajc.com/news/man-dies-from-virus-less-than-weeks-after-cough-began-disney-world/ohZVKVqKs3zUr9VHrTywRL/

Edited February 23 by pinball

[kbutton]

Interesting. I know people who got sick on vacation in that timeframe, and I think they were at WDW. They got partway home and had to stop at a hotel to ride it out, IIRC.

Didn’t we also call it Sars_Cov2 or something like that?

I guess it’s important to have not only primary sources, but contemporaneously recorded primary sources.

Most history places I’ve been to do stress changing terminology, such as PW being the term before POW was used. I think it’s just more fraught in the internet age with different search methods and just more publications all sitting there electronically vs. in a cross-indexed file paper system.

[Corraleno]

16 minutes ago, Amoret said:

This topic has been getting some media attention lately. For example from The Conversation:

COVID: there’s a strong current of pandemic revisionism in the mainstream media, and it’s dangerous

This is spot on:

"It is the voices of those lost to the pandemic, of those most vulnerable to the virus, past and present, of those most affected by the debilitating effects of long COVID, and of those advocating for a pandemic response based on principles of equity, that are written out of this increasingly popular, populist and revisionist picture."

The fact that the supporters of the Great Barrington Declaration are still claiming they were right all along, despite irrefutable evidence that "herd immunity" is not achievable with this virus, is just insane. Not only were their proposals completely untenable (you can't "isolate the vulnerable" if half the population falls into that category!), we know for a fact that "letting it rip" with no mitigation measures and before vaccines were available would have collapsed the entire healthcare system and led to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, more deaths. But apparently all you have to do when you've been proven wrong is just keep insisting you were right and those other people are lying, and millions of Americans will believe you. And now these clearly failed policies are official public health policy in Florida — a few days ago the Surgeon General sent out a letter contradicting CDC advice and allowing parents to send unvaccinated children to school in the middle of a measles outbreak.

 

[KSera]

40 minutes ago, kbutton said:

Didn’t we also call it Sars_Cov2 or something like that?

Yes. SARS-CoV-2 is still the official name for the virus that causes Covid-19 (similar to how varicella zoster is the name of the virus that causes chicken pox). 

[HomeAgain]

35 minutes ago, kbutton said:

Interesting. I know people who got sick on vacation in that timeframe, and I think they were at WDW. They got partway home and had to stop at a hotel to ride it out, IIRC.

Didn’t we also call it Sars_Cov2 or something like that?

I guess it’s important to have not only primary sources, but contemporaneously recorded primary sources.

Most history places I’ve been to do stress changing terminology, such as PW being the term before POW was used. I think it’s just more fraught in the internet age with different search methods and just more publications all sitting there electronically vs. in a cross-indexed file paper system.

We did!  I forgot that one!

 

@pinball, I didn't remember until we saw the story again that he died.  DH and I searched for quite a while before finding a set of terms that worked.  I'm glad you were able to find it with the information I gave you, though, it means I did a good enough job giving you information about something you knew nothing about previously.  So, good for you on that front! 🙂

[pinball]

26 minutes ago, HomeAgain said:

I didn't remember until we saw the story again that he died

Wow, how bizarre

[wathe]

53 minutes ago, KSera said:

Yes. SARS-CoV-2 is still the official name for the virus that causes Covid-19 (similar to how varicella zoster is the name of the virus that causes chicken pox). 

Yes.

2019-nCOV was the provisional name for the virus, also called Novel Coronavirus, for a short while.  Then the scientific community settled on SARS-CoV-2 for the virus and COVID-19 for the syndrome.

Varicella-Zoster Virus (VZV) causes two different clinical syndromes: Varicella (chicken pox) and Herpes Zoster (shingles).  In this case, the syndrome names existed long before science figured out the common causal virus - hence the hyphenated name.

[Teaching3bears]

7 hours ago, wathe said:

Covid terminology did change really fast.   

Early on,  we were calling it 2019-nCOV.   I still have grand rounds notes from Feb 11, 2020, and that's the term that was in use on that date.  By March, the terminology had shifted to COVID-19.

Oh! The 19 is from 2019.  I never thought of that.  Maybe they should have changed it to 20 because everyone associated it with 2020.

[Not_a_Number]

On the topic of reevaluating the lockdowns, there's good evidence that Sweden did very well after all: 

https://reason.com/volokh/2023/01/10/no-lockdown-sweden-seemingly-tied-for-lowest-all-causes-mortality-in-oecd-since-covid-arrived/

 

It's not really revisionism to reevaluate given further data. 

[KSera]

1 hour ago, Not_a_Number said:

On the topic of reevaluating the lockdowns, there's good evidence that Sweden did very well after all

The Sweden thing really requires context, as it's not what many people like to make it out to be. Sweden did not implement required mitigations as strict as its neighbors. It did however have many suggestions, and studies show that people were pretty cooperative with those things voluntarily. They social distanced, wore masks, and mobile phone data showed they stayed home at rates similar to neighboring countries. Sweden has a more community-minded culture than the US, and it's hard to imagine it would have played out the same way here. It was supposed to be that these voluntary measures (and some enforced--such as mask requirements in certain health settings) would protect the vulnerable, but they didn't. The elderly in particular paid a very high price there in the first year of the pandemic. They died at a high rate, and those deemed unlikely to survive often received only palliative care because the hospitals were too full. The excess death rate in subsequent years is better than many other countries, but had they protected their elderly better, perhaps many, many more of them could have lived that first year as well.

Quote

In an exchange on 14 and 15 March with the head of Finland's public health agency, Tegnell speculated that "one point would be to keep schools open to reach herd immunity faster." When the Finnish colleague said models suggested closing schools would decrease infection rates among the elderly by 10%, Tegnell replied: "Ten percent might be worth it?"

 

Edited February 24 by KSera

[Corraleno]

1 hour ago, Not_a_Number said:

On the topic of reevaluating the lockdowns, there's good evidence that Sweden did very well after all: 

https://reason.com/volokh/2023/01/10/no-lockdown-sweden-seemingly-tied-for-lowest-all-causes-mortality-in-oecd-since-covid-arrived/

 

It's not really revisionism to reevaluate given further data. 

That's a really frustrating article, because so many critical details have been left out. He admits that Sweden's covid death rate was higher than Norway's, without mentioning that it was actually more than double Norway's (and nearly double Denmark's), and then says that the total excess death rates were the same for both countries, as if that proves Sweden's so-called "no lockdown" policy (which in itself is kind of deceptive) was the superior approach. But he doesn't provide any information at all about the causes of non-covid excess deaths in either country — what caused the "excess deaths" among Norwegians who didn't die of covid? What were their ages and what year did they die? What other causes of death went down as well as up, and how did those parameters change over the course of the last 4 years?

If Sweden killed off a higher percentage of their elderly in 2020, then you'd expect that deaths from illnesses that normally kill old people would go down in subsequent years, because there were fewer people left to die of those. Protecting the elderly from covid also tends to protect them from flu, RSV, and other contagious diseases — did rates of those also go down in Norway in 2020, which would be expected to lead to an increase in elderly deaths in 2021-2023?

There's no question that Sweden's approach led to higher covid death rates compared to other Scandinavian countries, and trying to disguise that by averaging together four years of total deaths from all causes, in a way that implies they all "even out" in the end — while failing to disclose who was dying, when, and of what — seems purposely deceptive. I suspect that if you drill down into details here, it would become apparent that the conclusion is less "lockdowns don't work" and more "you can avoid lockdowns if you're willing to shorten the lives of a lot of old people by 2-3 years." I wonder if the families of all the people who died in Swedish nursing homes in 2020, who might otherwise have lived for a few more years, think that was a worthwhile trade-off? Especially since it turned out that this sacrifice had no real economic benefit — in the end, Sweden was no better off economically than Norway.

Also, as KSera mentioned, portraying the Swedish response as if it was a no lockdown, no holds barred free-for-all really distorts the situation there. For example, although they kept elementary schools open, they did close secondary schools and colleges, and many people voluntarily stayed home, masked, distanced, etc. But I have no doubt that articles like this will end up all over social media as proof that the Great Barrington supporters were right all along and this would have worked just as well in the US, without any acknowledgment of the VAST differences in culture, demographics, overall population health, rates of masking and vaccination, etc.

 

[Ausmumof3]

Changing the name to Covid helped it sound more friendly and people accepted getting infected more readily I think.

Our brains aren’t really made for the amount of information we get now so they do weird pruning I think.

My kids were just commenting the other day how if a future society discovers us and can’t figure out how to power up our devices they might think we were actually illiterate. More survives from the days of stone carving than papyrus and digital is another step.

[HomeAgain]

5 hours ago, Ausmumof3 said:

My kids were just commenting the other day how if a future society discovers us and can’t figure out how to power up our devices they might think we were actually illiterate. More survives from the days of stone carving than papyrus and digital is another step.

At that point we can only hope that the plethora of science fiction from the 50s and 60s continues to exist.  😄 DS is reading Fahrenheit 451 this year.  IIRC, many of our current devices are written about in a possible form within the story.  A little clunky, but a little eerie.  The first time I saw the Robotic Hound in person I nearly flipped, and screens are integral into their homes already - something thought about in 1953 and put into practice by the 2000s.

[DawnM]

It is interesting.

I have a coworker who visited Italy summer of 2019 and came back so sick they almost put her on a ventilator.   We do wonder if it was Covid before there was actual Covid.

[maize]

7 hours ago, Ausmumof3 said:

 

My kids were just commenting the other day how if a future society discovers us and can’t figure out how to power up our devices they might think we were actually illiterate. More survives from the days of stone carving than papyrus and digital is another step.

The devices themselves are readily identifiable as too complex to have been produced by an illiterate society though. It should be clear to anyone following a scientific approach to archeology that data was being analyzed and transmitted on a large scale for our technology to be as advanced as it is. For a human society, that requires literacy. Alien societies...who knows. I'm going to presume these future archeologists are human though.

[HomeAgain]

6 minutes ago, maize said:

The devices themselves are readily identifiable as too complex to have been produced by an illiterate society though. It should be clear to anyone following a scientific approach to archeology that data was being analyzed and transmitted on a large scale for our technology to be as advanced as it is. For a human society, that requires literacy. Alien societies...who knows. I'm going to presume these future archeologists are human though.

It does bring up an interesting point as to what a divided society would look like: those who can program the machines for a functionally illiterate society and those who use them as consumers.

It's not something that historians have considered out of reach for periods of post-Roman society or rural, serfdom-driven economies.  Depending on how things progress over the next centuries, would be not be an adequate hypothesis of 2020, where people looked like they just didn't understand directives and safety measures?

[Not_a_Number]

I don't want to restart a giant debate, but for me personally, the fact that the excess deaths are lower makes up my mind. Lockdowns have such immense costs that they need to at least decrease excess deaths if they're to justify themselves. If they don't do even that, I would never again support them. 

I was very pro-lockdown at the time. I look around right now, and the lockdowns did incredible harm to the fabric of every community I'm a part of. The homeschooling community in NYC hasn't recovered yet. I've been doing a lot of work to make it lively again and it's hard. 

As for voluntary stuff, absolutely. What I'd like to see in some utopian world I don't live in is the level of trust that results in people actually following public health guidelines without lockdowns. I'd want people to be very careful in vulnerable places, masks to be distributed, all sorts of stuff that would decrease virus transmission. 

But lockdowns again? I'll take a pass. 

Edited February 24 by Not_a_Number

[kbutton]

2 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

What I'd like to see in some utopian world I don't live in is the level of trust that results in people actually following public health guidelines without lockdowns. I'd want people to be very careful in vulnerable places, masks to be distributed, all sorts of stuff that would decrease virus transmission.

Part of the reason for the lockdowns is that we didn’t have masks yet. There wasn’t even the option to behave like Sweden.

Many people were also not willing to get tested locally until home tests were widespread because they didn’t want to be part of contact tracing. They wouldn’t mask except when mandated, and even then often not. 

None of that sounds like Sweden for an apples to apples comparison.

[KSera]

17 minutes ago, kbutton said:

Part of the reason for the lockdowns is that we didn’t have masks yet. There wasn’t even the option to behave like Sweden.

I also think "lockdown" itself is a misnomer. China had lockdowns. We had something different. Mostly varying degrees of stay home orders in the very beginning, but nothing as extreme as a lockdown. I could still go out in my car and drive around and go to the grocery store. The time period where things were mostly closed wasn't really all that long.

2 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

I don't want to restart a giant debate, but for me personally, the fact that the excess deaths are lower makes up my mind. Lockdowns have such immense costs that they need to at least decrease excess deaths if they're to justify themselves.

As mentioned above "lower" is up for debate. For example, here's a comparison of excess deaths in Sweden, Norway, Australia and the US. I picked Australia specifically because Australia is the example of what happened when they prioritized protecting people until they had vaccines. Obviously Australia has geography that made that easier to do (once they go through their initial waves). Sweden's not looking superior to me here, except to the US, which had large swaths of the country that resisted covid reduction measures and a large anti-vax sentiment. Sweden's current excess death rate is remaining higher than it is in many other countries.

 

That all said, when people say that the excess deaths are "worth it," I always have to think they are saying so under the (likely subconscious) assumption that it's not going to be themself or their kids that are dying to make it worth it to everyone else. It's the same dynamic that I think underlies most people not caring about covid anymore despite the data being really clear at this point that the risk of long term health impacts and disability is high. There's no way people wouldn't care if they actually thought *they* were going to be the ones disabled by it. They assume that's going to be other people (because they're too healthy, fit, eat right, work hard, never get sick, etc etc) and it just doesn't faze people if they feel confident they and their own kids are going to be fine (and by the time people find out they were wrong, it's too late--like all the sad stories of people begging for the covid vaccine before being put on the ventilator and subsequently dying).

[Corraleno]

3 hours ago, KSera said:

 

 

That all said, when people say that the excess deaths are "worth it," I always have to think they are saying so under the (likely subconscious) assumption that it's not going to be themself or their kids that are dying to make it worth it to everyone else. It's the same dynamic that I think underlies most people not caring about covid anymore despite the data being really clear at this point that the risk of long term health impacts and disability is high. There's no way people wouldn't care if they actually thought *they* were going to be the ones disabled by it. They assume that's going to be other people (because they're too healthy, fit, eat right, work hard, never get sick, etc etc) and it just doesn't faze people if they feel confident they and their own kids are going to be fine (and by the time people find out they were wrong, it's too late--like all the sad stories of people begging for the covid vaccine before being put on the ventilator and subsequently dying).

As that chart shows, there was a huge difference between Norway and Sweden in excess deaths in 2020 and early 2021, when Norway took a much stricter approach to covid. And then that big spike in Norway's excess deaths in late 2021/early 2022 occurs after Norway dropped all covid restrictions. They had a higher death rate from Omicron than Sweden did, but at that point neither had any mitigation measures in place. Norway had a large drop in deaths from non-covid respiratory infections in 2020 and 2021, and then an increase in deaths from the usual illnesses that old people die of, like heart disease and cancer (e.g. 22% higher than normal deaths from cardio-vascular disease in 2022).

One of the articles that was pushing the Sweden-was-right narrative said that since excess deaths worked out about the same in the long run, Norway just "postponed deaths" rather than preventing them. But isn't that entirely the point of medical care for the elderly??? Do doctors tell anyone over 65 "There's a treatment available that can likely extend your life by 2-3 years, but you're old and you're going to die anyway, so you might as well die now"? My stepmother had cancer treatment in her 80s and enjoyed another four years of life, during which she got to meet two more great-grandchildren. Those years were most definitely worth it to her.

One article stated that Norway spent more money on the pandemic than Sweden did, so were those extra years of life really worth the extra millions that Norway spent? That gets closer to what the real issue is, but it's also a bit deceptive, because Norway and Sweden also took very different economic approaches, with Norway opting for upfront payments to businesses and workers, while Sweden's approach involved more things like deferring taxes. And in the end, "GDP dropped by approximately the same amount in 2020 in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, and had recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the second quarter of 2021." (source)

So what it basically comes down to is: "Is it worth letting a bunch of mostly old people die a few years early so that others are not inconvenienced by the measures taken to protect them?" Of course, the people who happily answer yes to that question generally assume they are not part of the group that gets sacrificed. And Americans who point to what they see as the "success" of the Swedish approach ignore the fact that a much higher percentage of the US population is at risk through obesity, diabetes, CVD, etc., and are far less willing than Swedes to take voluntary measures. Sweden and other Nordic countries were also in a far better position to move work and education online with existing systems, while the US scrambled to throw things together and ended up with a huge dysfunctional mess. And Sweden has a very different healthcare system — they never had totally overwhelmed hospitals and refrigerated trucks full of dead bodies, which the US had even with restrictions. 

Sweden and the US are just not remotely comparable, and anyone who thinks that telling Americans to just "do the right thing" voluntarily would have worked as well here as in Sweden is just delusional. The valuable lessons we can learn from Sweden and apply to future pandemics aren't about "letting it rip," they're about universal healthcare, universal access to high speed internet, an education system that can easily transition to online as needed, job flexibility to work from home, and a population that actually cares about the common good instead of only caring about themselves. Without those things, letting it rip in the US would have left us looking more like Peru than Sweden.

Edited February 24 by Corraleno

[bookbard]

I also think people blame lockdowns for things when they should be blaming Covid for things. Covid itself wreaked havoc in people's lives. And to be honest, it still is. Not only leading to massive numbers of orphans, but just wrecking people's health. I can't believe the number of friends, younger than me, who now have chronic conditions due to Covid. It's been far more damaging than lockdowns. And I believe the studies that are coming out at the moment about lockdowns (especially in Melbourne, Australia, which had a lot of them) are finding that they didn't lead to enormous issues for most people - and in fact didn't have any lasting issues with education, either. 

Of course, you can't extrapolate Australia to the USA, especially New York. What an awful time that was. 

[KSera]

1 hour ago, bookbard said:

I also think people blame lockdowns for things when they should be blaming Covid for things.

Agree 100% with this. You can’t go through a pandemic and have it have zero effect on society and when the disease is one like Covid that has far-reaching affects on people’s mental and physical health, it’s hard to separate which of the impacts are just direct consequences of the disease. We know that mental health difficulties go way up after a Covid infection for example. People can’t still be blaming “lockdowns” for that, particularly this far out when no one is even really taking precautions. It’s been frustrating throughout to see people blame lockdowns for increased suicide rates in young people when the data is actually really clear that suicide rates among young people went down when schools were closed and went right back up again when schools went back in session (the seasonality with the school year pre-dates the pandemic).