7 ms·

U.S. Covid death toll hits 1,500 a day amid delta scourge

56 points by rolph 5y ago

mmastrac 5y ago
It's sad that 90%+ of these deaths are entirely preventable.
0-_-0 5y ago
Confirmed cases chart: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~AUS~ISR~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... Confirmed deaths: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~AUS~ISR~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... The ratio of the two, case fatality rate: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Case+fatality+rate&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~AUS~ISR~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
- tomohawk 5y ago
  The most reliable number is excess mortality, although it does lag by a month or so due to how long it takes to collect the date. Here is the chart for the US for the past few years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... You can see the massive drop off earlier this year when the vaccines became massively available. Since then, we've been tracking the upper bound of normal. Not great, but probably not bad considering all of the follow on effects of stress, isolation, closing down routine medical exams, job loss, business loss, and many other assorted things that also contribute to excess mortality. For comparison, you can see the 2017/2018 flu season impact on excess mortality in the same chart.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    The latest data on that chart is from Jul 12th due to reporting lag, which was the low point in COVID mortality before delta. There is none of the excess mortality due to delta which is currently captured in that chart.
    - TheParkShark 5y ago
      How would one go about finding the data for the excess mortality due to delta?
      - lamontcg 5y ago
        Wait
neel8986 5y ago
My biggest fear is immunity of an individual lasts around 6 month.Thats why we are looking at wave after wave in different countries approximately 6 months apart. Data from Israel is scary and kind of points to similar trend.
- sprafa 5y ago
  Sure and Israel is doing booster shots and it’s working. Your point being? Covid is a new “flu” type endemic disease. We’ll manage it, hopefully.
- tzs 5y ago
  Are you talking about the data from Israel that shows efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine dropping to 67.5%? If so what you are seeing is Simpson's paradox. The same data when broken down by under 50 and 50+ gives 91.8% and 85.2%. Breaking it down even farther by age group gives: 12-15 100% 16-19 100% 20-29 100% 30-39 96.8% 40-49 93.9% 50-59 92.8% 60-69 88.7% 70-79 89.6% 80-89 81.1% 90+ 92.4% See [1]. [1] https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-efficacy-vs-severe-disease-be-strong-when-60-of-hospitalized-are-vaccinated https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
e40 5y ago
Or 550K per year. Just below cancer and heart disease. (according to https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm ) EDIT: to fix the logic.
- jovial_cavalier 5y ago
  Nevermind that the death toll was under 100 a day a few months ago... Always extrapolate from the now!!!
graeme 5y ago
Here’s a couple exercises to test your intuition about this disease. —————————— Year on year risk 1. Pick an area with good covid stats. The google data on cases/hospitalizations/icu/deaths will do 2. Compare the stats for each with the numbers exactly one year ago. You may be surprised to find that unless the country is Qatar, every number will be worse than year on year. Including hospitalizations, icu and deaths Like other respiratory viruses, SARS-Cov-2 is seasonal. You may recall that last year around this time, Florida and Texas had big waves before the north. And America had a big wave before Europe. Europe declared victory late summer 2020. This is a surprising conclusion. Going into winter we appear to be in a worse position compared to last year. ——————————— Relative vs. Absolute Risk of severe disease post vaccine Here’s another exercise. Most reading this are likely vaccinated, as am I. You surely read that this vaccination has ~95% efficacy against severe disease. Great! I’ll take those odds. But what do they mean in absolute risk terms? Let’s say that last year your local area had 1,000 cases a day, and had the wild type variant. At that level you had a certain risk tolerance. Now, relative to unvaccinated you back then, you have a 20x lower risk. But, it is 2021: 1. Delta seems to have a 2x odds ratio for hospitalization (source below). Oops. Your absolute risk reduction is only 10x. 2. Your local area has more cases now. See the first exercise. So if your area has 5x more cases, a typical multiple, then your absolute risk reduction for severe disease compared to same time last year is only 2x less. Oops. Now, your peak risk will probably stay lower, as in a lot of places it is implausible that peak caseloads will hit 5x their peak loads. Among other things, ICU capacity would break before then. But this exercise is still valueable, as the merely relative protection of vaccination is unintuitive. Oh, and the risk of an unvaccinated person compared to same time last year? 10x more! That preserves 95% efficacy. ————————— No one knows the future. Maybe these waves all peak, we hit the happy land of immunity as a herd, and we have a normal future. But I say it is futility to declare victory over a respiratory pathogen until your country makes it through at least one winter with the level of restrictions you’d like. Summer is easy mode. —————- Sources: 1. Delta hospitalization. This is actually relative to alpha, which may itself have had a higher hospitalization odds ratio relative to wild type: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/sars-cov-2-delta-variant-doubles-hospital-risk-study-shows https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/sars-cov... 2. Country stats. For quickly checking a country, google is fastest. But they generally pull from our world in data, which is the best aggregator: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
bdibs 5y ago
Has something like this happened before in history? Where we have the tools to avoid deaths both caused by COVID and the indirect deaths caused by a lack of healthcare capacity, but the people refuse to use them?
- sprafa 5y ago
  Obesity is a similar scourge, albeit it was not completely caused by misinformation. Tbh I now see our society as a memetic organism and I think the cleansing of people who don’t understand reality is just a part of the process at this point.
  - proc0 5y ago
    > caused by misinformation It's so deadly it requires misinformation to kill people? Why do you think it's taking years for the public to reach consensus, if this is such a threat?
    - andrekandre 5y ago
      i think a very real problem people face is its hard to discern what is reliable information (information overload, earned mistrust in "mainstream media", environment/culture, etc)
      - proc0 5y ago
        I agree. We're in the Misinformation Era, which is precisely why even the "official" sources are not to be trusted.
      - loonster 5y ago
        Banning "misinformation" makes all non banned information suspect.
        andrekandre 5y ago
        yep, i think this is a very real paradox banning misinformation might work short term, but longterm i suspect it will further harm things... long term credibility needs to be won back the hard way me thinks...
France_is_bacon 5y ago
98%-99% of the deaths are from those who are unvaccinated and/or refuse to wear masks. https://medicalpartnership.usg.edu/covid-19-staggering-statistic-98-to-99-of-americans-dying-are-unvaccinated/ https://medicalpartnership.usg.edu/covid-19-staggering-stati... No sadness from me, unless it is for children who are under 18-years-old. Because they have such sh-tty useless POS parents. As a matter-of-fact, I think that those who have not had a vaccination and don't wear masks should not be allowed to go to the hospitals for treatment, and take beds from those who are sick and HAVE had the vaccine. F them, completely. And I read a lot of articles from rabid anti-maskers/anti-vacciners, who contracted Covid, and are in a hospital, that they take it all back and that they were wrong. Well, those people can go right to hell. I don't believe in a god or afterlife, but if there is, I hope they get sent straight to hell. Anti-vaccers and anti-maskers say that they want their freedom, which is why when I know one of my neighbors is unvaccinated, I take a big sh-t in front of their driveway 2-3 times per week, because I want that total freedom and not worry about others, too. If they don't like it, they don't have to go outside (which is what unvaccinated say to the vaccinated and mask wearers).
geeB 5y ago
Question for people that understand mRNA vaccines: why does the third dose supposedly have the same exact formulation? The narrative in the beginning was that this new technology would allow for vaccines to be developed and manufactured in ~1 month, tailored to the variants (even claiming that cancer would be next). Why can't we have a vaccine that's more effective against the new variants?
- semigroupoid 5y ago
  According to this [0] at least BioNTech/Pfizer seem to be developing a booster shot specifically targeting the Delta variant. But they do mention that they’ve just recently “manufactured” the mRNA so it’s probably still months from being approved and ready to be deployed. [0] https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-details/pfizer-and-biontech-provide-update-booster-program-light-delta https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...
  - jleyank 5y ago
    I seem to recall that fda and maybe other regulatory agencies have said that approval of modified-payload mRNA vaccines will be quicker. I recall that Pfizer has tests for a delta variant shot underway and I (naively) hope they can include several mRNA sequences in the next booster. Otherwise, it’s just reloading the body’s antibody load. As the entire spike protein is presented, there’s no guarantee that each person’s antibodies are the same or even one variety. This differs from the monoclonal antibodies from Lilly and Regeneron which work as-is.
  - rolph 5y ago
    there is a lead time of 91 days from request to product to reformulate pfizer vaccine
- Exmoor 5y ago
  My understanding is that Delta variant is much more infectious, but doesn't differ very much in ways that would make it less recognizable to your immune system. So your body doesn't have any issue knowing there's a problem it just has a harder time fighting it off.
perl4ever 5y ago
The death rate in Florida that I've seen reported suddenly dropped by half in the last couple weeks, which is really weird, because it's ahead of the reported case rate, where it normally lags. The Miami Herald reported that a change in methodology has created an artificial gap distorting things: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article253796898.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25379689... https://floridapolitics.com/archives/444288-how-many-floridians-are-dying-of-covid-depends-on-where-you-look/ https://floridapolitics.com/archives/444288-how-many-floridi... Governor DeSantis and the Florida DOH have fired back, saying it's all political lies. https://floridapolitics.com/archives/454618-ron-desantis-covid-19-death-reporting-questions-are-partisan-distraction/ https://floridapolitics.com/archives/454618-ron-desantis-cov... Other people in Florida State government are clearly opposing DeSantis, for instance: https://floridapolitics.com/archives/444317-nikki-fried-directs-fdacs-to-publish-federal-covid-19-data-amid-covid-information-sharing-void/ https://floridapolitics.com/archives/444317-nikki-fried-dire... I think that while DeSantis and the DOH may well be technically correct that the new method of reporting statistics is objectively more accurate in the long run, that doesn't mean that it isn't causing a distortion downstream, where it looks like nobody's dying on the most recent days, even though they are. e.g. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/

56 points by rolph 5y ago

It's sad that 90%+ of these deaths are entirely preventable.

Confirmed cases chart: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~AUS~ISR~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... Confirmed deaths: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~AUS~ISR~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... The ratio of the two, case fatality rate: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Case+fatality+rate&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~AUS~ISR~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

tomohawk 5y ago
The most reliable number is excess mortality, although it does lag by a month or so due to how long it takes to collect the date. Here is the chart for the US for the past few years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... You can see the massive drop off earlier this year when the vaccines became massively available. Since then, we've been tracking the upper bound of normal. Not great, but probably not bad considering all of the follow on effects of stress, isolation, closing down routine medical exams, job loss, business loss, and many other assorted things that also contribute to excess mortality. For comparison, you can see the 2017/2018 flu season impact on excess mortality in the same chart.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  The latest data on that chart is from Jul 12th due to reporting lag, which was the low point in COVID mortality before delta. There is none of the excess mortality due to delta which is currently captured in that chart.
  - TheParkShark 5y ago
    How would one go about finding the data for the excess mortality due to delta?
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      Wait

neel8986 5y ago

My biggest fear is immunity of an individual lasts around 6 month.Thats why we are looking at wave after wave in different countries approximately 6 months apart. Data from Israel is scary and kind of points to similar trend.

sprafa 5y ago
Sure and Israel is doing booster shots and it’s working. Your point being? Covid is a new “flu” type endemic disease. We’ll manage it, hopefully.
tzs 5y ago
Are you talking about the data from Israel that shows efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine dropping to 67.5%? If so what you are seeing is Simpson's paradox. The same data when broken down by under 50 and 50+ gives 91.8% and 85.2%. Breaking it down even farther by age group gives: 12-15 100% 16-19 100% 20-29 100% 30-39 96.8% 40-49 93.9% 50-59 92.8% 60-69 88.7% 70-79 89.6% 80-89 81.1% 90+ 92.4% See [1]. [1] https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-efficacy-vs-severe-disease-be-strong-when-60-of-hospitalized-are-vaccinated https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...

e40 5y ago

Or 550K per year. Just below cancer and heart disease. (according to https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm ) EDIT: to fix the logic.

jovial_cavalier 5y ago
Nevermind that the death toll was under 100 a day a few months ago... Always extrapolate from the now!!!

graeme 5y ago

Here’s a couple exercises to test your intuition about this disease. —————————— Year on year risk 1. Pick an area with good covid stats. The google data on cases/hospitalizations/icu/deaths will do 2. Compare the stats for each with the numbers exactly one year ago. You may be surprised to find that unless the country is Qatar, every number will be worse than year on year. Including hospitalizations, icu and deaths Like other respiratory viruses, SARS-Cov-2 is seasonal. You may recall that last year around this time, Florida and Texas had big waves before the north. And America had a big wave before Europe. Europe declared victory late summer 2020. This is a surprising conclusion. Going into winter we appear to be in a worse position compared to last year. ——————————— Relative vs. Absolute Risk of severe disease post vaccine Here’s another exercise. Most reading this are likely vaccinated, as am I. You surely read that this vaccination has ~95% efficacy against severe disease. Great! I’ll take those odds. But what do they mean in absolute risk terms? Let’s say that last year your local area had 1,000 cases a day, and had the wild type variant. At that level you had a certain risk tolerance. Now, relative to unvaccinated you back then, you have a 20x lower risk. But, it is 2021: 1. Delta seems to have a 2x odds ratio for hospitalization (source below). Oops. Your absolute risk reduction is only 10x. 2. Your local area has more cases now. See the first exercise. So if your area has 5x more cases, a typical multiple, then your absolute risk reduction for severe disease compared to same time last year is only 2x less. Oops. Now, your peak risk will probably stay lower, as in a lot of places it is implausible that peak caseloads will hit 5x their peak loads. Among other things, ICU capacity would break before then. But this exercise is still valueable, as the merely relative protection of vaccination is unintuitive. Oh, and the risk of an unvaccinated person compared to same time last year? 10x more! That preserves 95% efficacy. ————————— No one knows the future. Maybe these waves all peak, we hit the happy land of immunity as a herd, and we have a normal future. But I say it is futility to declare victory over a respiratory pathogen until your country makes it through at least one winter with the level of restrictions you’d like. Summer is easy mode. —————- Sources: 1. Delta hospitalization. This is actually relative to alpha, which may itself have had a higher hospitalization odds ratio relative to wild type: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/sars-cov-2-delta-variant-doubles-hospital-risk-study-shows https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/sars-cov... 2. Country stats. For quickly checking a country, google is fastest. But they generally pull from our world in data, which is the best aggregator: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus

bdibs 5y ago

Has something like this happened before in history? Where we have the tools to avoid deaths both caused by COVID and the indirect deaths caused by a lack of healthcare capacity, but the people refuse to use them?

sprafa 5y ago
Obesity is a similar scourge, albeit it was not completely caused by misinformation. Tbh I now see our society as a memetic organism and I think the cleansing of people who don’t understand reality is just a part of the process at this point.
- proc0 5y ago
  > caused by misinformation It's so deadly it requires misinformation to kill people? Why do you think it's taking years for the public to reach consensus, if this is such a threat?
  - andrekandre 5y ago
    i think a very real problem people face is its hard to discern what is reliable information (information overload, earned mistrust in "mainstream media", environment/culture, etc)
    - proc0 5y ago
      I agree. We're in the Misinformation Era, which is precisely why even the "official" sources are not to be trusted.
    - loonster 5y ago
      Banning "misinformation" makes all non banned information suspect.
      - andrekandre 5y ago
        yep, i think this is a very real paradox banning misinformation might work short term, but longterm i suspect it will further harm things... long term credibility needs to be won back the hard way me thinks...

France_is_bacon 5y ago

98%-99% of the deaths are from those who are unvaccinated and/or refuse to wear masks. https://medicalpartnership.usg.edu/covid-19-staggering-statistic-98-to-99-of-americans-dying-are-unvaccinated/ https://medicalpartnership.usg.edu/covid-19-staggering-stati... No sadness from me, unless it is for children who are under 18-years-old. Because they have such sh-tty useless POS parents. As a matter-of-fact, I think that those who have not had a vaccination and don't wear masks should not be allowed to go to the hospitals for treatment, and take beds from those who are sick and HAVE had the vaccine. F them, completely. And I read a lot of articles from rabid anti-maskers/anti-vacciners, who contracted Covid, and are in a hospital, that they take it all back and that they were wrong. Well, those people can go right to hell. I don't believe in a god or afterlife, but if there is, I hope they get sent straight to hell. Anti-vaccers and anti-maskers say that they want their freedom, which is why when I know one of my neighbors is unvaccinated, I take a big sh-t in front of their driveway 2-3 times per week, because I want that total freedom and not worry about others, too. If they don't like it, they don't have to go outside (which is what unvaccinated say to the vaccinated and mask wearers).

geeB 5y ago

Question for people that understand mRNA vaccines: why does the third dose supposedly have the same exact formulation? The narrative in the beginning was that this new technology would allow for vaccines to be developed and manufactured in ~1 month, tailored to the variants (even claiming that cancer would be next). Why can't we have a vaccine that's more effective against the new variants?

semigroupoid 5y ago
According to this [0] at least BioNTech/Pfizer seem to be developing a booster shot specifically targeting the Delta variant. But they do mention that they’ve just recently “manufactured” the mRNA so it’s probably still months from being approved and ready to be deployed. [0] https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-details/pfizer-and-biontech-provide-update-booster-program-light-delta https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...
- jleyank 5y ago
  I seem to recall that fda and maybe other regulatory agencies have said that approval of modified-payload mRNA vaccines will be quicker. I recall that Pfizer has tests for a delta variant shot underway and I (naively) hope they can include several mRNA sequences in the next booster. Otherwise, it’s just reloading the body’s antibody load. As the entire spike protein is presented, there’s no guarantee that each person’s antibodies are the same or even one variety. This differs from the monoclonal antibodies from Lilly and Regeneron which work as-is.
- rolph 5y ago
  there is a lead time of 91 days from request to product to reformulate pfizer vaccine
Exmoor 5y ago
My understanding is that Delta variant is much more infectious, but doesn't differ very much in ways that would make it less recognizable to your immune system. So your body doesn't have any issue knowing there's a problem it just has a harder time fighting it off.

perl4ever 5y ago

The death rate in Florida that I've seen reported suddenly dropped by half in the last couple weeks, which is really weird, because it's ahead of the reported case rate, where it normally lags. The Miami Herald reported that a change in methodology has created an artificial gap distorting things: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article253796898.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25379689... https://floridapolitics.com/archives/444288-how-many-floridians-are-dying-of-covid-depends-on-where-you-look/ https://floridapolitics.com/archives/444288-how-many-floridi... Governor DeSantis and the Florida DOH have fired back, saying it's all political lies. https://floridapolitics.com/archives/454618-ron-desantis-covid-19-death-reporting-questions-are-partisan-distraction/ https://floridapolitics.com/archives/454618-ron-desantis-cov... Other people in Florida State government are clearly opposing DeSantis, for instance: https://floridapolitics.com/archives/444317-nikki-fried-directs-fdacs-to-publish-federal-covid-19-data-amid-covid-information-sharing-void/ https://floridapolitics.com/archives/444317-nikki-fried-dire... I think that while DeSantis and the DOH may well be technically correct that the new method of reporting statistics is objectively more accurate in the long run, that doesn't mean that it isn't causing a distortion downstream, where it looks like nobody's dying on the most recent days, even though they are. e.g. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/