Excess Deaths in 2020
kieranhealy.org
kieranhealy.org
In the UK a study predicts a 7.9-9.6% increase in breast cancer deaths within 5 years of diagnosis due to diagnostic delays caused by COVID. For other cancers their estimates vary, i.e. 15.3%-16.6% for colorectal, 4.8%-5.3% for lung, etc. thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(20)30388-0/fulltext
Basically I guess what I'm really trying to get at is that while COVID is certainly a terrible disease, there seems to have been little to no cost-benefit analysis performed by policy makers regarding the lockdowns and other attempts to combat it.
Cost benefit analysis is important. But it's pretty clear the vast majority of excess deaths were covid related, because there's a very strong correlation between excess deaths and reported covid cases/deaths, even when you look at different states that had different peaks at different times, and no such correlation to other responses like different types of lockdowns. More delayed / indirect / long-term effects might be harder to measure though.
[1]https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-me...
Looks like the CDC data is still preliminary? So I guess we'll have to wait and see what the actual number is.
EDIT: Looking through the charts on that link it does list a 14.8 for 2020 suicides but doesn't seem to have a source?
And it was much easier to commit suicide by lettin other people kill you too.
America is might be different, because it did not happened on their soil.
They — like my grandparents —considered themselves German because they were German.
The othering of Jews, that they are not really English/Spanish/German/Russian (to name a few examples), has been used to justify the persecution of Jews for the last 2000 years.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deaths-of-despair-during-c...
Suicidal ideation does appear to have increased: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm?s_cid=mm... But it doesn't correlate well to actual suicide rates. It's also quite possible that the emphasis on suicides has in fact raised awareness enough to prevent them. Or perhaps the way people are dealing with the stresses that lead to suicide has changed, resulting in that being expressed in some other way. Or a mix of all these factors.
Diagnostic delays are not caused by lockdowns. They are caused by an overwhelmed health care system or the fear of infection, both of which are caused by high incidence.
You also need to consider the damage that long covid possibly do over the next 30 years. If only 1% of the working age population that got infected suffers permanent disability, then the cost-benefit analysis will show that a low incidence strategy is clearly the better strategy.
Here are the statistics for Australia. They had a strict lockdown when cases where high.
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...
Arizona and Texas had weak lockdowns but high excess mortality.
It seems to help to be an island country or state though, or a geographically isolated region like South Korea or Alaska, as they can screen people coming into the country and there's not a lot of cross-pollination with tight border controls.
Remember that Florida has a significantly older population than California too. 2.1% of the population >85 years old vs 1.3%; 17.6% over 65 years old vs 10.6%. COVID deaths are very concentrated in the elderly. The CDC estimates that the 85+ age group has a 8700x higher chance an infection leading to death, and a 95x higher chance of infection leading to hospitalization, than the 5-17 age group. The article appears to be using non-age-adjusted excess deaths. So California and Florida being equal is a strong sign that California did significantly worse.
https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/florida/demographic-sta...
https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/demographic-...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
Miami is a small city of 500,000 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...
...with a density of 1004 people / sq. mi., compared to the NY metro area with a density of 5313 people / sq. mi..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_metropolitan_area
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area#com...
LA has more people (13.2 million) but appears to be less densely populated with 550 people per sq mile.
I didn’t follow California but I know Florida was offered as a place that not locking down worked.
I can look into it a little more. Florida has a lot of cases, and most came after the first wave. The same with Texas.
From the WSJ on July 16th, 2020, someone trying to promote the idea that it was only a Blue state problem:
=======•••
“Here are some real numbers to put things into context, and it's obvious the problem is certain incompetent blue state governors.
As of today:
Florida (population 23M) COVID deaths: 4,782
Texas (population 30M) COVID deaths: 3,561
New York (population 19M) Covid deaths: 25,014
New Jersey (population 9M) COVID deaths: 15,665”
=====
I recently compared these numbers in early March I believe
Florida: 31,523 for 26,741 additional deaths
New Jersey: 23,521 for 7856 additional deaths
New York: 48,410 for 23,396 additional deaths
Texas: 45,274 for 41,713 additional deaths
——————-
NY: 48,410/25,014 = 1.9 times more death
FL: 31,523/4,782 = 6.5 times more death
Florida and Texas lead in deaths after the first wave
March 6, 2021
Florida: 31,523 for 26,741 additional deaths
New Jersey: 23,521 for 7856 additional deaths
New York: 48,410 for 23,396 additional deaths
Texas: 45,274 for 41,713 additional deaths
Most lockdowns are not like that, for practical reasons. They are a random basket of restrictions that go into effect when the virus has already spread enough to cause great concern. At that point, it is hard to discern whether any of these restrictions cause a significant effect, much less a net benefit.
I gave a specific example of Melbourne and I was implying a specific timeframe when their lockdown went into effect. They went from having uncontrolled community spread, with tens of thousands of infections, to actually zero. They did it by having a very detailed plan, strict enforcement, high compliance, and an excellent testing regime. They also had clear goals and thresholds for lifting restrictions and communicated them to the public.
I generally agree that ineffective lockdowns mostly just slow down the spread. The spread picks up again exactly in proportion to restrictions being lifted. However, effective lockdowns have actually been able to eradicate the virus completely from whole areas: from Melbourne, from Victoria, from all of Australia, New Zealand, and several Asian countries. You need to be able to quarantine international travel and have high compliance. The places where the virus have been eradicated have to remain on high alert and remain extremely vigilant until they can roll out mass vaccination. I spent 10 months in Australia during the pandemic, 99% of the time stuck in the ACT. The extreme vigilance was contact tracing, social distancing, and some restrictions. There wasn't a mask wearing mandate, ever, because they never allowed uncontrolled community spread.
The US and European countries cannot meet those criteria, so they have the virus simmering until they can roll out massive vaccination. The US and Europe were too slow to take the pandemic seriously because their political leaders rolled in BS and denial for months and seeded their idiot followers with denialism. It's too late for them, and the only way out is vaccination. And yet, some idiots are still rolling out conspiracy theories about vaccination and want to f** that up, too. It's so disappointing.
Not sure what that did to the death rate.
Yes, and also the long term damage of lockdowns. Some children will be permanently harmed by the loss of education, and many people will be dealing with the effects of social isolation for quite a while.
That's a dangerous way to phrase it. People would delay the elective medical procedures due to covid, even without lockdown. Overwhelmed hospitals would enforce the same. The covid/lockdown split of excess deaths is very complicated in itself.
From that definition, I think a lot of the conclusions people are drawing would be substantially less surprising.
If we’re going to call a polite suggestion to stay home and a potential for small fines which were never or rarely levied a “lockdown” then it’s not surprising it had little impact.
Not necessarily. There is always the option of triaging COVID victims into palliative care (which can be very fast and administered even by non-specialist personnel) and away from intensive care. While that has never been official policy due to the political optics, there have been claims that it was done on a hospital-by-hospital basis in Italy and Sweden for elderly victims. If the voting public were clearly informed that it was an option they could choose as an alternative to lockdowns, it may well have seen significant support from the population.
And you can add Canada to that list of countries that have had to do that, by the way. Like the others you mention it’s been a forced decision due to the healthcare system becoming overwhelmed.
Here in Canada, excess deaths in 2020 for the 15 to 64 age range has been abnormally high, starting in March. Yet, unlike older age groups, the level of excess does not follow the pattern of reported COVID infections. That looks like deaths from lockdown and delayed medical care.
I personally know people who, for example, put off getting potential cancers checked out due to fear of covid. Similarly, I had to convince some people to go to the hospital for potentially serious non-covid symptoms who were afraid to do so because of covid.
1. covid-related mortality and morbidity would not make up for any drop in other excess deaths
2. short-term stops on all non-critical care would, on balance, result in a significant drop in excess deaths over longer-term stops on a smaller percentage of non-critical care
3. hospital systems and their staff would still be intact after such a large wave. This may sound crazy, but while we're trading anecdotes you may be surprised at how many ICU nurses considered quitting because of how hard the latest surge hit. These are the people who dictate how many "ICU beds" we have, not the physical beds themselves!
4. that we can make any kind of meaningful analytical statement on covid mortality vs excess mortality for a specific age group given the lack of reporting data on both. In particular, data from coroner's offices on covid deaths has a huge lag time at present. Looking at case counts only is a poor proxy given you have to model infection -> death/recovery/discharge lag times, geographical variations and healthcare capacity as well. The HMD link merely provides total counts and proportions with no additional commentary. You can find more specific discussions on the subject [1], but they don't cover demographic breakdowns over time and necessarily maintain a high degree of uncertainty.
I don't think it's controversial to say governmental policy here has been sub-optimal at best. But to say that one extreme approach or the other is what we ought to have done based on woefully incomplete data is a stretch too.
[1] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...
No I'm not. Remember, what I said was: "So in many circumstances the hospitals would be overloaded for less total time and thus lead to less non-covid excess deaths."
Let's assume hospitals are severely overloaded, and are simply unable to treat COVID patients. The pedantic meaning of what I said will certainly be true: non-covid excess deaths will be less.
But the steel-manned version - less excess deaths in total - could still be true if lockdown drags on sufficiently long, and COVID-19 is sufficiently mild, and/or the marginal benefit of hospital care on survival is low enough.
> hospital systems and their staff would still be intact after such a large wave. This may sound crazy, but while we're trading anecdotes you may be surprised at how many ICU nurses considered quitting because of how hard the latest surge hit. These are the people who dictate how many "ICU beds" we have, not the physical beds themselves!
I'm well aware. Frankly, I suspect that problem is made worse by a long, dragged out, pandemic. People can often handle a short period of extreme stress better than they can handle a much longer period of high stress.
Even the pedantic interpretation does not necessarily hold. Though healthcare resources for life-threatening conditions are not strictly zero-sum, many of them would effectively be once covid overwhelms existing ICU and ED capacity. There are plenty of examples of personnel being pulled from e.g. cancer care or cardiology teams to help in covid wards. This directly translates to increased wait times for patients in those categories, much like would happen if people were putting off getting checked out themselves.
Moveover, hospitals and healthcare systems to not just "bounce back" after being severely overloaded. Staffing is already strained, and unless you ban clinicians from taking leave you would see cascading reductions in capacity after a couple months of being overloaded. This is to say nothing of the equipment shortages we had in the early days of the pandemic. Ultimately, patients who would require care for non-covid reasons would still suffer because of a massive backlog. Determining whether this backlog would be larger or more/less harmful when amortized compared to what we have now requires health economics analysis that I am certainly not qualified to perform.
> Frankly, I suspect that problem is made worse by a long, dragged out, pandemic. People can often handle a short period of extreme stress better than they can handle a much longer period of high stress.
This feels right to me too, though I've not the literature to verify it. However, it's an equally valid argument for strict short-term lockdowns a la New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan, etc. That is to say, it does not follow that not mitigating is the only reasonable strategy to prevent a dragged out pandemic.
A better (if grim) post-hoc analysis of Canada would be to compare the Atlantic provinces (less densely populated, strictly enforced interventions), the other smaller provinces (less densely populated, few interventions until recently) and the large provinces (densely populated, moderate but very poorly enforced interventions). My guess is that all three approaches will not be found to be equally effective.
In other words, the comparison isn't between how many people Covid-19 did kill and how many preventative measures did. It's between how many it would have killed and how many preventative measures did. While there's a lot of uncertainty in how many people Covid-19 would have killed, it's still certainly higher than the preventative measures.
India did have very strict lockdowns. Yet, very high rates of antibodies were also measured in some areas. Those strict lockdowns may have been successful in shielding some of the population from covid, and that part of the population is getting infected now. India is a very unequal society, with a very wide range of wealth present in the same areas.
In the US in some lockdown states there have been dramatic differences between infection rates between different socioeconomic levels. While in other states that were more open, that has tended to be less true.
It will be decades before we know the answer to this, if we ever do. Trying to justify these lockdowns while in the middle of the storm is fools errand. Heads are running way to hot and brains aren’t thinking clearly.
What we’ve done over the last year represents one of the largest uncontrolled public health experiments ever performed. The best part is all the billions caught up in the experiment never consented and many don’t even know it was an experiment.
Society has never, ever had a pandemic plan that includes what we’ve done over the 14 months.
Only through the passage of time, when all the people who instituted these policies are no longer with us and all the costs of these lockdowns will be laid bare, will history truly be able to judge our actions.
(Personally I think history will take an incredibly dim view of lockdowns and those who enacted them)
If they hadn’t locked down for the first wave, they probably would have reached herd immunity before the second, more devastating wave. This time, we have a vaccine, so we’ll probably avoid that, at least.
That’s a long-winded way of saying that it’s a safe bet that people will take a dim view of the 2020 lockdown in hindsight.
I looked at this a while back and, as far as I can tell, there were relatively limited interventions in the US. If you read beyond the headline of this link [1], for example, it doesn't seem as if you had much in the way of workplace closures and, in general the "non-pharmaceutical interventions" were for a fairly limited period of time. This study concludes they helped but the data is inconsistent and hard to interpret.
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/study-sa...
"The researchers report that all the cities used at least one of the three main categories of NPIs, and 15 used all three at the same time. The most common combination was school closures and public gathering bans, used by 34 cities for a median of 4 weeks. All the cities except New York, Chicago, and New Haven (Conn.) closed their schools for some period of time; the median was 6 weeks."
It seems to me we should all state our positions now with the information we have available now, and let the future take care of itself.
I'll go a step further and actually suggest that authoritarian lockdown measure haven't done as much as they've been touted as doing. This is pretty easy to see by comparing states with less lockdown measures vs. ones that went full economy shutdown. Most of the "open" states aren't any worse off than the ones who went lockdown crazy and in some cases they're actually better off when you look at spread and death.
This could also indicate that states where Covid-19 had a bigger impact responded by enacting stronger mitigations. What makes you prefer your interpretation?
You can say that but there's no data that supports this at all.
NYC(not state) tops the charts for deaths per 100k. Notice how low FL is?
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_deathsper100...
What you can easily notice is that strict lockdown measures don't seem to make any difference at all.
So, it would have killed 2-3x more people, max. There were strategies that were developed after the 1918 pandemic that probably would have saved more people than the lockdown at much lower cost, but they were ignored by the politicians. The basic idea was to focus all resources on protecting the vulnerable, and let the disease run its course quickly. Effectively protecting the vulnerable during extended lockdowns is extremely difficult, and the COVID lockdown was no exception.
Rounding, that's possibly another 1-2 million people. Those are big numbers!
Also one quibble in that most of the US did not have an extended lockdown. Here in GA ours lasted basically a month. As others have said, people voluntarily stayed home, in part because the exponents of letting the disease "run its course" tended to exhibit a level of comfort with millions of deaths that perhaps is not widely shared in the population.
You are very cavalier with somewhere around 1.1-1.6 million extra deaths, to date. That's your GOOD number?
If that's your anti-intervention argument, I'm unconvinced. Saving a million lives is worth a lot to me.
Where did that number come from?
I have read more like 8% (https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)32009-2/full...)
So - 2 to 3x... Nope. 8 - 10x.
What I want to know is why you have constructed this belief and want to propagate it when it is refuted by a google search in 10 seconds flat?
Using more current antibody data, the CDC released updated estimates yesterday [0] that there have been ~115 million actual COVID infections in the US. That makes the 2x-3x number pretty reasonable (especially since herd immunity is supposed to kick in around 70%).
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
I had no real reaction to the first one and a day of increased fatigue so far with the second.
Anecdotally, many more people are having stronger reactions to the second.
The "what ifs" get harder to calculate.
I see this line of reasoning a lot, even in mainstream media here in Sweden, but it seems flawed to me. As I see it diagnostic delays and delayed elective care is caused by a lack of lockdown or other stringent decease control measures. It’s when hospitals are overrun by people infected with SARS-CoV-2 that they have to delay other care. This happens due to rapid spread of the virus, which happens when lockdown is not imposed.
What’s the argument for the parents opposite line of reasoning?
In 2019 more than 800 000 screenings were done (with 8288 cancer cases discovered in the country that year) and this system has been credited for pushing down the yearly cancer deaths due to earlier discoveries.
In 2020 there was 160 000 less screenings so we can probably expect an increase in number of deadly cases in the coming years.
(Source, https://www.dn.se/sverige/en-av-fem-kvinnor-screenades-inte-... )
Something that has never been properly explained to me is how "overwhelmed" the hospitals were in relation to their normally "overwhelmed" state.
I wrote a script which extracted time series data from one of the hospital bed data APIs in my country around April last year and ran it for a couple of months. I wasn't able to make any useful conclusions from the data other than more patients were coming than going for a certain time periods and some wards had beds reassigned to other wards. It would have been a lot better if I had access to historical data to compare it to previous years.
(Btw I'm not in healthcare. If anything my point is a logical alternative to the idea that overwhelmed covid wards could be the only thing affecting other services. But it's my impression of how things seemed to be, at least in the UK).
What evidence do you have of this? This seems like a baseless criticism.
Deaths from all causes has declined rapidly in the U.S. since January. The red dotted line is my best attempt to correct for reporting lag: https://i.imgur.com/z8M0k2h.png
Excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths every week of the pandemic: https://i.imgur.com/MeGMsRx.png
Total excess deaths in the U.S. were about 500,000 for 2020. The excess breaks down as 77% COVID, 16% non-COVID natural causes, and 7% external causes for the whole year. External causes include homicide, suicide, accidents, overdoses/poisonings.
The count of COVID deaths include COVID as underlying cause of death (91%) and COVID as a contributing cause (9%). Even when including the contributing cause, it looks like COVID deaths were significantly undercounted in the first wave March/April/May and somewhat undercounted in the later waves. https://i.imgur.com/YjZeI2E.png
Deaths from most major categories were higher or unchanged: https://i.imgur.com/TDGwVU9.png
Excess deaths by age group: https://i.imgur.com/oKda9Dl.png
Ages 0-14 had lower than normal deaths in 2020.
Non-COVID excess deaths by age group: https://i.imgur.com/8pJnauz.png
Not entirely sure how to parse that statement, but I think most people would interpret that as "non-COVID excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths", which doesn't match what's on your graph. E.g. for week 15, expected deaths = 55k, deaths - COVID = 63k and all deaths=79k.
The only truthful way to interpret your statement is that "excess deaths (including COVID deaths) exceeded COVID deaths". Which isn't that interesting of a statistic.
Yes, that's what I meant. I didn't think it was ambiguous. Lots of people think that COVID deaths were exaggerated. There are countries (with not very many COVID deaths) where the number of excess deaths is less than the number of COVID deaths. There are even countries with negative excess deaths for the whole year, even though they had some COVID deaths.
The second interpretation (which is the one I called "not interesting") just means there was at least one non COVID death in each interval, and the total deaths never dropped below the average number of deaths. One could reasonably assume there was at least one non-COVID death per week, making that part of the statistic useless, and you could just state the total deaths.
The number of unattributed excess deaths is fewer than the number of covid attributed excess deaths, bit it should be zero, because the null hypothesis is that the only things killing people are "the same stuff as last year" and covid.
While a true (and interesting) statement, that's not what the OP said. He said "Excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths", not "Excess deaths minus COVID deaths exceeded expected deaths". Again, the second statement is true (based on his graph), but not all all what he said.
Yes, and this is the right statement!
Excess deaths minus covid deaths should be zero, because the null hypothesis is that covid is the only thing contributing to the excess deaths.
That there are additional excess deaths beyond covid deaths is interesting (and means, as I originally said, that covid deaths are undercounted, or that some other unknown force is killing people).
The statement you provide as an alternative "Excess deaths minus COVID deaths exceeded expected deaths", doesn't make sense. Excess deaths are already above the expected deaths.
Let me run an example.
Last year, 100 people died each month. This is the expected number of deaths. This year, 150 people died each month. This gives us 50 excess deaths. 40 deaths are attributed to Covid. So, 10 are of unknown origin. This is interesting!
If the excess deaths - covid deaths exceeded expected deaths, you'd have to have 40 covid deaths, 110 deaths of unknown origin, and 100 "expected" deaths, which would also be quite interesting, but abjectly terrifying too (the death rate would need to more than double).
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
For example, in Germany it was only ~ +3%, and Sweden, which didn't lock down and had no mask mandates, had a lower death rate than in 2012:
What I wonder from that table though is why does Germany seem to have a higher death rate than peer countries over the prior few years? They are in line with Estonia and noticably higher than all the other countries listed.
A big contributor (at least according to local epidemiologists) was the numbers here in Belgium were over reported, whereas most countries under reported. There was also an issue getting accurate numbers, because (mostly privately run) elderly homes weren't looking into it carefully enough to distinguish between Covid and other causes. That said, balls were definitely dropped.
Among other things it says the excess death in last December among members of a large health insurer (AOK) rose to 250% of the previous year in various heavy hit regions like Zwickau, Görlitz and Sächsische Schweiz ("So stieg die Übersterblichkeit im vergangenen Dezember unter den sächsischen AOK-Mitgliedern in den Landkreisen Zwickau, Görlitz und Sächsische Schweiz auf 250 Prozent des Vorjahresniveau.").
Some call Sweden a nanny state and it's true in some regards as there had been changes to regulations (esp laws regarding smoking in bars,etc), comprehensive cancer screening initiatives, road construction laws,etc to decrease the impact of common mortality causes.
- US letting it rip through vulnerable populations with the promise of "herd immunity" being right around the corner
- Fewer hospital beds available in less populous areas.
- Taking COVID seriously became a culture war issue. So while some countries might've had its youth catch it while mostly keeping it away from older populous, the US had the opposite: less vulnerable youth took it relatively seriously, with lots of 60+ flaunting safety measures they felt were oppressive
The National Safety Council (NSC) says deaths from motor vehicles rose 8% last year, with as many as 42,060 people dying in vehicle crashes.
When comparing traffic deaths to the number of miles driven, the rate of fatalities rose 24% — the highest spike in nearly a century, NSC says.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-...
Also, working at home may be allowing people to avoid traffic because hours are less strict. Again, that would allow traffic to move faster on average.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-...
Lockdowns of the duration that we experienced should be illegal because they take away the citizens' liberties to an extent that no government should be able to take them away. It has nothing to do with health.
I fully agree with you. If people want to sit at home it should be a personal choice. However people do like to control other peoples lives, that is the bottom line and they will use any argument to justify it.
IMO that would be fine so long as we had a citizenship that was well educated and the topic of virus spread had not been politicized to the point that certain groups believe the virus itself is a conspiracy.
This seems like data that would be better understood as per capita all cause mortality versus time over the last century.
Anyone know where to find that plot?
This is close to the analysis of interest.
It’s true there are so many confounding issues, e.g. obesity rates have never been higher and are a huge cofactors, population inversion, etc.
Even taking them as evenly distributed over 1914-1918 (inaccurate) that's 20k extra deaths in each of those years.
Also, weren't deaths in the first year of life much more common back then? Maybe there were just significantly less people having kids right after the pandemic.
A common line of argument online is "it's just the flu, and we don't panic like this for flu season every year." Observing a spike in total deaths puts that line of thought to the test.
Over the past 12+ months, people have accepted enormous infringements on freedoms in their everyday lives. Many of the public health measures that we take as a matter of course in the "new normal" - lockdowns, social distancing, extended closing of churches, etc.- are things that would have been almost unthinkable as recently as January of 2020.
If you look far enough back, to some point in the twentieth century, you'll find a time at which the baseline infectious disease risk in everyday life was higher than it has been in the COVID-era US. But people at that time went to crowded theaters, ate in restaurants, packed together in churches and schools, and so on. Restricting these things could have decreased their all-cause mortality, but they clearly found that option unacceptable.
Note that this isn't an issue of whether people "believe in science" or "believe in data". It's an issue of risk tolerance. People a few generations ago understood the Germ Theory of Disease perfectly well, and they knew that they could reduce the spread of infectious disease by implementing the kinds of measures we've implemented for COVID. And yet they didn't implement these measures, except in very minor and temporary ways. We've become far more risk-averse than they were. And the question of whether that's a good thing is not an empirical question.
Before COVID, I was under the impression that most Americans found "Give me liberty or give me death" an admirable sentiment. But it turns out that I was mistaken about that.
Are you under the impression that you were experiencing pure liberty before COVID? Because it's pretty obvious to me that there was an acceptable level of restraints that society generally agreed to, and those levels changed due to the pandemic. It's a fun saying, but it's in no way, shape, or form realistic.
What measures are you referring to with this? Masks clearly aren't going to stay around, and there's a push to reopen everything and get life back to normal as soon as possible.
America is country with most strict safety standards in pretty much anything I ever heard of. Including kids playground structures.
In the U.S., deaths were 16%-17% higher than expected. The death rate was 17.8% higher than in 2019. Excess deaths were higher in 1918, but every other year since 1900 is lower.
Using 1946-2019 as our sample, the average yearly change in death rate is -0.2% with a standard deviation of about 1.47 (percentage points). The biggest increase in this year range was 3.1% (2.2σ).
If we go back before the antibiotic era, the biggest one-year increases are in 1918 (29.3%) and 1929 (7.2%). Note that statistics before 1933 don't include all states.
For some other ways of looking at the data, here's an economists blog post: https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/01/06/excess-morta...
(He was writing in January, so had less complete stats.)
The pre-war population of this country was around 34mln - a figure reached again in the early 70s - while currently it's slightly less than 38mln, so this event can definitely be seen as rare.
One factor to bear in mind is the 5 year period includes a particularly nasty flu season in 2017-18 so the last 5 year period includes a high outlier.
The thing is over the long term all kinds of outlier events pop up, like this one, but it's hard to think of any with this magnitude. 9/11 killed 3k people in one go, but that's only one tenth of the excess deaths in New York from Covid in a single month. Even the 1906 Earthquake that devastated San Francisco only killed less than 1% of the city's population. World War 2 had an appreciable effect of course at 300k deaths over about 3 years.
If we're including other pandemics of course there's the Spanish Flu which also killed about half a million Americans or more, against a population a third the size.
Deaths in England and Wales in 2020
80,830 Covid-19 as underlying cause of death or contributing factor
77,161 Increase in deaths (from all causes) from 2019 to 2020
73,444 Covid-19 as underlying cause of death on death certificate
70,013 Any death within 28 days of a positive Covid test
https://fullfact.org/health/liam-fox-death-figures/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/uk-official-co...
> Generally speaking, the ineffectiveness of lockdown stems from voluntary changes in behavior. Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns. The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries. Using a cost/benefit method proposed by Professor Bryan Caplan, and using two extreme assumptions of lockdown effectiveness, the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.
So we don't really know how many people would have died without lockdown to make a comparison, but it would have been a lot higher.
If the health service is completely overloaded it means people would start dying from all sorts of other things too.
Am I missing the point?
Even if lockdowns are ineffective at preventing overload, it doesn’t follow that they can’t reduce the severity of that overload, or that the outcome would be the same either way.
Would it be end of humankind? Nope, but I sure as hell don't want to be part of such selfish civilization just that cashflow is maintained
so where does pharma with no liability, running their own trials and effectively being handed blank checks during the pandemic fit into this?
Which never really pans out (field hospitals, hospital ship sent to NYC, etc.) - they got strained and perhaps local spots overwhelmed, but never doomsday scenarios we hear bandied about without any evidence. His point is that lockdown doesn't really change behavior and places that don't have strong mandates end up largely practicing safer behavior anyway.
I think there's also a strong argument that lockdown ends up decreasing the time spent outdoors, which promotes spread.
"The thing you were trying to prevent didn't happen, therefore you didn't need to try to prevent it" is really curious reasoning. "It didn't happen, therefore it was because we did this things" is also a weak claim, but the reverse seems far sillier. Especially if you look at the hot spots where things got worst, like Italy or India. Instead of being glad we avoided that, we're whining that we had to do anything at all.
> His point is that lockdown doesn't really change behavior and places that don't have strong mandates end up largely practicing safer behavior anyway.
Again, this is a curious claim. If lockdown doesn't really change behavior, how can lockdown be responsible for the things it's being blamed for like isolation and economic impact? That is then the fault of the pandemic, and the natural behavior changes that resulted, instead!
Note how toilet paper was gone from grocery stores BEFORE any official action was taken.
Anything and everything must be done in each country to prevent the hospitals from filling up.
You have to say more than this.
They can’t exactly do cost benefit analysis without models to compare, but their cherry picking models to support their assumptions and then happy that their assumptions where validated by their models.
In a non lockdown world where schools are open and attendance is mandatory... well it’s clear to the average person the government doesn’t think people need to stay home. Sure, old people are dying in hospitals but I am 40 so it’s nothing to worry about etc.
However, shut everything down and people get the message that this is serious irrespective of the actual dangers they personally face.
the Pajama Class say this and then wonder why their "messaging" doesn't go over well with anyone who's not able to log into zoom and chat it up with their comfortable, salaried, urban-elitist compatriots
Consider sitting, back taking a deep breath, and then stepping away from the computer to do something you enjoy.
I'm claiming this precise thing, that you're arrogantly presuming that everyone can just hole up in their house like the elite class of people who do nothing but berate the (almost always) lower class people who do not have the privilege to stay home.
Gp didn't claim that. You're putting words in their mouth and lashing out for things they never said.
A reasonable interpretation of their claims is that even if not everyone can hole up, government policies that are intense encourage everyone to hole up as much as they can.
It's also worth mentioning that many, many working class people did not enjoy the fact that they had to take on risk in order to survive. Pretending everything is fine simply offloads even more risk onto those people.
Notice how teachers act as though they're above everyone else? Refusing to work, whereas normal people that aren't of means largely kept working, and didn't act like paranoid agoraphobes exaggerating their actual risk?
It's no secret that most people overestimate their risk by an order(if not multiple) of magnitude.
You're somewhere between pretending those people don't exist and claiming that those lower class people who didn't want to work but had to are also morally bankrupt. It's neither coherent nor respectful of those you claim to be defending.
Having to make the choice between going to work at a job where you have health concerns and losing your home is not a fun situation. You're correct that this is not a choice I've personally had to face, but it is a choice that many people have had to deal with. The issue, that you keep ignoring, is that people who "kept working" did so in many cases not by choice, but by necessity. Yes, the privilege that some (including myself!) had to continue working safely is nice. But you shouldn't use that to discount the opinions of people who had to continue working unsafely, but did not want to.
And you are continuing to ignore those people. Anecdotally, those people make up the majority of those in service industries that I know. They weren't happy to have to continue working. They were scared. Were it economically feasible, most of them would have preferred to stay home and not work. But that option wasn't available to them, because not working would mean losing their homes too.
And it is ridiculous for you to try and weaponize my privilege to ignore those people's opinions.
No, especially in the context of the pandemic, it's easy to start talking about pandemic policy as though "everyone should just do X" where X is something extremely convenient, profitable, even pleasant for tech workers and other white collar jobs.
On the other hand pointlessly attacking people just makes you seem foolish.
This was done in the pro-lockdown measures camp all the time, epidemiologists, etc. love using models based on assumptions that are used to show scenarios as evidence of the original assumptions.
>Suppose you could either live a year of life in the COVID era, or X months under normal conditions. What’s the value of X that makes the AVERAGE American indifferent?
Yet you'll notice this is not about lockdown versus non-lockdown this is "normal" versus COVID. Moreover, the number they use for X is just made-up. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black - this is the exact mistake the author goes on and on about for the other side of the cost/benefit equation.
This paper is super sketchy in other ways - it's clearly a personal diatribe, not an attempt to be accurate. Like:
> Lockdown is a formal,state-mandated “one size fits all” version of the social norm “keep your distancefrom people who are sick."
Is the author unaware of asymptomatic transmission? If all we had to do was keep away from sick people, then this would have been a SARS-1 outcome.
> As a result, the ICL model made some dire predictions ... For instance: “In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour ... In total,in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US...”
The US has achieved 1/4 of those deaths with behavioral changes (from lockdowns or not), so 2 million without any behavioral changes seems like a good estimate from early data.
Fig 2B is clearly over-fit on past data. I doubt it will hold up well.
I think you're overlooking the idea that "lockdowns", as we know them, do little other than impose massive costs and anxieties on society, while failing to achieve their main objective i.e. complete immobilization and eradication.
So you end up with all the costs of the policy with little upside because the dynamics of spread seem very heterogeneous, mass-spread seems to happen in relatively few people in very particular scenarios (crowded indoor areas - notice that lockdown ends up pushing the entire society, especially the least healthy and most vulnerable, indoors).
The lockdowns increased the rate of suicides substantially. Largely suicides occur in people 65+, so a 100% increase in suicides would be some 150k deaths in the same age range as COVID.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml
Murder is also up some 50% and there were riots...
Not disputing the excess deaths, just the causes aren’t all that clear imo.
NOTE, I was also considering unintentional suicide (overdoses), which were dramatically up (38%).
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm
https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/16/suicides-fell-in-2020-w...
What is this incentive? How did governments benefit from more covid deaths?
why did you link to stats that only go to 2018?
Suicides are down in 2020[1]
1. https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-me...
Looking at the NIMH link you sent, I'm not sure where you're pulling that data from as 65+ isn't in the chart but some quick maths shows it would be about 9k people, so your assumed 100% increase would only lead to an extra 9k deaths from suicide in that group. The total for all age groups is 48k, so you'd need a 200% increase in all ages to get to that number.
However, if we look at this, based on CDC data: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 "From 2019 to 2020 ... suicide deaths declined by 5.6%." So you really need some strong evidence to back that suicides went up at all, let alone by 100%. It would also be very difficult to blame false attribution of suicide deaths to Covid-19 without equally strong evidence as there are usually pretty strong clues to the cause of death in suicides.
The riots & associated high levels of aggression between social groups did not lead to a high number of deaths, definitely not enough to have a significant impact on total deaths, unless you have a good source for that claim.
Murder rates seem to be up by about 36.7% across the US, but even then that increase is not enough to cause a significant bump in the numbers. There are normally about 870 deaths per 100,000 in the US due to all causes. Murder is about 5 in 100,000 (2018) so a 36.7% increase in that 5 gives 7, an increase in 2 per 100,000. That's an increase in the death rate of 0.23% due to increased murder. The CDC number I just checked is a 15.9% increase in deaths for 2020.
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/06/953254623/massive-1-year-rise... https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm