It's worth noting that in terms of person-years lost, an average malaria death is significantly worse as it predominantly kills children under the age of 5.

source: https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/world-m...

Tremendous progress is being made against Malaria. Of course, it's not enough until will destroy this scourge.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-kills-people-an-ave...

Agreed. But I think quantifications can still be useful.

Person-years probably aren't the right sort of quantification though, in that they blend together too many kinds of human experience. But I imagine most people would agree that statements like "X% of grandparents, lost 10 years earlier than expected" or "Y% of children under 10" allow for comparing the relative impact on families.

Quantifying losses doesn't mean that we consider the quantified as fungible.

Unless you're a hospital director on a budget, or something. (I don't know how such people cope; there's no winning decision there.)

And in context of opportunity cost, in a situation where limited medical resources need to be allocated, it’s not a controversial opinion that a 90 year old can be let go in favor of saving a 10 year old.

"Potential" person years lost, I guess. If you used "person years" the same way you use "Our firm has a combined 125 years of experience" then it's the other way round.

(Grim discussion, I guess, but I'm just not certain I agree with the unspoken assumption that seems to be in that statement, that the younger the death, the more tragic/more effect on society.)

>(Grim discussion, I guess, but I'm just not certain I agree with the unspoken assumption that seems to be in that statement, that the younger the death, the more tragic/more effect on society.)

It is a matter of morality and personal ethics. I chose to mention it only because the discrepancy in this case is so large, and it felt almost misleading to not relate the information. That said, I regret framing it in such a coldly utilitarian way.

Hard to know. Do you think there's zero chance that, when you're their age, you might be the one telling your adult kid that you've had a happy, long life, and don't feel the need to experiment with longevity?

It's not only deaths, it's also lost opportunity, as malaria is a chronic disease. Children miss out on schooling, adults miss out on work, and malarious areas miss out on investment.

I'd been hearing the numbers might be inflated from diagnoses on dead people without tests. Hard to know what's really going on with anything with all the conflicting information.

Here are some good state-by state graphs [1], and here's a country-wide graph [2]

By any measure, our "excess deaths" since February have spiked enormously, and significantly more than the current official Covid death count.

Some may be due to hospitals overflowing preventing other care. But it's pretty clearly all Corona-related.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronaviru...

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/02/exc...

Over the past few years, the evidence linking human health and overall mortality to isolation and human contact has been increasing. Don't get me wrong I'm staying locked down for the foreseeable future, but I have family and close friends whose mental health I'm seriously worried about. Not to mention physical health from stress, isolation, reduced activity, and can't afford to eat as healthy / stress-eating.

No idea if those are trends that will even come close to direct covid deaths, but we can't make informed decisions considering them.

> But it's pretty clearly all Corona-related.

If you count the above as "Corona-related", then I don't think the number has much meaning in terms of informing public policy.

Of course as that article and any other responsible ones should point out, the benefits and harms fall quite unevenly, and there is a lot of real misery too. And at some point the economic harm from ongoing lock down would certainly affect more and more people regardless of previous income. But even so as far as society overall goes it at worst looks like a wash right now, and seems more likely to lean towards fewer deaths. So excess vs previous years does look like a valid number to use as some level of gut check given the ongoing poor state of testing.

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1: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/recessions-dont-lead...

2: https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-offers-a-clear-view...

Yes, but you don't have to give up. If you use critical thinking and assess the competing claims and the strength of the evidence for them, it becomes clear that the evidence for inflated counts is extremely weak, bordering on hearsay, and inconsistent with the overall data, while the evidence for extra uncounted deaths is much broader and stronger and consistent with the overall data, so while there is uncertainty about the true numbers, on net it's reasonable to assume more deaths are being missed than overcounted.

Should we assume that social isolation, lack of physical activity, change of habits, being laid off a job and worse health care (preventive for example) have no impact on the number of deaths? That's quite a big assumption.

There are certainly some deaths being incorrectly attributed to COVID-19, but I think the data conclusively rejects the hypothesis that there is rampant COVID-19 over-reporting.

With covid, the worst case scenario with no mitigation is quite literally that everyone in the world gets it in fairly short order, which could cause tens of millions of deaths even with low IFR estimates, plus all the social and economic destabilization that implies.

COVID certainly has a lower mortality right now, but it's only because of the extreme precautions we've all taken. In a world where we didn't bother, I presume that would completely change.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#/media/File:Paludisme....

Yep. A vast majority of those who've contracted COVID are asymptomatic. The mortality rate might be significantly lower than previously reported.

That seems to point to the opposite happening: a higher mortality that is still not fully understood for lack of accurate data.

I suspect that will account for most of the differential, and possibly even be the more important number. (because many countries diagnose deaths with covid as deaths by covid)

Added bonus: the economic outcome of 2 million dead people is bad too, perhaps worse than a shutdown of (largely) healthy people. It's not an either/or, economic hardship right now is unavoidable. The choice is between getting a handle on the virus or not, and thousands dead instead of millions.

https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-new-york-antibody-test-f4f...

Confirmed and probable deaths are 16700 for a population of 8.4 million we come to about 1% IFR. However the excess deaths (for example how we count deaths during flu seasons) are 21000, so we are likely undercounting covid 19 deaths. Based on that number the IFR is 1.2% both these numbers are significantly higher than the flu. The other thing is that the numbers there are taken at similar times. However there is an incubation time of about 4 days (IIRC) and a time to death from first symptoms of about 10 days. So we really should compare the infection rate now with the death toll in 2 weeks. Which likely will increase IFR

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-crisis-210...

You are still in the end of the flu season though so some of those excess death numbers might be that.

Any sources on that?

From the https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E... it looks like at most 17% could be asymptomatic, but I'm not sure if it wouldn't be lower if they waited longer.

The concept of death rates, symptomatic rates, and even transmission rates as a generic term is meaningless because it depends entirely on the age demographics of the population (and behavior, and other things, etc.).

The idea the most people who catch it are asymptomatic is true if our antibody tests aren't throwing out massive false positive rates. For something closer to the general population, the USS Theodore Roosevelt is probably a better guess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_USS_Theod...

Looks like 90% of them had the disease on April 11. By April 20, 60% were asymptomatic. The last update seems to have been on April 22, with about 50% asymptomatic. That's probably a good bet for an actual figure in my opinion.

That's not what the wikipedia says... 94% of the crew has been tested for Covid, with 678 positives. Infection rate ~15%.

From those infected, ~60% didn't show symptoms.

However given my error on the 90%, it seems much more likely that a large proportion of the people asymptomatic on the 22nd had caught it more recently than I was assuming, so the asymptomatic rate is probably a bit worse.

E.g. if hypothetically people under 20 never exhibit symptoms but also never get the disease, they won't bring the asymptomatic rate down because they won't be infected in the first place.

Averages suck in this context.

As to regional differences, see here for some recent excess-mortality data that includes Ecuador and Brazil, two countries that don't have Malaria but share some characteristics with countries that do, such as climate and relative poverty: https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...

This isn't going to spare the countries affected by Malaria, except that some of them have a demographic advantage.

The only redeeming factor in Covid's favour is that mortality isn't the only, and possibly not even the most important, harm of Malaria: Just like Covid, it kills only a minority of those infected. But survivors sometimes suffer chronic relapses, enduring symptoms such as fatigue, and, in children, cognitive deficits.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/what-we-know-about-th...

I'd be shocked too; there IS a treatment for malaria.

https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/14-12-2017-up-to-650-00...

Covid-19 should kill 30 million.

.5% * 80% * 7.8 billion.

That will be over many years however. Maybe 2-3 years.

Some estimates put Covid-19 at 10 years lost per person average.

If you can get it multiple times, which is likely after a few years, it'll keep killing forever but it'll slow down, and we might even slow it even more in the richer countries, like we sort of bother with the Flu for, if a vaccine is ever possible.

Currently China has an unsustainable model going (School is not back properly) for 1.4 billion. If however they can move to a sustainable model, maybe they might not get it..... Good luck everyone else.

IFR is a guess and yours could be right. It is lower than NYC but the developing world is much younger than the west so they might have a much lower IFR unless their lack of available health care hurts them too much.

Hopefully IFR will drop as well as we learn to protect the elderly better.