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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

#351

Post by nightpool »

belltaco wrote: post #281
nightpool wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It makes sense. Cops were more reluctant to pull people over for covid safety reasons so drivers felt more emboldened speeding. The roads have been emptier so people have been going faster than norma, whether above or below the speed limit. Lack of other social entertainment may have caused thrill seeking in the form or speeding or racing, especially since drug and alcohol use seems to have gone up as well for the sa…

"Cops were more reluctant to pull people over for covid safety reasons so drivers felt more emboldened speeding"

Is this true? The rest of the possible explanations you cite make sense, but the USA Today article I cited earlier contains a quote from the Minnesota traffic safety department saying that the number of speeding tickets handed out went up in 2020, almost 100% (from 500 tickets in 2019 to 1,068 in 2020).

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

#352

Post by sokoloff »

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…

Holy cow; what is the birth rate to let a country have an average age in the mid-teens?!

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

#353

Post by refurb »

orblivion wrote: post #279
refurb wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As I understand, SARS 1 and MERS are much less contagious than SARS 2.

But much more fatal. These countries had two rounds of practice in controlling a major epidemic.

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

#354

Post by eyelidlessness »

giantg2 wrote: post #218
eyelidlessness wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"People who’ve been sick and survived, even with minimal symptoms, are experiencing long term health issues." I would say 65-80% of non-hospitalized people being fine is consistent with the prior comment's use of "vast majority".

I didn’t object to the quantification, I objected to minimizing the impact and characterizing it as temporary. I don’t know the distribution of long term impact (and as far as I can tell no one does, unless we have time travelers about), but it’s pretty well known that there’s more than mortality rate at stake.

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

#355

Post by chmod600 »

raydev wrote: post #325
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?

I don’t know why no one is saying this, but Ontario’s ICU numbers skyrocketed to 900 at the peak just a few weeks ago. We’re only down to 700 occupied beds now and normal medical procedures are still paused because of the enormous ICU load. It wasn’t until we closed schools that the trend reversed. People are so quick to blame fear without actually looking at the data

Is the data conclusive? I try to look at the data, but it seems like a mixed bag when it comes to school closures.

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

#356

Post by atweiden »

sellyme wrote: post #253
greenwich26 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

If being an island state was really the only thing that mattered here, why is Hawaii not at Covid zero? Why is Alaska not at Covid zero?

(Despite not being an island, AK is still highly comparable to OZ.)

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

#357

Post by raydev »

ceejayoz wrote: post #350
raydev wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conveniently skipping over the occupied ICUs. How do you not know that our medical system was overwhelmed or that the rise in cases only reversed after we shut down schools both times in the last 4 months?

Surely that wasn’t the only tightened restriction or change in behavior during the case surge, though? There are a lot of confounding variables in these analyses. It’s going to take years to tease them apart, and we may never truly know for certain in some cases.

Perhaps, but do you lock everything down mid-spike when you know the current rate will lead to extreme triage measures within two weeks, or do you wait two weeks to act and start rejecting patients as they continue to flood in?

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

#358

Post by rossdavidh »

tbenst wrote: post #81
rossdavidh wrote: post #43

If you're talking about a 7 billion population, the deaths of which will vary from year to year, this seems like a number in the noise range which would be very hard to distinguish from background variation. If everyone of the 7b people lived 100 years, we would expect about 70 million deaths a year, and we know they don't live 100 years on average. Any reasonable range of assumptions puts this in the range of too-sm…

You make a strong claim with no supporting evidence or analysis. On the other hand, we have roughly 3.3M (Econimist) or 3.4M (Financial, Times [1]) confirmed COVID-19 deaths. Is it so surprising that only 25-50% of actual deaths due to COVID-19 were confirmed? Why do you try to downplay that COVID-19 is the second most deadly pandemic in a century, after HIV/AIDS? [2] [1] https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633…

"...Which doesn't mean it doesn't matter or isn't important, but it does mean that this is not a good method for estimating it. "

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

#359

Post by mojomark »

raphlinus wrote: post #261
mojomark wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not conflate "anti-vaccine people" with "anti-mask people". I live in the state of Maryland and yesterday our governor lifted the mask requirement for vaccinated people. I am a fiscal conservative and am vaccinated (got it as soon as I could, because science and common sense informed me that I should). I have relatives, including my own mother, who are far right wing and will not get vaccinated because they b…

I am not in exactly the same place, but respect your comment as being at least logically self-consistent. It reminds me of Jody Lanard's thread[1] about how the new CDC guidelines are "adultifying" in that they transfer the decision back to individuals rather than paternalistic guidelines. The way I think about it is that until recently, the risk calculus was analogous to drunk driving, but is now more similar to rid…

> The way I think about it is that until recently, the risk calculus was analogous to drunk driving, but is now more similar to riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

Appreciate the link and I fully concur with your analogy. It may boil down to some psychological primitive (perhaps some deep-rooted defense mechanism that developed in my youth), but within this analogy I also say "let people wear or not wear helmets on bikes, the risk and evidence have been clearly presented for decades".

I know, in my heart of hearts that this is a cold stance. Perhaps because you can't possibly assume to know the circumstances that led a person not to wear a helmet on a bike (or get a vaccine). Maybe they're a young teen revelling from their parents or were extremely sheltered in some way from the evidence that would have changed their mind. There are a lot of "if's" here. At some point, in my value set, you have to draw the line and look out for yourself and loved ones first.

I went out today without a mask and it was amazing (it felt better than I expected). That said, based on your comment, I will give more consideration to wearing masks in public as general practice for the next month or so. However, I can't live like that forever. There will be a turning point.

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

#360

Post by klmadfejno »

dham wrote: post #209
lolc wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is already mostly the case for covid. We just tend to think of chickenpox as a mostly childrens disease to begin with.
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