Realistically 3,100 people died over several days, possibly weeks, and due to reporting delays caused by the Thanksgiving holiday, the numbers were all reported on one day.
There's never a more important time to follow the seven-day rolling average than around a major holiday. A lot of people died of covid yesterday, and a lot of people will die of covid today, but not 3,100 people.
We have a significant number of people in this country (including the person you replied to) who sincerely believe that covid is overblown. Obviously incorrect statements like "3100 people died in a single day" reinforce those beliefs and are counterproductive.
The kids who are being left behind because schools across the country have gone virtual?
The increases in domestically violence? Suicide and depression rates?
The unavoidable health decline because people have been forced in to their homes and apartments for several months?
There’s a boatload of problems in the US. COVID is a symptom - not the cause.
Health is the antidote to COVID - not lockdown. And as we see, far too many people have spent years upon years sacrificing their health and now suffering consequences.
The rough price of a human life in estimates of cost-benefit analysis is on the order of $10-100 million. That puts the cost of pandemic in lives lost in the US alone as of this date to a couple of trillion dollars. Were the pandemic to infect everyone in the US, the resulting death toll would have a calculated cost of approximately 100% of yearly GDP. The economic costs of a lockdown are a bargain in comparison.
Yeah, agree with all of that.
I see this pattern in COVID discussions all the time. Someone claims COVID is overblown, people push back, then the response is always "yeah but lockdowns are horrible!". It's largely a strawman.
COVID, as a disease, should be taken seriously. It is absolutely more serious for some than others. Ultimately every person needs to exercise personal responsibility instead of demanding that others change their behavior.
I don't know how well other jurisdictions do at distinguishing between day-of-report versus day-of-event, nor how well aggregations do at tracking the disparities here.
In any case, at current trends, "3100 people died in a single day" will shortly be true if it is not true already.
Nobody would have predicted the current response based on that graph. It fits a trend where people become less and less willing to accept physical risks.
Why can't we discuss this without calling one another "purposefully blind"?
Not to mention that if we were to have lived our lives as normal and not cared, then deaths outcomes would rise even more in proportion to hospital admissions since the more overloaded a hospital gets, the harder it is to get proper care.
It’s really not rocket science. Epidemiologist and doctors are saying we should take significant measures to stop this, I think I trust them. I wouldn’t want a doctor telling me how to engineer a web service.
And then if, through heroic effort and sacrifice the hospitals don't get overrun, people say "why were we worried? The hospitals never went over capacity!". Like if a team of engineers spend a week mitigating a security attack, then all of the non experts at the company say "well, nothing ended up happening, guess the whole thing was overblown".
"One epidemiologist told us the environment was “too toxic” to talk to us, even anonymously."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-covid-science...
We know how to beat this virus, other countries have done it (South Korea, Taiwan, NZ). The solution is incisive contact tracing, short effective and targeted lock downs, social distancing, etc...
The problem is that in the US our institutions have failed us so badly that those solutions are not an option. Because of the delayed (and insufficient) response and our hollowed out institutions the virus has become so widespread (and our institutions so rickety) that we can’t effectively apply the solutions we know exist because it’s too late.
This is where the problem lies. Instead of talking about the solutions we know work, we are forced into a position where our only options are extreme (full lock downs and such) and they can't even fix the problem, only mitigate the damage (with significant collateral damage). Our binary choice is essentially death or destruction, and that is a direct result of our own failures. These are not the only two existing options, they are just the only ones presented to us in the US.
I am not trying to say that epidemiologists all agree on full lock downs. But no epidemiologist worth their salt will say we should do absolutely nothing about this virus, they will argue over specific strategies and their collateral damage, but they will not say that we should do nothing.
You're being dishonest however in saying "look the excess deaths are so low" without considering that their have been significant measures put in place to reduce that death count. That's logically equivalent to saying "see we don't need seatbelts because the number of people dying is not that high" after seat belt laws have been implemented. In this case, the reason excess mortality is lower is not because the virus isn't deadly to many people, but precisely because the measures we have taken.
I don't know a lot about viruses, but I know groupthink when I see it. Suppressing competing opinions is the opposite of science.
> My bias is that the COVID-19 response in and across the United States is overblown and hysterical. In other words, the juice has not been worth the squeeze.
These are the kind of statements that people in future generations will look back on in embarrassment. "How could people be so purposefully blind to what's happening right in front of them?"
Also this;
> I argue that getting sick is a human right and that no one can deny you this right.
Do you not realize the fundamental issue with this statement?
Edited to add: 3,100 deaths reported in a single day, not necessarily all dead on the same day.