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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

#221

Post by msbarnett »

claytongulick wrote: post #180
msbarnett wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

17% excess mortality (and that’s assuming this 1% baseline we pulled out of the air, remember) doesn’t mean that the pandemic is only responsible for those excess deaths – a bunch of people who might have otherwise been expected to get hit by a car worked from home all year, or died from COVID instead, etc. So the pandemic is responsible for the 17% (in this scenario) uplift above baseline plus an unknown portion of…

Apparently suicides and deaths from starvation were also up significantly. It will indeed be interesting to see how the distribution of deaths plays out.

> Apparently suicides and deaths from starvation were also up significantly

Out of curiosity, do you have any sources on that?

I’ve been interested in this topic after observing, locally, a number of politicians who had previously pushed hard to cut funding for mental health and who were ideologically opposed to the concept of lockdowns suddenly and vocally expressing a great deal of concern about mental health & a supposed uptick in suicides that was (they claimed) going to be worse than COVID itself.

When all was said and done, though, suicide rates in my locality were significantly lower than average: https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/suicide-deaths-in-alberta-in-2020...

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

#222

Post by dubyah »

mattnewton wrote: post #56
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.

Low income / essential workers & overcrowded homes are a far more significant factor that often go unmentioned when people try to compare the outcomes between state & municipal public health interventions. This was observed well before the winter surge. https://calmatters.org/projects/overcrowded-housing-californ...

How do you isolate when there's more members than actual rooms in the home & only one one restroom?

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

#223

Post by octodog »

danenania wrote: post #156
TheRealSteel wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean?

It doesn't account for Africa, but many of best-performing countries have been island countries (Australia, NZ, Taiwan, Iceland, etc.). Islands have some fairly obvious advantages in fighting a pandemic, and it shows in the statistics. I believe Hawaii has also done much better than other US states. I'm not sure whether that's what the comment was referring to though.

None of Thailand, Vietnam and Mongolia are islands and their handling of covid is world class compared to parts of Europe and the US.

These countries are also far poorer and in the case of Thailand especially that has been a major contributing factor, as they've been less able to afford closing their country to tourism.

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

#224

Post by xwolfi »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #170
umvi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Not necessarily. Part of the reason there was so much pushback against public health mandates was because covid was so tame. You are being forced, by the government, to wear a mask, isolate from others, and stop going to work for an entire…

I think that's exactly why the COVID pandemic has been so bad. The outcomes aren't as terrifying as say, ebola. If COVID had been ebola but with incredibly high transmission rate, people would have shut down hard. Everyone. Everywhere. With an extreme abundance of caution. I bet we would have stopped that early. Instead, you have this insidious disease that is so easy for people to compare to the flu and common cold,…

It s so easy to compare with common cold because both are coronavirii...

Look I wore the mask like everyone in HK since the first day, but you have to admit you talk of it like it could kill you. It wouldn't, deaths are rare.

Millions of people are not a big relative number... There are things that must kill way more that you consider absolute necessity, like coca cola, whisky or cigarets.

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

#225

Post by torstenvl »

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…

Can someone help me understand why the above, well-sourced post is getting downvoted into oblivion while the nasty one-line response with no supporting citations is getting upvoted?

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

#226

Post by jmahyoung »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #75
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…

Count of covid cases and deaths has been highly politicized and manipulated in Florida to the point of firing people for reporting them. Not sure how possible it is to get accurate info in this environment.

Somewhat related, on the opposite point. Elon Musk among others said the counting of deaths was manipulated upwards, with comorbidity being counted as a COVID death even when the patient had 2 or more serious health conditions already. I think there is a desire to overcount which must not be glossed over either.

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

#228

Post by refurb »

orblivion wrote: post #128
candu wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO if you want to understand what an effective response looks like - don't look at North America or Europe. Think Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Africa, all of which had vastly better outcomes. Of course, I'm not an epidemiologist or public health expert, so while I have some guesses I'm not sure what exactly they did that was more effective - but there's no question that it was more effective.…

In how many of the countries that did really well did the virus have the same head start that it had in the US and Europe before getting discovered?

The real question - how many countries did well that were at the center of the prior SARS and bird flu outbreaks of the past?

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

#229

Post by alerighi »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #117
umvi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Not necessarily. Part of the reason there was so much pushback against public health mandates was because covid was so tame. You are being forced, by the government, to wear a mask, isolate from others, and stop going to work for an entire…

I can accept that the initial worst case mortality claims turned out to be too high. But I can’t accept this claim: > a disease that, for the vast majority who get it, just makes it so you can't taste or smell anything for a few days along with fatigue and flu-like symptoms People who’ve been sick and survived, even with minimal symptoms, are experiencing long term health issues. It’s one thing to recognize that the…

In very small minority of cases. I know a lot (at least 20) people that got the virus, and all of them are fine today, as they were before catching the virus. Of course people that got really sick and went to the hospital, it's different. But most of them were either old or already had some illness.

In the end we are making all this effort to stop a virus, while we sell (with profit) cigarettes that makes each years an only slightly smaller number of deaths. So to me, if we care about public health so much, just stop selling tobacco and we reduce the mortality. But do we care? In the end, we need people to die, at one point.

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

#230

Post by vosper »

greenwich26 wrote: post #173
candu wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO if you want to understand what an effective response looks like - don't look at North America or Europe. Think Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Africa, all of which had vastly better outcomes. Of course, I'm not an epidemiologist or public health expert, so while I have some guesses I'm not sure what exactly they did that was more effective - but there's no question that it was more effective.…

The average age in many African countries is in the mid teens, and we know that age is one of the strongest risk gradients. So Africa is not at all comparable with the aging West. Australia and NZ have the huge advantage of no land borders. Everything and everyone comes through a few ports and airports, which already had the infrastructure established to tightly control and monitor everything. Meanwhile most European…

> And the U.S. couldn't close its land borders even if it wanted to

Maybe not perfectly, but surely the vast majority of traffic across land borders is at managed border crossings. The US could shut those down, put the army on any unmanaged roads/routes (don’t know if this is a thing) and stop 95% or more of land border traffic?

Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference to Covid - I don’t know about that, but I do question the impossibility claim.

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