5 ms·
> 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 te
by 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 agoOf 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...