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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

#361

Post by wernercd »

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?

This has nothing to do with "recovered NHs (nursing home) patients"... this has to do with housing COVID patients in NHs.

This ain't "grandma went to the hospital and got sent back to the nursing home" and it was never about that.

Hospitals were over stressed so they sent sick people to nursing homes.

https://apnews.com/article/new-york-andrew-cuomo-us-news-cor...

"More than 9,000 recovering coronavirus patients in New York state were released from hospitals into nursing homes early in the pandemic under a controversial directive that was scrapped amid criticism it accelerated outbreaks, according to new records obtained by The Associated Press."

Notice: Not "9000 NH patients sent back from the hospital". 9000 individuals NOT nursing home patients sent to NHs

New York, AGAINST CDC guidelines, forced NHs to house sick people that weren't prepared to handle them - and THOUSANDS of old people died because they then got sick from the influx of COVID patients.

You have some seriously confused notion of what happened in New York (and, I think, similar happened in Texas - I may be wrong on that).

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

#362

Post by bredren »

karmelapple wrote: post #182
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"

I find this both surprising and not. Early in the pandemic, when most everything was shut down, I had to run an errand and ended up driving down some streets I’ve driven many times before. The percentage of cars driving erratically on the road was much higher than usual. I figure one of these might explain it: 1. People are stressed / distracted, and driving poorly because of it 2. Most drivers are well-meaning and c…

Early on in the initial outbreak, I also noticed what sometimes felt like lawless driving in comparison to before.

For example, people treating a red light as a four way stop, or just slowing down and running through it.

It didn't last very long as far as I observed, but it definitely was a thing in Portland.

At the time I thought it was because there were so few cars on the road. Your point, 2. seems like a solid explanation to me.

In some cases it wasn't just that drivers were "not as conscientious," but more actively taking advantage of a lower amount of vehicles and LE patrol.

There is some evidence of this from the multiple record-breaking Cannonball Run challenges performed in May and June 2020 with no new records recorded since. [1]

Another explanation is that well-meaning drivers were treating urban driving the way folks do out in rural areas, where stop signs are sort of followed "as appropriate" by locals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Run_challenge#Durin...

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

#363

Post by klmadfejno »

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 find 65% an extremely low threshold for a "vast majority" personally.

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

#364

Post by jaimex2 »

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…

An important bit of information is Victoria indebted itself heavily to contain its outbreaks. The state is in $150B worth of debt and already increasing its taxes and fines to compensate.

It also had the largest exodus of people ever seen. About 11,000 leaving per quarter.

The fallout from businesses isn't know yet either, that'll become apparent after EOFY.

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

#365

Post by nscalf »

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 want to be a conspiracy theorist here, but Florida has seemed like a pretty untrustworthy source of info on their covid numbers. There is even an ongoing battle with a data scientist who was fired, according to her, for refusing to fake the covid numbers. Just at a glance, Florida's reported covid numbers seem to be so anomalous compared to the rest of the country, even though when you think of Florida you think of groups at high risk from covid. I can't say they're actually lying about their numbers, but it's enough of an outlier to reasonably remove it from the data set.

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

#366

Post by bluekite2000 »

candu wrote: post #95
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…

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.…

I am here in Vietnam (and was in California a few months ago) and the difference is day and night. Lockdown is super strict here. Everyone wears mask (even when it is only a few cases out of millions). It is a 21 day mandatory quarantine (if you get approved to get in). The results speak for itself.

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

#367

Post by greggman3 »

shoguning wrote: post #260
mattnewton wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

Here in Japan they've never really had lockdown. Restaurants have remained open the entire time, just asked to close at 8pm. I could/can walk by them at 7pm and see them full of people talking and eating without masks. I was invited by Japanese friends the entire time (didn't go) and would see them posting pictures of their restaurant dinner gatherings on Facebook.

Further, as a comparison, Tokyo Metro has 38 million people, California has 38 million people. Tokyo Metro has ~6500 people per square mile, California has 240 per square mile. Tokyo Metro had and still has people commuting in very crowded trains every weekday. California mostly people drive cars. California closed restaurants. Tokyo Metro never closed restaurants.

Yes, Tokyo is going through a "spike" right now but compared to California it's still tiny. Compare Tokyo Metro's current "spike" (~2k people per day) with any of California's spikes at 40k per day, 20x more.

Some people will claim testing but that doesn't fit the facts either. Deaths from COVID in Tokyo Metro. California 62k death, Tokyo Metro, 2k dead. And, if you believe the attribution of death by COVID is bad then all you have to do is look at the death rate from all causes and see that Japan is doing much better than the USA

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...

I have no idea what Japan did right or got lucky with. Various speculations abound. Japanese don't shake hands, hug and kiss friends. Japanese may be commonly taking some medicine for unrelated things that happens to provide protection. Japanese might have more people with genetic immunity. Japanese mask compliance might be higher. Japanese aren't obese (I'm sure there's some other non-obese country they can be compared to). Japanese have a different diet (not sure what other countries have similar diets)

I recognize that even with restaurants open it's possible just the various other factors are/were enough to keep R low enough.... I really have no clue. Personally I mostly stayed locked up. I live alone. Saw less than 1 person a month in person, usually an outdoor walk with masks on.

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

#368

Post by jryle70 »

octodog wrote: post #223
danenania wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both Thailand and Vietnam have been devastated economically, and even with various levels of lockdown both country is currently experiencing the highest number of cases since the beginning of the pandemic.

Also, the vaccinated population in either country is at low single digit percentage, so no end in sight for the harsh measures. Compare that to the US or Europe where 50% of population is (partially) vaccinated and, as the result, gradually reopen.

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

#369

Post by flukus »

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...

> 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%.

Using the entire human population also skews things because the deaths were concentrated in North America, South America and Europe. To over generalize, Asian countries did a much better job at managing the pandemic and have a population of 4.5 billion people. Most of the deaths were concentrated in the remaining 2.5 billion.

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

#370

Post by bitcurious »

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

> It wasn’t until we closed schools that the trend reversed.

The other way to think about it is that it wasn’t until things got bad that people got cautious.

Kind of how people take homeopathic drugs when they are sickest.

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