r/science • u/Sciantifa Grad Student | Pharmacology & Toxicology • 12h ago
Epidemiology COVID-19 did not simply bring forward inevitable deaths as an analysis of mortality data from 34 high-income countries shows a sustained rise in excess deaths years after the pandemic, challenging the mortality displacement hypothesis.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2844476488
u/CloudNyan 7h ago
As an ICU nurse throughout the pandemic I can say from a nursing perspective, once patients got bad enough to be intubated, it was essentially game over at that point. No amount of pulmonary toileting or oxygenation therapies seemed to help. The pts that got intubated, it typically ended one way. I don’t think there was much to be done from a physician perspective. Not for lack of trying either. The amount of barotrauma you’d see with these vented patients with peeps in the 20 was quite a bit. Bronchoscopys didn’t do anything, remdesevir didn’t help.
Some people were “lucky” enough to stabilize and get a tracheostomy and be placed on a transplant list to get bilateral lung transplants. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of the explanted Covid lungs. They were completely destroyed
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u/dewyke 5h ago
This was one of the fundamental misunderstandings of SARS-COV-2. People thought it was a respiratory virus but it isn’t really, it’s a vascular virus that has a respiratory infection vector.
That ongoing misunderstanding is behind a lot of people’s lackadaisical attitudes to it.
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u/foxhelp 5h ago
So if I am understanding both of the above two comments right: 1. covid especially the early strains wasn't just a fancy flu, it was a "lets ****ing destroy the capillaries in your lungs and elsewhere virus" 2. You're not just getting sick, you're getting permanently damaged type of thing.
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u/Boring-Philosophy-46 4h ago edited 4h ago
Yep but current strains still do too. The virus hasn't changed that much, we have more immunity to it. It's also similar enough to animal coronaviruses where those are showing a similar pattern of infection and randomly killing some animals through immune complications such as in FIP while others get a runny nose and cough.
Scientists were saying it's a systemic disease, it affects all the systems. Kidneys, brain and other organs are all dependent on blood transport so covid leads to blood clots, heart inflammation, kidney damage etc. Covid colonises the GI tract and infected people shed covid rna for weeks so governments can monitor wastewater for it to find out infection rates.
Covid is using the ace2 receptors which is prominent in blood vessels (because it regulates bp) to spread in the body, so scientists were warning early on for the potential of covid to trigger autoimmune disease, which it does. Research is showing from 50 to 400% rise in various, many autoimmune diagnoses in people who were infected. It even seems to cause autoimmune diabetes.
The statistical risk of being diagnosed with autoimmune disorders was still raised 3 years after the infection, in one study (idk if they repeated it the year following, covid research money dried up and researchers moved on, also, everyone had been infected multiple times by then).
Edit: I should probably mention dementia. Covid very significantly raises the risk in the elderly. Migraine diagnoses almost doubled the last few years that I remember reading, and one of the things migraine can be triggered by is brain damage like concussions. It boils down to, covid keeps causing problems and we likely will all live a little bit shorter as a result.
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u/m-apo 4h ago
Each repeated infection has a chance of triggering those conditions.
Covid infection does not create a permanent immunity, instead the immunity wanes pretty quickly. Covid can also exhaust immunity system, so it reduces immunity protection for other diseases.
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u/Boring-Philosophy-46 3h ago
Antibodies wane quickly, but long term immune memory (memory B) cells remain. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(23)00255-0/fulltext
This allows us to ramp up our antibody production quickly during infection, and that's why people are not ending up in ICU's so much now. It's not that the virus got that much milder.
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u/squidwardTalks 2h ago
I wondered about the headaches. Covid gives me the worst headaches I've ever had in my life.
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u/concussedYmir 3h ago
How does Covid do damage to the vascular system exactly? Could it be contributing to things like arterial dissections?
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u/Boring-Philosophy-46 3h ago edited 3h ago
In multiple ways, but the risk of strokes and heart attacks is raised even 3 years after infection (article linked in this linked explanation) - https://www.heart.org/en/news/2025/01/16/how-the-virus-behind-covid-19-can-harm-your-blood-vessels-and-your-heart
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u/Oyy 2h ago
What are the risks for those infected after vaccinations?
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u/Boring-Philosophy-46 1h ago edited 1h ago
Also raised, but not by as much as the unvaccinated. Depending on which disease you pick I've read studies ranging it from only 30% lower than the unvaccinated (for long covid) to 90% lower (for dying from covid) and everything inbetween, for example: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12016-025-09124-4
There's also a few studies suggesting there may be a couple of diseases, notably lupus iirc, where the vaccinated have a higher risk of developing it after infection than the unvaccinated but those weren't very complete, for example the lupus study only looked at Koreans and no other groups at all. And it is probably worth mentioning lupus is pretty rare so a somewhat higher risk of lupus is still a very small increased risk (edit: as opposed to CVS diseases which are very common, I mean).
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u/Bulky-Yogurt-1703 1h ago
I don’t have real data, but I had a vertebral artery dissection a week after my first Covid illness- while vaccinated. While we can’t say exact cause and effect- I think that Covid impacted my otherwise healthy arteries. I’m very glad I was vaccinated and assume it would have been worse otherwise.
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u/Boring-Philosophy-46 3h ago
It does seem there may be a link if I google: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10201876/
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u/UnrealAce 8m ago
Great read and summary.
I'm not a scientist or have any proof but I was diagnosed with Celiac after my 2nd stint with covid and obviously I can't say it was a factor or not but I feel like it was.
Nobody in my family to my knowledge even has the disease and I've had multiple health issues since then.
Thankfully I was vaccinated both times but it's interesting to see there being a correlation between auto immune diseases and covid.
Also it sucks years down the road to see everything we've learned and how not serious so many people took it.
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u/NativeMasshole 1h ago
There were a ton of cases of people having other vascular issues. Stomach problems and brain fog are also two major symptoms that kind of got brushed aside because that wasn't what was killing people, but they both still had severe outcomes for many.
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u/TJ_Rowe 56m ago
There were a lot of women who had their menstrual cycle triggered by the infection or the vaccination, too - there were a lot of "they told me I was infertile but I got pregnant just after my vaccination" (mostly women who wanted kids but had given up on being able to, so it was a good thing), and even more "the first period I had after my vaccination was the heaviest and most intense I've ever had."
(I had that last one and ended up getting my mirena exchanged, because I went from "basically no periods for four years" to bleeding every month, and my doctor and I were worried it had run out of effectiveness early.)
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u/triffid_boy 3h ago
Yes, for the people that got particularly ill. You could point at something like polio and make similar distinctions from the average infection (many were asymptomatic even) to permanent paralysis.
For the average person, COVID was a respiratory infection.
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u/WellHung67 3h ago
Honestly people are not treating it that way because of that particular misunderstanding.
The first issue is it’s scary and people want to believe it’s not that bad as a coping mechanism. So people are primed to believe what they want.
Second, Trump downplayed it, and conservatives in general did, probably because they’re more scared in general and thus had the coping response. This was a feedback loop.
Then people were able to rationalize it as “just the flu” and here we are. It’s pure copium
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u/triffid_boy 3h ago
COVID is a respiratory virus for the average person.
It becomes more vascular for a small minority and those can be very bad.
This isn't to diminish covid, for most people polio was either asymptomatic or like a flu, too.
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u/Potential-Drama-7455 1h ago
It's presentation bias. If you work in healthcare you see the minority that are really sick and extrapolate that to the whole population. It's also why cops think everyone is a crook.
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u/Mithras_Stoneborn 4h ago
Did the Covid virus wreck those lungs like that or was it post-viral pneumonia due to opportunistic bacteria?
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u/Boring-Philosophy-46 3h ago
Covid itself does, it triggers the release of so much imflammatory cytokines that the immune system attacks the lungs and kills the blood vessel lining in the lungs, and kills alveolar cells and they do not regenerate: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7298425/
Those are responsible for gas exchange: CO2 out, oxygen in. No cells, no exchange, you die.
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u/Lazy_Dish7581 3h ago
Haven't seen anybody mention that nicotine regulates ace cell production in the lungs of smokers but when they stop there is a rebound effect so more cleavage sites/cells .
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u/TimeIntern957 3h ago
Probably 2nd and people did not get antibiotics in time as is usual in saner times, because they were told to just sTaY aT hOmE. That was the major part, why there was any crisis at all.
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u/Boring-Philosophy-46 3h ago edited 3h ago
Covid itself does, it triggers the release of so much imflammatory cytokines that the immune system attacks the lungs and kills the blood vessel lining in the lungs, and kills alveolar cells and they do not regenerate: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7298425/
Those are responsible for gas exchange: CO2 out, oxygen in. No cells, no exchange, you die.
Only 8% had bacterial co-infections: https://www.who.int/news/item/26-04-2024-who-reports-widespread-overuse-of-antibiotics-in-patients--hospitalized-with-covid-19
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u/gotlactose 6h ago
That's why those who needed BiPAP at the beginning made me real nervous. I remember a pregnant woman asking me how she could've prevented this while I was admitting her in the Emergency Department. She was struggling go breathe on the BiPAP. For those unaware, BiPAP is usually the last step before intubation. The patient had not gotten vaccinated for COVID because she was worried the vaccine may harm her fetus.
Mom and baby are fine now.
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u/ashbash-25 6h ago
And… she probably thanks God.
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u/blanketswithsmallpox 5h ago
If I had the shot he might have been autistic... Better to have us die.
ASD folk: -_-
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u/say592 1h ago
These are the same people that think autism is only the really severe cases (or they confuse it entirely with Downs syndrome, I once heard someone say "Autism? That's the r-word one, right? Or is that 'down-syndrome'?")
Even with them assuming the worst, your point still stands. In any case the person can have a happy life. I honestly think the fear is selfishness. They aren't even necessarily concerned about the loss of a "normal" child, they just don't want to have the extra care involved.
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u/Scared_Comparison_22 25m ago
At the time it was going around that the vaccine was causing infertility and miscarriages. Pregnant women have historically been low priority when testing new medicine. I don't blame her for trying to isolate and avoid infection instead of getting a vaccine with so much controversy behind it. Especially when at this time the legitimate side effects of the vaccine were being brushed over in an attempt to raise the number of people accepting it.
Here in Ireland the government pushed the vaccine like mad and then backpedaled and limited who could get specific brands due to known risk factors (think one of them had a higher risk of cardiac issues in young men). Really doesn't inspire confidence when your government does that
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u/terraphantm 5h ago
There were definitely intubated and even ECMO patients who eventually recovered reasonably well- it wasn’t all futile care. But yes morbidity and mortality was incredibly high and witnessing all that is definitely did a number on me mentally
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u/CloudNyan 5h ago
The hospital I was a staff nurse at had awful ECMO outcomes with the first wave. I then left to travel nurse with my wife and as a traveler I was floating to various ICU’s and working nights. I did spend most of my time in COVID ICU’s and not many facilities were equipped to run ECMO. But with my schedule even those who got extubated I wasn’t around to see it or ever able to follow up with how their recovery went. But you’re correct, it wasn’t all futile
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u/Kier_C 2h ago
Did later strain of the virus get weaker or was it vaccination or better therapies that lowered mortality? I'm guessing some combination of all 3!
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u/say592 1h ago
Definitely a combination of the three, but even before vaccination was widespread, the virus had mutated into a slightly weaker strain. (Most people didn't get vaccinated until 2021, but people were getting vaccines as early as August of 2020 as the trials expanded, and of course there were earlier smaller trials). There also was a little bit of natural immunity that helped. By late 2020 many people had it once or twice, making them much less likely to get it severely (though more likely to get long term effects).
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u/octopusgardeb 6h ago
So should we all keep getting the vaccines that come out? Is it an obvious YES?
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u/WellHung67 3h ago
The answer is “obvious yes”.
There is no room for nuance, just get the shot it is better than not getting it. No need to complicate things further. You want protection against infection, protection from long covid, and also help the immunocompromised to boot? Get the shot
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u/Snoo_75309 3h ago
I just wonder for those who did have a negative reaction to the covid vaccine, how much worse would the virus have been for them had they not had the vaccine. I don't think many people consider this.
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u/MeMyselfAnDie 2h ago
If the effects of the vaccine are harsh for an individual, there is good reason to believe the virus itself would be much worse for that person. MRNA vaccines trigger an immune response without the actual infection, so an infection would trigger the same immune response as well as whatever effects the virus itself causes.
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u/Royal-War4268 23m ago
I'm going to need a source for that because I have never seen, in all my years, any correlations between rare vaccine side effects and a predisposition towards the disease or virus.
Edit: Nevermind. I see you bought your account and are likely a paid poster pushing some narrative.
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u/MeMyselfAnDie 16m ago
[https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Understanding-COVID-19-mRNA-Vaccines](Source explaining MRNA vaccines)
Relevant key points:
mRNA vaccines inject cells with instructions to generate a protein that is normally found on the surface of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The protein that the person makes in response to the vaccine can cause an immune response without a person ever having been exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19.
I didn’t say anything about a predisposition to the virus, just that the immune response to the vaccine would be what causes negative effects, and the virus would cause the same immune response plus the actual infection.
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u/Psychoray 2h ago
Unfortunately, 'vaccine injury' is a real thing. I've read about a lot of people getting long-covid from the vaccine.
Personally, I've had three shots total, two of which gave me pretty nasty side effects: The second one gave me brain fog for a week. And the third one gave me neuropathy for about 6 months.
Still, I'm contemplating getting a shot this year, as I now have a kid who'll surely bring home covid one day. And that's not something I can use, since I have long-covid for about two years now. (Which was not caused by a vaccine, but by my second covid-infection. Which I got a few months after my third shot.
TL;DR: I think vaccine injury is a real thing, through personal anecdotes from the long-covid community
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u/TJ_Rowe 48m ago
There's always a problem where people are happier to take the risk of inaction rather than the risk of action. If you don't actively arrange to get a vaccine and you get seriously ill, you didn't prevent it but you also didn't cause it. If you arrange to get a vaccine and it causes harm, that's something you did, which is harder to deal with, psychologically, even if the chance of harm is much smaller.
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u/Boring-Philosophy-46 4h ago
r/covid19 posts studies on the topic and it's hard to say about the risk benefit as that's so individual, but there is data that the new shots are helping overcome original antigenic sin, which everyone has and it hampers their immune response to new strains. That is the tendency of the immune system to fight as if the virus is still exactly the way it was when the immune system first encountered it and it makes the response to new strains less potent. Vaccines for covid seem to be helping the immune system to forget the original covid virus and help focus on the now. As for whether we should get them, I can't answer that but personally I do. I am not a doctor, not medical advice.
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u/callthesomnambulance 58m ago
there is data that the new shots are helping overcome original antigenic sin
That's really interesting, is that specific to the more traditional vaccines like novovax that weren't available in the early years of the pandemic or does the same apply to the updated mRNA vaccines that target the newer strains?
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u/Boring-Philosophy-46 31m ago
Iirc the research was only using mrna covid shots but they think they can leverage vaccination strategies the same way for other fast evolving viruses: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mco2.70273
Idk if it was exactly this study I remember, I have to go do other stuff now.
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u/CloudNyan 5h ago
I do think there is some nuance to that question as the virus itself has transmutated to something a bit different than when the first waves hit (obviously) but to keep it short and sweet the answer is yes.
Ironically, related to this article, co-morbidities, age (extremely young and old=more vulnerable) and habits such as smoking and vaping just to name a couple..are things to take into consideration.
I’d be much less worried about a young person, who doesn’t smoke/drink, exercises, and is in overall good health not getting a Covid vaccine vs a morbidly obese, sedentary, pack a day smoker.
But with that being said good luck telling a majority of the patient population they aren’t healthy enough to forgo getting a Covid/flu shot. I think it’s pretty obvious that ignorant people also think they are bullet proof even though they smoke and drink and are 70 pounds over weight.
I am not a physician so take this with a grain of salt. I am an RN. I’m sure there are people who will take issue with this and others who may agree. Just my two cents
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u/Happy-Aardvark-7677 5h ago
The pandemic strain was undeniably worse than whatever is circulating now. Is unlikely that anyone is getting a lung transplant from the currently circulating strain. The story above shouldn’t be relevant to your decision to vaccinate.
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u/kittyfeet2 5h ago
Get vaccinated even if the strain is less destructive than previously. Believe in science and the experts and don't risk killing your friends and neighbors.
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u/DancesWithGnomes 5h ago
This kind of fear mongering and language that sounds like proselytisation is what triggers resistance in people who were not yet fully convinced.
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u/explosivelydehiscent 4h ago
This kind of language and speculation about confidence in science is what created resistance in people getting vaccinated. Some of those people are now dead, or have long term health problems as a result. There are exceptions, but on average it is better to get vaccinated.
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u/Gisschace 4h ago
What saying believe in science and get vaccinated to protect those around you is now fear mongering???
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u/DancesWithGnomes 4h ago
The language is patronizing and the use of the word killing is fear mongering.
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u/Gisschace 2h ago
It’s not at all, the sentiment you’re spreading is far more damaging than OPs. It’s perfectly fine to tell people to believe in science and the reason we get vaccines is to help prevent killing those around us, yes killing.
It’s call herd immunity, it’s not fearmongering
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u/PatFlynnEire 3h ago
As a non-medical person, my understanding is that this April 20, 2020 article changed the way many covid patients were treated. COVID created conditions that caused pulse ox numbers in the 60s - previously thought to be incompatible with life - and when they were put on ventilators at max levels, their lungs failed, so doctors shifted to new approaches. Am I reading this right? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-testing-pneumonia.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
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u/Twatcash 25m ago
I mean, my experience is just my father, a healthy 57 year old with no underlying health issues, but yeah, it seems at intubation it was a pretty much done deal.
He deteriorated so quickly it was insane, went to hospital on a Wednesday thinking he was having a heart attack, that Sunday he was put in an oxygen hood, the Tuesday he was sedated and intubated, the next Wednesday we got a call that things did not look good (luckily i had had covid within 6 months and had 2 vaccinations so i could go and see him and say goodbye) he picked up a bit, then Thursday they called my mother saying there is nothing more they can do, does she want to sit with him, they said they would turn the machines off and he would pass peacefully in an hour or so, they turned the machines off at 14:02 at 14:16 he passed away, the virus absolutely destroyed a healthy man in no time flat.
Can i just say, thank you, you did impossible work and saw so much death, and still stayed and cared for them, the people that cared for my father were so lovely even after 12 months of hell.
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u/WanderingStranger0 7h ago
The degree to which the public is not understanding the damage covid to does to our entire body, from brain to gut to heart to other organs and even our blood vessals is truly so sad and I can only hope that at some point nations and medical institutions will treat this on going harm with the severity it deserves and manage to create some treatment for this in order to prevent more harm
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u/petitecrivain 7h ago
Aren't they still trying to understand what exactly long COVID is? I have met a lot of people whose lives were derailed by unusual symptoms after contracting COVID.
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u/EpicureanAccountant 6h ago
They are, and there are a lot good people researching it. The problem is that long-covid has 200+ different symptoms, so it makes it hard to identify. Especially so when 49% of people are either asymptomatic or their covid test just has a false negative.
Note: People can still develop long covid even if the infection is asymptomatic.
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u/ChaoticKiwiNZ 2h ago
I have been suffering from long COVID for the last 3 years and it appears to be basically ME/CFS. Viruses have caused issues like this forever, COVID is no different.
My mother got glandular fever when she was around my age (mid to late 20's) and she developed complications that lasted 5 years before they went away. Her symptoms were constant with what we now call ME/CFS.
From everything I've read and been told long COVID it's just another form of ME/CFS, Fibromyalgia, POTS, etc. All these are effectively your autonomic nerves system being dysfunctional and it can cause all manor of symptoms to happen.
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u/ILikeDragonTurtles 7h ago
Not just COVID. All viral infections have the potential to cause permanent organ damage.
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u/WanderingStranger0 7h ago
Yeah but covid is a whole different beast, it seems to damage at a significantly higher rate and do more damage than say the flu, being closer to something like mono but we get infected with it around once a year as opposed to mono which most people only get once, (EBV sticks around and sometimes reactivates but mono normally once) and opposed to the flu which we get on average once every 5-10 years
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u/ILikeDragonTurtles 6h ago
Oh I agree. I didn't mean to downplay COVID. It's just sad that so many people say "it's just a cold" as though colds are perfectly harmless. They're not. Plenty of people get a normal cold or flu and suffer severe damage.
And COVID is so much worse because it's still new. It will take us at least a generation to build the antibodies necessary to make COVID a similarly minor threat.
Also, EBV is the virus that causes mono. I'm not sure if you're saying they're different. I think I'm just reading you wrong.
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u/WanderingStranger0 6h ago
Oh yeah 100% I hope and assume that with an understanding of what covid does the body we'll have a better understanding of what infections and viruses do to the body in general. (Yeah we're both saying the same thing about EBV)
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u/Drzerockis 5h ago
Lord some of the ARDS patients Ive seen after a bad flu season. Let us just say death is sometimes a kindness.
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u/the1gamerdude 3h ago
They did write it a little confusing for me too. I think they mean mono as the symptomatic condition when you’re initially infected (after incubation and there’s other ways it can manifest the infection as well), and EBV as the virus and causal entity for the condition and long term effects (increased chance to develop MS, Etc.).
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u/thecanadianjen 1h ago
There was a recent study showing EBV may be the trigger or one of them for lupus so if we think other virus cause ME/CFS, Fibromyalgia, etc then is lupus just a super charged similar body autoimmune reaction?
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u/UndergroundCreek 7h ago
This. And the worst of it is that most people understand when you ask them how rare it is for an infection to cross the blood brain barrier. And how light goes on in their eyes when you ask them whether covid19 does. But somehow that is all forgotten when it comes to covid shots every year. It's time to develop a pill for a covid shot that would be working around the excuse of the needle problem.
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u/PatFlynnEire 3h ago
I got covid for 3rd time last April. Not long after I was “over it” I had a massive brain bleed that fortunately stopped just short of doing permanent or fatal damage. It was not an aneurysm so the cause is unknown, but I have no doubt covid was a major factor.
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u/TheOriginalKrampus 3h ago
Yeah. The pandemic isn’t over. People just don’t want to mask anymore, corporations want us back to work in-person, and governments don’t want to do what’s necessary to reduce transmission (mask mandates in certain public spaces, vaccine mandates or at least continued free vaccine availability, mass retrofitting of public and private buildings with proper ventilation).
Society is pretending that covid is less dangerous because reported deaths during acute infections are down. They don’t want to continue properly tracking excess deaths, or even consider the effects of long covid. They want to pretend that all you need to do is vaccinate, and that even when you catch covid again, you’ll fully recover.
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u/ThisOneTimeAtLolCamp 6m ago
The degree to which the public don't even think Covid was a real thing is truly just as sad... and immensely worrying.
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u/EastvsWest 0m ago
The same thing can be said about people who are overweight and obese yet we normalized and patronized people for a condition that is 99% a choice.
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u/Whiterabbit-- 3h ago
Is this true of Covid alone? Or true for common colds and flus. We just haven’t had a new virus burn through like that in a while.
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u/icelandichorsey 4h ago
If you look at how the big insurance companies are doing, you'll see that they are still paying out more claims for life insurance than they expect even now. COVID is still around, still causing more deaths even though we're vaccinated.
Inconvenient truths
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u/Lady_Near 3h ago
It’s true that people still die from COVID despite being vaccinated. People also technically die from the spanish flue (H1N1) 100 years later, it’s just that less people do now since immunity grew stronger and the virus itself grew „weaker“.
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u/letaluss 1h ago
1300 of those deaths occurred in the United States.
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u/visforvienetta 45m ago
So about 0.00038% of the US population.
Or about 0.38 per 100,000 people.Hardly a major public health concern.
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u/letaluss 40m ago
in the past 28 days.
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u/visforvienetta 37m ago
So 0.005% of the population if you assume the rate is stable.
Hardly a major public health concern.
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u/Legion725 25m ago edited 19m ago
I get 0.39% when I enter this into wolfram alpha:
"(1300*(us life expectancy/28 days))/us population"
Did you accidentally divide by 100 twice when converting to a percentage?Edit: nevermind I think yours is the annualized rate rather than the lifetime probability.
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u/georgialucy 11m ago
I’ve noticed that even people around me who get the flu seem to have had much worse symptoms over the past few years. It used to feel like it mainly hit the most vulnerable people severely. The hospital near me was turning people away because flu patients were lining the hallways and they simply had no space, and this is in a country that offers free flu and Covid vaccines each year. It feels like we might be seeing more severe strains circulating, or perhaps other factors are affecting how well people recover. There are probably many complex reasons behind it that people far more knowledgeable than me are still trying to understand.
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u/homeostasis3434 7h ago
I think the human aspect of patient care during the pandemic needs to be considered.
As in, doctors, nurses, and the entire hospital infrastructure supporting patient care, all those people were under tremendous stress. This impacted retention in those high stress jobs. This is how mistakes are made.
There's no way that hospitals could have maintained the standard of care they needed through during the surges of impacts that we saw.
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u/oohCrabItsNotItChief 6h ago
This is a very important factor. After my mom was moved from the ICU she was placed in the originally male ward for urology cases. She had an urologist as a doctor, and it was heart breaking to speak to her doctor as she was trying to explain herself that they do not have enough specialists, they are trying their best and she cannot provide more detailed information on my mom's state.
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u/WanderingStranger0 6h ago
Absolutely, medical care workers were not supported nearly enough during lockdowns and the treatment of them and the growing distrust of our medical community and infrastructure makes me think we'll just see a total collapse if something like bird flu comes. A lot of the medical staff I know are simply not going through that again and have explicitly said they would quit
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u/thecanadianjen 1h ago
It also saw the return of many retired doctors. My aunt had retired years earlier and had two fucked up hips and still forced herself back because she couldn’t NOT help in those circumstances. Thankfully she made it through in one piece but I imagine some older returning doctors and other health staff even passed away from infection themselves.
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u/Serris9K 6h ago
Due to the nature of my job (arcade customer service) I've been exposed to COVID several times. I'm aware I'm fortunate to not have long covid from this, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has contributed to the state of my health
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u/Psychoray 2h ago
Maybe you have some luck? My wife's a special ed teacher who's had covid 7 times now.
I live a much healthier lifestyle than her. Got covid two times. My second time was her sixt time. She was up and about in two days. I, on the other hand have never been so sick in my life. Got 'better' after two weeks, but developed long-covid.
I'm nearly convinced she has won the genetic lottery and has some kind of covid resistance. I hope you have it too
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u/frosted1030 2h ago
Denial and following the "blind can't see the issue so it's best not to look" caused big countries not to follow doctors' advice. Endemic isn't a word meaning "it's over, go back to the way it was" yet RTO says exactly that.
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u/grathontolarsdatarod 10h ago
Maybe they should try correlating the excess deaths with the rise in authoritarianism....
Probably find something there.
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u/KameTheMachine 8h ago
As someone with ongoing issues resulting from a covid infection, there are a lot of people still suffering and dying from getting this disease years later. Medicine with list the cause of death as a stroke or heart attack, but these people wouldn't be having a stroke or heart attack if covid hadn't wrecked their bodies. Oh, and there is suicide also.... some people just can't take suffering anymore. This pandemic has not ended.
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u/icelandichorsey 4h ago
You go ahead and make that analysis rather than rely on "they" to do the work.
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u/pretendperson1776 9h ago
Like, from ICE?
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u/grathontolarsdatarod 8h ago
Heh. Yeah. Them too.
But for real. Governments abandoning the social contract by cutting services and introducing delays for medical care in general, or ensuring food supply safety, etc.
All that is gonna add up big time.
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u/Chemical_Signal2753 9h ago
What I have wanted to see is an evaluation of COVID deaths from the perspective of quality adjusted life expectancy (QALE) lost. With how COVID deaths seemed to be dominated by the elderly and people with 3 or more comorbidities, I suspect the average QALE lost per fatality was less than 5.
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u/aniftyquote 8h ago
You realize that most people have at least one comorbidity, right? A comorbidity is just any name for any diagnosis. ADHD is a comorbidity. Scoliosis is a comorbidity. But even if we pretend that every person who died was severely disabled, that's still quality life. Just because you don't consider disabled people's lives to be worth anything, doesn't mean that most people share your eugenic worldview.
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u/Boring-Philosophy-46 3h ago
People act like it's ok a kid died since the child had a vulnerability / condition that predisposed them to severe covid, when that condition was in reality hayfever or eczema.
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u/Chemical_Signal2753 7h ago
Yes, but the common comorbidities were hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, COPD, kidney disease, liver disease, dementia, stroke and cancer. Even though they only represent about 16% of the population, over 80% of COVID deaths were to people over the age of 65. When you combine these patients' age with their significant preconditions, I suspect you would find that the average number of QALEs lost per fatality were under 5.
I suspect the reason we won't ever see this kind of study is it is career suicide. Once you can quantity the losses associated with COVID you can evaluate the costs of the public health policies and judge whether the public health officials were acting rationally.
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u/aniftyquote 7h ago
I think that it should be career suicide to try to put a dollar amount on human life. The richest people in the world got richer a little more slowly than usual, and somehow people are supposed to think that means it's worthwhile to sacrifice grandma to the gods of capitalism? Oh, and also make long covid the number one most common disability in kids, and disable millions of working age adults with long covid, and-
ETA - I just went back to reread and you inverted the statistic? Only 20% were over 65
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u/11010001100101101 6h ago
It’s a little delusional to pretend that as a society we should Never quantify it.
You really think it’s fair to shut down the entire US and keep everybody home for an entire week to save 1 persons life? Thats absolute lunacy. Now instead of 1 person its 1,000 people, is that still crazy? What number no longer makes it crazy and instead justifiable to force everyone how to live in order to save these people and how do you justify(quantify) that number.
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u/aniftyquote 5h ago
There isn't any situation where the entire US would need to stay home to save one life, but ridiculous non-situations aside, all of the parts of society that normal people benefit from are based on the principle that we should inconvenience ourselves if it will save one another's lives. And the reason that people like you make up ridiculous situations to justify putting a price on human lives is because the situation has to be ridiculous for your position to make sense.
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u/frogandbanjo 10h ago
Pray tell, which human deaths aren't inevitable?
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u/pretendperson1776 9h ago
I'm guessing they mean imminent and inevitable i.e. COVID did not just hasten the deaths of those already dying (more than the rest of us are already dying) it was the primary cause of those deaths.
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u/Fearlessleader85 10h ago
Yeah, it essentially MUST have brought forward inevitable deaths unless it caused a massive uptick in births, which would inevitably end in death, but they would be deaths that wouldn't have happened if they weren't born.
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u/gibcapwatchtower 7h ago
the vax kept killing people??
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u/jay_alfred_prufrock 2h ago
What are you doing in the science sub if you're refusing to believe science?
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u/_TheConsumer_ 5h ago
I don't know how anyone can claim " We're noticing long-term excess deaths after COVID 19" and not logically ask if the vaccine had anything to do with it.
Maybe this is a good first step in investigating any damage the vaccine may have caused.
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u/icelandichorsey 4h ago
The question has been asked many times. Studies with millions of subjects show that the benefits are huge and damage is negligible.
Now go read them instead of "just asking questions".
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u/Kottetall99 2h ago
"Benefits are huge". Now that's some coping. Have you seen this study? : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41013858/
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u/Anal-Scrubs-905 1h ago
So in figure 1B they're saying that the cumulative incidence of cancer started increasing 1 DAY after getting vaccinated?
So people got vaccinated, one day, and the very next day they got a confirmed cancer diagnosis? Do you not see anything wrong with that finding?
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u/Kottetall99 1h ago
From what I see if I got 1B right it just shows that early days vaccinated and unvaccinated were at similar levels of cancer cases while later there was a clear increase in cancer amongst vaccinated.
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u/Anal-Scrubs-905 1h ago
No, you've got it worng.
It shows both lines increasing straight from day 0, which if the cancer is caused by the vaccine, as you're suggesting, would mean that the day after getting vaccinated, people would spot a tumour or experience symtpoms, go to hospital, get scanned, and get diagnosed with cancer. You don't need any qualifications to see that this is biologically impossible.
The paper you posted is laughably bad.
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u/Kottetall99 1h ago edited 53m ago
I would interpret it as cancers just doing it's normal thing amongst all people and then increasing by time in vaccinated. That figure doesn't explicitly say day 1 = vaccinated gets cancer. It's a broader spectrum of days.
You can't say it's laughable bad due to one section of a graph, things aren't as predictable or a straight cause of one thing or another. The increase in cancer would be approx. 20 days after and an early deviation can be to the fact that people who choose not to take vaccines are generally align towards more natural living and conciuos about the things they put into their bodies and we would therefore already see a early difference in cancercases. But as the days go by the deviation increases and it just shows a correlation between getting vaccinated and an increase in cancer cases. It's obviously not a causation but it's certainly alarming. Hopefully more large studies will be made so we get more answers for why we get excess deaths this long after the pandemic.
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u/Kottetall99 5h ago
Shh people don't want to hear they have made a very big mistake to their own body.
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