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The CDC has an excellent visualization for this. 2020 is a major outlier in the last few years in terms of excess deaths. If you drill down into the local data,

The CDC has an excellent visualization for this. 2020 is a major outlier in the last few years in terms of excess deaths. If you drill down into the local data, you can see some really stark visualizations: for example, the tremendous increase in deaths in New York City in spring of 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

jfengel 6y ago
It's astonishing that New York managed to halt that. Some is surely getting better at treating people with the disease so that they don't die, but they must also have had totalitarian levels of compliance. Exponential growth means that even a small amount of non-compliance will still be explosive, and with so many cases already there were enormous opportunities for somebody to fail.
- tarboreus 6y ago
  We got hit hard here and New Yorkers are tending to take it seriously going forward. You see really sharp mask compliance, you can actually get a test and a result in a day, and they give out free masks everywhere. Doing a little traveling recently it just kind of seemed that other parts of the country were effing around, kind of going through the motions, but people would be weird about masks, focus on odd things like putting shrink wrap on food between the kitchen and the table, stuff like that. There were a couple weeks here in April where it just seemed like the city was dead and people remember that.
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    The image of freezer trucks full of bodies parked in the streets is a really hard one to get rid of.
- taxicabjesus 6y ago
  The herd-immunity threshold is probably around 20% -- enough to stop exponential growth in cases, but not enough to get the virus to self-extinguish. It also helped when front-line doctors figured out the treatment they were told to use ("invasive ventilation") was a death sentence. They stopped ventilating all their patients, and their patients stopped dying so quickly. The sun also provided progressively more adequate illumination (providing Vitamin D and red light), starting with the vernal equinox on March 20. Covid Season has returned this fall, like clockwork. The only factor that really matters is light exposure. https://www.space.com/vernal-equinox-2020-earliest-spring-124-years.html https://www.space.com/vernal-equinox-2020-earliest-spring-12...

jfengel 6y ago

It's astonishing that New York managed to halt that. Some is surely getting better at treating people with the disease so that they don't die, but they must also have had totalitarian levels of compliance. Exponential growth means that even a small amount of non-compliance will still be explosive, and with so many cases already there were enormous opportunities for somebody to fail.

tarboreus 6y ago
We got hit hard here and New Yorkers are tending to take it seriously going forward. You see really sharp mask compliance, you can actually get a test and a result in a day, and they give out free masks everywhere. Doing a little traveling recently it just kind of seemed that other parts of the country were effing around, kind of going through the motions, but people would be weird about masks, focus on odd things like putting shrink wrap on food between the kitchen and the table, stuff like that. There were a couple weeks here in April where it just seemed like the city was dead and people remember that.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  The image of freezer trucks full of bodies parked in the streets is a really hard one to get rid of.
taxicabjesus 6y ago
The herd-immunity threshold is probably around 20% -- enough to stop exponential growth in cases, but not enough to get the virus to self-extinguish. It also helped when front-line doctors figured out the treatment they were told to use ("invasive ventilation") was a death sentence. They stopped ventilating all their patients, and their patients stopped dying so quickly. The sun also provided progressively more adequate illumination (providing Vitamin D and red light), starting with the vernal equinox on March 20. Covid Season has returned this fall, like clockwork. The only factor that really matters is light exposure. https://www.space.com/vernal-equinox-2020-earliest-spring-124-years.html https://www.space.com/vernal-equinox-2020-earliest-spring-12...