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Comment by tigershark | Hacker News Reader

It’s not true. In all the world covid caused way more deaths than smoke related diseases. If in Slovenia it’s not the case then they are massively undercounting covid deaths. And the covid mortality is 1%, not 0.5%. Stop spreading dangerous misinformation.

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I have to disagree

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco

> Tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.

Two years, 16+mio deaths. Total covid deaths, a bit over 5 mio.

edit: even obesity, 2.8mio per year, 5.6mio in two years - https://www.who.int/news-room/facts-in-pictures/detail/6-fac...

Only in India the excess deaths were 4.5M in one year.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-57888460

The total death count for covid will be known only in the next years and it’s for sure many multiple of the current official numbers.

So, which country data do you want to use?

Usa, 480k smoking deaths yearly - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast... , still more than covid deaths there.

And not to mention counting the iffy counting of covid deaths (any death, even suicide within 28 days is a covid death) and covid hospitalizations ( https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/26/exclusive-half-c... ).

Let's be honest here... covid is really bad for old and already ill people. For young and currently healthy, the impacts of lockdowns will be worse than covid, especially for younger children (imagine just going to first grade, unable to rad and write yet, and you're put infront of a laptop with Zoom running, no real-life contact with friends, parents having to quit their jobs to take care of you, and all that to "save grandma", even with vaccines already available).

USA excess deaths are over 1M so it’s still greater than smoke deaths.

646k is for the first year: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29503

646k > 480k if I’m not mistaken.

So, every excess deaths is a covid death now?

20k of those, are just extra overdoses (100k total). - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...

Two years, 16+mio deaths. Total covid deaths, a bit over 5 mio.

I don't get it. You're arguing against government interventions because of relatively low fatality numbers. Yet, the fact that these numbers are not higher is a direct outcome of the world-wide vaccination campaigns. Don't you think you got it backwards?

I'm saying that we violated many basic human rights because of a disease that killed 5 mio people, citing those deaths as reasons to violate all the basic righs, while we're unwilling to violate a relatively minor right (to smoke), to save even more lives.

If you're saying we need a cufrew, because covid killed X people, but are not willing to ban the sale of cigarettes, even though they kill 3.2*X people, you're doing something wrong.

Covid kills X people because of the restrictions, otherwise it would kill N*X people, where N would be a lot higher number than 3.2 because of the secondary problems like hospitals overflowing.

An often ignored fact is that many of these restrictions and the fear many governments have stoked (e.g. fear of going to the doctor, fear of going out, interruptions in work) have caused many deaths. We won't know what the net cost is until many years from now.

Well we'd all like to think that but if you plot cumulative world deaths on a graph there's no inflection point in 2021. The graph just keeps going up and to the right at exactly the same speed as it always did:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

It's really hard to explain this. I admit to being baffled. If vaccines are saving lives then there should have been a clear bend downwards in the trend line of the graph but if any such bend exists at all you have to squint to see it. If anything there looks like a slight acceleration in the first months of 2021 (but it's small enough I can't say for sure by eyeballing it).

Lots of people don't understand the numbers around total COVID deaths, by the way. In the past week alone I've seen internet comments saying that over 20 million have died of COVID, that vaccines have saved "millions of lives" when COVID overall since the start has only claimed (or rather, been temporally associated with) millions of lives, and VE lasted only months due to Omicron and when it rolled out. So it's impossible for vaccines to have saved millions of lives.

But this is understandable when you consider what people tell opinion polls. Lots of people, including people who think of themselves as well informed and educated, mis-estimate the dangers of COVID by orders of magnitude :(

https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...

What I see in this graph is a more or less linear growth instead of an exponential one. That's good news.

But a more tangible insight into why you're wrong and why vaccines do work is to look at statistics for hospitalization in intensive care: these days, the vast majority of ICU cases of COVID are unvaccinated patients. Given that most people are vaccinated, it should be the other way around if there was no difference between vaccinated or unvaccinated. This is a much stronger argument than speculating what a growth graph should or should not look like with or without vaccines.

Why would deaths increase exponentially over a period of years? That would not be expected and was not occurring even before vaccines.

The point I'm making here is that the data is contradictory, which means there is a need to investigate. Trials didn't show any impact on hospitalization or death (because it's so rare, they were too small to get significance). That means the data on them is confounded. For example, in the UK the data shows that pregnancy makes you more likely to be admitted to ICU with COVID but less likely to die. A biological effect? No, of course not. Rather, hospital staff have a lot of discretion on who they send to ICU or not, and they prefer to spend resources on women who are pregnant.

The expected curve without intervention would have an S-shape: initially, you see exponential growth which will flatten out later on when you reach a point of saturation.

In many countries, the intensive care units have not been in the situation where they had to triage, so the selection effects you report have not been necessary there. And even if, no hospital would make the decision on who to assign to an ICU based on their vaccination status, but based on the medical needs. The fact that we see dramatically less vaccinated people in ICUs is most plausibly explained by the effectiveness of the vaccines.

Logistic growth (S shaped) is observed in any specific epidemic regardless of intervention. But what we're looking at here is the sum of all COVID epidemics together.

"no hospital would make the decision on who to assign to an ICU based on their vaccination status, but based on the medical needs"

Your beliefs about hospitals and doctors are romanticized and I already gave you evidence of this. Albeit I didn't cite it, so let me do that now with this analysis of UK ICNARC data:

https://communityoperatingsystem.wordpress.com/2021/12/09/uk...

Pregnant women get admitted more and survive more because they weren't being admitted based on true medical need but rather the subjective feelings of staff that [currently/very recently] pregnant women should get higher levels of care due to having a baby.

This also affects other decisions. Doctors aren't always rational well informed calculating machines:

"We see a similar admissions bias when we examine the hospitalization fatality rates between the fully vaccinated and unvaccinated under 50s with PHE hospitalization data for 218,784 confirmed Delta infections – which show that whilst the 1.7% hospitalization rate of the unvaccinated is almost 2X that of the vaccinated (0.9%), the HFR in the vaccinated is 3 times higher (7.4%) than the unvaccinated (2.4%) and the case fatality rates is also lower in the unvaccinated."

Why does this happen, well, the population has been terrorized for years into believing things that are wildly untrue. The average Australian believes an unvaccinated person has a 33% chance of dying if they catch COVID. They think it's as deadly as smallpox or the plague. 40% of American Democrat voters believe half of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized with COVID! Half!

It'd be great if all the people who believed this nonsense were somehow excluded from the health system but of course they aren't. Quite the opposite: those who understand the true numbers and severity rates are much less likely to want to get vaccinated than those who think it's literally the plague and they're all being fired.

The thing is that tobacco deaths are usually from several years of use. I don't think most of the dead people who died from tobacco have begin smoking this last two years meanwhile covid killing is quite faster.

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