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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

2017 had more excess deaths than 2020[1]. The DALY loss was much greater too. What happened in 2017 that dwarfed the pandemic?

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/118/16/e2024850118

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If I'm reading this correctly, this paper is defining excess deaths as the number of people who died in the US who wouldn't have were those people living in Europe instead of the US at that point in time? Which points to structural issues in the US system, but not to some event in 2017 that resulted in extra deaths vs. any surrounding years (just that the death rate in the US has dropped much slower than in Europe over the study timeline 2000-2017).

The US death rate didn't appreciably increase (~3 per 100k) in 2017 vs. 2016[1] and has generally been improving. That's about 10k extra deaths, not 400k, like the paper says (because the paper's usage of that term is very different than The Economist's!)

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends...

> but not to some event in 2017 that resulted in extra deaths vs. any surrounding years

But that's exactly what the paper shows. It's reasonable to ask the question why was the difference in deaths far greater in 2017 than in the surrounding years and why was the mean age of the persons excessively dying so relatively young? There most likely are structural differences causing excess US deaths, but the claim that those structural differences caused a huge relative spike in one year for no particular reason isn't very satisfying.

Did you read the paper? It effectively has three US data points it's using: deaths in 2000, 2010, and 2017. And it's comparing to European countries in the same time to calculate excess deaths. But they're defining excess deaths as those due to living in the US vs. Europe. Not excess deaths in 2017 vs. 2000 or 2010. This is pointing to structural issues in the US (like healthcare, violence, opioid issues, etc.) causing a long-term mortality rate difference between the US and Europe (it's significantly worse in 2010 as well as 2017). Not that there was a peak in 2017.

I don’t see how I can state what I’m saying more clearly and you’re obviously not following. Maybe try reading the comment you’re replying to more carefully?

I got something different from that paper. Quote from the abstract:

"Applying European age-specific death rates in 2017 to the US population, we then show that adverse mortality conditions in the United States resulted in 400,700 excess deaths that year."

To paraphrase: on average in 2017, US people died more than the equivalent people in some bit of Europe.

No great event happened.

It’s still significant because it’s a huge anomaly to the annual mean difference between the two populations.

Absolutely. But the paper is talking about a long-term mortality divergence between populations, not a peak in 2017 like you were claiming (and there's nothing about 2020 data in this paper).

What happened in 2017 that was completely unresponded to that dwarfed the pandemic when the world shut down.

Flu? That's my completely uneducated guess

There was a recent year that flu vaccines were remarkably ineffective. At least here in Australia.

Perhaps that was worldwide?

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