It looks like that's more Americans than have been killed in combat in all of the wars of the 20th century combined [1]
Granted it's less than the UK lost in WW1 alone, so it's perhaps more a testament to how few the US managed to loose in the world wars (compared to Europe), but it's still wild to realize.
I know this is going to sound conspiratorial but I think you’d have to be pretty naive to accept the reported deaths in the US due to Covid to be that accurate. Hospitals(which in the US are for profit mind you) were quite literally given more money for reporting a death as a Covid death for a period of time. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac...
Actually you could say it’s difficult to trust the numbers coming from any country for a variety of reasons, whether it be under or overreported.
You can use excess deaths then, those numbers are even higher. And even if official Covid numbers are inflated, even tenfold, it's still a disease that resulted in a lot of death.
A non trivial portion of excess deaths can be laid at the feet of the response to the virus, not necessarily the virus itself.
This would include the things like firing healthcare workers, leading to other problems being undiagnosed, and worsening instead of being treated. I would also include lockdowns and mask mandates as being responsible for increased amounts of depression, which has a known poor impact on survival over time, and that's not just counting suicide.
we maybe fired less than a tenth of a percent of health care workers. and most were not even nurses they were janitors and the like. a few thousands in a field of hundreds of thousands.
if your going to make shit up at least make up believable bullshit.
And it doesn't have to be widespread - given the thin staffing margins that hospitals already run on, losing a small amount of people in a large facility can have outsized effects.
You yourself said we're talking about a few thousand people. The idea that losing that many people all at once (within the space of a month or two), especially during a time of increased hospital usage, has no impact on outcomes (which is what you appear to be arguing), is asinine.
I'd thank you to engage with the argument in good faith per the site guidelines, or don't bother responding.
tl;dr; when you start having the discussion in good faith I will.
once you actually have a position that can be discussed. show me evidence of your position and I'll stop calling it a bat shit insane conspiracy theory.
right now all you've done is assert complete bullshit. I can link to articles with hospitals stating how many of their staff they've fired due to anti-vax behaviors. I doubt you can find a single instance of a hospital shortage due directly to the few thousand works in the entire country who were fired for their anti-vax beliefs.
even if you did find a hospital in that position, the issue certainly isn't wide spread enough to even merit a footnote when it comes to health policy.
This is just one reason for doubting the accuracy of the reported number of COVID-related deaths. Fauci, Chicago's Department of Public Health, and others have admitted that they've counted deaths as COVID deaths if the person tested positive for COVID while in the hospital. Dying from COVID and dying with COVID are two different things, but both have been lumped together in the CDC's death tally.
Some doctors are reporting adverse/fatal effects associated with the use of Remdesivir (which hospitals are using to treat COVID patients). These issues include acute kidney injury, bradycardia, and death. The CDC has counted these deaths as COVID deaths as well.
There are also other aspects of COVID that seem difficult to suss out. For example, how many people have died from the vaccines? VAERS is reporting 22,193 vaccine-related deaths and over 1 million adverse reactions. There are also deaths and suicides caused by our response to COVID; e.g., the lockdowns, depression, job loss, fear of going to the doctor/hospital due to COVID, etc. Those aren't being counted as COVID-related deaths by the CDC, but perhaps they should be.
Even if you removed all the politicization/propaganda of both COVID and the vaccines, it still seems like we've made a lot of mistakes during the past two years that would make producing an accurate death count virtually impossible.
> difficult to trust the numbers coming from any country for a variety of reasons
This must be a golden age for those doing a dissertation on media studies. So many quant-driven narratives, so little time. Hopefully cross-country data and narratives are being archived and aggregated into an open-data academic repository that can be studied in coming years.
Progress is slowly being made on transparency. For the Omicron-specific Pfizer vaccine, the clinical trial in humans must be completed before approval and clinical trial data must be submitted at the same time (no 75-year delays).
> recent study from Israel showed that while a fourth dose of an mRNA vaccine boosted antibodies, the level was not high enough to prevent infection by the Omicron variant ... the debate appears to have shifted with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) saying on Friday that international regulators now preferred clinical studies to be carried out before approval of a new vaccine ... it may not be possible to realise a current plan to launch an Omicron-targeting vaccine by the end of March ... Inclusion of clinical trial data in the regulatory filings may have an impact on the delivery of initial batches.
At this point, given that the quantity and quality of the public data of vaccine rollouts dwarfs the data of vaccine trials in both scope and usefulness, anyone still grousing about vaccine trial data is just playing political football, for the sake of FUD.
It's like arguing about the raw data of the Wright brothers flight, when millions of people are flying around the world on 747s. Was it relevant in the past? Yes. Is it relevant today? No.
You want to know about vaccine safety? Look at excess mortality, hospital admissions, and long-term health problems of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, today. Ten billion COVID vaccines have been administered around the world in the past year. Any of the data we've gathered from that is about a thousand times more relevant to literally anything we could be doing, than raw study data on a few thousand people.
Most legal systems do not agree with you. Fruit of the poisoned tree is a peculiarly American legal abberation, and even in the United States, it is not applicable in many cases.
Most ethical and legal systems around the world, in fact, would use that evidence to both convict the criminal, and then independently recommend separate sanctions for breaking procedures.
But we're not even talking about ethics or legality, here. We are talking about knowledge. People claim that we don't know about the safety of vaccines because we don't have data on trials conducted on thousands of people.
... Yet we have data about vaccines administered to billions of people. Why don't those critics look at that data, instead?
It's because knowledge and fact-finding isn't the point of that complaint. The people asking about this don't actually care about having a data-driven argument about the safety or efficacy of vaccines, they just found a procedural problem, that they can play a political game with. The politics is the entire point.
These numbers can be further separated by "with Covid" and "from Covid" causality, as well as co-morbidities and expected lifetime. E.g. if someone was soon to die from illness A, but died 3 months earlier from complications induced by Covid, and the hospital received a financial payment for classifying this as Covid-related treatment, that should be broken out into a separate reporting category. Such deaths would not much change all-cause mortality for the year.
Excess mortality is higher than reported COVID deaths. Australia contained the virus in 2020 and saw negative excess mortality. Official COVID deaths understate the true toll.
One thing I've heard multiple doctors comment on is that they are seeing more patients who were successfully managing a condition have significant declines after a bout of COVID, even a mild one. That's definitely a bit of a philosophical question trying to assign fractional responsibility but you can also side-step this to some extent by looking at it as years of life lost — e.g. if someone with a manageable heart disease where patients tend to die 10 years older dies after having COVID, that's something like a decade where they could have been around their friends and family.
In places with good nationwide data like the UK and national level lockdowns, the excess mortality spikes also line up very well with the case outbreaks (especially pre vaccination), and considerably less well with other plausible causes of excess mortality (lockdown and unemployment induced stress, [long term effects of] reductions in access to treatment for chronic conditions)
COVID denialists often attribute excess deaths to lockdowns as opposed to undercounting of deaths from COVID. I was just preempting that line by pointing out Australia had severe lockdowns but negative excess deaths.
As I recall the basis of the argument against lockdowns (which yes was made by legitimate epidemeologists before covid made everything so politicized and tribal) is that the disease eventually comes right back and infects everyone once the lockdown ends. I do think there is a good argument about allowing vaccines to be developed and delivered though. But benefits like preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed were believed to already be achievable with social distancing alone. So one must be careful to not give to much credit to the lockdowns alone.
As for excess deaths, it presumably depends on how well the country can endure the self-inflicted downsides (such as a recession) that comes with it. Countries where it causes severe problems probably are the very ones who didn't have the political will to maintain the lockdowns, leading to some biased conclusions. We also have lots of other issues caused by covid response such as shortages and spiking prices all over. Being outright dodged by pointing blame at some indermediate actor like "corporate supply chains" or "hoarders" or whatever.
The point is there are arguments that can be made on all sides. No need to insult and dismiss people.
COVID what-ists? You mean all manner of people who have all manner of opinions and reasons for them that just so happen to differ from the views presented as scientific consensus by government, media and celebrities?
Here is a summary of over 400 studies demonstrating lockdowns are ineffective or harmful:
Prepare a sufficiently convincing argument against each and every one of them, and against the credentials of each and every author, before using the term "denialist" in application to anyone other than yourself.
Ok. I don’t care what the purported “studies” say. China, Taiwan, Australia had hard lockdowns. Taiwan and Australia have accurate statistics — they had virtually no COVID deaths and no excess deaths.
Sweden is 62nd on a list of 180 countries on deaths per capita. We can argue back and forth like this but why bother? If you don't care what the studies say, your mind is made up, making discussion with you valueless - for you.
I’m not saying there’s a huge difference between light and lighter lockdowns (ie, Denmark/Norway/Germany vs Sweden). I’m saying lockdowns themselves don’t produce excess deaths vs baseline (as evidenced by Australia and Taiwan). Therefore, the excess deaths that occurred in the US, which are greater than official COVID deaths, indicate COVID deaths are being under counted, not over counted
Doesn't basing your conclusion on the two countries that support it, out of a pool of ~200 that exist, seem a bit tentative?
It's at about the same level as the counter argument regarding Sweden (which is one reason I made it).
Have a look through the studies I linked, you'll find several that perform rigorous analysis on a large number of countries, including in some cases specifically regarding excess mortality.
For example, have a look at Figures 2A and 2B from the following study. 38 countries compared by length of initial lockdown measures, versus per capita excess mortality for the period, and then the same measure compared across all states of the US:
Won't even examine 400 counter-claims? That's "denialism".
Lockdowns working/not-working and/or causing collateral damage potentially eliminating other gains is not even remotely on par with astrology.
Lockdowns used in this manner are entirely unprecedented, and the long-term results cannot be known by anyone, only guessed at.
Your rigid adherence to them as beacons of purity only demonstrates your religious-like faith in them, which strikes me as having far more in common with astrology than well-evidenced arguments by well-credentialed individuals that they might not work or be counterproductive.
I have no strong opinion on the lockdowns. In fact, when you have the optimal amount of lockdown, a large minority of the population might well think that they're too lenient, and a different large minority of the population might well think that they're too strong.
What I object to is your demand that anyone disagreeing with you first go through 400 studies, individually, and find the flaws in them, and destruct the credentials of the authors.
> Here is a summary of over 400 studies demonstrating lockdowns are ineffective or harmful:
You're welcome to present studies demonstrating the opposite, but even if you can find 400 of them (and I doubt you can), the best we'd have arrived at would be equal uncertainty either way.
The longterm results of anything for which a long term has not yet elapsed can indeed only be guessed at. The fact I need to point this out to many people is striking in its resemblance to some kind of mass delusion on their part.
> Lockdowns used in this manner are entirely unprecedented, and the long-term results cannot be known by anyone, only guessed at.
So which one is it? Are your studies useful, or can the results only be guessed at, and so what's the point of your 400 studies?
> The longterm results of anything for which a long term has not yet elapsed can indeed only be guessed at. The fact I need to point this out to many people is striking in its resemblance to some kind of mass delusion on their part.
It's amazing that you tell other people this yet don't seem to understand it yourself.
> the hospital received a financial payment for classifying this as Covid-related treatment
Can you explain this more? Surely a hospital doesn't just get money for simply classifying it. How does a hospital benefit from classifying someone's treatment as Covid related other than being paid for the necessary treatment?
> U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield agreed that some hospitals have a monetary incentive to overcount coronavirus deaths as they do deaths for other diseases. “I think you’re correct in that we’ve seen this in other disease processes, too. Really, in the HIV epidemic, somebody may have a heart attack but also have HIV — the hospital would prefer the [classification] for HIV because there’s greater reimbursement,” Redfield said during a House panel hearing Friday when asked by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer about potential “perverse incentives.”
There is very little substance on that page plus it's 18 months old and the other fact you posted isn't an incentive for hospitals. I really wonder if that's actually a thing.
U.S. Congressional testimony by a CDC Director is not substantive?
The 2nd point offers a financial incentive for families to agree with hospital (mis)classification, i.e. it aligns the financial incentives of family and hospital towards Covid attribution.
> It looks like that's more Americans than have been killed in combat in all of the wars of the 20th century combined [1]
Like all deaths tragic, but let's not pretend young men, effectively kids, dying in war is the same as elderly & chronically sick populations dying of disease.
> Like all deaths tragic, but let's not pretend young men, effectively kids, dying in war is the same as elderly & chronically sick populations dying of disease.
Where elderly means > 40 and chronically sick includes "has a bit of high blood pressure".
> chronically sick includes "has a bit of high blood pressure".
The CDC says > 40% of US adults are obese (> 100 Million people!) and 13% of US adults have diabetes. If that's not a chronically sick population I don't know what is.
This is the elephant in the room I was trying to talk to people about at the very start of this pandemic. People are endlessly willing to talk about how divided we are about all kinds of issues and yet the fact that we cannot at minimum rally behind the fact we need to deal with the obesity epidemic is a bad sign.
My big problem with the initial lockdowns was not really about the larger lockdown at all - we just (obviously in hindsight) went too far with locking down larger, wide open places where people exercise.
Spring break in Miami with people crammed onto a beach? Probably a bad idea. A few surfers going in the water a hundred feet from one another and some other people doing a morning run? Likely a net benefit to Covid outcomes.
It looks like that's more Americans than have been killed in combat in all of the wars of the 20th century combined [1]
Granted it's less than the UK lost in WW1 alone, so it's perhaps more a testament to how few the US managed to loose in the world wars (compared to Europe), but it's still wild to realize.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1009819/total-us-militar...