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There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

267 points by pranshum 5y ago

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mojomark 5y ago
Have we completely lost our ability to report at responsible scientists/engineers? There are no units on the y-axis of the subject graphs. Also 7m == 7 meters. 7M == 7 million. There are no legends for the color coding. This is absolutely the worst, most ambiguous (hence most confusing) presentation of data I have ever witnessed in my 20nyear career as an engineer. If the author can't at least present evidence for their case within a reasonably accepted scientific standard framework (e.g. graph legends, correct units, etc.) , than the evidence should ve dismissed until they can. Where is the peer review for this content? Why is this low caliber content showing up in my HN feed? Can we please do better?
- akomtu 5y ago
  Because it fits the narrative. Many people even on HN believe that a slightly misleading presentation is justified if it helps the greater cause. They forget that the price for that is erosion of trust, so when next time a really scary version of the virus shows up, people will dismiss "the scientists" because they fudged the numbers and misrepresented the data last time.
spankyspangler 5y ago
That sounds like a pretty wild conspiracy theory. Any basis for this belief?
- empthought 5y ago
  Virus reservoirs are things. This is why New Zealand has not admitted tourists, and why their case count is so low.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    But New Zealand not admitting tourists has little to do with whether in California "surrounding towns act as virus reservoirs for the large cities" and even less with there being a “become COVID-19 carriers to own the libs strategy".
  - spankyspangler 5y ago
    > Virus reservoirs are things. Clearly I was not suggesting the concept of a virus reservoir was a conspiracy theory. I don't know if you were being deliberately obtuse, but it does not help the conversation. The parent made 3 claims, increasingly improbable, with the last seeming to be a hateful conspiracy theory. >> Except these surrounding towns act as virus reservoirs for the large cities. The assertion is the towns acts as reservoirs for cities. Is that really true? >> That limits the effectiveness of restrictions. Is that really what limits the effectiveness of restrictions in cities? >> The “become COVID-19 carriers to own the libs” strategy kinda worked. It's pretty obvious this is the conspiracy theory I was talking about. The suggestion seems to be that conservatives in surrounding towns (but not those in the cities) had conspired to develop a biological warfare strategy based on becoming infected in towns and then traveling to infect nearby cities. This is one of the most hateful, unhinged paranoid delusion I've ever read about COVID. But this kind of thing doesn't raise many eyebrows on sites like HN because people think it's plausible or even likely ("yes it must be those hateful angry racist divisive conspiracy-theory-believing conservatives who are always out to get us, clearly it's conservatives who are to blame for any and all political failings that occur in liberal-run areas").
    - pasabagi 5y ago
      I'd hazard he's being ironic. This all said, there's a germ of truth in the unhinged paranoia - it's a bit like rolling coal. You heard of rolling coal? It's where people modify their trucks to make them emit toxic black smoke. It's bad for your engine. It's bad for your fuel economy. But, it's also bad for those pussy cyclists and eco-freaks who keep on going on about global warming. There is a powerful current in politics across the west that is actively, self-destructively antagonistic towards anything an expert says - and it's not based on profound disbelief in the value of expertise, but rather a deep disaffection, a desire to tear down the whole edifice of culture that makes you feel small - and that has carried into coronavirus precautions, where the bogeyman is not the virus, but the intrusive, patronizing and sinister powers of 'public health', a perfect representation of the entire institutional culture that your average NRA member hates.
- rualca 5y ago
  > That sounds like a pretty wild conspiracy theory. The concept of viral reservoir seems to be pretty basic and well established concept in virology, both in terms of macrobiomes (i.e., populations) and in terms of microbiomes (i.e., microbiotic community in the gut). A quick googling will show you a huge list of well-research introductions from reputable sources, if you're interested in the topic.
  - spankyspangler 5y ago
    Come on. Did you honestly believe I was referring to the concept of a viral reservoir as a conspiracy theory? This kind of obstructive style of conversation is unhelpful and tiresome. Some other poster above already tried that shtick, you can read my reply to them. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
- devin 5y ago
  "Wild conspiracy theory"? Uh, what? It's exactly what happened where I live. At least half of our hospitalizations at peak were from neighboring areas that had no more capacity due to low or non-existent restrictions.
  - spankyspangler 5y ago
    Yes, it sounded like a wild conspiracy theory. If it happened where you live then you'll be able to easily show some evidence that there was a strategy by residents of those towns to infect cities out of a hatred of their residents. I'll wait.
  - nradov 5y ago
    You are assuming causality there. That remains unproven. It could have been due to other factors, or random chance.
- dang 5y ago
  Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that, as you know. We're trying to have a different quality of discussion than what this sort of thing leads to. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27178252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27178252.
  - spankyspangler 5y ago
    Ahh, you not only detached the subthread but also crippled my ability to reply. Your intentions to swiftly protect the feelings of your user base and shield them from difficult conversations is laudable, though misguided because you inadvertently left the "The “become COVID-19 carriers to own the libs” strategy kinda worked." comment up. Or is that what you mean by different quality of discussion? It was certainly not my intention to start flamewars so I will make all endeavours to stop doing that (and stop beating my wife etc). From the votes and subsequent productive discussions in the thread you disconnected, it seems like a good number of users agreed with me, and we were able to shut down the conspiracy theory talk while leaving the door open to further discussion of the interesting parts (virus spreading between towns and cities). So I genuinely don't see the problem, but I can hold my nose and try to be gentler with conspiracy theorists if that would help. Because I will continue to call out baseless conspiracy theorists and hateful / flamewar comments as I see them, while trying to be calm, measured, and proportionate in response. If calling out baseless and harmful conspiracy theories proves too much for fragile users or moderators to cope with, I'm more than happy to move along from your site, and leave you to your "different quality" discussions and conspiracy theories.
    - dang 5y ago
      I rate limited your account, which is standard practice when an account has been posting too many low-quality comments too quickly. It hasn't crippled your ability to reply; it just means you need to wait a bit. We're happy to take rate limits off when people give us reason to believe that they've taken the intended spirit of the site to heart and will post fewer and more substantive comments in the future. That would be the opposite direction from things like "I will continue to call out" and so on—we're trying to avoid internet callout culture, denunciatory rhetoric, and things like that, because they're so tedious. Intention not to start flamewars is good but not sufficient. You also have to actually not start them (or perpetuate them). https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=troll%20effects%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- deleted 5y ago
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calvinmorrison 5y ago
Out of, 7+ billion people on the planet.
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  Roughly .2 percent of the population.
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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raphaelj 5y ago
And that’s with all the safety measures most of us have been following for more than one year now.
- deleted 5y ago
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0x0 5y ago
"Our apologies. An error seems to have occurred. We’ve logged this error. Contact us if this issue persists." ...
- drusepth 5y ago
  The site loads fine for me, but the whole article is behind a paywall anyway. You might try https://outline.com/PYEgK3 https://outline.com/PYEgK3 which should fix both problems.
- deepserket 5y ago
  pdf of the page here: https://gofile.io/d/IPEm7Z https://gofile.io/d/IPEm7Z there are 3 graphs that aren't completely shown in the file https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-excess-deaths-global-estimates-interactive/map-container.html https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-e... https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-excess-deaths-global-estimates-interactive/country.html https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-e... https://infographics.economist.com/2021/20210515_FBC103/index.html https://infographics.economist.com/2021/20210515_FBC103/inde...
- deleted 5y ago
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- Rexxar 5y ago
  "Funnily" the error appears after the page has started to display correctly and doesn't appear if you block the correct anti-adblock script that erase the correct page and replace the content by a fake technical error message. I find this behavior quite disgusting and sadly seen it on many sites.
xiphias2 5y ago
From what I have seen in poorer countries, in some cases the worst things have just started. I was dating a Colombian girl who got a 200% APR loan from a city near her during the lockdown to be able to pay her rent without a job, and hadn't even realized that it's 200% APR (15%/month didn't sound that bad to her). People are on the streets because the government wants to increase taxes, and they are already in huge debt. Now the government started to kill its own people in the daylight to stop the revolution.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > 15%/month didn't sound that bad to her This is why when economists talk about consumers acting as rational market participants I just laugh and shake my head. Have they met people?
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    When your only options are (1) a loan at 15% while you’re unemployed but you get another 30-60 days of a roof over your head or (2) immediate homelessness then the high-interest loan is the rational choice.
  - reader_x 5y ago
    I think Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky already put the “rational market participant” myth to bed for good.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      Definitely, for the consumer. I think the idea that "rational market participant emerges when you get the average of a lot of people (ie. the firm) together to make a decision" still remains alive and well. There is sort of a Darwinian argument there, that in the long-run only the rational market participant remains in business and functioning as a firm. The import of behavioral econ. definitely remains understated today. I am also interested in philosophical thinkers, like Elizabeth Anderson or Michael Sandel, that take questions like these and explore the implications that they might have for how we ought to structure society.
burlesona 5y ago
https://archive.md/36LK9 https://archive.md/36LK9
hedora 5y ago
The earth’s population is 7.9b, so the excess deaths are 0.1% of the population. COVID’s mortality rate is about 0.5%, so roughly 1/5 of the population has has had it (or died of other related things, like starvation in developing countries due to the lockdown stopping food harvests in California). Currently, 1.45b doses of a vaccine have been administered, so about as many people have had the vaccine (partially, at least), as have had COVID. Hopefully the vaccine will make to the rest of the population soon. If not, we’re about 20% done with COVID, world-wide. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina... I’m pretty jaded at this point. My guess is that the vaccine rollout stalls out in poorer countries and COVID falls out of the news cycle before the majority of deaths.
- nitwit005 5y ago
  > starvation in developing countries due to the lockdown stopping food harvests in California California doesn't export much in the way of staples, so that's probably quite a stretch: https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/ https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    Staples tend to be low-value exports, so they don’t show up in top-10-by-value lists when we also export truly enormous amounts of cash crops. But,e.g., California alone would be a top-10 rice exporter with about 1 million metric tons of annual exports.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Recent research claimed that the excess mortality rate among people who had COVID but didn't die from it immediately was elevated 6 months after their recovery, with 8 excess deaths per thousand patients. So the real mortality rate may be a little higher than people estimate. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210422123603.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210422123603.h...
- sneak 5y ago
  It's disheartening seeing people in the US mad at the 30% vaccine hesitant there, while 6B+ at the gates have no vaccines available at all. The US isn't an island, and the borders are nowhere near closed. The variants that grow in the other 96% of humans that aren't americans will doubtlessly end up there, and will be end up tending toward vaccine resistance due to selection pressure. I think this is going to get much worse before it gets better. The disunity of nationalistic selfishness has struck our species once again.
mfbx9da4 5y ago
What's that as a percentage?
- bdcravens 5y ago
  somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15% increase in deaths
timmg 5y ago
If I did the math right, that's (at most) .17% of the population. In a normal year I'd guess we lose 1% of the population. I guess this seems lower than I'd expect?
- HDMI_Cable 5y ago
  These are excess deaths, so 7-13m deaths on top of the 1% already expected for this year.
- msbarnett 5y ago
  This is excess mortality, as in “above what would be expected in a normal year based on demographics”. So, if looking at historical trends and the current demographics as compared with those trends we had a prior expectation of your 1%, then what we we actually observed is 1.17%.
  - timmg 5y ago
    Yeah, I get that. I guess I just mean that the worst pandemic of the last 100 years and (so far) it's maybe 17% deaths over the baseline. That feels kinda low.
    - msbarnett 5y ago
      17% excess mortality (and that’s assuming this 1% baseline we pulled out of the air, remember) doesn’t mean that the pandemic is only responsible for those excess deaths – a bunch of people who might have otherwise been expected to get hit by a car worked from home all year, or died from COVID instead, etc. So the pandemic is responsible for the 17% (in this scenario) uplift above baseline plus an unknown portion of that baseline itself. To be honest one cause, which changed a lot of behaviour that rolls into the baseline, pushing the global baseline up that much seems pretty impressive to me. Would be also interesting to consider distribution of that excess and how China fared in the excess mortality department. After the early days they seemed to keep it tightly under control, and they contain an enormous portion of the world’s population. That might suggest that excess mortality elsewhere was even further above baseline and the excess mortality only looks this good because 1.2 billion people mostly stuck to baseline?
pranshum 5y ago
Github link for all the code behind the analysis: https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-tracker https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-track...
sh1mmer 5y ago
According to the UN [1] 2019 worldwide mortality was 58m people. So that’s roughly a 12-22% increase assuming mortality stayed the same. [1] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/mortality/WMR2019/WorldMortality2019DataBooklet.pdf https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
Holy cow. This does massively underline how important the work of things like COVAX are in getting equitable global access to vaccines. We still need billions more doses manufactured, distributed and administered - it could take years and cost a fortune - and we should not lose our urgency or our focus.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  Pfizer is projecting 250 million doses per month by December. It will take years still at that rate, but they also have been doing a reasonable job of meeting and then increasing their projections.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    Plus Pfizer is one of about a dozen vaccine makers at or near approval. Pfizer, Moderna, AZ, Sputnik, Sinovac, Sinopharm, J&J, Novavax, and many more. If we have 10 Pfizers, we have a billion doses every few months.
chmaynard 5y ago
Rest in peace. Tragic to the people who loved them, a statistic to the rest of us.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I will never forget the New York daily death count a year ago. Seeing 600 a day is something I hope we never see again.
  - detaro 5y ago
    It's pretty sobering how quickly large numbers just become yet another statistic and just something that gets accepted by many. Here in Germany numbers way exceeding the high points of the first wave just went as "meh, let's not do anything rash that could make businesses or people unhappy" this year (although of course quite a few people are also made unhappy by people dying... I'm really curious to see how this will shake out over the next few years).
adventured 5y ago
I found the counting approach to Covid so far to be rather fascinating. With the flu in the US they guess and present that number, but we're supposed to attach some meaningful value to the Covid positive counts as though that actually represents anywhere near the real number of Covid cases since the outbreak began. It's bullshit, I'm just not sure why the establishment (media, government, censors, etc) stick so tightly to the line on the bogus official counts. They act like those counts actually represent the outbreak properly. Perhaps in their pathological quest for control (a central theme of most politicians) they need a number to lean on as authoritative, to prop up their weak credibility. If they can't even give you accurate outbreak counts, what else can be believed (masks, no masks; 6 feet, 20 feet, no feet; fear the surfaces, don't fear the surfaces; vaccines take years (nope: 1957 Asian flu); it has been a total clown show the entire pandemic). India had been seeing near 400,000 cases per day. That's an entirely bogus number of course. And it's near universally agreed upon that it's bogus. The question is whether it's a million, two million, five million, whatever. What's actually closer to the truth? That's where everybody abandons ship, I never see the news media go deep into that part of it (and yet they happily report the made-up flu numbers every year). Part of the comedy of it, is that the supposed truth enforcers are enforcing a fraud, because none of these official counts are anywhere close to real, no matter which country you pick as the topic. Is India seeing 4,000 deaths per day, or 10,000, or 15,000? It's a dramatic difference across a month of time. The best you'll get out of the media is a little edge statement of: but it's suspected to be under-reported. Yeah, no kidding. The US has seen 33 million cases of Covid - that's the reported media line in every story. Everyone knows it's bogus and doesn't represent anywhere close to the number of actual infections in the US and yet it's reported on as properly representing the scale of the pandemic in the US. There has been so much intellectual fraud in this pandemic. So the obvious question: if they very widely report the made-up / guess-work flu counts every single year, year after year, across all media, why haven't they been doing exactly the same thing with Covid? That's what I want an answer to. Everyone avoids throwing out flu-like guesses on the real scale of the pandemic - the CDC doesn't want to do it, the media doesn't want to do it, the government broadly doesn't want to do it. Why aren't they reporting that it's more likely that there have been 60, 90, 120 million (etc) cases of Covid? edit: and the downvotes on this are fascinating too, given what I'm talking about is rooted in obvious reality not propaganda or conspiracy theory. I've noticed reality - objectivity, facts, logic - has been particularly unpopular during the pandemic, people have been letting their emotions control their reactions to everything. I don't believe there are very many people ignorant enough to think the official positive Covid counts actually represent the pandemic properly; I do think there are a lot of people desperate to hide from reality for one reason or another, however.
winstonewert 5y ago
What strikes me is Asia. If I'm reading this right they have relatively low official Covid deaths, but off the charts excess deaths. What's up with that?
- bdcravens 5y ago
  The government can hide information easier than it can hide bodies.
- newuser00 5y ago
  China has been lying about many things since day 1.
bytematic 5y ago
For people who think that is low, this is with the precautions taken, imagine if nobody did anything
- chmod600 5y ago
  Florida didn't lock down (EDIT: except a few weeks at the beginning), and their death numbers are middle-of-the-pack[1], just marginally worse than California, which did heavy lockdowns. We should probably assume that, in addition to not following some practices we should have, we also did a lot that we didn't have to. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html list the states by "of all time" and "deaths" which shows FL with 168 deaths per 100k and CA with 159, only two slots apart.
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    This or that state government's mandate or lack thereof really can't stand in for actual behaviors. For one thing, regardless of state mandates, you can bet your buttons that a huge number of residential/nursing facilities for seniors in Florida did lock down, and thereby protected those most likely to increase Florida's numbers. If you want to see the effects of policy, don't compare states (especially big diverse ones like California). Compare, for example, San Francisco (with peak 7-day-average new cases of 363, total cases 36.7k, and population of 874k) and Miami (peak 7-day-average new cases of 3240, total cases 494k, and population of 2710k). Per capita, Miami was about four times worse. SF: https://www.google.com/search?q=san+francisco+covid+numbers https://www.google.com/search?q=san+francisco+covid+numbers Miami: https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+covid+numbers https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+covid+numbers
    - chmod600 5y ago
      There was both a policy difference as well as a behavior difference when it came to schools. Also, case numbers are a bad thing to measure. Death numbers are more reliable. EDIT: also, it appears state policy exacerbated the nursing home problems in California: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/06/editorial-newsom-falters-as-covid-19-nursing-home-cases-soar/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/06/editorial-newsom-falt...
noxer 5y ago
The question is how much less death will there be in the years to come. Especially the older people who died earlier because of covid. We should see a decline in death from all kinds of diseases that these people had and would have died from/with.
- glangdale 5y ago
  This assumes that there are no long-term mortality effects from having COVID and not dying from it, which seems not proven at this stage. I mean, yes, we'll see fewer very old people dying of the flu next year, but idk whether we'll see a bunch of late middle age or 'not very old' people dying from long COVID.
- virtuallynathan 5y ago
  This is an effect referred to as "mortality displacement" -- it tends to happen with bad flu years, heat waves, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_displacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_displacement
- jmull 5y ago
  > …years to come Those years of life are still lost. It’s true they would have died eventually anyway. But that’s true of everyone.
  - noxer 5y ago
    But day/weeks/month/years of life lost is not the same as what we understand if we say lives lost. Also we stooped helping people survives in the name of covid. Life extending treatments and surgery where paused to have resource for dying people. Whos gonna count the days/weeks/months/years these people lost? In the end everything just shifts number because we all die. I just think this virus mostly hit the people at risk of dying which should have been made it morally easier to let them die, rather than hurt others trying to keep them alive. But that's exactly what the western world did. I would understand it if children where affected. We would morally justify that someone with cancer dies a bit earlier if we can safe the life of someone who still has many years to come.
HatchedLake721 5y ago
Please don’t look at 7m-13m number and compare it to 7 billion population and say oh it’s only 0.1-0.2%. Pretty much ever country has seen a 15-20% increase in excess mortality rates (20% more people dying than averages in the past), this is huge. This is one of the best up to date visualizations on this topic, scroll down and see breakdowns by country - https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938 https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...
- kortilla 5y ago
  “Huge” is very relative. 20% increase of a number that is very low by historical standards is still really low.
  - robbrown451 5y ago
    Very low? You mean not that many people die, of any cause, typically? Not sure what you are getting at here.
    - therufa 5y ago
      very low in a sense that since we discovered antibiotics, the global mortality rate went down by a factor of 10. compared to that we are still in a relatively "good" position.
      - robbrown451 5y ago
        Relative to what, again? The old days, before antibiotics? I mean, if you go back far enough, 1 out of 5 people died by homocide. That still wouldn't make it reasonable to say that we're "relatively good" if only 10 million Americans a year are getting murdered. Death, and specifically premature death, is still a very unfortunate reality. Playing it down as if "well it happened more often in the old days" is, frankly, a bit bizarre.
    - alerighi 5y ago
      Really... not many. In my city of about 14k people last year died 19 people, that is like 3/4 more than the norm, but with these numbers, we are well inside statistical error. Also we must evaluate the increase in mortality in a longer period. I can as well being that most of the people that died of COVID were either old people or people with other health issues that would have died anyway in a year or two. The problem with COVID to me seems that everyone just remembered that people will die. In the old days death was normal, there were wars, there were al sort of illnesses and infections that caused death, it was common to see people die even at young ages. And I don't talk about centuries ago, it was like that till the end of WW2. Nowadays we are used to people that lives till 90 years, we no longer have wars, we are able to cure practically every illness, so a virus that kills slightly more people that we are used to see terrifies us. But in reality, it's nature, we will all die one day, COVID or not, so there is no real reason to fear it to me. In fact, we will live worse life because of the fear of this virus, and all the restrictions that we had put in place to avoid that (without so much success, in the end).
rossdavidh 5y ago
If you're talking about a 7 billion population, the deaths of which will vary from year to year, this seems like a number in the noise range which would be very hard to distinguish from background variation. If everyone of the 7b people lived 100 years, we would expect about 70 million deaths a year, and we know they don't live 100 years on average. Any reasonable range of assumptions puts this in the range of too-small-to-detect. Which doesn't mean it doesn't matter or isn't important, but it does mean that this is not a good method for estimating it.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Deaths don't actually vary that much year to year. Increase/decrease over time? Yes. Swing by 10 million in a year? No. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-deaths-by-world-region https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-deaths-b...
- tbenst 5y ago
  You make a strong claim with no supporting evidence or analysis. On the other hand, we have roughly 3.3M (Econimist) or 3.4M (Financial, Times [1]) confirmed COVID-19 deaths. Is it so surprising that only 25-50% of actual deaths due to COVID-19 were confirmed? Why do you try to downplay that COVID-19 is the second most deadly pandemic in a century, after HIV/AIDS? [2] [1] https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938 https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7866842/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7866842/
  - rossdavidh 5y ago
    "...Which doesn't mean it doesn't matter or isn't important, but it does mean that this is not a good method for estimating it. "
khazhoux 5y ago
This has me a bit confused: I look at the stats on cases and deaths per capita across various U.S. states, including California (which was very locked down, at least in theory) and Florida (which was flippant towards risks of contagion), and many states in between. The per capita cases+deaths are nearly identical across many states with very different approaches. This left me really wondering which measures were and weren't necessary. Anyone seen good studies or analysis on this? Legitimate question, please no political commentary.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Either you lock people downs and those would reject it will go out nonetheless. Or you don't and people who are at risk will lock themselves down. There's no particular benefit to one or the other so states do what match their current constituents. And that's exactly what you'd expect in a democracy.
- vmception 5y ago
  No state had an optimal viral mitigation strategy. The optimal strategy being impractical or even impossible. Densely populated places that would have acted flippantly would have been much worse. Densely populated places with mixed unit housing had hurt themselves with the strategy they chose. So basically California and New York could just barely keep numbers as close to Florida numbers by locking down hard. The methods California and New York chose could have been even more optimized, but not possible for a US government to do.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  Where I live, the restrictions have explicitly been tuned so as to not overwhelm hospital facilities. Minimizing deaths was not a stated goal. They measured new cases and how many hospital bed were available, then adjusted restrictions accordingly per County. So for example, you might see no indoor dining in one County, but indoor dining allowed at 25% capacity the next County over. They seem to have done a pretty good job given the stated goal.
- melling 5y ago
  People are lumping the numbers together for the entire pandemic. During the first wave New York and New Jersey got hit really hard. Basically, it was too late to do anything.
deleted 5y ago
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tester756 5y ago
How strong is anti vaccine / anti mask movement in the US? As I see there's very little of it "on the american side of the internet", meanwhile "here" they tend to cause a lot of disruption and shitton of missinformation
- mojomark 5y ago
  I would not conflate "anti-vaccine people" with "anti-mask people". I live in the state of Maryland and yesterday our governor lifted the mask requirement for vaccinated people. I am a fiscal conservative and am vaccinated (got it as soon as I could, because science and common sense informed me that I should). I have relatives, including my own mother, who are far right wing and will not get vaccinated because they believe COVID is a conspiracy and/or "fake" (... I know). As far as I'm concerned, folks who refuse to get vaccinated are on their own and all of the remaining vaccine doses should get sent to people and countries who actually want and need it most. I realize that's cold. I also realise that's a logistical nightmare, but I have zero empathy for people who refuse to get vaccinated and then contract COVID. So, I am for vaccines, but in regions where vaccines have been fully offered to every single citizen that wants one, I am against forcing the wearing of masks. I still carry a mask in case I'm in a situation that warrants, but I will not inconvenience myself any longer for someone who refuses to do the bare minimum to protect themselves from COVID.
  - raphlinus 5y ago
    I am not in exactly the same place, but respect your comment as being at least logically self-consistent. It reminds me of Jody Lanard's thread[1] about how the new CDC guidelines are "adultifying" in that they transfer the decision back to individuals rather than paternalistic guidelines. The way I think about it is that until recently, the risk calculus was analogous to drunk driving, but is now more similar to riding a motorcycle without a helmet. [1]: https://twitter.com/EIDGeek/status/1393987801260204034 https://twitter.com/EIDGeek/status/1393987801260204034
    - mojomark 5y ago
      > The way I think about it is that until recently, the risk calculus was analogous to drunk driving, but is now more similar to riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Appreciate the link and I fully concur with your analogy. It may boil down to some psychological primitive (perhaps some deep-rooted defense mechanism that developed in my youth), but within this analogy I also say "let people wear or not wear helmets on bikes, the risk and evidence have been clearly presented for decades". I know, in my heart of hearts that this is a cold stance. Perhaps because you can't possibly assume to know the circumstances that led a person not to wear a helmet on a bike (or get a vaccine). Maybe they're a young teen revelling from their parents or were extremely sheltered in some way from the evidence that would have changed their mind. There are a lot of "if's" here. At some point, in my value set, you have to draw the line and look out for yourself and loved ones first. I went out today without a mask and it was amazing (it felt better than I expected). That said, based on your comment, I will give more consideration to wearing masks in public as general practice for the next month or so. However, I can't live like that forever. There will be a turning point.
atweiden 5y ago
Covid makes your country worse. It’s like having endemic malaria. No one wants endemic malaria in their country, and costly government intervention was required to rid the developed world of it. Similarly, it’s disheartening to see so many people — especially on partisan lines — promulgate the talking point that we just need to “learn to live with it”. This is insanity. Annual mRNA booster vaccines ad infinitum, with continuous vaccine passports is a wholly inadequate vision for the future. Melbourne, Oz — a diverse, international city of 5M — demonstrates it’s very possible to eradicate Covid with international, interregional and interstate border closures, with hard lockdowns plus federal financial support. Four months later, zero covid.
- greenwich26 5y ago
  You literally can't close the American brder. As a strict lower bound (based on CBP encounters) 3000 people walk through the desert or jump the fence every day, and statistically many of them have Covid. This is a constant source term to the growth equation that precludes a Melbourne solution, even if the borders were officially closed and optimal lockdowns.
  - atweiden 5y ago
    > You literally can't close the American brder. As a strict lower bound (based on CBP encounters) 3000 people walk through the desert or jump the fence every day, and statistically many of them have Covid. This is a constant source term to the growth equation that precludes a Melbourne solution, even if the borders were officially closed and optimal lockdowns. That doesn’t sound like a long-term problem given the imminent rise of drone patrols, and is likely short term correctable by bolstering security along the US southern border. Like many aspects of the US’ abject failure in managing the pandemic, this seems like a “lack of political will” problem more than anything else.
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      It's mostly a cost thing, in reality. Closing the Southern border -- "building a wall" if you will -- is an absolutely gargantuan task. The border is huge, many parts it extremely harsh and remote terrain unfriendly to construction projects. Trump made it a huge part of his platform, had a majority, and in four years got a pitiful amount of wall actually built.
dnissley 5y ago
A related angle I haven't seen much investigation on is to what degree we'll see negative excess deaths (surely there's a better term, but I'm at a loss) in the coming years due to how much covid impacted older folks.
darig 5y ago
Be careful if the stats came from an Israeli.
igonvalue 5y ago
Searching for what excess mortality looks like in a "normal" (non-pandemic) year, I found this interesting statistic: > By the year 2017, the United States was already suffering more excess deaths and more life years lost each year than those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/United-States-COVID-19-was-not-sole-cause-excess-deaths-2020 https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/United-States-COVID-19-was-...
archsurface 5y ago
What rubbish. In the UK the figures have been blatantly inflated. The entire UK media has turned into a bought and paid for government propaganda machine; the only journalists left are the independents. The whole thing has been such farce that I now struggle to acknowledge anything more than the presence of a virus. I still, after a year, don't know anyone who knows anyone who's died from this catastrophic, sky is falling, disaster pandemic. Condolences to anyone has been affected, but this whole think stinks with deceit.
- mft_ 5y ago
  Would you be able to share any evidence to back up your suspicions?
- astroalex 5y ago
  You don't offer any evidence for your claim except anecdotal experience of not knowing anyone who has died. Do you think it's possible that your local bubble of information (not knowing anyone who has died) is not actually representative of a true larger trend? I'm always curious about how people draw conclusions like this.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  So all nations are creating fake deaths now?
chiefalchemist 5y ago
"The rich world suffered relatively badly, but most of the dying has been elsewhere." Saying the subtitle. Elsewhere, meaning relatively poor countries. But even within the rich world the poor within those are disproportionately affected by Covid (deaths). But those ppl - at least in the USA - have worse health outcomes in general already. Covid is both a disease and a symptom. Unfortunately, the disease lens is being used to distract from how it's a symptom of deeper longer running societal problems. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/communities-color-face-deadly-air-pollution-regardless-location-or-income-180977624/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/communities-color-...
nradov 5y ago
So at the upper end of the range that would be 0.17% of the world population.
jaimex2 5y ago
I was hoping the silver lining to the pandemic would be our planets overpopulation brought down but it really hasn't even made a chip in it. With new births added in were still growing the global population
Proven 5y ago
Not unusual by CCP standards

267 points by pranshum 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Have we completely lost our ability to report at responsible scientists/engineers? There are no units on the y-axis of the subject graphs. Also 7m == 7 meters. 7M == 7 million. There are no legends for the color coding. This is absolutely the worst, most ambiguous (hence most confusing) presentation of data I have ever witnessed in my 20nyear career as an engineer. If the author can't at least present evidence for their case within a reasonably accepted scientific standard framework (e.g. graph legends, correct units, etc.) , than the evidence should ve dismissed until they can. Where is the peer review for this content? Why is this low caliber content showing up in my HN feed? Can we please do better?

akomtu 5y ago
Because it fits the narrative. Many people even on HN believe that a slightly misleading presentation is justified if it helps the greater cause. They forget that the price for that is erosion of trust, so when next time a really scary version of the virus shows up, people will dismiss "the scientists" because they fudged the numbers and misrepresented the data last time.

spankyspangler 5y ago

That sounds like a pretty wild conspiracy theory. Any basis for this belief?

empthought 5y ago
Virus reservoirs are things. This is why New Zealand has not admitted tourists, and why their case count is so low.
- coldtea 5y ago
  But New Zealand not admitting tourists has little to do with whether in California "surrounding towns act as virus reservoirs for the large cities" and even less with there being a “become COVID-19 carriers to own the libs strategy".
- spankyspangler 5y ago
  > Virus reservoirs are things. Clearly I was not suggesting the concept of a virus reservoir was a conspiracy theory. I don't know if you were being deliberately obtuse, but it does not help the conversation. The parent made 3 claims, increasingly improbable, with the last seeming to be a hateful conspiracy theory. >> Except these surrounding towns act as virus reservoirs for the large cities. The assertion is the towns acts as reservoirs for cities. Is that really true? >> That limits the effectiveness of restrictions. Is that really what limits the effectiveness of restrictions in cities? >> The “become COVID-19 carriers to own the libs” strategy kinda worked. It's pretty obvious this is the conspiracy theory I was talking about. The suggestion seems to be that conservatives in surrounding towns (but not those in the cities) had conspired to develop a biological warfare strategy based on becoming infected in towns and then traveling to infect nearby cities. This is one of the most hateful, unhinged paranoid delusion I've ever read about COVID. But this kind of thing doesn't raise many eyebrows on sites like HN because people think it's plausible or even likely ("yes it must be those hateful angry racist divisive conspiracy-theory-believing conservatives who are always out to get us, clearly it's conservatives who are to blame for any and all political failings that occur in liberal-run areas").
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    I'd hazard he's being ironic. This all said, there's a germ of truth in the unhinged paranoia - it's a bit like rolling coal. You heard of rolling coal? It's where people modify their trucks to make them emit toxic black smoke. It's bad for your engine. It's bad for your fuel economy. But, it's also bad for those pussy cyclists and eco-freaks who keep on going on about global warming. There is a powerful current in politics across the west that is actively, self-destructively antagonistic towards anything an expert says - and it's not based on profound disbelief in the value of expertise, but rather a deep disaffection, a desire to tear down the whole edifice of culture that makes you feel small - and that has carried into coronavirus precautions, where the bogeyman is not the virus, but the intrusive, patronizing and sinister powers of 'public health', a perfect representation of the entire institutional culture that your average NRA member hates.
rualca 5y ago
> That sounds like a pretty wild conspiracy theory. The concept of viral reservoir seems to be pretty basic and well established concept in virology, both in terms of macrobiomes (i.e., populations) and in terms of microbiomes (i.e., microbiotic community in the gut). A quick googling will show you a huge list of well-research introductions from reputable sources, if you're interested in the topic.
- spankyspangler 5y ago
  Come on. Did you honestly believe I was referring to the concept of a viral reservoir as a conspiracy theory? This kind of obstructive style of conversation is unhelpful and tiresome. Some other poster above already tried that shtick, you can read my reply to them. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
devin 5y ago
"Wild conspiracy theory"? Uh, what? It's exactly what happened where I live. At least half of our hospitalizations at peak were from neighboring areas that had no more capacity due to low or non-existent restrictions.
- spankyspangler 5y ago
  Yes, it sounded like a wild conspiracy theory. If it happened where you live then you'll be able to easily show some evidence that there was a strategy by residents of those towns to infect cities out of a hatred of their residents. I'll wait.
- nradov 5y ago
  You are assuming causality there. That remains unproven. It could have been due to other factors, or random chance.
dang 5y ago
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that, as you know. We're trying to have a different quality of discussion than what this sort of thing leads to. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27178252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27178252.
- spankyspangler 5y ago
  Ahh, you not only detached the subthread but also crippled my ability to reply. Your intentions to swiftly protect the feelings of your user base and shield them from difficult conversations is laudable, though misguided because you inadvertently left the "The “become COVID-19 carriers to own the libs” strategy kinda worked." comment up. Or is that what you mean by different quality of discussion? It was certainly not my intention to start flamewars so I will make all endeavours to stop doing that (and stop beating my wife etc). From the votes and subsequent productive discussions in the thread you disconnected, it seems like a good number of users agreed with me, and we were able to shut down the conspiracy theory talk while leaving the door open to further discussion of the interesting parts (virus spreading between towns and cities). So I genuinely don't see the problem, but I can hold my nose and try to be gentler with conspiracy theorists if that would help. Because I will continue to call out baseless conspiracy theorists and hateful / flamewar comments as I see them, while trying to be calm, measured, and proportionate in response. If calling out baseless and harmful conspiracy theories proves too much for fragile users or moderators to cope with, I'm more than happy to move along from your site, and leave you to your "different quality" discussions and conspiracy theories.
  - dang 5y ago
    I rate limited your account, which is standard practice when an account has been posting too many low-quality comments too quickly. It hasn't crippled your ability to reply; it just means you need to wait a bit. We're happy to take rate limits off when people give us reason to believe that they've taken the intended spirit of the site to heart and will post fewer and more substantive comments in the future. That would be the opposite direction from things like "I will continue to call out" and so on—we're trying to avoid internet callout culture, denunciatory rhetoric, and things like that, because they're so tedious. Intention not to start flamewars is good but not sufficient. You also have to actually not start them (or perpetuate them). https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=troll%20effects%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
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calvinmorrison 5y ago

Out of, 7+ billion people on the planet.

calvinmorrison 5y ago
Roughly .2 percent of the population.
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raphaelj 5y ago

And that’s with all the safety measures most of us have been following for more than one year now.

deleted 5y ago
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0x0 5y ago

"Our apologies. An error seems to have occurred. We’ve logged this error. Contact us if this issue persists." ...

drusepth 5y ago
The site loads fine for me, but the whole article is behind a paywall anyway. You might try https://outline.com/PYEgK3 https://outline.com/PYEgK3 which should fix both problems.
deepserket 5y ago
pdf of the page here: https://gofile.io/d/IPEm7Z https://gofile.io/d/IPEm7Z there are 3 graphs that aren't completely shown in the file https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-excess-deaths-global-estimates-interactive/map-container.html https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-e... https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-excess-deaths-global-estimates-interactive/country.html https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-e... https://infographics.economist.com/2021/20210515_FBC103/index.html https://infographics.economist.com/2021/20210515_FBC103/inde...
deleted 5y ago
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Rexxar 5y ago
"Funnily" the error appears after the page has started to display correctly and doesn't appear if you block the correct anti-adblock script that erase the correct page and replace the content by a fake technical error message. I find this behavior quite disgusting and sadly seen it on many sites.

xiphias2 5y ago

From what I have seen in poorer countries, in some cases the worst things have just started. I was dating a Colombian girl who got a 200% APR loan from a city near her during the lockdown to be able to pay her rent without a job, and hadn't even realized that it's 200% APR (15%/month didn't sound that bad to her). People are on the streets because the government wants to increase taxes, and they are already in huge debt. Now the government started to kill its own people in the daylight to stop the revolution.

whimsicalism 5y ago
> 15%/month didn't sound that bad to her This is why when economists talk about consumers acting as rational market participants I just laugh and shake my head. Have they met people?
- elliekelly 5y ago
  When your only options are (1) a loan at 15% while you’re unemployed but you get another 30-60 days of a roof over your head or (2) immediate homelessness then the high-interest loan is the rational choice.
- reader_x 5y ago
  I think Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky already put the “rational market participant” myth to bed for good.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Definitely, for the consumer. I think the idea that "rational market participant emerges when you get the average of a lot of people (ie. the firm) together to make a decision" still remains alive and well. There is sort of a Darwinian argument there, that in the long-run only the rational market participant remains in business and functioning as a firm. The import of behavioral econ. definitely remains understated today. I am also interested in philosophical thinkers, like Elizabeth Anderson or Michael Sandel, that take questions like these and explore the implications that they might have for how we ought to structure society.

burlesona 5y ago

https://archive.md/36LK9 https://archive.md/36LK9

hedora 5y ago

The earth’s population is 7.9b, so the excess deaths are 0.1% of the population. COVID’s mortality rate is about 0.5%, so roughly 1/5 of the population has has had it (or died of other related things, like starvation in developing countries due to the lockdown stopping food harvests in California). Currently, 1.45b doses of a vaccine have been administered, so about as many people have had the vaccine (partially, at least), as have had COVID. Hopefully the vaccine will make to the rest of the population soon. If not, we’re about 20% done with COVID, world-wide. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina... I’m pretty jaded at this point. My guess is that the vaccine rollout stalls out in poorer countries and COVID falls out of the news cycle before the majority of deaths.

nitwit005 5y ago
> starvation in developing countries due to the lockdown stopping food harvests in California California doesn't export much in the way of staples, so that's probably quite a stretch: https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/ https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Staples tend to be low-value exports, so they don’t show up in top-10-by-value lists when we also export truly enormous amounts of cash crops. But,e.g., California alone would be a top-10 rice exporter with about 1 million metric tons of annual exports.
jeffbee 5y ago
Recent research claimed that the excess mortality rate among people who had COVID but didn't die from it immediately was elevated 6 months after their recovery, with 8 excess deaths per thousand patients. So the real mortality rate may be a little higher than people estimate. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210422123603.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210422123603.h...
sneak 5y ago
It's disheartening seeing people in the US mad at the 30% vaccine hesitant there, while 6B+ at the gates have no vaccines available at all. The US isn't an island, and the borders are nowhere near closed. The variants that grow in the other 96% of humans that aren't americans will doubtlessly end up there, and will be end up tending toward vaccine resistance due to selection pressure. I think this is going to get much worse before it gets better. The disunity of nationalistic selfishness has struck our species once again.

mfbx9da4 5y ago

What's that as a percentage?

bdcravens 5y ago
somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15% increase in deaths

timmg 5y ago

If I did the math right, that's (at most) .17% of the population. In a normal year I'd guess we lose 1% of the population. I guess this seems lower than I'd expect?

HDMI_Cable 5y ago
These are excess deaths, so 7-13m deaths on top of the 1% already expected for this year.
msbarnett 5y ago
This is excess mortality, as in “above what would be expected in a normal year based on demographics”. So, if looking at historical trends and the current demographics as compared with those trends we had a prior expectation of your 1%, then what we we actually observed is 1.17%.
- timmg 5y ago
  Yeah, I get that. I guess I just mean that the worst pandemic of the last 100 years and (so far) it's maybe 17% deaths over the baseline. That feels kinda low.
  - msbarnett 5y ago
    17% excess mortality (and that’s assuming this 1% baseline we pulled out of the air, remember) doesn’t mean that the pandemic is only responsible for those excess deaths – a bunch of people who might have otherwise been expected to get hit by a car worked from home all year, or died from COVID instead, etc. So the pandemic is responsible for the 17% (in this scenario) uplift above baseline plus an unknown portion of that baseline itself. To be honest one cause, which changed a lot of behaviour that rolls into the baseline, pushing the global baseline up that much seems pretty impressive to me. Would be also interesting to consider distribution of that excess and how China fared in the excess mortality department. After the early days they seemed to keep it tightly under control, and they contain an enormous portion of the world’s population. That might suggest that excess mortality elsewhere was even further above baseline and the excess mortality only looks this good because 1.2 billion people mostly stuck to baseline?

pranshum 5y ago

Github link for all the code behind the analysis: https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-tracker https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-track...

sh1mmer 5y ago

According to the UN [1] 2019 worldwide mortality was 58m people. So that’s roughly a 12-22% increase assuming mortality stayed the same. [1] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/mortality/WMR2019/WorldMortality2019DataBooklet.pdf https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

Holy cow. This does massively underline how important the work of things like COVAX are in getting equitable global access to vaccines. We still need billions more doses manufactured, distributed and administered - it could take years and cost a fortune - and we should not lose our urgency or our focus.

maxerickson 5y ago
Pfizer is projecting 250 million doses per month by December. It will take years still at that rate, but they also have been doing a reasonable job of meeting and then increasing their projections.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Plus Pfizer is one of about a dozen vaccine makers at or near approval. Pfizer, Moderna, AZ, Sputnik, Sinovac, Sinopharm, J&J, Novavax, and many more. If we have 10 Pfizers, we have a billion doses every few months.

chmaynard 5y ago

Rest in peace. Tragic to the people who loved them, a statistic to the rest of us.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
I will never forget the New York daily death count a year ago. Seeing 600 a day is something I hope we never see again.
- detaro 5y ago
  It's pretty sobering how quickly large numbers just become yet another statistic and just something that gets accepted by many. Here in Germany numbers way exceeding the high points of the first wave just went as "meh, let's not do anything rash that could make businesses or people unhappy" this year (although of course quite a few people are also made unhappy by people dying... I'm really curious to see how this will shake out over the next few years).

adventured 5y ago

I found the counting approach to Covid so far to be rather fascinating. With the flu in the US they guess and present that number, but we're supposed to attach some meaningful value to the Covid positive counts as though that actually represents anywhere near the real number of Covid cases since the outbreak began. It's bullshit, I'm just not sure why the establishment (media, government, censors, etc) stick so tightly to the line on the bogus official counts. They act like those counts actually represent the outbreak properly. Perhaps in their pathological quest for control (a central theme of most politicians) they need a number to lean on as authoritative, to prop up their weak credibility. If they can't even give you accurate outbreak counts, what else can be believed (masks, no masks; 6 feet, 20 feet, no feet; fear the surfaces, don't fear the surfaces; vaccines take years (nope: 1957 Asian flu); it has been a total clown show the entire pandemic). India had been seeing near 400,000 cases per day. That's an entirely bogus number of course. And it's near universally agreed upon that it's bogus. The question is whether it's a million, two million, five million, whatever. What's actually closer to the truth? That's where everybody abandons ship, I never see the news media go deep into that part of it (and yet they happily report the made-up flu numbers every year). Part of the comedy of it, is that the supposed truth enforcers are enforcing a fraud, because none of these official counts are anywhere close to real, no matter which country you pick as the topic. Is India seeing 4,000 deaths per day, or 10,000, or 15,000? It's a dramatic difference across a month of time. The best you'll get out of the media is a little edge statement of: but it's suspected to be under-reported. Yeah, no kidding. The US has seen 33 million cases of Covid - that's the reported media line in every story. Everyone knows it's bogus and doesn't represent anywhere close to the number of actual infections in the US and yet it's reported on as properly representing the scale of the pandemic in the US. There has been so much intellectual fraud in this pandemic. So the obvious question: if they very widely report the made-up / guess-work flu counts every single year, year after year, across all media, why haven't they been doing exactly the same thing with Covid? That's what I want an answer to. Everyone avoids throwing out flu-like guesses on the real scale of the pandemic - the CDC doesn't want to do it, the media doesn't want to do it, the government broadly doesn't want to do it. Why aren't they reporting that it's more likely that there have been 60, 90, 120 million (etc) cases of Covid? edit: and the downvotes on this are fascinating too, given what I'm talking about is rooted in obvious reality not propaganda or conspiracy theory. I've noticed reality - objectivity, facts, logic - has been particularly unpopular during the pandemic, people have been letting their emotions control their reactions to everything. I don't believe there are very many people ignorant enough to think the official positive Covid counts actually represent the pandemic properly; I do think there are a lot of people desperate to hide from reality for one reason or another, however.

winstonewert 5y ago

What strikes me is Asia. If I'm reading this right they have relatively low official Covid deaths, but off the charts excess deaths. What's up with that?

bdcravens 5y ago
The government can hide information easier than it can hide bodies.
newuser00 5y ago
China has been lying about many things since day 1.

bytematic 5y ago

For people who think that is low, this is with the precautions taken, imagine if nobody did anything

chmod600 5y ago
Florida didn't lock down (EDIT: except a few weeks at the beginning), and their death numbers are middle-of-the-pack[1], just marginally worse than California, which did heavy lockdowns. We should probably assume that, in addition to not following some practices we should have, we also did a lot that we didn't have to. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html list the states by "of all time" and "deaths" which shows FL with 168 deaths per 100k and CA with 159, only two slots apart.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  This or that state government's mandate or lack thereof really can't stand in for actual behaviors. For one thing, regardless of state mandates, you can bet your buttons that a huge number of residential/nursing facilities for seniors in Florida did lock down, and thereby protected those most likely to increase Florida's numbers. If you want to see the effects of policy, don't compare states (especially big diverse ones like California). Compare, for example, San Francisco (with peak 7-day-average new cases of 363, total cases 36.7k, and population of 874k) and Miami (peak 7-day-average new cases of 3240, total cases 494k, and population of 2710k). Per capita, Miami was about four times worse. SF: https://www.google.com/search?q=san+francisco+covid+numbers https://www.google.com/search?q=san+francisco+covid+numbers Miami: https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+covid+numbers https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+covid+numbers
  - chmod600 5y ago
    There was both a policy difference as well as a behavior difference when it came to schools. Also, case numbers are a bad thing to measure. Death numbers are more reliable. EDIT: also, it appears state policy exacerbated the nursing home problems in California: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/06/editorial-newsom-falters-as-covid-19-nursing-home-cases-soar/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/06/editorial-newsom-falt...

noxer 5y ago

The question is how much less death will there be in the years to come. Especially the older people who died earlier because of covid. We should see a decline in death from all kinds of diseases that these people had and would have died from/with.

glangdale 5y ago
This assumes that there are no long-term mortality effects from having COVID and not dying from it, which seems not proven at this stage. I mean, yes, we'll see fewer very old people dying of the flu next year, but idk whether we'll see a bunch of late middle age or 'not very old' people dying from long COVID.
virtuallynathan 5y ago
This is an effect referred to as "mortality displacement" -- it tends to happen with bad flu years, heat waves, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_displacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_displacement
jmull 5y ago
> …years to come Those years of life are still lost. It’s true they would have died eventually anyway. But that’s true of everyone.
- noxer 5y ago
  But day/weeks/month/years of life lost is not the same as what we understand if we say lives lost. Also we stooped helping people survives in the name of covid. Life extending treatments and surgery where paused to have resource for dying people. Whos gonna count the days/weeks/months/years these people lost? In the end everything just shifts number because we all die. I just think this virus mostly hit the people at risk of dying which should have been made it morally easier to let them die, rather than hurt others trying to keep them alive. But that's exactly what the western world did. I would understand it if children where affected. We would morally justify that someone with cancer dies a bit earlier if we can safe the life of someone who still has many years to come.

HatchedLake721 5y ago

Please don’t look at 7m-13m number and compare it to 7 billion population and say oh it’s only 0.1-0.2%. Pretty much ever country has seen a 15-20% increase in excess mortality rates (20% more people dying than averages in the past), this is huge. This is one of the best up to date visualizations on this topic, scroll down and see breakdowns by country - https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938 https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...

kortilla 5y ago
“Huge” is very relative. 20% increase of a number that is very low by historical standards is still really low.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  Very low? You mean not that many people die, of any cause, typically? Not sure what you are getting at here.
  - therufa 5y ago
    very low in a sense that since we discovered antibiotics, the global mortality rate went down by a factor of 10. compared to that we are still in a relatively "good" position.
    - robbrown451 5y ago
      Relative to what, again? The old days, before antibiotics? I mean, if you go back far enough, 1 out of 5 people died by homocide. That still wouldn't make it reasonable to say that we're "relatively good" if only 10 million Americans a year are getting murdered. Death, and specifically premature death, is still a very unfortunate reality. Playing it down as if "well it happened more often in the old days" is, frankly, a bit bizarre.
  - alerighi 5y ago
    Really... not many. In my city of about 14k people last year died 19 people, that is like 3/4 more than the norm, but with these numbers, we are well inside statistical error. Also we must evaluate the increase in mortality in a longer period. I can as well being that most of the people that died of COVID were either old people or people with other health issues that would have died anyway in a year or two. The problem with COVID to me seems that everyone just remembered that people will die. In the old days death was normal, there were wars, there were al sort of illnesses and infections that caused death, it was common to see people die even at young ages. And I don't talk about centuries ago, it was like that till the end of WW2. Nowadays we are used to people that lives till 90 years, we no longer have wars, we are able to cure practically every illness, so a virus that kills slightly more people that we are used to see terrifies us. But in reality, it's nature, we will all die one day, COVID or not, so there is no real reason to fear it to me. In fact, we will live worse life because of the fear of this virus, and all the restrictions that we had put in place to avoid that (without so much success, in the end).

rossdavidh 5y ago

If you're talking about a 7 billion population, the deaths of which will vary from year to year, this seems like a number in the noise range which would be very hard to distinguish from background variation. If everyone of the 7b people lived 100 years, we would expect about 70 million deaths a year, and we know they don't live 100 years on average. Any reasonable range of assumptions puts this in the range of too-small-to-detect. Which doesn't mean it doesn't matter or isn't important, but it does mean that this is not a good method for estimating it.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Deaths don't actually vary that much year to year. Increase/decrease over time? Yes. Swing by 10 million in a year? No. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-deaths-by-world-region https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-deaths-b...
tbenst 5y ago
You make a strong claim with no supporting evidence or analysis. On the other hand, we have roughly 3.3M (Econimist) or 3.4M (Financial, Times [1]) confirmed COVID-19 deaths. Is it so surprising that only 25-50% of actual deaths due to COVID-19 were confirmed? Why do you try to downplay that COVID-19 is the second most deadly pandemic in a century, after HIV/AIDS? [2] [1] https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938 https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7866842/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7866842/
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  "...Which doesn't mean it doesn't matter or isn't important, but it does mean that this is not a good method for estimating it. "

khazhoux 5y ago

This has me a bit confused: I look at the stats on cases and deaths per capita across various U.S. states, including California (which was very locked down, at least in theory) and Florida (which was flippant towards risks of contagion), and many states in between. The per capita cases+deaths are nearly identical across many states with very different approaches. This left me really wondering which measures were and weren't necessary. Anyone seen good studies or analysis on this? Legitimate question, please no political commentary.

xwolfi 5y ago
Either you lock people downs and those would reject it will go out nonetheless. Or you don't and people who are at risk will lock themselves down. There's no particular benefit to one or the other so states do what match their current constituents. And that's exactly what you'd expect in a democracy.
vmception 5y ago
No state had an optimal viral mitigation strategy. The optimal strategy being impractical or even impossible. Densely populated places that would have acted flippantly would have been much worse. Densely populated places with mixed unit housing had hurt themselves with the strategy they chose. So basically California and New York could just barely keep numbers as close to Florida numbers by locking down hard. The methods California and New York chose could have been even more optimized, but not possible for a US government to do.
amanaplanacanal 5y ago
Where I live, the restrictions have explicitly been tuned so as to not overwhelm hospital facilities. Minimizing deaths was not a stated goal. They measured new cases and how many hospital bed were available, then adjusted restrictions accordingly per County. So for example, you might see no indoor dining in one County, but indoor dining allowed at 25% capacity the next County over. They seem to have done a pretty good job given the stated goal.
melling 5y ago
People are lumping the numbers together for the entire pandemic. During the first wave New York and New Jersey got hit really hard. Basically, it was too late to do anything.

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tester756 5y ago

How strong is anti vaccine / anti mask movement in the US? As I see there's very little of it "on the american side of the internet", meanwhile "here" they tend to cause a lot of disruption and shitton of missinformation

mojomark 5y ago
I would not conflate "anti-vaccine people" with "anti-mask people". I live in the state of Maryland and yesterday our governor lifted the mask requirement for vaccinated people. I am a fiscal conservative and am vaccinated (got it as soon as I could, because science and common sense informed me that I should). I have relatives, including my own mother, who are far right wing and will not get vaccinated because they believe COVID is a conspiracy and/or "fake" (... I know). As far as I'm concerned, folks who refuse to get vaccinated are on their own and all of the remaining vaccine doses should get sent to people and countries who actually want and need it most. I realize that's cold. I also realise that's a logistical nightmare, but I have zero empathy for people who refuse to get vaccinated and then contract COVID. So, I am for vaccines, but in regions where vaccines have been fully offered to every single citizen that wants one, I am against forcing the wearing of masks. I still carry a mask in case I'm in a situation that warrants, but I will not inconvenience myself any longer for someone who refuses to do the bare minimum to protect themselves from COVID.
- raphlinus 5y ago
  I am not in exactly the same place, but respect your comment as being at least logically self-consistent. It reminds me of Jody Lanard's thread[1] about how the new CDC guidelines are "adultifying" in that they transfer the decision back to individuals rather than paternalistic guidelines. The way I think about it is that until recently, the risk calculus was analogous to drunk driving, but is now more similar to riding a motorcycle without a helmet. [1]: https://twitter.com/EIDGeek/status/1393987801260204034 https://twitter.com/EIDGeek/status/1393987801260204034
  - mojomark 5y ago
    > The way I think about it is that until recently, the risk calculus was analogous to drunk driving, but is now more similar to riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Appreciate the link and I fully concur with your analogy. It may boil down to some psychological primitive (perhaps some deep-rooted defense mechanism that developed in my youth), but within this analogy I also say "let people wear or not wear helmets on bikes, the risk and evidence have been clearly presented for decades". I know, in my heart of hearts that this is a cold stance. Perhaps because you can't possibly assume to know the circumstances that led a person not to wear a helmet on a bike (or get a vaccine). Maybe they're a young teen revelling from their parents or were extremely sheltered in some way from the evidence that would have changed their mind. There are a lot of "if's" here. At some point, in my value set, you have to draw the line and look out for yourself and loved ones first. I went out today without a mask and it was amazing (it felt better than I expected). That said, based on your comment, I will give more consideration to wearing masks in public as general practice for the next month or so. However, I can't live like that forever. There will be a turning point.

atweiden 5y ago

Covid makes your country worse. It’s like having endemic malaria. No one wants endemic malaria in their country, and costly government intervention was required to rid the developed world of it. Similarly, it’s disheartening to see so many people — especially on partisan lines — promulgate the talking point that we just need to “learn to live with it”. This is insanity. Annual mRNA booster vaccines ad infinitum, with continuous vaccine passports is a wholly inadequate vision for the future. Melbourne, Oz — a diverse, international city of 5M — demonstrates it’s very possible to eradicate Covid with international, interregional and interstate border closures, with hard lockdowns plus federal financial support. Four months later, zero covid.

greenwich26 5y ago
You literally can't close the American brder. As a strict lower bound (based on CBP encounters) 3000 people walk through the desert or jump the fence every day, and statistically many of them have Covid. This is a constant source term to the growth equation that precludes a Melbourne solution, even if the borders were officially closed and optimal lockdowns.
- atweiden 5y ago
  > You literally can't close the American brder. As a strict lower bound (based on CBP encounters) 3000 people walk through the desert or jump the fence every day, and statistically many of them have Covid. This is a constant source term to the growth equation that precludes a Melbourne solution, even if the borders were officially closed and optimal lockdowns. That doesn’t sound like a long-term problem given the imminent rise of drone patrols, and is likely short term correctable by bolstering security along the US southern border. Like many aspects of the US’ abject failure in managing the pandemic, this seems like a “lack of political will” problem more than anything else.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    It's mostly a cost thing, in reality. Closing the Southern border -- "building a wall" if you will -- is an absolutely gargantuan task. The border is huge, many parts it extremely harsh and remote terrain unfriendly to construction projects. Trump made it a huge part of his platform, had a majority, and in four years got a pitiful amount of wall actually built.

dnissley 5y ago

A related angle I haven't seen much investigation on is to what degree we'll see negative excess deaths (surely there's a better term, but I'm at a loss) in the coming years due to how much covid impacted older folks.

darig 5y ago

Be careful if the stats came from an Israeli.

igonvalue 5y ago

Searching for what excess mortality looks like in a "normal" (non-pandemic) year, I found this interesting statistic: > By the year 2017, the United States was already suffering more excess deaths and more life years lost each year than those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/United-States-COVID-19-was-not-sole-cause-excess-deaths-2020 https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/United-States-COVID-19-was-...

archsurface 5y ago

What rubbish. In the UK the figures have been blatantly inflated. The entire UK media has turned into a bought and paid for government propaganda machine; the only journalists left are the independents. The whole thing has been such farce that I now struggle to acknowledge anything more than the presence of a virus. I still, after a year, don't know anyone who knows anyone who's died from this catastrophic, sky is falling, disaster pandemic. Condolences to anyone has been affected, but this whole think stinks with deceit.

mft_ 5y ago
Would you be able to share any evidence to back up your suspicions?
astroalex 5y ago
You don't offer any evidence for your claim except anecdotal experience of not knowing anyone who has died. Do you think it's possible that your local bubble of information (not knowing anyone who has died) is not actually representative of a true larger trend? I'm always curious about how people draw conclusions like this.
MattGaiser 5y ago
So all nations are creating fake deaths now?

chiefalchemist 5y ago

"The rich world suffered relatively badly, but most of the dying has been elsewhere." Saying the subtitle. Elsewhere, meaning relatively poor countries. But even within the rich world the poor within those are disproportionately affected by Covid (deaths). But those ppl - at least in the USA - have worse health outcomes in general already. Covid is both a disease and a symptom. Unfortunately, the disease lens is being used to distract from how it's a symptom of deeper longer running societal problems. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/communities-color-face-deadly-air-pollution-regardless-location-or-income-180977624/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/communities-color-...

nradov 5y ago

So at the upper end of the range that would be 0.17% of the world population.

jaimex2 5y ago

I was hoping the silver lining to the pandemic would be our planets overpopulation brought down but it really hasn't even made a chip in it. With new births added in were still growing the global population

Proven 5y ago

Not unusual by CCP standards