Personally, I'll measure Canada's performance throughout this pandemic by the final number of per-capita deaths. We're hardly best in the world but doing a lot better than the US so far (1,783/M vs 643/M at the moment[0]).
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Edit to add: Canada could easily take the lead over US in deaths/M if US get's vaccinated faster/better. I'm not so naive to believe that's impossible. It does seem Canada has a strategy to avoid that. Otherwise, it simply seems too early to call either way.
How about in relation to the cost & externalities of this per-capita death figure? Financially, socially etc.
It's as though there's no adults in the room willing to speak to tradeoffs - the pernicious, long-term 2nd+ order consequences to be considered.
There's extensive evidence suggesting that many of the economic effects of the early pandemic were entirely independent of whether a choice was made to lockdown. Individual people aren't stupid and they're not going to keep going out and consuming while a deadly pandemic is raging.
Remove choice from business owners & watch effected industries move elsewhere (texas, flordia).
>"Individual people aren't stupid and they're not going to keep going out and consuming while a deadly pandemic is raging."
Covid is 'deadly' to the overweight & immunocompromised.
And yeah, I'll wait and see.
> Covid is 'deadly' to the overweight & immunocompromised.
Oh and what percent of our population is overweight again?
Not going to continue this conversation, enough of the usual covid canards that I can tell it wouldn't be worth it.
Did these typos affect your ability to parse my comment? :)
>Oh and what percent of our population is overweight again?
What's your point?
I know in Philadelphia, the murder rate is up about 40%. When I was looking at deaths data from the CDC, I found that deaths were up (from 2% on average increase) substantially. I dont remember the % increase, but I do remember 40% of the deaths were not directly from covid-19. if those numbers remained consistent, about 400k extra people died this year from other causes.
that 400k, its hard to tell where 'they would have died as a direct result of covis19' and 'lockdowns caused it' begins and ends, but that is not a nebulous number, and its not a small one.
And honestly, I dont care about how many would have died vs this and that, back off our freedoms. No one, for any reason, should be able to tell us we can't go outside, can't have family gatherings, can't run a business, etc. No one, for any reason even if the death rate was 100%. And HIV is 100% fatal, yet no one ever required showing someone their HIV status on an app before having sex.
Moreover, I'm not convinced the economy wouldn't have declined if we hadn't locked down - consumers changed their behavior even in places that didn't lock down. The economic decline is likely behind the increase in murders (along with school closures).
> if those numbers remained consistent, about 400k extra people died this year from other causes.
I'd love to see a source, as I haven't seen a single bit of evidence suggesting anything like that.
> "I'm not convinced the economy wouldn't have declined if we hadn't locked down"
I didnt say the economic decline is solely linked to the lock downs, I dont think anyone ever has. however, no one with half a brain would ever argue the lockdowns were so much worse.
> "The economic decline is likely behind the increase in murders"
Not likely, the last severe economic decline (great recession) didnt see such large spikes in violence. school closures are part of the lock-down.
> "I'd love to see a source, as I haven't seen a single bit of evidence suggesting anything like that."
That data is freely available from cdc.gov
That doesn't seem like a good measure. At the extreme, enforcing a stay-at-home order would make this number 0, but a lot of people would argue this wasn't "good performance."
Australia was a clear success case.
Number of deaths per capita should absolutely be the primary metric we are using to judge pandemic success.
I'm not sure what you are saying, doses of vaccines?
Number of deaths per capita don't take QoL into account over the period you analyze and the response's effect in the future.
I'm curious, what QoL increase makes up for 400k additional deaths over Canada's number?
I have not claimed doses of vaccine to be a good metric.
>I'm curious, what QoL increase makes up for 400k additional deaths over Canada's number?
Who has 400k more?
You also have to take into account that policy differences do not solely explain the difference in death toll. Saying 400k more death over canada = canada good response is a reductionist view when there are other factors in play.
> Who has 400k more?
If we had Canada's per capita rate, 400k fewer people would have died.
>I certainly don't think it is only policy diffferences.
And I agree with you, which is why I think using death toll as a single metric is a bad idea.
EDIT:
>If we had Canada's per capita rate, 400k fewer people would have died.
Even with the same policy as Canada, it is unlikely that the death toll would just transpose (it's a bad assumption, because policy doesn't define the death toll - it affects it)
But I'll cede to you that YLL is also a good metric. When comparing two developed nations like Canada and US, most of the difference there will probably be explained by per capita deaths though.
Source?
I also saw a US specific article but can't find it off the top of my head.
The metric can still be used in extensive studies (that take nuance into account), but using it as a metric on its own is fallacious imo.
Not least, Canada had a government that admitted the virus existed and might be a problem. Following that, we had a coordinated national effort to combat it rather than a laissez-faire approach of letting every state do as they please (which often meant nothing at all in many states).
Canada's approach was hardly bullet-proof but claiming the countries' responses were identical could not be further from the truth.
The federal govt requires a quarantine when arriving by plane but thousands have said “no” (how is that possible) and been threatened with a fine that costs the same or slightly more than quarantine.
It’s been a major cock up.
As refurb said, this is completely wrong. Canada is decentralized (yes, including its healthcare system) like the US. Ottawa didn't mandate the Atlantic Bubble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Bubble), for example; the Atlantic provinces set it up on their own. Ontario's recent lockdown—far stricter than occurred anywhere in the US, as I understand it—is just that, in Ontario.
India was able to make their own vaccine and so far vaccinated 158M single and 29.1M fully. US 248M and 106M fully. Yet Canada wasn't able to make their own and so far only 14M single and 1M fully.
I have friends in BC. For a population of 5 million they had around 2,000 cases in September. Now? 130,000 cases. They got complacent, people let their guards down, it exploded.
California based their lockdown level on ICU capacity per region of the state dictating which businesses could remain open. There was a lot of (warranted) criticism on the specifics because officials seemed to based the list off of necessity rather than potential for harm, which potentially led to the unnecessary killing of many small, locally owned businesses. It didn’t help that we had a few elected officials skirting lockdown regulations by dining out with a large group and going to a high end salon when these things were not allowed at the time.
The first half of the vaccine rollout was rocky. When the first group (medical professionals and 75+ only) had their turn, There were clinics with vaccine that needed to be used because appointments slowed down quickly. It took them weeks to move onto the next group which included people with high risk medical conditions, front line workers, and 65+. The list of qualifying medical conditions was laughably incomplete, e.g. you didn't technically qualify if you just had severe asthma in many counties. Many clinics stopped asking for proof of a qualifying medical condition and let people “self certify.”
I probably only see the bad having to live with consequences of others’ hasty decisions in California but we may have redeemed ourselves, in a small way, in the second half of this vaccine rollout by being able to provide vaccines to anyone over 16 earlier than the goal set by the Biden administration.
From the onset of the pandemic, I don’t think it was massively unreasonable to let states make their own rules but the federal government utterly failed to adequately support people and small businesses. To qualify for the stimulus check, you had to made under the limit according to your 2019 (or 2018 if you did not file yet) tax return. Last time I checked, the pandemic hit us in March of 2020 - so why was this determined by earnings a year earlier? There is a certain set of people in power that will fight to the nail to make sure that nobody receives a benefit if there is even the smallest sliver of a chance that they may not be deserve it, which is an absurdly nonsensical and short-sighted approach to take in the wake of a global pandemic.
Canada could have chosen to vaccinate about 15% of the population fully, which would have been enough for the supermajority of the >65 population that is responsible for almost all of the deaths. But we chose not to. Whether or not that is the right choice remains to be seen.
In Ontario we have 42.5% of all adults with 1 dose. In Ontario we expect ~80% of the population to have 1 dose by June 20th[1]. Which I believe is a really promising statistic, and based on current vaccination trajectory we will meet that date. The 4 month dose stretch is expected to be shrunk to a lot lower once supply has increased sufficiently and most people have 1 dose.
The increasing restrictions was unfortunate but very necessary. In Ontario at least hospitalizations and ICU capacity was getting out of hand at a faster pace than Ontario has seen throughout the pandemic. These numbers spiked in part because the lack of vaccine supply in the early days of vaccinations. Our importing of vaccines was incredibly slow at the beginning of the pandemic, mostly because we had to import from other nations which are already scrounging for vaccines. Now the pace has stepped up dramatically, based on our current jabs in arms per capita we are ~42 days behind USA[2]. Which is not that bad considering Canada has no vaccine production capacity. Excluding micronations we are ranked ~16th in the world.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/7679338/ontario-coronavirus-phase... [2] https://www.howfarbehindiscanada.com/
Huh, interesting, TIL.
I was not feeling very confident in the vaccination response seeing that 3% number, but this changes my perception quite a bit.
I do still have questions about the overall handling of pandemic risks though. I recall reading last year that several million masks went to waste because they expired in warehouses, and not having vaccine production facilities despite being aware of the potential risks after SARS seem... suboptimal.
I realize the media sensationalizes a lot of this but from the outside it doesn't look good. I know the US is seen as not doing enough but I prefer that over the authoritarian responses.
We certainly have our issues but for now we still hold people's personal freedoms at a high level. I live in a somewhat rural area but I haven't had to wear a mask in most places for about a month, I've been vaccinated for over a month and I've been out enjoying beers etc. like normal for the last several weeks.
Obviously, I don't live there so I'm open to changing my mind. I've just read some stories that don't sit well with me coming out of Canada and even if they're in the minority they should still be addressed.
In Alberta, which has the highest case rates in Canada, there have been less than 2 tickets issued per day for violating the restrictions. Until yesterday at least, if you went out you would see people all over the place without masks, hanging out with their friends on patios, having parties, etc.
You say you've been vaccinated for over a month, but we haven't had that privilege. So instead, we have to rely on safety measures like avoiding big gatherings and unsafe behaviour.
Main problem here is that instead of building temporary hospitals to boost the hospital capacity like US did last year, we have simply kept locking down which is equivalent to throwing the problem under a rug. It's been a year and even though they were talking about it last year, only as of couple weeks ago, they are planning on using temporary field hospital in the coming weeks. Why wasn't it used for a year to boost the capacity? Also the 2 temporary hospitals in Ontario have only 73 and 84 beds. That's tiny.
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-says-a-covid-19-field-hos...
Then the whole nursing home debacle where the military audit showed reprehensible conditions and caused vast majority of the nursing home deaths:
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/gut-wrenching-military-report-she...
From as early as February or March 2020, I had always felt they told us what we needed to know - about 600k people would die of covid-19 in the US. I thought maybe if we did some things we could get that number down, but we failed in that respect. We pretty much had as many deaths as we would have doing nothing.
on a per capita basis, canada did a lot better (600 deaths / mil vs 1800, 32k cases / mil pop vs 94k). +2 Canada, although there are some circumstances that I will get to later.
our deaths per case is about the same, although NYC and NJ skews our numbers. call it a tie.
vaccines, US is a clear winner. +1 US
Freedom wise, its a mixed bag. States like NYC and California did all sorts of lockdown shenanigan's that all failed, where as states like Florida stayed mostly open and did better than the national average case/death wise. I can't really speak to what Canada has done, I'll let you fill this one in.
So in the end, Canda 2: US: 1 + 1 ? going to who wins on freedom. However, the US did have some circumstances that canada did not have.
Latin and South America have been ravaged by cv19, and approximately 1-2 million walk across the border / year illegally. I really don't care if that is 'wrong vs right'. Its important to consider when thinking how the virus is going to play out, and its no surprise that areas with high immigration from those areas did the worst.
Its also why relying on herd immunity here will also never work. Unless we vaccinate Latin and South America (I'm in favor of that), we are going to have plenty of exposure to the virus.
If we had let the pandemic spread in normal course early on, I suspect we would have seen many more deaths.
I think it is way too easy to look back and say that we had as many deaths as we would have had doing nothing.
In the US, 1.8% of cases have resulted in deaths, with 10% of Americans getting sick and tested[0]. The majority of these deaths happening 6 months into the pandemic, i.e. a lot of knowledge had been gained and resources stockpiled.
Doing nothing early in the pandemic would likely have increased the death rate to roughly 3% because of a lack of medial resources (including doctors and nurses), and resulting in 66% of Americans getting sick. Excluding children (i.e. 300 MM US adults) the expected death count would have been 6 MM people.
That said, I feel you, I would have personally hoped that for the effort we did put into "whatever we did", it would have reduced deaths by 100x (i.e. less than 0.06 MM deaths) but sadly we didn't work as a team and people died for it.
However, while it shouldn't even have been 0.6 MM, "whatever we did" roughly decreased the deaths by 10x and thats a worth calling out.
[0] As of May 5th 2021, 32,513,303 cases and 578,500 deaths. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/01/8167071...
CDC actually has a page where they estimate the true number of cases of COVID in the US, and they put it at ~115 million. So that would be 578k deaths / 115M cases, or a fatality rate of ~0.5%, which is roughly in line with what you could have expected based on the early studies from the cruise ships where there was free spread of covid in a contained space.
If medical facilities had been overloaded, we certainly could have seen more fatalities, but beyond protecting the hospitals from running out of beds (which was worthwhile), the other interventions didn't seem to do much.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
I guess the deaths per capita will be fairly high in the US but it varies a lot from place to place. Many places did very little lockdown and more-or-less carried on with life as usual.
The particular opinion here is that everyone should get vaccinated. Any other opinion is down voted.
Solution: Downvotes should require an accompanying comment as to why. Downvoting without explanation does nothing to change minds or behavior. It just alienates people.
Ironically, if one gets a downvote without explanation, it only serves to reinforce the opinion of the downvoted commenter.
HN, like every community, and every person has blind spots and this is one of theirs.
The US has done very well with vaccines so far, but in terms of (in my view) the real number for success (deaths per capita), the US has had 3x as many.
Looks like vaccine IP restriction lifting is finally going to happen. I would stay put in non-US places.
Such a political take. The US did a lot right.
We absolutely had no effective backup plan, but also weren't completely honest about relying so heavily on vaccines.
(Now again vaccines are great, so that's not the worst plan, but what I'm getting it was it wasn't really the plan at all. We were screwing up by the measure of our own goals rather than intentionally waiting for the big bailout.)
----
Also East Asia is mopping the floor. There's truly very little good to say about EU let alone US in comparison.
Probably not. The infection and death rates were plummeting even before general availability of the vaccine. States that locked down super hard, and states that barely locked down at all, have essentially the same infection/death rates as well.
The US is a big country, with a lot of people. However, the average health of an individual in the US is far better than the East Asia area, and much of the world. That's before we even consider the vast young population in the US which mostly are asymptomatic infectees...
The number of people who have been infected already and cannot become infected again with the same variant is likely massive in the US, making it quite possible the US would have weathered even the latest variants due to a lack of infectible people (ie. "herd immunity").
We have tiered lockdowns all over the place, rent protections, paycheck protections, massively improved digital services from Google, Zoom, etc. Just the digital services alone have enabled home schooling and home working for a good chunk of the world.
I wouldn’t call this nothing.
There's very little.
Instead I see rent seeking, nepotism, resting on credentials, signalling..
Canadian health care is attracting worse & worse (in terms of competence & care) people every year.
Objectively we are probably doing the best in the world at vaccinating such a large and diverse population. You’ll never hear one of us admit it though and if you do then you can be sure to hear it followed up with a “but” denigrating ourselves in some other way. Objectively Canada is doing terribly at vaccination and it boggles the mind that your country is still having to impose strict lockdowns and go off the label with dosing timelines because of your inability to secure a supply.