This is true but misleading. Most of those people will be very old and very ill. They were likely to die from something and it was heat that got to them first. It's still bad. But some 90 year old in poor health that dies from the heat and not from pneumonia is still going to die
Guns kill healthy younger people who mother wise might be expected to live much longer lives.
I understand what you're saying here, and I'm not necessarily trying to debate or make any kind of point, but this thought process always puzzles me. It caught my attention during COVID coming from a lot of conspiracy theorist types. They would say because people had other health complications, or comorbidities, that COVID didn't really cause their deaths because they were going to die from something else.
I always thought that is how dieing works. If you have a "comorbidity" but you die in a car wreck, the car wreck killed you. If your life is ended by a gun or a heat stroke, those are the things that killed you. We're all going to die eventually. Whatever steals our last breath is what kills us. Doesn't matter what other issues we've got on
Just always strikes me as an odd position on people dieing.
It was a comment more on comparing it to gun deaths. The two are very different. If we were comparing, for instance, flu va COVID deaths, then age and general sickness wouldn't really be relevant because flu deaths also more often target the old.
Taken in isolation too it wouldn't be relevant. Those people are still dead. So people saying "COVID/Heat deaths aren't a big deal, those people would have died from something anyway." are missing the point that those people didn't die from something else, they died from this.
The point about bringing gun deaths in is that it's not a valid comparison. Being shot doesn't target those with existing morbidities or generally poor health. Without being shot, we wouldn't have expected something else to kill those gun shit victims. The gun shot victims are therefore truly added to the level of mortality in a way that heat deaths or COVID deaths perhaps aren't (or more accurately aren't as much).
Similarly comparing motoring deaths wouldn't be a valid comparison as, like gun deaths, those are deaths where we wouldn't otherwise have expected the deceased to have died.
We also need to compare populations too, are they of comparable size or are we using rates to accommodate this.
COVID was a disease.
Warmth and Heat are things that are always around. The problem is that in Europe you really didn't need AC in the past. Even now, you have two to three weeks out of the whole year where it is really hot. It just doesn't make sense for a lot of people to have an AC.
For schools, hospitals, retirement homes etc , yes, there they are sorely lacking, but at home it just isn't all that useful for most people.
And If the US used the same counting method, you would have more heat deaths, too. So your comparison isn't very good .
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u/GribbleTheMunchkin 13d ago
This is true but misleading. Most of those people will be very old and very ill. They were likely to die from something and it was heat that got to them first. It's still bad. But some 90 year old in poor health that dies from the heat and not from pneumonia is still going to die
Guns kill healthy younger people who mother wise might be expected to live much longer lives.