US COVID-19 Death Toll Surpasses That of 1918 Pandemic (thehill.com) 228
The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed that of the 1918 flu pandemic, according to a tracker from Johns Hopkins University. The Hill reports: The U.S. has passed 675,000 deaths, the estimated toll from the 1918 pandemic, which for a century had been the worst pandemic to hit the country. "The number of reported deaths from Covid in the US will surpass the toll of the 1918 flu pandemic this month," Tom Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tweeted earlier this month. "We cannot become hardened to the continuing, and largely preventable, tragedy."
Deaths from COVID-19 are also far from over. The U.S. is averaging about 2,000 more deaths from the virus every day, according to a New York Times tracker. Those deaths are overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated, though, highlighting that the continuing toll of COVID-19 is now largely preventable now that vaccines are widely available in the U.S. In 1918, there was no vaccine to help stop the flu pandemic. Still, the U.S. population was far smaller a century ago, meaning that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic is still higher than for COVID-19. E. Thomas Ewing, a Virginia Tech history professor, wrote in Health Affairs earlier this year that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic was about six in every 1,000 people, given the U.S. population at the time of around 100 million. The death rate from COVID-19 in the U.S. is about two in every 1,000 people. A disproportionate share of COVID-19 deaths are also in the United States. Worldwide, the 1918 flu killed far more people than COVID-19 has so far, at about 50 million compared to about 5 million.
Deaths from COVID-19 are also far from over. The U.S. is averaging about 2,000 more deaths from the virus every day, according to a New York Times tracker. Those deaths are overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated, though, highlighting that the continuing toll of COVID-19 is now largely preventable now that vaccines are widely available in the U.S. In 1918, there was no vaccine to help stop the flu pandemic. Still, the U.S. population was far smaller a century ago, meaning that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic is still higher than for COVID-19. E. Thomas Ewing, a Virginia Tech history professor, wrote in Health Affairs earlier this year that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic was about six in every 1,000 people, given the U.S. population at the time of around 100 million. The death rate from COVID-19 in the U.S. is about two in every 1,000 people. A disproportionate share of COVID-19 deaths are also in the United States. Worldwide, the 1918 flu killed far more people than COVID-19 has so far, at about 50 million compared to about 5 million.
anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:4, Insightful)
they are more relevant.
Re:anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:4, Informative)
About 1/3rd. The US populaton in 1918 was ~103m, vs ~328m today.
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yup, backwards,
Re:anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:4, Informative)
Covid is less deadly per capita, but the deaths are also not directly comparable.
The 1918 influenza was especially deadly to young adults. It killed people in their prime, losing their most productive years, and left children orphaned or with only one parent.
Covid kills grandpa, not dad.
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Back in 1918-1919, grandpa would probably already be dead from those comorbidities.
In other news, my grandma died in the 1918 epidemic, but she would have been in her twenties, I think.
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Try to keep up, deaths are trending to the people in the 30-50 range as they're unvaccinated and Delta hits them hard. The 1918 pandemic was similar with the later waves killing the young.
To anyone who says it's overblown (Score:5, Insightful)
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And, on the other hand, population density and mobility increases. It really is difficult to compare the two. In a manner it simply doesn't matter as the death rate is the final determiner of 'badness' and incorporates the current context of medical technology.
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just point out that we hit these numbers after more than 100 years of medical advancement.
100 years of MEDICAL advancement, yes; MENTAL advancement, not so much.
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The other way around, but those are not comparable figures either IMHO. Your chances of survival in 1918 were way lower than they're today, with modern medical technology.
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right, I backspaced to change "one third" and forgot to switch the pandemics. Was trying to say covid in between the worst and the other next worse things, but only thus far. It's not over yet and something bad could happen in USA.
Re:anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:5, Informative)
Still, the U.S. population was far smaller a century ago, meaning that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic is still higher than for COVID-19. E. Thomas Ewing, a Virginia Tech history professor, wrote in Health Affairs earlier this year that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic was about six in every 1,000 people, given the U.S. population at the time of around 100 million. The death rate from COVID-19 in the U.S. is about two in every 1,000 people.
The crazy thing is (Score:2)
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the death rate is higher even though we have much, much better treatments
Last I checked, 2/1000 is not higher than 6/1000. The fact that we have much better treatments today is a contributing factor in why the death rate today is 2/1000 today vs. 6/1000 a century ago. The infectiousness of the disease is the other major factor.
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True, a vague notion is included. But that's about it. It's still not very clear.
6/100 vs 2/100 is vague and not clear ?
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No, it isn't. What is relevant is that they didn't have the medicines or technology to treat people back then. We do now. First figure out how many people would have died from COVID-19 if we didn't have modern treatments, then figure out per capita. Per capita differences likely won't be significant even though we have roughly 3.5 times more people on earth now.
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And after awhile it effective disappeared, even without a vaccine and without any modern medical technology.
It still comes back periodically. 1957 (116K dead out of 172M in USA) and 1968 (100K dead out of 200M) were the worst comebacks.
Re: anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:2, Funny)
Forget covid, they did not have Ivermectin to protect people from horse STDs back then. What was the death rate from horse STD in 1918 vs. today? Why is that not being celebrated as a trump of modern medicine?
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Re: anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:2)
Horse STDs ? Amongst humans ?
I guess all that weird porn on the net is actually true...
Yes and no (Score:2)
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Right there in the summary?
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The US had a third the population in 1918, so the per capita is 1/3 what it was then.
However, I suspect most of that difference is a century of medical advances, a generally healthier population, and people being more educated on how to respond to being sick, rather than a difference is the mortality rate.
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they are more relevant.
Keep moving the goalposts. But, since you asked, if Mississippi was a country, it would have the second highest per capita deaths [businessinsider.com] in the world due to covid. And their governor has this to say about it [businessinsider.com].
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The article states 2 per 1000 for Covid-19, 6 per 1000 for 1918 flu.
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they are more relevant.
Yes. The USA shares the top spot with 4 other first world idiots, a bunch of 3rd world shitholes, and a few countries with populations so low that the statistics don't make much sense.
Feel better now?
Re:anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a strong negative correlation at the county level between vaccination levels and whether a county voted for Trump. Here's a look at Colorado's counties [coloradohe...titute.org] as of late June 2021. Healthcare data analyst Charles Gaba charted vaccination rates and 2020 presidential election results per county [twitter.com] across the country and found a strong negative correlation as well, with some outliers, as one should expect from such a large data set. (Note that NJ is much more flat and has had higher numbers, and NC's numbers are kind of broken, but he briefly explains both.)
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The latest conspiracy theory is that liberals are pro-vaccine because they know that many conservatives will automatically take the opposite position, die, and hand them the next election.
Even their own stupidity is liberals fault.
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For anybody reading the parent comment, here's context about that conspiracy
https://www.breitbart.com/ente... [breitbart.com]
Though the grand majority of the commentators are just compaining the vaccine is deadly - rather than blaming the left for reverse phycology killing them.
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With apologies to Aldo Nova - probably ahead of the times for many on
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Any numbers after the idea of booster shots started gaining momentum in April are utterly worthless.
Re: anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:5, Insightful)
Similarly, vaccines prevent the transmission of infectious disease. Sure, they also protect the person who is vaccinated, but that's only part of why they should be required.
As for pro-choice & pro-vax-mandate being hypocritical... maybe a little. The big difference is that an abortion is a private matter. Not getting a vaccine affects everyone around you.
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Seat belt laws exist because it's expensive when someone kills themselves on a public road. There have to be inquiries and investigations into why and how it happened. It has little to nothing to do with remaining in control of a vehicle, although that's a good reason too.
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Whether the government has the right to mandate vaccines was decided over a hundred years back, and yes it does, as well as the right to lock up super spreaders.
And the hypocrisy is the right to life (when it comes to fetuses) people arguing they have the right to indiscriminately kill. Almost like they want to force women to have kids so they can kil them. No fun killing those not yet alive I guess, though admittedly, they do like killing older people. Lots of them seem to be in favor of death panels too.
H
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There is no hypocrisy to the right to life people, if they are also saying that they have the right to refuse, though you are conflating two different groups of people, that may overlap, but are likely not the same group. The difference is, if you are vaccinated, and someone else is not, you are in very little danger. If they have already had COVID, they are in more danger from the vaccination than from COVOD. There is more chance of someone who has had COVID having negative consequences from the vaccine
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Re: anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does the US have a such an outsized portion of all deaths?
Our deaths per 1mil is 2k, which ranks 21st. Granted, some of those ahead of us are 3rd world and/or very tiny, but we are in the same ballpark as France, UK, Spain, so I question what you mean by 'outsized portion of all deaths'. If you mean TOTAL deaths, the reason is that we have one of the highest populations in the world.
Also, some countries that have higher populations are either unable/unwilling to give accurate death totals (China, India, etc.). There is no way a poor, cramped country like India only has 300 deaths/1 mil. And although China has more authority to lock down vs. the US, I don't really believe their numbers at all. 3 deaths/1 million? I'm not THAT stupid...
Two other factors that may have put us on the higher end. First, as a republic of individual states (and freedom to move between states easily), there is less of a cohesive, centralized response to the pandemic, so even if state A locks down like crazy, state B next door could be spreading and bring it with them when the visit state A. Second, we are an obese nation, and there is some correlation between obesity and severity of COVID symptoms.
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France, UK, Spain, so I question what you mean by 'outsized portion of all deaths'.
Firstly, you're ahead of France, the UK, and Spain by a significant sum, both in terms of per capita and in total (which in theory would mean your per capita figures move slower).
Secondly while you self gratify I advise you to open up the graphs of each country, especially the countries actually above you like Belgium, Italy, and Croatia. What you find may startle you.
You see those countries you compare yourself to had the largest portion of deaths *at the start* of the pandemic. Compare that to the USA whi
Good graphs (Score:2)
This is one of the few sites with decent graphs per capita.
https://ourworldindata.org/exp... [ourworldindata.org]
UK is a bit more than the USA, but USA figures are very unreliable, gathered by republican states. India's numbers are a fiction. China's numbers would be higher than stated but still very low. Australia had a few cases early on when it got into old age homes, very few recently.
Interesting to compare UK death vs cases. Cases are way up recently (due to Delta) but deaths are not (due to vaccine).
Re: anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:2)
Bear in mind it's impossible to call the virus insignificant whilst comparing it unfavourably with 1918.
The cynics, along with those trying to make it a Liberal virus or a left-wing conspiracy, are forced to either refute the virus exists or to try to spin the figures to look good.
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The only even remotely reliable way to measure the deaths across the globe is to look at excess mortality compared to normal years. Many of the largest countries in the world outside the US either cannot or will not accurately count and report COVID-19 deaths. I don't know if any studies have thoroughly looked at this across the globe yet. The problem, there too, is we still have to rely on individual countries death / census data which may be just as fictional.
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Also, some countries that have higher populations are either unable/unwilling to give accurate death totals (China, India, etc.). There is no way a poor, cramped country like India only has 300 deaths/1 mil. And although China has more authority to lock down vs. the US, I don't really believe their numbers at all. 3 deaths/1 million? I'm not THAT stupid...
There goes my karma... but if you Google for "US Covid unregistered death toll" then you will find evidence that the US is under-reporting a lot of Covid-19 deaths. Several reasons are given for this, for example local Republican leadership that wants to avoid bad numbers. Many other countries (Russia al of a sudden has way more lung-disease-deaths) are also under-reporting.
Also a number of countries in the the top 20 (worldometer.info) have over-reported deaths because things like a heart attack or stroke
Re: anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:4, Insightful)
Still, I can not help but feel this data is off.
Facts don't match with my beliefs..
Maybe it is that the US incentivized reporting deaths l WITH covid, as opposed to reporting deaths FROM covid? This data doesnâ(TM)t measure up when put in the global context.
So I will change the facts
We should not be leading in deaths, we should be trailing, by all reasonable indicators.
If you make a prediction based on your understanding of things and then the facts are different, the scientific thing to do is assume that your understanding is wrong and go back and change that.
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Re: anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, there is not much of a difference between "dying with CoViD" and "dying from CoViD". People die of multiple organ failure in those cases, and if there is an inflammation of the lung associated, caused by an infection with SARS-CoV2, it's CoViD19 (a.k.a. Corona Virus Disease of 2019).
Not sure what you are trying to say here overall, but your point is well made that there is a difference between dying with and dying of the infection but it's a difficult difference. That's why, rather than just go on test results other statistical means are used. These show clearly that testing results undermeasure the number of people who are dying earlier than they would die otherwise due to SARS-COV-2. E.g. if the disease affects your brain and causes you to have a car crash, that will be recorded as a normal accident when actually it's a death which would not have happened without the disease and should be seen as multi-causal.
The grandparent is trying to claim that deaths caused SARS-COV-2 are over-recorded. That's a political lie. We know and can measure that the opposite is true.
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Why does the US have a such an outsized portion of all deaths?
Maybe the answer is that you have difficulty with numbers and math. I'll try to explain this in both plain English and with some data that is comparable.
First, the nations that have a lot of travellers and a lot of economic activity are the "first world" nations. And that is where COVID-19 has hit hardest. Also numbers only go up, not down so the longer you have had an uncontrolled outbreak the larger your number. Again these nations where a lot of travel occurs every day tend to have the worst numbers. Oth
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First, the nations that have a lot of travellers and a lot of economic activity are the "first world" nations. And that is where COVID-19 has hit hardest.
Or you could argue that countries that do a lot of COVID-19 testing and correctly record "cause of death" as COVID-19 have been "hit the hardest" ...
Africa - population 1.2 billion
covid cases 8,242,857
covid deaths 206,897
Europe - population 746 million
covid cases 57,777,542
covid deaths 1,206,251
https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
Re: anybody have per-capita #'s? (Score:3)
No, covid deaths aren't on Biden, they're on the idiots who refuse to get vaccinated. In fact, said idiots are the ones who are dying. Poetic justice of sorts.
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Full coverage. (Score:2)
Have we got the numbers in from Africa and India?
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Have we got the numbers in from Africa and India?
Would you trust them?
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In hindsight. I wouldn't expect them to be up to date while the crisis is still in progress, but eventually I do expect they'll be able to take a decent count.
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Numbers from Africa... well, either google them or make up your own, there ain't a big difference in accuracy.
Percentage is more useful than absolute numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
Given the population in 1918 was around 103 million people, using absolute death counts is the wrong way to compare both pandemics. On the other hand basing it as relative percentage of the population in each time period would be more valid.
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Given the population in 1918 was around 103 million people, using absolute death counts is the wrong way to compare both pandemics. On the other hand basing it as relative percentage of the population in each time period would be more valid.
...which is why the summary included it? It's had about a 1/3 the death rate.
Still, the U.S. population was far smaller a century ago, meaning that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic is still higher than for COVID-19. E. Thomas Ewing, a Virginia Tech history professor, wrote in Health Affairs earlier this year that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic was about six in every 1,000 people, given the U.S. population at the time of around 100 million. The death rate from COVID-19 in the U.S. is about two in every 1,000 people.
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Not in the headline. And guess who will repeat the headlines. Stupid people and those that do not bitch about the headline.
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Given the population in 1918 was around 103 million people, using absolute death counts is the wrong way to compare both pandemics. On the other hand basing it as relative percentage of the population in each time period would be more valid.
In one sense yes, in another sense a life doesn't become less valuable just because the person lived in a larger country.
Of course, the 1918 flu was famous for killing otherwise healthy people in their prime. So if you look at years of life lost [wikipedia.org] the 1918 epidemic is probably still far worse on the scale of tragedies.
Still, it is important to step back and realize the just how many people have died and are still dying of COVID-19.
Neither are very useful (Score:5, Interesting)
And we're not done by a long shot. Best case things start to peter out in November as the people who are gonna die... well die. But there's some who don't think that's going to happen (the petering out, the dying is definitely happening). And all that assumes no new variants, which given 1/3rd of our population (and most of the rest of the world) is currently acting as a breeding ground out of some deluded view of freedom isn't unlikely. That nonsense is how we got Delta (e.g. India opened back up and did massive religious festivals in the lead up to an election).
And This Is With Modern Medicine (Score:4, Insightful)
If we didn't have modern medicines, respirator machines, and properly trained medical professionals it would have been much, much worse. Think New York City in March, April, and May of 2020 where up to 800 people a day were dying from it.
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Yup. Almost certainly anyone sent to the ICU (let alone intubated) wouldn't have survived with 1918 medical care. Most people who were hospitalized wouldn't have made it either. That's a whole lot of people.
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in 1918, germ theory was still new, and knowledge of viruses was extremely sparse as they had only been discovered less than 30 years previously. Washing hands by doctors was newish still. In some sense that time was still in a medical revolution towards understanding what really causes a disease and what to do about it.
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If there wasn't a world war going on in 1918, there would likely have been much less spread then.
It's interesting to compare numbers and is especially useful for clickbait titles. There are a lot of differences between now and th
Actually no (Score:2)
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There's a lot of younger people who with some oxygen came out of it OK, without oxygen, perhaps not. And most of the people dying here are now 30-50 year olds who are unvaccinated. The old people are mostly vaccinated otherwise the numbers would be much higher. Just like the first wave of the Spanish flu mostly killed old people and later waves killed young people, Covid now has Delta which is way more infectious and somewhat deadlier and who knows about new variants, Mu sounds like it can evade vaccination
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> If COVID had happened 100 years ago the death rate would have been far higher than it is now.
I'm not entirely sure about that, just because population density and ability to travel is so much higher now.
By all means, if COVID materialised in 1918, it would be much more deadly to anybody who caught it, but I think it would spread less.
Though I'm also pretty sure all the willfully unvaccinated filling up hospitals aren't appreciative of the advancements in medicine.
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Remember there was a world war winding down with lots of troops being transported across the Atlantic and continents, crammed into ships and railway cars. I also saw some pictures from Vancouver during the pandemic, sidewalk to sidewalk people, most mask less, watching some guy scale a building. The article I saw that in was comparing Vancouver (hardly any masks) and Seattle (lots of masks).
Confessions of an Insane Conspiracy-Theorist (Score:3, Interesting)
So, I'm one of the few people I know who will openly admit to any concerns about the vaccines. My views are genuine, but these days, it doesn't matter. You're a troll for merely having thoughts which stray from the consensus. I'm insane, though, and can't help but have these thoughts, and all the people who call themselves "tolerant" and "diverse" like to point out what a piece of crazy shit I am. They like to say I''m a Troll and I deserve to die. It's empathetic and morally superior, or so I'm told. I'm pretty sure it's true, or the media's fact-checkers would have said something by now.
Anyway, despite eventually going through with it, my vaccine concerns had nothing to do with conservatives or liberals, or Trump or Biden, or religion or politics, or horse de-wormer, or monkey sperm, or a public hair from the taint of a pot-belly pig, or all of the things people assume it's related to.
Quite simply, my hesitancy grew out of my distrust for big pharma, because I'm crazy. I mean, Pfizer has been fined for fraud more than any other US company, and they are still, to this day, doing incredibly cruel and greedy things ... even after taking huge wads of our tax dollars to develop the vaccine, but it's ignorant and crazy to actually know this. If the develoeprs-of-consensus don't care, neither should I. And see, that's the crux of my insanity. Despite knowing that I should not care, I can't help it. I still do.
Certain things nag me. Things like:
https://www.pharmaceutical-tec... [pharmaceut...nology.com]
Pfizer asked for liability protection not only against civil claims from citizens who suffer serious adverse events after being vaccinated, but also for cases brought due to Pfizerâ(TM)s own negligence, fraud or malice.
Whoa. That doesn't sound right. I mean, it sounds right to sane people, but to kooks like yours truly, it sounds patently bizarre that people would just shrug it off and not worry about it.
I mean, Pfizer demands to to have no liability even if in the event they purposely and willfully commit fraud (which they've been fined for doing numerous times already)? Yikes!
Now, whether you're left-wing, right-wing, or chicken-wing, that should concern you. At least that's how things seem to my, admittedly messed up brain.
Or this article from a conspiracy-theory peddling website that I read sometimes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/0... [nytimes.com]
" In some instances, countries are prohibited from donating or reselling doses, a ban that could hamper efforts to get vaccines to poor countries."
Damn! When it comes to evil corporations, they don't get much more evil than big pharma, and any notion that they might have changed and actually somehow care about people, has been pretty soundly obliterated by the shenanigans they've been up to over the past few months.
At least that's how reality appears to me.
In the United States, the government serves big corporate interests as a priority. Here you have big corporations taking billions of dollars from the government to whip out some vaccines,, and then they say "so here you go, but here's the thing, we;'re not liable for anything that goes wrong ... even if it went wrong via our negligence or fraud. Oh, an we get to charge insurance for it, and get more tax dollars for every dose injected. You promise to promote people getting these vaccinations, and you cannot promote any other potential treatment, much like only our drugs can cure scurvy (no cheap oranges allowed!), only our vaccines can save people from COVID. and we get to strong-arm all the poor countries before we let them buy any of it ... deal?"
And the US government says ... "deal? You had me at "negligence or fraud"! Of course it's a deal! U complete me!"
T
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I don't believe you are insane - or maybe not totally :)
With the example you cite on how Pfizer has behaved in the past and the limitations they put on providing the vaccines for free to poor countries just to maximize their profit, mistrust towards big pharma is totally warranted!
Regarding the vaccine itself and the science behind though I personally believe its safe and sound.
It was not actually big pharma who developed the technology (mRNA), but a small company in Germany that was initially working on a
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Being hesitant about vaccines was reasonable until they reached widespread use and we had enough data to show that they are a lot safer than not getting them. Now it's just foolish.
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My views are genuine, but these days, it doesn't matter. You're a troll for merely having thoughts which stray from the consensus. I'm insane, though, and can't help but have these thoughts, and all the people who call themselves "tolerant" and "diverse" like to point out what a piece of crazy shit I am. They like to say I''m a Troll and I deserve to die.
If it quacks like a gaslighting alt-right troll....
And boy do you quack a lot.
BTW, Pfizer didn't get blanket immunity for fraud and negligence, just some civil liability protection. The company could still be fined and the officers sent to jail. If any serious malfeasance ever came to light everybody on both sides of the red-blue divide could make serious political bank by crushing them. It would be literally suicidal on so many levels to engage in such a conspiracy at this moment in history.
Life expectancy (Score:2)
In 1918 was 53 years.
Today more like 78 years.
All covid deaths except about 37k of them have been in people over 50.
Travel differences (Score:2)
You didn't have nearly as many people traveling the country and the world by train, car, plane, and ship, like we can now.
This left each region isolated and able to handle the pandemic according to their own local laws and opinions.
A new standard of stupidity (Score:2)
Misinformation (Score:2)
This is what the "fact checkers" call misinformation -- technically true but misleading. US population in 1918 was 103 million; today it is 333 million. So the per capita rate for Covid is still far below what is was for the Spanish Flu.
Re:Using what data? (Score:4, Informative)
Given the overall data, it really isn't unreliable unless you think that the CDC is inventing dead people out of whole cloth.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/... [cdc.gov]
If you scroll down on that page, it shows a plot of total deaths per week over the last few years. Again, total deaths, regardless of cause. The line indicates a level that would be counted as abnormally high - the average is lower. The toll of the bad flu season in 2018 is clear, and so is the impact of COVID-19. The total deaths are largely consistent with the attributed toll.
I can't stress enough that this data isn't vulnerable to errors in the "cause of death" attribution.
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Can you point to at least 5 of these reports from different sites?
No I'm not going to Bing them myself.
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That might work in the USA that way (however it sounds not plausible). It definitely does not work like this in Germany.
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Or are you one of those people who thinks that the entire world of medical science has conspired against some US morons? Pull your head out of your ass snowflake.
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I think COVID deaths in the US are probably under-counted. There are a lot of people desperate to have anything other than COVID listed on their death certificate. There are people who die of "heart attacks" or "kidney failure" which are actually affects of COVID. And that's not even counting people who are currently dying of otherwise survivable factors but can't get a hospital bed, or people who will die of preventable diseases in the coming years except they couldn't get screening now due to capacity. Th
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I've heard some really sus talk from friends and family who tested negative for covid twice, but because of a cough, their doctors reported "covid case" to the CDC. How much of that is also happening with deaths?
That seems weird, especially with a negative test (when people tell you stories beware of games of "telephone"). It takes more than a positive test for a death to be attributed to COVID, and most evidence suggests that the true death toll is higher. In fact, the CDC estimates 656,460 - 830,443 in the US [cdc.gov]. You can try to handwave a few excess deaths away due to lockdown related causes, but it's pretty hard to pretend several hundred thousand extra people died during the pandemic due to reasons other than COVI
Re:"With Covid" or "Due to Covid"? (Score:4, Informative)
Hospitals get a pile of money from the feds for each case, and another pile for each death.
A little extra, not a pile [politifact.com].
And CDC guidelines for reporting COVID deaths say that any patience who the doctor believes has symptoms consistent with COVID should report it as a COVID death. So an 80 year old chain smoker with emphysema who coughs a lot and is hit by a bus can, under CDC guidelines, be reported as a COVID death - and the hospital is financially rewarded for doing so.
I know two people who had loved ones die last year from different forms of cancer (and there's no question what actually killed either), who had to threaten legal action to prevent them from being reported as COVID deaths.
Maybe it's underreported. And maybe it's overreported. It's impossible to tell, because nobody is keeping accurate records. On purpose.
I of course have no knowledge on what happened with those particular deaths.
But you skated past the major point of my post, the 650-830 thousand extra deaths in the US during the pandemic. Those people clearly died, and they died of something. It's really hard to account for those deaths using any explanation other than COVID.
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And CDC guidelines for reporting COVID deaths say that any patience who the doctor believes has symptoms consistent with COVID should report it as a COVID death. So an 80 year old chain smoker with emphysema who coughs a lot and is hit by a bus can, under CDC guidelines, be reported as a COVID death - and the hospital is financially rewarded for doing so.
And yet when you graph excess mortality last year after removing all reported COVID deaths you still end up with man thousands of excess deaths compared to normal.
Everyone keeps repeating this talking point that COVID deaths are being over reported in the USA, and yet the reality is they are still massively underreported when you just look at raw statistics.
Just because that old person looked after by a carer who was hospitalised due to COVID died of starvation because he wasn't able to feed himself and not
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I imagine if that was the way of delivery there'd be more vaccinated.
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GET THE FUCKING VACCINE!
They can't because the "liberals" want them to get it. So to own the "libs", they're not going to do it.
No, really. That is the logic [imgur.com] they're using to explain why a certain group of people are refusing to get vaccinated [mediaite.com].
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You know, I just don't get why Trump supporters wouldn't get the Trump vaccine. Even liberals have to admit they're pushing one of Donald Trump's ideas. Given the news coverage of the vaccine, it's the next best thing to winning a second term. Right-wingers have a constant opportunity to remind liberals of this... and yet, they're quiet?
If I was rabid Trump supporter, I'd probably have "Vaccinated by Trump" tattooed on my forehead. Or wear a red hat with the text, "Make Vaccines Great Again".
But I
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GET THE FUCKING VACCINE!
They can't because the "liberals" want them to get it. So to own the "libs", they're not going to do it.
No, really. That is the logic [imgur.com] they're using to explain why a certain group of people are refusing to get vaccinated [mediaite.com].
Seriously? It is hard to top that level of stupidity.
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Yes, definitely. All of us that are supposed "lefties" that don't support the violence in our cities nor the drone strike that killed children, and have begged, pleaded, and demonstrated the safety of the vaccine by taking it at our earliest convenience are definitely trying to reverse psychology to prevent Trump supporters from taking the life saving vaccine.
The logic loops in that posting are astronomical.
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The 2nd paragraph discusses casualties per capita.
Re:Well... yes and no (Score:4, Insightful)
In 1918 there was no vaccine for the flu. At the time, they thought the flu was caused by bacteria and antibiotics hadn't been invented. They didn't know what viruses were as they were too small to see with a microscope. Towards the end of the pandemic, they were treating people by using blood transfusions from a flu survivor, but didn't fully understand blood types or matching.
Today we have electron microscopes, mRNA vaccines and DNA sequencing technologies. We have a number of safe and effective vaccines that a large swathe of the population refuse to take because YouTube told them not to.
Comparing apples to apples, the USA has a death rate per capita that's 1/3rd what it was from the 1918 pandemic, however this pandemic isn't over yet. Don't you think we should be doing better than that with all the advancements that science has provided for us over the last 100 years?
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Not really, and I'm thankful it's not at bad an 1918.
To get the same death rate as 1918 we'd "need" something like 1.8 million, and yes, I agree it ain't over yet by a long shot we could get close to that... Too many screaming for their free-dumb.
We are in the first innings (Score:2)
Thats when we should compare numbers.
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Check the ratio on this FB post by a Detroit news org.... https://www.facebook.com/wxyzd... [facebook.com]
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