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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

#331

Post by spankyspangler »

pasabagi wrote: post #293
spankyspangler wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Virus reservoirs are things. Clearly I was not suggesting the concept of a virus reservoir was a conspiracy theory. I don't know if you were being deliberately obtuse, but it does not help the conversation. The parent made 3 claims, increasingly improbable, with the last seeming to be a hateful conspiracy theory. >> Except these surrounding towns act as virus reservoirs for the large cities. The assertion is the to…

I'd hazard he's being ironic. This all said, there's a germ of truth in the unhinged paranoia - it's a bit like rolling coal. You heard of rolling coal? It's where people modify their trucks to make them emit toxic black smoke. It's bad for your engine. It's bad for your fuel economy. But, it's also bad for those pussy cyclists and eco-freaks who keep on going on about global warming. There is a powerful current in p…

I don't get the irony.

If you think there's a germ of truth in this conspiracy theory let's see the evidence for it.

I do see a great irony in pointing at the others as enemies who are always scheming and conspiring to attack, and who stand against everything good and right, as evidence for conspiracy theories.

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

#332

Post by cma »

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?

I believe in those instances they welded backdoors while the front door was monitored by the community enforcement people to make sure each family only sent one member to the grocery store a week, etc. It was also at the outbreak, so you would hope we would have some strong measures at the very beginning when there is highest risk and greatest benefit to the rest of the country and world from strict quarantine.

I don't know that we would have done anything similar for this one if we were ground zero, but hopefully we would have for something like aerosolized Ebola with a contagious yet symptom-free incubation time.

We did come close to doing some similar things to welding to the Grand Princess cruise ship early on.

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

#334

Post by sam_4675 »

belltaco wrote: post #250
wernercd wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>If New York ONLY ignored the problem that'd be one thing So where would recovered nursing home residents go? Keep staying in the hospital which would mean active covid patients would die in the streets? Or the streets?

From experience in another state, they go first to the hospital, secondly back into nursing home but into isolated quarantined floors with specially trained fully covered ppe'd staff until several times testing negative, then into warm floor, then back to normal resident floor.

Not as I believe initially was case in NY from hospital directly into regular resident floor.

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

#335

Post by klmadfejno »

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...

As someone who believes the pandemic was real, that lockdowns early on were a good idea, that mask wearing is trivial and probably helpful, that social distancing was also easy to do and a reasonable idea, and that vaccinations are safe and effective. My gut reaction is still that the number of deaths was relatively small.

About a third of US deaths were in nursing homes, and that doesn't include people who probably could / should have been in nursing homes from a health and self-sufficiency perspective. 85% were 65 or older (65 isn't especially old that's just the lowest data threshold I could find). I am fortunate enough to not know anybody who died from COVID.

Concerns about long lasting effects might be true. We might see this having substantial long term effects and that could be bad. It could be worse than the impact of the deaths.

That aside however, I just don't think a one time 20% increase in annual mortality is that terrible, but that does not mean that the virus was trivial.

If I'm understanding this chart correctly, forecasted 2021 death rate per 1,000 people (not covid adjusted) plus 20% is less than the 1970s... and the next 50 years as well.

(EDIT: Sorry idiot math. The 2021 rate + 20% is above any historical rate since 1970, and is on par with expectations 2050 onward)

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...

This includes all sorts of demographic assumptions about age, but so does COVID, I would argue, in the least convincing demographic groupings possible.

Maybe COVID was a genuine threat but on a whole we did a pretty good job and it wasn't that bad in total effect as a result?

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

#336

Post by nimbleal »

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…

Mainland Chinese citizens are not allowed to travel to Taiwan as individual tourists since July 2019. This was interpreted as an attempt to hurt tourism and so the economy at the time. May have been a factor.

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

#337

Post by disordinary »

nightpool wrote: post #236
disordinary wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He should have specified that, because we're talking global here.

A 24% spike in the US is absolutely insane.

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

#338

Post by nimbleal »

orblivion wrote: post #277
slg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an even less fair comparison. The Chinese government has a tremendous amount of power over the daily life of its citizens in a way that isn't replicable most other places. There were stories of China literally welding doors to apartment buildings shut and forcibly dragging people away to quarantine facilities as soon as they tested positive.

FWIW from a brief search months ago it seemed that the welding stories are hearsay. Iirc you can find reference to them in the news but it didn't sound concrete.

Yes, as I’ve said elsewhere in this thread the strictness of the Chinese lockdown has been exaggerated in the media/Western imagination.

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

#339

Post by raydev »

auxym wrote: post #154
chmod600 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closing of schools in California (vs open in Florida since last fall) was a very distinct difference in both policy and actual behavior. It seems not to have had a dramatic effect on outcomes. At least in hindsight, the closing of schools might have been a huge mistake.

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

Yeah because it appears to have helped reverse cases both in January and this month.

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

#340

Post by dang »

spankyspangler wrote: post #227

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

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that, as you know. We're trying to have a different quality of discussion than what this sort of thing leads to. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27178252.

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