
Originally Posted by
gimmick
Of course the study is a week old and apparently every article about it butchers it even more.
They used this model...
https://covid19.healthdata.org/unite...aths&tab=trend
...the best case scenario today for Feb 1st is 305k and the worst case is 622k.
The 380k referred in the study is the average of the current projection from a week ago. Now it's 399k.
First and foremost, there needs to be a sensible and uniform way to define COVID deaths.
In my county, a 37-year-old drug addict overdosed, was found to have COVID, and was listed as a COVID death.
In nursing homes, where COVID has killed a ton, there are a lot of ancient people in really terrible shape where even a fairly minor illness could kill them. Thus, even if COVID was the breaking point which put them in the ground, it's questionable whether that should be counted. Note that we had 80,000 flu deaths in the 2017-18 season in the US (about a third of reported COVID US deaths in 2020), but nobody panicked because it was generally understood that you weren't in much danger if you weren't very old, very young, or already in bad health.
I'm not comparing COVID to the flu, but we need to get real regarding accurately reporting death stats, and breaking it down into categories so people know their real risk of death.