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"plague" Diarrhea probably ended up killing more people than SARS-CoV-2 in 2020.
by thepangolino 6y ago
"plague"
Diarrhea probably ended up killing more people than SARS-CoV-2 in 2020.
- ianlevesque 6y agoIn the United States 50,000 more people died of COVID-19 directly in 2020 than died in World War 2. I don’t get these comments.
- leereeves 6y agoI'm sure thepangolino was talking about deaths worldwide, and it's probably true. Here in the developed world, where COVID was an aberration, it's easy to forget that it was barely a blip in Africa. "Diarrhea kills 2,195 children every day—more than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined."[1] "In 2016, diarrhoea was the eighth leading cause of death among all ages (1 655 944 deaths, 95% uncertainty interval [UI] 1 244 073–2 366 552)"[2] 1: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html 2: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(18)30362-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
- sdenton4 6y agoOTOH: 'A Continent Where the Dead Aren't Counted' https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coronavirus-deaths-underreporting.html?searchResultPosition=2 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coron... Tl;dr: Reporting of deaths is incredibly irregular across Africa, and counting excess deaths is likely impossible as a result. The population is younger on average, which likely helps, but we probably don't know the real numbers there.
- leereeves 6y agoThere are still doctors and hospitals there who would see a huge increase in deaths due to respiratory illness, if one occurred. According to your source, they haven't: > “The mortality due to Covid in the African continent is not a major public issue,” said Dorian Job, the West Africa program manager for Doctors Without Borders. The rest of that article is just speculation that there might be an outbreak that isn't being recorded, with little evidence.
- coderintherye 6y agoEven if they did, based on the source you pointed to (CDC) and their estimate of Covid deaths, Covid killed more people in 2020 than diarrhea killed in 2016 (1.834 million vs. 1.655 million). CDC data is at https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#global-counts-rates https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#global-counts-rate... And comes from JHU https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
- thepangolino 6y agoWorld population was also much smaller. The Spanish flu killed 50 million people. That’s 5% of the word population at the time. Now 50 million would barley be over half a percent.
- roenxi 6y agoFor anyone interested, the world population in the 1940s was ~30% of what it currently is.
- leereeves 6y agoWhile we're correcting facts, we should also note that over 70 million people died in WW2.[1] COVID doesn't come close, not even on a yearly basis. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
- makomk 6y agoYeah, the trick is that they're comparing to US World War 2 deaths when almost all the deaths from the war were elsewhere. For context, Wikipedia seems to reckon that the UK had more total WW2 deaths than the US despite being a rather smaller country, and we weren't the worst affected even within western Europe by a long shot.
- ianlevesque 6y agoIt’s no “trick.” World War 2 is considered a historic loss of American life, and we just topped it.
- bauerd 6y agoIt is not about fatality rates. It is about health systems getting overwhelmed
- base698 6y agoMaybe try to learn why people make them? Why do you think people down play it?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- OminousWeapons 6y agoAt the risk of being blunt, what is there to learn besides people are self-interested and don't like sacrificing? At this stage either you agree that hundreds of thousands dying is a problem or it's not. It's pretty much that simple.
- base698 6y agoI'll tell my friend that couldn't have his wife's funeral and friend that lost his house and restaurant they should sacrifice harder. Meanwhile almost everyone I know in tech has had the best financial year ever. It's good we have to sacrifice nothing and even gain, but I totally get the loss from the rest of the world. With the death count, we will see when all cause mortality is published. If there are huge drops in heart disease and cancer deaths that would imply some things. The median age of death is over 80.
- closeparen 6y agoWWII is important more because of the radical restructuring of society undertaken to fight it, the potential consequences had we gotten it wrong, and its lasting impact on the world. It's not about the sheer number of combat deaths. Same with COVID.
- tinus_hn 6y agoIn the United States more than 100000 less people died of COVID-19 in 2020 than of smoking. It is useful to put it all in perspective to keep from panicking.
- ianlevesque 6y agoYou can choose not to smoke. You can’t choose not to covid.
- tinus_hn 6y agoNice offhand dismissal. * Many of these people are not smokers themselves, they are dying from second hand smoking * You are free to choose to smoke, but not to choose to go to a bar? It’s reasonable to forbid people to visit their grandparents but not to forbid them to smoke? The proper comparison would be that you can choose ‘not to Covid’ as much as you can choose ‘not to lung cancer’. A nonsensical proposition.
- timr 6y agoDiarrhea kills 800 thousand children every year, alone (something like 1-2M people die from it every year). https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/pdf/global/programs/Globaldiarrhea508c.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/pdf/global/programs/Globald...
- ianlevesque 6y agoSo let’s fix both, not neither.
- timr 6y agoI'm not sure who you're arguing with, but it isn't me. You said you didn't understand the comment, yet it's pretty much a statement of fact. I would personally characterize diarrheal diseases as a plague, but I think the broader point is fair: people have lost all perspective on how Covid compares to other causes of death around the world. How far would the tens of trillions of dollars the worlds' advanced economies have spent on Covid in 2020 have gone to eradicating childhood deaths due to dirty water? You can't simply say "let's do both", because the fact is that we immediately found the money for one, and we haven't found it for the other despite years of effort. It speaks to our priorities.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ianlevesque 6y agoI understood their dismissal of covid-19 just fine. I don’t understand why people are still stringing that harp a year into this. I would like to believe we have the ability and will to tackle big problems. The existence of another problem isn’t a compelling reason to not act to me.
- timr 6y ago> I don’t understand why people are still stringing that harp a year into this. Because it isn't a "harp". It isn't just a niggling little thing, and it isn't "dismissal" to put something into perspective. The world's economies have thrown tens of trillions of dollars into the response to Covid (not to mention the incalculable follow-on costs in terms of mental health, missed diagnoses and the like), and nary a thought was given to what the side-effects of that response might be, or whether those resources might have been better spent elsewhere. We just did it, and it turns out that the disease will have an impact on par with something else that we spend drastically less money on in any given year. If you literally cannot fathom why a cost/benefit calculation might be appropriate here, you have lost perspective, and the OP's point is well-taken.
- paulpauper 6y agoAgeing probably will kill more people. But the problem is phycological. People tend to not fear things they think they can prevent through willpower. For people in developed countries, diarrhea deaths are preventable... airborne viruses, not so much.
- sdenton4 6y agoKeep in mind that the mortality rate is much better now than at the beginning, largely due to improvements in treatment as we've learned. (Prone positioning, better alternatives to ventilators, etc.) Without the massive effort undertaken early in, things almost certainly would have been far, far worse. Even still, parts of the US are teetering on the edge of having overwhelmed ICUs, nine months in. Let's also remember the way the world was reshaped by 6000 deaths in new york in 2001... Or to say it less charitably: Back at the beginning it was commonly foretold that we would do all this work to flatten the curve, and then some idiots would look at the resulting numbers and say 'See, it wasn't so bad at all!'
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago> Diarrhea probably ended up killing more people than SARS-CoV-2 in 2020. Only if you include the verbal kind.