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

economist.com

451–460 of 489 posts

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

#451
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which facts in that article are incorrect?

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

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wasn't much they could do about the situation that would make a major difference, save for employing totalitarian enforcement measures that no one wanted. Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US. There are countries (SK, Japan) with tiny numbers of cases. There are obviously thousands of things that could have been different…

Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US .... There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better. The latter part doesn't follow logically from the first. It can be that performance is essentially random, or determined by geographical factors, or by the pre-existing health of the population,…

"I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few, there were actually a few coronavirus patients, and I shook hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands," - Boris Johnson

Anybody who thinks the UK represents competent totalitarianism needs to really think about where they are getting their news from. The UK's response was objectively worse than similar countries, in that more people died per capita, and this was because of two late lockdowns, both late because top politicians ignored scientific advice.

The success of the vaccine rollout is arguably the result of the government's procurement efforts, but also deserving of credit are the UK population (overwhelmingly non-skeptical), and the NHS, which allows for a highly organized and centralized rollout.

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

#453
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the restrictions didn't work at all in that community.

You can’t assert this without confirming that zero restrictions would have led to the same number or fewer deaths.

What I meant is that restrictions are ineffective if they are ignored, not that they literally had no effect.

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

#454
post #450
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to understand limitation of this study. This is not a best estimate for CFR or IFR. This is an estimate based on a review of seroprevalence studies. Some of them are complete crap (IFR 0.0%!), a lot of them are biased towards taking samples from people who went through an influenza like illness recently. And even if done perfectly about 5% of people had some antibodies against coronaviruses even way before the pandemic so there is some background level that should be subtracted from the seroprevalence but almost never is.

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

#455
post #454
post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to understand limitation of this study. This is not a best estimate for CFR or IFR. This is an estimate based on a review of seroprevalence studies. Some of them are complete crap (IFR 0.0%!), a lot of them are biased towards taking samples from people who went through an influenza like illness recently. And even if done perfectly about 5% of people had some antibodies against coronaviruses even way before t…

I read the study and understand the limitations. So far it's the best estimate of worldwide IFR. If you have something better then please provide a citation.

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

#456
post #91

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’ve asked myself this question. I have no hard data to back this up, but wonder If it’s related to outside time and vitamin D absorption, which seems to have an affect on covid. Ex: did NYC have a tougher time than Florida as a result of this, and even with all the protocols in NYC, they could do only as well as Florida with no rules.

NYC has a combined sewer system [0] [1] that overflows when it rains more than .... ~1/10 of an inch per hour (iirc). The fecal-> aerosol transmission route is certainly very important: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27156256

"Who do you share a bathroom with" is very important for tracking transmission. In NYC, everyone shares a bathroom.

[0] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dep/water/combined-sewer-overflows...

[1] https://www.riverkeeper.org/campaigns/stop-polluters/sewage-...

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

#457
post #450
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Peer reviewed has never meant, and will never mean, correct.

In general arguing that a particular authors contributions in an area have been less than stellar is not an ad hominem attack.

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

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imm…

It's mostly a cost thing, in reality. Closing the Southern border -- "building a wall" if you will -- is an absolutely gargantuan task. The border is huge, many parts it extremely harsh and remote terrain unfriendly to construction projects. Trump made it a huge part of his platform, had a majority, and in four years got a pitiful amount of wall actually built.

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

#459

Holy cow. This does massively underline how important the work of things like COVAX are in getting equitable global access to vaccines. We still need billions more doses manufactured, distributed and administered - it could take years and cost a fortune - and we should not lose our urgency or our focus.

Pfizer is projecting 250 million doses per month by December. It will take years still at that rate, but they also have been doing a reasonable job of meeting and then increasing their projections.

Plus Pfizer is one of about a dozen vaccine makers at or near approval. Pfizer, Moderna, AZ, Sputnik, Sinovac, Sinopharm, J&J, Novavax, and many more. If we have 10 Pfizers, we have a billion doses every few months.

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

#460

Earlier 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…

People discuss the range of social lockdown techniques as if they're generically effective or not, when really I think think the effectiveness of the same strategies varies vs how high the current community state of infection is, as well as a hysteresis of what level of infection you're coming from.

If you can act earlier, maintain a external boundary, and maintain a low enough level to trace then I think you can stay in a very good state with minimal inconveniences. But once the infection rate has passed a certain level, more stringent strategies are needed to get back to the same low state.

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