5 ms·

> TB remains the deadliest infectious disease on Earth, killing about 1.2 million people every year. I would guess, in 2024 Covid killed more than 1.2 million

by sampo 2y ago

> TB remains the deadliest infectious disease on Earth, killing about 1.2 million people every year. I would guess, in 2024 Covid killed more than 1.2 million people. I guess many people are assuming that Covid was a temporary disturbance, and will attenuate in the coming years. But what if it doesn't but will keep at about the current levels from year to year for a long time.

mauricioc 2y ago
The WHO [0] reports 60 thousand Covid deaths this year so far, and around 250 thousand deaths in 2023. [0] https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths
- sampo 2y ago
  US CDC has about 40k deaths for 2024 so far [1] for United States, and 76k for the year 2023 [2]. Maybe the WHO dashboard is left unmaintained, or maybe many countries have stopped reporting Covid deaths to WHO. [1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths_select_00 https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths... [2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2823584 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/28235...
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    Or it’s accurate.
    - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
      How is the cause of death determined for 250k people? EDIT: I got curious and looked up the CDC guidelines https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf > based on sound medical judgment drawn from clinical training and experience, as well as knowledge of current disease states and local trends > the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death It goes on to suggest that if Covid was present they strongly recommend including it. And even if you did not diagnose Covid it can be a good assumption to make.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        There were upper and lower bound stats that accounted for many discrepancies. The high numbers were "death with covid", which means the covid might not've done it, and the low numbers were "death by covid" where we were (fairly) sure Covid did it due to lack of other factors, but missed things where Covid tipped someone over the edge.
        tightbookkeeper 2y ago
        That sounds right. Based on my reading the CDC numbers are basically death with Covid test or symptoms, with the exception of an obvious distinct cause. Which honestly I can’t think of a better way for mass data collection.
thenerdhead 2y ago
This isn’t even considering the latest being found about Covid either for long term illness/disability, virus on tumors making certain cancers grow faster, and sudden stroke/cardiac events. We are heavily undercounting until we can definitively link it. That requires families to consent to an autopsy and for biomarkers to be finalized and used to confirm. Researchers are pretty close to that nowadays though with micro clots, viral rna persistence assays, and even pathology studies which are all showing results this year and will be for years to come.
Yeul 2y ago
The difference is that TB kills young people. Old people have to die from something it's irrelevant what eventually knocks them out. But with TB it was laying waste to people who were supposed to be in their prime. That's why it was so insidious.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  Covid turns young people into disabled people. Then we can say "well they had preexisting conditions, it's irrelevant what eventually knocks them out."
  - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
    Based on the percentage of young people who got Covid (very high) and were disabled (very few), this doesn’t seem significant.
    - aredox 2y ago
      The difference with TB being that COVID infects 95% of the population several times per year, turning those low relative rates into higher and higher absolute numbers... "Death by a thousand cuts"
      - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
        Can you estimate those absolute numbers for us?
        giraffe_lady 2y ago
        Can you? You were the first to bring in a concrete claim about them, that they are "very small."
        tightbookkeeper 2y ago
        I’m not the one claiming Covid is as impactful or dangerous as TB, a very unusual claim. Please make your case.
ywvcbk 2y ago
> I would guess, in 2024 Covid killed more than 1.2 million people Why? Seems extremely speculative.
tzs 2y ago
COVID-19 appears to act similarly to the other coronaviruses that are endemic in humans. There are two key properties. 1. You don't develop an immunity to infection by them, but you do become less likely to be made severely ill from subsequent infections. 2. The severity of illness from the first infection is generally less if you are very young. With the others it is thought that they probably did cause deadly pandemics when they first crossed over to humans, but did not cause much harm to babies or very young children, and so by the next generation they were no longer a big deal. Nowadays we don't even bother to have a name for infection by them. We just lump them in with around 200 other viruses and call what happens when we get sickened by any of them a "common cold". Pretty much everybody alive now was exposed to those viruses as a baby, got mildly ill and got that first infection out of the way, and then it is just a routine common cold to them when they get older. I don't think it is yet known if COVID-19 will fully follow that path of those others. It still does cause severe illness far more often than the common cold viruses even in people who have been infected multiple times. We probably won't know for sure until we see what happens over several years with people who were very young during the pandemic or were born after it. For people older than that is is probably going to be something that is more like a severe flu, where we'll have a vaccine each year for the strains expected to be most common that year, and while the vaccine won't stop you from getting sick it will greatly increase you chances of not getting severely sick. We are already seeing that. COVID-19 fell from the 4th highest cause of death in the US in 2022 to the 10th highest in 2023, with 76000 deaths. Compare to 246000 deaths in 2022 and 462000 in 2021.

by sampo 2y ago

mauricioc 2y ago

The WHO [0] reports 60 thousand Covid deaths this year so far, and around 250 thousand deaths in 2023. [0] https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths

sampo 2y ago
US CDC has about 40k deaths for 2024 so far [1] for United States, and 76k for the year 2023 [2]. Maybe the WHO dashboard is left unmaintained, or maybe many countries have stopped reporting Covid deaths to WHO. [1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths_select_00 https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths... [2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2823584 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/28235...
- dgfitz 2y ago
  Or it’s accurate.
  - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
    How is the cause of death determined for 250k people? EDIT: I got curious and looked up the CDC guidelines https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf > based on sound medical judgment drawn from clinical training and experience, as well as knowledge of current disease states and local trends > the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death It goes on to suggest that if Covid was present they strongly recommend including it. And even if you did not diagnose Covid it can be a good assumption to make.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      There were upper and lower bound stats that accounted for many discrepancies. The high numbers were "death with covid", which means the covid might not've done it, and the low numbers were "death by covid" where we were (fairly) sure Covid did it due to lack of other factors, but missed things where Covid tipped someone over the edge.
      - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
        That sounds right. Based on my reading the CDC numbers are basically death with Covid test or symptoms, with the exception of an obvious distinct cause. Which honestly I can’t think of a better way for mass data collection.

thenerdhead 2y ago

This isn’t even considering the latest being found about Covid either for long term illness/disability, virus on tumors making certain cancers grow faster, and sudden stroke/cardiac events. We are heavily undercounting until we can definitively link it. That requires families to consent to an autopsy and for biomarkers to be finalized and used to confirm. Researchers are pretty close to that nowadays though with micro clots, viral rna persistence assays, and even pathology studies which are all showing results this year and will be for years to come.

Yeul 2y ago

The difference is that TB kills young people. Old people have to die from something it's irrelevant what eventually knocks them out. But with TB it was laying waste to people who were supposed to be in their prime. That's why it was so insidious.

giraffe_lady 2y ago
Covid turns young people into disabled people. Then we can say "well they had preexisting conditions, it's irrelevant what eventually knocks them out."
- tightbookkeeper 2y ago
  Based on the percentage of young people who got Covid (very high) and were disabled (very few), this doesn’t seem significant.
  - aredox 2y ago
    The difference with TB being that COVID infects 95% of the population several times per year, turning those low relative rates into higher and higher absolute numbers... "Death by a thousand cuts"
    - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
      Can you estimate those absolute numbers for us?
      - giraffe_lady 2y ago
        Can you? You were the first to bring in a concrete claim about them, that they are "very small."
        tightbookkeeper 2y ago
        I’m not the one claiming Covid is as impactful or dangerous as TB, a very unusual claim. Please make your case.

ywvcbk 2y ago

> I would guess, in 2024 Covid killed more than 1.2 million people Why? Seems extremely speculative.

tzs 2y ago

COVID-19 appears to act similarly to the other coronaviruses that are endemic in humans. There are two key properties. 1. You don't develop an immunity to infection by them, but you do become less likely to be made severely ill from subsequent infections. 2. The severity of illness from the first infection is generally less if you are very young. With the others it is thought that they probably did cause deadly pandemics when they first crossed over to humans, but did not cause much harm to babies or very young children, and so by the next generation they were no longer a big deal. Nowadays we don't even bother to have a name for infection by them. We just lump them in with around 200 other viruses and call what happens when we get sickened by any of them a "common cold". Pretty much everybody alive now was exposed to those viruses as a baby, got mildly ill and got that first infection out of the way, and then it is just a routine common cold to them when they get older. I don't think it is yet known if COVID-19 will fully follow that path of those others. It still does cause severe illness far more often than the common cold viruses even in people who have been infected multiple times. We probably won't know for sure until we see what happens over several years with people who were very young during the pandemic or were born after it. For people older than that is is probably going to be something that is more like a severe flu, where we'll have a vaccine each year for the strains expected to be most common that year, and while the vaccine won't stop you from getting sick it will greatly increase you chances of not getting severely sick. We are already seeing that. COVID-19 fell from the 4th highest cause of death in the US in 2022 to the 10th highest in 2023, with 76000 deaths. Compare to 246000 deaths in 2022 and 462000 in 2021.