Meh, I’m not convinced it’s such a disaster it’s being portayed.
Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average before that. Again, meh.
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...
It’s also true that I couldn’t find an easy comparison with the previous 5 years average.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nevertheless, I agree it's a catastrophe.
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.