5 ms·
Just because we don't know exactly doesn't mean we aren't able to create good estimates. We don't know how many people die of any disease. But if you have a lar
by xkjkls 5y ago
Just because we don't know exactly doesn't mean we aren't able to create good estimates. We don't know how many people die of any disease. But if you have a large enough dataset, and analyze it well, you can make good determinations of the approximate scale of each factor. The paper linked in this article does that, and concludes approximately 900,000 died of COVID who would not otherwise.
- fastball 5y agoTwo different ideas are being conflated here. One is the OP's idea, "deaths due to COVID". This idea is "how many people would have died if COVID had never existed". However, what a lot of people hear when you say "deaths due to COVID" is "this is the number of people that died as either a direct or indirect result of having COVID in their system". But that is not the 900,000 number being cited. It is made even worse by the HN headline, which is "death toll from COVID", which even more strongly implies the above.