Coronavirus: Care home deaths 'far higher' than official figures | Hacker News Reader

Coronavirus: Care home deaths 'far higher' than official figures

bbc.com

27 pointsDanBC32 comments

In the U.S., it's pretty broadly assumed that in hot-spots like NYC, the death rate is also being under-counted. Apparently, those who die in their apartments are not added to the official death-toll. Another method for finding these excess deaths is to compare January or February to the rate in the same month of 2019 and then extrapolate the expected death rate for April 2020. This number will obviously be lower than the actual death rate so the difference should be considered COVID-19 related. Note that even this is probably low since other factors like deaths from car accidents (which I would expect to be down this year) aren't considered. Since we're burying many of the dead without testing, I think the best numbers we're going to get will come from statisticians/actuaries.

It is interesting to take a look a the overall trend in total number of deaths (without filtering specifically for those attributed to COVID-19). The graphs for an area like New York clearly look like we are undercounting Coronavirus deaths and look pretty sobering: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/corona...

The only country that is counting deads at people's homes and care facilities is Sweden and they have significantly higher fatality numbers than anyone else.

They also just started looking at increase in general deaths to see if any are related to corona. I think there will be a jump in the numbers soon.

(Since this will probably come up: Despite popular belief, Sweden _is_ under partial lockdown)

We're counting covid deaths in care facilities (old-folks homes) in Canada. We're finding it (tragically) one of the largest categories.

But I'm sure you'll find it true in any country that those deaths are under reported to some extent due to some lack of testing before the first clinical diagnosis of covid in a facility earlier on in the pandemic.

Tracking this stuff is really messy, when testing just isn't available universally, and current tests are only a point-in-time confirmation. We won't have much more accurate statistics until there's a test that can tell if you were infected at some point (forget the name for that type of test).

> We're finding it (tragically) one of the largest categories

Our prime minister said it accounted for over half of the deaths.

They are counted in France, albeit not on a daily basis, which explains the irregular bump on data such as https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/

The official government stats publishes both numbers (death at hospital / death in care facilities).

Hmm no, Sweden is not the only country that is counting dead at care facilities.

See Belgium which is on top of the chart presented by Trump:

https://translate.google.be/translate?hl=fr&tab=wT&authuser=...

> Despite popular belief, Sweden _is_ under partial lockdown

Sweden has implemented voluntary restrictions on social contacts as well as a partly enforced limit on social gatherings. Some gatherings of more than 50 people are left alone by the police, e.g. recent demonstrations by illegal immigrants in Gothenburg were and are allowed to continue [1].

[1] https://www.expressen.se/gt/demonstration-pagar-utanfor-migr...

https://www.facebook.com/polisen.sodermalm/posts/33302423503...

Here's the Swedish police giving some insight in how locked down Sweden is, run it through a translation site or just look at the image to understand that 'lockdown' is not the right term for how things are handled here.

Do you know where one can get up-to-date, raw mortality numbers? CDC doesn't publish anything until they've had time to categorize them, but CDC's processes are seriously in question right now.

My understanding is that there are variable lags up the chain, and some states don't report deaths for months. NYC as it happens is a relatively prompt reporter. Not sure if there is any public information locally before it's reported upwards, e.g. if you could send volunteers to county health offices.

This was discussed fairly widely recently when people were interpreting recent decline in year over year deaths as evidence that COVID responses were saving lives (e.g. less driving). But it was almost all just typical reporting lag.

Demonstrated by an animated graphic: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/fxau85/the...

For europe: https://www.euromomo.eu/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

They are making an effort in keep things updated. Of course, they depend on the official figures of every country or state that are not very accurate at the moment. The sources that they are using in any case are there too.

Does anyone else feel like this has been a long time coming for seniors’ care homes and retirement centres? For years, I have heard many outrageous stories of elderly abuse and neglect at these types of places. I’m sure some of them aren’t terrible, but I’ve always felt they were essentially warehousing elderly people so that their families didn’t have to look after them.

All of this is of course because their offspring, the present working-age demographic, are busier than ever at work. It used to be (and perhaps still is in some countries) that people would live in multigenerational homes. Grandparents would participate in the rearing of their grandchildren and in turn receive care and support from their offspring. Houses were never empty during the day, as they so often are in the suburbs we occupy these days. Perhaps it’s time we reconsider our ideas around the nuclear family and revisit the traditional way of life.

> this is of course because their offspring, the present working-age demographic, are busier than ever at work.

Even if I was retired, I wouldn't want to spend several hours of my day nursing someone. I'm not good at that, and I don't enjoy it.

> people would live in multigenerational homes

I would much sooner live in a small apartment with my wife than have either of my parents in my house. They aren't my friends, I don't enjoy their company, I would be constantly avoiding topics that my wife and I talk about freely like politics or sexuality.

One of my parents doesn't know that I'm transgender and the other one isn't thrilled about it. I would expect a lot of negativity about that.

> I’ve always felt they were essentially warehousing elderly people so that their families didn’t have to look after them.

Maybe they're a local maximum.

We've realized that taking care of seniors, especially when they live longer than ever in gradually worsening health, doesn't sound like a good use of our time.

But euthanizing them is obviously off the table. [1] So the nursing home evolved as a way to 'politely' live as though your parents or grandparents have already died.

Nobody really likes it, but the alternatives are worse.

[1] It might have been acceptable in a small farming village in the old days where the alternative was everyone starving.

But it's hard to justify when the only thing I might lose from a multigenerational lifestyle is my own happiness, my free time, my freedom, a lot of money, and my marriage. If I only stand to lose everything _but_ my life, it sounds selfish to say I want them to live somewhere else.

Not trying to start a flamewar, but if you werr to ask the other cultures around the world that don't send their elders into the care of strangers...

the decision to stay present in the lives of their parents etc has nothing to do with what they're good at (can be learned), or enjoy.

Multi-generational homes aren't exactly a terribly safe idea either during this Covid-19 pandemic. They're suspected to be one of the reasons why some communities have had much worse death tolls than others. Younger members of the family go out to work and socialize and bring the disease back into the house.

My kids’ Boomer grandparents wouldn’t want the burden of assisting with rearing their grandchildren. We can barely get them to watch our kids for an afternoon. Seems a common theme with our friends who are parents.

Their parents’ generation would/would have though. My grandparents did a lot with me and my siblings when we were young in the 80s and 90s

By busier than ever do you mean spending 5 hours a day watching TV and surfing Reddit?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption#Stati...

Most of the TV consumption is from the elderly[1]. Maybe they're the ones who need to put down the remote?

You're absolutely right about reddit though.

[1]https://www.statista.com/chart/15224/daily-tv-consumption-by...

I'm submitting this because there are people on HN who think we're over-counting deaths to Covid-19.

This article shows that in some countries we're under-counting covid-19 deaths by thousands.

In the UK we have two counts. There's the daily count from PHE. That's the number used for sources like Worldometers. It only counts people who died in hospital who were tested positive for covid-19. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

We also have the ONS numbers. These are based on death certification and then coding by statisticians. There's some lag involved. Here's the most recent version, issued on 3rd April. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

The reality is that we're probably doing both. We're undercounting Covid-19 deaths due to the headline figures in the UK mostly only counting deaths that occur in hospitals, and also overcounting because not all of those deaths are caused by Covid-19: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51979654

Also, this is a terrible, clickbaity headline. When they say that the care home deaths are "far higher" than official figures, they mean that they're far higher than the figures for the number of deaths two weeks ago. For something that's growing exponentially. As the analysis at the bottom points out, "the hospital figures show deaths have been increasing at a similar rate", so this is sad but not exactly surprising. (It might not be exactly the same rate of growth as hospital deaths, but the numbers given in the article are only very approximate.)

The unfortunate reality is that anyone who is claiming that at this point likely has made up their mind on this. We’ve got huge problems right now with media trust.

I have never heard anyone claiming that deaths from covid-19 are over-counted.

It is clear that, if anything, they are indeed under-counted.

Edit: this is getting ridiculous being downvoted for reasonable comments. Is this HN? No serious source claims that deaths are over-counted. Ignore fake news from conspirationists. The US seem to be sinking if that what is happening on your side of the pond.

It's becoming a conservative media talking point (Tucker Carlson, Brit Hume):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/coronavirus-co...

Just my own perspective, but claims of over-counting appear to be getting more common. There were several demonstrations (granted, over-covered in the media) over the weekend in the US about opening the country up again, and accusations of inflating death toll numbers.

There were many suggestions that Italy was over-counting because anyone who died WITH COVID-19 was counted as having died OF COVID-19.

Even if you test every single death, there is the problem of determining who dies with Corona versus who dies of Corona. In the current situation, these numbers are hard to keep apart. A lot of bodies are disposed of before viral spread and cause of death are assessed. We will be able to guess at the numbers, but the error bars will remain big.

In this thread we have at least one person saying deaths are over-counted, and there are plenty of similar comments on HN.

I agree about the down voting.

This is noise. Ignore it, don't amplify it.

It’s very much conspiracy theorist stuff, but it’s definitely a thing.

Find some Republicans on Facebook the day after NYC updated their estimate of COVID-19 deaths to include unconfirmed cases.

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