The Covid-19 pandemic is worse than official figures show | Hacker News Reader

The Covid-19 pandemic is worse than official figures show

economist.com

This seems to assume all of the excess deaths are directly attributable to Covid-19, but shouldn't we consider the possibility that our reaction to Covid-19 could also play a role, things like: generally increased levels of stress, suicide rate, elderly more depressed due to no in-person visitors, less exercise?

And lots of people avoiding the doctor’s office or hospital because they are afraid to go.

In some places, excess death is now lower than recent average years, probably due to less commuting and other dangerous activities.

I'm looking into this gap right now. In the US for example, deaths from dementia so far this year are much higher than the average for the past five years (up until ~Aug 15). There's also a not insignificant amount of notes saying deaths are being underreported in a lot of jurisdictions.

Pretty much across the board jumps for most major causes of death. Haven't pulled in anything on suicides yet. Interestingly though, deaths from lower respiratory disease are down for all regions of the US. I wondered how much that has to do with less traffic/air pollution which might otherwise aggravate that?

Isn't it more likely that deaths from other kinds of respiratory diseases are being re-classified as COVID?

My thoughts were the same, but nothing I've seen (yet) would suggest that. Though deaths by dementia seem to be up far above the 5 year average (especially in the Southern US).

Total mortality up to Aug 15 is up at least 580k over the 5 year average from what I'm seeing right now, fwiw. Probably will post it here on HN once I've got everything tied together.

If anything I think most people (at least where I live in Colorado) are getting significantly more exercise. Everyone is outside biking, hiking, running, paddling, fishing, etc. They may not be doing a Pilates class or on a treadmill, but are exercising none the less. And with no endless stream of school events and kids sports, I can go hiking every day after work if I want. I've never spent this much time outside since I was probably 12 years old.

For some context at 1M deaths so far, and pessimistically if we end 2020 with 1.5M global deaths, this would be <3% increase over 2019 deaths (https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths), and with most deaths being of the elderly.

Some more context around 3% of the world population died in World War 2 which was over 6 years.

I don't think you are talking about the same number. Original mentioned that the number of deaths in 2020 would be 3% more than the number of deaths in 2019, not that 3% of the population had died. That would be 240 Million people!

Oh thats fair I should have done the math

Of the 1.5 M, only a small fraction would be from Covid 19 exclusively; CDC states 94% of deaths listing Covid 19 as a cause had co-morbidities, meaning other things that they also died from other than Covid 19. So the actual increase in deaths from 2019 to 2020 will probably be significantly lower than 3%.

I am curious why this is being downvoted. The CDC reported this a couple weeks ago.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fb...

https://wgntv.com/news/coronavirus/new-cdc-report-shows-94-o...

My guess is because it's kind of misrepresenting the data. While it's technically true, most of those co-morbitities were things like respiratory failure or pneumonia. So while it's not an outright lie, it's also not a particularly insightful bit of information when presented without further explanation.

I don't understand how it's misrepresenting the data. :)

94% of COVID deaths had comorbidities, often serious. The average number of comorbidities is more than 2.

Can you clarify how this is misrepresenting the data?

>had co-morbidities, meaning other things that they also died from other than Covid 19

First, that is not what comorbidity means. From Wikipedia[0]: >In medicine, comorbidity is the presence of one or more additional conditions often co-occurring with a primary condition.

Second, most of the listed comorbidities that are significant factors for death are actually complications due to COVID-19. The number of people who die of spontaneous respiratory failure is basically zero.

>So the actual increase in deaths from 2019 to 2020 will probably be significantly lower than 3%.

This is assuming the other comorbidities would have lead to death in the absence of COVID-19. But that is not a reasonable assumption based on the CDC data. There are many kinds of comorbidities that people live with that don't usually cause sudden death. So if they didn't have COVID-19, they would almost certainly still be alive at the end of the year.

Since your conclusion doesn't follow from the data, claiming the data supports your conclusion is necessarily misrepresenting it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comorbidity

Sorry, I confused you and the author of the comment you replied to.

Reminder: Sweden has had no excess deaths since early June https://news.yahoo.com/sweden-records-first-week-no-15544144...

Finland, Denmark and Norway had less excess deaths the whole year and much less COVID19. It's amazing how people keep trying to make Sweden out to be a success by comparing it favorably to the worst cases. Detailed source:

https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

https://outline.com/uyBW8B

Meanwhile, the much maligned Sweden is experiencing no uptick in deaths: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/, and US death counts are dropping as well.

I see that sweden's new deaths have gone down (but their overall deaths are much worse than other scandinavian countries), but the US graphs shows no slowing of the death rate that I can tell.

You need help from an optometrist then. There are two clear downward trends, one starting in late April, and one starting in late July.

It's funny that many arguments against social democratic economic policies from Nordic countries are on the basis of them being smaller countries and therefore not comparable. But somehow when it's a contagious disease though, we should totally use them as a model example..

We'll see in another year. Truth of the matter is: C19 is endemic, and everyone will get it sooner or later, much like common cold. Another, more pernicious mistake people make is they assume we're out of the woods with this, whereas we'll never be out of the woods. Is it worth curing a headache by decapitation?

The 4000+ extra COVID19 deaths they've had are years of life lost even if in the end the same number of people die. And their economic downturn was no better either.

They may end up with _fewer_ deaths per million when all of this plays out in full over the next couple of years.

I've yet to see any argument for why that would be, and your argument was that everyone was going to get it "sooner or later". At this point you're just conjecturing scenarios without an argument.

The actual metric to compare is years of life lost, not even total deaths, and thus getting it later is a benefit in itself, and gives you more chances of getting a vaccine before getting the disease, or just getting better treatments from what we've learned of the disease in the meantime.

But the key issue is, _who gets it first_. If older people get it first, you get what happened in New York and New Jersey. If young people get it first and you effectively isolate the old, then the number of cases doesn't matter - younger people aren't dying from C19. Unfortunately Sweden failed to protect their elderly - hence the body count. But they couldn't really do anything else, since they treat their constitution seriously, and it does not allow the restriction of freedoms.

There is no guarantee whatsoever that there _will_ be an effective and safe vaccine. There is no vaccine for any other coronavirus, and it's not for the lack of trying.

We don't have a guarantee of a vaccine but we've already gotten better at both treating the disease and at defending ourselves from it. People and businesses didn't change their habits overnight. They're much more prepared now than before because of that extra time. And again, dying later rather than sooner is a benefit in itself.

Sweden has had 4000 extra people die early in the pandemic directly related to the strategy they chose. Treating that as "you just wait and see if it doesn't pay out in the end" is not an argument for why their strategy is better. And it's not true that there was any constitutional problem with doing lockdowns as they did do them. Just less because that's the strategy they chose.

They're probably a more realistic model than (say) the even smaller New Zealand - which seems to be the current favourite of people opposed to the Swedish model, especially since things started going badly throughout the rest of Europe - because Sweden hasn't taken advantage of their smaller size in the same way that New Zealand did. As far as I know they don't have any restrictions on travel from the rest of the EU, meaning they're still exposed to incoming infections from all those other countries with their much bigger populations, and elimination is just inherently more sensitive to rare, random events than strategies which involve living with the virus because achieving exactly zero active infections is so crucial to its success.

One thing I don't see being taken into account in articles like this one is that the vaccines will not be 100% effective. The US FDA has set the bar at 50% effective. So even people who get the vaccine can still become infected. Maybe with less severe disease and less ability to spread it further, but we don't know that yet. On a whole population level a vaccine will be a major help in reducing the effects of the virus, but on an individual level it's not going to mean things go back to normal because many people will not be fully protected. So besides "Access to the safety thus promised will be unequal", the access to safety itself is questionable. If I understand that "50% effective" correctly, getting a vaccine does not mean you are safe and free to walk through the world.

Not to mention people who will refuse to get the vaccine, and those people are more likely to be carrying it anyway due to misbehavior.

> more likely to be carrying it anyway due to misbehavior

I’m not sure about that. I’ve been pretty strict about physical distancing, mask wearing, and all of the other things necessary to help combat the spread of the virus. I’m also someone who gets a flu shot every year and I make sure my child is vaccinated.

That being said - I am majorly skeptical about a vaccine being rushed through the approval process for political reasons and how safe it will be for me and my family. I may refuse it if it seems like it will do more harm than good and/or the process isn’t transparent and the safety data aren’t made available.

Makes sense. Yet, in our current hyper-polarized climate applying fine grained, measured judgement is increasingly hard; if you are for or against X, you're automatically assumed you belong to one of the few camps that carry that flag

I don't know about the US, but at least in Germany, no vaccine is being "rushed through". What is happening is that we're pumping a lot of money into the process in order to expedite it and remove idle time - for example, typically pharma companies wouldn't start preparations for a phase 2 or 3 trial before the previous phases were successful due to the high likelihood of failure. Now they will do precisely that, allowing them to save time, at the risk of having wasted a lot of resources for nothing if the previous phases do indeed turn out to be a failure.

I meant not getting the vaccine on the basis of someone not believing in the virus and/or vaccines in the first place.

Of course, I will also cautiously approach the first vaccine arrivals due to the nature of them being rushed.

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