Yeah, Malaria has been taking that death toll every single year, but not many people in the US or Europe seem to give a shit (except for Bill and Melinda Gates).
Even more surprising because heart disease is a major risk factor for a severe outcome in COVID-19, and a significant number of heart disease cases are lifestyle related (and preventable).
For dementia this is explained on this page, and it’s similar with heart disease:
While a person with end-stage dementia may technically die from an infection or other medical complication, it is their severe dementia that predisposed them to that complication and made them too weak to fight it off.
This also will lead to less deaths from these causes in future years for dementia, but depending on extent and severity of the lockdown, heart disease might become an even larger problem.
If the reports of increased deaths in northern Italy (for example) are to be believed, it could well happen. COVID-19 hotspots saw triple the normal amount of mortalities, suggesting that the number of those dying as an indirect cause was at least 100% that of those officially noted as dying due to the virus.
I was genuinely shocked when I first learned that a practical technology to eradicate malaria already exists, but is considered too much of a heavy lift, politically, because it involves the deliberate extinction of one or two species of mosquito. People from poorer countries could be forgiven for drawing some blunt conclusions about where they stand in the hierarchy of international concern.
Am I a horrible person for having an internal horse race announcer calling out the chart as it progresses? “It’s malaria leading homicide, Parkison’s, and drownings. Malaria is pulling away! Malaria with a commanding lead… but wait! COVID-19 is putting on a burst of speed! It’s breaking through the pack! It’s sprinting past Hepatitis! It’s passing drugs! It’s flying past homicide and Parkinson’s. It’s malaria and COVID neck-and-neck! COVID pulls ahead! Down the back stretch into June, it’s COVID with a commanding lead!”
AFAICT it’s more just that the pandemic is quite unpredictable at all scales. Lots of things make a difference statistically, but it’s still the case that some places with a strong response will be worse off than other places with a weak response, especially on short time scales. Exponential growth is inherently clumpy, and there are geographic factors beyond anyone’s control.
(This is also why it’s fraught to rely on the rona to make political points for you; anyone can cherry-pick anomalous data to prove anything)
I want to disagree with you, but you’re right. Still, my father died of smoking. Lung cancer. They had to remove a lung. It spread. Obviously, they couldn’t remove the other lung. It was ugly. And sad. Dad had quit smoking apparently when I started (I only noticed when he stopped waking up coughing). The man couldn’t quite catch a break. He quit drinking, finally, got promoted and relocated and then his wife (mom) dies. There were a ton of people at his funeral. I would have been stunned by that were I not more or less in shock.
