No, it's not. The Atheist regularly downplays the pandemic and its death toll and ignores fairly obvious truths:
"Almost 7 million deaths have been reported to WHO, but we know the toll is several times higher – at least 20 million."
Now that regular testing and reporting of the disease has been more or less abolished even in the industrialized world, the official death toll has become even less reliable, which is why I confront The Atheist with fairly reliable statistics, in particular New Zealand's, whenever he posts unreliable claims about
"the world".
But The Atheist doesn't like reliable statistics about the pandemic. Since his only concern is finding ways to minimize the
apparent impact of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on people's health and lives, he posts whatever
seems to him to kinda prove his point. This is also the reason why he doesn't comment on the numbers in the statistics I present.
His own link, if he had actually read the Wikipedia article he links to, would help him understand why C-19 deaths tend to be underestimated:
Such deaths are sometimes evaluated via excess deaths per capita. Unlike, for instance, road or fire deaths.
As I mentioned in my post 2,919 yesterday, in 2023 so far the USA, USA
alone, has had approximately 50,000 confirmed C-19 deaths. (Unfortunately,
Our World in Data no longer gives us a more accurate number.):
(This year, so far, it's
approximately 50,000 confirmed C-19 deaths, so already 13 times more C-19 deaths in the first four months than the number of fire deaths in all of 2021.)
And yet, he pretends that C-19 kills only
"128,000 a year." In the whole effing
world! So in spite of the USA having only a very small fraction of the world's population:
Population:
World: 7.888 billion
USA: 0.332 billion
The USA is still supposed to have more than one third of the world's C-19 deaths!
The Atheist doesn't actually believe this to be true. As I have mentioned before, his behavior in this question is akin to Swedish Clutch Cargo's when he continued to post WHO's daily count of C-19 deaths around the world but always did so
before Sweden's numbers had been reported in order to make it look as if Sweden had 'Zero Covid'.
Scammers gonna scam. Minimizers gonna minimize.
ETA: This footnote is particularly interesting:
*Wikipedia may understate hepatitis deaths by a significant number, as
WHO states it's 900,000 from Hep B alone. That's a communicable disease killing more than 5 times as many as covid.
Notice that The Atheist is aware that his world numbers are unreliable, but it only occurs to him when one of the numbers he uses in his comparisons to minimize COVID-19's impact is probably underestimated. It never occurs to him (to mention) that the C-19 death toll according to official world statistics might be underestimated, too.
This is why I prefer the numbers from, for instance, New Zealand and the USA and will continue to post them whenever The Atheist comes up with his attempts at truthiness.
The Atheist refers to the world numbers (if he refers to anything specific at all) as if the number of C-19 deaths last week was reliable. I can't say if he does so deliberately imitating Clutch Cargo's tactics or not, but last week's numbers are usually much more unreliable than last year's or those from two months ago because even some of the countries that have fairly reliable statistics in the long run take their time reporting those numbers.
Our World in Data has an old (in pandemic terms) article about the problem:
Why do COVID-19 deaths in Sweden’s official data always appear to decrease? (Nov 13, 2020)
.[/sidetrack]