Covid has 2.2%? Now thats some serious number for 2023. Not doubting, just feeling that we went through seriously traumatic event as whole mankind, and it feels like subconsiousness is pushing it into distant dream-like story compared to what it actually was and how recently.
Determining primary cause of death is often somewhat subjective. Almost everyone listed as a COVID-19 death had other serious co-morbid medical conditions. If a deceased patient had heart failure and type-2 diabetes, and also tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, then what killed them in the end? Hard to say. (Same issue applies to influenza etc.)
A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in fact was. Most people don't talk about it because as with everything (NFL halftime shows, restaurant logos, etc) in my quickly-regressing country, COVID is a topic that inflames passions.
> A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in fact was.
I don't know what country you're referring to, but there's ample data that it's highly partisan in the USA, and you, too, might be misinformed. In particular, the political left wildly overestimates the lethality of Covid (both historically and in the present). See, for example [1]. Other sources [2,3] reporting on the same data also validate the overall partisanship, but unfortunately don't show the correct answer in a way that makes it easy to see the pattern.
To the extent that you asserted anything specific at all, it was that "a HUGE amount of the population" in your country don't believe that the virus was "the killer it in fact was".
I just showed you that a) there's a large misconception about the lethality of the virus, and b) people on the left side of the US political spectrum tend to systematically exaggerate the threat. In particular "the killer it in fact was" is often not a factual statement, but a partisan exaggeration of reality.
There are studies that show the the "far right" (since you insist on interpreting this in a partisan lens) have a much higher death rate, after the introduction of covid-19 vaccination rates. IU'm going to make a wild assumption here: the far left and the far right want to avoid death at roughly equal rates. I interpret the finding above as a partisan underestimation of the lethality of covid.
80% of republicans believed (according to Gallup) that COVID death rates were falsely inflated. Only 47% of Republicans believe that COVID is more deadly than seasonal influenza, whereas 87% of democrats did.
> You've shown that there's a large misconception about the hospitalization rates of the virus, not its lethality.
Hospitalization is upstream of death. You don't just get the virus and fall over dead. More to the point, to the extent that one group incorrectly believes that risk of hospitalization is higher than it is, it reflects their overall incorrect belief that the mortality of the virus is higher than it is.
> There are studies that show the the "far right" (since you insist on interpreting this in a partisan lens) have a much higher death rate, after the introduction of covid-19 vaccination rates.
No, there aren't. You're referring to this study [1], which was conducted in two states (Ohio and Florida), and was overgeneralized on NPR, MSNBC and other left-wing media outlets.
The study ran only until December 2021, and found an overall excess death rate of 2.8% for republican voters, which was 15% higher than the excess death rate for democratic voters, according to their model (in other words, democratic voters had an excess death rate of ~2.4% during the same period). The claim you're making extends only from the May-December period of 2021, where they found a roughly 8% difference in excess death rates between parties, on a baseline of approximately 25%.
In other words: both parties saw excess death rates of approximately 25%, and the "republican" part of the set was 8% higher [2]. But when you look at the data by state [3], there's hardly any difference for Florida, so this study is really describing a difference only in a subset of Ohio voters.
Again, you've probably been misinformed about what you think you know. When you actually look at the data, the results are far less dramatic than reported in the media.
The data seems flawed. Also the number at the left chart for homicide with <1% is technically correct, but with the actual number at roughly 0,007% it seems like a bit of an exaggeration.
For a while, if a person had COVID within the previous month, any subsequent death counted as COVID. Recover from COVID and jump out of a plane without a parachute? COVID. I believe that doesn’t happen much anymore, at least I hope.
I suspect what may be happening is that we have some very sick, elderly people with only weeks to months to live who catch COVID and die. Those deaths may still be counted as COVID deaths.
>For a while, if a person had COVID within the previous month, any subsequent death counted as COVID. Recover from COVID and jump out of a plane without a parachute? COVID. I believe that doesn’t happen much anymore, at least I hope.
If anything covid deaths are under-counted. While you can't give a single example of someone dying after jumping out of a plane and it being called a covid death there are actual examples of covid deaths and infections being suppressed and hidden from the public. There's also a huge jump in excess deaths unaccounted for by official numbers and some suspicious spikes in flu and pneumonia deaths.
Or am I the only one feeling about it this way?