CDC at the moment says 12% increase compared to the average of the last three years.
Absolute number of deaths have been rising from year to year, sometimes with jumps of 90k.
Sure Covid has an impact, but whether it is dramatic is another question.
23 karma · joined December 4, 2020
Absolute number of deaths have been rising from year to year, sometimes with jumps of 90k.
Sure Covid has an impact, but whether it is dramatic is another question.
How come number of Covid infection rates is rising, while flu seems to be eradicated? If the measures help against the flu, why not against Covid?
According to the CDC, there seem to be about 12% more deaths than the average of the last three years, or about 300K. Number of deaths has been rising every year, though, sometimes increasing by up to 90k from one year to the next.
In the same vein, you could assume Democrats are more at risk because they put too much faith in masks, thereby entering more risky situations. Not saying that's the case. The point is, your expectation of who gets infected is merely your partisan belief, not anything rooted in evidence.
Show me the computer program that knows how to create a pencil? And then a toaster? How does it know how many toasters will be needed? Is a toaster more important than a smart watch?
Also, if you have such a Computer program, you could use it to beat the markets. You could use it to compute the perfect prices of futures (because you know the future demand and supply). So I guess there is your answer: if you had such a Computer, you could beat the markets, as long as you don't do that, markets are better.
The other "closing of the borders" is about immigration laws. I'm not from the US, but I never understood the anti-Trump position there. Surely, if you have immigration laws, you should try to uphold them. You can criticize the laws and try to change them, but criticizing attempts to uphold the laws makes no sense.
No, that is just a strategy of defamation that you fell for. Basically the "Hitler was a vegetarian" argument against vegetarianism. In short, "a person of type x believes y" does not imply "everybody who believes y is a person of type x".
" And no, just because a militant group actively denies and rejects facts that doesn't make them disputed nor does it means there is no consensus."
If you would watch more YouTube, you would be aware that it is not only "militant groups" who argue about aspects of Covid.
"This is about people actively disseminating and consuming propaganda and disinformation."
There are such people on all sides.
Other people also have coherent belief systems they arrived at through their personal experience, that contradict yours.
I'm more worried about the censorship leading to totalitarian states than extremist YouTube channels.
It also doesn't say why people joined those groups. Maybe they are just curious to see what the crazy people are up to.
It takes basic knowledge of statistics to verify that those things are just random correlations, not causation (show that incidence of certain afflictions (like autism) is the same among vaccinated and non-vaccinated people). That is what the memes feed from. I don't think censoring would help much here, especially as most people know such stories personally. I don't know people directly, but I know people who know people who got sick after vaccination. I suspect many others do, too.
Granted, anecdotes spread especially well on Social Media. It works the other way round, too. Have you heard a story of somebody who almost died, or died, from Covid, despite being young and healthy? Such incidents are very rare, but since they get shared a lot, one such personal report may be shared by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. every one of them now feels like they "know" somebody who died from Covid despite of being young and healthy.
Should such stories also be banned, to ease the psychological burden (fear) on billions of people?
The change of policies in Sweden seems to be entirely political, not driven by the health authorities who stand by their decisions (I have a German article about it, but perhaps you can find something in English). The curve of deaths the second wave is much smaller than the first wave, nothing that really warrants such a change of course. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
As for excess deaths, you really have to look at it over the years, not just at single years. Comparisons with "neighboring" or "similar" countries don't automatically make sense, given that deaths are often driven by local hotspot events (like infections spreading in nursing homes).
You are mixing things together that don't belong together. Covid is very new and scientific discussion is still ongoing. There is no consensus. Anti-vaxxers are about tried and proven vaccines they don't trust.
I think as with other things (like religion), people get mostly "infected" by their peer group. Also there are certain aspects that make memes prevail, like fear and protectiveness of one's own children in the case of vaccines. It's not simply a matter of exposure to YouTube videos.
The propaganda by totalitarian states is an entirely different beasts, it reaches into all walks of life.
Anyway, it is more difficult for non-island countries and bigger countries with more global ties.
Using their numbers, I am not sure how CDC arrives at their estimate of 300K excess deaths, either. The average 2017-2019 appears to be 2833507. With three weeks to go in 2020, according to the CDC there are 2703232 deaths so far in 2020. So using the average of 60k deaths of the previous weeks, we should be arriving at around 2900K deaths, maybe 2950k. That's 120k more than the average, not 300k excess deaths. Jumps of up to 90K more deaths in the yearly account also seem to be not uncommon (among other things because of rising population size).
Maybe there is a delay with death certificates registering, but then the precise numbers don't make sense to begin with, and we'll really have to wait a couple of months for final results.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
12% big enough to worry about - worry maybe, but will it register as a significant event with hindsight (like 10 years down the road)? And the argument of it being "with lockdowns in place" is not really convincing, as other countries with fewer lockdowns have not necessarily fared worse (afaik Sweden does not have more excess deaths than in some especially flu heavy previous years, for example). Also, the claim was that we will wonder about our stupidity of not having more draconian lockdowns.
I think most financial constructs were created by traders, not governments. Financial constructs are basically standard contracts.