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United States Medicine

US Has Suffered More Than 1 Million Excess Deaths During Pandemic, CDC Finds (theguardian.com) 285

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: There have been more than 1 million excess deaths in the US during the pandemic, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The deaths are mainly attributable to Covid-19, as well as conditions that may have resulted from delayed medical care and overwhelmed health systems. At least 923,000 Americans have died from confirmed Covid cases, according to the CDC. Other causes of death above the normally expected number have included heart disease, hypertension and Alzheimer's disease. Some Americans also die months after their initial Covid diagnosis, because the virus created other fatal complications.

Excess deaths are calculated by looking at previous years' fatalities. In 2019, there were 2.8 million deaths in the US; in 2020, it was approximately 3.3 million. While cause of death can sometimes be difficult to ascertain, and political pressures can lead to miscounting, excess deaths can indicate the broad scope of a health emergency. These figures can reveal the truer toll of Covid -- including deaths directly from infection as well as deaths from the circumstances of the crisis. The global number of excess deaths may be millions higher than the official count of Covid deaths. Excess deaths are also known as untimely or "early" deaths. While the majority of excess deaths in the US occurred among those 65 and older, many of those Americans had many years left to live.

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US Has Suffered More Than 1 Million Excess Deaths During Pandemic, CDC Finds

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday February 17, 2022 @10:36PM (#62278769)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      Shhh! They think they are the epitome of freedom or something.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Canada has fewer people than California. It does, in fact, have a rate of death 1/3 of the US. Of course Canada is not lead by people who believe a virus that almost killed 1 out of 300 people over the past two years is mostly harmless.
      • Wouldn't that mean that Canadian life expectancy is 3x longer than the death rate in California? I'm not sure I follow your math.

      • by rbrander ( 73222 )

        Clarification: the US has 3X the gross death rate of Canada. It's much worse than that for people under 50.

        Separate two statistical groups: remove those over 65 that are about 90% of the whole pandemic; many died in care-homes with a very different infection path than active people in the community.

        Clarify the separate signal, the 5% of the pandemic of those under 50, community-driven.

        There the USA/Canada ratio is more like seven. Canada had lost 875 on Jan 21 when I posted the calcs. Like an Americ

        • by noodler ( 724788 )

          It had also lost 1990's births of over 5241, a count like the Iraq War...

          The deaths due to the Iraq war were massively larger, you self-obsessed asshole.
          You just chose not to count all the murdered civilians in Iraq.
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          but of kids too young to have died in that.

          Yeah? And how many kids were among the civilian casualties in Iraq?
          It sickens me that you refer to your 'losses' while you are collectively guilty of far worse horrors.

          • Re:Frosted Piss (Score:5, Insightful)

            by rbrander ( 73222 ) on Friday February 18, 2022 @11:41AM (#62280387) Homepage

            I wasn't counting Iraqi pandemic losses, either. The comparison was between *America's* losses in the war and *America's* losses in the pandemic, because the subject WAS America; not out of "self-obsession", me being a Canadian who was and is fiercely against the war.

            Alas, however, your "sickened" outrage is hoist on its own petard. You forgot to ALSO gig me for "ignoring" Vietnam's losses in Vietnam when I also mentioned the Vietnam war. YOU just forgot about THEM - by the same logic. Two million dead is the best guess. Double the recent Middle-East tragedies.

            But, hey, in a spirit of peace, let me offer you a free gift for a fellow America-in-MidEast-War hater. Not many people complain about, because they don't know about, the terrible war crime committed in the first Iraq war, 1990. Fully reported by the Washington Post, then simply dropped as a topic.
            https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com] ...it seems to be not paywalled, but there are archives if the WaPo changes its mind. (search on the "struck broadly in Iraq" string)

            Briefly, the Pentagon admitted to destroying Iraq's electrical generation, not to win the war, not for a legal reason, but to "create postwar leverage", to imiserate the civilians. Except the water treatment plants predictably failed, cholera and typhus epidemics predictably broke out, and the Pentagon accepts the estimate that 170,000 kids under age 5 died in them. A massive, literally sickening war crime of germ-warfare-by-proxy, and I didn't even find out it happened until The Intercept mentioned it in passing. (Jon Schwarz, google "Republicans have been lawless for decades")

            Whenever I want to be sickened with outrage at America's dismissive attitude to foreign death, that's my go-to contemplation.

      • by quenda ( 644621 )

        Canada's excess death rate is more like 1/5 that of the US.
        And Australia has had negative excess deaths, partly due to no flu season since Covid.
        Russia on the other hand, despite a low number or reported covid deaths, has more than double the excess deaths as the US.

        Map of the world with per-capita excess deaths:
        https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Canada has fewer people than California. It does, in fact, have a rate of death 1/3 of the US. Of course Canada is not lead by people who believe a virus that almost killed 1 out of 300 people over the past two years is mostly harmless.

        To be fair, those people are in Ottawa right now trying to change that.

      • (snip) people who believe a virus that almost killed 1 out of 300 people over the past two years is mostly harmless.

        Perhaps a poor choice of phrasing, considering 299 out of three hundred is, indeed, "mostly".

      • Canada has fewer people than California. It does, in fact, have a rate of death 1/3 of the US. Of course Canada is not lead by people who believe a virus that almost killed 1 out of 300 people over the past two years is mostly harmless.

        And a lot of them are in Ottawa, and blocking entry points because they don't want to get the vaccine. With the claims that Americans are all stupid be allowed on the freedum loving Canadians?

        Protip - despite the popular narrative, the USA doesn't have a monopoly on the stupid.

    • Re:Frosted Piss (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday February 17, 2022 @10:49PM (#62278793)

      Hey it's my patriotic duty to pay 7x more than the next most expensive country. https://www.rand.org/blog/rand... [rand.org]

      But government intervention=bad...

      • Agreed that article reveals some extra delightful sunshine on the craptacular US healthcare "system". But I also can't help but wonder why a Japanese company doesn't just flood the US with Japanese manufactured insulin. That competition should bring down the prices.

        So is it that US protectionist policies for meds are keeping foreign manufacturers out?

        • Trump campaigned on bargaining for drug prices but because the bill was sponsored by Nancy Pelosi it was called "socialist" by Mitch McConnell.

            https://thehill.com/policy/hea... [thehill.com]

          • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday February 18, 2022 @12:06AM (#62278961)
            And a huge platform especially back before he got banned from Twitter and Facebook. Anytime he wanted to pass a law allowing drug price bargaining he could have just by going to his base and telling them not to vote Republican until the law passed. The fact that he didn't prove that he wasn't serious about drug price reform.

            Whether pelosiers or not I can't tell because the Democrats haven't been in power for more than about 2 months in about 20 years. Seriously if you look into when the affordable Care act passed because of how the midterms landed and how senators were retiring and how there were a couple of senators elected in between the midterms the Democrats actually only held the Senate with enough to overcome filibusters for 2 months and they used that time to pass the affordable Care act. This year's size of the ACA means that it was about the only thing they could get through reliably at the time. As for now they don't have a filibuster proof majority and Joe Manchin is basically a Republican, going so far as to threaten to withhold a supreme court seat from Biden
      • Re:Frosted Piss (Score:4, Informative)

        by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Thursday February 17, 2022 @11:26PM (#62278877)

        There is a lot of government intervention, but on the opposite direction.
        You know, patents, copyrights, passing laws that break the legs of any possible competition...

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      America has 3x the body count at like 10x the healthcare cost per capita compared to Canada during the pandemic.

      The fuck is wrong with all of you??

      Capitalism as a fetish instead of a necessary evil that needs to be carefully limited and reigned in. There is a price to pay for that.

    • Our system is set up to give them more power and they should have. A rural voter in Montana has 46 times more voting power than a city voter in California.

      Originally it was set up this way because only wealthy landowners were allowed to vote and they tended to be rural for obvious reasons and so our entire political system was built from the ground up to give the rural parts of the country and outsized voice in political matters.

      As Time moved on it became useful to have rural voters continue to have
      • Our system is set up to give them more power and they should have. A rural voter in Montana has 46 times more voting power than a city voter in California.

        Originally it was set up this way because only wealthy landowners were allowed to vote and they tended to be rural for obvious reasons and so our entire political system was built from the ground up to give the rural parts of the country and outsized voice in political matters.

        Originally it was set up this way to keep the republic together. It forces candidates to appeal to a wide swath of the country instead of two or three most populous states. It prevents the three high-population states from ganging up on the other states and forces policies to have wide appeal as well.

        Liberals are all about pointing out the problems with the system, but conveniently forget that dismantling the system will bring back the original problems that the system was built to address.

        Defund the police

        • Very few people could vote back then. You needed to be white, male, and own land. And even that wasn't a guarantee since we didn't let the Irish vote. Appealing to democracy back then as an excuse is just silly. It was done to protect the interests of the aristocracy that existed back then.

          And we're about to try socialism very soon. Or at least the kind the nationalists like so much. We came very close to installing a dictator on January 6th and the more we learn about that day the more we learn how clo
        • According to some social media conservatives:
          Mandating a free and safe vaccine that will prevent you, your loved ones and your neighbour from dying == Nazism.
          Limiting your freedom of voting by making other people count more than you by birthright == pillar of Liberty that keeps the Nation together.
          • Limiting your freedom of voting by making other people count more than you by birthright

            Not at all.

            The president is elected by the STATES.

            You are a citizen of your state first, and then the United States.

            This was all set up, to prevent a few massive state populations from running roughshod over the interests of the smaller states.

            All states are equal, so, they had some compromises. The house is based on population, the senate has equal representation from each states, the the presidential elections goe

      • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

        A rural voter in Montana has 46 times more voting power than a city voter in California.

        California doesn't mind because they have more seats in Congress than Montana and that gives them a big advantage.

        • by necro81 ( 917438 )

          California doesn't mind because they have more seats in Congress than Montana and that gives them a big advantage.

          I think you need a remedial civics lesson. What you say is only true in the House of Representatives, and correct only to a degree in the Electoral College. In equal standing of states in the Senate skews the power dynamic, and confers less populous states drastically greater power than they would have if population were the only determinant.

          • I think you need a remedial civics lesson. What you say is only true in the House of Representatives, and correct only to a degree in the Electoral College. In equal standing of states in the Senate skews the power dynamic, and confers less populous states drastically greater power than they would have if population were the only determinant.

            And, this is a good thing.

            Otherwise about 3 states would run roughshod over the rest of the states....and being such a large country, with different population spread

      • by necro81 ( 917438 )

        Our system is set up to give them more power and they should have. A rural voter in Montana has 46 times more voting power than a city voter in California.

        I think this is something that the Founders simply could not have fathomed - that there could be such vast disparity in state populations. At the time of the 1790 census, the least populous state (Delaware) had about 59k people in it; the most populous (Virginia) had about 748k, or about 12.5x as much. [ref [wikipedia.org]]. In terms of potential voters (free white

        • I think that if the Founders were to see the power disparity as it stands today....

          Fucking hilarious.

          Tell me, when the country was founded, who was the richest person in the country, and where did their wealth come from?

          Once you figure that out, the design of the country and the path it's taken should be blindlingly obvious. I'll give you a hint: Where we are now isn't an accident or some system gone wrong like you suggest.

    • Re:Frosted Piss (Score:5, Informative)

      by Trailer Trash ( 60756 ) on Thursday February 17, 2022 @11:56PM (#62278939) Homepage

      America has 3x the body count at like 10x the healthcare cost per capita compared to Canada during the pandemic.

      The fuck is wrong with all of you??

      Obesity:

      https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/produ... [cdc.gov]

      That alone explains a large part of the difference. Most people who die of Covid have three or four comorbidities, with obesity being the common factor.

      • Although probably not as girthy as our southern neighbours, Canada is getting pretty big in general as well. I thought I read that the UK is more overweight than the US now, and their death rates are also lower. Maybe a contribution, but not a silver bullet

      • America has 3x the body count at like 10x the healthcare cost per capita compared to Canada during the pandemic.

        The fuck is wrong with all of you??

        Obesity:

        https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/produ... [cdc.gov]

        That alone explains a large part of the difference. Most people who die of Covid have three or four comorbidities, with obesity being the common factor.

        And note that the American system of capitalism is what generates all our obese citizens, and our system of health allows these citizens to prosper despite co-morbities.

        Obesity is a problem (that we are trying to fix), but it's only a reflection of the wealth that is created in our country.

        • Obesity is a problem (that we are trying to fix), but it's only a reflection of the wealth that is created in our country.

          You're saying that other countries can't afford to be overweight?

          Oh, dear.

          • Obesity is a problem (that we are trying to fix), but it's only a reflection of the wealth that is created in our country.

            You're saying that other countries can't afford to be overweight?

            Oh, dear.

            In a sense, yes.

            Large amounts of cheap, high calorie food is a modern novelty, historically.

            Previously economists studied average health, longevity, weight, height, calories produced per person, dollar cost per calorie, annual income.

            All this was in a context of undersized adults and starvation.

            So yes. Too much food is the result of capitalism producing wealth and plenty, and insofar as otber nations always lag behind the US in this, they are too poor to suffer obesity (as opposed to malnourishment) as the

        • And note that the American system of capitalism is what generates all our obese citizens

          I think you mean corn subsidies. The fattest people are the poorest, because that's what they can afford to eat... junk food with loads of refined carbohydrates and corn syrup

          and our system of health allows these citizens to prosper despite co-morbities.

          "prosper"... your think being poor and fat is a sign of prosperity? That might be the dumbest thing I heard all day
      • Your link only mentions obesity. It says nothing of covid. American Samoa should be empty by your logic.

      • >Obesity:

        The McDonalds, KFC and the rest of the garbage chains parking spots are still full, and will continue to be.

      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday February 18, 2022 @02:04AM (#62279169)
        and that list of 20 makes up a broad list of conditions that has many conditions under it.

        It's practically impossible not to have at least one of them. It's so long that having four of them really isn't that much of a surprise.

        The point is, yeah Americans could stand to lose a few pounds, but the statistic being thrown about about four comorbidities is deceptive and designed to downplay both the risk of covid and are extremely poor response to it.

        It's also kind of f'd up because it implies those lives aren't worth saving
      • America has 3x the body count at like 10x the healthcare cost per capita compared to Canada during the pandemic.

        The fuck is wrong with all of you??

        Obesity:

        https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/produ... [cdc.gov]

        That alone explains a large part of the difference. Most people who die of Covid have three or four comorbidities, with obesity being the common factor.

        But ... but ... how does that let our friend feel superior and gloat about death???

      • by Nugoo ( 1794744 )

        Obesity:

        https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/produ... [cdc.gov]

        That alone explains a large part of the difference. Most people who die of Covid have three or four comorbidities, with obesity being the common factor.

        Obesity doesn't explain shit. If we look at the prevalence of comorbidities [cdc.gov], and sort by all ages, we can see that the most common comorbidity is "influenza and pneumonia" (which might as well just be pneumonia, since COVID is a lung infection), followed by "other", then "respiratory failure", then "hypertensive diseases", and "diabetes" finishes off the top 5. Obesity is 16th on the list.

        • by Nugoo ( 1794744 )

          I know it's bad from to reply to myself, but there's no edit button, so here we are.

          Rather than saying "COVID is a lung infection", I should have said "COVID infects the lungs". It also infects lots of other parts of the body, especially the cardiovascular system.

        • Re:Frosted Piss (Score:4, Informative)

          by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Friday February 18, 2022 @04:41PM (#62281595)

          Obesity doesn't explain shit. If we look at the prevalence of comorbidities, and sort by all ages, we can see that the most common comorbidity is "influenza and pneumonia" (which might as well just be pneumonia, since COVID is a lung infection), followed by "other", then "respiratory failure", then "hypertensive diseases", and "diabetes" finishes off the top 5. Obesity is 16th on the list.

          I think obesity does not explain the difference but it does explain some of it. The positioning is due to difference in causation. People who get covid die from pneumonia, ARDS, sepsis, respiratory failure..etc it tends to be caused by covid. The pre-existing conditions (obesity, diabetes, hypertension) predate contraction of covid.

          There are many studies who have looked at this. Obesity, diabetes and hypertension seem to consistently rank as top risk factors.

          According to this study absolute chance of death is increased by 12% for obesity, 14% diabetes and 11% for hypertension.

          https://bmjopen.bmj.com/conten... [bmj.com]

          Certainly health plays a role but there seems to be a lot missing from the story.

          • Re:Frosted Piss (Score:4, Informative)

            by Nugoo ( 1794744 ) on Friday February 18, 2022 @05:20PM (#62281737)

            Thanks for this post. This is honestly a more polite and thoughtful reply than I deserve.

            I don't disagree with anything you said, and I didn't mean to imply that obesity doesn't increase a person's chances of dying of COVID. My intention was simply to provide a counter-argument to the claim that obesity explains the difference in deaths per capita between the US and Canada. According the CDC data that I linked, roughly 5% of people in the US who died of COVID had obesity listed as a comorbidity. But Canada's deaths per capita are roughly 33% of the US's. Even if there were no obese people in Canada (and I can assure you that there are), American obesity would not be close to enough to explain the gap.

    • We are creating shareholder value!

    • It's not all.
      King County, where I live, at about 6% of Canada's entire population, and about 27,000% the population density, is at right about Canada's death rate.
      I want to know why theirs is so high with only 4 of the motherfuckers per square kilometer.
    • America has 3x the body count at like 10x the healthcare cost per capita compared to Canada during the pandemic.

      The fuck is wrong with all of you??

      I dunno, but at least we don't take the number of stupid people, and claim the entire country is made up of stupid idiots.

      That would be like Americans claiming that the tomfoolery of the idiots in Canada blocking the roads for their Freedumb, are what all Canadians are like.

      I just love it when presumably smart people make wildly generalized statements about Americans,

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Fox News is killing its sleazy and stupid viewers at a very impressive rate.

    I don't know about you, but when I see thousands of right wing retards sprinting off a cliff I'm inclined to just let this scene play out for a while.

    That's right, Trumptards. Don't get vaccinated because of muh freedumb.

    You fucking idiots.

    • Fox News is killing its sleazy and stupid viewers at a very impressive rate.

      I don't know about you, but when I see thousands of right wing retards sprinting off a cliff I'm inclined to just let this scene play out for a while.

      That's right, Trumptards. Don't get vaccinated because of muh freedumb.

      You fucking idiots.

      Florida did better than New York.

      Trump spearheaded the Manhattan project for getting vaccines fast in the first place.

  • by RhettLivingston ( 544140 ) on Thursday February 17, 2022 @11:16PM (#62278845) Journal

    There have been many indications since the start that COVID deaths for other than respiratory reasons have been misclassified. For example, some hospitals noticed excess strokes in middle-aged folks in the spring of 2020, tested them for COVID after the fact, and found it most of the time. We've now got some indications of what might be causing these cases in the research finding that COVID activates endogenous retroviruses [phys.org].

    Even if COVID disappeared into oblivion today, we'll have people dying or living in disability from it for decades. Like auto accidents, those who die from the initial trauma will just be the tip of the iceberg representing those who have permanent medical consequences.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday February 17, 2022 @11:26PM (#62278875)
    Was caused by politics. In particular one political party lead heavily into anti vaccine rhetoric through their media outlets and the more extreme elements of the party. It's become a very effective wage issue as well as an effective issue to try and win seats in the midterm. And all it cost was half a million lives that probably weren't going to vote anyway disproportionately affects communities that although they listen to the anti vaccine lies they tend to forget to vote. For the few close elections a touch of voter suppression will fix everything
  • That's one Hell of a little flu
  • Did all the people go? Every single business has a help wanted sign. Are they really during at home, you can't tell me that everyone retried from Walmart and Wendy's

    • Right, people mostly don't retire from Walmart and Wendy's, they move up into the jobs that people did retire from.

      There are two big stories on decreased labor participation rate during Covid:

      First, boomers:
      (This is not just an increasing percentage of people born 1944 or later who are retired, which would be normal with the passage of time, but an increasing percentage of people over fixed ages, say 60 who are now retired).

      https://www.pewresearch.org/fa... [pewresearch.org]
      https://www.latimes.com/politi... [latimes.com]

      Second,

    • The market is undergoing a wage correction. If nobody will work for the price you're willing to pay then you're the problem.

    • The jobs running into staffing problems have 3 common traits: You need to be physically present, the wages are often poor or tipped, they are fields that often have a larger young women workforce.

      * Dual working families going to single workers. If you have pre-teenage kid you can't really leave them alone for 8-10 hours every single day. You need childcare in the form of either childcare facilities or schools. Both of those where regularly shutdown or would randomly shutdown. If both parents worked jobs out
    • by GlennC ( 96879 )

      I don't know about anyone else, but my wife contracted COVID in September of 2020 and was in ICU for a week. She suffered lung and brain damage and is no longer able to work.

      I imagine she's not the only one, although I have no data to back it up.

  • I'd like to know how many life years were lost. If average life expectancy is 80 years and a 79-year-old dies, you lose one life year, but if a 20-year-old dies, you lose 60. We might calculate the sum from the average age of those who died "excessively".
  • The list of causes is very one-sided. It is clear that the Covid restrictions caused some mental problems, leading to people being careless with their health and to suicides. Also the lack of exercise causes health problems. And the restrictions and anxiety of the people caused economic damage. Economic damage also increases the death rate.

    I am not saying that these are the main causes of death. But when discussing the excess death rate these must be taken into count. They must put numbers on that, or any

The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.

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