5 ms·

Meh, I’m not convinced it’s such a disaster it’s being portayed. Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average

Meh, I’m not convinced it’s such a disaster it’s being portayed. Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average before that. Again, meh.

piva00 6y ago
Only 12%? More than 1/10 of your population dies, literally more than a decimation by its old meaning, saying that this is not such a disaster is incredibly unempathetic. Or you have a very warped view of what consists a disaster...
- jeofken 6y ago
  I think you misread the comment your replying to. He said the difference between average deaths per year and 2020 deaths per year was 12%. Likely this will balance out with a lower death rate in the next year, as the old and weak who would have died in 2021 sadly left this world already a year early.
- beprogrammed 6y ago
  He's not saying 12% of the population, he's saying 12% more then the running 5 year average.
- nwj 6y ago
  You are confusing "12% more than the prior 5 year average" with "12% of the overall population". Nevertheless, I agree it's a catastrophe.
- zoid_ 6y ago
  12% of the population? No, surely what's meant is an increase of 12% to the usual number of deaths per year.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- mikem170 6y ago
  No, In Sweden 1144 out of every million people have died [0], which equates to 1 out of every 874 people. Does 1 out of 874 people dead, mostly elderly and/or with comorbidities, sound bad? Picture a room with 874 people. That's a lot of people. Ask 1 person to leave. Is that a disaster for society? [0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
  - outside1234 6y ago
    I think the answer to that is: “Are you the one person?”
    - mikem170 6y ago
      That's a personal disaster, but not a disaster for society.
      - papaf 6y ago
        Yes it is. Once hospitals fill and no longer function you are living in a society without healthcare.
        MrRiddle 6y ago
        And, at least in my country, that's not the fault of the virus, but politicians who didn't invest in healthcare not even remotely enough. Here we were hit hard by virus, however we never had more than 10k people hospitalized. If we, as a country of 7 million have a problem with this weak virus, what would happen if it were couple times stronger. People should be outraged with how healthcare failed, but media and politics are reporting about the virus like it's a plague, just so they can cover their asses.
  - MrRiddle 6y ago
    And the person is already on the way out.
jeofken 6y ago
In Sweden the death rate during 2020 was equal to the average for the last 10 years. We had zero restrictions until a couple of months ago.
- fabbari 6y ago
  No - it wasn't, head over to EuroMomo and you'll find out that it was over[0]. Not only that, compare the excess mortality with your neighbors and the "Sweden did fine without lockdowns" sounds hollow. That would explain the restrictions. Consider that the excess mortality is just a small indicator that things didn't go well - if you plug in the equation a reduction of deaths due to other causes you figure out pretty quickly that things were pretty bad. [0] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
  - mikem170 6y ago
    The grandparent's original point still stands, this is not the disaster that the headlines portray. The U.S stands at 1 in 750 people dead from covid, mostly elderly with comorbidities, a rate similar to many other countries. That is 0.13% of the population. That's not 1 in 10, or even 1 in 100. It's not the young and healthy, either. A pretty small number. And if you are old and frail something is going to get you soon, anyways. Per-capita just as many, perhaps several times more, people died of the 1968 Hong Kong flu. New viruses happen, part of nature, people die, that's how it goes, This isn't nearly as bad as a lot of similar situations in the past.
    - petre 6y ago
      Just take a look at Reuters' stats page. It's easy now as we have just passed 100m infections with 2m deaths. That amounts to 2 dead out of every 100, globally. https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/ https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m... Death rate is 0.16% in the US though.
      - mikem170 6y ago
jokethrowaway 6y ago
The real disaster is yet to come, and it will be economical and caused by the prolonged lockdowns. Not to mention the third world starving, but it's not like western countries ever cared about that.
- adventured 6y ago
  The US has been consistently providing 50% or more of the world's food aid for a century at this point. It has saved tens of millions of people from starvation over that time. No western countries eh.
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    We produce more than enough food for everyone on the planet (even if we were 10bln), the United Nation's World Food Program, whose mission is to "eradicate hunger", in 60 years just managed to get bigger and bigger (15k employees nowadays) without solving the problem. The number of undernourished people is higher today than in 2014. Poor countries don't get industrialised and never manage to make enough food by themselves. If you ask me, I think it's just a way to spend some money to make your citizens feel good while keeping the status-quo.
simonh 6y ago
That's the number with restrictions, lockdowns, curfews, etc, etc. In other words while Serbia was hit fairly badly, relatively speaking, the mitigation measures largely worked. This is not a good argument against mitigation measures. The Spanish Flu seems to have similar case mortality rates and efforts to implement preventive measures were hampered by the war time conditions so it's a good candidate to compare against when considering the effectiveness of preventive measures. It's spread lead to from 17x to 50x as many deaths as we've seen from the coronavirus at the global level. In India where lockdown measures weren't significant 5% of the population died.
- thu2111 6y ago
  No, mitigation measures have had no effect: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full#SM6 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30208-X/fulltext#fig0002 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... etc. And there are many more. I know it doesn't seem to make sense, but lockdowns have had no impact on mortality. This is seen when examining all the data. Consider Sweden - very little government suppression, and it's got a basically average outcome. In fact when analysed properly they don't have much excess death in 2020: https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01/15/final-report-on-swedish-mortality-2020-anno-covid/ https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01...
vixen99 6y ago
Romanian death rate per 1000 (8th highest in the world) has increased monotonically from 12.7 in 2015 by 0.1/1000 each year to 13.2 in 2020. In other words Covid has had zero effect (to one significant place) on the increase in rate of death per 1000. However to claim Covid has not been a disaster is disingenuous. On many fronts it's been a calamity though much of this has been self-inflicted.
- paganel 6y ago
  Any source for those 2020 numbers? Afaik the Romanian Statistics Institute only published mortality figures up to (and including) November 2020, and the nominal numbers were indeed similar to Serbia’s, i.e. up until then we had had about 10% more deaths in the first 11 months of the year compared to the first 11 months of 2019 (with November 2020 a particular dire month). It’s also true that I couldn’t find an easy comparison with the previous 5 years average.
- MrRiddle 6y ago
  What I believe Covid proven, at least in Serbia, is that you can’t have hospitals built 50 years ago serve almost double population of Belgrade. It shows how politicians didn’t invest in healthcare. In my mind, the whole thing is so overblown because the medical sector works on fumes. Doctors and nurses are working in Germany, and our hospital are few and far between. We have thousands of young and educated leaving the country every year. That’s the real tragedy. However, this is not to say I’m against measures. I wear a mask, I social distance, I haven’t seen my friends in months.
  - petre 6y ago
    It's not much different in neighbouring countries. Don't know about Slovenia or Croatia but the same issues plague Romania and Bulgaria. Just Thursday night there was yet another fire at a hospital in Bucharest and another four victims.
helij 6y ago
Serbia is actually doing pretty well. Both in controlling Covid and vaccination. Take a look at their cases and deaths. Unlike many countries in Serbia you are actually recommended to visit a doctor when you have any signs of Covid and not wait for severe symptoms. They established separate small Covid centres. Take a closer look at how they are handling this. Pretty interesting.

Meh, I’m not convinced it’s such a disaster it’s being portayed. Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average before that. Again, meh.

piva00 6y ago

Only 12%? More than 1/10 of your population dies, literally more than a decimation by its old meaning, saying that this is not such a disaster is incredibly unempathetic. Or you have a very warped view of what consists a disaster...

jeofken 6y ago
I think you misread the comment your replying to. He said the difference between average deaths per year and 2020 deaths per year was 12%. Likely this will balance out with a lower death rate in the next year, as the old and weak who would have died in 2021 sadly left this world already a year early.
beprogrammed 6y ago
He's not saying 12% of the population, he's saying 12% more then the running 5 year average.
nwj 6y ago
You are confusing "12% more than the prior 5 year average" with "12% of the overall population". Nevertheless, I agree it's a catastrophe.
zoid_ 6y ago
12% of the population? No, surely what's meant is an increase of 12% to the usual number of deaths per year.
deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
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mikem170 6y ago
No, In Sweden 1144 out of every million people have died [0], which equates to 1 out of every 874 people. Does 1 out of 874 people dead, mostly elderly and/or with comorbidities, sound bad? Picture a room with 874 people. That's a lot of people. Ask 1 person to leave. Is that a disaster for society? [0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
- outside1234 6y ago
  I think the answer to that is: “Are you the one person?”
  - mikem170 6y ago
    That's a personal disaster, but not a disaster for society.
    - papaf 6y ago
      Yes it is. Once hospitals fill and no longer function you are living in a society without healthcare.
      - MrRiddle 6y ago
        And, at least in my country, that's not the fault of the virus, but politicians who didn't invest in healthcare not even remotely enough. Here we were hit hard by virus, however we never had more than 10k people hospitalized. If we, as a country of 7 million have a problem with this weak virus, what would happen if it were couple times stronger. People should be outraged with how healthcare failed, but media and politics are reporting about the virus like it's a plague, just so they can cover their asses.
- MrRiddle 6y ago
  And the person is already on the way out.

jeofken 6y ago

In Sweden the death rate during 2020 was equal to the average for the last 10 years. We had zero restrictions until a couple of months ago.

fabbari 6y ago
No - it wasn't, head over to EuroMomo and you'll find out that it was over[0]. Not only that, compare the excess mortality with your neighbors and the "Sweden did fine without lockdowns" sounds hollow. That would explain the restrictions. Consider that the excess mortality is just a small indicator that things didn't go well - if you plug in the equation a reduction of deaths due to other causes you figure out pretty quickly that things were pretty bad. [0] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
- mikem170 6y ago
  The grandparent's original point still stands, this is not the disaster that the headlines portray. The U.S stands at 1 in 750 people dead from covid, mostly elderly with comorbidities, a rate similar to many other countries. That is 0.13% of the population. That's not 1 in 10, or even 1 in 100. It's not the young and healthy, either. A pretty small number. And if you are old and frail something is going to get you soon, anyways. Per-capita just as many, perhaps several times more, people died of the 1968 Hong Kong flu. New viruses happen, part of nature, people die, that's how it goes, This isn't nearly as bad as a lot of similar situations in the past.
  - petre 6y ago
    Just take a look at Reuters' stats page. It's easy now as we have just passed 100m infections with 2m deaths. That amounts to 2 dead out of every 100, globally. https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/ https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m... Death rate is 0.16% in the US though.
    - mikem170 6y ago

jokethrowaway 6y ago

The real disaster is yet to come, and it will be economical and caused by the prolonged lockdowns. Not to mention the third world starving, but it's not like western countries ever cared about that.

adventured 6y ago
The US has been consistently providing 50% or more of the world's food aid for a century at this point. It has saved tens of millions of people from starvation over that time. No western countries eh.
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  We produce more than enough food for everyone on the planet (even if we were 10bln), the United Nation's World Food Program, whose mission is to "eradicate hunger", in 60 years just managed to get bigger and bigger (15k employees nowadays) without solving the problem. The number of undernourished people is higher today than in 2014. Poor countries don't get industrialised and never manage to make enough food by themselves. If you ask me, I think it's just a way to spend some money to make your citizens feel good while keeping the status-quo.

simonh 6y ago

That's the number with restrictions, lockdowns, curfews, etc, etc. In other words while Serbia was hit fairly badly, relatively speaking, the mitigation measures largely worked. This is not a good argument against mitigation measures. The Spanish Flu seems to have similar case mortality rates and efforts to implement preventive measures were hampered by the war time conditions so it's a good candidate to compare against when considering the effectiveness of preventive measures. It's spread lead to from 17x to 50x as many deaths as we've seen from the coronavirus at the global level. In India where lockdown measures weren't significant 5% of the population died.

thu2111 6y ago
No, mitigation measures have had no effect: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full#SM6 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30208-X/fulltext#fig0002 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... etc. And there are many more. I know it doesn't seem to make sense, but lockdowns have had no impact on mortality. This is seen when examining all the data. Consider Sweden - very little government suppression, and it's got a basically average outcome. In fact when analysed properly they don't have much excess death in 2020: https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01/15/final-report-on-swedish-mortality-2020-anno-covid/ https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01...

vixen99 6y ago

Romanian death rate per 1000 (8th highest in the world) has increased monotonically from 12.7 in 2015 by 0.1/1000 each year to 13.2 in 2020. In other words Covid has had zero effect (to one significant place) on the increase in rate of death per 1000. However to claim Covid has not been a disaster is disingenuous. On many fronts it's been a calamity though much of this has been self-inflicted.

paganel 6y ago
Any source for those 2020 numbers? Afaik the Romanian Statistics Institute only published mortality figures up to (and including) November 2020, and the nominal numbers were indeed similar to Serbia’s, i.e. up until then we had had about 10% more deaths in the first 11 months of the year compared to the first 11 months of 2019 (with November 2020 a particular dire month). It’s also true that I couldn’t find an easy comparison with the previous 5 years average.
MrRiddle 6y ago
What I believe Covid proven, at least in Serbia, is that you can’t have hospitals built 50 years ago serve almost double population of Belgrade. It shows how politicians didn’t invest in healthcare. In my mind, the whole thing is so overblown because the medical sector works on fumes. Doctors and nurses are working in Germany, and our hospital are few and far between. We have thousands of young and educated leaving the country every year. That’s the real tragedy. However, this is not to say I’m against measures. I wear a mask, I social distance, I haven’t seen my friends in months.
- petre 6y ago
  It's not much different in neighbouring countries. Don't know about Slovenia or Croatia but the same issues plague Romania and Bulgaria. Just Thursday night there was yet another fire at a hospital in Bucharest and another four victims.

helij 6y ago

Serbia is actually doing pretty well. Both in controlling Covid and vaccination. Take a look at their cases and deaths. Unlike many countries in Serbia you are actually recommended to visit a doctor when you have any signs of Covid and not wait for severe symptoms. They established separate small Covid centres. Take a closer look at how they are handling this. Pretty interesting.