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Comment by mempko | Hacker News Reader

Ok, but over a million people in the US died from covid and even more with permanent damage.

3.5M people died last year in the US. as usual, heart disease and cancer were the overwhelming leaders. covid claimed ~460K, but that's "deaths involving covid", not "from covid". there is no evidence of "permanent damage" from covid. a novel contagion of any kind will exhibit its highest mortality rates at the beginning of its epidemic incursion, and eventually reach steady state. from all indications, the steady state of covid will follow its coronavirus predecessors and settle at negligible death rates. heart disease and cancer will continue to kill millions into the foreseeable future.

that's not to dismiss the threat of covid, but to merely put it in perspective. people at risk (elderly, or with co-morbidities) should get vaccinated and perhaps take other precautions. but none of that fearmongering did any good, and in fact, did a lot of bad, by sowing division rather than fostering unity.

there is no evidence of "permanent damage" from covid.

There is some evidence. But as you said, it's a novel disease and still being studied.

https://www.bcm.edu/news/what-eegs-tell-us-about-covid-19-an...

Some of the EEG alterations found in COVID-19 patients may indicate damage to the brain that might not be able to be repaired after recovering from the disease.

note that EEGs are a very crude instrument relative the fantastic complexity of the brain. it's like putting a rock on the ground to try to understand geotectonics. it's not nothing, but it's not much at all. i wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years, it's viewed much like we now view leeching or lobotomies.

“altered mental status” in EEG context means, like, coma. These aren’t very healthy people.

In 2020 602,350 people died of cancer[1]. Seems odd to use it as an example of a bigger threat when it's entirely comparable, especially when we can argue the "with not of" distinction there - they may have died of systemic failure while also having cancer.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...

It would be reasonable to say, today, that the dominant varieties of SARS-CoV-2 are basically similar to an average to not great flu season, particularly for the vaccinated, where there is still a mortality benefit. In fact, I was at a talk 2 weeks ago where Sir Jonathan Van-Tam said exactly this.

However. This is a long way from where things started.

*> that's not to dismiss the threat of covid’

Actually, I think what you’re doing is worse. As a doctor I’m happy to treat current covid as something we need to live with and get on with, but you’re actually dismissing the prior threat of COVID as well. Dismissing all the people who did die. Dismissing the 140,000 children who were orphaned in the US alone. Dismissing the real contribution of COVID to actual deaths - your distinction of ‘deaths from covid to deaths with covid’ is meaningless when excess mortality clearly shows that without the impact of covid the US population would be 1m higher than it is today.

The fact that you choose to see the COVID information as having sowed division speaks more to the bizarre information landscape you have in the US. Many other countries found the last couple of years intensely frustrating but managed to forge a sense of national spirit in fighting it, and as a result have significantly lower excess deaths, significantly less orphaned children, and significantly lower societal scars to bounce back from.

so where are the heartwrenching anecdotes about heart disease or cancer deaths? otherwise you're just projecting a recency and availability bias. but none of that matters for how we, and especially the press, should have handled the topic.

no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it". every single person on earth will get covid at some point. at best, we've delayed that point a little bit for some people, not to mention some shifting of mortality. note that liver disease and chirrosis deaths rose last year - why aren't we making video montages and pouring one out for them, or their orphaned children, again?

Every untimely death is a tragedy. That's why every country has widespread public health campaigns extolling the virtues of stopping smoking, healthy diets, exercise, maintaining a healthy weight. But these are background noise to most people, and most people don't change their behaviour anyway. If your point is the news should be plastered with images of people suffering heart attacks or cancer wards, i'm not sure what the utility of that argument is. The hospital system has capacity for steady state burden of disease. If Heart disease and cancer patients were dying in hospital corridors, or at home unable to get to hospital, can you actually tell me with a straight face there wouldn't be widespread outrage?

>no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it".

This is simply not true. Countries that avoided early surges, avoided overrunning hospitals and were able to get their populations vaccinated and dealing with lower virulence covid strains have had lower overall deaths over the 2 and a half years of the pandemic.

Australia for example, had largely flat excess deaths in 2020 & 2021 (actually a reduction in 2020, due to no covid, reduced travel, no flu season). Australia started dealing with the actual burden of COVID in late 2021 and 2022, and has seen 10,000 COVID deaths so far. Excess deaths in 2022 is 17.5% above average for the year to end of May. [0, 1].

If the US had of been able to pull together, instead of, as you have, variously dismissing it as 'nothing more than the flu', 'no more important than Cancer and Heart disease deaths', or moving the goal posts and declaring that, essentially, the area under the curve will be the same but the timing will be different (which is at conflict with earlier points) - ie if the US had of been able to pull an Australia (or one of many other countries that didn't just totally shit the bed and hide their heads in the sand) than COVID deaths, scaled for population, could have been in the 150-200k range.

Or, to put it another way, if Australia had of shit the bed as badly as the US did, then Aus would have had 60,000 deaths.

[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-australias-excess-... [1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...

> that's "deaths involving covid", not "from covid".

Unless they all would have died at that time regardless, in the absence of COVID, isn't this a distinction without relevance?

death is often not as simple as "you died of dysentery". your liver might fail, and your lungs are full of fluid, and your arteries are clogged. you smoke like a chimney and drink like a fish, while eating like a recently unhibernated bear. how do you decide which caused the death, especially without some very detailed monitoring of all of the body's major systems?

"with covid" is the same. that's why co-morbidities are almost universally indicated in covid deaths. it's because the people dying of covid are pretty unhealthy already, and covid is not the primary cause of death, but a contributing one, often a minor contributor at that.

the distinction is also important because it has multi-faceted follow-on effects. in terms of treatment, a doctor could otherwise have focused more on treating a co-morbidity than covid. a researcher might focus more on other ailments than covid. the public might have been less fearful and tribal. public health guidance might have been different. it has lots of relevance actually.

That's why you look at excess deaths. Covid increased excess deaths significantly. In other words, those unhealthy people would still be alive without covid, enjoying a longer life.

That's less than 1% of the population. If you're not in the high risk category or living with someone at high risk, and you got vaccinated, then there isn't reason to be overly concerned. Take precautions as you feel the need, but otherwise, life goes on. This isn't the bubonic plague or smallpox.

Over a million people died with covid, not from covid. If after 2 years you haven't got this distinction, do you think possibly you're just severely confused on the topic and shouldn't be discussing it publicly for fear of spreading misinformation?

How is the distinction meaningful? Would these people who "died with COVID, not from COVID" certainly still died if COVID hadn't been a thing?

Certainly? No. Probably? Yes. The average age of a covid death in the UK was higher than the actual life expectancy age.

Add in how overly sensitive the tests were, especially pcr, testing for the virus and not for actual proof of infection... It's all a joke.

Ok, then explain the excess deaths. Explain how more people dying than normal is a joke.

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