Young adult (20-49) mortality in Israel during time of Covid-19 crisis | Hacker News Reader

Young adult (20-49) mortality in Israel during time of Covid-19 crisis

poseidon01.ssrn.com

38 pointswalterbell29 comments

Note: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3896310 says

> This paper has been removed from SSRN at the request of the author, SSRN, or the rights holder.

even though the download link seems to work at the moment. Here is the abstract in case the download also disappears.

> Herein, we analyzed the mortality in Israel during time of COVID-19 crisis, focusing on the young adult age group below 50 years old, for their susceptibility to COVID-19 mortality is low. Mostly based on the online data from the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel, we observed an unexpected rise of excess mortality among the 20 to 49-year-olds in February-March 2021. Noteworthy, excess mortality within those young age groups is scarcely observed, with low number of deaths that are usually caused by wars. We examined whether COVID-19 could account for this excess mortality. Inconsistency between the overall excess deaths and the number of reported COVID-19 deaths in this age group led to consider other potential causes: accident and vaccination. In fact, the surge in mortality coincides with the beginning of the Israeli vaccination campaign, which has reached more than 75% of individuals within this age group. Such unexpected rise in excess mortality in young adults was also found in two other countries, the United Kingdom and Hungary, which have in common with Israel to have massively injected their populations. Thus, our observations should prompt to pause the campaign, while clarifying the underlying reasons of those excess mortalities, all the more in the context of a low mortality risk from COVID-19 within adults below the age of 50.

A retracted, un-peer-reviewed article published by an economist and a medical doctor, neither of whom have any experience in public health.

Might as well be written by Andrew Wakefield.

I can quickly identify some potential issues with statistical controls and low numbers of samples, but a dismissal based on credentials is a weak logical fallacy called credentialism. I see it everywhere, especially on forums of people who are likely to have and value credentials (HN). The authors' credentials (which are really not lacking anyway) have nothing to do with the merits of their argument. Especially on an internet forum, where there is no shortage of people with free time to analyze arguments.

I see your point, but the opposite is just as bad or worse. The idea that studding for years has no merit and that the opinion of a professional with 10 or 20 years in a field (20.000 hours - 40.000 hours) has the same value of the opinion of some dude on the internet that thinks he is really smart and googles shit for a couple hours, even if it's hundreds of hours, is just ridiculous.

The retracted part isn't a credential though - it shows that someone with authority/knowledge decided there was something really wrong with the piece.

The graphs are preposterous. This looks like an exercise in finding what you want to see in noise. I’m horrified at the thought of this paper being disseminated to the general populace that won’t understand that.

Hungary by far has the highest “excess mortality” but the lowest vaccination rate in the three (!) mass vaccination countries used for the whole paper and in Table A-1. In fact remove Hungary and there isn’t even an effect I assume. They are just averaging the three countries together! Israel and UK aren’t even high it’s just that Hungary is super high and doesn’t have lots of other countries to average out its variance. Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland have vastly higher excess mortality than Israel and UK but are in the low vaccination category. It’s nonsense.

Do you have any problems with the substance of the article?

I do. Look at the table A1 in the appendix. They separate the countries in two groups:

Mass vaccination countries: Israel, United Kingdom, Hungary

Moderate vaccination countries: All the other in Europe, or something like that.

To simplify, let's make a new column with the average of the excess of deaths, and sort them. The biggest ones are:

Hungary: 39.3%

Slovakia: 26.7%

Poland: 26.3%

Czechia: 25.0%

Bulgaria: 20.3%

Cyprus: 12.3%

Austria: 10.3%

United Kingdom: 10.0%

Israel: 8.3%

Other: 8.0% or less

Average: 4.8%

So clearly Hungary is a huge outlier.

Back to the three mass vaccinated countries:

If you compare Israel to the moderate vaccinated countries, the different is not statistically significant.

If you compare United Kingdom to the moderate vaccinated countries, the different is not statistically significant.

If you compare Hungary the moderate vaccinated countries, the different IS statistically significant. Moreover, it's much bigger.

The correct conclusion is that something extraordinary bad happened in Hungary, not that something extraordinary bad happened in the mass vaccinated countries.

You can at least look at the same data they did.

Well, since they seem to conclude that "vaccinations bad", and I'm pro-vax, I'm skeptical of this paper.

I wonder if the excess deaths are because people went out more after many months of lockdown, leading to more accidents on the road or e.g. because of alcohol. Seems lazy to just conclude "must be the vaccine", a proper researcher would try to analyse the causes of the excess deaths...

My personal experience, not in Israel, echos this.

Everyone I know who restricted their lives in 2020 went out, post-vaccination, and tried to pack everything they missed into the following months. People did the things they postponed, like dentist appointments, but also things that they wouldn't have done otherwise, like travel.

The chart that shows excess mortality seems to have much more volatility than I would expect.

Why can't this simply be noise?

As an aside - I'd be very interested to see the excess deaths by cause. Could it be possible that some or a lot of these deaths were actually people that got Covid but had no symptoms?

The last table in the paper is a one-sided t-test, where they get a 89-97% chance that the gap is not random.

EDIT Included the whole range

The problem comes from grouping Hungary with Israel and the United Kingdom. More details in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28103813

Which is doubly problematic given that UK & Hungry have a completely different vaccine than Israel.

The graphs at https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps should give you some idea of the typical behavior of excess mortality in many countries in Europe and adjacent regions (including Israel), by age group, by week. At least from a cursory look, there doesn't seem to be anything nefarious going on in Israel.

This doesn’t seem to factor in the rates of covid over time. In Israel there was a huge run up of cases just before vaccination began [1], which then really plateaued. This is a much more plausible explanation for the shape of the excess mortality curve in the younger age group.

This is the second somewhat ‘contrarian’ analysis I have seen which wilfully ignores the rates of covid19. The other one was showing that Sweden’s strategy did not result in excess deaths, but conveniently stopped the analysis just before the spike in cases (and deaths) showed up.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/

Disclaimer: I didn't the whole paper This paper is based on the assumption that when the Israeli vaccine campaign started, everyone were allowed to get the vaccine. In truth, only at the start of Feb people older than 35 were allowed to get the vaccine.

Also, this is a sloppy work at best. No statistical analysis (what about confidence intervals?) whatsover. Total waste of time

It looks like as many young adults were vaccinated in March as in February, but deaths drop off quickly.

I suspect if "number of vaccines given" was displayed on the chart, ideally grouped by week instead of month, it would be more obvious that the increase in deaths actually preceded the vaccinations, rather than the other way around.

This does raise questions about the wisdom of mandating experimental vaccinations for low-risk people. The vaccines are quite rough on the body from everything I've heard.

That being said, even if the vaccines do kill a few extra people there is still a pretty good chance it is net-positive. A lot of people will avoid nasty damage from COVID and death statistics aren't everything when the numbers are so low.

>The vaccines are quite rough on the body. Hundreds of millions have been vaccinated by now. The side effects are generally mild and don’t last over 24hrs. Where are you getting your information?

From stories I've heard from a sample of the hundreds of millions of people vaccinated, combined with reports form health authorities about the side effects, and various studies. Many people I've talked to said that the vaccines (AstraZeneca and Pfizer in Australia) was more intense than most.

This study is saying there might be a 20% increase in risk of death in young people from being vaccinated and that seems pretty plausible. 120% of nearly 0 is still nearly 0 and that could easily be missed in the phase I-III trials.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine ended up in the ER after his 2nd dose

Apparently you can still suffer long covid even if vaccinated. Ivermectin seems like a way better route for these ages.

Curious, why do you believe in ivermectin? It’s an anti-parasitic, not an anti-viral. It also seems there is significant controversy with every study that shows any positive effect, eg the study from Egypt that was recently withdrawn due to data manipulation by the authors. Is it really realistic that random people on the internet are better at finding a cure for a never before seen disease than the world’s best doctors and pharma companies? Just trying to understand the rationale.

It's not a matter of belief of disbelief, and there's no strict separation between anti-parasitic versus anti-viral drugs. Ivermectin is a small molecule drug with a variety of effects, one of which might impact SARS-CoV-2 replication. This paper explains the suspected mechanism of action.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635422...

Because it actually cleared up my long covid. Had it for three months with no help or options from my doctor. Got the horse paste from a rancher buddy and felt improvement in a few hours and complete recovery in a few days of one dose per day. Except for lung inflammation which prednisone was able to resolve.

Here's an index of the studies on ivermectin as a COVID-19 prophylactic or treatment. Most of the studies are small or otherwise low quality, but overall there does seem to be at least a small benefit and the risk of harmful side effects is low. It certainly isn't as effective as the current vaccines, and I think most people would prefer to avoid taking ivermectin for the rest of their lives.

https://c19ivermectin.com/

This is a valid criticism of the studies but realize it is difficult to fund large ones given ivermectin's patents are long expired. It has billions of doses of decent safety history at least.

Lot of great anecdotal reports on various forums for whatever that's worth, including yours truly.

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