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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

Even just looking at excess deaths immediately shows the scale of the pandemic. Some weeks during December, there were 25,000 additional people per week dying compared to the typical year. What do you think was causing this if not Covid?

Over 680,000 additional deaths in 2020/early 2021.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Talk to a single doctor that was on the 'front lines' of this - a family member was signing 20 death certificates per week for people dying of horrible respiratory disease with positive Covid tests. One person at one hospital overwhelmed with the quantity of death. What was it if not Covid?

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Agreed, I use euromomo to look at total mortality across Europe and it's difficult to deny that something was killing lots more people than usual last spring and winter (northern hemisphere).

However it can also be the case that COVID deaths (and hospitalizations as well) may be over-reported. We have recent reports that seem to be pointing strongly to this possibility.

[1]: Alameda County revising COVID deaths downward by 25% - https://oaklandside.org/2021/06/04/alameda-countys-new-covid...

[2]: Research in CA suggests COVID hospitalization in children overcounted by 40% - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/study-number-of-kids...

So you think that "something was killing lots more people than usual" but that the few isolated cases of counties overcounting Covid deaths are systemic and that there was no reciprocal data issues?

What precisely do you think was killing all of those extra people who were showing up in ERs with respiratory distress?

Personally my guess is that COVID was, yes, responsible for the vast majority of those deaths.

But I also do think that those cases of overcounting are very likely NOT the only, isolated ones. The dynamics exposed (how hospitalizations were counted, the basic 'with' vs 'of' question), almost certainly apply more broadly.

So, apologies for attempting nuance, but I think COVID can at once be a) a massive pandemic (and tragic for millions), while also being b) somewhat overblown due to unrigorous metrics that in turn feed more sensationalism than otherwise warranted.

But that’s not really nuance in any classic sense —- you’re right to point out that there were numerous problems (as expected with a novel virus) in attributing deaths with any certainty to Covid so we did the best we could. And even with the “sensationalism” and “overcounting”, excess deaths surpassed actual Covid deaths by something like 15%.

Doesn’t that actually imply that there wasn’t enough sensationalism and that our methods, while attributing some non-Covid deaths to Covid, were actually missing many more Covid deaths?

I don’t get the leap from “we misattributed some non-Covid deaths to Covid” in an environment that had even more deaths that our supposed overcount as evidence that we overreacted.

So you're saying 'net net', you think the COVID mortality is undercounted? If I had to bet something valuable, I'd take the other side. That's just what seems most probable to me, based on the evidence I cited.

Another plausible explanation to excess mortality differences is that lockdowns and other measures caused people to engage in behaviors that increased mortality, from putting off necessary medical visits to exacerbated mental health due to social isolation or financial stress.

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