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by dukeofdoom 1859 days ago
What do feeling have to do with facts. COVID has at most 1% mortality rate. It hasn't been shown to significantly increase yearly mortality rate. About the same number of people are dying as every year. The Ganges is a large river. The claim is a hyperbolic exaggeration.
2 comments

Feeling doesn't have anything to do with facts, as I pointed out to the other poster.

However in a situation with very little in the way of actual verifiable facts, what is someone actually asking for in terms of something that will support the evidence? What is a source in this environment? And at various thresholds of that, I will give you many sources (mostly medical) that will support 1-2 orders of magnitude increase. The article itself says only 196 people died in Kanpur during a 3 week period, but there were 8,000 cremations (obviously not all covid related, and without a baseline I can't tell you where this sits, but there is an implied increase given the other statements about lack of cremation space)

I would also challenge your definition of 'significant'. In the US last year, there was a 20% increase in excess deaths (0). Having an extra 20% of humans die in your country counts, I think, as significant.

Now granted it really depends on whether you are talking about India, the US, or the rest of the world but your statement is demonstrably false - in a country with good data, there were an extra 20% of humans dying last year; in a country with terrible data with an out of control epidemic and no way for people to isolate safely, the facts are we will probably never know what the true deaths are but if you're saying (and here a couple of things don't compute) about the same number of people are dying every year (?in India? how do you know that in the absence of data? and generally death statistics take several months to become solid) and the Ganges is a large river, are these two statements logically linked? And how?

(0) https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361

> What do feeling have to do with facts. COVID has at most 1% mortality rate.

The basis for this is data from places with at least some level of health care. From the reports I'm hearing, a lot of India's rural population is not making it medical care.

Also, worth mentioning that 1% of India's population is 13.8 million people.

1% of those that get the disease. Not everyone. I would expect the average Indian to fare better than the average American due to the population being younger. Some stats on age and comorbidities.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...