Comment by adinosaur123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adinosaur123 | Hacker News Reader

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> "I also believe these greater restrictions will result in more job loss, more hunger, more despair and desperation (...) and more death from causes other than COVID. And I wonder, are these premature deaths any less worrisome than COVID deaths?”

There's been a total of 164 registered COVID-19 related deaths in San Francisco county, the vast majority of which had other comorbidities, assuming trend[1]. On the other hand, there has been nearly three times (~460) as many deaths in San Francisco related to overdoses between January and August alone[2].

It's hard to disagree with his sentiment.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Co...

[2]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2020/sf-overdoses-inter...

San Francisco has so far had by far the best Covid health outcomes of any major US city. If the US on the whole were doing as well as SF, there would be at least 200,000 fewer deaths than there have been.

I really hope SF can keep it that way. The recent trend is pretty scary, but if we all hunker down for the next month or two, we can still turn it around.

SF has had 30% of the deaths per 100K as the US average? That is shockingly good and worthy of deeper study if true.

Less than that. SF has had about 20.5 confirmed Covid deaths / 100k so far.

The USA overall has had about 86 confirmed Covid deaths / 100k.

And the USA total is likely a more significant underestimate than the SF total, as there are many places where there has been an abnormal spike of “pneumonia”, “stroke”, etc. deaths never attributed to Covid.

Does SF has similar age demographics to the rest of the US?

I disagree: overdoses in 2018 killed 259, in 2019 it killed 441, so I don't think it was really surprising to get around 550 for this year.

Do you... expect drug overdose deaths to increase exponentially, as standard practice?

No, but if they increased 80% in one year is not that strange if the next one they increase around 40%

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