I've been talking about making this poll for a while now and I guess it's about time.
The simple question is to guess the answer to: "What will history books say the USA death toll was for the COVID-19 pandemic?"
A couple of quick "rules".
- We're asking this question in good faith. How many actual deaths. This isn't going to be "Donald Trump becomes dictator for life in the USA ala Kim Jong-Il and the American history books say that only 4 people died". Germany is going to be like "Uh, yeah, but we estimate 500K people died". That's the number we're counting here.
- But this also means we're talking about actual deaths - like the real number not the "reported number". If you think we're massively under-reporting and have 2M deaths right now and hiding how many are actually dead, then say 2M, and assume history will get the answer correct(-ish) in the end.
- Yes, I realize this gets a little dicey because you can start talking about off the wall hypotheticals like "pilot with COVID passes out, crashes plane into nuclear plant, and 50K people die" or "the Paraguayans start experimenting with COVID and create a virus that turn us all into zombies and goodbye human race". Let's assume "standard" unknowns. But if you want to comment about that one guy on Reddit who claimed to know this was coming back in January and how it's going to mutate in bats in Brazil and could roar back with a 20% fatality rate -have at it; just show your work.
- I wrestled with this one so I'll leave it up to you, the voter. If the vaccine is unsafe and kills some people (ala the Cutter Polio vaccine), count those or don't into your tally. I probably would as people wouldn't be taking the vaccine if there were not for the virus so this would be a direct cause. However, there also hasn't been a vaccine incident that added a significant percentage to the death toll of a virus so keep that in mind.
- Things like 100K additional people died from economic distress and suicide are a lot more of a grey area. We've seen some really odd behavior with death numbers since the pandemic like a decrease in traffic fatalities that offset some of these. Do what you will with this, but I, personally, would not include them. History likely won't recognize those numbers.
- I'm guessing history will probably recognize the pandemic as over once major spikes mostly disappear or turn into a tail. Like I get that flu seasons kills 20-60K per year in the USA. But these aren't considered deaths as part of any pandemic like, say, 1968 or 1918. This is going to be a race to either a treatment (unlikely), vaccine (probably a ways off), the virus mutates into a less lethal form, or herd immunity is reached because enough of the population has gotten sick. All of these have happened historically to stop pandemics.
Here's the best estimates of where we are right now:
Johns Hopkins has us at 119K right now.
CDC has us with excess deaths between 110K-153K with a caveat that there is up to a 10 day delay on deaths.
So, at its essence, this question boils down to
"How many people actually die of COVID in the USA during what history will call the COVID-19 pandemic?"
SI