The USA has 900k covid deaths from 74M cases. The real number of cases are likely to be double that, but it's still a very high rate - from the richest country in the world.
If the real number of cases is double that, then that would be a death rate of ... about 0.6%. And not everyone catches the disease in one pandemic wave, so the total population death rate in the US isn't going to reach that.
And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical. It is one of those sounds-scary-not-likely scenarios that doesn't play out at scale. The part people were initially worried about - ventilators, which can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency - turned out not to even be especially useful in managing COVID.
There are basic questions about whether the hospital system would have been overwhelmed in practice. People keep saying the response was bad, and yet there aren't any instances anywhere in the world I'm aware of where the hospital system really crumbled under pressure. There were lots of instances I heard of where where some people didn't get treated, and that is bad, but not so bad that death rates more than doubled to like ~1% in a local area. And even if the hospital system literally vanished, an order of magnitude worsening from 0.6% still wouldn't get death rates to 10% of the population.
It has been 2 years. We have the data now. 10% was never a possibility although that was less clear in the opening months. Even 1% appears not to have been reached in practice with the worst response policy response of any country in the world.
The hospital system literally vanishing is not really a possible failure condition. It just doesn't work like that, medical staff will always keep trying to treat whoever they can with whatever resources they have.
The hospital system being overwhelmed looks like what you said, "some people didn't get treated". Triage assigns resources to patients based on need, if there are more patients (because there are more COVID cases) or less resources (because medical staff are getting sick too), that still doesn't mean no one is getting treated, just that people who would have gotten treated sooner before now have to wait. And while they're waiting, some of those people would die. People were worried about ventilators, but medical staff can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency either.
Also, of course, all the statistics you're mentioning are with the response.
As long as their is oxygen support and health care people show up for work you are correct.
In Mexico and other countries with less access to modern health care the death rate seems to be an order of magnitude higher. (if the CDC data is valid)
This was just a trainer pandemic. :-)
Imagine one where the children and young people are dying instead of seniors.
Amazingly, it's true, in countries like Mexico and the USA the death rate was an order of magnitude higher than in Australia: 0.23% and 0.27%, respectively, rather than 0.016%. But even in countries with good access to modern health care the rate was often pretty bad; Italy had 0.24%, the UK 0.23%, Spain 0.20%, and France also 0.20%.
> And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical.
No it isn't: the USA already rolled over and shrugged when their hospital system reached the state (mainly with regards to financing) it was in pre-pandemic.
The USA may be the richest country in the world but it doesn't mean much when facing the virus, especially considering how widespread inequalities are.
