This has me a bit confused: I look at the stats on cases and deaths per capita across various U.S. states, including California (which was very locked down, at least in theory) and Florida (which was flippant towards risks of contagion), and many states in between. The per capita cases+deaths are nearly identical across many states with very different approaches. This left me really wondering which measures were and weren't necessary. Anyone seen good studies or analysis on this?
Legitimate question, please no political commentary.
The earth’s population is 7.9b, so the excess deaths are 0.1% of the population. COVID’s mortality rate is about 0.5%, so roughly 1/5 of the population has has had it (or died of other related things, like starvation in developing countries due to the lockdown stopping food harvests in California).
Currently, 1.45b doses of a vaccine have been administered, so about as many people have had the vaccine (partially, at least), as have had COVID.
Hopefully the vaccine will make to the rest of the population soon. If not, we’re about 20% done with COVID, world-wide.
I’m pretty jaded at this point. My guess is that the vaccine rollout stalls out in poorer countries and COVID falls out of the news cycle before the majority of deaths.
It's R_t < 1 for sustained amounts of time. Where the effective reproduction number depends on the basic reproduction number, and the number of susceptible people, which depends on the number of people who have had coronavirus infections / vaccinations & the durability of immunity.
So some amount < 100% of people infected / vaccinated will create enough spreading "distance" between that coronavirus won't be able to effectively reproduce, because the (limited) vulnerable hosts will be too "far" apart.
Thanks for summing up the relevant numbers, it's helpful in putting all this in context.
.1% isn't nothing, but it isn't really a disaster either. The Black Death was 30-50% of the population in Europe. The "Spanish" Flu of 1918 killed about .64% of the US population. Things could still get worse of course. But barring that, and considering the absolute disaster that Covid has revealed our political system and interlocking health and government bureaucracies to be, I think we got off lucky. If this had been a "real" plague, of the kind humanity has faced repeatedly in the past (and has been expected for some time now), we would have been totally and utterly screwed.
Will this serve as a wake-up call? For the most part, probably not. The best we can hope for is that some of the new thinking and systems created for this situation will still be around when the other shoe drops and we really, really need them.
The mortality is 0.5% WITH functional healthcare. Thankfully we do not have data of mortality from places where healthcare collapsed, although India might provide us with a glimpse of what Covid looks like in its unmitigated form.
It's disheartening seeing people in the US mad at the 30% vaccine hesitant there, while 6B+ at the gates have no vaccines available at all.
The US isn't an island, and the borders are nowhere near closed. The variants that grow in the other 96% of humans that aren't americans will doubtlessly end up there, and will be end up tending toward vaccine resistance due to selection pressure.
I think this is going to get much worse before it gets better. The disunity of nationalistic selfishness has struck our species once again.
The current best estimate of infection fatality rate is not 0.5%. It's actually half that at 0.23%. However the error bars are pretty wide on that number.
Recent research claimed that the excess mortality rate among people who had COVID but didn't die from it immediately was elevated 6 months after their recovery, with 8 excess deaths per thousand patients. So the real mortality rate may be a little higher than people estimate.
> If not, we’re about 20% done with COVID, world-wide.
For exponential processes think of the % done on a log scale. So population of USA is 320M, and ~100M had COVID, or we were 94% (8/8.5) done with it before vaccine was introduced.
As someone who believes the pandemic was real, that lockdowns early on were a good idea, that mask wearing is trivial and probably helpful, that social distancing was also easy to do and a reasonable idea, and that vaccinations are safe and effective. My gut reaction is still that the number of deaths was relatively small.
About a third of US deaths were in nursing homes, and that doesn't include people who probably could / should have been in nursing homes from a health and self-sufficiency perspective. 85% were 65 or older (65 isn't especially old that's just the lowest data threshold I could find). I am fortunate enough to not know anybody who died from COVID.
Concerns about long lasting effects might be true. We might see this having substantial long term effects and that could be bad. It could be worse than the impact of the deaths.
That aside however, I just don't think a one time 20% increase in annual mortality is that terrible, but that does not mean that the virus was trivial.
If I'm understanding this chart correctly, forecasted 2021 death rate per 1,000 people (not covid adjusted) plus 20% is less than the 1970s... and the next 50 years as well.
(EDIT: Sorry idiot math. The 2021 rate + 20% is above any historical rate since 1970, and is on par with expectations 2050 onward)
This includes all sorts of demographic assumptions about age, but so does COVID, I would argue, in the least convincing demographic groupings possible.
Maybe COVID was a genuine threat but on a whole we did a pretty good job and it wasn't that bad in total effect as a result?
Not only that, but the covid restrictions have meant that the normal death rate is lower. Because people aren't traveling and commuting the road toll is down, because people are at home and social distancing workplace deaths are down. So excess mortality is up and the base deathrate is down meaning excess mortality is actually higher than shown.
I'm not quite sure what your point is. The absolute number is the number, and zooming in to make it a relative number for dramatic effect doesn't change that.
It's kind of like zooming in to a stock market graph so the spikes look bigger.
FWIW, the FT article appears to be calling out the difference in peak rates “for the same dates”, not for the full year.
While the excess deaths are awful, it’s also important to keep the number in context. The death rate has been decreasing for over a century, and in absolute terms, the death rate of 2020 looks like the year 2000 [1].
> Please don’t look at 7m-13m number and compare it to 7 billion population and say oh it’s only 0.1-0.2%.
Using the entire human population also skews things because the deaths were concentrated in North America, South America and Europe. To over generalize, Asian countries did a much better job at managing the pandemic and have a population of 4.5 billion people. Most of the deaths were concentrated in the remaining 2.5 billion.
Just a reminder to people: That is enough to kill the entire population of Denmark... Twice.
When we talk about people, percentages just doesn't make sense to use.
The question is how much less death will there be in the years to come.
Especially the older people who died earlier because of covid. We should see a decline in death from all kinds of diseases that these people had and would have died from/with.
This assumes that there are no long-term mortality effects from having COVID and not dying from it, which seems not proven at this stage. I mean, yes, we'll see fewer very old people dying of the flu next year, but idk whether we'll see a bunch of late middle age or 'not very old' people dying from long COVID.
Covid makes your country worse. It’s like having endemic malaria. No one wants endemic malaria in their country, and costly government intervention was required to rid the developed world of it.
Similarly, it’s disheartening to see so many people — especially on partisan lines — promulgate the talking point that we just need to “learn to live with it”. This is insanity. Annual mRNA booster vaccines ad infinitum, with continuous vaccine passports is a wholly inadequate vision for the future. Melbourne, Oz — a diverse, international city of 5M — demonstrates it’s very possible to eradicate Covid with international, interregional and interstate border closures, with hard lockdowns plus federal financial support. Four months later, zero covid.
If I did the math right, that's (at most) .17% of the population. In a normal year I'd guess we lose 1% of the population. I guess this seems lower than I'd expect?
This is excess mortality, as in “above what would be expected in a normal year based on demographics”.
So, if looking at historical trends and the current demographics as compared with those trends we had a prior expectation of your 1%, then what we we actually observed is 1.17%.
Also, deaths are not the end-all be-all to be assessed. Many more people have survived it but many have near crippling after effects from it, and even more, if not suffering now, have had a terrible and painful experience going through it.
Holy cow. This does massively underline how important the work of things like COVAX are in getting equitable global access to vaccines.
We still need billions more doses manufactured, distributed and administered - it could take years and cost a fortune - and we should not lose our urgency or our focus.
From what I have seen in poorer countries, in some cases the worst things have just started. I was dating a Colombian girl who got a 200% APR loan from a city near her during the lockdown to be able to pay her rent without a job, and hadn't even realized that it's 200% APR (15%/month didn't sound that bad to her). People are on the streets because the government wants to increase taxes, and they are already in huge debt. Now the government started to kill its own people in the daylight to stop the revolution.
Searching for what excess mortality looks like in a "normal" (non-pandemic) year, I found this interesting statistic:
> By the year 2017, the United States was already suffering more excess deaths and more life years lost each year than those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020
What strikes me is Asia. If I'm reading this right they have relatively low official Covid deaths, but off the charts excess deaths. What's up with that?
A related angle I haven't seen much investigation on is to what degree we'll see negative excess deaths (surely there's a better term, but I'm at a loss) in the coming years due to how much covid impacted older folks.
"The rich world suffered relatively badly, but most of the dying has been elsewhere."
Saying the subtitle.
Elsewhere, meaning relatively poor countries. But even within the rich world the poor within those are disproportionately affected by Covid (deaths). But those ppl - at least in the USA - have worse health outcomes in general already.
Covid is both a disease and a symptom. Unfortunately, the disease lens is being used to distract from how it's a symptom of deeper longer running societal problems.
Have we completely lost our ability to report at responsible scientists/engineers? There are no units on the y-axis of the subject graphs. Also 7m == 7 meters. 7M == 7 million. There are no legends for the color coding. This is absolutely the worst, most ambiguous (hence most confusing) presentation of data I have ever witnessed in my 20nyear career as an engineer.
If the author can't at least present evidence for their case within a reasonably accepted scientific standard framework (e.g. graph legends, correct units, etc.) , than the evidence should ve dismissed until they can.
Where is the peer review for this content? Why is this low caliber content showing up in my HN feed?
[+] [-] khazhoux|4 years ago|reply
Legitimate question, please no political commentary.
[+] [-] hedora|4 years ago|reply
Currently, 1.45b doses of a vaccine have been administered, so about as many people have had the vaccine (partially, at least), as have had COVID.
Hopefully the vaccine will make to the rest of the population soon. If not, we’re about 20% done with COVID, world-wide.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina...
I’m pretty jaded at this point. My guess is that the vaccine rollout stalls out in poorer countries and COVID falls out of the news cycle before the majority of deaths.
[+] [-] ethbr0|4 years ago|reply
It's R_t < 1 for sustained amounts of time. Where the effective reproduction number depends on the basic reproduction number, and the number of susceptible people, which depends on the number of people who have had coronavirus infections / vaccinations & the durability of immunity.
So some amount < 100% of people infected / vaccinated will create enough spreading "distance" between that coronavirus won't be able to effectively reproduce, because the (limited) vulnerable hosts will be too "far" apart.
[+] [-] ergot_vacation|4 years ago|reply
.1% isn't nothing, but it isn't really a disaster either. The Black Death was 30-50% of the population in Europe. The "Spanish" Flu of 1918 killed about .64% of the US population. Things could still get worse of course. But barring that, and considering the absolute disaster that Covid has revealed our political system and interlocking health and government bureaucracies to be, I think we got off lucky. If this had been a "real" plague, of the kind humanity has faced repeatedly in the past (and has been expected for some time now), we would have been totally and utterly screwed.
Will this serve as a wake-up call? For the most part, probably not. The best we can hope for is that some of the new thinking and systems created for this situation will still be around when the other shoe drops and we really, really need them.
[+] [-] whatever1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|4 years ago|reply
The US isn't an island, and the borders are nowhere near closed. The variants that grow in the other 96% of humans that aren't americans will doubtlessly end up there, and will be end up tending toward vaccine resistance due to selection pressure.
I think this is going to get much worse before it gets better. The disunity of nationalistic selfishness has struck our species once again.
[+] [-] nitwit005|4 years ago|reply
California doesn't export much in the way of staples, so that's probably quite a stretch: https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/
[+] [-] nradov|4 years ago|reply
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331/
[+] [-] PieUser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210422123603.h...
[+] [-] breck|4 years ago|reply
For exponential processes think of the % done on a log scale. So population of USA is 320M, and ~100M had COVID, or we were 94% (8/8.5) done with it before vaccine was introduced.
[+] [-] natural219|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyager|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] elchief|4 years ago|reply
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[+] [-] HatchedLake721|4 years ago|reply
Pretty much ever country has seen a 15-20% increase in excess mortality rates (20% more people dying than averages in the past), this is huge.
This is one of the best up to date visualizations on this topic, scroll down and see breakdowns by country - https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...
[+] [-] klmadfejno|4 years ago|reply
About a third of US deaths were in nursing homes, and that doesn't include people who probably could / should have been in nursing homes from a health and self-sufficiency perspective. 85% were 65 or older (65 isn't especially old that's just the lowest data threshold I could find). I am fortunate enough to not know anybody who died from COVID.
Concerns about long lasting effects might be true. We might see this having substantial long term effects and that could be bad. It could be worse than the impact of the deaths.
That aside however, I just don't think a one time 20% increase in annual mortality is that terrible, but that does not mean that the virus was trivial.
If I'm understanding this chart correctly, forecasted 2021 death rate per 1,000 people (not covid adjusted) plus 20% is less than the 1970s... and the next 50 years as well.
(EDIT: Sorry idiot math. The 2021 rate + 20% is above any historical rate since 1970, and is on par with expectations 2050 onward)
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...
This includes all sorts of demographic assumptions about age, but so does COVID, I would argue, in the least convincing demographic groupings possible.
Maybe COVID was a genuine threat but on a whole we did a pretty good job and it wasn't that bad in total effect as a result?
[+] [-] disordinary|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmod600|4 years ago|reply
It's kind of like zooming in to a stock market graph so the spikes look bigger.
[+] [-] kortilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amscanne|4 years ago|reply
While the excess deaths are awful, it’s also important to keep the number in context. The death rate has been decreasing for over a century, and in absolute terms, the death rate of 2020 looks like the year 2000 [1].
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/25/is-it-real...
[+] [-] flukus|4 years ago|reply
Using the entire human population also skews things because the deaths were concentrated in North America, South America and Europe. To over generalize, Asian countries did a much better job at managing the pandemic and have a population of 4.5 billion people. Most of the deaths were concentrated in the remaining 2.5 billion.
[+] [-] xdrosenheim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pranshum|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bytematic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noxer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virtuallynathan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glangdale|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmull|4 years ago|reply
Those years of life are still lost.
It’s true they would have died eventually anyway. But that’s true of everyone.
[+] [-] atweiden|4 years ago|reply
Similarly, it’s disheartening to see so many people — especially on partisan lines — promulgate the talking point that we just need to “learn to live with it”. This is insanity. Annual mRNA booster vaccines ad infinitum, with continuous vaccine passports is a wholly inadequate vision for the future. Melbourne, Oz — a diverse, international city of 5M — demonstrates it’s very possible to eradicate Covid with international, interregional and interstate border closures, with hard lockdowns plus federal financial support. Four months later, zero covid.
[+] [-] timmg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msbarnett|4 years ago|reply
So, if looking at historical trends and the current demographics as compared with those trends we had a prior expectation of your 1%, then what we we actually observed is 1.17%.
[+] [-] pilsetnieks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HDMI_Cable|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burnte|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|4 years ago|reply
It will take years still at that rate, but they also have been doing a reasonable job of meeting and then increasing their projections.
[+] [-] xiphias2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] igonvalue|4 years ago|reply
> By the year 2017, the United States was already suffering more excess deaths and more life years lost each year than those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/United-States-COVID-19-was-...
[+] [-] sh1mmer|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...
[+] [-] raphaelj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] winstonewert|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dnissley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burlesona|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|4 years ago|reply
Saying the subtitle.
Elsewhere, meaning relatively poor countries. But even within the rich world the poor within those are disproportionately affected by Covid (deaths). But those ppl - at least in the USA - have worse health outcomes in general already.
Covid is both a disease and a symptom. Unfortunately, the disease lens is being used to distract from how it's a symptom of deeper longer running societal problems.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/communities-color-...
[+] [-] mojomark|4 years ago|reply
If the author can't at least present evidence for their case within a reasonably accepted scientific standard framework (e.g. graph legends, correct units, etc.) , than the evidence should ve dismissed until they can.
Where is the peer review for this content? Why is this low caliber content showing up in my HN feed?
Can we please do better?
[+] [-] jaimex2|4 years ago|reply
With new births added in were still growing the global population
[+] [-] 0x0|4 years ago|reply