I will let others speak for me on this. First, the official, but not final, numbers on excess deaths over time. The final numbers will of course be even larger.
Next, Lyman Stone, who should have some credibility here because he is 1)from AEI, and 2)thinks lockdowns don’t work, discussing excess deaths.
Unless you have other, better numbers, I’d rather not keep going through this.
The graphs are lovely. A bit skewed towards the past, for ‘excess deaths over time”, only the far right means anything,, when talking about the Pandemic. “Discussing excess deaths” graphs are not very useful, to me anyway.
I predicted this number, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/, would go past 100,000 deaths. I now expect 1/4 million+. Only the Civil War and WW2 has cost you more.
I looked at several jurisdictions, and I don’t quite understand those fits. The seasonal variation wants last year to be higher than the years before and after, and it tends to drop for more recent weeks. I’m guessing that when they suppressed the expectation to account for incomplete recent data, that made the splines wabble in other places too.
@ Pen Gun – Really? More than cancer? More than heart disease, traffic deaths, Spanish flu? CoVid is #3 all-time behind two wars? Whatever did we die of before?
Toxic BS is my guess.
Death6
re: excess deaths, this is decent, actually, even though it’s from the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deaths-us.html
It definitely feels like they are trying to minimize how horrific NY did–they change the scales on the regional plots, and put the plot showing the massive mountain of death that Cuomo caused only at the very end–but there’s no way for them to completely hide it.
“More than heart disease, traffic deaths, Spanish flu?”
Yes, the numbers for C19 are on top of the things you mentioned. So without the Pandemic, we would have about the numbers at wordmeters, more people alive. The numbers are at war levels of casualties at this point.
You are screwing this up so much more than any other first world country, that one must ask why?. I have a few thoughts on that I’m sure you will find fascinating.
With respect, PenGun, you may want to check some of the published statistics.
OK — these are government figures (Strike 1) and the government is slow in putting out statistics so these are not bang up to date (Strike 2). With those provisos, here are the official numbers for deaths in the US in 2018. With some digging, you could probably find similar numbers for the Dominion of Canada:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db355_tables-508.pdf#page=2
2,839,205 – Total all causes deaths
655,381 – Diseases of the heart
599,274 – Malignant neoplasms
167,127 – Accidents (unintentional injuries)
159,486 – Chromic lower respiratory diseases
147,810 – Cerebrovascular diseases
122,019 – Alzheimer disease
84,946 – Diabetes melitus
59,120 – Influenza and pneumonia
51,386 – Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis
48,344 – Intentional self-harm (suicide)
744,312 – All other causes
In 2018, an average of 7,779 people died in the US every day. Over 320 every hour, more than 5 people dying each minute 24/7/365. There are many ways to leave Dodge City — but the Covid-19 virus is not a particularly important one. You are blessed to live in Canada where apparently no-one ever dies of anything.
OK. You are doing what you can to spin your terrible response. Not unsurprising.
Yes its true people die. They are doing this for a number of reasons, and this produces statistics. The number of deaths caused by the C19 pandemic, is on top of all those other numbers, and adds to the total. That number added to the total, is what you would like buried in other data if you can possibly get away with it.
In Canada our 10,000 extra dead are important to us, and we are concerned to keep that number as low as possible. In America human life seems to be part of your economic thought, more than any other, and I have some thoughts on this and its ramifications. It kinda starts here. At chicagoboyz, where the disciples of Milton Friedman hold sway. ;)
I for one encourage the two resident trolls to spend all their time bothering each other lol.
Then go ahead Brian
PenGun: “The number of deaths caused by the C19 pandemic, is on top of all those other numbers, and adds to the total.”
Possibly. We don’t know that. The best anyone can do is compare what actually happened with a model of what might have happened without the Lock Downs and the Covid-19 virus — and we all know how unreliable models can be.
There is the additional problem of knowing what indeed actually happened. In most cases, death means the heart stopped beating. But why did the heart stop beating? If someone gets run over by a truck, the reason is obvious. If a 70+ year old individual with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer dies while testing positive for Covid-19, the reason is not so obvious. So we have to be careful about interpreting the reported data.
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Sex-Age-and-S/9bhg-hcku
For what it is worth, the CDC provisionally reports that 1,778,821 individuals died in the US this year between Feb 1 and Aug 26 — not particularly out of line with prior years; 164,280 of those deaths were attributed solely to Covid-19 — 9% of all deaths. Interestingly, that is about twice the 5% of deaths attributed to Covid-19 in England. In the US, hospitals got paid extra when they classified a death as being due to Covid-19. Does that figure into the difference in the reported impact of Covid-19 in England and the US?
The one thing that is absolutely clear from the fairly ordinary total reported numbers of deaths is that we are not talking about a pandemic, not really even an epidemic. Which brings us back to the issue of the original Chinese photos of people collapsing in the street and bodies lying on sidewalks. Those kinds of images certainly scared some people in the West, and helped trigger the Lock Downs which are doing so much damage to Western populations and economies. But we have never seen anything like that again — not in the West, not in South America, not in India, not even in China. It makes a guy think, doesn’t it?
To continue with my thesis. Its my contention that America is where it is, at least partly, because of the economic philosophy of Milton Friedman. To use AVIs technique of diagnosing conditions, what has happened is that Milton has empowered an amoral narcissist, America, with the idea that greed is good.
This is why your streets are on fire and also why you have dealt so badly with the pandemic. What is so difficult, with any narcissist, is that they cannot admit to any mistake and so cannot learn. ;)