4 ms·

As an American, here are my thoughts. From as early as February or March 2020, I had always felt they told us what we needed to know - about 600k people would

As an American, here are my thoughts. From as early as February or March 2020, I had always felt they told us what we needed to know - about 600k people would die of covid-19 in the US. I thought maybe if we did some things we could get that number down, but we failed in that respect. We pretty much had as many deaths as we would have doing nothing. on a per capita basis, canada did a lot better (600 deaths / mil vs 1800, 32k cases / mil pop vs 94k). +2 Canada, although there are some circumstances that I will get to later. our deaths per case is about the same, although NYC and NJ skews our numbers. call it a tie. vaccines, US is a clear winner. +1 US Freedom wise, its a mixed bag. States like NYC and California did all sorts of lockdown shenanigan's that all failed, where as states like Florida stayed mostly open and did better than the national average case/death wise. I can't really speak to what Canada has done, I'll let you fill this one in. So in the end, Canda 2: US: 1 + 1 ? going to who wins on freedom. However, the US did have some circumstances that canada did not have. Latin and South America have been ravaged by cv19, and approximately 1-2 million walk across the border / year illegally. I really don't care if that is 'wrong vs right'. Its important to consider when thinking how the virus is going to play out, and its no surprise that areas with high immigration from those areas did the worst. Its also why relying on herd immunity here will also never work. Unless we vaccinate Latin and South America (I'm in favor of that), we are going to have plenty of exposure to the virus.

whimsicalism 5y ago
The range was from 500k to 1.2 million if elimination failed, at least in the early estimates I saw. Early in the pandemic, we were woefully underprepared with care - you can see how the death proportion has changed with time. If we had let the pandemic spread in normal course early on, I suspect we would have seen many more deaths. I think it is way too easy to look back and say that we had as many deaths as we would have had doing nothing.
yazaddaruvala 5y ago
> We pretty much had as many deaths as we would have doing nothing. In the US, 1.8% of cases have resulted in deaths, with 10% of Americans getting sick and tested[0]. The majority of these deaths happening 6 months into the pandemic, i.e. a lot of knowledge had been gained and resources stockpiled. Doing nothing early in the pandemic would likely have increased the death rate to roughly 3% because of a lack of medial resources (including doctors and nurses), and resulting in 66% of Americans getting sick. Excluding children (i.e. 300 MM US adults) the expected death count would have been 6 MM people. That said, I feel you, I would have personally hoped that for the effort we did put into "whatever we did", it would have reduced deaths by 100x (i.e. less than 0.06 MM deaths) but sadly we didn't work as a team and people died for it. However, while it shouldn't even have been 0.6 MM, "whatever we did" roughly decreased the deaths by 10x and thats a worth calling out. [0] As of May 5th 2021, 32,513,303 cases and 578,500 deaths. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/01/816707182/map-tracking-the-spread-of-the-coronavirus-in-the-u-s https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/01/8167071...
- pashamur 5y ago
  Of reported cases*, which is very different than actual cases. CDC actually has a page where they estimate the true number of cases of COVID in the US, and they put it at ~115 million. So that would be 578k deaths / 115M cases, or a fatality rate of ~0.5%, which is roughly in line with what you could have expected based on the early studies from the cruise ships where there was free spread of covid in a contained space. If medical facilities had been overloaded, we certainly could have seen more fatalities, but beyond protecting the hospitals from running out of beds (which was worthwhile), the other interventions didn't seem to do much. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

whimsicalism 5y ago

The range was from 500k to 1.2 million if elimination failed, at least in the early estimates I saw. Early in the pandemic, we were woefully underprepared with care - you can see how the death proportion has changed with time. If we had let the pandemic spread in normal course early on, I suspect we would have seen many more deaths. I think it is way too easy to look back and say that we had as many deaths as we would have had doing nothing.

yazaddaruvala 5y ago

> We pretty much had as many deaths as we would have doing nothing. In the US, 1.8% of cases have resulted in deaths, with 10% of Americans getting sick and tested[0]. The majority of these deaths happening 6 months into the pandemic, i.e. a lot of knowledge had been gained and resources stockpiled. Doing nothing early in the pandemic would likely have increased the death rate to roughly 3% because of a lack of medial resources (including doctors and nurses), and resulting in 66% of Americans getting sick. Excluding children (i.e. 300 MM US adults) the expected death count would have been 6 MM people. That said, I feel you, I would have personally hoped that for the effort we did put into "whatever we did", it would have reduced deaths by 100x (i.e. less than 0.06 MM deaths) but sadly we didn't work as a team and people died for it. However, while it shouldn't even have been 0.6 MM, "whatever we did" roughly decreased the deaths by 10x and thats a worth calling out. [0] As of May 5th 2021, 32,513,303 cases and 578,500 deaths. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/01/816707182/map-tracking-the-spread-of-the-coronavirus-in-the-u-s https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/01/8167071...

pashamur 5y ago
Of reported cases*, which is very different than actual cases. CDC actually has a page where they estimate the true number of cases of COVID in the US, and they put it at ~115 million. So that would be 578k deaths / 115M cases, or a fatality rate of ~0.5%, which is roughly in line with what you could have expected based on the early studies from the cruise ships where there was free spread of covid in a contained space. If medical facilities had been overloaded, we certainly could have seen more fatalities, but beyond protecting the hospitals from running out of beds (which was worthwhile), the other interventions didn't seem to do much. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...