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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

Truly a novel situation we find ourselves in:

https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3Ahospitals+intitle%...

Check the death statistics instead of headlines and you'll see it truly is a novel situation - no previous year saw as many Americans die as 2020 and 2021. And excess deaths correspond closely to regions that saw high reported COVID-19 deaths, indicating "COVID-19 deaths" are people who would not have died had they not been infected with and killed by COVID-19.

2022 death rates are still high, nearing 2000 people killed by COVID-19 daily. We can hope that due to the death toll hitting mostly the unvaccinated, plus omicron being a somewhat milder than Delta, we won't possibly be able to hit the same high death rates all year long.

No previous year saw as many Americans live as 2020 and 2021 either :)

https://www.census.gov/popclock/

https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=PEPNATMONTHLY2021.N...

Good thing births offset deaths :)

That data is irrelevant to my point. Compare deaths from 2015 through 2021 on a bar chart and the discontinuity is obvious even to the naked eye.

See the charts shown on https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/25/is-it-real... for a simple visual example.

I think activating “crisis standards of care” is a bit more substantial and worrying than any previous claims of being simply “overwhelmed” which could be subjective. This is what we are seeing here in the US.

https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3Ahospitals+intitle%...

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