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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

How do you interpret a zero negative excess death rate? Sweden has over 1000 Covid attributed deaths, but almost no difference in weekly deaths compared to the same weeks in 2019. Death numbers are extremely noisy and especially in the flu season with the flu one year perhaps twice as deadly as the previous year.

Covid restrictions have also reduced (a lot) some other seasonal diseases like flu and noro/caliciviruses, so you get an effect in the other direction too. When those that die from Covid are in the highest age groups it's not unthinkable that a part of them would have been killed by the flu too, only the flu didn't come this year because of Covid. Perhaps that's why we have a lot Covid deaths but no excess deaths? Who knows. It's too noisy and has too many dependencies to be very useful I think.

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The idea is that if your country/region doesn't have excess total deaths, then whatever pandemic restrictions and policy you've implemented is good enough.

To make an absurd example: Duterte in the Philippines has allegedly ordered the military to shoot at people who violate curfew. That helps bring corona-related deaths down drastically, but if your population is dying because you're shooting them or they're starving to death because they can't leave their homes, that's obviously not a good whole-society policy.

And that's why staring at only the corona-related numbers is wrong.

I'm also following the debate in Sweden, which has less restrictions de jure than its neighbours, but people are de facto self-isolating and keeping their distance to almost the same degree. There are lots of people in Sweden screaming that government absolutely must impose a stricter lockdown because the corona-related numbers are worse than in Denmark and Norway, who have stricter lockdowns, therefore Sweden should also follow suit.

But if Sweden doesn't have excess mortality, if Sweden's total mortality rate is the same as Denmark and Norway, while Sweden's economy is less restricted, then I would argue that Sweden is doing the right thing. Or at least not doing the wrong thing. :-)

> The idea is that if your country/region doesn't have excess total deaths, then whatever pandemic restrictions and policy you've implemented is good enough

I disagree with this inference. Different countries have different demography, different weather, different cultural habits, different infrastructures, etc. On top of that, we still don't know how many people would only have benign symptoms when they are infected.

I would refrain anyone to compare pandemic restrictions with a correlation in total death of a country. There are simply too many unknowns, both politically and scientifically

Less people driving?

Didn't think about that. Looking at figures it's less than 6/week killed in traffic, while all deaths is 1700/week, so it's unlikely to make a dent. Easter is probably one of the worst traffic weeks, but even then it's probably not enough for a difference.

Also perhaps fewer elective medical operations, which result in fewer iatrogenic deaths (3rd leading cause of death, at least in the US).

This is a good candidate. Although some of this effect might be countered by people dying because they didn't get elective treatment.

Regardless: when you change pretty much every parameter of society (risk behavior, driving, crime, health care, ...) I don't understand how one can use the overall death statistics and try to attribute them to Covid.

I think the elective treatment theory is a better point than my driving guess. If you have a disease and your options are to get surgery or take medicine, you are probably being pushed towards non-surgical options, even if that would have overall worse results on average. This might ultimately raise the mortality rate, but would temporarily depress it.

Anecdotally, I definitely find myself trying to be safer right now. I have avoided ladder work on my house and been super careful when using a knife. I just do not want to go to a hospital right now.

I think looking at the overall death statistics are super interesting though. If traffic deaths fall, that is in some ways a byproduct of Covid. If more cancer patients die, that is also a byproduct. All of this goes into factoring how much damage and protection both the disease and the quarantine orders have caused.

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