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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

#391
post #384
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Did it actually help, or was that just coincidental?

The alternative was not closing schools while cases and incoming patients were increasing exponentially. Is that a theory we should be testing when we've already paused elective medical procedures due to the already high numbers of people in the hospital?

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

#392
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Who knows. The alternative was not closing schools while cases were increasing exponentially. Is that a theory we should be testing when we've already paused elective medical procedures due to the wave of COVID patients?

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

#393
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.

I did some searching and it looks like you are right that there isn't anyone credible officially reporting it. However multiple credible news sources do mention welding doors shut as part of opinion pieces, including this one from Ai Weiwei[1] who presumably has more info about the situation and isn't going to simply speak on Western hearsay.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/08/china-...

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

#394
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is from earlier: https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/excess-mortality-across-countr... Interestingly Sweden that got famous for defying lockdowns saw an uptick of 1.5% excess mortality per 100K people compared to 12.9% for the US that was relatively more locked down. I'm not sure what to make of it, but it sure is an interesting data point.

Sweden's early success with their 'herd immunity' experiment was short lived. They failed to actually achieve 'herd immunity' and did not avoid the eventual virus death toll: https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/sweden-cris... By comparison Finland, it's neighbor took a much stricter approach and never reached the same level of death. Finland: 931 deaths at 168 per million with a 1.0% death rate. https://…

Can we then talk about the economic disruption felt by each respectively compared to the 0.4% difference in death rate? I don’t have insights into either county.

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

#395
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This line of argument is so tiresome. If death is not a big deal to you, you're welcome to give it a swing and see what you think. Or to take as much personal risk as you want. But people get to choose. If a recreational skydiver gets pancreatic cancer, that's still bad and I refuse to pretend otherwise.

> Or to take as much personal risk as you want

That’s the point that all people challenging the lock downs and mask are trying to make. It just kinda ignores the whole “this can cause it to be more likely to be encountered by a person who will handle it poorly” thing.

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

#396

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…

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

Well Uganda has a median age of about 17 and a birth rate of about 5 children per woman.

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

#397
post #264

Earlier 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…

Which states are taking militant stances against public health precautions?

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

#398

Earlier 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…

Helping people interpret data and providing context is good.

You seem to be taking it a step further to create a messaging strategy around these numbers that will cause the reaction you think is best for everyone. While the intent is noble and may work in practice to some extent, I don't think that's a good thing. That leads to a lot of distrust of experts because people can sense it.

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

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Excess deaths certainly are not entirely caused by the virus, so you still need to try to subdivide them somehow, which is once again a ripe opportunity for "gaming" / creative statistics.

But if you assume the main thing special about this year was the virus and strategies aimed at mitigating it, you can still compare overall outcomes between jurisdictions. If tight lockdowns decrease COVID deaths but increase other deaths enough to compensate then they didn’t achieve anything. It would be valuable to know the exact breakdown but you don’t have to.

Right, but my point is that it's hard to separate those things if your idea is just "excess deaths tell us the cost". So if lockdowns slow COVID but increase suicides... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#400
post #365

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 th…

Please stop spreading misinformation. Rebekah Jones was never asked to falsify any numbers. She is simply a liar.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-cov...

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