Guys, the vast majority of deaths were always going to be people in their 80s and 90s. The question that will be interesting when this is all said and done is whether that demographic was more or less likely to die in an elderly care facility than at home. But even this is likely too muddled by other factors to allow for a judgment on how these facilities performed, not least because the individuals who live in them are less healthy otherwise than those who don’t, whether because of physical ailments or dementia. And the fact that these people are in need of care and support means that they can’t “isolate” and therefore are more exposed.

None of this means that a general lockdown would have been at all beneficial, or that there are not other, much easier to implement measures with fewer repercussions, that could have improved how elderly care facilities would have performed.

Deaths by age, per the Seattle Times' daily update about Washington:

80+: 53%
60-79: 38%
40-59: 8%
20-39: 1%

Usually deaths are people with other issues, but this gets many who are nowhere near nursing homes.

The nursing homes have obviously been death traps though.

Nursing homes are full of frail old people close to death. That is their entire reason for existence. They are “death traps” in normal times.

Obviously death rates higher with CV19, even higher than flu season (though how it compares to a bad flu season we will see, and the data may never be made public, but 15-20 residents dying of flu in a single home is not terribly uncommon), but they are high always.

The flu doesn't kill this many people despite basically EVERYONE being exposed to it.

COVID-19 has done worse with a tiny fraction of the exposures, and a tiny fraction of the actual infections.

I can't understand how people can make this comparison with a straight face.

My point wasn’t to compare to the flu, just that when someone in a nursing home gets the flu, it can lead to numerous deaths in that home.

But I’m also not sure you are correct on the facts. What makes you think fewer people have been exposed to Covid than the flu? There is increasing evidence that it’s been around the world since last November (when flu season typically starts, incidentally), and that most of us have been exposed to it. Also, deaths globally are still at less than half the level of some flu years.

Secondly, why does it matter? There are two factors that influence how deadly a virus is, how easily it spreads and how likely it is to kill an infected person. So even if you were correct that this was more likely to kill but harder to catch, that wouldn’t necessarily make it deadlier.

I get what 10023 is saying though, like the concept that he's trying to convey.

Essentially a probability correlation in any given year between present, known hazards such as the flu or existing probabilities of death after ages (80+) versus new existing hazards such as Covid-19. Almost like a hazard assessment. Essentially, the cost of such restrictions on society is not worth the extra change that it may prolong life by 1-2 or 2-4 years for that target age-demographic. Something along those lines. I think thats what he's alluding too...

Look, it’s certainly worse than the flu. It’s a novel virus and we don’t think that anyone had existing immunity. Coronaviruses as a family of viruses, however, are not new. SARS and MERS were largely contained and didn’t spread widely, but there are a number of endemic coronaviruses that cause common cold.

And even if there is no immunity, the statements people have been making to the effect of “we don’t know anything about this virus” are objectively false. Epidemiologists know a lot about coronaviruses generally and understood the structure of this particular virus very quickly. They knew how it was likely to spread, they knew that simple soap would kill it because of its relatively fragile lipid membrane.

More generally, this isn’t a sci-fi movie and viruses are subject to the usual laws of nature and natural selection. We new it wasn’t some super-killer that stayed in the air indefinitely and killed anyone within hours like the virus in Outbreak, because those just don’t exist in nature. Viruses have evolved to enhance the chances of their own survival like any other living thing, and if they kill that efficiently they don’t stay around long enough to spread.

My bold for emphasis. More than we know about? More than the actual number of recorded cases? Most certainly. MOST of us? Absolutely not. Not by a long shot. Most experts expect that somewhere between 5% and 15% of the population may have been exposed so far. Most experts say "herd immunity" cannot be achieved until the population exposure rises to more like 65% or 70%.

Two things:

1. COVID-19 is the leading cause of death in the United States, and that's with all the social distancing measures and it's geographical isolation to this point. The flu is never the leading cause of death.
2. There is a flu vaccine.

One way to estimate the infection rate is to use population IFRs inferred from NYC deaths/serology study (suggests an IFR of ~1% for NYC demographics). Since "only" ~70k people have died of COVID-19 in the US, that suggests that only 2% of the population has been exposed. Of course the death toll may be undercounted, so maybe it's really 3%.

Even if you make the crazy assumption that the IFR is 0.1 % (which is probably about right for people under ~60), then no more than 30% of the US has been exposed.

Wow, we've made it to this point in the crisis and we still have armchair experts comparing this to the flu.

I spend two hours a day watching this stuff (to keep my construction employer informed), and have seen NOTHING about exposure on a flu-like scale, or even a significant fraction of it.

Very inaccurate and presumptuous statement.

This is based on daily death rates right now.

I’m quite certain that by the end of 2020, it will end up being far behind the other usual contenders.

Also, it appears that anybody who is Covid positive who dies is now being labeled as a death “due to Covid”. Very suspect, IMO

Just because you have an opinion that is contrary to fact does not make fact inaccurate or presumptuous. It is fine if you think that at the end of this year COVID-19 won't be the leading cause of death, but at this point in time it is. That is a fact.

We are currently stuck in the crisis. It's impossible to get any accurate statistics in this context.

Death toll in my country takes into account hospitals and care/retirement homes, but not people who died at their very own homes.
I heard of a 10k estimate. That would take the death toll in France to roughly 35k. That sounds credible.

I believe the French authorities are trying to be as transparent as anyone can be in that respect, because truth will be brought to the public opinion anyhow and scientists need the real figures to solve the problem as soon as possible.

You are definitely being presumptuous. There are already models out there that are estimating what the total US death toll may be, and none of them come close to predicting that Covid will be the leading cause of death in 2020.

If you had properly worded your original comment along the lines of “in recent days, the death toll from Covid is higher than any other cause of death” it would’ve been far more accurate. Instead you made an inaccurate statement that will almost certainly bear out to be false.

There is nothing wrong with my wording. The number of deaths/day from COVID-19 has only increased since this was published a month ago:

(Edit...Ihearthed answered it better)

No, even the strictly-limited version has more than any other cause...heart disease and cancer are in the 1,700 range per day, and Covid a little higher typically.

The difference in typical deaths vs. recent deaths is MUCH larger than the Covid stats...the question is how much is additional Covid deaths vs. deaths because people are avoiding hospitals for other things.

Have the deaths/day gone up? I thought early-to-mid April would've been peak deaths in New York and the hardest hit areas.