Excess mortality seems like the best way to track the pandemic because determining whether someone died of covid can be debatable sometimes, but there can be no debate over whether someone died.
I would not go so far as to support anyone claiming this is why we should be breaking quarantine, but can’t quite support racking them all up as COVID deaths either. Reality is somewhere between the two (but close to “most” than “few”)
If the purpose of the analysis is to determine whether the preventive measure is effective and not overwrought, an excess deaths analysis is a good one because it helps infer what the toll would be in absence of the measure.
If the purpose is to attribute cause of death, it’s just a heuristic. But a useful one when other methodologies are (rightly or wrongly) suspect.
How do you know what the toll would be in the absence of the measure? Excess deaths tells us how many deaths are from virus+shutdown. I don't see how we can use this data to find out how many deaths there would be in a virus (no shutdown) scenario, or in a shutdown (no virus) scenario.
Although there clearly is a harmful impact on mental health caused by "general shutdown", it's not clear that it's a net negative. Compared to the potential alternative (higher mortality, overwhelmed health systems, and anxiety about insufficient measures being taken) it may be a net positive.
We have these restrictions to avoid collapse of our health systems. The hospitalisation rate of an uncontrolled spread of the virus far exceeds any country's healthcare capacity. The maths is inescapable.
In the past month they've also imposed several enforced measures to restrict the spread of the virus, including a limit on gatherings to 8 people, a bar curfew, and they've just closed secondary schools for at least a month.
"Don’t go to gyms, don’t go to libraries, don’t host dinners. Cancel." - Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven.
Despite these measures they are seeing rising hospitalisations. Further measures look inevitable.
Or if not, what are you arguing?
By the way despite all the drama hospitalizations are still not at the level they were beginning of the year. But I’m sure that’s because they are following the rules again?
At least one study didn't find an uptick in suicides as a result of the lockdowns. Situation may differ in America because it's run by idiots that cut off state income support and didn't commit to locking down till the situation was under control.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/28/asia/japan-suicide-women-...
"We didn't even have a lockdown, and the impact of Covid is very minimal compared to other countries ... but still we see this big increase in the number of suicides," said Michiko Ueda, an associate professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, and an expert on suicides.
> Women make up a larger percentage of part-time workers in the hotel, food service and retail industries -- where layoffs have been deep.
> In a global study of more than 10,000 people, conducted by non-profit international aid organization CARE, 27% of women reported increased challenges with mental health during the pandemic, compared to 10% of men.
> Compounding those worries about income, women have been dealing with skyrocketing unpaid care burdens, according to the study.
Doesn't exactly sound "very minimal" for women.
The lockdown, however, was not the source of the economic down turn, but rather the virus roaming about killing people was the cause. An effective lockdown, supported by government subsidies and contact tracing, has been proven to be beneficial to the economy. After the shutdown, consumers can roam about in the comfort of knowing that they have almost zero chance of contracting the virus. Australia and New Zealand are now so confident in their success that they can fill entire stadiums with people as though a vaccine had already arrived.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.06.20207530v...
> By August, the total number of suicides was 7.72% higher than the average number of suicides in the same month of the previous three years.
> Without introducing lockdown measures or strict domestic movement restrictions during the state of emergency, authorities requested non-essential businesses to close or opt to work remotely. Stores and restaurants were asked to operate for reduced hours. The state of emergency was lifted on May 25, 2020.
Yes economic down turns can increase the suicide rate shock, but shutdowns are obviously not a factor for Japan as they haven't imposed nearly as onerous containment measures as other countries. The main reason for Japan's current plight is that its economy is heavily susceptible to external economic shocks such as decreased global consumption due to an ongoing pandemic.
https://www.businesstoday.in/current/world/covid-19-effect-j...
For white collar workforce, it just becomes at-home injury, whatever it is. Transmission generally might not be so greatly reduced either - there are jobs which have to go to work (like my wife who is a doctor) so whole household is exposed, there are schools/kindergardens still open in many countries (so our baby can easily bring covid from it while I haven't been sitting in the office since mid march).
Using face masks and washing hands might be helping more with spread, something that was ridiculous and laughed at in western culture still 1 year ago. I was a fan of it even for regular flu as done in south east asia for a long time, but no way you could have done it here.
The pattern is very clear and obvious, and not at all what you would expect if the primary cause were just something to do with being in lockdown.
It’s not that I don’t have the Time to make it up, but there’s a lot of days where I only left the house because I had somewhere to go (cold, rainy, busy, etc). There’s a huge difference between “I have to walk to the store because we’re out of bread” and “I have to walk around the block because I need exercise”
For example, someone could have used to walk to work, or walk to lunch. Or just spent more time walking about an office building than their home office. Or had a routine of hitting the gym after work, but be unable to find the same motivation to work out at home.
I had a routine of hitting the gym between 13.00-15.00, when it is at its emptiest. When the deadlocks came, I bought some rudimentary equipment home, but the experience sucked... Polished hardwood floors are just too slippery.
Fortunately, they opened the gyms on Thursday again and I am going back to my previous routine.
We combine excess mortality with other stats.
One of the reasons excess mortality has attracted so much attention is because there are a bunch of people saying that covid just isn't killing many people and we point to the pile of corpses and ask "what happened to them then?"
For me covid is not a big deal and it should have been ignored. And I have came to this conclusion looking at the official data. For a lot of people that are very passionate about masks and lockdowns this is incomprehensible - that I could look at the data and come to different conclusion.
That is the point - for me covid isn't killing many people. It is killing tiny amount relative to the global population and it is usually people that were on the way out.
Which ones again shows how difficult is to argue with someone when your basic axioms, values and definitions mismatch.
You haven't looked at the data closely enough if you believe this.
Covid is killing people an average of 10 years early. Most of these people needed no assistance in their day to day life before they died. This isn't the frail, very elderly, population you think it is.
A lot of the dead were having chronic conditions or were already old.
In that case, how do you avoid your health system collapsing? The hospitalisation rate for an uncontrolled spread of the virus far exceeds the capacity of any country's health system.
The only option in this case is either to introduce drastic measures to reduce the spread of the virus or accept that very large numbers of people will die at home without oxygen or other medical care.
> for me covid isn't killing many people
If you're doing x to suppress y, you can't claim that low y is a reason not to do x. You have to consider how much y would be if you weren't doing x. And that y would be far higher.
Consider the argument that we should not bother with antibiotics because bacterial infections don't kill many people.
> Which ones again shows how difficult is to argue with someone when your basic axioms, values and definitions mismatch.
It's interesting that not many people are arguing that huge numbers of people would die without measures and that that would be acceptable. People tend to fall into two groups: either restrictions are necessary to avoid large numbers of death, or that restrictions are not necessary because you wouldn't have large numbers of deaths.
This suggests that the argument is not a mismatch of values, but one of whether the data are correct.
That represents only a few hundred lives, it seems. Deaths per vehicle mile traveled are actually up.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a34240145/2019-2020-traffi...
I'd rather phrase it as "because of inadequate social support during lockdown". A few countries paying low support had money to do more. Blaming that just on long lockdown is missing all the other possible solutions.
As for the effect on mortality of the lockdowns themselves, it will be interesting to look at Australia in a few months where the infections stayed relatively low, but lockdown lasted months. Especially comparing Vic to NSW.
In some places, there are apparently many fewer people dying from the flu, because, well, we're isolated from one another!
Similarly, fewer car accidents. Suicides are probably altered, as well as violence in some cases, in particular domestic violence.
People forgoing treatments for any host of disease due to either fear of going to the clinic, or delayed treatments.
etc..
This lead many residents to die of neglect, or for COVID to sweep easily through many centres if the remaining staff worked whilst symptomatic and took shifts across multiple locations.
This is part of the reason why countries in EE and the FSU, as well as those with less strict lockdowns (ie. Sweden), had lower mortality rates than in places like the UK, Spain, Italy, France.
It might be worth reconsidering the whole aged care model, and advancing the idea of voluntary euthanasia for the elderly.
Sure, but their deaths can be attributed to lockdowns. And when the vaccine is out, their deaths will probably be attributed to the vaccine.
Measuring excess mortality is not going to convince a covid denialist.
Imagine a parallel universe, where COVID-19 is actually just a flu, but for some reason the oppresive governments execute anyone who says so. In the parallel universe, they also have excess mortality (because of the executions) during 2020. So you cannot use the mere fact of excessive mortality to prove that we do not in fact live in this parallel universe.
It is not "conflating". That's the actual point of the exercise here. It's asking, how would things have been had there not been a pandemic? How much impact did the pandemic have on the society, in TOTAL, OVERALL.
So take a look what this guy found out: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=240767
Firstly, it's nonsense to take "average amount of deaths" over the past few years and extrapolate it to the current year without accounting for population growth changes, and rate of population growth acceleration.
Secondly, if you look at the "expected U.S. Death Rate" data[1], it shows that they expected U.S. death rates (per capita) to rapidly accelerate about 7 years ago, but the rate of deaths didn't really begin that acceleration cycle until ~2 years ago:
2017: 858.0 deaths per 100,000 predicted
2018: 868.5 deaths per 100,000 predicted
2019: 878.2 deaths per 100,000 predicted
2020: 888.0 deaths per 100,000 predicted
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2017: 731.9 actual deaths per 100,000 [2]
2018: 723.6 actual deaths per 100,000 [3]
2019: 867.8 actual deaths per 100,000 [4]
2020: Could be anywhere between 835-910 depending on the population data and total death numbers you use to calculate
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Not sure why people aren't dying as fast as they initially thought (probably modern medicine, etc), but that simply means there were more old people on the verge of dying coming into 2020. So even if 2020 shows a per-capita increase in deaths, it's to be expected.
[1] - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat... [2] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf [3] - https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/death-rate-per-100... [4] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
U.S. deaths this year are well above that curve: https://imgur.com/p4kBgXF
We are on track to have 3.2 million to 3.3 million deaths this year. That's a crude death rate of 970 to 1000 deaths per, well above the megatrends (U.N.) forecast of 888.