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Comment by neilsense | Hacker News Reader

"not that bad" -> more people dying

I don't understand this comment. Could you please expand it in a more constructive way?

Vaccination is not the only way available to stop the spreading of the virus:

  - Keep social distancing
  - Avoid friends and familiar reunions
  - Wash your hands frequently
  - Wear a mask
  - Be careful

The top 5 places with most coronavirus deaths are:

1. USA 2. Brazil 3. Mexico 4. India 5. UK

None of these are in the EU.

The parent comment is just saying that a poorly-run vaccination programme results in more deaths than a successful one, everything else being equal. Hope that helps.

In that logic the parent comment disregards the original comparison operands. Innocuous, irrelevant, if not somewhat offensive and disrespectful.

That's not even true when looking at deaths per capita (because how is total deaths relevant?) If you remove micro-states, the top 5 in deaths per capita is:

1. Belgium 2. Slovenia 3. UK 4. Czech Republic 5. Italy

4 out of 5 are in the EU.

Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Sort by total deaths. It is true. The parent comment did not specify the metric, every death counts and total deaths is a metric that should not to be disregarded.

You are disregarding total deaths, like a robot that only looks at percentages and ratios. These are real people.

If you remove micro-states, if you filter by this, if you only consider that, if you spin this enough, if you consider that this metric is invalid, if you this, if you that...

then what do we have for such a vague claim such as "-> more people dying"?

Total deaths are an awful way of comparing countries, it's heavily correlated with population size.

You yourself just said, in this thread:

> A fair comparison would be the data of today in EU with the data from 1 or 2 months ago in those countries (per capita).

Using absolute counts, Switzerland handled the virus better than Germany on many metrics despite losing a larger percentage of its people just because it's smaller. Alternatively, the UK handled it better than the EU if we ignore populations, while India supposedly handled it worse than the EU.

It's silly to do so because the country's handling of the pandemic through policies and societal responses have an impact on the people in that country (or multinational union). They should be measured based on how well they managed to protect their people. I don't really know how to relate to the logic that a less populous country or bloc deserves less criticism even if they hypothetically lose half of their population to a virus, just because they had fewer absolute deaths than a country with a far larger population.

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