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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

What do excess deaths look like for 2020?

The CDC has an excellent visualization for this. 2020 is a major outlier in the last few years in terms of excess deaths. If you drill down into the local data, you can see some really stark visualizations: for example, the tremendous increase in deaths in New York City in spring of 2020.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

It's astonishing that New York managed to halt that. Some is surely getting better at treating people with the disease so that they don't die, but they must also have had totalitarian levels of compliance.

Exponential growth means that even a small amount of non-compliance will still be explosive, and with so many cases already there were enormous opportunities for somebody to fail.

We got hit hard here and New Yorkers are tending to take it seriously going forward. You see really sharp mask compliance, you can actually get a test and a result in a day, and they give out free masks everywhere. Doing a little traveling recently it just kind of seemed that other parts of the country were effing around, kind of going through the motions, but people would be weird about masks, focus on odd things like putting shrink wrap on food between the kitchen and the table, stuff like that. There were a couple weeks here in April where it just seemed like the city was dead and people remember that.

The image of freezer trucks full of bodies parked in the streets is a really hard one to get rid of.

The herd-immunity threshold is probably around 20% -- enough to stop exponential growth in cases, but not enough to get the virus to self-extinguish.

It also helped when front-line doctors figured out the treatment they were told to use ("invasive ventilation") was a death sentence. They stopped ventilating all their patients, and their patients stopped dying so quickly.

The sun also provided progressively more adequate illumination (providing Vitamin D and red light), starting with the vernal equinox on March 20.

Covid Season has returned this fall, like clockwork. The only factor that really matters is light exposure.

https://www.space.com/vernal-equinox-2020-earliest-spring-12...

This is the only question that matters in the context of covid deaths, at least at a high level. After the initial shock, it's dropped to around 10%. I expect that this will continue to drop as we lose our most vulnerable. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

GIFY https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

This chart shows deaths due to COVID: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm

It peaked in April at 17,000 in one week.

There's a column for percentage of expected deaths too.

I imagine the total deaths over the next 2-3 years will be below average based on the deaths experienced this year in older people and/or those with co-morbidity.

368,000 excess deaths so far in 2020, with 7k to 10k excess deaths coming every week as of late November. I.e. more than 400k excess deaths by the end of the year.

If you sum up all the excess deaths above the CDC 2015-2019 average, it comes to 335k so far this year, and their data lags by several weeks.

the Financial Times has been tracking this: https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest, although it seems to lag somewhat.

^ The metric I hope to get my hands on come January.

I am not sure about this specific metric but based on my experience with government metrics you will be waiting until closer to April than January for those numbers.

Your experience is misleading you then. The CDC numbers for excess deaths are only a bit more than a week out of date: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

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