Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 489 posts

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

#231

Post by auxym »

chmod600 wrote: post #158
auxym wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some canadian provinces are still closing down schools at the moment.

Why? Sincere question. Is there science to back it up or is it just fear of making a wrong decision?

Sincerely, I don't know. Almost all of the at risk population here has had at least a first shot. But the situation in Ontario has been pretty bad the past few weeks.

But I don't follow the science closely enough. I hope they're making the right call, because it's really hard on the kids. I'm just glad my own little guy is not of school age yet, and in fact is young enough to be mostly oblivious to the whole thing.

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

#232

Post by clairity »

danenania wrote: post #166
clairity wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly. the measures were always about keeping us simultaneously busy and anxious and not about their actual effectiveness. it’s been so frustrating to see discussion after discussion about the minutiae of masking when they’re so minor to the overall picture. what mattered above all was indoor, familiar social proximity (where we’d be most likely to be exchanging spit for prolonged periods), exactly where our strong…

I think the intentions were good, but it's also probably true that public health officials have been reluctant to admit when there just wasn't much they could do about the situation that would make a major difference, save for employing totalitarian enforcement measures that no one wanted. Masks in public are not all that burdensome, so imo the mandates were reasonable regardless of the actual impact, but I wish they…

outside of the totalitarian choices, which were entirely untenable in the US, we really had no good options to slow, much less stop, the pandemic. nearly all of it was theater.

the best mitigation would have been to get people to generally distance around familiars indoors and don a mask if you’re going to spend time in close proximity or face-to-face for a while. that would have required families to treat each other as threats rather than safeties, which is why that was not tenable. it’s so much easier to treat strangers as threats.

this best mitigation would have led us to violate a visceral belief about the world, creating significant cognitive dissonance, and that’s why we instead focused so much on ineffective measures to protect ourselves from strangers with masks and lockdowns that didn’t tackle the core infection vector through familiars. it’s really not that difficult to unravel what was happening, even at the beginning. watching us dance around this elephant in the room as if it didn’t exist has been no less than maddening.

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

#233

Post by chmod600 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #214
chmod600 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Sincere question. Is there science to back it up or is it just fear of making a wrong decision?

They have vaccine shortages. The issue is the teachers, not the kids.

Are schools a major source of transmission for teachers and staff?

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

#234

Post by rualca »

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.

Given that until recently the US was quite militant in refusing to act upon the outbreak, and it's a country comprised of hundreds of million of people among which about a third showed themselves to be quite defiant towards even the most trivial emergency public health policies, I don't think it's fair to refer to border control as a relevant factor in the US's death toll.

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

#235

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#236

Post by nightpool »

disordinary wrote: post #193
virtuallynathan wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the case with automotive fatalities, they were up in 2020. "A 24% spike in roadway death rates is highest in 96 years"

There was a global 24% spike in roadway deaths? I find that hard to believe. Please provide evidence. In my country we saw a 10% reduction in road deaths through 2020.

GP means in the US, where there was a 24% spike in roadway deaths per miles driven. Here's some more details:

"The nonprofit National Safety Council estimates in a report issued Thursday that 42,060 people died in vehicle crashes in 2020, an 8% increase over 2019 and the first jump in four years.

Plus, the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven spiked 24%, the largest annual percentage increase since the council began collecting data in 1923."

"Motor vehicle fatality estimates are subject to slight increases and decreases as data mature. The National Safety Council uses data from the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the CDC, so that deaths occurring within 100 days of the crash and on both public and private roadways – such as parking lots and driveways – are included in the Council’s estimates."

It's hard to figure out exactly how to credit this—perhaps the overall excess COVID deaths are being counted as part of the "100 days"? But the USA Today article quotes lots anecdotal data from state highway officials that back up this claim, including an increase in speeding tickets and an increase in crashes that involve intoxication over the same time period: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2021/03/05/pandemi.... The 8-9% number they quote is also backed up by Minnesota's own statistics, which I would imagine are more limited in what they consider a traffic death.

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

#237

Post by lostapathy »

bradlys wrote: post #197
lostapathy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wait to draw any serious conclusions until after the pandemic is "over" in both countries you're comparing. It sure seems like this virus doesn't need much of a foothold to take off, and just because an island has been able to deny that so far doesn't mean they'll be able to deny the virus until they are fully vaccinated and out of the woods.

I don't think thinking of these places as "islands" really makes sense. The USA could do the same for all people flying or driving in. It just has chosen not to. The US could close its boarders if it wanted to. Just because we have two neighboring countries on north and south borders doesn't mean we couldn't lockdown people from coming in... Literally do not get this argument.

> Just because we have two neighboring countries on north and south borders doesn't mean we couldn't lockdown people from coming in...

If there was one thing Trump was all in on, it was closing the southern border. His motivations were obviously not COVID for most of that, but the fact is he was nowhere near able to control that border (let alone close it) despite his best efforts.

Before you downvote me, I'm not saying I agree with Trump's policy on the matter, just pointing out that he did try.

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

#239

Post by ummonk »

danenania wrote: post #134
ngngngng wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community I grew up in in California purposefully threw rallies and went out of their way to rebel against every single restriction. I keep this in mind when people say California's restrictions didn't work. Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.

Still, the vast majority of cases in California have been in the metropolitan areas that have also had the strongest restrictions.

No SF had stronger restrictions with high adherence and had much lower per capita case and death rates. It’s hard to say how much of that is causal though (SF has temperate humid weather and a large white collar workforce that could afford to stay home that could have helped independent of lockdown).

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

#240

Post by refurb »

atweiden wrote: post #86

Covid makes your country worse. It’s like having endemic malaria. No one wants endemic malaria in their country, and costly government intervention was required to rid the developed world of it. Similarly, it’s disheartening to see so many people — especially on partisan lines — promulgate the talking point that we just need to “learn to live with it”. This is insanity. Annual mRNA booster vaccines ad infinitum, with…

Unless Australia wants to remained closed to all international travel forever, they are going to have to learn to live with it.
Post reply on HN