Hacker News Reader

Comment by emmelaich | Hacker News Reader

Estimation is surprisingly hard!

Johns Hopkins Newsletter deletes article re excess Covid-19 deaths --

https://twitter.com/JHUNewsLetter/status/1332100155986882562

The crazy thing for that article is, it basically says there aren't any excess deaths, which is one of those conclusions where you ought to stop and think "Wait, surely that's a high level statistic I could cross-check?" and sure enough yes there are excess deaths statistics calculated, that's a normal thing countries do - and of course the US stats shot up due to COVID-19.

It's written by an economist, which maybe explains why they didn't check. You won't get far in economics if you insist on checking whether your work matches reality. Ask Arthur Laffer.

That's a terrible thing to say about economists - don't you know those people successfully predicted eight out of the last three recessions?

(wrap in a joke tag)

> It's written by an economist

A weirdly large number of economists seem to have taken it upon themselves to do dubious COVID work lately.

The graph on the second page is really low quality (I can't read the X-axis, the highlighted section is a different size, and the highlighted section has 2 additional series that don't show up in the key), so it's really hard to say for sure, but it's totally possible for both to be true: If most of the deaths so far were a "culling effect" of people likely to die later in the year, then the net by the end of the year could be "no difference".

Given the average age of deaths by COVID-19 being above average life expectancy, this totally seems possible to me - lots of excess deaths early in the year, but the opposite later in the year, resulting in net "deaths as usual" over the whole year.

> Given the average age of deaths by COVID-19 being above average life expectancy, this totally seems possible to me - lots of excess deaths early in the year, but the opposite later in the year, resulting in net "deaths as usual" over the whole year.

Life expectancy at birth, and life expectancy given a particular age are very different.

Most of those Covid deaths were above life expectancy are using life expectancy at birth figures, which is very misleading (as if you make it 82 you're almost certainly a fitter than average 82 year old).

The year 2020 isn't over as we write this, so of course your hypothesis is technically possible. In the final weeks of the year US death rates could fall through the floor compared to normal.

But that's not a hypothesis about the existing data, that's a guess about the future, and probably not a very good one.

This presentation masqueraded as an analysis of existing data, and the existing data shows a big rise in excess deaths. A competent analysis ought to at the very least point out this discrepancy and try to address it.

The alternatives are the author wasn't aware that excess deaths statistics are available or worse they were aware those statistics contradicted their thesis and decided to hope the audience didn't know.

Somebody else has linked one of the sites that charts US death figures. They are not subtle. In some countries you have to squint to see any impact from COVID-19, because the data is noisy and their population is small. (And maybe their reaction was effective, we can say this is the case for New Zealand but less clearly for say, Finland). But for the US it's an obvious anomaly, a prolonged excess over months.

Our World in Data does show excess mortality for US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...

No need for estimation, just go to the data (England and Wales):

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

So compared to 2018 and 2019, there is no change in deaths for those aged 45 and younger.

However there is an increase in death apparent for those aged above that, such that overall deaths when comparing up to Week 46 are 9.5% higher in 2020 than 2019. However, 2019 was a very weak flu season, with no excess death periods in England:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country

If you reduce 2020 deaths by the amount that didn't occur in 2019 due to the weak flu season but did occur in 2018, then 2020's deaths are only 6.8% higher than 2018. Consider also that in those two years the population of the UK aged 45 and above increased by 1.7%.

The question is - is COVID just shuffling fundamentally unhealthy people off their mortal coil a bit faster than would have occurred naturally? How many COVID deaths are really due to ongoing societal issues like Vitamin D deficiency, air pollution, poor diets and obesity? Or simply just old age?

Is shutting down and completely disrupting society for something which is about 5% worse than a regular flu season in terms of deaths really justified? Would we have noticed without the media attention?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com