There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
economist.com
economist.com
Legitimate question, please no political commentary.
Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.
I had to go do business in LA specifically around Manhattan Beach and Inglewood, and the folks that live there were taking me to strip malls where all the businesses looked closed but we're all actually open.
They just had their windows covered. I'm talking about an MMA gym next to a hair salon next to an Ethiopian restaurant.
But I don't think that SF's 62 deaths/100k (compared to e.g. 240 for LA and 232 for Miami) is solely explained by that, and that the tighter (and more adhered to) restrictions did play a role.
Without the poorly considered relaxations in Oct/Nov, despite clear indicators for a worsening situation, it'd have ended up better...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
All it takes is a single spreader moving from outside of the metro area to negate the effect of the lockdown, specially if a considerable portion of the population is quite militant in their refusal to follow even the most basic health and safety precautions.
So are the vast majority of people, and greater population density makes it harder to control the spread of communicable disease. So you’d expect, all other things being equal, not only thr vast majority of cases but the highest per capita cases to be in the metro areas.
But, actually, the highest per capita infections (both total and current) were mostly in rural, not metropolitan, counties.
Can you please cite your sources for this claim? I just did the math using the numbers of infections[0] and the county populations[1] and it doesn't really seem to match up with your claim at all.
There are 58 counties in California.
San Bernardino, LA, and Riverside counties are numbers 4, 5, 6 respectively for highest cases per capita and all have populations above 2.2 million.
Of the bottom 10 counties in cases per capita, only 2 have a population larger than 100k (SF, Humboldt)
[0] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...
At least in hindsight, the closing of schools might have been a huge mistake.
In Nov-Feb, I was losing 40-60 employees a week to infection or quarantine. Mostly people in essential IT support positions
My sons school was open most of the year, but shutdown for a month due to teacher quarantines.
> Hospitalization rates in children are significantly lower than hospitalization rates in adults with COVID-19, suggesting that children may have less severe illness from COVID-19 compared to adults.
Less severe response to it, not "less chance of getting it." And then just two lines later:
> Recent evidence suggests that compared to adults, children likely have similar viral loads in their nasopharynx,7 similar secondary infections rates, and can spread the virus to others
I don't know how you arrived at your opinion here.
But I don't follow the science closely enough. I hope they're making the right call, because it's really hard on the kids. I'm just glad my own little guy is not of school age yet, and in fact is young enough to be mostly oblivious to the whole thing.
There are a lot of confounding variables in these analyses. It’s going to take years to tease them apart, and we may never truly know for certain in some cases.
The point is not "is it wise to take precautions"; that's obvious. The point is we don't necessarily have great data on which precautions work better than others because they're largely all being put into effect at the same time.
We actually do, though, and it's preventing close contact of non-household members and preventing sharing enclosed spaces with non-household members for long periods of time.
People spread the virus before they even know they're sick, and a subset of sick people either need to go to work despite being sick, or they just don't care.
It's going to take time and years of research to tease out things like "did closing schools specifically help".
It wasn’t until we closed schools that the trend reversed.
People are so quick to blame fear without actually looking at the data
The other way to think about it is that it wasn’t until things got bad that people got cautious.
Kind of how people take homeopathic drugs when they are sickest.
Unfortunately, some of the things done were disruptive, and if they were also ineffective, that will lead to blame. But our mission should be honesty first, and have faith that reasonable people can accept that the best decisions were taken with the information available at the time.
Regardless, school is being done online. Kids that needed laptops got them.
Right, I forgot University of Phoenix regularly matches their in-person counterparts in terms of quality. Keep telling yourself that teachers who were never trained to do remote teaching are anywhere near the same effectiveness as before. You ever dissect something virtually? Somethings can simply not be learned through a screen. Physical education, dealing when your crush looks at you in the eye, literally anything "hands-on" like swinging a hammer at a nail, the of useful skills that can only be developed in the presence of another human are tremendous. Funnily, most of the useful things learned at school for most people are not the curriculum and it is these things that are missing.
How do you isolate when there's more members than actual rooms in the home & only one one restroom?
Another study in Eur J Clin Inv had similar findings comparing countries: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484
COVID went wild basically everywhere. There were a few strong exceptions: China (apparently), Australia, New Zealand and some others. What these had in common was very strict police enforcement, which led to some dramatic scenes like people getting welded into their houses in China, or houses in Australia getting broken into by police on suspicion of too many people gathering.
In my _opinion_, lockdowns didn't work elsewhere because most cases are not from casual public transmission in places like stores, restaurants etc. Rather, events like kickbacks, dinner parties, and practices like in-home workers (nannies, cleaners etc) continued throughout the pandemic, or resumed shortly after the original March 2020 shockwave. While strident police enforcement of physical distancing could eliminate cases, and seemed to in a few places, the half measures used by most of the world did little-to-nothing positive while being an economic and cultural disaster.
Personally, I never caught COVID and rarely socialized during the pandemic. All the cases I heard of stemmed from the kind of thing I mention above: private dinner parties, nannies and so forth, rather than casual public transmission.
You, or any individual may have taken social distancing seriously but it's clear many or most did not, including people on both political "sides", up to and including governors, members of congress etc.
Further, as a comparison, Tokyo Metro has 38 million people, California has 38 million people. Tokyo Metro has ~6500 people per square mile, California has 240 per square mile. Tokyo Metro had and still has people commuting in very crowded trains every weekday. California mostly people drive cars. California closed restaurants. Tokyo Metro never closed restaurants.
Yes, Tokyo is going through a "spike" right now but compared to California it's still tiny. Compare Tokyo Metro's current "spike" (~2k people per day) with any of California's spikes at 40k per day, 20x more.
Some people will claim testing but that doesn't fit the facts either. Deaths from COVID in Tokyo Metro. California 62k death, Tokyo Metro, 2k dead. And, if you believe the attribution of death by COVID is bad then all you have to do is look at the death rate from all causes and see that Japan is doing much better than the USA
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
I have no idea what Japan did right or got lucky with. Various speculations abound. Japanese don't shake hands, hug and kiss friends. Japanese may be commonly taking some medicine for unrelated things that happens to provide protection. Japanese might have more people with genetic immunity. Japanese mask compliance might be higher. Japanese aren't obese (I'm sure there's some other non-obese country they can be compared to). Japanese have a different diet (not sure what other countries have similar diets)
I recognize that even with restaurants open it's possible just the various other factors are/were enough to keep R low enough.... I really have no clue. Personally I mostly stayed locked up. I live alone. Saw less than 1 person a month in person, usually an outdoor walk with masks on.
My guess is that the low obesity rate is the critical factor, but that remains somewhat speculative.
A) Japan has a more temperate climate
B) Japan is an island and was pretty strict about locking down travel and forcing everyone entering the country to quarantine for 14 days
C) Japanese culture seems to promote very rigid adherence to rules and proper social etiquette.
If you can act earlier, maintain a external boundary, and maintain a low enough level to trace then I think you can stay in a very good state with minimal inconveniences. But once the infection rate has passed a certain level, more stringent strategies are needed to get back to the same low state.
To address the parent question - one thing to keep in mind is that states are extremely heterogeneous, and "Did or did not lock down/mask mandate/etc." isn't actually a binary variable, but a very difficult to measure continuous response of both policy and compliance.
It became more extreme during the Trump era with many historically red suburbs around cities turning blue and some rural areas turning more red.
Not sure how possible it is to get accurate info in this environment.
"Widespread assumptions that suicide rates would increase during the pandemic are not supported by the growing amount of evidence coming out of Canadian provinces and other jurisdictions around the world, say experts who study the topic."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/suicides-alberta-bc-s...
Please let’s remember it is not a simple lever.
Let’s remember the overflowing ICUs and morgues and the very very limited menu of possible immediate actions - all this amongst unprecedented scrutiny, politicization and division.
We’re human. We’re doing the best we can. Lockdowns do flatten the curve.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-ss-prem-covid...
I think we need something much stronger before we enter into evidence such a powerful allegation.
EDIT: http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess... seems to suggest California covid deaths were underreported to a greater degree than Florida. That would be even stronger evidence that Florida had better outcomes compared with the disruption.
Only followers of fringe left wing Twitter believe any of that.
So there was overcounting, but somehow excess mortality in 2020-2021 is higher than in normal years? How?
>with comorbidity being counted as a COVID death even when the patient had 2 or more serious health conditions already
A high percentage of people in the US have "serious health conditions" like diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure etc. If Covid accelerated their deaths then it should be counted as a covid death because they would likely be otherwise alive now. If you want to get pedantic there's a measure called QALY(quality adjusted life years).
Musk said there would be zero cases in the US by April 2020 among other dumb predictions, so I don't think he's the best person to go to for Covid related information since his domain is technology and not epidemiology. https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/03/13/elon-musks-...
People dying of heart attacks because they didn’t seek timely care because of fear of going to the hospital. Medical screenings postponed. Undetected cancers. Suicides. There is a direct correlation between unemployment rates and disease. My annual physical, due in July 2020 was cancelled. How many other people’s were as well? Also one also should note increases in deaths of despair. That’s a real thing.
Excess deaths can’t be called “covid,” without proof that they were. How would else know Covid was the cause and not the flu? Are we just assuming excess deaths were Covid? The uncomfortable truth is that lockdown proponents don’t want to admit that their policies may have caused more damage than the disease from which they were claiming to protect us.
I don’t know the answer. My point is that excess deaths aren’t necessarily Covid deaths. That’s an assumption, not a fact.
Most of these will show up at a later time. And some of them were caused by hospital overcrowding, doctors trying to save themselves etc. not lockdown.
>Suicides.
Suicides are down.
>My annual physical, due in July 2020 was cancelled. How many other people’s were as well?
How many people die within a year due to something that's caught in a physical? I'd say barely any. If you're counting them then you should also count the lives saved by reduced pollution due to the lockdowns.
>Also one also should note increases in deaths of despair. That’s a real thing.
Suicides are down.
>Excess deaths can’t be called “covid,” without proof that they were. How would else know Covid was the cause and not the flu?
Because flu deaths are included in normal rate of deaths. If you're saying there are multiple times the number flu deaths than during a normal year with no measures to contain it, and it doesn't show up on the yearly disease surveillance, then you're arguing in bad faith.
>The uncomfortable truth is that lockdown proponents don’t want to admit that their policies may have caused more damage than the disease from which they were claiming to protect us.
The uncomfortable truth that pro-covid(and anti-vax people) don't want to admit is that their attitude of calling covid just a flu or something less harmful has caused death, disease, hospital overcrowding, increased number of lockdowns due to increased cases/deaths, and damage from the lockdowns. Compare the economies of countries that strict lockdowns but were able to open up sooner like Australia, New Zealand, China etc.
Do you think people will keep participating in the economy and crowded events etc. at the same rate if there are scenes like this at hospitals? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Y1YakG60s
Now that things are opening back up, if there is hospital overcrowding and more covid deaths and cases due to the pro-covid and anti-vaccine people, then who is to blame for the economic damage and death from ensuing lockdowns?
The jury’s still out in my case.
https://tallahasseereports.com/2020/05/20/rebekah-jones-firi...
Please stop spreading misinformation. Rebekah Jones wasn't a data scientist and was never asked to falsify any numbers. She is simply a liar.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-cov...
Masks in public are not all that burdensome, so imo the mandates were reasonable regardless of the actual impact, but I wish they would have re-evaluated closing businesses a lot sooner, since that did a ton of economic damage, and the benefit there seems very questionable. I doubt the CA statistics would have been any different if they had never banned outdoor dining, for instance, or even just kept most businesses running normally but with an indoor mask requirement.
Comparing CA to TX and FL, it's also pretty hard now to argue that closing playgrounds and schools made much difference either, and that has had a severely negative impact on kids. I understand doing it in the first place when everything was unknown, but they should have been quicker to revise in response to new information.
the best mitigation would have been to get people to generally distance around familiars indoors and don a mask if you’re going to spend time in close proximity or face-to-face for a while. that would have required families to treat each other as threats rather than safeties, which is why that was not tenable. it’s so much easier to treat strangers as threats.
this best mitigation would have led us to violate a visceral belief about the world, creating significant cognitive dissonance, and that’s why we instead focused so much on ineffective measures to protect ourselves from strangers with masks and lockdowns that didn’t tackle the core infection vector through familiars. it’s really not that difficult to unravel what was happening, even at the beginning. watching us dance around this elephant in the room as if it didn’t exist has been no less than maddening.
Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US. There are countries (SK, Japan) with tiny numbers of cases.
There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better.
One key area I think the US did really badly on was messaging - basically, having Trump drawing the whole thing into his orbit made everybody feel like it's just business as usual. It's hard to take something really seriously when the nation's highest elected official talking nonsense about it on Twitter, so obviously people don't follow rules. Public health messaging is really easy to get right, and the nations that have done really badly (Britain, the USA, Brazil) all had heads of state who did the worst possible kind of messaging.
The latter part doesn't follow logically from the first. It can be that performance is essentially random, or determined by geographical factors, or by the pre-existing health of the population, and so on. The assumption that governments can control respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 is at the heart of all of this but needs very strong evidential support, given how strong the evidence against this belief is by now.
If you look at the data then there are no obvious explanations for why some countries did better than others. It's far from insane to observe this. There are a lot of plausible sounding explanations but they all fall apart due to exceptions, e.g. Japan did very little for a long time and yet has hardly been affected. In fact Asia in general has not been strongly affected (Taiwan is another example) despite a wide variety of response severities, which raises the question of whether Australia/New Zealand's relatively good performance is due to location rather than behaviour. Meanwhile Latin America was very hard hit despite some truly totalitarian responses by the authorities.
Your own explanation is especially weak because it appears to be based on a cartoon New York Times interpretation of what happened outside the USA. The British government's messaging was the polar opposite of Trump's. The PM appeared next to two chief scientists every single day, and the government was basically replaced by SAGE, the scientific advisory board. The SAGE scientists took total control of the messaging including designing large scale ad campaigns specifically designed by behavioral psychologists to provoke as much fear as possible in the population. The UK also has by far the highest vaccine uptake in the world. The whole thing had a singular focus, the messaging was very well organized to an extent that evokes people's worst fears of competent totalitarianism and so the idea that the UK was somehow doing the same things as Trump just has no basis in reality.
Yet, in the end, it didn't seem to matter. Sweden has had lower excess deaths despite consistent year-long messaging of chill, relax, it's no big deal. Hence, politics can be pretty conclusively eliminated as the source of any differences.
Anybody who thinks the UK represents competent totalitarianism needs to really think about where they are getting their news from. The UK's response was objectively worse than similar countries, in that more people died per capita, and this was because of two late lockdowns, both late because top politicians ignored scientific advice.
The success of the vaccine rollout is arguably the result of the government's procurement efforts, but also deserving of credit are the UK population (overwhelmingly non-skeptical), and the NHS, which allows for a highly organized and centralized rollout.
Vaccine skepticism isn't based on a question or challenge towards experts - questions or challenges exist within a specific framework, a specific body of knowledge. Rather, it is based on a challenge to the value and nature of expertise itself. As such, it's absolutely compatible with docility, totalitarianism, and antipathy towards questioning. In fact, since experts are experts by virtue of their existence within a specific body of knowledge, they are always by their very nature open to questions and challenges. Attacking the idea of expertise can as such be a way of attacking these areas of open questioning and challenge.
A good example of this is how authoritarian governments are typically hostile to academic institutions.
there are a plethora of open questions in vaccine science and epidemiological policy that naturally allow for skepticism. it’s not only political or partisan. you can strip away the political and still be left with plenty valid skepticism.
and yes, skepticism challenges the notion of expertise itself. it suggests humility is undervalued, that an ‘expert’ knows so little against the backdrop of the world’s knowledge (much less the world itself), especially when the ego becomes intertwined with the ideological. experts over time trend toward surety rather than openness and inquiry, especially as stature rises in a field. it’s so common that the out-of-touch know-it-all is a storytelling caricature.
while it’s not always a valid line of attack, questioning the basis of “expertise” can certainly unveil erroneous assumptions, poor methodology/data, and faulty reasoning. the raison d'être of skepticism is to push knowledge forward, not hold it back, and this sort of challenge is just as valid as any other in this regard.
finally, authoritarian governments are hostile toward academic institutions due to concerns over its power and legitimacy as embodied by... skepticism (of the state and its propaganda).
As for your cited quote, would you like me to cite the thousands of other things government leaders have said over the course of the year that support my point? Yes, the PM is a naturally optimistic guy. None of the people around him are, and they've all been ramping the fear factor to 11 continuously, and in particular they controlled the public messaging not the PM. With the result that there is now a serious problem in the UK with people who are afraid to leave their own homes.
Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics.
Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the middle of one of the UK waves was about as dangerous as regularly riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
You seem frankly a bit divorced from reality. If you go to a chart of the daily incidence rate before either the first or the second wave, then mark on it when the lockdowns occurred, it's clearly visible that they occurred too late.
I had to discourage my at-risk mother from going to a choral Christmas concert last year, at a time when they were clocking 40,000 new cases every day and that number was doubling every few days. That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was, and at the time, conservative ministers were still going on TV and talking about a five day christmas.
If you go to the deaths graph, you can see that as a result of this awful mistake, tens of thousands of people died. This is plainly visible in the statistics. Whatever political axe you have to grind is frankly irrelevant, and to be honest, facetious.
You can also look at the different performance of US states (none) despite very different measures.
That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was
In other words you were terrified and forced that fear on your family, based on a mis-understanding of how to use data to draw scientific conclusions. And now you're accusing anyone who points out the truth to you of political axe grinding, although it's you who just threw in a random mention of "conservative ministers" implying their politics is responsible for lots of deaths. That's a political talking point!
At least here in the UK, lockdown meant not seeing friends or family (unless you lived with them). Was that not the case in the US? Of course if people flout the rules then they won't have any effect.
Outside of those times there were restrictions on meeting indoors (at times max 6 people, at other no meeting indoors at all) pretty much continuously since last April.
"Who do you share a bathroom with" is very important for tracking transmission. In NYC, everyone shares a bathroom.
[0] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dep/water/combined-sewer-overflows...
[1] https://www.riverkeeper.org/campaigns/stop-polluters/sewage-...
Of course, I'm not an epidemiologist or public health expert, so while I have some guesses I'm not sure what exactly they did that was more effective - but there's no question that it was more effective. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what to do next time, I'd start there. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what not to do next time, well...
and no geographer either apparently :D
These countries are also far poorer and in the case of Thailand especially that has been a major contributing factor, as they've been less able to afford closing their country to tourism.
Also, the vaccinated population in either country is at low single digit percentage, so no end in sight for the harsh measures. Compare that to the US or Europe where 50% of population is (partially) vaccinated and, as the result, gradually reopen.
"highest number of cases" here meaning between 1 and 2 cases per million people per day.
For context, the United States is currently at its lowest daily case count since June last year, which is slightly above 100 cases per million people per day.
"Even with various levels of lockdown both countries have 1-2% of the case count of countries that didn't treat this seriously" isn't quite as dramatic of a statement though I guess.
(all figures using the typical 7 day rolling average and data available from Mackuba)
I agree that there could be a way for this to work in the US but it would be a long slog. South Korea seems like they could pull it off. So I'll grant you them for sure as being superior.
What would even be framed in the media when these were really user videos without journalists. Journalists couldn't report live, so i don't think there's something else than opinion pieces.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/08/china-...
However... at least for Taiwan that doesn't feel like it adds up:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan
They've had fewer than 1700 cases, and that's including a recent massive outbreak. They peaked on March 26th 7-day average with 21 cases a day. Granted, the US took maybe a couple more weeks to ramp up to its first plateau, so maybe if it was caught here a few weeks earlier it would have made all the difference. But it feels a lot more like Taiwan just didn't have a lot of travel to and from Wuhan?
That’s bad, it might get a lot worse, and we’re all nervous — but just wanted to add the context because “massive” can mean a lot of things with orders of magnitude difference.
BTW is there a vaccination drive over there? That's got to calm things down somewhat right?
There are all kinds of effective measures (e.g. contact tracing, quarantining of unconfirmed suspect cases) that work when you have 20 cases a day and don't work when you have 2000 cases a day, so going all-in while you still have just a few cases works, because by the time you have many cases, it's too late.
The current Vice President of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te, has a Master's degree in Public Health from Harvard. The previous VP, Chen Chien-jen, has a Master's degree in Public Health from National Taiwan University. Taiwan takes public health seriously, especially after the original SARS experience.
Nobody in Taiwan thinks the virus is a "scam" or that masks are a "tool of oppression." Even before the pandemic masks were totally common. There is complete public buy-in on masks without even having to be asked. Some of my friends work in a clinic in Taipei so I hear updates. I was also in Taiwan last year for a month. The difference in attitude between the US and Taiwan is startling. If the US had acted like Taiwan, instead of acting in a way that was indistinguishable from sabotage, we'd have a lot fewer deaths and would have avoided a recession.
What western government could pull off welding doors shut the way they did in China? Even if the government had emergency powers that "allowed" it, would they have had willing workers to do it?
Western governments have pulled all kinds of restrictions themselves, from curfews, closed borders, and "let's close all retail businesses" restrictions, to mandatory movement monitoring.
Heck, Italy might not have welded doors, but had the Army patrol to enforce strict lockdown, and citizens in northerns cities stay inside.
Sometimes this even meant closing them in-house with the corpses of their dead (from covid) relatives for several days. There were several such reported cases, e.g.:
https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-...
https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-...
There are not enough police in most of the US to actually enforce closing businesses, let alone confining people to their homes. Especially not when half the populace sees it as a political infringement of their rights.
There's not enough police to enforce no traffic violations at all either (what would that be, a traffic cop for every street or car?). That's not how laws work, you just need to make a law/rule and collect fines from the businesses that violated it. If there wasn't the political will to do so in the states, that's another thing.
But in at least a couple of countries in the EU I know of, all businesses were closed (by government decree) except explicitly whitelisted "necessary" shopping (like groceries, drugstores, and such) for months on end.
You say you "just need to... collect fines". And that is the OP's point.
Without enforcement you do not get relevant levels of compliance. Just upping the fines seems easy but if your enforcement percentage is 0 (or close enough to 0 as felt by citizens) you will not get compliance.
Theres a balance if you ask me. If it costs $5000 to be caught after curfew but police go home when curfew hits too instead of patrolling the streets, you will likely have no compliance. If you get caught at least 50% of the time then $5000 probably isn't even necessary and say $1000 will be 'enough' for most people.
I don't know that we would have done anything similar for this one if we were ground zero, but hopefully we would have for something like aerosolized Ebola with a contagious yet symptom-free incubation time.
We did come close to doing some similar things to welding to the Grand Princess cruise ship early on.
That gives the West an independent source of information about what is going on in China. China can still fudge the numbers, but those independent observations place a limit on how far China can fudge without getting caught.
Just because we have two neighboring countries on north and south borders doesn't mean we couldn't lockdown people from coming in...
Literally do not get this argument.
If there was one thing Trump was all in on, it was closing the southern border. His motivations were obviously not COVID for most of that, but the fact is he was nowhere near able to control that border (let alone close it) despite his best efforts.
Before you downvote me, I'm not saying I agree with Trump's policy on the matter, just pointing out that he did try.
Is there any source that even suggests that the US's "southern border" played a remotely relevant role in the US's pandemic?
I mean, COVID spread like wildfire in the US throughout a timespan where the US's central government was quite militant in either denying or downplaying it's gravity. Even today we see states and cities taking militant stances in refusing to implement basic public health precautions. Why is the US's "southern border" suddenly relevant regarding covid-19?
Maybe not perfectly, but surely the vast majority of traffic across land borders is at managed border crossings. The US could shut those down, put the army on any unmanaged roads/routes (don’t know if this is a thing) and stop 95% or more of land border traffic?
Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference to Covid - I don’t know about that, but I do question the impossibility claim.
Even with full legal closure, the borders are porous enough for a border wall to have been a talking point in some previous election debates. Build a mile-tall wall out of mithril, and you'd still be left with a ton of unsecured coastline, connected by some rather convenient oceans...
Given that until recently the US was quite militant in refusing to act upon the outbreak, and it's a country comprised of hundreds of million of people among which about a third showed themselves to be quite defiant towards even the most trivial emergency public health policies, I don't think it's fair to refer to border control as a relevant factor in the US's death toll.
Factually untrue. The US was the first country to shut down China travel. And we got called Xenophobic for it. The mayor of Florence even held a “hug a Chinese” day in response.
https://rmx.news/article/article/fears-of-being-called-racis...
Singapore started severely restrict travel and quarantining arriving citizens a couple days before the US ban.
https://www.gov.sg/article/how-is-singapore-limiting-the-spr...
A faster travel ban for Italy and other EU countries would have done the US more good.
Australia had a major outbreak in Victoria in July last year. Victoria has a 2,550km land border with other states, including with South Australia, which peaked at 10 active cases over the same time period.
The evidence shows that strict quarantining and early lockdowns prevent spread even when there's an outbreak on the other side of a land border, and it also shows that being an island doesn't help at all if you don't do this (see also: the United Kingdom). I don't know why people constantly act like Australia and New Zealand only succeeded because they're islands when they were locking cities down at single digit case counts while the United States and India were packing stadiums full of people when they were getting tens of thousands of new infections a day.
(Despite not being an island, AK is still highly comparable to OZ.)
It also had the largest exodus of people ever seen. About 11,000 leaving per quarter.
The fallout from businesses isn't know yet either, that'll become apparent after EOFY.
Canada did greatly restrict the border!
Australia: Island, hot climate, pretty heavy travel/quarantine restrictions
New Zealand: Island, rural with very dispersed population, heavily restricted international travel
People may argue that the UK is also an island but fared much worse. To that I would say 1) Much colder climate 2) did not heavily restrict travel like AUS and NZ did.
the US was not mostly locked down, and indeed made noncompliance with safety measures a major partisan identity issue for the faction controlling the federal executive, the upper federal legislative house, most state governments, and much of law enforcement even in the other states. It mostly had modest, inconsistent, uncoordinated, and largely unenforced restrictions. A few jurisdictions did at least nominal lockdowns for fairly brief periods (California did twice, though virtually every county sheriff had publicly announced that they either would not enforce orders at all or would do so only by education around compliance by the time of the second one near the end of 2020.)
They failed to actually achieve 'herd immunity' and did not avoid the eventual virus death toll:
https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/sweden-cris...
By comparison Finland, it's neighbor took a much stricter approach and never reached the same level of death.
Finland: 931 deaths at 168 per million with a 1.0% death rate.
https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/finland
Sweden: 14275 deaths at 1406 per million with a 1.4% death rate.
Sweden: https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/gdp-growth-annual
Finland: https://tradingeconomics.com/finland/gdp-growth-annual
Looking at those charts they show very similar economic outcomes for the two countries.
Of the last 4 COVID effected quarters Finland won two and Sweden won two.
And Sweden actually felt the highest quarterly contraction at -7.7% compare to the -6.1% for Finland.
That 0.4% difference suggests Finland's health system was better than Sweden's at handling the virus, as your chances of dying were much less.
When it comes to actual deaths Finland was doing over 830% better (i.e. 168 per million compared to 1406 per million) than Sweden.
Edit: Fixed my bad math. My 90% better figure was out by a factor close to 100.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
Also I've heard the claim that (to be as apolitical as I can here) in Florida they secured the elderly population more quickly and carefully than in New York. You may want to look into that claim.
If New York ONLY ignored the problem that'd be one thing... but they actively made decisions that led to a large number of deaths - and more importantly those decisions were AGAINST the CDC guidelines.
WHY they made the decisions is a rabbit hole... but the facts are simple.
So where would recovered nursing home residents go? Keep staying in the hospital which would mean active covid patients would die in the streets? Or the streets?
Pretty shitty. That people are willing to gaslight around it over politics is shittier still.
Not as I believe initially was case in NY from hospital directly into regular resident floor.
https://www.wxyz.com/news/region/detroit/20-year-old-beating...
And Cuomo has the balls to write a book patting himself on the back for doing such a good job? Utterly disgusting!
This ain't "grandma went to the hospital and got sent back to the nursing home" and it was never about that.
Hospitals were over stressed so they sent sick people to nursing homes.
https://apnews.com/article/new-york-andrew-cuomo-us-news-cor...
"More than 9,000 recovering coronavirus patients in New York state were released from hospitals into nursing homes early in the pandemic under a controversial directive that was scrapped amid criticism it accelerated outbreaks, according to new records obtained by The Associated Press."
Notice: Not "9000 NH patients sent back from the hospital". 9000 individuals NOT nursing home patients sent to NHs
New York, AGAINST CDC guidelines, forced NHs to house sick people that weren't prepared to handle them - and THOUSANDS of old people died because they then got sick from the influx of COVID patients.
You have some seriously confused notion of what happened in New York (and, I think, similar happened in Texas - I may be wrong on that).
And on top of that, the actively hid deaths of nursing home residents that happened in hospitals to further downplay the impact of COVID to the nursing homes.
If you only watch the main stream media it's no wonder you haven't heard any of this :p
There's no particular benefit to one or the other so states do what match their current constituents. And that's exactly what you'd expect in a democracy.
Densely populated places that would have acted flippantly would have been much worse.
Densely populated places with mixed unit housing had hurt themselves with the strategy they chose.
So basically California and New York could just barely keep numbers as close to Florida numbers by locking down hard. The methods California and New York chose could have been even more optimized, but not possible for a US government to do.
During the first wave New York and New Jersey got hit really hard. Basically, it was too late to do anything.
You could be less restrictive in a rural area, while the same policies would have been very harmful in cities.
The places hit hardest were very dense cities... viruses spread very well in big cities, regardless of mitigation steps.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-cov...
This is a bit nuanced because lots of people wore masks without a mandate, but it is also true that many people are pretty anti mask and definitely won't wear one if not forced to.
From my perspective it is pretty clear that masks did not have a large enough protective effect to show up in aggregate data.
As far as lockdowns go, they work until you end them, at which point you have just delayed the inevitable.
If you want to look at the data yourself, I would highly recommend the following site run by a prof at University of Illinois (use the population normalized graphs): http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Having a hard time finding the primary study I mentioned but I have provided links with some (population normalized) data below.
Florida counties (scroll down to second graph near the bottom for the start of the discussion): https://rationalground.com/after-nine-months-we-still-know-m...
Various graphs showing infection rate pre and post mask mandate: https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/
More mask graphs, mostly US states: https://rationalground.com/post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-sti...
Where in the data can you see this? Lockdowns don't appear to work. If they did, then places that didn't use them or cancelled them very early would have had drastically higher numbers than other places that kept them and the curves would be clearly moved around. But that isn't visible in the data.
That said, I'm glad you posted those links and agree with you on the lack of effectiveness of mask mandates. I've been posting links like those and various other studies for the past year because it was clear within weeks that these measures weren't having any impact. Sometimes those posts got upvoted but mostly, down down down. Very interesting that the top comment on this thread is one pointing out that lockdowns and mask mandates don't work: it used to be quite the taboo to point that out in this forum. And just recently there were the threads about the WIV, where again, many posts that a year ago would have been sitting at -4 and near-unreadably gray were sitting near the top. It's good to see that some rationality is returning to these discussions, because the data is public and easy to browse. It's not hard to flip through a bunch of countries and observe that you can't figure out when lockdowns/mask mandates started/ended with any reliability by looking at the data, even though affecting the data is the only justification for those measures' existence.
I also looked into the mask literature when the pandemic first started and agree there is no evidence to support their effectiveness (unless they are N95s). Even the meta-analysis published by the WHO stated there was no evidence for their effectiveness but tentatively recommend their use as the cost of mask usage was low.
I will add that most of the studies had healthcare workers wearing masks, and did not test the combination of both parties wearing masks. It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective". In this case it's less about being actually protected (N95) and more about lowering the probability of transmission events, which our common leaky/crappy masks may be able to accomplish under the aforementioned conditions.
I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.
If you remember, please do post so I can take a look. Because, the evidence I've seen is all completely unambiguous and resolves the question completely in favour of "lockdowns do not work and have no effect". And actually there are now many simple examples of that, of places where restrictions were not applied, or were applied much less strictly, or were lifted, and no differences were observed in outcomes (e.g. Sweden, Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Belarus, Japan etc).
It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective".
If that were the case then sudden behavioural changes caused by mask mandates should reliably cause graphs to drop or obviously inflect to a lower growth rate. That should happen everywhere mask mandates come in and are well enforced (which they are, this has been measured). But we don't see that. Of course you can cherry pick a few graphs where there seem to be such inflections, but when you look at lots of them it becomes clear there's no correlation with anything.
I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.
I see people wearing masks outside all the time, as well as in empty cars. Health 'experts' say nothing about any of this. So, I'm pretty sure lots of people do believe that unfortunately :(
Currently, 1.45b doses of a vaccine have been administered, so about as many people have had the vaccine (partially, at least), as have had COVID.
Hopefully the vaccine will make to the rest of the population soon. If not, we’re about 20% done with COVID, world-wide.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina...
I’m pretty jaded at this point. My guess is that the vaccine rollout stalls out in poorer countries and COVID falls out of the news cycle before the majority of deaths.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210422123603.h...
The US isn't an island, and the borders are nowhere near closed. The variants that grow in the other 96% of humans that aren't americans will doubtlessly end up there, and will be end up tending toward vaccine resistance due to selection pressure.
I think this is going to get much worse before it gets better. The disunity of nationalistic selfishness has struck our species once again.
I would get vaccinated ASAP. You're as deserving as anyone else. You don't want to risk spending the rest of your life with impaired breathing.
I know other people who treat this like some kind of joke. You just don't know how bad you might react to it.
I am most worried about the long term effects. If you die, that's one thing, but having lingering after-effects would really suck.
The point was that 100% of the USA could be vaccinated today, and the USA will not be done with covid.
Vaccinating a grandpa helps the grandpa. Vaccinating a super social young person helps everybody else.
Let's unpack that.
Is what you describe a species specific phenomenon i.e. biological in origin? I'm not sure how you'd determine that question, if what you are talking about is "attitude to vaccine inoculation to stave off pandemic spread", since that behaviour is limited to one species, and is fairly recent.
Is what you describe a species wide phenomenon i.e. biological in origin? What does the data from different nationalities tell us? Does the phenomenon occur similarly in all nationalities, or only some?
Is the phenomenon biological in nature, or might it be cultural? Is it even widely held amongst individuals, or might it originate from some other level of organisation e.g. government, media? How would you investigate these questions?
As a private citizen, I'd be 100% for the US helping to vaccinate the world. It's an obvious benefit to the US to not have variants arising outside its shores and coming into the country.
I hope you meant this as a way to sell it, because this view is a terrible, terrible way to approach the world, as it lives outside of the US are only to be preserved insofar as doing so protects USians.
Saving human lives is sufficient reason itself.
I think our experience over the last year and a half has proven that, for many, it is not sufficient reason. Self-interest is a far stronger motivator.
Not just that but it's economically beneficial as well. There are a lot of US jobs that are dependent on exports and tourism from those countries.
(Everyone that can should get vaccinated anyway.)
For exponential processes think of the % done on a log scale. So population of USA is 320M, and ~100M had COVID, or we were 94% (8/8.5) done with it before vaccine was introduced.
Edit-But the effects of the vaccine aren't exponential. You really need to get a good population coverage to axe the thing. And outbreaks can still occur (though less deadly) when/if outsiders come in from populations less vaccinated.
It's R_t < 1 for sustained amounts of time. Where the effective reproduction number depends on the basic reproduction number, and the number of susceptible people, which depends on the number of people who have had coronavirus infections / vaccinations & the durability of immunity.
So some amount < 100% of people infected / vaccinated will create enough spreading "distance" between that coronavirus won't be able to effectively reproduce, because the (limited) vulnerable hosts will be too "far" apart.
But your 'less than 100% infected/vaccinated' is an assumption, not a guarantee. There's an ongoing possibility of immune escape.
Which might not be possible due to many factors, including non-human hosts.
I'm inclined to think that infection by a non-human host would be a different virus with different circumstances (SARS-CoV-1 is considered different from SARS-CoV-2).
Unless, you mean that our reaction to the pandemic globally has allowed a bunch of new non-human reservoirs to form.
We had the chance to eradicate it 16 months ago. But we weren't all ready. Now we'll have to live with it. And as it stands, if another one of those develops, we'll just blow it again. On a positive note: it looks like we got quick vaccination figured out.
With "we" I mean humanity.
One thing I do wonder is whether we will see permanent "Covid-free" zones such as Australia. Or whether they'll drop their guard after vaccinating.
.1% isn't nothing, but it isn't really a disaster either. The Black Death was 30-50% of the population in Europe. The "Spanish" Flu of 1918 killed about .64% of the US population. Things could still get worse of course. But barring that, and considering the absolute disaster that Covid has revealed our political system and interlocking health and government bureaucracies to be, I think we got off lucky. If this had been a "real" plague, of the kind humanity has faced repeatedly in the past (and has been expected for some time now), we would have been totally and utterly screwed.
Will this serve as a wake-up call? For the most part, probably not. The best we can hope for is that some of the new thinking and systems created for this situation will still be around when the other shoe drops and we really, really need them.
Not necessarily. Part of the reason there was so much pushback against public health mandates was because covid was so tame. You are being forced, by the government, to wear a mask, isolate from others, and stop going to work for an entire year for a disease that, for the vast majority who get it, just makes it so you can't taste or smell anything for a few days along with fatigue and flu-like symptoms. If it were like black death and 50% of people who got it were dying you better believe there would be bi-partisan support for mask usage and lockdowns.
Some call this a test run. I'm not so sure crying wolf qualifies.
> a disease that, for the vast majority who get it, just makes it so you can't taste or smell anything for a few days along with fatigue and flu-like symptoms
People who’ve been sick and survived, even with minimal symptoms, are experiencing long term health issues. It’s one thing to recognize that the early estimates overstated mortality. It’s another thing to minimize what people who’ve survived infection are experiencing.
I would say 65-80% of non-hospitalized people being fine is consistent with the prior comment's use of "vast majority".
The CDC and others have looked at at long term effects, which is where I got those estimates. If you mean it's too early to tell because not enough time has gone by, then we could say the same about the vaccine (which is somewhat valid for both sides, but lacking evidence relegates it more to a belief than fact-based opinion).
The comment wasn't minimizing the impact. They were simply stating that people didn't take it as seriously as they would have if covid was more impactful. I think this is a valid point. We see similar issues in attitudes for other infections that can carry longterm impact (even lack of education and protective measures around stuff like hepatitis and HIV).
> just makes it so you can't taste or smell anything for a few days along with fatigue and flu-like symptoms
Maybe for the “vast majority” that’s true, I can’t speak to the distribution of ongoing impact people are experiencing or will over time. But there are a lot of people who have been infected, have survived, and have ongoing complications that go well beyond this description.
"Maybe for the “vast majority” that’s true"
That's why they qualified it as such. Even the flu has long term impacts in 10% of patients. So yeah, long term impacts are a concern, but the attitudes of many people (the commenter's point) are based on the fact that the majority of people are fine. For example, have you ever considered that you have a 10% chance of long flu effects? I would guess that like most people, you have not, because the vast majority of people are not affected by it.
In the end we are making all this effort to stop a virus, while we sell (with profit) cigarettes that makes each years an only slightly smaller number of deaths. So to me, if we care about public health so much, just stop selling tobacco and we reduce the mortality. But do we care? In the end, we need people to die, at one point.
If you don't think death is a big deal, you are welcome to live your life courting it. But I don't get the performative lack of empathy for those dead, those deeply sick, and the living who have to deal with both the rest of their lives.
Instead, you have this insidious disease that is so easy for people to compare to the flu and common cold, and it preys mostly on the oldest and most frail, so many people went with a "I'll be fine" attitude. And most of those folks did survive. And the virus just continued to spread, steadily doing its thing, killing millions of people worldwide.
Look I wore the mask like everyone in HK since the first day, but you have to admit you talk of it like it could kill you. It wouldn't, deaths are rare.
Millions of people are not a big relative number... There are things that must kill way more that you consider absolute necessity, like coca cola, whisky or cigarets.
That’s the point that all people challenging the lock downs and mask are trying to make. It just kinda ignores the whole “this can cause it to be more likely to be encountered by a person who will handle it poorly” thing.
As to your "millions of people are not a big relative number" point - at the peak of the pandemic in the USA, COVID became the leading cause of death.[0] That seems fairly major in a relative sense.
[0] https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/slide/covid-19-now-...
Which is to say, comparing deaths across centuries is hard. It’s hard to say how many people COVID would have killed without oxygen and intubation in the time period of the Black Plague. That it killed as many as it did even given our medical advances may indicate that it is in some absolute sense much worse, not better.
The populations were much lower back then. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, so there are probably many more deaths to come.
As a percentage of the population, why would this matter?
Other than for population density which you would generally expect to cause an increased rate of infection, not less.
Conservative estimated deaths: Coronavirus - 3M Black death - 75M (in ten years) Spanish flu - 35M
California doesn't export much in the way of staples, so that's probably quite a stretch: https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/
In general arguing that a particular authors contributions in an area have been less than stellar is not an ad hominem attack.
0.23% IFR might be correct or even too high for India or African countries where maybe 2-3% of the population are pension-aged. In western countries with 18-20% pensioners, IFR is definitely above 0.5%.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... Look at the second table
Pretty much ever country has seen a 15-20% increase in excess mortality rates (20% more people dying than averages in the past), this is huge.
This is one of the best up to date visualizations on this topic, scroll down and see breakdowns by country - https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...
I mean, if you go back far enough, 1 out of 5 people died by homocide. That still wouldn't make it reasonable to say that we're "relatively good" if only 10 million Americans a year are getting murdered.
Death, and specifically premature death, is still a very unfortunate reality. Playing it down as if "well it happened more often in the old days" is, frankly, a bit bizarre.
Also we must evaluate the increase in mortality in a longer period. I can as well being that most of the people that died of COVID were either old people or people with other health issues that would have died anyway in a year or two.
The problem with COVID to me seems that everyone just remembered that people will die. In the old days death was normal, there were wars, there were al sort of illnesses and infections that caused death, it was common to see people die even at young ages. And I don't talk about centuries ago, it was like that till the end of WW2.
Nowadays we are used to people that lives till 90 years, we no longer have wars, we are able to cure practically every illness, so a virus that kills slightly more people that we are used to see terrifies us. But in reality, it's nature, we will all die one day, COVID or not, so there is no real reason to fear it to me. In fact, we will live worse life because of the fear of this virus, and all the restrictions that we had put in place to avoid that (without so much success, in the end).
Are you sure you thought this whole thing through?
It's kind of like zooming in to a stock market graph so the spikes look bigger.
People can read and shout - I WAS RIGHT!! Only 0.1% people die of covid, lockdowns were unnecessary, masks don’t help, everyone’s a sheep for believing covid is anything more serious than a flu. Now they want to vaccinate us for this, what a joke. Wake up people!!
This is how people can misunderstand and spread misinformation because they don’t have the experience reading and interpreting such data and make conclusions.
Per [1] United States’ current covid deaths is 912k. That is twice the amount USA lost during WW2.
So on one side of the spectrum we have “wake up people, 0.1%, this is a hoax” and on another side we have that more people died from covid in a single year than the sum of all war and terrorist casualties USA had in the last 150 years.
Context matters.
[1] - http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess...
It's true that fewer lives were lost to wars in the past 150 years and terrorist attacks. But that's also a somewhat misleading data comparison. Terrorism is basically nothing for Americans but is implied to be relevant. The 150 years mark is carefully chosen to avoid including the civil war, which comes close to matching covid numbers on its own, nominally, and is hugely higher on a percentage level (it was ~2%).
Context matters. Normalized to population size, you would need 20 COVID 19 pandemics to match the scale of the civil war. The proportional rates for other countries besides the US which tended to do quite well in WWII were obviously much more slanted towards the effects of war. Some light googling suggests Germany lost about 10% of its population during wwII. The overall world lost about 3% of its population (~80 million people).
Covid was not a hoax, but you're pushing a fair heaping of bias while implying to take any other view would be misunderstanding or spreading misinformation
You seem to be taking it a step further to create a messaging strategy around these numbers that will cause the reaction you think is best for everyone. While the intent is noble and may work in practice to some extent, I don't think that's a good thing. That leads to a lot of distrust of experts because people can sense it.
Early in the pandemic, when most everything was shut down, I had to run an errand and ended up driving down some streets I’ve driven many times before. The percentage of cars driving erratically on the road was much higher than usual.
I figure one of these might explain it:
1. People are stressed / distracted, and driving poorly because of it 2. Most drivers are well-meaning and conscientious, but most of those conscientious people were staying at home as public health officials directed, so the few people left on the road were more disproportionately less conscientious 3. Fewer cars on the road meant I noticed the bad drivers more readily
Other hypotheses?
Drug and alcohol use is up, due to lack of entertainment outside the home, and that affects driving as well. More speeding or racing for thrill seeking as a result of boredom.
Many new drivers for Amazon Prime, Uber Eats, Fedex/USPS etc. who are under time pressure to deliver fast, which they're not used to.
For example, people treating a red light as a four way stop, or just slowing down and running through it.
It didn't last very long as far as I observed, but it definitely was a thing in Portland.
At the time I thought it was because there were so few cars on the road. Your point, 2. seems like a solid explanation to me.
In some cases it wasn't just that drivers were "not as conscientious," but more actively taking advantage of a lower amount of vehicles and LE patrol.
There is some evidence of this from the multiple record-breaking Cannonball Run challenges performed in May and June 2020 with no new records recorded since. [1]
Another explanation is that well-meaning drivers were treating urban driving the way folks do out in rural areas, where stop signs are sort of followed "as appropriate" by locals.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Run_challenge#Durin...
"The nonprofit National Safety Council estimates in a report issued Thursday that 42,060 people died in vehicle crashes in 2020, an 8% increase over 2019 and the first jump in four years.
Plus, the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven spiked 24%, the largest annual percentage increase since the council began collecting data in 1923."
"Motor vehicle fatality estimates are subject to slight increases and decreases as data mature. The National Safety Council uses data from the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the CDC, so that deaths occurring within 100 days of the crash and on both public and private roadways – such as parking lots and driveways – are included in the Council’s estimates."
It's hard to figure out exactly how to credit this—perhaps the overall excess COVID deaths are being counted as part of the "100 days"? But the USA Today article quotes lots anecdotal data from state highway officials that back up this claim, including an increase in speeding tickets and an increase in crashes that involve intoxication over the same time period: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2021/03/05/pandemi.... The 8-9% number they quote is also backed up by Minnesota's own statistics, which I would imagine are more limited in what they consider a traffic death.
Is this true? The rest of the possible explanations you cite make sense, but the USA Today article I cited earlier contains a quote from the Minnesota traffic safety department saying that the number of speeding tickets handed out went up in 2020, almost 100% (from 500 tickets in 2019 to 1,068 in 2020).
A 24% spike in the US is absolutely insane.
While the excess deaths are awful, it’s also important to keep the number in context. The death rate has been decreasing for over a century, and in absolute terms, the death rate of 2020 looks like the year 2000 [1].
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/25/is-it-real...
About a third of US deaths were in nursing homes, and that doesn't include people who probably could / should have been in nursing homes from a health and self-sufficiency perspective. 85% were 65 or older (65 isn't especially old that's just the lowest data threshold I could find). I am fortunate enough to not know anybody who died from COVID.
Concerns about long lasting effects might be true. We might see this having substantial long term effects and that could be bad. It could be worse than the impact of the deaths.
That aside however, I just don't think a one time 20% increase in annual mortality is that terrible, but that does not mean that the virus was trivial.
If I'm understanding this chart correctly, forecasted 2021 death rate per 1,000 people (not covid adjusted) plus 20% is less than the 1970s... and the next 50 years as well.
(EDIT: Sorry idiot math. The 2021 rate + 20% is above any historical rate since 1970, and is on par with expectations 2050 onward)
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...
This includes all sorts of demographic assumptions about age, but so does COVID, I would argue, in the least convincing demographic groupings possible.
Maybe COVID was a genuine threat but on a whole we did a pretty good job and it wasn't that bad in total effect as a result?
Using the entire human population also skews things because the deaths were concentrated in North America, South America and Europe. To over generalize, Asian countries did a much better job at managing the pandemic and have a population of 4.5 billion people. Most of the deaths were concentrated in the remaining 2.5 billion.
We should probably assume that, in addition to not following some practices we should have, we also did a lot that we didn't have to.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html list the states by "of all time" and "deaths" which shows FL with 168 deaths per 100k and CA with 159, only two slots apart.
For one thing, regardless of state mandates, you can bet your buttons that a huge number of residential/nursing facilities for seniors in Florida did lock down, and thereby protected those most likely to increase Florida's numbers.
If you want to see the effects of policy, don't compare states (especially big diverse ones like California). Compare, for example, San Francisco (with peak 7-day-average new cases of 363, total cases 36.7k, and population of 874k) and Miami (peak 7-day-average new cases of 3240, total cases 494k, and population of 2710k). Per capita, Miami was about four times worse.
SF: https://www.google.com/search?q=san+francisco+covid+numbers
Also, case numbers are a bad thing to measure. Death numbers are more reliable.
EDIT: also, it appears state policy exacerbated the nursing home problems in California:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/06/editorial-newsom-falt...
Those years of life are still lost.
It’s true they would have died eventually anyway. But that’s true of everyone.
In the end everything just shifts number because we all die. I just think this virus mostly hit the people at risk of dying which should have been made it morally easier to let them die, rather than hurt others trying to keep them alive. But that's exactly what the western world did. I would understand it if children where affected. We would morally justify that someone with cancer dies a bit earlier if we can safe the life of someone who still has many years to come.
Similarly, it’s disheartening to see so many people — especially on partisan lines — promulgate the talking point that we just need to “learn to live with it”. This is insanity. Annual mRNA booster vaccines ad infinitum, with continuous vaccine passports is a wholly inadequate vision for the future. Melbourne, Oz — a diverse, international city of 5M — demonstrates it’s very possible to eradicate Covid with international, interregional and interstate border closures, with hard lockdowns plus federal financial support. Four months later, zero covid.
That doesn’t sound like a long-term problem given the imminent rise of drone patrols, and is likely short term correctable by bolstering security along the US southern border. Like many aspects of the US’ abject failure in managing the pandemic, this seems like a “lack of political will” problem more than anything else.
So, if looking at historical trends and the current demographics as compared with those trends we had a prior expectation of your 1%, then what we we actually observed is 1.17%.
So the pandemic is responsible for the 17% (in this scenario) uplift above baseline plus an unknown portion of that baseline itself.
To be honest one cause, which changed a lot of behaviour that rolls into the baseline, pushing the global baseline up that much seems pretty impressive to me.
Would be also interesting to consider distribution of that excess and how China fared in the excess mortality department. After the early days they seemed to keep it tightly under control, and they contain an enormous portion of the world’s population. That might suggest that excess mortality elsewhere was even further above baseline and the excess mortality only looks this good because 1.2 billion people mostly stuck to baseline?
It will indeed be interesting to see how the distribution of deaths plays out.
Out of curiosity, do you have any sources on that?
I’ve been interested in this topic after observing, locally, a number of politicians who had previously pushed hard to cut funding for mental health and who were ideologically opposed to the concept of lockdowns suddenly and vocally expressing a great deal of concern about mental health & a supposed uptick in suicides that was (they claimed) going to be worse than COVID itself.
When all was said and done, though, suicide rates in my locality were significantly lower than average: https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/suicide-deaths-in-alberta-in-2020...
Where are you getting your information from.
If plane crashes increased 17% in a single year, it would be bit. If cancer deaths increased 17% in a year, it would be pretty remarkable.
It will also be interesting to see how death rates behave in the following years post covid, since it did affect elderly population disproportionately.
It will take years still at that rate, but they also have been doing a reasonable job of meeting and then increasing their projections.
This is why when economists talk about consumers acting as rational market participants I just laugh and shake my head.
Have they met people?
The import of behavioral econ. definitely remains understated today. I am also interested in philosophical thinkers, like Elizabeth Anderson or Michael Sandel, that take questions like these and explore the implications that they might have for how we ought to structure society.
This isn’t someone deciding between 15% monthly and a nice 4% annual personal loan. This is someone deciding between 15% monthly and homelessness. Choosing the interest rate is rational.
If she's not able to pay back the loan, she will be killed and her family is responsible for paying it back. The amount of undocumented suffering in the poor world right now is huge.
A standard payday loan might be 10% on a $100 advance, repaid after 2 weeks (when your next paycheck comes in). That translates to a 260% APR, even without considering compounding.
> By the year 2017, the United States was already suffering more excess deaths and more life years lost each year than those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/United-States-COVID-19-was-...
[1] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...
Saying the subtitle.
Elsewhere, meaning relatively poor countries. But even within the rich world the poor within those are disproportionately affected by Covid (deaths). But those ppl - at least in the USA - have worse health outcomes in general already.
Covid is both a disease and a symptom. Unfortunately, the disease lens is being used to distract from how it's a symptom of deeper longer running societal problems.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/communities-color-...
If the author can't at least present evidence for their case within a reasonably accepted scientific standard framework (e.g. graph legends, correct units, etc.) , than the evidence should ve dismissed until they can.
Where is the peer review for this content? Why is this low caliber content showing up in my HN feed?
Can we please do better?
With new births added in were still growing the global population
You might try https://outline.com/PYEgK3 which should fix both problems.
https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-e...
https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-e...
https://infographics.economist.com/2021/20210515_FBC103/inde...
I find this behavior quite disgusting and sadly seen it on many sites.
Seeing 600 a day is something I hope we never see again.
As I see there's very little of it "on the american side of the internet", meanwhile "here" they tend to cause a lot of disruption and shitton of missinformation
This means there will likely be covid hotspots and reservoirs for a long time.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/states-r...
Just last night I met a guy that lives in my building—a gregarious blue-collar type guy. At one point he got kind of hushed and asked me if I had gotten the vaccine (yes) and what my experience was. He divulged he was hesitant (but “not like that”), citing concerns about possible unknowns or side effects. I just tried to convey my honest (very positive/no side effects) experience, some spare stats about vaccine protectiveness, perks (“you can go to Greece!”), and warmly encouraged him to go for it. I like to think I passed my CHA check, since he nodded his approval and said he was going to keep his appointment.
My sister and her husband (a private school teacher earning ~$40k a year in San Diego) recently lost their insurance, only have internet via the library, etc. She is not an anti-vaxxer by any stretch, but is often (understandably overwhelmed by interacting with the healthcare system. In her case, she just needed some reassurance about access/costs and some help scheduling.
Anyways, there are many others out there like them. What seems like a no-brainer to many of us can often be more complex decision/task for many everyday people. And many of them are right there...just one non-judgmental conversation or helping ha f away from being nudged in the right direction.
I live in the state of Maryland and yesterday our governor lifted the mask requirement for vaccinated people. I am a fiscal conservative and am vaccinated (got it as soon as I could, because science and common sense informed me that I should). I have relatives, including my own mother, who are far right wing and will not get vaccinated because they believe COVID is a conspiracy and/or "fake" (... I know). As far as I'm concerned, folks who refuse to get vaccinated are on their own and all of the remaining vaccine doses should get sent to people and countries who actually want and need it most. I realize that's cold. I also realise that's a logistical nightmare, but I have zero empathy for people who refuse to get vaccinated and then contract COVID.
So, I am for vaccines, but in regions where vaccines have been fully offered to every single citizen that wants one, I am against forcing the wearing of masks. I still carry a mask in case I'm in a situation that warrants, but I will not inconvenience myself any longer for someone who refuses to do the bare minimum to protect themselves from COVID.
Appreciate the link and I fully concur with your analogy. It may boil down to some psychological primitive (perhaps some deep-rooted defense mechanism that developed in my youth), but within this analogy I also say "let people wear or not wear helmets on bikes, the risk and evidence have been clearly presented for decades".
I know, in my heart of hearts that this is a cold stance. Perhaps because you can't possibly assume to know the circumstances that led a person not to wear a helmet on a bike (or get a vaccine). Maybe they're a young teen revelling from their parents or were extremely sheltered in some way from the evidence that would have changed their mind. There are a lot of "if's" here. At some point, in my value set, you have to draw the line and look out for yourself and loved ones first.
I went out today without a mask and it was amazing (it felt better than I expected). That said, based on your comment, I will give more consideration to wearing masks in public as general practice for the next month or so. However, I can't live like that forever. There will be a turning point.
Clearly I was not suggesting the concept of a virus reservoir was a conspiracy theory. I don't know if you were being deliberately obtuse, but it does not help the conversation.
The parent made 3 claims, increasingly improbable, with the last seeming to be a hateful conspiracy theory.
>> Except these surrounding towns act as virus reservoirs for the large cities.
The assertion is the towns acts as reservoirs for cities. Is that really true?
>> That limits the effectiveness of restrictions.
Is that really what limits the effectiveness of restrictions in cities?
>> The “become COVID-19 carriers to own the libs” strategy kinda worked.
It's pretty obvious this is the conspiracy theory I was talking about. The suggestion seems to be that conservatives in surrounding towns (but not those in the cities) had conspired to develop a biological warfare strategy based on becoming infected in towns and then traveling to infect nearby cities.
This is one of the most hateful, unhinged paranoid delusion I've ever read about COVID. But this kind of thing doesn't raise many eyebrows on sites like HN because people think it's plausible or even likely ("yes it must be those hateful angry racist divisive conspiracy-theory-believing conservatives who are always out to get us, clearly it's conservatives who are to blame for any and all political failings that occur in liberal-run areas").
This all said, there's a germ of truth in the unhinged paranoia - it's a bit like rolling coal. You heard of rolling coal? It's where people modify their trucks to make them emit toxic black smoke. It's bad for your engine. It's bad for your fuel economy. But, it's also bad for those pussy cyclists and eco-freaks who keep on going on about global warming.
There is a powerful current in politics across the west that is actively, self-destructively antagonistic towards anything an expert says - and it's not based on profound disbelief in the value of expertise, but rather a deep disaffection, a desire to tear down the whole edifice of culture that makes you feel small - and that has carried into coronavirus precautions, where the bogeyman is not the virus, but the intrusive, patronizing and sinister powers of 'public health', a perfect representation of the entire institutional culture that your average NRA member hates.
The concept of viral reservoir seems to be pretty basic and well established concept in virology, both in terms of macrobiomes (i.e., populations) and in terms of microbiomes (i.e., microbiotic community in the gut).
A quick googling will show you a huge list of well-research introductions from reputable sources, if you're interested in the topic.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27178252.
It was certainly not my intention to start flamewars so I will make all endeavours to stop doing that (and stop beating my wife etc). From the votes and subsequent productive discussions in the thread you disconnected, it seems like a good number of users agreed with me, and we were able to shut down the conspiracy theory talk while leaving the door open to further discussion of the interesting parts (virus spreading between towns and cities). So I genuinely don't see the problem, but I can hold my nose and try to be gentler with conspiracy theorists if that would help.
Because I will continue to call out baseless conspiracy theorists and hateful / flamewar comments as I see them, while trying to be calm, measured, and proportionate in response. If calling out baseless and harmful conspiracy theories proves too much for fragile users or moderators to cope with, I'm more than happy to move along from your site, and leave you to your "different quality" discussions and conspiracy theories.
Intention not to start flamewars is good but not sufficient. You also have to actually not start them (or perpetuate them). https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
India had been seeing near 400,000 cases per day. That's an entirely bogus number of course. And it's near universally agreed upon that it's bogus. The question is whether it's a million, two million, five million, whatever. What's actually closer to the truth? That's where everybody abandons ship, I never see the news media go deep into that part of it (and yet they happily report the made-up flu numbers every year).
Part of the comedy of it, is that the supposed truth enforcers are enforcing a fraud, because none of these official counts are anywhere close to real, no matter which country you pick as the topic.
Is India seeing 4,000 deaths per day, or 10,000, or 15,000? It's a dramatic difference across a month of time. The best you'll get out of the media is a little edge statement of: but it's suspected to be under-reported. Yeah, no kidding.
The US has seen 33 million cases of Covid - that's the reported media line in every story. Everyone knows it's bogus and doesn't represent anywhere close to the number of actual infections in the US and yet it's reported on as properly representing the scale of the pandemic in the US. There has been so much intellectual fraud in this pandemic.
So the obvious question: if they very widely report the made-up / guess-work flu counts every single year, year after year, across all media, why haven't they been doing exactly the same thing with Covid? That's what I want an answer to. Everyone avoids throwing out flu-like guesses on the real scale of the pandemic - the CDC doesn't want to do it, the media doesn't want to do it, the government broadly doesn't want to do it. Why aren't they reporting that it's more likely that there have been 60, 90, 120 million (etc) cases of Covid?
edit: and the downvotes on this are fascinating too, given what I'm talking about is rooted in obvious reality not propaganda or conspiracy theory. I've noticed reality - objectivity, facts, logic - has been particularly unpopular during the pandemic, people have been letting their emotions control their reactions to everything. I don't believe there are very many people ignorant enough to think the official positive Covid counts actually represent the pandemic properly; I do think there are a lot of people desperate to hide from reality for one reason or another, however.
And thats a helpful (if not the only one) indicator on whether there will be enough ICU beds one month from now. If not, we should consider lockdowning.
If everyone of the 7b people lived 100 years, we would expect about 70 million deaths a year, and we know they don't live 100 years on average. Any reasonable range of assumptions puts this in the range of too-small-to-detect. Which doesn't mean it doesn't matter or isn't important, but it does mean that this is not a good method for estimating it.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-deaths-b...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7866842/