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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

#271

Post by spankyspangler »

devin wrote: post #257
spankyspangler wrote: post #227

That sounds like a pretty wild conspiracy theory. Any basis for this belief?

"Wild conspiracy theory"? Uh, what? It's exactly what happened where I live. At least half of our hospitalizations at peak were from neighboring areas that had no more capacity due to low or non-existent restrictions.

Yes, it sounded like a wild conspiracy theory.

If it happened where you live then you'll be able to easily show some evidence that there was a strategy by residents of those towns to infect cities out of a hatred of their residents. I'll wait.

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

#272

Post by licyeus »

claytongulick wrote: post #180
msbarnett wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

17% excess mortality (and that’s assuming this 1% baseline we pulled out of the air, remember) doesn’t mean that the pandemic is only responsible for those excess deaths – a bunch of people who might have otherwise been expected to get hit by a car worked from home all year, or died from COVID instead, etc. So the pandemic is responsible for the 17% (in this scenario) uplift above baseline plus an unknown portion of…

Apparently suicides and deaths from starvation were also up significantly. It will indeed be interesting to see how the distribution of deaths plays out.

Suicides were down (in USA) for 2020: https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-me...

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

#273

Post by coldtea »

lostapathy wrote: post #262
coldtea wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What western government could pull off welding doors shut the way they did in China? Western governments have pulled all kinds of restrictions themselves, from curfews, closed borders, and "let's close all retail businesses" restrictions, to mandatory movement monitoring. Heck, Italy might not have welded doors, but had the Army patrol to enforce strict lockdown, and citizens in northerns cities stay inside. Someti…

Announcing restrictions and enforcing them are two separate animals. There are not enough police in most of the US to actually enforce closing businesses, let alone confining people to their homes. Especially not when half the populace sees it as a political infringement of their rights.

I'm not sure about there not being "enough police in most of the US to actually enforce closing businesses".

There's not enough police to enforce no traffic violations at all either (what would that be, a traffic cop for every street or car?). That's not how laws work, you just need to make a law/rule and collect fines from the businesses that violated it. If there wasn't the political will to do so in the states, that's another thing.

But in at least a couple of countries in the EU I know of, all businesses were closed (by government decree) except explicitly whitelisted "necessary" shopping (like groceries, drugstores, and such) for months on end.

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

#274

Post by melling »

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…

People are lumping the numbers together for the entire pandemic.

During the first wave New York and New Jersey got hit really hard. Basically, it was too late to do anything.

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

#275

Post by NicoJuicy »

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…

I think you should population density as a variable.

You could be less restrictive in a rural area, while the same policies would have been very harmful in cities.

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

#276

Post by breck »

josh_today wrote: post #47
breck wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If not, we’re about 20% done with COVID, world-wide. For exponential processes think of the % done on a log scale. So population of USA is 320M, and ~100M had COVID, or we were 94% (8/8.5) done with it before vaccine was introduced.

Not questioning the numbers but genuinely curious how the exponential math works in this case. Thanks

For an exponential process it takes roughly the same amount of time to go from 10 to 100 as it does to go from 100,000 to 1M, 10M to 100M, et cetera. So if you had a progress bar of an exponential progress, you'd want the % to be of the log, not the absolute number. Because even if you were at 100M/1B, in terms of time you would not be 10%, but rather 90%. Of course, this situation is dynamic, and there are more variables at play, but a baseline for thought for progress bar of exponential processes is to do log of the numbers.

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

#277

Post by orblivion »

slg wrote: post #168
Barrin92 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It started in China, a country with 1.4 billion people and 20 million pop cities and even if you 100x their official number they did better than the US or Europe. There's few excuses for our mismanagement.

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.

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

#278

Post by briandear »

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.

It was a huge mistake in foresight as well. Many of us were highly vocal against school closings.

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

#279

Post by orblivion »

refurb wrote: post #228
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?

The real question - how many countries did well that were at the center of the prior SARS and bird flu outbreaks of the past?

As I understand, SARS 1 and MERS are much less contagious than SARS 2.

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

#280

Post by MaulingMonkey »

vosper wrote: post #230
greenwich26 wrote: post #173

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…

> And the U.S. couldn't close its land borders even if it wanted to Maybe not perfectly, but surely the vast majority of traffic across land borders is at managed border crossings. The US could shut those down, put the army on any unmanaged roads/routes (don’t know if this is a thing) and stop 95% or more of land border traffic? Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference to Covid - I don’t know about that, but I do que…

The border is already closed (at least around here) to "non-essential travel". So, no crossing the border for vacationing. But "full" closure would mean blocking "essential" trade (food, oil/fuel, ...), and blocking "essential" workers that commute across the border. It could technically be done, but it'd be incredibly disruptive.

Even with full legal closure, the borders are porous enough for a border wall to have been a talking point in some previous election debates. Build a mile-tall wall out of mithril, and you'd still be left with a ton of unsecured coastline, connected by some rather convenient oceans...

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