Here is Chris Hayes today on Twitter:
I'd probably put myself in that "worn out" category too. But we've arrived at a point, through a complicated mix of policy, media and political culture, where we've collectively decided on a staggeringly high level of acceptable deaths as normal and tolerable. https://t.co/X2HYnM4cof
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 15, 2021
I tweeted back that the level of COVID deaths wasn't actually that high, and naturally I've been dragged all over Twitter as a result. Maybe I deserved it. But I still think there's something not quite right about this.
The CDC's preliminary mortality report for 2020 is here. When you separate out the numbers for working-age adults, here's what you get: COVID has increased the crude death rate from 0.43% of the population to 0.47%. If this happened in the absence of COVID it would barely even be noticeable.
As before, I want to emphasize that I'm not saying that the deaths of the elderly don't matter. Or that COVID-19 is no big deal. Or that long COVID isn't scary. Or that we couldn't have done better.
All I'm saying is that the lived experience of most people simply doesn't match the constant rhetoric of "staggeringly" high levels of death. Does this matter? I think it does, though I admit I'm not quite sure how. But it's something to think about if you're trying to figure out why so many people have come to accept the COVID death rate as normal and tolerable.
1% of every American over 65 has been killed by Covid.
Explains why I only feel 99% alive.
+1 for wit
It's not just about deaths, although the 800,000 deaths are horrific. For every death something like 8-10 were hospitalized, which has caused massive stress on our health care delivery systems and brutalized health care workers. I'm 68 years old, and have never experienced anything like this before. So many hospitals swamped, so many non covid procedures, even serious ones, delayed.
What on earth is the salience of using only "working-age adults?" It makes no sense to use such an arbitrary classification.
Maybe you could try this: "When you separate out the numbers for people who didn't die of COVID, here's what you get: COVID hasn't changed the crude death rate at all!."
There, I've made your already very compelling case even stronger!
@clawback
Since deaths are measurable increased during covid-19:
- https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
your assertion does not seem to be supported by the data.
I take the point to be, if you are not in a high-risk category your risk of dying from COVID is actually not very high. To me it's obvious and its a good corrective to all the nonstop panic and hysteria we get from the media, esp the more liberal media.
In this Michigan homeschool co-op, Coronavirus still means that time Bruce was shitbarfing after too many enchiladas & Coronitas on Cinco de Mayo, but they do know this: nobody's shitting their drawers over a fake Chinese plandemic released from a Wuhan lab.
The point has been made a million times but I guess I'll make it once more for your benefit: many of us know and love people who are not "working-age adults" and we would like them to not die of covid.
Well, I think it depends on your baseline. It depends on what you compare it to.
For instance, covid has killed more Americans than WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam combined, and in far less time. We cared about that.
Covid doesn't kill more people than heart attacks, and we don't radically change lifestyles to prevent other people from getting heart attacks. (Ourselves, yes, but not others).
However, we don't know how many people covid would kill if we weren't taking precautions. It might be a lot more.
Let’s not forget 9/11 killed a whopping 2977 people. And we REEEEEELLY cared about that.
Did anyone calmly calculate the excess death rate before we invaded the planet to prevent a handful of occasional deaths?
I agree. The volume/intensity of the COVID coverage just does not fit with the lived experience of a majority of people. The dividing line seems to be: hospitals filling up, health care workers overwhelmed and long haul symptoms being pretty scary and not well known is enough for some of us to want to Do Something and go along with mandates and masking. Sadly, a large portion (majority?) of Americans just can't muster the empathy to do the same. This seemed to be a similar problem in prior pandemics (cf HIV and 1918 Flu) so I'm not overly surprised. Very very sad.
Over 80% of adults got vaccinated. I'd call that doing something. We also shut down the economy and radically changed our behavior for a freakin' year. Now we are at the point where the vaxed can just take a breath and not worry about it so much.
A 10% increase in the death rate isn’t a big deal? Good to know. Meanwhile as plenty of have said repeatedly in response to these “it’s really not that bad” posts is that focusing solely on deaths ignores a significant aspect of the adverse consequences of catching COVID. It isn’t just about dying. Maybe you don’t know anybody who has had long COVID. Maybe you don’t know anybody in the health care industry. If not, maybe you should familiarize yourself with a few of those people so you get that it’s not just about whether a person dies.
Thanks for running the numbers! 0.43% "looks small," and so does 0.47% -- but the increase is well over 9%. Death rates going up that fast are -- or should be -- red flags that something bad is happening.
You’d think.
A good case why most Americans do not care about deaths at work.
Yes. I would have expected Kevin to notice how it was an almost 10% increase (9.3). Perhaps his post about hitting 63 was more timely than we thought. While he was there, he seemed to be one of the more "numerate" writers at Mother Jones. Though that may be damning with faint praise.
I’m really having a problem with the very narrow way Kevin is addressing COVID in recent posts.
10% increase in death rate while not even living life to the fullest! Not even taking all of the daily risks that you would otherwise!
I appreciate the point you're trying to make but it strikes me that you're making a mistake similar to that of Fogel & Engerman in their 1974 book, "Time on the Cross". They used statistical analysis (e.g., of plantation records of whippings administered annually) to argue (basically) that American slavery wasn't that violent.
Herbert Gutman wrote a scathing review (that he turned into a book, "Slavery & the Numbers Game", where he pointed out that a plantation with 100 enslaved workers where, on average, 1 slave was whipped every 2 years (my example, not quoting here)---or, a 0.5% chance of being whipped in any given year---meant that most slaves would be whipped at least once in their lifetime, and someone in their extended family would be whipped a couple of times a decade.
My point being: percentage-wise, the number of Covid deaths is small. In real life, almost everyone in the country has had someone close to them die from Covid in the past 21 months. Probably most people can name multiple friends and family members who've died and/or been seriously ill and/or suffer from "long Covid".
On a lesser level: Why is a 10% increase in the death rate for working-age adults "barely even...noticeable", but a 6% increase in prices is a major political issue?
On a larger level: We don't live our lives as "working-age adults". We live them as people who have parents and children and friends and neighbors and colleagues of all ages. It's one thing if someone you know gets sick and dies from a new and rare disease. It's another if everyone you know also knows someone who's died from a new disease.
I think your points are good ones. When I was a in school, I took a course that was basically statistics for the innumerate. On the first day of class, the professor warned never to trust anything with lots of numbers, charts, and any form of statistical analysis. The rest of the semester was filled with examples and ever since that time, I’ve always been intensely suspicious of such things because they are so easy to manipulate yet seem so objective and credible.
Not surprisingly, "How to Lie with Statistics" is still in print, nearly 70 years after it first came out. It's been supplemented by "How to Lie with Maps" and "How to Lie with Charts".
How to lie with photography has been "a thing" basically since the first photographic images were recorded some two centuries ago.
And now we have technical progress that guarantees
that doctored videos can be produced & will be accepted as factual by many people.
Good points.
"All I'm saying is that the lived experience of most people simply doesn't match the constant rhetoric of 'staggeringly' high levels of death."
Am I imagining things or was there once a time when our "lived experience" included what happened to other people, not just what happens to ourselves?
Your point is well taken, yet I must confess that until recently I didn’t know anyone who’s had Covid-19 let alone died from it. I learned recently that the wife of an old friend from squash had long-Covid-19 and had killed herself because the symptoms were unbearable. I think that I’ve got as much empathy as the next guy but that hit a lot closer to home and was consequently more disturbing.
I know at least a few dozen people who've had COVID: only was was even sick enough to go to the hospital, and his problem was dehydration--they gave him IV fluids and sent him home.
I know people who’ve had worse. A friend’s father passed away during the second wave last fall, and an in-law (a Trumper) passed away in the hospital just this last week. A family friend’s wife (staunch Republican) was hospitalized for over a week this October. Another in-law’s mother (also Republican) was hospitalized for over three weeks in the first wave and received a blood transfusion back when that was a thing.
Was there once a time when our "lived experience" included what happened to other people, not just what happens to ourselves?
I am sure there was once a time, back when our ancestors lived in tribal villages of only a hundred people or less.
I see it as a combination numeracy/political issue. Is a preventable megadeath a terrible thing? You becha! Is it a small percentage of total bodies still moving?
Now, I'm in the camp that sees a million preventable deaths (800k + "excess" sure looks to me to be well over that) as terrible. But at this point, Ford is not worried that they're making too many cars and insurance companies are not concerned that their risk pools are shrinking.
My problem with this is that people seem to be treating the delta between here and the point that insurance companies are worried as some sort of expendable slack. This is mostly Republicans - they're literally burning people to manufacture discontent and privately telling themselves they're killing off the dead weight. But Democrats are doing it now, too - they're tired of fighting. (Which is how you lose, but we already knew that.)
So of course we risk a variant that really does put us there.
Cool, cool. To really jump topics, my personal vote for what the Great Filter is: collective action problems.
Half of those are from the nursing home. But a dialectical warrior like Chris Hayes won't tell you that.
A bunch of old people 1 step from the grave makes is more obvious how devastating the Spanish flu was in retrospect......yet the world recovered. Not even a dent this time.
Dude, Chris Hayes is your ally.
Lay off.
The Spanish influenza was unusual in that it was rarely serious for older people, but deadly for people in the prime of life.
Since death levels are significantly increased during covid-19:
- https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
and this increase is consistent with the known covid-19 death numbers, the argument that the death toll is not that big a deal is refuted by the data.
We are losing close to a Sept 11 worth of deaths daily from covid-19.
So was Sept, 11 not that big a deal? We revamped our entire national security posture on about one days worth of deaths from covid-19.
Correction. It takes 2 to 3 days of covid-19 deaths to much 9/11.
The message does not change.
I very much appreciate Kevin's presenting this measure of covid's effect, because it's just the thing I've been wondering about lately. Namely, how high has the covid-death rate among working-age people been, in comparison to deaths by other causes?
Now, here's where I get to disagree with Kevin. When you're talking about deaths of people in their prime, going from 0.43% to 0.47% is a big, bad thing. Life is fragile and survival is chancy, but most of us would like to see that number be closer to zero. Look at it this way: a jump from 0.43% to 0.47% is a ten-percent increase in that quantity. If the murder rate went up by ten percent in the United States, would we shrug that off? Or auto accident deaths, or cancer deaths? A ten-percent jump in any major category of deaths would be called a crisis. So if the rate of deaths from all causes goes up by ten percent, how is that not a big deal?
It's a frog-in-boiling-water situation, the kind we're seeing a lot of these days.
Many people have come to accept the COVID death rate as normal and tolerable for a variety of reasons, which we can only speculate about. But I suggest two factors would be very important:
- The tendency to accept anything as normal and tolerable if it goes on long enough, whether that be the road toll or shootings or mass morbid obesity;
- The almost universal tendency to believe "it won't happen to me", no matter how strong the probability that it will.
I'm not even going to respond to the claim that Americans don't care about people dying if they're beyond working age. Whatever that is supposed to be.
It's not that we don''t care, it's that we accept various "infirmities of age", that vigor drains away even while a person lives, and that even if one cause of death of an aged person can be avoided, there will soon be another that is not avoided. That makes the loss of an elderly person a smaller grief than that of a younger person.
Maybe to SpadesofGrey. Hope that attitude isn't common.
I shouldn't have said "smaller grief". This isn't about diminishing the sorrow of any person's death.
However, mortality costs are commonly quantified in terms of years lost, and I think that kind of calculation can't be avoided when you try to balance a life-saving policy with society-wide losses in personal freedom or economic productivity. This is what pundits think about. The hope of saving 100 ninety-year-olds isn't going to justify as much sacrifice as saving 100 forty-year-olds. Not to me, and not to Kevin Drum, it seems.
I didn't figure you for a heartless human! But I spent too many years in A&H underwriting & claims, which necessitated some acquaintance with actuaries. I do not envy them their jobs & try not to judge, understanding that as long as we have insurance, someone will fill those positions.
Thanks for the thoughts. I'm not an actuary, but I often think like one. My idea of fun.
This feels like a nonsensical counterfactual.
First, to have an excess of 800K deaths in under 2 years is to have some meaningfully catastrophic event, or a sudden, stupendously dumb policy change, either of which would precipitate outrage and rapid reaction.
Second, if not for all of the extensive and intensive measures taken and the speed at which vaccine development had occurred, we might be talking 2M excess deaths, not 800K. Didn't some college in London speak to this?
Third, every excess death represents a loss in potential GDP. Make America Great Again, wasn't it supposed to be? Hard to do that when we're subtracting GDP potential by these excess deaths combined with Biden's continuation of Trump's immigration policies.
Stop making things up. I would argue it's adding to GDP potential. But your too stupid to realize it.
You are rich with irony, my friend.
You are the irony. Ignorant clod hoppers who need a socialist reeducation camp.
Still doesn't get it; just separates the words.
I thought we weren't suppose to feed the troll...
I don’t even read his word salad. I rarely read rational thought anymore either; no data or citations whatsoever, lots of hypotheticals, and just too damn many words.
RT tries to twist our thought process.
He starts sentences off by saying things like "Isn't it safe to say that......" and then in future postings alludes to that statement as fact.
He disagreed with the definition of herd Immunity so he started off his sentence with "I think my definition is better........" then goes off and uses that as fact in future posts.
Spades is just an idiot who wants to compare COVID to the Spanish flu. Then he conveniently forgets the fact that it came in waves JUST like COVID but the 4th (or 5th) wave was a much more deadly variant - but then says COVID is over because our 4th wave is weaker. And of course he conveniently forgets that our boys overseas then crammed themselves into 747s to come home after the war, or piled into the Symphony of the Seas to come home on board a ship. Never mind the fact that the world population has grown by a multiple of 4 or 5 since then. He's a complete moron. So, like you I no longer respond to either of them
Except when there's a laugh to be had at his expense.
Just when I thought your comments couldn't get any dumber.
Wealth comes from people resources. You need people to do things that make wealth. Fewer people means less wealth, end of story. That holds true when you're talking about just labor, but when you add in innovation and ideas it's just even more so.
Jesus, you're dumb.
These people ain't wealth moron. They are wealth destroys
These posts would be a lot shorter if Kevin just posted, "remember, most people are stupid."
I mean, people still smoke cigarettes. I saw an estimate of 34 million smokers, and about 100K deaths per year from lung cancer attributable to smoking.
So, by smoking, if you don't complicate the analysis, its something like taking a .002 risk of death which is completely optional.
Well, we have already established, over decades, that a .002 risk of death is not enough to keep people from smoking cigarettes, even though it should be.
But this is rationalized by smokers. I knew a very intelligent guy who smoked all day and died prematurely, horribly, from lung cancer. He said, in a rare bit of poor analysis "well, I enjoy it, and we are all going to die sooner or later."
Covid is about the same level of risk if the risk of smoking were collapsed into one year. Its not surprising that a segment of the population doesn't think countermeasures are "worth it."
I mean, they are idiots, but its not surprising. They wouldn't get very far as a
Vulcan, that's for sure.
If hospitals were to become overwhelmed and have to turn away the unvaccinated as a way to treat the most likely to survive, the death rate would become much higher and more people would be impacted by the losses of family, friends, colleagues. Perhaps this policy will become necessary in societies that value economic activity over stringent quarantine regimens to adopt should the number of infected and severely impacted increase beyond the level of the past two years. Additionally, how much longer can America's hospital systems run at this high capacity rate? Can it continue at this level never sustained for such a long time period before?
It isn't that high now. Look at a year ago.
Imagine it was announced that a new highly contagious respiratory virus was now sweeping the globe that rarely caused death for younger people, but had a shockingly high percentage chance of giving even kids what amounts to dementia after an asymptomatic infection. And it may or may not be permanent, who knows? We would be FREAKING OUT.
That's what Covid actually is for most people. Google "covid brain fog" and brace yourself for an anxiety attack.
Being singularly focused on hospitalizations and deaths, and pretending that the virus is otherwise a harmless head cold, has been a profound misstep. We'd have 100% vaccination rates if the news (and Kevin) spent every day focusing more on Long Covid.
Most infections diseases have long term effects on some patients. The whole long covid scare has been blown way out of proportion. Get vaccinated. Stop panicking at every new covid scare story.
90% of Democrats including Biden nod to this post. 10% of Democrats who post here.........whine. Go back to Democratic Underground with all the other wimpy pansies.
Prior to Covid, how many of these did we see a year and exactly what were the long term effects?
Youre using a lot of squishy language and not really saying anything.
Yea, they’ve recently started to be more precise about Long Covid… it’s actually several different things going on.
There is the post viral syndrome that you’re talking about which accounts for some lingering symptoms. But also, Covid can specifically attack the brain, which is why some people lose their sense of smell, develop debilitating brain fog, etc.
Anyway, apparently they’re finding that Long Covid affects to varying degrees about 1/3 of everyone who gets infected, so assuming you have any friends you can probably ask people around you about it. I personally know a couple people suffering from it, including one that’s basically on disability over a year after infection.
My 7 dead family members thank you.
COVID has increased the crude death rate from 0.43% of the population to 0.47%. If this happened in the absence of COVID it would barely even be noticeable.
Wrong.
For the life of me I cannot imagine any other event that caused 800,000 deaths (900.000+, per excess deaths stats) that would not be considered an epic and horrific catastrophe.
War, nuclear attack, natural disaster, terrorism, what have you. If an asteroid landed on Seattle and killed every single resident, could you imagine making the claim that not a lot of people died? What is so different about a deadly pandemic that makes you think that way?
If 800,000 is not a lot, please tell us what is? 10 million? 30 million? Inquiring minds want to know.
Don’t care what percentage is. That’s roughly 800,000 people who shouldn’t be dead. The more accurate comparison might be Afghanistan, where the deaths of so many young Americans somehow became “acceptable.” The rest of us barely batted an eye over 20 years.
When was the last time we saw the crude death rate for working-age Americans increase by over 9 percent in one year?
What happened to the crude death rate for all Americans, and when was the last time we saw a comparable change in that rate?
And WTF does “worn out” mean? I’m certainly tired of masking and restricting my activities, but I haven’t stopped, and I don’t find the level of COVID deaths to be “normal” or “acceptable.” Hayes can be frustratingly shallow in his analyses at times.
Worn out means it doesn't look like the pandemic will ever end. We had 1 year until vaccines and since we have had nothing but a worsening situation. The key word you are missing here is hopelessness. Particularly for those of us who have children too young to be vaccinated or have vulnerable people in our lives.
I have vulnerable people in my household. My experience has been plenty of cause for discouragement, but not hopelessness. My problem is that Hayes appears to conflate fatigue with resignation and acceptance. I think my own experience, as well as statistical breakdowns of support for proactive measures show that there is still an enormous divide that seems to split along ideological lines. I am more fortunate than many in that I am retired, and my livelihood isn’t threatened by COVID fallout.
I agree with you that “worn out” has a close connotation with hopelessness. Still, “worn out” is kind of a colloquial and imprecise term. I wish the survey had used “resigned” instead. I suspect the results would have been different.
Also, what proportion of eligible unvaccinated people are “worn out?”
Consider: You can be worn out easily because you lack physical fitness. The people who are unvaccinated who are tired of the pandemic have been tired of it since May 2020. They mostly lack mental discipline.
My son is too young to be vaccinated. Everyday I have to choose between hurting his development and hurting his body. Money is tight because one parent stays home to provide childcare. That is what wears me out. Other people have it worse, as I said above collectively we have lost 7 relatives to the virus, but it wears you down with no end in sight.
That is an interesting assertion. What those numbers mean, unless I am mis-interpreting them, is that not quite 10% more (9.3%) people in the working-age adults died in 2020 than would have otherwise.
I'd think that might be noticed.
As others have noted, a 10% increase in the death rate is HUGE - in the air quality world, that's much larger than the cutoff needed for fairly drastic emissions reductions.
Also, look at the excess death graph: https://public.tableau.com/views/COVID_excess_mort_withcauses_12152021/WeeklyExcessDeaths?:embed=y&:toolbar=n&:tabs=n&:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link
So if it goes from .47& to .49% we should equally just shrug our shoulders and say meh? How about .51%? Isn’t .61% an equally small number that most people won’t see the difference?
I just wonder at what point it becomes staggering to Kevin.
Kevin, by this point you could let that troll Spadesofgray write your posts for you, because lately the majority of them are basically a long version of "this doesn't matter", or "this is no big deal", which is pretty much the same crap that idiot spouts on most of his comments (when he isn't going on some bigoted rant).
I think the Evil Dex Days are becoming more common.
Honestly the number of COVID Chicken Littles populating this comment section is dispiriting. If you are vaxed and not in a high risk group your chances of having a serious case of COVID are very small. It just seems that a lot of people don't want to accept this. Honestly it's almost like a lot of people actively want it to not be true.
To say that most people's risk of serious covid are low is not to say that no one has suffered or died. But it is to say that it is time to stop freaking out and just get on with our lives. The vast vast majority of the country (liberal, conservative, or independent) feel this way. It's only the tiniest fringe (well represented here) who seemingly can't wait till the next wave or variant comes along to show everyone who disagrees with them just how wrong they are.
I don’t get the impression that people are freaking out. I think a good many of us here are continuing to mask when indoors, limit contacts and maintain separation standing on line, shopping, etc. These behaviors reduce risk, just as does wearing a seat belt, which I suspect nobody freaks out over. Yes they are little annoyances, having Covid carries a significant probability of being worse or far worse than annoying.
We knew Chris Hayes was copacetic with increased death rates when he joined Ryan Lizza in crowing that Donald Trump was running to Shrillary's left in 2016.
Lets also note how well the vaccines did in blunting the Delta wave. We could have been staring at 1 2-3 million deaths by March 1st. It was clearly peak covid. Mutations like Omicron represent its mutation to weaker forms like the Spanish flu 1919-20.
The chicken littles whining on this thread are annoying and morons. Go into the bunkers.
Soylent Green virus?
I really think you need to get out more. A lot more. You need to interact with more people. Your daily life needs to have a broader reach. Posts like these, plus the ones about generational conflict and inflation and housing, are really cementing to me just how insular and insulated life in Irvine must be.
If Kevin has addressed it, I haven’t seen it, but I would suspect that, as someone with a besieged immune system, he is more vulnerable to COVID than many of us.
Sure, but the trend extends pre-COVID.
And one doesn't have to leave home to "get out", socially/societally speaking.