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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

We can make a pretty good estimate of COVID deaths by comparing against past years. There's a clear, large spike - NYC's death rate is six times the average for this time of year.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona...

Giving that we're still low on tests, if someone dies before a test of COVID-like symptoms, it makes sense to consider them a probable (and save the test for someone alive) if deaths are 6x normal - you've got a roughly 5/6 chance of being correct.

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Couldn’t the spike in nyc deaths be inflated due to the standard operating procedure of using mechanical ventilators for which 9 of 10 patients die [1]? Wasn’t there a big fuss (several articles posted here) about how mechanical ventilators were overused when less invasive methods produced better outcomes, therefore reducing mortality[2]?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-22/almost-9-...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...

Seems like it should be explored further

That's kind of incompatible with the critique 2 posts up. They asked if we could have "false positive" deaths because dead people with covid-like symptoms are labeled as covid deaths even when they are not tested (e.g. after dying at home). The people on ventilators were ones in hospitals that were treated as covid patients, those were likely to be tested - and the problem that people on ventilators have a low chance to make it is specific to covid (which is why we are seeing this, ventilators have existed for a long time, usually they don't kill people which is why it became standard operating procedure, unfortunately with covid they seem to trigger something bad ...)

This is interesting. I'm a little confused though. Life expectancy has been on a consistent decline for the last few years, particularly in the US. On top of the declining life expectancy, there should presumably be more people dying as a result of a growing population. In the graphs, they show multiple years. Why do weekly deaths from the last several years, broken out by year, basically look the same?

It's gone from 78.8 to 78.5 for males over the last few years, most people think due primarily to the opioid epidemic. And the population of NYC is barely growing, maybe a percent or two a year. These factors you mention aren't even in the same neighborhood as being large enough to explain the data you're reacting to.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNLE00INUSA

The proportion of the NY population that is over 60 looks like it generally trends higher as time passes. I would imagine a greater proportion are near death as time proceeds because of this.

http://alloveralbany.com/images/capital_region_population_ag...

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-l...

So, this is an anti-pattern in conversation, where you come up with an alternate hypothesis to explain something, and then someone tells you your hypothesis is wrong, and then you just jump to another one, and make them work to disprove that as well. What do you have against the obvious explanation?

If you have another hypothesis, it would be better to at least do the napkin math and show that you've put in a tiny amount of work, rather than just tossing out random far-fetched stuff. For example, this new hypothesis of yours is even more absurd than the last one, because the relative demographics of New York have not changed much in the past year. It could not explain a large spike in deaths this year.

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