Covid-19 has killed more people in the US than HIV/Aids did in 40 years
thenationalnews.com
thenationalnews.com
Deaths from COVID so far have been estimated to be around 5 million.
And this doesn't even begin to consider the differences in age distribution of both diseases.
That will give you an estimate of the life-years the disease has cost us. Then you divide that by the total life years available to understand the expected toll to each person.
I am not going to say, "the toll is X" -- in the future we will understand the toll of covid.
We will also understand the toll of the reaction to covid -- the consequences of people not being able to go the gym, of cancelling doctors appointments and deferring cancer screening, of despair from job loss, destroyed careers, lost schooling, seniors dying in nursing homes unable to see their family members, and shortages.
At the end of the day, when all these tallies are counted, a lot of people screaming about civil war style death counts are going to be deeply shamed for their foolishness.
Second, you are not counting how many of these excess deaths were due to the reaction to covid because people were denied access to doctor's care.
My best friend's father died because he was in an VA care facility and could not get any access to a doctor to diagnose his skin cancer. Because of covid. By the time he got someone to look at his skin, the cancer had spread and he died shortly thereafter. During the entire time, his family was not allowed to see him. Only when they moved him to hospice did they allow mercy visits.
So at least one of those "excess deaths" was due to the reaction to covid, not covid itself.
Third, the death count will keep increasing as the toll of deferred cancer screenings and medical treatment continues, as does the toll of people who lost their careers, the small business they spent their life building, their housing, and their savings. That will continue far beyond 2021.
* Important cancer screenings decreased due to covid: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/important-cancer-scre...
* Learning loss due to school closures: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/17/e2022376118
* Effects of job loss on health: Layoffs could increase mortality rates by 10.3% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5495022/
* Long term unemployment and mortality, mental health: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/23921/...
The idea that every bad thing must be stopped "at all costs" is terrible, hysterical public policy.
Many times the solution may be worse than the cure, and merely restating "but the disease is so bad" does not mean that destroying social bonds and the labor market is a good idea for the society over the long term.
The numbers you want are out there - many in the report I linked. (The preceding quote is from it as well.)
I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to attach a, what, dollar amount loss or amount of appropriate grieving to each person’s death.
The long term cost numbers will become known. But let's say that over a 3 year period there are 600,000 excess deaths, of which 80% are due to covid, so that would be 1.4 million life years, and then after that it goes back to normal (I'm not claiming these are the numbers -- in the future we will know the numbers). Assuming that one battle death in a war reduces 40 life years, then this would be 35,000 military deaths, in terms of life years. You would need 14 million life years to get 350K ~ WW2 deaths. And 28 million life years to get ~ Civil War.
But the relevant number is how many more life years would be lost if we didn't adopt these measures. And here, it's not clear at all what the covid life years saved as a result of the lockdowns would be. I do think in the future we will get estimates of this, but we certainly don't have that data today, so merely arguing that many are dying today is not a good justification for the today's policies. I am really confused by how any criticism of today's policies is responded by how many have died under those policies, as if that was some kind of defense for the efficacy of the policies.
On the other side, start counting the costs of the policies, which will continue for many years, and compare to the number of life years saved if some of these measures weren't taken. Measures that resulted in perhaps 10 million people losing their career, millions of small businesses going bankrupt, tens of millions of children losing 1 year of schooling, etc. Then look at mortality effects of these things.
It's not at all clear that a less strict lockdown would have cost more lives than it would have saved. In fact it's hard to ascribe lifeyears saved to any specific policy profile. At least not to me. Unlike the other side, I am not making strident claims that because a lot of people are dying with lockdowns, that the lockdowns are necessary.
But again time will tell -- people insisting the answer is obvious don't make any sense to me.
If a 90 year old man with failing health catches Covid is that a truly preventable death? Its at least murky what is meant there.
My great uncle had both legs amputated the day before he died in some vain attempt to extend his life. Was that intervention necessary? He was doomed to die by all estimates within the week.
Research the meaning of "excess deaths".
Second, I'm talking about opportunity cost. Saying that a lot of people died under your preferred policy does not measure what the opportunity cost of that policy is. It really has nothing to do with it, or if anything, undermines your point.
Is this a repeat of the ageist "I don't care if those older than me are killed" sociopath mantra?
Merely arguing that it is really ineffective isn't helping your case that all these lockdowns cause more good than harm.
Take a nation that did nothing, like Brazil. It has 600K deaths and 215 million pop. Scaled to the US, that would be ~900K deaths.
That seems to be about the ballpark of where we are in the U.S., right? So what good did all the lockdowns do, exactly?
But let's say the U.S. is 200K deaths lower than the nations that do nothing, so that's how many lives the lockdowns saved.
Again, my point is that you need to count lifeyears, since those are mostly elderly deaths and correspond to say, 800K - ~1 million lifeyears. Or distributed among the population, 1 lifeyear for every 3 people, or 4 months per person. Did the average person lose more than 4 months during the lockdowns, once you consider all the costs? I think a good case can be made for that. Would you agree to shorten your life by 4 months in order to have no lockdown at all and keep your house/career/savings/schooling? To be able to visit your family, friends, travel, and go to the gym? A lot of people would say yes.
Are you really trying to argue that people should just be left to die in droves because otherwise that would have a dent in logistics/the economy?
It's baffling. We have a crisis now because the current policies are not working and the answer is that it's not so bad. People can't even imagine different policies, meanwhile China is very successful with covid suppression.
Hospitals were encouraged to label people as positive/covid deaths because that's how they got funding for the last two years (since no one were getting optional surgeries, how hospitals normally get their funding). If hospitals are incentivized by money to label someone as a covid patient...they'll do everything possible to do it.
The CDC's estimates for deaths from the flu are tiny and irrelevant when compared with the massive impact of COVID-19. It's estimated that in the past 20 years the yearly number if deaths from the flu peaked at 61k in 2017-2018, which is less than a tenth of covid19's death count.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html
Keep in mind that the flu didn't benefitted from public health and safety containment policies such as mask mandates, lockdowns, social distancing, or even changes to workplace higiene. Thus the 730k deaths from COVID-19 are significantly lower than it would be if no precautions were taken.
We also have a covid vaccine now. In the last 30 days, the United States has averaged 2,000 or less deaths per week. Annualizing this comes out to 104k deaths per year.
While this number is higher than the 50k ish deaths per year from the normal flu, it is not 750k per year.
The people who died during the onset of corona virus were all unvaccinated, mostly elderly, in tight quarters, and almost all of them had underlying health issues from smoking, obesity, and heart disease.
Those of us who have survived the initial onset are, based on the official evidence much more able to survive being infected with corona virus.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/adult-flu-vaccinat...
I would like to add that they are vulnerable for a few reasons-- the first being that being old is correlated with dying from covid, the second being that old people are more likely to have been pack a day smokers, and the third being that old people are more likely to have heart disease.