thrifty++ wrote: ↑Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:22 pm
...5 million dead?
CDC says 2,813,503 died in USA in 2017 (
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm). Probably similar number in 2018 and 2019. Year after year, more people dying than in all US wars combined. Why was no one talking about these mass deaths back in 2017, 2018 and 2019? Where did they stack all the bodies?
I've been away for a while, largely because I didn't want to be exposed to the stupidity of namby-pamby nitwits who outnumber smart people in this forum. But I'll stop in briefly to shed a little light.
Metric of interest is not how many died or will die of covid, but rather how many years of life were lost. Assumimg life expectancy of 80 in USA, then it takes 60 people age 79 dying to equal one person aged 20 dying (20:1 ratio if 60yo, 80:1 if newborn, etc). Life insurance companies do good job of estimating remaining life expectancy for large groups of people based on a few parameters (current age, sex, bmi, pre-existing conditions). So take all the people who died of covid, plug their info into a life insurance calculator to compute expected years of life remaining without covid, then sum up to get total years of life lost to covid, then divide by total US population to get years lost per person to covid. Result is probably under one day.
Better result would take into account loss of life due to lockdowns and other measures taken to protect against covid. Result would likely show that deaths caused trying to protect from covid greatly outweigh deaths caused by covid itself.
I'm aware that cold statistics are no consolation to those who die of covid. But that's true about all sorts of things. Innocent people are run down by careless drivers all the time, but we don't outlaw motor vehicles in response, because cost outweighs benefit, and by cost I mean deaths not just money. No motor vehicles means no motor vehicle ambulances or fire trucks, for example.