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There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

economist.com

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Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#51

Post by khazhoux »

This has me a bit confused: I look at the stats on cases and deaths per capita across various U.S. states, including California (which was very locked down, at least in theory) and Florida (which was flippant towards risks of contagion), and many states in between. The per capita cases+deaths are nearly identical across many states with very different approaches. This left me really wondering which measures were and weren't necessary. Anyone seen good studies or analysis on this?

Legitimate question, please no political commentary.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#53

Post by ergot_vacation »

hedora wrote: post #11

The earth’s population is 7.9b, so the excess deaths are 0.1% of the population. COVID’s mortality rate is about 0.5%, so roughly 1/5 of the population has has had it (or died of other related things, like starvation in developing countries due to the lockdown stopping food harvests in California). Currently, 1.45b doses of a vaccine have been administered, so about as many people have had the vaccine (partially, at…

Thanks for summing up the relevant numbers, it's helpful in putting all this in context.

.1% isn't nothing, but it isn't really a disaster either. The Black Death was 30-50% of the population in Europe. The "Spanish" Flu of 1918 killed about .64% of the US population. Things could still get worse of course. But barring that, and considering the absolute disaster that Covid has revealed our political system and interlocking health and government bureaucracies to be, I think we got off lucky. If this had been a "real" plague, of the kind humanity has faced repeatedly in the past (and has been expected for some time now), we would have been totally and utterly screwed.

Will this serve as a wake-up call? For the most part, probably not. The best we can hope for is that some of the new thinking and systems created for this situation will still be around when the other shoe drops and we really, really need them.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#54

Post by School-Cotton »

timmg wrote: post #27
msbarnett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is excess mortality, as in “above what would be expected in a normal year based on demographics”. So, if looking at historical trends and the current demographics as compared with those trends we had a prior expectation of your 1%, then what we we actually observed is 1.17%.

Yeah, I get that. I guess I just mean that the worst pandemic of the last 100 years and (so far) it's maybe 17% deaths over the baseline. That feels kinda low.

Is it actually worse than the flu pandemics in the 50s and 60s?

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#55

Post by MattGaiser »

rossdavidh wrote: post #43

If you're talking about a 7 billion population, the deaths of which will vary from year to year, this seems like a number in the noise range which would be very hard to distinguish from background variation. If everyone of the 7b people lived 100 years, we would expect about 70 million deaths a year, and we know they don't live 100 years on average. Any reasonable range of assumptions puts this in the range of too-sm…

Deaths don't actually vary that much year to year. Increase/decrease over time? Yes. Swing by 10 million in a year? No.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-deaths-b...

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#56

Post by mattnewton »

khazhoux wrote: post #51

This has me a bit confused: I look at the stats on cases and deaths per capita across various U.S. states, including California (which was very locked down, at least in theory) and Florida (which was flippant towards risks of contagion), and many states in between. The per capita cases+deaths are nearly identical across many states with very different approaches. This left me really wondering which measures were and…

I don’t have anything to add except that California is huge and very unevenly applied “lockdown” - there are many towns a where businesses remained open or reopened frequently, but the big cities did have large shelter in place efforts. It would be interesting to compare on the municipal level if the data was that granular.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#57

Post by kortilla »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #41

Please don’t look at 7m-13m number and compare it to 7 billion population and say oh it’s only 0.1-0.2%. Pretty much ever country has seen a 15-20% increase in excess mortality rates (20% more people dying than averages in the past), this is huge. This is one of the best up to date visualizations on this topic, scroll down and see breakdowns by country - https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...

“Huge” is very relative. 20% increase of a number that is very low by historical standards is still really low.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#58

Post by MauroIksem »

wyager wrote: post #24
hedora wrote: post #11

The earth’s population is 7.9b, so the excess deaths are 0.1% of the population. COVID’s mortality rate is about 0.5%, so roughly 1/5 of the population has has had it (or died of other related things, like starvation in developing countries due to the lockdown stopping food harvests in California). Currently, 1.45b doses of a vaccine have been administered, so about as many people have had the vaccine (partially, at…

Neither mortality rate nor vaccine administration rate are uniform. The mortality rate is much lower than 0.5% in e.g. people under 60 years old, and people who are in high-risk groups are mostly already vaccinated. The effective mortality rate today is probably at least an order of magnitude lower, maybe two. Edit: To whoever is downvoting this - you are not only wrong, but hilariously directionally wrong, and in a…

This is literally just your opinion and you have zero to base this on. Stop spreading misinformation.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#59

Post by Rexxar »

0x0 wrote: post #7

"Our apologies. An error seems to have occurred. We’ve logged this error. Contact us if this issue persists." ...

"Funnily" the error appears after the page has started to display correctly and doesn't appear if you block the correct anti-adblock script that erase the correct page and replace the content by a fake technical error message.

I find this behavior quite disgusting and sadly seen it on many sites.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#60

Post by todfox »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #33
sneak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's disheartening seeing people in the US mad at the 30% vaccine hesitant there, while 6B+ at the gates have no vaccines available at all. The US isn't an island, and the borders are nowhere near closed. The variants that grow in the other 96% of humans that aren't americans will doubtlessly end up there, and will be end up tending toward vaccine resistance due to selection pressure. I think this is going to get muc…

You're getting downvoted but I do believe you're correct. I'm a healthy 21 year old, please govt., give my vaccine to other countries. I will take it if offered, but I'd prefer to give it to those who really need it all things considered. Let me get the vaccine when others are safe.

Your altruism is laudable but don't think this can't hurt you. I know a healthy, athletic 25 year old who has needed an inhaler every day for the last year because of her moderate, non-hospitalized Covid case. Her lung damage will probably not heal any further at this point.

I would get vaccinated ASAP. You're as deserving as anyone else. You don't want to risk spending the rest of your life with impaired breathing.

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