After the Omicron outbreak of early 2022 subsided, death rates from COVID-19 have been steady and relatively low for the rest of the year:
I've included Germany just to provide a comparison with a typical peer country. This still comes out to more than 13,000 deaths per month in the US, so it's a lot of deaths. But so far we haven't seen a winter surge.
We are seeing a slight increase in daily deaths, but nothing alarming yet. At his point deaths are the best measure we have, so we have to run whut we brung. So far things look reasonably good.
"death rates from COVID-19 have been relatively low"
"it's a lot of deaths."
Um, one or the other - can't be both!
I think what Kevin means is that the rate of deaths per million total people is low but the sheer number of deaths is high. Kind of like how $1B is both a very low share (.059%) of the $1.7T federal budget and also $1B is still considered a lot of money to the average taxpayer.
Last year at this time there were approximately 1,000 more deaths per day than this year. So, relative to last year it is ‘low’, but it’s still a lot of deaths.
Given the use of the word reletively, it's not ture that it can't be both relatively low and really high. It is certainly low (400 deaths per day) relative to the peak death rate of 4200. But 420 is still high, 2nd only to all forms of cancer combined.
So, we've settled into a dynamic whereby we're seeing about three times the number of deaths annually from covid that we'd get from a bad flu season (and maybe 4x-5x the number from an ordinary flu season). Or, to put it in a different context, covid would appear to be killing about three times as many Americans as were annually dying of HIV/AIDS at the height of that pandemic's mortality in the US in the 90s.
That's well below the number that would constitute a societally-destabilizing crisis, but it still sucks.
You betcha! We've done such a good job in not slowing down the rate of transmission that now when we get together for the holidays, there's no increase in transmission! Good job, us.
Covid has lowered the life expectancy in the US a lot, along with opioid epidemic, etc. Note: data through 2021--expect some bounce back in 2022 in US since covid deaths are down overall and more so in 2023 if there are no more major outbreaks.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/12/22/1144864971/american-life-expectancy-is-now-at-its-lowest-in-nearly-two-decades
see also:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=US
Long covid is real and will be an "underlying condition" for many people now. Vaccines helped lower long covid risk overall, and I don't know if the more recent strains are more or less prone to give someone long covid.
What has happened is that the protection offered by Covid-19 vaccines wear off, and for some reason, many people are unwilling to get periodic vaccinations.
If you get all the boosters, your risk of dying from Covid is very low. I'm in my 60s, and according to the CDC ( https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status ) my odds of dying of Covid are about 1% of the risk of someone who's unvaccinated and my age, and about 10-15% of the risk of someone who hasn't received the last booster.
I don't understand why people aren't willing to get boosters, but if you're looking for a reason why Covid is still killing more people than the flu, there it is.