Comment by ryankemper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryankemper | Hacker News Reader

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So, I've read the article, and it seems to not support this assertion of yours:

> TLDR: We're undercounting deaths due to covid-19 by ~60% nationally, and 40% in NYC.

What it does say is this:

> “Thus I would probably add about 15% or so to the known death toll,” she wrote to two city officials. “However — no city or state will be factoring this in or reporting it, so I don’t think we should either. We should just assume that the deaths are about 15% more than we can count, but not include them in official modeling, because we will never really know.”

It does pay some lip service to the notion that some of these at-home deaths could be precisely because of the "elective" (meaning, scheduled) surgeries that we had postponed.

Interestingly per the https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm, we see something like 647,000 heart disease deaths per year. So, I haven't done the napkin math, but could the 20%-odd spike of cardiac arrest events they mentioned have more to do with postponed surgeries?

>> “Thus I would probably add about 15% or so to the known death toll,” she wrote to two city officials.

There's a few different numbers and it's important to keep them clear.

The main number that people know is "died after being tested positive with covid-19 from a covid-19 like illness". For a while this number only included people who died in hospital.

The next number (which the 40% to 60% refers to) is "died from a covid-19 related cause after testing positive, or after being suspected of being covid-19 positive". This includes all the frail people in nursing homes where tests were not carried out (they weren't being tested because it wasn't going to affect their treatment).

The 15% appears to refer to all the people who live alone at home.

> Interestingly per the https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm, we see something like 647,000 heart disease deaths per year. So, I haven't done the napkin math, but could the 20%-odd spike of cardiac arrest events they mentioned have more to do with postponed surgeries?

I agree that cancelled surgeries, and also people delaying seeking help when they start to have heart problems, is really worrying and has caused some of this excess death.

See Figure 3.

I was off, Nationally were underreporting ~47%, NYC is at ~60%.

We can argue the pictures and stats in the Washington Post all day long. But either way, we're likely to be underreporting.

Also, though not directly due to the virus itself, the 'avoidable' deaths are kinda due to the pandemic and an over-response-ish factor.

This thing is going to take decades to sort out. Kinda like how people that die from digging up bombs from WW1 are counted in stats as WW1 collateral deaths, still.

I see, I think my point of contention was that it's not accurate to say that these are necessarily undercounted covid deaths. That hasn't been proven.

I do agree however that it is very likely that the majority are.

> Also, though not directly due to the virus itself, the 'avoidable' deaths are kinda due to the pandemic and an over-response-ish factor.

Right, the distinction is if they would have occurred in an environment where we weren't locking down and suspending elective surgeries in places that weren't hard-hit. In a place like New York we should definitely assume that the capacity wasn't there until we have evidence otherwise though, so that would be a region where we certainly could not blame overreaction.

Thanks, I'll try to think about this more later on.

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