A lot more people used to die of disease

The New York Times shared an enlightening graph last Sunday. A graph of deaths per year per 1,000 people living in New York City.

Here we are in the midst of a horrific global pandemic. Over 13 million known infections and more than half a million known deaths, and counting. This disease is far from the worst of history.

As of today, the death rate in New York City is 19 per 10,000 or 1.9 per 1,000. Across the whole U.S. the death rate is 419 per 1,000,000 or 0.4 per 1,000.

Thank goodness for modern medicine and instant communications. This pandemic could have been so much worse.

Two years into this global pandemic, many misguided people are still comparing Covid-19 to influenza. 1,600 death in a week in 2018 was tragic, but those influenza spikes are barely visible when compared to the tragic scale of Covid-19, and even more so given a simple cloth mask and vaccines that prevent most deaths. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on...

Two years ago was the first known case of Covid-19 in a human being. That makes this week a very unhappy anniversary, one that we’re likely to “celebrate” for quite a few more years before this pandemic is finally history. Looking back at the 5+ million lives lost so far, despite those losses and despite the historically fast rollout of vaccines, the overall trend of cases is...

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 killed at least 25 million people globally. Here in the United States 675,000 people are known to have died from that massive outbreak of flu. As of this last week (middle of September 2021), more people have died of Covid-19 in this pandemic. 682,000 as of today, with another 2,000 Americans dying every single day. While 675,000 is the population of a city and...

If only people looked back into history to learn from past mistakes, the masses would stop repeating so many past mistakes. Here in 2021, it’s the ideas that vaccines are worse than the disease and that vaccines take away one’s freedom. This long tweet stream tells the story better than I could (emphasis is mine, unrolled into text and images to make it easier to read): This is a good...

Back in March 2020, when the first lockdowns hit, The Hammer and the Dance was published on Medium predicting the future of the pandemic. This is a great piece of analysis. Unfortunately, like my predictions written way back then, this author had an assumption that proved false. Specifically, that people would prioritize life. That people would behave so that the fewest number of people would die...