Man, this is almost as bad as 1988.

Dry tinder. Lets look at these graphs for 2021 and 2022. Want to take bets about what we will see by the second half of the coming year? I would wager that 2021’s second half will show a significant drop in mortality rates since people who died of COVID in 2020 won’t be around to die of something else in 2021 and 2022.

#So what are you saying…that I should take the fakakta vaccine?

You probably saw the bullshit going around a couple of months ago about how “only 6 percent of COVID deaths are really COVID” because only 6% of COVID death certificates just had COVID and no other conditions (in either part 1 or part 2 of death certificate).

So, tell us: did that guy in Florida who died – at the scene! – from trauma sustained in a motorcycle accident, actually die of COVID-19?

Sure, more than 6% of those who’s deaths were “COVID-involved” actually died because of COVID. But less than – and probably considerably less than – 100% of “COVID-involved” deaths are really due to COVID. How many people have keeled over from cardiac-arrest, possibly brought on by the stress of 24/7 COVID-fear-porn, who just happened to test positive (or – not even that – the CDC doesn’t require a positive lab test) for SARS-COV-2, and are subsequently called a “COVID-19 death”?

I’m surprised that you’re falling for this bulls**t, Steve.

All-cause mortality to-date is under-shooting past years. There may be fewer people dieing this year than in previous years. How does that square with the horrific COVID-pandemic?

And I was impressed that your analyst’s graphs go all the way back to 2015. Why – that’s practically the Flood.

Here’s a graph:

All-cause mortality per-capita in Sweden going back to 1850. Does this make COVID-19 seem like a World-altering event?

The question is this.

If Covid had never existed, how many years longer would the average victim have lived?

Logoically over the short term the lockdowns and reduction in economic activity should have reduced fatal accidents significantly. It may have increased domestic violence and homicide though. I would think an increase in suicides unlikely during the first waves, we will probably see that in the winter.

Any future reduction of the death rate will be attributed to lockdowns and vaccinations.

Suicides, poisonings, etc., aside, does any of this data analysis look at the extent to which lockdowns hastened the “natural” deaths of elderly and sick people? Lack of exercise, sunlight, contact with loved ones, and regular medical attention? It’s probably near impossible to say for certain, but is it that outrageous to suggest that many people died this year who would have died in ’21 or ’22 if the lockdowns hadn’t happened?

I’m tired of all this Corona Crap! Here’s a different cause of death:

“As a group, illegal aliens are terrible drivers. Years of data show they are five times more likely to be involved in a fatal collision, five times more likely to drive drunk, and ten times more likely to hit-and-run.”

Democrat politicians fall over themselves making sure illegals can drive ‘legally’ but I haven’t heard a single one mention a little thing called insurance. What’s it matter anyway, since we’re eliminating penalties for just about any crime now.

Don Rosenberg’s son, Drew Rosenberg, was 25 years old and riding his motorcycle in San Francisco when Roberto Galo slammed a car into him on Nov. 16, 2010. Galo, who entered the country without permission from Honduras and later earned temporary protective status, had been cited five months earlier for driving unlicensed, uninsured and the wrong way down a one-way street.

Dear Mr Sailer,

(Excuse please, my ingrish not best)

Your political masters in B____g very preased with you for playing your part in cover up of our role as first deliberate superspreader of glorious made-in-C___a virus!

Prease cally on with self-censorship (like obedient C___e citizen) and continue no make mention of X_ J___g and C___e C____t P___y Politburo!

Enjoy lockdown in Carifornia (stay off wet sand, no!, now stay off dry sand (ha! ha!), while we here in W___n enjoy crowded wave pool!

Yes, Mr Sayra, you tell you readers: man up America and take vaccine (just in time for us to release an even deadlier virus on our geo-political enemies!)

Yours,
Wee Win Ning
Director
W_n Institute of Virology

PS: All you Joe Biden belong us

If you’re very at risk, sure. If not, I wouldn’t recommend it.

COVID-Chinese is not “just the flu, bro,” but letting it run rampant would be far preferable to the demonic agenda being forced on us by our malevolent and/or incompetent elites. I’ll cut my left nut off before I’ll take the vaccine.

Steve, i suggest that going forward you should look at excess/missing births.

Overall this stuff looks solid. I was going to comment on the previous post, that when you finally put some numbers out there, they look a lot like what i’ve been saying since the end of February. As i’ve said 20 or 30 times now, once the Diamond Princess came back, we had a pretty good handle on what we were going to be dealing with and nothing has popped up so far that’s changed that story. (Funny how math is like that.)

But–also said a bunch of times–once the Diamond Princess was back, i emailed my kids “do X, Y, Z … but while this has a good chance of taking out G-Dad, and a small chance of taking out me, you are going to be fine.”

As killer plagues go, the Xi plague is just about as good as they get. Instead of killing your first born son, it kills your parents, or grandparents. A few young docs have gotten a big dose–utterly incompetence of our establishment to be prepared with the gear, quarantine procedures and facilities–and gotten taken down with cytokine storm. Very sad. But otherwise, there’s an almost complete absence of productive people dying. Almost all have had their families, done their life’s work. Most of these folks are deep in the 4th quarter … many are in OT.

It will be interesting to see deaths in the three to five years. Obviously 2021 will still have a lot of excess death, but then i predict a noticeable drop. Note the comparison must be done fairly, because each year we boomer marching closer to our demise. US deaths were bound to crest 3 million a year within the decade as the lead boomers head into the death zone. My guess is in just five years or so we’ll have recovered these deaths. The years of life lost here–unimpressive. Quality years–even less so.

What worries me is the cost. We are only this month really getting to births conceived during the plague time. Haven’t looked. But i fear a significant drop–especially among whites, the middle class, the educated. Hope, i’m wrong…

But my guess is once again–as with immigration, feminism, LBGQWERTY, crime, welfare; as with pretty much everything–our establishment “elites” have concocted “policy” that attacks the normal, healthy, productive, destroys the future of the nation. (It’s the only thing they are good at.)

As long as young BBBBBBBBlack men can continue killing each other at the same rate as their grandfathers did in the early 90’s I don’t see what the problem is.

Looks like your standard Asian flu that hits every 30 to 40 years……

To protect the aged population that now dominates our culture, we have stopped educating 70 MILLION of our youth.

We have destroyed the middle class and eliminated tens of millions of small businesses. We have made TENS OF MILLIONS OF AMERICANS HOMELESS.

We have ruined the lives of TENS OF MILLIONS OF AMERICANS because people in their 80’s want to live a few more months. This is a sign of sick and decadent broken society.

The Boomer Elite have burned our country to the ground because these DECADENT FUCKS want to live forever.

The Time to RESIST IS NOW.

Any comments on the Trump/OANN story?

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1339090279429775363

I would wager that 2021’s second half will show a significant drop in mortality rates since people who died of COVID in 2020 won’t be around to die of something else in 2021 and 2022.

Almost certainly. The more interesting question is over what time period will the drop in deaths be spread out? Obviously most of the deaths have been among the elderly, but anecdotally I’ve known a few elderly people to die from it who didn’t seem to be in their last days of life, while my father-in-law and an uncle, who both have several health issues, managed Covid just fine.

I would think it would be fairly straightforward to make an actuarial estimate of how many days/months/years of life the average covid victim lost. It’s probably less than a year, but just going on the few people I’ve known to die from it, it’s possible it could be longer.

I think your analysis (or that of your friend) is fine except on this point–it is not fair to attribute to COVID, for example, a death due to heart attack in a patient who avoided the hospital when he had chest pain because he was afraid of contracting COVID. That is attributable to the news coverage and panic surrounding the virus, not to legitimate avoidance of the virus. For example, back in February-March, when COVID was blowing up in NYC, there were zero cases in most cities and townships of the rest of New York State. But rather than getting on TV and telling people to take precautions but be reasonable, Cuomo’s management promoted the feeling that we were in the middle of the apocalypse. Aside from Cuomo, many people (for example on this blog) were obsessed at that time with whether or not the IFR was going to be a small bit higher than flu or just a tiny bit higher than flu. This discussion was not only useless, it was misguided (as everyone’s focus should have been on other things like how to prevent patients from going from infected at home to infected in the ICU) and helped create a false sense of danger that may have kept people at home and created that Corona-shaped curve of other causes of mortality.

I would be very interested to see the same analysis of excess deaths in other countries like Sweden, Japan, China, Taiwan, New Zealand, or Hong Kong. Do other countries with other approaches to the pandemic have the same Corona-shaped curve of deaths from other causes?

Q1: In the above graph, why was the death rate going up already basically since Obama was elected? Is that all the opioid epidemic?

Q2: Why doesn’t the 2018 blip show up in this graph?

Dear Steve,

Speaking of vaccines, we find it puzzling your reticence about a wonderful new vaccine which was successfully released here in the US on Tuesday November 3.

This vaccine, specifically released in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada (and other states we assessed as potential superspreaders), successfully inoculated the Body Politic from the Populist Virus which currently affects up to (at least) 75 million Americans.

This virus, first seen in Eastern Europe, started spreading westwards until in arrived in the US in 2016.

Symptoms include delusions about secure borders; patriotism; economic fairness; law and order; blind justice, and, above all, American Greatness.

Thankfully, we have defeated this virus, and the Body Politic is now fast expelling the 75 million virus particles out its anus where it will be afterwards defecated on by millions of virus particles originating from third world countries which we will invite to invade the US Body Politic.

The good news is under the new Chinese-owned Biden Administration we will be promoting a permanent Chinese-made cure for sufferers of this virus: Fentanyl.

Yours,
The Washington DC Institute of Virology (branch laboratories all across the US)

While the Corona Virus around here has had little direct effect, I have to concede it has indeed killed a significant number of people elsewhere.

However, we’re left with the question of whether our response has been reasonable or even effective. Everything I’ve seen suggests it hasn’t been.

Yes, people have died from the virus. Would many more have died if we had just skipped all the mask histrionics and restaurant closures and contented ourselves with barring mass events and taking prophylactic measures around senior centers, etc?

I would think it would be fairly straightforward to make an actuarial estimate of how many days/months/years of life the average covid victim lost. It’s probably less than a year, but just going on the few people I’ve known to die from it, it’s possible it could be longer.

It’s certainly bigger than a year.

Just looking at the size of the excess death bulge tells you that. This is several “good flu” seasons worth of deaths. It’s not just clearing next year’s “dry tinder”.

The average will also be above the mean here. A whole, whole lot of “last couple years of life” folks getting carried off months or a year or three early. (My uncle among them–was pretty much “due”, ) But a lot of mid-range as well and then a few long range real losses.

My guess would be median years of life 3-4, but average maybe 5-6. QALYs considerably less.)

I predict we’ll see a significant makeup over the next three or four years, but it will take ten to really make up most of it.

But–as i noted in a previous comment–because the boomers are entering the death zone, it’s going to take a bunch of “age-adjusted” math to see these effects. We were destined to get a death rate above 3 million a year by end of this decade. (My birth year had 4m+ births … and a few hundred thousand plopped in via immigration. Those people all have to die sometime.) So i’m not sure how easily it will be to see the makeup longer term. But the next year or two–assuming the vaccine really is effective and really breaks this thing–i think that’s a lock.

The graph we will never see: Excess deaths 2020 without lockdowns and face diapers. It probably would have looked like these. If I cut off my finger, it doesn’t grow back if I scream and run around in panic.

Any comments on the Trump/OANN story?

a) President Donald – Orange-Man-Hitler-Bad-Man – Trump is history.

b) Winner Joe – Just-Let-Me-be-Clear-Arrrggh-Boing! -‘s as I Said! – Biden takes it all – no matter what (voting machines, etc., etc., pp.).

I would be very interested to see the same analysis of excess deaths in other countries like Sweden

Hail predicted the number of deaths in Sweden this year on May 1st – and – it turns out, he was astonishingly right.

https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/

What he says about Sweden is – cum grano salis – also true for the German-speaking (= the bigger part of) Switzerland. – Both countries had – to this day – no lockdown (in the German-speaking part of Switzerland there was a mini-lockdown in spring – but even then, schools and kindergartens and shops, restaurants, museums etc. were open).

How many excess deaths are due to wearing the freaking masks? Not to mention health complications due to lack of oxygen?
https://nypost.com/2020/12/16/wearing-a-used-mask-could-worse-than-no-mask-amid-covid-19-study/

OT – George Pell, wrongly convicted aka set-up Catholic cardinal, on Trump. He’s spot on.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/17/george-pell-trump-is-a-barbarian-but-in-some-important-ways-hes-our-barbarian

“Trump is a bit of a barbarian, but in some important ways he’s our barbarian.”

I wouldn’t use that word, but I take the point. God works through some very unlikely people. Satan likewise, to be even-handed.

(and in the UK, Wales manage not to report 11,000 positive tests – quite impressive number to lose for a small country)

Chrisnonymous,

A1: The American population (at least those counted in the Census) is getting older quickly. As I mentioned in the previous thread, I read yesterday that we’d gone up by a whole 1.2 years in average age from ’18-’19 and there was a 34% increase in Americans over 65 in the decade ’10-’19, (not sure if it was those exact 10 years – closed my source tab).

That big jump would be significantly smaller, say 25% lower, o.95% – 0.98% rather than 0.94% – 0.98%, if the base-curve is made accurately. The opiate deaths could be an additional factor that could explain the already rising curve.

.

It’s that weekly death counts by age group graph that I’d wondered about at first glance last time. Of course there are many more people in the 45-65 (double the # of years, note) and 65-75 than the 75-85 group, so absolute # excess deaths looks balanced. I know, Steve, that’s not your analyst’s point – it’s about the shape of the curves. True, but how many of the younger people’s excess deaths were really the COVID, rather than being marked that way for insurance purposes or government pressure to keep up the hysteria?

I was put off of having a colonoscopy by 5 months. Due to my genes if I don’t have these every 3 years I get cancer. I got it during the late summer lull in cases, I did not have cancer. But the doc I went to is the top man in Chicago and he was slow – I got in immediately. The cancer cases causes by people not going to the doctor this year will show up in the coming years.

The dashed line is CDC’s “Average Expected Count” of deaths. It is a smoothed extrapolation of recent years trends in deaths. Because it is a trend analysis, it implicitly accounts for population growth and aging.

That is an absolutely moronic statement.

I’d like to see a graph showing the excess deaths of people under the age of 30, or even 40, or even 50.

Funny how none of the “sensible” (a synonym of pro-panic, it seems) analysts ever seems to want to talk about the inconvenient fact that this virus is essentially harmless to anyone under the age of 30.

Yes, medical services do, over time actually save lives, so when people stop using them, many more die

In London, in the first wave, the hospitals were empty of all non-Covid patients. Everyone stayed away. This is why they were never even close to full and is a plain and obvious fact to everyone who works in them.

Combine these two, and many extra deaths are guaranteed. Indeed it accords to a simple formula:

Number of lives normally saved by medical services = number of extra deaths during first wave Covid in the UK

Here’s my theory…

Deaths are up Due to Murder

I would like a breakdown of deaths by Hospital/Medical Clinic

My bet is, that most of the Excess Deaths are Murders of Minorities at Minority Run “Hospitals”

Once I saw the black funeral parlor guy with a lot of bodies, outside the Black Medical Clinic in Queens or whatever bad area it was in…I thought ‘Aha…so that’s how they are getting the bodies’

Your friend is an idiot. Sorry, but he is. He spent all this time ‘analyzing’ the stats but he failed to consider context.

People don’t deny Covid so much as they are skeptical of the response. Since the Covid skeptics are deluged with so much Covid hysteria bullshit, is only natural for many to (possibly) overcompensate and ‘deny’ Covid at every turn.

But let’s get real, the Covid denial is strictly a response to the insane response. Your friend knows this–but he doesn’t address it. Instead, he concocts all this analysis to argue against the Covid Denying Strawman.

If the Covid response was little more than PSAs about washing your hands and common sense health precautions, ‘Covid Denial’ would be nonexistent. People would treat it like they treated Swine flus, and the Hong Kong flu. And it would pass…like every other damned influenza-spectrum malady.

Did the insane response to Covid actually help? That’s the issue of the day.

Our ‘denial’ of Covid is semantics. Our ‘denial of Covid’ is nothing more than a denial of this insane response. It is perfectly rational and far from being bullshit. Tell your friend to get a hobby.

Nice. It’s just like “climate change”, looks real scary if you carefully adjust the scale and window, looks like nothing at all if you don’t.

ACM hasn’t changed except for the first few months of the outbreak. If it has changed, someone needs to explain why the social security payouts have not. Apparently the CDC keeps different tallies from the guys who write the checks, and I know which department I’m betting on for accuracy.

Man, this is almost as bad as 1988.

I think it was more like 1968 on the chart. But yeah, people weren’t exactly hiding in their basements in the 1960s to avoid the danger of mingling with others.

We need a context to establish proportionality.

I did a post awhile ago where I looked up the historical death rates from just infectious diseases and it looked like covid put us back to the 1940s in terms of your odds of dying from interacting with others.

That’s not great. But if people were willing to leave the house then, why not now?

But–as i noted in a previous comment–because the boomers are entering the death zone, it’s going to take a bunch of “age-adjusted” math to see these effects. We were destined to get a death rate above 3 million a year by end of this decade. (My birth year had 4m+ births … and a few hundred thousand plopped in via immigration. Those people all have to die sometime.) So i’m not sure how easily it will be to see the makeup longer term. But the next year or two–assuming the vaccine really is effective and really breaks this thing–i think that’s a lock.

That was the first thing I thought when I launched into the Google graphs.

Let’s be cynical for a moment: Boomers approaching death, having largely denied the existence of God, confuse physical existence with living, and are willing to trade anything for a few more years of life, ergo demand. Medical services providers and Big Pharma, being offered reimbursements for COVID typically far more generous than those on offer from Medicare, supply as much COVID treatment and paraphernalia as the market will bear.

The US per capita medical spending on the last twelve months of life was roughly 8.5% when Dr. Zeke studied it. Recent studies ex ante COVID suggest roughly $80k per capita. COVID plus pneumonia Medicare reimbursements are roughly $8k higher than garden variety pneumonia ($5k), and COVID+pneumonia +ventilator is good for $25k. Ka-ching !!! That’s a heck of incentive to crank up the PCR cycle count, find the bug, and treat it just among Medicare patients alone.

Imagine how much more you can fleece out of scared boomers who still gave assets to sell, and bigger numbers of them are approaching the reaper every year, desperate to hang on. Better still to do it in one big crescendo now before the Mediscare system that was already going to implode in a few years actually does.

Biden, Pelosi, Fauci are not Boomers (too old), nor are Harris, Obama, and others in Obama’s orbit behind the four-year harassment of Trump and pulling Biden’s strings (too young). No doubt there are too many selfish Boomers who think they should live forever and/or are otherwise responsible for driving this country into the ground with insurmountable debt, interference in foreign affairs, proxy wars, pressing for globalism, etc. But it wasn’t Boomers who passed the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, and it isn’t Boomers who are toppling statues, looting, creating mayhem in the cities, or agitating for such ridiculousness as the “Green New Deal.” I will grant you that Boomers are largely responsible for initiating the wreckage of the universities.

Again, leaving out ages in these charts gives a severely false impression. Even were the amount of deaths to double (600K in the US), it would remain orders of magnitude less concerning than even half the number of deaths (150K), concentrated among the young. There is a reason that we spend so much, relative to number of deaths, to reduce child mortality. Merely prolonging nursing home existences, however, is not worth any sort of massive price.

Also left out of these charts is any estimate of lockdown effectiveness. Do any of the massive efforts going on substantially effect these numbers? Given how the disease seems to follow the arrival of “indoor weather”, it wouldn’t seem so. The only thing that seems to be super effective is good border controls and living on an island.

Probably, but they’d be expected to pile up later on, not earlier. The frontloading of “non-Covid” excess deaths into April suggests they were more likely more directly tied to the pandemic.

Such as – for example – being put into an induced coma and put on the vent when they didn’t need to be? Maybe purely for the protection (or imagined protection) of the hospital staff even though it was not the best treatment for the patient?

There were lots of anecdotal stories of this happening back in April/May. If true, do we expect the medical establishment to come clean about it?

We don’t really know over what period the “mortality displacement” effects are going to be spread. There was a study that Steve linked months ago which suggested that the average number of life years lost to COVID was about ten. Maybe that’s too long, but it may be significantly more than one or two.

New York City was the hardest hit area in the U.S., and probably the world. It’s interesting to see what happened to death rates after the initial epidemic:

New York City is also one of the fastest jurisdictions at reporting deaths to the CDC, so we have good data up to week 47. Between weeks 27 and 47, everything is remarkably average.

Man, this is almost as bad as 1988.

I think it was more like 1968 on the chart.

Have not looked seriously at any of this data (too much to do, too little time), but 1968 is when the Hong Kong flu pandemic started, which replaced the late 1950’s pandemic H2N2 with H3N2, the former having replaced H1N1 until a presumed 1976 lab release put the latter back into play.

So we’ve got an estimated 100,000 killed in the US from that pandemic, whereas, and there’s strong arguments it’s an under count as well as an over count, ~300,000 dead from COVID-19 and counting, however you have to adjust for the population growing about 50% larger since then. Quite a few more will die before enough of the most vulnerable can be vaccinated, Pfizer has supply chain problems and has halved its early promises, Moderna, assuming it gets a FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in a couple of days is obviously a week behind Pfizer, and their ability to manufacture at scale is completely untested, but they’re fully part of Operation Warp Speed, whereas Pfizer/BioNTech only accepted a contingent purchase order. So … model this with say 100 million vaccinated by the end of the first quarter?

Every prior pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on younger people, whose immune systems are not as robust to new viral strains. Thus the average age at death for those dying of the Spanish flu was well below the unconditional average age of death. This points towards covid killing old people indirectly, via aggressive ventilation, neglect of regular health care, and isolation.

Almost half the fatalities were nursing home residents. Nursing home typically live less than 6 months after being admitted, but live an average of 12 months after being admitted due to some living as long as 2 years. Men admitted to nursing homes have a median stay of 3 months until dying.

https://www.geripal.org/2010/08/length-of-stay-in-nursing-homes-at-end.html

the average COVID fatality was 79 years old and had several comorbidities, typically those under the age of 79 were obese, diabetic with high blood pressure, or fighting cancer or heart disease. A significant percentage of the elderly had Alzheimer’s disease along with other health conditions. It would surprise me if the average victim lived another two years.

Do we still think there are reliable data to be had from the likes of the CDC?

I’m confident trust in “vaccines” has plummeted, and I’m real sure that is a problem for people like Gates.

I don’t doubt that some people have caught something that has done something to them that was very unpleasant/fatal, but I’ve yet to hear of anyone I know being sickened or killed by it although we all are undoubtedly “positive”.

My sister says a couple of friends had it and recovered (one taking the ok-not-ok-ok-again HCQ), but she might be lying too.

I think you hit on it. The six percent thing is a red herring that no serious skeptic promoted. OTOH some small jurisdictions have audited their death certificates. The ranges of actual (from the rona) deaths attributed to covid19 vs what was marked down vary from 25% to 80%. That’s a giant range but probably not unexpected given how dirty the data is. That would put the US at about 75k to 240k ‘rona deaths. The rest are likely caused by the lockdowns themselves.

So does a virus that is somewhere on the scale of a bad flu year to 3x as bad as a bad flu year justify the kind of intervention tried? Also note that intervention has no track record of stopping the virus and quite possibly lead to somewhere around 60k to 225k deaths itself. That’s just this year, and doesn’t account for some of the carry forward deaths from things like missed cancer screenings.

When you start to dig into the numbers, you see why past events of this magnitude (about a once every two decades occurrence) were allowed to take its course instead of implement government overreach of dubious “help.”

Few deny the existence of the disease. Some of us just maintain that given the statistics we’re not scared enough of it to hand our livelihoods, and in some cases lives, over to the government in a vain attempt to stop nature. I understand others feel different and try to justify their fear. I remain unconvinced.

The scaling makes all the difference. The six month tally produced by CDC looks impressive until it’s compared to death rates over 150 years. Yeah, Covid is bad, but not the worst ever. Median age of decedents was and remains 83, which happens to be median age of death all along. Since everyone dies only once, the scary CDC graph won’t look so scary when the people standing on banana peels with multiple risk factors are culled by Covid. I plan to get the vaccine because I don’t like getting sick. My risk factor is being over 70. I tolerate vaccinations well and I like to minimize risk. However, as studies are showing, cloth masks and lockdowns don’t do much to reduce the natural surges of a seasonal virus.

The Boomer Elite have burned our country to the ground because these DECADENT FUCKS want to live forever.

Age 66 here, asking a small favor: please secure the stupid generational analysis. Not everyone born in a given year thinks the same way. From what I’ve seen, the correlation between birth year and stupid covid panic is weak-to-nonexistent.

I go everywhere that will let me walk in, and I wear no goddam mask, except in gun-to-the-head situations like when I have to go to the dentist, in which case it’s dentist’s rules until I get out of there. I’ve signed the Great Barrington Declaration. I have renounced, and hereby renounce yet again, any claim on the lives of younger people to keep my ass alive. I work out daily, don’t drink or smoke, get plenty of vitamin D and zinc, spend whatever time I can out in the sun (not much, this damn month), and count on my immune system to take care of business. If it’s unable to do so, I’ll hand in my lunch pail as cheerfully as I can.

In my daily life, I see distressing numbers of 20-somethings and teens going around with diapers on their faces and acting like they’re scared shitless. I do not, however, generalize about “millennials” or “zoomers” or any such artificial category.

The Time to RESIST IS NOW.

Now, there we’re in full agreement. Testify, brother!

well stated. The excess deaths may have been less without the lockdowns and mask mandates.

Mask wearing increased fatalities, as most people are wearing cloth masks for days without washing them, resulting in an increase in infections diseases. Masks are quickly contaminated with bacteria, mold and viruses. Forcing children to wear masks for 8 hours a day is harmful and pointless.

It appears the covid is fading out as a cause of death, just like all the previous flus. So why rush experimental vaccines into the population. Why is only one style of vaccine available in the US?

Would many more have died if we had just skipped all the mask histrionics and restaurant closures and contented ourselves with barring mass events and taking prophylactic measures around senior centers, etc?

The U.S. state with the least restrictions was probably South Dakota. If you take the death rate per million of South Dakota and apply it to the nation as a whole you would have around 500 thousand deaths. South Dakota may not be exactly like other states. It is more rural and white and that may decrease deaths. On the other hand, it has more elderly whites and Indian reservations and that may increase deaths. It is unlikely, though, that we would have reached millions of deaths in this country if we had decided to have no lockdowns and mandatory mask wearing.

This disease is most likely seasonal and regional. When temperatures get very hot or very cold people move inside. The disease is transmitted more easily when people are crowded together indoors. Being out of the Sun may also cause drops in vitamin d levels and that may be another factor. We had a Sunbelt peak in the summer when it was the hottest there and people stayed inside. The coldest state in the U.S. is North Dakota and cases started rising there first as winter approached. North Dakota peaked in November and cases have been falling recently. North Dakota finally introduced a mask mandate in mid-November but cases would have likely dropped anyway since South Dakota with no mask mandate had a drop in cases around the same time. Some have suggested South Dakota cases have dropped because of less testing but hospitalizations have been dropping too.

I would think it would be fairly straightforward to make an actuarial estimate of how many days/months/years of life the average covid victim lost.

I estimate I will have lost 35-40 years of life due to Covid.

I’m a relatively young, healthy, married man. In late March I noticed some blood in the toilet. I wasn’t able to get an appointment for months for a colonoscopy because of C-19 . I had to wait. Anxious I went to my PCP and got a Cologuard test. It came back positive. All in all I had to wait a total of 7 months for the first available opening for a colonoscopy and then an additional month for the cancer surgery.

Long story short the tumor grew through the wall of my bowels and spread to lymph nodes. I’m now in advanced-stage cancer. I’ve asked several colorectal surgeons and oncologists if it would’ve made a difference if it were caught in March. Their diffident replies let me know the answer.

During my chemo treatment this week my nurse remarked how unusually busy they’ve been lately (in chemo ward). I didn’t ask if it was higher than normal because I didn’t want to know. I’ve already gotten over the gnawing what-ifs. But I couldn’t help overhearing the DOBs of some other male chemo patients around me and was surprised to hear quite a few others born in the 1970’s-1980’s.

“I’ll cut my left nut off before I’ll take the vaccine.”

Just take the vaccine – it’ll fall off by itself.

Any future reduction of the death rate will be attributed to lockdowns and vaccinations.

Dr. Kelly Moore, associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition, on CNN:

“One of the things we want to make sure people understand is that they should not be unnecessarily alarmed if there are reports, once we start vaccinating, of someone or multiple people dying within a day or two of their vaccination who are residents of a long-term care facility. That would be something we would expect, as a normal occurrence, because people die frequently in nursing homes.”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/04/health/coronavirus-vaccine-acip-nursing-homes-question/index.html

The skeptics have already been discredited by claiming covid isn’t very deadly.

So, tell us: did that guy in Florida who died – at the scene! – from trauma sustained in a motorcycle accident, actually die of COVID-19?

There may be a handful of cases like this around the country. We know of thousands of deaths in New York City alone that weren’t counted as COVID even though they happened during the peak of the epidemic there. Even during the second surge, the increase in deaths was considerably larger than the official COVID death toll. We will see about the year-end surge.

All-cause mortality to-date is under-shooting past years.

No, it isn’t. All-cause mortality in the U.S. is up about 14% for all of 2020 compared to 2019.

Since 1900, there’s only one year with a higher jump in death rate. The 1918 death rate was 29% higher than 1917.

The 14% jump is about four times worse than any year since World War II.

Right.

You can go back to 1958 as well, when we lost 120,000 people to that strain of the Asian flu in a population of 175 million.

Back then, no one gave a shit. No one expected medicine to save you. Everyone got on the crowded bus to get to work.

In fact all the breathless stories about health care workers being overworked is due to the fact that people DO expect medicine to save you, even if you’re 80 and have congestive heart failure on top of getting the Wuhan.

Today we have a population of 330 million, which skews older AND sicker — and, I may add, much less White. The death levels comparable to the 57-58 outbreak, given our current population, would be 220,000. Right now we’re over 300,000 deaths due to Corona Chan — even assuming those numbers are correct.

So while we have proportionally surpassed 1958, and may touch 500K, there’s a bigger issue, and it is indeed one proportionality.

Do we destroy the economic and social lives of 30 million people in a futile effort to save some percentage over and above 500,000 people, or whatever, and that’s assuming that what we’ve done — mask wearing, social distancing, all the theater, actually MAKES a difference, which is certainly debatable.

So while the graphs that Steve posted look oh-so-ominous, we need to ask this fundamental rock bottom question.

Do we destroy the lives of 10% of the population in order to save less than ONE QUARTER OF ONE PERCENT of the population?

If you’re Gavin Newsom, or Bill deBlasio, or Gretchen Whitmer, or Jay Pritzker, or Andrew Cuomo, you fuckin’ love the idea. It’s the biggest wet dream they have ever had.

Aha. Herein lies the rub. The US death rate and future “projections.” You post this:

View post on imgur.com

But not this (which I have posted twice before):

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate

The latter shows where the UN projects the death rate to be going soon. And it’s much higher than 9.8/1000. It’s called aging.

I’m going to take the graphs at face value even though you can’t trust the government. However, they clearly destroy any rational for lockdown. More lockdown equals more death. They also destroy any need for a vaccine, since the value of deaths is falling to normal levels.

Lockdown is the greatest crime against the American people and those graphs prove it.

This week, as I keep saying, Trump and the Senate Republicans need to set up two special prosecutors, one to drill right down to the bottom on the elections and the other to investigate the Biden crime family. Both will have a helpful influence on matters going forward, even though they won’t change the election.

Now that we know that elections can be rigged reliably, I want to see what happens in Georgia. If the Dems are allowed to take the Senate (because VP Harris gets a tie-breaker vote), I’d be surprised. I think that the Powers That Be want a divided government, so we don’t get USSA (United Socialist States of America) right away.

Agree. We’re on a steep upward trend in the US death rate due to age. And ironically, due to the medical advancements aimed at the very old. In the last few decades, we’ve kept a lot of old sick people alive well past their natural expiration date.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate

More charts you won’t see:
People who wish they were dead
People who wish their governor were dead
People still alive, if you call this living

The uptick in deaths, however scary the chart makes it look, is still completely insignificant. It’s a tiny, tiny fraction of the population. The impact of the useless lockdowns, social fragmentation, economic devastation, etc. will have harmful effects that will go on for years and ultimately be vastly more damaging that the extra dead grannies.

Sorry to be crass, but grow up people. The Covid deaths are a blip, not at all out of line with past “pandemics” that we shrugged off. As I’ve said over and over, if there hadn’t been a gigantic panicked over-reaction, you wouldn’t even know anything different was going on. 2020 could have been a perfectly normal year.

Just looking at the size of the excess death bulge tells you that. This is several “good flu” seasons worth of deaths. It’s not just clearing next year’s “dry tinder”.

No, it doesn’t work this way- we aren’t talking about dry tinder just for respiratory illness deaths- we are talking about all the people who were going to die in the next 2 years from all physical ailments. COVID is clearly killing mostly people who were very infirm and likely to die from the things that ailed them in the present- heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, etc. Only fraction of those would have died of pneumonia and/or influenza in the next two years- their death certificates would have shown exactly those ailments as cause of death or “natural causes”. The things to look for by the 2nd half of 2021 is decreases in the other causes of death in the elderly, not just from respiratory disease. I predict that we run well under the predicted mortality rates for such illnesses for at least a two year period, and at the end of 3 years, the total mortality for 2020-2022 will probably not be noticeably off course than could have been predicted in 2018 long before COVID showed up. No one lives forever.

The only real spike was caused by the nursing home killer coumo.

endless boomer bullshit. looks about as ‘bad’ as the late 60s, the golden era that boomers like Steve extol endlessly.

remember in his review of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood how Steve spent most of his time talking about how the movie was highly unrealistic because in late 1960s Los Angeles everybody was terrified of going outside. there were no muscle cars, surfers, or movie sets.

back in the real world, the Summer Olympics happened normally in Mexico City, Woodstock went down without one person wondering for one second whether it was safe, GDP growth was about 5%, and Apollo was on schedule, with a million people working on it, then, gasp, standing around together watching men land on the moon.

I would think it would be fairly straightforward to make an actuarial estimate of how many days/months/years of life the average covid victim lost. It’s probably less than a year, but just going on the few people I’ve known to die from it, it’s possible it could be longer.

We talked about this back in May (it is amazing how many of my comments from April and May I can just reproduce verbatim now without much to add, kind of sad how little we seem to have learned in those 6+ months). This comment has a detailed discussion about the best reference I found on the topic.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/how-many-quality-adjusted-life-years-is-coronavirus-costing/#comment-3915503

Based on that analysis I think seven QALYs lost per COVID-19 fatality is a good working estimate. So your “probably less than a year” would be a significant underestimate. I would be interested in a thoughtful critique of Briggs’ work and my take on it though.

P.S. Actual calendar years lost are obviously even greater (about 10 years in that analysis), but I think talking about QALYs is more useful.

Every prior pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on younger people, whose immune systems are not as robust to new viral strains. Thus the average age at death for those dying of the Spanish flu was well below the unconditional average age of death.

Flu != SARS type coronaviruses. One guess is that a lot of older folks had been previously exposed to a H1N1 strain that gave them enough immunity to the 1918-9 Spanish flu one they survived while lots of younger folks were totally naive to H1N1.

Sort of like how H1N1 regained a foothold after being serially displaced by the late 1950s and 1960s pandemic flues from Asia, H2N2 and then H3N2, when some $()*&$(*^& in the Soviet Union or the PRC accidentally released in 1976 a H1N1 strain which had been captured in the 1947-57 range. Those around 23 years of age or younger had never before seen H1N1, and going forward provided a reservoir for it, so now we have both it and H3N2 simultaneously circulating.

I think your analysis (or that of your friend) is fine except on this point–it is not fair to attribute to COVID, for example, a death due to heart attack in a patient who avoided the hospital when he had chest pain because he was afraid of contracting COVID.

Hard to be sure about that one IMHO (I think it comes down to whether one thinks the COVID response was justified), but one thing is clear. Such a death should be counted as a cost of the COVID response. Along with the trillions of dollars in economic costs.

“We need a context to establish proportionality.”

the context is that boomers were young and weren’t worried about dying from a flu that was killing people in the late 60s, whereas the greatest and silents, who were in control, wisely didn’t lock down anything, and allowed the boomers to live out their younger lives, make money, meet women, have kids, buy houses.

now that boomers are in control and have been for decades, they’re ruining the rest of our lives so they can eek out a few more years. total selfish assholes who never had to work hard for anything and will drag the entire ship down for a couple more crappy years of 401K withdrawals and hospital visits.

here are the Hate Facts – old people are net negative GDP and when they die, that is a NET POSITIVE for the rest of us. fat africans and fat mexicans are net negative in every way. when they die, it’s a NET POSITIVE. that’s who is doing most of the dying. the virus is improving society biologically, as diseases often do.

is anybody even checking the Social Security situation to make sure the great Old Die Off is lining up with government statistics? SS payrolls better be down by substantial, noticeable amount.

Q1: In the above graph, why was the death rate going up already basically since Obama was elected? Is that all the opioid epidemic?

Chris, Achmed gave the key to answer: We’re getting older.

Key to understand this graph is that it is crude death rate. (Simply deaths per thousand, no age adjustment.) So the changes are not just a reflection of our medical technology and/or lifestyle (obesity, fentanyl, etc.) practices, but also the age structure of the population.

The reason the graph turns back up around 2008 is in part the Great Recession and the white deaths of despair–being un-nationed, un-peopled by the minoritarians.

But the biggest part of it is simply that the elderly population is exploding.

The lead Boomers crested 60 in 2006 and every year chucks the larger Boomer cohorts every nearer the Grim Reaper. (Heck, i’m over 60 now, and i’m a young guy!) As i noted in other comments, we were locked into to reach 3 millions deaths/year this decade. There were 4m+ born in my year, and a few hundred thousand more immigrants tacked on. We all gotta die. The “baby boom” must in due course be answered by a “death boom”. (Math).

Note the obvious:
In a steady state–non-increasing–population, a crude death rate of 10 requires an average age of death of 100. (Math) If your metric for “healthy society” is simply a low crude death, you better either cook up some really cool life extension technologies–crack aging, the cellular death code. Or you need to get your women off the Pill and carry them to bedroom. I.e. more young people and an actual “population pyramid ” instead of “population penis”.

~~

And here’s the deal relative to the Xi virus:

The death rate is back up to where it was in 1960, but does that mean that the Xi virus has erased all gains? No. It’s that the Xi virus is going to town killing in a much older, more vulnerable population.

That’s the deal. Consider people in born 1880 in 1960, and people born in 1940 in 2020.

— Born 1940, in 2020: A bit more than half of the people born in 1940 are still alive and 80 year olds today. Yeah, they are facing this nasty Xi virus and if it gets it’s grubbing little spikes in ’em, it’s killing 15-20% of them. Ouch!

But …

— Born 1880, in 1960: No Xi virus! Oh wait, almost all of you are dead. Sorry.

The Xi virus is indeed a decent killer of the elderly. But it looks nasty and has such a notable effect on the death rate because–with our improved living standards and medical technology–we’ve built up a huge supple of very old, very vulnerable people who simply did not exist in early times. And–with our fertility collapse–they are a much larger segment of our population.

The average will also be above the mean here.

Do you mean median? If so, agreed about that.

What do you think of the SMR2 estimates I gave from Briggs? They are about double yours (average of 5-6 vs. 10 and “considerably less” vs. 30% less for QALYs).

Steve, these are the best time-series graphs on the subject that have been produced, to my knowledge (and I’ve looked). So a big *Thanks* to your anonymous correspondent for the work that went into them, and for sharing both the images and the underlying data sets.

The analyst’s remarks and yours both provide reasonable interpretations for what the data show. In some cases, the only reasonable ones. Thanks also to AnotherDad, res, and Chrisnonymous for thoughtful on-topic comments.

I have a question.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm

Figure 3, bottom left graph, white non-hispanic

I just noticed this graph is much flatter.

Why?

Sailer? anyone?

TL;DR

— Key in looking at this graph is that it is crude death rate. No age adjustment. So it reflects not just medical advance but population structure.

— We (America, but true in the West generally and in most of the civilized world) are getting older. And more importantly regarding this graph and Xi virus–we are getting much more “elderly” as Boomer cohorts march into the death zone.

— Despite the death rate returning–or besting–its 1960 value, that in no sense means life is worse or “more deadly” even living with the Xi virus. (In 1960, only a small fraction of people born in 1880 were still alive. In 2020, 55% of people born in 1940 were still alive at 80, and as the virus only kills 15-20% of 80 year olds infected, even if they all got infected, there would still be 45% of the 1940 cohort alive. Still much, much better than the 1960.)

— The Xi virus looks deadlier now than it would have seemed in early times because
a) Medical and living standards advance mean we have a lot more very elderly, very vulnerable people around, and
b) With the fertility collapse those elderly are a much larger share of the total population.

> I would be very interested to see the same analysis of excess deaths in other countries

Here is a link to some quite similar analyses from Europe, by EuroMomo.

As here, graphs can’t be created for subdivisions. The picture for the whole (US, EU) has the advantage of reducing noise, allowing hard-to-quantitiate features like non-natural-causes deaths to be placed in context.

[MORE]

A figure from a November medRxiv preprint is instructive for what fine-grained looks can add, I think. As a whole, cases rose in April, fell back for the summer, then rose again in October.

This map contrasting the two Covid waves shows that the towns that were most affected in the spring (e.g. Bergamo, to the east) were relatively spared, while the places with lower spring incidence were hit hardest in the fall (e.g Milan, west side).

I suspect that New York State shows the same pattern, with the NYC Metro area accounting for most first-wave cases, and the later resurgence contributed more from upstate.

As Mark Twain said, ” there are lies, damaged lies and the statistics ”

Thanks for the graph. Now, I’m going to hide in my basement knowing it’s just as dangerous as 2008.

Hail predicted the number of deaths in Sweden this year on May 1st – The same Hail from the school of Knut Wittkowski who predicted 10,000 deaths in the US?

Knut Wittkowski: The Coronavirus Truthers’ Newest “Expert
https://thebulwark.com/knut-wittkowski-the-coronavirus-truthers-newest-expert/

“Of all symptomatic cases. 2% of all symptomatic cases will die. That is 2% of the [25,000] a day. So that is 500 people a day, and that will happen over 4 weeks. So, that could be as high as 10,000 people.” (April 1, 2020)

7 is a massive overestimate. The study cited in the earlier link makes no adjustment for the fact that this often kills the very sickest of the very elderly: 50% of its victims are already in nursing homes, with a 6 month median life expectancy.

Also, the only reason people are talking about QALY instead of the more normal YPLL for a public health event, is that YPLL has a built in cutoff at 75 years of ago.

Do you mean median? If so, agreed about that.

What do you think of the SMR2 estimates I gave from Briggs? They are about double yours (average of 5-6 vs. 10 and “considerably less” vs. 30% less for QALYs).

Yes, meant “median”. (I shouldn’t be let loose on a keyboard without an editor.) Thanks res. And thanks for bothering to read.

Re Briggs. We all banged this around months back, right? I think his estimates are ridiculous. You can’t have a mean age of death at 80 and pretend the years lost is 10. The over-under on the mean 80 year old in the us is about 10 years. And for men–and the Xi virus prefers to kill men–it’s even lower.

Briggs is basically taking life expectancies straight up as if the virus is some sort of equal opportunity killer. C’mon. That’s absolute nonsense. “Co-morbidity”.

Cut it in half.

~~

Re QALYs. I’m guessing Briggs is doing the same thing. Again, nonsense. Xi is preferentially harvesting the “ripe”. People with issues. For many of the truly vulnerable, the dementia cases, the QALYs lost here–zero.

With QALYs of course there are value judgements. My life at 50–kids at home, holidays, foreign travel, road trips in America, scouting with my son, enjoying the kids accomplishments on the track–one of those years are already worth way more than a year now doddering on the beach. That was *life*. I still want to do the granddad thing and plan on getting my jab and pushing on out to a ripe old age. But when i’m done, i’m done. I have zero interest in being a demented blob in a wheelchair with some Somali gal shoveling pablum in my maw.

I feel bad for the deaths of the healthcare workers, but isn’t that an indication of how futile it is to tell the world to mask up? In addition I’ve stopped shopping at my local graocery store for meats and go to the more expensive and professional butcher shop because the deli workers are constantly putting their fingers under their mask to adjust-kinda disgusting and it defeats the intended (questionable) purpose.

The excess mortality in the US tracks almost perfectly with (but is much higher than) the ups and downs of the Covid attributed deaths as the epidemic waxes and wanes which tends to indicate that too few, rather than too many, deaths are attributed to Covid.

Your motorcycle accident is exactly ONE death misattributed to Covid. Anecdote is not the singular of data. Meanwhile there must be thousands of people who die of respiratory failure or MI brought on by the stress of the disease and either they are not tested at all or they die after they get home and are no longer infectious so they don’t get coded as a Covid death. In NY when they were overwhelmed at the peak I doubt they were testing the folks who died before they got to the hospital. The EMS guys were told not to spend more than 30 min on CPR.

Dear Wee Win Ning,

I am impressed by Chinese ingenuity. Can you give us inside information on how you managed to get the your “glorious made-in-C___a virus” into Spanish sewage samples 5+ months before you intentionally let it spread in Italy in September 2019?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science-idUSKBN23X2HQ
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13206255/covid-plagued-eu-september-2019-italy/

Thank you for your help.

“The graph we will never see: Excess deaths 2020 without lockdowns and face diapers. “ – One can produce graphs showing excess death if people went about their business as if there was no epidemic around them. Obviously it would be based on modeling with some parameters empirically derived. I think that for the US it would show at least 3 times more excess deaths. You can have some idea about the effectiveness of countermeasures by looking at empirical data from similar (means minimum confounding variables) countries that had different levels of countermeasures. Nordic countries are a very good example for it:

Sweden which had minimal countermeasures had deaths rate (per capita) about 7-10 times higher than the other three Nordic countries in both the first and the second wave.

You seem to be exceptionally well versed in these matters, so can I ask you whether viruses do ANYTHING good? I know there are some bacteria that actually do helpful things for us and which we live with symbiotically, and of course there other bacteria that do harmful things. But do viruses do anything at all that’s beneficial for any animal, or are they purely and solely destructive forces? And if they are, I don’t suppose there’s any realistic, feasible chance that we’ll be in a position anytime soon to just exterminate them all and get them off this planet, right?

Nationwide, deaths in long-term care facilities account for over 40% of all COVID-19 deaths. In 18 states, COVID-19 deaths in long-term care facilities account for at least half of all deaths due to the pandemic. In one cohort study of 627 LTC facilities, the incidence rate ratio for COVID-19–related death among LTC residents was 13 times higher than that among community-living adults older than 69 years.

this is important, since nursing home residents typical die within 6 months of being admitted to the facility while the average is 12 months the median is 6 months.

the 120,000 deaths in nursing homes this year were among those with the worst health status and would have less than a year of life remaining. Half of them had Alzheimer’s disease. Sad that so many died without the ability to have their families visit them. It is difficult to estimate the years lost for the average victim , but since the median death was at age 79 it was certainly closer to 5 years than 9 years of lost years.

even in California 35% of the deaths are in nursing homes, so despite getting months of warning from when the pandemic swept through NY killing mostly nursing home patients, CA did about the same in protecting the vulnerable elderly as NY. The lockdowns and mask wearing failed to protect the elderly even in States which had months to prepare for the second and third waves of the pandemic. https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/nursing-homes/

Why are we destroying the country and the lives of our young for a bunch of geriatrics that are dying 6 months early? ~50% of the deaths in NY were people in nursing homes and the average life span after entering one of those is 6mo. Hello? My parents, both in their late 70’s and chock full of co-morbidities, are shocked at how stupid and weak our society has become as they watch their grand children being forced to wear masks and forced to remain 6′ away from each other in school. Your graphs are clouding your judgement. Do you have children Mr. Sailer? Are you scared of your own shadow?

Re QALYs. I’m guessing Briggs is doing the same thing. Again, nonsense. Xi is preferentially harvesting the “ripe”. People with issues. For many of the truly vulnerable, the dementia cases, the QALYs lost here–zero.

On the other hand At the other extreme, there are the likes of Philip Peven, 104, who live to see thousands of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren:

Doctor used his sperm to father hundreds of babies with patients over four decades

With his genes, many will live to see the 22nd century.

Someone created a David Letterman style list to visualize Covid-19 that seems to suggest Covid is much worse than 1968 flu.

(This was posted a week back, so the days referenced are off by -7)

Of the 15 deadliest days in American history, 10 of them have happened within the last two weeks.

Galveston Hurricane (in 1900) — 8,000
Battle of Antietam (1862) — 3,675
Battle of Gettysburg (1863) — 3,155
This Thursday – 3,067
This Wednesday – 3,054
September 11 (2001) — 2,977
Last Thursday — 2,879
Last Wednesday — 2,804
This Friday – 2,749
This Tuesday – 2,622
Last Friday — 2,607
Last Tuesday — 2,597
Today – 2,477
Last Saturday – 2,445
Pearl Harbor (1941) — 2,403

Multi-variant statistical analyses are very difficult to untangle.

These graphs/charts are helpful but are for the current year and situation, tentative. Ph.D theses will be dining out on this subject for decades.

It will be very difficult to quantify and separate the excess deaths due to COVID-19 that are caused by the illness from those caused by countermeasures employed to stop it. Plus as some note aging populations have different behavior than those of stable age mixes or getting younger.

BTW: “face diapers” is just an obnoxious version of Bro-Heroic virtue signaling. Masks aren’t diapers and people have to wear them (or face negative consequences) whether they like it or not. Insulting people for wearing them is like labeling people who stop at Stop signs “Traffic disrupters.” Or worse.

Like many other such tropes, it gets old after the first week.

If you really want to demonstrate your fearlessness, sneak into a COVID wing at the nursing home
mask-less and breathe deeply for a few hours. Several days a week. Report back. We will be getting your medals ready for you.

I would be very interested to see the same analysis of excess deaths in other countries like Sweden, Japan, China, Taiwan, New Zealand, or Hong Kong. Do other countries with other approaches to the pandemic have the same Corona-shaped curve of deaths from other causes?

I haven’t seen graphs but totals of excess deaths and ovoid deaths are in different proportion in different countries.

Latvia and Finland have negative excess deaths. The epidemic plus the countermeasures saved lives there.

Belgium and France have more covid deaths than excess deaths.

Most countries are like the US having more excess deaths than covid deaths. But some like Spain and Poland by a great margin. Spain by about 50% and Poland by about 90%. Poland did not have lockdown in the second wave when 90% of all covid deaths and excess deaths happened.

As a white male, I am standing aside until all BIPOC receive the vaccine first. They are hardest hit by covid and I would be contributing to white supremacy by getting a vaccine before every single Diversity American. I encourage all anti-racist whites to do the same and put the safety of marginalized and oppressed groups first

Yeah, it’s important to remember that if you use life expectancy conditioning on current age, any death will be counted as premature.

Yep.

When all this is behind us, we will rue the day we’ve done this.

The same Hail from the school of Knut Wittkowski

Yes, this one. He had the Swedish death toll right tough – and – as I said – the Swiss numbers too. His blog is here – : –

https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/

Switzerland had more people on ventilators in the first half of 2019 than in the first half of 2020.

“Like many other such tropes, it gets old after the first week.” – They can’t help it. They constitute 75% of the UR commentariat force. What does it say about your product if they are your clientele?

Don’t give me link to his whole website but give me link to specific document and a proof that the document was not altered.

I am wondering why Germany has so many kooks who became very active during this epidemic. This is not a question directed to you because you seem to be one of them kooks. Just a rhetorical question.

A country which penalizes any alternative reading of history is tolerant of all kinds of mumbo-jumbo when it comes to medical science.

In 2016 Higher Regional Court in Stuttgart ruled in favor of the anti-immunization activist Stefan Lanka who claimed that there is no proof that measles virus exists. If Germany had precedence based legal system this ruling would be a de facto law that viruses do nor exist.

Is it a reaction to Anglo-American empiricism imposed on them after WWII that destroyed more holistic approaches acceptable in German medical science like making pills form human feces and obsessive attention to a stool. Patients are still being sent to spas where they take mud baths and drink mineral waters while taking leisurely walks in a park at insurance expense as part of recuperation.

Or is it possible that while Germany is coping with the Covid-19 pandemic very well (mostly because having great infrastructure of medical system) having one of the lowest death rates per capita in Europe at the same time it is allowing for spreading disinformation to undermine response in other countries?

In 1980’s KGB was running a quite successful disinformation campaign about AIDS and it was based on work of researchers from East Germany.

Operation INFEKTION
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION

Wow, that is really striking. A combination of multiple subjects of interest on this blog.

One of the reasons why New York has more Covid cases per capita than Florida isn’t just Vitamin D. Most people move to New York because they’re looking to hook up with other people. They want high-quality mates and high-quality contacts that can land them plush jobs or better deals in life.

The hooking-up impulse is relentless in New Yorkers. They love that close proximity with other people, but it’s boosting their Covid rates. You need 15 minutes of sustained face-to-face contact with another person to pass on the virus, and that’s what New Yorkers do all the time. Their whole mode of communication is to get in each other’s faces and talk loudly and frantically. This spreads Covid full-blast. Getting right into another’s face to talk with wild vigor is a peasant style of communication inherited from old-world Europe and Russia. But you’d have to change the manners of a New Yorker to combat the disease, and that’s not possible. They don’t have enough self-awareness of how they behave to be able to change it.

Since the vaccine won’t eradicate the disease, there eventually isn’t going to be such a thing as an old New Yorker. The vaccine only works as long as your immune system is strong. Age and various health conditions will weaken the immune system in some people and cause a poor immune response to Covid despite the vaccine, so Covid will kill them anyway.

If you don’t stay in good shape, the vaccine won’t help you.

And no one will be punished.

Evolution doesn’t ask that question and viruses (being technically not living) are a kind of pure evolutionary statement.

That’s a good point. If the median nursing home patient lives for 6 months, then we could assume that the typical COVID victim in a nursing home had no more than a few months to live.

So this disease shaved a few months off their lifespan.

However, for non-nursing home individuals, it’s difficult to say how long they would’ve survived before death.

According to a study, around 1/3 of elderly are resident at a nursing home before their death. Which isn’t too far apart from the 40% of COVID victims who were resident at nursing homes.

The above data MIGHT suggest that COVID isn’t reducing life expectancy by that much, for those who are dead.

One way to figure out if we’re right is to look at mortality statistics for 2022 and 2023. If COVID is killing lots of terminal elderly right now, we’d expect mortality to fall off by late 2022 (when the vaccine has been given to those who need it) and 2023.

By the way, one more issue…. Does COVID have a long term impact on the health and mortality rates of those who were infected but survived? That’s the sort of information that interests me, but of course there’s no hard data. There hasn’t been enough time to do a longitudinal study.

Sweden has been largely shutdown (remote work/school), large events completely cancelled, travel heavily restricted.

Imagine what that would look like with no restrictions + an extremely unhealthy 40+ year old populace of America..

The hooking-up impulse is relentless in New Yorkers.

Not neccessarily.

https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/high-rates-of-unsafe-sex-in-new-york-city/

*Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of adult New Yorkers reported being sexually active in 2006, and one in nine said they had had two or more sex partners.
*Over all, 11 percent of New Yorkers, or 610,000 adults, report having more than one partner in the past year.
*Men are three times more likely than women to report multiple partners (17 percent vs. 6 percent).
*Young adults (18 to 24 years old) are four times as likely as older adults (45 and older) — 25 percent vs. 6 percent — to report having multiple partners.

Though men are 3x more likely to report multiple partners. Which suggests that many men are probably visiting escorts or street prostitutes.

What is your estimate as to the median number of years of life that the typical COVID fatality victim would’ve survived for (if not for the disease)? You could break down that down for nursing home residents (who are 40% of decendents) and non-nursing home individuals.

What is your estimate as to the number of years of life lost by COVID survivors?

Thanks

Stuttgart low court is – nothing but, utu. It’s not significant of anything else than a single judge’s opinion at the time in Stuttgart. – And this town hosts a big Rudolf-Steiner center of Anthroposophic “medicine” too, by the way. And that is rather early 20th-century stuff (Hitler – the vegetarian and non-smoker, mind you, was in a way part of this movement of the Young Germans… of the roaring twenties…).

Hail seems to be American though.
The interesting part is German-speaking Switzerland as of now. I don’t know what will come after Dezember. But up until now, they got along really fine – without any serious lockdown and with the lowest damage done to an economy throughout Europe, I’d assume. And as I said – they had fewer people on a ventilator in the first six months of 2020 than in the first six months of 2019 -who would have betted against me if I’d said so – before reading this?

The residual deaths are still in the shape of the COVID deaths, strongly suggesting that COVID deaths are undercounted. The residual deaths are still in the shape of the COVID deaths, strongly suggesting that COVID deaths are undercounted.

That’s one interpretation. Another interpretation would be that due to all of the COVID capture of excess deaths, that COVID heart attacks, COVID renal failure, etc. numbers are just tracking an increase of excess deaths due to any number of causes, demographics for example. So if a similar proportion of all types of excess deaths are labeled COVID, the proportion of non-COVID excess deaths would adhere to the same curves. Otherwise you’re just saying that all excess deaths, give or take, are unreported COVID deaths, which is just another way to approach the ‘it’s probably a lot more’ nonsense. Have they missed some deaths due to COVID? Probably since many disease related mortality statistics are estimates. Have they included heart attacks, and kidney failure and so in the COVID death stats? We know that they have. As for all the lost quality of life year arguments, 65% of COVID deaths in my state are in nursing homes. If we look at those deaths, we cannot be talking about more than months if it can be measured accurately at all. And if the average ages of COVID deaths are equal to regional life expectancies, you’d need to look at the numbers more closely, but those aren’t stats that scream premature deaths.

Many of us refer to them as “face diapers” because, frankly, that’s what they look like. I don’t disparage every person who wears them — only those who wear them enthusiastically, convinced their life depends on it.

You seem to be exceptionally well versed in these matters, so can I ask you whether viruses do ANYTHING good?

Not a virologist so not the best person to answer, but I can’t recall any short term good things. They take over cells, usually in an uncontrolled fashion so if the immune system doesn’t kill the cells first, the cells die of overuse. On the other hand, I recall speculation or better that part of our DNA has been acquired viruses incorporated into it, so….

[…] or are they purely and solely destructive forces? And if they are, I don’t suppose there’s any realistic, feasible chance that we’ll be in a position anytime soon to just exterminate them all and get them off this planet, right?

I can’t think of any instrumentality that would be feasible any time soon, sounds like a job for Drexler style nanotech. You also want to be careful here, surely there are viruses that are helping to keep various populations of bacteria, plants and animals in check to some extent. A general problem with “invasive” organisms is that they’re transplanted without much or any of the ecological measures that kept them in some degree of balance back home.

I did not look into it. Check with the commenter res.

That would seem like the most important question.

If COVID is taking a few months off life expectancy, that’s much less significant than if it took years (or decades!) off your lifespan.

A few months = A bad flu.
A few years = Pandemic
A few decades = Bubonic Plague

40% of deaths are nursing homes…. Of the remaining 60% who died (not nursing home residents), how much longer did they have left?

Maybe there’s a bimodal mortality distribution. Around half had a few months left and the other half had years left.

Or maybe the overwhelming majority had a few months left, with most of the remaining 60% being terminally ill and on their last legs.

The U.S. state with the least restrictions was probably South Dakota. If you take the death rate per million of South Dakota and apply it to the nation as a whole you would have around 500 thousand deaths.

Good point. This approach produces a lower bound estimate. SD has one of the lowest population density. If you included population density in your scaling the number could be 2-3 times higher depending on what regression analysis between deaths per capita and population density for all states would tell you. The effective population density that excludes large uninhabited ares should be used.

This should not be too difficult to calculate. You need (1) population age profile, (2) covid deaths count in each age bracket and (3) actuarial table that tells you the probability of deaths in on year. Or you skip (1) and (2) and use empirical excess death by age.

“Man, this is almost as bad as 1988.”

Yeah, just imagine how bad it would be this time around without all the lockdowns/masks/social distincing, etc.

Oh wait, we don’t have to just imagine it. As utu noted above, we actually have people world-wide who model this stuff for a living. and make note of changes in the death toll due to masks/lockdowns/etc. They tell us the US death toll would have been over a million if we did what we did in 1988 (i.e. nothing). And THAT is the number that you should be referencing if you want to talk about 1988 or the Hong Kong flu or whatever. As it is, if you’re trying to say those spikes (be it here or in Sweden) aren’t really that big a deal, the CDC types are just going to say “you’re welcome”.

On second thought, forget all that — why don’t I instead just listen to a bunch of love-to-lose whiners on iSteve complaining about how Steve has forsaken the cause and surrendered to data and graphs and geekery? Because for them, it was never about facts and reality and what two plus two really equals to. No, all they want in life is to be “anti-establishment” because that little edgelord routine is what they rely on to give meaning to their otherwise empty lives. They are the complete mirror image of the neon-haired SJW’s they rail against, who similarly don’t care in the least how disconnected they are from reality

“New York City …Between weeks 27 and 47, everything is remarkably average.”

Again, given that the huge spike in the graph is what happened before all the social distancing went into effect and what you call “remarkably average” is what has been in place in one form or another afterwards, that’s just one big high-five to those who said social distancing can put a dent in this thing.

Many of us refer to them as “face diapers” because, frankly, that’s what they look like. I don’t disparage every person who wears them — only those who wear them enthusiastically, convinced their life depends on it.

Yes, I get your point. But the very term is disparaging to those who are wearing them, irrespective of enthusiasm.

It is now a legal mandate in most public places, and many private businesses also require them because whether you agree or not many people are fearful of getting COVID. Businesses want to cater to the widest possible customer base, not merely the brave or reckless.

Also, as you should already know, ridiculing people for they wear — for whatever reason — seldom proves persuasive to those who obviously don’t share your view.

what is there to disagree about? want to do statistics? well here are the statistics.

in the 60s, the US median age was about 29. now it’s about 40.

in the 60s, people were A LOT slimmer and healthier. now they’re so fat that the left has a fat acceptance campaign and puts fat women on the cover as Sports Illustrated.

in the 60s, there were about a million africans and a dozen mexicans. now there’s 40 million africans and 50 million mexicans. and surprise! they’re fat!

in the 60s, the United States was a mostly european, mostly fit and slim nation that was young and healthy.

in 2020, the United States is old, declining nation with a billion people over 65 and half the population is fat mexicans and africans. and that’s who is dying. that’s who we’re supposed to stop the planet for.

by far, Steve’s WORST EVER statistics job. absolute dogshit. not even the SLIGHTEST ATTEMPT to correct for confounding variables, as he would in ANY OTHER SITUATION.

At a glance, Graph Man is perhaps strawmanning a bit.

For instance, the question of lockdown-induced deaths is much more than “homicide, suicide, accidents, overdose, poisonings”. What about all the missed cancer screenings, all the people who had a really bad headache but didn’t go to the hospital because they wanted to keep a bed free for a COVID patient, etc?

…even if you subtract the number of COVID deaths from the number of excess deaths, what you’re left with is still a huge number. The residual deaths are still in the shape of the COVID deaths, strongly suggesting that COVID deaths are undercounted.

Isn’t the criticism, though, that non-COVID deaths are often counted as COVID deaths?

Surely, when we see deaths from cause A tracking with deaths from causes B thru Y, what we’re actually (potentially) seeing is deaths from common cause Z, yes? In other words, that particular graph either shows that COVID deaths are miscounted as non-COVID deaths, or that non-COVID deaths are miscounted as COVID deaths, but not necessarily one or the other.

Am I wrong? I’m open to correction.

The U. of Washington does projections for various scenarios. As of today (*) on April 1 total number of deaths in the US:

Current projections 502k
Mandates easing 597k
Universal masking 446k

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view=total-deaths&tab=trend

(*) The projections are adaptive and thus change as new data is incorporated.

Anyway Germany went on lockdown. Poor Knut Wittkowski, they did not want to listen to him!

Here are projections (as of today) by the U. of Washington for Germany for April 1 :

Total deaths on April 1, 2021
Mandates easing 138k
Current projection 91k
Universal masks 61k

Lockdown is not incorporated in the model yet. The model is adaptive and self correcting and will adapt once new data reflecting change of R0 when lockdown measures kick in begin to arrive.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/germany?view=total-deaths&tab=trend

I am surprised that other countries do not seem to be having the debate going on here in Britain about the possibility that the current second wave of Covid is largely a phantom menace, an artefact of testing – see the technical articles on lockdownsceptics.org or search on casedemic. False positives, false negatives, random sample, opportunity sample, estimates differing by an order of magnitude etc etc. It is a minority view, but has the support of people with impressive qualifications in statistics and in relevant sciences.

Meanwhile, the Secretary of State for Health has more than once demonstrated under questioning that he does not understand Bayes’s theorem, and opinions liable to endanger the health of the public may not be aired on media subject to government regulation.

Peven is Jewish so they’ll all be smart too. In one of the articles they had a picture of one of his daughters. She looked just him which unfortunately was not a good look.

‘BTW: “face diapers” is just an obnoxious version of Bro-Heroic virtue signaling. Masks aren’t diapers and people have to wear them (or face negative consequences) whether they like it or not.’

Hi there, thought I’d respond as I invented the term Facediaper™ back in March.

If anyone else insists I strap a mask on my face, then it is a diaper by definition as it purportedly protects you from my icky sicky cooties. Viz:

If it’s a mask, then you don’t care if I’m wearing one – because a mask protects the wearer from airborne pollutants. Viz:

If masks work, then you don’t care if I’m wearing one. Viz:

If vaccines work, then you don’t care if I take one. Viz:

Get Out Live Life!

And take off that filthy skid-marked Facediaper™. Viz:

I love how Millennial heads snap back, as if I jabbed them in the face, when I call it a Facediaper™. Man that term must hurt. Viz:

Nobody reasoned herself into wearing a Facediaper™, so maybe humiliation will convince her to rip it off. I’ve made two Millennial women weep by stoutly refusing to diaper up.

Because for them, it was never about facts and reality and what two plus two really equals to.

You’re suggesting that this is all fundamentally an empirical problem, and that the disagreement is between those who can’t do math and those who can. But it’s not. It’s a complex ethical problem whose inputs are drawn in part from empirical data.

In his response to this comment, utu links to a model that predicts that mandates will save 95,000 people between now and April 1. Suppose that number is correct. That’s three one-hundredths of one percent of the US population. To save those people, most of whom have already lived most of their lives, we are to impose huge restrictions on the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people: restrictions that would have been unthinkable a year ago.

You’re free to argue that those restrictions are justifiable, but reasonable people can disagree with you about that. Ultimately this isn’t a math problem. By suggesting that everyone who disagrees with you is a troll or a moron, you’re avoiding the stronger arguments against your position.

I’d like to see a graph showing the excess deaths of people under the age of 30, or even 40, or even 50.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm

Figure 2

No need to imagine.

Confirmed coronavirus infections and virus-related deaths are soaring in California, the nation’s most populous state, setting new records as hospitals struggle to keep up with the onslaught of cases.

It has prompted the state to activate its “mass fatality” program, which coordinates mutual aid across several governmental agencies.

On Thursday, California reported 52,281 new daily confirmed coronavirus cases and 379 new virus-related deaths, according to state data. This brings the state’s total number of cases to more than 1.7 million, with 21,860 deaths since the pandemic began.

The impact on hospitals is particularly grave in Southern California, where no intensive care unit beds are available.

“I am standing aside until all BIPOC receive the vaccine first.”

Agreed. All arms of colour should be injected before my pale one. And if you are a pale stale male who suffers from a condition that could worsen from the chemical cocktail in the vaccine you need to step aside altogether. Especially if you have an autoimmune disease like me. The one I have is fairly rare and is most prevalent in Iceland and Ireland. Irish women make up the majority of those inflicted. This female component has me a bit concerned; has me checking for possible moob growth; has me worried I will become a customer of the Lex Wexner-owned Tee-Hee’s Manzier Catalog.

Does COVID have a long term impact on the health

JAMA estimates about 10% become long haulers, which is akin to PTSD. With 17 million infected and rising, this will be very significant with a long tail.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2771111

Look at the area under the curve “Excess deaths for 2020”.

Week 10 to week 35 had an average weekly death rate of 8,000 (just spitballing but it looks about right). That indicates 200,000 total excess deaths. Adding in the last quarter, we would get to, last I checked, approximately 320,000 deaths attributable to Covid. The curve looks bad because that was the intent. They could have shown the daily fatality rate and the curve would be much, much lower on the graph but that wasn’t the impact they were looking for.

So, the graph shows that cratering the economy had no positive impact on the fatality rate of the virus. And it shouldn’t because there was no vaccine, which is the only way to reduce impacts of a virus. Imagine what the annual influenza outbreak would look like without the availability of the flu shot?

Can we now start calling this something akin to the Ferguson effect. Will it be brought out every 4 years at the same time just so the PTB can manipulate another election cycle?

“can I ask you whether viruses do ANYTHING good? “

As is the case with evolution in general, most mutations are bad, but the rare exceptions are vital into making us what we are. The same goes for the genetic changes introduced by viruses — see “syncytin” and “jumping genes”.

That being said, one of the stupider things one anti-vaxxer around here once said (the one with the lame emoji at the end of every post) was that we would eventually evolve in response to any virus, as if that were a good thing. It isn’t. I mean, not necessarily. Chemotherapy (especially earlier forms of it) “works” only in the sense that it kills the cancer cells more quickly than it kills the rest of you. That’s sort of how malaria adaptationshave worked too (though note malaria is not caused by a virus). For example, sickle-cell anemia causes all sorts of problems, but it just happens to cause enough problems for the plasmodium parasites so that (at least for the heterozygotic people) you’re somewhat better off if malaria is around, though you’re still weaker and have medical issues.

To the extent we evolve in response to any virus, it may well be in that kind of poison-pill direction. Evolution doesn’t care in making is better, it just makes us survive, and if that means turning us into that thing at the end of “I have no mouth and I must scream”, it won’t care.

In other words, Nietzsche was an idiot. What doesn’t kill you sometimes just makes you wish it had.

The U. of Washington does projections for various scenarios.

Thanks, but I’m looking for updates (based on what we’ve learned so far) as to what this thing would have done if no one had paid it the slightest mind from the start — i.e. what the corona-truthers and the nothingburger and the just-a-flu bros were advising. The proverbial road not taken. THAT is what we would compare against if we want to compare this to Hong Kong flu or 1988 or whatever, not the smaller number that still die in spite of any counter-measures.

I realize they sometimes want to pretend they’re OK with “sheltering the vulnerable” by some vague and unspecified means, but given that we don’t store the vulnerable in hermetically sealed bubbles and given how pathetically the truthers grasp at any excuse to handwave away any death spike (“you see, comrade, the excess deaths we see today will be matched by reductions in the following months so this will all work out”, or “this will just get us to herd immunity faster and save more lives in the long run”) I’m not falling for that one either.

Take the peak value in week 15 of 22,000. If you spread that over 7 days, on average, that’s 3000, which graphically, doesn’t look as bad as 22,000.

agree.

“In his response to this comment, utu links to a model that predicts that mandates will save 95,000 people between now and April 1. Suppose that number is correct. That’s three one-hundredths of one percent of the US population.”

Except that those who were saying “no more counter-measures from this point onward” were, with few exceptions, the exact same ones saying that since day one. The same ones saying just-the-flu, the same ones saying hoax and nothingburger and whatever. At least Sweden backed up their strategy with a willingness to pay people with sick-leave for doing the responsible thing and sequestering. The Sweden bros in the USA wouldn’t have bothered with any of that. You might not remember all that, but I do.

“That’s three one-hundredths of one percent of the US population. To save those people, most of whom have already lived most of their lives, we are to impose huge restrictions…”

And there we have it — you just proved my point. Because even if the number of dead were ten times worse than it is now, the same argument would apply (i.e. three-tenths of one percent is pretty minuscule too). For that matter, what’s a few million lives worth, really, especially since they’re only a month or two away from dying anyway, or whatever other lame and lying excuses you use to justify what you really never cared about anyway? Spare me. If you think I can’t see through that, then you are indeed either an idiot or troll.

Again, if you had a better proposal, you wouldn’t have allowed genuine sociopaths and really bad projections (e.g. only-10,000-dead Wittkowski or only 5,000 dead Epstein or all the other false prophets of “this thing is just about over”) to blow your credibility to shreds. And that’s what happened.

Sure it’s an ethical problem. Free-rider-problem/tragedy-of-the-commons, prisoner’s dilemma, trolley problem. I get that. But if you had ethics on your side, or really anything of value, you wouldn’t have been reduced to calling your opponents diaper-face and going apoplectic over wearing a mask or taking a vaccine jab. Apparently you didn’t.

I’m not saying you’re all trolls and idiots and as always, I remain fairly agnostic (if not pessimistic) about the ultimate long-run worth of any of these counter-measures. But the trolls and idiots were the ones who hogged the megaphone of that end of the argument this time around, with precious little resistance, and to me that says something.

In one cohort study of 627 LTC facilities, the incidence rate ratio for COVID-19–related death among LTC residents was 13 times higher than that among community-living adults older than 69 years.

Okay, but aren’t death rates from all causes already “13 times higher” for those in nursing homes? I mean a super sick gonna die soon 70 year old in a nursing home is already “13 times” more likely to die than a 70 year old living in the community.

I exaggerate of course, but you get my point.

Steve et al,
For someone expert and trustworthy on this subject, google ‘Ivor Cummins’.

There may be a handful of cases like this around the country. We know of thousands of deaths in New York City alone that weren’t counted as COVID even though they happened during the peak of the epidemic there.

How do we know this?

No, it isn’t. All-cause mortality in the U.S. is up about 14% for all of 2020 compared to 2019.

Where do you find this data? When I look for it, all I find are slanted “fact-check” media stories.

Your motorcycle accident is exactly ONE death misattributed to Covid. Anecdote is not the singular of data.

As of the end of September, there were nearly 22,000 “COVID deaths” where a contributing cause of death was “cardiac arrest”. There were just over 5,000 “COVID deaths” where a contributing cause of death was accident, poisoning, or drug overdose. You mean to say that in none of those cases was COVID wrongly tacked on to the death certificate? Even given the considerable financial incentives that hospitals have to do so.

Meanwhile there must be thousands of people who die of respiratory failure or MI brought on by the stress of the disease and either they are not tested at all or they die after they get home and are no longer infectious so they don’t get coded as a Covid death. In NY when they were overwhelmed at the peak I doubt they were testing the folks who died before they got to the hospital.

Doesn’t matter. According to the CDC’s own guidelines a positive lab result was not required for attributing a death to COVID. Moreover, as I remember, New York was requiring corpses to be tested for corona-virus prior to being released to the mortuary. So they were testing dead people. That might have also at least partly explain the scary morgue-truck appearances. Well that, and because the authorities wanted people to be scared.

Yeah, just imagine how bad it would be this time around without all the lockdowns/masks/social distincing, etc.

Ah, the old chicken-suit and enema reasoning. If you have an argument, it’s always best to make it unfalsifiable.

Oh wait, we don’t have to just imagine it. As utu noted above, we actually have people world-wide who model this stuff for a living.

Poorly.

These are percents of percents. So, even a few excess deaths among the middle aged is a large percent increase. But a huge fraction of the elderly die every year, so even large increases in absolute numbers only comes out be about the same percent increase of the percent expected. If you expect 0.03% to die but 0.06% die, that is 100% more. If you expect 5% to die but 10% die, that is also 100 % more. Obviously, 0.0006x is far less than 0.1x but the percent increase for both is 100% more than the percent expected.

This sockpuppet has a two comment history. Don’t waste your time. He/She/They is the equivalent of a Hare Krishna showing up at your door at 7am on Christmas Day.

Oh wait, we don’t have to just imagine it. As utu noted above, we actually have people world-wide who model this stuff for a living. and make note of changes in the death toll due to masks/lockdowns/etc. They tell us the US death toll would have been over a million if we did what we did in 1988 (i.e. nothing).

Isn’t it tragic, for these fancy modelers, that the one place that had no lockdown (Sweden) shows no such thing (that is, 1988 is still badder than 2020)? It is in comment 4 by anon. But then again, this comes from modelers well embedded in a medical field that states unequivocally that salt, red meat, saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for you. It’s as if they do not have our best interests at heart.

I’ve made two Millennial women weep by stoutly refusing to diaper up.

All of the angels in heaven weep for you Mr. Mateen.

As do we all.

…what this thing would have done if no one had paid it the slightest mind from the start — i.e. what the corona-truthers and the nothingburger and the just-a-flu bros were advising.

I am not aware of recent modeling except for the early British model that became an object of derision for “the corona-truthers and the nothingburger and the just-a-flu bros.” I find that the example of Sweden vs. Nordic countries is a god illustration that also may suggest a value of the scaling factor between the life as usual and the life with countermeasures, though obviously Sweden did not have life as usual either. People stopped going to the movie theaters and so on. The validity of the Nordic example comes form the fact that there are no significant confounding variables as all four Nordic countries have similar pop. density (except for Denmark), similar age demographics, similar economic level, similar human development index, similar life styles. Here are my two recent comments on that:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/graphing-total-deaths-in-the-us-in-2020/#comment-4349302
https://www.unz.com/isteve/excess-deaths-graphed/#comment-4334020

As far as the early British model the only mistakes they made was to slightly overestimate the IFR which at that time was not that well known and that they did not take in to the account that life as usual as if there was no epidemic during an epidemic is a mathematical fiction because people act differently and adjust once they become aware of the epidemic. BTW, the truthers love Sunetra Gupta modeling (wrong on many levels) in which she used (which is hidden) IFR=0.001. Now she is a founding member of the Great Barrington Declaration pushing the same dreck she did in March. I wrote about the circumstance how she wrote her paper and who was behind it.

https://www.unz.com/jthompson/once-more-unto-the-breach-dear-friends-covid-19-part-ii/?showcomments#comment-4201851
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/once-more-unto-the-breach-dear-friends-covid-19-part-ii/?showcomments#comment-4203243

“I realize they sometimes want to pretend…” – Apart form many stupid arguments the truthers use there are some that are quite ingenues though always flawed but you have to dig it deeper. Probably somebody should write them down and refute them one by one. There is always a hidden assumption that is false. What interest me is that some of their arguments are clever and one can see why they can seduce people who have a need to confirm their bias even if only slight. But the people who we encounter here did not come up with those clever arguments. Thy just repeat them. Where are the sources of those argument? We know of some like Knut Wittkowski, Sunetra Gupta and few others form GB Declaration, several doctors/epidemiologists in Germany and even one Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/nobel-laureate-israel-will-have-no-more-than-ten-coronavirus-deaths-621407

and I wonder how is it possible that they get it so wrong. Where is the glitch? How does the human mind work that it goes off into the wilderness? And then I also wonder that possibly there is no glitch, that this on purpose. The next question is what is the purpose?

Someone created a David Letterman style list to visualize Covid-19 that seems to suggest Covid is much worse than 1968 flu.

Of the 15 deadliest days in American history, 10 of them have happened within the last two weeks.

This Thursday – 3,067
This Wednesday – 3,054
September 11 (2001) — 2,977
Last Thursday — 2,879
etc.

This is so stupid its hard to know where to begin. But lets try.

195,000 people died in October 1918 from Spanish Flu. That would be an average of 6,300 per day for a month.

Next is the factual inaccuracy of using “COVID Tracking Project” “Dashboard” style report numbers as if the deaths they report actually correspond to a particular day. If you’d think about it for a moment, we certainly have no ability to tabulate and no clue of how many people died yesterday of anything. Reports don’t get made and aggregated that quickly. Those reports are made up of events pulled from days, weeks, even months before and “reported” as if they are immediate.

But no matter, we have hard CDC data by week for much of the year now.

Week ending 4/11 had 78,998 deaths compared to 55,636 in 2019
Week ending 4/18 had 76,702 deaths compared to 54,950 in 2019
Week ending 4/25 had 73,808 deaths compared to 53,685 in 2019

That’s a net of:
23,362 (average of 3,337 per day)
21,752 (average of 3,107 per day)
20,123 (average of 2,874 per day)

All much higher than most data points on that list.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

The week ending 12/5 is partially reported already as ~41,000 deaths. Typically the CDC has about 60% of the final count in the initial report due to delays. This implies a final number will be around 70,000 for your meme week. Compare to 57,000 a year prior and you have under 2,000 actual COVID deaths per day, less than 2/3 of the numbers in your meme.

Beyond this is the stupidity of ignoring underlying ongoing mortality in saying “this is the dealiest ever”. Do people dying of non-COVID not count?

The deadliest weeks in US history outside of October 1918 are:

4/11/20 78998
4/18/20 76702
4/25/20 73808
4/4/20 72224
5/2/20 69214
1/13/18 67664
5/9/20 66743
1/6/18 66317
1/20/18 64820
5/16/20 64398
7/25/20 64078
8/1/20 64015
8/8/20 63452
8/15/20 63296
7/18/20 63009
3/28/20 62955
1/27/18 62944

Notice those 2018 weeks in there? Its hard to believe we were so callous in the winter of 2018 to leave bars and restaurants open and let kids go to school in the midst of a pandemic. I blame Trump.

The validity of the Nordic example comes form the fact that there are no significant confounding variables as all four Nordic countries have similar pop. density (except for Denmark), similar age demographics, similar economic level, similar human development index, similar life styles. Here are my two recent comments on that:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/graphing-total-deaths-in-the-us-in-2020/#comment-4349302
https://www.unz.com/isteve/excess-deaths-graphed/#comment-4334020

And yet, there are no excess deaths in total for the year in Sweden.

The total count of mortality in Sweden will be lower in 2020 than it was in 2018.

Population density is literally the dumbest excuse for all this too.

“there are no excess deaths in total for the year in Sweden” – I doubt it very much. There is always some baseline error as its estimate is counterfactual. Sweden claimed few months ago that their excess death was equal to the covid deaths. They made this claim to assure everybody that they were not cheating and hiding covid deaths as it was insinuated.

https://www.scb.se/en/About-us/news-and-press-releases/excess-mortality-in-sweden-is-followed-by-mortality-deficit/

The high level of excess mortality in the second quarter of 2020 was followed by a marginal mortality deficit in the third quarter, according to Tomas Johansson, statistician at Statistics Sweden.

In the second quarter, the highest level of excess mortality in Sweden was recorded in Stockholm County. There were 5 952 deaths, which is 59 percent more than the average for the second quarter in the years 2015-2019.

On the other hand, in the third quarter Stockholm County recorded the highest mortality deficit in Sweden. We have noted 3 379 deaths in the county, which is 8.4 percent less than in the same period in 2015-2019, Tomas Johansson concludes.

I saw somewhere a claim that Norway’s total excess deaths for 2020 is negative. This is actually believable because they had only 404 covid deaths in a country of 5 million. And they had social distancing countermeasure that could lower the number of other infections diseases.

Population density is literally the dumbest excuse for all this too. – How well the pop. density explains data depends on the stage of epidemic. Few weeks ago for EU countries plus Switzerland and Norway 25% of variance in deaths per capita could be explained with population density. This is a significant correlation of r=0.5. And obvious there is very good theory behind it became R0 is depend on to the pop. density and we know how.

It is easy to do a drive by like saying that something is the dumbest something but this only reflects on you that you have not thought things through and that you act emotionally and in a rude way.

utu – no pun intended at all. Let me just mention that you don’t go into the data (s. Covid Worldometer) from (the Germanic part of) Switzerland and Sweden -not to mention into the details of Hails findings about Sweden on his quite informative website.. – And do note, that Switzerland does still not make mask-wearing mandatory in kindergarten and for school-kids up until ten years and on the streets and in the woods, etc. – they up until June did people not even ask to wear masks in trains and busses – let alone restaurants and museum and schools etc, which were all open (and still are!).

Here is Hail again – I can’t detect a baseline error in his findings – maybee you can –

https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/

They did more than Sweden to protect the elderly though – for example, they reserved the hours between 9 and eleven in the morning for the elderly to buy food and recommended early on they should not use public transport – and especially not without masks.

Tübingen in southern Germany has very low numbers of CO-19 in the care homes for the elderly and they copied the Swiss shopping system for them plus: They paid them the difference between the ticket for public transport and a taxi i. o. words – they subsidized heavily the use of taxis for the elderly – and they increase testing for staff especially and made it mandatory that staff does not go to work from a serious cold on.

Do we still think there are reliable data to be had from the likes of the CDC?

Except this kind of data is coming not just from the CDC but from health authorities from many countries, Peru, Mexico, Belgium, Italy. Do you think that they are all in on some cover up ?

I’m confident trust in “vaccines” has plummeted, and I’m real sure that is a problem for people like Gates.

What does this mean ? Public confidence has nothing to do with science.

My sister says a couple of friends had it and recovered (one taking the ok-not-ok-ok-again HCQ), but she might be lying too.

Your circle of conspiracy seems to be pretty big here. Why would she lie ?

Every American who owns a house and still has a job is feeling ok though. Watching the values of their portfolios and real estate increase, and saving money by not going out to eat, no need to buy clothes, less pressure to impress acquaintances. More time to fix the house and work in the yard. This is why the situation is far from revolutionary. The productive intelligent people needed to lead that revolution aren’t that unhappy.

I am not really sure what you are trying to say. If you want to make a specific point make it. If the part of the point is something what you found on the Hail’s site give me the url to the specific page on his site.

I openly ridicule them to like-minded people and, on occasion, to checkout clerks. I think they are as stupid as the one-way signs in store aisles, which, I’ve noticed, have been done away with, because they were so stupid. I am not angry at the average citizen, as we are all being forced to wear them. I am angry at what Joel Kotkin refers to the “aristocrats” and “clergy” under our increasingly neo-feudalistic society, as they are the ones responsible for this. But I also am angry at Lefties who fully embrace the mask-wearing but do nothing to reduce their co-morbidities that make them vulnerable to COVID and, for that matter, other preventable illnesses. I know several Lefties who are morbidly obese and refuse to exercise or improve their eating habits. Do they not owe it to society to take better care of themselves? Shame can be a powerful societal force, and we have plenty of it in our society but, unfortunately, it’s for too many of the wrong things.

As someone else wrote, I believe we would have been much better served if the emphasis had been on personal hygiene; i.e., reminding people to wash their hands frequently, carry a package of tissues to use if they have to cough or sneeze, stay home when they are sick, etc. Who, when at the grocery store, stands and talks to someone else for 15 minutes or more, unless it’s a long-lost family member or friend?

The average person is not trained in operating room procedures and the proper way to don and doff a surgical mask, nor is the average person likely to buy boxes and boxes of disposable masks and use a mask only once or twice and then discard it. As such, it’s all political theater.

Just for some perspective, on average how many people under the age of 60 die of flu per year? And how many under 60 have died of covid this year?

Bottom line seems to be that in general, young healthy people do not die of flu or covid.

So, who wants to wager that once the health care workers are vaccinated, this thing peters out. Perhaps they are the real super spreaders. Sounds terribly ungrateful, I know, but could be plausible.

How does all cause mortality look internationally?

your analyst’s graphs go all the way back to 2015. Why – that’s practically the Flood.

Brillent! After a dire read, this was a welcome comic relief

If you get tired of doing statistics, consider stand up comedy.

For the euro data, you an find weekly updates at euromomo.eu. The z-scores graphs are the standard deviations for the week, basically the square root of the expected mortality for the week (example Italy has about 12600 deaths a week, so one unit is about 112 deaths). Comparing mortalities, Europe had an excess of +2% in 2018 and +4% in 2020 (we can already say that because the 2nd wave is on the mend everywhere there). In the US it has been closer to +4 and +4% respectively. In 2019, in Europe, it was +1%. Theses excesses are almost always due to respiratory diseases.

Looking at that Swedish graph of all cause mortality being passed around I see the timescale is very large ca 150 years. On that scale this years mortality is low as it has been for past 50 years or so. Same applies to US: this year is not bad if you compare with a century ago. But that is a ridiculously low standard; given all the technological and economic advances we should expect mortality to be lower than a hundred year ago. When you apply a more appropriate time scale of the past five years or so, you see same excess mortality in both countries.

Good thing Sweden did impose some measures like bans on large gatherings and good thing Swedes in general adopted social distancing measures to slow spread. The thing is there is no true control group for Covid; everyone practiced some kind of mitigation , whether voluntarily or under government compulsion. Sweden was a bit more relaxed than its neighbors but then again it’s neighbors saw many fewer deaths; all cause mortality in those countries is not excessive. That does not mean the virus behaved differently there but that they were better at controlling it.

“Ah, the old chicken-suit and enema reasoning. If you have an argument, it’s always best to make it unfalsifiable.”

Except that we had numerous cases of human guinea pigs willing to lift restrictions, voluntarily bypass mask restrictions* and impose looser lockdowns than their immediate neighbors, and observe the results. In general, counter-measures reduce COVID. Whether they’re worth the effort is another matter, but even in that case it’s generally better to avoid listening to clueless morons who think they don’t have to bother with that fancy schmancy book learning in order to pontificate about epidemiology.

That’s why it helps to actually have data on your side.

(*) If you’re going to link to that idiot blogger who says he has “proof” the Kansas study is bogus, maybe try and send him an email telling him that it can take a week or more for lockdowns to take effect in those parts of the world where people can’t be bothered to take the initiative and start wearing masks on their own behest — you know, a dose of reality. And if that was the best comeback you were able to muster, you needn’t have bothered.

Yes, that David Letterman style list is exactly that, a conversation piece. In the list you suggested, 13 out of 17 weeks are in 2020. That is a pretty strong indication of the severity of the pandemic, at least after 1918 flu. I am not sure if either the Letterman style list or your list include deaths from wars etc., But by gross numbers, we are near WW2 totals and will probably be near or exceed Civil War when this ends.

A different perspective from “Russia state-affiliated media”:

https://www.rt.com/usa/510057-july-deadliest-month-young-americans/

“A damning new report suggests that, in the month of July alone, some 16,500 young Americans aged 25 to 44 lost their lives in what may prove to be the deadliest month in US history for young adults.”

“Going by the official data, the Covid-19 fatalities account for only one-third of the excess deaths.”

“However, the CDC already estimates, with some degree of certainty, that the US will surpass last year’s grim record number of opioid deaths, as overall use of synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, increased by an estimated 38 percent compared to 2018-2019, while some western states reported a 98-percent increase in synthetic opioid-involved deaths.”

“The disruption to daily life due to the Covid-19 pandemic has hit those with substance use disorder hard,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in a statement.”

So, in contrast to Covid whose average death age is as high or even higher than the usual death age, the excess deaths happen to a large part in younger age cohorts. Even if we believe the official Covid case numbers it seems that more people have been killed by the measures to fight the disease than the disease itself.

So the percentage increase in excess deaths is about the same in every age group above 30 or so, but the absolute difference is much higher in older ones.

That’s kind of a hard concept to wrap my head around.

It’s a very easy concept to wrap your head around on the hypothesis that there is a very nonspecific additional risk factor affecting all categories of people. This is not Covid, it’s “general malaise.”

Basically, life is getting more difficult for everyone.

“Isn’t it tragic, for these fancy modelers, that the one place that had no lockdown (Sweden) shows no such thing (that is, 1988 is still badder than 2020)?”

You mean the one country that had COVID death rates 7-10 times greater than its neighbors? You mean the one that admitted that it’s herd immunity approach was an abject failure?

Don’t get me wrong. In a country where the government generously compensates you for doing the responsible thing and sequestering when you’re sick (unless you’re a third-world shift worker in the nursing homes who don’t get government-funded sick leaves and therefore decide to power through their sniffles and fever regardless of how many old people die) Sweden’t approach isn’t that bad (though even there, those third-world nursing home workers are recognized as a disastrous kink in their COVID policy). Moreover, they VOLUNTARILY chose to forego restaurants and cinemas, as Steve has noted repeated. And yes, as a result of those VOLUNTARY restrictions (and living in a low-density landscape with not so much twelve-per-room immigrant housing) they were able to bring their overall death rates in line with past years. Good for them. Stop pretending that would have worked in America (except for maybe the parts that are kind of like Canada) or that this says anything about lockdown measures in general.

Sure, if we all did what Sweden did and voluntarily did the right thing, we wouldn’t need the government to issue orders. But Sweden is a high-trust society that listens to their health experts instead of sending death threats to them and their families like we do around here. We gave up having nice things like high-trust communities a long time ago. Thanks, globalism! Even Sweden admits that next time around, they’re going to be more like everyone else.

“there are no excess deaths in total for the year in Sweden” – I doubt it very much. There is always some baseline error as its estimate is counterfactual.

A baseline error in the reported total? We aren’t talking about made up quantities like “excess thresholds” and the like. This is a pure comparison of raw total numbers to raw total numbers.

At this point, with so much contrary information readily available, its hard to understand people continuing to paint such grim pictures of Sweden, you have to pretty much assume bad faith on the part of those pushing the Sweden catastrophe narrative or making facile comparisons to other Scandanavian countries of whatever is being reported as COVID versus looking at total mortality. COVID deaths really shouldn’t matter any more than all other deaths and if the goal is mortality limitation, the proof can only be from comparing total mortality year by year between countries. See here and elsewhere on these timelines and please feel free to peruse the sources used and cited by the authors in their work on the platform.

#Covid #Swden: Unless there's a catastrophic nonlinear rise in deaths in the last two weeks of the year, the total deaths in 2020 are likely to be within the range of deaths of the 5-year average. https://t.co/TmFIpWtXvU pic.twitter.com/Ni55JpmNtz

— John D Stats (@JohnDStats) December 13, 2020

5/ Lastly updated acm January through October from latest SCB update. Expecting October to be pretty solid regarding day to day figures. Final figures will be presented probably during Feb21/END pic.twitter.com/vhv0cIq2qy

— Harold (@HaroldofWorld) November 24, 2020

Population density is literally the dumbest excuse for all this too. – How well the pop. density explains data depends on the stage of epidemic.

The stages of the epidemic are seasonal in nature. The supposed correlation to population density is likely mainly dependent on what people are doing in those differing areas in differing seasons and what the weather was.

Most people contract COVID when they are in close contact with an infected person in a private home, in a hospital, or in a group care facility. Whether that home is in a place where 50,000 or 50 people live in a square mile doesn’t seem very relevant, since they aren’t getting it because their neighbors home is 50 ft. or 5000 ft. away from them, they are getting it because their neighbor came and visited. People in rural low density areas are just as sociable as people in cities, if not more so.

To give you an idea of why voluntary measures would not work in the US, a man literally died of Covid the other day on a United flight from Orlando to LA. United (all the airlines) ask you to confirm that you don’t have Covid before you get on the plane and this man and his family just lied about it. After his death, his wife confirmed that they had lied in order to get on the plane and that her husband was in respiratory distress and known to have Covid already when they boarded. I assume the family didn’t want to (probably didn’t have the $) to pay for a Medevac flight and needed/wanted to get back home and so they just lied about it and got on board even though he was very ill with Covid. His blood oxygen was probably barely adequate at sea level (early in the epidemic doctors were shocked that people with Covid were walking into the ER with blood oxygen levels usually associated with unconsciousness) but planes are pressurized to the equivalent of 7,000 ft of altitude so when the plane reached altitude that tipped him over the line and he expired.

United BTW doesn’t do temperature checks. In fact I don’t think they really try very hard – you just check off “I don’t have Covid” on the self-check in kiosk screen. At a minimum they should be grilling people in person the way they question you about whether you packed your own luggage when you check in for an international flight. But that would cost $ and slow the line down so they would rather just let people self-certify. If something goes wrong later – not their fault – they asked and the man lied – what could we do?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2020/12/18/united-airlines-flight-covid-19-case-passenger-who-died-symptoms/3900814001/

Of course everyone feels sorry for the poor grieving widow but I think she should be prosecuted. In low trust societies (like ours apparently) the only thing that people respond to is fear of punishment.

Chris, Achmed gave the key to answer: We’re getting older.

The reason the graph turns back up around 2008 is in part the Great Recession and the white deaths of despair–being un-nationed, un-peopled by the minoritarians.

But the biggest part of it is simply that the elderly population is exploding.

That can’t possibly be the correct explanation.

The birth rate plummeted through the 1920’s into an absolute crater in the 1930 to 1945 period.

US Births Per Year
1910 2,777,000 30.1
1915 2,965,000 29.5
1920 2,950,000 27.7
1925 2,909,000 25.1
1930 2,618,000 21.3
1935 2,377,000 18.7
1940 2,559,000 19.4
1945 2,858,000 20.4
1950 3,632,000 24.1
1955 4,104,000 25.0
1960 4,257,850 23.7
1965 3,760,358 19.4
1970 3,731,386 18.4
1975 3,144,198 14.8

The people in the leading death cohort should be around 80. If deaths turn up markedly in 2010 and race higher through 2020, its very strange to attribute this to an ever larger cohort of soon to die elderly when the generation born 1925 to 1945 was one of the smallest population cohorts ever in the US. Where is this increasing number of peak dying years Americans coming from then?

Look at the above. The number of people dying in 2015 should have been significantly lower than the number dying in 1995, because there were 600,000 fewer Americans born 80 years before those years. We really should have an answer as to why this didn’t get reflected in actual mortality.

Something else is up, its very facile to say its the elderly population in peak death years. There will be peak death years soon. That will be in the 2025 to 2045 period when the Baby Boomers actually hit 80 and their time is up.

https://www.prb.org/us-fertility/

Of course everyone feels sorry for the poor grieving widow but I think she should be prosecuted. In low trust societies (like ours apparently) the only thing that people respond to is fear of punishment.

Given the circumstances, that’s very unlikely. Any pol who supports something like this is probably not running for re-election ever again.

“To give you an idea of why voluntary measures would not work in the US, a man literally died of Covid the other day on a United flight… United (all the airlines) ask you to confirm that you don’t have Covid before you get on the plane and this man and his family just lied about it. “

I am sorry for this man and his family, but I will point out that if he had only done the responsible thing and refused to strap on a mask once he got onto the plane — like all self-respecting REAL Americans should be doing in these dark days of Gestapo-like government overreach, according to many of the self-styled experts here — he would have been taken off the plane and maybe this sad event could have been avoided.

I suspect that will be the take-away lesson for many of the people reading this. So much for going out and living your life, regardless of the consequences.

Do you think it was because of the Dominion voting machines?

Funny how Sweden had many times the deaths of its neighbors but also did not experience any excess mortality. Are you saying Sweden was a failure or that its success cannot be replicated here? I’m not sure you can argue both at the same time.

Nancy and her pals wouldn’t lie to you…lol

Screw you, bozo.

https://twitter.com/RestingTwitFace/status/1339909623898357760/photo/1

I don’t see what you’re seeing. For both EU and US excess mortality this year well above 2018.

In general, counter-measures reduce COVID.

They don’t.

That’s why it helps to actually have data on your side.

You don’t.

Your arguments are tantamount to those of commies who say that “real communism” has never been tried. Maybe if we just force people to stay in their houses for a year and never come out of doors, we can finally defeat this thing.

(*) If you’re going to link to that idiot blogger who says he has “proof” the Kansas study is bogus, maybe try and send him an email telling him that it can take a week or more for lockdowns to take effect in those parts of the world where people can’t be bothered to take the initiative and start wearing masks on their own behest — you know, a dose of reality. And if that was the best comeback you were able to muster, you needn’t have bothered.

You’re still touting the “Kansas Miracle”? The state government lied about its data – they desceptively graphed it in a way to make it appear that mask mandates had an effect. You can’t point to any graph of infections and tell from it where masking-mandates went into effect. And yet you’re still trotting out this horses**t from your plague-bunker.

Perhaps they are the real super spreaders. Sounds terribly ungrateful, I know, but could be plausible.

Good point. They quite possibly are. A lot of medical people have no real idea of infection control. They’re lectured on it, but it’s just magic to them, so they do what they’re told (or not) without thinking about the reasons behind it. Another thing: a lot of people in health-care are really unhealthy. 12 hour work shifts (which is common for nurses and many doctors), poor diet, and lack of sunlight contribute to making a lot them chronically ill.

“This is why decontexualized numbers don’t help us. We need to know what’s typical. Saying an ICU is 85% occupied sounds scary to people who don’t know anything. But they generally have to be at least that occupied for a hospital to stay afloat.”

From “Is the hospital system overwhelmed?”

https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/hospover?e=7b87ea4483

Also see:

“And Now, The Fake Un-Demic:

Suddenly Cases and Hospitalizations Will Dive As Coerced Vaccination Among Nursing Home Residents And Staff Is Achieved Prior To Christmas Day”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/12/no_author/and-now-the-fake-un-demic/

I can only guess that the world is the way it is because we want to see it that way.

I suggest you flip a coin and take odds as to whether you’ll still be alive by the time the coin hits the palm of your hand. If you’re still alive then maybe, just maybe, you wanted to see it that way. At the other extreme we’ll never really know if you really wanted to see yourself dead if you actually died. That will be between you and your maker.

Although I tend to think that the number of COVID deaths will remain about the same as the COVID vaccination takes its toll on the weakened immune systems of maskholes everywhere.

“Funny how Sweden had many times the deaths of its neighbors but also did not experience any excess mortality. “

Why is that funny? If you lock down a society, whether that be by voluntary measures or government mandated ones, you may well see a drop in death rates. In a place like Sweden, the fewer elective surgeries, fewer highway miles, fewer trips to bars and related drunken driving crashes, may well have been about equal to the COVID deaths plus any increase in suicides, drug overdoses, and women battered to death by frustrated husbands, etc., all of which were brought on by all that voluntary sequestering. (Clearly, in the US, the latter effects were still enough to swing the see-saw in the other direction.)

So in Sweden, the voluntary sequestering (which, again, wouldn’t work in a low-trust society like America for reasons I’ve already noted) not only reduced the COVID deaths but brought the overall death rates down to average. Like I said, good for them. Do their health authorities still get a pass for the stupid things they did which caused people to die? Of course not. Early on, they lost thousands of old people because their third-world immigrant shift-workers in nursing homes decided to “get out and live life” regardless of whether they were feverish or sniffly, because they needed that paycheck, and weren’t eligible for governmental sick-leave. Some people now want to give them a pass for that, or just “blame the immigrants”. But that’s like saying that aside from all the beheadings, the machete giveaways were a great success. No, they weren’t — you can’t just blithely brush off what you don’t like. The government should have foreseen that the shift-workers in nursing homes were going to be a problem. And if they had taken things slowly like their neighbors did, instead of leaning into the curve in order to build up that (much-anticipated but sadly never-attained) herd immunity as quickly as possible, they could have recognized the problem earlier on and done something about it. They chose not to do that. Instead, they played stupid games, and won stupid prizes, and yes, I knock them for that. Even THEY admitted that they bungled that part — so why can’t you? The fact that the reduction in other deaths managed to bring the overall death rates to normal doesn’t absolve them of their stupidity.

So yeah, I’m able to see both the good and the bad of the Swedish approach and note that certain portions of it were peculiarly tailored to features the US lacks. You think I have to apologize for that? I don’t care how strenuously Cuomo pats himself on the back for the smart things he claims he did in the last year, he’s not going to get a pass from me for sending those old people to die in the nursing homes.

If the flu season of 2001 had been milder, or the vaccine officials had been extra efficient, to the extent that 3,000 people fewer than average had died of the flu, does that mean that the government (or those 19 conspirators) should have gotten a free pass for letting 9/11 happen? According to you, it would have all been a wash, so “s’all good, bros”. Come on. That’s not going to fool anyone who doesn’t want to be fooled.

Your motorcycle accident is exactly ONE death misattributed to Covid.

Here are some more:

https://www.freedomfoundation.com/washington/washington-health-officials-gunshot-victims-counted-as-covid-19-deaths/

And some more:

https://denver.cbslocal.com/2020/12/15/grand-county-covid-deaths/

It’s all about trade offs. If the policy results in no net change in mortality, that strikes me as a success considering the policy goal was preventing a net rise in mortality. There is a reason we don’t habitually lock down society even if in the short run it prevents deaths from flu or drunk driving.

My guess would be median years of life 3-4, but average maybe 5-6. QALYs considerably less.) I predict we’ll see a significant makeup over the next three or four years, but it will take ten to really make up most of it.

Anecdotally, just based on the handful of (distant) acquaintances I have known to die of COVID, you may be right. They were all older or had comorbidities, but none seemed exactly at death’s door. But the fact that the average age of COVID deaths is deep into the 70s, and many or most were already in long-term care, suggests that it probably isn’t that long.

I’d guess an average of 1-2 years of life lost. Again, given how little we know, I wouldn’t be completely shocked if it is more, but it seems unlikely.

“There is a reason we don’t habitually lock down society even if in the short run it prevents deaths from flu or drunk driving.”

Ah yes, the old canard in which we’re supposed to pretend that highly contagious diseases for which no vaccine is available are the same as car wrecks. If the new arguments don’t work, you can always fall back on the classics.

Actually, we do encourage people massively to get the flu vaccine and to avoid drunk driving, in ways that civil libertarians would frown upon (look up the M.A.D.D. campaigns). We make them obey speed limits and buckle up and force them to buy airbags (even when we subsequently learn that they decapitate children and short people) despite tirades from the Sammy Hagars of the world. And at this point, both drunk driving and the seasonal flu are known quantities and can be easily avoided without lockdowns for those who choose to do so. Finally, if the next holiday season causes drunk driving deaths to explode worldwide by a factor of 10 (which is, by a rough estimate, how much worse COVID is than the regular flu) I suspect we’d see some massive campaigns for that, too. Though maybe not in parts of the world like Belarus where life is cheap, I guess. Maybe that’s the real discrepancy we’re dealing with.

Because again, if this place were more like the ACTUAL Sweden rather than the fantasy Jeff-Spicoli version the Sweden-bros around here would have us believe, more people would voluntarily go out of their way to listen to their authorities and make the effort to get a flu shot and be diligent about designated drivers and forcing people to call cabs (come to think of it, we’ve sort of managed to reach that point despite ourselves, at least when it comes to drunk driving — maybe M.A.D.D. wasn’t that bad after all).

Whereas the only way to make the Spicoli version of Sweden work is to couple it with outright psychopathy, as in “If all they do is drink, fight, make babies, and eat potatoes, what does it matter if a couple of thousand extra Irishmen are starving given that they were about to slam into the Malthus-limits anyway? If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. And, given everything else we had to deal with at the end of WWII, did we really need an extra couple of million Jews and gypsies to deal with on top of all that? Really? Really really? So in that sense, what happened was a kindness, on the whole, if you stop and think about it.” You can fill in the rest.

“ They tell us the US death toll would have been over a million if we did what we did in 1988 (i.e. nothing).”

So what? It’s still a tiny number and the harm done by the lockdowns is infinitely worse. The fact that you can’t grasp that suggests a morbid imagination.

The coroner of one small Colorado county says that 2 out of 5 COVID-19 deaths also had gunshot wounds.
https://denver.cbslocal.com/2020/12/15/grand-county-covid-deaths/

Sweden apologists use the annual mortality argument to diminish the fact that Sweden had 7-10 times higher death rate per capita from covid than its Nordic neighbors. The sole motive is the wounded national pride. The argument is also used by the covid denialist that the annual mortality in Sweden is within normal so covid is a nothingburger.

By using the annual deaths the spikes of covid deaths from the first wave and the second wave are diluted. But if you plot weekly deaths the spikes are clearly visible in the sequence of weekly deaths of last 10 years. It is true however that in periods outside the spikes of 2020 deaths the values are somewhat lower. Why I do not know but they somewhat compensate covid deaths in the annual value.

So the Sweden apologist and the covid denialist will say that the covid deaths was a nothingburger because the people who died of covid were the ones who did not die in the weeks preceding covid, that actually they had audacity to live longer than necessary and covid mercifully exposed that audacity and terminated their excessively long lives.

These are just word games that use number games to obscure the facts and promote their a priori assumptions that Sweden is good because it must be good and that covid is a nothingburger that kills only those who had the audacity to live too long.

It does appear at the very least (based on what happened in Antrim county, Michigan), that Dominion vote totals can be changed without audit logs. It also appears that bullying opposition party poll watchers into leaving and then throwing away the provenance documents for mail-in ballots is a successful way to rig elections.

And, of course, I can’t understand how it’s possible for one party to control 95% of the traditional media, practically all of K-12 and college education AND all of the big social media platforms, and still lose an election. The demonization of Donald Trump and all who supported him had unprecedented success.

I’d like to see a special prosecutor go through this past election, with an eye to improving future elections. Of course, guilty parties should receive the maximum sentence according to the law.

Why not do both?

None.

All I’m saying is the Swedish approach should be considered a success insofar as they saw no net increase in mortality. What other benchmark for success is there?

Well I think we have to pick some timescale for a benchmark and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at annual rate.

“What other benchmark for success is there?”

See my earlier 9/11 reference for a reductio ad absurdum of that. Please stop pretending it’s too difficult for you to understand. I’d wager it isn’t. The EMT who saves seven lives over the last week and then figures he’s earned himself the right to go on a good old fashioned killing spree is going to get a multiple murder rap regardless of whether his contribution to the annual death toll is zero or whatever. And that’s true even if the victims were all elderly. Imagine that.

I will do you the favor of assuming you’re not really so dense that you can’t understand what I’m saying. Unfortunately, unless you can plead autism or Aspergers or something to that effect, that implies a shadier motive for this con job you’re trying to pull, but I’ll leave it to others to decipher that.