Covid Deaths

In public health, mortality and morbidity are often expressed in units of DALY (Disability-adjusted life years) or QALY (Quality-adjusted life years).<p>Because COVID deaths are being predominantly borne by the old, and deaths due to war are predominantly borne by the young, I would be very curious to see the equivalent charts in DALYs.<p>In other words, not &quot;what is the number deaths&quot; but &quot;what is the expected number of healthy years of life lost.&quot;

Key difference would be the age demographics. Wars are so devastating not only because people die, but it is young people who die. As unethical as it sounds and completely from the perspective of impact on human capital, COVID is far less damaging.

During World War I, the population of the world was 1.7 Billion. Just one of many other flaws in this comparison.

Why is the US Election day marked on the graph? Is it saying &quot;Lots of Covid deaths, also US Election wink wink&quot;?

It strikes me as quite dishonest to put World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, but not World War II on this chart. It&#x27;s hard to imagine selection criteria that could generate that set of wars other than &quot;don&#x27;t put anything above the COVID line&quot;.

Why don&#x27;t they add in something for comparison, like yearly flu deaths, or road accients so people ca get a real perspective on this.<p>Personally I feel that it has been hyped up beyond belief but I am aware that many disagree. It appears to be around 3 times as bad as normal flu season (going by infection fatality rate), yet for flu we don&#x27;t really bother much at all. A bad flu season may get some attention in the press but not much more, though a bad flu may double the IFR.<p>We are destroying economies because of covid, and I predict that the long term damage will be far worse than the virus. I think its important to keep a sense of perspective.

I&#x27;m skeptical of the source numbers here. The early dates on the X-axis were over 7-months ago.<p>Full factor mortality adjusted tallies from early months don&#x27;t seem to be included? I can find no mention of full-factor mortality adjustments on covidtracking.com.<p>In other words, are the numbers verified and adjusted by other methods? Full-factor mortality is among the most accurate measurements of society. Yet there appears to be no mention of it. Did I miss it?

I like the intention, some comments from me:<p>1. The site starts off with &quot;0 deaths&quot; and hovers there for a second or two. I guess depending on how quickly the API can respond.<p>2. I personally believe COVID 19 is more comparable to the Spanish flu, therefore it should be illustrated on the same graph. I think that is probably 2-3 times the number of deaths due to COVID.

The US has always been different than other countries. It&#x27;s the reason we have more gun deaths than other countries and it will be the reason we will always lead in pandemic deaths if they somehow reach our shores.<p>You will never get 20 million Americans per week to line up for testing unless it&#x27;s the same 20 million over and over. You will never get Americans to sign up for voluntary contact tracing or vaccines. You can barely get half of us to wear masks all the time.<p>Furthermore, the federal government is limited in what it can enforce. It is up to the states individually to enforce these rules. The populace in many places have no desire to continue a locked-down, mask-mandated existence, regardless of the cost.<p>If COVID-19 had the same symptoms as Ebola all these things would change dramatically.<p>I say all this because the Election is marked on this timeline as if it&#x27;s going to have a major impact on the pandemic in the U.S. I don&#x27;t believe it will. We may see an impact but I think it will just be a result of having the pandemic fizzling out due to herd immunity etc.