In order to have a valid comparison you would have to adjust the numbers based on age demographics and prevalence of pre-existing conditions. Those factors have a huge impact on death rates.
While US federal and state government responses have been incompetent, there are other critical factors such as population density and cultural behaviors. So blaming everything on the government is a "god of the gaps" logical fallacy. And over time I expect death rates to roughly even out over the full span of the pandemic; unless a country can completely eradicate the virus and close their borders, public health measures only delay the deaths rather than preventing. Flattening the curve will only slightly decrease the total area under the curve.
Which is why I put the number at 50,000-150,000. I don't think we should have the exact rate as Germany, but I think it is obvious that demographics don't make up the entire difference between Germany and the US. You can see this by looking at the shape of the graphs for daily deaths. After the peak, the US has basically stuck somewhere between 20-40% of the its peak number. Most other countries were able to get their daily numbers down much further from their initial peak.
>And over time I expect death rates to roughly even out over the full span of the pandemic; unless a country can completely eradicate the virus and close their borders, public health measures only delay the deaths rather than preventing. Flattening the curve will only slightly decrease the total area under the curve.
What evidence is there for this? Which of our peer nations have had the sustained death or a secondary spike that would indicate that herd immunity is going to be the end result of this pandemic rather than societal change until a vaccine exists?
> Flattening the curve will only slightly decrease the total area under the curve.
I don't think that's true. Time delay has a number of actual long-term benefits. Hospitals are less likely to reach capacity. Better treatments can be developed. And, of course, eventually we'll have a vaccine.
>The number of people in the US who have died due to government incompetence...
I don't think the US government has a monopoly on incompetence with regard to the pandemic.
We're seeing a massive uptick in cases in the UK at the moment, just a couple of weeks after the government encouraged people to go back to work and re-opened the schools and universities.
I live in a university city in UK. Since March we've been told at various times; to work from home if we possibly can, not to leave the area, to only leave the area to visit one other family, to go back to work if we can, to wear masks in indoor spaces, not to mix in groups of more than 12, not to mix in groups of more than 6... etc. etc. No-one seems to know what the regulations actually are from one week to the next... least of all those in charge.
Then, in the past couple of weeks, the new university year has come around and our city has had its annual influx of 100000+ students from all over the UK.
It's so insane it would be laughable, if it weren't putting lives at risk. You've got the city's inhabits being told to minimise contact with other people and not leave their local area unless absolutely necessary and then, after 6 months of following these guidelines we are suddenly inundated with 100000+ outsiders, from all over the country. And this is happening in university cities up and down the land.
If I'd been asked to come up with a scheme to deliberately spread the virus as widely as possible, I'd have been hard pushed to come up with a better one.
I don't know what the situation is elsewhere but in the UK there's also an obnoxious 'spin doctoring' effort ongoing on to try and take the blame for the failure to control the outbreak away from government and onto the people.
The fact that the UK government were one of the last in Europe to introduce a lockdown; the fact that they've done nothing but chop and change the rules & guidelines ever since, so that no-one actually knows what they are; the fact that the government ordered hundreds of thousands of people back to work, schools and universities while the pandemic was still not properly under control are all brushed under the carpet.
Instead, every government announcement on Covid emphasises that tougher measures will be needed if "people don't follow the guidelines". A nice bit of deflection, to blame the victims of their own incompetence for the failure to keep the pandemic under control.
> not to mix in groups of more than 12, not to mix in groups of more than 6
I always find quibbling over this strange. There is a fucking pandemic. Don't mix in groups of any size if possible no matter what the government says. If you have to meet someone do it online, 1-on-1 or outside. We had a baby 4 months ago and saw in total about 10 people over the months. It's totally doable.
Meanwhile our obesity and asthma rates are sky high and we are mostly an urban population.
But we have a government that moved fast and well, a single payer health care system, and so on.
Belgium and Sweden are much less populated countries than US, Germany, France, and even Canada. I'm not sure their per capita numbers will translate directly. Sweden has been widely criticized for their response and I think they could also fall in the incompetent government group. I don't know enough about Belgium's response to judge it. Spain was the 3rd country really impacted by COVID-19. Their death rates dropped considerably after their huge initial spike. There was an over month long stretch in which they were in the single digits for deaths per day. I don't think it is fair to judge their response based on total deaths the same way we judge countries that were hit later.
Sweden's initial response may have been incompetent but they have been down at an average of about 1 death per day for weeks now. So whatever they're doing currently seems to be competent. Level of competence per country is not a constant.
Population densities are largely meaningless at that level. Sweden has a low density only because most of the northern part is wilderness. Most people live in the south, in urban and suburban areas where density is similar to other European countries.
If governments were serious about protecting their populations then they would have put more funding into reducing obesity. No matter what pandemic control measures are taken, many of us are eventually going to get infected. So we all ought to be doing whatever it takes to cut body fat down to healthy levels. Our lives may literally depend on it.
We can't trust these stats because the CDC said itself that 94% of the "covid19" deaths had co-morbidity factors. Keep in mind, not a pre-existing condition, a CO-MORBIDITY.
As people have been reporting - the hospitals have a huge monetary incentive to code a death as COVID19. If someone comes in and dies, the hospital can run a PCR test, get a false positive then get 10's of thousands for the COVID19 death from the government.
My best friend's dad is currently a Doctor and is fighting his hospital after he transferred two patients to a different hospital to try and save their life. One of the patient died, depriving his hospital of the death funds from the government, which the other hospital got.
Even the fact checkers are admitting that the [entire incentive structure is to count as many people with covid19 as possible](https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-...), but then say "there's no evidence" that there is fraud. A laughable proposition. When there is a bag of money for doing corrupt thing X, corrupt thing X always get's done throughout history.
These deaths are therefore the result of mostly fraud and when the real numbers are considered (probably something closer to 15-25% of what's being reported) then this disease is something that lags behind many other diseases currently circulating in the population that the media just ignores.
Diabetes and Asthma are common comorbidities for COVID-19 deaths. Those conditions traditionally have a very small impact on normal life expectancy all other things being equal. I think you are being thrown off by the "morbidity" part of that word. It is another factor that contributed to the person's death. It doesn't mean the person would have died from that condition absent COVID-19.
>These deaths are therefore the result of mostly fraud and when the real numbers are considered (probably something closer to 15-25% of what's being reported) then this disease is something that lags behind many other diseases currently circulating in the population that the media just ignores.
If the COVID-19 death total is inflated, how do you explain the huge rise in excess deaths? Here is one article that talks about comorbidities and excess deaths.[1]
That doesn't actually link to the source and I couldn't find it with a couple Googling attempts. I would be curious to see how they correct for the fact that Type 2 diabetes is often a symptom of poor health as much as a cause of poor health. That is why I included the "all other things being equal" disclaimer. Long term health for people with diabetes is hugely impacted by continued maintenance and therefore there is likely some bias in the data when comparing health rates of diabetes patients to people without diabetes.
To put this number in perspective, in 1945 US population was 140 million, compared to today's 330 million. So, WWII had around 3.5 times deaths per capita, overwhelmingly among very young people, compared to COVID-19 deaths, which are overwhelmingly among elderly. If, instead of deaths, you look at the years of life lost, then considering that typical WWII casualty had something like 50 years ahead of them, compared to 10 years of COVID-19 casualty, WWII deaths were probably 15-18 times worse than COVID-19.
Here are another numbers to consider. 2017-2018 was a pretty bad flu season, and according to CDC, resulted in around 70 000 deaths. When you look at COVID-19 death trends and fit the curve, we're looking at probably 270 000-300 000 deaths before the current epidemics ends. So, COVID-19 is going to be around 4 times as bad as a bad flu season.
2017-2018 flu season was bad, but was not extraordinary. An extraordinary flu season happened in 1968, a so-called Hong-Kong flu. It had, according to CDC, around 100 000 victims, back when US population was 200 million. When you consider per-capita death rates, COVID-19 is less than twice as bad as Hong Kong flu was. We didn't lock down for Hong Kong flu, and I don't think people really paid much attention to it -- the year was 1968, after all.
The above was of course medical harms. The non-medical harm due to COVID-19 is wholly disproportional to non-medical harms for flu, it's orders of magnitude worse. The economic cost (in terms of actual production/GDP lost) COVID-19 just in the US is estimated to have similar economic cost to WWII. What did we gain for it? What was the point of the lockdowns, if we're just letting them up now anyway? We could have just told people to put on masks back in February and have them get on with their lives.
> The non-medical harm due to COVID-19 is wholly disproportional to non-medical harms for flu, it's orders of magnitude worse.... What did we gain for it?
We're lowering the curve. If we let the infection spread unabated, most hospital systems will swiftly be overrun. Just as in Italy when the outbreak first occurred, we would have people dying in the streets due to lack of care, leading to complete and total collapse of trust in the healthcare and governmental systems.
The lockdowns are absolutely necessary to avoid panic and potential societal breakdown. It's hard to imagine because it's not the path we've taken.
The lockdowns happened specifically because at the time, the two places with widespread spread of the virus(China, Italy) had overrun hospitals. The lockdown was implemented to pause the system and determine just exactly how bad this was and come up with a response.
> If we let the infection spread unabated, most hospital systems will swiftly be overrun.
There is no reason to believe that. The hospitals weren't overrun in New York City, where the infection was not only not abated, but in fact the policy of sending infected people to nursing homes, and requiring them to accept them. Texas and Florida had very little cases before they locked down, and only started growing after lockdowns were mostly lifted. At no point were their hospital systems overwhelmed.
> The lockdowns are absolutely necessary to avoid panic and potential societal breakdown.
No, it's the lockdowns that are inducing panic. There was no panic during 1968 Hong Kong flu, which up until recently was worse than COVID-19 -- it only recently over took it. Where was the panic in Sweden?
> The lockdown was implemented to pause the system and determine just exactly how bad this was and come up with a response.
Why did so many lockdown measures persist, then? Sheer arbitrariness of it all shows pretty clearly that at this point is more about politician's power trip and sending message of doing something, and not actual public health concerns.
Your final statement is completely missing the huge swath of research intelligence and advancements we have now compared to February. Even if removing the spike is not possible, moving it to a time with better knowledge of the virus or even a vaccine will reduce spike of deaths quite a bit.
And try not to think too hard about why 9/11 brought about a massive restructuring of our government along with a mass infringement of our civil liberties but a pandemic doesn't.
This comparison has very little meaning. About 5k people over the age of 55 die every day, roughly 1.8 million a year. About 45k people die/year from a lack of healthcare in the US. About 38k people/year die from car accidents.
A more important metric is, "How many people died prematurely from COVID and how prematurely versus lifetime left?"
EDIT: @enraged_camel: I think you're either missing my point or I'm not communicating it as well as I could. I'm arguing that, when looked at at a higher level (all deaths), 200k is noise in the usual death rate floor.
Statistically, COVID has caused roughly a quarter million more people to die than we expected to die of other causes.
That said, your point about the age of the deceased is a good one. There was something particularly tragic about the death of a young, drafted soldier. That doesn't take away from the vast numbers of parents and grandparents who have died in the United States from this pandemic, though.
There are also fewer e.g. auto traffic deaths due to the lockdown.
These are all secondary effects given the number of deaths that mentioned COVID in the coroner's report. (See the headline article.)
All of it is due to the pandemic, directly or indirectly, right? There were no other significant national fatality-related events in that timeline, thank goodness. You'll see that the death rate is remarkably predictable over time.
There was a significant uptick in auto deaths in may/June once lockdown was eased. Drug overdoses are up too. Homicides is another that has been up lately.
Are these indirectly related to Covid? Are all contemporary deaths Covid induced? Are any lockdown induced but not Covid directly?
I would suggest that the anomaly in death rate, because it is well-correlated in time with COVID infection rate, is primarily caused by COVID, directly or indirectly, yes.
Think also about the people who have postponed going to the doctor or dentist due to fears of infection.
If the goal is to be critical of the United States, one needn't contort oneself or lose all perspective. In particular, we can acknowledge that the absolute number of deaths is not a very good metric, but that the better metric (number of years lost prematurely adjusted for population) is probably still worth criticizing.
An example of a problem counting this is co-morbidities - if you have heart problems and COVID-19 (even if it was apparently asymptomatic), the odds that your heart problems kill you goes up. If you die from a heart attack, should you be counted as COVID-19? Maybe you would have died without COVID-19, maybe not. And depending where you die, maybe you would be counted as a COVID-19 death, and maybe not. So there is both an over and under count going on.
But based on excess mortalities, it is likely that COVID-19 is being undercounted a lot more than it is overcounted.
I am not aware of any definitive evidence either way on whether lockdowns are good or bad for physical health.
They are clearly bad for people's mental health (except adolescents) and are horrible for the economy. However for physical health we have a variety of effects. Positive ones include reduced car accidents and communicable diseases of all kinds. Negative ones include more suicides and less preventive care. I don't know how they balance out.
I don't think anyone does yet, and there's still the massive confounder of 'covid'. But it's hard to say for sure that excess deaths above normal beyond what are reported to be from covid are missed cases, when we don't know the size of other effects.
It is hard to say for sure that ALL excess deaths above normal are COVID-19. But it is extremely likely that there are a lot of excess deaths that are. Even though we don't know the actual breakdown.
The comments in this thread are a microcosm of why there are 200k COVID deaths in the USA. A website with supposedly smart people are posting wild conspiracy theories around COVID and the reasonable responses being down-voted. By most measures the USA has done a terrible job, worse job than countries with much fewer resources. There is nothing to be proud of here.
I know there are tons of visualizations out there, but this is the one I use to get a very quick, at a glance look at the trends at the US and state levels: https://mackuba.eu/corona/#united_states.daily
I find it extremely annoying that hey stopped publishing age demo-graphics for deaths in Spain from covid. If you say 169 people died over the last 48h let me know in what age groups they are.
They throw anyone who had any contact with someone who had covid in quarantine camps. Basically, the power of being an authoritarian government where people have no rights.
Probably also a fair bit of luck. Those tactics don’t scale. So they only work when you catch it early. The wrong travels visit a conference and it’s impossible to keep up.
There is some speculation Asian counties had some level of immunity from past epidemics, but it’s only a hypothesis at this point.
Could it be that they have one (if not the best) obesity rate in the world?
I’m suspicious that this isn’t just countries with order of magnitude healthier populations (although maybe they have malnourishment the US doesn’t have).
If this was the decisive factor, you'd expect Belgium, Italy and France to have low rates, with Germany, the UK, and most of Eastern Europe having high rates.
The key thing is we (as in the government and it's people) could have handled this crisis differently.
There's no good reason for the USA to have had a higher per capita death count than South Korea, Germany or other well resourced nation that is fully capable of dealing with large-scale crisis.
This was a profound failure of leadership when it was needed the most.
In the future, students in high school history classes will watch with their jaws hung open at clips of the president of the USA in 2020 free-associating doing and his insipid "air-accordion" gestures during the daily briefings at the peak of the crisis.
> There's no good reason for the USA to have had a higher per capita death count than South Korea
There are some reasons which probably explain part of the gap:
* South Korea and Germany are both smaller and more homogeneous, making them easier to govern
* South Korea has a lot of recent experience responding to respiratory epidemics
Moreover, while I would like to see the US at the bottom of a chart of deaths per capita, the US is in the same cohort as many western European countries including Sweden, the UK, Spain, and Italy.
There's still plenty to criticize, but the media are pretty deliberately choosing metrics that are designed to exaggerate the US's handling of the crisis, specifically by ignoring per-capita death rates. I'm sure they're just doing this to get Trump out of office at all costs (ends justify the means), but they risk playing right into Trump's hand (and in any case, they certainly contribute to a broader atmosphere of fake news and partisanship).
> ...the media are pretty deliberately choosing metrics that are designed to exaggerate the US's handling of the crisis...
"The media" would have had far less grist if Trump hadn't been astonishingly incoherent and outright lying much of the time. I think it's not a coincidence that a good number of nations with delusional tin-pot autocratic wannabee's have been hit very hard by covid-19.
> "The media" would have had far less grist if Trump hadn't been astonishingly incoherent and outright lying much of the time
See, that's exactly the thing. Trump is absolutely a liar and incompetent and lots of other things, but it doesn't follow that the media has to lie to exaggerate these attributes. If the media contented itself to report the facts, they would expose Trump's lies and incompetence, the would preserve their own credibility, and they would reduce the overall volume of disinformation, partisanship, and other kinds of toxicity. Instead they play into his hand, presumably because there's a market for that kind of grifting.
Distribute masks to everyone’s door, not send mixed signals - being charitable here - about the seriousness of the virus when they had intelligence briefings about it in January, not turned mask-wearing into a political thing, not contradict their own doctors and scientists, not water down the stimulus meant to make staying home and closed affordable for people, and on, and on, ...
You do realize doctors, the WHO and the CDC were advising against masks originally? The same "problem" of not recommending masks from the beginning happened in a lot of other countries.
I do think it was pitiful how masks were turned into a politician device, but this was the doing of both parties. Not just the "government".
As for taking the virus seriously, a travel ban with China was put in place fairly early and was criticized as being "racist".
You do realize that the downplaying of masks was because we didn't have enough for medical staff and they didn't want to cause a run on that and leave our frontline responders unprotected?
And that it was an acknowledged mistake done under duress for the above?
The politicization of masks was an interesting thing, at least in my bubble. Initially when the CDC and the WHO were telling people not to wear masks, my very left-leaning friends and acquaintances were anti-mask and my right-leaning friends were very pro-mask. But once the CDC and WHO came around that (obviously) masks were effective, the positions nearly reversed (my right leaning friends didn't become anti mask per se, but they became very sympathetic toward those on the right who were anti-mask).
Every partisan affair is a tragedy, but this one felt particularly sad. The right had an opportunity to be correct and vindicated and they spurned it. The left initially took the anti-science position (I'm assuming there's no scientific defense for "in the absence of knowledge about a respiratory virus, we should default to masklessness"--and to be clear, none of my left-wing friends were arguing that we should forego masks to save them for healthcare workers), but only came around to masks when it became politically convenient (which is marginally better than the other way around).
Anyway, here's to hoping we can overcome COVID and partisanship in short order.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it a lot; in fact it's nearly all that your account has contributed to HN. That's really not what this site is for. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
Deaths will continue the slow roll until herd immunity is reached, either artificially via a vaccine or naturally. Masks, distancing, lockdowns do not _prevent_ infections, deaths or otherwise. They _delay_ and _slow_ infections, deaths etc. There is no perfect compliance to masks, lockdowns etc. and masks, lockdowns etc. are not 100% effective.
The greatest lie we were told back in March was that lockdowns were temporary to beat COVID. There is no beating COVID, we are not gods. The disease will continue until it doesn't.
> There is no perfect compliance to masks, lockdowns etc. and masks, lockdowns etc. are not 100% effective.
They don't need to be 100% effective, only reasonably effective. Take New Zealand for example. They have a population of about 4.8 million, yet have only had 25 deaths. Louisiana, a state in the US with a similarly sized population has had 5,375 deaths as of writing.
Just because the lockdowns in the US didn't work isn't a flaw of lockdowns in general; it's a flaw in the response of the US government. We needed swift, strong, decisive action, and we needed it when cases first started appearing. We didn't get that, and now hundreds of people are dying each day.
I think it's too early to assess New Zealand vs. Louisiana. New Zealand likely has very little immunity to this virus. And it will have paid a heavy price in second-order effects from lockdowns.
I picked Louisiana because they reported their first COVID case a few days after New Zealand reported theirs. I think it's an apt comparison in their current outcomes, just to indicate that strong action could have prevented virtually all of the deaths that have occurred.
That being said, I do agree that the long-term implications of their actions aren't something we can really discuss at the moment. My biggest concern, however, is the increasing number of cases of heart damage following COVID infection. We may find ourselves in a situation where deaths _after_ COVID are significant. A vaccine won't help the almost 7 million people who have likely already suffered that damage. I sincerely hope that in a few years time the most significant damage COVID has is on a country's economy, since that's something that can recover.
> The greatest lie we were told back in March was that lockdowns were temporary to beat COVID.
I thought the stated purpose of those early lockdowns was to "flatten the curve"? I don't recall anyone ever promising that they would beat COVID. They simply wanted to distribute the need for hospital beds.
That was the purpose, and then the media moved the goalposts to minimizing total deaths regardless of the cost, and freaked out over any reopening hiccups.
And, like expected, they continue to have, and will continue to have essentially forever, a slow trickle of detected cases, until they reach whatever herd immunity looks like, at their own pace. Or, if they're not completely bonkers, they'll just cover their ears and sing "la-la-la", pronounce victory over the disease, win the election, and join the rest of the world in having a bit heavier trickle.
Characterizing something as a lie when the facts were not at all clear at the time is not a good idea. Especially regarding the situation in China, Vietnam etc. where the results of the lockdown have actually been very different.
This is demonstrably false. Basic interventions have proven effective across the globe. Reducing the growth rate can cause the case count to decay to zero. Interventions do not need to be 100% effective to succeed in controlling a problem. This is like saying that it is possible to get pregnant or an STI with a condom so we should just have unprotected sex.
Sadly the lockdowns were never billed as something that would put a stop to Covid and the government has really never made an honest effort at that. But let it never be said we took the easy way out.
The greatest lie that we keep telling ourselves is that there is no way we could have done better. And I don't mean marginally better, I mean orders of magnitude better.
Look at how South Korea dealt with Covid. Look at how Taiwan dealt with Covid. Look at how China dealt with Covid. Look at how Canada dealt with Covid.
If we took the problem seriously back in March, we wouldn't be where we are today. If we got aggressive about testing, contact tracing and quarantine, like all of those countries did, we wouldn't be dealing with this slow roll of a disaster today.
I think it's rather self-evident that the lion's share of the blame lies with the administration that was proclaiming that Covid will go away in April, the CDC (whose failings are in large part, but not solely on the shoulders of this administration), and their regional equivalents. You're also free to blame some structural problems, if you're looking to assign blame. [1]
The civil unrest that followed made it clear that the administration is more then willing to use federal forces to interfere in state business - but only when it comes to putting down civil unrest, not to prevent the spread of an epidemic.
[1] I honestly don't think assigning blame matters at this point, everyone's already made up their mind on whether or not the man who claimed that sunlight and bleach cures Covid has done a good job.
That simply is not true. You are comparing apples to oranges. First, SK and Taiwan has potential latent immunity with SARS v1, and China literally imprisoned an entire city. Canada is the only fair comparison.
Now that we are on month six of this disaster, I would have taken a full lockdown of my city[1], if it meant that that the virus would have been brought under control in two months, and lockdown were lifted after three... And 200,000[2] lives had been saved.
And neither Korea nor Taiwan had latent immunity. What those countries had is a CDC equivalent that actually did it's job, because of its experience with SARS.
[1] My city did actually get a full lockdown, when the civil unrest started a few months ago. Apparently, people protesting deserves a curtailment of basic freedoms, but stopping a deadly pandemic does not. Puzzle me that...
[2] That number will keep growing, not to mention unprecedented economic damage.
>Deaths will continue the slow roll until herd immunity is reached, either artificially via a vaccine or naturally. Masks, distancing, lockdowns do not _prevent_ infections, deaths or otherwise. They _delay_ and _slow_ infections, deaths etc. There is no perfect compliance to masks, lockdowns etc. and masks, lockdowns etc. are not 100% effective.
Then why does almost every other nation have a much lower per capita infection rate and per capita death rate?
1) I don't know how you define "every other", but there are several other states (notably, with dramatically different political responses) that have similar mortality rates.
2) It's plausible (perhaps even likely) that the US has experienced a more acute course of the virus, and thus has experienced more of its deaths already, while others like New Zealand are still in a much earlier stage.
3) The US has done a miserably shitty job of stratifying risk. There was no reason to send SARS-CoV-2+ patients to nursing homes, for example. It was possible, with the trillions of dollars spent, to completely isolate nursing homes and nearly completely isolate vulnerable populations, as most of the world's best experts advised. Instead, we chose to horizontally stratify - that is to say, constrain activity and contact regardless of risk profile. This was a huge blunder, but one that nearly every state in the world made.
>2) It's plausible (perhaps even likely) that the US has experienced a more acute course of the virus, and thus has experienced more of its deaths already, while others like New Zealand are still in a much earlier stage.
New Zealand will never get to where the US is because they have an administration that actually takes it seriously. It's also resulted in them being able to have no restrictions aside from travel for quite a long time.
What if in absence of good information about covid all countries acted more or less randomly. Then we pick the ones with the lowest death rate and call their administration wise?
I didn't say they were wise. I said they took it seriously.
There's the possibility of taking it seriously and doing the wrong thing. There's not really any possibility of saying it's a hoax and doing the right thing.
There is also a huge variance between US states. Some states have larger populations than most whole countries, and under the dual sovereignty principle of our federal system the state governments bear the primary responsibility for pandemic responses. Several US states, mainly in New England, have worse death rates than any other countries. Others are doing much better: for example Utah has a lower death rate than 51 other countries.
My point of reference is always the UK, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, the largest five EU countries comprising 70% of the EU population. Germany is outperforming everyone, but otherwise we are right in the middle of the pack. (Ahead of the UK and Spain, about tied with Italy, a bit behind France.)
France, with one of the best socialized healthcare systems in the world, isn’t much better at 15th out of 191. So I’m not sure what that’s supposed to prove.
It means “best socialized healthcare systems in the world” have failed miserably this time for the most part. You don’t get to pat yourself on the back just because supposed peers did just as terribly.
I'm in Austin and based on what i'm seeing on the streets. this corona thing, will never end in the states without a vaccine. even then some people don't believe in vaccination. I won't even start with fl where parties are going non stop
What's happening in the streets is largely irrelevant over the long term. SARS-CoV-2 is now endemic in the worldwide human population, plus some animal hosts, just like four other coronaviruses. So it will never end, but a vaccine will hopefully reduce the death rate. Even people who don't get vaccinated will indirectly benefit from herd immunity in the vaccinated population.
"For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death."
Calling all of these "Covid-19 deaths" is extremely disingenuous. All it means is that someone (may have) had Covid-19 in their system at the time they died. Some states don't even require a positive PCR test to list Covid-19 as a cause of death - just suspicion they might have had it!
More than 200,000 additional people in the US have died in 2020 compared to this point in 2019. There is no other reasonable explanation for those additional deaths. That makes it abundantly clear that they are COVID-19 related. Hand-wave all you want, you can’t get around this obvious indicator.
According to NHS stats, the vast majority of UK covid deaths would have died in the next 6mo-1yr anyway, due to other conditions they also had. Net effect on annual deaths will probably be small.
It’s a fair point to say that causality is complicated. But COVID as a cause of death is like a match as a cause for a forest fire. It only has an effect in certain conditions, but when those conditions are in place, it is certainly to blame for triggering the unfortunate event.
The question here is: would these people have died when they did if they had not had Covid? (Would the forest have burned if the match had not been lit?) If the answer is “no”, which it probably is in aggregate for cities and states whose death rate has increased since January 2020, then the virus does share at least some of the blame for these deaths. It may even be the proximal cause. Doesn’t mean it’s the only cause, or that people wouldn’t have benefited from a healthier lifestyle. But the implication that these people died from other causes — and would have died anyway when they did - is also disingenuous.
If someone had COPD but could have lived 5-20 more years but Covid took them out, you don't want that reported as a Covid-related death?
You do realize that the reason why they've had to list Covid-19 as a cause of death when suspected was because of a major shortage of tests still ongoing?
Even as late as a month ago, you are refused a test unless you were in close contact with someone who had a positive test. What kind of self-restricting self-limiting bullshit is that?
It's like saying you can only buy a car if you can drive to the dealership in your car.
NHS estimates put most people who died with covid as being likely to die within 6mo-1yr anyway, so your “5-20 more years” thought experiment is off by an order of magnitude.
> Methods: We first estimated YLL from COVID-19 using standard WHO life tables, based on published age/sex data from COVID-19 deaths in Italy. We then used aggregate data on number/type of LTCs to model likely combinations of LTCs among people dying with COVID-19. From these, we used routine UK healthcare data to estimate life expectancy based on age/sex/different combinations of LTCs. We then calculated YLL based on age, sex and type of LTCs and multimorbidity count.
> Results: Using the standard WHO life tables, YLL per COVID-19 death was 14 for men and 12 for women. After adjustment for number and type of LTCs, the mean YLL was slightly lower, but remained high (13 and 11 years for men and women, respectively). The number and type of LTCs led to wide variability in the estimated YLL at a given age (e.g. at ≥80 years, YLL was >10 years for people with 0 LTCs, and <3 years for people with ≥6).
That article overestimates YLL by failing to specifically account for obesity as a comorbidity (although there is some correlation with other comorbidities included in their model). We know that obesity both reduces lifespan on its own, and is a serious risk factor for COVID-19.
The article you posted says "It means someone who suffered a heart attack, or even died in a road traffic accident, may have been included in the figures if they had also tested positive for coronavirus at some point, or if doctors believed the virus may have exacerbated their condition."
But, the CDC link in the parent post has the detailed breakdown and it has a category for "Intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning and other adverse events" and that amounts to 5,930 off the total 179,927.
Though there is also a sizable chunk in another category "All other conditions and causes (residual)" which has 88,801 off the total 179,927 (mostly 65+ year olds)
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/04/coronavir...