U.S. Covid Death Toll Surpasses 700k Despite Availability of Vaccines | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Covid Death Toll Surpasses 700k Despite Availability of Vaccines

nytimes.com

> The new and alarming surge of deaths this summer means that the coronavirus pandemic has become the deadliest in American history, overtaking the toll from the influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919, which killed about 675,000 people.

Typically you calculate deaths at the percentage of the population if you are seriously trying to make a point. It's not like the population of 100 years ago was remotely the same as now. High journalism again, NYT.

Do you know how this current event compares in terms of percentage of population deaths? Would be hard because I think you'd have to control for health as well since it wouldn't be fair to compare current obesity rates with the past.

Age is the other major risk factor. The 1900 age pyramid is completely different than 2000 age pyramid. Within the biologically active sector of the population (persons with biological children in their future, aka children and young adults, or primary caregivers of such persons, aka mothers and fathers of minors), 1918 pandemic was way worse than covid.

https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/055

We’re starting to see the stats change for the delta variant. The article shows incidents of fatal infections now spiking for the 25-34 bracket.

Edit: not claiming qualitative differences in the illness, that’s not what the article is about.

... we are not ... but there are nightmare scenarios ... some human induced ... pray they never come true ...

This is media fear porn. Take a minuscule number. Can't fear monger the number itself. But look, it's 50% larger than it was during the last year's spike. The headlines write themselves:

RECORD NUMBER OF YOUNG PEOPLE DIED DURING THE DELTA SURGE. JOE, 31, DIED OF COVID

PS. The delta spike appears to be over in the South. I bet you never saw that one on the front page of NYT.

PS2. Just noticed the funny choice of words. NYT prefers 'surge'. I prefer 'spike'. Because the data we have so far indicates that state-level 'spikes' are short lived, about 3 months, and then numbers rapidly decline.

PS3. UK data. Two large spikes in spring 2020 and winter 2021. Then a relatively small spike corresponding to delta, apparently receding. Presumably the vaccine program worked quite well. Can we please stop fearmongering 'delta', as if it is the end of humanity? https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths

This article is about each 100,000 COVID deaths in a big country. It’s a psychological number and since the last 600,000 cases, it happens to coincide with a new spike. I don’t think the average reader is more afraid after reading these facts.

This article doesn’t compare state performance. It’s not important to always compare on electoral lines, and it sounds like you want a different article. The NYT is covering this from a national angle; your county newspaper will be more relevant.

For a really large country like USA, state-level data is more accurate than country-level data when it comes to evaluating length of epidemic spikes. It is conceivable to have rolling spikes that affect different states at different times, but when summed up give the illusion of a never ending surge. County data is even better, but it's harder to assess at a glance, probably more prone to cherrypicking.

The capitalized quotes are from the article itself. I'm pretty confident they are fearmongering the specific point that delta is super hyper dangerous for young cohorts.

In my experience, almost no mass death event is computed as a per capita amount. Except perhaps the USSRs casualties in ww2, ever war I’ve ever seen has been counted in raw numbers.

Yes and the exceptions are historical cases where counting is impossible. The Mongol invasion and various plagues come to mind; when whole villages are wiped out we have to talk about proportions because even the total population is an estimate.

I don't think that's typical for catastrophies. You also don't include some factor for better healthcare in 2021 than in 1918 either, or some of the other countless factors one could look at that would tilt the number in either direction.

the logic I suppose is that people are interested in the severity of the event as such. To take a crass example, we would probably not adjust a genocide for population either.

> I don't think that's typical for catastrophies

It is typical for pandemics. For the black plague the deaths are reported at the % of population.

This isn’t what I’ve seen. Historical speculation talks about proportions because they’d have to use proportions to arrive at a total number anyway. Any *demic event with modern record keeping talks about the numerator.

Disaster reporting focuses on absolute numbers because populations have exploded during XX century. Disasters have a whole lot more people in their path, thus a solid chance to break morbid records that sell newspapers. "Record deaths during Japan tsunami" sells a whole lot better than "Yet another tsunami in Japan".

This is media selling fear porn. It didn't start with covid.

The pandemic that kills more people is the deadliest one. Is correct to use absolute numbers here.

Mortality rate is a different measure, also valuable but not the only one that we can use.

Just like walking is deadlier than deep sea diving.

Driving is the riskiest method of transportation yet everyone does it without blinking an eye

Exact. And this is why societies usually focus more in how to reduce the amount of people killed when walking and paint crosswalks in every city, whereas people killed when sea diving is a minor problem for most of us.

Yet nobody says walking is deadlier than deep see diving.

There are good reasons to compare pandemics this way. I think the mutation rate depends on total secondary infections, if you can compare mutation rate between events. Cemetery plots are found on land that’s not growing proportional to population. The risk over hospital beds doesn’t change when the population shrinks, it’s a fixed number. Etc.

I’d leave the proportional figures as a footnote. It’s only useful as a scorecard between countries. Only economists make judgments based on changes in proportion.

This makes sense. As a kind of sanity check, I thought about the Ebola reporting I've read in the past decades and cannot remember any reporting that used the proportion of population. I do remember Ebola reporting that described outbreak magnitude using absolute numbers of people, though.

I'm persuaded.

Ebola comes to mind, yeah. Discussing rates is error-prone, I think. The effects that cause a change in absolute numbers are topically different than the effects that cause a difference in proportion.

So, a bunch of people already replied to note your proposal is non-standard, and the NYT is reporting this correctly, but I'd like to reply to ask: Why were you confident enough that you were right and they were wrong to actually have to add the dunk at the end of your post? Like, it wasn't enough to say "It seems like we should care more about per capita deaths" -- reasonable enough, you could imagine considering the impact of an event in either manner -- but you had to declare your way was obviously right, and then insinuate Of Course The Failing New York Times Blew It Again.

I've noticed this quite often here over the last year; not just someone replying to or critiquing a journalist's defensible choice, but then immediately jumping to indicting the practice of journalism or their outlet. It's already an overreaction when the criticism is true, but it's especially an overreaction when the criticism ends up more wrong than the position being criticized.

A very popular covid comorbodity is obesity and diabetes, which are extremely common conditions in the US. It would be interesting to split those death rates statistics by those conditions as well ( and not just age group).

It may help understand the epidemic, and encourage vulnerable people to get vaccinated. But also maybe focus the public's attention on the atrocious food habits most americans are living with.

This is going to sound cynical but what you suggest doesn’t make money so there’ll never be such campaign in US unless there’s a way to make more money out of it compared to the current state of things - which is very difficult. The entire health care industry and policies in US are atrocious.

I wonder if any data exists that would indicate how much money the Healthcare industry would lose if the obesity rate dropped by X percent. Would be an interesting thing to look at.

Yes, also see the UK where we also suffer similar levels of obesity, and have seen high numbers of covid deaths as a result. However we're not allowed to talk about it due to "body shaming", even though the ones who are obese suffer throughout their lives.

What's interesting is that this number matches very closely with the recorded excess mortality: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-... - for those who think the COVID-19 death numbers are artificially blown up.

the mortality has largely slowed down after the vaccines were introduced... as shown by this graph.

Or, since it's all causes, it might show that covid measures like lockdowns, and others, actually killed more people instead of saving

There are some countries that locked down that show no excess mortality: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ so at least we can say not all lockdowns result in mass casualties.

A “lockdown sceptic” may argue that not all lockdowns are the same of course.

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