> That's why I'm upset, anyway, because my life was turned completely upside down for something that's actually quite minor in the grand scheme of things, whilst we're leaving the big stuff alone.
Here in my region of Spain overall deaths were lower than in a normal year.
Media attention is so skewed towards covid it's almost impossible to even think of anything else. Heck, even googling 'list of cases of deaths globally' directly redirects to covid-related hits. On the first two pages there isn't anything that's not covid. I think this has to stop.
Nice link. I appreciate that page, actually. Hadn't seen it.
However, this is with all of the interventions, plus vaccines in. It's with the curve flattened as much as all of the interventions allowed.
What you don't have is the counterfactual of what would have happened with no intervention of a highly contagious air-borne virus, and a matching health care collapse. In the beginning we were closer to 1% and higher in some places. This is US stats, where people have access to higher quality healthcare than much of the world (and vaccines), plus mixed interventions (since local/state dictated much of that).
We were never higher than a 1% fatality rate in any place. The high rates that some people estimated early in the pandemic were due to garbage data from very limited testing of asymptomatic cases. The CDC did a more thorough analysis and estimated a 0.6% infection fatality rate back when no one was vaccinated.
Also before vaccination and prior infection. Either or both of those mean that the risk involved with catching Delta or Omicron is generally far lower than it would have been had they just "appeared" in March 2020.
If it were 1% (it's 0.3% in the UK and US) then it's about a normal year, again.
So over two years we go from losing 2% of the population to losing 3%. Assuming you're talking excess deaths.
Yeah, it's pretty bad.
I don't think it's "make it illegal to visit your mum, ban all social events, close the schools, bars, pubs, stop flights, wear things on your face, stop going to work normally, ..." bad.
But that's just a value judgement thing. Without those things there is no life to save. YMMV.
How is Covid-19 minor?