Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

>Specifically, if you take 10 million people and just wave your hand back and forth over their upper arms, in the next two months you would expect to see about 4,000 heart attacks. About 4,000 strokes. Over 9,000 new diagnoses of cancer. And about 14,000 of that ten million will die, out of usual all-causes mortality. No one would notice. That’s how many people die and get sick anyway.

So why is it all year long the world has been operating the complete opposite to this?

Why is it every covid death with a comorbidity was classed solely as a covid death and why is it every couple hundred deaths in places with populations of millions was treated as such a big deal if now we shouldn't be so worried about 14000 deaths in 10 million and shouldn't be in a rush to attribute side effects to the vaccine?

All year long there's been a rush to attribute everything to covid. All year long every death has been a massive deal.

Now it's the entire opposite to everything everyone's been saying all year because...vaccine?

If you knew how comorbidity worked then you would know why. All potential health issues are listed, but that doesn't mean they're all viable. Also if you die from lung complications, that will also be listed on there even if it was brought on by covid.

At the end of the day there's still only one cause of death. If it's covid then that counts as a covid death.

I believe you've got it backwards. Many deaths that were probably attributable to COVID-19 were not recorded as caused by it. Excess mortality is much higher than reported deaths due to the disease. In the US some of this was caused by the fact that many COVID victims were just found already dead at their homes in places like New York.

We have excess mortality as a metric to help us determine the cause of the bulk of these deaths:

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

Yeah...and the article in the op is saying we shouldn't rush to attribute excess deaths to the new vaccine.

Yet all year it's been the opposite with covid. Why have we been attributing every excess death to covid but we shouldn't be in a rush to do the same with the vaccine?

How does this make sense?

The deaths the OP references are specifically NOT excess. An effective vaccine would reduce the number of excess deaths. No one is saying we start ignoring those when the vaccine rolls out, if anything we should watch the number even more closely to make sure it is working.

You have it backwards. You say:

> Yeah...and the article in the op is saying we shouldn't rush to attribute excess deaths to the new vaccine.

That's NOT what the article is saying. Excess deaths are those beyond what are to be expected. The article specifically is saying not to attribute the many, many usually expected deaths to the vaccine.

The article's own words:

> And about 14,000 of that ten million will die, out of usual all-causes mortality.

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