This is apropos of nothing in particular, but with the passage of time it's now pretty easy to figure out how many people died of COVID in the US:
The trendline shows the normal monthly number of deaths excluding seasonal flu. The spikes in 2020 and beyond add up to 1.2 million, all of which are almost certainly due to COVID.
You can look up this number pretty easily, but I thought at least a few people would be interested in seeing it graphically.
NOTE: The total number of deaths is pretty sensitive to precisely where the trendline is drawn, so there's some inherent error in this kind of calculation. At a guess, I'd put it at ±100,000.
Looks like a yearly holiday spike in deaths.
Yes, Covid has a flu-like seasonality.
This chart could be improved by fitting a trend + average annual cycle (probably calculated over a decade), which would include flu (I don’t understand how seasonal flu was “excluded” as stated).
Judging by the 2018-19 seasonality, total excess deaths would be larger since they are clearly higher than the previous summer minima. Net excess deaths would be larger for all months of covid.
The Donald revealed the origin of the pandemic at a rally a few days ago.
Why the intelligence agencies carry on as if it's a big puzzlement is baffling.
And independent corroboratable scientific evidence for t his claim?
It's a mystery how so much can wrong and not a single bit of has ever been his fault.
1,000,000+ people died of this disease in the USA and they probably hoped their voices might mean something but they didn't mean a damn thing to 45% of the country.
The partisan divide of Covid deaths runs like this: more D's than R's died before 2020 election; more R's than D's died after the 2020 election.
If you're wondering whether Covid deaths since the 2020 election could swing states this election, Charles Gaba has crunched the numbers:
Not very likely but certainly a possibility.
Right now kind of feels like waiting to find out if the cancer this country has is terminal or not. Find out tomorrow.
Plus all the people who got vaccinated are all dying off now - sure as shootin'! - same as MAGA said we would.
I have had 5-6 boosters, too many to count, and I have died. A fatal case of death. My neighbors, family, friends: all gone.
Sometimes, in the distance, a dog barks. Maybe you hear the sounds of families begging for their lives, captured for food by post-apocalyptic cannibal biker gangs, amid the mountains of vaccinated corpses and burning overturned cars.
Not that it matters: The living now envy the dead.
An interesting dream, Darkie. But totally based on established science: Everyone who has gotten vaccinated will die. There are NO exceptions.
I, OTOH, prefer to put that event off for a while longer.
My condolences.
I knew roughly 10 who died from Covid.
Not one was vaccinated.
2 were recovering from strokes. The others were healthy and highly functioning 60ish year olds.
All were Trump supporters. One each in Indiana, Florida, Georgia. And 7 in Ohio.
Interesting observation. Because of the epidemiology and the timeline of vaccine development/deployment, most of the deaths occurred during Biden's presidency. This may help explain the incomprehensible unpopularity that Biden suffered from: people react to conditions in real time with no comprehension of cause and effect. They make up this or that rationale for the "vibe" they feel, but don't understand why. It could be that people just remember feeling "things were bad" when Biden was in office. Even though the pandemic hit during the election year of 2020, most of the COVID bad news happened during 2021-2022. We are still a population that reacts to how things "feel" above all.
This is the curse of politics. You can't win with reason and logic.
That's not the way I remember it at all. 2020 was the terrible year. When Biden took office, vaccines were just starting to become available (I got mine in Feb 2021), and death rates were starting to fall. By May or June, most people who wanted the vaccine had gotten it, most restrictions were being lifted, and life was starting to feel a bit normal. Despite a couple of variant spikes, 2021 and 2022 were way better years COVID-wise than 2020.
If RFK Jr (aka "Worm Brain") gets to head the CDC or HSS, I guess the next Covid booster targeting the then currently circulating variants will be available in America at your local CVS, Rite Aid, or Walgreens, around September, 2029.
This assumes that Il Duce don't name himself dictator for life.
Putin didn't name himself dictator for life. There are even elections in Russia, it is just that Putin decides the results of the elections, not the voters.
If Trump wins and is still alive in 2028, he will continue, and get his people to shoot anybody that actually object.
It should be mentioned that this way of estimating the death toll includes deaths not of COVID that occurred as a consequence of the pandemic, e.g. heart attacks not properly cared for or cancers undetected too long because of lack of resources.
The Financial Times has an almost complete list of excess deaths by country:
https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938
Once again, anybody who wants to avoid pandemic deaths in their country should look at what the countries with the lowest rates per capita did; Finland, Denmark, S. Korea, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, New Zealand. Surely some of the Asian countries had visitors from China as early as the US did.
If all of the spikes above the trendline are due to covid, what is the cause of all the troughs below the trendline prior to 2020?
It would be my guess that there is less flu in the summer and more in the winter (plus crowded indoor gatherings). That also seems to be the case with Covid, but more pronounced.
That’s right.
If you’re trying to estimate excess deaths, it makes no sense to represent the background level by a straight line when we know deaths are highly seasonal (e.g. the years 2018 and 2019 in Kevin’s chart).
The summer troughs in covid are still above the typical pre-covid summer values. The line is misleading in implying that somehow things were better than average in the summers of 2020, 2021 and 2022.