Your response is a weird combination of vague and rude/patronizing. I’m not sure what your point is.
It will be hard to get a total estimate until at least a year or two after the pandemic is over, because even in developed countries death reporting can lag by up to a year (that’s leaving aside cause-of-death attribution). If you check back in a year or two WHO, CDC, etc. will have much better estimates for the total death toll in 2020, with (possibly wide) error bars you can largely trust.
Beyond that, this is weak pedantry about the definition of “millions”. People commonly use this plural to mean >1 million; we’re talking about the order of magnitude here, not the precise count.
Show me the 3 million excess deaths, before you continue with the alarmism.
If you have let’s say two years left to life and COVID ends up finishing you off, that’s a death due to COVID.
And what if somebody has only one month to live, and dies with Covid, also a death from Covid? Maybe yes, but really worthy of hyperbole then?
My grandmother died from the flu, at 99 years old. I never felt I should blame her death on the flu pandemic, though.
Regular old respiratory infections are a frequent indirect cause of strokes and heart attacks, but we've never claimed before that common colds cause "millions" of deaths.
The official death toll in Germany from the 2017/2018 flu season is still higher than deaths from COVID-19 so far. And I suspect that if we used the same method for COVID-19 deaths that was used for the flu (indirect measurement), the flu of 2017/18 would surpass COVID-19 by far.
The method used to estimate flu deaths every year is far more expansive than the method used for confirmed Covid deaths.
One interesting thing to see is that the social reactions vs. Covid have radically reduced the amount of flu spread this year vs. previous years.
Two points:
a) 'Flu' is a different disease than respiratory viral diseases. (A.k.a. "common colds".) Covid is a kind of respiratory viral disease.
b) "Common colds" are also deadly and cause a huge number of deaths each year. They just get classified as deaths from stroke or heart attack, not the common cold: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=does%20the%20common%20...
So counting mortality rates is not a simple issue and depends a lot on cultural factors, political incentives, etc.
But, chances are that latter are more frequent. Covid tests are not done on all deaths precisely in places where situation is worst.
There is no such assumption. Read my post again: millions and millions of people died from the common cold before 2020. The media never reported those deaths as 'common cold deaths', though, even though it would have made just as much sense as reporting 'Covid deaths' does.
It'd really be halpful to frame with some kind of context. TB kills that many annually. To make matters worse, it's a curable disease, so these deaths are entirely unnecessary, but when was the last time you heard a peep about that? It's been raging for decades, and WHO is targeting 2030 as the end of it.
But, the way this control has been achieved is that the US and many other rich countries require anyone applying to immigrate (and many people not applying to immigrate, if they are from a risky country) to be screened for TB and be treated successfully before they are allowed to enter the country (with some waivers where treatment is unlikely to be available where they are). On top of all these border controls, at least $100 million is spent specifically on TB just inside the US every year, in order to keep the number of annual cases down somewhere around 10,000. Until 2019 healthcare professionals in the USA were required to be screened for TB every year. People in America who do contract active TB disease are required to take medication daily, personally supervised by a healthcare professional, for six months - to make sure they do it correctly.
And all this is only possible because TB takes a pretty significant amount of contact to spread, and there's a detectable latent stage (sometimes lasting an entire lifetime) of infection before it becomes contagious - neither of which is true with covid.
Thankfully all around the world people have taken significant steps to slow the virus down, and so hopefully the vaccine will arrive in time to save tens of millions.
I am happy to agree with you that humanity could do a whole lot more to prevent deaths from infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.
Your link estimates the Covid IFR in the USA to be about 0.6%, compared to e.g. 0.4% for China where the population skews younger or 0.8–1.1% for several European countries and Japan where the population skews older.
https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/images/november2020/1124...
I’m somewhat suspicious about the numbers for lower-income countries though. In Mexico for example Covid deaths have been grossly undercounted. These kind of high-level estimates are hard to do reliably when they are built on poor-quality low-level data.
I don’t know why you are pretending that “good medical care” (by which I mean, the average in a typical developed country with a well funded medical system that has not yet been completely overwhelmed; as compared to the “poor” level of care available in many developing countries or in places where hospitals are collapsing) is equivalent to “exceptional treatment”. I don’t know what you mean by “exceptional treatment”, but your link says nothing about it.
There have been a large number of estimates of IFR, and they consistently range from about 0.4% to about 1.5%, mostly toward the middle of that range. Judging by the best current science, the 0.5% number I used is probably a slight underestimate, but it is at at any rate in the right ballpark.
If you e.g. guess the actual number of deaths in absence of any countermeasures would be more like 10–20 million instead of the range I gave of 15–50 million, that seems plausible enough (though I stand by my estimate). It’s a counterfactual in any case, since in practice extreme countermeasures were adopted in many parts of the world.