Comment by smaryjerry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smaryjerry | Hacker News Reader

Delta is getting a crazy amount of press but for some reason most articles don’t show any of the articles stats. For instance rather than show cases or deaths, they show “percent of cases that are delta.” Here is the CDC chart showing cases and deaths by group.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographicsoverti...

Cases are increasing but even case increase is a tiny blip compared to winter. Cases have always been a poor metric to judge the pandemic as it doesn’t indicate the severity of the infection. Filter the graph by deaths and we can see COVID deaths have still yet to increase even a tiny amount from their already extremely low levels after vaccinations become mainstream. Yes there is a lag time between death and cases but that lag time is only two weeks.

> Cases are increasing but even case increase is a tiny blip compared to winter.

If you look at the US as a whole cases are not are still well below the worst daily averages of last Christmas, but blip is a much stronger word than I'd use when the trend line is pointed up with no obvious end in sight.

Drill down on the individual states with the most issues and you'll see that places like Louisiana are basically at the same point as they were in winter and will likely far exceed it.

As you say, the fact that most of the most vulnerable age ranges have been vaccinated will certainly help the death tolls. The flip side of that, however, is that a much higher concentration of the deaths in those states are going to be younger individuals.

True cases are equal in some areas like Louisiana and Florida. Florida is completely open with the worst possible scenario of practically no masks, low vaccine rates, and enormous crowds but has only 1.4 weekly deaths per 100,000, low but above the national average of .5 weekly deaths per 100,000. Compare this with deaths from all other causes which average about 16 weekly deaths per 100,000. So yea we have a problem but at the current rate you are more likely to die from a stroke than COVID. You are about half as likely to die by suicide. You are about 6 times as likely to die from heart disease than COVID. I’m just saying there are other things to be afraid of and focus on than the pandemic.

Careful, I got buried by the downvote and flag brigade for pointing that out.

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