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by NotAnEconomist 2283 days ago
My back of the napkin math indicates that roughly 2x as many people will die in the US this year.

Normal deaths are 2.8M/year.

There's 330M people in the US. At 70% infection, that's 230M people. At 1% mortality, that's 2.3M excess deaths.

That's 80% of the normal deaths for a year; and since other causes of death haven't stopped... we get 180% for the year, or "twice as many".

2 comments

Most coronavirus victims were already in poor health. So your analysis is double-counting.
TBH, it's impossible to 'not double-counting'. We don't live in math.
Perhaps within the next five years we will see the number of deaths decline, as a pandemic results in people who would die in the next few years instead die earlier.