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Comment by pierat | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Covid certainly didn't wipe out %5 or anywhere near that. That's roughly 400 million people if scaled to the whole world.

Point to the phrase or sentence where I said ALL of 5.3% declined was all "covid deaths", or all "moving away".

Only around 0.4% of the city's population died of COVID, as of March 2023.

That's crazy high isn't it? That's 1 out of 250 people!

Sources like [1] put New York at 379 in 100,000 people, or 0.379% making it the 15th worst hit US state.

Bear in mind that even if everyone in the country lived to 100 then died of old age, you'd still have a 1% of people dying every year.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

Still, over three years around 1 out of 40 die of other causes.

Drug overdoses killed more than covid in NYC in 2021

~1% of the population dies every year.

I mean, yeah, some absurd fraction of NYC (25%? 50%?) got it before we knew how to treat it.

But it's less than a tenth of the total population loss, so it's probably not worth trying to figure out either if the actual toll was higher than the official death toll (maybe by a factor of two?), or if some in the first wave would have died by now of other causes.

Every government has a justification to minimize Covid deaths. And that quote is the 'official death toll'.

My guess is this is grossly underreported. My original idea to track deaths was to compare before-covid year-to-year to during and after. Using death records would sidestep the 'died from covid' and 'died from covid but written down as something else'.

But hot damn. My post is at -4. Sure seems like people really don't appreciate 'intellectual curiosity' that much.

I think you may be getting downvoted for a couple of reasons. First, your "original idea" is called excess deaths and it has been reported since the beginning of the pandemic [1]. The entire state of NY had 42k excess deaths. If all these deaths came form NYC, that would be 0.5% of the population which is in line with the GP. Which brings us to the point of why some people are downvoting. Some people believe that COVID deaths were over reported, not under reported.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

"Only"

But yeah, not the cause.

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