The earth’s population is 7.9b, so the excess deaths are 0.1% of the population. COVID’s mortality rate is about 0.5%, so roughly 1/5 of the population has has had it (or died of other related things, like starvation in developing countries due to the lockdown stopping food harvests in California). Currently, 1.45b doses of a vaccine have been administered, so about as many people have had the vaccine (partially, at…
The current best estimate of infection fatality rate is not 0.5%. It's actually half that at 0.23%. However the error bars are pretty wide on that number. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331/
There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
431–440 of 489 posts
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
A) Japan has a more temperate climate
B) Japan is an island and was pretty strict about locking down travel and forcing everyone entering the country to quarantine for 14 days
C) Japanese culture seems to promote very rigid adherence to rules and proper social etiquette.
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were literal videos about it at the same time ( a year ago)
I recall seeing various grainy creepy videos (not just about this) supposedly of China posted on Twitter. I started to wonder who was really pushing these videos. I'd have to see a video corroborated by a reasonably trusted news source.
What would even be framed in the media when these were really user videos without journalists. Journalists couldn't report live, so i don't think there's something else than opinion pieces.
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be a blindspot among the US citizens. I know the European countries have united to supply vaccines to the developing world with their Covax program. But I don't think the US is doing anything similar. I'm not even sure how the US would go about doing that. Would it have to be a Presidentially-ordered/led initiative? As a private citizen, I'd be 100% for the US helping to vaccinate the world. It's an obviou…
>It's an obvious benefit to the US to not have variants arising outside its shores and coming into the country. Not just that but it's economically beneficial as well. There are a lot of US jobs that are dependent on exports and tourism from those countries.
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least one study was done in Florida comparing counties that had mask mandates vs those that did not. The general conclusion matches your observation, mask mandates did not appear to have a material effect on any covid related metrics (infections, hospitalizations, deaths, ect.) This is a bit nuanced because lots of people wore masks without a mandate, but it is also true that many people are pretty anti mask and d…
As far as lockdowns go, they work until you end them, at which point you have just delayed the inevitable. Where in the data can you see this? Lockdowns don't appear to work. If they did, then places that didn't use them or cancelled them very early would have had drastically higher numbers than other places that kept them and the curves would be clearly moved around. But that isn't visible in the data. That said, I'…
I also looked into the mask literature when the pandemic first started and agree there is no evidence to support their effectiveness (unless they are N95s). Even the meta-analysis published by the WHO stated there was no evidence for their effectiveness but tentatively recommend their use as the cost of mask usage was low.
I will add that most of the studies had healthcare workers wearing masks, and did not test the combination of both parties wearing masks. It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective". In this case it's less about being actually protected (N95) and more about lowering the probability of transmission events, which our common leaky/crappy masks may be able to accomplish under the aforementioned conditions.
I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What you're saying is consistent with my hypothesis. Ie that casual public transmission on subways and in restaurants is low. Rather, it's "behind closed doors", at extended private gatherings, via domestic workers and so on. Those are the only such cases I have direct knowledge of (California USA). It could be that Japanese don't gather as much, or have chosen to skip it during pandemic.
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has it occurred to you that people taking payday loans don’t have a lot of options? This isn’t someone deciding between 15% monthly and a nice 4% annual personal loan. This is someone deciding between 15% monthly and homelessness. Choosing the interest rate is rational.
Is it that high because of the risk? Why aren't competitors lowering the rates if it's that high and excessive.
If she's not able to pay back the loan, she will be killed and her family is responsible for paying it back. The amount of undocumented suffering in the poor world right now is huge.
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That 0.4% difference in death rate is measuring survivability as it records the chance of dying from the virus. That 0.4% difference suggests Finland's health system was better than Sweden's at handling the virus, as your chances of dying were much less. When it comes to actual deaths Finland was doing over 830% better (i.e. 168 per million compared to 1406 per million) than Sweden. Edit: Fixed my bad math. My 90% be…
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#439This 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…
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.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.