"Given that fully vaxxed places are blowing up in case numbers, the vax obviously isn't stopping transmission much if at all right now."

This is one of those "obvious" things that mathematically isn't obvious at all.

Any slope of a line could be steeper or shallower, so looking at that alone obviously can't tell you if the slope is 1% shallower than it could be, 5%, 10%, 50%... it's not like we hit "100% of the population has had covid now" overnight.

I don’t know if an average of 1500 deaths a day counts as “mass die off” or not, but it kind of feels like it does.

If you had a flock of a million birds and sixty of them died and you wrote a thesis with the term "mass die off" you would be laughed out of the room.

According to NatGeo "mass die off" is 90% of the population. I'd be alarmed at 6% die off in humans and not even be posting on the topic, but we are at less then 1%. For the unvaxxed.

"Killing each other off" just doesn't fit here.

The only reason that seems like a big number is because you do t count all the people that died everyday before Covid.

You know that precovid about 8000 people died each day in the USA?

Sure. So an increase of 20% every day from a single cause is significant.

In some countries, there was no major difference in annual All-Cause deaths between 2020 and prior years, which suggested that some deaths (with? of?) Covid were accelerated by a few months, but would have happened even without Covid due to existing ailments/co-morbidities.

Some countries reported more all-cause deaths for 2020.

Some states/countries sent Covid-infected patients into nursing homes, which did not help.

The vast majority of countries (~75%) reported significantly more deaths: https://elifesciences.org/articles/69336

Thanks, very useful article.

"That's not even a 9/11!"

The vaccinated and unvaccinated are not evenly distributed across the country. The distribution seems to bimodal, where there are areas with high concentrations of vaccinated people, and areas with high concentrations of unvaccinated people. I'm in a state with high vaccination rates, but in a county and municipality where vaccination rates are low and where COVID denialism has been law of the land for over a year now.