I was hoping the silver lining to the pandemic would be our planets overpopulation brought down but it really hasn't even made a chip in it.
With new births added in were still growing the global population
There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
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Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's exactly why the COVID pandemic has been so bad. The outcomes aren't as terrifying as say, ebola. If COVID had been ebola but with incredibly high transmission rate, people would have shut down hard. Everyone. Everywhere. With an extreme abundance of caution. I bet we would have stopped that early. Instead, you have this insidious disease that is so easy for people to compare to the flu and common cold,…
It s so easy to compare with common cold because both are coronavirii... Look I wore the mask like everyone in HK since the first day, but you have to admit you talk of it like it could kill you. It wouldn't, deaths are rare. Millions of people are not a big relative number... There are things that must kill way more that you consider absolute necessity, like coca cola, whisky or cigarets.
That's exactly my point. I got COVID. It was a mild case and I survived it with no issues. My case did feel like a common cold, as did so many others. I also know someone who died of COVID. That's the sneaky thing. It's almost as if the virus plays eeny, meeny, miny, moe - a bunch of us get a sore throat, and one person gets absolutely ravaged. It's very tempting not to put your life on hold when there's a really good chance you'll beat it. Of course, when vast numbers think that way, the virus spreads widely and many die.
As to your "millions of people are not a big relative number" point - at the peak of the pandemic in the USA, COVID became the leading cause of death.[0] That seems fairly major in a relative sense.
[0] https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/slide/covid-19-now-...
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
"(and as far as I can tell no one does, unless we have time travelers about)"
The CDC and others have looked at at long term effects, which is where I got those estimates. If you mean it's too early to tell because not enough time has gone by, then we could say the same about the vaccine (which is somewhat valid for both sides, but lacking evidence relegates it more to a belief than fact-based opinion).
The comment wasn't minimizing the impact. They were simply stating that people didn't take it as seriously as they would have if covid was more impactful. I think this is a valid point. We see similar issues in attitudes for other infections that can carry longterm impact (even lack of education and protective measures around stuff like hepatitis and HIV).
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#374The question is how much less death will there be in the years to come. Especially the older people who died earlier because of covid. We should see a decline in death from all kinds of diseases that these people had and would have died from/with.
> …years to come
Those years of life are still lost.
It’s true they would have died eventually anyway. But that’s true of everyone.
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
I just haven't been following the news that closely, especially for Ontario (I'm not in ON). No intent to "conveniently" hide information, though thanks for clarifying.
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You mean cases started to drop after everyone stopped traveling for Christmas and vaccines started to hit meaningful numbers?
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Announcing restrictions and enforcing them are two separate animals. There are not enough police in most of the US to actually enforce closing businesses, let alone confining people to their homes. Especially not when half the populace sees it as a political infringement of their rights.
I'm not sure about there not being "enough police in most of the US to actually enforce closing businesses". There's not enough police to enforce no traffic violations at all either (what would that be, a traffic cop for every street or car?). That's not how laws work, you just need to make a law/rule and collect fines from the businesses that violated it. If there wasn't the political will to do so in the states, th…
You say that's not how laws work and then you basically say he's rihght.
You say you "just need to... collect fines". And that is the OP's point.
Without enforcement you do not get relevant levels of compliance. Just upping the fines seems easy but if your enforcement percentage is 0 (or close enough to 0 as felt by citizens) you will not get compliance.
Theres a balance if you ask me. If it costs $5000 to be caught after curfew but police go home when curfew hits too instead of patrolling the streets, you will likely have no compliance. If you get caught at least 50% of the time then $5000 probably isn't even necessary and say $1000 will be 'enough' for most people.
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 say…
> If there was one thing Trump was all in on, it was closing the southern border. Is there any source that even suggests that the US's "southern border" played a remotely relevant role in the US's pandemic? I mean, COVID spread like wildfire in the US throughout a timespan where the US's central government was quite militant in either denying or downplaying it's gravity. Even today we see states and cities taking mil…
It wasn’t relevant in the course we took. But had we locked down until there were 0 cases-like AZ or NZ—then new cases would walk across our borders.
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not quite sure what your point is. The absolute number is the number, and zooming in to make it a relative number for dramatic effect doesn't change that. It's kind of like zooming in to a stock market graph so the spikes look bigger.
Because numbers and how people interpret data is hugely important (there was a great article years ago how data visualization tricks can completely make a person misinterpret the presented information) People can read and shout - I WAS RIGHT!! Only 0.1% people die of covid, lockdowns were unnecessary, masks don’t help, everyone’s a sheep for believing covid is anything more serious than a flu. Now they want to vaccin…
But it is 0.1%. That's a fact. You keep saying things like "misunderstand", and straw manning people who think 0.1% is a relatively small proportion of the population as people who are claiming the virus is a hoax.
It's true that fewer lives were lost to wars in the past 150 years and terrorist attacks. But that's also a somewhat misleading data comparison. Terrorism is basically nothing for Americans but is implied to be relevant. The 150 years mark is carefully chosen to avoid including the civil war, which comes close to matching covid numbers on its own, nominally, and is hugely higher on a percentage level (it was ~2%).
Context matters. Normalized to population size, you would need 20 COVID 19 pandemics to match the scale of the civil war. The proportional rates for other countries besides the US which tended to do quite well in WWII were obviously much more slanted towards the effects of war. Some light googling suggests Germany lost about 10% of its population during wwII. The overall world lost about 3% of its population (~80 million people).
Covid was not a hoax, but you're pushing a fair heaping of bias while implying to take any other view would be misunderstanding or spreading misinformation
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Workplaces with lots of contact always are. In Nov-Feb, I was losing 40-60 employees a week to infection or quarantine. Mostly people in essential IT support positions My sons school was open most of the year, but shutdown for a month due to teacher quarantines.
Schools are different than a business setting. Young children have less chance of getting it and less of spreading it. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/pediatric-hcp....
The population of humans in schools includes many adults.