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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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought the main driver of spread was probably not the political football issues like masks in public and businesses being open or closed, but what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this.

> what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this. At least here in the UK, lockdown meant not seeing friends or family (unless you lived with them). Was that not the case in the US? Of course if people flout the rules then they won't have any effect.

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

#202
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.

I am confident that HN crowd has heard about graph theory. We try to deactivate a network, we care firstly for the nodes of high connectivity to kill the virus transmission network.

Vaccinating a grandpa helps the grandpa. Vaccinating a super social young person helps everybody else.

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

#203
post #183
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a blindspot among the US citizens. I know the European countries have united to supply vaccines to the developing world with their Covax program. But I don't think the US is doing anything similar. I'm not even sure how the US would go about doing that. Would it have to be a Presidentially-ordered/led initiative? As a private citizen, I'd be 100% for the US helping to vaccinate the world. It's an obviou…

> It's an obvious benefit to the US to not have variants arising outside its shores and coming into the country. I hope you meant this as a way to sell it, because this view is a terrible, terrible way to approach the world, as it lives outside of the US are only to be preserved insofar as doing so protects USians. Saving human lives is sufficient reason itself.

>Saving human lives is sufficient reason itself.

I think our experience over the last year and a half has proven that, for many, it is not sufficient reason. Self-interest is a far stronger motivator.

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought the main driver of spread was probably not the political football issues like masks in public and businesses being open or closed, but what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this.

> what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this. At least here in the UK, lockdown meant not seeing friends or family (unless you lived with them). Was that not the case in the US? Of course if people flout the rules then they won't have any effect.

I remember a period last spring and early summer when parties and gatherings were getting "busted", but I don't think the enforcement of restrictions on private gatherings has been meaningful for the majority of the pandemic.

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

#205
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…

> starvation in developing countries due to the lockdown stopping food harvests in California

California doesn't export much in the way of staples, so that's probably quite a stretch: https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seemed like a lot of the states that did well despite opening early were southern states where it isn't really winter when it's winter. Also I've heard the claim that (to be as apolitical as I can here) in Florida they secured the elderly population more quickly and carefully than in New York. You may want to look into that claim.

I'd say "Florida secured their elderly population more quickly and carefully than in New York" misses the fact that New York ACTIVELY put its elderly in harms way by requiring nursing homes take patients. If New York ONLY ignored the problem that'd be one thing... but they actively made decisions that led to a large number of deaths - and more importantly those decisions were AGAINST the CDC guidelines.

Heh, well there you go. I wanted to avoid that point to avoid politics (per the OP's request), but yes. Also I think I heard NY wasn't the only state that did this.

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

#207

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…

Either you lock people downs and those would reject it will go out nonetheless. Or you don't and people who are at risk will lock themselves down.

There's no particular benefit to one or the other so states do what match their current constituents. And that's exactly what you'd expect in a democracy.

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

#209
post #171
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% COVID / vaccination isn't the end point. It's R_t So some amount < 100% of people infected / vaccinated will create enough spreading "distance" between that coronavirus won't be able to effectively reproduce, because the (limited) vulnerable hosts will be too "far" apart.

Unfortunately it looks like this virus will be endemic indefinitely. It has spread to animal and human reservoirs we can't reach. Likely it'll end up being another one of those colds that children develop partial immunity against and most everybody catches another mutant of it a few times through their life. We had the chance to eradicate it 16 months ago. But we weren't all ready. Now we'll have to live with it. And…

Could it become chicken pox? Where it's nothing in children but much more deadlier in adults if you never got it?

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

#210
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a reliable source that the covid deaths in FL were manipulated downward?

This one seems a good place to start: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-ss-prem-covid...

Even if true, that doesn't suggest that the overall numbers are artificially low. That represents a reporting time gap, the deaths were still presumably counted correctly.

I think we need something much stronger before we enter into evidence such a powerful allegation.

EDIT: http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess... seems to suggest California covid deaths were underreported to a greater degree than Florida. That would be even stronger evidence that Florida had better outcomes compared with the disruption.

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