Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average before that. Again, meh.
The Spanish Flu seems to have similar case mortality rates and efforts to implement preventive measures were hampered by the war time conditions so it's a good candidate to compare against when considering the effectiveness of preventive measures. It's spread lead to from 17x to 50x as many deaths as we've seen from the coronavirus at the global level. In India where lockdown measures weren't significant 5% of the population died.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
etc. And there are many more.
I know it doesn't seem to make sense, but lockdowns have had no impact on mortality. This is seen when examining all the data. Consider Sweden - very little government suppression, and it's got a basically average outcome. In fact when analysed properly they don't have much excess death in 2020:
https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01...
In my mind, the whole thing is so overblown because the medical sector works on fumes. Doctors and nurses are working in Germany, and our hospital are few and far between.
We have thousands of young and educated leaving the country every year.
That’s the real tragedy.
However, this is not to say I’m against measures. I wear a mask, I social distance, I haven’t seen my friends in months.
It’s also true that I couldn’t find an easy comparison with the previous 5 years average.
Take a look at their cases and deaths. Unlike many countries in Serbia you are actually recommended to visit a doctor when you have any signs of Covid and not wait for severe symptoms. They established separate small Covid centres. Take a closer look at how they are handling this. Pretty interesting.
No - it wasn't, head over to EuroMomo and you'll find out that it was over[0]. Not only that, compare the excess mortality with your neighbors and the "Sweden did fine without lockdowns" sounds hollow. That would explain the restrictions.
Consider that the excess mortality is just a small indicator that things didn't go well - if you plug in the equation a reduction of deaths due to other causes you figure out pretty quickly that things were pretty bad.
It is also clear from your link that deaths was unaffected by government forcing lockdowns. Lockdowns certainly do have an effect on freedom and economics though - creating a huge dependence on hand outs for millions, and a lost year of youth for a generation.
In your link it’s clear there was two minor bumps - “Low excess”.
Still, it was good to retain relative freedom throughout the year. My friends in DK and NO live in fear - a friends mother doesn’t leave the apartment for a year, friends lost each other, thousands of lovers never met, weddings not happening, and massive unemployment (doesn’t affect HN tech workers who can humblebrag about getting take out food).
https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01...
The summary is that when controlling for population growth there was a very small amount of excess death, that made 2020 comparable to 2012 or 2013 (depending on if you also control for age structure).
NB: due to an unusually non-deadly 2019, which will naturally increase 2020 mortality even without COVID, Swedish stats must be used carefully if the goal is to answer the question "how deadly was COVID in a country that had very few mitigations". Regardless even if you don't control for that additional factor, it's clear that the outcome was very far away from the 'expert' predictions of 100,000+ deaths from COVID alone, on top of all the normal deaths, which would have more than doubled the usual death rate.
That is 0.13% of the population. That's not 1 in 10, or even 1 in 100. It's not the young and healthy, either. A pretty small number. And if you are old and frail something is going to get you soon, anyways.
Per-capita just as many, perhaps several times more, people died of the 1968 Hong Kong flu.
New viruses happen, part of nature, people die, that's how it goes, This isn't nearly as bad as a lot of similar situations in the past.
https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
Death rate is 0.16% in the US though.
The link you provided says that 2.2 million people globally reportedly have died of covid. Out of world's population of 7.8 billion that amounts to 1 out of 3545 people who have died, or 0.028%.
I wonder if a lot of people have misconceptions about their odds of dying from covid, given the alarmist news coverege. Especially the young and healthy, who are more at risk of dying of other things like suicide for example.
Some would say that the reaction and mitigations to covid have been more impactful than the disease itself.
This is pure speculation.
Not to mention the third world starving, but it's not like western countries ever cared about that.
The number of undernourished people is higher today than in 2014.
Poor countries don't get industrialised and never manage to make enough food by themselves.
If you ask me, I think it's just a way to spend some money to make your citizens feel good while keeping the status-quo.
Does 1 out of 874 people dead, mostly elderly and/or with comorbidities, sound bad?
Picture a room with 874 people. That's a lot of people. Ask 1 person to leave. Is that a disaster for society?
People should be outraged with how healthcare failed, but media and politics are reporting about the virus like it's a plague, just so they can cover their asses.
Nevertheless, I agree it's a catastrophe.
The only countries that were ready for covid19 were the ones who got hit significantly by sars-cov1.
1 in 750 people have died, mostly elderly and./or with comorbidities. 0.13%. Hardly a social catastrophe. A lot of people think the world has grossly overreacted. These are in democracies so their opinions count, too.
One of the lessons taught in "crisis management", it seems, is to downplay an emergency so that the people do not panic. Death due to ignorance is much preferable?
Kind of like how 80 percent of dinosaurs are from the US and Europe - you only find things if you look. Ignorance is bliss.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_...
Let's not spread misinformation either. India did enough testing. India's positivity rate was almost always below 10%. Now it's even less than 1%. India has made testing fast, cheap, and easy to access.
Also, it doesn't matter if india has fewer hospital beds, if those beds are empty. Hospitals beds are empty, and our morgues aren't overflowing (like how milan or nyc in March did). It is a free country with open media. Nobody is suppressing covid cases.
There are many reasons it could happen like this. Cross immunity. Younger demographics. Smaller groups (most indians live in rural villages). Diet. Weather. Etc.
It's not strange that delhi and bangalore have more cases. They are also denser cities with more people. It's just like how nyc and Los Angeles have more cases than say indianapolis or santa Cruz.
>>>> first they said that vegetarians will not get Covid, it came from bushmeat (ignoring the fact that human-to-human transmission was through cough droplets)
This was at the point when WHO was saying there was no Human to Human transfmission.
>>> then they blamed it on a minority gathering
Well obviously since even during lockdown, they conducted that gathering which had people coming from almost all states, then after the gathering went back to their home states. This was during the height of lockdown. The problem was that people though t rules did not apply to them. There was even a riot in Bangalore by these people when lockdown was being imposed.
Same goes for Russia btw, theres no 50+ males for covid to kill as they die to alcohol abuse. So they peaked at "only" 600 deaths / day.
Authoritarian, right wing, populist governments tried bullshitting and gaslighting to combat the virus.
Me I'm an introverted hermit. Been working well so far.
Not everything is about America, you know? We in Europe made our mistakes on our own. Also the epidemic hit parts of Europe before it arrived to USA.
I've definitely lost the illusion that mankind is able to rise to the challenge as a whole species, in spite of our smarts and our ability to communicate. Some of us will, and some of us won't, the winners will be the ones that adapt rapidly.