There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, May 17, 2021, 12:07 AM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #205

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…

> 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/

Staples tend to be low-value exports, so they don’t show up in top-10-by-value lists when we also export truly enormous amounts of cash crops. But,e.g., California alone would be a top-10 rice exporter with about 1 million metric tons of annual exports.

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

#252

Post by raphlinus » Mon, May 17, 2021, 12:07 AM UTC

torstenvl wrote: post #225

wyager wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

One error is that the citations only support the claim within the US, while the context of the original story and the parent comment are the world. That makes rather a large difference.

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

#253

Post by sellyme » Mon, May 17, 2021, 12:07 AM UTC

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…

> Australia and NZ have the huge advantage of no land borders.

Australia had a major outbreak in Victoria in July last year. Victoria has a 2,550km land border with other states, including with South Australia, which peaked at 10 active cases over the same time period.

The evidence shows that strict quarantining and early lockdowns prevent spread even when there's an outbreak on the other side of a land border, and it also shows that being an island doesn't help at all if you don't do this (see also: the United Kingdom). I don't know why people constantly act like Australia and New Zealand only succeeded because they're islands when they were locking cities down at single digit case counts while the United States and India were packing stadiums full of people when they were getting tens of thousands of new infections a day.

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

#254

Post by eob » Mon, May 17, 2021, 12:07 AM UTC

orblivion wrote: post #199

PeterisP wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me "countries that did really well" is mainly places like Singapore and Taiwan and South Korea, which got the virus earlier than USA and Europe but took it seriously from the very start.

Okay, if they actually got the virus that early, then these countries are the answer to my question. However... at least for Taiwan that doesn't feel like it adds up: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan They've had fewer than 1700 cases, and that's including a recent massive outbreak. They peaked on March 26th 7-day average with 21 cases a day. Granted, the US took maybe a couple more weeks to ra…

Taiwan resident here. Just wanted to include that “massive outbreak” so far means a few hundred cases nationally.

That’s bad, it might get a lot worse, and we’re all nervous — but just wanted to add the context because “massive” can mean a lot of things with orders of magnitude difference.

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

#255

Post by coldtea » Mon, May 17, 2021, 12:08 AM UTC

lostapathy wrote: post #181

cma wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about China itself?

I'm not sure it's fair to compare an authoritarian country to a western country that's nominally free. What western government could pull off welding doors shut the way they did in China? Even if the government had emergency powers that "allowed" it, would they have had willing workers to do it?

>What western government could pull off welding doors shut the way they did in China?

Western governments have pulled all kinds of restrictions themselves, from curfews, closed borders, and "let's close all retail businesses" restrictions, to mandatory movement monitoring.

Heck, Italy might not have welded doors, but had the Army patrol to enforce strict lockdown, and citizens in northerns cities stay inside.

Sometimes this even meant closing them in-house with the corpses of their dead (from covid) relatives for several days. There were several such reported cases, e.g.:

https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-...

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

#256

Post by rualca » Mon, May 17, 2021, 12:08 AM UTC

spankyspangler wrote: post #227

That sounds like a pretty wild conspiracy theory. Any basis for this belief?

> That sounds like a pretty wild conspiracy theory.

The concept of viral reservoir seems to be pretty basic and well established concept in virology, both in terms of macrobiomes (i.e., populations) and in terms of microbiomes (i.e., microbiotic community in the gut).

A quick googling will show you a huge list of well-research introductions from reputable sources, if you're interested in the topic.

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

#257

Post by devin » Mon, May 17, 2021, 12:08 AM UTC

spankyspangler wrote: post #227

That sounds like a pretty wild conspiracy theory. Any basis for this belief?

"Wild conspiracy theory"? Uh, what? It's exactly what happened where I live. At least half of our hospitalizations at peak were from neighboring areas that had no more capacity due to low or non-existent restrictions.

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

#258

Post by pasabagi » Mon, May 17, 2021, 12:08 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US. There are countries (SK, Japan) with tiny numbers of cases.

There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better.

One key area I think the US did really badly on was messaging - basically, having Trump drawing the whole thing into his orbit made everybody feel like it's just business as usual. It's hard to take something really seriously when the nation's highest elected official talking nonsense about it on Twitter, so obviously people don't follow rules. Public health messaging is really easy to get right, and the nations that have done really badly (Britain, the USA, Brazil) all had heads of state who did the worst possible kind of messaging.

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

#259

Post by robbrown451 » Mon, May 17, 2021, 12:08 AM UTC

alerighi wrote: post #196

robbrown451 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very low? You mean not that many people die, of any cause, typically? Not sure what you are getting at here.

Really... not many. In my city of about 14k people last year died 19 people, that is like 3/4 more than the norm, but with these numbers, we are well inside statistical error. Also we must evaluate the increase in mortality in a longer period. I can as well being that most of the people that died of COVID were either old people or people with other health issues that would have died anyway in a year or two. The probl…

Well I guess I'll stop making my kid wear a helmet when she skateboards. No need to fear her premature death, it's just nature and everyone dies anyway.

Are you sure you thought this whole thing through?

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

#260

Post by shoguning » Mon, May 17, 2021, 12:09 AM UTC

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.

According to a study in PNAS, shelter-in-place policies in the US did not work: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/15/e2019706118

Another study in Eur J Clin Inv had similar findings comparing countries: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484

COVID went wild basically everywhere. There were a few strong exceptions: China (apparently), Australia, New Zealand and some others. What these had in common was very strict police enforcement, which led to some dramatic scenes like people getting welded into their houses in China, or houses in Australia getting broken into by police on suspicion of too many people gathering.

In my _opinion_, lockdowns didn't work elsewhere because most cases are not from casual public transmission in places like stores, restaurants etc. Rather, events like kickbacks, dinner parties, and practices like in-home workers (nannies, cleaners etc) continued throughout the pandemic, or resumed shortly after the original March 2020 shockwave. While strident police enforcement of physical distancing could eliminate cases, and seemed to in a few places, the half measures used by most of the world did little-to-nothing positive while being an economic and cultural disaster.

Personally, I never caught COVID and rarely socialized during the pandemic. All the cases I heard of stemmed from the kind of thing I mention above: private dinner parties, nannies and so forth, rather than casual public transmission.

You, or any individual may have taken social distancing seriously but it's clear many or most did not, including people on both political "sides", up to and including governors, members of congress etc.