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>It has killed more than 865,000 Americans It looks like that's more Americans than have been killed in combat in all of the wars of the 20th century combined

>It has killed more than 865,000 Americans It looks like that's more Americans than have been killed in combat in all of the wars of the 20th century combined [1] Granted it's less than the UK lost in WW1 alone, so it's perhaps more a testament to how few the US managed to loose in the world wars (compared to Europe), but it's still wild to realize. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1009819/total-us-military-fatalities-in-american-wars-1775-present/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1009819/total-us-militar...

walterbell 5y ago
These numbers can be further separated by "with Covid" and "from Covid" causality, as well as co-morbidities and expected lifetime. E.g. if someone was soon to die from illness A, but died 3 months earlier from complications induced by Covid, and the hospital received a financial payment for classifying this as Covid-related treatment, that should be broken out into a separate reporting category. Such deaths would not much change all-cause mortality for the year.
- xadhominemx 5y ago
  Excess mortality is higher than reported COVID deaths. Australia contained the virus in 2020 and saw negative excess mortality. Official COVID deaths understate the true toll.
  - argvargc 5y ago
    ...of lockdowns?
    - xadhominemx 5y ago
      COVID denialists often attribute excess deaths to lockdowns as opposed to undercounting of deaths from COVID. I was just preempting that line by pointing out Australia had severe lockdowns but negative excess deaths.
      - argvargc 5y ago
        COVID what-ists? You mean all manner of people who have all manner of opinions and reasons for them that just so happen to differ from the views presented as scientific consensus by government, media and celebrities? Here is a summary of over 400 studies demonstrating lockdowns are ineffective or harmful: https://brownstone.org/articles/more-than-400-studies-on-the-failure-of-compulsory-covid-interventions/ https://brownstone.org/articles/more-than-400-studies-on-the... Prepare a sufficiently convincing argument against each and every one of them, and against the credentials of each and every author, before using the term "denialist" in application to anyone other than yourself.
        FabHK 5y ago
        argvargc 5y ago
        Won't even examine 400 counter-claims? That's "denialism". Lockdowns working/not-working and/or causing collateral damage potentially eliminating other gains is not even remotely on par with astrology. Lockdowns used in this manner are entirely unprecedented, and the long-term results cannot be known by anyone, only guessed at. Your rigid adherence to them as beacons of purity only demonstrates your religious-like faith in them, which strikes me as having far more in common with astrology than well-evidenced arguments by well-credentialed individuals that they might not work or be counterproductive.
        squeaky-clean 5y ago
        You just said it's been proven that lockdowns are harmful. Now you're saying the longterm results can't be known by anyone, only guessed at.
        argvargc 5y ago
        No, I didn't. I said: > Here is a summary of over 400 studies demonstrating lockdowns are ineffective or harmful: You're welcome to present studies demonstrating the opposite, but even if you can find 400 of them (and I doubt you can), the best we'd have arrived at would be equal uncertainty either way. The longterm results of anything for which a long term has not yet elapsed can indeed only be guessed at. The fact I need to point this out to many people is striking in its resemblance to some kind of mass delusion on their part.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    Leading cause of death in the US, 2015-2020: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 (see table a few paragraphs down) Heart disease, unintentional injuries, Alzheimer disease, and diabetes all jumped more than the expected trend. 2021 numbers I don't think will be finalized for another month or so.
    - xadhominemx 5y ago
      Yes so it seems if anything COVID deaths are being misclassified as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, etc
    - acdha 5y ago
      One thing I've heard multiple doctors comment on is that they are seeing more patients who were successfully managing a condition have significant declines after a bout of COVID, even a mild one. That's definitely a bit of a philosophical question trying to assign fractional responsibility but you can also side-step this to some extent by looking at it as years of life lost — e.g. if someone with a manageable heart disease where patients tend to die 10 years older dies after having COVID, that's something like a decade where they could have been around their friends and family.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    In places with good nationwide data like the UK and national level lockdowns, the excess mortality spikes also line up very well with the case outbreaks (especially pre vaccination), and considerably less well with other plausible causes of excess mortality (lockdown and unemployment induced stress, [long term effects of] reductions in access to treatment for chronic conditions)
- barbazoo 5y ago
  > the hospital received a financial payment for classifying this as Covid-related treatment Can you explain this more? Surely a hospital doesn't just get money for simply classifying it. How does a hospital benefit from classifying someone's treatment as Covid related other than being paid for the necessary treatment?
  - walterbell 5y ago
    There are probably better sources, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cdc-director-acknowledges-hospitals-have-a-monetary-incentive-to-overcount-coronavirus-deaths https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cdc-director-acknowl... (Aug 2020) > U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield agreed that some hospitals have a monetary incentive to overcount coronavirus deaths as they do deaths for other diseases. “I think you’re correct in that we’ve seen this in other disease processes, too. Really, in the HIV epidemic, somebody may have a heart attack but also have HIV — the hospital would prefer the [classification] for HIV because there’s greater reimbursement,” Redfield said during a House panel hearing Friday when asked by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer about potential “perverse incentives.” For families, Covid classification for a death enabled up to $9000 for funeral expenses, https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/covid-funeral-reimbursement-now-9000-heres-how-to-apply-today/ https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/covid-funeral-reimburs...
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      There is very little substance on that page plus it's 18 months old and the other fact you posted isn't an incentive for hospitals. I really wonder if that's actually a thing.
      - walterbell 5y ago
        U.S. Congressional testimony by a CDC Director is not substantive? The 2nd point offers a financial incentive for families to agree with hospital (mis)classification, i.e. it aligns the financial incentives of family and hospital towards Covid attribution.
  - 5y ago
tjr225 5y ago
I know this is going to sound conspiratorial but I think you’d have to be pretty naive to accept the reported deaths in the US due to Covid to be that accurate. Hospitals(which in the US are for profit mind you) were quite literally given more money for reporting a death as a Covid death for a period of time. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fact-check-medicare-hospitals-paid-more-covid-19-patients-coronavirus/3000638001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac... Actually you could say it’s difficult to trust the numbers coming from any country for a variety of reasons, whether it be under or overreported.
- sofixa 5y ago
  You can use excess deaths then, those numbers are even higher. And even if official Covid numbers are inflated, even tenfold, it's still a disease that resulted in a lot of death.
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    A non trivial portion of excess deaths can be laid at the feet of the response to the virus, not necessarily the virus itself. This would include the things like firing healthcare workers, leading to other problems being undiagnosed, and worsening instead of being treated. I would also include lockdowns and mask mandates as being responsible for increased amounts of depression, which has a known poor impact on survival over time, and that's not just counting suicide.
    - jatone 5y ago
      we maybe fired less than a tenth of a percent of health care workers. and most were not even nurses they were janitors and the like. a few thousands in a field of hundreds of thousands. if your going to make shit up at least make up believable bullshit.
      - Karunamon 5y ago
        No need for the attitude. And it doesn't have to be widespread - given the thin staffing margins that hospitals already run on, losing a small amount of people in a large facility can have outsized effects.
dehrmann 5y ago
That's true, but not if you make the deaths per capita. WWII was per-capita deadlier in the US than covid (so far).
rkk3 5y ago
>> It has killed more than 865,000 Americans > It looks like that's more Americans than have been killed in combat in all of the wars of the 20th century combined [1] Like all deaths tragic, but let's not pretend young men, effectively kids, dying in war is the same as elderly & chronically sick populations dying of disease.
- gibspaulding 5y ago
  I would personally agree (though you will find people who won't), but I found it to be an interesting comparison just to get an idea of the scale.
- DanBC 5y ago
  > Like all deaths tragic, but let's not pretend young men, effectively kids, dying in war is the same as elderly & chronically sick populations dying of disease. Where elderly means > 40 and chronically sick includes "has a bit of high blood pressure".
  - rkk3 5y ago
    > chronically sick includes "has a bit of high blood pressure". The CDC says > 40% of US adults are obese (> 100 Million people!) and 13% of US adults have diabetes. If that's not a chronically sick population I don't know what is. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html [2] https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-diabetes-statistics-report.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-d...
    - Melatonic 5y ago
      This is the elephant in the room I was trying to talk to people about at the very start of this pandemic. People are endlessly willing to talk about how divided we are about all kinds of issues and yet the fact that we cannot at minimum rally behind the fact we need to deal with the obesity epidemic is a bad sign. My big problem with the initial lockdowns was not really about the larger lockdown at all - we just (obviously in hindsight) went too far with locking down larger, wide open places where people exercise. Spring break in Miami with people crammed onto a beach? Probably a bad idea. A few surfers going in the water a hundred feet from one another and some other people doing a morning run? Likely a net benefit to Covid outcomes.

walterbell 5y ago

These numbers can be further separated by "with Covid" and "from Covid" causality, as well as co-morbidities and expected lifetime. E.g. if someone was soon to die from illness A, but died 3 months earlier from complications induced by Covid, and the hospital received a financial payment for classifying this as Covid-related treatment, that should be broken out into a separate reporting category. Such deaths would not much change all-cause mortality for the year.

xadhominemx 5y ago
Excess mortality is higher than reported COVID deaths. Australia contained the virus in 2020 and saw negative excess mortality. Official COVID deaths understate the true toll.
- argvargc 5y ago
  ...of lockdowns?
  - xadhominemx 5y ago
    COVID denialists often attribute excess deaths to lockdowns as opposed to undercounting of deaths from COVID. I was just preempting that line by pointing out Australia had severe lockdowns but negative excess deaths.
    - argvargc 5y ago
      COVID what-ists? You mean all manner of people who have all manner of opinions and reasons for them that just so happen to differ from the views presented as scientific consensus by government, media and celebrities? Here is a summary of over 400 studies demonstrating lockdowns are ineffective or harmful: https://brownstone.org/articles/more-than-400-studies-on-the-failure-of-compulsory-covid-interventions/ https://brownstone.org/articles/more-than-400-studies-on-the... Prepare a sufficiently convincing argument against each and every one of them, and against the credentials of each and every author, before using the term "denialist" in application to anyone other than yourself.
      - FabHK 5y ago
        argvargc 5y ago
        Won't even examine 400 counter-claims? That's "denialism". Lockdowns working/not-working and/or causing collateral damage potentially eliminating other gains is not even remotely on par with astrology. Lockdowns used in this manner are entirely unprecedented, and the long-term results cannot be known by anyone, only guessed at. Your rigid adherence to them as beacons of purity only demonstrates your religious-like faith in them, which strikes me as having far more in common with astrology than well-evidenced arguments by well-credentialed individuals that they might not work or be counterproductive.
        squeaky-clean 5y ago
        You just said it's been proven that lockdowns are harmful. Now you're saying the longterm results can't be known by anyone, only guessed at.
        argvargc 5y ago
        No, I didn't. I said: > Here is a summary of over 400 studies demonstrating lockdowns are ineffective or harmful: You're welcome to present studies demonstrating the opposite, but even if you can find 400 of them (and I doubt you can), the best we'd have arrived at would be equal uncertainty either way. The longterm results of anything for which a long term has not yet elapsed can indeed only be guessed at. The fact I need to point this out to many people is striking in its resemblance to some kind of mass delusion on their part.
- Izkata 5y ago
  Leading cause of death in the US, 2015-2020: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 (see table a few paragraphs down) Heart disease, unintentional injuries, Alzheimer disease, and diabetes all jumped more than the expected trend. 2021 numbers I don't think will be finalized for another month or so.
  - xadhominemx 5y ago
    Yes so it seems if anything COVID deaths are being misclassified as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, etc
  - acdha 5y ago
    One thing I've heard multiple doctors comment on is that they are seeing more patients who were successfully managing a condition have significant declines after a bout of COVID, even a mild one. That's definitely a bit of a philosophical question trying to assign fractional responsibility but you can also side-step this to some extent by looking at it as years of life lost — e.g. if someone with a manageable heart disease where patients tend to die 10 years older dies after having COVID, that's something like a decade where they could have been around their friends and family.
- notahacker 5y ago
  In places with good nationwide data like the UK and national level lockdowns, the excess mortality spikes also line up very well with the case outbreaks (especially pre vaccination), and considerably less well with other plausible causes of excess mortality (lockdown and unemployment induced stress, [long term effects of] reductions in access to treatment for chronic conditions)
barbazoo 5y ago
> the hospital received a financial payment for classifying this as Covid-related treatment Can you explain this more? Surely a hospital doesn't just get money for simply classifying it. How does a hospital benefit from classifying someone's treatment as Covid related other than being paid for the necessary treatment?
- walterbell 5y ago
  There are probably better sources, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cdc-director-acknowledges-hospitals-have-a-monetary-incentive-to-overcount-coronavirus-deaths https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cdc-director-acknowl... (Aug 2020) > U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield agreed that some hospitals have a monetary incentive to overcount coronavirus deaths as they do deaths for other diseases. “I think you’re correct in that we’ve seen this in other disease processes, too. Really, in the HIV epidemic, somebody may have a heart attack but also have HIV — the hospital would prefer the [classification] for HIV because there’s greater reimbursement,” Redfield said during a House panel hearing Friday when asked by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer about potential “perverse incentives.” For families, Covid classification for a death enabled up to $9000 for funeral expenses, https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/covid-funeral-reimbursement-now-9000-heres-how-to-apply-today/ https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/covid-funeral-reimburs...
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    There is very little substance on that page plus it's 18 months old and the other fact you posted isn't an incentive for hospitals. I really wonder if that's actually a thing.
    - walterbell 5y ago
      U.S. Congressional testimony by a CDC Director is not substantive? The 2nd point offers a financial incentive for families to agree with hospital (mis)classification, i.e. it aligns the financial incentives of family and hospital towards Covid attribution.
- 5y ago

tjr225 5y ago

I know this is going to sound conspiratorial but I think you’d have to be pretty naive to accept the reported deaths in the US due to Covid to be that accurate. Hospitals(which in the US are for profit mind you) were quite literally given more money for reporting a death as a Covid death for a period of time. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fact-check-medicare-hospitals-paid-more-covid-19-patients-coronavirus/3000638001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac... Actually you could say it’s difficult to trust the numbers coming from any country for a variety of reasons, whether it be under or overreported.

sofixa 5y ago
You can use excess deaths then, those numbers are even higher. And even if official Covid numbers are inflated, even tenfold, it's still a disease that resulted in a lot of death.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  A non trivial portion of excess deaths can be laid at the feet of the response to the virus, not necessarily the virus itself. This would include the things like firing healthcare workers, leading to other problems being undiagnosed, and worsening instead of being treated. I would also include lockdowns and mask mandates as being responsible for increased amounts of depression, which has a known poor impact on survival over time, and that's not just counting suicide.
  - jatone 5y ago
    we maybe fired less than a tenth of a percent of health care workers. and most were not even nurses they were janitors and the like. a few thousands in a field of hundreds of thousands. if your going to make shit up at least make up believable bullshit.
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      No need for the attitude. And it doesn't have to be widespread - given the thin staffing margins that hospitals already run on, losing a small amount of people in a large facility can have outsized effects.

dehrmann 5y ago

That's true, but not if you make the deaths per capita. WWII was per-capita deadlier in the US than covid (so far).

rkk3 5y ago

>> It has killed more than 865,000 Americans > It looks like that's more Americans than have been killed in combat in all of the wars of the 20th century combined [1] Like all deaths tragic, but let's not pretend young men, effectively kids, dying in war is the same as elderly & chronically sick populations dying of disease.

gibspaulding 5y ago
I would personally agree (though you will find people who won't), but I found it to be an interesting comparison just to get an idea of the scale.
DanBC 5y ago
> Like all deaths tragic, but let's not pretend young men, effectively kids, dying in war is the same as elderly & chronically sick populations dying of disease. Where elderly means > 40 and chronically sick includes "has a bit of high blood pressure".
- rkk3 5y ago
  > chronically sick includes "has a bit of high blood pressure". The CDC says > 40% of US adults are obese (> 100 Million people!) and 13% of US adults have diabetes. If that's not a chronically sick population I don't know what is. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html [2] https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-diabetes-statistics-report.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-d...
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    This is the elephant in the room I was trying to talk to people about at the very start of this pandemic. People are endlessly willing to talk about how divided we are about all kinds of issues and yet the fact that we cannot at minimum rally behind the fact we need to deal with the obesity epidemic is a bad sign. My big problem with the initial lockdowns was not really about the larger lockdown at all - we just (obviously in hindsight) went too far with locking down larger, wide open places where people exercise. Spring break in Miami with people crammed onto a beach? Probably a bad idea. A few surfers going in the water a hundred feet from one another and some other people doing a morning run? Likely a net benefit to Covid outcomes.