The US has had around 8,000 deaths from COVID in the last two weeks.

And around 110,000 from other causes.

Which are still happening. Your point would have resonance if Covid were replacing a sufficient number of those deaths. But, it's additive.

Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported

https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac8...

What was the average life expectancy last year, and what is it now?

The lockdown is causing deaths too which also need to be considered.

We shut down cancer screening and gyms for 3 months in Ontario; that’s almost certainly going to kill more people than COVID did.

How will shutting down gyms for 3 months kill more people that covid? ~2600 people died from covid in Ontario. Are you saying that they gyms being closed caused more than that?

At ~10y of life lost per COVID death that's about 320,000 months of life lost to COVID in Ontario.

If there are ~1 million gym patrons in Ontario, then the gym lockdown (which is still ongoing) only needs to decrease a gym patron's lifespan by 10 days on average to be worse than COVID.

Also, I claimed cancer screenings + gyms combined. Hundreds of people get diagnosed with malignant tumors every day in Ontario and those tumors are now 3 months more advanced than they should be (and will be for a long time after the lockdown until the queues for medical care clear up).

That's just silly. You would get into the most ridiculous moral quandaries with thinking like that. If 75,000 people commute 1 hour each day on a highway and then someone offers to reconfigure the highway to cut the time in half and all he is asking for is the lives of 100 children, its a good trade!

At an avg lifespan of 78 years, 100 kids is ~68 million hours. 30 minutes saved a day / 261 days / year for 75,000 people is ~9.7 million hours a year, so after 7 years, it basically free. Except we would never do that because we don't measure human value in hours because the people in power would be free to make some really terrible optimizations.

You are right though, you did include cancers and I ignored it so we can call it a tie.

"and cancer screening"

That's why the Paleolithic had shorter lifespans than moderns... no gyms....

Heart disease and cancer kill more people per day than COVID even now.

Edit: and it's not just the gym obviously, we've removed any incidental exercise one might get from work or leisure activities that were locked down too

Please show your calculations of excess cancer deaths being greater than the projected non-lockdown Covid deaths over the same time period?

50% of those could be nursing home patients. Could be more or less, depending on your region.

Those are absolutely moving deaths forward by a couple months at best.

I'd be willing to put money on a fair amount of the rest of the deaths also being people who are pretty ill. Not all, of course.

Maybe not even most of the rest.

But enough to not be a rounding error.

The operative point is not how many have died — it's how many could die. If we gave up altogether on mask-wearing and social distancing, the numbers would get to be much larger. This is partly because the ratio of deaths to infections would increase as the hospitals were overwhelmed. The relentless march of exponential growth would see to that.

The fact that the numbers don't seem that dramatic yet doesn't mean that measures to slow the progress of the virus aren't important.

So due to coronavirus the US has experienced a 7% increase in general mortality. That seems pretty significant.

For 2.5 months the cases (both in the US and worldwide) have climbed steadily, even with all the measures implemented worldwide to cooldown the rate of infection, we are beating day after day the record of infections and deaths in the world.

The US didn't devolve into mass graves and people dying waiting for hospital care yet, it doesn't mean that the fearmongering is misplaced and the more you doubt it the more you will be part of the problem.

>we are beating day after day the record of infections and deaths in the world.

No, we are not setting death records day after day. Deaths worldwide have held steady since mid May; deaths in the US have been trending downwards since May.

But it did in NYC. The freezer truck outside of my local funeral home only disappeared about 2 weeks ago.

Well that's not actually wrong. The number of cases can go up 20 fold in two weeks without social distancing measures and people wearing masks.

Just wait until two weeks from now...

Go work at the nearest meat processing plant.

That's just hyperbole and a statements to shut down a conversation. That statement has nothing to do with "one should absolutely be concerned about the number of total cases".

The fact that there are continuously new outbreaks in meat processing plants shows that indoors the disease is easily transmitted, and it's so serious that the workforce is off sick with high fever for weeks.

The CFR for coronaplague is ~ 1 %, comparable to the Spanish Flu in Germany. The impact was catastrophic, the High Command had to decide between sending young men to the front or keeping them at work in coal and steel. In those days there was little automation, the infection would spread like wildfire through the workforce at any large employer. The only reason we aren't seeing the same now is that people adhere to some form of social distancing - work from home, no going out to bars, no gym, no church, kids are not in school, but as soon as guard is dropped infection rates jump up again. We are seeing this as well. Israel had new cases down to 1 per 100000 people until they opened up the schools and cases increased by two orders of magnitude.

On some points I agree, the disease is really terrible, the problem is elected officials are wildly unprepared for the job at hand. I'll never forget Gavin Newsom's dire proclamation that 25M Californians would have covid 19 in a few weeks(we have 174k currently), this was late march [1]. In addition in Santa Clara county I remember this statement saying 16k deaths from covid by end of May(we have 152 currently) - [2]. Don't get me started on Trumps statements! If I put out these insane numbers at my job I would have been fired, and if I wasn't fired I would have resigned in shame. These statements bring extreme anxiety and fear to people and I feel like there will be repercussions come Nov.

[1] - https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-20/newsom-c...

[2] - https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/san-jose-braces-for-2000-...

Weren't those projections for the "business as usual" scenario? Isn't the fact that the number of actual cases are far lower just a reflection of the fact that society has, in fact, responded by changing the situation and thus lower transmission?

"They told us all that we shouldn't jump off a bridge into shallow water, so none of us did—and not one single person got hurt. I can't believe we all listened to such wild fearmongering."

You've made a classic converse error.