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Our model suggests that global deaths remain 5% above pre-Covid forecasts
- f6v 3y agoJust by looking at the map there might be some correlation with vaccination rate.
- draw_down 3y ago[dead]
- awestroke 3y agoYes, it's thoroughly documented that increasing vaccination rates decreases mortality rates
- Izkata 3y agoThat would be a negative correlation. The map seems to indicate a positive correlation overall, negative correlation only if you ignore Africa and half of South America. (Eyeballing it side-by-side with the vaccination map here: https://fortune.com/2021/06/30/covid-vaccines-global-vaccination-rates-by-country/ https://fortune.com/2021/06/30/covid-vaccines-global-vaccina... )
- roywiggins 3y agoWealthy countries have way more old people, and way more vaccines. COVID is still more dangerous to elderly vaccinated people than to unvaccinated teenagers. You can sometimes even see this effect in one country, if all the old people are vaccinated and none of the young people are, you'll still probably get more COVID deaths per old person. If you just look at mortality by vaccination status you'll see lots more COVID deaths in the vaccinated cohort, but that's because the vaccinated cohort is just old.
- nwienert 3y agoWhy do you immediately jump to one conclusion as to explain this?
- pessimizer 3y agoProbably because while it's a simple observation, it's not an intuitive one, so a lot of us had to have it pointed out recently. It's the nature of the math, not anything that has to do with covid or can be sensibly argued with.
- nwienert 3y agoSure it’s something to take into your model, but I find the just so framing weirdly pressing in these types of threads.
- revelio 3y ago[flagged]
- croes 3y agoAnd if you ignore east Europe and north europe. East has low vaccination rates and high excess mortality, north has high vaccination rate and low excess deaths. Africa and South America could be different effects. I don't know how thoroughly they do, can or want to track excess deaths.
- isoprophlex 3y agoBig red splotch over Russia, and data includes 2022-2023... maybe there's also some other factor inducing excess death in Russians?
- ls612 3y agoThe upper estimates are that Russia has suffered 50k KIA in the war which is a lot but in the grand scheme of things won’t show up much in excess deaths.
- f6v 3y ago> maybe there's also some other factor inducing excess death in Russians? It’s just that buying a fake vaccination was(still is?) a thing. I don’t know the extent of this, but you could just bribe a doctor to issue a vaccination certificate and throw the vaccine in the thrash. The whole affair was very disappointing.
- Mesopropithecus 3y agoMeaningless statement unless you correct at the very least also for demographics and infection rates.
- zvmaz 3y agoYes, there is [1]. I remember vividly this one cop that quit his job of so many years over a vaccine mandate. He was invited on TV, and was all proud and righteous of his great deed. He died of COVID. His name was Robert LeMay [2]. I wonder how many deaths could have been avoided were it not for vaccine skepticism. [1] https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2022/3/17/22979105/covid-19-pandemic-democrats-republicans-vaccines-death-rates-pew-research-center https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2022/3/17/22979105/covid... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trooper-covid-ass-governor-lemay-b2003442.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trooper-co...
- revelio 3y ago[flagged]
- Djeman 3y agoCompletely opposite. Western Europe was highly vaccinated low mortality in map. Eastern Europe low vaccination high mortality
- croes 3y agoHere you can see the excess death rate if Europe https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1632003510274347010 https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1632003510274347010 Here the vaccination rate https://www.statista.com/statistics/1196071/covid-19-vaccination-rate-in-europe-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1196071/covid-19-vaccina...
- Anon84 3y agohttps://archive.md/PmmMY https://archive.md/PmmMY
- awestroke 3y agoFourth leading cause of death. Wow. But we decided as a society that, enough is enough, economic output is more important
- colecut 3y agoOr, living is more important
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI mean how many more years should we have been locked down?
- roywiggins 3y agoEconomic output is also what keeps people fed and the lights on, it's not really something people are going to tolerate turning down indefinitely.
- spurgu 3y agoGovernments can just keep printing money forever, no one has to work. /s
- mjr00 3y agoThere is no conclusion that all of those deaths were due to COVID, and the article is irresponsible for implying as much even after repeatedly saying that attributing all the excess deaths to COVID is jumping to conclusions. Some other things that have happened since before COVID which would cause an increase in pre-COVID forecasts include a war between the world's two global superpowers, a global recession and disruption of the supply chain, a massive shortage of healthcare workers in many countries, and an enormous spike in usage of fentanyl in the developed world. COVID plus any or all of those factors are contributing to excess deaths.
- gt565k 3y ago[flagged]
- 3y ago
- zvmaz 3y agoCOVID has wreaked havoc in many aspects of life. There may well be a pandemic of prolonged grief [1]. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/USA-CASUALTIES/lbpggbmrapq/ https://www.reuters.com/graphics/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/USA-CASU...
- isoprophlex 3y agoWell, anecdata, but I'm generally very healthy, vaccinated, what not... I managed to not get covid until early this year. I was so tired for two weeks, I literally spent a good hour watching a shadow moving across the wall, hyping myself up thinking "when that bit of shadow hits that spot, I will have the energy to get up from this chair" It was no joke, and with young kids, I caught my fair share of other bugs over the last 6 years. I'm not surprised at all that this pushes some people over the edge, like influenza.
- Wiki39366 3y ago[flagged]
- isoprophlex 3y agoThree booster shots after the initial dose. All mRNA...
- Toutouxc 3y agoI got it last year, reasonably healthy, late twenties, vaccinated. Thought I was gonna die on the first day. Then two weeks of really bad influenza and two months of having to catch my breath after a flight of stairs. Since then — heart arrhythmias, irritable bowel, all kinds of pain in all kinds of places, generally much worse mood. I was okay through the lockdowns btw, but fuck Covid itself.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DantesKite 3y agoOne of the things that isn’t talked about enough in a reasonable and calm way is the impact COVID can have on the immune system long term. It’s talked about in terms of Long COVID and whether or not it’s psychosomatic, the policies made during the lockdowns, and so forth, but always with so much emotion, and sometimes for good reason. I don’t want to dismiss that or trivialize it. Those are important topics to discuss for how we’ll handle future pandemics. But the evidence is accumulating that COVID does seem to impact CD8+ T cells, causing T cell exhaustion and reduced effector response. One running hypothesis is that the impaired immune response is caused by a persistent viral reservoir infection, particularly in the gut (although not all people show signs of a spike protein months after the initial infection) causing your CD8+ T cells to express more inhibitory receptors (similar to what happens in HIV or cancer with excessive and prolonged exposure to cancer cells). Another hypothesis that is lesser known but I find particularly compelling is gut dysbiosis following a COVID infection causing a persistent immune activation that leads to T cell exhaustion or impaired T cell functionality especially through persistent activation of the dendritic cells (which are important for presenting antigens to the adaptive immune systems (i.e. T cells, B cells, etc)). I think a researcher put it best when they said COVID is roughly halfway between HIV and the common cold in terms of the impact it has on the immune system. It may also not be accurate. We have to find out. For context, think about how long it took to realize the Epstein Barr virus was a causal factor in multiple sclerosis. It took years of evidence collecting and data analysis to eliminate other confounding variables. We shouldn’t rush to judgement or a narrative, but remain calm and dispassionate here and examine what’s going on, both for the virus, the vaccine, and the actions taken during the pandemic. It’s important we get it right.
- gtop3 3y ago> It’s important we get it right. I really want to echo this. We are talking about millions of lives a year right now, and basically every human has been infected. We need a solid answer for why some people have long term health impacts and others do not. There are many brilliant people working on this problem. Let's accept that this might actually be a complicated long term problem.
- 3y ago
- netsharc 3y agoGeez, that deep red for Russia in the diagram, I wonder what the official figures of deaths due to war is. Radio Yerevan was asked: "Why does Russia have high excess deaths, is it because of the what the government has deemed as special military operation?" Radio Yerevan answered: "No, it's because of Covid." Radio Yerevan was further asked: "Is the government mishandling the Covid-crisis?" Radio Yerevan answered: "The government has successfully managed the pandemic and ended Covid."
- yarg 3y agoIt might be worth generating a version that excludes Russia and Ukraine. https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-global-excess-deaths-model https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-globa...
- paganel 3y agoMaybe in Western Europe and in North America, here in Romania we've had the month of March with the lowest number of deaths for the last 10 years (maybe more, I didn't look further back), and the same went for February. We also had a much higher number of deaths during the height of the pandemic (October 2021 had about 100% more deaths compared to a "normal" month of October), and one of the lowest vaccinations rates in the European Union. Which goes to say that many of the people who would have died now, so to speak, have in fact died one or two years prior, during the pandemic. Can't find the link, but a similar effect was noticed in Netherlands after their great famine of 1944-1945, which was followed by about a decade of bellow average death numbers. For those interested the Excel with the official data is in here [1], it's in Romanian but relatively easy enough to understand the data in there. [1] https://insse.ro/cms/sites/default/files/com_presa/anexa_date/pop03r23.xls https://insse.ro/cms/sites/default/files/com_presa/anexa_dat...
- momirlan 3y agopai cine mai e tâmpit să moară în Romania? au fugit să moară în alte părți...
- tourgen 3y ago[dead]
- hartator 3y agoLocking down people in their house can be also a root cause. Our reaction to covid has been probably worse than actual covid.
- andybak 3y agoHow does that mesh with this article? Also where do you live? I'm curious what your experience was.
- tomrod 3y agoRespectfully, I think you're wrong and assuming a personal speculation.
- commandlinefan 3y agoI actually sort of enjoyed the lockdowns, but I have a job that I can do from home and I’m not a particularly social person. Pretending that they didn’t or couldn’t have harmed other people - significantly - is arrogant.
- tomrod 3y agoPretending to no effect whatsoever of lockdowns on people would be arrogant. I'm glad we agree. It's also not what the parent commentator said, when they point to lockdown as the root cause (not a cause) of the 5% increased death rate. The activity you labeled as arrogant is denying the antecedent to what the parent and my comment said.
- peteradio 3y agoOP said "a" root cause not "the" root cause. Few things have a single cause.
- someNameIG 3y agoHere in Australia we had pretty long lockdowns compared to many other places. Our excess deaths are multiple times lower than say the US or UK for example.
- Wiki39366 3y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 3y agoThat's a very modest proposal.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI for one am sick of all the covid related back biting and second guessing. There was no way a major pandemic was going to be anything but an unmitigated natural disaster of global proportions. Policies chosen as “least bad” are still bad. Maybe they were worse, maybe they were just less bad. No one sold them as good. Now the job of science is to pick out what was efficacious and what was worse. But the moaning about policies that were unpleasant to my mind ignores the fact that it was a global natural disaster and it was never going to be ok, or pleasant, or not inconvenience you. For some people the policies were worse than the disease. For millions that didn’t die, they were better. As a species I wish we could put down our gripes and figure out how to make the next time less bad, but we need to realize even then it’s going to be a global natural disaster and those might interfere with your preferred daily routine. Edit: to those who brought up ways that the inconvenience was greater than disrupting their preferred daily routines (missed funerals - same happened to me, loneliness, other tragedies). First, I had my share as well and I empathize and mine were fairly horrific with profound impact on me and my family I still struggle with. That comment wasn’t meant for you, but there are many who just simply didn’t like the inconveniences. The rest was for you. It was a global disaster. Disasters are tragedies, heaped upon tragedies. We made good decisions, bad decisions, ineffectual decisions, but ultimately nothing would have made it good, ok, or anything but a disaster of monumental proportion. I’m sorry it was hard for you, it was for me too. It was hard for everyone. I’m down with healing together. I’m down with learning and evaluating. I’m down with building a better society from our pain.
- zmgsabst 3y ago[flagged]
- AgentOrange1234 3y agoWhat’s your source on this? I haven’t heard anything like this.
- zmgsabst 3y agoOn what? I cited the OECD data; I downloaded it, added up COVID deaths, excess deaths, and subtracted COVID from excess to get “non-COVID attributed excess”.
- CPLX 3y agoMy problem with this is that there seem to be two related but not really correlated points of opinion: 1. How bad Covid was, like was it a big deal or not. 2. The effectiveness of the means we had at our disposal to do anything about it. At least in the US everyone’s responses are highly correlated. For example: if you think Covid is a big deal you think we should have taken all the measures we took and that relaxing restrictions was a mistake. If you’re on the other team you feel like we shouldn’t have done the interventions and lockdowns because you think Covid is not that big a deal and is overhyped. I feel most attracted to the group that agrees that Covid is a pretty big deal and very deadly and an incredible tragedy. I also think that except for the vaccines we’ve never had much control over it at all, and that for the most part the various lockdowns and mandates were pretty pointless after the first few months had passed and we knew what we were dealing with. Not much of a constituency for this point of view in the narrative, though I feel like it might be commonly held.
- x86x87 3y agoOne thing that stuck with me since the early stages was the remark that if by looking at it after it's over the measures that were taken don't look like an overreaction it means we didn't do enough. My guess is that we'll see the effects of covid for decades both in the form of long covid and socio-economic impacts.
- CPLX 3y agoI remember that line too but it’s just a slogan, it doesn’t really have normative meaning. For example, closing public beaches was an overreaction. It was pointless and had no positive effect at all. Noticing that doesn’t prove that we did enough. It’s still possible that we didn’t manufacture vaccines or staff hospitals fast enough for example.
- andybak 3y agoI think broadly speaking there were plenty of outdoor measures that quickly felt like overreactions. Indoor measures often felt the opposite (at least in terms of how they actually played out)
- LouisSayers 3y agoSo 307 / 100,000 = 0.3% of the population above what would naturally occur. I wonder how this trend plays out in the long run. I.e. how many of the 0.3% were due to die in the next few years because of existing health conditions? It's interesting how people reacted during the pandemic. While I sympathise with anyone that has a loved one that is vulnerable to disease (I certainly have some!), one could make the case that many lives could be saved by banning sugar and forcing mandatory gym memberships. You could argue that one is within our control vs the other - but you could also argue that many are not in control of their addictions (food for example) as well. The scariest part of it all for me was the way government quickly attempts to rewrite the rules and gain control. Being in Melbourne where the gov tried pushing through a bill to give them seemingly unlimited power during "emergencies" (as defined by them) was really crazy.
- hoorible 3y ago> how many of the 0.3% were due to die in the next few years because of existing health conditions? “They were going to die anyways!” was always a common argument one among the “muh freedoms!” crowd. When someone dies in a car crash, we don’t just shrug it off if the victim was terminally ill. Why is this different? A preventable death is still a preventable death and their life still has value whether it’s for another 20 years or 20 days.
- pessimizer 3y ago> their life still has value whether it’s for another 20 years or 20 days. This is avoiding the question by being emotive and vague. Would you trade the life of somebody who had 30 years more to live for the life of someone who had 30 seconds to live? Why or why not?
- hoorible 3y agoNot giving a direct answer to a question isn’t the same as avoiding it; it’s asked disingenuously, so the actual answer doesn’t matter. Just like your follow up question, which is similarly irrelevant, since changing behaviours to save lives isn’t at all the same as trading lives.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoWorld population is larger than what the planet can sustain, so 5% higher death rate, even if unfortunate and sad at the individual level, helps humanity become more sustainable at a collective level. Also, 5% less demand for cattle and resources or so.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rtz121 3y ago[flagged]
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- thwoerjwda 3y agoWouldn't we expect this to be high with declining birth rates and aging population?
- simonster 3y agoExcess deaths are the number of deaths above the expected number of deaths. The expected number of deaths usually comes from a model that takes into account how the number of deaths would normally change from one year to the next. This model would incorporate the effect of changes in the composition of the population that are occurring over long timescales.
- kpennell 3y agoIf anyone is reading this, please don't exercise very hard when you're recovering from COVID. I went on two bike rides two weeks after I got my negative test. I was so eager to get out of the house and back on my goal of 3,000 miles for the year. And that's when all my symptoms like tremors, brain fog, and memory issues started. There were also a few times I struggled to understand people. There are many similar anecdotes out there of formerly athletic people trying to get back to training too soon, and that's when their long COVID symptoms started. So, if you're reading this, please give yourself at least a month of slow movement and don't jump back into vigorous activities right away.
- AgentOrange1234 3y agoThis is important advice. I was lucky to have heard this before getting infected. The immediate infection hit me hard for a week, but I waited a good couple of months before trying any exercise more vigorous than a long walk. Even so, an hour after my first (short!) run, my watch gives me a high heart rate alert. Heart continues to clock 100bpm for the next three hours while I lay around doing nothing. Freaked me out. Take getting back to normal very slowly, and watch for weirdness.
- lorddoig 3y agoThere is a growing body of evidence to suggest that heart deaths are up by a significant amount, that those deaths _may_ account for most or all of excess deaths currently seen, and that they _may_ be related to safety issues with some of the mRNA vaccines.[0] I resent the fact that statements like this have become political and that I now have to explain myself. Nevertheless, here we go: I have no vested interested in this being true. I've had two doses of the stuff, I want it not to be true. However, there are legitimate questions here that have not been satisfactorily addressed. I'm raising this because reading the article and the other comments I can see nobody else has. I would encourage people to look at the link and scrutinise the evidence presented themselves before deciding whether or not there might be an issue here that needs looking at. [0]: https://www.hartgroup.org/what-are-people-not-dying-of/ https://www.hartgroup.org/what-are-people-not-dying-of/
- halfjoking 3y agoIs now a good time to say what I was censored for on Reddit/Twitter in 2021? You are statistically more likely to die if you took a Covid vaccine. https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-devils-advocate-an-exploratory?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-devils-advocat... We said the vaxx would cause more heart attacks, blood clots and cancers, and few people listened. Those things happened, deaths skyrocketed starting in mid-2021, and everyone is still in denial. If you don’t believe me, go to this website, filter by 25-44 and set the time range from Jan 2020-2023. https://www.usmortality.com/deaths/weekly https://www.usmortality.com/deaths/weekly The big jump in deaths for young people happened in the middle of 2021… do people think Covid only started killing young people mid-2021? That the virus waited over a year before killing in this age group? Overall - young people don’t die of Covid. Look at this table: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... About 45k people died of Covid in the age group we’re talking about during entire pandemic. Every week of 2021 thousands of excess deaths occurred in that age group. So Covid deaths come nowhere close to covering young people’s excess deaths. It’s the stupid vaccine - Covid doesn’t even cause myocarditis, see this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/ All studies funded by CDC that say “Covid causes more myocarditis than vaxx” were damage control. They fabricate data and the science is fraudulent. If you do country by country comparisons by vaccination rate as in the first link it becomes very obvious.