U.S. surpasses 200k Covid-19 deaths
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/04/coronavir...
Governors and mayors shut down churches and assemblies by fiat. People weren’t allowed to see their family. Couldn’t sell goods and services.
You may think that was necessary (and at least some of it was). But That doesn’t change what it was.
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.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
...over 200,000.
> Total predicted number of excess deaths since 2/1/2020 across the United States: 201,917 - 262,877
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
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 cases of people not seeking medical help because they were told non-essential visits were to be avoided.
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.
Are these indirectly related to Covid? Are all contemporary deaths Covid induced? Are any lockdown induced but not Covid directly?
Think also about the people who have postponed going to the doctor or dentist due to fears of infection.
I think the number that might bring a better perspective is the number of death
- for any reason per year
- from flu/influenza per year
- ...
France - 157,536
Canada - 88,287
Germany - 37,087
The number of people in the US who have died due to government incompetence is in the neighborhood of 50,000-150,000.
Belgium: 320,007
Sweden: 190,186
Just the first Google hit — I didn't do any thorough vetting other than it doesn't appear to be propaganda.
At that of Sweden, about 189k.
At that of Belgium, about 286k
Numbers from https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality, assuming a US population of 328 million.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
>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]
[1] - https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/09/01/comorbidities-and-coronavirus...
>The number of people in the US who have died due to government incompetence...
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.
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.
This does a decent job. https://twitter.com/MichaelPDeacon/status/130829568209300684...
England's policy is "you can't be in groups bigger than 6, stay 1m or more apart".
United States: 36%
France: 22%
Canada: 29%
Germany: 22%
Adiposity is the Crucial Enhancer of COVID-19: https://cardiologyres.org/index.php/Cardiologyres/article/vi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
According to the NY Times in https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deat... we likely passed 200k dead by mid-August. And since then we've become even more parsimonious about who we count as dead of COVID-19.
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.
Unless lockdowns are rather bad for one's health, you mean.
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.
Do you have any data on that?
Remember Birx announced some months ago that anyone dying with c19 would be counted as c19?
To put this in further perspective, the number of flu deaths in recent years has been as high as 80-120K.
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).
We know the seriousness of obesity wrt covid.
This turns out not to be the case.
If the lack of chronic disease leads to less severe covid, you'd expect the nosocomial spread factor of the pandemic is lower.
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.
Mostly tiny islands in the Pacific.
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 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" 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.
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.
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.
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".
And that it was an acknowledged mistake done under duress for the above?
https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-doesnt-regret-advising...
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.
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.
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.
Then why does almost every other nation have a much lower per capita infection rate and per capita death rate?
For we are doing great, but we are not the worst either. That is basically the story of the USA in general I think
I would be far more worried if the US had the same death rate as Turkmenistan or North Korea.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Whom do you mean by "we" here?
The president?
The governors?
The hidden powers who rule the world?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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!
Almost one third of Covid deaths in July and August 'primarily caused by other conditions'
https://www.yahoo.com/news/almost-one-third-covid-deaths-155...
Source: Oxford University
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)
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.
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.
https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75/v1
> 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).
14 years for men and 12 years for women.
Have a look at the ICNARC data. https://www.icnarc.org/Our-Audit/Audits/Cmp/Reports
Of the 10834 patients admitted to ICUs in England and Wales so far the mean age was 58.8.
9580 of these patients were able to live without assistance in daily activities.
1094 had some assistance.
Just 40 had total assistance.
These are the people most at risk of death (they're ICU patients), but they're not the frail group of 90 year olds that you're making them out to be.