Comment by basisword | Hacker News Reader

Comment by basisword | Hacker News Reader

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>> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves.

You can’t just exclude the data that disproves your point. The peaks were the original variant, Alpha(?), Delta and now Omicron. Deaths in this wave are extremely lower than in any other wave due to severity, immunity and vaccinations. Hospital stays are reduced and shorter. The original point of avoiding covid en masse was to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. Although it varies from place to place the healthcare systems in highly vaccinated countries are no longer seeing that kind of pressure even with high case numbers (still lots of pressure but not enough to risk overwhelming the system entirely).

Deaths are currently at around 2,000 PER DAY in the United States. That is not in any way, shape, or form "extremely lower" than earlier waves. The Omicron wave was equal to the initial wave in severity, and we're still not out of it.

Interesting. Deaths in the US are still a lot higher than I realised. I was basing my thoughts on UK data which I’m more familiar with and I thought would be relatively similar to the US but surprisingly not.

No politicians and news channels in the UK telling people not to get vaccinated.

Deaths from COVID is different from Deaths with COVID.

If they're not dying from COVID then why are they dying in such excessive numbers? Because whether you believe it's COVID or not, you're stacking up ~1500 more bodies per day than you were three years ago. What's the cause?

I think you're both right, but sort-of arguing different issues. Here's two points:

* Covid deaths per-day are at-or-near their highest ever levels

* the current wave is less dangerous

These sound contradictory, but aren't: deaths are high, death rates aren't -- if you catch Covid you're more likely to survive than ever before, but you're also more likely to catch Covid. This is because we're (currently) in a wave of a high-infection low-mortality variant.

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