One in 500 US residents have died of Covid-19:

[tblue37]

BREAKING: One in 500 US residents has died of Covid-19, according to a
@CNN
analysis of Johns Hopkins University and US Census Bureau data.

Link to tweet

[tblue37]

1. I agree with this reply, though:

Link to tweet

Text

It's probably closer to 1 in 400 when you consider excess deaths.

[Karma13612]

2. So is that

Like slightly more than 0.2 % of the population?

That’s pretty significant. No wonder our life expectancy has dropped.

Wow. And it was preventable to a great extent.

[tblue37]

3. Yep.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. It is still not a population-reducing disease.

[Karma13612]

7. Actually, I read somewhere that

Our life expectancy dropped a tad since this all started.

But I don’t have a link so I understand that this is only worth grains of salt at the moment.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

8. That is probably true.

But a couple of months' reduction in life expectancy isn't going to noticeably impact population numbers.

Keep in mind that in this country alone more than 10,000 babies are born each and every day. World wide is some 385,000 babies per day.

[Karma13612]

9. Ah!!!

I see your point. Thanks for putting the stats in context.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

10. Yes, putting numbers in context is very important.

Before the Pandemic, about 2.8 million people died each year in this country. Not all of the nearly 700,000 people who've died from Covid so far would still be alive, were it not for that virus. I can't begin to guess what the correct percentage would have died anyway in this length of time, but some of them.

I don't want to sound callous about the deaths, especially as most of those in the past six months were almost completely avoidable were everyone to be vaccinated. But I'm going to guess that things like traffic accident deaths are down as people are just not in their cars quite as much.

When you look at world population charts, the Black Death of the 14th century impacts European population, but not world population. Even the 1918 flu epidemic did not reduce world population. It did impact life expectancy, but that recovered by 1922. Same with WWII. It strongly affected life expectancy in European countries, but that also bounced back a year or two after the war ended.

We humans are remarkably good at reproducing.

[Karma13612]

12. For the sake of

Self-preservation, the act is a pleasurable one.

Funny how that works!!!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

13. Yeah.

I'm someone who is an incredible stickler for facts.

You probably don't ever want to go see a movie with me, because I'll complain endlessly about the flaws, the incorrect stuff, and the wrong things in that movie as we exit.

I am CONSTANTLY fact checking things. Most of the time I learn that what I fact check is wrong, and I let the poster know. Sometimes, it's correct and I might well be surprised.

I also love things like math and statistics. I have a son who is in a PhD program in astronomy at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, and I constantly call him up with astronomy questions.

Here's a factoid, even though you didn't ask: our galaxy, Milky Way, is on a collision course with Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy. Milky Way has about 300 billion stars, Andromeda is three times as large as Milky Way, with about one trillion stars. Anyway, we'll collide in about 4 or 5 billion years, so brace yourself. A while back I was thinking about this, and called up My Son The Astronomer and asked him, when this happens, how many stars will actually crash into each other. He said, "Well, we're not certain, but probably no more than 10." No more than 10 out of a combined 1.3 trillion stars. That alone tells you how vast interstellar distances are. Okay, so any number more will interact gravitationally, but still.

Here's one computer simulation of that collision:

There are others out there if you care to look.

[Karma13612]

14. Thanks! Very interesting

And rather scary tho I will be long gone by then.

I can almost picture some ‘beings” floating around in really neat space vehicles, going about their routine in space. They tune into the ‘news’ and are informed that some space matter has collided. And the ‘announcer’ anecdotally mentions that one of the bits of matter just happens to be the famed ‘planet earth’ from eons ago. Then they’ll say something like “In other stories this morning, Pluto is holding their annual Identity Crisis Festival. Let us know what you think! Does size matter?”


Have a great day!

[Ohio Joe]

5. Sheesh...

The murderous right wing death cult cannot be satiated.

RIP

[albacore]

6. Have you tried explaining what "excess deaths" means to those people?

They think you made up the term, and since they can't read graphs or charts, they simply deny that more people have died than average in the last 2 years.

[madville]

11. Statistics like this are very interesting to me

Say 1 in 500 people in the US died of Covid in the last 18 months.

I calculate 1 in 485 died from cigarette smoking over that same 18 months based on the 480,000 annual number from the CDC and a population of 350 million.

Say you have a smoker with terminal lung cancer who got Covid and died. Is it a Covid death or primarily a cigarette smoking lung cancer death or both as far as the statistics go?

Same with obesity, say an obese person with diabetes and heart problems died of COVID, what’s more to blame for killing them, their existing conditions or COVID or a combination of the two for statistical purposes?

I find it all so complex and fascinating, I’m just glad I don’t have to figure it out.