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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

#151

Post by orblivion »

lethologica wrote: post #139
orblivion wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In how many of the countries that did really well did the virus have the same head start that it had in the US and Europe before getting discovered?

How important is a head start though in these situations? If the response was poor in either case, the result would be poor, right?

If the US had in reality on the order of 100 cases, there could be a credible effort to get rid of all of them and reopen. You wouldn't have to lock down hardcore for as long. In Australia from what I've seen fly across Twitter, they had the luxury of periodically locking down a city when they saw a single case, to make sure it didn't escape into the population.

I agree that there could be a way for this to work in the US but it would be a long slog. South Korea seems like they could pull it off. So I'll grant you them for sure as being superior.

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

#152

Post by chmod600 »

GavinMcG wrote: post #114
chmod600 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Florida didn't lock down (EDIT: except a few weeks at the beginning), and their death numbers are middle-of-the-pack[1], just marginally worse than California, which did heavy lockdowns. We should probably assume that, in addition to not following some practices we should have, we also did a lot that we didn't have to. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html list the states by "of all time" a…

This or that state government's mandate or lack thereof really can't stand in for actual behaviors . For one thing, regardless of state mandates, you can bet your buttons that a huge number of residential/nursing facilities for seniors in Florida did lock down, and thereby protected those most likely to increase Florida's numbers. If you want to see the effects of policy, don't compare states (especially big diverse…

There was both a policy difference as well as a behavior difference when it came to schools.

Also, case numbers are a bad thing to measure. Death numbers are more reliable.

EDIT: also, it appears state policy exacerbated the nursing home problems in California:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/06/editorial-newsom-falt...

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

#153

Post by PeterisP »

orblivion wrote: post #128
candu wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO if you want to understand what an effective response looks like - don't look at North America or Europe. Think Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Africa, all of which had vastly better outcomes. Of course, I'm not an epidemiologist or public health expert, so while I have some guesses I'm not sure what exactly they did that was more effective - but there's no question that it was more effective.…

In how many of the countries that did really well did the virus have the same head start that it had in the US and Europe before getting discovered?

For me "countries that did really well" is mainly places like Singapore and Taiwan and South Korea, which got the virus earlier than USA and Europe but took it seriously from the very start.

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

#154

Post by auxym »

chmod600 wrote: post #146
mattnewton wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have anything to add except that California is huge and very unevenly applied “lockdown” - there are many towns a where businesses remained open or reopened frequently, but the big cities did have large shelter in place efforts. It would be interesting to compare on the municipal level if the data was that granular.

The closing of schools in California (vs open in Florida since last fall) was a very distinct difference in both policy and actual behavior. It seems not to have had a dramatic effect on outcomes. At least in hindsight, the closing of schools might have been a huge mistake.

Some canadian provinces are still closing down schools at the moment.

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

#155

Post by mft_ »

archsurface wrote: post #137

What rubbish. In the UK the figures have been blatantly inflated. The entire UK media has turned into a bought and paid for government propaganda machine; the only journalists left are the independents. The whole thing has been such farce that I now struggle to acknowledge anything more than the presence of a virus. I still, after a year, don't know anyone who knows anyone who's died from this catastrophic, sky is fa…

Would you be able to share any evidence to back up your suspicions?

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

#156

Post by danenania »

TheRealSteel wrote: post #127
t8e56vd4ih wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, I'm not an epidemiologist and no geographer either apparently :D

What do you mean?

It doesn't account for Africa, but many of best-performing countries have been island countries (Australia, NZ, Taiwan, Iceland, etc.). Islands have some fairly obvious advantages in fighting a pandemic, and it shows in the statistics. I believe Hawaii has also done much better than other US states. I'm not sure whether that's what the comment was referring to though.

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

#157

Post by chiefalchemist »

"The rich world suffered relatively badly, but most of the dying has been elsewhere."

Saying the subtitle.

Elsewhere, meaning relatively poor countries. But even within the rich world the poor within those are disproportionately affected by Covid (deaths). But those ppl - at least in the USA - have worse health outcomes in general already.

Covid is both a disease and a symptom. Unfortunately, the disease lens is being used to distract from how it's a symptom of deeper longer running societal problems.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/communities-color-...

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

#158

Post by chmod600 »

auxym wrote: post #154
chmod600 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closing of schools in California (vs open in Florida since last fall) was a very distinct difference in both policy and actual behavior. It seems not to have had a dramatic effect on outcomes. At least in hindsight, the closing of schools might have been a huge mistake.

Some canadian provinces are still closing down schools at the moment.

Why? Sincere question. Is there science to back it up or is it just fear of making a wrong decision?

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

#159

Post by wernercd »

orblivion wrote: post #140
khazhoux wrote: post #51

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…

It seemed like a lot of the states that did well despite opening early were southern states where it isn't really winter when it's winter. Also I've heard the claim that (to be as apolitical as I can here) in Florida they secured the elderly population more quickly and carefully than in New York. You may want to look into that claim.

I'd say "Florida secured their elderly population more quickly and carefully than in New York" misses the fact that New York ACTIVELY put its elderly in harms way by requiring nursing homes take patients.

If New York ONLY ignored the problem that'd be one thing... but they actively made decisions that led to a large number of deaths - and more importantly those decisions were AGAINST the CDC guidelines.

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

#160

Post by raphlinus »

natural219 wrote: post #87
hedora wrote: 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%.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v... estimates it at 0.68% (0.53-0.82%). Boiling it down to one number is tricky though, as it is hugely correlated with age, so looking at any particular demographic is likely to give you pretty different numbers.
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