In the United States 50,000 more people died of COVID-19 directly in 2020 than died in World War 2. I don’t get these comments.
https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/pdf/global/programs/Globald...
I would personally characterize diarrheal diseases as a plague, but I think the broader point is fair: people have lost all perspective on how Covid compares to other causes of death around the world. How far would the tens of trillions of dollars the worlds' advanced economies have spent on Covid in 2020 have gone to eradicating childhood deaths due to dirty water?
You can't simply say "let's do both", because the fact is that we immediately found the money for one, and we haven't found it for the other despite years of effort. It speaks to our priorities.
Because it isn't a "harp". It isn't just a niggling little thing, and it isn't "dismissal" to put something into perspective.
The world's economies have thrown tens of trillions of dollars into the response to Covid (not to mention the incalculable follow-on costs in terms of mental health, missed diagnoses and the like), and nary a thought was given to what the side-effects of that response might be, or whether those resources might have been better spent elsewhere. We just did it, and it turns out that the disease will have an impact on par with something else that we spend drastically less money on in any given year.
If you literally cannot fathom why a cost/benefit calculation might be appropriate here, you have lost perspective, and the OP's point is well-taken.
The Spanish flu killed 50 million people. That’s 5% of the word population at the time. Now 50 million would barley be over half a percent.
* Many of these people are not smokers themselves, they are dying from second hand smoking
* You are free to choose to smoke, but not to choose to go to a bar? It’s reasonable to forbid people to visit their grandparents but not to forbid them to smoke?
The proper comparison would be that you can choose ‘not to Covid’ as much as you can choose ‘not to lung cancer’. A nonsensical proposition.
Meanwhile almost everyone I know in tech has had the best financial year ever. It's good we have to sacrifice nothing and even gain, but I totally get the loss from the rest of the world.
With the death count, we will see when all cause mortality is published. If there are huge drops in heart disease and cancer deaths that would imply some things. The median age of death is over 80.
"Diarrhea kills 2,195 children every day—more than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined."[1]
"In 2016, diarrhoea was the eighth leading cause of death among all ages (1 655 944 deaths, 95% uncertainty interval [UI] 1 244 073–2 366 552)"[2]
1: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html
2: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coron...
Tl;dr: Reporting of deaths is incredibly irregular across Africa, and counting excess deaths is likely impossible as a result. The population is younger on average, which likely helps, but we probably don't know the real numbers there.
> “The mortality due to Covid in the African continent is not a major public issue,” said Dorian Job, the West Africa program manager for Doctors Without Borders.
The rest of that article is just speculation that there might be an outbreak that isn't being recorded, with little evidence.