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Comment by bugglebeetle | Hacker News Reader

> Covid is now here to stay, ranking somewhere in severity between the common cold, flu or pneumonia.

I know it’s ideologically motivated, but it’s surprising people just bold-faced lie about the impact of COVID, when the stats are there for everyone to see. In the US, COVID is on track to kill ~200K people this year:

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker

The cold and flu will not kill anywhere near this number, pneumonia is a consequence of respiratory illness, not a disease in itself, and before COVID, this would be considered an absolutely insane amount of deaths.

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> COVID is on track to kill ~200K people this year

Where are you seeing this? I'm eyeballing cumulative deaths in the linked data tracker, it's about 50k through September 23.[1]

[1]: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths...

Is that tracking deaths from COVID or deaths with COVID? I have doubts that the numbers are not overstated (by how much, I'm not sure).

Looking at CDC data for excess deaths from Jan through July 2023*, excess deaths have averaged around 1.7%. Deaths reported as being due to COVID are running at 2.7%.

Annualizing and turning the data back to excess deaths, that means of the ~200K people that "COVID is on track to kill", only about 53.4K total excess deaths are expected, projecting from Jan-Jul, or projecting mid-Jan-Jul, excess would be only 31.5K.

Perhaps COVID is saving 146K-169K lives and then killing 200K this year?

* This is to avoid the recent data incompleteness. If I include more recent data records, my argument becomes stronger, not weaker. Setting aside the first two weeks in January, the average drops to 1.0% excess deaths overall.

The death from/with covid distinction is only relevant here if there is a systematic difference in over/under reporting of covid deaths between red and blue states. If it's a constant bias regardless of state, it would not change the conclusion of the article. And it could only change the conclusion of the article directionally if covid deaths in red states are significantly overreported compared to blue states.

GP was claiming COVID was on track to kill ~200K in the US this year *

If that's the case, it seems reasonable to compare that claim to the total excess deaths in the country. Nothing to do with red or blue states.

* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37729830

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