Hacker News Reader

Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I’m always fairly torn by these numbers (I’ve done a lot of research and tracked this[1]). There’s a lot of confounding factors...

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.

[1] https://github.com/lettergram/covid19-analysis

View on HN

This is nonsense. Suicides are down in 2020. It was a virus that killed people, the deaths were reported. Conspiracy theories are so exhausting

You say that with such certainy but the official number I've seen is a 10% increase. Also there is no measure for misery.

it would be helpful if you provided your sources

The government has an incentive to report deaths as covid deaths. I'm simply stating it is not 100% clear what causes the deaths. The reason I suspect a higher suicide rate than otherwise estimated is that the number of people with suicidal ideation has doubled.

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...

> The government has an incentive to report deaths as covid deaths.

What is this incentive? How did governments benefit from more covid deaths?

It makes their policies appear sensible.

> The lockdowns increased the rate of suicides substantially

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...

Succesful suicides were down, but attempted suicides and overdoses were both much higher.

Your suicide statistic link doesn't have any data for the 2020 year. And in my region suicides are down. https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/suicide-deaths-in-alberta-in-2020...

The problem with "what about other increases in cause of deaths" is that you have to find a LOT of these reasons to even begin to compete with Covid-19 as a cause. When the increase in deaths is in the hundreds of thousands it is not adequate to point to something that potentially increased the deaths by hundreds or thousands and say that's enough evidence that the Covid numbers are grossly inflated. You need to provide evidence backing your claims for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com