Quote (Black XistenZ @ Feb 7 2022 01:30am)
Life expectancy is around 80 years, so as a very rough approximation, we can assume about 1/80 = 1.25% of the population to die each year. Increasing this by 0.3% would actually represent quite a substantial increase in mortality. Also, when hospitals get swamped, we can safely assume that quality of care goes down and survival rates with them.
Sorry, what?
I don't know where you got your 1.25% figure. However, let's go with that. The population of the US is 330 million.
1.25% of 330 million is 4,125,000 deaths.
.03% of 4,125,000 is 123,750 deaths.
Now consider how many people are being counted as covid deaths despite dying with covid instead of due to covid, which is a large number. Santa Clara county did a cursory revision of their death toll and found the preliminary overcounting to be 20%:
https://sanjosespotlight.com/santa-clara-county-revises-total-covid-deaths-by-over-20/Extrapolate that in the entire country and let's say it is 40% when all is said and done.
The range depending on whether you choose 20% or 40% overcounting of deaths, is a total of 99,000 to 74,250 deaths from COVID.
As comparison, the number of flu deaths in the 2019-2020 flu season was 40,684 (source below):
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2019-2020.htmlSo covid is essentially a more severe flu, for which treatments are available.
Furthermore, per Italy data, 97.1% of covid deaths were in people with comorbidities:
https://www.epicentro.iss.it/en/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_5_october_2021.pdfSo again, why all this malarkey for covid?
This post was edited by tugofpeace on Feb 8 2022 11:18pm