Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC director says

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/11/coronavirus-covid-live-updates-us/

by bookofjoe • 6 years ago

120 197 6 years ago

washingtonpost.com

bookofjoe• 6 years ago

https://archive.vn/q9WGK

danhak• 6 years ago

I would really like to see these numbers expressed in DALY / QALY, which I have not been able to find anywhere.

belltaco• 6 years ago

Hopefully whatever analysis or conclusions you make from those numbers take into consideration the health complications that survivors can suffer from.

bryanlarsen2• 6 years ago

Here's a side effect that will worry some people more than death: https://www.dw.com/en/covid-19s-link-to-erectile-dysfunction...

pjc503• 6 years ago

I find it hard to imagine that if 3000 people had been killed by Saudi terrorists flying a plane into a nursing home people would have said "let's not bother invading afghanistan, those people would have died soon anyway"

nawgz3• 6 years ago

I mean, I don't think any nursing homes are iconic towers in what is in some ways the flagship city of the country?

yread• 6 years ago

I saw a study which estimated 14 DALY average per victim in the UK iirc. I think that average age of covid dead in the US is higher though

rriepe• 6 years ago

Will 2020's death toll exceed 2019's?

anoonmoose3• 6 years ago

Yes, the death toll for the first ten months of 2020 vs first ten months of 2019 is +388K, so unless there's about 200K less deaths than expected in each of Nov and Dec we'll be well above

edit: and since over 200K people die in the US every month during an average year, that is not particularly likely, to say the least

data from here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

jessaustin13• 6 years ago

Maybe this is a good time to stop the multiple wars that were falsely claimed to be justified by "9/11"? Dare one hope?

NationalPark• 6 years ago

You're looking at this all wrong - we could be justifying a brand new war every single day with these numbers!

TuringNYC• 6 years ago

I dont think this is a joking matter. The toll of wars are far greater than the initial provoking incident. There are death tolls for your home troops, innocent civilians, and long-term tolls of disabilities and psychological damage.

paxys2• 6 years ago

If Covid had originated in a less powerful country than China I'm almost certain we would have invaded them already. You can see it by the amount of "Chinese virus"/"it was made in a lab" rhetoric from the top to try and deflect from our shitty handling of it.

mywittyname4• 6 years ago

Great sarcasm predicts the future.

While you were joking, this is honestly what I think is happening. Our country has already started a number of "wars" on groups and this is only going to get worse now that a significant portion of the population feels that our soon-to-be leaders are illegitimate.

pjc503• 6 years ago

Bit late to put Saddam and Gaddafi back, and you might have some trouble dislodging the Russian and Turkish forces from their positions.

But that's why war is a genie you can't put back in the bottle.

fuoqi2• 6 years ago

And why exactly do you have to dislodge Russian and Turkish forces from their positions which are 10 000 km from the US borders and in Russian and Turkish neighborhood? Just to "secure the oil" [0]? Because stabilization, development, and prosperity of the affected countries is certainly not on the US agenda list if are to judge by the numerous outcomes.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U10p3Tn9V5Y

hombre_fatal• 6 years ago

Maybe, but that's a separate issue.

Deaths from a natural disaster are fundamentally different than deaths caused by a murderer. Trying to evaluate policy by comparing the two is nonsensical. Like suggesting that it's a waste of time to spend resources to find a murderer when they only killed one person vs the thousands that die to flu.

jessaustin13• 6 years ago

Murderers are sometimes caught. Our multiple decades of wanton murder overseas have only enriched armaments manufacturers and their puppets in politics and journalism. That's not a good enough reason.

spamizbad• 6 years ago

9/11 killed mostly high status people. COVID mostly kills low status people. So there won't be any wars this time.

cracksmoka4202• 6 years ago

There are a number of strategic reasons to be involved in the middle east and none of them are stupid. Would you be happier if ISIS was running amok?

vkou3• 6 years ago

ISIS was created by our involvement in the Middle East. It was the direct result of destabilizing Iraq and Syria.

8note• 6 years ago

Those strategic reasons are dumb. Getting rid of oil dependence was the smart option.

thegrim33• 6 years ago

Isn't this also the case with the normal flu? 30,000-60,000 people die from the flu in the US every year. That averages out to 2,500-5,000 a month.

TinkersW• 6 years ago

This is per day

spaetzleesser• 6 years ago

This is daily, not monthly

titzer2• 6 years ago

3,000 a day, not month.

DamnYuppie• 6 years ago

Also it would be nice to see which of these COVID deaths actually had no co-morbidities. Basically how they account for it now, you could have advanced cancer and pneumonia and if you have traces of COVID in your system your death was definitely due to COVID.

titzer2• 6 years ago

Got any evidence of this claim?

supernovae• 6 years ago

Why? This doesn't change anything.

majormajor• 6 years ago

So when you see hospitalization capacity reporting, do you think they're just lying, and that the hospitals were already full of these advanced cancer + pneumonia folks who now just happened to go and catch COVID too?

lawn• 6 years ago

It's the daily death toll that exceeds the 9/11 death toll, not the monthly.

nicoffeine• 6 years ago

"Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC director says"

It's right there in the headline. We are approaching a breaking point where more people will be dying not because we don't know how to save them, but because there are not enough health workers to attend to them.

Wearing a mask and leaving home only when absolutely necessary is a simple thing we can all do to help save lives.

jschwartzi4• 6 years ago

And not just the lives of people who get COVID in the future, but also the lives of people who contract other illnesses. Every COVID bed is a bed that can't be used to treat someone who would have otherwise gotten sick or injured, and that person will have to go somewhere. Early on in Washington when the Army was setting up temporary field hospitals, it wasn't to handle COVID patients, it was to handle the normal patients who would have otherwise gone to the regular hospital.

What's messed up about this whole "crisis" is it's being framed as an individual choice to wear a mask. People make it sound like wearing a mask protects you somehow. And that's simply not true. I think in all this "individual freedom" sabre rattling someone is forgetting that you do not have the freedom to harm someone else. And your choice to not wear a mask is a choice to harm the people around you.

So really choosing not to wear a mask is more like choosing to drive drunk, and you won't ever know how many people you kill.

CivBase7• 6 years ago

The article is talking about just daily deaths from COVID-19, not the overall daily death rate or the monthly COVID-19 death rate. Even on a good day, more people die in the United States than died of the 9/11 attacks (~3k) - just usually not of any single cause.

In context... Approximately 655k Americans die of heart disease each year[0], which comes out to about 1.8k per day. Approximately 600k Americans die of cancer each year[0], which comes out to about 1.6k per day.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

yellowapple2• 6 years ago

30,000-60,000 people die from the flu in the US every year.

COVID eclipsed that within a couple months. By year's end it'll very likely have killed 10× that lower bound. And like others said: COVID's killing the same number of Americans per day that the flu kills in a whole month.

The people who insist "it's just the flu" evidently need to brush up on elementary school arithmetic.

cjlars• 6 years ago

Just in case anyone's confused (I was at first), the title refers to COVID deaths only. The all cause US death toll was ~7,700 per day over the 2017-2019 period, and has likely exceeded the 9/11 number (2,996) every day for decades.

tonmoy• 6 years ago

Sure, but all case numbers are not preventable like COVID (assuming people dying from COVID would’ve been fine otherwise)

disown• 6 years ago

Most of our deaths are preventable as we mostly die of excess - obesity related issues, smoking, drugs, etc.

thu21116• 6 years ago

How are COVID deaths preventable? They generally haven't been and still aren't. Especially given that so many deaths labelled COVID deaths are of people who were about to die anyway and the COVID label took priority over other causes.

All lockdowns were ever meant to do originally was temporarily delay the inevitable to ensure everyone got a hospital bed if they needed one, to give their bodies a better chance. But hospitals were never overwhelmed or even at any risk of being overwhelmed: the places that didn't lock down and saw incidence curves the same as everywhere else have now proven that. So in the end they had no real health impact in the positive direction, yet they've definitely killed people. In the UK about half of all excess death in the first wave wasn't even COVID related, let alone COVID caused. That's the human price of government mandates.

Karellen• 6 years ago

You realise that 9/11 deaths refers to Al Qaeda-caused deaths only. The all cause US death toll was also several thousand per day over the 2001 period, and may have exceeded the Al Qaeda-caused excess deaths on 9/11 in any case.

war10254• 6 years ago

I understand using that number as a benchmark, but really at this point I've just turned off all news sources that bring up the pandemic. They are little more than propaganda anymore.

Tokkemon2• 6 years ago

That sounds highly reckless, tbh. It's easily the most important event in the US's history since WWII and you're ignoring the people who help get through it.

war10254• 6 years ago

What more is someone going to tell me that they didn't get across in the first six months of this?

paxys2• 6 years ago

Yes, because it will definitely go away if we all ignore it.

war10254• 6 years ago

And it will definitely go away if we obsess over it without having any actual means to affect the outcome.

orblivion• 6 years ago

I usually use this https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

It looks like close to 3000 deaths were reported the last day or so, but note how there's always this 7 week cycle. I assume it has something to do with reporting delays over weekends. I even noticed a big dip in reports around Thanksgiving in some state graphs, particularly the case counts, followed by apparent spikes to catch up.

So, I always use the 7 day average. It's very smooth, and it looks like we're actually closer to 2500 today. That said, maybe the CDC is using different numbers.

And as long as I mentioned this, I should caveat that in Sweden they actually mark the deaths according to date of death. However, this means that it always looks like there's a big downturn in deaths in the last couple weeks, when there may not actually be.

jb7752• 6 years ago

This is misinformation pulling on the heartstrings of the non-logical. Most people who caught covid would have died if they caught the normal flu...like every other year.

Also, wasn't it convenient of them to leave "covid" out of the headline. Expected deaths this year without a pandemic were already expected to be much higher.[1]

FYI if you downvote without refuting my statements, you are that non-logical person.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...

bryanlarsen2• 6 years ago

downvoted for whining about downvoting.

jb7752• 6 years ago

HN is a liberal echo chamber when it comes to politics. I added that because any non-left comment gets immediately bombarded with downvotes without discussion (the typical leftist approach to political issues when challenged).

anoonmoose3• 6 years ago

That link says deaths this year without a pandemic were expected to be 1.12% higher, if I'm reading it correctly.

according to the CDC, the US had 16.5% more deaths through the first ten months of 2020 than it had in the first ten months of 2019

edit: i downvoted AND refuted, fyi

tzs2• 6 years ago

This is misinformation pulling on the heartstrings of the non-logical. Most people who caught covid would have died if they caught the normal flu...like every other year.

Even if that were true, I fail to see how it is relevant.

We demonstrably have massively more people dying from COVID than die from normal flues, so either COVID is more fatal than normal flu, or we have a massive amount of people catching COVID who would not have caught normal flu.

FabHK• 6 years ago

Ok, look at this chart, and with your super logical mind (not influenced by misinformation and emotional heartstrings like the Director of the CDC) tell me whether the red 2020 line is "like every other year"?

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#excess-mor...

tzs2• 6 years ago

He actually addressed that 6 days ago [1] when someone posted a link to that page. His answer is that it is BS because they do not take into population growth since the years they are comparing to.

His argument was not very convincing, because (1) the chart is only going back 5 years, which is not long enough for population growth to have affected anything, and (2) population growth effects would change the height of the curve but not the shape of the curve, whereas the actual curve shows large shape changes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25312460

medium_burrito2• 6 years ago

What about car accidents and overdoses?

ok_coo• 6 years ago

We try to prevent those as well, but we don't have half the country saying that seat belts don't work, or Narcan.

vkou3• 6 years ago

Actually, we do have ~half the country saying Narcan doesn't work. The argument is a bit more nuanced then that, but that's what it boils down to.

pjc503• 6 years ago

People said seat belts were more dangerous. It wasn't true, they just didn't want to wear them. Ralph Nader got his start on politics on car safety.

medium_burrito2• 6 years ago

We do have most people looking at their phones while driving. We do nothing to prevent this.

AnotherGoodName• 6 years ago

Err... Let me Google that for you? https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

It's a smaller number. Not sure why you posted this when you can search from your browser really easily.

yabones• 6 years ago

Somebody who doesn't wear a seat belt can't cough on you in public and make you die in a car accident.

You can't catch overdoses by breathing too much near a heroin addict.

This isn't a time for using whataboutisms.

sparrish• 6 years ago

But it won't reach the 465k deaths a year that the CDC says are directly from smoking.

Nobody making that illegal or shutting down economies over it.

I think it's strange what is decided as dangerous.

Tokkemon2• 6 years ago

You can't spread smoking deaths to innocents. At least not in the same way (second hand smoke is dangerous but not like a virus).

kevinventullo• 6 years ago

There have been plenty of laws enacted to make smoking more difficult or outright banned. It used to be very common for people to smoke in bars!

CivBase7• 6 years ago

To be fair, a tobacco-related death is almost always the result of the victim's own decisions and the government sees to it that everyone knows the risks before making the choice to smoke. More importantly, cancer is not so easily transmitted from person to person.

spekcular• 6 years ago

An enormous amount of public health resources are devoted to deterring smoking. It's illegal indoors most places, and outdoor smoking bans are not uncommon. We've certainly decided it's dangerous and attempted to stop it!

arbitrary_name• 6 years ago

Smoking is banned in most public spaces when the smoker is at risk of harming others via second hand smoke. The taxes on tobacco are also extremely high to restrict usage. There are bands on tobacco advertising. The government invests in anti smoking ads and cessation programs.

You really didn't think twice before hitting reply, did you?

jmull• 6 years ago

I don’t know what country you’re from, but there are very significant restrictions on smoking in the US and numerous social and health policies designed to reduce smoking. Smoking is overwhelmingly considered dangerous.

Pretty poor counterpoint.

nerpderp82• 6 years ago

This is exactly why capitalism fights single payer healthcare to aggressively when it would be in every corporations best interest to offload those costs.

They gain two things, 1) control over the worker and 2) externalize costs for selling addictive, unhealthy products.

gdulli2• 6 years ago

Inaction on smoking is tragic, and it serves more as cautionary example to avoid inaction elsewhere than justification for inaction. I'll take a better response to covid than to smoking even if that's technically an inconsistency. Right?

thebruce87m• 6 years ago

We have less COVID deaths because of lockdowns and other mitigations so it’s a bit strange to compare the numbers like that.

It’s a bit like arguing against seatbelts because of the current car accident fatality rate.

hfkldjsjfkdj2• 6 years ago

I think this a poor way of looking at death tolls when context such as cause of death and the people dying matter too. In other words I don't think it is appropriate to bring up 9/11 and whether its for clicks or to gain points for their political side (because covid has been heavily politicised), it has only caused more people to take it less seriously.

gmadsen• 6 years ago

Why?

the science is clear on masks. That shouldn't need discussion. Hospitals are at or near capacity in many places. Do your civic duty for the country and wear a mask.

Shutdowns and other things, sure discuss and debate

hfkldjsjfkdj2• 6 years ago

I'm all for masks btw, just not a fan of the journalism around covid is all.

leetcrew• 6 years ago

a "9/11" is not some standard unit of death that can be compared to any other death toll to compute a value for "how much should we care?". comparing covid deaths to having 9/11s every day ignores almost all the context for why we care so much about 9/11 in the first place. without context, 3000 deaths is just not that much for a country of ~300 million. it's a lot to have in a single day, but it's only about half of what we expect under normal circumstances. it is a really large number of people to lose in a day to a single disease, but it's not comparable to the deliberate killing of 3000 civilians in a novel terror attack.

this kind of comparison serves only to provoke an emotional response; it doesn't contribute to a reasonable conversation about mitigations and tradeoffs. at best, it might serve as a critique of the US reaction to 9/11 itself.

timeeater7• 6 years ago

7500 deaths per day are average for the US. 9/11 caused 3000 deaths. So the US will probably exceed 9/11 deaths forever, unless population size is drastically reduced somehow.

dionian• 6 years ago

You beat me to it. Look at deaths by other causes. Lots of "9/11"s every year here! Why is this being treated as if its dramatically worse than a death by other causes? Any death is a bad thing

lutorm3• 6 years ago

Arguably, death by old age is not a bad thing, it's the gold standard which we can all hope to reach.

gwittel2• 6 years ago

For those downplaying the scope of this, the death counts / excess deaths data is most illuminating.

This page has a number of good breakdowns, but here's the US chart comparing 2020 vs other years:

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#excess-mor...

Can you spot the anomaly?

CivBase7• 6 years ago

Nice. I haven't been able to find anything like that up until now. I really wish the y-axis on that graph started at zero, though.

vonmoltke• 6 years ago

Agreed. If you go up two graphs to "Excess mortality for all ages"[1], though, you can see the same stat as a percentage delta from the average of the five preceding years.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#excess-mor...

lutorm3• 6 years ago

Why? For a roughly stable population like the US, the "baseline" is that something like 1/79/52 of the population dies every week, since life expectancy is 79 years. Zero deaths is nonsensical.

jointpdf2• 6 years ago

Y-axis starting at zero is essential for bar charts, but not necessarily time series / line charts. Insisting on a zero axis can crunch the data and obscure the trends and is unnatural for some data sets (e.g. the mortality time series—if that trend line ever goes to 0...something has gone awry).

Quote from Tufte on the subject:

” In general, in a time-series, use a baseline that shows the data not the zero point. If the zero point reasonably occurs in plotting the data, fine. But don't spend a lot of empty vertical space trying to reach down to the zero point at the cost of hiding what is going on in the data line itself.”

https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

cozzyd• 6 years ago

The data is available for download so you can plot as you please.

banana_giraffe• 6 years ago

I was mildly curious what that'd look like:

https://ibb.co/qnx2Y4H

Or, another way, % change compared to the average:

https://ibb.co/5T5dMZk

Consultant324522• 6 years ago

This is both shocking and promising. Looks like the rate is normalizing relative to previous years. That means the steps we're taking, treatments, etc. are working.

lutorm3• 6 years ago

Another interpretation is that the most vulnerable have already been culled, so now the virus has to work harder.

dave5104• 6 years ago

In a more morbid observation, the 2020 data in that chart ends on Nov 1, 2020.

I would be surprised if the 2020 line doesn't jump right back up again once the rest of November and post-Thanksgiving numbers are added in given that we're seeing large numbers of reported deaths again in recent weeks.

PaulDavisThe1st7• 6 years ago

I think you're being misled here. The steps we're taking to prevent covid19 are also having a dramatic impact on the spread of other respiratory infections. It's not so much that covid19 is under control - it's that our attempts to control it are suppressing deaths from flu etc.

hansjorg• 6 years ago

Looking at graphs of daily deaths which extend beyond that one, that is just the through before the next big wave.

gwittel2• 6 years ago

Note the US data for 2020 ends in early November; before the large November surge.

I would not take that much comfort given the surge in case counts. I don't doubt we are better handling cases now vs April, at the same time hospitals will soon hit the triage stage.

Positive tests tend to trail exposure by 1-2 weeks, while hospitalizations trail another week or two behind positive tests. Deaths can lag even further (not sure on the numbers here). So we're only just getting into the beginning of the post-Thanksgiving spike impacting hospitals.

While most serious cases hit those with compounding factors (age, health, etc.) if you look at the percent of excess deaths, it spans all age groups (again data ends early Nov):

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...

The other good resource is John Hopkins has a chart overlaying date of policy changes vs cases (or deaths):

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/state-timeline/new-confirme...

umvi7• 6 years ago

Won't it just get balanced out in following years though? A vulnerable/old person that died this year is one that can't die next year. Think of it like a forest fire. Once all the old/vulnerable wood is burned up, it's much more difficult for another forest fire of the same magnitude to happen in following years because the primary source of fuel is gone and it takes decades to build it up...

tenacious_tuna6• 6 years ago

People aren't dry brush though. It's not a good thing that huge swaths of the population are dying. We won't be inherently more resilient to diseases in the short term just because all the vulnerable people are dead.

For one, we don't even understand all the long term effects of having COVID as it is: there's heart damage, lung damage, brain damage, extended fatigue, and that's just what we're seeing evidence of now. [0]

If another disease like COVID strikes in a couple years, it could still tear through the surviving population and cause similar long lasting effects. The thousands that're suffering a terrible death daily, separated from their families and straining our healthcare systems to the breaking point--their deaths are not somehow making our populaitons safer from another disease.

EDIT: your analogy also supposes it's somehow the old/vulnerable populations that're the reservoir for the virus in our populations, when data indicates the opposite: it's far more likely younger populations are the carriers/vectors for COVID, especially since they are more often asymptomatic (w.r.t. acute effects) than more vulnerable chunks of the population. Future bugs will have plenty of population to travel through.

[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

kusha3• 6 years ago

If there is another pandemic there is no guarantee that the same group of people would be vulnerable. The 1918 spanish flu, for example, was particularly dangerous to infants and younger people [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/spanish-flu-largest-influenza-pan...

throw-away_42• 6 years ago

Old people are just deadwood. Doesn't matter if they died five years early. Great analogy.

dxdm• 6 years ago

This is the most cynical and brutal thing I've read today. Just let the vulnerable die, they have it coming anyway? These are people, from all walks of life, not all of them "vulnerable", and they might include yourself. If you're lucky, you'll walk away with a permanent heart condition. Or hey, maybe you need some other medical procedure, but guess what, doctors are busy treating the dying, also there's no spare oxygen bottles for you. Geez. Time to stop reading the internet for today, I suppose.

timeeater7• 6 years ago

Classic to have the y-axis not start at 0 to make a curve look more dramatic.

According to the CDC, there seem to be about 12% more deaths than the average of the last three years, or about 300K. Number of deaths has been rising every year, though, sometimes increasing by up to 90k from one year to the next.

tenacious_tuna6• 6 years ago

From the linked article: "The raw death counts help give us a rough sense of scale: for example, the US suffered some 275,000 more deaths than the five-year average between 1 March and 16 August, compared to 169,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that period."

So that's 275k-169k=106k extra deaths, which is a napkinmath'd 17% increase over the baseline (assuming that's 106k deaths over a 12wk period, and baseline is ~50k/week).

A 17% rise in extra deaths seems pretty dramatic to me, regardless of the graphs.

Granted, I'd love to see error bars on this stuff, but I don't think the axis starting at 0 is some nefarious plot to dramatize the data.

dpc_pw• 6 years ago

Around 2 thousands people die every day from heart diseases in the US, every day (635k annually). Not in extreme temporary conditions. That's a standard baseline, year after year like that.

I wonder how many lives would been saved if we had mandatory 30 minutes jogging sessions, fastfood lockdowns and vegetable subsidies.

jessaustin13• 6 years ago

Is wearing a mask while in public really so unbearable?

mikecoles• 6 years ago

Easier solution: you stay home and the rest of us will get on with life.

If you'd like to wear a mask, go for it. If not, don't.

varjag• 6 years ago

Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death, period.

You are trying to downplay COVID19 by comparing it with the leading cause of death among people, contemplate on this.

adolfojp• 6 years ago

Is heart disease transmitted from person to person?

umvi7• 6 years ago

From parents to children, yes, both genetically and via (un)supervised learning.

PaulDavisThe1st7• 6 years ago

What do you suppose the upper limit on daily deaths related to heart disease (a variety of conditions) is?

What do you suppose the upper limit on daily deaths for covid19 (a single infectious disease) is?

alexashka• 6 years ago

Yes, but how many mega-corporations would become less profitable as a result? No mega-corp left behind I say.

toomanyrichies4• 6 years ago

I am not endangering others by choosing to eat a cheeseburger.

I am, however, doing so by choosing not wear a mask.

Your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins.

CivBase7• 6 years ago

Your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins.

I keep seeing this analogy when it comes to masks and COVID-19, but I don't think it's a great one. The difference between me punching your face and not wearing a mask is risk and intent.

The overwhelming majority of people do not intend to transmit any virus to those around them. It's pretty difficult to punch someone in the face without intending to harm them.

We also cannot avoid risking harm to someone else. Despite my best efforts, I risk hurting someone every time I sit behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. However, there are clearly some risks that are too great. If I punch you in the nose, it's a pretty sure thing you will be harmed. But if I do not wear a mask in a public space... the odds aren't particularly bad on any single outing.

What makes the mask thing really troublesome is pinning down just what the risks of transmission are with and without masks over an extended period of time in a variety of normal scenarios. I've seen enough to personally conclude that wearing a mask in public spaces is probably a good idea if I cannot avoid public spaces altogether. It's just hard to convince everybody that masks are effective enough at reducing risk - and that the risk is great enough to warrant the (very minor) sacrifice of freedom - to mandate them without also overstating their effectiveness.

I stand by the gist of your argument, though. There is a significant difference between risking harm to yourself and risking harm to those around you. I just wanted to address that analogy since I've been seeing it everywhere and I think it oversimplifies the conflict.

aaron695• 6 years ago

Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months.

Wow.

So it's over 3000 young, well educated, working age people, in cities dying a day?

That's unheard of in Europe. Compared to Europe you'd expect about that number but far older and often sick.

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

So it’s over 3000 young, well educated, working age people, in cities dying a day?

More than 3,000 people. None of the other factors are relevant to the claim that the US death toll will exceed 9/11’s each day. If the headline said “Death toll of young, well-educated, working people in the urban U.S. will exceed the 9/11 death toll every day for months”, then you’d have a point.

Compared to Europe you’d expect about that number

Europe is hovering around 5,000 (oscillating above and below) out of ~747M per day; the US at the same per capita rate would be around 2,200 per day. So a floor of around 3,000 per day is significantly higher.

yongjik• 6 years ago

If comparing to 9/11 seems like an "apples to oranges" comparison, we can compare with other natural disasters exacerbated by poor government response:

Hurricane Katrina (2005) killed 1,836. That's like 12 hours of Covid.

burnthrow• 6 years ago

It's pointless to compare morbidity of local, acute and national, protracted events.

AndrewBissell2• 6 years ago

The point of the 9/11 comparison seems to be "we reacted with a hysterical response and permanently expanded our military and surveillance infrastructure as a result of 9/11, and therefore if the same death toll is occurring every day we should consider similar drastic and permanent measures in response to Covid."

throwaway4good• 6 years ago

It is probably going to peak in April and decay naturally be its flu-like seasonality; it doesn't look like a vacine will have a major impact before that. Meaning this is going to be some very hard months, probably much harder than last year as the virus didn't have such a wide spread as it has now december last year.

I am reading about incident numbers of about 600 cases pr. week pr. 100.000 here in Copenhagen. Meaning 0.6% of the city's population will get it over just one week; if that continues 1/3 will get it within a year.

WhompingWindows• 6 years ago

What a fascinating chart. I think the first wave in the springtime killed a lot of vulnerable populations in nursing homes and assisted living. I'm surprised the "third" wave we are currently experiencing hasn't led to more excessive mortality, but I think we will be seeing that data spike once this chart gets updated in a few weeks.

Suffice to say, if we had been more responsive, more cooperative, and more on top of our response earlier in the year, many thousands of lives could've been saved.

mywittyname4• 6 years ago

Treatment has apparently improved dramatically in the few months since the pandemic began.

jessaustin13• 6 years ago

Parent may have been thinking of Taiwan, where seven people have died of covid. That's not a daily or weekly or monthly rate. That's the total for the whole pandemic. In Taiwan they were "on top of" the situation.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/29/asia/taiwan-covid-19-intl-hnk...

Animats• 6 years ago

Fixing this is an industrial problem. The vaccines exist. They just need to be mass produced in larger numbers. So what's the holdup? Actual production of the vaccine itself? Precursor chemicals? Bottling lines?[1] Bottles? Needles? Staff training? Transport coolers? Storage coolers? Dry ice? And why wasn't all that taken care of months ago?

(And why doesn't the US have a web site like Alibaba for industrial equipment?)

[1] https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/automatic-filling-machine-v...

Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC director says

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