[HN Gopher] There have been 7m-13m excess deaths worldwide durin...
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There have been 7m-13m excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic
Author : pranshum
Score : 98 points
Date : 2021-05-16 22:09 UTC (50 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| chmaynard wrote:
| Rest in peace. Tragic to the people who loved them, a statistic
| to the rest of us.
| adventured wrote:
| I found the counting approach to Covid so far to be rather
| fascinating. With the flu in the US they guess and present that
| number, but we're supposed to attach some meaningful value to the
| Covid positive counts as though that actually represents anywhere
| near the real number of Covid cases since the outbreak began.
| It's bullshit, I'm just not sure why the establishment (media,
| government, censors, etc) stick so tightly to the line on the
| bogus official counts. They act like those counts actually
| represent the outbreak properly. Perhaps in their pathological
| quest for control (a central theme of most politicians) they need
| a number to lean on as authoritative, to prop up their weak
| credibility. If they can't even give you accurate outbreak
| counts, what else can be believed (masks, no masks; 6 feet, 20
| feet, no feet; fear the surfaces, don't fear the surfaces;
| vaccines take years (nope: 1957 Asian flu); it has been a total
| clown show the entire pandemic).
|
| India had been seeing near 400,000 cases per day. That's an
| entirely bogus number of course. And it's near universally agreed
| upon that it's bogus. The question is whether it's a million, two
| million, five million, whatever. What's actually closer to the
| truth? That's where everybody abandons ship, I never see the news
| media go deep into that part of it (and yet they happily report
| the made-up flu numbers every year).
|
| Part of the comedy of it, is that the supposed truth enforcers
| are enforcing a fraud, because none of these official counts are
| anywhere close to real, no matter which country you pick as the
| topic.
|
| Is India seeing 4,000 deaths per day, or 10,000, or 15,000? It's
| a dramatic difference across a month of time. The best you'll get
| out of the media is a little edge statement of: but it's
| suspected to be under-reported. Yeah, no kidding.
|
| The US has seen 33 million cases of Covid - that's the reported
| media line in every story. Everyone knows it's bogus and doesn't
| represent anywhere close to the number of actual infections in
| the US and yet it's reported on as properly representing the
| scale of the pandemic in the US. There has been so much
| intellectual fraud in this pandemic.
| tyrex2017 wrote:
| I think those daily numbers are very helpful, because they show
| the relative change in infections.
|
| And thats a helpful (if not the only one) indicator on whether
| there will be enough ICU beds one month from now. If not, we
| should consider lockdowning.
| winstonewert wrote:
| 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?
| bdcravens wrote:
| The government can hide information easier than it can hide
| bodies.
| newuser00 wrote:
| China has been lying about many things since day 1.
| bytematic wrote:
| For people who think that is low, this is with the precautions
| taken, imagine if nobody did anything
| noxer wrote:
| 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.
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| This is an effect referred to as "mortality displacement" -- it
| tends to happen with bad flu years, heat waves, etc:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_displacement
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| 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%.
|
| 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...
| kortilla wrote:
| "Huge" is very relative. 20% increase of a number that is very
| low by historical standards is still really low.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| Very low? You mean not that many people die, of any cause,
| typically? Not sure what you are getting at here.
| [deleted]
| chmod600 wrote:
| 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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Out of, 7+ billion people on the planet.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Roughly .2 percent of the population.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rossdavidh wrote:
| If you're talking about a 7 billion population, the deaths of
| which will vary from year to year, this seems like a number in
| the noise range which would be very hard to distinguish from
| background variation.
|
| If everyone of the 7b people lived 100 years, we would expect
| about 70 million deaths a year, and we know they don't live 100
| years on average. Any reasonable range of assumptions puts this
| in the range of too-small-to-detect. Which doesn't mean it
| doesn't matter or isn't important, but it does mean that this is
| not a good method for estimating it.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Deaths don't actually vary that much year to year.
| Increase/decrease over time? Yes. Swing by 10 million in a
| year? No.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-deaths-b...
| raphaelj wrote:
| And that's with all the safety measures most of us have been
| following for more than one year now.
| [deleted]
| 0x0 wrote:
| "Our apologies. An error seems to have occurred. We've logged
| this error. Contact us if this issue persists." ...
| drusepth wrote:
| The site loads fine for me, but the whole article is behind a
| paywall anyway.
|
| You might try https://outline.com/PYEgK3 which should fix both
| problems.
| Rexxar wrote:
| "Funnily" the error appears after the page has started to
| display correctly and doesn't appear if you block the correct
| anti-adblock script that erase the correct page and replace the
| content by a fake technical error message.
|
| I find this behavior quite disgusting and sadly seen it on many
| sites.
| deepserket wrote:
| pdf of the page here: https://gofile.io/d/IPEm7Z there are 3
| graphs that aren't completely shown in the file
|
| https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-e...
|
| https://www.economist.com/assets/infographic/2021/covid-19-e...
|
| https://infographics.economist.com/2021/20210515_FBC103/inde...
| [deleted]
| khazhoux wrote:
| 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.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I don't have anything to add except that California is huge and
| very unevenly applied "lockdown" - there are many towns a where
| businesses remained open or reopened frequently, but the big
| cities did have large shelter in place efforts. It would be
| interesting to compare on the municipal level if the data was
| that granular.
| teej wrote:
| San Francisco had some of the heaviest lockdowns in the
| country, yet 100 miles east in Modesto the mayor actively
| defied the statewide lockdowns. California is a big state.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I suspect there'll be decades worth of study of this. Hopefully
| it'll help the next time.
| soared wrote:
| To really understand it you'd need to look at cultural,
| geographic, climate, demographic, etc differences that apply to
| transmission rates. I'd be curious to see it though, and a
| similar one for other illnesses.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| https://twitter.com/IAmTheActualET/status/139036896599463117...
| MattGaiser wrote:
| You would need to look at everything from ages to whether the
| lockdowns where enforced to how people lived (high or low
| density) to how deaths were counted. It would be an interesting
| study.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Count of covid cases and deaths has been highly politicized and
| manipulated in Florida to the point of firing people for
| reporting them.
|
| Not sure how possible it is to get accurate info in this
| environment.
| [deleted]
| xiphias2 wrote:
| 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.
| vitus wrote:
| This reads like a standard payday loan, to be honest. Which is
| to say, it's absolutely taking advantage of people who already
| can't afford it, but it's also not a new phenomenon.
|
| A standard payday loan might be 10% on a $100 advance, repaid
| after 2 weeks (when your next paycheck comes in). That
| translates to a 260% APR, even without considering compounding.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > 15%/month didn't sound that bad to her
|
| This is why when economists talk about consumers acting as
| rational market participants I just laugh and shake my head.
|
| Have they _met_ people?
| elliekelly wrote:
| When your options are (1) a loan at 15% while you're
| unemployed but you get another 30-60 days of a roof over your
| head or (2) immediate homelessness the high-interest loan
| _is_ the rational choice.
| reader_x wrote:
| I think Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky already put the
| "rational market participant" myth to bed for good.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Definitely, for the consumer. I think the idea that
| "rational market participant emerges when you get the
| average of a lot of people (ie. the firm) together to make
| a decision" still remains alive and well. There is sort of
| a Darwinian argument there, that in the long-run only the
| rational market participant remains in business and
| functioning as a firm.
|
| The import of behavioral econ. definitely remains
| understated today. I am also interested in philosophical
| thinkers, like Elizabeth Anderson or Michael Sandel, that
| take questions like these and explore the implications that
| they might have for how we ought to structure society.
| kortilla wrote:
| Has it occurred to you that people taking payday loans don't
| have a lot of options?
|
| This isn't someone deciding between 15% monthly and a nice 4%
| annual personal loan. This is someone deciding between 15%
| monthly and homelessness. Choosing the interest rate _is_
| rational.
| burlesona wrote:
| https://archive.md/36LK9
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| breck wrote:
| > 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.
| josh_today wrote:
| Not questioning the numbers but genuinely curious how the
| exponential math works in this case. Thanks
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 100% COVID / vaccination isn't the end point.
|
| 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.
| elchief wrote:
| COVID mortality rate (deaths / closed cases) is ~2.5%
|
| https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| That's the CFR, the OP is probably referring to the IFR,
| which is likely <0.35%
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| 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.
| soared wrote:
| I feel like the more logical take is that our healthcare
| technology, policy, etc prevented the deaths from being on a
| scale closer to previous plagues. It may have been closer to
| 1918 but we stopped that from happening.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210422123603.h...
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| You're getting downvoted but I do believe you're correct. I'm
| a healthy 21 year old, please govt., give my vaccine to other
| countries. I will take it if offered, but I'd prefer to give
| it to those who really need it all things considered. Let me
| get the vaccine when others are safe.
| todfox wrote:
| Your altruism is laudable but don't think this can't hurt
| you. I know a healthy, athletic 25 year old who has needed
| an inhaler every day for the last year because of her
| moderate, non-hospitalized Covid case. Her lung damage will
| probably not heal any further at this point.
|
| I would get vaccinated ASAP.
| dpeck wrote:
| It's not going to happen. That's not the way that
| distribution works at scale. Just like the "kids are
| starving in $country/continent" lines that were often said
| when I was a kid, it's horrible and I wish it wasn't true
| but whether I clean my plate or not has little to do to
| help their situation. Whether you personally take a vaccine
| dose or a tax credit or whatever that you quality for, it
| has been allocated and will not be given to anyone else.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Your being vaccinated is important for protecting those who
| _can't_ be vaccinated. Plus, what's most likely to drive
| governments to exports of vaccines is hitting /exceeding
| their own vaccination targets. The most effective way to
| lobby for exports is to get vaccinated.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > The disunity of nationalistic selfishness has struck our
| species once again.
|
| Let's unpack that.
|
| Is what you describe a species specific phenomenon i.e.
| biological in origin? I'm not sure how you'd determine that
| question, if what you are talking about is "attitude to
| vaccine inoculation to stave off pandemic spread", since that
| behaviour is limited to one species, and is fairly recent.
|
| Is what you describe a species wide phenomenon i.e.
| biological in origin? What does the data from different
| nationalities tell us? Does the phenomenon occur similarly in
| all nationalities, or only some?
|
| Is the phenomenon biological in nature, or might it be
| cultural? Is it even widely held amongst individuals, or
| might it originate from some other level of organisation e.g.
| government, media? How would you investigate these questions?
| wyager wrote:
| Neither mortality rate nor vaccine administration rate are
| uniform. The mortality rate is much lower than 0.5% in e.g.
| people under 60 years old, and people who are in high-risk
| groups are mostly already vaccinated. The effective mortality
| rate today is probably at least an order of magnitude lower,
| maybe two.
| MauroIksem wrote:
| This is literally just your opinion and you have zero to base
| this on. Stop spreading misinformation.
| mfbx9da4 wrote:
| What's that as a percentage?
| bdcravens wrote:
| somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15% increase in deaths
| tester756 wrote:
| How strong is anti vaccine / anti mask movement in the US?
|
| As I see there's very little of it "on the american side of the
| internet", meanwhile "here" they tend to cause a lot of
| disruption and shitton of missinformation
| timmg wrote:
| 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?
| burnte wrote:
| This is deaths in excess of the expected number, not total
| deaths. Given the normal death rate, we're 10m(+-3m) over that.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| These are excess deaths, so 7-13m deaths on top of the 1%
| already expected for this year.
| msbarnett wrote:
| 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%.
| timmg wrote:
| Yeah, I get that. I guess I just mean that the worst pandemic
| of the last 100 years and (so far) it's maybe 17% deaths over
| the baseline. That feels kinda low.
| msbarnett wrote:
| 17% excess mortality (and that's assuming this 1% baseline
| we pulled out of the air, remember) doesn't mean that the
| pandemic is only responsible for those excess deaths - a
| bunch of people who might have otherwise been expected to
| get hit by a car worked from home all year, or died from
| COVID instead, etc.
|
| So the pandemic is responsible for the 17% (in this
| scenario) uplift above baseline plus an unknown portion of
| that baseline itself.
|
| To be honest one cause, which changed a lot of behaviour
| that rolls into the baseline, pushing the global baseline
| up that much seems pretty impressive to me.
|
| Would be also interesting to consider distribution of that
| excess and how China fared in the excess mortality
| department. After the early days they seemed to keep it
| tightly under control, and they contain an enormous portion
| of the world's population. That might suggest that excess
| mortality elsewhere was even further above baseline and the
| excess mortality only looks this good because 1.2 billion
| people mostly stuck to baseline?
| bdcravens wrote:
| An extra death for every 6 deaths seems pretty substantial
| to me, especially considering the skewed morbidity across
| age groups.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 17% increase seems kind of big, no?
|
| If plane crashes increased 17% in a single year, it would
| be bit. If cancer deaths increased 17% in a year, it would
| be pretty remarkable.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Is it actually worse than the flu pandemics in the 50s and
| 60s?
| pranshum wrote:
| Github link for all the code behind the analysis:
| https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-track...
| sh1mmer wrote:
| According to the UN [1] 2019 worldwide mortality was 58m people.
| So that's roughly a 12-22% increase assuming mortality stayed the
| same.
|
| [1]
| https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2021-05-16 23:00 UTC)