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Information on COVID-19 I still see people claiming that COVID-19 is
no more serious
than the flu, or that hospitals are attributing to COVID-19
deaths due to other
causes (somehow they would make money this way, it is claimed).
We can understand the seriousness of COVID-19
by looking at
death rates. Overall death rates tend to be stable year to year,
so a
significant excess of deaths is a strong signal. Typical rates of death in the US per year,
according to the
Centers for Disease Control: Flu: 20-60,000 per year (Centers for Disease
Control) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html Car accidents: 30-40,000 per year (National
Safety Council,
CDC) https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estimates Guns: about 38,000 (this includes suicides) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm Annual deaths overall in the US: In 2018,
about 2.8 million https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/deaths.htm You can find the leading causes of all deaths
in the US (for
2017) here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm Heart disease and cancer top the list at
about 600,000 per
year each. This year, the US has seen an excess
of deaths (from
all causes) of about 200,000. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid This is a nearly 10% increase in
deaths so far this, about
five times the number of deaths that the flu, car accidents,
and guns each
cause in a year. We would need an increase of 16% of heart
disease and cancer
deaths and label all of those as COVID to explain the
excess deaths. The truth is, COVID-19 is real, is serious,
and is now
the 3rd leading cause of death in the US, far more
than the flu,
than car accidents, or gun deaths. I read some people arguing that 99.5% of
people recover. It’s
not clear it’s that high, but let’s suppose the mortality rate
is only
0.5%. But the virus
is also extremely infectious.
If half the US population eventually gets infected,
which is the minimum needed for so-called “herd immunity” to
kick in, which is
around 150 million, that means 750,000 deaths.
(At SDSU, with 30,000 students, that would
translate to 75-150 deaths.) |
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