That doesn't seem like a good measure. At the extreme, enforcing a stay-at-home order would make this number 0, but a lot of people would argue this wasn't "good performance."

Australia was a clear success case.

Number of deaths per capita should absolutely be the primary metric we are using to judge pandemic success.

But I'll cede to you that YLL is also a good metric. When comparing two developed nations like Canada and US, most of the difference there will probably be explained by per capita deaths though.

Source?

I also saw a US specific article but can't find it off the top of my head.

I'm not sure what you are saying, doses of vaccines?

Number of deaths per capita don't take QoL into account over the period you analyze and the response's effect in the future.

I'm curious, what QoL increase makes up for 400k additional deaths over Canada's number?

I have not claimed doses of vaccine to be a good metric.

>I'm curious, what QoL increase makes up for 400k additional deaths over Canada's number?

Who has 400k more?

You also have to take into account that policy differences do not solely explain the difference in death toll. Saying 400k more death over canada = canada good response is a reductionist view when there are other factors in play.

> Who has 400k more?

If we had Canada's per capita rate, 400k fewer people would have died.

>I certainly don't think it is only policy diffferences.

And I agree with you, which is why I think using death toll as a single metric is a bad idea.

EDIT:

>If we had Canada's per capita rate, 400k fewer people would have died.

Even with the same policy as Canada, it is unlikely that the death toll would just transpose (it's a bad assumption, because policy doesn't define the death toll - it affects it)

The metric can still be used in extensive studies (that take nuance into account), but using it as a metric on its own is fallacious imo.

How about in relation to the cost & externalities of this per-capita death figure? Financially, socially etc.

It's as though there's no adults in the room willing to speak to tradeoffs - the pernicious, long-term 2nd+ order consequences to be considered.

There's extensive evidence suggesting that many of the economic effects of the early pandemic were entirely independent of whether a choice was made to lockdown. Individual people aren't stupid and they're not going to keep going out and consuming while a deadly pandemic is raging.

Remove choice from business owners & watch effected industries move elsewhere (texas, flordia).

>"Individual people aren't stupid and they're not going to keep going out and consuming while a deadly pandemic is raging."

Covid is 'deadly' to the overweight & immunocompromised.

And yeah, I'll wait and see.

> Covid is 'deadly' to the overweight & immunocompromised.

Oh and what percent of our population is overweight again?

Not going to continue this conversation, enough of the usual covid canards that I can tell it wouldn't be worth it.

Did these typos affect your ability to parse my comment? :)

>Oh and what percent of our population is overweight again?

What's your point?

I know in Philadelphia, the murder rate is up about 40%. When I was looking at deaths data from the CDC, I found that deaths were up (from 2% on average increase) substantially. I dont remember the % increase, but I do remember 40% of the deaths were not directly from covid-19. if those numbers remained consistent, about 400k extra people died this year from other causes.

that 400k, its hard to tell where 'they would have died as a direct result of covis19' and 'lockdowns caused it' begins and ends, but that is not a nebulous number, and its not a small one.

And honestly, I dont care about how many would have died vs this and that, back off our freedoms. No one, for any reason, should be able to tell us we can't go outside, can't have family gatherings, can't run a business, etc. No one, for any reason even if the death rate was 100%. And HIV is 100% fatal, yet no one ever required showing someone their HIV status on an app before having sex.

Moreover, I'm not convinced the economy wouldn't have declined if we hadn't locked down - consumers changed their behavior even in places that didn't lock down. The economic decline is likely behind the increase in murders (along with school closures).

> if those numbers remained consistent, about 400k extra people died this year from other causes.

I'd love to see a source, as I haven't seen a single bit of evidence suggesting anything like that.

> "I'm not convinced the economy wouldn't have declined if we hadn't locked down"

I didnt say the economic decline is solely linked to the lock downs, I dont think anyone ever has. however, no one with half a brain would ever argue the lockdowns were so much worse.

> "The economic decline is likely behind the increase in murders"

Not likely, the last severe economic decline (great recession) didnt see such large spikes in violence. school closures are part of the lock-down.

> "I'd love to see a source, as I haven't seen a single bit of evidence suggesting anything like that."

That data is freely available from cdc.gov

Not least, Canada had a government that admitted the virus existed and might be a problem. Following that, we had a coordinated national effort to combat it rather than a laissez-faire approach of letting every state do as they please (which often meant nothing at all in many states).

Canada's approach was hardly bullet-proof but claiming the countries' responses were identical could not be further from the truth.

The federal govt requires a quarantine when arriving by plane but thousands have said “no” (how is that possible) and been threatened with a fine that costs the same or slightly more than quarantine.

It’s been a major cock up.

As refurb said, this is completely wrong. Canada is decentralized (yes, including its healthcare system) like the US. Ottawa didn't mandate the Atlantic Bubble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Bubble), for example; the Atlantic provinces set it up on their own. Ontario's recent lockdown—far stricter than occurred anywhere in the US, as I understand it—is just that, in Ontario.