Wednesday, February 02, 2022

900,000 dead so far

The US has the highest death rate from Covid-19 per capita in the developed world.

As TYWKIWBI notes, we know why this is.


And, as this paper notes, we are almost certainly underestimating the number of deaths due to Covid-19 in nearly every country. (Date on paper is June 2021.)

Summing up the excess mortality estimates across all countries in our dataset gives 4.0 million excess deaths. In contrast, summing up the official COVID-19 death counts gives 2.9 million deaths, corresponding to the global undercount ratio of 1.4. However, there is ample evidence that among the countries for which the all-cause mortality data are not available the undercount ratio is much higher (Watson et al., 2020Djaafara et al., 2021Watson et al., 2021Mwananyanda et al., 2021Koum Besson et al., 2021Leffler, 2021). Using a statistical model to predict the excess mortality in the rest of the world based on the existing data from our dataset, The Economist in May 2021 estimated 7–13 million excess deaths worldwide (The Economist, 2021), which was 2–4 times higher than the world’s official COVID-19 death count at the time (3.5 million).

And yet we still get militantly ignorant losers in this country cracking jokes about "a bad flu" and how the entire pandemic was invented to "control" Trump voters. 

I watched Contagion again last night -- it's free with my HBO trial. The weirdest thing about the movie is how few people are wearing masks. But everything else, even to the scam "cure" and the anti-vaxxers, is spot on.

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