Covid 19 excess mortality: How many deaths can it be?

 "At the latest since "TeamOpening" called for a debate about how many deaths from Covid-19 our society is willing to accept in the further course of the pandemic, we can no longer avoid the painful topic of "normal deaths". It is difficult to deny that we have become accustomed to our daily efforts to stay healthy – even if it is admittedly different. German health politicians seem to be able to accept a few tens of thousands of deaths a year due to antibiotic abuse from resistant germs - as little as happens in this area - while they have apparently come to terms with a figure of around three thousand a year for traffic fatalities. Which statistically means fewer than ten deaths a day.

In any case, German Federal Minister Karl Lauterbach does not want to put up with the 400 or 500 Covid-19 deaths a day that his pandemic models predict if the current measures are canceled, even if the health infrastructure can withstand the associated stress in the intensive care units would. TeamOpening, on the other hand, objects that no minister, not even a health minister, should set the acceptable death rates.

Getting used to a "harmlessness"?

This macabre dispute could drag on for weeks - and in the end no target can be found, which the initiators of the debate will hardly regret, because they are only concerned with the right framing, as they say today: with the "more harmless" omicron variant, the virus is said to have lost its horror. The respected epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch and his team at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has now presented new figures on excess mortality between June and early December 2021 in a medRxiv preprint, which show the opposite. According to this, about 135,000 adult Americans have died from Covid-19 in the six months because they were unvaccinated - almost a thousand preventable deaths every day. One in six victims was under the age of 50.

That was still the Delta variant, one could argue, and the USA is special. That's true, but also from the Omicron variant, with more than 130 million infected people worldwide, half a million, mostly non-immunized people, have already died in just under two months. So many unnecessary deaths. How long does a pandemic have to last before you get used to such “harmlessness”?”