Live data from Hacker News

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

economist.com

441–450 of 489 posts

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

#441
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count of covid cases and deaths has been highly politicized and manipulated in Florida to the point of firing people for reporting them. Not sure how possible it is to get accurate info in this environment.

Please stop spreading misinformation. Rebekah Jones was not fired for reporting data manipulation. She is simply a liar. All of her key claims have been debunked. Please stop spreading misinformation. Rebekah Jones wasn't a data scientist and was never asked to falsify any numbers. She is simply a liar. https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-cov...

Claiming that on the back of an opinion piece in a partisan publication which seems not at all interested in neutral fact finding but revels in partisanship and plays this up as a political issue does not bolster your argument's credibility. Indeed it weakens it. I say that as a non-American who doesn't have a horse in the race.

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

#442
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this. At least here in the UK, lockdown meant not seeing friends or family (unless you lived with them). Was that not the case in the US? Of course if people flout the rules then they won't have any effect.

It varied from state to state. I live in Maryland, and there was maybe a 2 week period last spring where you weren't allowed to drive anywhere except to get groceries and medicine, or if you were an essential employee for a business that was allowed to stay open. Outside of that two week period, the only travel restriction I know of was a mandatory quarantine period for people traveling in from other states.

Ah, for comparison we had a 6-week period of similar restrictions last spring. Followed by another 4-week period in September, and a 3 month period at the start of this year.

Outside of those times there were restrictions on meeting indoors (at times max 6 people, at other no meeting indoors at all) pretty much continuously since last April.

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

#443

Covid makes your country worse. It’s like having endemic malaria. No one wants endemic malaria in their country, and costly government intervention was required to rid the developed world of it. Similarly, it’s disheartening to see so many people — especially on partisan lines — promulgate the talking point that we just need to “learn to live with it”. This is insanity. Annual mRNA booster vaccines ad infinitum, with…

You literally can't close the American brder. As a strict lower bound (based on CBP encounters) 3000 people walk through the desert or jump the fence every day, and statistically many of them have Covid. This is a constant source term to the growth equation that precludes a Melbourne solution, even if the borders were officially closed and optimal lockdowns.

> You literally can't close the American brder. As a strict lower bound (based on CBP encounters) 3000 people walk through the desert or jump the fence every day, and statistically many of them have Covid. This is a constant source term to the growth equation that precludes a Melbourne solution, even if the borders were officially closed and optimal lockdowns.

That doesn’t sound like a long-term problem given the imminent rise of drone patrols, and is likely short term correctable by bolstering security along the US southern border. Like many aspects of the US’ abject failure in managing the pandemic, this seems like a “lack of political will” problem more than anything else.

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

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that you could place the condition on reproduction number - you really intend that the virus becomes extinct. But your ' less than 100% infected/vaccinated' is an assumption, not a guarantee. There's an ongoing possibility of immune escape.

"...you really intend that the virus becomes extinct." Which might not be possible due to many factors, including non-human hosts.

> including non-human hosts.

I'm inclined to think that infection by a non-human host would be a different virus with different circumstances (SARS-CoV-1 is considered different from SARS-CoV-2).

Unless, you mean that our reaction to the pandemic globally has allowed a bunch of new non-human reservoirs to form.

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

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"(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 w…

This is the part I object to: > just makes it so you can't taste or smell anything for a few days along with fatigue and flu-like symptoms Maybe for the “vast majority” that’s true, I can’t speak to the distribution of ongoing impact people are experiencing or will over time. But there are a lot of people who have been infected, have survived, and have ongoing complications that go well beyond this description.

It's about 20-35% for non-hospitalized cases according to the CDC.

"Maybe for the “vast majority” that’s true"

That's why they qualified it as such. Even the flu has long term impacts in 10% of patients. So yeah, long term impacts are a concern, but the attitudes of many people (the commenter's point) are based on the fact that the majority of people are fine. For example, have you ever considered that you have a 10% chance of long flu effects? I would guess that like most people, you have not, because the vast majority of people are not affected by it.

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

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...you really intend that the virus becomes extinct." Which might not be possible due to many factors, including non-human hosts.

> including non-human hosts. I'm inclined to think that infection by a non-human host would be a different virus with different circumstances (SARS-CoV-1 is considered different from SARS-CoV-2). Unless, you mean that our reaction to the pandemic globally has allowed a bunch of new non-human reservoirs to form.

Remember when they kill all those minks in Europe last year? They also say that some pets can get covid as well. So it's possible that non-human hosts could prevent eradication. Although it is possible that we get to the point of stuff like plague or hantavirus today - rodents are hosts but only a few people are infected each year and it fails to spread. But who knows.

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

#447
post #405
post #11

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/

Excess deaths in Peru are at around 0.5% of the population already, and there's a dozen other European and LatAm countries above 0.3% [1] - and not everyone has been infected yet. So 0.23% is certainly wrong in those regions.

0.23% IFR might be correct or even too high for India or African countries where maybe 2-3% of the population are pension-aged. In western countries with 18-20% pensioners, IFR is definitely above 0.5%.

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... Look at the second table

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

#448
post #11

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…

Still not sure where 0.5% IFR is derived from; the best data I've seen puts it at 0.25% - 0.4%.

In Peru, we already had 0.5% of the population die in excess of normal. Even if most people in Peru have been infected, that puts IFR above 0.5%. (The US has a bigger proportion of elderly and obese, but better ICU care, so that might skew numbes up or down.)

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

#450
post #431
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Take anything from Ioannidis with a huge grain of salt. His first californian seroprevalence study was flawed. NYC or Czech Republic had higher share of population die of covid so the cfr is probably higher.

That is a peer reviewed study published by the WHO. If you have something better than an ad hominem attack then please provide the citation.
Post reply on HN