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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years

That's surprising. Do you have a source?

That stat has been widely reported, in the U.S. at least. There are more deaths from Covid occurring currently in the U.S. on an average daily basis that at any prior time in the pandemic.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/24/health/covid-deaths-now-y...

NY Times, Washington Post, and other media have similar stories.

From Covid != With Covid

That is misinformation. The current US daily death rate is significantly lower than the January 2021 peak.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-...

The CDC excess deaths count shows the Omicron peak was about the same as any prior peak. Note that the CDC excess deaths data has a tendency to rise until it is at least 12 weeks old, due to state bureaucracy, as explained on their page.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

From your article:

>The people dying from Covid-19 now tend to be younger than before, and they're overwhelmingly unvaccinated, experts say.

To be honest, I'm at the point now where the vaccine has been available for a year. Everyone who was going to get it has had it, and you're not likely to change the minds of those who won't get it. As heartless as this sounds, I'm tired of waiting for those people to come around. They are making the choice to not get it, let them live with whatever the consequences may be instead of keeping shit closed/restricted just because that group is making poor choices.

Edit: I realize that some people can't get it for various medical reasons, and I empathize with them. It's everyone else I'm referring to.

That's one approach. Another is to pay attention to what they're saying and try a different approach to persuasion. It turns out it's not actually that hard to convince a lot of them if you just treat them like human beings. Perhaps even enough to achieve herd immunity and moot the rest.

A good recent video on the subject with something resembling science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va0RCgbywGc

"More than 2,000 Covid-19 deaths have been reported in the United States each day for the past month"

This is 2 weeks old and already out of date. Numbers are in freefall. It's now at 1,357. And cases have dropped sharply and consistently for a few weeks which means the (lagging) drop in deaths will continue for a few weeks.

What? The daily average is still at 1,800.

Worldometers says 1,357 for the 7-day average. But regardless of differences in sources and collections, the trends are the same.

It's still about four airplanes worth of people crashing daily, to put it into perspective.

Not to mention people under immunosuppression or legitimately unable to get vaccinated (e.g. allergies or immunodeficient) - these poor souls are effectively locked into their homes as a permanent jail.

Must we then have vaccinated people join them out of some sense of solidarity?

There are people confined to wheelchairs yet we allow others to walk.

Being vaccinated does not prevent the spread or infection, it only reduces the severity of symptoms, so this doesn't work. Having a vaccinated person sit with them is just as unsafe as an unvaccinated person. Testing, with a period of isolation before contact, is the only safe method. This is what I have to do with my mom.

Yeah its only World Trade Center tower 1 every day. Its not like we'd go to war over those numbers.

>> these poor souls are effectively locked into their homes as a permanent jail.

Why do you believe this to be true? Seems exaggerated to me.

I know a couple of people who are in exactly that predicament. They're scared shitless of catching the virus - and they need 24/7 at-home assistance, which means at least five people that could potentially catch and transmit the virus.

CNN is basically a tabloid at this point.

Everything is a tabloid, including government reporting. We won't know how many people have died of COVID unitl the academics start studying excess deaths and get into years long fights over the minutiae of "with" and "of." We still don't have exact numbers on any modern genocides and likely won't ever.

I never expected a "free democracy" to run into basic stalinist subversion of facts, but here we are.

> but here we are.

2 years into just 2 weeks to stop the spread of information.

If you don't like the source, there are plenty of other sources saying the same thing.

You are not their customer. The customer for these shows are companies sponsoring ads. If you are not paying for the product you are the product.

I'm confused, the graph they show in the article refutes the headline.

It's common these days for the headline - and sometimes first paragraph - of an article to be utterly contradicted by the body of the article.

CNN does it constantly. The headline and first para is editorial, the remainder is reportage. Totally untrustworthy.

Deaths this week in California are higher than at any time in 2020, when every office and school was closed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/corona...

I don't understand that trend happening in California since it doesn't match the rest of the country and doesn't line up with a spike in cases a few weeks prior.

But what's different between 2020 and now:

- We understand covid risk, treatment, etc. better now. There's a box around it. In 2020 we didn't know what would happen, if there would ever be a vaccine, or what variants might do. We don't know what the next variant will be, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, but "variant" is a less scary word if only due to having been through two of them and come out.

- In 2022 the deaths are more voluntary than in 2020. Of course some people can't get a vaccine or remain at higher risk despite a vaccine. And it's a tragedy that the world will remain more dangerous for some, maybe permanently. But after 2 years of on and off measures we know we can't keep it up forever.

I'd be all for making it a social convention to wear masks (at certain times) going forward every flu season, which some cultures already did before covid. While wearing a mask I didn't get my annual cold last winter, which was awesome. If you de-politicize it and think of it as a piece of cloth, it stops being a big deal. But keeping stuff closed needs to stop.

> I didn't get my annual cold last winter, which was awesome

The best theory of why some people are asymptomatic with covid is previous coronavirus infections, from the common cold, so maybe this isn't the best approach. ;)

Our immune systems weren't designed with a clean room in mind. There are a few childhood cancers and problems that are possibly caused by not having enough exposure to pathogens, like leukemia, blood cancers, allergies. So, I think it's complicated.

> 2020

That's a convenient time window. If you extend it even one month into 2021, you include the large winter surge.

> at any time in 2020

It looks like today's 7-day average deaths in CA (192) is below the Dec 31, 2020 number (250).

https://i.imgur.com/aO5zJwL.png

Is a random image on imgur really a source? Really?

It's from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

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