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A comment on Estimated 1.56B face masks will have entered oceans in 2020. Parent comment

Re:Estimated 1.56B face masks will have entered oceans in 2020 by WhiskeyVictor on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @03:31PM (#25434850)
2020 is coming to a close. In a couple of weeks we will have the final tally for the year. This is good because we can then compare it to other years in total. I suggest you check the all cause excess mortality figure. It's already been projected to be essentially the same. This is a really good metric to evaluate the threat level.

Here's a nice graph of deaths per month per millon for a nearly 200 year perspective: https://swprs.org/facts-about-covid-19/#foobox-1/3/sweden-mo...

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Re:Estimated 1.56B face masks will have entered oceans in 2020 by slaw on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @03:51PM (#25435084)
There will be some mortality excess in 2020.

'The observed temporary excess mortality likely arises because people in vulnerable groups die weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise, due to the timing and severity of the unusual external event.' https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...

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Re:Estimated 1.56B face masks will have entered oceans in 2020 by yibg on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @04:16PM (#25435367)
I’m all for data driven decisions. We just need to be more careful to dig into the details of the data. A simple excess mortality figure may not be relevant. Both covid and the lockdowns could have caused increased or decreased mortalities in other areas.

Eg if there was zero excess mortality, that alone doesn’t prove much either way.

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Re:Estimated 1.56B face masks will have entered oceans in 2020 by worker767424 on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @02:30AM (#25439996)
I wonder if we would have noticed this before modern hospitals and record keeping. I suspect it would have spread much slower, maybe over a decade. In a village of 1,000, there might be 5 deaths that would have been written off as a bad flu, or whatever people used to call getting sick like that.
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