Hacker News Reader

Comment by DelaneyM | Hacker News Reader

> …COVID has killed more people in the past 4 years than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+.

Ok, so that’s wrong by an order of magnitude. AIDS has killed ~85.6 million [64.8 million–113.0 million] people, and it’s plausible that could be a huge undercount. COVID has killed ~7M people, which is also bad but nowhere near “more”.

There are also a lot of reasons these aren’t really comparable pandemics, and the responses to them are similarly difficult to compare, but I’m not going to bother with that conversation here.

[https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet], [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/]

View on HN

OP was probably referring to the American experience, which is correct. AIDS has killed about 700,000 in the USA, vs 1.1 million Covid deaths.

Apologies, I should’ve clarified that I was referring to the US, where COVID has, in fact, killed more people than HIV/AIDS.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-covid-deaths-...

You copied info from that first page incorrectly; 85.6M is their estimate on number of infections and 40.4 million [32.9 million–51.3 million] is their estimate on deaths.

As abeppu points out, this is their death estimate: 40.4 million [32.9 million–51.3 million] is their estimate on deaths.

Further, covid deaths are severely undercounted. Our world in data reports 26 million excess deaths to date, about 5 million in the past year. That's with three years of data, vs. three decades for HIV.

There's surely some HIV undercount too, but it's a reasonable bet that covid will exceed HIV in terms of deaths long run.

>Further, covid deaths are severely undercounted.

No, they are severely overcounted. We were literally counting people who died of motorcycle accidents as COVID deaths if they tested positive for COVID in the emergency room. The PCR tests were dialed up to 40 cycles, which caused a huge amount of "false positives" as well.

The health authorities admitted that over 90% of the COVID deaths had pre-existing conditions and the actual cause of death wasn't really COVID. The IFR of COVID is less than a bad flu season.

What I cited are excess deaths rather than Covid deaths. No one labelled them. The baseline death rate went up after Covid arrived.

You can argue they weren’t Covid. But you need another explanation. And it needs to be global; this happened in every country.

The rise in deaths began with Covid, and continues now. The baseline death rate has shifted higher.

>But you need another explanation.

Oh, I have the explanation, and stacks of studies to back it up, but I'll be banned and downvoted for explaining it here. Have a nice day.

You need an alternate explanation which started February 2020. That’s when the excess deaths began.

No, a much bigger spike happened in December 2020 to February 2021, with another spike July-August 2021. https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

How does the WorldMeters site reach the covid 7M figure? I know that deciding how to attribute deaths to covid is not that trivial (e.g. as opposed to deaths with covid; or people who did not get tested, i.e. unconfirmed deaths etc.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com