9 ms·

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

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).
    - robbrown451 5y ago
      Well I guess I'll stop making my kid wear a helmet when she skateboards. No need to fear her premature death, it's just nature and everyone dies anyway. Are you sure you thought this whole thing through?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
chmod600 5y ago
I'm not quite sure what your point is. The absolute number is the number, and zooming in to make it a relative number for dramatic effect doesn't change that. It's kind of like zooming in to a stock market graph so the spikes look bigger.
- jussij 5y ago
  The OP's point is focusing on that absolute number is not a good measure, only because when compared to the world population it gives the 0.1-0.2% of population effected result, which is obviously way off.
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  Because numbers and how people interpret data is hugely important (there was a great article years ago how data visualization tricks can completely make a person misinterpret the presented information) People can read and shout - I WAS RIGHT!! Only 0.1% people die of covid, lockdowns were unnecessary, masks don’t help, everyone’s a sheep for believing covid is anything more serious than a flu. Now they want to vaccinate us for this, what a joke. Wake up people!! This is how people can misunderstand and spread misinformation because they don’t have the experience reading and interpreting such data and make conclusions. Per [1] United States’ current covid deaths is 912k. That is twice the amount USA lost during WW2. So on one side of the spectrum we have “wake up people, 0.1%, this is a hoax” and on another side we have that more people died from covid in a single year than the sum of all war and terrorist casualties USA had in the last 150 years. Context matters. [1] - http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess-mortality-due-covid-19-and-scalars-reported-covid-19-deaths http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess...
  - akomtu 5y ago
    What's the age distribution of that 0.1%? I guess it's mostly old people. When a war takes down a big chunk of young males, it's a problem. When a pandemic takes down 2x more but only old people, the nation may as well not notice that. This coronavirus is surprisingly courteous in this regard for it doesn't touch the young folks.
  - 5y ago
disordinary 5y ago
Not only that, but the covid restrictions have meant that the normal death rate is lower. Because people aren't traveling and commuting the road toll is down, because people are at home and social distancing workplace deaths are down. So excess mortality is up and the base deathrate is down meaning excess mortality is actually higher than shown.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  On the other hand, people have been avoiding going to the doctor, so diagnosis and treatment of all sorts of preventable/treatable diseases (like cancer) is down, leading to excess death, disability, and suffering.
  - disordinary 5y ago
    Most of those diseases have a long tail so we won't see the death rate from them for 2020 probably. They'll increase the death rate in a year or two unfortunately.
    - colordrops 5y ago
      Things like diabetes and kidney disease which can cause acute failures if not managed properly are certainly causing short term upticks in deaths.
- virtuallynathan 5y ago
  This is not the case with automotive fatalities, they were up in 2020. "A 24% spike in roadway death rates is highest in 96 years"
  - karmelapple 5y ago
    I find this both surprising and not. Early in the pandemic, when most everything was shut down, I had to run an errand and ended up driving down some streets I’ve driven many times before. The percentage of cars driving erratically on the road was much higher than usual. I figure one of these might explain it: 1. People are stressed / distracted, and driving poorly because of it 2. Most drivers are well-meaning and conscientious, but most of those conscientious people were staying at home as public health officials directed, so the few people left on the road were more disproportionately less conscientious 3. Fewer cars on the road meant I noticed the bad drivers more readily Other hypotheses?
xdrosenheim 5y ago
Just a reminder to people: That is enough to kill the entire population of Denmark... Twice. When we talk about people, percentages just doesn't make sense to use.
amscanne 5y ago
FWIW, the FT article appears to be calling out the difference in peak rates “for the same dates”, not for the full year. While the excess deaths are awful, it’s also important to keep the number in context. The death rate has been decreasing for over a century, and in absolute terms, the death rate of 2020 looks like the year 2000 [1]. [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/25/is-it-really-true-that-the-u-s-death-rate-in-2020-was-the-highest-above-normal-since-the-early-1900s-even-surpassing-the-calamity-of-the-1918-flu-pandemic/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/25/is-it-real...
klmadfejno 5y ago
As someone who believes the pandemic was real, that lockdowns early on were a good idea, that mask wearing is trivial and probably helpful, that social distancing was also easy to do and a reasonable idea, and that vaccinations are safe and effective. My gut reaction is still that the number of deaths was relatively small. About a third of US deaths were in nursing homes, and that doesn't include people who probably could / should have been in nursing homes from a health and self-sufficiency perspective. 85% were 65 or older (65 isn't especially old that's just the lowest data threshold I could find). I am fortunate enough to not know anybody who died from COVID. Concerns about long lasting effects might be true. We might see this having substantial long term effects and that could be bad. It could be worse than the impact of the deaths. That aside however, I just don't think a one time 20% increase in annual mortality is that terrible, but that does not mean that the virus was trivial. If I'm understanding this chart correctly, forecasted 2021 death rate per 1,000 people (not covid adjusted) plus 20% is less than the 1970s... and the next 50 years as well. (EDIT: Sorry idiot math. The 2021 rate + 20% is above any historical rate since 1970, and is on par with expectations 2050 onward) https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat... This includes all sorts of demographic assumptions about age, but so does COVID, I would argue, in the least convincing demographic groupings possible. Maybe COVID was a genuine threat but on a whole we did a pretty good job and it wasn't that bad in total effect as a result?
flukus 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%. Using the entire human population also skews things because the deaths were concentrated in North America, South America and Europe. To over generalize, Asian countries did a much better job at managing the pandemic and have a population of 4.5 billion people. Most of the deaths were concentrated in the remaining 2.5 billion.

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).
  - robbrown451 5y ago
    Well I guess I'll stop making my kid wear a helmet when she skateboards. No need to fear her premature death, it's just nature and everyone dies anyway. Are you sure you thought this whole thing through?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

chmod600 5y ago

I'm not quite sure what your point is. The absolute number is the number, and zooming in to make it a relative number for dramatic effect doesn't change that. It's kind of like zooming in to a stock market graph so the spikes look bigger.

jussij 5y ago
The OP's point is focusing on that absolute number is not a good measure, only because when compared to the world population it gives the 0.1-0.2% of population effected result, which is obviously way off.
HatchedLake721 5y ago
Because numbers and how people interpret data is hugely important (there was a great article years ago how data visualization tricks can completely make a person misinterpret the presented information) People can read and shout - I WAS RIGHT!! Only 0.1% people die of covid, lockdowns were unnecessary, masks don’t help, everyone’s a sheep for believing covid is anything more serious than a flu. Now they want to vaccinate us for this, what a joke. Wake up people!! This is how people can misunderstand and spread misinformation because they don’t have the experience reading and interpreting such data and make conclusions. Per [1] United States’ current covid deaths is 912k. That is twice the amount USA lost during WW2. So on one side of the spectrum we have “wake up people, 0.1%, this is a hoax” and on another side we have that more people died from covid in a single year than the sum of all war and terrorist casualties USA had in the last 150 years. Context matters. [1] - http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess-mortality-due-covid-19-and-scalars-reported-covid-19-deaths http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess...
- akomtu 5y ago
  What's the age distribution of that 0.1%? I guess it's mostly old people. When a war takes down a big chunk of young males, it's a problem. When a pandemic takes down 2x more but only old people, the nation may as well not notice that. This coronavirus is surprisingly courteous in this regard for it doesn't touch the young folks.
- 5y ago

disordinary 5y ago

Not only that, but the covid restrictions have meant that the normal death rate is lower. Because people aren't traveling and commuting the road toll is down, because people are at home and social distancing workplace deaths are down. So excess mortality is up and the base deathrate is down meaning excess mortality is actually higher than shown.

pmoriarty 5y ago
On the other hand, people have been avoiding going to the doctor, so diagnosis and treatment of all sorts of preventable/treatable diseases (like cancer) is down, leading to excess death, disability, and suffering.
- disordinary 5y ago
  Most of those diseases have a long tail so we won't see the death rate from them for 2020 probably. They'll increase the death rate in a year or two unfortunately.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Things like diabetes and kidney disease which can cause acute failures if not managed properly are certainly causing short term upticks in deaths.
virtuallynathan 5y ago
This is not the case with automotive fatalities, they were up in 2020. "A 24% spike in roadway death rates is highest in 96 years"
- karmelapple 5y ago
  I find this both surprising and not. Early in the pandemic, when most everything was shut down, I had to run an errand and ended up driving down some streets I’ve driven many times before. The percentage of cars driving erratically on the road was much higher than usual. I figure one of these might explain it: 1. People are stressed / distracted, and driving poorly because of it 2. Most drivers are well-meaning and conscientious, but most of those conscientious people were staying at home as public health officials directed, so the few people left on the road were more disproportionately less conscientious 3. Fewer cars on the road meant I noticed the bad drivers more readily Other hypotheses?

xdrosenheim 5y ago

Just a reminder to people: That is enough to kill the entire population of Denmark... Twice. When we talk about people, percentages just doesn't make sense to use.

amscanne 5y ago

FWIW, the FT article appears to be calling out the difference in peak rates “for the same dates”, not for the full year. While the excess deaths are awful, it’s also important to keep the number in context. The death rate has been decreasing for over a century, and in absolute terms, the death rate of 2020 looks like the year 2000 [1]. [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/25/is-it-really-true-that-the-u-s-death-rate-in-2020-was-the-highest-above-normal-since-the-early-1900s-even-surpassing-the-calamity-of-the-1918-flu-pandemic/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/25/is-it-real...

klmadfejno 5y ago

As someone who believes the pandemic was real, that lockdowns early on were a good idea, that mask wearing is trivial and probably helpful, that social distancing was also easy to do and a reasonable idea, and that vaccinations are safe and effective. My gut reaction is still that the number of deaths was relatively small. About a third of US deaths were in nursing homes, and that doesn't include people who probably could / should have been in nursing homes from a health and self-sufficiency perspective. 85% were 65 or older (65 isn't especially old that's just the lowest data threshold I could find). I am fortunate enough to not know anybody who died from COVID. Concerns about long lasting effects might be true. We might see this having substantial long term effects and that could be bad. It could be worse than the impact of the deaths. That aside however, I just don't think a one time 20% increase in annual mortality is that terrible, but that does not mean that the virus was trivial. If I'm understanding this chart correctly, forecasted 2021 death rate per 1,000 people (not covid adjusted) plus 20% is less than the 1970s... and the next 50 years as well. (EDIT: Sorry idiot math. The 2021 rate + 20% is above any historical rate since 1970, and is on par with expectations 2050 onward) https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat... This includes all sorts of demographic assumptions about age, but so does COVID, I would argue, in the least convincing demographic groupings possible. Maybe COVID was a genuine threat but on a whole we did a pretty good job and it wasn't that bad in total effect as a result?

flukus 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%. Using the entire human population also skews things because the deaths were concentrated in North America, South America and Europe. To over generalize, Asian countries did a much better job at managing the pandemic and have a population of 4.5 billion people. Most of the deaths were concentrated in the remaining 2.5 billion.