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Comment by dane-pgp | Hacker News Reader

> (No more than 250,000 deaths from COVID-19 worldwide within a quarter of a year, compared to 1.5 million deaths during the flu wave in 2017/18).

Interesting weasel-words and cherry-picking. First, comparing a quarter of a year of Covid deaths against a whole year (or two?) of normal flu, and then subtly shifting between deaths from Covid and deaths during a flu wave (so not caused by the flu?).

For a more accurate comparison: "between 291,000 and 646,000 people worldwide die from seasonal influenza-related respiratory illnesses each year"[0] and 907,917 have died from Covid so far this year[1], despite all the extra measures taken to limit its spread and mortality rate.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1213-flu-death-esti...

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

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> The people dying from corona are mainly those who are statistically dying this year because they have reached the end of their lives

The excess deaths statistics [1] give lie to the tired claim that these were all people who "would have died anyway." 200,000+ more people have died this year in the US alone than normal, and it's very statistically-significant, particularly as the annual death rate is under 3 million.

1. https://www.sciencealert.com/2020-has-killed-up-to-200-000-e...

I’m an ER doc, it’s unclear to me how many of these excess deaths are due to covid, or due to the covid lockdown. I am sure that many are due to covid, but patients avoiding hospital due to the worry about covid, cancelling surgeries, and delaying chemotherapy adversely affects health too. The US government paying for covid care is also a positive step for society, but it does have the effect that patients who have no covid symptoms but have a positive screening test who die of non-covid pathology will end up being labelled a covid death in order to maximize the hospital and physician reimbursement.

I’ve seen statistical analysis that shows US states that had a lockdown, but not a high number of covid cases, don’t have excess deaths.

* https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1301975654771064834?...

* https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1301976643146317825?...

This suggests undiagnosed COVID is in fact the cause of most of the excess deaths.

That's super-interesting, thank you.

You won't be able to prove your assertion until there is a known vaccination that helps elderly people avoid Covid. At that point, if these deaths occured in elderly who were probably within a year of dying even without covid, we'd expect to see next year a much smaller amount of deaths compared to average, because so many people died one year early.

> > the flu wave in 2017/18

> a whole year (or two?) of normal flu

Flu season is fall to spring, that range is (northern hemisphere) half a year. Both years are given because it started in 2017 and ended in 2018.

If the original claim was being made in good faith I would agree that "2017/18" means a single year, but given the other prevarications I couldn't rule out an attempt at double-counting.

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