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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

#311

Post by amscanne »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #41

Please don’t look at 7m-13m number and compare it to 7 billion population and say oh it’s only 0.1-0.2%. Pretty much ever country has seen a 15-20% increase in excess mortality rates (20% more people dying than averages in the past), this is huge. This is one of the best up to date visualizations on this topic, scroll down and see breakdowns by country - https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...

FWIW, the FT article appears to be calling out the difference in peak rates “for the same dates”, not for the full year.

While the excess deaths are awful, it’s also important to keep the number in context. The death rate has been decreasing for over a century, and in absolute terms, the death rate of 2020 looks like the year 2000 [1].

[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/25/is-it-real...

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

#312

Post by maxerickson »

greenwich26 wrote: post #173
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.…

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…

Of the many things we didn't bother doing, closing the Mexican border probably didn't matter a lot.

Canada did greatly restrict the border!

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

#313

Post by akomtu »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #263
chmod600 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not quite sure what your point is. The absolute number is the number, and zooming in to make it a relative number for dramatic effect doesn't change that. It's kind of like zooming in to a stock market graph so the spikes look bigger.

Because numbers and how people interpret data is hugely important (there was a great article years ago how data visualization tricks can completely make a person misinterpret the presented information) People can read and shout - I WAS RIGHT!! Only 0.1% people die of covid, lockdowns were unnecessary, masks don’t help, everyone’s a sheep for believing covid is anything more serious than a flu. Now they want to vaccin…

What's the age distribution of that 0.1%? I guess it's mostly old people. When a war takes down a big chunk of young males, it's a problem. When a pandemic takes down 2x more but only old people, the nation may as well not notice that. This coronavirus is surprisingly courteous in this regard for it doesn't touch the young folks.

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

#314

Post by DangitBobby »

karmelapple wrote: post #182
virtuallynathan wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the case with automotive fatalities, they were up in 2020. "A 24% spike in roadway death rates is highest in 96 years"

I find this both surprising and not. Early in the pandemic, when most everything was shut down, I had to run an errand and ended up driving down some streets I’ve driven many times before. The percentage of cars driving erratically on the road was much higher than usual. I figure one of these might explain it: 1. People are stressed / distracted, and driving poorly because of it 2. Most drivers are well-meaning and c…

There was another article posted recently which explained that suburban traffic patterns changed so there was a lot more traffic congestion in the afternoons in suburban areas, while roads such as interstates and highways had lower than normal peak traffic. Having more traffic concentrated in areas not designed for heavy traffic could explain it.

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

#315

Post by GavinMcG »

chmod600 wrote: post #152
GavinMcG wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

There you go, dig into the specific policy choices of specific leaders. The world isn't as simple as which team you're on.

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

#316

Post by belltaco »

briandear wrote: post #303
belltaco wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think there is a desire to overcount which must not be glossed over either So there was overcounting, but somehow excess mortality in 2020-2021 is higher than in normal years? How? >with comorbidity being counted as a COVID death even when the patient had 2 or more serious health conditions already A high percentage of people in the US have "serious health conditions" like diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure et…

> So there was overcounting, but somehow excess mortality in 2020-2021 is higher than in normal years? How? People dying of heart attacks because they didn’t seek timely care because of fear of going to the hospital. Medical screenings postponed. Undetected cancers. Suicides. There is a direct correlation between unemployment rates and disease. My annual physical, due in July 2020 was cancelled. How many other people…

>Medical screenings postponed. Undetected cancers

Most of these will show up at a later time. And some of them were caused by hospital overcrowding, doctors trying to save themselves etc. not lockdown.

>Suicides.

Suicides are down.

>My annual physical, due in July 2020 was cancelled. How many other people’s were as well?

How many people die within a year due to something that's caught in a physical? I'd say barely any. If you're counting them then you should also count the lives saved by reduced pollution due to the lockdowns.

>Also one also should note increases in deaths of despair. That’s a real thing.

Suicides are down.

>Excess deaths can’t be called “covid,” without proof that they were. How would else know Covid was the cause and not the flu?

Because flu deaths are included in normal rate of deaths. If you're saying there are multiple times the number flu deaths than during a normal year with no measures to contain it, and it doesn't show up on the yearly disease surveillance, then you're arguing in bad faith.

>The uncomfortable truth is that lockdown proponents don’t want to admit that their policies may have caused more damage than the disease from which they were claiming to protect us.

The uncomfortable truth that pro-covid(and anti-vax people) don't want to admit is that their attitude of calling covid just a flu or something less harmful has caused death, disease, hospital overcrowding, increased number of lockdowns due to increased cases/deaths, and damage from the lockdowns. Compare the economies of countries that strict lockdowns but were able to open up sooner like Australia, New Zealand, China etc.

Do you think people will keep participating in the economy and crowded events etc. at the same rate if there are scenes like this at hospitals? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Y1YakG60s

Now that things are opening back up, if there is hospital overcrowding and more covid deaths and cases due to the pro-covid and anti-vaccine people, then who is to blame for the economic damage and death from ensuing lockdowns?

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

#317

Post by neither_color »

sneak wrote: post #183
ianai wrote: post #84

Earlier 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. I hope you meant this as a way to sell it, because this view is a terrible, terrible way to approach the world, as it lives outside of the US are only to be preserved insofar as doing so protects USians. Saving human lives is sufficient reason itself.

If your expectations of people are too high you will always be disappointed. If other people's goals are aligned with yours for the wrong reason, that's better than them not being aligned with your goals at all. See the book "The Wisdom of Psychopaths." Your surgeon might be motivated by profit or might be motivated by altruism, in the end what matters for your survival is that he's the best at his job.

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

#318

Post by raydev »

onionisafruit wrote: post #165
ngngngng wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community I grew up in in California purposefully threw rallies and went out of their way to rebel against every single restriction. I keep this in mind when people say California's restrictions didn't work. Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.

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.

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

#319

Post by sam_4675 »

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 agree. These numbers and methodology are highly suspect to me, particularly given the large self granted estimate range. Obviously lots of room for error. Not very useful analysis imo.

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

#320

Post by [deleted] »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #295
orblivion wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There were literal videos about it at the same time ( a year ago)

[deleted]
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