> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves.
There is a huge difference between "dying with COVID" and "dying from COVID".
There is a huge difference between "dying with COVID" and "dying from COVID".
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
[3]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
"About 7% of L.A. County’s total staffed ICU beds are taken up by COVID-19 patients, compared with 15% during the summer Delta wave and more than 50% last winter. "
"In early November — before Omicron swept around the world, and Delta was still dominant — 75% of coronavirus-positive patients countywide were in the hospital for COVID-related medical issues, Ferrer said.
By late December, the same was true for 45% of coronavirus-positive hospitalized patients, Ferrer estimated."
"During last winter’s COVID-19 surge, about 80% of coronavirus-positive patients in the emergency department at L.A. County-USC Medical Center were being admitted to the hospital, and nearly half of those went to the ICU, Spellberg said. Now, about a third of coronavirus-positive patients are admitted, and 20% to 25% are going to the ICU."
[0] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-07/fewer-co...
The distinction you're making isn't new - it's literally years old at this point.
Note it's still bad, you don't want to catch it. But you don't want to catch the flu either. People who think the flu is nothing are confusing it with a common cold - I got a flu Jan 2020 and couldn't get out of bed for days.
The more important point is we've just been ignoring every other "long X" condition, like multiple sclerosis.
How do you remove people who die in the hospital for other reasons but have a mandatory COVID swab done and are positive?
And that's not to say an explanation other than covid is impossible, but it would need to be compelling.
Delayed medical care because of Covid fear. I missed my annual physical two years ago and ended up with a heart attack I barely survived last October. People were delaying routine screenings such as mammograms, physicals, and other preventative care.
There are also increases in suicide, deaths of despair, especially in younger people. Addiction especially.
Nobody wants to talk about vaccine injuries and related deaths. But that is non-zero.
If you just look at the all-cause mortality increase, it neatly works around this problem, and looking at it that way gives a staggeringly higher number than the official tolls
In the UK they are in fact inversely correlated for Omicron. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30558089
It’s not really true if you read further into it. Think about it - if you get nasty infection while under surgery - was cause of death surgery or infection.
> "The clinical criteria will continue to be guided by WHO definition which is basically to report any death where the person had an acute Covid-19 infection regardless of what the cause of death might be," Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield told RNZ.
The death was reported as a "death with covid" in accordance with WHO guidelines. Again, if you don't see the absurdity then you can't be helped.
> Think about it - if you get nasty infection while under surgery - was cause of death surgery or infection.
How on earth is this relevant? The victim was not showing symptoms and did not undergo surgery.
There is still the determination that he was shot, so it's not like we are going to forever think these deaths were just attributed to covid.
Even vaccinated (and never testing positive), the immune response I got from taking care of a highly infectious toddler screaming in my face was terrible and really brutal. I’m not old, fully functional immune system, etc. and it had me out for weeks, brain fog, exhaustion, off and on high fever, you name it. I suspect I still am suffering side effects from the last infection in Jan.
If I hadn’t been fully vaccinated just before the first time he got it, I’d probably be dead.
Pretending that someone who was not as strong or healthy, gets it, then dies didn’t ‘die from Covid’ is probably disingenuous at least 90% of the time.
We all die eventually, it’s the norm for whatever obvious change occurred to be blamed for it, not ‘inevitable entropic reality’ or whatever.
At the end of the day, someone has to made a judgement call about the appropriate factor in a complex system.
Statistically speaking, that isn’t true.
Statistically, Li Wenliang shouldn’t be dead either.
The statistical results reflect the range and distribution of the entire populations exposure and immune responses, which by their nature have outlier situations and responses.
Most diseases, the more exposure you get, the more chance it has to take hold before the immune system can fight it, and the worse it gets.
I’m pretty confident, but I guess the only way we could know for sure is find a statistically significant population of infected toddlers and unvaccinated otherwise healthy middle aged adults to hold them for an hour.
Oh yeah we did that, it was 2020. Turns out basically none of the toddlers died, and for the middle-aged adults, "probably be dead" is > 51% chance, not < 1% as it was in reality.
This great tiktok doc broke it down a year and a half ago.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/corona...
Given how hard “with vs. from” is to tease apart, excess mortality is a good way to look at things, eg
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/17/us-excess-deat...
You also need to take into account the fact that that most of the deaths in the US are amongst the unvaccinated (something like 20:1 last I checked) so your personal risk of death, if vaccinated, is very different from the overall death rate.