If I read those graphs correctly, except during the peak of each waves, the death rates seems very similar to other years?
ie, people dying of covid are people that would have died anyways from other causes.
ie, people dying of covid are people that would have died anyways from other causes.
For example, there are much less people dying by automobile accidents (a leading cause of death for young people). In 2020, they could be replaced by very different types of death (COVID, Suicide, etc.)
That said, it certainly COULD be relatively similar people. You’d likely see relatively similar individuals dying of pneumonia as dying from COVID.
If people live 100 years, you have 1% of the population die each year. In the US, COVID has killed a quarter-million, which is just under 0.1%, so an increase of under 10%. You'll barely see a 10% increase on a noisy chart.
In practice, that's a 50% increase some months, and a 1% increase others. So it looks underwhelming. But it isn't the same people.
But it's definitely not just people who would have died anyway. We're also at just under 1 in 30 people infected. If everyone caught COVID, you'd naively see 30x as many deaths, or 7.5 million dead.
Practically, not everyone would catch COVID, and by demographics, I suspect fewer would die, so we'd be talking maybe 2-3 million excess deaths if we let it burn. And probably another few million with long-term disability.
Obviously even one life lost is too much, but one has to wonder if that stimulus and productivity loss could have saved more lives if invested somewhere else, such as healthcare, cancer research or motor vehicle safety.
In fact, if we would have indeed 10 times the death rate, the impact on the economy could very well be larger.
yes, with some exceptions (Spain, the UK, the US seem to register an actual significant spike in deaths). But overall it's true that the age of the average covid death is as high, or in some countries even higher than the average lifespan, meaning it's likely the person would have died of some other cause.
I've always thought that not comparing deaths, but comparing 'number of high quality life years' lost or something similar would make more sense, even if it is somewhat more abstract.