Y-axis starting at zero is essential for bar charts, but not necessarily time series / line charts. Insisting on a zero axis can crunch the data and obscure the trends and is unnatural for some data sets (e.g. the mortality time series—if that trend line ever goes to 0...something has gone awry).
Quote from Tufte on the subject:
> ” In general, in a time-series, use a baseline that shows the data not the zero point. If the zero point reasonably occurs in plotting the data, fine. But don't spend a lot of empty vertical space trying to reach down to the zero point at the cost of hiding what is going on in the data line itself.”
If you're looking for trends, sure. But this graph seems to be clearly designed to compare the overall US mortality rate across the last five years. It's hard to appreciate scale when comparing elements on an axis which does not begin with zero.
Imagine that this were a time series graph of your body temperature over the last week. With the Y-axis set at (min_temp, max_temp) or similar, the graph would clearly show a mean of about 98.6F and consistent trends based on the hour of the day. If you had a fever (>100F), it would be readily apparent in the graph.
A zero baseline for this chat is meaningless and would render the plot useless, unless the purpose of the graph was to show what happens to your body temperature as you turn into a White Walker.
Similarly, the axis chosen for the mortality chart is effective since it shows the typical range of values (and thus does convey the scale effectively), the consistent seasonal trends, and the anomaly (which is very significant in terms of standard deviations above the mean). Setting a zero y-axis would squeeze the graph into 1/3 of the vertical space, leaving 2/3 as useless white space for no benefit at all.
You are comparing the Y values for multiple points with different X values in the same series. You are looking for trends and fine differences.
I am comparing the Y values for multiple points with the same X values in different series. I'm only looking for course differences.
For my purpose, it makes sense for the scale to start at zero.
At a glance, the week of April 12, 2020 looks like it has four times as many deaths as any other year since 2015. In reality, it has roughly 1.5x as many. That's still a huge difference, but I had to check the scale and do some quick mental calculations to figure that out - which is more than I would have had to do if the graph's vertical scale started at zero.
I'm not arguing that all graphs must start their scales with zero. I'm not even saying that this is a bad graph. It's just not as effective for the kind of analysis I want to use it for.
Agreed. If you go up two graphs to "Excess mortality for all ages"[1], though, you can see the same stat as a percentage delta from the average of the five preceding years.
Why? For a roughly stable population like the US, the "baseline" is that something like 1/79/52 of the population dies every week, since life expectancy is 79 years. Zero deaths is nonsensical.
That's not the point. It's very hard to appreciate the scale of a difference between two elements on a graph if the graph's scale does not start at zero.
That's completely wrong. And by that I mean "you just failed your statistics class" wrong.
Imagine you had a graph of earth's temperature and decided to set the y axis at absolute zero. What would that look like? Would it be in any way useful?
This is both shocking and promising. Looks like the rate is normalizing relative to previous years. That means the steps we're taking, treatments, etc. are working.
Note the US data for 2020 ends in early November; before the large November surge.
I would not take that much comfort given the surge in case counts. I don't doubt we are better handling cases now vs April, at the same time hospitals will soon hit the triage stage.
Positive tests tend to trail exposure by 1-2 weeks, while hospitalizations trail another week or two behind positive tests. Deaths can lag even further (not sure on the numbers here). So we're only just getting into the beginning of the post-Thanksgiving spike impacting hospitals.
While most serious cases hit those with compounding factors (age, health, etc.) if you look at the percent of excess deaths, it spans all age groups (again data ends early Nov):
In a more morbid observation, the 2020 data in that chart ends on Nov 1, 2020.
I would be surprised if the 2020 line doesn't jump right back up again once the rest of November and post-Thanksgiving numbers are added in given that we're seeing large numbers of reported deaths again in recent weeks.
I think you're being misled here. The steps we're taking to prevent covid19 are also having a dramatic impact on the spread of other respiratory infections. It's not so much that covid19 is under control - it's that our attempts to control it are suppressing deaths from flu etc.
Or they are all counted as Covid. If you go to the physician with a respiratory disease, they will test for Covid first. Will they still test for the flu? What about people who get to the hospital because of the flu and get infected with Covid there? How will they be counted?
How come number of Covid infection rates is rising, while flu seems to be eradicated? If the measures help against the flu, why not against Covid?
> How come number of Covid infection rates is rising, while flu seems to be eradicated? If the measures help against the flu, why not against Covid?
I don't like appeals to authority, but this perspective that people who have spent their entire lives studying epidemiology have just got this all wrong, don't understand what they are doing, and that appeals to "common sense logic" will reveal the truth ... really irritates me.
I mean, just as a basic starting point, most people have immunological exposure to the flu, so a fairly effective method to prevent spread of the flu virus will have outsized effects on the incidence of flu (even more so if that fairly effective method is even more widely utilized by those most at risk from flu). But no humans prior to the end of 2019 had immunological exposure to SARS-COV-2, and so any "leakage" in the efforts to stop its spread will have much greater impact than with influenza.
More generally, this is really basic epidemiology, and I don't understand why you think it's so useful to question this stuff in this way.
So what is your knowledge of Epidemiology? Are you an working in the field? Or do you just believe that science happens to agree with your view?
There is actually no clear cut scientific story about Sars-Cov-2 yet. That is part of the scare.
I also don't think your logic is sound - influenca used to spread rapidly through populations in all previous years, despite of previous immunological exposure as you describe. There is no reason to assume it would spread less rapidly this year because of "previous immunological exposure".
The effectiveness of masks and social distancing also does not depend on previous immunological exposure.
I don't like appeals to authority, but this perspective that people who have spent their entire lives studying epidemiology have just got this all wrong, don't understand what they are doing, and that appeals to "common sense logic" will reveal the truth ... really irritates me.
That's very understandable but I doubt your view would survive contact with the epidemiological literature.
It's really hard to believe I know, but epidemiology papers are all terrible. They seem to always contain basic errors that any lay person can spot, and peer review doesn't catch them, nor does the editing process at supposedly prestigious journals. I've read a lot this year and by now I go in to a new paper being sure I'll encounter something stupid or crazy, because the rate of problems is just so high.
Remember that the only people who study epidemiology their whole lives are in academia, a place where being correct is less important than being published. Although it sounds absurd, 2020 has convinced me that epidemiologists and public health researchers in general know absolutely nothing about disease. They are however very good at closing ranks and claiming nobody outside their little cliques should be allowed to criticise or question them.
More generally, this is really basic epidemiology, and I don't understand why you think it's so useful to question this stuff in this way.
There's nothing basic about the claim you just made, and I'm really curious now if you yourself are an epidemiologist. Because you've gone from asserting that epidemics aren't susceptible to "common sense logic" to saying it's obvious and common sense that lockdowns/masks - which have no observable impact on case curves for COVID at all - will have outside impact on influenza.
No, it's not. The graph shows mortality rates without cause. Excess mortality rates are not that high at present, meaning that the total number of deaths is not that much above the expected death rate based on historical numbers.
But imagine the "extreme" case where excess mortality is zero - that is, even with covid19, about the same number of people die every day.
That would mean, presumably, that since covid19 causes some deaths that would not have happened historically (it doesn't matter what you think that number is) it would have to be balanced by some decrease in "more normal" deaths.
Obviously, one could propose all kinds of mechanisms that might lead to this. One could suggest that because people are either disgusted by or rallying around Trump, death rates are different. One could suggest that the impending conjuction of Saturn & Jupiter on Dec 21st has reduced death rates from non-covid19 causes. And to be sure, at present, there doesn't seem to be a particularly good way to establish this.
But it also seems rather reasonable to say that since the biggest change in human behavior at this point has been driven by attempts to contain covid19, that it is likely these changes that have caused the "balancing" decrease in non-covid19 deaths.
One obvious rebuttal is that the graph does NOT show no excess mortality. This is certainly true. But the magnitude of the it is smaller than would be expected from even the most, ahem, conservative estimates of covid19 deaths. Ergo, there is some reduction in non-covid19 deaths, and occam's razor would put changes due to anti-covid measures near the top of the list of likely causes for that.
"since covid19 causes some deaths that would not have happened historically"
That would not be a given assumption (under your scenario of zero excess deaths). Old people who would otherwise have died from another reason could die from Covid19 instead.
Or imagine testing everybody for the common cold, and if somebody dies with the common cold virus, they would be counted as a "common cold death". Then you would see a lot of deaths "from the common cold", without any actual change in death rates.
Won't it just get balanced out in following years though? A vulnerable/old person that died this year is one that can't die next year. Think of it like a forest fire. Once all the old/vulnerable wood is burned up, it's much more difficult for another forest fire of the same magnitude to happen in following years because the primary source of fuel is gone and it takes decades to build it up...
People aren't dry brush though. It's not a good thing that huge swaths of the population are dying. We won't be inherently more resilient to diseases in the short term just because all the vulnerable people are dead.
For one, we don't even understand all the long term effects of having COVID as it is: there's heart damage, lung damage, brain damage, extended fatigue, and that's just what we're seeing evidence of now. [0]
If another disease like COVID strikes in a couple years, it could still tear through the surviving population and cause similar long lasting effects. The thousands that're suffering a terrible death daily, separated from their families and straining our healthcare systems to the breaking point--their deaths are not somehow making our populaitons safer from another disease.
EDIT: your analogy also supposes it's somehow the old/vulnerable populations that're the reservoir for the virus in our populations, when data indicates the opposite: it's far more likely younger populations are the carriers/vectors for COVID, especially since they are more often asymptomatic (w.r.t. acute effects) than more vulnerable chunks of the population. Future bugs will have plenty of population to travel through.
In the analogy the dry brush are the vulnerable that die. Once the dry brush is gone, it can't burn a second time. Just like small pox wiped out all the vulnerable native americans, but then the offspring of the survivors were increasingly more resilient. Except in this case the fatality rate is 1% (or less) instead of 90%.
> For one, we don't even understand all the long term effects of having COVID as it is: there's heart damage, lung damage, brain damage, extended fatigue, and that's just what we're seeing evidence of now.
This just seems like fear of the unknown. On the contrary, for the vast majority of healthy humans, it seems like the immune-system is well equipped to deal with the virus so there isn't much reason to fear IMO (i.e. most people recover at home with no modern medicine needed). I have several family members that had it and recovered with seemingly no other long term effects, so there is no reason to believe they are going to be screwed later in life.
> If another disease like COVID strikes in a couple years, it could still tear through the surviving population and cause similar long lasting effects.
More fear of the unknown. Novel viruses don't come along very often. Getting sick is not a bad thing, natural selection is not a bad thing, it's the very mechanism that has allowed humans to survive this long on planet earth.
No, the dry brush is what makes the fires get out of control and cause more damage than they "ought to," implying that if the brush is regularly dealt with then the broader population of trees will be better off.
But (a) we're not talking about trees, we're talking about people, and (b) letting swaths of the population die from a disease does not imply the surviving population will be better off in the future.
People can't die twice because we only have a single life, and callously saying "welp, you would have died later anyway, might as well die now so our stats look good" is so unbelievably short-sighted I can't believe I'm seeing this argument made by multiple people on HN.
> This just seems like fear of the unknown..
Uh, yes, it's fear of what the largely unknown disease will do to us. We shouldn't blindly assume that it's "not that bad" if it occasionally rips through the population off of some belief it'll make us safer if we're routinely exposed to pandemics--as follows from your brush-and-forest-fire analogy--when we don't understand the effects of those diseases.
> Natural selection is not a bad thing
I do not understand this point at all. Should we not have allergen warnings on food packaging? Or glasses for folks with bad eyesight? There are plenty of reasons we intervene in the "natural course" of events to make people's lives better. Citing "natural selection" is not in any way a valid defense for just letting diseases meander through populations.
> No, the dry brush is what makes the fires get out of control and cause more damage than they "ought to,"
Wait, am I making the analogy, or you? You can't just take my analogy and twist it until it fits your view. Make a new analogy, but don't correct mine.
> I do not understand this point at all. Should we not have allergen warnings on food packaging? Or glasses for folks with bad eyesight? There are plenty of reasons we intervene in the "natural course" of events to make people's lives better
Sure, but where do you draw the line? Should we move heaven and earth to artificially prolong the life of people extremely vulnerable to common diseases? Or just let them die and be replaced with more resilient humans?
My whole point is your analogy is flawed and you shouldn't use it for this purpose because it trivializes significant components of the issue at hand. You said:
> Once all the old/vulnerable wood is burned up, it's much more difficult for another forest fire of the same magnitude to happen ...
Which is demonstrably wrong when you liken _people_ to the dry brush, which is exactly what you did. We aren't optimizing to minimize deaths in individual years (or else we'd just kill everyone right now and the death rate would spike and then drop to zero), we're optimizing for general well-being of the population.
Your analogy is flat wrong, which is why I'm poking holes in it. It also belies a shocking lack of empathy for your fellow humans, which I frankly find alarming.
> Where do you draw the line?
I have no idea, and I don't think this is the venue to argue it, but I definitely don't think we're at it yet, and I would much rather err on the side of trying too hard to protect people's lives than not trying hard enough.
For example, when death numbers from COVID were first being released, people compared them to car fatalities, going "Why are we so worried? Car crashes kill 100x as many people in the same timeframe." The point is not "we should not worry about COVID because other things are more deadly" but "there is an alarming new source of deaths, and we should be working to reduce death as much as we can in the interests of maximizing the population's happiness."
EDIT: I mean, consider, the sitting US president called COVID "a hoax" for a good two months, then kept downplaying it for another two ("it'll be gone after November, you'll see"), and overall completely failed to make a plan at the federal level to, I dunno, provide more sick leave for people so they could actually avoid spreading it to their co-workers, or rent assistance for those out-of-work because we shut down the industries with high levels of communication, or support just wearing a mask when you go outside. We are so far and away from even a reasonable level of response to this it seems wholly disingenuous to pose the "but where do we _stop_ intervening?" argument.
> We aren't optimizing to minimize deaths in individual years (or else we'd just kill everyone right now and the death rate would spike and then drop to zero), we're optimizing for general well-being of the population.
I disagree. If we were optimizing for general well-being of the population we wouldn't be doing things that will push hundreds of millions into poverty[0] and drive up suicide rates[1].
From my perspective all the evidence points to us optimizing either for healthcare capacity or for minimizing covid-19 deaths.
> "there is an alarming new source of deaths, and we should be working to reduce death as much as we can in the interests of maximizing the population's happiness."
Well, clearly a huge % of the population is not happy with the current actions and policy being performed in the name of saving lives as evidenced by this thread.
Fair enough, I wasn't clear: we _should_ be optimizing for general well-being, and among other things I think minimum-effort disease-prevention (masks, distancing, reasonable sick leave) are completely reasonable asks.
Similarly, we probably shouldn't be relying on a mega-consumerist culture that, when suppressed for whatever reason, has far-reaching economic effects that doom millions in developing countries to hunger/whathaveyou.
But these issues are not in opposition, we just have a crappy system that doesn't deal with both of them well at the same time. I think it's unreasonable to frame it as "well we can only address these issues in degrees, lest we make the other worse" and not question the system that somehow frames disease prevention and feeding people as opposing goals.
It's certainly possible to address this disease without such drastic impacts, but it relies on the population having an empathic mentality. Look at Japan, as an example[0]: Similar in terms of development, but with a much less invasive response they've only suffered around 2.3k deaths _total_, when the US is already seeing that number daily.
You are completely correct that "a huge % of the population is not happy with the current actions and policy being performed," because we have examples of cultures that are weathering this storm FAR better than those of us in the USA are.... but I think attitudes like yours are contributing to our failure to deal with this pandemic well.
If there is another pandemic there is no guarantee that the same group of people would be vulnerable. The 1918 spanish flu, for example, was particularly dangerous to infants and younger people [1].
> The Spanish flu pandemic was the largest, but not the only large recent influenza pandemic. Two decades before the Spanish flu the Russian flu pandemic (1889-1894) is believed to have killed 1 million people.
> Estimates for the death toll of the “Asian Flu” (1957-1958) vary between 1.5 and 4 million. Gatherer (2009) published the estimate of 1.5 million, while Michaelis et al. (2009) published an estimate of 2–4 million.
> According to a WHO publication the “Hong Kong Flu” (1968-1969) killed between 1 and 4 million people.
> Michaelis et al. (2009) published a lower estimate of 1–2 million.
> The Russian Flu pandemic of 1977-78 was caused by the same H1N1 virus that caused the Spanish flu. According to Michaelis et al. (2009) around 700,000 died worldwide.
> What becomes clear from this overview are two things: influenza pandemics are not rare[...]
Heck, ebola was a decade ago with 300k deaths. Novel viruses appear all the time.
Oh, I didn't realize that. Yet, even my 90 year old grandpa has stated he's never seen anything like this, so were we just callous in the 60s when millions upon millions of people were dying of Asian and Hong Kong Flus? What changed between the last pandemic and this one? Technology has led us to believe we can save everyone?
Unfortunately I think part of the answer is somewhat political in nature, which I'm not willing to get into an argument over.
The other side of the problem is that lawmakers have no incentive to set aside money/time/resources for pandemic preparedness.
A quote from HHS Secretary under Bush, Mark Leavitt sums up part of the problem nicely:
> “In advance of a pandemic, anything you say sounds alarmist. After a pandemic starts, everything you’ve done is inadequate.”
Another example of lawmakers having no incentive to think about the future:
>The Public Health Emergency Preparedness program’s funding has gone from about a billion dollars in 2003 to $675 million this year, while the Hospital Preparedness program has gone from more than $500 million at its peak in 2004 to less than $300 million today.
No, it's not, even if you restrict yourself to novel betacoronaviruses that become significant human public health concerns (e.g., SARS, MERS, SARS-CoV-2).
This is the most cynical and brutal thing I've read today. Just let the vulnerable die, they have it coming anyway? These are people, from all walks of life, not all of them "vulnerable", and they might include yourself. If you're lucky, you'll walk away with a permanent heart condition. Or hey, maybe you need some other medical procedure, but guess what, doctors are busy treating the dying, also there's no spare oxygen bottles for you. Geez. Time to stop reading the internet for today, I suppose.
Classic to have the y-axis not start at 0 to make a curve look more dramatic.
According to the CDC, there seem to be about 12% more deaths than the average of the last three years, or about 300K. Number of deaths has been rising every year, though, sometimes increasing by up to 90k from one year to the next.
From the linked article: "The raw death counts help give us a rough sense of scale: for example, the US suffered some 275,000 more deaths than the five-year average between 1 March and 16 August, compared to 169,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that period."
So that's 275k-169k=106k extra deaths, which is a napkinmath'd 17% increase over the baseline (assuming that's 106k deaths over a 12wk period, and baseline is ~50k/week).
A 17% rise in extra deaths seems pretty dramatic to me, regardless of the graphs.
Granted, I'd love to see error bars on this stuff, but I don't think the axis starting at 0 is some nefarious plot to dramatize the data.
I thought that _was_ the quesiton: you seemed to imply the graph not starting at 0 was the article editorializing in some drama. My point was the situation is indeed dramatic (perhaps "significant" is a better phrase?) on its own, and they weren't unfairly exaggerating it for clicks/attention/fearmongering/whatever.
It makes sense that 'absolute deaths' would rise as a function of absolute population size, but that's why this data is important to pay attention to: if our death rate is climbing more than expected, there's problems we should probably pay attention to.
It is a problem and it should absolutely be paid attention to. US excess deaths aren't like in other countries, where they are generally on a long downwards trend. In the US they've been rising since the financial crisis.
Oddly this year the CDC baseline expected death rate diverged from the trend line:
That looks bad. If they were projecting the long term trend forward as they did in prior years, excess deaths from COVID in the USA would suddenly become a lot lower.
One other thing to bear in mind - a lot of these graphs that make excess deaths look dramatic are only looking 5 years in the past, because that's generally the easiest data to get hold of. But death rates are falling with time, as you'd hope to see. If you look further back you don't have to go far to find years with similar death rates. E.g. the UK had one of the highest excess death rates in the world from COVID in the first wave, but when you look at historical data, it was no worse than the the winter of 1999/2000 when no special measures were employed.
Lockdowns are an ahistorically extreme move. For that to make sense the scale of the problem with have to be equally ahistoric but it's not. I've lived through years with excess death rates just as bad as 2020 and never even noticed, because nobody was commenting about it. That's the risk with very short term analysis.
While you were joking, this is honestly what I think is happening. Our country has already started a number of "wars" on groups and this is only going to get worse now that a significant portion of the population feels that our soon-to-be leaders are illegitimate.
This is why Trump will stay on the news. He's too sui generis to be the creation of TPTB, but they would never let an iron grip on the brain stems of the more suggestible 70% of the population go to waste. At the same time a third of us expect nothing from their votes for Biden because It Could Be Worse, another third will be sure that Trump's Triumphant Return awaits only a few thousand dead Bolivians or gays or whatever. If he faded from view, so would the heat he generates.
If Covid had originated in a less powerful country than China I'm almost certain we would have invaded them already. You can see it by the amount of "Chinese virus"/"it was made in a lab" rhetoric from the top to try and deflect from our shitty handling of it.
Deflection may have been positive side-effect. Officially it is:
> U.S. President Donald Trump Monday said his "Chinese virus" statement for weeks was a counter-propaganda strategy to fight Chinese allegations that American soldiers brought coronavirus to Wuhan.
Given how China and Russia stepped up their muscle flexing in the past year, how China is against an international investigation into the origins, I am expecting more than not, that 2021 will reveal it was indeed a lab leak. If natural, China still has to answer why it sat on corona for at least 3 months before notifying international health agencies. All this research should see atomic-bomb grade inspections anyway, those are long overdue. I don't want Iran experimenting with SARS-3 without oversight, invading afterwards will be too late.
I dont think this is a joking matter. The toll of wars are far greater than the initial provoking incident. There are death tolls for your home troops, innocent civilians, and long-term tolls of disabilities and psychological damage.
I appreciate your feelings on this, but I somewhat agree with parent that humor is a good idea. The majority of Americans, and nearly all the "journalism" to which they are subjected, still believe that they should fear brown people overseas enough to preemptively murder them. That is counter to logic and reality, but logic is not the way to make this argument. Few people (well, few Americans anyway) are capable of controlling their fears through logic. Lots of people don't like to be the butt of jokes, though. If the rest of us are always laughing at them, their insecurity might open their eyes to the emptiness of their fear.
The "journalism", however, won't change until it's no longer cost-effective. We have to change ourselves first.
I’m fairly certain the parent commenter was being facetious. It’s really hard to comprehend why powerful people are willing to impose such devastation on humankind; the parent is mocking their thought process, with a touch of rather dark humor.
And why exactly do you have to dislodge Russian and Turkish forces from their positions which are 10 000 km from the US borders and in Russian and Turkish neighborhood? Just to "secure the oil" [0]? Because stabilization, development, and prosperity of the affected countries is certainly not on the US agenda list if are to judge by the numerous outcomes.
It's crazy there are still people here who don't realize that ISIS was created because of US involvement. Great book with link below on the topic of America's actions in the middle east that talks about everything starting from Carter in the late 70s to time of publishing in 2016. Highly suggest reading.
Under the Obama administration the CIA was funneling billions of dollars worth of military equipment -- ranging from small arms and ammo, to vehicles and even anti-tank missiles -- into the hands of Syrian militant groups[1][2].
These groups specifically include ISIS.
It's hard to think that the Syrian civil war would have been so bloody or lasted as long as it did without USA involvement.
Syria had a civil war before significant US involvement, but between being bordered by a completely destabilized Iraq, and the US campaign against Assad means that US involvement made the situation so much worse.
Deaths from a natural disaster are fundamentally different than deaths caused by a murderer. Trying to evaluate policy by comparing the two is nonsensical. Like suggesting that it's a waste of time to spend resources to find a murderer when they only killed one person vs the thousands that die to flu.
Murderers are sometimes caught. Our multiple decades of wanton murder overseas have only enriched armaments manufacturers and their puppets in politics and journalism. That's not a good enough reason.
Just in case anyone's confused (I was at first), the title refers to COVID deaths only. The all cause US death toll was ~7,700 per day over the 2017-2019 period, and has likely exceeded the 9/11 number (2,996) every day for decades.
How are COVID deaths preventable? They generally haven't been and still aren't. Especially given that so many deaths labelled COVID deaths are of people who were about to die anyway and the COVID label took priority over other causes.
All lockdowns were ever meant to do originally was temporarily delay the inevitable to ensure everyone got a hospital bed if they needed one, to give their bodies a better chance. But hospitals were never overwhelmed or even at any risk of being overwhelmed: the places that didn't lock down and saw incidence curves the same as everywhere else have now proven that. So in the end they had no real health impact in the positive direction, yet they've definitely killed people. In the UK about half of all excess death in the first wave wasn't even COVID related, let alone COVID caused. That's the human price of government mandates.
You realise that 9/11 deaths refers to Al Qaeda-caused deaths only. The all cause US death toll was also several thousand per day over the 2001 period, and may have exceeded the Al Qaeda-caused excess deaths on 9/11 in any case.
If comparing to 9/11 seems like an "apples to oranges" comparison, we can compare with other natural disasters exacerbated by poor government response:
Hurricane Katrina (2005) killed 1,836. That's like 12 hours of Covid.
The point of the 9/11 comparison seems to be "we reacted with a hysterical response and permanently expanded our military and surveillance infrastructure as a result of 9/11, and therefore if the same death toll is occurring every day we should consider similar drastic and permanent measures in response to Covid."
1) our response to 9/11 was wrong
2) it's all about perception of risk and control. 9/11 appeared to be a situation where the US, individually and as a state, had zero control over a nearly existential threat risk. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of the US, individually and as a state, seems to believe that in the case of covid19, we have large amounts of control over a rather small risk.
I think it is possible for most people to understand and agree that "our response to 9/11 was wrong," and yet still experience a higher subjective impression of trauma from the pandemic as a result of the comparison, which softens them up for agreeing to drastic measures in much the same way 9/11 did.
People respond to violent attacks differently than outbreaks of infectious disease. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
I don't think the different reactions are perfect, but there is some logic to it. Violence is much less predictable or reactive than the spread of infectious disease is.
It looks like close to 3000 deaths were reported the last day or so, but note how there's always this 7 week cycle. I assume it has something to do with reporting delays over weekends. I even noticed a big dip in reports around Thanksgiving in some state graphs, particularly the case counts, followed by apparent spikes to catch up.
So, I always use the 7 day average. It's very smooth, and it looks like we're actually closer to 2500 today. That said, maybe the CDC is using different numbers.
And as long as I mentioned this, I should caveat that in Sweden they actually mark the deaths according to date of death. However, this means that it always looks like there's a big downturn in deaths in the last couple weeks, when there may not actually be.
I find it hard to imagine that if 3000 people had been killed by Saudi terrorists flying a plane into a nursing home people would have said "let's not bother invading afghanistan, those people would have died soon anyway"
The point of QALYS analysis is that yes, even though it sounds harsh we should in fact care less about a 90 year old with multiple severe problems who's going to die in the next few months no matter what mountains are moved for them, than a healthy 25 year old working in a flagship tower who was looking forward to a full and happy life.
Do you not think that terrorism is more effective when it is a spectacle? I think you wouldn't be able to ignite such visceral fears and reactions with almost any other kind of attack killing so few. The death of a skyscraper is more or less unheralded, and it's easy to empathize with the abject horror the people must've felt as that happened
If it's just a low-rise apartment in Anytown it's not going to drop everyone's jaw when played on TV. Can't believe people think my last comment was a commentary on the value of human life as opposed to the impact of literally toppling a tower...
I see. No, I was suggesting that the effectiveness of the attack wasn't it's death toll but instead its visibility. Anyways, enough of this topic, thanks for explaining
Hopefully whatever analysis or conclusions you make from those numbers take into consideration the health complications that survivors can suffer from.
Around 2 thousands people die every day from heart diseases in the US, every day (635k annually). Not in extreme temporary conditions. That's a standard baseline, year after year like that.
I wonder how many lives would been saved if we had mandatory 30 minutes jogging sessions, fastfood lockdowns and vegetable subsidies.
> Your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins.
I keep seeing this analogy when it comes to masks and COVID-19, but I don't think it's a great one. The difference between me punching your face and not wearing a mask is risk and intent.
The overwhelming majority of people do not intend to transmit any virus to those around them. It's pretty difficult to punch someone in the face without intending to harm them.
We also cannot avoid risking harm to someone else. Despite my best efforts, I risk hurting someone every time I sit behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. However, there are clearly some risks that are too great. If I punch you in the nose, it's a pretty sure thing you will be harmed. But if I do not wear a mask in a public space... the odds aren't particularly bad on any single outing.
What makes the mask thing really troublesome is pinning down just what the risks of transmission are with and without masks over an extended period of time in a variety of normal scenarios. I've seen enough to personally conclude that wearing a mask in public spaces is probably a good idea if I cannot avoid public spaces altogether. It's just hard to convince everybody that masks are effective enough at reducing risk - and that the risk is great enough to warrant the (very minor) sacrifice of freedom - to mandate them without also overstating their effectiveness.
I stand by the gist of your argument, though. There is a significant difference between risking harm to yourself and risking harm to those around you. I just wanted to address that analogy since I've been seeing it everywhere and I think it oversimplifies the conflict.
I appreciate your counter-argument. Let me address intent first, then risk.
I would argue that intent might be relevant when assigning legal consequences, but not when assessing the damage caused. If I catch a case of COVID, I’m not somehow less likely to die or suffer long-term effects because the person who gave it to me didn't intend to do so. Nor can I pay my hospital bills with their good intentions. And if they engaged in reckless behavior such as attending super-spreader events or failing to wear a mask, I have to question how good their intentions were in the first place. It sounds like the drunk driver who says “But I didn’t intend to run over that pedestrian”. Maybe not, but their gross negligence allowed it to happen.
Now for risk. I agree that we can’t eliminate risk from our lives entirely. But I hope that's not the litmus test for whether to take any prevention steps at all, especially if the cost of taking those steps is minimal. Take your example of getting behind the wheel of a car. It's likely that sooner or later, if I drive long enough, I'll get into some kind of accident, even if it's just someone rear-ending my car. I can't prevent this entirely, but I can mitigate the risk by getting regular maintenance on my car (i.e. new brake pads so I don't cause a fender-bender), refraining from driving drunk, keeping my auto insurance policy current so that I can pay out in the event I'm at-fault, etc. Wearing a mask is the public-health equivalent of getting new brake pads. It won't eliminate the risk of spreading COVID entirely, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw my hands up and admit defeat.
I would further argue that people are less-than-great judges of just how big a risk vector they are, because of the delay between when someone catches COVID and when they present symptoms. I've heard it can be up to two weeks, during which time that person is unknowingly exposing others. Because of this, and given the potential life-or-death consequences of catching COVID, it seems insane not to err on the side of caution.
If mask mandates worked, they'd have a clear impact on incidence graphs. Many such graphs exist, none show any impact whatsoever - not even a small one.
Nobody wants to throw up their hands and admit defeat. But the people who don't wear masks aren't "insane" as you put it. Rather ironically, the cliché definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over whilst expecting different results, isn't it? Mask mandates have been implemented everywhere and there are no results to show for it, which makes continuing them the insane act. It's certainly not immoral or unethical for people to not wear a mask, any more than it is for someone not to wear a cross around their neck.
The tweet you linked to says "The masked counties had increases in cases after the mandate and used the high point as the reference for the decrease." If you're implying that this means masks have no effect, you should know that correlation does not equal causation.
There are multiple interpretations for the data in the tweet, one of which is that local authorities (correctly) anticipated a spike in cases based on conditions and behavior in their community, and responded with a mask mandate, which took a little less than 2 weeks to have a noticeable impact. The graph in your linked tweet shows that a mask mandate went into effect on July 3, then a spike occurred, which hit a peak on July 12th. That's consistent with the interpretation I mentioned.
It doesn't make sense to use the day after a mandate takes effect as a reference, because there's roughly a 2-week period between when a person catches COVID and when they exhibit symptoms or require hospitalization. The July 12th is a little less than 2 weeks after the mandate began, enough time for anyone who already had the virus before the mandate to exhibit symptoms.
As for the 2nd link you posted, graphs like these are useless without additional context on what was happening in those communities at the time. We don't know if people were actually following the mandate or not, how frequently they were taking their masks off, whether they were engaging in other behavior which would put them at risk for COVID exposure, etc. Until you can control for those variables, it's hard to take these graphs as evidence that masks don't work. Indeed, mask mandates will be useless if enough people don't follow them, or if people attend a super-spreader event in their area, or if any number of other things happen. That's... kind of my point.
You claim that "If mask mandates worked, they'd have a clear impact on incidence graphs". How do you know they didn't have an impact on incidence graphs? It's entirely possible that the spikes in those charts would have been even more severe without a mask mandate. There are hardly "no results to show for" masks, as you say. Indeed, the first tweet you linked to is someone replying to exactly that kind of evidence.[1] The TL;DR is "The governor of Kansas issued an executive order requiring wearing masks in public spaces, effective July 3, 2020, which was subject to county authority to opt out. After July 3, COVID-19 incidence decreased in 24 counties with mask mandates but continued to increase in 81 counties without mask mandates."
"Masks don't work at all" is a pretty bold statement considering the sources you posted are a collection of Twitter accounts belonging to people of unknown expertise. But don't listen to me, I'm not an expert either. Listen to the people who do this kind of thing for a living and who know what they're talking about. They know more than we do about their chosen field. There is a general consensus among serious experts that masks do work.[2][3][4][5][6]
Or if appeals to authority aren't your cup of tea, here[7] is an explanation of how masks work, specifically how they help filter and trap particles which carry COVID. If you still believe masks don't work, I'd love to see your rebuttal to the specific points that this NY Times article makes. I'm open to being proved wrong.
If you're implying that this means masks have no effect, you should know that correlation does not equal causation.
No, I'm implying what I said explicitly: some people have taken to deceptive tactics to try and argue mask mandates work, like truncating graphs to create apparent correlations where none really exist.
We don't know if people were actually following the mandate or not, how frequently they were taking their masks off, whether they were engaging in other behavior which would put them at risk for COVID exposure, etc
We do know this because the Delphi project has been tracking mask compliance, at least among Americans. It's extremely high, like above 90%. If mask mandates don't work with such high levels of compliance it means they don't work at all. And if masks 'worked' but had no observable effect due to other factors, that's logically the same as having no effect, isn't it?
How do you know they didn't have an impact on incidence graphs? It's entirely possible that the spikes in those charts would have been even more severe without a mask mandate
Even when controlling for increase in testing, the second wave in some places with mask mandates introduced after the first is equal in size to the first. If they worked that shouldn't be possible.
For something to be scientific you have to start with the null hypothesis. Believing in something despite evidence that it has no effect places us firmly in tiger-protecting rock territory - it's fundamentally a religious impulse rather than scientific. I could just as easily argue that the second waves would have been much smaller if we hadn't been wearing masks: I'd have no proof of that so I doubt you'd accept it, but it's no more valid than what you're arguing here. Yet maskers insist they are being scientific.
So far every piece of "evidence" for masks I've seen boils down to a correlation/causation fallacy. A few places where mask mandates were introduced as incidence was falling anyway are used to argue for them, and all the places where incidence went up or did nothing are ignored. The existence of second waves and second lockdowns despite masks is ignored. The studies pre-dating 2020 that showed masks don't seem to have any impact are ignored. The completely unstudied and hitherto-fore never proposed hypothesis that masks are meant to stop people infecting other people rather than stop people getting infected is taken as "scientific", even though it appears to have been made up on the spot for political reasons.
But don't listen to me, I'm not an expert either. Listen to the people who do this kind of thing for a living and who know what they're talking about. They know more than we do about their chosen field.
No, they don't. 2020 has made it abundantly clear that public health expertise is a massive fraud. These people systematically have no clue what they're talking about. Their predictions are always wrong, they constantly ignore evidence they're wrong, they lie all the time and their credibility is zero. As for random people on Twitter, do you really think I was making an appeal to their authority? Twitter is irrelevant, it just happened to be a place where the graphics are hosted. It's the data that matters to my argument, not who's making it.
Remember these 'experts' changed their positions on masks 180 degrees almost overnight. Now they claim they were previously lying en-masse. I don't think that's true, I think they were summarising the literature up to that point (which said masks don't really work) and then changed their views for political reasons. But even if you believe it was the other way around, it's impossible at this point to not believe in a massive coordinated conspiracy. Either they were all lying before or they were all lying now: it's not possible for it to be neither. There's really no point in making appeals to the authority of these people.
here[7] is an explanation of how masks work, specifically how they help filter and trap particles which carry COVID
I'm aware of how they are meant to work, it's obvious, nobody needs the New York Times to tell them that masks are meant to filter particles. Yet mask mandates (which is what we're talking about here) clearly don't work for any meaningful definition of work. If they did we wouldn't be seeing second waves larger than the first and being put into a wave of second lockdowns, would we?
Whether it's due to air going around the masks, most transmission being in-home, viruses being too small for masks to block them, people not wearing them right, masks being ineffective for viruses in general or whatever, doesn't actually interest me that much. That might be an interesting topic for mask manufacturers or doctors to investigate. But there's really no need to debate this: mask mandates are frequently followed by dramatic climbs in incidence, or falls, or no change at all. Meanwhile every claim that masks work is simply picking cases where the natural end of the first wave happens to roughly line up with when masks were introduced, ignoring the cases where they don't line up. Why should anyone be convinced by this?
I wear a mask in public, and I have since March. I'm speaking up for your elderly and obese and otherwise-compromised relatives and neighbors, whom you seem determined to kill. If you're unhappy with how the pandemic has affected your business, you should ask the politicians why the CARES act gave the rich $5T and the rest of us a one-time $1200.
> If you're unhappy with how the pandemic has affected your business, you should ask the politicians why the CARES act gave the rich $5T and the rest of us a one-time $1200.
Better yet, ask why half of them won't get off their ass and appeal for everyone to wear masks. Call it a civil duty; call people who wear their masks patriots/hero; equate a refusal to do so is like kneeling during the national anthem or burning the flag. I don't really care what, but they need to do something.
There's a lot of science supporting mask wearing as an effective way of mitigating the impact of covid. If everyone wore masks in public and around any person who is not a member of their household, the economy would not be so stressed; hospitals would not be so stressed; and we could largely go back to "normal."
At this point, every time you go out in public without a mask, you are lighting cash on fire. You are hurting American companies and helping foreign ones. No amount of government stimulus is going to bring back all of the people who died or were permanently crippled from covid. Nor will it give back the year of schooling that children have lost due to covid.
The cynic in me thinks that some leaders are dragging their feet with the goal of dragging the American economy into the toilet so that they can blame the next guy for it.
Is anyone in USA so inspired by politicians that they would slightly inconvenience themselves in response to a polite request by a politician? If anything I'd expect the effect to be negative, especially with polarizing people like Pompeo or Pelosi. (You'll never convince me that a significant portion of mask-wearing in "blue" states isn't due to Trump's famous opposition to masks.) Many of those who wear masks do so because we are aware of the respiratory pandemic underway, and not pathologically selfish.
Certain sports stars or perhaps "country" musicians could have a one-time effect on mask rates if they really went hard, but each time we fire one of these bullets it's used up. If "Florida Georgia Line" go all-in on masks, they won't be cool enough to tell us about vaccines.
Politicians are one thread in the tapestry of news and information that blankets the country. Yes, people listen to them.
It's abundantly clear that the entire GOP coordinates with Fox News and other sources (reddit, FB, etc) to deliver consistent messages that are curated and on-brand. So when I say politicians, I really mean this entire machination.
If the entire Conservative Messaging Platform decided to tackle this problem and encourage mask wearing, we could get a critical mass of people to do so. They could have Laura Ingram, Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell, and a bunch of lesser known pundits/politicians harping on this day-in and day-out. While having facebook and r/conservative bots posting pro-mask memes.
We know this is an effective way of influencing behavior, because we've seen it work numerous times throughout the past decade. Too bad it's never used for anything good.
You probably aren't wrong with respect to coordination between politicians and "news" firms. When I read "GOP with Fox" I heard "DNC with MSNBC" as an echo. (My father watches MSNBC so I see more of it than Fox, just by mistake.) Just like the latter (to be more correct, the same) machine, however, it isn't magical. There are a set of buttons and pressing them has a set of effects. Some choices make others impossible. Trump could have made mask-wearing a conservative thing in January. In December that's not an option. Everyone, even his fans, would just laugh at him. No other Republican has any power to change red-staters' minds about anything. Eventually there might be a different Republican with influence, but until then many Americans must be reached in other ways.
Why didn't you wear a mask in public before March? Influenza is also a potentially fatal respiratory disease that is frequently spread by asymptomatic carriers.
We have a vaccine for it, but some years the vaccine is as little as 19% effective. In particular the vaccine doesn't work very well on immunocompromised people.
You might have already killed elderly and obese and otherwise-compromised relatives and neighbors by your failure to wear a mask in previous years! COVID-19 fatality rate is around 6 – 8 times worse than influenza, but that's just a difference in degree. Personally I do wear a mask in circumstances where it actually makes a difference to slow down the COVID-19 pandemic, and encourage others to do likewise. But spare us the moralizing and appeals to emotion. That doesn't help, it just divides people.
The Surgeon General and the NIAID director both told me not to. They've since changed their minds, but I changed mine before they did. I'm kind of surprised they haven't resigned, to underscore the certainty of their new recommendations...
Easiest solution: you act like the adult you ostensibly are and wear a mask, and we adults will get on with life. And if you don't want to be an adult about it, then you are welcome to stay home, where you can be yourself without any need to wear any sort of clothing at all.
Not everyone has the option to stay at home. Essential workers, for example. Making them choose between forced exposure to COVID vectors and joblessness is not much of a choice.
We don't tell people in wheelchairs to stay at home while the rest of us get on with life. We accommodate them because pure survival of the fittest is the baseline of how animals live and civilization is about evolving beyond that.
It is probably going to peak in April and decay naturally be its flu-like seasonality; it doesn't look like a vacine will have a major impact before that. Meaning this is going to be some very hard months, probably much harder than last year as the virus didn't have such a wide spread as it has now december last year.
I am reading about incident numbers of about 600 cases pr. week pr. 100.000 here in Copenhagen. Meaning 0.6% of the city's population will get it over just one week; if that continues 1/3 will get it within a year.
What a fascinating chart. I think the first wave in the springtime killed a lot of vulnerable populations in nursing homes and assisted living. I'm surprised the "third" wave we are currently experiencing hasn't led to more excessive mortality, but I think we will be seeing that data spike once this chart gets updated in a few weeks.
Suffice to say, if we had been more responsive, more cooperative, and more on top of our response earlier in the year, many thousands of lives could've been saved.
Parent may have been thinking of Taiwan, where seven people have died of covid. That's not a daily or weekly or monthly rate. That's the total for the whole pandemic. In Taiwan they were "on top of" the situation.
I never said anything wasn’t a big deal. I don’t think death toll has a direct relationship with how “big of a deal” something is.
The premise of the article is that relative number sizes have a bearing on how big of a deal something is, so I have to assume that’s to whom you’re responding.
I'm not sure what post you're responding to said, but I do believe federal Medicare reimbursement is higher for covid-19 care than for similar care that doesn't involve covid-19. It seems there is an additional 20% payment from Medicare when covid-19 is involved (though it seems this must also be much smaller than the "extra $13,000" or "extra $39,000" claims I've seen. I think it may be an extra 20% of those base numbers, not sure). [1]
The step many irresponsible people take to suggesting that doctors, hospitals, or insurers are fraudulently marking deaths as covid-19 deaths is whacked, though, in my opinion. The penalties for Medicare fraud are large, including criminal punishment (individuals can go to prison), and I highly doubt anyone is doing it. (Maybe, like voter fraud, there are isolated instances by bad actors, but to believe there is widespread misreporting of covid-19 deaths that substantially affects the overall numbers is crazy.)
Oh yeah hospitals all benefited so much from having to postpone expensive well-compensated elective surgeries for months, after which many of the heart, cancer, etc. patients were just dead so it wasn't so much a postponement as a cancellation. Their CFOs were turning cartwheels. Q people are really tying themselves in knots trying to explain away the excess deaths. (Hint: this goofy argument doesn't work either.)
I didn't say hospitals haven't undergone financial hardship due to COVID-19. In fact, the reason for the extra funding is precisely to alleviate the stress under which hospitals have been for the past ~year.
All I said was that hospitals receive extra funding from the government for taking in COVID-19 patients, relative to "normal" patients. This is indisputable and I was not making a broader point.
Don't try to lump me into a group such as QANON based on something I didn't say.
At this time your comment still says "It's pretty well-established fact that hospitals benefit financially by taking COVID-19 patients." Those hospitals that didn't take covid patients didn't delay as many surgeries for as many weeks. Every heart bypass is worth more than ten covid deaths have even been rumored (falsely) to be worth. This is a pointless argument that harms public health, and those who wish to distinguish themselves from Q shouldn't make it.
I honestly don't get what you're trying to accomplish here. The original question was this:
"How does a doctor/hospital/insurer benefit from putting Covid-19 on the death certificate?"
My read of this question is that the person was unaware of the extra funding made available to hospitals taking COVID-19 patients. Therefore, I gave a link to a USA Today article which explained the facts.
I didn't say that there aren't ways for hospitals to make more money than they get by caring for COVID-19 patients. My only point, which I'll reiterate, is that the government provides additional funding to hospitals that take COVID-19 patients.
I haven't indicated whether I think that's good or bad, and I haven't indicated whether I think the additional funding has been abused or not. I just gave information about government funding of hospitals to somebody who asked a question about the subject.
> ten covid deaths have even been rumored (falsely) to be worth
Is there a problem with the USA Today article I posted? If the numbers are wrong, I'll be happy to correct it.
> This is a pointless argument that harms public health, and those who wish to distinguish themselves from Q shouldn't make it.
I haven't made an argument, and I haven't harmed public health. You're still reading things I didn't write and then making assumptions about me with no basis. Please stop. Slow down, reread everything I've written. Then reply here without fighting windmills so we can converse.
There is a financial incentive for hospitals to mark Medicare patients as covid-19. Even more so if they get put on a ventilator. That doesn't mean that hospitals are abusing it. My assumption any time money is involved is that somebody will abuse the system for profit.
They'd be taking a pretty big risk by doing that. Not only is venting a patient extremely dangerous (50% chance you're never coming off that vent), you can lose your license, face prison time and get fined as least as much as you defrauded Medicare.
A hospital gets paid $13,000 extra (per patient) if a COVID-19 patient is admitted and an extra $39,000 (per patient) if the patient goes on a ventilator.
Fixing this is an industrial problem. The vaccines exist. They just need to be mass produced in larger numbers. So what's the holdup? Actual production of the vaccine itself? Precursor chemicals? Bottling lines?[1] Bottles? Needles? Staff training? Transport coolers? Storage coolers? Dry ice? And why wasn't all that taken care of months ago?
(And why doesn't the US have a web site like Alibaba for industrial equipment?)
Yes, the death toll for the first ten months of 2020 vs first ten months of 2019 is +388K, so unless there's about 200K less deaths than expected in each of Nov and Dec we'll be well above
edit: and since over 200K people die in the US every month during an average year, that is not particularly likely, to say the least
7500 deaths per day are average for the US. 9/11 caused 3000 deaths. So the US will probably exceed 9/11 deaths forever, unless population size is drastically reduced somehow.
You beat me to it. Look at deaths by other causes. Lots of "9/11"s every year here! Why is this being treated as if its dramatically worse than a death by other causes? Any death is a bad thing
Death by old age does not exist, it is just the older you get, the more likely it is that some disease or other will push you over. Only Covid somehow doesn't count. It's OK to die of an heart attack when you are over 80, but not to die from Covid. (It's OK to try to prevent or delay both things).
> So it’s over 3000 young, well educated, working age people, in cities dying a day?
More than 3,000 people. None of the other factors are relevant to the claim that the US death toll will exceed 9/11’s each day. If the headline said “Death toll of young, well-educated, working people in the urban U.S. will exceed the 9/11 death toll every day for months”, then you’d have a point.
> Compared to Europe you’d expect about that number
Europe is hovering around 5,000 (oscillating above and below) out of ~747M per day; the US at the same per capita rate would be around 2,200 per day. So a floor of around 3,000 per day is significantly higher.
Smoking is banned in most public spaces when the smoker is at risk of harming others via second hand smoke. The taxes on tobacco are also extremely high to restrict usage. There are bands on tobacco advertising. The government invests in anti smoking ads and cessation programs.
You really didn't think twice before hitting reply, did you?
To be fair, a tobacco-related death is almost always the result of the victim's own decisions and the government sees to it that everyone knows the risks before making the choice to smoke. More importantly, cancer is not so easily transmitted from person to person.
An enormous amount of public health resources are devoted to deterring smoking. It's illegal indoors most places, and outdoor smoking bans are not uncommon. We've certainly decided it's dangerous and attempted to stop it!
Inaction on smoking is tragic, and it serves more as cautionary example to avoid inaction elsewhere than justification for inaction. I'll take a better response to covid than to smoking even if that's technically an inconsistency. Right?
I don’t know what country you’re from, but there are very significant restrictions on smoking in the US and numerous social and health policies designed to reduce smoking. Smoking is overwhelmingly considered dangerous.
This is exactly why capitalism fights single payer healthcare to aggressively when it would be in every corporations best interest to offload those costs.
They gain two things, 1) control over the worker and 2) externalize costs for selling addictive, unhealthy products.
I think this a poor way of looking at death tolls when context such as cause of death and the people dying matter too. In other words I don't think it is appropriate to bring up 9/11 and whether its for clicks or to gain points for their political side (because covid has been heavily politicised), it has only caused more people to take it less seriously.
the science is clear on masks. That shouldn't need discussion. Hospitals are at or near capacity in many places. Do your civic duty for the country and wear a mask.
Shutdowns and other things, sure discuss and debate
a "9/11" is not some standard unit of death that can be compared to any other death toll to compute a value for "how much should we care?". comparing covid deaths to having 9/11s every day ignores almost all the context for why we care so much about 9/11 in the first place. without context, 3000 deaths is just not that much for a country of ~300 million. it's a lot to have in a single day, but it's only about half of what we expect under normal circumstances. it is a really large number of people to lose in a day to a single disease, but it's not comparable to the deliberate killing of 3000 civilians in a novel terror attack.
this kind of comparison serves only to provoke an emotional response; it doesn't contribute to a reasonable conversation about mitigations and tradeoffs. at best, it might serve as a critique of the US reaction to 9/11 itself.
I feel it's exactly the other way around. People are dead just as much irrespective whether they died on 9/11 or because of Covid or because of, let's say, a traffic accident. Family and friends will miss them just as much.
To me giving a different weight to different causes of death is what seems the more emotional response. If your feelings are influenced by that context for why we care, that is emotional. There's nothing inherent in the distinction between those circumstances that should influence how much we care.
I understand using that number as a benchmark, but really at this point I've just turned off all news sources that bring up the pandemic. They are little more than propaganda anymore.
I understand this, the thought also occurred to me. Consider that if you are already aware of the issue, then maybe you are no longer the intended audience of those news reports. https://xkcd.com/1053/
That sounds highly reckless, tbh. It's easily the most important event in the US's history since WWII and you're ignoring the people who help get through it.
The majority of people I see in public every day aren't wearing masks. (If I see them in the business I manage, I show them the door. Thankfully this hasn't been a big problem.) I have spoken to some of these people whose family members have both died and suffered major health consequences. Idiot talk radio/Q-anon mind control is strong.
Do you think they're going to figure it out if we just yell at them one more time? Those who are going to listen have listened.
I mean, look, continue to state, loudly and publicly, that QAnon is full of it. But war1025 has a point - we're well past the point of diminishing returns. Personally, I find myself hitting refresh to see if anything has happened lately. And it hasn't, and it won't today, and it won't tomorrow. The hourly news cycle is a really bad match for a six-months-and-counting pandemic.
In my personal life, I try to have kind, reasoned discussion. This is sometimes effective.
In general I agree with the news media complaints in this thread. In February this was all just racism against the Chinese. In March masks didn't slow infections. A vaccine has been a month away since April. We should be so afraid of brown people overseas that we should bomb them before they get us. Trump is Putin's buddy. Etc. All bullshit. If someone had been trying to undermine public confidence in journalism, they might have made the same editorial decisions. I totally understand why people don't believe what they're told. I have myself been accused of skepticism.
Let's not despair, however. It is still possible to learn facts about the world around us. The headline on TFA shouldn't surprise anyone; I've been thinking the same thing for weeks. (Granted, I'm a moron not a CDC director. However, I don't have the wishful thinking disease that nearly everyone on TV seems to have.) Even so, it is news to someone. Vaccines, even if they're effective and available, aren't going to save us for many months. More people could be wearing masks right now. Some people will start wearing masks, this week, in response to the perfectly natural comparison between covid and 9/11.
"Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC director says"
It's right there in the headline. We are approaching a breaking point where more people will be dying not because we don't know how to save them, but because there are not enough health workers to attend to them.
Wearing a mask and leaving home only when absolutely necessary is a simple thing we can all do to help save lives.
And not just the lives of people who get COVID in the future, but also the lives of people who contract other illnesses. Every COVID bed is a bed that can't be used to treat someone who would have otherwise gotten sick or injured, and that person will have to go somewhere. Early on in Washington when the Army was setting up temporary field hospitals, it wasn't to handle COVID patients, it was to handle the normal patients who would have otherwise gone to the regular hospital.
What's messed up about this whole "crisis" is it's being framed as an individual choice to wear a mask. People make it sound like wearing a mask protects you somehow. And that's simply not true. I think in all this "individual freedom" sabre rattling someone is forgetting that you do not have the freedom to harm someone else. And your choice to not wear a mask is a choice to harm the people around you.
So really choosing not to wear a mask is more like choosing to drive drunk, and you won't ever know how many people you kill.
The article is talking about just daily deaths from COVID-19, not the overall daily death rate or the monthly COVID-19 death rate. Even on a good day, more people die in the United States than died of the 9/11 attacks (~3k) - just usually not of any single cause.
In context... Approximately 655k Americans die of heart disease each year[0], which comes out to about 1.8k per day. Approximately 600k Americans die of cancer each year[0], which comes out to about 1.6k per day.
> 30,000-60,000 people die from the flu in the US every year.
COVID eclipsed that within a couple months. By year's end it'll very likely have killed 10× that lower bound. And like others said: COVID's killing the same number of Americans per day that the flu kills in a whole month.
The people who insist "it's just the flu" evidently need to brush up on elementary school arithmetic.
Also it would be nice to see which of these COVID deaths actually had no co-morbidities. Basically how they account for it now, you could have advanced cancer and pneumonia and if you have traces of COVID in your system your death was definitely due to COVID.
So when you see hospitalization capacity reporting, do you think they're just lying, and that the hospitals were already full of these advanced cancer + pneumonia folks who now just happened to go and catch COVID too?
This is misinformation pulling on the heartstrings of the non-logical. Most people who caught covid would have died if they caught the normal flu...like every other year.
Also, wasn't it convenient of them to leave "covid" out of the headline. Expected deaths this year without a pandemic were already expected to be much higher.[1]
FYI if you downvote without refuting my statements, you are that non-logical person.
> This is misinformation pulling on the heartstrings of the non-logical. Most people who caught covid would have died if they caught the normal flu...like every other year.
Even if that were true, I fail to see how it is relevant.
We demonstrably have massively more people dying from COVID than die from normal flues, so either COVID is more fatal than normal flu, or we have a massive amount of people catching COVID who would not have caught normal flu.
Ok, look at this chart, and with your super logical mind (not influenced by misinformation and emotional heartstrings like the Director of the CDC) tell me whether the red 2020 line is "like every other year"?
He actually addressed that 6 days ago [1] when someone posted a link to that page. His answer is that it is BS because they do not take into population growth since the years they are comparing to.
His argument was not very convincing, because (1) the chart is only going back 5 years, which is not long enough for population growth to have affected anything, and (2) population growth effects would change the height of the curve but not the shape of the curve, whereas the actual curve shows large shape changes.
HN is a liberal echo chamber when it comes to politics. I added that because any non-left comment gets immediately bombarded with downvotes without discussion (the typical leftist approach to political issues when challenged).
I think it's very rational to see people being harmed and to want to do something about that. It's how many of the best policies in America have been formed. What's irrational is making it about politics, like it's somehow a leftist thing to empathize with the plight of others.
Rationality isn't about suppressing your emotions and your connection to other people. It's about integrating those emotions with your values, knowledge, and capabilities and deciding how to act based on that synthesis.
The fact is that we Americans are at our best when we're looking out for each other. And many of us are very concerned about COVID.
i'm a leftist and i responded to your comments with specific numbers as a rebuttal. you've chosen to ignore those numbers and complain about liberal bias.
This page has a number of good breakdowns, but here's the US chart comparing 2020 vs other years:
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#excess-mor...
Can you spot the anomaly?